Dan's response # 2

I put an important question at the end of my first response, and it was either overlooked or ignored. So to emphasize the importance of the question I’ll put it here at the beginning: What is God?

Christian Presuppositional Apologetics and its underpinning of the transcendental argument for God (TAG) are (unintentionally) successful in establishing the primacy of existence. So long as the term God simply represents existence, presupposing such a God is the only rational thing to do. To assume that existence is not constrained by space/time is perfectly reasonable. However it is the attempt to impart agency to this existence and assign human-like attributes that send the Christian apologist into the land of irrational speculation. Dissecting the attributes of the Christian God will clearly demonstrate its incoherence.

Regarding Hebrews 11:1 you wrote, “Paul is encouraging a group of people to remember that their hope for what God said would happen would actually happen based upon prior experiences.”

“Faith” as you define it here is inductive inference. There’s no doubt that faith can be used in this way. For example, I have “faith” that the chair I’m sitting in will hold me because it has held me in the past. But I think it is naïve to suggest that “faith” does not carry with it the conceptual baggage of unwarranted confidence. Indeed context is important, and throughout Hebrews 11 the Bible speaks to the power of faith. But as in Hebrews 11:5, “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists”, that faith is linked to belief alone. And nothing in the previous response repudiates the notion of faith as unbridled conviction as stated in Matthew 17:20, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”  It is clearly the depth of conviction that is paramount, not the quantity or quality of the evidence. Sure, you can call rational trust "faith", but religious faith is more than that. There’s a reason why they call an irrational reliance on prayer faith-healing. 

And regardless of whether faith is based on evidence, the initial claim was that Christian doctrine encourages doubt. Faith, trust, inductive inference…whatever you call it… faith is clearly the opposite of doubt. If faith, hope and love are truly the preeminent virtues of Christianity, then promoting doubt would directly contradict what it means to be a good Christian.

Regarding logic you wrote, “…you have no justification to assume that in a world that is constantly expanding and headed towards chaos that such laws will be consistent in the future.” Setting aside the red herrings of cosmic expansion and increasing entropy for a moment, the argument that inductive inferences are invalid after making an argument for inductive inference (faith) is noteworthy.

Regarding my comment, “Christians are encouraged at every turn to suppress doubt and believe without evidence, or in spite of the evidence to the contrary.” I had no intention for this to be an ad hominem attack or to dismiss “all believers as willfully ignorant and manipulated.” If you took it that way I apologize. I was simply trying to accurately portray the emphasis on belief as a virtue in itself and the accompanying devaluing of skepticism.

On the issue of morality being tied to well-being you dismissed the idea, writing, “Dan fails to recognize that the well being of one group often requires them to defend against another”.  I won’t deny that moral and ethical questions can be very difficult, and often involve assessing consequences at multiple levels of impact from the individual to larger groups. The best analogy might be to health. When I run long distances I often get blisters. I also sacrifice time with my partner or children. But the payoff of improved fitness, decreased illness and increased longevity are worth the short term sacrifice. The same is true of many moral calculations. A decrease on well-being in one area may result in greater well-being somewhere else. But to assume the position that because such calculations can be difficult that we should give up trying to assess them is folly. If morality is divorced from well-being, then upon what basis can we judge any action moral or immoral? This is precisely the question that needs to be answered regarding my reference to Numbers 31:17.  Even if I take at face value your assertion that the Midianites were a “malicious pursuing army”, how can slaughtering everyone and keeping the virgin girls for themselves be considered moral after the Midianite army was defeated? I can confidently say that hacking to death unarmed women and children, and carting away traumatized young girls as sex slaves is a net decrease of well-being on every level.

In characterizing my statement “Sense information is required for knowledge” as “self-refuting”, you have failed to understand the very first argument I made in my opening statement. I won’t re-argue the point, but only restate the important point that “the justification that cannot be further justified, is not itself a knowledge claim.”

I agree with your statement “Assuming logic as an axiom does not undermine God”, depending on what you mean by “God”. It is the Christian, Biblical definition of God that undermines the concept.  You’ve also stated that I’ve stopped the conversation and come to a conclusion “despite evidence to the contrary.” I’m completely open to accepting the proposition that God exists, provided that a coherent definition for God is provided and the evidence is compelling. Evidence might be interesting, but it would be impossible to determine what amounts to evidence if we don’t know what we’re looking for in the first place. That's why my first question in this response is so important.

I object to your statement “the atheist has already decided, not based upon evidence but upon emotion that God cannot exist” for two reasons. First, to assume to understand my emotional state is problematic, and to state that my position is based solely on my imagined emotions is the type of ad hominem attack that we have both agreed is not acceptable. Second, atheism is the rejection of the positive claim that a theistic God exists, and not the claim that a God cannot (or does not) exist. The best analogy I’ve heard to explain the distinction is the following. Suppose we come upon a large jar of marbles. You glance at the jar and state “the jar contains an even number of marbles”. I don’t accept your conclusion; therefore I’m an “A-even-ist” regarding your claim. This doesn’t mean that I claim that the opposite of your claim is true (that there is an odd number of marbles). Of course we can agree on what marbles are, so we could, at least in principle, determine what constitutes evidence for the claim of an even number of marbles. But the Christian conception of God is logically incoherent, and therefore a coherent definition is required before we can even entertain propositions about such a thing.

Therefore, when you say “According to Dan’s definition of doubt, his atheism is then a lack of conviction and disbelief” you are exactly right!

Let me examine a paragraph in which you claim that I have removed the tools for the justification of logic and arbitrarily stopped.

“This brings us back to his claim that logic is simply an axiom, a foundation that we all just believe that needs no further justification. Of course I would agree that if we start with his worldview it is an axiom because as I said he has removed the necessary tools to go any further. He has arbitrarily chosen to stop his train of thought here, because going any further would give evidence for what he has already decided is false.”

I’m wondering what tool we could use to justify logic? It can’t be faith, because faith has been defined as a part of logic (induction). How do we step outside of logic to find the foundation upon which it rests? The Presuppositionalist claims to have solved this riddle by positing God as that justification. But if God is the source of logic, then logic cannot be said to be transcendent. In other words, there would have been a time when logic didn’t exist. Furthermore, if God pre-existed logic, then He wouldn’t have been bound by logic, and he could have, for example, existed and not existed at the same time and in the same manner. On the other hand if God is (as some have said) “logical by nature”, then logic is transcendent and not a product of anything…including a transcendent mind. So the theist has a choice; 1.either give up the absolute universal nature of logic, and with it an eternally logical God, or 2. agree that logic is universal as a necessary precondition for intelligibility. The second option seems prudent. But unfortunately for the theist, the second option concedes the necessity of anything other than existence itself, including the Christian conception of God.

However, when you wrote that logic is “the product of a being that is perfect and unchanging, the very mind of God”, you chose the less prudent option.  To be a “product”, logic would require a producer and a production process. What tools are used in the manufacture of logic?

You also stated that my belief in logic as an axiom was arbitrary. Far from it. My belief in logic comes from the impossibility of the contrary. However, by attempting to step outside of logic to posit a God as a producer of logic, you are committing the sin of arbitrariness. For without logic (reason), there is no reason in anything, including the production of logic.

You also ask an important question, “why is it impossible to have a transcendent cause of transcendent laws?” Because cause requires an effect. But if logic transcends space/time, then there was never a time or place that logic didn’t exist and it didn't need to be caused. Without a temporal sequence of cause and effect, you cannot even establish a correlation, much less causation.

Regarding omnipotence, by attempting to salvage the concept you’ve committed the same mistake as Sye Ten Bruggencate, and rendered the term meaningless. “Yes, God has the capacity to do anything he wants but because his will is perfect he only does what he wants making the opposite of that impossible.”

My dog is still omnipotent per your definition. You might say that my dog can’t open the back door, so he’s not omnipotent. But when he whimpers at the back door what he really wants is for me to come and open the door for him. My dog’s primary goal is to be dog-like, and because his will is perfect, it is impossible for him to do anything that a dog wouldn’t do… no matter how much I wish he would let himself out.

Finally, you ask the question, “why is his reasoning valid?”  This question can be interpreted two ways. First, am I reasoning correctly? And second, why is using reason valid? From the context of your argument I’m assuming you intended the second meaning. The answer is because it’s all we have. You’ve accused me of giving up the tools to go beyond logic. But to go beyond, you must give up the only tool that allows us to make sense of the world. I’m unwilling to go beyond logic, because to do so would be, by definition, irrational.