Fare well Deacon Duncan

Deacon Duncan of Evangelical Realism and Alethian Worldview is one of my favorite bloggers - his attention to details and his perseverance in unearthing apologist foolishness have been fascinating and inspiring to me. Over the last year and a half, I've happily followed his careful deconstruction of William Lane Craig's book "On Guard", a series on presumably the first apologist - Justin Martyr, and finally a detailed examination of Pastor Stephen Feinstein's rather inane and irritating “arguments” against atheism in his on-line debate with Russell Glasser.

His prior efforts on Evangelical Realism and Alethian Worldview were also worthy reads - I especially appreciate his Gospel Hypothesis series.

Deacon is now burned out by all this.

I understand the burnout. There is no physical evidence for a supernatural scheme of any sort, let alone God. The classic arguments for the existence of God are shot through with logical fallacies - they fail without exception. Current attempts by modern apologists are mostly awful, and occasionally bizarrely foolish. No wonder Deacon is burned out. I believe that the best counter-apologists (like Duncan) reach the limit of knowledge on the subject of theism and apologia, because it is not a real science. It is an attempt to make excuses for a superstitious mode of thinking that should have been dead millennia ago. New “arguments” are just reformulations of old arguments that were never any good to begin with.

There's no “there” there.

Here’s to Deacon - may he fare well. And may we see him down the road.

Absolutes and uncertainty

I tried several times to add a comment to Deacon Duncan’s post “The Gypsy Curse” at Evangelical Realism this morning - but was thwarted by the iPad/JavaScript conspiracy. Or maybe he’s blocking me. :-).

Deacon is deconstructing Pastor Stephen Feinstein’s impenetrable quasi-philosophical wankery (Russell’s characterization) from the Feinstein-Glasser debate last summer, and I can't wait for each week’s new installment.

Here’s what I wrote:

On a serious note, I have to ask about logic, and how much of it is axiom and how much of it is demonstrable **to a high degree of certainty**.

First, I assume most of what we learn is by exploration. A hot stove burns you, you learn not to touch it. From there we build up a library of rules of thumb that guide us through life. As society grows, people agree that some of these rules of thumb are universally valuable, and thoughtful people reverse engineer them into more formal statements.

It seems like a very few axioms are required (identity, non-contradiction), and that other components of our logic library can be exercised to a high degree of certainty (one error in a million, billion, or more).

Isn't the Pastor's (presuppositionalist's) line of attack here just based on a desire to have more absolutes in the world, as opposed to a willingness to accept uncertainty?

Comments?
Ridicule?

There are two trains of thought above that can be explored further. One, that some things require base assumptions (“axioms” or “presuppositions”, to use the debater’s parlance). Two, that the desire (or need?) for absolutes distinguishes the theist personality from the non-theist.

The second thought may have the broader implication, in that the need to have some (imagined or real) organization in one’s life - including clear answers to life’s burning questions - might be driving the attack on the first thought - “axioms”.

I don't know how long I’ve been able to deal with uncertainty - many decades, for sure. I don't have this burning need for an externally directed purpose (I’ve made my own), or an answer to the questions “where did everything come from” and “where will I go when I die”. We can talk about all of those for a lifetime, but it ceases being interesting to me when people act as if an absolute answer is *required*. I therefore tend to see this need for absolutes to be a common characteristic of the firm believer. Like it or not, I’m finding it harder to not be dismissive of this character trait.

As for absolute truths, such as axioms, I'm interested in how far down we can go before relying on mutually-agreed-upon axioms that we can’t “prove”.

Food for future thoughts.