Dan's opening argument

As I had prepared material based on John Laun’s promise to debate, and our subsequent agreement, I will be defending the premises:

1.     Sense information is required for knowledge.

2.     The Christian God fails as a precondition for intelligibility.

The Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”

Wittgenstein, like most contemporary philosophers, recognized that knowledge requires justification, and that there is a limit to the justifications that one can provide for any knowledge claim. Like each story of a skyscraper rests on the story below, a knowledge claim rests on the justification for the claim. For example, we know the earth is approximately 25,000 miles in circumference. This knowledge rests on a number of justifications, including the length of a shadow cast by a vertical stick at different points on the earth. In turn, we know that the varying shadow lengths indicate the curvature of the earth by using Euclidean geometry, etc., etc. Eventually we descend the justification skyscraper and reach bedrock. Bedrock, in this case, is a justification which itself cannot be further justified, in a philosophical sense.

The critical point to understand is that the “bedrock”, the justification that cannot be further justified, is not itself a knowledge claim. Because knowledge is a justified belief, the point at which no further justification is possible cannot be knowledge, and is instead a belief. These foundational beliefs I call axioms. To avoid stopping our descent down the justification skyscraper prematurely and arbitrarily declaring a justification axiomatic, we need to apply a simple test. The test is to ask whether accepting the opposite of the justification is conceptually coherent. If the opposite is conceptually coherent, then we will require a justification for not accepting the alternative. Using our example, having two vertical sticks of the same length projecting shadows of the same length at different latitudes at the same time of day (the opposite of what we actually find) is conceptually coherent. In other words, the opposite of differing shadow lengths is, at least in principle, possible. Therefore accepting the differing shadow lengths (what we do find) is not axiomatic, and must be further justified.

This understanding that our foundational beliefs (axioms / bedrock) are themselves not knowledge claims is critical to the defense of premise #1, “Sense information is required for knowledge.” In my experience this point (underlined above) is intentionally ignored by Presuppositionalists because is nullifies their most effective rhetorical attack, “How do you know?” When it comes to the axioms, I believe them because the opposite is impossible, not because I claim them as knowledge.

With that distinction, we can look at why sense information is required for knowledge. Knowledge is a justified belief about some aspect of reality. We interact with reality through our senses, record the sensory information in our brains as memories, and conceptualize and integrate the concepts using reason. To have the knowledge that my dog is a mammal, for example, I need to at some point have sensed (saw, felt, smelled, etc.) what a dog is. On the other hand, if I come to a belief that I arrive at by reason alone, then I (if I am reasoning properly) have illuminated a necessary truth; an axiom. This truth, because the opposite is impossible, would neither have, nor require a justification, and would therefore not be knowledge.

Therefore, sense information is required for knowledge.

On the second premise, The Christian God fails as a precondition for intelligibility, a book could be written. However for my opening remarks I’ll simply chose one reason why the core Christian Presuppositional position is fallacious.

Much effort is expended by the Presuppositionalist to establish a necessary transcendent being. I’ll forgive them for a moment for rendering the term “being” meaningless, but the idea that something must exist without temporal or spatial limitations is not new (ref. ontological argument by Anselm of Canterbury, 1078). The problem with this view is that a necessary transcendent something is indistinguishable from existence itself. The Christian Presuppositionalist intends to argue for the specific God of Christianity, and therefore he must employ additional arguments to rescue his god from being a mere metaphor for existence. He typically does this by appealing to such things as the uniformity of nature, love and morality. There are whole lists of attributes you could deduce from the Bible, including some that contradict each other. But one that you don’t typically hear being brought up the Presuppositionalist is omnipotence. Although Presuppositionalists seem to universally agree that it is an attribute of God, they don’t seem eager to volunteer it up front, and instead they hope that it gets carried along with the other arguments such as the necessity of a transcendent being and a Trinitarian self-loving threesome.

Omnipotence is avoided by Presuppositionalists for a good reason…it’s totally devoid of meaning. I don’t want to straw-man John’s [any Presuppositionalist’s] position, so I’ll note here that this understanding of the Presuppositionalist view of omnipotence I get from my discussion with Sye Ten Bruggencate. If John [any Presuppositionalist] disagrees with Sye’s position, then he [she] is free to clarify his [her] own position, and I will respond accordingly. Sye claims that God is omnipotent, and that this means that He can do anything within His nature. Furthermore, God’s nature excludes the possibility of lying, and therefore lying is not a constituent of omnipotence.

At this point I shouldn’t need to say anything more, because in as much as omnipotence is meant to be the capacity to do anything, Sye has provided a directly contradictory definition of an attribute he claims for his god. But I do need to say more, because Sye has dangled the concept of unlimited capability and then immediately negated its meaning. When Sye qualifies omnipotence as being the ability to do anything “within His nature” he erases any content the concept might carry. Lying is not a desirable concept to have stuck on God (despite God’s deception described in the Bible), so the Christian simply excludes it from God’s nature. Being irrational is another un-Godly idea, so voila, it’s not in his nature. Cruel? Nope, not is his nature. God ends up being whatever the Christian wants Him to be, while still claiming him to be omnipotent.

Using this same line of reasoning, my dog is also omnipotent. Can he read the newspaper? No, but that’s not in his nature. Can he bark at the neighbor’s cat? Sure, he’s good at that. Can he calculate the circumference of the earth? Nope, not in his nature. So barking at a cat is a constituent of my dog’s omnipotence, and reading and math are not. He is not especially smart, but I love my omnipotent dog. In fact you can make the same argument for everything. A rock, for example, is capable of doing everything within its nature. A table; bird; coffee cup…everything is omnipotent. As long as the Christian clings to omnipotence as an attribute of their God, they are claiming a God that is not rationally justified. And a concept with no rational foundation cannot be the precondition for intelligibility.

OK John [Presuppositionalist], your turn.