ABSTRACT
Professor Herman Dooyeweerd’s Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea is important because of the large number of philosophically important issues raised by him. The very idea of a Christian philosophy seems therefore to involve a dilemma: either a Christian philosophy is possible because our religious commitments necessarily determine the way we interpret experience philosophically. But then philosophical agreement and communication between the Christian and the non-Christian are impossible because the differences between them are basically differences in religious commitment that are not arguable in terms of common criteria. Dooyeweerd quite correctly rejects the view and maintains that the Christian and the non-Christian share the same world-order. The Christian and the non-Christian have common criteria for the acceptability of an interpretation – and yet they have differing criteria. Christians and non-Christians can agree in principle about an interpretation of experience to the extent that interpretation involves a purely descriptive integration of states of affairs in common experience.
