Quotes About Presuppositions

Whether one believes in miracles or the miraculous has mostly to do with the presuppositions one brings to the subject.

The U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit indeed encourage spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness

An audience that is unwilling to suspend its own presuppositions and biases while considering an opposed (or even unopposed) viewpoint not only frustrates the function of extended argument but effectively denies its own beliefs a rational basis.

Christians need not sit in an isolated philosophical tower, reduced to simply despising the philosophical systems of non Christians. No, by taking every thought captive to Christ, we are enabled to cast down reasoning that is exalted against the knowledge of God (cf. 2 Cor. 10:5). We must challenge the unbeliever to give a cogent and credible account of how he knows anything whatsoever, given his espoused presuppositions about reality, truth, and man (his "worldview").

Apologetics involves a conflict over ultimate authorities — that is, a conflict over our presuppositions or final standard. What should be the source of a person's presuppositions? For the unbeliever, it will be some authority for reasoning other than the word of God, while for the believer it is God's revelation.

The philosophy which Paul spurns is that reasoning which follows the presuppositions (the elementary assumptions) of the world, and thereby is "not according to Christ.

All men have their presuppositions; none is neutral. Shall your presuppositions be the teachings of Christ or the vain deception against which Paul warns? Choose this day whom ye shall serve!

But the Christian worldview does not have this intellectual dilemma of justifying the causal principle (inductive or scientific reasoning). It is transcendentally justified by the inner coherence of our presupposed worldview, or within its wider context, being entailed by both the nature and promises of God.

Racial reasoning conceals these presuppositions behind a deceptive cloak of racial consensus—yet racial reasoning is seductive because it invokes an undeniable history of racial abuse and racial struggle.

If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going.

But Derrida is confronting an argument for the priority of speech over writing. A side issue? According to Derrida, setting speech to rule over writing is crucial to the underpinning presuppositions of Western philosophy.

Derrida's texts aren't located "outside" the texts they examine, in a position of attempted mastery or privileged authority. He doesn't simply reject or oppose them. It's more a strategy of inhabiting them, making a destabilizing passage through them, undoing their presuppositions and desedimenting them: stirring up their underlying levels.

Nothing can guarantee that the community will not become a monster—especially if it does not put its own presuppositions at risk and listen to the other

Sometimes the very presence of God is barred by our presuppositions and our intense and constant desire for triumph.

Experience is more basic than ultimate worldview presuppositions and, in fact, the evidence of experience provides data for evaluating rival worldviews or interpretations of some event.

Ati?a, following N?g?rjuna's commentator Candrak?rti, held that although our everyday language adequately describes apparent reality, philosophical discourse nevertheless has a necessary role: not system-building but the criticism of our presuppositions, dismantling them until we arrive at the profound realization of emptiness and the opening that this entails.

Anyone who has worked within biblical scholarship knows, or ought to know, that we biblical scholars come to the text with just as many interpretative strategies and expectations as anyone else, and that integrity consists not of having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one's presuppositions are and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different ones.

As Francis Schaeffer pointed out (and his whole apologetics turned on this point), "The more logical a non-Christian is to his own presuppositions, the further he is from the real world; and the nearer he is to the real world, the more illogical he is to his presuppositions."41 There