Who Was Cornelius Van Til?

Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987) was a Christian apologist and theologian.  He was born in the Netherlands and moved to America as a child.  Van Til was influenced by Abraham Kuyper, Herman Bavinck, and John Calvin.  He taught at Princeton Theological Seminary for a short time but left along with J. Gresham Machen and others after it took a liberal turn.  Afterward Machen convinced Van Til to teach apologetics at the new Westminster Theological Seminary.  Van Til started there in 1929 and stayed there for several decades.  

Van Til became unsatisfied with the traditional methods of apologetics, the classical and evidentialist approach.  Van Til believed the traditional methods erroneously assumed that there was a neutral ground where the believer and the unbeliever could meet and reason from there.  He believed that if you assumed from the start that intelligibility and knowledge were possible apart form the triune God you had already lost the argument.  

Cornelius Van Til developed his own apologetic method which became known as presuppositional apologetics.   A presupposition is an assumption or basic belief that a person holds from the start through which he interprets everything else. Van Til believed that an unbeliever would interpret evidences and proofs through his basic presupposition of unbelief and deny the Christian God.  The unbeliever suppresses the truth about God because of his sin and rationalizes away the evidences and proofs. 

Van Til's apologetic used the transcendental argument or indirect reasoning.  He believed that intelligibility and meaning are only possible if we presuppose the Bible as true. The Christian worldview is the only worldview that makes sense of your world.  Van Til believed that the unbeliever had to borrow from the Christian worldview in order to live his life consistently.  The unbelievers worldview will break down because it cannot account for intelligibility, meaning, or the preconditions for life.  Van Til's apologetic used the transcendental argument in order to show the contradictions, inconsistencies, and arbitrariness of the unbelievers worldview.   He also showed that the Christian worldview was consistent and was necessary for intelligibility and purpose.

Cornelius Van Til's presuppositional apologetics flowed from his Reformed theology.  He sought to develop an apologetic that was truly Biblical and truly Reformed.  He sought to honor Christ as Lord throughout his entire apologetic method.  There is no neutral ground, you are either with Christ or you are against him.  Van Til sought to prove the existence of the Christian God not just provide evidence that made the existence of God probable.  Notable students of Van Til's 
who continued to use his apologetic method include Greg Bahnsen and John Frame.