It has been a couple of days since I have responded to the rantings of Matthew O'Donnell, a man whose views change with the passing of each day. While he has proceeded to hop from one issue to the next, I have consistently pressed home the question of how he can account for the laws of logic. Perhaps the most honest answer I received from him was when he admitted he didn't have a clue.
Like most opponents of the faith, when asked a direct and specific question like the one mentioned above, his worldview could not bear such serious scrutiny. Instead, he quickly began promoting a negative position, offering his reasons why the Bible cannot be authoritative. Much to his disliking, I do not have the time to extinguish flaming strawmen after flaming strawmen. While before he challenged the very notion of God's existence, now he is targeting Reformed soteriology and by his arguments you would think that he is now conceding theism! The irony of the whole situation is he attempts to use the Bible to refute Reformed theology when he himself is presuppositionally opposed to the Bible!
As time permits, I will respond to some of the comments he has made on this blog. However, I will not waste my time hosing down an endless amount of fiery strawmen. Soli deo gloria!
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Now honestly, Mr. Almy--
Do you honestly believe that if you somehow "get me" by getting me to say that I can't account for the laws of logic, somehow I will be unable to make any further arguments? Do you really think "gotcha" applies to argumentation?
http://www.4forums.com/political/worldviews/7480-how-do-atheists-account-laws-logic.html
Here you go--a whole website forum devoted to arguments, rantings, ravings, and downright hysterics on the subject of accounting for the laws of logic. You'll notice near the bottom of the first page (admittedly, I couldn't take it much more than the initial page and gave up reading further), the conversation immediately turns, as I have pointed out, to the conceptual understanding of logic. What is logic? Who defines logic, and which rules are "logical" and which are merely conceptual agreements?
I have attempted to posit several foundations for the existence of morality IN YOUR POSTS, on your weblog, but you apparently refuse to do nothing more than "hose down" my arguments. Frankly, I didn't know they needed a good hosing, but thank you. After your hosing is finished, you might think to read them. Perhaps when you respond to me as diligently as I respond to you, we can engage in further debate. Remember--YOU asked ME to come to this weblog and contribute my further ideas. Don't try and blame me if you don't like the ideas that you courted from a Facebook post of which you were not even the author!
M
"Straw Man," a quote from the top of the Wikipedia page:
"A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[1] To "set up a straw man," one describes a position that superficially resembles an opponent's actual view, yet is easier to refute. Then, one attributes that position to the opponent. For example, someone might deliberately overstate the opponent's position.[1] While a straw man argument may work as a rhetorical technique—and succeed in persuading people—it carries little or no real evidential weight, since the opponent's actual argument has not been refuted." (original citation, grammatical errors included)
Considering I've already said I "haven't a clue" as to the fundamental basis for the laws of logic, by necessity i CANNOT make a straw man. The only way I can make a straw man argument is to give a watered-down version of YOUR view, which I can then refute. You have just done this in your most recent posting, as you have done in previous postings and continue to do, and I will ask you nicely to please desist from misrepresenting my viewpoints. If you do not, then by your own words may you be condemned, since your distortions seem to be coming not from our debate but from the deep-seated antipathy you apparently feel for me. I do not know where I have earned this bigotry, considering I came here under good faith that my ideas would be heard. Apparently my faith was misplaced.
As I have posted in THREE separate posts, I still cannot understand your view. I have thus asked questions, pointed and biased as they may be, as to what your views actually are. I would assume you are in the midst of "hosing" my questions down before answering them, so I will wait for your answers before misrepresenting you. In the meantime, if you have any questions about my worldview (other than to put me to the undefined shibboleth of "account for the laws of logic!" "which laws?" "shut up and account!"), feel free to ASK ME. I've not once refused to answer a question, even when i don't even know the answer to said question!!
In fact, as you so well pointed out, I have been "conceding theism" and "attempting to use the Bible" to come to a larger arena of discussion where we can both be accomodated. I have actually been willing to disclose certain portions of my faith (to which, following my faith, I prefer not to shout out in the street while rending my face and banging my tambourine) and allow monumental errors of fact to go unnoticed (ahem--no proof for God in mathematics or scientific experiment, numerous religions all promoting exclusionary salvation) repeatedly for the sake of argument. If anyone is making a straw man of anyone, YOU SIR are hosing me down.
I came to this debate forum in good faith with the understanding that my ideas would receive a larger discussion and that my beliefs and questions would be respected. Instead, I have been marginalized, rebuffed, ignored, ridiculed, excommunicated, and personally insulted. If this is how you run a debate forum, then I am truly shocked and depressed, though not unsurprised. Ideas of those who disagree with the majority in power are never given a fair chance--look at what happened to Jesus! It is truly disheartening to receive such short shrift from someone who claimed to want to hear my side of the story. Instead of a friendly ear, I've received nothing but abuse from Mr. Almy!
My thanks to the other posters who responded to me with more kindness and magnanimity than was afforded by the leader of this weblog. For shame, Mr. Almy!
I will ask another question, and I hope you will not avoid this one as you have avoided my many others, Mr. Almy:
Please explain why Buddhism cannot support presuppositional apologetics using the same format as Reform Christianity (Calvinism).
In my studies of presuppositionalism (which, i admit again, are incredibly paltry and hardly worthy of consideration next to your obvious mastery of the material), the subject of adherence to Christianity is only necessary because Christianity is a "Total Truth" worldview, supposedly that promotes "objective claims about the world, including its history and about absolute right and wrong." In fact, the website (Creation Ministries Intl.) goes so far as to exhort a complete reliance on only the bible for mathematical, scientific, historical, and geographical fact: "Christians should not fall for this. Christ is the Lord of the universe, and the Bible is accurate on everything it touches, not just faith and morality, but history, science and geography also."
http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/2626
http://creationontheweb.com/content/view/3855/#noma
There is so much literature written about the inconsistencies in the Bible, the medical, scientific, and geographic inaccuracies of its writers, and the many antiquated or even vicious moral judgments rendered therein (on women, slaves, foreigners, etc.), that to sum it all up in one post would be a fool's errand. Suffice it to say that that last statement is demonstrably false, and we'll move on.
Why can we not replace the "Total Truth" criterion purported for Christianity with Buddhism? Buddhism is older, has more divine and semi-divine literature attached to it, and includes just as many all-encompassing systems of thought and belief about the world that it surely can either rival or surpass Christianity as a Total Truth system. So why not Buddhism?
Just the ability I have to ask that question, the ease with which one can take out the Christian system (centered around a god-king avatar and backed up by a faith-based understanding of the universe) and plug in Buddhism (also containing avatar and faith-based universe understanding) means that the primary feature of "Christian" presuppositionalism can be replaced without altering any other tenets of the system, invalidating Christianity as the yardstick by which all other systems cannot measure up.
And for that matter, how is "Christian" presuppositionalism not simply the worldview of presuppositionalism under the rubric of religion X, whatever it happens to be? You must do more, Mr. Almy, than to say to me "the Bible says that it is perfect and so it is perfect;" you must say why it is MORE perfect than any other system of faith!
Again, all fault to me for misrepresenting any of your ideas. If you had come to Austro-libertarianism just a week prior, I would certainly give you all the leeway in understanding the topics that you needed in order to participate in the debate.
In response to my own comment, this quote by K. Scott Oliphant:
"He (Paul) begins, first of all (1:18-23), by asserting that the attributes of God have been both clearly seen and understood since the creation of the world. [3] That is, Paul is telling us here, part of what it means to be created in God’s image is that man inescapably knows God. It is not simply that he knows that a god exists. But, says Paul, man, all men, know God (1:19 - dio/ti to\ gnwsto\n tou= qeou), the true God, the God who made all things. We can say unequivocally, therefore, that by virtue of man’s being created in the image of God, by virtue of man’s being a covenant creature every human being on the face of the earth since creation has an ineradicable knowledge of God – a knowledge that is given through the things that were made, including, of course, everything except God himself.
"http://mysite.verizon.net/oliphint/Writings/A%20Covenantal%20Apologetic.htm"
To take a hardline approach, why does this assertion by "Paul" (the pauline letters are attributed to Paul, but not necessarily written by him) necessitate a change on my part? For the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster asserts what it likes, and can believe what it likes, but none of its assertions or beliefs necessitates activity on my part. Paul is free to assert that God created the world; I am under no obligation to believe him over any of the other assertions made by thinkers of various worldviews. I can be threatened to comply with his followers' demands (Hell is a threat, not an argument), but nothing Paul has said is either objectively demonstrable or necessary for my existence. It may add to it, but I do not exist only because Paul says I exist. I exist because Descartes says I exist!
So, if Paul can be denied with no change to either his worldview or my worldview, why MUST i follow his worldview, according to my worldview?
I fear we may be laboring under a fundamental flaw--facts vs. faith. There is no way to correlate the two in my untrained mind; perhaps you can come up with an answer that will satisfy my prejudices?
Perhaps, to facilitate discussion, I can elucidate my own crazy ideas further:
I definitely believe in logical absolutes. I recognize that all knowledge, and indeed the entire structure of the universe is founded on a very logical and mathematical structure--elements bonding to make chemical compositions, electrons passing between atoms to make a particular charge, thus charging the object and passing that to other objects around it, and so on, until the entire universe is powered by innumerable little sock-footed rocks rubbing their feet on the carpet of the space-time continuum. All this is perfectly understandable to me.
I can even understand how an 'intelligent designer,' an 'unmoved mover,' or even a 'creator' could instill all this. It would have to be a perfect creator, endowed with limitless power to order the universe at its inception, and possibly even be benevolent enough to allow creatures like us to come into existence and kill him off.
However, to make a move from that very evidence-based, rational understanding of the universe to championing a particular faction supporting only one out of the pantheon of potential gods is simply too far a logical leap. I mean, i'm confronted by the massive number of religions out there, hundreds, all claiming to "know" the truth. Being already indecisive, it is maddening to be chastized because i cannot make heads or tails of which one "did it," which one ordered the universe. Frankly, they all fall short in the role of creating such a perfection as the universe has always been and will always be.
You cannot deny me the ability to work from a rational, objective, evidence-based standpoint. To do otherwise would be Gnosticism, and i prefer to remain safely out of that heresy. I simply do not know the origin of the laws of logic. I don't even know if a god is necessary to make those laws, or if they can spontaneously come out of the sufficing principle of the conservation of energy in the universe. If that was ordered by somebody, i simply do not know who it was and I should be allowed not to have to make a decision yet on who that person/thing might be!
"Don't be so hasty," said the ent to the hobbit.
p.s.--since you're operating under the assumption that your God's the "right" one, you have no basis under which to devalue anyone else's ability to say their god is the "right" one. If you are to be allowed your choice, they must be allowed theirs. Just as i, in my agnosticism, am allowed the opportunity to say i'm entirely unsure who created the laws of logic, or whether they were "created" at all!
MDO-
The reason presuppositionalism cannot be employed to defend Buddhism as a viable worldview is because Buddhism is internally incoherent. Buddhism cannot account for the philosophical problem of the one and while the Triune God of Christianity does.
In reference to your fact vs. faith statement, the point I am making is that at the basis of all worldviews is a measure of faith. In other words, we all hold basic beliefs or assumptions that we operate upon that cannot be measured empirically. One example is believing that the universe operates in a logical and predictable way (this cannot be tested). How do you know the universe operates in such a way? How does your worldview account for this? I know you have called this "metaphysical tail chasing" but in centuries past, it was important to have an internally coherent worldview. It is difficult at first to think this way (I do not mean this in a condescending way) because our entire educational system has been structured around teaching epistemology to the exclusion of metaphysics.
Again, I appreciate your questions. Hopefully, my caustic replies will be taken with a little grain of salt. If you are interested in further reading on the subject of presuppositionalism, I recommend Bahnsen, Oliphant (I was pleased to see you had read something of him) or Van Til. Again, I will reply in more detail to some of the things you have said but I have been pressed for time as of late. As I am writing this, I am traveling home for Christmas. I will respond in more detail later.
Thank you for a more congenial response. I am ashamed at my own responses from time to time online, so it is nice to be able to pull back on the throttle and have a meaningful discussion without destroying everything intellectual curiosity had started amongst us. Happy holidays to you and yours, and I look forward to your future posts.
Now, if i may be so bold as to continue my barrage, it seems you are overstepping your bounds by prejudging Buddhism as "internally incoherent." Unless you can back up this statement with some sort of logical proof, I cannot consider this in any way a valid observation.
In my own (very limited) studies of Buddhism, I see it is a tradition that garners anywhere from a quarter to a half billion adherents and has been a cornerstone of individual and collective faith in the East for 2400 years. Are you saying they are ALL wrong in their faith? Certainly you cannot, because you immediately say after this initial statement, "the point I am making is that at the basis of all worldviews is a measure of faith... we all hold basic beliefs or assumptions that we operate upon that cannot be measured empirically."
To take this statement as read can be very easily interpreted as an attack on your perceived foundations of logic, since logic as a system must hold true for all occurrences. If one must believe certain things on faith because no logical foundation exists, then one quite literally cannot have a logical foundation for that particular belief. It otherwise would be simply a logical conclusion, and faith would be unnecessary (the belief in gravity, for example). The predictability of the universe, unlike you assert, can be logically and empirically tested. This is the foundation of science--or do you seriously want to posit that vaccines and chemical compounds work by faith alone?
But as i assume you are interpreting this thought, you are looking for the "man behind the curtain," to use a literary allusion, the Designer behind the design of the universe. You are totally within your right to believe for yourself that God has done these miracles for our benefit, but you simply cannot delegitimize the beliefs of another! You would be calling your own worldview, your own rationalization of the Designer's identity, into serious, if not fatal question!
For what criterion can you give that Buddhism would fail that Christianity can possibly pass? If you use the Bible as your coherency criterion, you must vouch for the internal coherency of the bible, which it cannot pass (it is still a collection of various documents written independent of each other--not even the genealogies of Jesus match!). If you use the message of the Calvinist church, you must account for the fact that it is not the only message of Christian origin, nor is it even itself coherent--as you have pointed out, various sects and degrees of Calvinist thought have different positions and focii (lapsarianism, arminianism, four-point calvinism, hyper-calvinism, neo-orthodoxy, neo-calvinism, and christian reconstructionism are all discussed in great detail on wikipedia, as I now see...).
Internal coherency is a logical principle derived from the use of proofs that provide a regular outcome. Consistency is structured such that A and not A cannot be derived from the same data set. In order to avoid a fatal inconsistency, you must also demonstrate Soundness (by which all axioms and theorems are independently true, or at the very least that the resulting logical structure cannot yield a false inference) and Completeness (by which all portions of the logical structure can be verified individually by the whole).
You have not completed these steps with regard to Buddhism's "internal... incoheren[cy]," and honestly, you also have not done so with your Calvinist interpretation of Christianity's internal coherency. Until you can do so, you will not even approach the logical coherence you so greatly espouse as a hallmark of your approach, and I cannot allow you to malign Buddhism or any other faith without absolute proof of your assertions.
"One example is believing that the universe operates in a logical and predictable way (this cannot be tested). How do you know the universe operates in such a way? How does your worldview account for this?"
You are denying an important antecedent here, so I will warn you not to do so if you wish your argument to be taken seriously. Your assertion that "the universe operates in a logical and predictable way" "cannot be tested" is unquestionably false, almost to the point of being absurd, and I sincerely hope you aren't attempting to call into question patently observable facts about the universe just to prove an unsound argument.
Thus it is unnecessary to explain certain things using a "worldview," because as you point out, worldviews are for things that cannot be explained empirically. I do not need a worldview to know that objects have shape, height, mass, and substance; i do not even need language to observe the world around me, as babies can interact with objects without having ever witnessed them before.
I don't want to have to be any more pedantic, but it sounds like you are laboring under the delusion that the universe is subjective just because our view of it is subjective. How we view the world may alter the world to some degree (the two-slit test, for example) but the world still exists if we are not there. Rooms don't pop out of existence when you are not in them; if they did, then by inference you would not exist at any time except for when I read your posts on this forum. Such subjectivity is fun to imagine, but completely inconsistent with the measured, objective world around us.
This is important to point out, because you habitually harp upon the foundations "behind" logic, that logic being inherently coherent is not sufficient for logic's inherent coherency. I will refer back to my main argument, which is that you need to prove logic's own incoherency (logically, which might be a task!) before you can replace it with a higher power (God, faith, etc.).
I believe in the internal coherency of logic, and as such it is sufficient to explain the function of its elements (mathematics, biological and scientific systems, et al). In order to replace logic with a more consistent "logic," you must first explain the deficiencies in logic itself. This might be, as I said, hard to do, considering that you view the perfection of logic as evidence of the perfection of the Creator. How can logic be both internally coherent and yet not sufficient to explain itself? Please answer in detail, as quick posts tend to skip over the necessary details of a particular argument.
I would like to include this point on the wikipedia page devoted to Ayn Rand's Objectivism, with regard to metaphysics:
"Rand held that when one is able to perceive something that exists, then one's "Consciousness exists" (the Axiom of Consciousness), consciousness "being the faculty of perceiving that which exists."[7] Objectivism maintains that what exists does not exist because one thinks it exists; it simply exists, regardless of anyone's awareness, knowledge or opinion. For Rand, "to be conscious is to be conscious of something," so that an objective reality independent of consciousness has to exist first for consciousness to become possible, and there is no possibility of a consciousness that is conscious of nothing outside itself. Thus consciousness cannot be the only thing that exists. "It cannot be aware only of itself — there is no 'itself' until it is aware of something."[8] Objectivism holds that the mind cannot create reality, but rather, it is a means of discovering reality."
This is a very important point, because it gives primacy to the act of witnessing ahead of the concept of witnessing; instead of being a metaphysical positivism, such as Socrates' Forms would posit, metaphysical objectivism would instead speculate that the very axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness exist whole and entire unto themselves, and are not dependent on "worldviews" to sustain them. One does not have to consciously "think" oneself into sight--one simply sees, using one's eyes merely by reflex, and infers about the universe from what is reflected in them. Without this fundamental experience, nothing objective can be formulated about the universe; the ability to experience the world independent from one's own mind, even partially or imperfectly, is a prerequisite for knowledge about that world. Worldviews are simply addenda to that initial primal sensory experience. Cool beans!
I have decided!
I will no longer post on Post Tenebras Lux. I will freely debate Mr. Almy on an equal debate footing, but I refuse to confine my potent and salient points to footnotes of various posts. Too many questions i have are unanswered, and I have been subjected to ad hominem attacks for my efforts at debate. Since what I say obviously means little or nothing to the poster who brought me here, I can only assume that my time at this forum is at an end. I would still be happy to debate, but debating with an empty room is difficult. If Mr. Almy wishes to meet me in fair and equal posting conditions, I will consent to presenting my arguments. However, you all are probably only too happy to be rid of my marginalia. Well, dust on my shoes! Guess i'll be on my way.
M
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