Van Til: To the argument we must now shortly come. Just another word, however, about my schooling. That will bring all the factors into the picture.

Thorn: Okay, Dr. Van Til. Tell us about your schooling.

Van Til: I was not quite five when somebody -- fortunately I cannot recall who -- took me to school.

Thorn: Why is it fortunate that you cannot recall who took you to school?

Van Til: On the first day I was vaccinated and it hurt. I can still feel it. I had already been to church. I recall that definitely because I would sometimes wear my nicely polished leather shoes. A formula was read over me at my baptism which solemnly asserted that I had been conceived and born in sin, the idea being that my parents, like all men, had inherited sin from Adam, the first man and the representative of the human race.

Thorn: And you accepted this formula as truth, Dr. Van Til? At the tender age of five, you could discern between truth and falsehood so clearly?

Van Til: The formula further asserted that though thus conditioned by inescapable sin I was, as a child of the Covenant, redeemed in Christ.

Thorn: Did you have any understanding of what these things meant, Dr. Van Til?

Van Til: And at the ceremony my parents solemnly promised that as soon as I should be able to understand they would instruct me in all these matters by all the means at their disposal.

Thorn: Let me get this straight, Dr. Van Til. The important thing at this point in your life was simply that you accept what they told you as truth, and later, after it was certain that you had accepted it, they would tell you what it all means? Is that how it worked? If you ask me, that sounds like a cruel trick to play on a young mind. Indeed, perverse.

Van Til: It was in pursuance of this vow that they sent me to a Christian grade school.

Thorn: Ah, to the institution to further facilitate the indoctrination. Your parents didn't want you to slip from the mighty grip of mysticism, did they?

Van Til: In it I learned that my being saved from sin and my belonging to God made a difference for all that I knew or did.

Thorn: Yes, indoctrination tends to do this to a mind.

Van Til: I saw the power of God in nature and His providence in the course of history.

Thorn: You must have had a vivid imagination even then, Dr. Van Til.

Van Til: That gave the proper setting for my salvation, which I had in Christ.

Thorn: Yes, a new environment in which the conditioning process could be carried out more systematically and with more safeguards. Your mind was like putty in their fingers. Watch them shape it into the image of their god-belief.

Van Til: In short, the whole wide world that gradually opened up for me through my schooling was regarded as operating in its every aspect under the direction of the all-powerful and all-wise God whose child I was through Christ.

Thorn: It sounds like a form of self-induced intoxication.

Van Til: I was to learn to think God's thoughts after him in every field of endeavor.

Thorn: Ever stop and ask yourself how silly that sounds, Dr. Van Til, this notion of a god thinking? Think about it. You say this god is omniscient and infallible, right? If that's the case, why would it think? We think in order to figure out problems, to identify things, to contemplate our values and determine which ones are more important to us. An omniscient being wouldn't need to do this, it would already know. To say that you "think God's thoughts after him" is to ignore the fact that the act of thinking and the notion of omniscience cannot be integrated. Also, it's symptomatic of a deep, psychological pursuit of the unearned, in this case, of unearned authority. If you can get others to believe that you "think God's thoughts after him," they will naturally consider your thoughts unquestionable, for to question your thoughts becomes paramount to questioning god's, and this devoted believers are reluctant to do.

Van Til: Naturally there were fights on the "campus" of the school and I was engaged in some -- though not in all -- of them. Wooden shoes were wonderfull weapons of war.

Thorn: So you were a violent youth?

Van Til: Yet we were strictly forbidden to use them, even for defensive purposes.

Thorn: Well, that is at least consistent with the teaching attributed to Jesus in Matthew 5:39: "turn thy cheek." Such a policy has grave impact on one's power to defend his values.

Van Til: There were always lectures both by teachers and by parents on sin and evil in connection with our martial exploits. This was especially the case when a regiment of us went out to do battle with the pupils of the public school.

Thorn: It is, after all, spiritual warfare, right, Dr. Van Til?

Van Til: The children of the public school did not like us. They had an extensive vocabulary of vituperation. Who did we think we were anyway? We were goody goodies -- too good to go to the public school! "There! take that and like it!" We replied in kind.

Thorn: The division of people into groups of chosen versus the damned, inculcated so early in life. A direct result of religious collectivism. Did you ever stop to think about your actions on these occasions, Dr. Van Til?

Van Til: Meanwhile our sense of distinction grew by leaps and wounds.

Thorn: Well, of course, Dr. Van Til. Since you were not being taught to distinguish yourselves by rational and productive means, you allowed your enemies define you. This is where the church teaching really came in handy I bet.

Van Til: We were told in the evening that we must learn to bear with patience the ridicule of the "world." Had not the world hated the church, since Cain's time?

Thorn: Yes, I'm sure there are many examples to draw from the Bible to console your spite and assuage your guilt. By the pretense of thinking that you should "bear with patience the ridicule of the 'world'," you were able to foster a false sense of self-esteem, a wholly borrowed emotion, a feeling which you could neither earn nor enjoy, but you wanted it all the same, isn't that so, Dr. Van Til?

Van Til: How different your early schooling was! You went to a "neutral" school.

Thorn: "Neutral" is your word for it. I would not call it that.

Van Til: As your parents had done at home, so your teachers now did at school.

Thorn: No, there was no such solidarity, believe me. I was fortunate in that I had a mother who questioned the content of the school books and urged other parents to do the same. For years she had a bumper sticker on her car which read, "Your children's textbooks - have you read them?" She sought to enable parents to inform themselves on what their children were being fed in the schools. Sort of like sending your kid to a church. The schools are little different. When you send little Johnny to school, you entrust your child's mind, his highest value, to the hands of anonymous "professionals," just as when you send your child to a church, you entrust his soul to a group of reason-rejecting mystics. It's not a pretty sight, and the world is paying for this egregious negligence.

Van Til: They taught you to be "open-minded." God was not brought into connection with your study of nature or history. You were trained without bias all along the line.

Thorn: They didn't want me to open my mind any more than the churchmen want me to open my heart. Both the educators and the priests want me to open it so that they can remove what they find distasteful and replace it with something more to their liking. Sure, the education which I received was no more bias-free than any other secular education. What distinguishes it from a religious education is that the biases are subtler; they weren't so explicit as they are in a religious school. Consequently, to become aware of the bias, a young person has to be pretty sharp. It doesn't jump out at you like stories of a 600 year old man gathering two of every species to load onto a giant barge made of gopher wood and sealed with pitch.

Van Til: Of course, you know better now.

Thorn: Well, I have grown immensely since then, Dr. Van Til. I questioned a lot of what I was taught. I'm certainly glad I did, too.

Van Til: You realize that all that was purely imaginary. To be "without bias" is only to have a particular kind of bias. The idea of "neutrality" is simply a colorless suit that covers a negative attitude toward God.

Thorn: I claim no neutrality, sir. I am 100% devoted to reason. I'm fine if you want to call this a bias against your god-belief. Indeed, it is not for it, that's for sure.

Van Til: At least it ought to be plain that he who is not for the God of Christianity is against Him.

Thorn: Now, Dr. Van Til, you equivocate. Just because I am against your god-belief does not mean that I am "against God." One cannot be against something that does not exist.

Van Til: You see, the world belongs to Him, and that you are His creature, and as such are to own up to that fact by honoring Him whether you eat or drink or do anything else.

Thorn: Is this part of an argument, or the conclusion? If this is part of an argument, what's the argument? If it's the conclusion of an argument, where's the argument?

Van Til: God says that you live, as it were, on His estate.

Thorn: So, you are a spokesman for this god, is that the case, Dr. Van Til? See, this is your desire for unearned authority poking through again. I understand you probably are not aware of it.

Van Til: And His estate has large ownership signs placed everywhere, so that he who goes by even at seventy miles an hour cannot but read them.

Thorn: Well, let's see one of these signs. Tell me, when was the last time I saw one? How would one distinguish one of these signs from something that is not such a sign? And how do you know it's a sign of your god when it could be a sign belonging to one of your god's competitors?

Van Til: Every fact in this world, the God of the Bible claims, has His stamp indelibly engraved upon it.

Thorn: With all due respects, this just sounds like another counterfeit doctrine, Dr. Van Til.

Van Til: How then could you be neutral with respect to such a God?

Thorn: As I mentioned above, I do not claim any neutrality. The image in your mind which you call "God" is an affront to human decency and civilization. That you attempt to hijack that decency from the rational man is in line with the secondhand character which the Bible seeks to foster in believers. Your soul is indelibly soiled from before your birth, and therefore it must be exchanged for one which is not yours, one which you could never create for yourself. You live on borrowed self-esteem and attempt to rationalize it by inventing the notion of an invisible magic being which hovers over your head constantly, watching everything you do and listening to your every thought. This voyeuristic deity consumes you but is never satisfied. Thus it seeks more souls to devour. Are you sure you aren't trying to convert me, Dr. Van Til?

Van Til: Do you walk about leisurely on a Fourth of July in Washington wondering whether the Lincoln Memorial belongs to anyone? Do you look at "Old Glory" waving from a high flagpole and wonder whether she stands for anything? Does she require anything of you, born an American citizen as you are? You would deserve to suffer the fate of the "man without a country" if as an American you were neutral to America.

Thorn: I agree. I am not neutral toward America either. America was born out of the Age of Reason. This was a period in western history when the church was in its deepest stages of retreat. Men were arming themselves with the light of reason and the darkness that is religion was chased into the shadows, waiting for its chance to reassert itself. Kant, who lived in the shadow of Hume, was probably the single most responsible for revivifying the essence of religion in the west. The serial tyranny of the 20^th century was the result. Now, with Objectivism, the cat is out of the bag, and we have the chance to build a new Age of Enlightenment where reason, not faith, is the accepted standard among men.

Van Til: Well, in a much deeper sense you deserve to live forever without God if you do not own and glorify Him as your Creator.

Thorn: May we each get what we deserve, Dr. Van Til. In all candor, I am definitely counting on it.

Van Til: You dare not manipulate God's world and least of all yourself as His image-bearer, for you own final purposes.

Thorn: Gee, Dr. Van Til, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you are trying to threaten me. I suppose you need it explained to you that the concept is necessarily selfish in nature? If you were honest to yourself, I'm sure you could see this on your own.

Van Til: When Eve became neutral as between God and the Devil, weighing the contentions of each as though they were inherently on the face of them of equal value, she was in reality already on the side of the devil!

Thorn: You say that Eve was "weighing the contentions" of both the god and the devil. But what tools did she have to do this? If her actions and choices ended her up standing in error before god, she obviously was not created with perfect judgment. This tells us that the creator could not have been perfect. A perfect creator, by definition, does not create imperfections. Its creations would have to be perfect to warrant the claim to perfection.

Van Til: There you go again getting excited once more.

Thorn: Well, I admit it, I do get passionate when I think about reason. It's an affair of a mind which enjoys non-contradictory joy, Dr. Van Til. I would that all men could know it, but I see that they do not want it.

Van Til: Sit down and calm yourself.

Thorn: I was hoping we could drop by the burger joint, to be honest. Aren't you getting hungry yet? You look totally emaciated.

Van Til: You are open-minded and neutral are you not?

Thorn: I am active minded, and I am committed to reason.

Van Til: And you have learned to think that any hypothesis has, as a theory of life, an equal right to be heard with any other, have you not?

Thorn: I've heard that teaching from those who have little confidence that their ideas would be taken seriously unless everyone accepted such a policy in the first place. I do not believe that ideas gains credibility simply because they've been assembled into theories. They must stand on reason, and their defenders should be willing to argue for their merits. And while it is certainly the case that Christianity has had no shortage of defenders, it certainly is not the case that Christianity stands on reason.

Van Til: After all I am only asking you to see what is involved in the Christian conception of God.

Thorn: History provides plenty of examples of this particular conception of the genus "invisible magic being." Not surprisingly, they are often bloody and, when allowed to flourish unfettered, terribly repressive. That you would want to spread this conception among men is a strong statement on your character, Dr. Van Til.

Van Til: If the God of Christianity exists, the evidence for His existence is abundant and plain so that it is both unscientific and sinful not to believe in Him.

Thorn: Do your students accept such non sequiturs, Dr. Van Til?

Van Til: When Dr. Joad, for example says: "The evidence for God is far from plain," on the ground that if it were plain everybody would believe in Him, he is begging the question.

Thorn: Which question exactly is that begging? Aren't you begging the question when you accuse him of the same? Seems you're not too aware of your own question-begging assumptions, Dr. Van Til.

Van Til: If the God of Christianity does exist, the evidence for Him must be plain.

Thorn: Now you're begging the question!

Van Til: And the reason, therefore, why "everybody" does not believe in Him must be that "everybody" is blinded by sin.

Thorn: It would not surprise me that you give such rationalizations great weight in your mind. You'd hate to admit at this late stage in your life that you spent the bulk of it chasing a fantasy born out of childhood fears.

Van Til: Everybody wears colored glasses.

Thorn: And the color of mine is reason.

Van Til: You have heard the story of the valley of the blind.

Thorn: No, can't say I have, Dr. Van Til. Would you mind repeating it for me?

Van Til: A young man who was out hunting fell over a precipice into the valley of the blind. There was no escape. The blind men did not understand him when he spoke of seeing the sun and the colors of the rainbow, but a fine young lady did understand him when he spoke the language of love.

Thorn: Is this supposed to be an erotic story, Dr. Van Til?

Van Til: The father of the girl would not consent to the marriage of his daughter to a lunatic who spoke so often of things that did not exist.

Thorn: If the father accepted the concept of marriage, on what basis did he accept it if he supposed that love did not exist? Even the characters in your story are not free of stolen concepts.

Van Til: But the great psychologists of the blind men's university offered to cure him of his lunacy by sewing up his eyelids.

Thorn: Gee, that was smart. Why didn't he just spit into everyone else's eyes, like Mark's Jesus did?

Van Til: Then, they assured him, he would be normal like "everybody" else. But the simple seer went on protesting that he did see the sun.

Thorn: Your parable reminds me of the young lad who found himself wandering amongst a group of Sunday churchgoers. They were friendly to him and quickly gained his unsuspecting trust. They invited him to visit the church that evening for service, and the young lad agreed. When he got in there, he was told of all the joy that he would get if he committed himself to their ideal: a corpse on a stick. They were essentially saying that it was in his own best interest to make this commitment. But the commitment consisted of dying. Thus he was being told that it was in his own best interest to give up his best interest. Then he looked around at all the churchgoers and began to see them in a new light: they all pretended to have given up their own interest in the interest of something that was said to be better. With his new awareness, he saw their dishonesty and parted company with them.

Van Til: So, as we have our tea, I propose not only to operate on your heart so as to change your will, but also on your eyes so as to change your outlook. But wait a minute.

Thorn: Well, given that you have answered my primary question - namely, why do you believe these things, Dr. Van Til? - I'm willing to entertain your attempts to mine my mind. But beware, good doctor, you may find some things you won't be able to bear. And just as you seek to change my outlook, I seek to find whether or not you are capable of honesty at this late stage in your life. Is it true that, as a man spends his whole life trying to confirm and rationalize a fundamental deception, that he is, at the end of it, incapable of recognizing the truth?

Van Til: No, I do not propose to operate at all.

Thorn: Well, do you or don't you, man? Make up your mind.

Van Til: I myself cannot do anything of the sort.

Thorn: You mean, you're either unqualified, or unskilled?

Van Til: I am just mildly suggesting that you are perhaps dead, and perhaps blind, leaving you to think the matter over for yourself.

Thorn: Dr. Van Til, to make such a suggestion, you must ignore the self-evident facts of reality and drop the context of our entire discussion. For here I am, standing right beside you, fully alive, fully aware. Your religious views compel you to make a mockery of reason in every possible contortion, don't they?

Van Til: If an operation is to be performed it must be performed by God Himself.

Thorn: This is nothing but a euphemism for the use of force, albeit on a psychological level. It is at this point that god-belief transitions from its useless philosophical implications (e.g., "where did the universe come from?") to its lethal mental ramifications.