Caleb Moore's opening statement

As a brief reminder, even if you don't respect the arguments that are made, I insist that we respect the people  making the argument. Please keep any comments civil, and on topic. Thank you.

I would like to thank Caleb Moore for agreeing to debate. Caleb is stepping in where other Theists have declined, so I respect his willingness to express his views publicly. He has provided a brief statement about himself, followed by his opening argument.

My name is Caleb Moore I am the pastor of Logos Church in Tulsa, Ok. I barely made it out of high school and I have no college degree. I have never taken a class in philosophy I just enjoy reading and thinking. If my grammar and punctuation are poor please don’t let it take away from the argument. Me no school much so me bad egwish.

I would like to thank Dan for giving me an opportunity to express why I think the worldview of a Christian theist is more plausible, consistent and accurate then any other worldview, especially the view that he affirms which is atheism. I watched several of his videos today and I noticed that he often mentions a recent study that shows a large number of Christians struggle with doubt. From his perspective this is a sign of the weakness of their argument and he shows a sincere desire to free them from their cognitive dissonance.

I would like to remind him at the outset, that Christians are actually encouraged to doubt by our belief system. We are told in scripture to “test everything.” In discussions such as these we bring two competing worldviews together and test them against each other to see which one best describes the world we find ourselves in.

               I will be defending theism not based upon evidential claims such as the Kalam cosmological argument, or the fine-tuning argument, although I think these are solid and valid points. Instead I would like to ask the question, why would proving anything actually prove something? Instead of starting with the axiom that he believes to be the foundation I think we can take one more step back. My argument is a version of the Transcendental Argument for God (TAG).

It goes as follows
1. If there is no God then logic is relative

2. Logic is not relative

3. Therefore God exists

I am reasoning from the absurdity of the contrary.

               For the atheist the laws of logic are not necessary, universal, unchanging, abstract truths; they are simply the product of the mind, or an agreed upon system conceived through some sort of sensory input in order to make society work. This means that essentially the laws of logic are not laws that must be obeyed to do this kind of debate, they are merely suggestions that are somehow so universally accepted and exercised that it would be consistent to put them in a category of thinking called “might makes right” The sociopath who believes to have for himself a logical reason to fly planes into a building is not thinking illogically it is just that his version of logic does not conform to the patterns agreed upon by the majority of present and past. Since his logic is different (not wrong) it also gives him a different set of moral values. Now his logic and morality differ greatly from the rest of society but they are not in themselves evil or universally wrong.

For anything to be evil there would have to be an absolute standard of good and for it to be wrong there would have to be a universal standard of rightness. Things like rape and murder are not evil by atheistic standards they are just socially unacceptable. So it is neither wrong or evil it is just different than what one bag of protoplasm might prefer over another bag of protoplasm. Logic has been reduced to majority rules since there is  no absolute standard one can appeal to and when a person acts outside of this majority he is declared foolish and perhaps even dangerous.

Given atheistic naturalism the human mind is just atoms banging around. If we were to take two sodas and shake them up really well, then simultaneously twisting off the tops of both sodas, we would see them begin to fizz. Here is the point of such an exercise, nobody would see such a feat and ask which Soda is winning the debate. There is no debate because there is no truth to their fizzing; it’s just what those chemicals do in that environment under pressure…they fizz. Following atheism all we are is Sodas fizzing, sure we are more complex but at the core we are chemical reactions interacting with our environment.  If this is so, then logic, reasoning and truth are all relative and debating is pointless. I fizz Christianity and my opponent fizzes atheism. 

               The atheist philosopher Alex Rosenberg was correct in carrying his worldview to it’s logical conclusions when he pointed out in his book The Atheist Guide to reality that words have no real meaning and there are no real truths and the self doesn’t exist. Strangely enough he used words and logic to make that case and then put his name on the book.

We regularly encounter logical absolutes that are not created but rather conformed to. Without a universal standard of logic, we cannot expose what is illogical. Whether or not someone recognizes this presupposition is irrelevant to the fact that the foundation of rationality is built upon absolute truth and logical absolutes. There is no point in debating if truth is relative.

               There are logical absolutes. They are always true, everywhere, all the time. An example would be, "Something cannot bring itself into existence." We know this is true because if something does not exist, it cannot have any attributes and would not be able to perform any action. If something does not exist, it does not have any attribute by which it might perform an action. If it can't perform an action, nothing can be accomplished and it could not bring itself in the existence. We can then see that the statement "something cannot bring itself into existence" is an absolute logical truth.

We live in a world with universal abstract constants. Logic in the US is the same as the logic used in China. If logic was a social construct then we would find that different societies has completely different rules of logic. Naturalism cannot account for such universal abstract constants. The atheist thinker Hume stated that it is a fallacy to assume regularity in the future simply based upon regularity in the past so an appeal to past experiences for living by the rules in the future is not a justification in and of itself. Since the word is chaos, and the universe is spinning out of control there is not reason to believe that words or truth have any constant universal meaning. You must appeal to a universal, unchanging, immaterial creator in order to live in the world that we live in on a daily basis. Therefor God exists.

               I am sure my opponent will disagree but if does so by arguing logically then he is standing on my presupposition while denying it’s conclusion.