Monday, March 9, 2009

Presuppositionalism summarized

I said a long time ago, in a debate with a presuppositionalist (PS) named CalvinDude, that the PS request for an atheist to give an "account" of logic (in the sense of justifying the use of, or explaining the metaphysical concept of, with the possibility that it was unjustified) was retarded, for the very reason that in doing so, one must assume that logic was valid. See here for a more articulate dismissal of PS based on that issue. And see here for the point that there is a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of PS proponents in trying to ask us to "justify" logic at all.

I also said a long time ago that the entire apologetic method of PS was simply not an argument at all, but a ridiculous burden that naive people place on other naive people. See here for that issue revisited. What people "arguing" for PS are actually doing is asking you to write a textbook on metaphysics and epistemology in order to thoroughly explain logic. But if you fail to do this, how does this prove anything about their positive claim for God's existence? It doesn't. Not even in the slightest.

Instead, all it does is give them the opportunity to try to find some mistake in your textbook(s), which is usually not hard to do, unless you're a genius philosopher, and thus you spend hours and hours carefully constructing arguments for no reason at all except to prove that logic is valid.

Wow.

On the other hand, they just sit back and basically do nothing to advance the idea that logic presupposes God's existence. Instead, all they have "on their side" is that a crude material reductionism, if attempted by an atheist, will fail to properly explain abstracta like concepts and mathematical entities and logical relations and properties. So basically just don't try to reduce those things to matter, and the PS literally has nothing to argue about!