Jeff and I have been having a good discussion about apologetics and certainty. I want to pick up on that discussion here.
As I’ve thought this through and read through some materials, I think one of the key issues for me is what we mean by “certainty.” I believe we should make a distinction between certainty and certitude or assurance. This distinction is helpfully made by the late Paul Feinberg (a former professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) in his essay on Cumulative Case Apologetics in the book Five Views on Apologetics. Here is what Feinberg said:
Many apologists distinguish between certainty and certitude. Certainty looks at the strength of the external evidence for a belief. Certitude looks beyond the external evidence, recognizing that there is a subjective element which can alone explain the tenacity and stubbornness of belief. This stubbornness is not the result of ignorance or stupidity; it is the work of the Holy Spirit.
Feinberg elaborates on this point in a footnote as follows:
Nash makes well the point that I am trying to make here. He points out that because worldviews are about reality, we can never have logical certainty. Evidence for interpretations of reality can only have probability or plausibility as I have called it. Nash points out that some have taken this lack of logical certainty to be a sacrilege. He counters this claim that we can and often do believe matters that lack logical certainty with moral or psychological certainty. I have called this certitude to distinguish it from certainty. It is subjective, and it is the work of the Holy Spirit.
Feinberg touches on the heart of my issue with the term “certainty”: in my experience, all too often, logical or evidential apologetic arguments advanced by Christians are less than convincing. I do believe that there are a number of quite convincing logical and evidential arguments in favor of Christianity, but even these are not indubitably correct. There are any number of points at which even the best logical and evidential arguments could fail, even if the likelihood of such failure seems passingly small. And, there are a number of important questions, many dealing with the relationship between scripture and science, that simply are not resolveable given our present state of knowledge.
I am in agreement, then, with the presuppositionalist view that certitude or assurance is an internal work of the Holy Spirit. However, I do not think there is no role for external logical and historical evidence that can be ascertainable in some sense even to unregenerate people. On this point, I like Feinberg’s cumulative case approach, which sums various arguments to propose an overall case in favor of belief. Perhaps I like Feinberg’s approach because it essentially what we lawyers do when we present a case to a judge or jury.