tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-117145222024-03-13T06:03:06.063-04:00Incinerating Presuppositionalism"Presuppositionalism" is the name given to a special branch of Christian apologetics. In this blog, I will post my criticisms of presuppositionalism as it is informed and defended by apologists such as Greg Bahnsen, John Frame, Cornelius Van Til, Richard Pratt, and their latter-day followers.Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.comBlogger529125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-9532113108832588882024-03-06T06:00:00.025-05:002024-03-06T06:00:00.136-05:00Peikoff on the Invulnerability of the Objectivist Axioms<div style="text-align: justify;">Since it is inevitable that Christian apologists will, when it is expedient to do so, dispute the truth of the Objectivist axioms, I thought it might be helpful to dedicate a single entry here on <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/">Incinerating Presuppositionalism</a> showcasing Leonard Peikoff’s mock dialogue between a defender of the axioms and someone who denies their truth. <br /><br />Here Peikoff shows how a denial of each of the axioms both exposes the detractor’s own absurdity as well as confirms the inescapability of their truth.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">For reference, the three axioms in view here are:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<b>One:</b> The axiom of existence, which states: <i>existence exists</i> – i.e., things exist, there is a reality.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Two:</b> The axiom of consciousness, which states that consciousness is consciousness of things that exist, consciousness is real.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Three:</b> The axiom of identity, which states: to exist is to be something specific, distinct from other things that exist, A is A, a thing is itself.
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">The axioms denote fundamental recognitions as formal statements of the most basic of all truths. All other truths depend on the truth of these axioms in that without their truth, there would be nothing to be true to begin with. We know these truths implicitly because they are self-evident in all experience, i.e., in all conscious interaction with reality, with our surroundings, with our daily life. As formal statements, the axioms make explicit what we’ve known implicitly all along. To deny the truth of the axioms is to commit <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2008/06/stolen-concepts-and-intellectual.html">the fallacy of the stolen concept</a>, for the very act of denying the truth of the axioms performatively confirms their truth: one would have to exist in order to deny the axiom of existence; one would need to be conscious in order to deny anything; the axiom of identity would itself need to have identity in order to be singled out and denied as against anything else.
<br /><br />The following excerpt appears on pages 9-10 of Leonard Peikoff’s book <i>Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand</i>:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
The three axioms I have been discussing have a built-in protection against all attacks: they must be used and accepted by everyone, including those who attack them and those who attack the concept of the self-evident. Let me illustrate this point by considering a typical charge leveled by opponents of philosophic axioms.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
“People <i>disagree</i> about axioms,” we often hear. “What is self-evident to one may not be self-evident to another. How then can a man know that his axioms are objectively true? How can he ever be sure he is right?”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
This argument starts by accepting the concept of “disagreement,” which it uses to challenge the objectivity of any axioms, including existence, consciousness, and identity. The following condensed dialogue suggests one strategy by which to reveal the argument’s contradictions. The strategy begins with A, the defender of axioms, purporting to reject outright the concept of “disagreement.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
A. “Your objection to the self-evident has no validity. There is no such thing as disagreement. People agree about everything.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
B. “That’s absurd. People disagree constantly, about all kinds of things.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
A. “How can they? There’s nothing to disagree about, no subject matter. After all, nothing exists.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
B. “Nonsense. All kinds of things exist. You know that as well as I do.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
A. “That’s one. You must accept the existence axiom even to utter the term ‘disagreement.’ But, to continue, I still claim that disagreement is unreal. How can people disagree, since they are unconscious beings who are unable to hold ideas at all?”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
B. “Of course people hold ideas. They are conscious beings—you know that?”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
A. “There’s another axiom. But even so, why is disagreement about ideas a problem? Why should it suggest that one or more of the parties is mistaken? Perhaps all of the people who disagree about the very same point are equally, objectively right.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
B. “That’s impossible. If two ideas contradict each other, they can’t both be right. Contradictions can’t exist in reality. After all, things are what they are. A is A.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Existence, consciousness, identity are presupposed by every statement and by every concept, including that of “disagreement.” (They are presupposed even by invalid concepts, such as “ghost” or “analytic” truth.) In the act of voicing his objection, therefore, the objector has conceded the case. In <i>any</i> act of challenging or denying the three axioms, a man reaffirms them, no matter what the particular content of his challenge. The axioms are invulnerable.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
The opponents of these axioms pose as defenders of truth, but it is only a pose. Their attack on the self-evident amounts to the charge: “Your belief in an idea doesn’t necessarily make it true; you must prove it, because facts are what they are independent of your beliefs.” Every element of this charge relies on the very axioms that these people are questioning and supposedly setting aside.
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">The axioms of existence, consciousness and identity are inescapable. To deny them is to performatively concede their truth. <br /><br />I challenge any and all Christian apologists to make one coherent pronouncement which does not assume or concede the truth identified by the axioms of existence, consciousness and identity. Just one. You won’t be able to do it. You won’t be able to assert any statement as true without assuming or conceding the truth of the Objectivist axioms.
Comments are open and apologists are welcome to post their attempts there.
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-85731257986382358182024-03-03T06:00:00.109-05:002024-03-03T07:30:35.876-05:00Is the Axiom of Existence "Ambiguous"? A Reply to Eli Ayala<div style="text-align: justify;">I’m often fascinated at the lengths to which Christian apologists will go in order to salvage the wreckage of their worldview when confronted with Objectivism. The amount of energy they pour into creating ways of obfuscating and evading can be staggering. And throughout it all, it is ironic to observe how high they set the bar for non-Christian worldviews on certain topics while ignoring the fact that Christianity itself has no player to send into the arena to compete. A great example of this is when apologists assert that non-Christian worldviews lack the necessary preconditions for knowledge while Christianity itself has no theory of concepts to begin with. Apologists themselves seem oblivious to this enormous shortfall.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">We have observed apologists trying to wrestle with the axiom of existence in the past. It’s clear that to the last one, they undoubtedly sense the threat that the Objectivist axioms pose to the Christian worldview, and yet they fail to grasp the power of their truth. What’s most bewildering is their insistence to deny the axioms all the while unaware that their own denials would not be possible if not for the truth of the axioms they deny.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;">A noteworthy example of this is when Christian apologist Annoyed Pinoy denied the axiom “existence exists.” Some readers may recall this spectacle from my <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2016/10/exchange-with-presuppositionalist.html">Exchange with a Presuppositionalist</a>:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
AP: “Existence doesn't exist. Existence is a property of things that do exist.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Me: I’m having a real hard time understanding what you’re trying to say here. So, in your view, existence is a property of things that do exist, and yet this property itself doesn’t exist? Yikes! How does that work? Is this from the bible some place? What does the bible say about these matters?
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">At one point, Annoyed Pinoy (AP) attempted to recover his self-inflicted contradictions by stating: “It depends on what one means by ‘existence’,” yet he had already made it clear that he thinks “existence is a property of things that do exist,” just after stating that this property “existence doesn’t exist.” <br /><br />Unfortunately, this is not an isolated example. For the past 19 years (yes, 19!) on this blog, I have presented the undeniable receipts documenting the harrowing lengths to which defenders of the religious mindset will go to protect their confessional investment, sputtering, stammering and squirming in the futile hope of escaping the damning implications of their own affirmations. Two collections of my "From the Horse’s Mouth" series (see <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2005/04/from-horses-mouth-apologists-shooting.html">here</a> and <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2015/06/from-horses-mouth-again.html">here</a>) will attest, but those I’m afraid are just the tip of the iceberg. Readers are invited to share their favorite in the comments. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>Enter Eli Ayala</b>
<br /><br />Recently in the comments of <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2024/02/concepts-and-induction.html">my previous entry</a>, visitor Robert Kidd provided a link to a video on YouTube titled <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNWp64-7xmU">Presup REFUTED?</a> on a channel called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@RevealedApologetics">Revealed Apologetics</a>. According to the website <a href="https://www.revealedapologetics.com/">Revealed Apologetics</a>, Eli Ayala is “one of the best among Christian apologists and debaters.” I often wonder how on measures apologists in order to rank them and arrive at such superlative accolades. I remember years ago how similar things were said of Sye Ten Bruggencate, but last I heard he’s under a vow of silence (see <a href="https://julieroys.com/apologist-resigned-sin-woman/">here</a>).
<br /><br />Now as of this moment I have not listened to the entirety of Eli’s video (given the repetitiveness of what I have heard already, do I really need to?), and I don’t recall ever listening to any of his other broadcasts (at the time of this writing, his channel <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@RevealedApologetics">Revealed Apologetics</a> has 296 videos). At the beginning of the video he announces that he had been scrolling through the comments of some of his videos and “came across, I mean, this amazing refutation of presuppositional argumentation and transcendental arguments, these sorts of things” (0:30 – 0:39). I did not see where he identified the specific videos where these comments he references can be found, so I haven’t seen the full context of the comments themselves or the exchanges that may have taken place where they were posted. The comments Eli references are from an Objectivist perspective. From what Eli has to say in his video (at least the portion I’ve listened to), it does not appear that he’s very familiar with Objectivism for, as we will see, much of his reaction to the Objectivist content in those comments suggests that he’s encountering Objectivism for the very first time.
<br /><br />He then reads the comment “word for word” (yet he apparently mixes his own words in) which runs as follows (4:49 – 5:58):</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Point one: Existence exists, there’s something rather than nothing. [Point two:] A equals A, whatever exists is what it is and not simultaneously what it is not. Point three: Consciousness is consciousness of existence; consciousness is consciousness of something. A consciousness conscious of nothing is a contradiction in terms. An so he goes on to say: These axioms are not presuppositions so much as they are statements of fundamental truths. Their power lies in the fact that even attempts to deny them end up performatively affirming them. Hmmm… The axioms themselves – check this out, so – the axioms themselves require no proof, presupposition, justification, grounding, etc. This is in part because without them you couldn’t form any of those particular concepts or any other concepts for that matter. Existence is, he says, metaphysically primary and conceptually irreducible. All concept formation is ultimately grounded in existence. And so there you go: no god needed.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In response to this, Eli announces (6:57 – 7:26):</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Now, of course, as you would imagine, there are a whole host of problems here. Of course, I am – for people who are a little slow, okay, um – of course, I don’t find this line of reasoning convincing at all. Uh, but the reason why I’m addressing it is because this is not the first time that I’ve heard it and so I’m trying to, uh, respond to thing that, um, us presuppositionalists will often hear and perhaps you’re not sure how to respond.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">At this point, I’ll call out the points that Eli apparently wants to refute:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Point 1: Existence exists – there is something rather than nothing.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Point 2: A equals A – whatever exists is what it is and not simultaneously what it is not.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Point 3: Consciousness is consciousness of existence; consciousness is conscious of something; a consciousness conscious of nothing is a contradiction in terms.
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Eli says that “there are a whole host of problems here.”
Really? That’s fascinating.
I have questions for Eli:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Is it not true that there is something rather than nothing?<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Is it not true that whatever exists is what it is and not simultaneously what it is not?<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Is it not true that consciousness is conscious of something?</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">I would think that if Eli does not “find this line of reasoning convincing at all,” he must presumably think that all three of these affirmations are false or at least untrue. So, if he is going to reject these affirmations as false or untrue, then he must align philosophically with the following three contrary positions:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Existence does not exist – there is nothing instead of something.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Whatever exists is not what it is, but is what it is not.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Consciousness is not conscious of anything.
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Eli is so invested in his god-belief that he apparently finds it necessary to deny the axioms of existence, identity and consciousness in order to defend it. I know that apologists love to hear themselves, but I wonder sometimes if they ever listen to what they’re saying.
<br /><br />One thing I would be curious to know is whether or not Eli ever addresses the issue of metaphysical primacy – i.e., the relationship between existence and consciousness. In my experience, while Christianity and other mystical worldviews clearly and indisputably assume the primacy of consciousness metaphysics (e.g., consciousness creates, controls, dictates existence, including the identity of existents, and can alter what exists and what happens in reality at will, since reality is essentially a product of conscious activity – cf. wishing makes it so), Christian apologists – including presuppositionalists – never validate this critical premise. In fact, they seem oblivious of any need to do so. So far as I have observed, the resounding testimony is that adult religionists accepted implicitly at some point early in their lives the notion that reality is a product of conscious activity and as they matured into adulthood, they never explicitly grasped this or questioned this. Religion provides a deceptive mask for this assumption given all its reinforcing distractions. And yet, philosophically, it is the diametric opposite of objectivity. The notion that the subject in the subject-object relationship holds metaphysical primacy over its objects is the very essence of subjectivism (see <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2006/03/confessions-of-vantillian-subjectivist.html">here</a> and <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2016/08/normativity-and-primacy-of-existence.html">here</a> for starters).
<br /><br />Another question I would have is how Eli can explain how I and other thinkers can reliably distinguish between what he calls “God” on the one hand, and what he may simply be imagining on the other. Years ago I presented 13 points supporting my view that the Christian god is imaginary (see <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2010/05/imaginative-nature-of-christian-theism.html">here</a>). While there is no such thing as a burden to prove that the non-existent does not exist, I think a very strong case can be assembled to prove that the Christian god, and really any god for that matter, is <i>imaginary</i>. Indeed, even when apologists insist that their god is real and describe it and what it does, I still find that I have no alternative but to use my imagination to consider their assertions. <br /><br />The prospect that the Christian god is in fact nothing more than a figment of one’s imagination would be pretty alarming for the believer. Years ago <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2011/07/proof-that-christian-god-does-not-exist.html">I presented the following argument</a>:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Premise 1: That which is imaginary is not real.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Premise 2: If something is not real, it does not actually exist.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Premise 3: If the god of Christianity is imaginary, then it is not real and therefore does not actually exist.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Premise 4: The god of Christianity is imaginary.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Conclusion: Therefore, the god of Christianity is not real and therefore does not actually exist.
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">and asked the following pointed question:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><i>When I imagine your god, how is what I am imagining not imaginary?</i></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Whether it’s the claim “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1), “Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jonah 1:17), “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many” (Matthew 27:52-53), I have no choice but to use my imagination to contemplate these fictions. But in spite of the fact that we must engage our imaginations just to contemplate these claims, Christians insist that their god is real and that these things really happened, and yet they face inescapable futility when trying to recover these elements of their worldview from the unrelenting jaws of fantasy. Christians insist that human beings have a soul which survives their death and faces an eternal judgment. This too requires us to engage our imaginations. Cornelius Van Til passed away in 1987, and we’re apparently supposed to imagine that he’s alive and well, wandering the hallways and rooms of some heavenly mansion located in some supernatural realm. I readily concede that I can imagine this, but that’s the problem: I can <i>only</i> imagine this. So again, how is what I imagine not imaginary?
<br /><br />When confronted with these matters, apologists often resort to personal attacks, as though the one pointing out the grievous liabilities of their subjective worldview were the problem. Frankly, I find it difficult to have an adult conversation with someone who will likely end up spewing the equivalent of “You exposed the irrationality of my worldview! I’m taking my toys and going home!”
<br /><br />I don’t know how Eli Ayala would address these challenges to Christianity, but perhaps like some believers I’ve encountered, he might seek to discredit Premise 1: That which is imaginary is not real. But either way, believers are going to be motivated to refute my argument somehow given their commitment to believing that their god is real. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><b>“The axiom of existence is ambiguous.”</b>
<br /><br />In the portion of Eli’s video that I watched (the first eleven minutes or so), he states over and over again that the axiom “existence exists” is “ambiguous.” That’s very strange because the comments he cited (and even repeated!) made very clear what the axiom “existence exists” means (4:49 – 4:53):</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Point one: Existence exists, there’s something rather than nothing.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">One wonders if Eli has actually considered what it is that he’s trying to refute before trying to refute it. And even though what “existence exists” means was spelled out to him (so as to spoon-feed him a most basic recognition), he insists over and over again that it is “ambiguous.” I can only suppose that he has not reviewed the relevant Objectivist sources, either at all or at least in a charitable manner, to understand what is meant by the axiom ‘existence exists’ by those who affirm it, or if that would do any good given his predetermination to discredit it. From what he does say, it sounds like he did very little preparation before broadcasting his reactions on Youtube.
<br /><br />Nevertheless, I’m happy to explore this. <br /><br />To say that something is “ambiguous” is to say either that it is doubtful or uncertain, or that it is open to more than one interpretation. It would be rather ironic if Eli meant that the statement “existence exists” is uncertain given that many detractors have protested against Objectivism for its affirmation of the axiom of existence as a solid, incontestable certainty. “You can’t be certain of that!” is a common reaction from subjectivists, unaware that they themselves are uttering a certainty and their own actions confirm the truth of the axiom of existence – after all, they have to exist in order to deny the axiom of existence! Moreover, it is hard to fathom that a serious thinker could sincerely find the recognition that there is a reality – that existence exists – is “doubtful” – and even if one did doubt its truth, that would not make the truth itself dubious, but would rather call into question the thinker’s cognitive well-being. Who seriously doubts that existence exists? From what I have observed, thinkers who dispute the axiom of existence are doing so because they feel threatened by it somehow. <br /><br />To state that “’existence exists’ is ambiguous” in the sense that it is open to different interpretations is rather dumbfounding. What different interpretations are available here? Does Eli list a number of different interpretations and provide cues from the Objectivist literature suggesting a difficulty in understanding which interpretation might be intended while others are still possible? Perhaps if one deliberately distorts the meaning of the axiom, one might be able to imagine alternatives to what Objectivism is actually stating with the axiom of existence. But this would be a misrepresentation and any objection raised against the axiom of existence on such basis could only constitute a challenge to something other than Objectivism. That would be an instance of the fallacy known as straw-manning. <br /><br />The axiom of existence identifies a perceptually self-evident fact – namely the fact that things exist, that reality exists – explicitly in the form of a conceptually irreducible statement – i.e., an axiom. The concept ‘existence’ cannot be analyzed in terms of more fundamental concepts – indeed, there are no concepts more fundamental than the concept ‘existence’. It is an axiomatic concept. To have objective meaning, concepts must refer to things which exist, either directly as in the case of concepts denoting concretes, or ultimately as in the case of higher abstractions which rest on more fundamental concepts informed by perceptual input. <br /><br />Leonard Peikoff observes:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">We start with the irreducible fact and concept of existence – that which is.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
The first thing to say about that which is is simply: it is. As Parmenides in ancient Greece formulated the principle: what is, is. Or, in Ayn rand’s words: <i>existence exists</i>. (“Existence” here is a collective noun, denoting the sum of existents.) This axiom does not tell us about the nature of existents; it merely underscores the fact that they exist. (<i>Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand</i>, p. 4)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">So, in essence, the axiom ‘existence exists’ is essentially the recognition that things exist – that there is a reality – reduced to a single concept. Or, if you like: <i>all things that exist, exist</i>. <br /><br />It is fascinating that any thinker genuinely interested in getting to the fundamental level of knowledge would find this formalized recognition at all problematic. Meanwhile, Christians criticize the recognition that things exist as somehow “ambiguous” all the while affirming belief in an invisible magic being which can wish entire universes into being and never explain either how they could know this or how the alleged magic being is supposed to have done this (cf. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/10/is-creation-possible.html">here</a>). I’m reminded of the scolding thrust into Jesus’ mouth in Matthew 23:24: they “strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.”
<br /><br />Now it may be that Eli has a different objection in mind when he charges the axiom of existence with “ambiguity.” He seems to think that the axiom should do more than what Objectivism itself expects of it. He states (7:31 – 7:59):</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Let’s start with the statement ‘existence exists’. There is something rather than nothing. Now I want you to notice something, all right. I want you to notice how ambiguous and abstract this statement is, okay. Existence is asserted, but no content is given to the nature of existence. Isn’t that right? What does it mean to say ‘existence exists’, there’s something rather than nothing? What is the something?</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">If Eli stopped with “there is something rather than nothing” and asked whether or not that is true, I think he’d be on the right track. Does Eli think the statement “there is something rather than nothing” is not true? To address the axiom of existence <i>at its own level</i>, i.e., at the foundation of human cognition, the question is: is it true? Is it true that existence exists? Is it true that all the things that exist, exist? Or, as we saw with Annoyed Pinoy above, does Eli think that existence does not exist? Or that all the things that do exist, do not in fact exist? Well, he does not come out and say either way, but he sure seems very committed to taking issue with the axiom of existence as a basic recognition. Instead of confronting it head on, however, he chooses to move beyond it quite suddenly, ignoring the question of whether or not it is true, and urges his audience to “notice how ambiguous and abstract this statement is.” <br /><br />Mind you, simply calling a statement “ambiguous” or “abstract,” is not an argument. If Eli has an argument against the recognition that existence exists, what is it?
<br /><br />Apparently, Eli misses the distinction between a metaphysical starting point and a full-blown dissertation. The axiom ‘existence exists’ is only a <i>starting point</i>, an <i>initial</i> recognition at the base of knowledge. As a starting point, it cannot presume prior knowledge. And the axiom of existence does not presume prior knowledge. The very function of the axiom of existence qua starting point of knowledge is not to affirm omniscience about everything that exists, full of details about every existent in the universe, but to serve as the marker of where human cognition <i>begins</i>. It is not a <i>stopping</i> point - it is a <i>starting</i> point. At the level of one’s cognitive starting point, we would not expect one to know the kinds of details which apparently concern Eli. The kinds of details that Eli apparently has in mind would necessarily be <i>later discoveries</i>. <br /><br />Moreover, it is important to note that the axiom of existence is not a <i>deductive</i> starting point. Objectivism does not pretend to <i>deduce</i> all its principles and affirmations from the axiom of existence. On the contrary, as a starting point, the fundamental recognition that there is a reality, that things do in fact exist, is just the beginning of our cognitive journey. We still need to move forward on that journey and gather facts in the realm of existence to inform the content of our knowledge. Essentially, we need to <i>identify</i> what we discover in order to integrate what we discover into the sum of our knowledge. We do this by forming concepts (for details on how this is done, I recommend Ayn Rand’s <i>Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology</i>). We cannot, for example, derive deductively from the recognition that existence exists that “therefore the circumference of a circle can be calculated by multiplying its diameter by Pi.” We still need to do the hard work of discovering this. There are no shortcuts to knowledge. The “secrets” of the universe will never be “revealed” to the human mind by supernatural beings. That is a fantasy through and through.
<br /><br />It may be helpful to think of this as a two-step process. The two steps would entail, in order of performance by the human mind: first the discovery <i>that</i> a thing exists, and then second, further inquiry into discovering details about the attributes which make up the thing’s overall identity, to identify <i>what</i> exists – the “content” to which Eli refers. Adult human thinkers perform this two-step with such frequency and fluence fluency – they’ve been performing this two-step process throughout their lives – that simply recognizing it as a critical aspect of epistemology may seem rather “beneath” us. But as thinkers interested in general epistemology, we cannot take for granted what we might otherwise take for granted! <br /><br />(I’m reminded at this juncture of <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2020/07/wsibc-jump-page.html">my examination</a> of Christian apologist James Anderson’s
book <i>Why Should I Believe Christianity?</i> where Anderson, whom by the way <a href="https://www.proginosko.com/2020/05/interview-with-eli-ayala-revealed-apologetics/">Eli has interviewed</a>, calls out “existence” as the first item that thinkers take for granted. He writes on pg. 135 of his book: “I’ve argued that we need to acknowledge the reality of God in order to make sense of various things we take for granted and depend on every day: existence, values, morality, reason, mind and science.” See here: <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2020/05/wsibc-presup-enters-rehab.html">WSIBC: Presup Enters Rehab</a>)
<br /><br />Notice that there is an undeniable order to this: The first step must precede the second step; the second step cannot happen unless and until the first step has been performed. This is wholly in line with the observation Leonard Peikoff makes in the excerpt quoted above. The axiom of existence represents the first step in view here while Eli seems to be conflating the second step with the first, expecting from the first step what can only be gained in the second step while taking the first step completely for granted, putting the basic epistemological order completely in reverse. This is what Greg Bahnsen might call “a tremendous philosophical mistake” (see <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/12/bahnsens-tremendous-philosophical.html">here</a>).
<br /><br />Consider how tightly logical this is: awareness <i>that</i> something exists <i>precedes</i> (i.e., <i>must take place before</i>) awareness of <i>what</i> that something that exists is. If I’m walking along a path and I see something shiny, I’m going to know <i>that</i> it exists before I know <i>what</i> it is. In fact, while I have already discovered <i>that</i> something shiny exists, there’s no guarantee that I will discover <i>what</i> specifically it is: I may ignore it and carry on my way, never having stopped to investigate; or, I may stop to investigate and still puzzle over what it might be. This is the course of human epistemology: we come across things in reality (existence exists) and it is up to us to move forward with the task of identifying what we find if we so choose. <br /><br />The same epistemological order is observable in inference as well. If an astronomer infers from observing a slight wobble in the orbit of a distant planet that there must be some other celestial body nearby influencing its orbit, identifying that nearby celestial body as a moon could not happen prior to the inference that it likely exists. Inference is a conscious activity and therefore a form of awareness. And even then, there is still much to discover about the moon – e.g., its surface features, its composition, its approximate age, the degree of its rotational axis, etc. None of these attributes could be known <i>before</i> we first discover <i>that</i> it exists, and simply discovering that it exists does not give us these details. The general order here must be followed even in astrophysics.
<br /><br />Things are no different at the fundamental level of one’s cognition: we first perceive objects in our surroundings and recognize however implicitly that they exist (existence exists), and then we have a choice to make: do we examine those objects in order to identify them, or pass them over and go on to do something else? Sometimes we stop and examine them, and sometimes we ignore them and pass them over. There is certainly no obligation to stop and examine everything we perceive in order to enumerate their attributes. Consider when you’re driving down a road lined with trees on either side: do you count all the trees as you’re driving through the forest? Do you identify every species you see? Do you determine the age of each tree that you pass by? Do you ascertain how many branches and leaves each tree has? In each case I’m betting that the answer is a resounding no – on the contrary, you ignore them, you pass them by, they are unimportant to your task. While trees are certainly in your field of vision at some point, your focus is on the road, on other vehicles that may be sharing it, and on your driving. We perceive more than we identify.
<br /><br />But Eli was not finished trying to make his point that the axiom of existence is ambiguous. Here I will cite his words at length – but be warned, his rant gets a bit raggedy and repetitive. He states (8:38 – 10:43):</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">But notice this person says existence exists, there is something rather than nothing, and uh, we’re not told what this something is, okay, and I want, I want you to notice here that this… this person is going to remain ambiguous on the nature of existence and then also – this is important – he’s going to make a bunch of metaphysical and epistemological claims without first fleshing out how he knows these things given his worldview and the ambiguity of his starting point ‘existence exists’. Uh, you’re going to see this ambiguity throughout, okay? And this is important, because when people make epistemological statements or statements of of fact or whatever, you have to understand that all of those statements presuppose a particular metaphysical scheme, but what we’ll have here which is often the case is that um, they will sneak in me, well, they’ll assert something metaphysical, but it’s, but it’s ambiguous and undefined, okay, and then from that ambiguity they will build the rest of their case and of course we’re not going to, um, allow that as we are in apologetics dealing with a worldview clash, okay? We don’t do this from from the Christian perspective when we say we have a worldview, we have a specific metaphysical, um, u, we are making metaphysical claims, uh, we are saying something about God the nature of God and the… his ontology, these sorts of things, and we make claims about how we can know this and these sorts of things, okay. But I want you to notice that this person is going to remain ambiguous on the nature of existence and then he’s going to make a bunch of metaphysical and epistemological claims without fleshing out how we know these things, um, how he knows these things in light of his ambiguous metaphysical starting point, namely, uh, existence exists. For instance, he uh, asserts that, uh, he asserts a logical truth for example, A equals A, this is the law of identity. So those who are unfamiliar with logic, and you have the three basic laws, law of identity, law of non-contradiction, law of excluded middle, okay, law of identity basically is A is A, A is equal to A, so something is what it is, it’s not what it’s not, okay,…</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Alright, I think that’s enough.
<br /><br />So here are a couple points that Eli is missing here. First, in regards to his claim that the axiom of existence is “ambiguous” in that it does not tell us what a thing is, he misses the fact that whatever specific existent one perceives is irrelevant to the axiom of existence. Since many, many things exist in the world, one does not need to specify the <i>what</i> to understand the importance of the <i>that</i> of awareness. Again, as pointed out above, we first become aware <i>that</i> a thing exists, and then – and only then – are we in a position to move further to identifying <i>what</i> that something is. It could be a rock, it could be a shoe, it could be a microwave oven, it could be a fan belt, it could be a cloud, etc. The axiom of existence does not specify what the object you perceive must be – it could be anything in existence. That’s the beauty of the axiom of existence – since the concept ‘existence’ is the widest of all concepts – it includes everything that exists – the axiom applies regardless of whatever specific things a person happens to find in reality. This is how we know that the axiom of existence is universal to all human cognition: it applies to a child in ancient Greece watching a sparrow just as much as it applies to an elderly grandmother kneading bread dough in 1970s Nebraska. In either case, existence exists. As a starting point, its truth prevails regardless of whatever specific thing one happens to discover or perceive. We don’t need a separate axiom for the awareness of rocks, and another axiom for the awareness of shoelaces, and another axiom for the awareness of razor blades, and yet another axiom for the awareness of clouds. One axiom does it all in all cases everywhere and always. This is epistemological economy. This is the power of human cognition.
<br /><br />Second, in regard to the claim that the axiom of existence is ambiguous in that it “remain[s] ambiguous on the nature of existence” – that is, presumably, that the axiom does not do enough to tell us more about what existence as such is, this objection ignores the fact that existence is conceptually irreducible: existence cannot be analyzed or defined in terms of more fundamental concepts. As Peikoff rightly puts it, “existence exists, and <i>only</i> existence exists” (<i>Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand</i>, p. 32). No matter what makes up existence, whatever it is, it exists. So again, we can get no more fundamental than what the axiom of existence affirms. <br /><br />To have objective meaning, concepts would need to have reference to things which exist, either directly, or by way of abstraction. There are no concepts more fundamental than the concept ‘existence’, so one cannot define ‘existence’ in terms of more fundamental concepts. Existence is the foundation – there’s nothing more fundamental. Moreover, since ‘existence’ here is used as “a collective noun, denoting the sum of existents” – i.e., as a concept which includes the totality of everything that exists, the axiom of existence is at least as meaningful as the concept ‘universe’. When theists say that their god created the universe, do they bicker amongst each other saying it’s “ambiguous on the nature of [universe]”? No, they don’t. Eli reserves the right to apply a criticism, a vacuous one at that, to non-believing worldviews which he would probably never apply to his own. And yet we have an answer to the claim that the axiom is ambiguous: there is nothing ambiguous about existence. Existence exists. If Eli is confused on what ‘existence’ means, the fault does not lie with Objectivism. Perhaps his confusion originates in his own worldview which has no objective starting point. <br /><br />At no point does Eli actually demonstrate that the axiom of existence is in fact ambiguous. Rather, he seems to be importing his own ignorance of Objectivism into his own objections against Objectivism, which is neither charitable nor noble. Perhaps he believes that just by labeling the axiom of existence ‘ambiguous’, that is sufficient to <i>make</i> it ambiguous. But reality does not conform to wishing, for wishing does not make it so. And he has no argument against its truth. Indeed, any attempt to argue against the axiom of existence would performatively affirm its truth, which is what was stated in the comments Eli himself read out on his video. Again, does he ever listen to what he says?
<br /><br />If Eli has an alternative starting point, what is it, and how does it not take for granted the truth of the Objectivist axiom of existence? Where does human cognition begin if not with the unadorned, fundamental awareness that things exist? Even if Eli were to say that “God exists” is his starting point, he is affirming existence. (He would also be affirming the primacy of imagination over fact.)
<br /><br />On Eli’s view, does consciousness have an object? Does it need an object? If consciousness has an object, what according to his view is the nature of the relationship between consciousness and its object? Does he think that the object of consciousness is a creation of conscious activity (i.e., consciousness creates its own objects <i>ex nihilo</i>), or does he think that the object exists independently of conscious activity and it is by means of conscious activity that one becomes aware of the object of his consciousness? <br /><br />For example, I open my eyes and see a wall before me, and on the wall a painting is hanging. Sense perception gives me direct awareness of the wall and the painting. Did my consciousness create the wall and the painting such that they now exist and available for my eyes to perceive, or did they already exist and by opening my eyes I became aware of things which exist independent of the conscious activity by which I became aware of them? Or, perhaps Eli thinks there’s some other alternative to consider here. Perhaps he doesn’t think perception gives awareness of anything, or perhaps he thinks that the things we perceive don’t actually exist.
<br /><br />What likely rankles thinkers like Eli and other presuppositionalists even further than its truth as an axiom, is that the axiom of existence is presented as an expression of fundamental <i>certainty</i> on behalf of a non-Christian worldview. Apologists resent non-believers who are certain in their position, especially if the position in question provides a bullwork for their rejection of mystical worldviews like Christianity. And yet, Eli is likely oblivious to the performative contradiction he commits every time he affirms the existence of his god. When a thinker states “X is the case,” he is implying that this is true regardless of whatever anyone wants, believes, prefers, wishes, hopes, denies, ignores, forgets, etc. And yet when the “X” affirmed is a supernatural consciousness to whose will all reality allegedly conforms, his affirmation is immediately at cross purposes against itself: he is saying the primacy of consciousness is true, which is presented as a fact which obtains independent of conscious activity. He might as well say “The statement I am saying is false.”
<br /><br />What I would challenge Eli to make clear is the following: <br /><br />First, does he acknowledge that there is a reality? Either he does, or he does not.
<br /><br />Second, assuming he acknowledge that there is a reality, does he think that reality is a product of conscious activity (e.g., wishing, commands, mental projection, etc.), or does he think reality exists independently of any and all conscious activity? Or, has he just never really given this question any careful thought before?
<br /><br />Objectivist metaphysics explicitly observes that reality (existence) exists (‘existence exists’) independent of any and all conscious activity, whether that activity is characterized as wishing, commanding, demanding, ordering, wanting, preferring, insisting, projecting, imagining, hoping, supplicating, praying, etc. Objectivism observes that existence is a necessary metaphysical precondition for any conscious activity to begin with. The order of nature is not: consciousness, then (or therefore) existence, but rather: existence, and organisms capable of conscious activity are conscious in some way (by means of sensation, perception) of existence. Where does the Christian bible directly address these matters? Or, does it leave them terminally ambiguous?
<br /><br />Lastly, I invite him to weigh in on the question of whether or not, according to his worldview, wishing makes it so. Does he believe that wishing makes it so? If so, can he provide a demonstration? Or does he recognize that wishing is metaphysically inert in that no amount of wishing will alter reality? If he acknowledges that wishing doesn’t make it so, can he explain in a manner consistent with his own commitment to theistic metaphysics why that is the case? <br /><br />As we have witnessed time and time again right here on this blog, the presuppositionalist is motivated by a concern to protect his confessional investment in theism at all costs, even at the cost of his own reputation as a thinker before his peers. This is his self-sacrifice in action. He wants his god to be real, and given the primacy of this psychological investment in his interaction with the world (especially socially), he will naturally view any alternative to his view as a threat to be combatted at all costs, even if it requires him to deny the fact that existence exists outright. He rightly senses that conceding the truth of the axiom of existence will only undermine his god-belief at the most fundamental level of thought, so he will sense an urgency to discredit it somehow, even if his effort makes him look silly as a thinker.
I am perfectly content to rest on the following:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
P1: If existence exists, then there’s no rational justification to assert a god.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">P2: Existence exists.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">C: Therefore, there’s no rational justification to assert a god.
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In short, since existence exists, all gods are out of a job.
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-81845470168589966652024-02-03T06:00:00.007-05:002024-02-03T06:00:00.146-05:00Concepts and Induction<div style="text-align: justify;">Years ago I was in correspondence with a Christian apologist who presupposed that Christianity and <i>only</i> Christianity could solve the problem of induction. There were many Christians at one time who actually believed this. Perhaps some still do.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">This apologist carefully demonstrated how a number of prominent academic treatments of the matter missed the mark, sometimes by wide margin, when it came to providing a justification for inductive presuppositions. The apologist of course claimed that the existence of a universe-creating deity which actively “ordains and sustains” the “created order” provides the rational justification which secular scholars could only miss due to their chronic “unbelief.”</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It was never made clear what exactly the supernatural being’s alleged existence has to do with inferences which human thinkers perform on the basis of limited samples to wider generalizations, but I suspect that at the end of the day, this really doesn’t matter to the apologist: once he has asserted the existence of his god, even if doing so moves us no closer to understanding the problem it supposedly solves, he believes his task is complete.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">After reviewing what the apologist presented, I stated that I'm always surprised, when reading apologetic treatments of induction, that there is no discussion of concepts, the nature of their forming, or their relationship to inductive generalization, as if these issues did not matter.
<br /><br />To this, the apologist confessed by way of reply:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">It's not immediately obvious to me how the nature of concept formation bears either on the description of the problem of induction or on the development of cogent solutions. Perhaps you can elaborate.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here’s a handy way to look at this: concepts are in essence <i>mini-generalizations</i>; that is, a concept is a single dynamic unit of mental integration which contains <i>all</i> instances of an entire category of things, qualities, attributes, even <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/12/bahnsens-tremendous-philosophical.html">actions</a>, including those instances which we have not perceived directly, even those which we will <i>never</i> perceive. Concepts expand an individual’s awareness beyond what he perceives, either in the moment or across his lifetime. A concept is dynamic in the sense that we can continually add more data to it, packing it further and further with more information that we learn about the nature of the existents which the concept subsumes. <br /><br />The concept ‘table’, for example, includes <i>all</i> tables – not only those tables which exist now, but all tables which have ever existed in the past, and all tables which will exist in the future. It includes all tables in my neighborhood, in my county, in my nation, in the world, regardless of where they might exist. The scope of reference of a concept in its rawest state is not bound by temporal or locational constraints. Nor is a concept restricted to some quantity of instances – it is potentially infinite in this sense: there is no limit to how many tables can be included in the concept ‘table’.
<br /><br />To confirm this understanding of concepts, notice how we must <i>qualify</i> our use of concepts in order to narrow the scope of our intended reference. If I say “tables are brown,” one might immediately recall from memory seeing tables that are white, grey, light blue, tan, black, etc. As an unqualified pronouncement, the statement “tables are brown” is unreservedly general in nature, implying an affirmation about <i>all</i> tables, because the concept ‘table’, constituting a <i>mini-generalization</i>, is unqualified. But if I say “<i>This</i> table is brown,” hearers will understand immediately that I am speaking about a <i>specific</i> table rather than <i>all</i> tables, because I have used the qualifier “this” to enhance the meaning of the concept ‘table’ in my utterance. If concepts were not a kind of generalization already, without qualification, such qualification would not be necessary.
<br /><br />With this rudimentary understanding of the nature of concepts in mind, now it really should be “immediately obvious” that at the very least concepts have <i>something</i> to do with induction. If we recognize that concepts are in fact essentially <i>mini-generalizations</i>, then any expressly inductive inference which makes use of concepts is already drawing on a well of previously generalized data, arguably even taking the generalizing dynamics of concept-formation as an implicit model.
<br /><br />One might suppose, then, that a conceptual analysis of induction simply moves the problem of induction back a step. Indeed, if one is hard-pressed to provide a justification for the generalization “all multi-storied buildings require structural engineering,” especially when no thinker has had occasion to examine every multi-storied building which has ever been built (or will be built in the future), how much more difficult would it be to justify our formation of the concept ‘building’ in the first place? <br /><br />That’s a great question!
<br /><br />To which we put the question back on the apologist: how does Christianity account for concepts? Since induction depends on concepts, and concepts already expand our awareness from immediately perceptible samples to broad generalities, Christianity would need to provide an account for concepts if we’re to take the claim that Christianity and only Christianity can justify induction seriously. But herein is the problem: Christianity has no theory of concepts to begin with. So how can Christianity at all factor in any kind of answer to the problem of induction? <br /><br />It cannot.
<br /><br />Meanwhile, I refer readers to Ayn Rand’s <i>Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology</i> for the best theory of concepts I’ve ever examined. And I’m happy to report it’s not all that mysterious after all. There’s certainly no justification for asserting the existence of a supernatural mind for which there is no objective evidence whatsoever. Of course, if readers know of something better, please share your discovery in the comments section.
<br /><br />The Christian view seems to be that the problem of induction is best answered by asserting the existence of an omniscient mind which has comprehensive <i>a priori</i> knowledge of the universe since it wished the universe into being and is said to have “revealed” itself through human artefacts, such as fantastical writings handed down through the ages. As the creator of the universe, it would know everything about the universe, right? Again, it is unclear how this moves us any closer to understanding the cognitive process which the human mind performs to take us from “this egg broke when I dropped it onto the floor” to “all eggs will likely break when dropped on a hard surface.” If I imagine the Christian god (what alternative do I have other than to imagine it?), how does that in any way enlighten me as to how I draw general conclusions from isolated samples? It doesn’t. Even if I believe there’s a supernatural being which has all possible knowledge of the universe, that would not explain how I draw even the most rudimentary generalization. It does not even explain how I can form the simplest concepts. I can only suspect that theists making this kind of claim (to wit: “only Christianity can account for induction”) are taking so much for granted with respect to the operations of human cognition that they fail to grasp just how hollow their apologetic gambit is.
<br /><br />Back in 2007 I posted an entry here on <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/">Incinerating Presuppositionalism</a> addressing the provocative question: <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2007/04/would-omniscient-mind-have-knowledge-in.html">Would an Omniscient Mind Have Knowledge in Conceptual Form?</a> The Christian god is said to be all-knowing and all-seeing (cf. Job 34:21, Prov. 15:3, Heb. 4:13, et al.). <br /><br />A. W. Tozer, in <i>The Pursuit of God</i>, describes it as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">He is <i>omniscient</i>. He knows in one free and effortless act all matter, all spirit, all relationships, all events. He has no past and He has no future. He <i>is</i>, and none of the limiting and qualifying terms used of creatures can apply to Him. (p. 45)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">My answer to the question in the title of that entry is that an omniscient mind, being one which has immediate and direct awareness of everything that exists, that has existed, that will exist, etc., <i>would have no need for concepts</i>. Concepts would be useless to such a mind for it would have the capacity to have direct awareness of each and every particular in existence at all times, something the human mind cannot do. It is because human beings lack such a capacity that we need to economize our mental activity by forming concepts. This has implications for induction: where a human mind would need to <i>infer</i> that “all multi-storied buildings require structural engineering” – an inference which takes man’s awareness far beyond the range of what he has personally observed, an omniscient mind would have direct awareness of all buildings and their physical requirements without any need to make any inferences, for it would not need to perform any kind of mental action to expand its awareness beyond the range of what it can observe – it would already be observing <i>everything</i>. Concepts and induction, then, are <i>human</i> capacities, and problems pertaining to these capacities require <i>human</i> solutions. Pointing to an omniscient mind, then, misses the fundamental natures of concepts and induction as well as why they are essential to human cognition. <br /><br />So, to address the apologist’s confession I quoted above: One thing we can know with certainty is that thinkers will not be sufficiently equipped to explain and justify induction without a good understanding of the nature of concepts and how they factor in inductive thinking. Since we find no information about the nature of concepts or their formation in any of the books of the Christian bible, where would Christians go to get a <i>distinctly Christian understanding</i> of the nature of concepts?
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-83776648595162889262024-01-03T06:00:00.057-05:002024-01-03T06:00:00.134-05:00Answering Objections to my ‘Horse’s Mouth’ Collection<div style="text-align: justify;">A commenter posting under the name “Jim” recently left reaction to my 2005 entry <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2005/04/from-horses-mouth-apologists-shooting.html">From the Horse's Mouth: Apologists Shooting Themselves in the Foot</a>, asserting that I’m “being intellectually dishonest” in the “list of quotes” that I present in that entry. Jim called out three quotes and chastised me for my own comments on those quotes.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Given that Jim’s <a href="https://www.blogger.com/profile/06659172550914159280">blogger profile</a> indicates that he’s been on Blogger since 2024 and his comment was posted on the morning January 1, 2024, one might surmise that he created his account expressly to post his comment on my blog. I just found that curious.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Below I will consider Jim’s objections in order so that we can see how well they hold up.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 700;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-weight: bold;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Example 1</div></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The first quote that Jim cites comes from John Frame, namely the statement “We know without knowing how we know.” <br /><br />Jim asked: “What is the context?”
<br /><br />While it’s good that Jim is inquisitive, I did supply a link to the source, and surprisingly the link still works. Judging by his question, though, it appears he didn’t check the original source out for himself. Let’s take a closer look.
<br /><br />The quote in question is found in John Frame’s paper titled <a href="https://www.thirdmill.org/files/english/html/pt/PT.h.Frame.Presupp.Apol.1.html">PRESUPPOSITIONAL APOLOGETICS: AN INTRODUCTION Part 1 of 2: Introduction and Creation</a>, particularly in a section of that paper labeled “The Psychology of Presupposing.” Here I quote Frame at length so that I don’t get accused of mischaracterizing what Frame states in that section:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
I admit that it is difficult to construe the psychology of such faith. How is it that people come to believe a Word from God which contradicts all their other normal means of knowledge? How did Abraham come to know that the voice calling him to sacrifice his son (Gen. 22:1-18; cf. Heb. 11:17-19; James 2:21-24) was the voice of God? What the voice told him to do was contrary to fatherly instincts, normal ethical considerations, and even, apparently, contrary to other Words of God (Gen. 9:6). But he obeyed the voice and was blessed. Closer to our own experience: how is it that people come to believe in Jesus even though they have not, like Thomas, seen Jesus’ signs and wonders (John 20:29)?<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
I cannot explain the psychology here to the satisfaction of very many. In this case as in others (for we walk by faith, not by sight!) we may have to accept the fact even without an explanation of the fact. Somehow, God manages to get his Word across to us, despite the logical and psychological barriers. Without explaining how it works, Scripture describes in various ways a “supernatural factor” in divine-human communication. (a) It speaks of the <i>power</i> of the Word. The Word created all things (Gen. 1:3, etc.; Ps. 33:3-6; John 1:3) and directs the course of nature and history (Pss. 46:6; 148:5-8). What God says will surely come to pass (Isa. 55:11; Gen. 18:14; Deut. 18:21ff.). The gospel is “the power of God unto salvation” (Rom. 1:16; cf. Isa. 6:9-10; Luke 7:7ff.; Heb. 4:12). (b) Scripture also speaks of the personal power of the <i>Holy Spirit</i> operating <i>with</i> the Word (John 3:5; 1 Cor. 2:4,12ff.; 2 Cor. 3:15-18; 1 Thess. 1:5). Mysterious though the process may be, somehow God illumines the human mind to discern the divine source of the Word. We know without knowing how we know.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In the first paragraph, Frame poses an important rhetorical question: “How is it that people come to believe a Word from God which contradicts all their other normal means of knowledge?” A natural response to this might be: What do you take to be a person’s “normal means of knowledge”? Such questions are germane to any pursuit of understanding presuppositional apologetics since its proponents make so much hay on questions of the “How do you know?” sort. But curiously Frame himself does not elaborate on this. And yet presuppositionalists continually fall back on the strategy of interrogating non-believers on how they might know whatever they affirm. Even such observations such as “it’s raining outside right now” are liable to prompt the nearest apologist of this persuasion to snicker back, “How do you know?” Thus, one might think that presuppositional apologists would themselves have the basics of their epistemological house in order. Consequently, Frame’s statement “We know without knowing how we know” comes as quite a surprise: presuppositionalists insist that non-believers – who do <i>not</i> seat their claims on appeals to an omniscient and infallible source – account for every aspect of their own knowing process, while the presuppositionalists themselves – who <i>do</i> seat their claims on appeals to an omniscient and infallible source – reserve for themselves the privilege of seeking refuge ignorance when it suits them. <br /><br />Frame then cites the example of Abraham hearing a voice instructing him to prepare his own son as a sacrifice – yes, to <i>kill</i> his own son. Assuming Abraham heard a voice and that voice instructed in a language he understood that he prepare his own son as a burnt offering, how would Abraham know that this was the voice of the creator of the universe and not, say, something of his own imagining or perhaps an hallucination? Frame has no explanation for this. But Frame cannot allow for any alternative other than what his religion insists on being the case – namely that the voice truly was that of the divine creator. Instead, he’s content to rest the matter on “we know without knowing how we know.” <br /><br />How well would Frame’s own admission go over if a non-believer used it in response to a Syeclone? Consider for example the following hypothetical exchange:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Non-believer: I love apple pie.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Syeclone: How do you know?<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Non-believer: We know without knowing how we know.
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Naturally, we’d expect the Syeclone to react to this by saying the non-believer’s worldview cannot “account for” basic epistemological operations. And yet, this is what Frame admits when confronted with questions on how believers can know that a command “which contradicts their other normal means of knowledge” come from the creator of the universe. You suspect that the Christian god may have commanded you to kill your loved ones? Well, says Frame, “we may have to accept the fact even without an explanation of the fact.” Such cognitive resignation in fact falls right in line with the lesson of the Abraham and Isaac tale. Its value is not in its purported historicity, but in illustrating in stark form the model mindset which religion requires of the faithful. The story does not depict Abraham questioning the command to prepare his son as a burnt offering; at no point in the story do we find Abraham asking: “Gee, O Lord, did I get that right? Isaac? You want me to kill Isaac, the son whom I love so dearly? I must have misunderstood something. Can you clarify?” No, Abraham does not wince at the instruction. On the contrary, the story depicts him proceeding with the task as indifferently as he would take out the trash.
<br /><br />So now that we have shed light on the context of Frame’s admission, let’s consider Jim’s question:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Is he speaking of Christians alone or all humanity?</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Great question! The critical clue here would be Frame’s use of the pronoun ‘we’, the first person plural. By choosing this pronoun, Frame necessarily includes himself. And it’s quite fitting, since here Frame has put himself in the position of addressing epistemological questions germane to his faith, and he himself throws his hands up with the statement “we may have to accept the fact even without an explanation of the fact.” Moreover, the questions Frame raises have specifically to do with religious edicts, not mundane matters like “how do trees grow?” or “what is the average distance between the earth and the moon?” The context, then, indicates definitively that Frame is at the very least speaking on behalf of his own worldview. If he presumes to be speaking on behalf of “all humanity,” what warrant would he have for this? None that I see. It may be John Frame’s opinion that “all humanity” lacks better answers than his confessional non-answer, but that would merely be his opinion. Frame is happy to rest on “somehow” and “mysterious though the process may be.” These are open admissions of ignorance, and at the very least he is speaking for himself here. <br /><br />Indeed, if Frame is speaking on behalf of “all humanity,” we might ask him: How do you know this about people you’ve never met? I guess then he could paraphrase himself and say “I know without knowing how I know.” Which would only tell me: he really doesn’t know. <br /><br />Jim added:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Knowledge and belief are still openly debated even among unbelievers the world over.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">It’s unclear what relevance Jim thinks this may have on the matter. Frame is addressing questions stemming from a worldview which ultimately appeals to an omniscient and infallible source. Non-believers don’t have this imaginary advantage. Thus, disputes and disagreements are to be expected among non-believes on epistemological matters given that they’re left to their own devices to discover and validate their understanding. Unlike Christians, non-believers do not reserve for themselves the privilege of appealing to magic knowledge to affirm what they believe and then hiding behind vacuous statements like “We know without knowing how we know.”
<br /><b><br /><br />Example 2</b>
<br /><br />The second quote that Jim had issues with comes from Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, who write in their <i>Handbook of Christian Apologetics</i></div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">“Religious faith is something to die for.”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">My quip to this was:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">(So say Muslim suicide bombers. In fact, they even put this belief into practice!)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Jim snorted:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">This is horrendously ridiculous of you to say such a thing.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Jim seems more concerned with the sting of mere words rather than with the grave consequences of destructive acts. That there are people who are so devoted to an ideology that they diminish the value of human life does not faze him, but pointing this out does. Why exactly is it ridiculous to point out that Muslim suicide bombers also consider their faith to be something to die for? People who put a low value on human life can be very dangerous to those of us who do value our lives. And if someone doesn’t value his own life, how much less will he value the lives of others? <br /><br />Jim continued:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Muslim suicide bombers would actually say "Religious faith is something to kill for."</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">That reminds me of Abraham and his willingness to kill his own son when commanded to do so.
<br /><br />Jim says I’m getting this all wrong and provided his own understanding of the Kreeft and Tacelli quote:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">You're using the quote as implying murder whereas that is not what Kreeft is saying. He is instead saying that if someone wants to kill you because you believe in Christianity, then it is worth it to die for your beliefs.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">For one, there’s no discussion of “murder” per se in either the Kreeft and Tacelli quote or in my little quip in response to it. Muslims who kill infidels do not consider their act to be an act of murder, but rather a fulfillment the “will of Allah.” Many seem to think it’s a duty of some kind. Carrying out the will of an invisible magic being is important to believers of many religions, not just Islam. It is common to both Islam and Christianity that obeying what the adherent takes to be their god’s will is a fundamental duty. <br /><br />Now <i>I</i> would certainly call it murder, but then again, I’m an infidel according to these butchering savages. So far as they’re concerned, my views do not matter. Similarly, was it murder when the Israelites carried out their god’s command to slay the Canaanites? When a person believes in the supernatural, everything is permitted, and rationalizing what on a “naturalistic” set of presuppositions would constitute murder is easy for the committed believer. Just dial up “God” and voilá – the believer has all the justification he could ever hope for. Consider the following pronouncements from Christian apologist William Lane Craig (for source details, see <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2015/03/craigs-eight-arguments-for-god-part-vii.html">here</a>):</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands, so that when he issues commands to us, they become our moral duties. So Israel and the armies of Israel became in effect the instrument by which God judged these Canaanite peoples. The adults deserved the judgment that they received… Now the more difficult problem is the children. How could God command that children be killed, because these are innocent. And I think what I would want to say there is, that God has the right to give and take life as he sees fit. Children die all the time, every day, people’s lives are cut short. God is under no obligation whatsoever to prolong anybody’s life another second. So he has the right to give and take life as he chooses. Moreover, if you believe as I do in the salvation of infants or children who die, what that meant was that these… the death of these children meant their salvation. They were the recipients of an infinite good as a result of their earthly phase of life being terminated. The problem is that people look at this from a naturalistic perspective and think life ends at the grave. But in fact this was the salvation of these children, and it would be far better for them than continuing to be raised in this reprobate Canaanite culture. So I don’t think God wronged anybody in commanding this to be done. He didn’t wrong the adults because they were deserving of capital punishment. He didn’t wrong the children – if there were any that were killed, which we don’t know – because God has the right to take their lives, and in effect they were recipients of a great good. So I don’t think anybody that was morally wronged in this affair.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here Craig shows how believers can just dismiss destructive actions that result in people’s death. “Children die all the time,” he says, as though this had the relevance he needs it to have for his point. A murderer is “in effect the instrument by which” the believer’s god judges its victims. And in the case of children, it’s even less of a worry because, on Craig’s belief system, they’re saved any way. So their death means their salvation and they receive “an infinite good as a result of their earthly phase of life being terminated.” Victims of murder go on living in an afterlife anyway, so what’s the problem? The problem is only when we “look at this from a naturalistic perspective.” But on Craig’s view, of course he’s not going to say that “God wronged anybody in commanding” humans to kill other humans. The god which Craig worships in his imagination “has the right to give and take life” as it decides. <br /><br />As for Jim’s claim that Kreeft and Tacelli were really saying “if someone wants to kill you because you believe in Christianity, then it is worth it to die for your beliefs,” let’s examine the context in which they made the original quote:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
The act of faith is more than merely an act of belief. We believe many things-for example, that the Bulls will beat the Celtics, that the President is not a crook, that Norway is beautiful-but we are not willing to die for these beliefs, nor can we live them every moment. But <i>religious faith is something to die for</i> and something to live every moment. It is much more than belief, and much stronger, though belief is one of its parts or aspects. (<i>Handbook of Christian Apologetics</i>, p. 14, italics added.)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">There’s no mention in the immediate context of the prospect of someone wanting to kill the believer because of his beliefs – and reviewing again the preceding and proceeding paragraphs, I’m not seeing this concern at all being raised as part of the broader context surrounding Kreeft and Tacelli’s words. Rather, their concern is to distinguish faith from other beliefs given the strength of the commitment that the former commands of the believer which run-of-the-mill beliefs do not. It seems, then, that Jim is inserting his own context into the quote in question in order to chastise me simply for pointing out its implications for the devaluation of human life, beginning with the believer himself.
<br /><br />It is important to keep in mind that the words “Religious faith is something to die for” are not mine. I do not endorse such a view, and my worldview does not teach such a view. A religion, however, requires devotion and obedience, and it is religion which makes allegiance to its pronouncements a life and death issue. Here Kreeft and Tacelli are explicit in stating that “religious faith is something to die for,” which in fact means that to be worthy of their religion’s aegis, believers need to be willing to die for their faith. When an individual places value on something to the point that he apparently thinks it can be served by dying for it, he places a relatively lower value on his own life. And generally speaking, people who think that a belief system as such is of greater value than their own lives, are likely to suppose that the belief system in question is of greater value than <i>other people’s lives</i>. It just follows naturally.
<br /><br />My better judgment is to be very careful around people who think their own lives are expendable for the sake of advancing an ideology. Or for any reason for that matter.
<br /><br />A suicide bomber motivated by an ideology is willing to die in the service of advancing that ideology. There’s no question that a Muslim suicide bomber, bent on advancing Islam in the world, believes that his “faith is something to die for.” Supposing that taking out the lives of others in his vicinity is perfectly justifiable, is simply the next logical step in that twisted calculus. The key here is that faith demands self-sacrifice. This is the lesson put on display in the Abraham and Isaac story. When a rational individual is instructed to harm those whom he loves, he will defy this instruction. But when a devoted religious believer is so instructed, if he believes the instruction is coming from the right source, he very well may act on it. <br /><br />The ultimate point of my own quip (namely: So say Muslim suicide bombers. In fact, they even put this belief into practice!) is that, unlike many Christians I’ve known, Muslim suicide bombers actually put their beliefs into practice. I don’t see a lot of Christians dying to serve Christianity. It is not my position that believers dying for their beliefs would serve Christianity, so I think it’s a good thing that I don’t see them doing this. I’m simply observing that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the views Christians express and the actions they actually take. Believers should not be sore at me for making this observation.
<br /><b><br /><br />Example 3</b>
<br /><br />The third quote that Jim took issue with comes from Christian apologist Phil Fernandes in his debate with JJ Lowder. The statement goes as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">"I just believe that we are very good about lying to ourselves, and only accepting, uh, or interpreting the evidence the way we would like to."</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">For reference, Fernandes made this unscripted statement in the cross-examination period (in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CuumKoL9qg">this video</a>, you’ll find Fernandes’ remark beginning around the 4:25 mark). Fernandes was saying that the Christian god “has given us clear evidence,” but then says “we are very good about lying to ourselves” when it comes to “interpreting the evidence” he believes we have at our disposal. <br /><br />My reaction to this was, and still is, that Fernandes was speaking autobiographically here – i.e., that he’s essentially confessing that he himself is “good about lying” to himself on these and probably other matters. Indeed, I think Christians are in the habit of construing things as evidence for their beliefs when in fact they are not. I have exposed many examples of this right here on my blog. So there’s definitely a Freudian quality to Fernandes’ remark. Hence I would say he’s speaking for himself first and foremost.
<br /><br />Jim, however, objects to my reaction here. He writes:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">I heard that debate and know that Fernandes is not speaking for himself but for humanity in general. How could you not see that? Perhaps you are very good at lying to yourself.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Sure, it is certainly possible to <i>interpret</i> Fernandes’ statement here as a statement applying generally to all human thinkers. But that would be one’s interpretation – and in that act one may be importing one’s own assumptions into the mix. But note that Fernandes himself does not explicitly state that his assessment applies to “humanity in general.” He doesn’t even say “everybody” or “everyone.” Rather, just as when John Frame writes “We know without knowing how we know,” Phil Fernandes uses the first person plural pronoun “we,” which is self-inclusive. By using the pronoun “we,” Fernandes necessarily includes himself. He automatically puts himself at the center of his own blast zone. If I make the statement “we’re going to eat out tonight,” there’s no question that I’m including myself in that reference. It really is obvious to anyone familiar with English pronouns. That was the point of my statement that Fernandes was obviously speaking for himself here.
<br /><br />When individuals disguise their generalizations by using ‘we’ statements – such as “we are very good about lying to ourselves” or “we sometimes don’t know what we’re talking about,” I take it that they are speaking first and foremost for themselves. It may be that they're including others around them as unwitting accomplices in the act. <br /><br />But notice that Jim’s objection is all the more moot given his own expressed interpretation of Fernandes’ remark: If Fernandes intended the statement to apply to “humanity in general,” it would still include Fernandes in the scope of its generality! If we interpret Fernandes’ remark to be saying that that human beings <i>generally</i> are skilled at lying to themselves, we’d naturally assume that Fernandes is just as afflicted with this predisposition as anyone else given the fact that he himself is a human being. It may be that Fernandes was hoping that the audience would assume his pronouncement was self-exclusionary – i.e., that everyone else is skilled at lying to themselves, but not him – but that would be too obviously self-serving, and nothing in his statement would justify such self-exclusion. One does not even have to watch the whole debate to grasp my points here: if we accept the view that “humanity in general” is “very skilled about lying to ourselves and only accepting, uh, or interpreting the evidence the way we would like to,” why suppose this applies only to the skeptic, and not to those apologists who endorse such a view in the first place? After all, it’s the apologists who insist on the existence of a being which we cannot distinguish from something they themselves are merely imagining. <br /><br />I’m reminded here of Romans 3:4, where the author wrote: “let God be true, but every man a liar.” If it’s the case that “every man [is] a liar,” this accusation would logically apply to the person who penned those words in the first place. This is the same circumstance Fernandes finds himself in. I have heard many Christians tell me that all human beings are morally depraved. If true, this could only mean that the human being telling me this is himself morally depraved. They paint with such wide brushes that they themselves cannot escape the colors they want to splash on everyone else. <br /><br />Jim ended his comment with the following parting shot:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">I suspect that the rest of your articles are as bad as this. Why, then, should any self-respecting atheist bother with your website? I guess, if he likes lying to himself and is careless with the use of his mind. But perhaps it is the heart, and its biases, prejudices, and desires, which drives you.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Each individual must make his own decisions, and in doing so hopefully run the best cost-benefit analysis possible given the circumstances and the amount of time one deems worthy to give to a matter. We all must do this. If Jim reads one or two posts on my blog and has determined that spending any further time reading more would be a waste, that is certainly his prerogative. I do not expect my writings to appeal to many. I’m sure there are people out there who would prefer to spend their time watching some 80’s TV re-run instead of reading one paragraph of my blog. This does not bother me one bit. I am grateful to those who do read and even more to those who take the time to post their thoughts in reaction to what I have written. So for this, Jim does have my gratitude.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-39539837490255170952023-12-27T06:00:00.046-05:002023-12-27T06:00:00.128-05:00Bahnsen’s “tremendous philosophical mistake”<div style="text-align: justify;">Presuppositionalists love to tout the debate between Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein. In apologetic circles, it is commonly believed that Bahnsen got that evil atheist Stein real good, and no atheist thinker can really be capable of crawling back from that public whipping.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Of course, such evaluations are quite superficial and self-serving, and they willingly ignore many striking deficiencies in Bahnsen’s presentation (see for example <a href="http://www.katholon.com/poof.htm">here</a>, <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2005/11/bahnsens-poof-revisited.html">here</a>, <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2014/05/how-bahnsen-gives-away-farm-in-his.html">here</a> and <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/05/bahnsens-poof-revisited-again.html">here</a>).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">However, what’s curious is that apologists do not tend to point to Bahnsen’s discussion with George H. Smith, author of <i>Atheism: The Case Against God</i>.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;">Unlike his debate with Gordon Stein, here Bahnsen was dealing with someone more familiar with primary philosophy and thus was not able to get away with the gimmickry that is so characteristic to presuppositionalism. Audio of the discussion can be found on Youtube <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH62COW-qg0">here</a> (sorry, comments disabled…), and a written transcript can be found <a href="https://anthonygflood.com/2020/06/a-debate-on-the-existence-of-god-greg-bahnsen-vs-george-smith-1991/">here</a>.
<br /><br />Still, there are a few missed opportunities, and one in particular is worth exploring.
<br /><br />There’s a section in their discussion where Smith tries to education Bahnsen on the nature of causality, which Objectivism encapsulates as “the law of identity applied to action” (<i>For the New Intellectual</i>, p. 151). This is the observation that not only do actions have identity, but also that the actions which an entity performs (as well as those which it <i>can</i> perform, whether it actually performs them or not) depend on the nature of the entity performing those actions. Here I’ll quote the section at length to let readers enjoy this portion of their exchange without searching the transcript for it:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Smith:</b> Well the underlying assumption is that a thing is what it is. An existing thing has specific characteristics, and it’s restricted to the range of behavior or action as defined by those characteristics. A cat will not give birth to baby elephants.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Bahnsen:</b> Why not?<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Smith:</b> Because that’s the nature of the cat.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Bahnsen:</b> Well, that’s begging the question, to say it’s the nature of the cat.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Smith:</b> But you say that it’s the nature of God all the time. I can say it’s the nature of the cat.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Bahnsen:</b> No, actually I’m not just saying it’s the nature of God. I’m saying God reveals himself to people . . .<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Smith:</b> I’m saying my view of causation is that causation is essentially the law of identity applied to action. Things act as they do because they have specific, determinate characteristics and the [unintelligible] the physical or whatever nature of an existing thing determines the nature of the actions that that thing can take. So when one billiard ball strikes another billiard ball, the nature of the billiard ball is the nature of the motion, determines what the causal result will be. That’s why we get down to the law of identity. There’s regularity in nature because things are existing, determinate things with specific characteristics.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Bahnsen:</b> Well, it’s a tremendous philosophical mistake to assimilate the law of causality to the laws of logic, but if you study the history of philosophy, you’d know that this idea that things have a determinate nature and that’s why they behave the way they do is associated with the conclusion that there can be no change, that is, it’s impossible for things to change, well, because the law of identity prevents things from changing. So now I would continue the discussion. Let’s look at our underlying assumptions. How is it possible to extrapolate into the future, if you use the law of identity—there’s no change to look for in the future.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">The view that Bahnsen expresses here – that applying identity to action could only mean there’s no change – is not uncommon. The operative assumption underlying such views seems to be that ‘identity’ means whatever features an entity has are fixed and unchangeable, as though it were frozen in an instant of time. In other words, an entity’s identity could not, on this assumption, include or allow for any changes which the entity undergoes over time, or the potential for action that it has given its nature. Change of any sort, on this view, entails a metaphysical cancelling out of identity as such. On this arbitrary assumption, identity is an isolated, immutable snapshot severing the entity from the broader capacities of its features across time. Hence, ‘action’ and ‘identity’ are opposing concepts which cannot be integrated without contradiction. Consequently, Bahnsen explains, applying the law of identity to existents (rather than just in the hermetically sealed of logic, which for Bahnsen really has no connection to existence) necessarily leads to “the conclusion that there can be no change… because the of identity prevents things from changing.” </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />While the view which Bahnsen repeats here may be commonly accepted, it strikes me as truly bizarre. In practice, this can only mean that action cannot have any identity, because otherwise everything in reality would be restricted to what it is in an isolated instant, which would obviously make action impossible. <br /><br />But it should not take much critical examination to notice how every sentence in Bahnsen’s statement is inconsistent with the view he expresses. Take the following clause for example:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">”…if you study the history of philosophy…”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">What does the word “study” mean here? This is a <i>verb</i>. What do verbs do in a sentence? Verbs like “to study” <i>denote action</i>. Suppose instead Bahnsen stated:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">”…if you <i>deny</i> the history of philosophy…”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Or:</div><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">”…if you <i>ignore</i> the history of philosophy…”</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Would the overall point Bahnsen was trying to make with this clause remain the same if either of these two alternatives were put in place of Bahnsen’s original word choice? After all, both of the italicized words here - <i>deny</i> and <i>ignore</i> - are verbs. So why couldn’t Bahnsen have used one of these verbs instead of “study” to make his point? <br /><br />The reason why he couldn’t do this should be obvious: Because each of these verbs denote <i>different</i> actions.<br /><br />But if action has no identity, how can we say that one action is any different from another action? Is studying the same as denying, or are these different kinds of actions? Is studying the same as ignoring, or are these different kinds of actions? <br /><br />If an individual supposes that studying is distinct from both denying and ignoring, and that denying is distinct from both ignoring and studying, is he therefore not taking for granted that these different actions are distinct because they in fact have differing identities? Of course he is.
<br /><br />What’s ironic is that, as absurd an idea as a cat giving birth to elephants may be, it is not Smith’s worldview which could grant validity to the claim that such a phenomenon is possible, but Bahnsen’s! On Bahnsen’s view, there’s a supernatural consciousness which could will anything to happen in “Creation.” If the Christian god wanted a cat to give birth to elephants, what could possibly stop this from happening? If “God’s will be done,” who’s to say what said god might will, and on what basis can a mere mortal like Greg Bahnsen say that something on “God’s green earth” cannot happen? <br /><br />The “tremendous philosophical mistaking” here is failing to integrate fundamental philosophical pronouncements with your daily actions. The performative tension between Bahnsen’s denial of the applicability of the law of identity to action and his own ubiquitous assumption of the distinctions between actions is hard to miss here, once it has been pointed out.
<br /><br />How might this play out in daily interactions? Consider the following hypothetical exchange in the Bahnsen household:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><b>Bahnsen:</b> “Son, it’s time to do your chores. Get on it!”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><b>
Son:</b> “Sorry, Dad. Can’t. I’m busy right now.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><b>
Bahnsen:</b> “Busy? What are you doing?”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><b>
Son:</b> “What do you mean, ‘what are you doing?’? You act as though action has identity. You said it yourself – that’s a tremendous philosophical mistake!”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><b>
Bahnsen:</b> [silent]</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Consider the implications that Bahnsen’s position would have on our understanding of induction. If having an identity prevents a thing from changing, and “it’s a tremendous philosophical mistake to assimilate the law of causality to the laws of logic,” on what basis can one draw general conclusion from individual inputs? If entities and actions cannot have identity, then what could possibly connect an effect with any antecedent cause? There could be no such connection. And this was essentially David Hume’s view:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">We have sought, in vain, for an Idea of Power or necessary Connexion in all the Sources, from which we could suppose it to be deriv'd. It appears, that, in single Instances of the Operation of Bodies, we never can, by our outmost Scrutiny, discover any Thing but one Event following another, without being able to comprehend any Force or Power, by which the Cause operates, or any Connexion betwixt it and its suppos'd Effect. The same Difficulty occurs in contemplating the Operations of Mind on Body; where we observe the Motion of the latter to follow upon the Volition of the former; but are not able to observe or conceive the Tye, which binds them together, or the Energy, by which the Mind produces this Effect. The Authority of the Will over our own Faculties and Ideas is not a whit more comprehensible: So that upon the whole, there appears not, thro' all Nature, any one Instance of Connexion, that is conceivable by us: All Events seem entirely loose and separate. One Event follows another; but we never can observe any Tye betwixt them: They seem conjoin'd, but never connected. And as we can have no Idea of any Thing, that never appear'd to our outward Sense or inward Sentiment, the necessary Conclusion seems to be, that we have no Idea of Connexion or Power at all, and that these Words are absolutely without any Meaning, when employ'd either in philosophical Reasonings, or common Life. (<a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Philosophical_Essays_Concerning_Human_Understanding/Essay_7">Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, Essay VII: Of the Idea of Power or necessary Connexion</a>, Part II)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Notice that Hume’s assessment here itself contains sweeping generalizations – e.g., “All events seem entirely loose and separate.” Surely David Hume was not omniscient. So how would he know what he states here without implicitly grasping the fact that things have identity? What, for instance, is an “event” such that Hume could know that all of them “seem entirely loose and separate”? When he states that “we can have no Idea of any Thing,” whom does the “we” here include? Does it include just his immediate audience – individuals with whom Hume had firsthand familiarity? Or is it broader than this circle of intimates, including people whom Hume never met? Does it include all human beings – past, present and future? If so, how could Hume speak for them without some eligible basis in identity applying to the whole? <br /><br />But the assumption that things and their actions have no identity would account for much in Hume’s skeptical assessment of inductive inference. For if it is assumed that things and their actions can have no identity, then the notion of a causal connection would have no objective basis to begin with, which is essentially Hume’s very position on the matter. Thus, it should not surprise us to find Hume scoffing at the very foundations of induction, all the while tossing generalizations to and fro as though they were still valid on his assumptions. The lack of philosophical self-awareness masquerading here as some kind of deeply probing insight is indeed grotesque. <br /><br />The same goes for Bahnsen.
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-24975826883773263162023-11-01T06:00:00.056-04:002024-02-24T08:49:35.284-05:00Anderson’s Anti-Epistemological Argument Against Naturalism<div style="text-align: justify;">Recently Christian apologist James Anderson recently published <a href="https://www.proginosko.com/2023/10/an-epistemological-argument-against-naturalism/">An Epistemological Argument Against Naturalism</a>. Readers are encouraged to take a look for themselves.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There is much that I could provide in response to what Anderson presents there, but along with some comments about Anderson’s overall approach to the matter, I’m going to confine my present objections to two primary areas. In my estimate, the objections I will present below are sufficient to refute this argument beyond recovery. (Mind you, in doing so, I am not attempting to defend “Naturalism” as a worldview, for no version of Naturalism that I have looked at addresses the fundamental philosophical needs which Objectivism addresses.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If, after reading through what I have to say here, readers still have further questions on Anderson’s argument, feel free to post a comment. Reader feedback is always welcome.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Anderson’s argument consists of the following:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
P1: If Naturalism is true, then all factual knowledge (i.e., knowledge of facts) is acquired empirically. </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">P2: Knowledge of necessary facts cannot be acquired empirically. </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">P3: We have some knowledge of necessary facts. </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">C: Therefore, Naturalism is not true.
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Anderson provides some definitions, which will help us interact with his argument’s premises.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">By “Naturalism,” Anderson means “the ontological thesis that <i>only natural things exist</i>.” (By contrast, Objectivism recognizes the distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made (see <a href="http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/metaphysical_vs_man-made.html">here</a>) – i.e., those things which exist naturally as opposed to those things which human beings can fashion from things which exist naturally. So a clarifying modification would be: only natural and man-made things exist.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">By “empirically” Anderson means “by way of sense experience or observation” – which can only mean awareness “by means of our sensory organs.”<br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-weight: 700;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-weight: bold;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Roundabout Apologetics</div></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Before I delve into what I consider to be fatal vulnerabilities of Anderson’s argument, I just want to a few higher-level comments about Anderson’s paper, beginning with the apparent purpose behind this argument and the argument itself as a vehicle for achieving that purpose. If one’s purpose is to disprove “the ontological thesis that <i>only natural things exist</i>,” I’d think that the surest and most efficient way to do this would be to produce evidence of existing things that are <i>not</i> natural (or man-made). But I don’t see that Anderson has done this. Rather, it seems to be another example of roundabout apologetics that we see so routinely from presuppositionalists. For example, they apparently think they can prove their god’s existence by finding some fault with “the atheist worldview” (cf. the notion of “the impossibility of the contrary”). Or they apparently think that Christianity can “account for” the preconditions of inductive inference by showing that common secular theories fail to justify “the inductive principle.” And here, apparently “the ontological thesis that <i>only natural things exist</i>” is shown to be untrue because “knowledge of necessary facts cannot be acquired empirically.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">These “indirect” approaches to apologetics (which bear striking similarities to: “you’re wrong, therefore I’m right”) may serve as an opportunity for academic show-boating, but they invite the temptation to mischaracterize alternative positions (apologists have great difficulty resisting this temptation), and their effect – perhaps even their very purpose – is to distract audiences from what should be playing a starring role in their presentations: if the apologist has actual proof that his god really does exist, what exactly is his proof? We know that the conclusion should be “Therefore, God exists.” But what premises soundly support this conclusion? We are not provided this; rather, we are provided endless rabbit holes which divert our attention beyond distant peripheries into matters that will simply gum us up in side debates as well as a charade of table-turning aimed at putting non-believers on the defensive. At some point, we should realize that the apologist has no actual argument proving the existence of his god. In the final analysis, it’s all sleight of hand.
<br /><br />Of course, we might ask: what would be an alternative to something <i>natural</i>? To exist is to be something, to have a <i>nature</i>, to have <i>identity</i>. This is the case whether it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon or something man-made. There is no such thing as an existent that has no nature. But what alternative to natural things would there be if not supposed existents lacking a nature, lacking an <i>identity</i>? Is our epistemology consistent with the Law if Identity throughout, or do we pretend that some things are exempt from having an identity? To object to the view that “<i>only natural things exist</i>,” then, is to grant validity, however tacitly, to the notion that things can exist without identity. But this is a contradiction in terms at the most fundamental metaphysical level – the level of existence itself.
<br /><br />Again, there are many notions in Anderson’s paper which can – and <i>should</i> - be challenged, such as the rationalism-empiricism dichotomy, the necessary-contingent dichotomy, the imaginative notion of “possible worlds,” the notion of “exist[ing] spatiotemporally,” the notion of “<i>a priori</i> factual knowledge,” etc., all of which weigh down Anderson’s philosophical plights and hide from audiences the fact that his overall worldview has no objective starting point, no grasp of the issue of metaphysical primacy, no understanding of the nature of concepts. Consequently, it is not an <i>epistemological</i> argument that Anderson presents, but in fact an <i>anti-epistemological</i> argument taking for granted a whole host of invalid and false ideas. <br /><br />This comes out even when presuming to speak on behalf of Naturalism, Anderson writes:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">the only way for <i>factual</i> knowledge (i.e., knowledge of how things are in the external world) to get into the brain is by way of physical sensory organs, or, more loosely, physical ‘input devices’.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">No doubt there are people who think this, but in fact the senses do not give us awareness of <i>knowledge</i> as if knowledge is this thing floating in the air or hiding under rocks. Our senses give us awareness of entities which exist independently of the processes by which we are aware of them, and knowledge is the product of a process performed by the mind which we call <i>abstraction</i>, i.e., <i>concept-formation</i>. The mind plays an <i>active</i> role in developing knowledge – it does not just passively absorb knowledge from the world, nor does knowledge seep into the mind through the senses, like a leaking sludge or body fluid. The theistic view isn’t any better off, for it holds that the human mind passively absorbs ‘revelations’ from otherworldly sources which we can access only by means of imagination. Any view which effectively denies the <i>active</i> nature of human cognition in discovering, forming and validating knowledge as a product of volitional engagement with the objects of awareness is short-changing man’s mind and mutilating the conceptual level of human awareness beyond all recognition. Such views do not qualify as genuine epistemology.
<br /><br /><b><br />Objection 1:</b>
<br /><br />My first objection really has to do with what Anderson’s own argument actually <i>concedes</i>. What Anderson does <i>not</i> argue is that conscious activity <i>as such</i> is incompatible with the view that “<i>only natural things exist</i>.” Fundamentally, he grants that sense experience and observation – even factual knowledge as such (at least in terms of “how things <i>are</i>”) – are compatible with “the ontological thesis that <i>only natural things exist</i>.” This is a self-detonating concession, for if it is granted that conscious activity of <i>any kind</i> is compatible with the view that “<i>only natural things exist</i>,” then that should be sufficient to suppose that other kinds of conscious activity are <i>also</i> compatible with the view that “<i>only natural things exist</i>.” Anderson nowhere argues that <i>only certain kinds</i> of conscious activity are compatible with “the ontological thesis that <i>only natural things exist</i>” while others are not. By granting that the natural structures of human physiology support conscious activity (which he does by allowing sense perception and observation to be available on the Naturalist view), he thereby concedes that conscious activity as such is not incompatible with “the ontological thesis that <i>only natural things exist</i>.” <br /><br />Objectivism observes that we find three levels of consciousness in nature: the level of sensational level, the perceptual level, and the conceptual level. Ayn Rand presents these distinctions as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Man’s consciousness shares with animals the first two stages of its development: sensations and perceptions; but it is the third state, <i>conceptions</i>, that makes him man. Sensations are integrated into perceptions automatically, by the brain of a man or of an animal. But to integrate perceptions into conceptions by a process of abstraction, is a feat that man alone has the power to perform—and he has to perform it <i>by choice</i>. (<i>For the New Intellectual</i>, p. 11)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">By conceding that human beings (even on the “Naturalist” premise) are capable of sense perception and observation, Anderson is admitting that the two levels or stages of conscious activity which man shares with other animals are in fact compatible with Naturalism so defined. And he provides no argument against the third level of consciousness, that of conceptions, being compatible with “the ontological thesis that <i>only natural things exist</i>.” The very terms of Anderson’s argument grant that conscious activity as such is still possible given the view that “<i>only natural things exist</i>.” Thus, if conscious activity is possible, then conscious activity is possible – i.e., A = A. Human beings, being themselves “natural things,” are conscious organisms capable of forming concepts, including concepts like ‘necessary’ and ‘facts’. Nothing otherworldly or “supernatural” is needed here. The ability to form concepts from perceptual input is a natural ability, just as volition (i.e., the ability to select between alternatives) is also a natural attribute of human consciousness. Given that human beings can form concepts from perceptual input, our conscious activity is <i>not</i> confined to the immediate awareness of concretes; we are not stranded at the level of sense perception. We have the ability to form concepts, and this ability is in no way in conflict with the view that “<i>only natural things exist</i>” (allowing of course for <i>man-made</i> things, which are fashioned from natural things).
<br /><br />We can therefore observe that the human mind, given its natural endowments, is capable of identifying the material provided by the senses <i>in conceptual form</i>. This is possible through a process of abstraction. Children start to do this almost universally from a young age. The concepts which the human mind form can in tern be integrated into statements denoting things we observe in the world around us. We build our knowledge <i>upwards</i>, from the basis of perception, which is the mind’s firsthand contact with reality. For example, we can form the concepts ‘tree’, ‘height’, ‘tall’, etc., and observe “this tree is taller than that tree.” We call these propositions <i>truths</i>, which means the human mind – again, given its natural endowments – is capable of perceiving things and formulating true statements about those things. This puts <i>knowledge</i> of facts within reach of the human mind, since knowledge is conceptual in nature.
<br /><br />Now, this is not some “back door” trying to skirt around the thrust of Anderson’s argument. On the contrary, my objection here uncovers a glaring deficiency in the overall strategy of his argument by observing that its own terms make enough of a concession to admit its own defeat. The vulnerability here cannot be solved for by re-arranging certain assumptions already present in Anderson’s argument; rather, it stems from epistemological deficiencies which are a direct result of a failure of Anderson’s worldview to provide a good understanding of how concepts are formed from our perception of the world. It would have been more profitable for Anderson simply to announce, “we do have knowledge of all kinds of facts, but my worldview does not equip me to explain this.” Of course, it would not follow from this admission, which is very much in order given the tortured logic he has presented to the world, that his worldview is the only one which can “account for” the “necessary preconditions” of knowledge. Rather, it would be a sober starting point for some actual learning.
<br /><br />Of course, it may be that “Naturalism” as a philosophy includes other stipulations not considered here which in fact make it incompatible with the human capacity to form concepts. For example, the report among committed Naturalists may be that they accept the Empiricist horn of the Rationalist-Empiricist dichotomy and thus have no philosophical room for abstractions to begin with. However, the idea that “<i>only natural things exist</i>” by itself is not sufficient to create such an incompatibility (even Anderson apparently finds no tension between this aspect of “Naturalism” and sense perception – which is a type of <i>conscious</i> activity). But if Naturalism does in fact entail such stipulations, so much the worse for Naturalism. If Naturalism rejects the conceptual level of consciousness, then Naturalism should be rejected. However, Anderson does not raise this objection against Naturalism explicitly. His argument is <i>not</i>:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
P1’: If Naturalism were true, then human beings would not be capable of forming concepts from perceptual input.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">P2’: Human beings can and do form concepts from perceptual input.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">C’: Therefore, Naturalism is not true.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">If Anderson instead argued that the implications of Naturalism (given its pronouncements which make it incompatible with the fact that human beings form concepts from perceptual input) make it untrue <i>because</i> those pronouncements are in fact in fundamental tension with the fact that human beings form concepts from perceptual input, we might find something of lasting value in his paper. But then he would have to draw a similar conclusion about Christianity as well, since Christianity has no theory of concepts at all (along with numerous other epistemological deficiencies – e.g., contrary to Proverbs 1:7, knowledge does <i>not</i> begin with an <i>emotion</i>).
<br /><br /><b><br />Objection 2:</b>
<br /><br />The other objection I wanted to raise here can be fleshed out with a quick review of Anderson’s examples of “necessary facts.” They are as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
- “<i>No physical object is entirely red and entirely green at the same time.</i>”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">- “<i>No water molecule contains a carbon atom.</i>”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">- “<i>If there’s one stone in the bucket, and I add another stone, there will be two stones in the bucket.</i>”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">- “<i>It is morally wrong to torture infants for fun.</i>”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">There are two points to be made here, neither of which bode well for Anderson’s argument. <br /><br />The first is that each of these propositions is composed of concepts. That should not be a controversial point, but it is sufficient to tell us that we cannot treat either of these propositions as irreducible primaries. It should be obvious that we would have to grasp the meaning of these statements <i>before</i> we could accept them as true. However, in order to grasp the meaning of these propositions, we would <i>first</i> need to have grasped the meaning of the constituent concepts informing these propositions denoting “necessary facts.” There is an <i>order</i> to understanding because knowledge has a hierarchical structure: we need to understand why 2+2=4 long before we’ll be able to tackle differential calculus. As pointed out above, we build our knowledge <i>upwards</i>, from the raw material provided by the senses to ever-higher abstractions. Leonard Peikoff illustrates this principle as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Human knowledge is not like a village of squat bungalows, with every room huddling down against the earth’s surface. Rather, it is like a city of towering skyscrapers, with the uppermost story of each building resting on the lower ones, and they on the still lower, until one reaches the foundation, where the builder started. The foundation supports the whole structure by virtue of being in contact with solid ground. (<i>Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand</i>, p. 130.)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">The “knowledge of necessary facts” which Anderson’s examples represent are in fact <i>dependent</i> on more fundamental knowledge, knowledge which <i>is</i> based on perceptual input, even if the propositions in question do not identify facts which are themselves directly available to sense perception and observation (i.e., they must be <i>inferred</i> ultimately from facts which <i>are</i> directly available to sense perception and observation). That’s the beauty of concepts: they allow the mind to expand its awareness beyond the level of perceptions. (Further reading recommendation here: Leonard Peikoff’s essay “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” in Ayn Rand’s book <i>Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology</i>; I recommend this because it’s clear that Anderson’s case assumes the truth of this entire category of false ideas; in <i>How We Know</i> (p. 182) Binswanger puts it aptly: “The basic error behind the analytic-synthetic dichotomy is a wrong view of what a concept is.”)
<br /><br />More to the point, one cannot observe that “no physical object is entirely red and entirely green at the same time” without <i>first</i> having formed the concepts ‘physical’, ‘object’, ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘entirely’, ‘time’, ‘same’ and any other concept which the statement incorporates. And several of these concepts are in fact formed on the basis of direct perceptual input. Indeed, apart from the ability to see colors generally, concepts denoting particular colors or color categories would be meaningless. The same is the case for concepts such as ‘water’, ‘stone’, ‘bucket’, ‘infants’, and others which denote similar concretes. More advanced concepts such as ‘molecule’, ‘morally wrong’, ‘torture’, ‘fun’, etc., are abstractions which are not available to the mind prior to forming concepts of concretes (see chapter 3, “Abstraction from Abstractions,” of Ayn Rand’s <i>Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology</i>). <br /><br />Suppose I make the following statement:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">“My wife just bought a new vutorisant, and it fits perfectly!”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Is this statement true or not true? If you’re left wondering, “What the hell is a ‘vutorisant’?” you’re on the right track. The truth value of the overall proposition rests on the meaning of its constituent concepts, and if the proposition includes concepts unfamiliar to us or in fact <i>anti-concepts</i>, the proposition as a whole cannot be accepted as a truthful one. The point here is not that Anderson would argue against this observation, but to put the spotlight where it needs to shine: on <i>concepts</i>, not on deliverances from some alleged omniscient source whose ordained “necessary facts” are not accessible to human observation. <br /><br />So the very constituent concepts of these statements denoting “necessary facts” would not be available to the human mind without either the perceptual activity necessary to provide awareness of the kinds of concretes to which they relate, or the mental activity needed to integrate those concretes into conceptual form, including the higher-level abstractions present in these and other propositions we form on a daily basis. <br /><br />If it can be the case that (a) “<i>only natural things exist</i>” and (b) human beings can perform conscious activity, including the formation of concepts, then why would these facts be beyond the reach of human consciousness? Blank out. Moreover, if the constituent concepts of statements denoting “necessary truths” are only available to the human mind by forming concepts from perceptual input, what is it about this category of facts in particular that makes them incompatible with “Naturalism” qua “the ontological thesis that <i>only natural things exist</i>”? Again, blank out.
<br /><br />The other objection that can be raised here is that all four of the examples of “necessary facts” which Anderson presents share something critical in common, namely: <i>they all presuppose the truth of the axiom of existence</i>. None of these “necessary facts” could obtain if it were not the case that existence exists. If “necessary facts” is a valid concept, then there could be no fact <i>more</i> “necessary” than the ultra-fundamental fact that existence exists. Yet that is the founding recognition of Objectivism. If Anderson’s examples qualify as “necessary facts,” how much more is the axiom of existence itself an even more fundamental “necessary fact”? And I know of no contradiction between recognizing the fact that existence exists on the one hand, and on the other supposing that “<i>only natural things exist</i>” (again, with the qualification that man-made things also exist, which are made from natural things anyway). And Anderson does not show any incompatibility between these two positions. So not only do the “necessary facts” which Anderson presents as examples for his case depend on the truth of Objectivism’s initial axiom, there’s no tension to be found between Objectivism’s initial axiom and “the ontological thesis that <i>only natural things exist</i>.” <br /><br />The answer to Anderson’s argument, then, is a good understanding of the nature of concepts, of how we form them from perceptual input, of how concepts expand our awareness beyond the perceptual level to broader identifications encompassing entire categories of things, both natural and man-made, all without the need to pretend that imaginary agents are real things. What is certain is that supernatural entities are not necessary for human beings to discover and validate knowledge of the kinds of facts Anderson calls “necessary facts.” What we need is <i>reason</i>. What a novel concept!
<br /><br />So there you have it. Just a couple pokes, and the would-be menace of presuppositional apologetics simply evaporates into the ether.
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-141346398298582732023-10-23T06:00:00.038-04:002023-10-23T06:00:00.144-04:00Visitor Questions on Jeff Durbin and Formal Debates with Apologists<div style="text-align: justify;">A visitor to this blog recently left a question in the comments of <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/04/tasc-transcendental-argument-for-square.html">this entry</a> and I thought I’d share it in a dedicated post in case other readers had some insights to offer. Readers are invited to post any thoughts in the comments.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Barry asks:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
1. Do you ever formulate responses to "internet" presuppers like Jeff Durbin? </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
2. I'm finding it impossibly difficult to get in contact with Christian apologists so as to issue them a challenge to formal debate. My responses on their websites are never answered, and I get banned from their YouTube channels if I post a rebuttal to their YouTube Videos that has more substance than sheer gossip. Must I know somebody on the inside to cause an actual live debate to actually happen?
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In regard to the first question: I am unfamiliar with Jeff Durbin and aside from a couple mentions by readers in comments on my blog, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him. While I have interacted with numerous presuppositionalists over the years, since I am unfamiliar with Jeff Durbin in particular, I cannot say definitively whether I have formulated responses to anyone like Jeff Durbin. That being said, I would not be surprised if Durbin’s particular debating points, if they stem from presuppositionalist inclinations, are similar in many respects to those of apologists with whom I have interacted. Perhaps he has a unique bent on presuppositionalism that I’m unfamiliar with?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"> I did a web search of Jeff Durbin and found this brief bio of him <a href="https://apologiachurch.com/meet-the-team/">here</a>:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://endabortionnow.com/jeff-durbin/">Jeff Durbin</a> is Pastor/Elder of Apologia Church in Tempe since it was founded in February of 2010. He worked for many years as a hospital chaplain. Jeff is a popular speaker for camps, conferences, churches & schools across the nation. He has participated in outreach to various religious organizations nationwide and has even engaged in public debate against Atheism. Jeff was featured on a series for the History Channel, “The Stoned Ages” which reviewed the Christian approach and philosophy concerning drug and alcohol addiction. Jeff co-hosts Apologia Radio and Apologia TV, both of which garner followers throughout the US and internationally. Both shows are available via <a href="https://apologiastudios.com/">Apologia Studios</a>. He also leads Apologia’s ministry, <a href="https://endabortionnow.com/">End Abortion Now</a>, whose goal is to criminalize and end abortion through the work of the local church and state legislation. </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Jeff is a World Champion martial artist with 5 Black-Belts. He starred in popular video games, movies and tours. He played Michelangelo and Donatello for the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” franchise as well as Johnny Cage in “Mortal Combat” the world-tour. Our younger followers may have even seen him as a fighter in MTV’s “The Final Fu”. Jeff has been married to his bride, Candi, for over 20 years. They have 5-children: Sage, Immagin, Saylor, Stellar, and Augustine.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here is a link to <a href="https://apologiastudios.com/shows/apologia-radio/">Apologia Radio</a>, and here’s one to a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@ApologiaStudios/videos">YouTube channel</a>. – neither of which I have listened to. Maybe some readers of this blog have? If so, please feel free to share your reaction in the comments.
<br /><br />If there’s anything in particular that Jeff Durbin argues that readers might want to consider, feel free to use the comments. <br /><br />As for the second question, if apologists are not responding to direct challenges, I really have no suggestion other than perhaps to contact individuals who have arranged formal debates between apologists and their opponents in the past. It may be that people’s schedules are just full right now and they don’t have time – something I can fully appreciate. They may also already have a list of persons they’d be willing to debate and will consider formal exchanges only with them. One can only speculate if silence is all that is returned.
<br /><br />Speaking for myself, while I have not sought out formal debates (such as a televised performance), I have observed that many apologists seem reluctant to engage in actual discourse without a sympathetic audience cheering them on, especially if they find that they’re being called to defend their position. This seems ironic because apologetics as such is typically characterized as a <i>defense</i> of the faith. On the contrary, apologists seem most enthusiastic if they can maintain offensive postures, putting spoilsport atheists on the defensive and making them look ridiculous publicly. In years past here on this blog, we’d see the occasional Christian challenger post in the comments. That hasn’t happened in a long time now. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Earlier this summer in several comments on this blog (see for example <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/06/frank-turek-vs-laws-of-nature.html">here</a>), Robert Kidd shared some of his recent experiences interacting with an apologist, I believe in a YouTube video comments sections. The experiences he described are not unlike many that I have had. One gets the impression that many apologists do not actually want a dialogue, but rather a monologue in which they can just regurgitate assertions they’ve picked up from other apologists. Very often they’ll evade your direct questions, rely on stock caricatures of your position to do their heavy lifting, and ignore Christianity’s own glaring failure to address the very questions they insist non-believers answer with air-tight precision. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In my experience, it’s not uncommon for apologists to refrain from acknowledging their own blatant gaffs. They have a hard time taking ownership of their own positions and tend to make excuses when called out on statements they’ve made that are clearly incoherent or self-contradictory. A particularly noteworthy example of this can be found <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2016/10/exchange-with-presuppositionalist.html">here</a>, but many more can be found right here on my blog.
<br /><br />Over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that it does not seem worthwhile to seek intelligent conversation, let alone formal debate, with someone who asserts his position as truth along with what are effectively disclaimers saying, “don’t hold me to this.” Coming from a representative a belief system that's supposed to be "divinely inspired," that doesn't go down well. The claim to be in possession of "revealed truths" is not matched by the kind of confidence in those supposed truths on the part of the apologist that one would expect to observe, were such a claim itself to be true. And no, the arrogance one will observe in a Sye Ten Bruggencate should not be confused with authentic confidence. Bullies are always cowards hiding beneath a guise.<br /><br />Moreover, I find that apologists are in frequent need of being reminded that their own bible does not address many of the issues which presuppositionalists raise as debating points in their exchanges with non-Christians. Where, for example, does the bible discuss the foundations of logic, of induction, of truth, of values, of rationality, etc.? It doesn’t. I don’t even find the terms ‘logic’, ‘induction’ or ‘rationality’ in any of my copies of the Christian bible, let alone in-depth explorations of their philosophical bases. The bible provides no informed discussion of the nature of the relationship between consciousness and its objects or the relationship between perception and concepts; it provides no principles by which a thinker can reliably distinguish between what he imagines and what religion calls one to believe is “invisible”; it provides no guidance on clarifying the distinction between faith and wishing. On the contrary, the power of biblical teaching hinges integrally on the believer never coming to the realization that his imagination is fully engaged when he reads about Moses conversing with a burning bush, Jesus calming a storm with commands, or the Apostle Peter converting thousands of Jews in Jerusalem just weeks after Jesus had been arrested for and convicted of sedition. The believer is to immerse himself in the Christian fantasy, never becoming wise to the fact that he is merely fantasizing. As such, religion provides a successful formula for losing touch with reality as an inherent aspect of its devotional program. In this way, “worldview” is a misnomer when applied to Christianity in that its entire portrait of reality is delusional. <br /><br />But readers may have some other thoughts to share on these questions.
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-57385617784365187392023-09-25T06:00:00.039-04:002023-09-25T06:00:00.154-04:00Jason Lisle on Sensory Experience and Epistemology<div style="text-align: justify;">Nearly a decade ago now on this blog I interacted with writings by one Dr. Jason Lisle, a Christian astrophysicist who operates the <a href="https://biblicalscienceinstitute.com/">Biblical Science Institute</a> which, according to its own <a href="https://biblicalscienceinstitute.com/about/">about page</a>, is a “creation-themed science ministry” which “exists to help you rationally defend the Christian worldview against those who claim that the Bible is unscientific.” Now who could possibly make such a claim as that? Lisle is a proponent of presuppositionalism, and my past interactions with can be found <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2014/03/is-jason-lisle-epistemologically-self.html">here</a>, <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2014/03/jason-lisle-on-axioms.html">here</a>, <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2014/03/jason-lisle-on-logic.html">here</a> and <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2014/03/answering-jason-lisle-on-reliability-of.html">here</a>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I recently came upon a blog entry by Lisle in which he makes some comments about sensory experience, a topic I explored in <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/08/do-senses-distort.html">my previous entry</a>. My 2014 posts which I linked to above themselves contain links to Lisle’s old blog; those links seem not to work any more – my machine gives me warnings when I click on them, so I’d suggest not trying to visit them. Lisle seems to have moved his blog to his “institute” website. The present entry I found is here: <a href="https://biblicalscienceinstitute.com/apologetics/how-do-i-know-that-i-know-a-response-part-1/">How do I Know that I Know? – a Response (Part 1)</a>.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;">It’s always curious to me that apologists can seemingly devote much attention to epistemological questions beginning with “how” and yet never identify any replicable steps that they took to achieve the knowledge they claim to have about divine matters. I always get the impression that if their steps were in fact articulated, we might get something like the following:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
1. My parents told me to believe over and over again </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">2. Other family members also told me to believe over and over again </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">3. People at church made me fear not believing over and over again </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">4. I read stories which depicted fantastical things over and over again </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">5. I imagined the things those stories depicted over and over again </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">6. I acquired the habit of ignoring the fundamental distinction between what is real and what I imagine </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">7. I expect you to do the same, or I’ll ridicule you over and over again
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">But Lisle does not treat the matter with such candor. Instead, he recaps some points of disagreement he had in an exchange he had years ago with a Dr. Richard Howe – “a biblical creationist” who “argues against presuppositional apologetics in favor of classical apologetics.” They disagree on the role of sensory experience in the foundations of knowledge. <br /><br />Lisle states that he “maintain[s] that all knowledge ultimately stems from God and that human beings can only have knowledge by revelation from God. This is not to deny proximate means such as sensory experience – that’s one of the ways God has revealed information to us.” So if one claims that he has received a revelation that he needs to drown his children in a bathtub (cf. Andrea Yates), it’s difficult to see how Lisle could contest such a claim as knowledge given that it is said to have come by means of revelation. If biblicists object to such claims qualifying as revealed knowledge, the onus is on them to spell out the tests for legitimate revelation. Presumably those tests could not be based in knowledge reducible to sensory evidence since sensory experience is only “one of the ways God has revealed information to us.” I also wonder how one could reliably distinguish between said “revelation” and one’s own preferences, hopes, desires, predilections, inclinations, presumptions, etc. Typically believers do not elaborate on such concerns. <br /><br />Lisle claims that “we can only have confidence in such proximate [as sensory experience] means if the universe is actually the way the Bible says it is.”
<br /><br />So here we must ask: What does “the Bible” say about the way that the universe actually is? To explore this, I performed a search of the <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=universe&version=NIV">keyword ‘universe’</a> at <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/">Bible Gateway</a>. In the NIV version, there were four results: I Corinthians 4:9, Ephesians 4:10, Hebrews 1:2 and Hebrews 11:3. The first two of these are not helpful in addressing this question, but the second two provide us with a little more substance on what the biblical view of the universe might be. Hebrews 1:2 states that the Christian god “made the universe,” apparently having made it “through” “his Son.” It’s unclear what it means to say that a being “made the universe… through… his Son” – perhaps it’s like outsourcing labor to a contractor, but the important take-away here is that, according to what Christianity teaches, the universe – that is, everything that exists – is the product of some act of agency. (Presumably the agent itself thought to be responsible for making the universe is excluded from the totality produced by its act, since Christians typically hold that their god is itself not created while insisting that everything else needed to have been created, perhaps because things can’t just create themselves.) No indication of <i>how</i> this was achieved – the passage in question does not describe the act which could produce galaxies, stars, planets, dirt, dust, gases, minerals, atoms, etc. But we’re assured nevertheless that this is what happened.
<br /><br />Hebrews 11:3 sheds a little more light. It states:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen is not made out of what was visible.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Again what’s in mind here is that the universe is the product of some prior act by an agent and presumably this act was executed at some point in the distant past, an action that no human being could have witnessed, but one which we “understand” happened “by faith.” This last part is critical: it does not state that we can understand any of this by means of reason, or discover this by means of objective investigation, or by scientific research on items we find in the universe. As I’ve pointed out before, I can pick up a pebble from my backyard and put it under a microscope, looking at all its surface features, or subject it to all kinds of tests to determine its chemical make-up, but I’m quite confident that nothing I find by such means will at all suggest to me that it was brought into existence by a supernatural agent. But “by faith” we apparently can “understand” that it was. <br /><br />The verse also states that “the universe was formed at God’s command.” So this supernatural agent, which we can not perceive by any objective means, apparently made some kind of pronouncement, which no human being ever heard, and that resulted in all this matter popping into existence. This is what must be meant by “formed at God’s command.” If this is not an example of <i>wishing makes it so</i>, what would be?
<br /><br />So accordingly, the Christian view of the way the universe actually is, is that the universe is a product of wishing – and throughout Christianity’s many tales we learn that the things within the universe conform readily and immediately to wishing, such as when Jesus wishes water into wine or the Christian god wishes to resurrect its son – and we “understand” this by means other than by reason. It is hard, I must admit, to distinguish “faith” as it is used in passages like this, from a devotional commitment to something one must be <i>imagining</i>. For I concede that while I do not observe reality being conjured into being by means of wishing or objects conforming to wishes, I can <i>imagine</i> such things happening, and yet I am careful not to ignore the fact that I am merely imagining.
<br /><br />Going back to what Jason Lisle states, he’s essentially saying that “we can only have confidence” in sensory experience if the universe is a product of wishing and that the things within it conform to wishing. And yet, nothing we find when we observe any actual thing in the universe suggests any of this. The metaphysics which Lisle promotes as necessary for confidence in sensory experience is completely at odds with what we discover in the universe by means of sensory experience. The inconsistency here is fundamental. Quite the contrary: the senses could only be reliable if the universe is <i>not</i> what the Christian religion implies it to be. Were the universe subject to the dictatorship of anyone’s wishing, no constants would obtain to support the reliability of any stable epistemological basis.
<br /><br />The problem is even worse for Lisle. If the task of the senses is to provide awareness of objects, then any instance of the sensory awareness of objects serves as evidence supporting their reliability. For the task of the senses <i>is</i> to give us awareness of objects. What is critical to note here, contrary to Lisle’s appeals to religious beliefs, is that the senses are in this way reliable regardless of what one believes about anything – whether it’s about the bible, the circumference of the earth, the floor count of the world’s tallest building, the time it takes to boil an egg at sea level, your boss’s salary, etc. One’s beliefs are irrelevant to the validity of the senses, for the function of the senses in no way depends on the content of one’s beliefs. We have sensory awareness of objects well before we’ve developed <i>any</i> beliefs. So not only does the reliability of the senses obtain in spite of Christianity’s teachings, its teachings can only undermine confidence in the senses because nothing we sense supports the <a href="http://www.katholon.com/Cartoon_Universe_of_Christianity.htm">cartoon universe</a> assumed in Christian teachings and Christianity insists that we believe them in spite of their insubstantiability. <br /><br />Contrary to his own position, Lisle is critical of the position held by Richard Howe. Howe holds that “sensory experience is the beginning of knowledge which is completed in the mind.” Now both Jason Lisle and Richard Howe have extensive educational backgrounds, each holding Ph.D’s in their respective fields – Lisle in astrophysics and Howe in philosophy. And yet, they have diametrically opposed views on a most fundamental aspect of epistemology: does knowledge begin with sensory experience, or with something else? How can two highly educated adherents of the same worldview hold such fundamentally incompatible views? If this dispute were settled by revelation, either Howe simply hasn’t received it, or Lisle is mistaken in claiming he has received it.
<br /><br />Reacting to Howe’s position, Lisle states:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">One of the problems I see with Howe’s philosophy is that it is ultimately unjustified. That is, if all knowledge begins with sensory experience, then how do we know that sensory experience is basically reliable (true to reality)? This cannot be proved by sensory experience since this is the very issue in question. And if it is proved by some other standard, then sensory experience is not truly the foundational beginning of knowledge.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here Lisle ignores the fact that the senses are self-attesting. One would not need to prove that what he sees is real, for one cannot see something that is not real to begin with; only real things reflect light which stimulates actual seeing. Moreover, if I see an object and then put out my hand and touch it, my hand touching what I see only reinforces my sight. Our senses are remarkably consistent, so much so that we take this consistency completely for granted – since in effect it is granted – it is part of what Ayn Rand called “the metaphysically given”, which she contrasted with “the man-made”:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Any natural phenomenon, i.e., any event which occurs without human participation, is the metaphysically given, and could not have occurred differently or failed to occur; any phenomenon involving human action is the man-made, and could have been different. For example, a flood occurring in an uninhabited land, is the metaphysically given; a dam built to contain the flood water, is the man-made; if the builders miscalculate and the dam breaks, the disaster is metaphysical in its origin, but intensified by man in its consequences. To correct the situation, men must obey nature by studying the causes and potentialities of the flood, then command nature by building better flood controls. (<i>Philosophy: Who Needs It</i>, p. 27)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Our senses are biological structures that are a natural part of our existence as living organisms. We have senses, not because we devised them and gave them to ourselves (so they’re not man-made), but because our genetic profile ensures that we develop them naturally along with other aspects of our biological make-up, such as bones, muscles, skin, teeth, digestive organs, lungs, circulatory vessels, legs, arms, fingers, toes, etc. So I see nothing wrong with taking the self-attesting consistency of the senses for granted. We really have no choice but to do precisely this!
<br /><br />Lisle’s entire gambit here constitutes a rejection of the axiom of consciousness. We do not need to <i>justify</i> our consciousness. The validity of consciousness is axiomatic. The call to justify or validate consciousness would be a call to use what’s supposedly in doubt to justify what’s supposedly in doubt. And yet a challenge to justify anything is something one would need to understand before he could contemplate how to answer it. Consciousness must be real in order for any understanding to be possible. So the call to justify consciousness itself presumes the validity of what it calls to justify. Thus it performatively contradicts itself. This is a classic example of a stolen concept fallacy. <br /><br />I recall an instructive exchange I had with one apologist many years ago. He recited some statements of Van Til. I pointed out that just by making those statements, regardless of their actual truth value, Van Til was assuming the validity of his own consciousness. So I asked: How does Van Til validate his own consciousness without using his consciousness to validate it? The response was something to the effect of: “such circularity is unavoidable.” But in fact such circularity <i>is</i> avoidable entirely, <i>if you have an objective starting point</i>. Christianity does not have an objective starting point, so the self-defeating loop-pickle of the believer assuming the validity of something for himself that he simultaneously denies others is what is unavoidable, given the fact that what the Christian takes as his “ultimate presupposition” has no objective basis. What the Christian claims as his “ultimate presupposition” is not perceptually self-evident, so he cannot identify the means by which he supposedly has awareness of what he calls his “ultimate presupposition.” Hence he appeals to “revelations,” something one could have awareness of only by <i>looking inward</i> into the contents of one’s own imagination, for he has already discounted <i>looking outward</i> as the means of awareness of what is truly fundamental. And no matter what he does, no amount of <i>looking outward</i> will give anyone awareness of something that is only imaginary. My guess is that Richard Howe is just not as consistent with the fantasy-worship of Christianity as Lisle is.
<br /><br />Lisle continues:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">To expose this inconsistency, I asked the question, “How does he know [on his professed system] that he’s not in the ‘Matrix’ and that his sensory experiences have nothing to do with the real world?” The movie reference is to a hypothetical world in which the vast majority of humans are actually contained in pods with an electrical interface to their brains producing an artificial simulated environment which the people believe to be reality.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">So here Lisle insists that his opponent shoulders a burden to prove a negative, indeed a wholly arbitrary, fictitious negative at that. We might as well ask: “How do you know you’re not a fish swimming in a methane ocean on one of Neptune’s moons?” There is no such burden. Indeed, the whole ‘Matrix’ artifice doubles over on itself: “pods”? “electrical interfaces”? “simulated environments”? We are supposed to take these seriously, even though there’s no evidence that we are brains subjected to such conspiracies, and yet we cannot take the evidence of our senses seriously? It’s just more stolen concepts in service of defending the absurd.
Lisle thinks he can “answer” his own subterfuge as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">The presuppositionalist can answer this by pointing to the biblical worldview in which God has designed our senses to inform us of the external world, and God is a God of truth, not of deception. But on Howe’s system, he must arbitrarily presuppose that his senses are basically reliable, an assumption that can never be justified on his system.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here Lisle demonstrates his own lack of self-awareness by appealing to “the biblical worldview” while ignoring the fact that his own opponent, himself a professing Christian and thus adherent of “the biblical worldview,” disagrees fundamentally with Lisle’s own basic epistemological premises, namely on the role of the senses as the starting point of knowledge. Anyone who suspects that Lisle has been deluded, either by other human beings claiming to speak on behalf of a supernatural being or by supernatural beings proper, would not be very impressed by his claim that his “God is a God of truth, not of deception.” What Christian would deny his god’s ability to send a “deceiving spirit” (cf. I Kings 22:22-23) into the minds of any human being, including Dr. Jason Lisle? And what would prevent an evil spirit, a demon or emissary of Satan himself, from taking up residence in Lisle’s mind and deluding him on various matters, such as the role of the senses in epistemology? <br /><br />Again, if the senses give us awareness of objects – and they do – then their validity is incontestable, for they are performing the very function that we expect of them, given their task, just as when our stomach and intestines digest the food we eat, we know that our digestive track is thereby valid. Recognizing this is not an “arbitrary presupposition,” but rather a sober recognition of a basic physiological process which makes the discovery of physiological processes and any other factual state of affairs possible. Lisle’s calls for justification are just more examples of the fallacy of the stolen concept.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I’m glad these aren’t my problems!</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-14093870786278936892023-08-27T06:00:00.015-04:002023-08-27T06:00:00.139-04:00Do the Senses "Distort"?<div style="text-align: justify;">Some time back I was having a conversation with a colleague of mine. Our discussion started touching on philosophical topics and it was clear on the surface, at least up to a point, that my colleague agreed with my points about foundational principles and the need to govern our reasoning by facts and to steer our inferences by rational principles. He expressed strong agreement with these points, but suddenly made the remark in passing, “Yes, the senses do distort, but…”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">There I stopped him and asked him to explain this. He seemed taken aback by my challenge, as though it were self-evident that the senses “distort,” as though the recognition that the senses “distort” were unimpeachably true. After querying him on this assumption, it started to become clear that he really did not have an argument for this premise, but he also did not demonstrate any willingness to reconsider it.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;">Given what he had communicated up to this point in our conversation, it was strange how quickly he became defensive, as though a raw nerve had been exposed by challenging a statement he made in passing, a statement which, if true, would have significant implications for the entire body of our knowledge and the basic structure of human epistemology.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I explained that very often arguments to the effect that the senses are invalid or at any rate “distort” the objects of perception hinge on a stolen concept (e.g., they distort the “appearance” of objects, when in fact “appearance” is the form in which we perceive objects – cf. David Kelley’s <i>The Evidence of the Senses</i>) or in some manner or another miss the distinction between the objects we perceive and our <i>identification</i> of those objects. For example, I may briefly hear a squeaking sound and think initially that my neighbor is calling her dog when in fact, on closer inspection, it turns out to be the rusty hinge on a gate that I heard. In fact, I explained, the senses are remarkably accurate, and what’s critical is how we identify what we perceive.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">These points just sailed right past my colleague’s head, as if he hadn’t even heard them; he gave no reaction to my points, clearly not taking the time to consider them. Instead, he insisted that the premise that the senses distort is incontestable, citing his own colorblindness as an example. But colorblindness is not a power of distorting objects, but rather the inability to make “certain discriminations” (cf. Harry Binswanger, <i>How We Know</i>, p. 78).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So I asked what he meant by the statement “the senses distort.” Presumably just by looking outward at the world, our senses do something to the objects of our perception which changes them in some way. How does this allegedly happen, and how would we know this? <i>What</i> exactly in our senses does the alleged distorting, <i>what</i> is distorted, and how do the senses perform this act of distortion? And, to what degree does whatever is thought to be distorted by the senses deviate from its true nature? Again, if this were truly happening, how would could we discover and validate this?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I don’t think the claim is that just by perceiving something, that our act of perceiving an object changes the object in some way. In other words, my colleague is not saying that when I look at a plate of rice, my looking at the plate of rice turns the rice into tortillas or transforms the plate into a water pitcher. But what is being claimed? It was hard to get details out of him on this.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I then explained the premise that the senses distort the objects of our awareness implicitly assumes the vantage of an omniscient observer. It is essentially the claim to know how something appears apart from our perceiving it and to have the ability to compare how something appears apart from perceiving it to how it appears when we perceive, and then to say “Aha! See, the object really is different from what we are perceiving!” It is the claim to know how things <i>should</i> appear via sense perception and since they do not appear this way when we perceive them, the senses are in some way responsible for this failure. This presumption of omniscience lies at the heart of what Ayn Rand called “the prior certainty of consciousness,” namely “the concept of consciousness as some faculty other than the faculty of perception—which means: the indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality <i>has</i> to conform” (<i>For the New Intellectual</i>, p. 23). <br /><br />Of course, reality does not conform to the contents of our consciousness, indiscriminate or otherwise, but omniscient observer premise logically leads to the assumption that reality would need to do so, and when it fails to, the premise is not what’s wrong, but something in our perceptual faculties is. But by what means would we know how something should appear apart from sense perception? This part is never explained, but it’s hard to understand the premise without this component: we would have to know, independently of sense perception, how things appear to then say that the senses are distorting them in some way when we perceive them. Moreover, we would need to isolate what exactly is it in sense perception that does the alleged distorting, and my colleague did not identify this.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I think what I found most disturbing in our exchange was my colleague’s unwillingness to question an assumption which he took for granted and could not defend. He’s a very intelligent person – I would say more intelligent than myself, with certificates and diplomas decorating his office wall. But I don’t think intelligence is the factor here, but rather a commitment to a notion picked up at some point in life, assumed to be true and cordoned off from inspection and challenge. It’s an attitude in spite of one’s intelligence which keeps us from reconsidering what we have learned along the way and prevents us from re-examining ideas which we have accepted as true, even though they might not in fact be true. Such an attitude will inhibit us from being the best that we can be.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-86865943708625292912023-07-30T06:00:00.032-04:002023-07-30T06:00:00.137-04:00"What are the odds..?"<div style="text-align: justify;">In the comments section of <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/06/frank-turek-vs-laws-of-nature.html">my previous entry</a>, a frequent visitor to this blog named Robert shared some excerpts from encounters he had with religious apologists trying to push their mysticism. As is often the case, the apologist insisted on certain conditions which he as a non-believer needed to satisfy in order just to participate in an exchange, such as the alleged need to “provide a 'valid' explanation as to exactly HOW the genetic code created 'itself' WITHOUT the advantage of 'intelligent' thought'.” I can only suppose from statements Robert has made in numerous comments on my blog, that he does not in fact hold to the view that “the genetic code created itself,” either with or “WITHOUT the advantage of ‘intelligent’ thought.”</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;">What such insistence suggests is that the theist imagines himself in possession of a “valid explanation” of certain actual phenomena, such as the existence of the universe, the development of life on earth, the genetic code, moral norms, logic, etc., simply by virtue of ascribing to a worldview that asserts that all these things were brought into being by a supernatural consciousness which essentially wished them into being. The appeal to wishing, then, is treated as a “valid explanation,” and if those who do not appeal to wishing cannot provide alternative explanations which do not include an appeal to wishing, then they are dismissed as having no position worth taking seriously.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The irony of confusing mystical fantasies with explanations on a par with scientific discovery while dismissing other thinkers for less extravagant claims, is apparently lost on such persons. No objectively verifiable evidence even remotely suggests that conscious activity brought into being a little pebble you find in your backyard, let alone “the genetic code.” We have no objective evidence that such a conscious power could actually exist, and we do not observe physical things coming into existence by mere wishing. However, we do have piles of evidence that human beings have not only tremendous powers of imagination (think of Stephen King novels, Harry Potter stories, Alice in Wonderland, Grimms’ tales, sci-fi movies, etc.), but also the capacity to ignore the fundamental distinction between what they imagine and what is actually real (think of doomsday cults, for example). I do not observe any invisible magic being wishing anacondas into existence, but I can still <i>imagine</i> that supernatural wishing is the generative source of their existence. And if I ascribe to a worldview which in effect <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/01/buried-signposts.html">buries the signposts</a> warning me that I’ve ventured beyond objective evidence and into the realm of the imagination, I might very well delude myself that what I’m only imagining is actually real.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Failing to produce an alternative to fantasy does not validate the fantasy. If my wife asks how our cat got out and I explain that an invisible humanoid intruder broke into our house, picked up our cat out of his easy chair and carried him outside, letting him go on the lawn, would my wife’s lack of an alternative explanation validate my intruder story? My wife may still wonder how our cat got outside – he’s so insufferably lazy and thoughtless that he could never figure out how to get out by himself, but her lack of knowing how our cat got outside does not in any way support the many fantasies my inventive mind can muster.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Similarly, if I cannot tell a theist how DNA “came into being” (as though it had just magically appeared on the scene sometime in the distant past, with no material antecedents), would my lack of such an explanation validate the notion that Allah wished DNA into existence? The overt dependence on human ignorance of such an apologetic would be extraordinary. But when we consider that the elements composing the four nucleobases of DNA – cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine – are common to our “material universe” and in no way alien to the world in which we live, why even suppose that some otherworldly force, available only to the human imagination, is needed to call these into being? Perhaps it’s the believer’s own ignorance of science which fuels the fantasy that an all-knowing supernatural consciousness wished DNA into existence ex nihilo? After all, we find no informed discussion of these matters in either Leviticus or the Epistle to the Romans, yet their authors are not to be faulted for any ignorance on such topics.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">One of the questions which Robert reported getting from a sparring theist was the following:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">“[W]hat are the odds of some small lifeforms coming up out of a pond and turn into what we see in man today without a designer?”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">For one, I don’t think anyone has ever argued that a small lifeform came out of a pond and turned into a human being, or that a group of small lifeforms came out of a pond and then together turned into a human being. The characterization here is intended to smear the entire category of evolving life forms as evidence in its own right for the development of biological diversity. If natural selection has occurred at all, it has occurred over millions of years, with innumerable causal steps contributing to what we find in nature today.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Thus, it might be fruitful to call for some clarity. Is the apologist arguing that incremental changes among life forms, occurring over vast periods of generation as a result of biological causality, are impossible, and yet a supernatural consciousness wishing matter into being and guiding all biological events, from the minutest micro-movements of each individual living cell to the development of entire species, <i>is</i> possible?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">One point that I think we need to be careful not to overlook is the fact that we do actually observe remarkable changes in just a single organism over a span of time. Consider a human baby: months before it was born, it was (as some put it) “a clump of cells,” then it was a much bigger “clump of cells” with organs, limbs, a head, digestive, respiratory, circulatory and nervous systems, etc., and one day becomes a doctor, an even more complex “clump of cells.” The genetic maturation involved here is all a process of biological causality. It’s not magic, it’s not supernatural, it’s not a product of cosmic wishing. It can be studied scientifically and understood as a sequence of natural causes to the extent that it is predictable. On the so-called “macroscopic scale,” why wouldn’t changes within species be similarly possible over stretches of time as various organisms either adapt to changing environments or die off?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As for debating “what are the odds?” questions, this is practically inert in my view, at best a useless distraction in the context of the issues under dispute here. No matter what the odds for or against something happening might be, if it happened, it happened regardless of whatever odds we calculate against its occurrence. Before I have used the example of a banknote in my wallet containing a wholly unique serial number – for example, I have a $20 bill with the number MB 62724525 J right now. There is presumably only one banknote with that particular serial number in existence, and yet it somehow found its way into my possession. What are the odds, we may ask, that this wholly unique banknote would come into my hands? Of the billions of banknotes otherwise just like it, and the assortment of denominations which can serve as adequate monetary substitutes (e.g., twenty singles, a ten and two fives, three fives and five singles, etc.), the probability here may be what Plantinga would call “inscrutable,” and literally so if assessing those odds would require comprehensive knowledge of when and where that banknote entered circulation and how it passed from vendor to consumer, back and forth who knows how many times in different places, finally ending up in the drawer of a cash register when I happen to show up needing change for a Benjamin. Under the conditions and given the causation involved, no other alternative was possible, not because some invisible magic being willed it since the dawn of time as part of some “divine plan,” but because the causal steps, including human choices (volition being a type of causation!) allowed for no other outcome.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Given the habitable zone that the earth enjoys in its orbit around the sun, the conditions for liquid water, the development of an atmosphere, the kinds of elements in abundant supply throughout the earth, etc., it seems to me that the emergence of life was essentially guaranteed if not unstoppable, all through natural processes.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The questioner continued:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">”Look at the human brain how it works and your body how it’s made was that a big accident? Doesn’t that suggest that someone designed it and created it not just happenstance?”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">So did the “someone” who allegedly “designed” the human brain also have a brain, or was this alleged designer itself brainless? How does someone design anything without first having a brain? An immaterial being would have no brain, so the apologist needs to explain how something can be conscious without a brain or at least some kind of nervous system.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As is often the case in apologetics, much of the heavy lifting is borne on pitting the preferred religious view against a single alternative that is characterized as something so despicably unattractive that no one could enthusiastically endorse it. Consequently, on this stratagem, the religious view prevails as a matter of default. In the present case, we have the dichotomy that either the human brain was designed by some supernatural person (one which would have to be brainless, of course), or the human brain the product of an accident, of chance, of “happenstance,” of some random occurrence that would at best be a completely isolated, causeless fluke. While there is no rational basis to accept such a dichotomy, notice how the theist’s own denigrating characterization can rightly be put back on the theist’s preferred “explanation”: assuming the existence of a supernatural being, it’s just an accident that it happens to exist, since its existence would not have been the result of the kind of intentionality which, it is believed, could only explain the existence of the human brain. Thus, the apologist’s own position falls on the sword of his own vicious dichotomizing.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In my assessment, the theistic position actually represents a most lazy and uninterested view of anything it is promoted to “explain,” for it treats whatever phenomenon is thereby “explained” as an isolated primary with no causal connections to other things which exist, only to the creative act alleged to have occurred when the supernatural being wished it into being. Ignore all the similarities human brains have with the brains of other mammalian species and treat it as though it could have only been zapped into being as a finished product in its own right, without the use of schematics, drawings, problem-solving teams, testing, failure studies, fixes and improvements, etc., all of which are part of a real design process. If by ‘design’ the believer really means some infallible act of will by which an omnipotent consciousness just wished finished products into being by sheer fiat, then ‘design’ is really just another stolen concept, for it is being used apart from the genetic underpinnings of its true meaning.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Actual designers work with pre-existing materials and in fact have to become experts in the materials with which they work, knowing what those materials are capable of and what their limitations are. This takes discovery, learning, and integrating, not wishing and “just knowing.” Their task involves analysis, research, proportioning and specification, anticipating and solving problems, quality testing, and a readiness to acknowledge flaws as well as willingness to go back to the drawing board. Where is the evidence that such work was involved in developing the human brain? The enormity of the schematics needed to map out all the neural pathways in the human brain would be tremendous.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">No theist that I know of has ever produced any evidence suggesting that an actual design process of such magnitude took place to fashion the human brain. But we do find many similarities between human brains and those of other mammals (e.g., the presence of neurons, glial cells, cerebral hemispheres, thalamus, cerebellum, medulla oblongata, etc.) suggesting that the human brain in fact has a remarkable relationship to those of other organisms, perhaps even a common origin. Do we just ignore this fact in order to pretend along with the theist that the human brain was just wished into being by a conscious (albeit brainless) agent which is available to the human mind only by means of imagining?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The questioner provided an analogy to drive home the apologetic argument;</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">"That’s like looking at a Rolex watch laying in a desert and believing that sand Blowing around came together over millions of years and formed how this watch works, except that doesn’t approach how intelligently designed humanity is, atheism is a ridiculous Leap"</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here we can safely say that this analogy begs the question by assuming what the theist needs to prove when he compares the human brain to a human artifact. The theist has not in any way demonstrated that the human brain is analogous to any artificial item. And the comparison breaks down with even the most superficial probing. Rolex watches were designed by human beings, organisms which themselves have brains which give them the ability to undertake rational activities, such as designing, and they are manufactured from materials which were sourced from the earth by means of labor, knowledge and techniques which have developed over time.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But the theist claiming that the human brain is the product of divine design insists that there were no pre-existing materials – that the materials making up human brains and everything else in the universe were wished into being, and that the designer of the human brain had no physical body, was not a biological organism, and itself had no brain. They have no alternative but to suppose that the alleged designer of the human brain built it without physical labor, but rather just thought the design out completely in its brainless mind, conjured all the neurons, ganglia, blood vessels, structures, etc., into being <i>ex nihilo</i>, and assembled those elements into finished products without any physical labor whatsoever. Rolex watches are designed and manufactured by entire teams of skilled experts working together in their specialized areas, but the theist insists that his deity did all the planning and assembly all by itself, essentially producing the human brain as a final product simply by uttering magic words.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">So while the apologist erects a pretense to appear concerned for having a sensible position – given its presumed superiority over the alternative as he characterizes it, in the end the intolerable weaknesses of his own analogy prove that this is in fact just a pretense. And even more damning is the fact that the design argument suffers from the same self-defeating liability which plagues every theistic argument, namely that by the time we get to its conclusion, we still have no alternative but to <i>imagine</i> the god whose existence it is said to prove.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">That is not the atheist’s problem. Theists need to own this inescapable defect in their worldview. Religion’s reliance on blurring the fundamental distinction between reality and imagination is undeniable. Just ask any theist to explain how we can reliably distinguish between the god they claim to worship from something they’re just imagining, and watch the reaction. If they’re honest, they’ll acknowledge that we cannot – even he cannot. But typically they’ll try to turn the tables and disown the deficiency that haunts their worldview. His devotion to mystical delusion is his motivation for rejecting any and all alternatives, fair hearings be damned!</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">by Dawson Bethrick</div></div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-84801844322522161762023-06-25T06:00:00.047-04:002023-06-25T06:03:12.642-04:00Frank Turek vs. the Laws of Nature<div style="text-align: justify;">Recently I saw <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GzBYiMYUDCI">a brief video</a> on Youtube of Christian apologist Frank Turek interrogating someone who appears to be a student in some kind of public venue, like a seminar or classroom setting. The clip is clearly an excerpt from some longer broadcast, but I have not seen the whole thing. The clip is just under a minute long (what is called a “short” on Youtube) and was apparently deemed worthy enough to publish as a standalone piece of entertainment. <br /><br />The interaction here exemplifies an all-too common tactic in apologetics: the apologist demands that another person (presumably a non-Christian) present an explanation of something of a general nature about reality, and if the thinker cannot satisfy this demand, the apologist affirms “God” as the correct explanation, and the thinker’s inability to provide an alternative is construed as confirmation of the theistic worldview. On this strategy, a child repeating the affirmation of the existence of a god that he learned from adults in his life would be treated as having supplied an informed explanation. In essence, it is an appeal to ignorance packaged as a seemingly innocent gesture of philosophical inquiry. We must never forget that gods always come in the shape of man’s ignorance. The purpose of apologetics is to mask this ignorance as a recondite form of insight.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />Here is my transcript of the clip:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Turek: Where do laws come from?<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Student: Laws come from proven evidence over time that..<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Turek (interrupting): No. The laws themselves. Where do they come from? Where do the laws of nature come from?<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Student: Laws of nature come from men who have definitively done the same experiments with the scientific method and…<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Turek: No, no, no. I don’t mean us discovering the laws of nature. The laws themselves – the force of gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces. Why are they there and why are they so persistent and consistent?<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Student: I don’t know.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Turek: Well see, I’m saying that’s the product of a mind. Laws come from law givers. And the reason why the laws of nature are so consistent and precise is because this universe was put together and fine tuned and sustained by a mind. And that’s why we can do science. We can’t do science if the laws of nature changed every 10 minutes.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Student: That’s true.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Turek: So I’m saying to get behind all this, there’s a mind behind the universe. And that’s why science makes sense.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Now if what essentially reduces to “Where does X come from?/I don’t know./Therefore, God exists” passes as a serious argument in the apologist’s mind, I would think that his apologetic strategies would not net very many converts. Then again, there are many Christians out there, so perhaps such strategies are effective on philosophically defenseless minds, such as we find in children and many college graduates. What is clear is that such a strategy does not set out to draw the conclusion “God exists” from a set of clearly stated, positively affirmed premises whose truth can be logically traced to what is perceptually self-evident. Rather, it postures as revealing something that’s been there all along, a “hidden mystery,” even though no logical inference has been presented. It constitutes an attempt to wedge mystical assumptions into daunting voids in a person’s knowledge structure.
<br /><br />It is not accurate to suppose that people believe in a god already and then are persuaded by such subterfuge as Turek models here into supposing that Christianity is true. Apologists rely on statements found in Romans 1 to contrive such self-serving pretense. Rather, I think an argument can be made that most people have very likely implicitly assumed some expression of <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-theism-violates-primacy-of.html">the primacy of consciousness</a> since a young age (this commonly begins with a child’s ascent to parental authority) and, having never examined, questioned or corrected this false orientation to reality, they are consequently susceptible to the religious view of the world. This would not only explain why various religions around the world persist in distinct cultures, it would also help explain why apologetic strategies such as Turek’s can so easily gain a foothold in an individual’s background assumptions and exploit them for purposes of apologetic manipulation. A thinker unfamiliar with the issue of metaphysical primacy may very well take for granted the foggy notion that reality is controlled by conscious activity, and this underlying premise thus predisposes him to religious suggestion. In her novel <i>Atlas Shrugged</i>, Ayn Rand observed that “Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.” It’s not implausible in the least to suppose that faith in the superiority of other minds, neither infallible nor omniscient, begins in childhood and can remain in one form or another entrenched in one’s view of the world well into adulthood. Indeed, let us ask: what philosophy other than Objectivism puts comparable emphasis on explicitly grasping the proper relationship between consciousness and its objects? Religious worldviews certainly do not! <br /><br />In this light, I would say that Matthew 18:3, where the words “Except ye be converted, and <i>become as little children</i>, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” are inserted into Jesus’ mouth, are more fitting than what we read in Romans 1 (see <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2005/12/with-minds-of-children.html">here</a>). And while many Christians tell the story of their conversion in adolescence or adulthood, it is very common that they were raised from an early age in households which embraced the religious worldview to some degree or another. Most certainly we do not find believers who discovered and grasped the primacy of existence as a fundamental philosophical principle and later rejected it in favor of a worldview based on the primacy of consciousness. At least I certainly have not. <br /><br />The conversion story of Saul of Tarsus is perhaps the most famous, with those of Augustine of Hippo, John Calvin, Larry Flynt and Gary Busey following not far behind. Among noted apologists, Cornelius Van Til relates in his <a href="https://reformed.org/apologetics/why-i-believe-in-god-by-cornelius-van-til/">Why I Believe in God</a> how he was just a child when he prayed for conversion while being terrified of ghosts that he imagined, and he explains talk of Christian notions “was the sort of thing that constituted the atmosphere of our daily life,” clearly suggesting that religious beliefs had already been impressed on him at a very early and impressionable age. Apologist John Frame states in his <a href="https://frame-poythress.org/about/john-frame-full-bio/">bio</a> that he “received Christ as my personal Savior and Lord at around age thirteen.” The late Steve Hays of <a href="https://triablogue.blogspot.com/" style="text-align: left;">Triablogue</a><span style="text-align: left;"> related in </span><a href="http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2020/02/why-im-still-christian.html" style="text-align: left;">this blog entry</a><span style="text-align: left;"> how he “became a Christian at 16 simply by reading the Bible, beginning with Matthew,” noting also that he “grew up in a moderately Christian home.” In </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlItQ496sOw" style="text-align: left;">this video clip</a><span style="text-align: left;"> Turek himself says that he was “brought up in the Catholic church and went to Catholic high school.” It seems they took the suggestion found in Matthew 18:3.</span></div><br /><div style="text-align: justify;">Even many who have emphatically renounced theistic religion may still have deep in the benthic levels of their thinking about the world the presumption of the primacy of consciousness working in some capacity to shape their worldview. Scratch the surface of an antitheist and do not be surprised nevertheless to find a deep-rooted commitment to metaphysical subjectivism. For example, in a conversion testimony titled <a href="https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/january-february/david-nasser-escaped-iran-not-god.html">I Escaped from Iran, but Not from God</a> and bearing the subtitle “As a child of the Iranian Revolution, I wanted nothing to do with religion,” Christian evangelist <a href="https://www.davidnasser.com/">David Nasser</a> begins his story by chronically relating a most telling starting point: “I was nine years old when I decided that I hated God. I hated him because I believed he hated me first.” One does not hate something that he doesn’t think exists. Fortunately, he and his family did escape Iran, but states that “our country had been victimized by religion gone wrong.” Rather, what history shows is what happens when religion is taken seriously at the civic level to its logical conclusion.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Getting back to Turek, how can we answer his seemingly disarming question?</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">If Turek or any other theist were to ask me the question, “Where do laws of nature come from?” I’d answer this very directly: <i>They come from existence</i>.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">How would Turek react to this answer? Would he deny this and claim that the laws of nature come from non-existence? What is the alternative to existence if not non-existence? If Turek agrees that the laws of nature are real, that what we call ‘laws of nature’ refer to principles which human beings have conceptualized to denote constants which have been consistently observed in nature, and Turek insists that these laws “come from” somewhere, from where else could they have come if not from existence? It seems that the available options at this level are clear: either they came from existence, or they did not come from existence. If Turek insists that the laws of nature came from somewhere but denies that they came from existence (he probably wouldn’t want to concede the point to an atheist’s perspective, would he?), then would he find it sufficient to say that the laws of nature came from non-existence? <br /><br />Turek may be hard-pressed to agree with my answer to his question, not only because it would defuse his theistic gambit, but also because the Christian worldview itself has a very difficult time coming to terms with existence as a primary. Readers of this blog may recall my 2016 entry <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2016/10/exchange-with-presuppositionalist.html">Exchange with a Presuppositionalist</a> in which the apologist, who posts under the moniker “Annoyed Pinoy,” infamously insisted that “Existence doesn’t exist. Existence is a property of things that do exist.” <br /><br />Then there’s this excruciatingly contorted series of statements from a <a href="http://katholon.com/Pike-Logic.htm">rescued essay</a> by apologist Peter Pike:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Contrary to Ayn Rand, it is not true that “existence exists” however. Existence is an attribute that describes some other <i>thing</i>. That is, whether material or immaterial, objects that exist have the attribute of <i>existence</i>. Existence itself cannot exist, for it is not an object but an attribute of objects. Existence, therefore, presupposes objects.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Years ago over on Triablogue, a <a href="http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/05/bethricks-blunders-or-up-dawsons-creek_14.html">blog entry</a> which was, if I recall, written by Paul Manata – it now says “posted by Error,” which is not exactly imprecise – includes the following statement:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">A problem here, though, is that "existence" doesn't "exist" on a materialist and nominalist understanding of the world. "Existence" is a universal that can be said to be exemplified by exisTENTS. Thus I can kick a rock, I can't kick "existence." Thus I can blow up a house, I can't blow up "existence." Therefore, "existence" doesn't "exist" on a materialist and nominalist understanding of the world</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">It remains unexplained why “a materialist and nominalist understanding of the world” is so relevant that it needed to be called out. Either existence exists, or it does not. But apologists cannot help but dance around this most fundamental of recognitions, even though their own pronouncements put them in the dubious position of affirming on the one hand that existence is an “attribute” of things which do exist while on the other insisting this “attribute” itself cannot exist. I suspect that they sense the impending doom that the Objectivist axioms have for a worldview which treats existence as a product of wishing. Apologetics as a vocation has a way of committing its practitioners to extremes of contrarianism for the sake of being contrary. <br /><br />Turek could agree with my answer that the laws of nature come from existence, but then press the question further and ask <i>how</i> they came from existence. But questions of <i>how</i> something happens will necessarily invoke the law of causality, one of the very laws of nature in question. Thus, the question “How did the laws of nature come from existence?” would in effect hinge on the acceptance of a <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2008/06/stolen-concepts-and-intellectual.html">stolen concept</a> by making use of a concept while simultaneously requiring one to deny its genetic roots. Because of this, I do not think pursuing this track would be philosophically fruitful. Of course, Turek wants ultimate causation to be a form of conscious activity, like wishing matter into existence. I have seen no evidence in all my years that conscious activity has the ability to zap into being even a tiny grain of sand, let alone an entire universe or the laws of nature. And while there is no evidence for such phenomena, one can still <i>imagine</i> it, and one can even pretend that what they imagine is real.
<br /><br />And of course, Turek could respond to my answer by asking, “Where did existence come from?” But this too would be a philosophical dead-end: what else is there besides existence? As Peikoff puts it, “Existence exists, and only existence exists” (“The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” in Ayn Rand’s <i>Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology</i>, p. 109). Moreover, just looking at the constituent concepts of such a question should betray its reliance on stolen concepts. The concept ‘where’, for example, can only have meaning within the context of what exists; there is no “where” outside existence. The compound verb “come from” presupposes not only some existent capable of motion in some sense or another, but also a source of origination, which would have to exist in the first place to serve as a source of origination. The usage of past tense in such a question can only imply temporal distinctions, but temporal distinctions would not apply outside existence. <br /><br />As he makes clear in the video clip, Turek wants it all to come from a form of consciousness. At the very foundation of his worldview, he has in essence adopted the primacy of wishing as his ultimate starting point. The laws of nature are a product of wishing because existence as such must be a product of wishing. No argument is offered to support such a view, and yet its indispensability to theism is undeniable. Turek has imagined that there exists a supernatural mind which has the power to wish even the laws of nature into existence, and he wants everyone to pretend along with him that what he imagines is real. And if you don’t, well, maybe soon it will be time to unpocket those threats of eternal damnation, for how dare you think for yourself!
<br /><br />My assessment should not be mistaken as outlandish exaggeration. The quotes cited above, even from Turek’s own video clip, should make it clear that Christianity has a very difficult time wrestling with these matters. I recall a series of exchanges nearly a dozen years ago with Sye Ten Bruggencate who stubbornly resisted addressing the question of whether or not on his view, the Christian worldview, the uniformity of nature was caused by conscious activity. After much pushing, he finally affirmed that yes, <i>on his view</i>, the uniformity we observe in nature was caused by conscious activity. (See <a href="http://katholon.com/Syeco/Waiting.pdf">here</a>; this is also archived on the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/">Wayback Machine</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120120211842/http://anatheistviewpoint.blogspot.com/2011/11/were-still-waiting-for-sye-to-answer.html">here</a>.)
<br /><br />When apologists are confronted with Objectivism’s fundamentals, even though they are undeniably true and clearly fundamental, they find themselves compelled to reject them somehow, even though doing so only exposes their own commitment to absurdity. They pay lip-service to “the Truth” while denying the most fundamental truths upon which all other truths logically rest. And while many apologists are clearly intelligent persons, they have apparently mastered a habit of compartmentalization such that they can wall off the contradictions festering between their religious confession and fundamental facts whose implications they refuse to fully grasp so that the two never come into direct contact.
<br /><br />I’m glad these aren’t my problems!
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-70050777624016586962023-05-29T06:00:00.052-04:002023-05-29T06:09:23.600-04:00Bahnsen's Poof Revisited... Again<div style="text-align: justify;">Recently <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/04/tasc-transcendental-argument-for-square.html">this blog entry</a> received a comment from Jeffrey Jay Lowder (yes, <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2017/05/anderson-on-lowder-turek-debate.html"><i>this</i> Jeffery Jay Lowder</a>), one of the original founding members of <a href="https://infidels.org">Internet Infidels</a> (his articles there can be accessed <a href="https://infidels.org/author/jeffery-jay-lowder/">here</a>). It does not seem that Lowder is much associated with Internet Infidels any more, but the site did post an interview with him back in early 2022 (see <a href="https://infidels.org/kiosk/video/interview-with-jeffery-jay-lowder/">here</a>), which I have not at this time yet read.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Many years ago (I’m thinking 20-plus years at this point!), Internet Infidels was one of my more frequently-visited sites, though I do not visit very often at all any more. I just haven’t been keeping up, I’m afraid! But as I mentioned in my reply to Lowder’s recent comment here on my blog, I do remember enjoying his debate with an apologist named Phil Fernandes (that is with an ‘s’, not a ‘z’; the debate can be seen in its entirety, with the Q&A session, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJpjz4EB2N8">here</a>). That was back in the video-cassette days. In fact, in my first collection of self-owning statements made by Christian apologists, <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2005/04/from-horses-mouth-apologists-shooting.html">From the Horse's Mouth: Apologists Shooting Themselves in the Foot</a>, I included the following comment which Fernandes makes in that debate, which I take as a confession on his part:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">"I just believe that we are very good about lying to ourselves, and only accepting, uh, or interpreting the evidence the way we would like to."</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In his comment, Lowder provided a link to a <a href="https://youtu.be/tMlm0Ehz1ZU">video on Youtube</a> in which he presents a very detailed analysis of Greg Bahnsen’s opening statement in his famous <a href="https://www.bahnseninstitute.com/the-great-debate-bahnsen-vs-stein/">debate with Gordon Stein</a> (PDF transcript can be found <a href="https://andynaselli.com/wp-content/uploads/Bahnsen-Stein_Transcript.pdf">here</a>). I watched the video and encourage readers here to check it out for themselves as well.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I have posted my own interaction with Bahnsen’s opening statement here on Incinerating Presuppositionalism. Back in 2005, in <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2005/03/bahnsens-poof.html">one of my earliest entries</a> on this blog, I concluded that Bahnsen really does not present an argument for the existence of a god in his opening statement. Consequently I call what Bahnsen presents there a “poof” rather than a <i>proof</i>, for Bahnsen does not spell out any distinct steps of an inference from a clearly identifiable starting point to the conclusion “therefore, God exists.” In the comments of that entry several individuals challenged my assessment, prompting me to post a follow-up entry, <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2005/11/bahnsens-poof-revisited.html">Bahnsen’s Poof Revisited</a>. Hence, the current post is “Bahnsen’s Poof Revisited… Again.” (I posted on the Bahnsen-Stein debate again in 2014 <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2014/05/how-bahnsen-gives-away-farm-in-his.html">here</a>.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In his examination of Bahnsen’s opening statement, Lowder is much more detailed than I have been, at least statistically speaking, and examines not only its final paragraphs, where Bahnsen finally gets around to presenting his case (I use this term loosely), but all 2312 words in that opening statement! Lowder, being much more generous with his attention to Bahnsen’s entire opening statement than I was in 2005, provides the following word count distribution of Bahnsen’s initial presentation (with their respective percentage of the total statement):</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
1. Introduction - 22 words (0.95%) </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"> A. Definitions - 184 words (7.96%) </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"> B. Scope - 307 words (13.28%) </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"> C. Concession to Stein - 168 words (7.27%) </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">2. Opening case for the existence of God - 33 words (1.43%) </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"> A. The Nature of Evidence - 375 words (16.22%) </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"> B. Presuppositional Conflict of Worldviews - 985 words (42.60 %) </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"> C. TAG - 238 words (10.29%)
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In my blog entries on Bahnsen’s debate with Stein, I focused on just the very last section – what Lowder’s breakdown shows as the 238 words of section 2, part C.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In his video, Lowder makes the following comment reacting to the relative brevity (paltriness?) which Bahnsen allots to what should be the focus of his opening statement:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Finally, we turn to the third and final subsection C. Section C amounts to a little bit more than ten percent of the total word count in [Bahnsen’s] speech. And yet it is the first and only time in this speech that Bahnsen actually offers an argument for God’s existence. I think this is a really bad move on Bahnsen’s part for two reasons: first, again, at least 90 percent of a debater’s opening statement should be devoted to defending his or her position, with the remaining ten percent or less used for the introduction and conclusion. But as my math shows, Bahnsen managed to do the precise opposite: he devoted roughly 90 percent of his opening statement to introductory remarks, and only ten percent to arguing for God’s existence. The second reason I think this was a really bad move on Bahnsen’s part is due to the nature of Bahnsen’s transcendental argument. When Bahnsen and Stein debated in 1985, I think it’s fair to say that the presuppositionalist approach to apologetics in general, and the transcendental argument for God, or TAG, specifically, were not well known outside of some very tiny Christian circles. It was almost certainly unknown to non-Christians, including atheists. Because TAG is so different from traditional theistic arguments, I think Bahnsen would have been far better off explaining the argument itself and defending it.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Of course, Lowder is not remotely wrong here. Then again, I’ve come to see these theist-atheist debates, for the most part, as a kind of performance art, with more emphasis on rhetorical execution than on presentation of relevant substance. And while Lowder is more generous than I have been in referring to Bahnsen’s statement as actually including an argument, I do take his treatment as confirmation of my overall view that Bahnsen’s opening statement is an enormous missed opportunity. Christians who praise Bahnsen’s performance at this debate are apparently oblivious to the fundamental deficiencies glaringly evident to observers outside presuppositionalist circles, exhibiting the kind of loyalty that sports fans have for their favorite team, regardless of whether they win or lose. <a href="https://frame-poythress.org/bahnsen-at-the-stein-debate/">John Frame states</a> that “Greg Bahnsen’s debate with Gordon Stein has become something of a legend in our circles,” which is apparently true. In his book <i>Apologetics to the Glory of God</i>, Frame writes glowingly that “Greg Bahnsen utterly bewildered atheist spokesman Gordon Stein in a debate some years ago with his ‘transcendental argument for the existence of God’… Stein was ready for the traditional proofs, but not this one!” (p. 76n. 19). Meanwhile, I stand by the comment I made in 2005 when I wrote in <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2005/03/bahnsens-poof.html">Bahnsen’s Poof</a>: “If Stein lost the debate, it is not because Bahnsen won, but because Stein should have been more vigilant in pointing out his opponent's dishonest tactics.” <br /><br />But unlike Frame, there are Christians who are not so smitten. Kelly James Clark writes:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">I have listened to the tapes (which Frame commends) of the debate between Gregory Bahnsen, presuppositional apologist, and Gordon Stein, defender of atheism. Quite frankly, I found Bahnsen’s arguments precious thin and his approach wearisome – he simply repeated over and over that unbelievers have no grounds for reason and then offered the briefest defense of his view that only Christian theism provides grounds for reason. Van Til, I’m afraid, had a similar awkward tendency to prefer assertion over argument. (<i>Five Views on Apologetics</i>, p. 256)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">My observation is that repetition of assertions as well as treatment of rehearsed questions, often regurgitated in rapid-fire succession, as in effect substitutes for argumentation, are not just a fall-back devices for presuppositionalist apologetics, but in fact a significant aspect of its overall strategy. High-profile presuppositionalists like Sye Ten Bruggencate (who, according to <a href="https://julieroys.com/canadian-apologist-bruggencate-claims-exonerated-disqualified/">this article</a>, has been “permanently disqualified” from activities in the apologetics ministry), prefer public-forum debates, whether on a stage like Bahnsen and Stein, or in video or audio format, because for them presuppositionalism is at root a kind of performance, not an authentic philosophical position that can be defended in carefully developed written form open to close examination and serious scrutiny. <br /><br />Lowder’s presentation includes a screen quoting the initial paragraph of James Anderson’s blog entry <a href="https://www.proginosko.com/2017/04/a-selection-of-presuppositional-arguments/">A Selection of Presuppositional Arguments</a>:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">One criticism of presuppositional apologetics is that its advocates rarely if ever offer serious <i>arguments</i> for their distinctive claims (e.g., the claim that our ability to reason presupposes the existence of God). The criticism is overstated, but there is a measure of truth to it. I count myself a presuppositionalist, but I’ve been frustrated in the past by presuppositionalists who seem to imagine that declaring what Van Til’s “transcendental argument” <i>purports</i> to demonstrate is tantamount to actually making that demonstration. Simply <i>asserting</i> that “without God you can’t prove anything at all” or that “your very ability to reason presupposes the existence of God” does nothing whatsoever to explain <i>why</i> those weighty assertions should be believed. Likewise for the failure of non-Christians to answer questions asking them to account for their ability to reason, to know truths about the world, to make meaningful moral judgments, etc., in terms of their own worldviews. Questions cannot substitute for arguments, no matter how pointed those questions may be.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Lowder reacts to this, saying:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">I couldn’t have written it or said it better myself. Now, Anderson doesn’t call out Bahnsen by name, and I don’t know if Bahnsen is one of the unnamed presuppositionalists who [sic] Anderson had in mind when he wrote this. But, as my presentation has made clear, Anderson’s comments match my analysis of Bahnsen’s opening statement to a T. In the lead-up to the transcendental argument, Bahnsen beautifully laid out the nature of evidence and the presuppositional nature of conflict between worldviews. Once it was finally time to <i>defend</i> the transcendental argument, Bahnsen didn’t deliver the goods.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">So the question at this point is whether this failure to “deliver the goods,” as it were, on the part of presuppositionalists as defenders of the Christian faith, or even on the part of presuppositionalism as a distinct approach to apologetics, is a bug, or in fact a feature. While my many interactions with James Anderson’s writings right here on my blog will testify that Anderson is a cut above the fray in this regard (since he does actually attempt at times to piece together what resemble formal arguments for the existence of a god in written form), the outcomes of those interactions tally up in favor of the view that this failure may in fact really be a feature of presuppositionalism and some of its champions, like Anderson himself, have yet to admit this to themselves. The aim of presuppositionalism seems to be to disarm non-Christians in a debate setting without letting on the fact that no actual argument has been presented in the first place. It is for this reason why I suspect many apologists are impressed with Bahnsen's performance at his debate with Stein.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-73882139232932399762023-04-01T06:00:00.029-04:002023-04-01T07:38:54.693-04:00TASC: The Transcendental Argument for Square-Circles<div style="text-align: justify;">Hitherto it has been commonly supposed by the ill-informed that the non-existence of Square-Circles could be casually taken for granted. But demonstrating their non-existence has always proven problematic. After all, proofs are useful in demonstrating a positive, while proving a negative has always been notoriously difficult if not dubious. How exactly would one draw the conclusion that Square-Circles do not exist without begging the question or committing some other informal fallacy? What would one point to as evidence for their non-existence when everything we observe aligns so conclusively with the presupposition that Square-Circles exist? Wouldn’t one need to be omniscient to know that there are no Square-Circles existing somewhere in the universe beyond the reach of mere mortal sensibilities in order to proclaim definitively and with confidence that there are in fact no Square-Circles anywhere at all whatsoever? How would unSquare-Circulers account for logic, science and morality?</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">Perhaps we have in a most pedestrian stupor gone about this all wrong. Challengers often like to retort with the sneer “maybe you’re wrong!” or pester the self-confident with an endless series of the question “how do you know?” in rapid succession. Some detractors might even initiate their set of objections with “imagine that you are mistaken about everything you hold dear” (cf. <a href="https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/Why%20&%20What_%20A%20Brief%20Introductio%20-%20Douglas%20Jones.pdf">here</a>, also <a href="https://graceonlinelibrary.org/doctrine-theology/why-what-a-brief-introduction-to-christianity-by-douglas-jones/">here</a>). Isn’t there then at least a tiny sliver of hope that Square-Circles are in fact real, that Square-Circles do in fact exist? </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Now admittedly, because evidence of Square-Circles is in fact literally ubiquitous in human experience, attempts to construct direct arguments for the existence of Square-Circles have proven themselves to be a formidable stumblingblock for unSquare-Circulers given their anti-Square-Circles presuppositions. Because of the anti-Square-Circles bias of their unSquared-Circulerity, unSquare-Circulers have as it were a “filter [that] screens out certain features while tinting other features” (cf. <a href="https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2018/05/twin-paradox.html">here</a>), so they do not realize that everything they actually do see is in fact evidence of Square-Circles. Because their minds are engaged in active rebellion against Square-Circles, unSquare-Circulers suppress the truth in unrighteousness. <br /><br />Therefore, an indirect argument involving a <i>reductio ad absurdam</i> is to be called for. For it is by this method that one can clearly show precisely how a denial the existence of Square-Circles leads inevitably to the absurd conclusion that nothing at all exists, which is patently and undeniably false. And this is because denial of Square-Circles logically entails a fundamental denial of all reality whatsoever, for if Square-Circles do not exist, then nothing exists.
<br /><br />Thus, we can construct the following argument:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
1: If anything exists, then Square-Circles must exist<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">2: Things exist<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">C: Therefore, Square-Circles must exist
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">This argument is reflexively supported by a corresponding argument as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
1’: If Square-Circles do not exist, then nothing exists<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">2’: Things exist<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">C’: Therefore, Square-Circles must exist
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Clearly, then, we must confess that the soundness of the Transcendental Argument for Square-Circles is unassailable and undefeatable.
<br /><br />A similar transcendental argument can be drawn from causality:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
1’’: If causality is real, then Square-Circles exist<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">2’’: Causality is real<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">C’’: Therefore, Square-Circles exist
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">The argument “Causality, therefore Square-Circles” speaks to such fundamental presuppositions of human thought that it would be as unthinkable to deny the reality of Square-Circles as it is to deny the reality of causality. Moreover, to the extent that unSquare-Circulers endeavor to reason in a way consistent with their faulty presuppositions, they find themselves falling into skepticism and absurdity (cf. <a href="http://www.corneliusvantil.com/articles/vtfem.html">here</a>), and that’s not good.
<br /><br />If Square-Circles do in fact exist, as Square-Circulers uncompromisingly recognize, then Square-Circles would reside at the heart of our very being and occupy a fundamental role in all human cognition and experience. To deny the existence of Square-Circles, then, is to deny the very foundations of human experience and cognize in a vacuum. In short, the proof of Square-Circles is that, without them it is impossible to prove anything (cf. <a href="https://www.credocourses.com/blog/2015/does-god-exist-bahnsen-vs-stein-debate-transcript/">here</a>). Because of this, unSquare-Circulers inadvertently prove the existence of Square-Circles by their very denial. The only rational option open to us is to acknowledge the fact that Square-Circles exist because of the impossibility of the contrary.
<br /><br />Now it has often been charged that defenses of Square-Circles inevitably involve the elementary logic fallacy of circular argument or “begging the question.” To this we point out the fundamental fact that <i>all</i> argumentation, whether for the existence of Square-Circles or for anything else, must by nature of argumentation itself presuppose the reality of Square-Circles and the truth of Square-Circularism. Apologist James Anderson explains why:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Because when one argues in defense of an ultimate epistemic authority, such as an ultimate standard of truth, then some element of circularity will be <i>unavoidable</i>. Consider: if the truthfulness of our ultimate standard of truth… could be established on the basis of some <i>other</i> standard of truth, then it wouldn’t actually <i>be</i> the ultimate standard. Our attempted proof would effectively <i>disprove</i> our position! (see <a href="http://www.corneliusvantil.com/articles/vtfem.html">here</a>).</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Since Square-Circles are absolute, everything else depends on them for its own reality, including our own mental activity such as that used in developing proofs as such, for nothing else could exist independently of Square-Circles. Hence:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">We simply prefer to reason in a circle to not reasoning at all, for only circular reasoning is even possible to man. Unless we are larger than Square-Circles, we cannot reason about them in any other manner, than by transcendental or circular argument. The refusal to admit the necessity of circular reasoning is itself an evident token of opposition to Square-Circles. (see <a href="http://www.corneliusvantil.com/articles/vtfem.html">here</a>)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">After all, “’Circularity’ in one’s philosophical system is just another name for ‘consistency’ in outlook throughout one’s system. That is, one’s starting point and final conclusion cohere with each other” (Greg Bahnsen, <i>Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis</i>, p. 170n.42). For this reason, “we should not tone down the validity of this argument to the probability level. The argument may be poorly stated, and may never be adequately stated. But in itself the argument is absolutely sound” (Cornelius Van Til, <i>The Defense of the Faith</i>, p. 197). <br /><br />For more nimble thinkers, the similarities between the trinitarian deity of Christianity and the notion of square circles have been hard to miss. For example, the Trinity is supposed to be three and yet one, and yet one but three, a puzzle with which even deeply invested Christian theologians have had a tumultuously difficult time wrestling. For example, John Frame explains that “the Christian God is three in one. He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit… Somehow they are three, and somehow they are one… The fact is that we do not know precisely how the three are one and the one is three” (<i>Apologetics to the Glory of God</i>, p. 46). Those looking for a thorough explanation must accept the fact that they’re in for some dissatisfaction. As <a href="https://frame-poythress.org/a-primer-on-perspectivalism/">Frame explains elsewhere</a>: “The greatest mystery in Scripture and Christian theology is, of course, the mystery of the holy Trinity.” At the end of the day, it’s a mystery, and that’s all that can ultimately be said about it. Similarly, more restless thinkers are likely going to find the concept of Square-Circles to be similarly problematic. But this stumblingblock is a symptom of man’s enmity with Square-Circles. Enmity with Square-Circles could not exist if there were no Square-Circles in the first place with which to experience enmity! So in just this way puzzling over the nature of Square-Circles is testament to their reality.
<br /><br />What unSquare-Circulers tend to ignore is the fact that Square-Circles are holly square, wholly circular, and thus not at all contradictory as they often claim. This is demonstrably not a contradiction because a circle does not have a hole while a square does where a square does have a whole while a circle does not. Hence we say holly square, wholly circular, not wholey square, wholey circular. This trips up those who are darkened in their thinking, for they are not mindful of such rudimentary distinctions. But clearly this can only mean that Square-Circles are not wholly square and wholly circular in the same sense, thus not contradictory.
<br /><br />Since the objection to the very existence of Square-Circles that is most commonly raised is that the very idea of a Square-Circle is self-contradictory, this is worth exploring a bit further. Now, while such an objection is clearly absurd, it is so common that it is necessary to put this concern to eternal rest. To test the claim that Square-Circles are self-contradictory, we can use the same criteria which Marc Cortez uses when considering the question <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130904091610/http://marccortez.com/2013/08/29/is-the-incarnation-an-absurd-contradiction/">Is the Incarnation a Contradiction?</a> (Yes, the <a href="http://marccortez.com/2013/08/29/is-the-incarnation-an-absurd-contradiction/">original blog</a> has been removed from the internet – however, I found the entry on the <a href="https://web.archive.org/">Way Back Machine</a>.) According to Cortez,</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">a statement is only truly contradictory if it affirms that two contrary propositions are both true at the same time and in the same way.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Of course, in reaction to this one might point out that Square-Circles are not simply statements, but actual concretes that exist in <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2015/03/craigs-eight-arguments-for-god-part-iii.html">what William Lane Craig would call</a> “space-time reality”; they even exist <i>outside</i> “space-time reality”! This means that Square-Circles are not <i>statements</i> to begin with! Nor are its constituent elements mere “propositions.” So the very rudimentary conditions necessary for a contradiction are not even in play here. Now, it may be supposed that certain <i>statements about</i> Square-Circles on their surface <i>seem</i> self-contradictory, but that would be a problem with those statements, not with Square-Circles themselves. Insistence that there is something contradictory about Square-Circles, then, can be traced to some moral deficiency: unSquare-Circulers simply do not want Square-Circles to be real! And as everyone knows (or should know): Square-Circle denialism is the root of all evil and depravity. It is because unSquare-Circulers have unresolved depravity in their lives that they are so susceptible to the conclusion-delusion, a most insidious expression of vanity exemplified in such crass denialism.
<br /><br />Like reason, logic, the laws of nature and moral laws, Square-Circles are immaterial. They are also infinite, transcendent, sovereign, authoritative, self-attesting, immanent. Without Square-Circles, there could be no intelligibility whatsoever. Since Square-Circles are the necessary pre-condition to all intelligibility, Square-Circle denialism is like a man chasing his own tail in quicksand: he just goes around and around, not realizing that his very action affirms Square-Circles while sinking in his own absurdity. Pointing this out to an unSquare-Circuler is sure to pour hot coals on his head.
<br /><br />Do you have unSquare-Circulers in your life? Do you have unSquare-Circulers in your family? Take them to TASC with the Transcendental Argument for Square-Circles and help them get on the straight path. Challenge them to look deep into the rounded corners of their hearts. They too will see the light.
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-84606271651000467092023-03-26T06:00:00.029-04:002023-03-26T06:00:00.205-04:00Incinerating Presuppositionalism: Year Eighteen<div style="text-align: justify;">As usual on IP, I mark the anniversary of this blog (<a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2005/03/presuppositionalism-vs-causality.html">first entry</a> posted on March 26, 2005) with an entry listing the posts which I published over the previous year, beginning with a link to the previous year’s anniversary post. Whether readers find this valuable or not, it does help me in a variety of ways, especially since navigating a blog looking for that one item that I know is there, is not always very easy. It also gives me some added sense of accomplishment. <br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Since this time last year, here are the entries I posted on this blog: </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">503. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/03/incinerating-presuppositionalism-year.html">Incinerating Presuppositionalism: Year Seventeen</a> - March 26, 2022</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">504. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/04/some-thoughts-in-response-to-andersons.html">Some Thoughts in Response to Anderson’s Argument on Propositions</a> - April 28, 2022</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">505. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/05/apparently-i-dont-have-right.html">Apparently I don’t have the right…</a> - May 21, 2022</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">506. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/06/same-old-song-and-dance-anderson-on.html">Same Old Song and Dance: Anderson on Induction… again</a> - June 26, 2022</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">507. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/07/stovetop-realizations.html">Stovetop Realizations</a> - July 28, 2022</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">508. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/08/tag-and-appeal-to-magic.html">TAG and the Appeal to Magic</a> - August 28, 2022</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">509. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/09/why-do-apologists-raise-problem-of.html">Why Do Apologists Raise the Problem of Induction in Debate?</a> - September 25, 2022</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">510. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/10/is-creation-possible.html">Is Creation Possible?</a> - October 11, 2022</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">511. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/11/evolution-and-persistence-of-religion.html">Evolution and the Persistence of Religion</a> - November 25, 2022</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">512. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/12/on-kalam-cosmological-argument.html">On the Kalam Cosmological Argument</a> - December 24, 2022</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">513. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/01/buried-signposts.html">Buried Signposts</a> - January 16, 2023</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">514. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/02/epistemology-or-methodological-amnesia.html">Epistemology or Methodological Amnesia?</a> - February 21, 2023</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">515. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2023/03/tag-in-two-steps.html">TAG in Two Steps</a> - March 5, 2023</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">As always, a special thanks to anyone who bothers taking the time to read anything I post here, and even bigger thanks to those who trouble themselves to post a comment. I do read all comments, though I do not always have time to reply. But as far as comments go, they are always intelligent and bring additional value to my blog. So I am grateful for that.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I do not know how much longer I can maintain this blog, though I have no intention of stopping. Writing and editing take time and sustained focus, and I do try to provide something that readers will find valuable. My blog is not an advertisement for books, nor is there a paywall to the “real content” beyond some teaser. There are no ads and I don’t even ask for donations (and hope I never need to); there’s no link to Paypal or Subscribestar where I ask for coffee money. I will buy my own coffee as long as I can. We are always being hit with messaging urging us to “give back” to “the community.” Consider my writings my way of doing this. Those who muscle through an entry or two might find that this is a way that I can provide more impactful and lasting value than volunteering an afternoon at the local high school car wash, scrubbing graffiti off a parking structure or picking up trash along the interstate.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">With that, we embark now on Year Nineteen.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">by Dawson Bethrick</div></div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-48463605457951704312023-03-05T06:00:00.036-05:002023-03-05T09:41:31.676-05:00TAG in Two Steps<div style="text-align: justify;">It must be tough being a presuppositional apologist, for the quandary which haunts his vocation is never ending. On the one hand, he is under pressure to characterize his god as so fundamental and ever-present that only its existence could serve as man’s supreme epistemological axiom. On the other, given the fact that we have no direct awareness of anything that answers to the descriptions attributed to “God” or “the Lord,” the apologist cannot avoid the need to claim to be in possession of some kind of argument which compellingly establishes the conclusion, “therefore, God exists.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">These two horns which the apologist must somehow balance are mutually exclusive. An axiom identifies a fundamental fact which is perceptually self-evident. We do not need to prove that which is perceptually self-evident, while the purpose of an argument is not to establish the truth of facts which we directly perceive, but to make explicit the inferential steps leading from a truth which is perceptually self-evident to a truth which is not self-evident. It is always in the convoluted tangle of the apologist’s attempt to outline such an inferential sequence that the apologist’s argumentative efforts break down. But just by assembling an argument in the first place, the apologist is tacitly conceding the fact that his god-belief in fact does not have the fundamental status he claims it has.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The purpose of presuppositionalism as an apologetic method seems to be to play these two mutually exclusive horns while pretending that there is no dissonance between them at all.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I recall one of my earliest encounters with an enthusiast of Vantillian apologetics. This was in the later ‘90s. I have to say that, he carried on in the most flamboyantly display of vanity I had ever witnessed by this point in my life coming from a self-professing Christian, acting as though his god-belief were undefeatable and his argument sealing its alleged truth were utterly bullet-proof. It was almost as though he were engaged in a playground game like “king of the hill” or “we don’t stop.” Only he was very serious: his imaginary armada was of such immense proportions that everyone might as well just start running immediately, because no one could stop what was coming. Indeed, even running was ultimately futile, so just surrender. Like so many apologists I’ve encountered since then, this one asked a lot of questions in rapid-fire succession. The fact that he would simply dismiss whatever answers were offered in response to his questions, only suggested, at least in retrospect, that he was in fact not a serious thinker, but rather a serious pretender. One might be forgiven for supposing that he was just a two-bit troll. <br /><br />But I was new at all this and I was curious to see how effectively he could defend his god-belief. So I asked him to identify the first premise of his argument for God’s existence.
<br /><br />He replied: “Premise one: God exists.”
<br /><br />I then asked him how he established the truth of this initial premise. <br /><br />He replied: “I presuppose its truth.”
<br /><br />I then explained that this does not move us from any perceptually self-evident fact to the conclusion that a god exists.
<br /><br />He replied: “God IS because he is presupposed...period.”
<br /><br />It was clear by this point that the person I was dealing with had some kind of psychological condition rather than a soberly considered philosophical viewpoint. By essentially saying “I presuppose it, therefore it’s true,” this fellow was signaling that he simply had a puffed-up estimation of his own cognitive faculties, perhaps deluded that they had been fortified by supernatural enhancement to conform reality to his wishes. I knew enough then not to expect honest debate with someone so afflicted with such a distorted sense of self. But given that this was one of my first impressions of presuppositional apologetics, I never forgot it.
<br /><br />Several years later I had occasion to discuss this with another apologist of the presuppositional persuasion. I explained that it remained stubbornly unclear just how the presuppositional argument, or “TAG,” was structured, beginning with its initial premise and proceeding to support its intended conclusion. I made sure to clarify that its intent is to conclude that the Christian god exists, and the apologist confirmed this. I then told him about the flamboyant fellow who insisted that “God exists” was his first premise and explained that this is not a logical way to support the conclusion, “Therefore, God exists.” The apologist did not express agreement with my contention, but offered the following by way of reply:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">That God's existence is an inescapable presupposition does not mean that God's existence must be the premise. You could state the argument in two steps. One step would have God's existence as the premise, and then show that human knowledge is possible on that basis. The other step would be to begin with the negation of God's existence, and then show that human knowledge is not possible on that basis. But Van Til said that you can begin with any fact in the universe, such as "there is a tree in the yard" or "murder is wrong," and then show that such a statement is intelligible only if God exists.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">So even here, what is not presented is an actual inferential chain, expressible in the form of a succinct syllogism, which draws the conclusion that a god exists from facts that are readily available to an average thinker like myself. In fact, the flexibility described here suggests that the believer’s god is like a kind of putty that can be smoothed into place regardless of how one might approach the question. The argument for the existence of a god could begin with the assertion that said god exists as its initial premise, or with something else as its initial premise. Apparently the “logic” of the argument, which is curiously not revealed in any formal outline, leads to concluding that a god exists whether it has the support of premises or begins by asserting its conclusion. In short, the conclusion “therefore God exists” does not seem to follow as a logical consequence from any identifiable set of premises which the apologist is willing or able to state with any degree of precision. <br /><br />Now, if you are wondering what exactly is the difference between a presupposition on the one hand, and a premise on the other, in terms of framing the structure of an argument, I’m right there with you. Perhaps by “presupposition” the apologist means an assumption that one takes for granted while a premise is that assumption made explicit. Or, perhaps “presupposition” is just another term for precondition. But presuppositions are epistemological while preconditions may be entirely metaphysical. For example, my heart beating is certainly a precondition of my ability to think, talk and act, but any my thinking does not per se presuppose my heartbeat as an epistemological premise. And your thinking and speaking does not presuppose my heartbeat either. You might not even know I exist! In other words, logically speaking, the truth of my statements does not depend in any noetically structural manner on the beating of my heart. If my statements are true, they are true regardless of whether or not my heart is beating. So I would exercise caution against confusing an epistemological premise with a metaphysical precondition. Yet I suspect it is the latter that the apologist had in mind here.
<br /><br />The first step described here is to start with “God’s existence as the premise, and then show that human knowledge is possible on that basis.” Presumably all parties already acknowledge that human knowledge is possible, but the way this step is stated seems to pin two burdens on the apologist: not only does he now have to show that a god exists (simply starting with that does not meet this burden), he now also needs to show that human knowledge is possible “on that basis.” Why not just focus on establishing the truth of the claim that there’s a god in the first place and worry about whether or not human knowledge is possible “on that basis” once the initial burden has been satisfied? It seems that this step is geared towards changing the subject, for now the focus will be on the nature of knowledge and its basis and not on how one can infer the existence of a god. The nature and basis of knowledge were not the original topics of inquiry. <br /><br />Also, I suspect that whatever reasons the apologist might provide for supposing that knowledge is possible on the basis of his god’s existence, could be repackaged in terms of a rival belief, one which assumes the existence of something known to be imaginary, and have no less weight as a defense for that rival belief. The so-called “Fristianity” foil debated by some Vantillians as a possible counterexample to Christianity (Fristianity being similar to Christianity but with a four-headed god in place of Christianity’s triune god) is but one of possibly dozens of alternatives purporting to address fundamental questions about the nature of basis of knowledge. The point here is that once one opens the door to supernaturalism in order to explain some actual phenomenon in reality, we are limited not by facts but by whatever the imagination might invent. But knowledge is not imaginary, so neither can its basis be imaginary.
<br /><br />The alternative step – namely “to begin with the negation of God’s existence, and then show that human knowledge is not possible on that basis” – is no more promising than the first. Where the first step fails outright to establish the existence of said god and seeks to redirect our attention elsewhere, the second step misconstrues the nature of human cognition entirely. We do not begin by negating anything, but by perceiving and identifying what we perceive. Moreover, knowledge is not secured by rejecting arbitrary constructs and then affirming the validity of those constructs when we still find ourselves puzzled to explain something. Rather, we secure knowledge by discovering facts, identifying them by means of concepts and integrating them without contradiction into the rest of the sum of our knowledge. <br /><br />This second step, if conducted by the apologist, will no doubt involve a string of pronouncements saying “this wouldn’t be possible” and “that wouldn’t be possible” all because his god is not “presupposed” at the head of the table, as it were. But such pronouncements would essentially assume the truth of what the apologist has been called to defend in the first place, namely the truth of his belief that his god is real. What he cannot show is that something we cannot perceive or verify by any objective means is preconditional to fundamental truths which are informed by facts which we can perceive. Moreover, what he cannot show is how one can draw the conclusion “God exists” from the objective starting point represented by the axiom ‘existence exists’. Indeed, if we begin with existence as our primary, what function would the god part perform? Blank out.
<br /><br />Which takes us to the apologist’s final statement: “Van Til said that you can begin with any fact in the universe… and then show that such a statement is intelligible only if God exists.”
<br /><br />So again, there is no actual argument here because what is presented is not a series of steps of an inference from something known to some new knowledge to which it logically leads, but rather a paradigm by which various aspects of the knowing process would be deliberately characterized in such a way as to compel an outcome of the god-of-the-gaps variety. From what I have seen, this is typically accomplished by asking a series of questions which are intended to evoke admissions of “I don’t know” from non-believers (“How do you know X?”), thus exposing some area of ignorance into which the believer can shoehorn his god-belief as the goo plugging the hole in the non-believer’s knowledge. The dirty little secret here, however, is that this magic goo is really nothing more than something we must imagine. The confirmation of this analysis would be secured by using the believer’s own “How do you know?” interrogation techniques against the paradigm itself. For the believer will only be able to give vague reasons purportedly necessitating aspects of the paradigm rather than step us through the epistemological stages of an objectively informed inference detailing an actual knowledge process which has rooted contact with reality from beginning to end.
<br /><br />I suspect, quite strongly in fact, that the typical believer going to prefer some apologetic route which keeps his own reasons for believing shrouded in mystery, not only from onlookers, but also from himself. He certainly would not want his own reasons for believing to be scrutinized, so we can expect him to keep them hidden from view. Also, it may very well be the case that he adopted his god-belief when he was a child, long before he ever learned about syllogisms, logic, fallacies, preconditions of knowledge, and any skills under the rubric of critical thinking. Admitting the fact that he’s been believing all these years essentially because it is a psychological habit which he has never allowed himself to examine critically, correct and outgrow, would only jeopardize his apologetic intentions. Presuppositionalism is ideally suited in this way to enable the believer to protect a philosophically indefensible commitment while conducting a pretentious offensive against outsiders who can, in the believer’s mind, never deserve straight answers about his faith.
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-32533284244027197302023-02-21T06:00:00.017-05:002023-02-21T06:00:00.184-05:00Epistemology or Methodological Amnesia?<div style="text-align: justify;">In today’s post, we begin with a quote from Christian apologist John M. Frame:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Scripture actually has a great deal to say about epistemology, or theory of knowledge. It teaches that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Ps. 111:10; Prov. 9:10; 15:33) and of knowledge (Prov. 1:7). “Fear” here is that reverent awe that yields obedience. It is based on the conviction that God is Lord, and we are his creatures and servants. He has the right to rule every aspect of our lives. When he speaks, we are to hear with the profoundest respect. What he says is more important than any other words we may hear. Indeed, his words judge all the affairs of human beings (John 12:48). The truth of his words, then, must be our most fundamental conviction, our most basic commitment. We may also describe that commitment as our most ultimate <i>presupposition</i>, for we bring that commitment into all our thought, seeking to bring all our ideas in conformity to it. That presupposition is therefore our ultimate criterion of truth. We measure and evaluate all other sources of knowledge by it. We bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). (<i>Five Views on Apologetics</i>, pp. 208-9)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Frame assures his readers that the Christian bible (“Scripture”) “has a great deal to say about epistemology,” and immediately cites several passages from Proverbs and the Psalms.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;">Just so we don’t overlook anything, here are the passages Frame references (KJV):</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Psalms 111:10: “The fear of the Lord <i>is</i> the beginning of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do <i>his commandments</i>: his praise endureth for ever.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the Lord <i>is</i> the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy <i>is</i> understanding.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Proverbs 15:33: “The fear of the Lord <i>is</i> the instruction of wisdom; and before honour <i>is</i> humility.”<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Proverbs 1:7: “The fear of the Lord <i>is</i> the beginning of knowledge: <i>but</i> fools despise wisdom and instruction.”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Now, when I see the claim that a certain source “has a great deal to say about epistemology,” I tend to look for discussions pertaining to what knowledge actually is, how it is acquired, how it is validated, how it is differentiated from other modes of awareness, how new items of knowledge can be integrated into the sum of knowledge one already holds, and fun stuff like that. Frame himself states that “the epistemologist must also wrestle with such matters as the relationship between sense experience and reason” (<i>Five Views</i>, p. 214). But we don’t find anything like this in the biblical passages Frame references. One can read through these verses and never know what the biblical definition of ‘knowledge’ might be, or even if there is one. Then again, years ago I was informed by a believer (in the comments section of <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2014/05/shining-bright-light-into-daves-dark.html">this blog entry</a>) that “the bible is not a dictionary.” And while it’s true that the Christian bible is not a dictionary per se, this would not prevent it from defining its key terms, something many instructional tomes in fact do. What source are believers to consult if they want specifically Christian definitions of important worldview concepts?
<br /><br />At any rate, on Frame’s view, the starting point for knowledge is a type of emotion – namely a “reverent awe” which compels obedience. This “reverent awe” itself, according to Frame, “is based on the conviction that God is Lord, and we are his creatures and servants.” But if this emotion is the starting point for knowledge, then how could it be based on something more fundamental (e.g., a “conviction”) and how can “the conviction that God is Lord” itself be based on any kind of knowledge? What Frame describes seems to be a blind loop of sorts: fear is the starting point of knowledge, and yet this fear is based on a conviction, which itself is presumably informed by knowledge, but yet the fear experienced in reaction to the conviction informed by knowledge, is the starting point for knowledge. For it’s doubtful that Frame would say that the conviction in question here is not informed by knowledge. But on a plain reading, what he presents here suggests that his “epistemology” is analogous to a dog chasing its tail in circles. <br /><br />To fear something implies awareness of that something as well as awareness of what it represents to one’s values. If you’re hiking a country trail and you see a squirrel, you’re not likely going to be afraid of it. But if you learn that the squirrel is carrying rabies, you’re probably going to do anything possible to avoid contact with it if you know what rabies is and you know what’s good for you. All of this involves a complex chain of knowledge which we should not take for granted. So it makes no epistemological sense to claim that knowledge begins with an emotion, whether fear, awe, love, etc., for such emotions presume at least some rudimentary knowledge. Moreover, emotions are variable; they are not anything like unchanging fundamental facts. But if Christians want to admit that their knowledge begins on emotions, I’m not going to stand in their way.
<br /><br />Of course, what is the apologist’s plan of attack when he encounters someone who does not have the kind of fear described in the passages Frame references? The apologist can repeat the threats of divine judgment, eternal damnation, everlasting hellfire, weeping and gnashing of teeth, etc., but if one realizes that these threats are just imaginary, they’re not going to be frightened into the kind of fear that, according to Frame, gets “biblical epistemology” off the ground. Any variant of “if you don’t believe, then God’s gonna getcha for that!” will be like water off a duck’s back. Typically that’s when insults start to fly. <br /><br />Frame does not seem to have a solution for this, but instead takes the fear in question for granted and proceeds to describe the basis of the conviction which supports the awe-fear cited in the biblical passages he referenced. This conviction is itself informed by things which the believer is supposed to accept as knowledge: “[God] has the right to rule every aspect of our lives”; “When he speaks, we are to hear with the profoundest respect”; “What he says is more important than any other words we may here”; “his words judge all the affairs of human beings”; etc. It is “the truth of his words” which “must be our most fundamental conviction.” For this to be the case, one would need knowledge of “his words” and also have the knowledge that they are true. In short, one would need to be a Christian to already think any of these knowledge claims are true. So again, we have knowledge informing a fear, and this fear is the beginning of knowledge. What Frame describes is closer to methodological amnesia than it is to anything resembling epistemology.
<br /><br />Frame characterizes this conviction, which itself presupposes a long list of assumptions, as “our most basic commitment” and “our most ultimate <i>presupposition</i>,” but on what is this “most ultimate <i>presupposition</i>” based? By what means does one acquire awareness of this “most ultimate <i>presupposition</i>,” and by what means does one <i>validate</i> the claim that it is true? Even though such questions are epistemologically relevant, they do not get any worthwhile attention. In fact, given that this conviction rests on a series of more fundamental assumptions, how could it possibly be “ultimate” in any epistemological sense? It certainly is not conceptually irreducible, nor does it denote something that is perceptually self-evident. None of what Frame describes as his “ultimate <i>presupposition</i>” denote something we can have direct awareness of. I suspect that there is much which Frame’s epistemology takes for granted and which remains unexamined. <br /><br />In the same book, another Christian apologist, Kelly James Clark, openly disputes Frame’s notion of “biblical epistemology”:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Frame roots his epistemological commitments in Scripture and finds there support for the view that we can offer proof for our beliefs. Presuppositionalists have tended to believe themselves to be <i>the</i> biblical and Christian apologists (arrogantly so, in my estimation, when they call other apologetical approaches anti-Christian), but Frame is more generous in his assessment of other apologetic approaches. I am dubious, however, of finding any ultimate or coercive support for epistemology in Scripture. The Hebrews were not theoretical thinkers – wisdom was for them profoundly practical. To say that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” is not to make a claim about proper procedure in physics, packaging, or the culinary arts. It is a claim about practical wisdom – how to live one’s (moral and spiritual) life. The very idea of a biblical epistemology seems to be as misguided as the idea of a biblical meteorology. (Ibid., p. 256)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">So this raises a perplexing predicament for believers generally, and apologists in particular. How can two Christian scholars disagree on something so important as whether or not there’s such a thing as “biblical epistemology”? No doubt both Frame and Clark have scoured the pages of the Christian bible, from the first chapter of Genesis to the final chapter of Revelation. And they both have backgrounds in academic philosophy. Thus, if there were in fact a distinctive epistemology laid out in the Christian bible, we’d expect Christian scholars to be in unanimous agreement on this. They might trifle over how certain passages adduced to inform said epistemology need to be interpreted, but the very presence of an epistemological theory being spelled out in some or several sections of the Christian bible should not be a point of contention.
<br /><br />The dispute here is even more difficult to untangle when considering Frame’s statements about faith and “the Holy Spirit.” For Frame, “Faith is a demand of God” requiring human beings to “repent and believe in Christ” under the context that “God commands us to do many things that we cannot do in our own strength” (<i>Five Views</i>, p. 217). Christianity styles faith as a “gift of God” (Eph. 2:8), so naturally the apologist is going to cite his deity as the source of his faith. Frame gives his rationale for this as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">But if faith governs reasoning, where does faith come from? Some might think it is essentially irrational, since in one sense it precedes reason. But that conclusion would not be warranted. The question, “Where does faith come from?” may be taken in two senses. (1) It may be asking the <i>cause</i> of faith. In that sense the answer is that God causes faith by his own free grace. This is the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. (2) Or it may be asking the <i>rational basis</i> of faith. In that sense, the answer is that faith is based on reality, on truth. It is in accord with all the facts of God’s universe and all the laws of thought that God has ordained. The Holy Spirit does not cause us to believe lies. He is the God of truth, and so he makes us believe what is true, what is in accord with all the evidence and logic. The faith he gives us agrees with God’s own perfect rationality. (<i>Five Views</i>, pp. 209-10)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">The idea that a supernatural being “<i>makes</i>” people believe things only underscores the underlying authoritarianism of the religious mindset. If one were <i>made</i> to believe something by some irresistible otherworldly force, we would as a matter of course expect that person to say it’s true. But he would not <i>know</i> that it’s true through independent examination. If one came to a conclusion by means of independent rational inquiry, he wouldn’t need to be “made” to believe it, for he would have arrived at it through clear, uncoerced discovery and validation. <br /><br />But if we let Frame have his point, then the implications of his disagreement with Kelly James Clark raise grave questions. For both cannot be right on this: it cannot be true (a) that “Scripture actually has a great deal to say about epistemology” (Frame), and also (b) that “the very idea of a biblical epistemology seems to be as misguided as the idea of a biblical meteorology” (Clark). As we saw above, the verses which Frame cites as evidence supporting the notion of “biblical epistemology,” suggests that what he takes as epistemology is not epistemology at all, but rather a contorted view confusing emotion with knowledge and asserting the result as a noetic starting point. In the context which Frame provides with his claims about faith and the Holy Spirit against the relief of Clark’s disagreement, it seems we’d need to conclude that Frame has believed a lie and is thus not guided by the Holy Spirit. This seems to be what his own worldview implies here. If Christianity were true and the Holy Spirit is ensuring that the faithful are believing only truth and not lies, what would have to be the case when two people claiming to be Christians disagree on something so critical as whether or not the bible presents its own epistemology?
<br /><br />According to Frame’s frame of reference, Clark must be guilty of what presuppositionalists call “autonomous reasoning.” Apologist James Anderson characterizes “autonomous reasoning” as “treating fallen human reason as an independent and ultimate epistemic authority that can stand over God’s Word as a judge of its veracity” (<a href="https://journal.rts.edu/article/presuppositionalism-in-the-dock-a-review-article/">Presuppositionalism in the Dock: A Review Article</a>). Frame illuminates this in a footnote where he points out that “[Cornelius] Van Til likens fallen reason to a buzz saw that works well except for being pointed in the wrong direction” (<i>Five Views</i>, p. 214n.9). In his response to Frame, Clark makes the following counterpoint:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Unless the Holy Spirit totally overwhelms a person, human reason (of the autonomous variety) is still operative. We can seek to bring our minds into conformity with God’s will, but we have to decide which God and what is his will. We decide. [Quoting Frame:] “To claim neutrality is to claim that <i>I</i> am the one who ultimately decides what is true or false” (p. 218). But surely I <i>am</i> the one who decides what is true or false. Who else could do that for me? Of course, our deciding does not <i>make</i> something true or false; that is not my point. My point is that each of us must make decisions using our best judgment about what is true and false. I don’t see any other way around it. We have no other faculty than reason (in the broad sense) to come to our best judgment of which god to follow (or not) and what it means to follow that god. (<i>Five Views</i>, p. 262)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Hopefully Clark and Frame were not roommates at the time they wrote their respective portions of <i>Five Views</i>, otherwise someone would likely have been sleeping on the couch! But Clark is right in that there is no substitute for using one’s own mind to do his thinking. The presuppositionalist rejection of “autonomous reasoning” could only foster the view that <i>sacrificing</i> one’s own mind as such is the ideal required for genuine faithful piety. Moreover, Clark’s point that “unless the Holy Spirit totally overwhelms a person” should not be ignored: on Frame’s stated view, a supernatural being coercively takes over the believer’s mind, in effect destroying all volitional agency. This would render the believer to the status of an automaton or puppet, analogous to a character in a <a href="http://www.katholon.com/Cartoon_Universe_of_Christianity.htm">cartoon</a>. But then what does this say about Frame’s contention that “the faith [God] gives us agrees with God’s own perfect rationality”? We just have more fundamental disagreement between believers. <br /><br />The notion that “fallen reason” is like “a buzz saw that works well except for being pointed in the wrong direction” is rather telling. For one, it concedes something very important – that it “works well.” The insistence, however, that it is “pointed in the wrong direction” might not carry the sting which the apologist intends. For here we need to consider two fundamental questions:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">1. What is reason’s starting point? and<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">2. Does one’s reasoning take fully into account the distinction between that which is real and that which is merely imaginary?</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">If reason begins with the fact that existence exists, then already it has bypassed a fundamental flaw endemic to the religious view of the world – namely the view that existence is a product of conscious activity, a notion that is explicitly self-contradictory. By starting with the fact that existence exists, the rational thinker begins with both feet solidly planted in reality rather than in the void of religious speculation. Second, if one’s reasoning consistently recognizes that the imaginary is not real, and he has the self-awareness to recognize when he is imagining beyond what is warranted by the facts, then reason will never be able to lead a thinker to belief in supernatural beings. If Frame and other apologists want to say this is what is meant by “fallen reason… being pointed in the wrong direction,” they’re making quite an admission about their worldview.
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-56443008554841193592023-01-16T06:00:00.031-05:002023-01-16T06:00:00.192-05:00Buried Signposts<div style="text-align: justify;">Some fifteen years ago or so, I watched an episode of a program called “I Shouldn’t Be Alive.” The episode, titled “Lost in the Snow” (available <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4dg0hozhKA">here</a>), told the story of the Stolpa family, a young couple who got lost with their infant child in very remote northwestern Nevada during a snowstorm in the winter. They started driving from the Bay Area in late December 1992, heading to Idaho for a family gathering. Hoping to make time and avoid a heavy blizzard hitting the Reno area, they headed north and took a small highway into a very sparsely populated portion of Washoe County. Unfortunately for them, the sign on the highway notifying motorists that it was closed, was buried under snow. They got stuck in a frozen desert and eventually ran out of gas, and their harrowing adventure was just beginning. Luckily they survived, but the lessons of their experience are worth considering. <br /><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">For me, the story brings home an important point: our minds do not have a built-in signpost telling us when we’re departing reality and wandering into the realm of the imaginary. Religion is like a road into a fantasy-land with no signs warning drivers that they’ve gone beyond a fundamental boundary. When believers read the gospels, for example, and imagine the Jesus depicted therein preaching and performing miracles, they can be so engrossed in what they consider a solemn experience that they do not realize how far they have ventured beyond the realm of fact and into a figment of their own mental creation. What’s more, they think they’ve arrived at some sacred destination which they like to think of as a spiritual awakening of sorts, when in fact they’ve shut down their reasoning by going off-course and getting stranded in a wilderness far from reality. </div><span><a name='more'></a></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">This is why a philosophy which explicitly teaches us the fundamental difference between the real and the imaginary is so important. It is the only foolproof mechanism which can reliably point out important boundaries, such as when one’s thinking reaches the edge of what is objectively knowable and is on the verge of plunging into a fake environment. <br /><br />When reviewing theistic arguments, one of the things I’m always on the lookout for are any caveats which their defenders might include in their premises to keep those following along from getting lost in the psychological snowstorm of the imaginary. The imaginary and the non-existent indeed look very much the same, and they behave very much the same as well. If the believer’s god is actually real and not imaginary, one would think that apologists would take great care in preventing lay thinkers from mistaking what they imagine for the god enshrined by their religion. But curiously such concern is conspicuously absent from theistic defenses. <br /><br />Consider for example the cosmological argument, a version of which I examined in <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/12/on-kalam-cosmological-argument.html">my previous entry</a>. I know of no presentation of this argument in which its defender warns his audience against mistaking what they may be imagining for the god whose existence it is purported to prove. Apologists either are not concerned that those whom they seek to persuade might stumble and treat what they imagine as the god their religion calls them to worship, or they don’t want to draw attention to this as a possibility. Another alternative is that defenders of such arguments are so habituated in treating what they imagine as though it were real that it would never occur to them to acknowledge such a possibility or erect signposts along the way.
<br /><br />But notice how the argument begins by slithering past the signpost which should be in place to warn thinkers that they’re venturing into the imaginary. The first premise of the argument states:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">The argument starts off by exploiting the familiar validity of causation being involved in the beginning of an action, so most thinkers won’t question the meaning of this premise. For example, the rain began to fall, the fire began to spread, the eggs began to burn, etc. Even when nouns are used as the object of the verb ‘to begin’, actions are implied and understood – e.g., we began our trip in June, the teacher will begin the lecture in five minutes, John begins his day at 6:00 AM. When we speak of things beginning in time, they’re essentially processional or sequential in nature, inherently taking place in time – e.g., the music began with the brass section, the poem began with a somber tone, the argument began with a faulty premise. <br /><br />By contrast, we don’t apply the verb ‘to begin’ self-reflexively to a concrete’s existence per se – e.g., the mountain began, the tree began, or the car began. And that’s because we never observe concretes just popping into existence. If your neighbor said to you, “the hinges of my garage began three days ago,” you would rightly ask: “Began [doing] <i>what</i>?” <br /><br />In the case of the cosmological argument’s first premise, the clause “whatever begins” is not intended to denote the beginning of an <i>action</i>, but actual concrete entities – i.e., <i>their very being</i>, even though such a notion has no objective reference. The indefinite nature of the pronoun “whatever” is sufficient to hide this sleight of hand from view for it can include both actions and concretes when used generally. <br /><br />This is how easily a superficially crafted premise can slip illicit notions by the boundaries separating fact from fantasy without calling attention to the fact that the thinking involved has gone of track. Without applying just a little critical thinking to what the premise is affirming, one can easily accept a questionable premise without rational warrant. “Of course things that begin to exist must have a cause,” would be the desired reaction, for the implied alternative would be that things can begin without causation. But since ‘beginning’ as such belongs in the category of action, naturally one would grant that causation is necessary for action. But concretes are not actions! Concretes are preconditional to actions. Without being mindful of this distinction, the argument leads us into the fake environment of theistic fantasy. <br /><br />Consider Greg Bahnsen’s opening statement in his often-cited <a href="https://www.credocourses.com/blog/2015/does-god-exist-bahnsen-vs-stein-debate-transcript/">debate with Gordon Stein</a>. Here we find that he makes at least passing reference to a number of issues relating to “the nature of evidence, the presuppositional conflict of worldviews, and… the transcendental argument for God’s existence,” such as various fallacies, types of existence claims, whether or not “all existence claims are questions of matters about facts,” (that Bahnsen holds that it is “mistaken” to suppose that all existence claims are about matters of fact is rather telling), philosophical pre-commitments, “the testimony of the solar system” and “the persuasion of the sea,” tales of miracles from the Christian bible, the anonymous “500 witnesses of Christ’s resurrection,” an alleged “impossibility of the contrary” and the claim that “without [the Christian god] it is impossible to prove anything.” <br /><br />But at no point does Bahnsen express any concern for the distinction between reality and imagination or warn his audience against straying beyond fact and into fantasy. Nor does he articulate any set of principles by which we can objectively distinguish between what he calls “God” and what he very well may merely be imagining. Nothing Bahnsen presents in his opening statement gives us any confidence that his sphere of argument is delineated in any identifiable way so as to exclude figments of his imagination from contaminating his conclusion or any stage of argument leading to it. For all that Bahnsen does present in his opening statement and elsewhere in his debate with Stein, he may have himself passed a dozen signposts warning of departure from reality and never knew it. For his own worldview depends so heavily on treating what we can only imagine as though it were unchallengeable truth and rudimentary to thinking as such. In short, Bahnsen’s worldview systemically fails to distinguish between reality and imagination.
<br /><br />In his paper <a href="https://www.proginosko.com/docs/If_Knowledge_Then_God.pdf">If Knowledge Then God: The Epistemological Theistic Arguments of Plantinga and Van Til</a>, Christian apologist James Anderson surveys seven different arguments for the existence of the Christian god, but at no point in the presentations or defenses of these arguments does he show any concern for ensuring that thinkers whom these arguments are intended to persuade not lose sight of the distinction between the real and the imaginary. Given the nature of theistic belief, which centers on worship of something invisible, supernatural and capable of actions which we nowhere observe in reality, the hazard of supposing that said god may merely be imaginary is something one would hope such arguments would guard against. I don’t see that they do.
<br /><br />Perhaps somewhere in his many writings Anderson does provide guidance on clarifying a distinction between his god and what is really just imaginary, but I have not found it (and had I come across it, I would surely have flagged it!). Rather, it seems like one missed opportunity after another. A case in point is an entry which Anderson posted on his blog in 2018 titled <a href="https://www.proginosko.com/2018/09/wikiality/">Wikiality</a>. There he agonizes over a definition of ‘reality’ that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Reality&oldid=854938621">he found in Wikipedia</a>, which reads as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Reality is all of physical existence, as opposed to that which is merely imaginary. It is the name for all of physical existence, but the word is also used in a declension to speak of parts of reality that include the cognitive idea of an individual “reality” (i.e. psychology), to a “situational reality,” or a “fictional reality.”</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">This conception of ‘reality’ did not sit well with Anderson. He complains as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">This is awful in so many ways. In the first place, it defines reality as <i>physical</i> existence, and contrasts physical existence with the “merely imaginary.” In other words, it’s a metaphysically prejudicial definition that assumes <i>physicalism</i>, the view that only physical things exist. Accordingly, God turns out to be non-existent <i>by definition</i>! (If only it were that easy to defend atheism.) Likewise, minds, thoughts, numbers, sets, propositions, and all other non-physical entities are dismissed as “merely imaginary” by sheer verbal fiat. (That would include, presumably, the mind of the person who contributed that definition of reality.)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Now it’s unclear that the author of the definition in question intends to exclude minds from reality, either purposely or implicitly, but it is noteworthy that Anderson lumps minds as such in with categories that are psychological in nature, such as thoughts, numbers and propositions. While one may object to the supposition that “only physical things exist,” there is no question that physical things do in fact exist, and I don’t know how one could object to contrasting reality with “that which is merely imaginary.” Moreover, I take it from Anderson’s objections here that he grants that the merely imaginary is not real, since he does not object to the conception of reality excluding this category. <br /><br />So for Anderson this opens as it were a kind of gap – a chasm between physical things on the one hand and “that which is merely imaginary” on the other – where some critical thinking needs to be applied in order to determine whether some proposed existent is part of reality or not part of reality. We should agree that “that which is merely imaginary” is not real. But if we allow that there are actually existing things which are not physical in nature (e.g., consciousness, minds), then for those things which do not fall in the category of “physical things,” one would – so I’d think – want to apply care in ensuring that we are not mistaking “that which is merely imaginary” with the what-is-real-but-not-physical category. But nowhere that I can find does Anderson seem to do this. He refers to “other non-physical entities,” things which he presumably insists are real, but he does not identify them or the means by which he might be aware of them. If the means by which he’s aware of them is in fact indistinguishable from the psychological operation we call imagination, then how is it that these “other non-physical entities” are not imaginary? Blank out.
<br /><br />Or consider Michael Butler’s <a href="http://www.butler-harris.org/tag/">The Transcendental Argument for God’s Existence</a> in which he offers the following:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Transcendental arguments attempt to discover the preconditions of human experience. They do so by taking some aspect of human experience and investigating what must be true in order for that experience to be possible. Transcendental arguments typically have the following form. For <i>x</i> [some aspect of human experience] to be the case, <i>y</i> must also be the case since <i>y</i> is the precondition of <i>x</i>. Since <i>x</i> is the case, <i>y</i> is the case. The argument mentioned above serves as a clear example of a transcendental argument. For causality to be possible, God has to exist since the existence of God is the precondition of causality. Since there is causality, God exists. A corollary of this is that whenever non-believers employ the concept of causation, they are borrowing from the Christian worldview since only on a Christian worldview does causation make sense.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here we have, if nothing else, essentially assertion by stipulation rather than argument. For there is no actual inferring going on here. Instead of identifying the means by which man can have awareness of what Butler calls “God” and distinguishing those means from imagination, Butler is simply insisting that the existence of his god is a precondition for causality. But it’s clear that one can recast this line of would-be inference with something which (ostensibly) all parties would agree is imaginary, to wit:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">For causality to be possible, The Force has to existence since the existence of The Force is the precondition of causality. Since there is causality, The Force exists.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here the apologist would be right to challenge the assumption that “The Force is the precondition of causality,” but would he challenge this argument’s defenders to identify the means by which they are aware of “The Force” and distinguish those means from mere imagination? We can probably expect the apologist to contest this variant of the transcendental argument by asserting distinctions between his god on the one hand and The Force on the other, finding faults with the latter to which the former is exempt. But this would beg the question for such an objection would assume the truth of the very point in question, which is the claim that his god exists. It would also do nothing to rescue Butler’s god from the suspicion that it is merely imaginary.
<br /><br />Butler states that “only on a Christian worldview does causation make sense,” but this is without warrant. For one, this concept seems conspicuously absent from the teachings find in the pages of the Christian bible; if the concept of causality were a specifically Christian concept, there’d need to be a very good reason for such an oversight. Moreover, causality is a relationship between an entity’s actions and its own nature, a relationship which obtains independent of conscious activity. But on the Christian view, there is no such thing as something that exists or obtains independent of conscious activity, for everything which the Christian worldview teaches reduces to the primacy of consciousness metaphysics.
<br /><br />The kind of “argument” which Butler presents with the label “transcendental” is something we can expect from a worldview which enshrines the imaginary, for even Butler’s rendition leaves us with no alternative but to imagine the god whose existence it is intended to prove. Moreover, at no point does Butler express any concern for ensuring that those considering his argument do not fall into the trap of misidentifying what they imagine for the god affirmed by Christianity. <br /><br />It is clear that Butler acknowledges the human mind’s capacity to imagine, but he does nothing to protect his argument and its intended conclusion from its contamination. Curiously, when he addresses the triune nature of the god of Christianity, Butler contrasts this with a “quadrune” alternative posited by the fictional counter-example known as “Fristianity” – a Christianity with a four-headed god instead of a three-headed god. Butler writes:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">The only way we know that God is a Trinity is that he revealed it to us – mere speculation or empirical investigation would never lead us to this conclusion. But the Fristian worldview, which is, ex hypothesis, identical to Christianity in every other way, asserts that its god is a quadrinity. But if Fristianity is otherwise identical to Christianity, the only way for us to know this would be for Fristian god to reveal this to us. But there is a problem with this. Supposing Fristianity had inspired scriptures (which it would have to have since it is all other ways identical to Christianity), these scriptures would have to reveal that the Fristian God is one in four. But notice that by positing a quadrinity, the Fristian scriptures would be quite different from the Christian Scriptures. Whereas the Christian Scriptures teach that, with regard to man's salvation, God the Father ordains, God the Son accomplishes and God the Spirit applies, the Fristian scriptures would have to teach a very different order. But exactly how would the four members of its imagined godhead be involved in man's salvation?</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">If the godhead of Fristianity is “imagined,” as Butler clearly allows here, why isn’t it the case that the godhead of Christianity also not “imagined”? How exactly do we distinguish Christianity’s “trinity” from something we’re merely imagining? I’m reminded of <a href="https://triablogue.blogspot.com/2014/08/olsons-imaginary-jesus.html">Steve Hays’ admission</a> that “an imagined Jesus is just an imaginary Jesus.” Likewise, an imagined trinity is just an imaginary trinity.
<br /><br />In his paper <a href="https://thirdmill.org/articles/dou_jones/dou_jones.Christianity.html">Why & What: A Brief Introduction to Christianity</a>, apologist Douglas Jones begins his case for the Christian worldview by imploring his readers to engage their imagination:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Imagine that you are mistaken about everything you hold dear. Suppose you wake up one morning and clearly realize that your long-held, day-to-day views of nature, social values, and self are obviously mistaken. Common things that you have seen for years take on a whole new light. The world hasn't changed, but different things stand out in odd ways. Things you once adored are now utterly disgusting. Things you once hated now command your deepest loyalty. You can now see through your motives and rationalizations in a way hidden before. How could you have been so naive?</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here there’s no mistake: at the very outset of considering Jones’ case for Christianity, we must consult our imagination and move forward from there. Clearly there’s no chance for a signpost to warn us of danger, for the starting point of such a venture is well beyond its position. Indeed, Jones’ procedure is that we start by imagining that everything we have known is wrong.
<br /><br />In the same paper, Jones acknowledges “the human imagination's desire to make a god after its own likeness” and states that “the Church… ought to worship God in the way God prescribed and not according to vain imaginations.” It’s clear from these three places in his paper that Jones is aware of the power of human imagination. But if convincing people that Christianity requires them to begin by imagining an alternative to the reality they know, if man’s imagination has a “desire to make a god after its own likeness,” and if there’s a possibility of confusing the way one worships a god between the way it prescribes on the one hand and how one may vainly imagine doing so, what guardrails does Christianity put in place to ensure believers aren’t falling into the trap of their own imagination? How exactly does Jones suggest we distinguish between what he calls “God” and what we may simply be imagining? What reliable methodology can the believer apply to ensure that he faithfully distinguishes between the way the Christian wants him to worship it and the “vain imaginations” Jones warns about here? Again, blank out.
<br /><br />My view is that all thinkers should exercise care in ensuring they are aware when they are objectively reasoning about actual things and when the trajectory of their speculations is on the verge of drawing them onto the turf of fantasy. Surveying the several theistic defenses above, we see that apologists consistently fail precisely in doing this. If Christianity were in fact true, if the Christian god were in fact real and not merely imaginary, why do apologists default so conspicuously in this area, and why is it that time and again theistic arguments leave us with no alternative but to imagine the god they’re supposed to prove? Theistic arguments are all joined at the hip in their disregard for precluding the imagination as the true path to belief all the while pretending to have some kind of philosophical credibility by mimicking the form of serious argument. The jig, I dare say, is up.
<br /><br />Even Rod Serling saw the value of signposts warning of departures from reality in the opening of <i>The Twilight Zone</i>:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">You're travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone!</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">But religion does not. Religion can only survive so long as such signposts are buried under snow. <br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div></div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-3546694237389423822022-12-24T06:00:00.096-05:002022-12-24T06:00:00.210-05:00On the Kalam Cosmological Argument<div style="text-align: justify;">A fellow by the name of Jason who frequently posts thoughtful comments on this blog under the moniker Jason mc, recently had a friendly discussion with a Christian apologist named Arul Velusamy. A video of this discussion is publicly available on YouTube here:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXYIseW--J8&t=1259s">The Argument for God from the Universe | LiveStream Discussion with an Atheist | Arul Velusamy</a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The discussion was primarily occupied with Arul’s presentation and defense of the so-called “Kalam Cosmological Argument.” (For those interested, there is in fact an entire page on the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalam_cosmological_argument">Kalam cosmological argument</a> on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a>.) Unfortunately, as with other theistic arguments, I still find that I have no alternative but to imagine the god whose existence is said to be proven by this argument. Beyond this, however, the argument suffers from numerous other deficiencies.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Jason’s discussion with Arul is rather long, with Arul doing the lion’s share of the talking. At nearly three and a half hours, I have not listened to its entirety, but hopefully at some point I will. That said, I have listened to at least half of it and I’m confident this, along with an examination of the visual aids, is more than enough to get the gist of what is being argued.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">Arul did have some slides to present his argument, which is very helpful. In the first slide, he contrasted Al-Ghazali’s version of the argument with that of William Lane Craig (I have a number of entries on my blog interacting with arguments presented by William Lane Craig; readers can locate them here: <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/search/label/WLC">WLC</a>.).</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The Al-Ghazali formulation runs as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Premise 1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Premise 2: The universe began to exist </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause of its beginning
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Craig’s version is given as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Premise 1’: If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a cause of its beginning </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Premise 2: The universe began to exist </blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause of its beginning
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Both arguments are untenable on a rational understanding of reality and philosophy. Rational philosophy provides us with a correct understanding of the concepts involved here and the conclusion that arguments such as those presented above commit the fallacy of the stolen concept is inescapable once a correct understanding of those concepts has been surfaced.
<br /><br />(For a fuller understanding of what the fallacy of the stolen concept is, see my blog entry <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2008/06/stolen-concepts-and-intellectual.html">Stolen Concepts and Intellectual Parasitism</a>. In short, the fallacy of the stolen concept occurs when making use of a concept while ignoring or denying its genetic roots. A stolen concept assumes the validity of concept while ignoring its place in the hierarchy of conceptual knowledge. For example, if one claimed that he had a mathematical proof for the invalidity of mathematics as such, it should be clear that he’s making use of the validity of a concept in support of his case that it is not valid. Most instances of stolen concepts, however, are not so obvious. In the case of the cosmological arguments presented above, the arguer makes use of concepts – namely time and causation – while denying their genetic roots – namely the existence of the universe.) <br /><br />Consider the first premise of the Al-Ghazali version, which states: “Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning.” This is troubling on its surface because it does not seem to apply to anything I have personally experienced, and I doubt Arul has either. I cannot think of anything I’ve ever observed which “begins to exist” and yet which was not assembled from pre-existing things or which was not arranged from pre-existing materials. In short, I have never seen some wholly new existent pop into being and “begin to exist.” While some may claim that this happens, they either seem to be ignoring the fact that the thing in question was assembled from pre-existing materials, or they have only hearsay to go on rather than actual hard evidence. Even when Congress spends money as though it just popped into existence (I can imagine some members of Congress asking “If money doesn’t grow on trees, why do banks have branches?”), the nasty secret is that that money will have to come from somewhere eventually (after all, that’s what tax livestock is for).
<br /><br />Hence my initial question here:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<i>What does it mean to say that something “begins to exist”?</i>
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">While apologists in my experience tend never to explain this, presumably it would mean some substance or material which comes into being, adding new substance or material to the universe which did not already exist as a part of the universe; it would be something coming into existence which is not assembled by pre-existing substances or materials, but rather newly existing substance or material.
<br /><br />But again, I have never observed something beginning to exist in this sense. The first premise, then, seems to pertain to nothing that actually happens in reality.
<br /><br />My next question would be:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
<i>What would qualify as an example of something which “begins to exist”?</i>
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">If one posits a newborn puppy or a brand new building, or a manufactured item which comes freshly off an assembly line, such as a pencil or memory stick, we are not talking about some newly existing substance or material coming into being that did not exist in some form beforehand. Rather, in each case we have some new arrangement of materials which already exist. The puppy was birthed as a result of a biological gestation process by which its mother’s body collected nutrients it took in to develop an embryo; the brand new building was constructed using materials which had to be brought onto the building site and assembled over a period of months or more; the pencil and memory stick were likewise assembled in a factory from pre-existing materials. None of these examples would be things that came into existence adding a net gain to the sum total of what previously already existed. <br /><br />How about clouds? Clouds are formed from water vapor and other particles which accumulate under natural conditions in the atmosphere. The atoms and molecules of which the water vapor consists already existed. So again, when we see a new cloud in the sky that wasn’t there a short time earlier, we’re seeing a new arrangement of pre-existing materials. Similarly with mountains, ocean waves, stars, meteorites, raindrops, ice formations, dust, and so on. It seems that every example I can think of as something that might qualify as having “begun to exist” is something which is in fact just a new arrangement of pre-existing materials. I can think of nothing which I have ever observed in my several decades of life as having come into being and yet not from pre-existing materials.
<br /><br />So until we have an example of something that “begins to exist,” it seems that the first premise of this argument is about nothing that does actually exist. If that is in fact the case, then the cosmological argument, at least this version of it, has no philosophical value whatsoever.
<br /><br />In fact, it seems that the only place where we can observe some net new material or substance coming into being is in a <a href="http://www.katholon.com/Cartoon_Universe_of_Christianity.htm">cartoon universe</a>. If apologists want to cite such a reference as evidence informing the validity of the notion of things beginning to exist, I’d say they’re right on schedule.
<br /><br />The second premise asserts that “the universe began to exist.” During Jason’s discussion with Arul, Jason rightly asked for a definition of ‘universe’. Of course, what ‘universe’ is taken to mean here is of critical importance, but it does not seem to be something Arul included in his presentation sheets. Arul responded, saying that by ‘universe’ he means “all of physical reality that exists” and then qualified this as “including all things covered by science.” Such a qualified definition seems deliberately crafted to allow for the existence of some thing or things <i>outside</i> the universe. If that is in fact the case, what concept would Arul propose we use to include everything which exists, not only those things he considers to be part of the universe as he understands it, but everything else which he might think exists outside the universe as well? The concept ‘universe’ as I would define it (i.e., the sum total of everything that exists) satisfies a legitimate conceptual need – namely the need for a concept which encompasses everything which exists without any exception. Arul’s definition of ‘universe’ does not satisfy this conceptual need. Is this because his worldview is not equipped to do so? On that note, it might be fruitful to ask how the Christian bible itself defines ‘universe’, or does it?
<br /><br />The definition which Arul proposes raises further questions which, if pursued, drag us into additional areas which may involve further controversies. If we’re not careful, this will only serve to distract us from the matter at hand. For example, what does ‘physical’ mean? “Physical reality” as opposed to what? Typically theists will contrast ‘physical reality’ with what they call “non-physical” (and “material reality” with “immaterial reality”). But such negating concepts do not help enlighten us as to what actually exists, for their purpose is to wipe out what we know exists rather than point to some actual observable alternative to what we know exists. To say that something is “non-physical” only tells us what it is not, not what it is. So it is positively unhelpful in the most literal sense.
<br /><br />Similarly with the added qualification that ‘universe’ includes “all things covered by science.” This qualifier then raises the question: What is covered by science? And pursuing this question will inevitably meet with the question: What is science? What’s important to note here is that the scope of scientific inquiry is constantly expanding; what is “covered by science” is not static and unchanging. Things that were not “covered by science” fifty or a hundred years ago are now under the purview of new disciplines within science. <a href="https://gizmodo.com/11-emerging-scientific-fields-that-everyone-should-know-5987296">One article</a> which I found quite readily lists several new <i>fields</i> of scientific discovery – e.g., neuroparasitology, quantum biology, cliodynamics, etc. In my own <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2014/12/glossary-of-terms.html">Glossary of Terms</a> I define science as “the systematic application of reason to some specialized area of study.” On this definition, if something exists and we can discover its existence by means of reason, it should be accessible to scientific study. Arguments which seek to make allowance for things which exist but which are NOT open to scientific study strike me as rather suspect; in effect, such arguments are affirming the existence of things which are beyond the reach of reason and yet still expect us to consider assertions about such things as knowledge. But reason is how the human mind discovers and validates knowledge, for it is epistemologically suited to the metaphysical nature of human consciousness (see my entry <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2014/06/dawsons-razor.html">Dawson’s Razor</a>). We need a clear path of reason to the knowledge we secure and claim in order to guard against innocent mistakes as well as charlatans pretending to know something they don’t. By stipulating that an entire category of alleged existents is beyond the reach of science, apologists would in effect be stating that the “cause” they assert for the universe is beyond the reach of a systematic application of reason. <br /><br />To restrict “universe” to include only “physical reality,” then, implies that some other undefined form of reality also exists outside the universe; otherwise, why the need for such qualification? So we would need to inquire into what that might entail as well as how we can know this. Specifically, what possibly might exist “outside” the universe and, very importantly, what specifically would be the epistemological steps by which we can know this? Also we might inquire as to what safeguards the cosmological argument puts into place – <i>if any</i> - to prevent us from mistaking what may in fact be merely imaginary with the “cause” of the universe which it purports to prove. Unfortunately, from what I watched in the discussion, Arul does not shed any light on any of these concerns. We cannot define things into existence, nor does restricting our definitions to deliberately allow for things outside the universe allow us to claim validly that things beyond the reach of reason exist. And by implicitly putting the alleged cause of the universe beyond the reach of reason by making science out of bounds, the potential for the imagination to camouflage itself as knowledge is indeed significant.
<br /><br />Thus we need to make it explicitly clear – Yes or No: does “non-physical reality” include dreams, visions and imagination? For clearly these things are not physical or material, and yet people do dream, have visions and imagine things. If ‘universe’ does not include dreams, visions and imagination because they are “non-physical,” how can the Kalam cosmological argument avoid the dubious implication that the “cause” of the universe might be imaginary? I see nothing in the way that the argument is constructed to protect against such an outcome, and yet the view that the universe was caused by something imaginary in nature can only warrant immediate dismissal. <br /><br />Here I think it is instructive to revisit a point which I made at the end of my entry <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2020/11/presuppositionalism-and-induction.html">Presuppositionalism and Induction: Exhuming Hume</a>, namely that while apologists seem to think that the problem of induction is a strong debating device because human beings apparently cannot know about things which exist that are beyond the reach of our senses (e.g., the one thousand swans I’ve observed are all white, but I have no justification for assuming the next one will also be white), they seem to ignore this very limitation when it comes to beings allegedly residing beyond the universe. If my experience of pain the two times I have touched the surface of a hot stove does not give me “warrant” for supposing a third time will not result in pleasure, and I can see stoves and feel pain directly, what gives me “warrant” for knowing what allegedly “caused the universe” billions of years ago? In such a way, the Kalam cosmological argument seems expressly geared to lead the human mind out of the realm of knowledge and into the realm of fantasy.
<br /><br />Now turning to support for the cosmological argument, three points were offered in support of its first premise (“Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning”): <br /><br /></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div style="text-align: justify;">1. Something cannot come from nothing.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div style="text-align: justify;">2. If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn’t come into being from nothing.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div style="text-align: justify;">3. Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of Premise 1.</div></div></blockquote><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />Looking at the last point first, note that it appeals to “common experience” and states that this “confirm[s] the truth of Premise 1.” I’d say that common experience confirms something even more damning. As I noted above, common experience is unanimous in that we do not experience things “beginning to exist,” which obviates the very first premise of the cosmological argument. Since things don’t begin to exist in the sense that the cosmological argument requires, there’s no reason to fuss over whether they have a cause or not.
<br /><br />Turning to the first point: If one holds that “something cannot come from nothing,” it’s unclear why we would need to examine the second point since it hinges on the first item not being the case. In consideration of the first point, then, we can agree and then ask: Why not start with existence in the first place? What necessitates explaining the fact that existence exists by reference to non-existence? It is a fundamental fact that existence exists, and there is no need to try to explain this fact. An explanation, to have any content, would need to refer to things which exist, for explanations which are informed by elements denoting nothing would simply be contextually empty. A call to explain the fact that existence exists, then, commits the fallacy of the stolen concept: such a burden would ignore the fact that explanations presuppose the fact that existence exist while at the same denying the fact that existence exists. <br /><br />If we accept the statement “something cannot come from nothing,” and clearly something exists, then to ask for an explanation for existence as such is to performatively deny the statement we just accepted. Similarly, to argue that existence is the product of some prior cause makes use of a concept, namely the concept of causation, while ignoring the fact that causation is only possible in the context of existence. Causation is the identity of action, and action is something performed by something that exists. Only existing things perform actions. There is no such thing as action without an existent performing said action. As philosopher David Kelley once put it, “you cannot have a dance without a dancer.” If we suppose that the universe was caused to exist, then we’d have to posit something that did the causing, and this something would have to exist in order to perform the causing in question. But if ‘universe’ is the sum total of all that exists, that something said to have performed the causing in question would be <i>part</i> of the sum total of all that exists – i.e., <i>part of the universe</i>, and thus we have yet another stolen concept. There is no way for the theist to escape this self-defeating pickle.
<br /><br />Consider the following revision of Al-Ghazali’s formulation of the argument:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Premise 1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Premise 2: Existence as such began to exist.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Conclusion: Therefore, existence as such has a cause of its beginning.
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here the term ‘universe’ in the second premise is replaced with ‘existence’. I suspect even the most hardened apologists would have a really hard time finding any enthusiasm for this argument. But this version of the argument helps make my objection to the cosmological argument clear, for it frames the fundamental alternatives so clearly. What is the alternative to existence? It would have to be non-existence – nothing, nothingness, a complete void, the absence of any existence whatsoever. But if it’s the case that “something cannot come from nothing,” then clearly it would be a mistake to suppose that existence as such is the product of some prior cause, for whatever was doing the causing would have to exist in order to do the causing. <br /><br />Either we start with the fact that existence exists, or we start with non-existence, a denial of the fact that existence exists. But since we know that existence exists, why would anyone start with non-existence? There is no rational justification for this.
<br /><br />Additionally, consider the meaning of ‘beginning’. “Common experience” tells us that what has <i>beginning</i> is <i>action</i>: the clouds begin <i>gathering</i>, I begin <i>working</i>, the cat begins <i>chasing</i> his toy, the rooster begins <i>crowing</i>, the refrigerator begins <i>making</i> that funny sound again, the mob begins <i>rioting</i>, Congress begins <i>spending</i> more of our tax dollars, etc. Even when we think of things as having a beginning, it is because some action is involved. For example, the washing machine begins its spin cycle, the road begins to curve around the mountain, the orchestra begins the second movement, etc. Beginning itself is an action performed by something, and that something has to exist in order to do <i>any</i> action. It would not make sense to say “this mountain began” or “that ocean began” or “the moon began.” If one were to make such statements, we’d immediately figure that he was uttering an incomplete thought: The mountain began <i>what</i>? The ocean began <i>what</i>? And in each case, we would be looking for a verb signifying some kind of action to complete the sentence. E.g., the mountain began <i>to rumble</i>, the ocean began <i>to recede</i>, the moon began <i>to brighten</i>, etc. <br /><br />But, one might ask, doesn’t the premise “the universe began to exist” satisfy this need to express a complete thought? Structurally it appears to do so, but the problem here has to do with content and meaning. We need to keep in mind that ‘to exist’ is not an action verb, but a verb of being. The verb ‘to exist’ does not denote an action, but rather a state. So while the premise “the universe began to exist” has the semblance of a complete thought, the meaning of the statement falls apart under scrutiny.
<br /><br />At the fundamental level, existence is not an action which has a beginning or end. Rather, it is a state, and when we get to the grand level of <i>all existence</i>, i.e., the universe as in the sum total of all that exists, we are talking about a state which is literally eternal, since time and causation can only apply if existence exists. If there were no existence, there could be no time or causation, for both time and causation apply to action, and only existing things can be involved in actions. Since action is the action of things which exist, neither concept ‘time’ or ‘cause’ has any meaning outside the context of existence – i.e., outside the universe.
<br /><br />Existence is literally eternal – i.e., existence exists, and existence exists <i>outside of time</i>, and existence as such is not and cannot be the product of some prior cause. A brief review of what these concepts mean should clarify just why the cosmological argument errs by asserting a non-eternal universe which was caused to exist.
<br /><br />Consider the concept time:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Time is a measurement of motion; as such, it is a type of relationship. Time applies only within the universe, when you define a standard—such as the motion of the earth around the sun. If you take that as a unit, you can say: “This person has a certain relationship to that motion; he has existed for three revolutions; he is three years old.” But when you get to the universe as a whole, obviously no standard is applicable. You cannot get outside the universe. The universe is eternal in the literal sense: non-temporal, out of time. (Leonard Peikoff, <a href="http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/time.html"><i>The Philosophy of Objectivism</i> lecture series</a>.)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Since time is a form of measurement, there needs to be <i>something</i> to measure in order for there to be any time. A form of measurement which measures nothing is not a contradiction in terms. There can, then, be no such thing as “a time before the universe” because “universe” is the sum total of everything that exists:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">The universe is the total of that which exists—not merely the earth or the stars or the galaxies, but everything. Obviously then there can be no such thing as the “cause” of the universe . . .<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Is the universe then unlimited in size? No. Everything which exists is finite, including the universe. What then, you ask, is outside the universe, if it is finite? This question is invalid. The phrase “outside the universe” has no referent. The universe is everything. “Outside the universe” stands for “that which is where everything isn’t.” There is no such place. There isn’t even nothing “out there”: there is no “out there.”(Leonard Peikoff, <a href="http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/universe.html"><i>The Philosophy of Objectivism</i> lecture series</a>.)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Thus, since time is something that is only possible and meaningful <i>within</i> the universe, arguments which treat the universe as temporal or non-eternal are conceptually incoherent.
<br /><br />Consider the concept of causation. As stated above, causation is the identity of action. Like entities, actions also have identity. Some thinkers argue that ascribing identity to action implies a denial of change as such. Yet those same thinkers seem to be unaware of how regularly and casually they themselves treat actions as distinct from other actions and from the existents which perform those actions. A swimmer is distinct from his swimming (he may also drive, sleep, sit, walk, run, read, eat, shower, etc.) just as his swimming is distinct from other actions he may perform (such as those already listed). Presumably thinkers who insist that actions cannot have identity recognize that there is a difference between reading a book and burning it in a bonfire, and yet they seem clueless to their own inconsistency between their explicit insistence and their own implicit recognitions. When Objectivism affirms causality as the law of identity applied to action (see <a href="http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/causality.html">here</a>), this is essentially what is being affirmed: actions are distinct, they do have identity, actions have a nature and also the nature of an action depends on the nature of the existent performing it. (For more rebuttal to this objection, see my blog entry <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2019/06/does-objectivism-deny-reality-of-change.html">Does Objectivism Deny the Reality of Change?</a>.)
<br /><br />If causation is the identity of action and action is something which can only be performed by an existent – by something which exists – then causation is not possible “outside existence.” Which means: there can be no cause <i>outside</i> the sum total of existence, which means: there can be no cause <i>outside the universe</i>. It is therefore conceptually incoherent to assert that the universe is the product of some prior cause. There could be no such thing as a cause “prior to the universe.”
So we can construct an alternative to the Kalam cosmological argument, one exposing that argument’s fundamental conceptual deficiency:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Premise 1: If existence is a fundamental precondition for time and causation, then arguments to the effect that existence had a caused beginning in the past commit the fallacy of the stolen concept.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Premise 2: Existence is a fundamental precondition for time and causation.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Conclusion: Therefore, arguments to the effect that existence had a caused beginning in the past commit the fallacy of the stolen concept.
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Arguments which commit a fallacy are to be rejected for being unsound. The Kalam cosmological argument commits the fallacy of the stolen concept in a twofold manner by positing both time and causation as valid concepts apart from their fundamental genetic root, namely the fact that existence exists.
<br /><br />In their discussion, Arul did try to support Premise 2 (“the universe began to exist”) by stipulating that “actual infinities could not exist.” While much of the discussion got bogged down in hashing this out (which I consider a needless side distraction), it raises the question: What then are we to do with the many affirmations that the Christian god is infinite? <br /><br />For example, Psalm 147:5 states: <br /><br /></div></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><div style="text-align: justify;">Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite. </div></div></blockquote><div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br />We are supposed to believe that this understanding which “is infinite” belonging to “our Lord” is also <i>actual</i>, are we not?
<br /><br />The Athanasian Creed states the following:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">The Father is infinite; the Son is infinite; the Holy Spirit is infinite.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Presumably “the Father,” “the Son” and “the Holy Spirit” which are each respectively affirmed to be “infinite” are also supposed to be <i>actual</i>, are they not?
<br /><br />The Westminster Confession of Faith states:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">There is but one only (1) living and true God, (2) who is infinite in being and perfection…</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">This “true God” which is said to be “infinite in being and perfection” is also supposed to be <i>actual</i>, is it not?
<br /><br />On page 92 of their <i>Handbook of Christian Apologetics</i>, Christian apologists Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli write:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
God Is Infinite<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">We saw that it is finite or limited being that poses a question for us, that seems to require a condition or cause for its existence. So God cannot be limited or finite. In other words, God must be infinite, utterly limitless.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">This god which “must be infinite, utterly limitless,” is also supposed to be <i>actual</i>, is it not?
<br /><br />So here we have evidences from the Christian worldview which, in direct conflict with the claim that “actual infinities could not exist,” affirm the existence of something that is both actual and infinite. We might expect apologists to enumerate this as an example of “an apparent contradiction,” but in fact it could only be an example of a <i>direct</i> contradiction. <br /><br />In a footnote on page 119 of his book <i>Reasonable Faith</i>, William Lane Craig briefly wrestles with overt contradiction between the affirmation that an actual infinity cannot exist on the one hand, and the assertion that an infinite god is real on the other:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Students frequently ask if God, therefore, cannot be infinite. The question is based on a misunderstanding. When we speak of the infinity of God, we are not using the word in a mathematical sense to refer to an aggregate of an infinite number of finite parts. God’s infinity is, if you will, qualitative, not quantitative. It means that God is metaphysically necessary, morally perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, etc.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">This hardly bodes confidence that the direct contradiction has been dispelled. For one, none of the examples adduced above qualify their assertions with the distinction which Craig introduces in his passing footnote. Also, the universal statement “actual infinities could not exist” is itself unqualified and thus would seem to apply to both qualitative as well as quantitative infinities. Third, it is unclear how a qualitative infinity is not at least also implicitly quantitative in nature given that qualities can be measured in quantitative terms (think of the color spectrum or degrees of dissonance, for example). Lastly, if the intent all along was to say “that God is metaphysically necessary, morally perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, etc.,” why use a term (“infinite”) which is directly in conflict with assertions informing premises against atheism?
<br /><br />Arul’s point was to argue that the universe cannot be eternal because that would necessarily entail an infinite series of events. An infinite series of events would purportedly constitute an actual infinite, and since “actual infinities could not exist,” there could be no infinite series of events, and consequently the universe cannot be eternal. That seems to be the essence of the objection here. On one of Arul’s slides, the argument is presented as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
1. An actual infinite cannot exist<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">2. An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">3. Therefore an infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Arul added his own qualification as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Actual infinities could not exist merely within the dimensions available in our universe.
</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">It is unclear what Arul means by “dimensions available in our universe” – I did not hear him present a list of those dimensions, but the qualifier “available in our universe” implies that Arul has awareness of dimensions which are available “outside” the universe. Of course, he does not explain how he has awareness of anything “outside” the universe, and from what we saw already above, the notion of anything actually existing “outside” the universe is conceptually incoherent. However, this fact will not prevent anyone from <i>imagining</i> things (or “dimensions”) existing outside the universe. <br /><br />The argument presented above raises the question: what constitutes an ‘event’? I do not see where Arul addresses this, and yet since the argument has to do with series of events and the implications of their perpetual accumulation, one would think it imperative to provide a clear definition of this critical term. I wonder how the Christian bible defines it.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At any rate, suppose we were to go backwards in time from the present and count all the “events” which have happened. As we count, we keep adding one more event to our series as we identify it. And each time we add another event to our series of events, the tally would be finite. If it’s 100 and then 101, those are both finite quantities; if it’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 and then 100,000,000,000,000,000,001, those too are finite quantities. The argument above, however, apparently rests on the objection that at some point we reach an actual infinity in our tally. But it should not take much intelligence to see that extending this thought experiment will simply result in more finite quantities in our summary tally. So I guess I just don’t see the point of this objection.
<br /><br />Again, much of this objection trades on what is meant by ‘event’. But even then, we are likely dealing with epistemological distinctions which are not only flexible but also sometimes quantitatively hazy and blurry. For example, the arrival of British troops at the Battle Green in Lexington can be considered an event just as the Battle of Lexington itself can be considered and event, and likewise the Revolutionary War can be considered an event. There is nothing in reality requiring us to treat the Revolutionary War as a series of 4,218 events as opposed to a series of 6,181,347,922,879,204,067,339,146 events as opposed to a single event. Much of how we divide events depends on contextual needs, which confirms that ‘event’ is more of an epistemological category, whereas the support proffered on behalf of the cosmological argument’s second premise necessarily treats ‘event’ as a metaphysical category. <br /><br />Even more broadly, however, when it is understood that ‘event’ is really just a term denoting related actions in some collectivity, we can dismiss the support for the cosmological argument’s premise that the universe began to exist as an exercise in futility. For we have already seen that actions are actions of existents, which means actions must take place within the universe. If existence exists, then actions are possible. But nothing about existence necessitates the assumption that activity has been constant for all eternity. In other words, there is no contradiction in supposing on the one hand that the universe (qua the sum total of everything that exists) is eternal and, on the other, that activity within the universe is constrained to certain finitely distinguishable periods throughout its eternal existence. <br /><br />Another point that is easily missed in all this is the fact that <i>it is always now</i>. Action takes place in the present and it is always the present. The concepts ‘past’ and ‘future’ have meaning only in relation to the present. The fact that it is always now is unchanging. Apologists have argued that an eternal universe implies an infinite series of events which in turn would mean we would never reach the present. But if it is always the present, such an argument is a non-starter. Existence is not composed of time or of events; time and events are possible only within existence. There is no limit to how many actions (or “events”) can happen in reality. The universe is not defined by an accumulation of events strung together end to end like knots on a string. What exists is in fact finite, and the only metaphysical limit to the quantity of actions which an existent can perform is the existent’s own nature and its relation to other things which exist. But whatever actions it performs and whenever it performs those actions, it always performs them in the present. There has never been, therefore, a need to “reach the present” from the past. <br /><br />Ironically, the very argument which is presented in support of a non-eternal universe can similarly be turned around and applied against the notion of an eternal god. A god would presumably be a conscious being. But consciousness is in fact a type of activity. A non-active consciousness is a contradiction in terms. Thus an eternal god would be an eternally active consciousness. But then we’d face the very problem which Arul’s support for the cosmological argument’s second premise attempts to establish against an eternal universe: we would have in the case of an eternally conscious god the problem of an infinite regress of events in the form of conscious activity, which would be an actual infinite. And yet, we saw above in the very same argument that “An actual infinite cannot exist.” <br /><br />I’m glad these aren’t my problems!
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div></div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-39091406288906060762022-11-25T06:00:00.055-05:002022-11-25T06:00:00.199-05:00Evolution and the Persistence of Religion<div style="text-align: justify;">Many thinkers apparently believe that there is a contradiction of sorts between the theory that human beings evolved from more primitive organisms on the one hand, and the persistence of religion throughout human history on the other. If religion is not true, it is surmised, then how is it that religion has thrived in all eras of human history to such a fervent degree? Put another way: if human beings evolved and continue to flourish on earth through the survival of the fittest, how is it that religion has survived right alongside unless religion is true?
<br /><br />(Of course, here we apparently need to set aside the fact that there are many competing religions, some monotheistic, others polytheistic, and others that are not theistic in any ordinary sense.) </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Curiously, some thinkers believe there is a need to reconcile the fact that religion is so pervasive throughout the history of humanity with the premise that human beings as a species evolved from non-human ancestors. </div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: justify;">In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6c8dTB1_os">an excerpt</a> from a recent podcast, popular commentator Dinesh D’Souza states that “some evolutionary biologists are really baffled by the adaptive significance of religion.” Given the fact that so few thinkers these days guide their intellect by the norms of rational philosophy, I have no doubt this is true. D’Souza cites the view, which he attributes to Richard Dawkins, that “maybe religion serves the purpose of what he calls wishful thinking,” to wit, the argument</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">that religion has persisted over the centuries and [in] so many different cultures because people like to believe things that aren’t true and this gives them a certain type of psychological comfort.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here I think D’Souza may not be putting the point as charitably as he could. I don’t think it’s so much that people “like to believe things that aren’t true,” but rather that they have adopted beliefs which they have not examined very critically, with them some beliefs which are in fact not true, and yet they resist reconsidering them soberly and in fact invest themselves in the <i>hope</i> that they are true. I am reminded of Christian apologist Mike Licona who said of Jesus’s resurrection, “I want it to be true” (see <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2013/10/mike-licona-says-i-want-it-to-be-true.html">here</a>). The New Testament’s own definition of ‘faith’ in Hebrews 11:1 explicitly aligns faith with hope. This is no accident. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Nevertheless, D’Souza replies to this, saying “this explanation… makes no evolutionary sense… because evolution punishes beliefs that are ridiculously untrue,” such as those that one would hold as a result of the comfort they find in wishful thinking. D’Souza challenges this view by quoting Steven Pinker (see <a href="https://solarmythology.com/pinkerreligion.htm">here</a>):</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">“In other words,” says D’Souza,</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">what Pinker is saying is that, yeah, if you have people who like to believe things because they wish they were true – hey, I’m really cold, but you know, I wish I was warm and that’s somehow gonna make me feel better – he goes no, it doesn’t make you feel better. In fact, it gives you the illusion that you don’t have to go find a warmer place and so you’re more likely to freeze because you have this wrong belief that your imagination can kind of create warmth.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Thus, false beliefs accepted on the basis of wishful thinking, it is thereby inferred, would actually lead to the demise of the species, which is of course not what we find in the world today with some eight or so billion people on the planet. Apparently D’Souza takes this as some kind of confirmation that his religious beliefs are true, for otherwise the evolutionary model would have ensured that religion died out long ago. Or, alternatively, it may be that the persistence of religion is being treated as evidence that the evolutionary paradigm is in fact not true. <br /><br />Of course, the objection which D’Souza cites is obvious: believing that a prowling lion is just a harmless rabbit would likely preclude evasive action and you consequently become its dinner, and your beliefs die with you; such a belief has no survival value and thus it cannot be transmitted to your offspring. This of course assumes a lot of variables of course which may not in fact apply. For instance, suppose a person believes that he’s nothing more than a tasteless, unappetizing rock; he never encounters a prowling lion, and thus lives to propagate such a belief to his offspring. If D’Souza is trying to mount an argument against the evolutionary paradigm, the objection which he cites actually allows for the evolutionary paradigm a success factor which it pretends to have squelched. So while the objection may have its strengths, its success as a challenge to evolution as such depends on incidental conditions which may or may not obtain from case to case. <br /><br />But there are some critical distinctions about the nature of religious belief which are ignored in such contrived scenarios. While religion does in fact foster a predisposition towards wishful thinking (apologist John Frame admits on p. 37 of his book <i>Apologetics to the Glory of God</i> that “a person with a wish to be fulfilled is often on the road to belief”), one of the distinguishing factors of religious belief is that its content is <i>not</i> testable in the kind of concrete situations which D’Souza et al. cite as undermining examples. Religious beliefs posture as having to do with truths which “transcend” the immediacy of any particular individual’s experience, truths which allegedly obtain regardless of what happens moment by moment in one’s life. This ensures that the alleged truths of a religion do not rest or depend on what one might happen to observe in the real world, which effectively prevents them from coming into contact with the concretes of daily life and thus insulates them from critical scrutiny. It also ensures that such beliefs are accessible to human beings regardless of their specific circumstances and experiences.
<br /><br />In contrast to D’Souza’s examples, then, the situation is more like this: One may be shivering in the cold and yet still believe that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, and he may come face to face with a hungry tiger and yet still believe that his sins have been forgiven by a supernatural agent. On the surface level, the believer senses no conflict between the concrete situation he finds himself in and the beliefs which he resists submitting to rational inquiry. Meanwhile, nature still takes its course: we are still biological organisms, we still face the alternative between life and death, and we still need to act in order to continue living. So the notion that the theory of evolution is somehow incompatible with the persistence of religion throughout human history has very little going for it. <br /><br />The implications for this notion only get worse the deeper we examine the matter. The root issue here is to explain the persistence of false beliefs in spite of one’s experience. It is important to consider man’s distinctive form of consciousness, specifically his capacity to conceptualize. While there are no doubt many factors to consider in explaining why religious beliefs persist so stubbornly, there are three functions of human consciousness made possible by the capacity to conceptualize that I think are particularly responsible for the persistence of religion. These are the capacity to believe, the capacity to compartmentalize, and the capacity to imagine.
<br /><br />Regardless of the prehistoric conditions and events by which human beings as a species may have evolved, it is an incontestable fact that human beings have the capacity to <i>believe</i> - i.e., to accept ideational content as at least probably true, and with that the capacity to believe <i>indiscriminately</i> – i.e., to accept ideational content as true <i>even when it is not true</i>. We are fallible, and this means that our capacity to conceptualize brings with it our need for reason. It can be said that while evolution gave us the capacity for knowledge, it does not give us the knowledge we need in order to live or even the knowledge we need to validate knowledge; we need to discover and validate all of our knowledge through our own conscious efforts. Likewise, while evolution has given us the capacity for the conceptual level of consciousness, it does not automatically supply that philosophy which is proper to our needs as human beings. There’s no contradiction between the conclusion that human beings evolved from more primitive biological ancestors on the one hand and, on the other, the recognition that we need to discover and work out those philosophical principles most suited to our life needs. A random set of beliefs will not satisfy this specifically human need for philosophical principles, and yet human beings have demonstrated a remarkable ability to reproduce in spite of their ignorance of philosophical principles. After all, as many hapless high-schoolers have unfortunately discovered, lacking a rational understanding of reality, life and the trajectory of human history does not prevent the onset of puberty, sexual arousal, insemination, conception and successful pregnancy. The persistence of human history owes more to biological causation than many thinkers may be inclined to give it credit. <br /><br />Nothing in reality is going to function automatically to prevent a thinker from believing something that is not true. This is a fundamental reason why we need rational philosophy and with it, a reliable understanding of epistemology – the science which teaches us how the human mind discovers, acquires and validates knowledge. Moreover, there is nothing in reality which guarantees that any human thinker is (a) going to discover those epistemological principles which secure his mind from error and (b) apply those principles consistently so as to steer clear of any and all error. Add to this the real possibility that for every fact there may be any number of ways to get it wrong, we may sometimes marvel that we get anything right. Many well-educated adults, for instance, seem to believe that induction is rationally indefensible (presumably that assessment applies to <i>all</i> instances of inductive reasoning), and yet many of them no doubt lead relatively prosperous lives. <br /><br />Additionally, it is possible to accept untrue content which nevertheless does not impact an individual’s actions or decision-making. One may believe, for example, that everyone on the Hindenburg perished when it burst into flames, and yet this belief has no bearing on whether or not he can find his way back home through the streets of his neighborhood at night; he still makes the correct turns and takes the correct streets on his trip home in spite of this false belief. Not every belief one holds factors into every choice he makes. It is therefore not impossible or even unlikely for many beliefs to avoid conflict with one’s immediate experience. The need to choose between making a left turn and going over a cliff does not call into question one’s beliefs about the outcome of the Hindenburg disaster. Consequently, the number of errant beliefs which may remain unchallenged and undetected in the sum of one’s ideational content is, as Plantinga might put it, “inscrutable.” <br /><br />This last point easily segues our attention to the human mind’s ability to compartmentalize. <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/compartmentalization">This article</a> from <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us">Psychology Today</a> defines ‘compartmentalization’ as “a defense mechanism in which people mentally separate conflicting thoughts, emotions, or experiences to avoid the discomfort of contradiction.” There may be truth to the argument that our capacity to compartmentalize has its basis in our evolution. Our primitive ancestors, for example, had to push aside any fears they may have had as they went out to hunt for food. Ancient seafarers had to ignore their fears as they set sail for destinations beyond the horizon. Then again, fears can be conquered by certain motives and goals, e.g., a hungry stomach or the desire for riches and glory. <br /><br />Nevertheless, as with any human capacity, the ability to compartmentalize can be abused and misused. Many adults are reluctant to question – much less <i>challenge</i> - the beliefs they adopted in childhood. And yet, that some of those beliefs are out of sync with the reality they observe as adults is hard to deny. Rather than confront the resulting conflict and resolve it (which, it may be rightly sensed, would require abandoning a lifelong belief), a thinker may choose instead to shelter the questionable belief behind an impenetrable bulwark which shields it from clashing with new experiences and knowledge and numbs the thinker’s awareness of any problem. This is the opposite of the Objectivist goal of <a href="http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/integration_(mental).html">rational integration</a>. All too often, thinkers protect questionable beliefs which they have accepted from being challenged by other beliefs, observations, insights, discoveries, or experiences. By erecting a wall of separation between such beliefs and anything which might expose their falsehood, one can navigate life’s challenges while preserving attachment to beliefs of questionable value. But not entirely without cost.
<br /><br />I’m often amazed by believers’ ability to consider themselves Christians on the one hand while completely avoiding the Christian call to evangelize. Christians must believe that the New Testament stories are all true, including Jesus’ command to “go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mk. 16:15), and yet nothing in reality is going to force them to do this. And many never seem to get around to it. Compartmentalization is the means by which believers suppress the conflict between their professed beliefs and their own apathy to some aspect of those beliefs’ very content. This is just one example. One can cite the inefficacy of prayer, the absence of miracles, the failure of “laying on of hands,” the inability to move mountains by mere commands, the failure of prophecy, etc. Apologists spend great amounts of energy concocting explanations for why their beliefs fail to pan out, and by doing so they are trying to erect and strengthen walls of compartmentalization. To anyone truly paying attention, their defenses are typically not very convincing.
<br /><br />I’ve known many people throughout my lifetime who claimed to be Christians and yet never once witnessed to me. I’m sure if asked, they’d have some kind of explanation – albeit they’d likely be caught off guard. But this is something I’ve tested a number of times: a colleague or acquaintance makes passing reference in conversation to something he did or heard in church, and I might ask which church that is or how long he’s been attending it, thereby ensuring they have opportunity to share the good news. But beyond that it remains an idle triviality, as incidental as going to a hardware store or making an appointment with his dentist. The aspect of the religion’s teachings are themselves kept safely out of view, just as apologists themselves typically never initiate discussions on the nature of faith in debate. <br /><br />But in spite of these maneuvers to suppress conflict, believers can still <i>imagine</i> that their religious beliefs are nevertheless all true. Which is the third human capacity that is critical to the persistence of religion. Virtually all human beings, even from a very young age, have the capacity to <i>imagine</i>. In fact, what’s noteworthy here is how effortlessly one may go from not imagining to imagining without ever consciously realizing it. There is no “signpost,” as Rod Serling would call it, warning us that we have departed from objective fact and into the realm of the imaginary as we’re speeding along in our minds. It is thus entirely possible to be imagining without realizing it. I’d even go a step further and argue that it takes some self-discipline to train oneself to acknowledge to himself when he has engaged his imagination so that awareness of this distinction becomes more habitual. <br /><br />Religion lures the mind not only to imagine things, but to treat what one imagines as real things. In Christianity for example, adherents imagine Yahweh, Jesus, angels, demons, Satan, heaven and hell, and they do their level best to convince themselves that these things they imagine actually exist. Often this requires continuous positive reinforcement, and even then powerful doubts may still persist (see for instance <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-hideous-rigors-of-christian.html">here</a>). And naturally, contact between these imagined things and reality will inevitably be imagined to have taken place in the past. The past did happen, but what actually happened might as well be what the believer imagines to have happened.
<br /><br />All be told, it is easy to imagine what happened before some indefinite point in time. <i>Star Wars</i> famously opens with the tagline “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” which seductively invites the viewer’s imagination to depart earth and establish an orbit around an entire constellation of fictions. The book of Genesis does essentially the same thing when it opens with the words, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Here the reader is similarly beckoned to enter into the realm of imagination, a fictional realm where the mind is allowed to embellish details at will, emphasize some aspects over others according to one’s own values, and draw conclusions from depictions filtered through one’s own prejudices. <br /><br />Given these points, is it any wonder that the world’s “great religions” encapsulate their dogma to one degree or another in <i>narrative</i> form? A narrative provides the mind with imagery which can be visualized in the imagination and easily retained in memory. Allegories not only provide the memory something easy to recall, they also allow the believer to personalize elements of the narrative, thereby making them as intimately familiar as possible. The imagery of fiction lends itself to mental concretization, which is the closest that the imaginary can come to seeming real in one’s mind. Imagery allows a reader to experience the sensations and emotions of a text, which makes it possible for readers to invest themselves personally in the narrative, as though they were observing the story firsthand, thereby giving a foothold for deep emotional connection. To help sustain belief, the fact that the narrative is something one <i>reads</i> serves to create the illusion that the things and events depicted in the imagery have their basis outside the mind, as though it were based in objective fact. Readers of the narrative did not compose the narrative, so the reader’s experience is akin to that of an observer – witnessing the narrative’s events as though they were unfolding in reality, involved in the story’s conflict and committed to seeing it through to resolution. If a reader is not aware that he is imagining, he may lose sight of the fact that the experience he’s having is a response to something that is in fact fictional and not real. There is no doubt that religion owes not only its ease of assimilation by individual adherents, but also its persistence across cultures and history, to the narrative form in which it is preserved, transmitted and consumed. (See also <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2010/07/storybook-worldview.html">The Storybook Worldview</a>.)<br /><br />Other factors also come into play, such as trust in what others tell us, acceptance of pronouncements from authority figures, inability to discern in areas outside one’s expertise, and other expressions of intellectual default. Ayn Rand observed in her novel <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> that “faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others.” Such faith – as in uncritical acceptance – is to be expected in childhood. As one matures toward adulthood, however, the ideal is to shed the habit of uncritical acceptance and develop critical thinking skills, beginning with the elementary principles of rational philosophy, so that eventually he will think with his own mind. I’m doubtful that many will ever undertake this task as it will likely require inestimable effort to undo bad mental habits and define new ones, and even limit one’s dependence on unexamined mental habits where deliberate focus is required. One would need to be convinced that the reward for such an endeavor is worth the effort it incurs. Why not just watch TV instead? <br /><br />Now going back to D’Souza’s comments, we may ask: why doesn’t wishing to be warm when one is cold, make one warm? Why doesn’t wishing have the power to make anything come to pass? Why does D’Souza so casually characterize the “belief that your imagination can kind of create warmth” as a “wrong belief”? Two questions I have here are:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">What metaphysical orientation between consciousness and its objects does D’Souza’s dismissal of wishing and imagination as creative forces assume? and<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Is the metaphysical orientation that his dismissal assumes at all compatible with the metaphysics of supernaturalism that is central to religion?</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">The answer to the first question is: the primacy of existence. D’Souza knows implicitly what we all know implicitly, and that is that wishing doesn’t make it so, that imagining something doesn’t make it real, that consciousness does not hold metaphysical primacy over reality. The task of consciousness is to perceive and identify the objects of our awareness, not to create and/or manipulate them according to our will. D’Souza recognizes this fact at such a fundamental level that he likely doesn’t see the point of calling it out explicitly, even though it lies at the root of his dismissal of the notions in question. And though he clearly takes the primacy of existence for granted, he has yet to identify it in the form of an explicit principle and grasp its philosophical significance. “Primacy of… what?” we might hear him say. He’s not alone in this by any means. <br /><br />In response to the second question above, the answer is: No, the metaphysical orientation according to which D’Souza dismisses wishing and imagination as creative forces, is not at all compatible with the metaphysics of supernaturalism that is so central to religion. This is because the primacy of existence, which D’Souza assumes when dismissing wishing and imagination as creative forces, is diametrically contrary to the primacy of consciousness, which is the metaphysical orientation between consciousness and its objects which supernaturalism assumes. According to supernaturalism, conscious activity holds the upper hand over reality, whether it’s by means of wishing, commanding, or simply thinking. According to the Christian bible, for example, wishing caused the universe to come into being, water was commanded into wine, Jesus was raised from the dead by divine fiat, and Jesus himself tells readers that they can move mountains if they have enough faith – i.e., if they wish hard enough. Peter failed to stay afloat when attempting to walk on unfrozen water essentially because he began to doubt the power of wishing. The assumption of the primacy of consciousness metaphysics is the distinguishing attribute of the supernatural view of the world, a view which attributes “ultimate causation” to conscious agents which are available to the human mind only by means of imagination. The content of supernaturalism as well as the “means” by which believers “know” supernatural agencies are both premised on the primacy of consciousness metaphysics: a supernatural being’s wishes created everything in reality and control all their actions, and the believer “knows” this by means of wishful imagination. It is because of this combined, double application of the primacy of consciousness in both metaphysics and epistemology, that believers sense a kind of internal consistency to their beliefs. Meanwhile, they compartmentalize these beliefs in order to shield their own awareness from the conflict they produce when considered in the context of observable reality. <br /><br />No single factor predisposes an individual to adopting the religious view of the world more than acceptance of the metaphysical primacy of consciousness. Religion is a worldview premised expressly in primacy of consciousness metaphysics. The question of <i>which</i> religion one adopts rests in a variety of other factors, such as his immediate social influences, the prevailing religion in his culture, the nature of his education, etc. Ultimately acceptance of the religious view of the world hinges on an individual’s own choices. However, I also recognize that the culture I grew up in relative to many others around the world is one which to some degree or another fosters curiosity, inquisitiveness, opportunities to question and express doubt, etc., all of which I have enjoyed beyond my own realization. This is not the case for all human beings throughout history, of course. Many people live in cultures which actively prohibit freedom of thought and questioning of authority, while others tend to wash out curiosity and inquisitiveness at an early age through mind-diminishing indoctrination. I worry that this is happening to our culture now as the template for negating one’s own mind that is so characteristic of religion has become commonplace outside the church.
<br /><br />Does religion serve an evolutionary need? Ayn Rand referred to religion as “a primitive form of philosophy – an attempt to offer a comprehensive view of reality,” stating that “many of its myths are distorted, dramatized allegories based on some element of truth, some actual, if profoundly elusive aspect of man’s existence” (<i>The Romantic Manifesto</i>, p. 25). It is beyond dispute in my view that man needs philosophy. This need for philosophy is a consequence of his achievement of the conceptual level of consciousness, and his achievement of the conceptual level of consciousness is no doubt a result of advancement of the human organism on the evolutionary scale. In this sense, religion can be seen as an <i>attempt</i>, as Rand rightly puts it, to satisfy a need which human beings have inherited as a result of their special evolution. But this does not mean that man has an evolutionary need for religion; man does not need religion any more than he needs a nail gun pressed to his cranium. The intact brain that he was born with will do just fine – he just needs to learn to use it properly. And that is the task of philosophy. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">by Dawson Bethrick</div></div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-38201379692876933562022-10-11T06:00:00.031-04:002022-10-11T06:00:00.197-04:00Is Creation Possible?<div style="text-align: justify;">In their book <i>Handbook of Christian Apologetics</i>, authors Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli introduce their discussion of the topic of divine creation of the universe as part of a series of questions:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">There is much to be said about the issue of creation and evolution. However, here we only summarize the answers to five essential questions: (1) Is creation possible? (2) What difference does creation make? (3) Is evolution possible? (4) What difference does evolution make? (5) Does evolution contradict creation? (p. 103)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Not surprising (to me at least), Kreeft and Tacelli’s answer to the question “Is creation possible?” is superficial and uninquisitive. That is to say that, while Kreeft and Tacelli will of course, as believers, affirm that creation of the universe is possible, they identify no evidence whatsoever to demonstrate such a possibility, nor do they explain what “creation” in this context practically means. Rather, their primary if not only concern seems to be to secure the belief that creation is possible from the charge of irrationality.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;">They write:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">When Jewish and Christian theologians first talked to Greek philosophers, the Greeks thought the biblical notion that God created the world <i>ex nihilo</i> ("out of nothing") was absurd and irrational, because it violated a law of nature that <i>ex nihilo nihil fit</i> ("out of nothing nothing comes"). The reply was (and is) that<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
1. It is indeed a law of nature, but the laws of nature cannot be expected to bind the transcendent Creator of nature.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
2. The reason for this is that all of nature and all powers in nature are finite, but God is infinite; no finite power can produce the infinite change from nonbeing to being, but infinite power can.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
3. The idea of God creating out of nothing is not irrational because it does not claim that anything ever popped into existence without an adequate cause. God did not pop into existence, and nature did have an adequate cause: God. (Ibid.)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Needless to say, observing that a position in the field of metaphysics “does not claim that anything ever popped into existence without an adequate cause,” does not suffice to shield said position from the charge of irrationality. The rationality of a position pertains not only to the content of the position in question (i.e., what the position affirms), but also to the means by which it can be discovered and validated as factually informed knowledge. For example, one may hold that the universe has always existed and that this must be true because he learned it from the ghost of King Henry VIII visiting him in a dream. Here the metaphysical view in question does not contend that “anything ever popped into existence without an adequate cause,” but the “means” by which the view was discovered and validated do not adhere to rational standards. <br /><br />And yet it is context here which is so threadbare here, for they do not explain the content of the position in question, nor do they indicate the means by which independent parties can discover and validate what they claim. What exactly do Kreeft and Tacelli mean by ‘creation’? Presumably the entire universe which we observe and infer to exist beyond our observations, was “created” by this “transcendent Creator of nature.” Thus the universe is the product of some kind of <i>action</i>, specifically an action which is creative in nature. But what exactly is that action, what performed that action, and how can we discover and validate the claim that this alleged action ever occurred? Unfortunately, Kreeft and Tacelli do not explain any of this.
<br /><br />An enormous liability for this view is that whatever action is said to have produced the universe would have had to have happened well before any human beings would have been able to observe it firsthand. Even though anyone reading this was born, no one reading this was able to observe his own birth when it took place or anything that occurred before his birth (distant quasars and the like notwithstanding). Likewise, even according to the biblical account in the Book of Genesis, Adam, the first human being, was not around to witness this divine act of creation that is said to have produced the universe. So no account of this alleged event is based on eyewitness testimony. And of course, no one alive today would have been able to witness it. Far from witnessing it, we learn about this supposed divine act of creation only from other human beings, not from anything we actually uncover by examining nature itself – for when we examine nature itself, we are examining things that are naturally occurring or man-made, and yet the divine act of creation is supposed to be “supernatural.”
<br /><br />Theists are quite emphatic in their insistence that the god which they <i>have in mind</i> is not physical or material. Human beings and other living organisms, of course, are physical existents. And while theists use terms like “immaterial” and “non-physical” to describe their god, such descriptors are unhelpful in that they only tell us what their god is <i>not</i>, not what it supposedly <i>is</i>. This is critical in assessing whether or not “creation is possible” since the creating in question is supposed to have been accomplished by whatever it is that the theist calls “God,” and without understanding what exactly “God” is or is supposed to be, it is difficult, if not impossible, to make progress toward concluding that “creation is possible,” since this question all ultimately hinges on the nature of the thing which is said to have done the creating. <br /><br />Elsewhere in their book, Kreeft and Tacelli claim that “God is spiritual.” But what does this mean? They elaborate as follows:</div><blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">By saying God is spiritual, we mean that God is not a material being. To be a material being is to be a body of some kind. But a body is always limited and subject to change. To be subject to
change in this way is not to be what one will become. And therefore to be subject to change
involves nonbeing. And since to be a body is to be subject to change, therefore to be a body involves nonbeing. Now God is the limitless fullness of being, so God cannot be a body. In fact, God cannot be material at all-at least not as matter is normally understood. God must be immaterial, that is, spiritual. (<i>Handbook of Christian Apologetics</i>, p. 91)</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here we are again told what their god is <i>not</i>: “God is not a material being,” it “cannot be material at all,” it “must be immaterial.” In fact, the authors treat “immaterial” and “spiritual” as essentially synonymous. This too seems to be a liability, not only with respect to what it leaves implicit about the positive characteristics of “God,” but also to negative implications resulting from categorical associations that can be drawn from this. For example, dreams can be said to be “immaterial” – for they surely are not material. Similarly, things we imagine are also surely not material. So “immaterial” – and by extension, “spiritual” – would arguably include dreams and imaginary things. And yet, somehow I would expect theists to insist that their god is neither a dream or an imaginary thing. They want their god to be real, but describing it as “immaterial” and equating “spiritual” with “immaterial” puts it in a category alongside things which clearly are not real.
<br /><br />This blurriness can trip up even the most ardent defenders of Christianity. For example, years ago I read a paper written by apologist Peter Pike in which he attempted to make the case for the existence of the Christian god by reference to the properties of logic (I can no longer access the original paper online; fortunately, I kept a copy and have uploaded it to my website – readers can read the entire paper <a href="http://katholon.com/Pike-Logic.htm">here</a>). In his original paper, Pike makes the following, very telling point (emphasis original):</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">When something “exists” it <i>is</i>. Note that this does not mean that we are dealing with <i>physical</i> or <i>material</i> existence. Indeed, immaterial existence also exists. (For evidence of this, imagine a red ball. The red ball you have imagined does not have any physical existence; it exists immaterially. Granted, one can argue that the immaterial existence is <i>based</i> on a material brain, but the ball that is imagined is not material. It does not exist physically anywhere.)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Notice how this Christian apologist, according to what he has himself written and argued, clearly believes that imaginary things are examples of “immaterial existence” and that something one imagines “exists immaterially,” and this is argued to be “evidence” supporting the contention that “immaterial existence also exists.” Thus, while “the ball that is imagined is not material” and “does not exist physically anywhere,” the apologist still nevertheless believes that it really exists. <br /><br />Whether belief in a god causes this confusion or such confusion inclines a thinker to adopting a theistic worldview, is not the topic I want to explore here. But admissions such as this should give us pause when observing the difficulty apologists have in explaining what they mean by descriptors such as “immaterial” and “spiritual.” And while Kreeft and Tacelli do state that their god is “intelligent, refer to it as having a “will” and claim that “the sufficient reason for our ordered world-system must ultimately be a creative ordering Mind” (Op cit., p. 58), they do not, from what I can find, come out and say that explicitly that their god is <i>conscious</i>. This appears to be taken for granted, for it would be the one thing that ties all these alleged attributes together. And being “immaterial,” this consciousness would have to be a disembodied, or at any rate <i>bodiless</i> consciousness (for, they say, “God cannot be a body”).
<br /><br />But where do Kreeft and Tacelli <i>demonstrate</i> that a consciousness can create any material things? This is essentially what they would be claiming if they affirm that “creation is possible” in a theistic context. They are essentially saying that the universe did “pop into existence” and that their god is an “adequate cause” for this (for it is only when this is affirmed “without an adequate cause” does this view, in their view, become irrational). But they provide no explanation for how this could have happened. <br /><br />To accept rationally that some proposed outcome is possible requires evidence. Otherwise, we may merely be engaging in wishful thinking. We need evidence to inform our views and anchor them to reality. I cannot realistically suppose that I might win the lottery if I do not first get a lottery ticket just as I cannot realistically suppose that I can fly to Tokyo without boarding some kind of aircraft. All that Kreeft and Tacelli give us is what they call “God.” But <i>demonstrating</i> that matter can be produced by conscious activity is something they do not do, and yet the claim that “creation is possible,” which they surely endorse, would require such a demonstration in order to entertain their claim as rationally acceptable. <br /><br />What does the evidence that we do have tell us about such matters? All examples of consciousness that we can observe and examine are in nature, specifically in biological organisms which possess sensory organs and nervous systems. Rocks, balls of lint and bus transfers are not conscious organisms. All evidence that we gather from nature confirms that consciousness is a biological phenomenon (see <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2010/06/biological-nature-of-consciousness.html">here</a>). And all evidence that I am aware of confirms that conscious activity cannot cause material things to “pop into existence.” I cannot, for example, wish a million dollars into my bank account or into my mattress. I can <i>wish for</i> these things, but reality will not rearrange itself to conform to my wishing, for wishing does not make it so. And all evidence that I am aware of confirms that other conscious organisms have this same limitation: reality does not conform to my consciousness, to my wife’s consciousness, to my neighbor’s consciousness, to my town’s mayor’s consciousness, or to anyone else’s consciousness, even to my cat’s consciousness. Consciousness is simply not a metaphysically creative faculty in the sense that it can bring things into existence <i>ex nihilo</i>. And nothing I find in Kreeft and Tacelli’s book calls this observed state of affairs into question or proves my recognition of it wrong. <br /><br />One thing I can do with my consciousness, however, is <i>imagine</i> a conscious being which can do whatever it wishes and a corresponding reality which conforms to those wishes. I can imagine, for example, that the universe was created by an act of will, that a conscious being essentially wished the universe into being, thus satisfying Kreeft and Tacelli’s low bar of acceptability, for I can say that this conscious being is “an adequate cause” and therefore point out that my position “does not claim that anything ever popped into existence without an adequate cause,” including the alleged conscious being itself. Indeed, if I imagined the conscious being, isn’t that “an adequate cause” for the conscious being’s existence? The Peter Pike quote above would suggest that at least some thinkers might suppose so.
<br /><br />What I’m afraid I cannot do, however, is reliably distinguish between what theists like Kreeft and Tacelli call “God” and what they might in fact merely be imagining. I acknowledge that Kreeft and Tacelli do have the ability to imagine – in fact, they urge their readers on several occasions in their book to imagine certain scenarios. It may be that they’re simply imagining the god whose existence they’re trying to prove. It would be intellectually irresponsible for me simply to ignore this possibility while accepting the alleged possibility they affirm uncritically. So long as we have no alternative but to imagine the god theists claim to worship, the burden of proof lies squarely on their shoulders. They should not get sore at anyone for asking for actual, relevant evidence. <br /><br />If any theists who might happen to be reading this know of any evidence for the position that the universe was created by conscious activity, they are invited to use the comments section to introduce it. Simply asserting that it is possible does not serve as a demonstration. More instances of requiring me to engage my imagination will only reinforce the suspicion that there may in fact be no distinction between what the believer calls “God” and what he may merely be imagining.
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-40488424084065583722022-09-25T06:00:00.002-04:002022-09-25T12:32:10.944-04:00Why Do Apologists Raise the Problem of Induction in Debate?<div style="text-align: justify;">A visitor to my blog posting under the moniker Rageforthemachine (hereafter just Rage) recently left the following comment on my entry <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/06/same-old-song-and-dance-anderson-on.html">Same Old Song and Dance: Anderson on Induction… again</a>:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">I've never understood what presupps think they have over everyone else when it comes it inductive justification. Are they saying "because I have seen a thousand white swans I know all swans are white" which is false; or are they saying "because I have seen a thousand white swans I know the next one might be white or it might not" which of course renders inductive knowledge just as insure as they claim everyone else's is.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">It's a good question, and I think that however it can be answered ties in closely with what motivates apologists who raise certain topics as a focal point for debate. Discerning other people’s motives often involves speculation and conjecture, but if we’re careful, we might just find a certain pattern of tells which suggest and confirm certain desired end goals. The key part of Rage’s question is stated upfront: apologists do in fact seem to think they have something “over everyone else when it comes to inductive justification,” otherwise I doubt they’d be so eager to raise such questions in the first place. Curiously, however, I’ve never found any evidence of such advantage on behalf of Christianity in the pages of the bible.<span><a name='more'></a></span>
<br /><br />To be sure, neither option which Rage proposes on behalf of presuppositionalists is very impressive. Indeed, if they’re going to raise the example of swans in the first place, where exactly do they stand on the matter? And how does their stand on the matter bode for confidence in induction? <br /><br />But I don’t think presuppositionalists who raise the problem of induction are intent on making either case. The white swans example is offered simply to illustrate the problem; apologists themselves, for reasons which Rage’s comment indicates, probably don’t want the example itself to take a starring role in the discussion. There are stronger examples that come to mind – e.g., the freezing temperature of water, dropping uncooked eggs on a hard surface, or my favorite, <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/07/stovetop-realizations.html">touching a hot stove</a>, ones which do not have the reputation of infamously calling historic generalizations into question. So perhaps the choice of the white swan example is no accident, but I don’t think pursuing this particular example is going to help the apologists’ own purposes. <br /><br />Rather, from what I have observed, I think they see the problem of induction as an opportunity to corner non-Christians into a kind of dead-end pickle by exploiting an area which thinkers typically <i>take for granted</i>, this being a recurring theme in James Anderson’s book <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2020/07/wsibc-jump-page.html"><i>Why Should I Believe Christianity?</i></a> (Even many of those who do explore the problem of induction, as we have seen, tend to come up empty or even worse off than when they started.) Very simply, presuppositionalists raise the problem of induction in an effort to put non-believers on the defensive, especially with the intent to elicit a confession of “I have no answer” on a matter which, again, we all tend to take completely for granted. As a means of causing one to stop and doubt his own mental efficacy, this can be quite powerful. I can only suppose that many apologists actually believe that their theism gives them some upper hand on the topic. Delusions do run deep, I have found!
<br /><br />What’s ironic is that presuppositionalists themselves will have a hard time affirming any generality consistently since their own worldview cannot prop up the very solution which they claim non-Christian worldviews cannot supply. And that solution is the uniformity of nature. If anything, the reality which the Christian religion depicts hardly exhibits a nature which is uniform. On their own theistic presuppositions, their god could create counter-examples overturning any generalization they might make. Drawing reliable generalizations requires assembling samples which are reliably representative. But how can one suppose that any samples which he has assembled are at all reliably representative if at the same time he assumes there’s a supernatural consciousness which can create samples to the contrary that fall outside those which he has gathered?
<br /><br />If the presuppositionalist agrees that dogs are mammals, is he not thereby implying that his god cannot create dogs which are reptilian or avian? This is not a matter of mere definition or classification, but of actual differences in natures. On a this-worldly understanding of nature, we know dogs to be a mammalian species, but that’s because all the samples of dogs which we have curated into formulating such a classification have consistently exhibited those characteristics, in alignment with their causal nature, which inform said classification and no samples call this classification into question. This is not a probabilistic classification – e.g., “I’ve observed a thousand dogs and they were all mammals, so the next dog I observe will <i>likely</i> be a mammal also,” but an absolute, exceptionless categorization. <br /><br />However, if there’s a supernatural being which can create entire planets, set the stars in the heavens, raise people from the dead and direct the entire course of human history (right down to how many nooks and crannies populate the surface of the English muffin you had for breakfast this morning), who’s to say that this supernatural being cannot create – and indeed has not already created – dogs which lack some or all characteristics of mammals? We don’t have to “know” what that would look like because a genuine, bona fide supernatural being would not be constrained by what we do or do not know (or <i>think</i> we know). If the presuppositionalist dismisses such hypotheticals as self-contradictory, perhaps he’s on his way to understanding one of many reasons why I reject theism. <br /><br />This brings to the fore the deeper irony for presuppositionalists, namely that the very issue on which they suppose induction <i>generally</i> hinges, the uniformity of nature, is incompatible with supernaturalism. A nature which is both the product of wishing and conjuring as well as subject to revision by the same intentional forces would have no stable uniformity whatsoever, and this is because it would have no inherent identity; any identity it would be said to have would only be that identity which a supernatural being <i>chose</i> to bestow upon it, and only for as long as it chose it to have that identity. Certainly none that one can simply take for granted. In supernaturalism, wishing really does make it so. Indeed, if the realm of the knowable can be manipulated by unknowable deities, devils and demons, then the realm of the knowable is falsely so-called – it’s not really knowable at all, and any claim to knowledge is a pretense. If a supernatural being encasing itself in human form can simply wish water into wine, as we read in the Gospel According to John, how can one ever be confident that the bottles he bought from the grocery store marked ‘water’ don’t actually contain zinfandel or merlot? The retort “God would never do that” rings utterly hollow given the story we read in John, and it also misses a broader point: even if the believer’s god itself has not deigned to turn the water in those bottles into wine, an angel or demon could, on the believer’s own worldview premises. <br /><br />If I suggest that there are such things as flowers which recite Chinese poetry, and the apologist, intent on contradicting anything and everything I affirm (cf. “<a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2016/10/exchange-with-presuppositionalist.html">Existence doesn’t exist</a>”), protests “Flowers can’t recite Chinese poetry!” I should ask: Why not? More specifically, <i>on what basis</i> could the apologist affirm that there are no flowers which can recite poetry, Chinese or otherwise? Wouldn’t this amount to saying that his god <i>cannot</i> create flowers which recite Chinese poetry? Or, is it the case that the apologist has so quickly lost sight of what his own professed worldview entails? Does he not truly believe the Christian teachings which he champions?
<br /><br />I would think that, if the Christian apologist <i>truly</i> believed what his religion espouses, the conversation might go more like this:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">
Me: Hi Bill. How’re you doing today?<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Bill: Hi Dawson! The Lord has been good! Today I am very blessed!<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Me: Hey, that’s good to hear! Tell me more.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Bill: Well, my carnations are finally starting to bloom! And my what a beautiful sight they are!<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Me: Oh that’s great, Bill. I know you put a lot of work into them.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Bill: I sure did! And the Lord brought forth wondrous fruits to my efforts!<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Me: That’s interesting because, you know, just yesterday I saw a group of beautiful flowers at the park. I don’t know what kind they were, but here’s the funny thing – they were reciting Chinese poetry together!<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Bill: Yep, well the Lord does do some powerful things, y’know. Do you know if it was poetry from the Tang period by any chance?<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Me: No idea. But I coulda swore it sounded like something from Li Dongyang.<span style="text-align: left;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Bill: That’s Ming Dynasty. Well, the Lord sure knows how to impress! What will He do next, God only knows!</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here Bill’s statements are consistent with the supernaturalism of his espoused worldview, not batting an eye at the outlandish report of flowers reciting poetry in a human language. Bill recognized that the deity which he believes created the universe can also make flowers recite human literature. Plus, he knew his stuff when it came to Chinese poetry! What an awesome neighbor Bill makes. Oddly enough, this is not the kind of behavior we find in believers, especially apologists. Believers I’ve encountered seem to display their religious confession only so far as it bolsters their entitled sense of self-righteousness, unaware that their pronouncements are in fact not aligned with the supernaturalism which they say characterizes “ultimate reality.” </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">It's worth considering how probing this internal tension might play out. If apologists affirm that “flowers cannot recite Chinese poetry,” we should ask: Why not? Are they saying that their god cannot create flowers which recite Chinese poetry? “Well, of course,” they’d likely say, “God <i>could</i> do that, <i>but</i>…” and proceed to speak on behalf of their god (e.g., “God wouldn’t because [reasons]”). How they could know why the Almighty Creator would or would not do is never explained. After all, how could they know that their god <i>hasn’t already</i> created flowers some place which are reciting Chinese poems right now? Wouldn’t they have to be their own god in order to know this? That’s what apologists tell us all the time – that we would have to be gods to know that there is no god.
<br /><br />For example, Ron Rhodes, in his <a href="https://evangelism-matters.blogspot.com/2010/06/strategies-for-dialoguing-with-atheists.html">Strategies for Dialoguing with Atheists</a>, reasons as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Some atheists categorically state that there is no God, and all atheists, by definition, believe it. And yet, this assertion is logically indefensible. A person would have to be omniscient and omnipresent to be able to say from his own pool of knowledge that there is no God. Only someone who is capable of being in all places at the same time - with a perfect knowledge of all that is in the universe - can make such a statement based on the facts. To put it another way, a person would have to be God in order to say there is no God.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">I guess by the same token, one would have to be omniscient to know that <a href="http://katholon.com/squarecircles.htm">square circles</a> do not exist. However, this same “strategy” can be used against the theist, as I show above, as a means of exposing his own worldview’s epistemological bankruptcy. Once you assume the existence of a supernatural consciousness, there’s no reliable way to draw generalizations because there’s no way to assemble a sample that can be confidently deemed representative. No matter the size of your sample set, you would always have to allow for the possibility that counter-examples could very well exist – and maybe in fact <i>do</i> exist. Consequently, induction as anything more than an expression of self-puffery is out the door entirely once you let theism in. You can’t have both theism and induction because on theism’s metaphysics, reality would be a complete wildcard – i.e., no presumption of uniformity could be consistently sustainable.
<br /><br />So what motivates apologists to raise the problem of induction as a debating point in the first place? Again, I suspect that for many of them, they expect doing so will put non-believers on the defensive. Certainly I do not think it is so that they wander unawares into a trap of their own making which, if handled correctly, can be shown to be exactly what they’ve set themselves up for. Many apologists are well aware that some of the more traditional theistic defenses – e.g., the design argument, the cosmological argument, arguments from miracles or biblical prophecy, etc. – probably don’t offer much promise since more and more atheists, having consumed a vast and growing literature devoted to debunking such arguments, have ready answers for them. So a more esoteric approach may be sought out. Thus, a new market for alternative theistic defenses has emerged, and the problem of induction fits nicely in the paradigm of a ‘transcendental’ approach which seeks to validate god-belief by construing the “preconditions of intelligibility” as incontrovertibly requiring the existence of a god. <br /><br />For some it may also be an opportunity to impress onlookers as they ply the chops they’ve learned in an Intro to Philosophy course they’ve taken. This just feeds the apologist’s own sense of vanity which comes along with the territory of supposing he’s been chosen by a supernatural being to be its earthly representative of the moment. All the better if the non-believer has nothing of value to say on the nature of induction, and sadly that’s not unlikely since many atheists have to one degree or another inherited the crass skepticism of the Humean outlook. With its rejection of absolutes elevated to the status of a virtue, its “loose and separate” treatment of causation, and an irresistible cowardice before the supposed gulf between <i>is</i> and <i>ought</i>, the Humean view of the world is right at home with those who have adopted a naïve nihilism about human efficacy and value. Apologists who brandish the problem of induction may be viewed as a cultural byproduct of this symptomology, for it’s really an instance of one set of contradictions battling it out against its own mirror image; for the same skepticism which drove apologists into theistic religion is the same skepticism that has driven many atheists into a secular alternative. Both variants are variants of the same mind-negating impetus which will naturally foster a hunger for some kind of <i>authority</i> to supply fundamental “truths.” For religionists this authority of course is a supernatural deity while for atheists caught in these snares it is the state. This can only be expected since a mind which has renounced its own efficacy is eventually going to seek out some other mind as one having all the answers. Hume’s philosophy plays right into the presuppositionalists’ waiting hands, even though they don’t realize that their own predicament is choking from the same fallacies. <br /><br />Rand provides a concise summary of Hume’s philosophy in her title essay of <i>For the New Intellectual</i>, which I think is as powerful as it is accurate:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">If it were possible for an animal to describe the content of his consciousness, the result would be a transcript of Hume’s philosophy. Hume’s conclusions would be the conclusions of a consciousness limited to the perceptual level of awareness, passively reacting to the experience of immediate concretes, with no capacity to form abstractions, to <i>integrate</i> perceptions into concepts, waiting in vain for the appearance of an object labeled “causality” (except that such a consciousness would not be able to draw conclusions). (p. 24)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">In my view, the pronouncements I see many presuppositionalists making are not-too-distant echoes of just what Rand describes here. At its root, presuppositionalist theory is fundamentally incongruent with the understanding that the human mind <i>forms</i> abstractions – hence their repeated appeals to “<i>a priori</i> knowledge,” “intuitions” and “revelations” as the source and content of what they call “knowledge” as well as a complete aloofness to the epistemological activity which the human mind performs in inductive reasoning, which is at its very base a <i>conceptual</i> process. (In this respect, so-called “Clarkians” – a la Gordon H. Clark – are at least a little more consistent than Vantillians.) A theory which teaches that it’s impossible to form <i>abstractions</i> from empirical input is fundamentally <i>no different</i> from a theory which teaches that it’s impossible to <i>form</i> abstractions from empirical content. The divorce between the perceptual and the conceptual levels of consciousness is enjoined by both parties, the one secular, the other religio-theistic. When taking their shared premises to their logical conclusion, both ultimately have no alternative to treating the human mind as a merely passive receptacle of “impressions” (Hume) or “deliverances” (religion’s “revelations”) on an otherwise unwitting and inert substance (cf. the Apostle Paul’s analogy of the potter’s clay in Romans 9). They just envision themselves standing on one or the other side of the imagined wall of separation: Humean skeptics are stranded in the realm of the senses with no means of forming general truths from what they perceive, while the theists style themselves as possessors of received knowledge which could in no way have been derived from perceptual awareness (cf. “special revelation”). <br /><br />Rand continues, exposing the hideous implications all this has:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">To negate man’s mind, it is the <i>conceptual</i> level of his consciousness that has to be invalidated. Under all the tortuous complexities, contradictions, equivocations, rationalizations of the post-Renaissance philosophy—the one consistent line, the fundamental that explains the rest, is: <i>a concerted attack on man’s conceptual faculty</i>. Most philosophers did not intend to invalidate conceptual knowledge, but its defenders did more to destroy it than did its enemies. They were unable to offer a solution to the “problem of universals,” that is: to define the nature and source of abstractions, to determine the relationship of concepts to perceptual data—and to prove the validity of scientific induction. (Ibid.)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Given this, I would further hazard, and I hope I’m wrong but fear I’m not, that the only interest many presuppositionalists have in induction is merely to score debating points against non-Christians, or worse: to cower non-believers into a corner and lord over them like the deity they worship in an attempt to pulverize their human spirit. This may seem rather pessimistic, but my own firsthand experience with presuppositionalists as well as telltale signs in their literature bear this out. The very fact that presuppositionalists ignore the operation of man’s mind (an epistemological structure) in their treatments of the problem of induction, and that they imply that the supposed quandary rests strictly on justifying the uniformity of nature (a metaphysical structure), and that this is supplied by a supernatural being which magically conjures it into being, is sufficient, in my assessment, to demonstrate that the apologists taking this route really have no genuine interest in the nature of induction as a means of generalizing from systematically curated samples. For if they were, they would no doubt find value in Rand’s theory of concept-formation. But soon as they learn that Rand was an atheist, then nothing she said on any topic could have any positive philosophical value. So the choice to employ the problem of induction can be seen only as an expression of dogmatic prejudice. The apologists’ purpose for introducing the problem of induction in debate is not to increase anyone’s understanding of induction, but to weaponize it in an effort to manipulate other thinkers and reinforce a confessional investment. <br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-82362258131515462892022-08-28T06:00:00.004-04:002022-08-28T07:46:08.676-04:00TAG and the Appeal to Magic<div style="text-align: justify;">Proponents of the “transcendental argument for the existence of God,” or TAG, are well-known for repeating charges that non-Christians cannot “account for” some phenomenon or other of fundamental philosophical importance (e.g., truth, certainty, the laws of logic, induction, moral norms, etc.) simply because their worldview rejects Christian theism. On occasion some effort is made in the attempt to support the negative aspects of such charges, often with little more than pat slogans, such as that one cannot “ground” unchanging laws of logic in an ever-changing universe of constant flux, that rationality cannot arise out of the irrationality of chance-based evolution, and the like. Non-Christian worldviews are philosophically deficient because of reasons, so the Christian worldview prevails, almost as if by default.<br /><br /><span><a name='more'></a></span>What seems common to such critiques of non-Christian worldviews is the apologists’ self-appointed right to speak on behalf of the non-Christian worldviews in question, or at most to take statements from particular non-Christians as though they represented all non-Christians’ views. Of course, this saves apologists a lot of work, but it still nevertheless makes them look quite naïve and at times borderline illiterate on the topics on which they present themselves as experts. It may be that some eighty to ninety percent of apologetics consists in posturing, a determination never to allow a specific non-Christian’s position to entail positions the apologists have never truly considered before, when in fact their efforts to dispatch those positions reveal otherwise.
<br /><br />Adding to their credibility deficit is the apologists’ apparent contentment with “God did it!” as an explanation for what are otherwise important philosophical questions. On the one hand, apologists can demonstrate familiarity with famous philosophers’ names, pay lip service to fundamental philosophical concepts like epistemology, truth, certainty, validity, syllogisms, etc., and find all manner of fallacies in opposing viewpoints. On the other hand, these same individuals reserve for themselves the privilege of pointing to supernatural causes as the answer to problems which have been plaguing thinkers for millennia. Such a formula can be practiced by a six-year-old who, just by positing a deity, can supposedly stump tenured philosophy professors. <br /><br />I don’t think this assessment is at all hyperbolic. Rather, it is in line with exactly what I have observed among apologists attempting to defend their god-belief. The pattern is so consistent that I can only suppose that the fervent religious devotion which energizes such defense strategies has the effect of clouding the apologist’s own self-awareness such that he does not recognize that he is exempting his own position from the standards to which he holds his opponents’ positions and the scrutiny which he unleashes on them.
<br /><br />Take the following for example. After a cursory run-through of the historical context out of which transcendental argumentation arose (specifically Immanuel Kant’s struggles to answer David Hume’s skeptical arguments), <a href="https://morningview.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/The-Transcendental-Argument-for-the-Existence-of-God-by-Tom-Hicks.pdf">one paper</a> encapsulates the Christian worldview’s “solution” to the problem which other worldviews allegedly cannot solve as follows:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">While philosophical naturalists cannot account for the rationality and accuracy of logical categories in the minds of human beings, Christian theists can. If God created both the world (raw data of reality: what Kant called percepts) and the categories of the human mind (what Kant called concepts), and if He created them to reflect the thinking of His own mind and to correspond to each other such that true knowledge of the external world is possible, then human beings can have true and accurate knowledge of the external world. This would solve the problem that Kant tried to solve, but could not solve. Biblical theism teaches that God made the human mind able to comprehend the external world. Kant’s “wall,” therefore, comes tumbling down. This answers the causal question of the existence of mental categories. That is, our minds can understand the external world because God made them both.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">So after providing a brief synopsis of Hume’s mind-negating quandaries and Kant’s subsequent gropings and references to “abstract structures” and “the indispensability of reason and morality,” with carefully curated footnotes and citations to (purportedly) scholarly texts, we’re given this: a supernatural being, which we cannot perceive and can only imagine, “created” all this “necessary” stuff which together make truth, reason, knowledge and understanding both possible and real. <br /><br />If this is not essentially an appeal to magic, what is?
<br /><br />Suppose a crime scene investigator is applying his forensic skills to a murder case where the body was found in a room locked from the inside, and coming up short of any promising leads or explanation for who committed the murder or how, resorts to the conclusion that</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><i>the murderer turned himself into an ant, crawled into the locked room, turned back into a human being, conjured a knife out of thin air, slit the victims throat, then extinguished the knife back into nothingness, turned back into an ant and crawled out of the room, sprouted wings and flew three states away where he rematerialized back into his former human form, and went about his business as if nothing untoward had happened.</i></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Here the mystery of whodunnit is very real – someone had to have murdered the victim, but the explanation is outlandishly implausible. No one in their right mind would take such an “hypothesis” seriously, and anyone seriously proposing it would rightly be laughed out of a job (one would hope, at least; what's ironic is that <i>on the Christian worldview's own presuppositions</i>, such a hypothesis could not be dismissed out of hand - the believer would have to take it as a serious possibility if he were consistent with those presuppositions). </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But how is this essentially different from the apologists’ practice of asserting “God did it” as the answer to questions about the philosophical basis of human knowledge and reasoning? Human knowledge and reasoning are in fact real – just as for the forensic investigator the murder and the murder scene are real. But what passes muster with apologists and the investigator in the scenario described above indicates an abysmally low threshold when it comes to critical faculties. <br /><br />Another example comes from Michael Butler’s <a href="http://butler-harris.org/archives/158">The Pulling Down of Strongholds: The Power of Presuppositional Apologetics</a> where, after finding the atheist viewpoint (as Butler describes it) teeming with fallacies, points to the supernaturalism of the Christian faith as an “answer” which we are apparently expected to take seriously:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Where the atheist offers a viciously circular defense of induction, the Christian does not. The Christian worldview teaches that God is providentially in control of all events. God has revealed to us that we can count on regularities in the natural world. “He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down.” (Ps. 104:19) He providentially causes the harvest to come in due season. Nature is uniform because God makes it so. And since nature is uniform, the Christian can account for induction. And with induction, he can account for science as well. So while the atheist touts science as being on his side, the reality is that only the Christian worldview provides the precondition for science.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Thus, what “the atheist offers” can be dismissed because it supposedly commits some fallacy or another, but the assertion that “Nature is uniform because God makes it so” – apparently by means of <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2006/12/wishing-and-christian-deity.html">wishing</a> - should be accepted as incontestable fact.
<br /><br />There’s also the example provided by James Anderson who, in his <a href="https://www.proginosko.com/docs/induction.html">Secular responses to the Problem of Induction</a>, finds fault after fault in his selective survey of non-Christian answers to the famous Humean puzzle, but then finishes with the following self-contented indulgence:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Of course, a Person for whom universal <i>a priori</i> knowledge of the very constitution of the universe <i>is</i> attainable (and perhaps even <i>essential</i>) would be an invaluable ally in such an epistemological predicament — especially so if that Person were inclined toward revelation of Himself and His universe.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">It’s as though we are to believe that legitimate philosophical questions can be answered by positing unicorns, forest faeries and magic dust. Even worse, the “solutions” which presuppositionalists offer never move us any further in understanding the original problem to begin with; on the contrary, the original problem was just an opportunity – a gap in our understanding which apologists have seized on in order to exploit our lack of understanding to push a mystical agenda. In this way presuppositionalism answers darkness with more darkness while pretending it is a form of light. <br /><br />Cornelius Van Til himself declared that “God must always remain mysterious to man” (<i>The Defense of the Faith</i>, p. 14), which probably explains why apologists will spill much ink in an effort to convince people that the philosophical issues they exploit are real and serious problems, but very little on how exactly their god supposedly did what it did to solve those problems. When the apologist asserts that “God created both the world… and the categories of the human mind,” an obvious question would be: <i>How</i> did it do this? But no answer is provided. When Michael Butler asserts that “God is providentially in control of all events,” we might ask: how does it have such control and by what means does it wield this alleged control? Again, no elaboration on this is provided. When we are urged to consider the view that there exists “a Person for whom universal <i>a priori</i> knowledge of the very constitution of the universe <i>is</i> attainable,” one would naturally wonder: How would this person attain this alleged “universal <i>a priori</i> knowledge”? Since apologists cannot even explain how human beings acquire their knowledge, instead pointing to an invisible magic being to “answer” such questions, I think it’s safe to say that we should not expect any answers to such relevant and pressing questions. Apologists would do better just confessing that they believe a lot of nonsense and forego all the credibility-killing bamboozling. <br /><br />Time and time again, presuppositionalism reduces to the following formula:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;"><i>Your position is full of all these technical fallacies and thus cannot be accepted as true, but my answer – “God did it!” – can be the only correct and true answer.</i></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">which I’m afraid I do not find very convincing.
<br /><br />In his radio discussion with apologist Greg Bahnsen (see <a href="http://www.anthonyflood.com/bahnsendebatesgeorgesmith.htm">transcript</a>), atheist thinker George H. Smith made the following salient point after Bahnsen asserted that “it’s a tremendous philosophical mistake to assimilate the law of causality to the laws of logic”:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Well, let’s assume that I’m wrong. I could refer you to books: H. W. B Joseph’s book on logic. Maybe you’d consider it outdated. Brand Blanshard held a very similar view. It’s been held by—Richard Taylor holds a similar view. Okay, but let’s assume that they’re all wrong and it’s a minority view on the nature of causation. Granted. But at least I’m trying to reach an explanation within the sphere of reason. In other words, it seems to me that my explanation, even if you don’t accept it, makes a lot more sense than saying God does it. I mean, to me that explains nothing. If you’d like to quote another line from my book, quote the line where I said: the concept of God explains nothing. When you’ve been talking to me about how can we explain this, how can we make sense of this. Okay, I’m attempting to give an explanation and maybe an incorrect one, but it is within the realm of human understanding. I would challenge you to tell me how God explains anything. Let’s assume there is a problem, if my explanation—let’s make sense out of it: “A Blark did it.” That’s all I say. And I would say to you Greg, “You know, Greg, you really couldn’t reason if it weren’t for the existence of a Blark! You’d be a little bit puzzled and you’d understand the problem here and to me if we’re going to talk about explanation, right or wrong it has to be in the real of human understanding and human reason. If you simply plug in the word “Blark” or in your case the word “God,” whenever you encounter a problem, it doesn’t solve the problem. That is my fundamental point.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">So Bahnsen thought he could poke all these holes in Smith’s position with philosophically-infused jargon, but all the while apparently Smith, who is after a comprehensible solution which is grounded in observable facts (as opposed to inventions of the imagination), as well as the rest of us, are supposed to be satisfied with some rendition or another of “God did it,” which, when boiled down to its essence, is all that Bahnsen is really providing. <br /><br />Unfortunately, even saying “God <i>did</i> it” is insufficient when it comes to satisfying the apologists’ burden, which is to prove that said god <i>exists</i> in the first place. To say “X <i>did</i> Y” is to say that “X <i>performed some action resulting in</i> Y,” but this assumes that X is real in the first place, which is what the apologists are called to prove. Thus any “transcendental argument” which reduces to a conclusion affirming “God did it” (or some variant thereof) would be begging the question: before you can ascribe an action or set of actions to a god, you’d need to validate the claim that the god in question exists in the first place. Apologists do not succeed at this step, and bypassing it does not compensate for this failure.
<br /><br />(Similarly, a forensic investigator proposing the hypothesis described above, would first need to prove that a person who can turn himself into an ant and then back into a person actually exists in the first place before offering that as an explanation for the murder in question.)
<br /><br />Presuppositionalism, however, does something even more insidious: it essentially attempts to foist on the unsuspecting the conclusion that a god must exist because of the way that apologists have framed the issues about which they feign interest – e.g., truth, knowledge, logic, induction, morality, etc. Clear examples of this can be found <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2020/08/my-refutation-of-stb-ten-years-on.html">here</a>, <a href="http://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2012/02/reaction-to-my-critique-of-anderson-and.html">here</a>, <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/01/an-examination-of-van-tils-argument.html">here</a> and <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/02/an-examination-of-van-tils-argument.html">here</a>. If the preconditions of knowledge, the nature of logical laws, and the mechanics of induction are described in such a way from the outset that only positing the activity of a magical being can suffice as their explanation, there might be something wrong with the way the issues are being framed.
<br /><br />I’m so glad these aren’t my problems! </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-8686927288992153062022-07-28T06:00:00.025-04:002022-07-28T06:00:00.198-04:00Stovetop Realizations<div style="text-align: justify;">I’ve had yet another very busy month and in fact I had intended to post a couple entries this month, but life’s responsibilities have robbed me of the time needed to focus and work on them, so those drafts will have to continue incubating for some time. <br /><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">But I did want to share some thoughts in response to a comment which was made on my <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/06/same-old-song-and-dance-anderson-on.html">previous blog</a>. Before getting to that, I just want to express my gratitude to everyone who reads anything I post here and even more so to those who take the time to post such thoughtful comments. I started this blog back in 2005 and I didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep in running. It’s become something of a compendium at this point. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do intend to keep it going. Let’s see if I can make it to 20 years! That would be quite a milestone, no? In the meantime, please know that I do read all comments, and I almost always have something to say in response, if nothing more than “Thank you!” If I do not reply, it is not because I missed your comment (it’s possible, but probably not the case), but instead because I’m just a very busy workhorse. Writing is a love of mine, but sometimes it takes a lot of energy to get into the proper frame of mind to say something intelligent, and even then I can wildly miss the mark. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Anyway, on to today’s post. <span><a name='more'></a></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Here I wanted to repost a statement that Jason mc left in a <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/06/same-old-song-and-dance-anderson-on.html">recent comment</a>. Jason mc wrote:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">I imagine presuppositionalists and hyper-sceptics alike would dispute the claim that touching hot stoves is painful, as an item of certain knowledge possible to learn from instances of touching them. Touching stoves isn't enough to get a full understanding of the way the physiology of the human nervous system interprets intense heat as pain. Whether a full understanding of this will ever be within grasp is unknown. The presupper says God has this full understanding, and this somehow justifies the human claim, or maybe just for theists?</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">There is much to consider right here, so I’m very grateful that Jason mc took the time to post his comment. This paragraph stuck with me since I first read it. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">For one, I think Jason mc is correct here: it may in fact be likely that apologists and other induction-deniers (can we call them that?) would object to my example of touching a hot stove, feeling pain, and consequently internalizing the incident as an item of quasi-general knowledge. I would expect this; conceding my point would yield too much vital ground for the apologist, who probably has strong ideological motivation to object to the association of such mundane experience with drawing a generalized understanding. So to those who do object to my example, they are invited to touch their hands to hot stoves as many times as it takes to draw any other general conclusion. If they’re not going with Anderson’s one thousand, maybe they haven’t reached a point of certainty. Or maybe they have no hands left. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I see it first as a matter of discovery and then as an opportunity to conceptualize <i>what</i> is discovered though the experience. Since I was young I’ve always highly valued discovery, and I observed that the know-it-alls whom I personally knew growing up had a very hard time with making discoveries. Usually they came at a heavy cost. One boy I knew claimed that he would not be harmed when holding a lit firecracker in his clenched fist. I urged him not to do it, but he needed to prove something. He proved something alright – something I already knew. (I'm guessing he has recovered by now.)</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Conceptualizing what we discover is essentially a rudimentary learning process. I draw from my memory of my own experience here, when I was a child, and I don’t think I’m some unique specimen; from what I’ve observed throughout my life, other human beings make discoveries through their own firsthand experiences and <i>learn</i> from what they discover. Learning from what we discover is the true beginning of wisdom. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I recall – I must have been maybe four years old, maybe even younger – my mother was heating milk for me in a saucepan on the gas stovetop. I remember hearing the milk hissing as she sloshed the saucepan from side to side to make sure it warmed up evenly. As I would tend to do at that age, I was getting myself involved where I shouldn’t have, being the nuisance that I still am to this day, and reached my hand up to the stovetop. I was tall enough at the time to reach up and touch the stovetop, but not tall enough to see everything going on, arms being what they are, able to reach high above one’s head and beyond the field of vision. Before my mother could stop me, I touched my fingertips to the hot element on the stovetop and it delivered a sudden jolt of lasting pain. I’m sure I burst out in a bawling fit. But I definitely discovered something - <i>seared</i> into my consciousness, to be quite literal. What did I discover? I certainly discovered that I could feel pain – probably something I had discovered well before this, but if so, this discovery certainly reinforced earlier ones; it certainly did not pose as a counter-example overturning previous experiences of pain. I also discovered that touching certain things in my environment could result in such pain. And, I think implicitly I discovered that I had at least some control on the matter: maybe next time, I should choose to be a little more careful around certain things in my environment. (If I were truly precocious, maybe I would have learned not to meddle in my mother’s affairs when she was busy in the kitchen, but this learning wouldn’t come for quite some time.) The point is that I definitely learned something from the experience, and while it may not have been an instance of drawing a generalization that I could explicitly verbalize as “touching hot things can cause pain” (I didn’t have the verbal tools for that yet), it was as close to this as possible given the current stage of my development. The scope of what I learned was not confined to just that stovetop on that one occasion. There’s no doubt in my mind that I was already formulating primitive inductive inferences here, for from that point on I was much more careful around the stove. In fact, I don’t think I ever got close to it again until I was seven or eight. That one instance was enough.
<br /><br />Now of course it’s true that this experience was not sufficient to elucidate the physiology involved in my body’s reaction to the stimulus of the hot stove element. If I could verbalize the discovery I had made in the experience, it would not have been something to the effect of “there are nerves in my fingertips connected to other nerves running from my hand to my brain, and the sensations which those nerves registered sent waves of pain to my brain… [etc.].” And as Jason mc’s statement rightly predicts, even today, far more capable of drawing inductive inferences than I was at the time in question, I still cannot detail all of the physiology involved. But in spite of my deep ignorance of physiology (I was a humanities major), I have no hint of a doubt that touching a hot stove is not a good idea if I want to remain pain-free. Hierarchically, the realization “touching hot stove tops can result in the experience of pain” is not dependent on a detailed understanding of the physiology involved here. Rather, I’d say the opposite is closer to the point: the desire to understand how the stimulus results in such an experience is more likely to be dependent on the grasp that there is a causal connection involved here to begin. Understanding that chain of causality requires systematic investigation. <br /><br />As to the claim that “God has this full understanding,” it is of course epistemologically vacuous. Even if one were to believe this, it would provide no illumination on how the human mind functions. It is essentially a claim to vicarious knowledge and borrowed understanding, which could only mean: it’s not firsthand knowledge, but something accepted on faith, on the <i>hope</i> that it is true, but without the labor involved in discovering and confirming true discoveries. That’s a pose, not understanding.
<br /><br />As for how apologists think their theistic appeals in such areas address the questions they claim such appeals answer, that has never been clear to me. But I don’t think it’s meant to be clear. Apologists muddy the waters to create a philosophical crisis and then point to their inflatable deity as the supposed solution as if to say, “See! My God is indeed relevant!” What exactly this solves and how it supposedly solves it remains a mystery, which is really where religion needs everything ultimately to reside (as we saw in the Van Til quote I cited in <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2022/06/same-old-song-and-dance-anderson-on.html">my previous blog entry</a>). They treat their god’s supposed “understanding” as a surrogate for their own, which is no path to understanding for man.
<br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-52975261257468252072022-06-26T06:00:00.039-04:002022-09-30T07:32:03.707-04:00Same Old Song and Dance: Anderson on Induction... again<div style="text-align: justify;">Christian apologist James Anderson has published <a href="https://www.iliadforum.com/post/james-anderson-what-is-the-problem-of-induction-and-why-are-christians-uniquely-situated-to-answer">yet another article on the problem of induction</a>, this time as others essentially repeating the same superficialities from <a href="https://www.proginosko.com/docs/induction.html">two decades ago</a>, as though he has learned little in the intervening years: David Hume is still the prevailing authority on the topic of induction, and the problem of induction is “solved” by imagining an invisible magic being which ensures the uniformity of nature by means of sheer will. Nothing else really needs to be considered. The fact that he can point to academics who continue to be confused on the nature and basis of induction, as though this were even relevant, only serves to reinforce his theistic prejudices.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">My views on the problem of induction have indeed evolved over the years. More and more I have come to the assessment that the problem of induction commits the fallacy of the stolen concept: the very framing of the problem of induction in fact tacitly assumes the validity of induction, and yet the validity of induction is what the problem essentially aims to call into question.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div> <div style="text-align: justify;">Take for example statements from Anderson’s own recent paper outlining the problem of induction, such as:</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">“An inductive inference aims to draw a general conclusion from a series of particular observations.”</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Such a statement itself is a generalization as it is intended to apply to <i>all</i> instances of inductive inference. Although Anderson uses the singular here, it essentially states: <i>every</i> “inductive inference aims to draw a general conclusion from a series of particular observations,” which is to say: <i>ALL</i> inductive inferences do this. But if it’s the case that “inductive inferences cannot deliver absolute certainty,” on what basis does one form the generalization, stated here by Anderson as a solid, incontestable certainty, that <i>all</i> cases of inductive inference “aim… to draw a general conclusion from a series of particular observations”? At the level of its own genetic roots, the problem undermines itself.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">In answer to this, one might say it’s a matter of definition: inductive inferences <i>by definition</i> “aim… to draw a general conclusion from a series of particular observations.” But this only moves the problem back a step: on what basis does one form such a definition, indeed one which applies to all instances of a general category? Do we just pull definitions out of thin air, or from some unmentionable nether region? In fact, such a counter is to be welcomed, because by asserting that this generalization about <i>all</i> inductive inferences is a matter of definition, the apologist would be conceding that concepts play a fundamental role here, for it is concepts which require definitions.
<br /><br />Even the definition which Anderson offers may, on a plain reading, be deficient. For I can think of a number of generalizations I’ve drawn in my life which I treat a certain and exceptionless even though they were not based on “a series of particular observations,” but in fact on <i>single instances</i>. For example, I distinctly remember burning my hand on a hot stove when I was a child. I did not need repeated experiences of this to drive home the causal relation between a touching a hot surface and experiencing sudden, intense, and lasting pain. One instance was plenty sufficient! Similarly, also when I was a child, I remember trying to plug something into a power outlet and getting shocked because one of my fingers was in contact with the plug’s metal prongs when it came into contact with the power source. Again, I did not need to repeat this experience in order to draw the generalization that doing this anytime, anywhere, was not a good idea. Once was enough!
<br /><br />So, I would say that there are in fact inductive generalizations which one can – and probably should – draw without reiteration. In fact, philosopher David Kelley, in his lecture <a href="https://www.atlassociety.org/post/universals-and-induction">Universals and Induction</a>, goes so far as to say that “repetition plays no essential role in knowledge at all, not in induction, not in concept-formation, not in any reasoning process,” and his explanation is very cogent:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Whenever we reach certain conclusions about a given phenomenon, by observation or by inference, the occurrence of an exact repetition of that phenomenon does not allow us to draw any new conclusions, except the obvious conclusion that this has happened before. Repetition as such, the sheer fact of repetition, is epistemologically barren.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Contrast this with Anderson’s own example of an inductive inference, which in his view requires ongoing sampling:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">if I observe one thousand swans, and every one of those swans is white, I can infer inductively that <i>probably all swans are white</i>, and on that basis predict that any future swans I observe will (probably) be white.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Naturally the question arises: if repetition is required for inductive generalization, <i>how many</i> instances are sufficient to provide reliable content to said generalization? Is it ten instances? A hundred? Anderson’s “one thousand”? How does one arrive at such a figure without needing to enlist induction itself, which would lead to an infinite regress? On Anderson’s view, I would need to burn my hand a thousand times to draw the general conclusion that touching a hot surface (<i>any</i> hot surface) can cause pain, and then only probabilistically. Hopefully Anderson does not mind me going with my inductive process, which I conceive as <i>applying the law of causality to entity classes</i> (cf. <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2012/04/answering-dustin-segers_15.html">here</a>). <br /><br />For Anderson, the reliability of induction hinges – apparently exclusively – on one factor: the uniformity of nature:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">Our inductive inferences about the natural world take for granted that nature is basically uniform across both space and time, such that observations in one location (e.g., in our solar system) are reliable indicators of how nature behaves in all other locations, and such that past observations are reliable indicators of future occurrences. If the principle of the uniformity of nature does not hold, then inductive inferences should not be considered reliable.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">Anderson does not make the case that other factors do not play a vital role in inductive reasoning (such as man’s mental activity), and seems satisfied to rest the matter exclusively on a metaphysical premise without considering the epistemological activity of human cognition. This has always struck me as rather odd because inductive reasoning is in fact a form of <i>reasoning</i>, and human minds are what perform tasks of reasoning! But in fact, ignoring the role of man’s mind in his efforts to reason inductively is what is to be expected given the apologist’s goal.
<br /><br />After introducing the topic of the uniformity of nature, Anderson asks point blank, apparently not expecting a serious answer:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">On what basis do we assume that nature is <i>in fact</i> uniform across time and space?</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">That’s a tough one, eh?
<br /><br />My answer continues to be the same here: <i>On the basis of the axioms, the primacy of existence, and the objective theory of concepts.</i>
<br /><br />I am happy to explain this, but first I think it’s important to clarify what <i>I</i> take “uniformity of nature” to actually denote. The uniformity we observe in nature is essentially the concurrence of identity with existence. And this speaks to the first item in my answer – the axioms. The most basic recognition possible to the human mind is made explicit by the axiom of existence: “Existence exists – and only existence exists” (Leonard Peikoff, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy,” in Ayn Rand’s <i>Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology</i>, p. 109). In other words, things exist, there is a reality. Everything we perceive through our five senses provides a constant flow of objective input informing this fundamental recognition: everywhere we look, what we see is existence. Similarly with our other sense modalities. <br /><br />Critics of Objectivism have protested this starting point by stammering “That doesn’t tell us <i>what</i> exists!” which of course is true when it comes to <i>specifics</i>. And it’s not meant to do this. But notice that this objection misses the point: the axiom of existence is a <i>starting point</i> - it is where cognition <i>begins</i>, namely with its first contact with objective reality; it is not where cognition <i>ends</i>. But notice what the objection takes for granted: it takes for granted that what exists has <i>identity</i>. To ask <i>what</i> exists assumes that what exists can be <i>identified</i>, and having identity, a nature, is a necessary precondition to being identifiable. The axiom of identity, then, is the fundamental recognition that <i>to exist is to be something</i>, to have identity, to be something <i>specific</i> - <i>this</i> as opposed to <i>that</i>, <i>this</i> as opposed to <i>everything else</i>. <br /><br />Uniformity, then, is essentially the applicability of the axiom of identity to all existence. There is no such thing as an existent <i>without identity</i>, a thing <i>without a nature</i>, a thing that is <i>nothing specific</i>. To exist is to be something, and the axioms of existence and identity are our formal recognition of this fundamental fact. <br /><br />The second item in my answer is the primacy of existence. This fundamental principle is the formalized recognition that existence exists independent of conscious activity. As Ayn Rand observes: “that the task of man’s consciousness is to <i>perceive</i>, not to create, reality” (<i>For the New Intellectual</i>, p. 22; compare Leonard Peikoff: “that the role of the subject [of consciousness] is not to create the object, but to perceive it” and “The function of consciousness is not to create reality, but to apprehend it” (<i>The Ominous Parallels</i>, pp. 62 and 303). The recognition that consciousness perceives things which exists rather than conjures them ex nihilo is self-evident and fundamental, so much so that no adult thinker seriously questions the adage “wishing doesn’t make it so.” Consciousness does not have the power to simply revise reality at whim; if we don’t like something, we have to <i>act</i> to make things better, and that may or may not produce the outcome we desire. Reality does not conform to conscious activity, whether that’s wishing, hoping, imagining, preferring, willing, praying, throwing tantrums, etc.; consciousness must conform to reality. With respect to the uniformity of nature as understood above, this means that: <i>if</i> nature is uniform (i.e., if identity is concurrent with existence), this state of affairs is <i>not</i> the product of conscious activity – it is not an attribute that we can <i>wish</i> into being. If nature is uniform, it is uniform <i>independent of conscious activity</i>, and thus it is something we must <i>discover</i> and <i>identify</i>, not create or wish into existence. <br /><br />Lastly, we come to the objective theory of concepts. This is the theory of concepts which Ayn Rand lays out succinctly in her book <i>Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology</i>, which I encourage visitors to my blog not merely to read, but to deeply <i>study</i> what Rand develops in those precious pages. Rand makes the case that the human mind forms concepts on the basis of perceptual input and that concepts <i>expand man’s awareness beyond the range of his perception</i> (the real heart of the problem of induction) by forming open-ended mental integrations which <i>include</i> not just those specific things we have actually perceived, but also others which are essentially like those things we have perceived but which we have <i>not</i> perceived and which we <i>may never</i> perceive. Rand explains that we do this through a process of abstraction, a step-by-step process which she describes and whose distinctive feature is the process of <i>measurement-omission</i>:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">The basic principle of concept-formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist in <i>some</i> quantity, but may exist in <i>any</i> quantity) is the equivalent of the basic principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given <i>some</i> numerical value, but may be given <i>any</i> value. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but <i>conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition</i>. (<i>Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology</i>, p. 18)</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">(Rand cautions that “the term ‘measurements omitted’ does not mean, in this context, that measurements are regarded as non-existent; it means that <i>measurements exist, but are not specified</i>” (Ibid., p. 12).)
<br /><br />The concept ‘shoe’, for example, includes women’s size 6 as well as men’s size 12; shoes which are secured by laces as well as loafers (my personal preference!); shoes which are intended for use in sports as well as shoes worn by businessmen; shoes which are red and yellow as well as shoes which are solid black. <br /><br />Notice that the concept ‘shoe’ includes those specific shoes which we have personally seen and handled as well as shoes which we have not personally seen or handled. My cousin in Virginia, whom I have not seen in many years, can call me on the telephone and tell me that he has recently purchased a new pair of shoes, and even though I have not seen these shoes – and maybe never will – I know right off what he’s talking about because I have already formed the concept ‘shoe’ and his new pair is just another unit that I can integrate into that concept now that I am aware that it exists. But notice also that the concept ‘shoe’ includes all shoes which will never otherwise enter my awareness: shoes which exist in China, in Slovakia, in South Africa, in India, in Peru, etc. Moreover, it includes shoes which used to exist but no longer exist. And, it includes shoes which do not yet exist but may or will exist in the future. <br /><br />The take-away here is that just by forming the concept ‘shoe’ – or <i>any concept</i>, a skill which the human mind starts to develop in childhood, <i>we are already forming general categories on the basis on specific examples</i>, categories which expand our awareness beyond what we come into contact with personally. Thus, the role of concept-formation in inductive inferences is both fundamental and indispensable. Which means: no serious treatment of the topic of induction can be complete without understanding its basis in conceptualization. To put it succinctly, <i>concept-formation provides the cognitive model for inductive generalizations</i>.
<br /><br />Another important take-away here is that the conceptual understanding of induction pre-empts the stock objections which commonly accompany treatments of the problem of induction such as Anderson’s. Anderson provides an example of this objection in <a href="https://www.iliadforum.com/post/james-anderson-what-is-the-problem-of-induction-and-why-are-christians-uniquely-situated-to-answer">his paper</a>:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">A very common response is to suggest that the uniformity of nature, and thus the reliability of induction, has been confirmed empirically over time. Every time (or nearly every time) we’ve made predictions based on an inductive inference we’ve turned out to be <i>correct</i>, and therefore we’re justified in assuming that the same will be true in the future—in other words, that induction is generally reliable. The trouble with this answer, as Hume pointedly observed, is that it’s based on circular reasoning: it assumes the very thing in question, namely, that past observations are a reliable guide to the future. In other words, this answer tries to justify inductive inference <i>with an inductive inference</i>. That approach simply presupposes the reliability of induction rather than giving an independent justification for it. As Hume argued, it’s impossible in principle to justify induction on purely experiential grounds, because we will always have to extrapolate from what we have observed to what we haven’t observed.</blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">What should be clear in my points about concepts as open-ended integrations which include not only those particulars which we have perceived, but also those which we have not and never will perceive, is that the abstraction process makes time and place essentially irrelevant to what is included in conceptual integration. Time and place are basically omitted measurements in the sense that Rand explains. This means that the distinction between past and future has no fundamental bearing on the matter. The concept ‘shoe’ includes the pair of shoes which I possess now as well as the shoes I had in my seventh grade and the shoes which I will have five years from now, assuming I’m still alive. Since neither Hume nor Anderson enjoy the benefit of understanding induction in terms of its conceptual roots, this key point will continue to allude them and other thinkers who choose to remain uninformed on the nature of concept-formation and its bearing on the matter. Why is it that the concept ‘shoe’ can include all shoes which exist now as well as those which existed in the past and no longer exist and also those shoes which do not yet exist but will or may exist, and yet it is fallacious to infer that “past observations are a reliable guide to the future”? Indeed, we <i>can</i> infer this, not as the basis for <i>justifying</i> induction (for we have the axioms, the primacy of existence and the objective theory of concepts), but as a matter of extending the conceptual process across time and place in <i>applying</i> induction. Induction is already justified by forming our first concepts!
<br /><br />Another take-away that is often lost on those who take Hume seriously, is that the problem of induction, to the extent that it is a problem, cannot be addressed merely by justifying the presumption that nature is uniform. Nature is indeed uniform in the sense that identity is concurrent with existence: whatever exists has identity. That’s well and good, but that does not provide illumination on the <i>cognitive</i> nature of induction. By resting the matter entirely on the uniformity of nature, treatments like Anderson’s ignore the role performed by the human mind on the matter, which is key to it all! As I pointed out in my own blog entry <a href="https://bahnsenburner.blogspot.com/2021/01/presuppositionalism-and-induction.html">Presuppositionalism and Induction: Thoughts on the Uniformity of Nature</a>:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">If nature is uniform, it is uniform not only in my experience, but also in my cat’s experience. However, my cat will never be able to draw the generalization that dropping eggs will result in them breaking and spilling their contents. <i>But I can!</i></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;">If a justification of the presumption that nature is uniform were all that’s needed for induction, how is it that my cat cannot draw inductive generalizations like I can? The answer here is no mystery: unlike my cat, <i>I can form concepts</i>. As we saw above, the formation of our first concepts, a skill my cat will never be able to develop, human minds are already on the road to inductive generalization since concepts expand man’s awareness beyond the range of his senses. <br /><br />It should be no surprise that concept-formation never enters into consideration of the problem of induction in treatments like Anderson’s, not only because his very purpose in raising the problem of induction in the first place is to argue for the existence of something that we can only <i>imagine</i>, but because his worldview – the Christian worldview – has no theory of concepts to begin with. Since knowledge is concepts, lacking a theory of concepts is a fatal liability for anything posturing as a comprehensive worldview: it means it has no account for knowledge as such. Clueless about the conceptual nature of human cognition, apologists exploit what is mysterious to themselves in order to validate worship of something that “must always remain mysterious to man” (Cornelius Van Til, <i>The Defense of the Faith</i>, p. 14), namely the god which believers enshrine in their imagination. By clinging to the ever-mysterious, the apologist remains in the dark and never finds the light switch. <br /><br />Anderson notes that “solutions to the problem of induction have been offered, but none has been widely accepted and the issue has proven to be an enduring challenge.” Whether a solution has been “widely accepted” or not is irrelevant to its cogency. I would think that Anderson would understand this. After all, how “widely accepted” is the “solution” which Anderson endorses? And yes, if thinkers are looking for a solution in the wrong place, I would expect the original problem to constitute “an enduring challenge.” <br /><br />Anderson believes that “At the heart of the problem is the fact that only an <i>omniscient</i> being could possess direct and infallible knowledge of the uniformity of nature across space and time.” I do not see that Anderson has supplied an argument for this. It seems that the problem of induction is being treated here as just another in a long series of god-of-the-gaps type of apologetic, to wit: “I have no idea how to solve the problem of induction, but we draw inductive conclusions nevertheless, therefore there must be a God!” And given Anderson’s deep investment in his religious confession, it’s hard to shake off the suspicion that this was his desired outcome all along. <br /><br />In essence, Anderson offers an appeal to magic, not by means of sound reasoning, but by means of <i>imagination</i>: a supernatural consciousness which the believer concocts in his imagination has the power to wish uniformity onto the elements of reality, and reality conforms accordingly, just because. This is a two-fold violation of the primacy of existence – a principle which Anderson’s own affirmations take for granted (for no doubt he would not claim that his statements are true <i>because he wants them to be true</i>). This is far from a serious philosophical position. But what alternative to the imagination does Anderson offer here? How can anyone reliably distinguish between what Anderson calls “an <i>omniscient</i> being” from something which Anderson may merely be imagining? Blank out. And how does positing “an <i>omniscient</i> being” move us forward in any way toward understanding what the human mind does when drawing inductive inferences? At best, it’s a distraction; at worst, it’s a formula for keeping thinkers in the pitch black of anti-conceptual darkness.
<br /><br />Now maybe there’s a reader (or several?) who thinks I’m wrong, either partly or entirely, in my conception of induction, my defense of inductive reliability, or my challenges to Anderson’s viewpoint. If so, please feel free to use the comments section to voice your concerns. Maybe I am wrong. If I am wrong, how will I discover that I’m wrong if no one steps forward to show me the light? If we grow in our knowledge, what have we lost that’s worth protecting? <br /><br />by Dawson Bethrick</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-29706189548816940552022-05-21T09:00:00.001-04:002022-05-21T09:00:00.200-04:00Apparently I don't have the right...<div style="text-align: justify;">Cornelius Van Til writes:</div><blockquote style="text-align: justify;">No human being can explain in the sense of seeing through all things, <i>but only he who believes in God has the right to hold that there is an explanation at all</i>. (<a href="https://reformed.org/apologetics/why-i-believe-in-god-by-cornelius-van-til/">Why I Believe in God</a>, emphasis added)</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Really?</div>Bahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.com12