It’s Sunday morning and Kimberly my wife rolls out a display on the breakfast table that would make a king raise his eyebrows. On the table sits a coffee mug filled with orange juice. Atalie, my three year old blondie, says, “You’ve got coffee!”

“No,” she retorted, un-persuaded, “that’s coffee.” I brought the mug to her level so she could see inside.

“See? It’s orange juice.”

“Oh,” she squeaked, “It’s orange coffee!”

My three year old demonstrated an axiom in morals, religion, and ethics: everyone holds tenaciously to presuppositions. What is a presupposition? Something you believe in as a starting point, a reference point. Something you assume to be true and assume remains fixed. Something that stays the same by which you can interpret things that do change. Something that becomes foundational to your morals, convictions, money management, word choice, career pursuits—everything.

Atalie’s presupposition was that coffee mugs only hold coffee. To her, that’s just the way it is. When she saw orange juice in my mug, even though it didn’t look like coffee and even though I told her it wasn’t coffee, she remained faithful to her presupposition and decided that coffee can be orange.

Evolutionists and creationists demonstrate this all the time. Two men with equal intellect capacity, the same time-testing tools, who live on the same globe in the same age, can observe the same piece of evidence and arrive at two completely variant positions. One says, “That’s 10 billions years old” and the other concludes, “This is the result of a worldwide flood less than 6,000 years ago.” One sees orange coffee. The other sees orange juice in a coffee cup.

Perhaps you see how significant this concept is. We are not talking about evidence, but presuppositions; not about varying IQ levels, but different worldviews. We live in day when the Christ follower and the Christ rejecter operate from completely different presuppositions. To the Christ follower, truth is prepositional, objective and logical. Though many Christians do not actually understand it, they instinctively assume it. They believe in a universal. It is on this presupposition that God’s Word was written. But to the natural man, truth is not black and white, yes and no, but flexible, a product of blind faith and opinions.

In his book, The God Who is There, Francis A. Schaeffer observes the severity of his problem, “…this change in the concept of the way we come to knowledge and truth is the most crucial problem, as I understand it, facing Christianity today."¹He writes that Europe exchanged the acceptance of a universal, an absolutistic, objective presupposition way of thinking, in exchange for a relative approach to truth and knowledge around the year 1890. The US followed suit about the year 1935.

Endnotes

1.Francis A. Schaefer, The God Who is There (Chicago: InterVarsity, 1968), 13.