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WillowOne's Positions

Transcendental Argument

Form

The Transcendental Argument for God (TAG), associated with Cornelius Van Til, Greg Bahnsen, and in its online form with presuppositionalists such as Darth Dawkins, Sye Ten Bruggencate, and Eric Hovind:

  1. Logic, reason, knowledge, and morality presuppose a foundation.
  2. Only the Christian God can provide that foundation.
  3. Therefore the Christian God exists, and the very act of arguing against him presupposes him.

The usual conversational form is: "How do you know anything without God?" or "How do you account for the laws of logic?"

My Positions

  1. The argument is circular. It presupposes the Christian God in order to argue for the Christian God, and its proponents openly admit this, holding that all reasoning is circular at bottom. But if all reasoning is circular, the argument gives no reason to prefer their circle to mine.
  2. Premise 2 is never argued for. The claim that only the Christian God can ground logic is simply asserted. A Muslim presuppositionalist could run the identical argument for Allah; a Platonist could run it for the Forms. Nothing in the structure of the argument selects for Christianity.
  3. I do account for the laws of logic. See My Presuppositions: they are a priori constraints on coherent thought, discovered rather than invented, and compatible with naturalism as either features of evolved cognition or formal constraints on any possible description of a consistent reality. The presuppositionalist's demand that I "account for" them by deriving them from something more fundamental is a demand that cannot be met by anyone, including the theist, because there is nothing more fundamental than logic from which to derive it. See the Münchhausen trilemma.
  4. Grounding logic in God makes it less secure, not more. If the laws of logic depend on God's nature or will, they are contingent on him, and a being that could suspend them (as the omnipotent God is said to be able to suspend natural law) makes them unreliable. If God cannot suspend them, then they are independent of him, and the argument fails.
  5. The argument confuses the origin of a faculty with its justification. Even if God had given us reason, that would not be what makes reasoning valid, any more than my parents giving me eyes is what makes vision reliable.
  6. The method is dishonest in practice. The presuppositionalist refuses to argue for their own position, and instead demands that the interlocutor prove the possibility of knowledge from scratch, treating any failure as a win. This is a Loaded Question followed by an Appeal to Ignorance, and the correct response is to decline the game: I will not accept a burden of proof for a claim I have not made.

Also see