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We have a short five-week course on the essentials of L'Abri teaching, what we sometimes refer to as the 'Five Themes of L'Abri'. Each Friday, Greg Jesson and Jock McGregor will co-teach one of these themes. For those of
Pondering the Five Themes of L’Abri: #1: On Truth & Knowledge
Plan for the Lecture:
Truth, Reality, and Knowledge: Following Clues, Signposts, Hints, and Insights
Some Misconceptions and Confusions:
The Train Wreck of Truth and Knowledge:
2. Empiricism:
3. Relativism:
1. The correspondence relation does not look like a physical (causal) relation:
The truth bearer (a true belief, thought, or sentence) -----Corresponds to----- The truth maker (some fact)
“It [naturalism] refutes itself. Whatever else we may come to believe about the universe, at least we can’t believe in naturalism. The validity of rational thought, accepted in an utterly non-naturalistic, transcendental (if you will), supernatural sense, is the necessary presupposition of all other theorizing.”
“Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think the claim is false; but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to be difficult—at least as difficult as modern physics, and for the same reason.”
Descartes: How do you know that you are not now dreaming?
It is almost universally accepted among philosophers today that the only objects which we can be acquainted with are beliefs or something best described as mental.
“In whatever way a man might attempt to justify his beliefs, whether to himself or to another, he must always appeal to some belief. There is nothing other than one's belief to which one can appeal in the justification
According to Lawrence BonJour:
“Now it is a familiar but still forceful idealist objection to the correspondence theory of truth that if the theory were correct we could never know whether any of our beliefs were true, since we have no perspective outside our system of beliefs from which to see that they do or do not correspond.”
According to Michael Williams:
“Justification is a matter of accommodating beliefs that are being questioned to a body of accepted beliefs.
And, according to John Pollock:
“What is it that justifies a belief? Suppose someone justifiably believes some fact about the world on the basis of some other fact. Philosophers have often wanted to say that it is the second fact that justifies one’s belief in the first fact . . . But this is misleading. What is important in deciding whether the person is justified in his belief is not the fact itself but rather the person’s belief that it is a fact.”
*“Skepticism presupposes an ontology of the mind (a view of the mind) that makes knowledge impossible.” GJ
G.E. Moore:
A) 1. P
B) 1. Q
Moore’s point: Both A and B are logically valid, but we can still ask, “Which do we know better, A1 or B1?
What was Francis Schaeffer’s great insight about apologetics?
In other words, Schaeffer thought the greatest danger was that the non-believer didn’t take his or her views seriously enough. If non-Christians really took their beliefs and the logical implications seriously, they couldn’t continue to live in the world, thus they have to cheat by living inconsistently with their beliefs.
Schaeffer’s challenge to Christians: What about us? Are we intentionally living by taking our Christian beliefs seriously?
For Further Study:
Benjamin Keyes: “Five Themes at L’Abri Revisited” at
Gresham Machen: “Christianity and Culture, delivered at Princeton Seminary 1912” at
Jim Paul: “True Truth in a Post Truth Culture” at
Greg Jesson: “It All Comes down to ‘True-truth’” in He Still Speaks: Francis Schaeffer’s Enduring Relevance, 2021
Greg Jesson: “The Impossibility of Philosophical Skepticism” in Defending Realism: Ontological and Epistemological Essay, 2014
By Rochester L’Abri
We have a short five-week course on the essentials of L'Abri teaching, what we sometimes refer to as the 'Five Themes of L'Abri'. Each Friday, Greg Jesson and Jock McGregor will co-teach one of these themes. For those of
Pondering the Five Themes of L’Abri: #1: On Truth & Knowledge
Plan for the Lecture:
Truth, Reality, and Knowledge: Following Clues, Signposts, Hints, and Insights
Some Misconceptions and Confusions:
The Train Wreck of Truth and Knowledge:
2. Empiricism:
3. Relativism:
1. The correspondence relation does not look like a physical (causal) relation:
The truth bearer (a true belief, thought, or sentence) -----Corresponds to----- The truth maker (some fact)
“It [naturalism] refutes itself. Whatever else we may come to believe about the universe, at least we can’t believe in naturalism. The validity of rational thought, accepted in an utterly non-naturalistic, transcendental (if you will), supernatural sense, is the necessary presupposition of all other theorizing.”
“Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You may think the claim is false; but if it were true, what it tells us would be bound to be difficult—at least as difficult as modern physics, and for the same reason.”
Descartes: How do you know that you are not now dreaming?
It is almost universally accepted among philosophers today that the only objects which we can be acquainted with are beliefs or something best described as mental.
“In whatever way a man might attempt to justify his beliefs, whether to himself or to another, he must always appeal to some belief. There is nothing other than one's belief to which one can appeal in the justification
According to Lawrence BonJour:
“Now it is a familiar but still forceful idealist objection to the correspondence theory of truth that if the theory were correct we could never know whether any of our beliefs were true, since we have no perspective outside our system of beliefs from which to see that they do or do not correspond.”
According to Michael Williams:
“Justification is a matter of accommodating beliefs that are being questioned to a body of accepted beliefs.
And, according to John Pollock:
“What is it that justifies a belief? Suppose someone justifiably believes some fact about the world on the basis of some other fact. Philosophers have often wanted to say that it is the second fact that justifies one’s belief in the first fact . . . But this is misleading. What is important in deciding whether the person is justified in his belief is not the fact itself but rather the person’s belief that it is a fact.”
*“Skepticism presupposes an ontology of the mind (a view of the mind) that makes knowledge impossible.” GJ
G.E. Moore:
A) 1. P
B) 1. Q
Moore’s point: Both A and B are logically valid, but we can still ask, “Which do we know better, A1 or B1?
What was Francis Schaeffer’s great insight about apologetics?
In other words, Schaeffer thought the greatest danger was that the non-believer didn’t take his or her views seriously enough. If non-Christians really took their beliefs and the logical implications seriously, they couldn’t continue to live in the world, thus they have to cheat by living inconsistently with their beliefs.
Schaeffer’s challenge to Christians: What about us? Are we intentionally living by taking our Christian beliefs seriously?
For Further Study:
Benjamin Keyes: “Five Themes at L’Abri Revisited” at
Gresham Machen: “Christianity and Culture, delivered at Princeton Seminary 1912” at
Jim Paul: “True Truth in a Post Truth Culture” at
Greg Jesson: “It All Comes down to ‘True-truth’” in He Still Speaks: Francis Schaeffer’s Enduring Relevance, 2021
Greg Jesson: “The Impossibility of Philosophical Skepticism” in Defending Realism: Ontological and Epistemological Essay, 2014