Presuppositional Apologetics

[creature386]

I am right now enjoying a debate with a presuppositionaist. Presuppositionalists are among the most obnoxious, nonsensical and simply bizarre apologists you'll ever encounter. There are many very annoying apologetic arguments, like Pascal's wager and the moral argument and presuppositionalism seems to be one of the newest trends within creationist/fundamentalist circles. The argument is a bit bizarre because it at no point tries to prove God's existence, it rather tries to establish that it is the very first belief you hold before even starting to think!

John Frame said:

[We] should present the biblical God, not merely as the conclusion to an argument, but as the one who makes argument possible (...)

Hence, presuppositionalists are very fond of the idea that atheists merely willingly suppress the knowledge of God because they just want to sin.

Presuppositionalism is very popular among the Answers in Genesis folks and it has been summarized by their member Jason Lisle quite nicely:

1. If the Bible were not true, logic* would not be meaningful.
2. Logic is meaningful.
3. Therefore, the Bible is true.

*Logic is just one example. Presuppositionalists claim that logic, truth, reason, reality, morality and the laws of physics could not be accounted for in anything other than the biblical worldview.

Sometimes, the nonsense is more subtly hidden:

1. Logic (or reason or knowledge, depending on the variation used) requires justification.
2. Atheists cannot provide a justification.
3. Therefore, God is necessary in providing a justification.

wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Presuppositional_apologetics

I dare you, don't try to reason with presuppositionalists!
If try to do so, the reply will inevitably look like this:

"Hah! You are trying to use logic which means you agree with the second premise! You cannot argue against the Bible because it is what makes all your arguments even possible."

Alternatively, you may even hear more annoying stuff:
"How do you know that any of the points you just raised are true? How do you know that you can trust your mind? How do you know that logic exists? How can you justify your belief in logic? How can you know anything at all for any certainty?"

The entire point of such an argumentation is to keep the skeptic in a defensive position. The presuppositionalist does not need to provide any justification for their arguments, all they need to do is to keep and keep asking (no matter what counterargument they hear) "How do you account for knowledge? How do you account for logic? How do you KNOW that any of your statements is true?". Here's their definition of knowledge:

Sye Ten Bruggencate said:

If you know something, it is impossible to be wrong about it.

And once you admit that you cannot know anything using that definition, presuppositionalists will state that you inevitably commit yourself to a self-refuting skepticism:
"I know that I know nothing."
And if you are wrong, they are automatically right. 

You see, their entire intent is winning debates and persuading rather than engaging in serious discourse.

[coherentsheaf]

I think other than being confusing by not really justifying their propositions other than asserting them to be justified, I uusually think of the mirror position. I could make every argument they make a priori for atheism: Logic is part of the atheist world view. By trying to attack my proposition that logic is atheist, they are in fact borrowing from atheism, which they are not allowed to do....etc. Completely analogous to my mind, the string christianity is replaced witht he string atheism, nothing else happened. Of course they would dtehn claim that I am using logic and biorrowing from the christian worldview, but I would hope that any listeners would realize the epistemic equivalence and demand that the contingent claim in questione, i.e. god's existence is derived in another way.

[creature386]

The problem is that they may run into more nonsense and say that any a priori statement made by an atheist is necessarily invalid because truth can only come from an infallible being which means that divine revelation is the only possible foundation of knowledge (of course, their fallible minds must somehow know how to identify a divine revelation).

[coherentsheaf]

Which I would answer with the statement that truth can only be ciomprehended without presupposition of an entity in whos nature our perception is dependend upon, since the arbitrary properties of such a being would then form our apprehension and not any reference to an external stand point.

Edit: At least when I wanted to mirror. In reality I would dismiss the statement that truth can only come from an eternal being.... Why should that be the case.

[creature386]

I think my own response would be that any sort of attempt to justify the use of one's own mind necessarily fails because any possible attempt is a product of the own mind (including the conclusion "I received a divine revelation").
Now, accounting for truth and logic may be beyond my epistemological capabilities, but I believe (never, EVER, say "I believe" when trying to reason with a presuppositionalists, I'll have to restrict my skeptic and tentative language) "know" that psychologism is the only reasonable account for anything related to rationality:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychologism
Basically, logic is a product of our psychology and thus exists in our minds and the statement "I [in the sense of "my consciousness"] exist" is hopefully something that we can accept as an incontrovertible fact.

[coherentsheaf]

creature, I dont think the logic uis part of our mind claim is true- it seems to me it is actually real not just conceptual. Else it would not work as predictive tool in domains our mind is not adapted to like cosmology, but for the most part it does perfectly.

[creature386]

So, do you think it can be instead justified as a metaphysical necessity?
From my understanding of the term, metaphysical necessity means it could not be any other way. In the case of logic, any world without logic could somehow exist and not exist simultaneously which is obviously nonsensical.

[coherentsheaf]

I think metaphysical necessity is a confused notion we derived from peculiarities of our syntax ("rigid descriptors") and not actually a meaningful descriptor of states. I think at the time we have no meaningful framework to give an ontological account of logic or what Matt Slick would call "logical absolutes". We just know that there are such thought patterns that correspond to with how reality unfailingly behaves.

[creature386]

How do we define reality though (knowing that it exists may also solve the truth problem)? I've tried to define objective reality as what every mind can perceive to solve the problem of solipsism, though this obviously has problems, since it assumes that a rock won't be a rock anymore if there are no minds.

[coherentsheaf]

I dont define it. I think reality or existence are states whos contingency cannot really be analyzed.

[creature386]

BTW, coherent, how would you respond to the classical question SyeBorgs (clones of Sye Ten B.) ask ad nauseam, namely "So, is it possible that you are wrong about absolutely everything and that you know nothing to any degree of certainty?"? They often add that this inevitably results in a self-defeating skepticism.
My own response would be that there are some things I could not be wrong about (for example I have to idea how it would even look like to be wrong about the statement "I exist" or how something could and could not be simultaneously) and that their standard of knowledge is insane, since it is an inevitable fact that humans are fallible, presuppositionalists included (even if God revealed them some things, their worldview would still imply that they know nothing else) and that they can impossibly verify a divine revelation (though this is sounds much like a tu quoque and is often met with the response that an omnipotent being could reveal itself in a way so that they know it revealed itself).

I'm pretty sure you're a skeptic, so, is skepticism coherent?

[creature386]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcDebJuWcww&list=PLosPU1tNxECsyPYzhmJAbmn2eVuiqhrka
KnownNoMore offers the best rebuttal of presuppositional apologetics I'm aware of.

[coherentsheaf]

BTW, coherent, how would you respond to the classical question SyeBorgs (clones of Sye Ten B.) ask ad nauseam, namely "So, is it possible that you are wrong about absolutely everything and that you know nothing to any degree of certainty?"? They often add that this inevitably results in a self-defeating skepticism.
My own response would be that there are some things I could not be wrong about (for example I have to idea how it would even look like to be wrong about the statement "I exist" or how something could and could not be simultaneously) and that their standard of knowledge is insane, since it is an inevitable fact that humans are fallible, presuppositionalists included (even if God revealed them some things, their worldview would still imply that they know nothing else) and that they can impossibly verify a divine revelation (though this is sounds much like a tu quoque and is often met with the response that an omnipotent being could reveal itself in a way so that they know it revealed itself).

In my epistemic frame every statement carries a positive (often very small) probability of being wrong or malformed, so strict contradictions are impossible. End of story?

[creature386]

Infinity Blade (this really belongs here)
I already felt a disappointment about the stuff before it (and I guess that refutes the idea that Ray Comfort's banana argument was just a joke). Presuppositionalism is almost as embarrassing as young Earth creationism. There are certain arguments which are very persuasive to atheists and made even some convert (like the cosmological or teleological arguments). Then there are these so called gotcha arguments which convince nobody and are simply annoying because they are stupid, but it takes time to refute them (the ontological argument or the transcendental argument for God with the related presuppositionalist fuss).

I won't reply to his arguments against evolution, the index to creationist claims should cover them:

• Evolutionists have no evidence for their claims.
• Macroevolution does not pass the scientific method.
  • Were you there?

The idea that evolution is an atheistic philosophy or the creation myth of atheists will need another entry in the index, creationists indeed like that.

His argument against agnosticism is a straw man, the definition of agnosticism only concerns itself with knowledge about God, not with knowledge in and of itself. What he argues against is some form of postmodernism and his rebuttal is indeed valid, but as said before, a strawman.

He also seems to conflate pragmatism in epistemology with pragmatism as a moral theory (I have heard similar nonsense from Matt Slick, another presuppositionalist).
The case for empirical pragmatic rationalism can be made quite simple:
Immanuel Kant distinguished between two forms of propositions, synthetic and analytic propositions. Analytic propositions are logical propositions, like a bachelor is an unmarried man. Why? Because the word "bachelor" is simply a label we have for "unmarried man" and can be paraphrased as "an unmarried man is an unmarried man" or A = A. However, analytic propositions don't get us beyond mere tautologies. In other words, we don't get beyond the plain meaning of words. Luckily, we also have a thing called synthetic propositions which are propositions about things not contained in the definition of words, like "all bachelors live on Earth". How can we verify or falsify these claims?
We have a thing such a senses. We know the empirical manifestation of a thing such as a bachelor. We can experience sensory input and while there is of course an insurmountable epistemic barrier between the world as we perceive it and the world as it is (we could live in a matrix for example), we can inductively generalize the experiences we get, find patterns in them and formulate models with predictive power and keep or discard models depending on how well they predict sensory inputs. This is the scientific method in a nutshell.
Why do we do such stuff? It is obviously quite useful! It is useful for me to have a model like "When I don't hold my cup of tea, it will fall" so that I can decide whether I do that over my table or over the ground.
I can only emphasize that this is an epistemology, NOT a moral theory (I don't get why this is so hard to get).
It should be noted that divine revelation is basically a form of empiricism (because you experience God), not an alternative. Thus, he has no alternative to empirical logical pragmatism.

As for absolute moral obligations, what is that even supposed to mean? Is there ANY worldview where there is such a thing? No, because these statements are always conditional, i.e. "If you want to stay healthy, you ought to live healthy".
Now, how do you deduce an absolute obligation to worship God? What if a person does not care about God's commandments or his judgement (like the Devil in Christianity)? How does this person have an absolute moral obligation to obey him? The only justification apologists ever give is that he is "per definition a being worthy of worship", but as noted above, mere analytic propositions don't get you beyond the plain meaning of words. In other words, reality doesn't care for your definitions (this is something many self-styled professional philosophers need to understand)! That's why you call the police in case a thief is in your house and not philosophers or theologians because the thief probably doesn't care about the meaning of words.
As for the other question (about hamburgers and fish), if an atheist lives inconsistent, it follows that the atheist lives inconsistent, not that atheism is inconsistent (hence, it is a mere gotcha argument). I've seen vegan atheists justifying their veganism with their atheism, what are you going to say against them?
But to answer the question: "You eat other results of evolutionary processes, why don't you eat people?"
The origin of an entity has nothing to do with its moral value. I guess your pastor could agree that animals and people were both created by God.

It should also be noted that atheism is not the same as evolution (I don't know how many times this has to be explained to creationists). There are/were several tribes with no creation myth which thought the universe was eternal (it is maybe hard to grasp in a world where we see so much change, but the worlds the tribes lived in were far more static). It is at least logically possible for an atheist to hold that view.
Moreover, a theist can believe in evolution. If not a Christian, at least a deist can do so.

As for defense 3, I got tired of typing, so I will simply link you to a video:


Ausar, if you want to learn more about presuppositionalism and how to defeat it, I suggest watching the playlist by KnownNoMore I linked above. The videos by AntiCitizenX are also helpful.

But suffice to say:
You cannot "win" with simple word games because you cannot prove anything that is not contained in the definitions of the words. And reality after all does not care about our definitions. You cannot define unicorns into existence.