Sunday, September 18, 2011

Response to Warren Cruz: The Great Minds fallacy

Van Tillian Warren Cruz continues on promoting Vantillianism, this time around stating that "Great Minds Reject Univocity." It always amuses me how Vantillians argue, this time even more so.

First of all, the whole post is logically fallacious. Great minds think a lot of things, but their thinking so does not make it right. The logical fallacy is called appeal to authority. Great minds promote evolution as truth (ie the late Stephen Jay Gould), but I don't see many Reformed Christians using the same logic and capitulating to the embrace of evolution, at least not yet.

Secondly, we have a total lack of what exactly "univocity" is. The whole Vantillian polemic on univocity becomes an exercise in superior linguistic bashing. There is a certain type of jargon to use, but as long as "univocity" is condemned, everything is fine. No one bothers to define what "univocity" actually means, except that it has the connotation of denying the Creator/ creature distinction. How exactly that is the case is always not spelt out, and one has to attempt to understand this cliquish group in understand their elitist jargon.

I have tried in this respect to understand Van Til, and the result has been this post of mine. As I have written, Van Til distorts language in order to attempt to defend an important truth — the Creator/ creature distinction. The problem therefore with Van Til and Vantillians is their manifest distortion of language. It is almost like a cult in this sense — that unless one agrees as to their special jargon one cannot understand them.

Unfortunately, I prefer to use normal English, as I am sure most people do. I therefore reject the Vantillian novelty, and prefer the imperfect but mostly true teachings of Gordon Clark.

P.S.: As an aside, the quote by Trueman says nothing about "univocity" and nothing that a Clarkian does not accept.

2 comments:

Joel Tay said...

Van Til is confused over the creator/creation distinction when it comes to univocality.

Daniel C said...

=)