Hi SUTG,
I. Atheism: What it is, and what it ain't (Part deux)
SUTG said:
I think the confusion arises from the unfortunate use of the word "atheist" in the first place. Nowhere else can I think of a definition of a class of people who simply lack a belief in a certain type of worldview of system.
I fully agree. The word is unfortunately misused. I'm sure I'm guilty of misusing myself. That is why I specified in my opening post the following:
VIII. The Non-Existence of Atheists
I should also point out my aversion to the term "atheist." While I'm OK with "atheism" as a system of thought or worldview, I don't acknowledge there really is any such thing as an atheist, because deep down, all men know that God exists and that they are accountable to Him, yet they suppress that truth in their presumed autonomy, unrighteousness and self-will.
You may notice that in most of my discussions about "atheists" I will use the modifier "so-called" or the epithet "anti-theist." I realize the latter can be seen as accusatory or a pejorative, but it is not intended as such. It is descriptive in a biblical way. I have no problem with the term "atheism" or "atheistic," I just don't believe there is any such thing as an "atheist."
SUTG said:
Many of us don't believe in palm reading, fortune tellers, ghosts, pyramid power, or the Illuminati. But from the fact that one does not believe in the Illuminati does not follow that they insist on explanations sans Illuminati. This is strong atheism.
Would you then say that there are atheists who would allow for extranatural explanations of natural phenomena?
SUTG said:
To sidestep the jargon for a minute, I'll concede right away that it is possible that Christian Theism is the only true worldview. What I won't do is believe it because Hilston asserts its truthfulness.
That is excellent. I was most impressed by that statement. If SUTG were to suddenly embrace Judeo-Christian theism because I asserted its truthfulness, I would work very hard to disabuse SUTG of believing on that basis. The Bible does NOT teach a "persuade-at-all-costs" strategy to apologetics. If I were to detect that SUTG was believing for the wrong reasons, I would try to debunk those reasons. I've done it before. False conversions are worse than no conversion.
SUTG said:
An atheist, then, needs not assert anything whatsoever.
No one does. When someone tells me he is an atheist, I assume he is asserting
something. Is that a false notion, SUTG?
II. The Mandatory Worldview (to wit: The Biblical Worldview)
SUTG said:
Hilston, or many of you, might have taken issue with my final comment in the last section. An atheist may not assert anything, but as soon as he enters a debate, he tacitly agrees to the use of induction, the law of non-contradiction, and other presuppositions required to make sense of the debate.
Would you say the atheist also tacitly assumes that these laws exist apart from any extra-natural source?
SUTG said:
In a private message discussion with Clete, I came up with the shorthand "Mandatory Worldview" to encompass all of the presuppositions that must be accepted to engage in debate and render experience intelligible.
The "Mandatory Worldview" that must be accepted to engage in debate and make experience intelligible is the Judeo-Christian worldview. When the anti-theist engages in debates and finds his experience intelligible, it is only because he is using stolen fire. He has presumed upon the Biblical worldview, hijacked its tools, is pretending to be a Christian in order to make sense of his experience.
SUTG said:
To deny the Mandatory Worldview is incoherent.
Exactly! :up: The "Mandatory Worldview" is the Biblical worldview, and to deny it is indeed incoherent. I realize you didn't affirm this, SUTG. I'm merely trying to make drive home the point.
III. Ultimate Questions (More 'Ultimate' Than Last Time)
SUTG said:
Given that everyone reading this has accepted and must assert to the Mandatory Worldview, we can raise some interesting questions:
-Is the Mandatory Worldview justified?
The MW [i.e. the Biblical Worldview] is indeed justified in that it cannot be any other way if human experience is to be intelligible.
SUTG said:
-Does the Mandatory Wordlview even require justification?
If it doesn't, then why even engage in debate? No other worldview than the biblical worldview can account for the intelligibility of human experience. God Himself is the necessary precondition. It is not possible for this not to be true.
SUTG said:
-What would it mean to justify the Mandatory Worldview?
It would mean affirming the existence and attributes of God. Not affirming the existence and attributes of God results in incoherence and absurdity.
SUTG said:
-Does the Christian God justify the Mandatory Worldview?
Yes.
SUTG said:
Unfortunately, Ultimate Questions such as these are much easier to ask than to answer. Hilston claims to have an answer to all four of the questions listed above. I make no such claims.
Then why bother to debate at all? If even the notion of justification is uncertain, then aren't you really wasting your time?
IV. Hilston's Answer (corrected and updated from SUTG's previous attempt)
SUTG said:
Hilston would answer the above by stating that only Christian Theism justifies the Mandatory Worldview, thus making sense of our experience.
Biblically speaking, Christian Theism is equivalent to the Mandatory Worldview, and thus the existence and attributes of God justify that worldview.
SUTG said:
He attempts to argue transcendentally, inquiring about the necessary preconditions or presuppositions that will justify the Mandatory Worldview.
The Mandatory Worldview is the Biblical worldview. I don't need to argue transcendentally to justify it. Biblically speaking, God's existence and attributes justify it.
SUTG said:
One of Hilston's phrasings of his proof is that "the Christian God is proven in that without Him you cannot prove anything".
It may be my phrasing (copped from other authors, of course), but the concept comes from the Bible.
SUTG said:
In other words, the Christian God is a necessary precondition for any proof whatsoever.
Correct.
SUTG said:
As I've mentioned before, this statement needs to be shown, not just asserted.
I'm not sure why you keep saying this. It has been shown. You've not offered a coherent counterargument.
SUTG said:
Until then, we are left with "If God is a necessary requirement for any proof, then the existence of God is proven in that, without Him, you cannot prove anything. " This is a simple tautology and, as such, tells us absolutely nothing about the state-of-affairs in this, or any other possible world. Anything whatsoever can be substituted for the word "God" in the statement and we will have a similar tautological truth.
Correct. That's why that form of argument gets us nowhere, yet you keep stating it.
SUTG said:
In his previous post, Hilston challenged me to do just that:
Hilston wrote: Try it. Put anything in place of God and you'll find either (a) it collapses to absurdity and self-contradiction, or (b) you end up describing the nature and character of God Himself.
I'll suggest replacing "God" with "lima beans", giving the proposition "If lima beans are a necessary requirement for any proof, then the existence of lima beans are proven in that without them, you cannot prove anything."
Is this proposition true? Absolutely.
Does it tell us anything about lima beans? No. We don't even need to know what lima beans are to know that the statement is true.
Of course. Why are you concerned with this? You know you can't stop there.
SUTG said:
Now, all we need to do is show that lima beans are, in fact, a requirement for any proof.
Of course. Why does this even need to be discussed? I realize that you will be unsatisfied with the demonstrations of the necessity of God's existence in order to prove anything. They've been given to you, and you pretend they haven't. This comes as no surprise, and it is exactly what the Bible tells us to expect from those who irrationally refuse to acknowledge God in this way.
V. Proofs and Refutations
SUTG said:
In his previous post, Hilston accused me of being "too concerned with the form of the argument". But the form of a deductive argument is what makes it a logical argument in the first place!
According to whom? How does the anti-theist prove or justify the generality from which he deduces truth claims about particular cases without begging the very question? Is that where the lima beans come in?
SUTG said:
If the premises of two arguments have the same truth values and the same form, their conclusions will also have the same truth values. This is what deductive logic is!
According to whom?
VI. The TAG: Is it Biblical?
SUTG said:
Presuppositionalist apologists often quote from the gospel of Paul, and other parts of the Bible indicating from where they supposedly derived their knowledge and tools.
According to these same presuppositionalists, God has created the world consistently with His Attributes: logical, uniform, and intelligible. He has endowed his creatures with the tools necessary for making sense of His Creation. (Induction, etc...The Mandatory Worldview) He did an excellent job of this! No-one can deny induction, and we learn to use it very early in our development - before we can speak a single word of English we have learned to accept induction as a tool.
While the Christian God did an excellent job of endowing us with the tools necessary for making sense of His creation, He didn't do nearly as well in endowing us with the tools necessary to understand the transcendental argument!
This is not true at all. Transcendental reasoning is not difficult. It is made difficult by stubborn and thick-headed people, some of the worst obscurantists being the poseurs of Christendumb. Even anti-theists can understand it, and they don't claim to believe in the existence of God or verity of the Bible. All it takes is a little good faith effort and a willingness to grasp it. You're proof of that, SUTG. The difficulty lies not in the content or complexity of the argument, but rather in the attitude and desire of the one to whom the argument is presented.
SUTG said:
Is the argument made clear so a reader of the Bible will discover it within? Not even close!
This is false. Transcendental reasoning was already in place and fully understood by the human authors of Scripture as they penned the text under divine guidance. In every debate found in scripture, in every apologetic command in the Bible, transcendental reasoning is invoked. For biblical treatments of apologetics, see the following links:
SUTG said:
Most Christians are unfamiliar with the transcendental argument no matter how much they have studied the Bible.
This is the lonely bandwagon fallacy (
argumentum ad populum). There are plenty of things taught in scripture that most so-called Christians and Bible students are unfamiliar with. That doesn't make them untrue. Truth is not ascertained by majority agreement.
SUTG said:
There are many types of Christian presuppositionalists, and they all disagree about the nature and form of the argument. (see Gordon Clark, Vincent Cheung, etc.)
There are many types of logicians, and they all disagree about the nature and foundations of logic. By this reasoning, we should abandon the use of logic.
SUTG said:
In his previous post, Hilston asked me to remove Clete from the list of those who understand presuppositionalism. Is Clete's Bible missing the relevant passages?
No; Clete has rejected the only theological framework and conception of God that can justify his use of logic and by which to apply reasoning at all. Clete's conception of God, indeed that of any "Open Theist," is unwittingly of a God who is finite, irrationally denying God's exhaustive knowledge and universal experience. This places the Open Theist and the anti-Theist on similar footing (i.e. The Void) when it comes to justifying their knowledge about anything.
SUTG said:
Where do presuppositionalists learn of the transcendental argument for the Christian God? From other presuppositionalists, not from the Bible.
Again, this is false. Transcendental reasoning was taught (and violated) all the way back the Garden of Eden. The first sin was a violation of transcendental reasoning. Adam, instead of thinking God's thoughts after Him and seeing God as the foundation and starting point of all reasoning, decided he wanted to be His own god, to have autonomous knowledge of good and evil (which, by the way, is what the forbidden tree was called). So he conducted an experiment, at the suggestion of Lucifer, using Eve as a guinea pig. He presumed to use the scientific method
autonomously, as do anti-theists, using himself as the control and Eve as the variable. Scripture indicates that Adam was present during the entire experiment.
SUTG said:
Even Van Til's transcendental argument owes more to the writings of Kant and Hume than it does to any of the ambiguous Bible passages presuppositionalists so often quote.
Also false. All truth is God's truth and originates with Him. While men such as Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Hume may be best known among men for having formally published various arguments, they only discovered and documented that which they observed in the world that God created. Kant and Hume are no more the creators of transcendental reasoning than Edison and Ford are the creators of electricity and combustion, respectively.
By the way, there is not a single ambiguous Bible passage in the entire Canon. If you think you've discovered one, I can show you how to discover its clarity for yourself. You don't have to listen to me. You can do it for yourself.
He's a hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent,
Jim