Presuppositionalism

My weekend reading and podcasting revolved around

• Episode 97: Presuppositional Apologetics (part 1) at Reasonable Doubts
• Terry Gross's interview with C. P. Wagner at Fresh Air. Wagner is a leading apostle of the New Apostolic Reformation , which employs a presuppositionalist, and frankly, delightfully demon-infested, supernatural world view.

Presuppositionalism is

a school of apologetics that presumes Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought

Now, I'll be go-to-heck ... I thought that this was just a presumption that most literal believers have, not a specific strain of literal believer and apologist.

Into the fray...

Starting at the beginning, we must presuppose that the individual thinking the thoughts that you (or I) am having at least exists. Absent any sense experience, this individual is like a newborn infant ... possessing no sense or recollection of the world, and as yet having made no attempts to interact with the world. Certainly, communication is not yet on the table ... until that first primal scream.

I'm not qualified to say whether a newborn, without any sense experience or interaction with the world, is capable of reasoning about itself ... but I presume that, absent interaction with the world, it cannot know the world exists ... so only it only knows that its self exists.

Consequently, to discuss things about the world, we must presuppose that 1) we exist as an individual, and 2) the world exists. From there, we gather sense experience, initially interpreting it through the physical and emotional filters that we have at birth, and soon thereafter, adding additional filters that we ourselves build based on our previous experiences and interpretations of these experiences, combined with changes to our physical and emotional underpinnings. This sounds like it could become a pretty complicated business, so I'll stop there.

I must ask ... what would cause an adult to presuppose that "Christian faith is the only basis for rational thought"? I'll purposely overuse the word "presuppose" - and say that I must presuppose (without any prior sense experience of the presuppositionalist world view) that a presuppositionalist is capable of and in fact, does accept a world view that does not correspond with the sense experience that the vast majority of sentient Earth beings have. That is to say ... events and concepts in the Bible do not appear to exist in the real world. Presuppositionalists may think they do, but the existence of the supernatural has never been credibly recorded. God - presumably the epitome of a supernatural being - is thus less likely to exist than the simpler conception of just dimensions, forces, matter or beings outside of nature.

Cutting to the chase, I understand presuppositionalists dispense with, or ignore, other arguments for the existence of God, and simply employ the Transcendental Argument for God ... to wit:

1. If there is no god, knowledge is not possible.
2. Knowledge is possible (or some other statement pertaining to logic or morality).

Therefore God exists.

The counter apologetics segment at Reasonable Doubt - incomplete as of this blog post - assumes that some counter apologetics strategy is effective (or maybe they're just steering the uninitiated away from bad strategies - only completion of the series can tell me). I will take a stab at it, however.

It seems that TAG fails in these ways:

• It asserts without evidence that knowledge is only accessible through the god which the argument attempts to conclude
• It asserts the existence of god - which then fulfills the knowledge-enabling capability.

We have both a false dilemma in the first premise, and a bare assertion in the second premise. In fact, you can say the first premise is 1) a false dilemma, 2) circular, 3) affirms the consequent.

There is no reason to think other ways of achieving knowledge do not exist and aren't more simple, elegant and probable.

There is no reason to accept the assertion that god exists under any circumstances ... especially in the absence of 1) valid and true arguments for god's existence; and 2) credible physical evidence. The availability of other, better, more credible explanations for natural entities and phenomena eliminates the necessity of God or any other unnatural agent.

Oh ... and did I mention "Presuppositionalism"? ;-D

Answers in Genesis

If you haven't read Genesis - you haven't gotten the foundation of the Jewish and Christian (and presumably Muslim) religions from the acknowledged source.

If you skip Genesis and read only Exodus through the later prophets, the Bible reads as if the central character - Yahweh - is nothing more than a human illusionist or scam artist. There are a lot of negative adjectives that can be used for Yahweh, but the most famous collection is found in this statement from Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion:

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

"Insecure, murderous punk" is my personal synopsis. Without some establishing some credentials, Yahweh is no more than a petty tyrant.

Claiming "God did it" - as millennia of appropriately skeptical observers have noted, is not adequate validation that he-who-done-it exists in the reality that we all share. The first verse of the first chapter of the first book of the Bible does nothing to establish the bona fides of Yahweh ... it simply presumes at the beginning of all things, God did it. It goes on to paint a picture that is well removed from modern understanding of the cosmos. Later, we get to the creation of man and woman, then propagation of their offspring - who amazingly meet other humans out in the world. These other humans are never explained. Then we get to the memorable, but supremely impossible story of Noah's ark - a boat which serves as a repository for examples of all life on earth for a whole year. When the flood dies down, Noah's family encounters "other humans" again, just like the post-Adam story. These folks aren't explained either. The book closes with the dying of Jacob, and the establishment of the twelve tribes of Israel, which sets the stage for the cultural history that follows in Exodus.

Apologists and "sophisticated theologists" have and do weave all sorts of convoluted, self-contradictory and illogical arguments and excuses that seek to 1) establish "proof" of God's existence; 2) clarify (or sell their personal spin on...) the Bible for the consumption of the faithful; 3) reinforce faith in current believers - or gain new converts; 4) defend the base stories and the layers of interpretation and spin against the data and understanding that have accrued throughout human history.

When will Apologists, "sophisticated theologists" and rank-and-file believers just grow tired and say "this is stupid, how could I ever have believed this?". Inquiring minds want to know.

The birth of religion

We have reason to believe the world is the way it looks.

I can see through the air and I can walk through it, I cannot see through the walls of my cave and I cannot walk through them. I extrapolate from this that other objects and media that I can see through can be walked through, and other objects that cannot be seen through cannot be walked through. Consequently, I can walk through water, but not on it. I can walk on solid ground, but not through it.

I then encounter situations that change my rules of thumb for dealing with the solid and the fluid. I encounter muddy water, or quicksand. I can not see through them, but I can walk through them with varying success, and can not walk on them. My new heuristics involve looking for clues on the solidity or fluidity of a substance before attempting a physical encounter.

Notice that these rules of thumb were established by trial-and error. I can (generally) perform this kind of trial and error using my five senses on anything that I can come into direct contact with.

What about clouds? Clouds are a more difficult concept to deal with because, upon sighting my first cloud, I can only use the frames of reference that I have established previously. Additionally, I cannot touch, smell, taste or hear a cloud, so I am limited in what my senses can tell me. So ... clouds look solid, except that I can sometimes see through them. I may then consider them solid or fluid, as my observations dictate.

Then I encounter fog. I can kind-of see through it, kind-of can't. It varies. I can walk through it though, so my rules of thumb broaden to include fog. I may also have made the connection between fog and clouds - if I don't, someone eventually will. Clouds and fog may be the same kind of entity.

What about rain? Every time I've encountered it, it's fallen from the sky. 99.9% of the time there are clouds directly overhead, 100% of the time there were clouds in the sky, very nearly overhead. Sooner or later, I may be able to infer that rain comes from clouds, and clouds somehow contain water. Much later, maybe tens of millennia, someone confirms that clouds are made of water vapor. We have learned more about the world.

What about the sun and moon? Similar to the problem of clouds, celestial objects are an even more abstract concept, especially since they have no fog-like analogues that I can inspect directly with senses other than sight. Understanding the nature of the sun, moon, stars, planets, comets, meteors, novae and other celestial phenomena are, if I am the first human to inquire of their nature, beyond my ability to understand. If I have millennia of records that I can study, I can form some hypotheses about them. As better tools are built, telescopes, compasses, sextants, clocks, calendars and the like, I can make predictions that can be verified, and then even better hypothesize about the nature of the universe above the clouds.

Not once, in this contrived narrative, was there a need to posit something non-natural as the explanation, cause or effect of a phenomena that I observed.

Imagine that I was alone in the world, with no modern tools and no prior knowledge. I do not, I can not, know what I might conclude about phenomena that are beyond my reach - phenomena that I can only see, and then possibly only rarely. I can imagine, however, that in a family or tribal setting, around a campfire at night - five, ten or twenty millennia ago, being able to provide an explanation and being able to supply predictions about these phenomena might bring me advantages within the family or tribe - and I might be encouraged to produce more explanations and predictions about these phenomena as my fame grows, and the less imaginative tribe members express their desire for my more imaginative words.

Over time, my stories are spread. If they have explanatory or predictive or even comforting power, they persist through the generations. As the generations pass, and my stories are melded with the stories of other imaginative humans, they change, become more elaborate, and sometimes vanish as the tribes change and grow into larger social structures or die off completely.

One day, when the tools and techniques for observing natural phenomena are sufficiently advanced, and the body of knowledge is sufficiently large, the need for my primitive stories will wane, but will not die because of the massive industry that was built up to promulgate my stories and those of similar imaginative minds - incidentally providing jobs and influence to the industry workers.

There will eventually, down the millennia, be conflict between what is real and what is imagined. My stories will eventually vanish from daily life - hopefully to be resigned to a back corner in the loft of an ancient library. Reality will win. And it all started because I liked the feeling I got when I told stories and people liked the way they felt when I told my stories to them.

Truth is ...

A common bone of contention between non-believers and believers is the subject of "truth".

I understand truth as a declaration about the world that matches the way the world is.

Deacon Duncan at Freethought Blogs - Alethian Worldview and Evangelical Realism is having just this discussion with a commenter.

I won't repeat Deacon's words here, but I agree with him. If it can't be detected in the world, it doesn't qualify as "truth". This disqualifies claims that cannot be detected in any way - the invisible, the immaterial, the supernatural, the imaginary - a personal god, for instance.

It can be said - over, and over, and over again - that allowing claims for which the claimant is unwilling or unable to provide the slightest indication of its existence, opens the floodgates for all claims that lack evidence. The claim that I have a herd of wild elephants in my spare shower stall must then be met with the same seriousness and respect as the claims of a personal god, if claims of a personal god are allowed to be entered into public discourse. This doesn't disallow discussion of a personal god or a herd of shower-stall-based wild elephants when held among like-minded individuals - in private, you can discuss any whacky proposition you wish. Just don't let this whackiness pollute the world outside your home.

Logical Gaps

There are some huge logical gaps in arguments for the existence of God.

My prior post about God perhaps being dumb as a rock was intended to be tongue-in-cheek ... but illustrates one of the fundamental flaws in the Ontological, Cosmological and Teleological arguments. That is, if we can't explain it, God did it.

God - as conceived in various arguments, is outside time and space and requires no cause. Special pleading at its finest. This almost always invokes the response that "if God requires no cause, why does our universe?".

Secondly, why does a "first cause" or "designer" have to be omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent or omni-anything-else? If the creator of this explanatory scheme (a human, by the way) was trying to establish that this God was to be feared and obeyed, then the omni-gomnia is to be expected. How else will you revere me as a link between you peons and the omnipotent creator of all things? Otherwise, it does not explain a thing.

Dumb as a rock

A couple of items from the interwebs prompted this thought: that God may very well be dumb as a rock. The items are:

A comment by pboyfloyd on Evangelical Realism to a post on Defending the Courtiers at Intellectual Conservative:

Consciousness(as I understand it) is a property of certain organic beings, and of course there is a ‘gradient’, and of course we could devise tests to grade the consciousness of everything from a rock to a god.
Hint:- gods don’t do well.(they don’t seem to live up to their omnipresence to answer, while rocks, although ‘there’, don’t display any observable consciousness of their environment.)

...and a transcript of the 1995 debate between Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Corey Williamson on "Does God Exist" ... Dr. Williamson states:

"Every morning, I, a lot of you, get up and we go to our car, and we put the key in the ignition, turn it over, and the car starts up. You can think of the ignition of the gasoline as somewhat of a big bang. There's this explosion of gasoline igniting. What's the cause of the gasoline igniting? The sparkplug.[11] It's a spark off this sparkplug, which causes the gasoline to ignite, that causes the small big bang that gets you to school every day. What Professor Craig has given us is that there is some sort of cosmological sparkplug. Maybe there is. But if there is, we've no reason to believe it's omniscient, no reason to believe it's omnibenevolent, and no reason to believe that it's omnipotent. From the fact that the universe was created, all we have some reason to believe is that it is slightly more powerful than its effects. So maybe it's a little stronger or more powerful than the nature of the universe as it exists. But the universe is finite, as Dr. Craig has argued. So we don't have any reason to conclude this thing is infinite. It may be strong but finite. We don't have any reason to believe its omniscient or even sentient at all. It could be a spark plug of some kind, maybe a timeless sparkplug, but a sparkplug nevertheless."

So, this morning, my non-devotional thought is: God is not "necessary" in any sense. The argument that "because the universe began to exist, it had to have a cause, and that cause must be God" is wholly unsupported. It could have been a spark plug. Literally or metaphorically. It did not have to have intelligence or power. It could have been a catalyst for material or forces that already existed. Or it could have been something entirely unimaginable at this time in our history.

And it could have been dumb as a rock.

Apologia and Apologist tactics for amateurs

I'm still reading the Bible verse-by-verse with Bruce and the gang at Project: The King and I. We're finally in the New Testament, which is fun. I may have mentioned that this is my third reading of the NT ... The second verse-by-verse effort. I was once Born-Again many many years ago, and it was reading the OT immediately after immersing myself in the NT where things began to unravel.

Coincidentally, I've just watched my third debate video starring Dr. William Lane Craig , famous apologist and all-around fun guy. At the same time Deacon Duncan at Evangelical Realism is writing a chapter-by-chapter review of Dr. Craig's book "On Guard" - which I believe is intended as a handbook for amateur apologists. I look forward to Duncan's weekly installments like an adolescent waiting for the next issue of Spiderman to hit the comic book stands. (Duncan also blogs at Alethian Worldview at Freethought Blogs )

The three endeavors dovetail somewhat, which is the background for today's effort.

Encountering formal apologetics, such as presented by Dr. Craig, is fascinating. Duncan's critique of "On Guard" confirms and elaborates some of my informal observations - there's a lot of bait-and-switch, ad hominem attacks, bare assertion and avoidance in the tactics that a polished apologist such as Dr. Lane uses. Informal and amateur apologists, such as we encounter at P:TKAI should be less of a challenge due to their less practiced and polished approach. That's not really true.

We have a new commenter on P:TKAI who is a friend of Bruce, and who is a believer that's quite willing to engage in apologia. It's both head-shaking and irritating. He often makes claims out of thin air that seem as if they're from other conversations. The other day, he stated (quote) "By the way, nice touch on you approving our evidence that God and Jesus exist. Einstein found enough evidence. ...". He was replying to me after I chided him on a false equivalence that he used to bait commenters into demonstrating that scientific proof cannot be certain. It was a mess. This "evidence" rejoinder was completely out of the blue, and certainly didn't address anything that I had written. *

Here's where I'm going with this: I see a pattern with the vocal believers, in that they have (at least on the P:TKAI blog) exhibited a tendency toward non-sequitur. Three different apologists come to mind, each replying to specific posts with declarations that were either off the point (but still in the ballpark) or from completely beyond left field, like the one I cite above.

The pattern is that words go in one ear, and are replaced, partially or completely, with something off-topic. It's too small of a sample to make a general statement, but ***it looks like*** there's a comprehension problem at work. Or dishonesty. Time will tell.

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* There's a fine line to be tread on the P:TKAI blog, since Bruce wants it to be civil ... add to that we're now dealing with a personal friend of his. With a little too much caffeine and some shorter-than-normal patience, and I can see accusations of stupidity, delusion and childishness becoming hard to resist. Counting to ten - or sleeping on it - is definitely warranted.