Incinerating Presuppositionalism: Year Seven

Today is March 26, 2012, which means: another anniversary of Incinerating Presuppositionalism has been reached. That’s right, another milestone has been achieved.

The past year has signaled a most momentous transition for me. I moved with my then three-year-old daughter to Thailand from the United States in May 2011, started a new position, and have sought to live as a functionally single parent in a foreign country (where I do not speak the language). It’s been the experience and challenge of a lifetime. My lasting as long as I have – with my daughter reaching her fourth birthday, completing her first year of kindergarten, and developing as an exceptionally gifted child (albeit, with my special help) – is not a miracle, but a testament to my dedication and perseverance as a civilized human being and my ability as a father. Indeed, I’m not the kind of parent who’s about to stand idly by and let his child be abducted, tortured and executed by a bunch of lawbreakers and miscreants. Nope, unlike the Christian god, I’ll protect my child till my last breath!

In the meantime, I have continued with my blog, and have published the following entries since my blog’s last anniversary, the same time last year:

250. Incinerating Presuppositionalism: Year Six – March 26, 2011

251. Imagine There’s a Heaven - April 29, 2011

252. The Argument from the Unity of Knowledge - May 25, 2011

253. Considering Tony’s Offerings - June 2, 2011

254. A Proof that the Christian God Does Not Exist - July 15, 2011

255. Nide’s Snide - July 22, 2011

256. Presuppositionalism vs. Objectivism: How Objectivism Prevails - August 2, 2011

257. Five Years and Still Waiting… - August 12, 2011

258. STB: One Year and Still Waiting… - August 27, 2011

259. Answering Nide’s Questions about the Uniformity of Nature - September 6, 2011

260. Strange Bedfellows? - October 3, 2011

261. George H. Smith’s “Atheism: The Case Against God” – Online – Free PDF - October 16, 2011

262. Has the Primacy of Existence Been Refuted? - October 27, 2011

263. A Reply to Dustin Seger’s Dismantled Blog Entry on Objectivism - November 1, 2011

264. Cognitive Reliability vs. Supernatural Deception - November 21, 2011

265. Christianity’s Sanction of Evil - December 1, 2011

266. Christianity’s Psychological Price Tag - December 4, 2011

267. Some Thoughts on the “Sensus Divinitatis” - December 6, 2011

268. A Reply to Michael: Further Thoughts on the Issue of Supernatural Deception - December 10, 2011

269. Are the Laws of Logic “Thoughts” of the Christian God? - January 1, 2012

270. Reaction to My Critique of Anderson and Welty’s “The Lord of Non-Contradiction” - February 25, 2012

271. Nide’s 15 - March 6, 2012

272. Can a Worldview “Provide” the “Preconditions of Intelligibility”? - Part I - March 16, 2012

273. Can a Worldview “Provide” the “Preconditions of Intelligibility”? - Part II - March 17, 2012

274. Can a Worldview “Provide” the “Preconditions of Intelligibility”? - Part III - March 20, 2012

275. The Self-Attesting Absurdity of the Christian Worldview - March 22, 2012

Highlights from the past year include (not to mention being evacuated from a flooded Bangkok in the fall of 2011!):

- A Proof that the Christian God Does Not Exist;

- the one year anniversary of the publication of my refutation of Sye Ten Bruggencate’s argument for the existence of his god (which is still unrefuted);

- a most historic pwning of Dustin Segers in his fault-ridden attempt to refute the primacy of existence;

- two posts interacting with James Anderson and Greg Welty’s paper The Lord of Non-Contradiction, found here and here;

- and a three-part analysis of the presuppositionalist claim that the Christian worldview “provides” the necessary preconditions for intelligibility, found here, here, and here.

So there’s a lot here to sink your teeth into. So get busy – start reading, start digesting, start thinking. Consider the points I raise, and formulate your own view. Perhaps I’m wrong. If so, discover why. Perhaps I’m right. If so, understand why. In the meantime, I will do my best, given my haphazard and very full schedule, to keep up with my blog and carry it to its eighth anniversary.

by Dawson Bethrick

The Self-Attesting Absurdity of the Christian Worldview

Over the past week, I presented a three-part series exploring the common presuppositionalist claim that the “Christian worldview” is the “only worldview” which “provides” the necessary preconditions for intelligibility. My investigation of this claim, which can be found here, here and here, demonstrates why this claim simply cannot be true.

But in spite of giving the matter more careful and systematic attention than presuppositionalists themselves typically devote to their own talking points, this demonstration – and more importantly, just the idea of taking a critical look at such a claim – will likely be ignored by apologists.

Can a Worldview “Provide” the “Preconditions of Intelligibility”? - Part III

What Are the Preconditions of Intelligibility?

If intelligibility is the capacity of some thing to be an object of awareness and be identified and integrated into the sum of one’s knowledge without contradiction, then what can we say about the preconditions of this ability?

I would wager that we can say quite a bit, and everything we can say about them – it will be seen – vies against the presuppositionalist claim that the Christian worldview “provides the necessary preconditions for intelligibility.”

But let’s ask the question: what is needed for a thing to be an object of awareness and be identified and integrated into the sum of one’s knowledge without contradiction?

Can a *Worldview* “Provide” the “Preconditions of Intelligibility”? - Part II

What is “Intelligibility”?

In my initial post in this series, we saw that it is common for presuppositionalists to assume that a worldview is what “provides the necessary preconditions for intelligibility.” By ‘worldview’ presuppositionalists explicitly mean “a network... of beliefs,” and it has even been stated that “beliefs are preconditions for intelligible experience” (see here).

This is not an isolated example. Indeed, I gave several other examples in my previous entry on this topic, and here are yet two more:

TAG [i.e., the “transcendental argument for the existence of God”] asserts that only the Christian worldview provides the necessary preconditions for the intelligibility of human experience. (Michael Butler, TAG vs. TANG)

Van Til contended that the Christian worldview supplies the preconditions of intelligibility. (Steve Hays, Theonomy under fire-2)

Logically this all means that “a network.. of beliefs” – i.e., a worldview - is the source of the necessary preconditions of intelligibility.

Can a *Worldview* "Provide" the "Preconditions of Intelligibility"? - Part I

One of the more commonly met elements of presuppositionalism is the assumption that a worldview can “provide the necessary preconditions of intelligibility.” From what I have seen, this assumption in itself is never defended. Presuppositionalists typically do not present arguments for why one should expect that a worldview as such (regardless of the particulars of that worldview) “provides the necessary preconditions of intelligibility.” The assumption that “the necessary preconditions of intelligibility” are “provided” by a worldview is generally taken completely for granted by presuppositionalists, and I’ve never seen an argument which establishes this premise.

Rather, it is typically embedded into the presuppositionalist characterization of the antithesis between Christian theism and any acknowledged contenders, as though it required no substantiation whatsoever. This in itself is noteworthy since presuppositional apologists commonly seek to make a worldview’s ability to “provide the preconditions of intelligibility” the fulcrum upon which the debate between Christianity and any non-Christian position hinges.

In this series, I will argue that at least some (indeed, the most fundamental) preconditions of intelligibility are actually not provided by any worldview. The position which I will defend is the view that those preconditions in question would already need to be in place for any worldview to exist in the first place. Moreover, I will argue that in the case of those preconditions for intelligibility which a worldview should supply, Christianity as a worldview comes up far too short to be seriously considered as their source.

Nide's 15

Christian apologist in-the-making Nide Corniell, who blogs and comments under the pseudonym “Hezekiah Ahaz,” continues to insist on playing the court jester. I recently posed 15 questions for Nide to consider (in the comments section of this blog), and he addressed them in his usual evasive and tirelessly adolescent manner (see here.)

Most of these are questions that I had posed to Nide earlier in our comment discussion but which he had resisted answering. Now we have his answers. Let’s take a look and see what he says.

Reaction to My Critique of Anderson and Welty’s “The Lord of Non-Contradiction”

It’s not very common to find Christian apologists acknowledging my critiques of theistic apologetics (let alone actually interacting with them). So when it does happen, and I learn about it, my interest is piqued. Typically theistic apologists ignore my writings, suggesting that even if they are aware of them and have taken some time to examine any of them, they are left only with a blank stare and perhaps some sneering reaction against me personally. There are occasions when apologists confronted with my critiques of theistic defenses will indicate that they’ll examine the matter more deeply at some unspecified future time, but fail to deliver on such promises. I’m reminded of several occasions when Chris Bolt, for example, would promise to look further into the matter at some unspecified future time.

Are the Laws of Logic "Thoughts" of the Christian God?

Hello my readers.

Happy 2555 to all!

Yes, here in Thailand, it’s not 2012. Thailand goes by a version of the Buddhist calendar, and it’s already the year 2555 here. Perhaps you could think of me as writing to you from the future.

As I predicted in earlier messages to you on my blog, I’ve been busier than Wall Street on a bull rally since getting back to Bangkok late November. The flood waters are for the most part gone, and life for most people is back to normal. But there’s a sense of urgency to make up for lost time, both in the private sector and also in public works. Schools are even going six days a week here, which means my daughter, who’s only in kindergarten, has a brutal schedule to keep.

Unfortunately, that means I haven’t been able to keep up with my blog. I see that Nide is still going at it, and that Justin Hall and Ydemoc are continuing to engage him. They’re all welcome to continue doing so. I’m sure it will all make for some interesting reading one day, supposing I get the time.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been feasting – really, nibbling and grazing, when opportunity arises – on a paper recently published by James Anderson and Greg Welty called The Lord of Non-Contradiction: An Argument for God from Logic. In this paper, the authors set out to “argue for a substantive metaphysical relationship between the laws of logic and the existence of God” (p. 1). Specifically they aim to prove “that there are laws of logic because God exists,” that “there are laws of logic only because God exists” (Ibid.). Presumably this is the Christian god of the New Testament whose existence their argument will finally prove. They say of their own argument that it is “a fascinating and powerful but neglected argument for the existence of God.” Of course, this is not meant to be self-congratulatory, but rather a device intended to hook the reader’s interest so that he’ll continue on for the next twenty-plus pages of fun-filled reading. (I’m guessing that, for Sye Ten Bruggencate, 22 pages devoted to the development of a single argument does not constitute “argumentum ad verbosium,” since it’s intended to establish, once and for all, the existence of a deity.)

A Reply to Michael: Further Thoughts on the Issue of Supernatural Deception

In the comments section of a previous blog entry of mine, Cognitive Reliability vs. Supernatural Deception, Christian blogger Michael Russell has offered numerous points of reaction. His last two comments, dated 7 December, were so loaded with topical material that I decided to post my response to him in a new blog entry here on Incinerating Presuppositionalism.

Some Thoughts on the "Sensus Divinitatis"

In the comments section of my blog Cognitive Reliability vs. Supernatural Deception, a Christian blogger by the name of Michael Russell (whose blog Something to say has some interesting posts) challenged my view that Christianity’s supernaturalism undercuts any assumed cognitive reliability on the part of the believer given the possibility, implied by its supernaturalism, that malevolent spirits may be deceiving them undetectably.

Christianity's Psychological Price Tag

Alex Botten recently commented on my blog. He wrote:

I find it slightly disturbing that the Christians are complaining that they can't deal with anything other than bite sized points.

At a guess, their religion's absolute failure to account for knowledge causes them to run from any situation where they might learn something.

Christianity's Sanction of Evil

Prologue

Over the past two weeks or so, while I’ve been living temporarily in the seaside resort town of Cha’am, Thailand (since the part of Bangkok where I live has been flooded and unreachable), I’ve been party to several discussions with presuppositional apologist Sye Ten Bruggencate. Readers of my blog will remember my critique of Sye’s website where he’s published his version of a presuppositional argument for the existence of his version of the Christian god.

Well, we’ve butted heads again, and the results have been, shall I say, historic.

Cognitive Reliability vs. Supernatural Deception

Today we join presuppositional apologist Sye Ten Bruggencate in mid-session with the Goodness Over God crew, Ben Wallis and Michael, Long, on their recent podcast featuring both Sye and Dustin Segers, who also practices presuppositional apologetics (and has his own blog). The TAG team are at it again, battling non-believers and doing what they can to shut the mouths of atheist spoilsports.

A Reply to Dustin Segers’ Dismantled Blog Entry on Objectivism

Dustin Segers, who attempted to refute the primacy of existence in a podcast with Sye Ten Bruggencate and the folks at Fundamentally Flawed, also posted an entry on his blog restating and to some extent elaborating on the refutations he gave in that podcast. Unfortunately Segers has subsequently decided to remove his blog entry after I brought to his attention that he had made a fundamental error (namely confusing the principle of the secondary objectivity of consciousness with the primacy of existence). This was not what I had expected or even desired, for it is always good to have examples of failed critiques of Objectivism on the web to learn from.

Luckily I was able to save a copy of Segers’ post before he removed it from his blog. I have reposted it on my personal website here: Dustin Segers’ Failed Attempt to Refute the Primacy of Existence. My repost of Segers’ blog entry includes all the comments which I know were submitted to his blog, including his own final comment announcing his decision to take it down.

Has the Primacy of Existence Been Refuted?

Theists who are aware of Objectivism are right to be concerned with the devastating implications which the principle of the primacy of existence has for their religious worldview. So it should come as no surprise when Christian apologists try to find some way of destroying the primacy of existence.

Once such attempt was recently executed by Christian apologist Dustin Segers, who posts under the moniker “Dusman” on various blogs. Segers’ comments can be found in this episode of a podcast program called Fundamentally Flawed. In this blog I will examine Segers’ four-point attempt to refute the primacy of existence.

George H. Smith's "Atheism: The Case Against God" - Online - Free PDF

The full version of George H. Smith's book Atheism: The Case Against God has been converted to a PDF file and is available here.

A link to the file of Smith's book was posted by Smith himself in this forum.

I have also added a link to it from the main page of my blog under "Recommended Resources."

For those who have not read Smith's book, it's an enjoyable read. So take a look.

by Dawson Bethrick

Strange Bedfellows?

Paul Manata offers an interesting assessment of the “transcendental argument for God” (TAG).

Answering Nide's Questions about the Uniformity of Nature

A visitor to my blog named Nide who posts comments under the pseudonym “Hezekiah Ahaz” has asked a series of questions relating to one of my favorite topics, the uniformity of nature.

STB: One Year and Still Waiting…

It has been an entire year now since I posted my critique of Sye Ten Bruggencate’s argument for the existence of the Christian god.

And Sye has yet to interact with my criticisms.

Five Years and Still Waiting...

Five years ago, on August 11, 2006, Aaron Kinney over at Kill the Afterlife posted this blog entry in which he published a prayer request on my behalf.