The Impossibility of the Contrary

Recently, I have been engaging in an online discussion on the topic of the existence of God with a man named Matthew O'Donnell. The discussion began when I posed the question, "How do you account for morality?" The following is an excerpt of our interaction, indicating once again the impossibility of the contrary and just how unwilling the unbeliever is to give an answer for the laws of logic, morality, uniformity of nature, etc.:

Trevor Almy:

I agree with you that men are not inherently good. But how do you account for pervasive evil of men? I can account for it because God has revealed that "there is no one good" (cf. Rom. 3:10-18). An even more important question for you to grapple with is: how do you account for evil?

You are absolutely correct in saying that I presuppose the Christian worldview. I presuppose the Christian worldview because apart from it I cannot account for anything. Every day you must borrow from the Christian worldview in order to make sense of your life. If you did not, you would not be bother to type out meaningful sentences to me in this forum. You would not attempt to argue your points. If the universe were really based on randomness and chance, you have no foundation for your belief in the laws of logic and no rational platform for our discussion.

The truth is that no one is objective. No one is neutral in how they approach the facts. We all have basic, core beliefs that determine how we interpret reality. The problem is, given your presuppositions, how can you consistently live and behave in a coherent, rational way? I have only asked you to account for one thing: the laws of logic. I have given you answer and I eagerly await yours.

Matthew O'Donnell:

False, false, false! You're proselytizing again.

To quote from your above passage, "Every day you must borrow from the Christian worldview in order to make sense of your life." Patently false. In fact, the major precepts of western logic and rhetoric were established hundreds of years before Christ was even born, and largely forgotten during the 1000 years of the Middle Ages after he died. Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Epicurus; any philosopher you wish to study on the nature of existence, epistomology, and ontology ultimately derives his core argument NOT from the bible, which has no philosophical argument, but from the very pre-Christian Greeks.

Secondly, you make a disgustingly false dichotomy by saying either A) the Christian worldview forms the foundation of logic, or B) there are no laws of logic. FALSE! In fact, you would find this argument inherently insulting if you were Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, etc., because it again enforces a false reading of Christian ethics as...inherently human ethics, which implies that other religions' ethics are inherently inhuman, or sub-human. How much more bigoted can you be? Are you next going to tell me that Muslims don't deserve to go to school because they won't understand our way of thinking? Because revelation hasn't taught them the structure of logic?

In fact, were it not for the medieval Arabs, we would not have a single original work of Plato! Homer would be known only through epigrams, and the histories of Greek and Latin scholars by which we know the ancient world would be lost to the destructive force of time. It was Arab scholarly culture that learned Greek, Arab translators who saved the Odyssey and other great works, and Arab mathematicians who added their own philosophical underpinnings to Euclid and the logical works of the ancients, from which we derive our number and mathematics system, called Arabic numerals!

But beyond correcting you, I'm finished attempting to prove to you your own ignorance. If you had half the philosophical knowledge you pretend to have, you would know immediately that the only philosophical thrust of the Bible is as an allegory, and that is only if you do not take the events of the bible as historical fact. Otherwise, you are attempting to argue a fallacy from history, saying that what happened in the past is what ought to happen in every case, which is patently false.

The idea that morals could be inherently Christian is simply ludicrous, since Christianity has existed for only a definite span of time, but human morality has existed before Christianity and independent of Christianity to this day. I have already explained this elsewhere, and your tired protestations are simply no excuse for your ignorance. Be quiet already, if you can't have an original thought that doesn't reek of hegemonic propaganda.

Trevor Almy :

Matthew, Matthew, Matthew...your special pleading and playing to the crowd may fool others but it does not fool me. I have asked you one simple question that you still have not answered: how do you account for the laws of logic? I am NOT saying that you must be a Christian or read the Scriptures to think logically. I am saying that the mere fact that LOGIC exists presupposes the Christian God. In my worldview, I can account for the existence of logic. You may not like my answer but at least I have accounted for it. You cannot give me one answer aside from "They just simply are there!" I hope others will see who is focusing on the issue at hand and who is diverting the discussion to other issues.

You accused me of anachronism when I said you must borrow from the Christian worldview to make sense of your life. You pointed to Plato and Aristotle to validate your claim. However, the Christian worldview does not begin with the coming of Christ. It originates in our antediluvian ancestor Trevor Almy December 6 at 12:15pm
Adam who walked with God in the cool of the garden, experienced the Fall, and redemption in the same day. As such your accusation is unfounded.

My thesis still stands: There is no other system of thought that is internally coherent or cohesive outside the Christian worldview. In order for you to account for the laws of logic, you must presuppose a rational God who runs the universe in a predictable manner. You must, to quote Van Til, "climb into God's lap before you slap him in the face."

Matthew O'Donnell:

Ugh. You want God to be at the center of everything? Good for you. God for you. You can have him. But you certainly can't write an engineering equation with God as a variable, can you? I certainly hope you're not an engineering major attempting to prove the existence of god through thermodynamics or some such nonsense.

I certainly can and i certainly DO say that laws of logic "just simply are there". In fact, i defy you to give me an example of where the laws of logic are NOT. Mathematical structuring, orderliness, and conservation of matter/energy are spontaneous, unprovoked, diffuse workings of the system of the universe, and as such need no piddling definition from a hairy biped 3 million light-years from nowhere to define. If you persist in saying that laws of logic "have" to be defined, i'm going to have to internet-slap you. NO SUCH DEFINITION IS REQUIRED. End of question.

As for your infantile argument about God-as-universal-lawmaker, you really can't sustain it. It's just not possible. Either you have to accept that you don't KNOW what God is, or you have to admit that God is flawed, based on accounts given in the Old and New Testament. What is your choice? And no saying "i talk to God, and i believe he exists!" Fairy dust won't help you fly away from factual logic this time.

If God is indeed some grand planner, why does he hate mollusks? They are, after all, an "abomination." Would he really have made something he intended to be damned from the get-go? Also, why did he fake his own death? Obviously, either Jesus (eli, eli, lamma sabachthani!) had no frickin' clue he was God, and died unawares of his nature, or God essentially lied and used his get-out-of-death-free card on account of the fact that he's inherently immortal. After all, he created man, in all his complexity, sees everything of man, and even lived as a man. But he never...gave up his POWER as God. Otherwise, he would have really been in danger of dying, really dying! Universe would have flown to pieces, in your estimation, if he had actually died. So you must admit, logically, that either God truly had no actual Passion (just a fake one, for our benefit, since he was going to survive anyway), or Jesus is not God. Remember, no points for trinitarianism, because power is power, regardless of whether it's split or whole! Either God died and the universe didn't need God for three whole days (upsets your apple-cart of logic) or Jesus didn't actually ever fear death or have passion for our sins. Are you willing to give up the greatest sacrament of your faith for logic?

But ultimately, you must realize that the Christian God is eminently irrational, if you follow the dictates of logic. Hell requires it. Souls are punished in hell for eternity. Yet the sins required for exit from grace and entrance to Hell are temporal, literally temporary...

God is either cutting off his own people and (if you believe the divine spark is the Holy Ghost, part of God) part of Himself for all eternity, simply for things that his own creations did in a temporal space of which he was not a part. He lives outside of time, so he is able to see everything we will do in the future. In this way he is premeditatively injuring himself for all time by sentencing certain people to hell forever, certain bits of the Holy Spirit to eternal punishment. Unless, of course, you hold to the belief that no souls are in Hell as of yet, which is consistent with Jewish beliefs.

So, is God a cutter? Is he emo? Of all the things he does, he certainly does not conserve his own matter/energy matrix as the Holy Spirit--he violates his own laws, upon which you lovingly base "his" logic! The universe does not operate in such a wasteful fashion, so either A) God does not operate the way the universe operates, a theory which disproves your notion of...God as a foundation for logic, or B) the relationship is inverse--logic existed before God, and God is inferior to the logic of the universe. After all, how could an imperfect being create a perfect system? It's beyond him!

And, my usual rejoinder stands, which is that God didn't exist until 3000 years ago, but humans (in some form) existed for 3,000,000+ years prior to that. God was invented at a certain point in the timeline, so any argument about God-as-logician ultimately rests not with God (who isn't answering calls at the moment), but with the people that invented him. Not to say that some "God" figure might be out there, but again, NO EVIDENCE. And without evidence, there is no logical support for the conclusion. And if that's God's law, then by that very basis God disappears in a puff of logic, as Monty Python would want to say.

Trevor Almy:

Matthew, your response tells me either A) You do not understand the question that I am asking or B) you do not have an answer for the question I am asking. I am not an engineer major attempting to prove God through thermodynamics (I am actually out of college, by the way) but I can at least ACCOUNT for the existence of scientific laws. I also did not appeal to experience (which makes your "fairy dust" refutation sound rather absurd).

The question I keep asking and which you keep diverting the discussion away from is this: how do you account for the laws of logic? You said, "They just simply are there" which amounts to little more than, "I don't know." If you don't know the answer, just say so! You said, "Just because I have a thought, doesn't mean I have to justify that thought." That would be the same as me saying, "You're wrong and I'm going to hit you. I don't have to justify why you're wrong or why I have a right to hit you." This line of thinking is absurd.

If we had begun this discussion and you had asked me why I believe in God and I just said, "Because I just do. He is simply there" you wouldn't have been satisfied with this line of reasoning either.

At the end of your post, you said there was no EVIDENCE for God. Yet I ask you, what kind of EVIDENCE are you seeking? Are you seeking empirical evidence? Again, what basis do you have for believing that the only kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge? Did you empirically test that presupposition? Everyone knows that there are certain things that you cannot determine their existence empirically. I suppose in your worldview love does not exist because it cannot be tested empirically.

Finally, your diatribe against Christianity raises too many issues to address in this post. I will say one thing though: it demonstrates your widespread ignorance of the Christian religion. Your argumentation against the death of Christ indicates that you have no understanding of the hypostatic union-the doctrine that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man inseparably united in one person without separating or confusing the two natures. Christ was able to experience all the suffering of a man while still being fully God. In Christianity, death does not mean you "cease to exist" so when the God/man died, the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, didn't suddenly stop existing.

And no God is not emo. The Holy Spirit does not inhabit the reprobate who are sent to Hell. Only are believers indwellt by the Holy Spirit. His indwelling does not mean he is "cut off" from God for God is omnipresent. His indwelling also does not mean he is confined to the believer (like some kind of quasi-pantheism) but that he exists there because it is his gracious purpose to do so.