Is the Axiom of Existence "Ambiguous"? A Reply to Eli Ayala

I’m often fascinated at the lengths to which Christian apologists will go in order to salvage the wreckage of their worldview when confronted with Objectivism. The amount of energy they pour into creating ways of obfuscating and evading can be staggering. And throughout it all, it is ironic to observe how high they set the bar for non-Christian worldviews on certain topics while ignoring the fact that Christianity itself has no player to send into the arena to compete. A great example of this is when apologists assert that non-Christian worldviews lack the necessary preconditions for knowledge while Christianity itself has no theory of concepts to begin with. Apologists themselves seem oblivious to this enormous shortfall.

We have observed apologists trying to wrestle with the axiom of existence in the past. It’s clear that to the last one, they undoubtedly sense the threat that the Objectivist axioms pose to the Christian worldview, and yet they fail to grasp the power of their truth. What’s most bewildering is their insistence to deny the axioms all the while unaware that their own denials would not be possible if not for the truth of the axioms they deny.

Frank Turek vs. the Laws of Nature

Recently I saw a brief video on Youtube of Christian apologist Frank Turek interrogating someone who appears to be a student in some kind of public venue, like a seminar or classroom setting. The clip is clearly an excerpt from some longer broadcast, but I have not seen the whole thing. The clip is just under a minute long (what is called a “short” on Youtube) and was apparently deemed worthy enough to publish as a standalone piece of entertainment.

The interaction here exemplifies an all-too common tactic in apologetics: the apologist demands that another person (presumably a non-Christian) present an explanation of something of a general nature about reality, and if the thinker cannot satisfy this demand, the apologist affirms “God” as the correct explanation, and the thinker’s inability to provide an alternative is construed as confirmation of the theistic worldview. On this strategy, a child repeating the affirmation of the existence of a god that he learned from adults in his life would be treated as having supplied an informed explanation. In essence, it is an appeal to ignorance packaged as a seemingly innocent gesture of philosophical inquiry. We must never forget that gods always come in the shape of man’s ignorance. The purpose of apologetics is to mask this ignorance as a recondite form of insight.

Epistemology or Methodological Amnesia?

In today’s post, we begin with a quote from Christian apologist John M. Frame:

Scripture actually has a great deal to say about epistemology, or theory of knowledge. It teaches that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Ps. 111:10; Prov. 9:10; 15:33) and of knowledge (Prov. 1:7). “Fear” here is that reverent awe that yields obedience. It is based on the conviction that God is Lord, and we are his creatures and servants. He has the right to rule every aspect of our lives. When he speaks, we are to hear with the profoundest respect. What he says is more important than any other words we may hear. Indeed, his words judge all the affairs of human beings (John 12:48). The truth of his words, then, must be our most fundamental conviction, our most basic commitment. We may also describe that commitment as our most ultimate presupposition, for we bring that commitment into all our thought, seeking to bring all our ideas in conformity to it. That presupposition is therefore our ultimate criterion of truth. We measure and evaluate all other sources of knowledge by it. We bring every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). (Five Views on Apologetics, pp. 208-9)

Frame assures his readers that the Christian bible (“Scripture”) “has a great deal to say about epistemology,” and immediately cites several passages from Proverbs and the Psalms.

Answering the Epistemologist

A reader who contacted me privately asked a number of questions the proper philosophical starting point and related matters. This reader, in spite of all the material I’ve assembled on my blog, apparently persists in thinking that some cognitive structure or mental operation (e.g., beliefs, faith, reasoning, inference, etc.) must be the proper starting point, apparently unaware of the fact that mental operations must always have some independently existing object to which said mental operations must refer and conform, and without which those mental operations would simply have no basis or purpose. 

After I made several attempts to explain why the human mind must start with the objects of consciousness rather than with some cognitive structure or mental operation, the reader announced that we had basically reached an impasse and that we were “going to agree to disagree.” However, where exactly the disagreement lies remains a bit of a mystery, at least to me. 

“Faith in the reasoning process”

Recently a visitor to my blog stopped by and took some time to submit a comment on my latest entry. The visitor did not give a name, posting under a moniker consisting exclusively of the Greek letter Psi. At first, with my still ailing eyes (cf. here), I thought the visitor was self-identifying as a pitchfork, and perhaps that was the intention (you know what they say about first impressions…). Or perhaps it’s supposed to be a psitchfork? Or perhaps the commenter is a fan of Sye Ten Bruggencate and the Greek letter is now being used as a fraternal symbol for this, or it’s code for allegiance to Pat Robertson, given that the Greek letter also carries the value of 700. Or, perhaps it’s a physics reference. Who knows!

Unfortunately, the commenter removed the comment, for reasons unknown to me. But I still have a copy of the comment, so I thought I’d post some thoughts in reply since the question raised by the commenter (to whom I will refer with the ignominiously gendered pronoun “he” at the risk of sending some readers to a padded safe space) provides a good opportunity to make some points. So now that the complicated stuff is out of the way, I will proceed with doing just that. 

My Refutation of STB: Ten Years On

Here at Incinerating Presuppositionalism, I like to recognize special anniversaries, milestones and achievements which mark the highlights of my blog. That’s not easy because, in my humble opinion, there are a lot of candidates for this kind of celebration. As frequent visitors likely already know, every year on the anniversary of this blog (first post dated March 26, 2005), I post an anniversary entry listing out all the posts I have published since the previous anniversary. Back in March of this year I posted the fifteenth such anniversary entry. 

Today I would like to mark the anniversary of an entry which rivals only a handful of others for most view counts on my blog – yes, the interest here persists after all these years! – namely an entry which I posted on this date in 2010. That is my Critique of Sye Ten Bruggencate’s www.proofthatgodexists.org. Feels more like eight and a half years ago, but in fact it’s been a full decade now. 

WSIBC: “Competing Worldviews”

In setting the stage for making his case for Christianity, Christian apologist James Anderson makes it clear that he’s talking about Christianity as a “worldview.” On pages 32-33 of his book Why Should I Believe Christianity? (WSIBC), Anderson explains:

a worldview is a comprehensive view of the world. I don’t mean a physical view of the world, like the sight of planet earth you might get from an orbiting space station. A worldview is a philosophical view of the world – and not just of our planet, but of the entire universe, indeed all of reality. A worldview is an all-encompassing perspective on ourselves and everything else that exists, especially those things that matter most to us and have the greatest influence on our lives.

Since a worldview is “a philosophical view of the world… indeed all of reality” that is “all-encompassing,” a worldview should be expected to help us understand “things we take for granted in our everyday lives, such as the orderliness of the universe, the meaningfulness of human existence, and our ability to use reason to extend our knowledge of the world” (p. 45). Thus, if “Christianity is an all-compassing worldview" (p. 25), then I would expect Christianity to have something informative to say about some fundamental matters, such as the proper starting point of human cognition, the relationship between consciousness and its objects, the nature of concepts and how we form them, etc. For whether one realizes it or not, these are fundamental matters which “have the greatest influence on our lives.”

"He is found in our hearts"

Christian apologists often carry on as if they’re know-it-alls when it comes to arguments. It’s possible that some might even know what an argument is. Many will spend hours if not years in the effort to master formal argumentation, fallacy detection, rhetorical devices, and of course, expressions in Latin. Their hope is apparently to ensure that they be “always ready” for any skirmish with a non-believer, for defending the faith from the offense of non-belief is of paramount importance to preserving loyalty to the confession.

And over the millennia theologians and apologists have been very inventive, devising numerous arguments for theism from a variety of angles, such as that the universe needed a cause, that the design we find in the world indicates the existence of a designer, that moral norms necessarily imply a moral law-giver, etc. Once belief in theism has been accepted, there’s an argument to defeat every possible criticism of god-belief that naysayers and spoilsports might raise. And the motivation for devising such arguments should not be too difficult to understand: once belief in the supernatural has been accepted as a true account of reality, one will need to protect his pride from the baddies of the world who scoff at such beliefs.

Parsing the Haysian Square-Circle

Here I will post some thoughts and counterpoints to a post Steve Hays published on Triablogue at the end of July this year called Square one.

Hays begins by linking to an entry he posted in February (here) stating “an atheist attempted to refute my post.” In that February post, Hays writes:

To take a comparison, consider a typical debate with a village atheist. They lead with a particular reason for rejecting Christianity. If you shoot down their stated reason, it doesn't faze them at all. They just reach into the bag for another reason. You can go down the list, and it makes no difference.

I did not see the comment of the challenger on that blog entry, so either it was sent to Hays apart from the comments of that blog entry, or if it were originally posted as a reply to that entry, it appears to have been deleted.

Edward Feser on Ayn Rand

A couple of months ago a reader of my blog wrote to me privately and asked me to comment on a January 2014 blog posting of one Edward Feser titled Does existence exist? In this entry I’m finally getting around to posting some reactions to it.

Feser headlines his blog, simply called Edward Feser, with several bits of praise, all of it I’m sure very true, such as “One of the best contemporary writers on philosophy” (National Review) and “Feser… has the rare and enviable gift of making philosophical argument compulsively readable” (Times Literary Supplement). It’s not clear where in these publications one can find such laudations. But given these accolades, one would suppose that his efforts to interact with Rand’s axiom of existence might unearth startling and profound truths missed by the average armchair philosopher.

Beyond this article, I’ve never read anything of Feser’s (not that I remember anyhow), so without studying more of his work (it will have to get in line), I will take his profile for its word when it says that he “write[s]… from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.”

Existence and Perception

Fundamental principles are the most critical part of philosophy to get right since all inferences, deductions and applications of its principles depend on their truth, their defensibility, and their suitability as fundamentals. Unfortunately it is philosophy’s fundamentals that are often the most misunderstood or even the least developed, either because they have not been securely identified, their truth is taken for granted and therefore deemed unworthy of deeper attention, or they have been disfigured through filters foreign to that philosophy.

I suspect that one reason why Objectivism’s fundamentals are so frequently and persistently misconstrued, is the very fact that Objectivism actually has clearly stated fundamentals, affirmed in terms of conceptually irreducible primaries, while other philosophies typically have at best vague handling of fundamentals and essentially zero regard for conceptual irreducibility. For example, consider the question: What is the fundamental starting point of post-modernism? Or Dialectical Materialism? Or Existentialism? Or Hinduism? Or Christianity? Or Scientology? Etc. Are they truly fundamental, or do they take certain unstated premises for granted? Do their stated foundations consist in identifying general facts that are directly available to any thinker, or do they rest in authoritarian pronouncements, secret canons, or elements of stories passed down by prior generations? 

Is the Christian God a "Necessary Being"?

Recently Steve Hays over at Triablogue posted a blog entry titled Who Made God?. This entry offers some instructive opportunities for engaging the kind of thinking many believers indulge in, so I have decided to comment on it.

Hays begins with the following provocative statement:

Some atheists think they can dismiss cosmological arguments by simply asking, "Who made God?"

Given the tone Hays uses here (“you’ll never get away with it, you meddling atheists!”), I get the impression that he believes the question “who made God?” is an inappropriate reaction to the cosmological argument. However, it seems to be a perfectly valid response to an argument which insists that everything was made by a “who” in the first place. If someone wants to validate his belief in invisible magic beings by asking “who made the universe?” why would it be wrong to suppose that, if a person, specifically a consciousness, must have created the universe and everything in it, a person, specifically a consciousness, must have created the person who created the universe?

Does One Need Evidence to Be an Atheist?

“[A]theism is just a statement of what an atheist doesn't believe rather than what he does believe” – Steve Hays

Over on Triablogue, Steve Hays posted an entry provocatively titled There’s no evidence for atheism. In it, he argues that atheists are essentially at a loss when it comes to producing a positive case for atheism, that the most they can do is raise objections to theism. One wonders if he has ever read George H. Smith’s book Atheism: The Case Against God. Of course, that raises the question of what constitutes a positive argument for a position. Then again, we should also not overlook the obvious fact that atheism is not a position to begin with; it is essentially a negation, a negation of theism. Sort of like a-Moonism: here “a-Moonist” would simply refer to someone who does not subscribe to the teachings of Sun Myung Moon. This does nothing to indicate which views to which an a-Moonist does subscribe. In fact, I’d wager that Steve Hays would consider himself an a-Moonist (in spite of Moonism’s Christian roots), just as I do given that I do not subscribe to the teachings of Sun Myung Moon.

So the question boils down to: Does one need a positive argument to support a negation of a belief system? Does one need evidence if he does not subscribe to a belief system? Do I need evidence to be an a-Moonist? If so, why?

Creationism, the Universe, and Imagination

Religious apologists have a very limited set of gimmicks to use in defense of their theistic confessions. When more philosophical strategies focusing on the nature of knowledge, the source of morality, and criticism of rival philosophical viewpoints reach their stress point, apologists predictably fall back to questions such as “Where did it all come from?” and “Why is there something instead of nothing?” Or, as GotQuestions.org puts it, “Why do we have something rather than nothing at all?”

Such questions haunt the religious mind as never-resolvable puzzles that can only be put to rest by positing a supernatural mind. Why is this?

I think the most illuminating answer to why such questions persist in the apologetic arsenal of most religious thinkers, is one which does not help their religious cause. And this has chiefly to do with the role that the imagination plays in the very conceiving of such questions.

A Reply to Matthias on Philosophical Starting Points

Matthias McMahon (“McFormtist”) of Choosing Hats recently posted a two-part comment on my 2006 blog entry Confessions of a Vantillian Subjectivist. In this series of entries, beginning with this one, I address his points and objections. I suggest that readers familiarize themselves first with the older blog before reading my responses to Matthias. I re-read my entry prior to writing this response, and I still agree wholeheartedly with everything I stated in it.

In the present entry, the discussion focuses on starting points. In his comment Matthias indicated what Christians take to be their starting point, and I will contrast this with Objectivism’s starting point after defining relevant criteria which a worldview’s starting point must meet in order to be a proper starting point. I explain how Objectivism’s starting point (the axiom ‘existence exists’) in fact meets all of these criteria, and we will see how the starting point attributed by Matthias to the Christian worldview fails to meet same these criteria. Then it will be shown how Christians must in fact assume the truth of Objectivism’s starting point while taking it completely for granted.

So onwards and upwards, as they say.