Jason Lisle on Sensory Experience and Epistemology

Nearly a decade ago now on this blog I interacted with writings by one Dr. Jason Lisle, a Christian astrophysicist who operates the Biblical Science Institute which, according to its own about page, 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 here, here, here and here.

I recently came upon a blog entry by Lisle in which he makes some comments about sensory experience, a topic I explored in my previous entry. 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: How do I Know that I Know? – a Response (Part 1).

Sye's Fixation with "Insane" People

I’ve been asked to comment on a common tactic used by Sye Ten Bruggencate and those who copy his apologetic strategies. (See the comments section here for the original request.) The tactic is an interrogative maneuver by which the apologist seeks to commandeer the conversation and steer it in a direction intended to lead to a ‘gotcha’ moment, its goal being to trip up the non-Christian rather than to actually validate the position which the apologist should be defending.

The tactic consists of the following formula:

Sye: Do you agree that there are insane people whose senses and reasoning are not valid?

Sye's oppoenent: Yes  

Sye: Then how do you know you're not one of those people?

The obvious goal of this tactic is to trap the opponent in a death spiral of his own making. But the success of this tactic clearly depends on accepting the premises embedded in the leading question, as the opponent’s answer demonstrates.

Jason Lisle on Axioms

The topic of axioms was raised in Jason Lisle’s comment exchange with Tony and other visitors over on Lisle’s blog It’s not “Human Reason vs. God’s Word”!. Coming to this discussion from the perspective of a worldview which provides no “epistemologically self-conscious” understanding of axioms, Lisle is clearly unprepared to interact with this area of inquiry with any credibility. Instead of raising important issues that need to be addressed or even showing a willingness to learn from his interlocutors, Lisle can be seen flailing his arms around groping for anything that might stick in the heat of debate. Clearly his only ambition is to protect his god-belief. What does he want to protect it from? That’s obvious, he wants to protect it from reason.

Before getting started, I want to point readers to several posts on the topic of axioms that are available for readers to peruse on my blog:

The Axioms and the Primacy of Existence 

RazorsKiss on the Christian God as the Basis of Knowledge – Part 2: RK’s Axioms 

A Reply to Matthias on Philosophical Starting Points

I have also written about the validity of the senses, another topic that comes up in these exchanges, in the following:

On the Validity of the Senses 

Answering Jason Lisle on the Reliability of the Senses

I will not address everything stated in the comments of Lisle’s blog (there are 1,180 comments!), but will instead focus primarily on some of Lisle’s questions and statements about axioms that can be found on page 3 of his comments pages.

Answering Jason Lisle on the Reliability of the Senses

On page two of the comments section of his blog entry Are You Epistemologically Self-Conscious? Christian apologist Jason Lisle has challenged non-Christian visitors to his blog to explain how they know that the senses are reliable. This is a theme which appears in the main entry itself, where Lisle wrote:

Some people might suppose that our sensory organs are reliable because they have survival value. But this does not follow logically. Chlorophyll has survival value in plants; but this does not imply that chlorophyll reliably informs the plant about the outside world.

In response to this, commenter Zilch asked (September 18, 2013):

I don’t know anyone, naturalist or theist, who supposes that our sensory organs have survival value because they provide us with energy from sunlight- do you?

Replying to Zilch, Jason Lisle embedded the following insertion:

You seem to have misunderstood. The question is: "How do we know that our senses are basically reliable[?]"

Apologists for Christianity raise this question in their exchanges with non-Christians quite frequently, and I have previously addressed the matter on my blog: see my entry On the Validity of the Senses in which I answer Dan Marvin’s attempts to make apologetic use of this matter. In that blog, I address the predictable example of a stick dunked in a glass of water appearing to be bent as an attack on the senses, which is actually a testament to their reliability. Doubting the validity of the senses goes back to ancient skeptics such as Pyrrho, who advocated that since we cannot know anything, we should retreat into “noncommittal silence, with respect to all things” (W.L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, sv. ‘Pyrrho’, p. 622).

My August Comments to B.C. Hodge

I have had a most busy September, leaving me with no time whatsoever to devote to blogging. My schedule should hopefully loosen up some in October, and to whatever extent it does, I’m looking forward to it. Since I haven’t posted anything so far this month, I am posting the comments that I left on B.C. Hodge’s blog back in late August. I’m supposing that most regular visitors of my blog have already read these comments, but if not, here they are. If so, then obviously there’s nothing new here for you.

I know that Hodge reacted to some of what I have stated below and that some of the regulars here (Robert, Ydemoc, Photosynthesis, NAL, etc.) have continued interacting directly with Hodge on his blog. Unfortunately I’ve been able to read up on small portions of those conversations, but what I have seen so far is quite familiar: rational individuals trying their best to reach someone whose mind has turned its back on reason. There’s clearly more to say, but that will have to wait until later.

So here they are in their entirety, my last bout of comments to B.C. Hodge.

Subjectivism in Hodge's View of Reality and Knowledge

B.C. Hodge has posted a response to my blog Hodge’s Hedgings.

In a much more protracted blog entry, Hodge seeks to defend the idea that perception of reality is somehow epistemologically insufficient for knowledge, and that what really is vital for knowledge is some kind of faith in what he calls “subjective apprehensions.”

In telling his readers of his awareness of my responses (in my comments here and my main blog entry here) to his initial blog entry and follow-up comments, Hodge states that my efforts to rebut him “fail miserably to understand the argument and address the problem” which he apparently believes he has successfully laid forth. Hodge suggests that my intention is “to merely exhaust readers by lengthy posts that give the impression that [I have] actually said something relevant” to his argument. That I interact directly with Hodge’s statements is apparently not sufficient for my reaction to be relevant to what he has argued.

Referring to what I have written as a “sort of sophistry,” Hodge claims that such licentious discourse “is evident in these long posts when they attempt to nitpick everything about my argument, but the argument itself.” So interacting directly with a Hodge’s statements as I have constitutes “nitpicking” which is focused on “everything about [his] argument” somehow misses “the argument itself,” and word count is supposedly an indication of this. Hodge huffs:

”Hey, if you’re going to bluff, make sure you do it with a lot of words so it seems like you’ve got something to back up your claims.”

I noticed that Hodge’s own blog entry was itself quite lengthy, so I compared the length of mine with the length of his. I found that, while my blog had a total of 5,197 words, Hodge’s new blog entry exceeds this, with a total of 6,124 words, nearly a thousand words and over 15% longer than mine. I must say I feel quite humbled to be out-worded like this! But if word count is any indication, it seems that Hodge’s “theology served raw” is a bit over-cooked.

Now, I am happy to examine the entirety of Hodge’s reply to me, but in the present entry I want to focus on the very first paragraph he writes in his newest entry.

Hodge's Hedgings

In the comments section of my blog Presuppositionalist Pseudolosophy, NAL, a frequent visitor, posted in its entirety the blog entry of a Christian blogger named C.B. Hodge. Hodge runs the blog Theological Sushi and the blog entry in question can be found here: Objectivism Refuted

I read through Hodge’s brief entry and posted my own reaction to it in two comments on my own blog, where NAL had originally drew attention to it.

A little later, Ydemoc, another frequent visitor to my blog, posted a comment over at Hodge’s blog entry informing him of my critique of his refutation of objectivism (note the small ‘o’ here – it appears that Hodge has some generic understanding of objectivism in mind here; he makes no reference to Rand, Peikoff or other Objectivist author, and he does not interact directly with any of Objectivism’s own stated positions; moreover, he apparently expects his readers to “just know” what he’s addressing, since he provides essentially no explanation of what he’s trying to refute; in his blog entry, Hodge confines his refutation to an attack on the senses, and he presumably expects his readers to learn of his position by perceiving and interpreting the little marks he’s created on his webpage).

So my initial response to Hodge can be found there, in my comment on my blog.

Now Hodge has replied to me, in the comments of his own blog, in reply to Ydemoc’s comments drawing attention to my interaction with Hodge’s piece. So here is my interaction with his response to my criticisms of his “refutation.”

A Lesson on Presuppositional Gimmickry

Okay, over on his blog, presuppositional apologist D.A.N. proves that I called it right in my blog On the Validity of the Senses when I stated in my 4 April comment on that blog that

D.A.N. really does not care about knowledge, how we acquire it, how we can rationally put to rest skepticism’s gimmicks, etc.

D.A.N. is out there spewing the same thing that has already been answered here. Observe:

On the Validity of the Senses

D.A.N. of Debunking Atheists recently posted some comments on my blog Incinerating Presuppositionalism: Year Eight. In his 28 March reaction to the entry marking the anniversary of my blog’s inception, D.A.N. wrote:

I am cheering the day you abandon this blog to renounce your current autonomous and fallible reasoning as faulty, and worship the God you know exists. That is worth celebrating.

In part of my response to this statement, I wrote:

you insinuate that “my reasoning is faulty,” but you cite no example from my writings as evidence to support this. Is this because you have no example to support this? Or, is it because you think there is so much evidence that it should be self-apparent to anyone reading your comment?

Then D.A.N. in turn replied:

Well, you tell me, is it viciously circular to employ your senses and reasoning to validate your senses and reasoning?

Now, D.A.N. made the insinuation that my reasoning is faulty, and I noted that he produced no evidence to support that insinuation. And even after I point out the fact that he provided no support for his charge, he still fails even to make an attempt to provide support in his response. Instead of substantiating his claim, he asks me whether or not it is “viciously circular to employ your senses and reasoning to validate your senses and reasoning,” which does not strike me as relevantly supporting the characterization of my reasoning which he published on my blog. But in spite of this, I am willing to explore the matter.