Dan's response #1

Caleb wrote, “I would like to remind him at the outset, that Christians are actually encouraged to doubt by our belief system.”

I applaud Caleb if in fact he is embracing doubt and encouraging skepticism in his fellow Christians.  This, however, would be contrary to mainstream Christian teaching.  [Hebrews 11: 1  Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.] According to bible.org, the three primary virtues of Christians are faith, hope and love. Faith, and its cousin hope are the very antithesis of doubt. Christians are encouraged at every turn to suppress doubt and believe without evidence, or in spite of the evidence to the contrary.

Matthew 17:20  And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, 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.

Doubt is the lack of conviction; unbelief. This is the very state of mind which Jesus (according to the Bible) dismisses as impotent compared to the immense power available through even a small portion of faith. The verse Caleb is referencing, 1 Thessalonians 5, contains the advice, “But let us [put] on the breastplate of faith and love; and for a helmet, the hope of salvation.”  

That a verse can be plucked from the Bible to support skeptical inquiry amongst the sea of verses exhorting believers to have faith is just one example of the many contradictions contained in the Christian Bible. Again, if such pleas to faith can be dismissed by the Christian for their obvious folly, then I agree with Caleb that to “test everything” based on an objective assessment of the evidence is the only basis for knowledge.

Caleb posed the question “why would proving anything actually prove something?” Unfortunately this question seems to embody a contradiction that makes it unintelligible to me.

The argument being put forward for God appears to be similar to the traditional Presuppositional argument, in which all worldviews except for Christianity lead to absurdity, while the Christian God is said to provide the basis for logical absolutes. Caleb specifically states “My argument is a version of the Transcendental Argument for God (TAG).” So I will provide here one of many possible refutations of TAG.

First though, let me address a false assumption. Caleb wrote, “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.”

I don’t understand where Caleb got this impression, but speaking for myself, logic is an unchanging, universal, necessary truth. To state that for the atheist logic must be “simply the product of the mind” is ironic, because the traditional formulation of TAG states that regarding logical absolutes, “it must be an absolute transcendent mind that is authoring them.” (ref. http://carm.org/transcendental-argument)

The confusion comes from taking just one aspect of the chain of events that leads from logic being an aspect of reality, to expression of logic through language. It starts from some deduced aspect of reality (eg. the law of non-contradiction) that, the comprehension of which, alters our brains in such a way that we form a concept that is then expressed metaphorically using letters or sounds (aka a statement). To claim that logic is “simply the product of the mind” is to focus solely on the mental process of cognition and language formation, and to ignore the reality upon which the cognition is dependent.

While speaking from a hypothetical atheist’s perspective, Caleb posits a sociopath that has flown a plane into a building and concludes that the sociopath’s “logic and morality differ greatly from the rest of society but they are not in themselves evil or universally wrong.”

To re-state, I agree that logic is universal. However the scenario Caleb constructs suggests a misapplication of logic on the part of the sociopath, and not a different logic as he suggests.

An argument for absolute moral standards was put forward with. “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.”

Caleb does not define morality, but I will define it as follows: morality constitutes a set of guides to behavior in order to increase well-being. Therefore a moral act is that which increases well-being. From this definition we can objectively assess whether an act will increase or decrease well-being. The problem with the use of terms such as rape and murder, is that the terms already carry with them a moral judgment. Rape, for example, is the act of intercourse without the consent of one party. Intercourse in itself does not necessarily decrease well-being, but under the circumstances of force or coercion it can objectively be seen to decrease well-being.

As an atheist I have no problem comprehending an objective view of morality. However, for the theist that posits God as the source of morality, their view is necessarily a subjective view. Morality for this theist is subject to God’s whim and is divorced from the consequences of the act. Such a view leads to rationalizations as moral such behaviors as described in Numbers 31:17 “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.”

An error regarding the concept of truth was committed by Caleb in his opening statement. He wrote about shaking bottles of soda and removing the caps. He stated that “there is no truth to their fizzing.” This is a common presuppositional error. Truth, of course, applies to propositions and not to reality itself. If I were to say that the sky is blue, my statement could be assessed to either correspond with reality or not. If the statement corresponds, it is said to be true. But to ask whether the sky is true is nonsensical. By attempting to apply truth directly to fizzing sodas, as opposed to a statement about the fizzing sodas, Caleb is making the same error.

Caleb makes an argument that "Something cannot bring itself into existence" is an absolute truth. I agree that something coming from nothing seems contradictory.

Near the end of Caleb’s opening statement, in speaking about logical absolutes, we get to the nub of the presuppositional argument, “Naturalism cannot account for such universal abstract constants.”  Depending on what is meant by “accounts” I would agree. Logic is axiomatic; necessarily true based on the contrary being incoherent. As Caleb implies, the very act of debating requires that we accept the truth of logic. To go further and attempt to construct an “account” (a justification or cause) for logic is the Achilles heel of TAG, which I can explore in future posts.

The conclusion presented that God must exist as creator (presumably of logic) does not follow from the arguments presented. However, the most important question that needs to be addressed is “What is God?”