http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLi6UkYG8H0


I'm not sure if I totally understand the second argument he gives. It goes something like this:

Without God as an assumption all of our perceiving processes are not possible. When a man speaks, for instance, it has no more meaning than a dog barking. Or, assuming naturalism is true, when someone writes poetry it is the same as chicken scratch.

I know Darwin himself said towards the end of his life something along the lines of "my words have no more meaning than a monkey jabbering in a tree" or something like that. I have never totally understood this argument and I was hoping someone could clarify.

The last argument he gives, and the one that is the most persuasive to him, is puzzling to me. He basically argues that Christianity is true because the bible says so. He says that the biblical authors speak with a certain authenticity that he cannot deny that what they are saying is true. Muslims will say the same thing about the Koran, the Mormons will say the same thing about the Book of Mormon. His argument is totally question begging. Am I missing something here?

Just sounds like "I cant handle meaninglessness, therefore I will believe in a god, to make me feel better". Which is fine I guess.

Do you think poetry is different from a chicken scratch? If so, how?

[QUOTE] ... only VERY very something like this. It's slightly more intelligent that that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presupp...al_apologetics

Note that he's giving existential reasonings, i.e. what he finds for himself most compelling. He's not claiming that those are the philosophical most advanced or sophisticated arguments available.

Ravi Zacharias mentions the Darwin quote at the beginning if this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqwxhxKlmNU

I was wondering if someone could find the exact quote. I would be interested to see it. I'm pretty sure it is Darwin who said that.

Yes. Poetry is different than chicken scratch because the letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, ect... are labels for concepts that can be formulated in the mind and interpreted as rational thoughts. Chicken scratch is random markings produced by a being that is barley aware of terrestrial reality that does not represent labels for concepts and cannot be interpreted by the mind as rational thoughts.

Can anyone argue the other side?

I don't mean to be an idiot but what exactly does he mean by "existentially true to me." Does that mean that by his experience of the argument that it strikes him as being true more so than any other argument?

All the concepts, labels, letters, words are devoid of inherent meaning. They mean no more, or less, than a chicken scratch. The only meaning given to them is by the person who is listening to the poetry. Only by agreeing on the meanings of the labels, letters and words, do we give these sounds and squiggly marks on paper, meaning. Concepts dont exist outside of thought.

Existentialism

What he's saying, essentially, is that from his individual perspective, those arguments ring true the most.

It's presuppositional apologetics, as he notes in the video. Basically the argument goes that we can only make sense of the world through a Christian view, and so non believers have no rational basis for their beliefs, they are left to borrow from this worldview even if they dont know they are doing it.

Whenever you hear someone say something like "why is murder wrong on the athiest worldview" That's presuppositional apologetics.

I think its nonsense, personally

Not saying you're wrong, just that I think knowledge-oriented questions are more common from presupp's.
Is it nonsense? From a general point of philosophy, I think it's rather useful to examine things like "what is knowledge, how do we know things etc" and realising that some of the responses are frustrating and problematic. But those problems cannot be solved by religious arguments, and that's where it becomes nonsense if someone is asserting that they can (and all they can do is assert).

Well ok, i'd say the idea of "borrowed capital" is pretty big in pre supp, at least, it was for van till. I never meant to imply this is all presup is, its just that you hear this a lot from the evangelical psuedo philosphers now and presup is its root.
I don't know if you intended to do this or not but this is pretty much the textbook definition of a strawman. You changed what I said to "what do you know and how do you know it"? And then criticized me for calling it "nonsense."

They can be answered by religious arguments (if not that well). Remember, Descartes argued that at least part of the reason that we can be confident that our senses are not deceiving us is because God would not deceive us.

The biggest problem with presuppositional apologetics is that their arguments that all non-theistic (or even stronger, non-Christian) views of knowledge, morality, ontology, etc. are not only false but necessarily false are unsound, and obviously so.

I thought that it was established that God is quite capable of deceiving us and has done so in the past. I struggle to believe that Descartes wasn't aware of this so I guess I'm missing some nuance or interpretation that explains this away.

Source

Words have no intrinsic meaning in themselves. For example, I'm guessing this is not very meaningful to most people here (and no, google translate won't help... most likely it won't even be able to find the correct language), and very few of you (if any) have access to some kind of system that could derive the intended meaning from them.

Apparently, your theologian tries to extrapolate some kind of truth from this. That this lack of intrinsic objectivity has to mean extrinsic objectivity is a given.

Apologetic approaches are generally unsound ("if you can make an explanation, your belief holds") - and from experience most of the people who tout these things are generally not experts nor even well-versed dabblers in the fields they comment on. Usually they rely more on debate tricks, clever rhetoric and preaching to the choir more than anything else.

Language acquisition is broad field in its infancy. It has very diverse perspectives and few unifying theories. I doubt some singular theologian out to affirm his personal bias will be much of an impact.

This is what I'm talking about.

I can see why you might think this, and I apologize for my hastily written reply. But in fact I wasn't criticizing you calling it nonsense, but more pondering whether it was; in some ways yes, in others no (vague, I know).
By 'in some ways no' I meant that, at least for myself (someone with no formal education in philosophy, but some interest), the presupp arguments I have heard have been useful in exposing me to the more difficult to explain areas of understanding. I mentioned epistomology, but it is just as true for your original quote of morality. Or logic, reasoning, aesthetics...etc.

I'm fascinated with presupp apologetics (isn't it a contradictory term?), or more specifically with those that use it to "prove" the existence of God. YouTube is showing an increase in its use against unsuspecting atheists, which is rather unfair since you'd get the same blank stares and poorly considered answers from anyone, including Christians, if they were put in the same spot. These apologists are often very slick and well prepared, they use confusion, rhetorical and semantic tricks. That is not an honest approach, and it is not dialog.

Or 'in some ways yes' (nonsense).

I think you are right, but generally when we come to a conclusion that the reasoning is somewhat circular, we try to re-examine our ideas.

It seems here that the presupps say God is true therefore anything else is irrational.

Or am I missing something?

Consider the question "what do you know, and how do you know it to be true?".
Generally, what we know comes through our senses and from our rational thoughts. This is taking "true" to mean "that which corresponds to reality", and just through looking at what philosophy says about knowledge I came to my first I did not know that realisation: there is not really a uniformly accepted definition for knowledge, and there are fundamental problems with justifying what is "known" (to justify some belief, you must appeal to some preceding belief - MightyBoosh will love this since he's on an infinite regress kick atm!).

The presupp apologist will ask how you know your senses and reasoning are valid. And so it begins. It's a good question, but they're trying to get you to an uncomfortable place where you cannot ultimately justify any of your beliefs, without thinking too much about the fact that this is a universal problem, not just to you the atheist.

Once they have got your head spinning, they will tell you that the only way to have knowledge is to know everything or to know someone that does! Thus, revelation is the act of God revealing knowledge to someone such that they know it is true. That last part is the crux, I have never heard an explanation for how that could happen. It also relies on God being honest, and Christians know this because God told them....and for me, this is where a thoroughly interesting topic begins to turn into a farce.

There are alternative topics, such as morality (as listed earlier by Sommerset). The "discussion" goes the same way, "How do you decide what is moral / good and why should you act that way?"

Should we move this to a Presuppositional Apologetics thread, if there's enough interest?

I think this is an excellent rundown, and the bolded is my biggest problem with presupp. The brain in a jar problem is just as big of a problem for the Christian as it is for anyone else. Appealing to God cannot solve it, IMO As OrP eluded to, descartes basically just special pleads his way to god- why can't the demon be deceptive about God as well?

It is this that I consider nonsense. Questions like "what do we know" and "how do we know it" are important, of course, but you can't just insert your proffered belief system and say you've accomplished anything.

I don't really see presupp as anything but choir preaching. I don't really see how it could ever convince an unbeliever of anything.

It is gaining some popularity lately though. Sye Ten Bruggencate has some DVD coming out, or is just out - 'Answering The Fool', or some such witticism - so there is a market for it. If you look at Eric Hovind, who is very popular despite being....well, I won't say anything mean here... but he basically adopted presuppositionalism after meeting Bruggencate, and all but abandoned his evidentiary apologetics that his ministry had been built up of.

Yea I've seen them. Thunderfoot out in the rain. The problem is that guy is probably worse at logic then hovind is... so it really went nowhere.

This is an enormous overreach. TAG (Transcendental Arguement for the Existence of God) is a very strong argument, hardly obviously false. In a sense, all the theistic proofs tend in the same direction - that meaning is only possible if God exists. For instance, the moral argument says 1) If God doesn't exist objective morality doesn't exist 2) Objective morality exists 3) Therefore God exists. The substance of this argument can be stated "Objective morality only makes sense if God exists" - similar to TAG "The universe only makes sense if God exists". As Piper said, Shakespeare is no different from a barking dog, unless God exists.

Yes, I'm willing to stand by my claim that TAG arguments are obviously unsound. In my opinion only the ignorant or the strongly biased accept it as sound. While I think that rational and reasonable people can accept the cosmological, ontological, and (some variants of) design arguments as sound, I don't think this is so with the TAG argument.

Dealing more directly with what you say here, I don't agree at all that all the theistic proofs tend in the direction of saying that meaning is only possible if God exists. That is obviously false. For instance, what does that have to do with the ontological argument? Or the cosmological argument? Or the argument from religious experience?

The problem with the TAG argument is clear. It is enough to defeat it to show that morality, or reason, or knowledge is possible in a world without a God. You don't have to show that in the actual world morality, reason, or knowledge exist, but only that in some possible world without God they exist. That is trivial enough to demonstrate. For instance, suppose that Plato's theory of the Forms were correct. If so, then morality, reason, and knowledge would all exist and be justified. However, the theory of the Forms doesn't require the existence of a God. This immediately shows the premises of the TAG argument to be false unless its proponents can show, not just that Platonism is false, but that it is necessarily false, that it couldn't even possibly be true. The same thing goes for Aristotelianism, for Kantianism, for Hegel, for pragmatism, etc. None of those philosophies require the existence of a God (let alone the Christian God), but they all, if correct justify morality, reason, or knowledge. The proponents of TAG have utterly failed to show that any of these philosophies are necessarily false. In fact, most of them seem to just ignore these alternatives. So I don't see why I should take this argument at all seriously.

Hey original position instead of debating the wisdom of men which doesnt lead to anything why dont you watch some of those videos I posted of the demonstration of gods power which is the true way to gain faith and (unclose my thread )

Corinthians 2:1-5
1 And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God.

2 For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

3 And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.

4 And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power:

5 That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

This isn't your street corner. Put away the big cardboard sign, plz

Religion, God, and Theology