Tom, <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/hello.gif" alt="" />
What Ham describes is more like Evidentialist apologetics, which focuses
not only on God’s word, but archaeological, historical, and scientific evidence to support both the probable existence of God and the truth of the Bible, and refute the major objections to the same. Like John Frame, I don't believe that these arguments are good enough on the grounds that they start out by granting the assumption that human experience is intelligible without a complete acceptance of Scripture “alone”. Ham does this by stating, (1) Showing that the Bible
and science go hand in hand, (2) Forcing the debater to logically defend his position
consistent with science, (3) One can of course do this with
numerous scientific examples, showing how the issue of sin and judgment, for example, is
relevant to geology and fossil evidence, and (4) having a little thing called a scientific museum, which is kind of a dead give away to his apologetic method. This however does not mean the museum is useless, but merely that its apologetical method is somewhat flawed. At best, Ham attempts to mix the two apologetic methods (and like R.C. Sproul, some Classical, a defense that stresses rational arguments for the existence of God and uses evidence to substantiate biblical claims and miracles), which by definition does not make him a true Presuppositionalist. One of Frame’s required readings is the book,
Five Views on Apologetics, by Cowan and Gundry. This will assist you in defining some of the apologetic methods further.
