In the newly published Understanding Christian Apologetics (Hendrickson, 2025), five methods of defending the Christian faith are explained and critiqued. If you are interested in apologetic methodology, I recommend the book as a good introduction to the various methods promoted today and the arguments for/against them.

As someone who finds the presuppositional method persuasive, the critiques against it were my primary interest. Responding to each author’s critiques of presuppositionalism is not my goal for this brief post. I only want to focus on one argument that, in my opinion, represents the most common kinds of arguments made against the method. After the presuppositional method is explained thoroughly by James N. Anderson in Chapter 3, author and apologist, Sean McDowell, offers critiques.

In his critique of the presuppositional method, McDowell argues the epistemologies of presuppositionalism, Islam, and Classical Foundationalism are not at odds epistemologically. In other words, he wants to say these worldviews are not competing with one another in their ultimate standards and approach to knowledge, as presuppositionalists charge.

It is true that presuppositionalists say the disagreement with nonbelievers is not over facts but over “competing epistemologies.”  McDowell wants to argue, however, that this is not the case. He wants to say not all unbelieving epistemologies are in competition with a presuppositional (revelational) epistemology, and does so by offering two counterexamples. He names Islam and Classical Foundationalism as examples of systems with similar epistemologies to the presuppositional method. McDowell says Christians and non-Christian have different “worldview commitments” but not necessarily competing epistemological systems.

There are some problems with this line of reasoning. McDowell says Islam also uses a “presupposition-type” epistemology, but this is only superficially true. Though they regard the Koran as their ultimate standard in the same way a Christian regards the Bible, Bahnsen reminds us (Van Til’s Apologetic, p. 525) that Muslim scholars interpret the Koran (cf. 6:103, 24:35, 42:11) as teaching that Allah is so transcendent, he is beyond human description. If no human language can tell us about Allah, then the Koran cannot be the “word of Allah.” The Koran is fundamentally flawed in another way. It acknowledges Moses, David, and Jesus as prophets, but the Koran contradicts the words of these “prophets” centuries later, so again, the Koran refutes itself. Muslims may appeal to the Koran as the ultimate standard, but an internal critique reveals that the Koran itself does not support such a claim. Therefore, what McDowell calls the “presuppositional-type” epistemology of Islam is not truly revelational, and thus, not similiar to the presuppositional method. It goes without saying, that a revelational epistemology must have for its standard God’s true revelation and not a counterfeit. This is a common error of critiques against the presuppositional method: if claims of unbelieving systems sound similar to the claims of Christian theism, they are taken to be the similar/same. However, though Islam appeals to the Koran as the ultimate standard in the same way Christians appeal to the Bible, this does not make their epistemologies similar because the Koran is false. The presuppositional method appeals to the true revelation of God, and for this reason, no other epistemology can ever be the similar/same, unless it, too appeals to the only true revelation from God, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. The presuppositional method does not presuppose an ultimate standard in general but an ultimate standard in particular—the Bible.

The likening of presuppositional epistemology to classical foundationalism also misunderstands the presuppositional apologetic method. Foundationalism says knowledge can be built up from first principles, or basic beliefs. These beliefs have to be self-evident, evident to the sense, and incorrigible. But who decides what self-evident truths are at the end of the day? Finite, human reasoning decides, and that is the viciously circular blow to any epistemological system. Unlike a revelational epistemology, classical foundationalism grounds itself in the mind of man as the starting point, rather that God’s revealed words. It is difficult to see how McDowell sees this as a similar epistemology when the starting points are not the same. Again, it seems as if a superficial similarity is seen as a true similarity. It is basically the same error as before. That a system claims to presuppose basic beliefs is not similar/same as presupposing the self-attesting words of God. After all, the presuppositional method emphasizes all systems start from presuppositions. The question is not whether they do nor not, but what they presuppose.

Since neither Islam nor classical foundationalism begin with a truly revelational epistemology, we must conclude that “competing epistemologies” is exactly what we do have when we approach non-Christian positions. A revelational epistemology stands apart from all other systems and is the only system that fully honors the self-attesting word of God.