Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be analyzing the rhetoric of Cornelius Van Til’s “Why I Believe in God.”
In the first part of his apology for believing in God, Cornelius Van Til argues that believing in God is necessary because without God we couldn’t understand anything else. He begins his apology for believing in God by bringing up eminent scientists and philosophers who are have recently addressed belief. Jeans and Eddington allow for the possibility of religious experience, and Joad says that evil’s reality forces him to consider the possibility of God’s existence. Van Til wonders if the reader has pondered what happens after death. After all, even Socrates—the wisest philosopher—was uncertain of what would happen after he died. Is there a judgment or might there be a God? How does one know for sure. Asking such questions is a sure sign of intelligence and indicates a desire for you to know why it is you believe what you believe. You want to know what’s real, and asking about God is one way of doing that. Van Til indicates that his belief in God started when he was young and that he knows such an admission will taint his case in the reader’s eyes. He doesn’t agree, however. He will discuss the arguments he’s heard against God since he’s been an adult and why he’s even more positive now that God exists. Both the arguments he makes and the arguments he anticipates his readers will make are premised on God. He compares this state of affair to arguing about air while breathing it the entire time or trying to blow up a gun stand while using the gun stand as a foundation for your guns. Unless the thing you’re attacking existed in the first place, you couldn’t make your attack on its existence.
The most effective thing Van Til does is frame his argument in the second person. He poses his apology as a conversation with a non-believer, one who is intelligent and responsible enough to consider big questions like what is real in this life. By talking about death and what comes after it, Van Til gestures towards an almost universal human question: what to do in the face of death of either ourselves or those we love? Van Til brings this up in the second person so the reader cannot simply bypass personal reflection without consequences. He says that the reader is the one who noticed the statements about God and that because of the reader’s intelligence and responsibility they will not wish to be ignorant about the foundations for what they believe. Van Til can admit objections easily this way and will have to remain rhetorically aware of the fact that he is talking toa real person. This is not a lecture. It’s a dialogue.
In addition, Van Til effectively includes contemporary arguments about God to contrast with his definitive faith. He has no doubt about his own belief but neither is he simply combative when he brings up a viewpoint that doesn’t coincide with his own. In fact, it is because he is judicious in his bringing up Jeans, Eddiington, Niebuhr, and others that his own declaration about God being the necessary prerequisite for any argument comes across so even-handedly. We get his argument but not before we’ve not only heard the varied arguments of others but also Van Til’s guesses as to how these authorities might influence or echo some thoughts the reader has had on these topics.
Finally, Van uses two different and nuanced metaphors. The first gets at the way that we are surrounded by God and yet may dismiss him simply because we cannot see him. The case is true too, says Van Til, for air, yet air is the means by which we live. We live by something which in ordinary terms we cannot see. But perhaps this metaphor is too peaceful for the topic under discussion. Van Til introduces a military metaphor that gets at a real combat between those who do not believe in God (and wish to destroy the arguments of believers) and those who do. God is the very foundation those weapons rest on, Van Til insists.
Van Til effectively opens his argument by appealing directly to the reader, giving his opponents authority through his willingness to articulate the positions held by people of great repute, and finding adequate figurative language to spell out his main argument.