“Covenantal Apologetics and Common-Sense Realism: Recalibrating the Argument from Consciousness as a Test Case” by Nathaniel Gray Sutanto

Cornelius Van Til argued that theistic arguments are useful so long as one formulates them “in such a way as not to compromise the doctrines of Scripture.” He rejects, therefore, not the proofs in and of themselves but the foundation on which the proofs are often presented. Van Til thus argued that it is possible to construe the arguments in a manner consistent with Christian theistic principles, on the one hand, or anti-theistic principles, on the other. The former appeals to them in an indirect fashion as confirmatory of the necessary existence of the self-contained triune God while the latter comes in the form of a direct appeal, often yielding the meager result that some god probably exists. Thus many of Van Til’s intellectual descendants have attempted to show how particular theistic proofs might be appropriated into an apologetic dialogue in a manner consistent with the Reformed worldview. I offer, in this paper, then, a Reformed, Covenantal reappropriation of a contemporary popular argument for the existence of God: the argument from consciousness. What is attempted in this essay is thus not originality in substance but in application and expansion.