Rick Warden’s Ill-fated Effort to Refute the Argument from Metaphysical Primacy

Precisely one year ago today, on November 25, 2012, Rick Warden of the Templestream blog posted a blog entry titled A Refutation of Dawson Bethrick's Central Argument Against Theism. In this blog entry, Warden set out to achieve what the title suggests: he attempted to refute the argument from metaphysical primacy.

You see, Warden really wants his god to be real, and he wants his god-beliefs to be true. And like every good Christian, he wants everyone else to believe likewise and submit. Unfortunately, his zeal to vindicate his god-beliefs has clouded his critical faculties to a devastating degree.

Examining Stefan's Presuppositionalism

StefanMach (to whom I shall again refer as Stefan going forward) has left a series of comments responding to my blog A Reply to Stefan on Induction and Deduction. Stefan is clearly sympathetic to presuppositionalism, though he seems to be wary of Greg Bahnsen, which is curious in itself.

Below I reply to Stefan’s comments.

For Jonathan

Over on my blog Before the Beginning: The Problem of Divine Lonesomeness, internet apologist Jonathan Bradford (whose expert execution of presuppositional apologetics can be observed here) left a comment recently in which he asked me for “a detailed explanation of what a ‘consciousness’ is.”

He claims to have had interactions with Objectivists and gave the following statement:

I've never really received a satisfactory, rigorous definition of the concept as used by Objectivists.

In response to this, I explained:

The concept ‘consciousness’ is an axiomatic concept. Part of what this means is that it is conceptually irreducible and thus cannot be defined in terms of more fundamental concepts. So if you’ve been talking with Objectivists and they are not giving you a definition of ‘consciousness’ in terms of more fundamental concepts, that’s why. The same is the case with the concept ‘existence’ and those denoting sensations. These concepts are defined ostensively – essentially by pointing to those things which they denote. Axiomatic concepts are the most fundamental concepts; there are no concepts that are more fundamental than these. They are conceptually irreducible.

A Reply to Stefan on Induction and Deduction

On my blog Sye Ten Bruggencate vs. the Absolute Laws of Logic which I posted back in July, a visitor posting under the moniker StefanMach (to whom I will refer as Stefan henceforth) recently left a comment about the relationship between induction and deduction and presuppositionalism.

Specifically Stefan inquired about the consequences induction has for deductive conclusions given the view that “inductive argument conclusions are classified as either strong or weak and can never be classified as true or false.”

This is topical given that deductive arguments attempt to draw conclusions from at least one premise which, as a generalization, must be the conclusion of an inductive inference. Thus if an inductive inference can only produce a conclusion that is at best “strong” (as opposed to “weak”), then any attempt to draw a conclusion by means of deduction from an inductive conclusion would necessarily inherit the tentativeness already present in the inductive conclusion. Consequently, how can any deductive conclusion be accepted as reliably true or certain?

The Moral Code of Life

In its most general sense, morality is a code which guides one’s choices and actions.

Consequently there are two basic codes available to man, both mutually opposed to one another.

They are:

the moral code of life vs. the code of death.

Let us explore what distinguishes these two mutually opposed codes.

An Examination of the Ontological Argument

In my previous entry, Twerking for Jesus, I mentioned that I would be posting a new entry examining the ontological argument for the existence of a god more closely. So here it is.