When nutjobs fall out

J.D. Hall is an unusually stringent Calvinist pastor from Montana with a gift for self-promotion; he constantly lambastes anybody who doesn’t align with his straitened view of reality.

One of his favorite targets is Karen Swallow Prior at Liberty University, whom he complains is a heretical liberal.

That’s right: Liberty University, a known bastion of liberalism.

Anyway, Hall tracks Prior’s tweets, and had himself a regular conniption fit when Prior presumed to ridicule — get ready — him.

Yeah, well — ho-hum. Here is what interests me about this latest dust-up: Evangelical intelligentsia? Really? I emphatically deny that there is any such thing.

When an engineer sits down to make calculations and prepare design recommendations, for instance, every single line of the analysis has a pedigree that can be traced back, literally, millennia; Pythagoras, for example, flourished ~ 550 BC. The record of observations, the mathematical analyses of those observations, and the discussion and sometimes fierce fights over their interpretation, are all public record. An engineer’s analysis of a set of facts is always solidly within the continuum of proved, established, documented knowledge.

But all pastors and theologians and churchgoers are necessarily, though not always explicitly or even knowingly, presuppositionalists.

Presuppositionalism is a school of Christian apologetics that believes the Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought. It presupposes that the Bible is divine revelation and attempts to expose flaws in other worldviews. It claims that apart from presuppositions, one could not make sense of any human experience, and there can be no set of neutral assumptions from which to reason with a non-Christian.

In other words … The Bible says it, I believe it, and that’s that. A lot of intellectually dishonesty is required to be a believer — and that is the antithesis of intellectualism.