tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post115117311888992641..comments2024-03-27T09:11:00.450-04:00Comments on Incinerating Presuppositionalism: Steve's Persisting HaysinessBahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-1151407444516559102006-06-27T07:24:00.000-04:002006-06-27T07:24:00.000-04:00Steve wrote: "By contrast, God is fundamentally di...Steve wrote: "<I>By contrast, God is fundamentally disanalogous to a cartoonist inasmuch as God does not require a physical medium to make things happen. Indeed, he creates the physical medium itself.</I>"<BR/><BR/>Daniel responded: "You didn't call him to the carpet on this, but let's consider it--if God doesn't require "a physical medium", then at least God requires some medium, in which "things" can happen, where we suppose that "things" are separate entities from God itself."<BR/><BR/>In other words, the Christian god would need some plastic medium, regardless of its nature - whether physical or something other than physical (whatever that might be), <I>in order to stage the events it wants to take place</I>. This is not saying that it needs the physical medium for itself in any way (Christians want to make sure that they don't concede any implication of neediness on the part of their god.) In my blog, my basic approach to this point was simply to ask why this god finds it important to stage these events in the first place, though your statement here helps to clarify this question better. The Christian god is said not to require anything, so it's already a given in Christianity that its god did not "need" to create it per se. It chose to create its cartoon universe and stage the events that it wanted to take place within it because doing so "pleases" it. Its pleasure, after all, is its own self-sufficient standard, its only ultimate guide, its only measure of value. Christianity's affirmation of "law" thus breaks down to mere commitment to unconstrained whim.<BR/><BR/>Daniel: "Is "spirit" not supposed to be some substance, analagous to matter, in that it occupies a specific volume of, and position in, space in relation to other substances? Could God do anything without its cartoon book? If it didn't have a medium on which to project its will, it would only have itself. Indeed, your analogy is not only strong, I would dare to go so far as to call it perfect."<BR/><BR/>And yet I've been told that it is "systematically bungled." But again, if the cartoon universe analogy is "systematically bungled" because a cartoonist does not wish into existence the physical media he uses to illustrate his cartoons (something the analogy never claimed in the first place), then likewise Paul's analogy of the potter and his clay must be similarly "systematically bungled" as well, since a potter does not wish the clay he works with into existence. But we don't see Steve making such criticisms of Paul's analogy, because it comes from his "precious" bible. Instead, he retreats saying that "Paul didn’t use the potter analogy to illustrate creation ex nihilo." But the cartoon analogy is used to illustrate the determinism of Christianity - since its god "controls whatsoever comes to pass" in the universe it allegedly created, just as a cartoonist "controls whatsoever comes to pass" in the cartoons he creates. He claims that an analogy "does need to be identical at the salient point of comparison," but in fact an analogy is defined as a "resemblance in some particulars between things otherwise unlike: similarity: comparison based on such resemblance" (<A HREF="http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/analogy" REL="nofollow">Merriam-Webster</A>). Steve is so worried by the analogy that he finds the need to redefine it out of existence. Doesn't work.<BR/><BR/>Daniel "Steve is probably just miffed that he lives in a cartoon universe, and was called on it, by those who look around them and recognize that such a universe is just as subject to the cartoonist's eraser as it is his paint brush. No natural laws exist in a cartoon. The "illusion" of them is the cartoonist's desire to have its cartoon characters believe in them. The primacy of existence, as you pointed out, is undermined."<BR/><BR/>I can't really blame Steve for being miffed, especially after putting the energy into responding to me. But while doing so, he mentioned a couple times that I wasn't worthy of taking seriously. So why does he take the time to respond to me so much?<BR/><BR/>Yes, it's true, whatever is penciled into the cartoon can be revised or even erased at the direction of the cartoonist running the show. The cartoonist can have a woman running along one minute, and the next have her turn into a pillar of salt. Does this violate any natural laws? Well, if there are any natural laws, they're only there because they were penciled into the realm by the cartoonist in the first place, and his eraser is as big as his pencil. And of course, as you mention, since the cartoonist is in control of the characters which populate his cartoon universe, he can endow them with whatever delusions it wants them to have. In the end, it's all "God's good pleasure." That's the only ultimate standard that obtains in the cartoon universe of Christianity, since that's the only standard by which the cartoonist who determines its contents and events operates.<BR/><BR/>Note this pertinent quote by Van Til himself: <BR/><BR/>"God may at any time take one fact and set it into a new relations to created law. That is, there is no inherent reason in the facts or laws themselves why this should not be done. It is this sort of conception of the relation of facts and laws, of the temporal one and many, imbedded as it is in that idea of God in which we profess to believe, that we need in order to make room for miracles. And miracles are at the heart of the Christian position." (<I>The Defense of the Faith</I>, 3rd ed., p. 27)<BR/><BR/>The Christian god, on the basis of whatever happens to please it, can revise reality whenever it wants to. A substance can be water one minute, and wine the next, just because. A man can be sinking in the waters of an inland sea one moment, then walking on the water as if it were a solid the next. A man can come along to the foot of a mountain and yell the words "Be thou removed to yonder place!" and the mountain obeys. These are all things we can see in a cartoon whose events are designed and controlled by a cartoonist, who determines what we will see.<BR/><BR/>Yes, it is a perfect analogy. It perfectly exposes the absurdity of Christianity's determinism. Even Steve admits that he's a puppet, and in fact takes pride in it. If he were truly a puppet, would he have a choice in the matter? Indeed, how does he know who's holding the strings? If he's a puppet, he believes whatever the master puppeteer wants him to believe.<BR/><BR/>Regards,<BR/>DawsonBahnsen Burnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-1151316754521936252006-06-26T06:12:00.000-04:002006-06-26T06:12:00.000-04:00Steve is just digging himself deeper with comments...Steve is just digging himself deeper with comments like these:<BR/><I>By contrast, God is fundamentally disanalogous to a cartoonist inasmuch as God does not require a physical medium to make things happen. Indeed, he creates the physical medium itself.</I><BR/><BR/>You didn't call him to the carpet on this, but let's consider it--if God doesn't require "a physical medium", then at least God requires <I>some medium</I>, in which "things" can happen, where we suppose that "things" are separate entities from God itself.<BR/><BR/>Is "spirit" not supposed to be some substance, analagous to matter, in that it occupies a specific volume of, and position in, space in relation to other substances? Could God do <I>anything</I> without its cartoon book? If it didn't have a medium on which to project its will, it would only have itself. Indeed, your analogy is not only strong, I would dare to go so far as to call it perfect.<BR/><BR/>Steve is probably just miffed that he lives in a cartoon universe, and was called on it, by those who look around them and recognize that such a universe is just as subject to the cartoonist's eraser as it is his paint brush. No natural laws exist in a cartoon. The "illusion" of them is the cartoonist's desire to have its cartoon characters believe in them. The primacy of existence, as you pointed out, is undermined.<BR/><BR/>I'm glad non-Christians like us don't live in such a universe. Losing the boundaries of possibilities is akin to living in a dream...a nightmare. This cartoonist can do <I>anything</I>, at <I>any point in time</I>, and I have reason to suppose that it won't. Demons, leprechauns, fairies, unicorns, all are possibilities, composed of this <I>"immaterial" spirit</I> stuff, which is kind of like a different palette that the cartoonist uses--one whose colors are transparent 99% of the time, which is indistinguishable [to us] from these objects "poofing" into existence at the cartoonist's whim 1% of the time, kind of like a peripheral/ fancy/ complex character meant to "spice up" the tenor of the cartoon.<BR/><BR/>I called my deconversion <A HREF="http://www.exchristian.net/testimonies/2006/02/returning-to-sanity.html" REL="nofollow">"returning to sanity"</A> for good reasons.nsflhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04129382545589470620noreply@blogger.com