Incinerating Presuppositionalism: Year Twenty

I began this blog with the first post on March 26, 2005, which was twenty years ago today. As milestones go, some might say this one’s kind of big. No doubt, when I first started this blog, I did not expect it to have such a run time. But here we are! It’s been a labor of love and frankly kind of addicting.

As in years past, I like to recap the previous year with links to entries since the last anniversary date: 

530. Incincerating Presuppositionalism: Year Nineteen - March 26, 2024

531. Why are you an atheist? - April 26, 2024

532. Can an atheist have purpose? - May 27, 2024

533. Are you sure there’s no god? - June 30, 2024

534. can science answer the remaining mysteries of the universe? - July 28, 2024

535. Have you ever questioned your atheism? - August 21, 2024

536. Are you completely materialistic in your mindset? - September 28, 2024

537. If you were convinced there was a god, would that be good news? - October 27, 2024

538. What Does AI Have to Say About TAG? - November 30, 2024

539. Does My Atheism Make Me Closed-Minded? - December 27, 2024

540. Imagining Creation - January 27, 2025

541. Miracles and the Primacy of Consciousness - February 23, 2025

In recent years I have not been keeping up with the latest developments in presuppositionalism, simply because my time and focus are devoted to other responsibilities and interests. On those occasions when I do poke around for the latest goings-on, it seems that most of what I find are just stale rehashes of the same talking points. At this point, I cannot even say what I have seen actually amount to arguments as such. Presuppositionalism has in general been deficient in terms of actual arguments and heavy in offensive projection, relentless interrogation and unteachable echo-chambering. Apologetics is not actually about vindicating theism so much as it is to strengthen the believers commitment to his own confessional investment.

We should always remember that the Christian bible does not lay out an epistemology, which can only imply that there is no such thing as a distinctively Christian theory of knowledge. Questions probing how we know things ultimately cannot be answered by applying Christian epistemological principles, because there aren’t any. Apologetic strategies which insist that non-believers answer a series of “How do you know?” questions are inherently fraudulent to the extent that they imply the pretense to there being a means of knowing available to believers owing to the mere fact that they are professing believers.

Presuppositionalists focus their debate ploys on topics such as the necessary preconditions of knowledge, the justification of inductive reasoning, the foundations of morality, and the like. No doubt these are vitally important areas of philosophical inquiry. But they will never be settled by appealing to a worldview which ignores the fundamental distinction between the real and the imaginary. Genuine knowledge has its basis in facts, not in fantasy. The biblical worldview immerses the mind of the believer in a make-believe psychology and emboldens the believer to pretend that he knows things that he in fact does not know. It is on the basis of this delusion that he challenges non-believers to answer stock questions on the believer’s own terms, terms which evaporate immediately once it is pointed out that the imaginary is not real.

Their interrogations are answerable, and yet their own worldview cannot provide objective answers to their own interrogations. What are the necessary preconditions of knowledge? These are identified explicitly by the axioms of existence, consciousness and identity. Yet their own worldview wipes these fundamental truths off the table. How can inductive reasoning be justified? This is answered by the objective theory of concepts, yet their own worldview has no theory of concepts to begin with, not even a bad one. What is the basis of morality? This is the primacy of existence, yet their own worldview denies the primacy of existence by affirming a universe where wishing makes it so. Where did the universe come from? It came from existence, yet their worldview holds that existence is the product of divine fantasizing, something we never observe in reality, but nevertheless virtually anyone can imagine it.

As for the future of this blog, while part of me thinks that my work here is done (maybe overdone?), I am not committed to closing it all down for good. I reserve the prerogative to publish future entries as I see fit. But I may not be keeping even the meager pace I’ve had over the past several years going forward. While this has been a wonderful learning experience for me and it has allowed me to interact with many very intelligent people over the years from all walks of life, trying to find time to work on the next entry has become a bit of a chore for me given the wide variety of competing demands on my time. Moreover, as Bukowski would have said, it’s taken on a repeat, which I find unsettling. One reader commented some months ago that he rarely has time to read. That’s a sad statement, but it is every bit as true for me as well. My work and family life are breathtakingly busy, albeit highly rewarding in fact, and frankly I’m astounded that I’ve been able to keep this blog going as long as I have.

I would love to hear from readers on what they think I may have missed, overlooked or failed to address over the years, if just to see what anyone who may have followed my work might say on this front. That’s not a commitment to dive in and take on some new area of research, but I am curious and maybe other readers will be able to point to other sources that have attended those areas.

As always, thanks to everyone who reads, and special thanks to all who have taken time out of their lives to post their thoughts in the comments.

by Dawson Bethrick

Miracles and the Primacy of Consciousness

The notion of miracles has enjoyed tremendous staying power in one form or another throughout virtually all cultures. Along with other expressions of supernaturalism, they are the stuff of much story-telling. In modern-day entertainment, supernaturalism oozes in everything from Stephen King novels to science fiction space operas. It is featured in campfire stories and also ancient religious texts.

It is curious, however, how some who will not take the campfire ghost story seriously will be up in arms when you don’t take the ancient religious story seriously. But if you ask these same people whether or not they believe wishing makes it so, they’ll typically say no, even emphatically. And yet the very notion of a miracle traces its roots to instances of some consciousness commanding reality to conform to its intentions, and reality obeying those commands. 

Imagining Creation

Many thinkers insist that the universe cannot be eternal, that it must have been caused to exist by some previously existing power or agency. Many secular scientists affirm a version of the ‘big bang’ that purports to “explain” how the universe “got here,” while religious thinkers hold that the universe is the product of some conscious act. I have not adopted either of these views or anything comparable to them. 

My view is that the universe is eternal – because existence is eternal. ‘Universe’ in my view is essentially the sum totality of everything that exists, whatever that happens to be. On this view, if something exists, it is part of the totality of everything that exists, which means it must be part of the universe. This is not to say that every particular thing in the universe exists as-is eternally – the leaves on the tree outside my window will eventually fall off and decompose into something else, but the matter that makes them up continues to exist in some form. But this view does entail that one cannot postulate the existence of something outside the universe – such as some agency allegedly responsible for bringing the universe into existence. This instance of the self-exclusion fallacy invalidates such a proposal. 

Another way to frame my position is to recognize that reality is eternal. To say that reality was “created” could only mean that something must have created reality, but then the question becomes: is not whatever is that supposedly created reality, itself supposed to be real? Or are we to accept the view that the unreal created the real? Even the most hard-core theist is not going to allow this. But he will resist conceding the fact that the universe is eternal and thereby likewise avoid discussing the implications this has for reality as such. “Such a person,” writes Leonard Peikoff, “does not contest the need of an irreducible starting point, as long as it is a form of consciousness; what he finds unsatisfactory is the idea of existence as the starting point.” (Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p. 21). For the theist, it’s sacrilegious to suppose that the universe is anything other than the product of supernatural wishing.

Does My Atheism Make Me Closed-Minded?

On a number of occasions throughout my adult life in which I have discussed my views with theists, I have been accused of being closed-minded. Typically, the conversation starts out amicably enough, but at some point the theist realizes that my defense of my rejection of theism is impervious to his apologetic tactics. That is when frustration kicks in and personal attacks begin to well up. Usually the believer tells me that I hate his god or that I just don’t want to give up some sin or another. In some instances, the theist announces that I’m simply closed-minded and therefore unwilling to “see the light” as it were. 

In one exchange I had with a theist a couple years ago, I explained that my atheism was really a natural consequence of choosing to be honest on questions pertaining to theism in particular as well as philosophy in general. After all, I realize that I have no direct awareness of any gods, and I have found without exception that efforts to support the inference that there is (or “must be”) a god, are terminally deficient. I am of the view that choosing to believe something that one does not think is true (assuming that’s really possible) is not an application of honesty. Pretending to know something when one does not is certainly not an expression of an honest orientation to facts.

What Does AI Have to Say About TAG?

As readers here probably already know, AI is all the craze these days, and it’s not going away. I know next to nothing about AI myself, but my little experience with it is more than sufficient to give me some idea of its potential uses, some beneficial, others perhaps not so beneficial. But recently I got to wondering what AI can tell us about TAG, the transcendental argument for the existence of a god. Sometimes asking apologists to present this elusive argument has resulted in mixed and sometimes unsatisfying results. So why not ask AI? 

So I pulled up Chat GPT and plugged in my query. 

If you were convinced there was a god, would that be good news?

In today’s entry we turn to Michael Brown’s final question from his article 7 honest questions for atheists. As the title of his article suggests, Brown poses seven questions for atheists to consider, presumably in a good-faith effort to understand non-believers better. Naturally, different people who do not believe in a deity are going to answer Brown’s questions differently, and readers are invited to share their own reactions to his questions in the comments section below. The answers that I present here on my blog are my own and are not intended to speak on behalf of anyone other than myself. 

My answers to Brown’s previous questions can be accessed here:

1. Why are you an atheist? 

2. Can an atheist have purpose? 

3. Are you sure there’s no god? 

4. Can science answer the remaining mysteries of the universe? 

5. Have you ever questioned your atheism? 

6. Are you completely materialistic in your mindset?

In his seventh question, Brown wants to know how we as atheists would evaluate the prospect that the Christian god were real, whether we would welcome that or not.

Have you ever questioned your atheism?

In this entry I continue my interaction with Michael Brown’s 7 honest questions for atheists. This post is my answer to Brown’s fifth question. My answers to Brown’s previous questions can be accessed here:

1. Why are you an atheist? 

2. Can an atheist have purpose? 

3. Are you sure there’s no god? 

4. Can science answer the remaining mysteries of the universe?

In his fifth question, Brown queries atheists on their personal experiences, asking whether or not they’ve had any which challenge their atheism. The subliminal assumption seems to be that atheism is a worldview like a religion, and that certain experiences that one might have may conflict with the fundamental tenets of atheism. But atheism is not a worldview, and as such atheism has no tenets to speak of. Theism is not fundamental, and thus neither is atheism as an antithesis to theism. One can be an atheist and, like theists, still get the issue of metaphysical primacy wrong. (In fact, many atheists do!) 

Are you sure there's no god?

In today’s entry, I address the third question from Michael Brown’s 7 honest questions for atheists.

Earlier installments in this series can be found here:

1. Why are you an atheist? 

2. Can an atheist have purpose?

Brown’s third question has to do with certainty, and whether or not an atheist can be certain that there is no god. I will address this from my own standpoint – I do not presume to speak for all atheists. Readers are invited to share their own thoughts in the comments, either in reply to Brown’s question or in response to my own efforts to address it. 

Why are you an atheist?

Some time ago a reader asked me to take a look at Michael Brown’s 7 honest questions for atheists. I agreed to do so when I had time and said that if it interested me, I might post some thoughts in response to it. In this entry, I will address the Brown’s first question. Readers are invited to use the comments section to offer their own responses to the question.

Brown's first question is as follows:

1. Would you say that you are (or, were) an atheist based primarily on intellectual study or based on experience? Or did you never believe in God at all? 

Put another way, was it the lack of answers to prayer, failures within organized religion, or some other anti-faith experience that first caused you to question the existence of God? Or was it something you learned in school or your studies that caused you to doubt? Or were you raised without belief in God and you’ve never found a good reason to question it?

Is the Axiom of Existence "Ambiguous"? A Reply to Eli Ayala

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.

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.

Anderson’s Anti-Epistemological Argument Against Naturalism

Recently Christian apologist James Anderson recently published An Epistemological Argument Against Naturalism. Readers are encouraged to take a look for themselves.

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.)

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.

Frank Turek vs. the Laws of Nature

Recently I saw a brief video 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.

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.

Buried Signposts

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 here), 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. 

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. 

Evolution and the Persistence of Religion

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?

(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.) 

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. 

Same Old Song and Dance: Anderson on Induction... again

Christian apologist James Anderson has published yet another article on the problem of induction, this time as others essentially repeating the same superficialities from two decades ago, 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.

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.

Some Thoughts in Response to Anderson’s Argument on Propositions

Last month, the Ivy League International Apologetics Database, aka ILIAD Forum, published an article by Christian apologist James Anderson titled In What Ways is God the Foundation for all Knowledge? The ILIAD Forum is new to me, and it may be new to readers here at Incinerating Presuppositionalism as well. In its obligatory About page, it states that it “was founded in 2021 by undergraduate students from all across the Ivy League, who wanted to provide an online, accessible, and rigorous database of answers to common questions about the nature and commitments of orthodox Christianity.” The site hosts articles by some of the more familiar names (e.g., Vern Poythress, K. Scott Oliphint, William Edgar) and some not so familiar (to me at any rate). Without having explored much of it, already it appears to be a promising quarry for future reading.

In Anderson’s article (cross-posted on his own blog here), he includes a paragraph which demonstrates how apologists can pack so much distortion into so little space. Brian May must be green with envy!

In this entry I will first quote that paragraph in its entirety, then I will follow that with my own interaction, and readers can post their own reactions in the comments section.

An Examination of Van Til’s “Argument from the Unity of Knowledge”

In my previous entry we surveyed the salient background features propping up Cornelius Van Til’s arguments for the existence of the Christian god as formalized by apologist James Anderson in his paper If Knowledge Then God (IKTG). The four biggies here are that (a) there can be only one argument (hence Anderson presents a total of seven formalized arguments in his paper, four of them on behalf of Van Til), (b) this argument establishes specifically Christian theism (as opposed to some “generic theism”), (c) the argument’s conclusion is certain (“not merely probable”), and (d) the argument must be a “transcendental” argument (by which means the apologist “discovers” or rather asserts what the necessary preconditions of knowledge must be). Thus we witnessed Van Til boast that “there is absolutely certain proof for the existence of God and the truth of Christian theism” (The Defense of the Faith, p. 103.) and that “this one proof is absolutely convincing” (Common Grace and the Gospel p. 192). 

So the very nature of knowledge as such, which human beings do in fact acquire and possess, is purportedly of vital interest in drawing the conclusion that there must be a god, and accordingly this god must be the god described in the Christian bible. What always strikes me as a fundamental liability to the presuppositionalists’ project here is that their procedure exhibits virtually no awareness of how the human mind forms concepts or even any discussion of whether concepts even play an integral role in epistemology. This omission is evident even in the fourth argument which Anderson attributes to Van Til, the so-called “Argument from Conceptual Schemes” (cf. IKTG, pp. 23-24), which is where one would most expect to find an analysis of concepts, but does not. If knowledge is conceptual (and it is), this oversight is quite a liability. In fact, I’d go even further and wager that not only is it because Christianity lacks an understanding of concepts – their nature, how they are formed, how they relate to and depend on the perceptual level of awareness, etc. – that believers might therefore imagine that knowledge must somehow be sourced in the supernatural, but also that supernatural notions cannot be rationally inferred from an objective understanding of concepts. 

How all this plays out is very instructive when it comes to assaying the intellectual deficiencies of presuppositionalism in particular, and Christianity in general. So with my earlier points in mind, let’s turn to the Argument from the Unity of Knowledge and see how “absolutely convincing” this “absolutely certain proof for the existence of God and the truth of Christian theism” might be. 

Preliminary Thoughts on Van Til’s “Argument from Unity of Knowledge”

In his paper If Knowledge Then God: The Epistemological Theistic Arguments of Plantinga and Van Til (hereafter IKTG), Christian apologist James Anderson develops a total of seven arguments, three from Alvin Plantinga and four from Cornelius Van Til, which are intended to draw conclusions affirming Christian theism. What unites Plantinga and Van Til for Anderson is that “both have argued that a successful epistemology… must appeal to God at some point” and also that “a thoroughgoing adherence to naturalism (roughly, the view that there are no supernatural beings) is a recipe for debilitating skepticism” (IKTG, p. 2).

This is all very fascinating to me since, back when I was a believer, one thing that did stand out to me in my study of the Christian bible, is that it had next to nothing to say on epistemology. My guess is that Plantinga and Van Til were going off of sources other than what we find between Genesis and Revelation.

The Specter of Antithesis

Presuppositional apologists often frame the conflict between their “worldview” and all other worldviews in terms of a fundamental antithesis between Christianity on the one hand, and “unbelieving thought” on the other. The intention behind this notion of “antithesis” seems to be the self-serving portrayal of Christianity as the lone champion of truth contending against every other conceivable worldview as if they were mutually exclusive. This is certainly one of the take-aways of the biblical narrative, which is explicitly tribal in character.

However, in philosophical terms, Christianity is in fact just one among many forms of mysticism. Presuppositionalism’s claim to exclusivity actually underscores a profound lack of philosophical awareness on the part of its defenders. The apologist’s job is to give what is in essence a tribalistic feature of his religion the air of philosophical respectability. I’ll leave it to readers to judge how successful they are at this.

David Wood, Star Trek, and the Inevitable Persistence of Religion

Some weeks ago an acquaintance of mine asked me to comment on a video uploaded to a YouTube channel called Acts17Apologetics. This is David Wood’s channel – the would-be bomber who clobbered his own father over the head with a ball-peen hammer. That’s according to his own testimony. But I was not asked to explore David Wood’s daddy issues, so that can be left for another occasion.

The video of Wood’s which I was asked to review is called What Star Trek Got RIGHT about Jesus, which Wood published back in May this year. In this video, Wood reacts to “an atheist meme” which pokes fun at Christianity using the 1960s television series Star Trek as an exemplar.