Bob
Siedensticker has a way of oversimplifying, well, just about every
view that he disagrees with. Bob’s first step is to oversimplify, then
misrepresent and equivocate if necessary, and then refute. When it comes to the
transcendental argument for God (TAG), he remains consistent in his method. For
starters, Bob doesn’t think it necessary to spend any time talking about a
working definition of TAG, its history, philosophical or theological roots, or
its function. That is just plain sloppy work.
Concerning Transcendental
Arguments, Robert Stern writes, “The first, and perhaps most definitive
feature, is that these arguments involve a claim of a distinctive form: namely,
that one thing (X) is a necessary condition for the possibility of something
else (Y), so that (it is said) the latter cannot obtain without the former.”[1] A necessary
condition for the occurrence of a specified event is a circumstance in whose absence
the event cannot occur.[2]
For example, a necessary condition for combustion is oxygen. If there is no
oxygen, there can be no combustion. So then, a transcendental argument asks the
question, what has to be the case in order for (Y) to be the case?
The Transcendental
Argument for God is made predominantly by those who espouse the presuppositional
method of apologetics as popularized by Cornelius Van Til, Greg Bahnsen, and
lately, Scott Oliphint and James Anderson. Greg Bahnsen writes, “To put it
simply, in the case of “direct” arguments (whether rational or empirical), the
negation of one of their premises changes the truth or reliability of their
conclusion. But this is not true of transcendental arguments, and that sets
them off from other kinds of proof or analysis.”[3] In other words,
the necessary condition for the denial of God is the existence of God.
Cornelius
Van Til set out to show that TAG established the truth of the Christian worldview
as the necessary precondition for human experience. While I do recognize that
TAG is not persuasive, it is nonetheless, sound in its conclusion. Christianity
is, in fact, the only way to make sense out of human experience. Alternative
worldviews, or perhaps, the alternative worldview ends in irrationalism.
TAG starts
with human experience, things like science, morality, reason, and asserts that
God is the necessary precondition for the intelligibility of these experiences.
It seeks to prove its claim by indirectly showing that the alternative,
non-Christian worldview is impossible because it always involves contradiction.
Take, for example, human reason. TAG claims that God is the necessary condition
for human reason. Without God, human reason could not exist. An alternative is
that human reason evolved from non-reason to its present state. But we know
that reason cannot be the product of non-reason. We know that the reason cannot
exist without a rational mind. Locating the beginning of human reason apart
from God is an impossible challenge. It is a blatant contradiction to say that
reason was invented, created, or even evolved from non-reason. The same holds
for things like knowledge, human language, etc.
Bob has said
elsewhere that logic is an invention of the human mind. This means that the
laws of logic are not really laws after all, not in the sense that we
understand them. They are arbitrary rules engineered by some human mind(s)
along the way. If this is true, then it is possible to reject these laws
without consequence. Why should I accept the arbitrary rules of the majority?
Would it not be the case that such a perspective would be perfectly compatible
with Nietzsche’s will to power? So, when Bob asserts that Christianity lacks
evidence for its claims, I can happily ignore him and swat the gnat flying
about my head and get on with my business of believing, all the while ignoring
the buzz that is Bob telling me how irrational my Christianity is.
What is the
form of TAG? How does TAG proceed? While TAG takes the form of a deductive
argument, it is not. TAG is a transcendental argument. In a deductive argument,
negation of one of the premises proves the argument unsound. This is not the
case with the TA. The TA is looking for the necessary preconditions for the
possibility of things like intelligibility. It is asking what has to be true in
order for human intelligibility to be the case. The argument can be stated this
way:
Intelligibility
--> God
Intelligibility
/God
AND
Intelligibility
--> God
~Intelligibility
/God
Greg Bahnsen
helps: “Clearly, then, transcendental demonstration has a very distinct kind
of argument over against rational and empirical proofs.[4] The atheist will
protest that the first premise in both arguments cannot be proven and that the
second premise in the second argument leads to a non-sequitur. The second
indictment simply means that the atheist doesn’t understand transcendental
arguments. But the atheist doesn’t understand Christianity either and this
doesn’t step him or her from vociferously criticizing it. What the second
argument is saying is that the denial of intelligibility presupposes God
because it requires intelligibility. And since intelligibility presupposes God,
anything that requires it presupposes God as well.
Bob’s first
claim is that “TAG is just a deist argument.” Bob’s claim is that if he agreed
with TAG, he would only end up being a deist at best. Well, that is actually
not true. Bob says that same thing about a number of other theistic proofs here.
But is this actually the case? The answer is not at all. First of all, if one
of the theistic proofs moved you to accept the existence of God, it would not
necessarily move you to believe in a specific sort of God. There is something
to be said about the theistic arguments ability to prove that it is the God of
Christianity that exists. This is one of the criticisms of using these
arguments to prove God. The arguments are quite often criticized for proving a
generic theism and little more. But that is not the same thing a proving deism.
This they do not do. Bob seems to confuse generic theism with deism. You see,
deism is belief in a specific strain of theism: the divine being does not
intervene in the universe. Therefore, none of the arguments (cosmological,
moral, ontological, design, fine-tuning, argument from credulity) actually
prove deism. So Bob is factually wrong in his assertion. If these other
arguments convinced you, you would be a deist. And he is wrong about TAG as
well. TAG would not lead one to deism. This shows that Bob does not understand
TAG.
TAG is, for
the most part, the product of Cornelius Van Til. Van Til talks about the Christian
principle of discontinuity: the mind of God as all-comprehensive in knowledge because
all-controlling in power. He then talks about the Christian principle of
continuity: the self-contained God and his plan for history. When these
principles are conjoined, we obtain the Christian principle of reasoning by
presupposition. Van Til says, “It is the actual existence of the God of
Christian theism and the infallible authority of the Scripture which speaks to
sinners of this God that must be taken as the presupposition of the
intelligibility of any fact in the world.”[5] This sort of God
is not the god presented in deism. The god presented in deism does not
condescend. He is not immanent. He is not uninvolved. The God of TAG is both
all-controlling in power and he has a plan for history. At a minimum, this
shows that Bob’s analysis of TAG is wide of the mark. His first criticism
claims too much.
Bob’s next
criticism of TAG is a “God of the gap” objection. Bob seems to think that God
was invented as an explanation for the things humanity cannot explain. This is
simply an anachronistic falsehood. Men served, feared, and worshipped God long
before they didn’t know that they didn’t know. At best, where TAG is concerned,
this is a red herring.
Bob then
attempts his poor understanding of the laws of logic to attack and blaspheme
God. He says, “By saying that God can’t make something that’s logically
impossible, however, they create another problem as God’s actions become
constrained by an external logic. If God is bound by logic, logic isn’t
arbitrary. God can’t change it. He acts logically because he must, just like
the rest of us.” This is simply a false assumption on Bob’s part. There is
no reason to assume that logic is external to God any more than it is to think
that good or just or love is external to God. For some reason, Bob thinks he
has done his duty in his rebuttal to the many philosophers who agree that the
idea that God cannot create a rock so big that he cannot move it, is simply a
category mistake. Bob wants to force the theologian to accept his definition of
omnipotence. But that isn’t how arguments work Bob. That is not how you refute
another person’s worldview. That is the childish and amateur straw man fallacy
and it is a fallacy that Bob seems to live by. To say that God is all powerful
is to say that God can do anything that is logically possible for a being to
do. Bob thinks his reference to the Trinity demonstrates a violation of logic.
This only means that Bob does not understand the nature of the Trinity. Once
again, the straw man fallacies are adding up more quickly than one can count.
The limitations of human reason to fully comprehend the Trinity should not be
mistaken for obvious contradiction. Bob simply doesn’t get it. Bob then claims
this is a Euthyphro-like dilemma. But this depends entirely on Bob being
correct that Christians accept his view that logic is something external to God
just as the Greeks thought of morality as something external to the pantheon.
Christians do not accept the view that logic is something external to God. Bob
has been told this repeatedly, but he chooses to ignore it. Why? It preserves
his argument. He ignores it because Bob knows that if he does not, he will have
to retract his arguments and lose credibility. Well, Bob’s poor arguments and
multiple misrepresentations of Christian belief and his logical blunders have
demonstrated that his credibility is near the bottom anyways. Bob’s
understanding of Christianity and his use of logic are highly suspect.
Bob’s 4th
objection is no better. Bob asks, Could God create logic and mathematics? Or is
he bound by them? Well, Bob will have to prove that mathematics and logic are
created. Christianity and good philosophy hold both to be necessary truths.
They are absolute. There is no possible world in which 2+2 does not equal 4.
There is no possible world in which the law of non-contradiction is false. Things
like logic, math, language, knowledge, all existed eternally in the mind of God
who is himself an absolute, self-contained, eternal being. Bob is again
dreaming up objections to things that Christian belief does not teach. Bob is
0-4 in his criticism of TAG. In his 10 objections to Christianity, Bob scored
an impressive 0-10. At a minimum one can say if nothing else, Bob is
consistent; consistently wrong.
Bob’s 5th
criticism of TAG is not any more impressive than his first four: Bob talks
about the consequences of a godless universe. But he immediately imposes his
own fallacy on the apologist when he against implies that the TAG proponent
presupposes a universe in which God created logic. He goes on to talk about how
preposterous it is to think that the law of non-contradiction could be vacated.
Bob is on record as stating that logic is an invention of the human mind. Well,
Bob seems to have no choice but to think this way since he subscribes to
naturalism. Since this is the case, it is Bob who believes that logic was
created…created by the human mind. And if logic is created by the human mind,
then yes, it is quite alright for humans to vacate the laws of logic and this
means that A could be a rock and not a rock in the same sense and at the same
time, Bob. It isn’t the TAG proponent that has a problem dealing with the
existence of the laws of logic. It is the atheist sir!
Bob’s 6th
criticism of TAG is: You ask why? I ask why not? Bob says that God as an
explanation is nothing more than a theological claim, not evidence. But that is
yet another arbitrary decision on Bob’s part. Why does a claim have to be
either theological or not evidence? Why can’t theological claims count as
evidence if they come with good backing? Bob does say. He just presumes it to
be so and continues his criticism. Bob says that logic is an axiom. But how can
logic be the invention of human minds and be an axiom? How can mathematics be
an invention of the human mind and be an axiom. And if there were no human
minds to invent math and logic, then neither would exist, right Bob? At best,
in atheism, logic and math are mere conventions…conventions we are
theoretically free to ignore if we so choose. I will close with James Anderson’s
excellent formulation of TAG using human thought (T).
(1) Possibly, T
(2) Necessarily, possibly, T.
(3) Necessarily, if possibly T, then
G.
(4) If necessarily, possibly T, then
necessarily, G.
(5) Necessarily, G.
Anderson
rightfully notes, “I suggest that the transcendental argument should be understood
along similar lines; specifically, as a family of theistic arguments from the
possibility of human thought and experience. We ought therefore to be skeptical
of any claim that the transcendental argument has been refuted or shown to be
misguided.”
My next post
will deal with Bob’s observations of TAG, numbers 7-12. So far, Bob is 0-16 in
his criticisms of Christianity. I suspect it will get worse.
[1] Robert Stern, ed., Transcendental
Arguments: Problems and Prospects, Mind Association Occasional Series
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 3.
[2] Irving M. Copi, Introduction
to Logic, 14th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, ©2011), 471.
[3] Greg L. Bahnsen, Van
Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P & R
Pub., ©1998), 501.
[4] Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and
Analysis (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P & R Pub., ©1998), 502.
[5] Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg,
NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co., 1985), 118.
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