I wanted to clarify some points raised during the Magic Sandwich show this weekend.
For those who missed it, we had on Eric Hovind and Sye Ten Bruggincate.
The regular panel were all there, Thunder, dpr, and me, and Aron joined us from down
under at the World Atheist Convention, though his voice was nearly gone from trying to out-volume
a bullhorn.
It says something about Aron that he claims to have won, and I don't think anyone doubts
it.
Unfortunately, as usual, we had technical issues and the format was very challenging
for the kind of discussion I had hoped to have.
My thanks to our guests and the rest of the panel for their patience with my long-winded
comments.
I feared surrendering the microphone because I knew it would a long time before I had a
chance to follow up on my points.
So, why did we bother with two people that very few atheists have any respect for, at
least after their performance at the Reason Rally?
Why were Sye and Eric offered a chance to step on the street preachers platform once
again?
Personally I wanted to accomplish two things: One, to confront them about their behavior,
and two, to prepare any future victims of their ambush interviews with a counter-argument.
Sye Ten Bruggincate is an amateur apologist, but his apologetics represent something new
for me in terms of tactic.
Most logical arguments attempt to persuade the other party of the soundness of your premises
and conclusions.
Sye's tactic is to prevent his opponent from being able to contest his bland assertions.
This is such a shocking idea to me, because the discussion between people of different
faiths or none has always for me been an honest exchange of views that relies on each person
to present their worldview, and defend it against challenge.
Sye, on the other hand, never defends, never presents.
His apologetic is a bit of an insult to both sides, because not only does he attack the
very right of a non-believer to present arguments, but he makes no attempt to defend his own
worldview.
The pre-suppositional apologist's strategy is never to allow for neutral ground on which
to debate, and that's not my assertion, it's Sye's.
It catches people unprepared, especially non-theists who are used to simply defending the skeptical
position that a god has not been demonstrated to exist.
It's that logical bedrock that Sye is attempting to detonate.
I'll show in a minute how his own argument can be effectively used against him.
So, let's state Sye's argument, his version of the classic Transcendental Argument for
the Existence of God, henceforth called TAG for short.
Sye asserts that only a Christian worldview is sound because only a Christian is capable
of accounting for logical, scientific and moral absolutes.
Logical absolutes are the descriptions of how things appear to behave in reality, things
like the law of identity, A=A, and the law of non-contradiction, A cannot be not-A, and
the law of excluded middle, which can be stated simply as everything can only either be A,
or not A.
Sye says that these logical laws are absolute, immaterial, and unchanging and that this nature
can only be accounted for if the laws reflect the nature of his god.
Hence, anyone who attempts to deny that his god exists cannot use logic.
Since we all rely on these logical laws to make arguments, or to validate the evidence
of our senses, anyone not arguing from a Christian worldview can't make an argument about anything.
This gives Sye an excuse to dismiss all contrary views.
He's fond of certain questions like "How do you know your reasoning is valid?"
or "Tell me something you know absolutely" because it highlights the fact that we all
use, as a basal assumption, the existence of reality as an empirical test for our own
reason.
For example, we know that a rock is a rock and that it cannot be a non-rock because we
have never observed it to be.
We make logical inferences using our logical inferences, and that is circular.
We assume the evidence of our senses is accurate, at least provisionally, so that we can go
about our daily business and use our reason to tell green from red so we don't hit another
car going through the intersection.
My counter-apologetic is easier to explain if we have an analogy as a starting point.
Let's imagine a kingdom, I'll call it Godlandia.
In Godlandia, every citizen has a chip implanted in their brain at birth, and the chip can
alter the thoughts of the citizen at the control of the king, who has the master control device.
The people of Godlandia are aware of the chips and their influence.
Every time someone has a thought that they find surprising or troubling, they're reminded
that they can't entirely trust their own thoughts.
They can't be sure if, when they are happy or unhappy, angry or joyous, that they are
truly experiencing those emotions, or simply that the king pushed a button on the master
control device.
We haven't talked about the king much.
He could be a very good king, but the people of Godlandia have no way of trusting their
own judgement about him.
They could think him a good king simply because they have no choice to do otherwise.
The king could hold a giant demonstration where he promises never again to alter the
thoughts of the citizens, where he appears to smash the master control device... but
the people still can't be sure that they weren't being deceived.
They have no way of knowing anything about reality for sure, and the very presence of
the chip in their brains makes them always suspect their own reason.
On the other side of the mountains from Godlandia, we'll put Naturalia.
Here the people don't have chips in their brains...
so far as they know.
It's true that the people of Naturalia have no way of proving this, but since the idea
never occurs to them that their own thoughts are compromised, they trust their own reasoning.
Now, they could be wrong.
The king of Naturalia could be doing exactly the same thing as Godlandia, but the fact
that the people of Naturalia assume reality to be real means that they don't constantly
suspect their own logic.
In our analogy, Sye is arguing that because the king, his god, promises to be good and
never to actually use the mind control device, that Sye can always rely on his own reason.
As we've established, though, Sye can never reason about his god because at any time his
god could be deceiving him, including convincing him that god is incapable of deception.
Even his assertion that his god reveals truth to him through magical means that can't be
challenged can be rejected if Sye's reasoning is subject to his god, who may be deceiving
him.
Any argument Sye tries to make is defeated by his own inability to trust his "god-given"
reason.
The atheist, or more accurately we should say metaphysical naturalist, believes that
she has no motivation to assume that her reason should be doubted.
Things in the universe have a nature that govern their behavior.
The law of identity is simply an observation of how things are, and it's subject to revision
when it is no longer useful in logical inference.
The naturalist might be deceived by supernatural beings, and her reason might be faulty, but
there's no specific reason to believe this is so.
In fact, Sye's worldview, by asserting that logic has a subjective nature, that is it's
not a property that things have, but rather it's a property imposed by a mind, remember
A only equals A because it's concordant with god's wishes or nature or whatever, by asserting
that logic is subjective, we now have two epistemic uncertainties; the question of how
we can know reality, and the question of whether we can trust subjective logic.
The naturalist/atheist (whatever), simply asserts that the logical or scientific laws
are properties of the things themselves, so they need only make the assumption that these
things have a nature that we can understand.
Here's a good analogy for this.
Suppose you're lost in the woods, but you have a compass.
You might be uncertain about the accuracy of the compass's ability to point to true
north.
Now imagine that instead of you having the compass, it's in the hands of a stranger who
is also lost with you.
The stranger refuses to let you see the compass, insisting that he will tell you truthfully
and accurately what the true north is.
Sye argues that by trusting the stranger's truthfulness means he can trust the status
of true north, but in fact he now has uncertainty not only about the accuracy nature of the
compass but also the truthfulness of the stranger.
If the compass is malfunctioning but the stranger is truthful, or the compass is functioning
by the stranger is untruthful, there are more possibilities to account for in Sye's belief
that logical and scientific absolutes are the result of a mind that cannot absolutely
be trusted.
I feel like I'm belaboring this point a little, but it's so important.
On the left is the circularity of an naturalist worldview.
Reason is tested for coherence against our empirical observations which is interpreted
with our reason.
Things have properties, so far as we can tell, which we can call their nature, and those
properties are modeled and tested to derive the logical and scientific laws.
On the right is Sye's worldview.
It's not just that he's inserted an unecessary god into the process, a being that is itself
complex and improbable and requires explanation, he's actually reversed the flow of the circularity.
His god forces things to behave according to specific laws, rather than the laws arising
from the nature of things.
Those laws are subjective and contingent on the nature of his god.
But since we now have two steps that require explanation, it's actually a much weaker argument.
Sye refers to circularity vs. vicious circularity... he thinks that because the circularity goes
outside his own head it somehow becomes more reliable.
But his magical revelation isn't tested outside his head.
It's tested inside against his reason, he just refuses to recognize that.
I know this is getting a bit confusing because we're talking in logical abstractions and
analogy.
It gets easier when we focus on the same argument applied to the laws of science and morality.
As a metaphysical naturalist, I believe scientific laws emerge from the properties of the universe,
the nature of things.
The law of conservation of momentum, for example, is the result of forces that we can understand
through inductive means.
You throw a rotten tomato at a street preacher, it complies with the laws of gravity and Force
equals mass times acceleration and so on.
Now there may be cases where these laws don't apply.
If you throw a neutrino at a street preacher, it may not behave in exactly the same way
as the rotten tomato, but we believe that this behavior is inherent in the nature of
the thing itself.
That is, it is an objective property, derived from the object.
It's absolute, it a law that applies to all such things.
The metaphysical naturalist, the atheist, can account for objective and absolute laws
like this simply by assuming they're the properties that objects have in the same way she can
assume that the laws of logic derive from the nature of the universe she lives in.
Remember, they describe the nature of things, they are not commandments by a divine being.
In fact, Sye's Christian worldview says that scientific laws are the result of his god's
nature.
That is, the law of conservation of momentum is only true so long as it is consistent with
god's existence.
There are many instances in his holy book where these laws are reported to have been
suspended or violated.
So Sye believes in laws of science and logic and as we'll see, morality, that are SUBJECTIVE,
that is the not in the objects themselves, but rather derived from a mind.
Sye sees the laws of logic and science as being rules that we are forced to follow,
rather than descriptions of the nature of things in our universe.
They're also not absolute as they were in the atheist worldview, but rather limited
to all objects except his particular god.
Let's illustrate this last point by switching to moral standards.
Sye's very fond of saying he follows an absolute objective moral standard.
But it's a standard that is derived from his god's mind, hence it is subjective, and it
also doesn't apply to his god.
His god can murder and that murder is subjectively moral.
His god can promote slavery and that slavery is subjectively moral.
So there are two moral standards, one for his god and one for everyone else.
Hence, it is neither absolute nor objective.
So, we can clearly establish that Sye's Christian worldview, and I don't mean to tar every Christian
with the same brush, but Sye's worldview that he claims can account for objective and absolute
laws of logic, science and morality does nothing of the sort.
Sye has been concealing the massive flaw in his argument, specifically, that it confuses
absolute and objective for limited and subjective.
Fortunately, as we mentioned earlier, Sye can't rely on his reasoning about his god
or his god's revelation, so his entire argument is easily dismissed.
Now Sye, when presented with this argument, may be tempted to argue that it is the nature
of his god to be logical, and that logical nature is therefore instilled into the universe.
But either god commands logic to be, in which case it is subjective and limited, or the
universe is logical because it is the nature of the universe to be logical... which if
you recall is exactly what the metaphysical naturalist asserts.
In other words, Sye's only escape from this argument is to assume the atheist worldview,
to convert to atheism so that he can reason about his god.
Therefore the proof that God doesn't exist is that with him, we can't know anything.
There's your counter-apologetic, the Transcendental Argument for the Non-Existence of God.
Now if Sye or someone like Sye ambushes you, you really have three choices.
You can refuse to engage them, walk away from a very juvenile non-argument, but I suspect
that only encourages them to continue.
They confuse disinterest for fear.
You can engage them and expose the the self-contradiction in their own argument, though it will be a
painful process.
However, there is a third option that will work well if you refuse to lose control of
the conversation.
Every question they ask you, and remember they aren't interested in defending a position,
merely attacking yours, simply reframe it back it to them.
If they ask you "What is one thing you know absolutely?"
send the question back and force them to follow it to the very end, where they must concede
that their only "out" is a basal assumption of subjective logic based on an unreasonable
belief in magical revelation.
Thanks for watching.