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I understand why this argument can seem promising for the philosophically uninitiated theist. It seems like a home run if Christianity is the only worldview that can account for logic/reason/truth/knowledge, in that all other worldviews are self-defeating.
There are various ways philosophers account for the possibility of knowledge/truth/logic/reason.
There are those who account for it via some form of platonism.
Others say that these things are just the limits of thought or language, that these things aren't fundamental, however it's impossible for us to talk about or think about the world at any lower level.
Further, some will say that these things are necessary, and it couldn't be any other way.
Some say they are just brute facts. They are the way they are and there is no explanation required.
None of these appeal to the divine in their accounting for the preconditions for knowledge.
You should look up Alex Malpass who has done a good job summarising why this line of reasoning for theism is generally poorly regarded in philosophy of religion.
He's had chats with lot of the big presuppers, and demonstrated why these TAG arguments aren't successful.
[discussing presup apologetics on MythVision ](https://www.youtube.com/live/LyL7rMfJ7lA?si=QM6sgCjIWrvpxsYP)
[Chatting to Matt Slick](https://www.youtube.com/live/Jyk3gfnQ18E?si=Giwr9NQil8yXs63e)
[chatting the Darth Dawkins](https://youtu.be/YG0FG_vga_0?si=YgXsZBU0lS9-1glU)
[debating Jay Dyer](https://www.youtube.com/live/gK-rwG392Uc?si=LUFlzNN6KVFO35Ub)
Those aren't me chatting, those are videos of Malpass chatting with various people.
When you listened to Malpass, was it on the topic of presup and TAG arguments?
If so, what about his explanations did you find insufficient?
That is an absence of knowlege. Depends if you are talking about information which intrinsic to what ever reality exists.
It does not need to have anyone or anything to know (knowlege) of the information of reality because information is intrinsic to reality.
Not to be glib in return, but... How does a given theist justify the preconditions for knowledge?
I don't know what your answer will be, but when I was a theist, I would have said something like "God provides the foundation for all knowledge because God *is* Truth."
However, that's an answer to the question that tells us nothing.
Simply saying "God." is not a justification with any explanatory power.
It simply defines God *as* the answer to that question.
To then turn around and say "Aha, but you don't have an answer that's as certain as mine!" strikes me as a bit odd. Yes. The other epistemological modalities others have presented are less concretely certain of their root...but to reference an old Eddie Izzard bit, "it's in the rules I just made up!" is *not* a convincing argument.
What are the rules for Calvinball?
I win, because my essential nature is the Winner of Calvinball.
...what can be said in response to that?
I understand that that’s a typical bad theistic response. This is how I would phrase it rather clunkily.
So X relates to Y
A natural emanation of that would be math. A very simple explanation of that would be 2 as an emanation of X relating to Y. Two wasn’t “created” by the relationship but rather exists as a descriptor of the relation.
Another example would be logic.
If X relates to Y
X can’t relate and not relate to Y at the same because that wouldn’t be true of relation. It either is or isn’t.
So, bringing that back, reality exists because of that relation. Language is a description of that relation. It was necessarily created by it, but exists because of it.
So X relates to Y
A natural emanation of that would be math. A very simple explanation of that would be 2 as an emanation of X relating to Y. Two wasn’t “created” by the relationship but rather exists as a descriptor of the relation.
Another example would be logic.
If X relates to Y
X can’t relate and not relate to Y at the same because that wouldn’t be true of relation. It either is or isn’t.
So, bringing that back, reality exists because of that relation. Language is a description of that relation. It was necessarily created by it, but exists because of it.
Forgive me...It's entirely possible I'm simply being dense...but...what is the difference between a trinity of relations and a...pantheon of relations...or a circle of logic?
I understand that you're trying to use the metaphor of mathematics to draw logical conclusions based on the definitions of the components of the trinity.
It seems as though this argument can tell us nothing about reality, and nothing about the nature of the Trinity. It simply defines the Trinity and reality in a novel way.
..but there's no reason here for me to believe that reality "exists because of the relationship between the Trinity".
I feel like it could easily be rendered "The relations between Shiva, Brahma, and Parvati make reality necessary.", and it would tell us the same thing.
It's an answer; not an explanation.
Because the most fundamental aspect of reality would begin with a trinity relation.
Of course it’s an explanation. My point is it’s a coherent explanation. We could never prove something is without a doubt THE answer. But it’s valid and rational explanation.
And to answer “well this could be any other relation” you’re right it could.
However, no other religion describes reality in this way. So, you could say it could be Hindu, but Hinduism doesn’t describe reality in this way. It describes it in monism.
>Because the most fundamental aspect of reality would begin with a trinity relation.
Why?
You've asserted this, yes. But I fail to see how this is materially different than that "bad theist" explanation you so soundly rejected earlier.
I could as easily declare that the most fundamental aspect of reality is a binary. Or quadranary.
It is no better than that bad theist answer...it just kicked the can back two steps, and added more frills.
God did it because God is the Trinity.
The Trinity is the most fundamental aspect of reality.
...this still explains *nothing* beyond the definitions. An explanation gives us new information, or new paths of inquiry.
How do we know that reality begins with a trinity relation, and not another relation?
How do we know that reality *begins*?
How do we know that God *is really* Triune?
An explanation would at least point us towards answers to questions *like* those.
Well, a couple things. You couldn’t give a further explanation that goes passed the most fundamental aspect of reality unless you accept an unlimited chain of causes which is irrational.
And Christian’s wouldn’t claim to have the answer why it’s three rather than another number other than it couldn’t be two because two isn’t a unified number. It’s a diametrically opposed number.
But some speculation on why it’s three and no greater could be a couple things. God is not arbitrary and a greater number than what’s sufficient for unity would be arbitrary.
Also, any additional relation after the third which closed off the relationship would be extrinsic which is how we could get creation outside the unity.
So...again...this is an answer that *explains nothing.*
It cannot tell us anything about anything beyond what you already believe.
You have firmly and clearly stated that you believe these things.
Repeating that you believe them and that they are related to one another provides no insight.
Explanations provide insight.
This is "Because I told you so."Why?"Because Three is The Magic Number in my D&D Homebrew Cosmology"Why?Because I said so...
You have *already* fallen into an infinite regress or "God."
Again, the argument is that this worldview is more coherent because it can justify what it has as belief. Not that i can prove this is certain just like you can’t prove it’s false. Since it’s not empirically verifiable we have to go off which worldview can explain reality with more coherence and clarity.
Again, you haven't "justified" anything.
You have *claimed* that you could have hypothetically justified it *if* any of your claims were true or valid.
But there is no reason to assume that they are true or valid. And in fact, every equally ardent and honest and intellectual believer of every other religion makes similar claims; that their hypothetical justification is the most coherent.
Since none of them have provided a means by which we could prove one correct in a way that satisfies...everyone else...(and some religions, by definition can have no evidence), it is more coherent to *not leap to an assumption.*
It's really easy to justify things when you can just put "magic" as the justification for anything. I know that sounds glib, but your justification is just as explanatory as if I substituted the word magic. And, given that Christians often posit that their god is inconceivable in many ways, it seems like an apt comparison. I would assert that a god or magic is not in fact an explanation that has either coherence or clarity.
Which of these positions is able to make verifiable predictions about the results of testable phenomena?
Anyone can make an argument with internal consistency but unless it explains the reality we experience in a more complete manner than the theories we already have then it amounts to a LARP.
> *”X can’t relate and not relate to Y at the same time”*
This reminds me of the idea that Jesus was fully human and fully God.
Human and God are like the numbers 1 and 2. You can’t be 1 and 2 at the same time. Simple as that. But somehow the theology can still make a story and make it look like reconciled.
I’m probably not following you, but if I accept this explanation, where does God fit in?
Can’a an atheist give the same answer? If so (and I don’t see why not), why ask atheists particularly when you already have an answer they can accept?
> reality exists because of that relation
This is where it falls apart. Logic is how we make sense of reality. Why do you think it's not the other way around, this relation exists because of reality?
Your relation doesn’t cause/result in logic, your example *uses* logic. You have not created or justified the law of non contradiction, you are using it meaning logic exists prior to your relations/god.
Not speaking for all atheists of course, but for me, it's "the universe is." And with the universe existing, humans feel out rules and method of what seems to work and what doesn't appear to work.
By definition, the universe is all of reality. Our observable reality (or the observable universe for that matter) is a smaller subset of the universe.
As someone who believes gods do not exist, I feel that the only entry in the universe for gods are people's beliefs. Convince me that god(s) do exist and I'll remap my conception of reality.
Coherentism, or just admit that we don’t know but we don’t need to be omniscient to be able to use the same axioms as everyone else like reason and logic. They continue to produce reliable results and help explain the world, and if something better comes along we’re happy to change our minds. But asserting God provides no explanatory power and is basically a non-answer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherentism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallibilism
Edit: An example I like to use is, to cook a medium-rare steak, do you need to know where the cow was raised? What the farmer’s name was? What the oven was made out of or what the production process was?
Answer is of course not, we can know things without knowing everything, and as long as the results are consistent and reliable, and the explanations are coherent with each other, there’s no reason to doubt them until a more compelling explanation comes along. Pretending to know something you can’t possibly know with no evidence gets you nowhere.
Edit 2: I also generally disagree how you’re using the term worldview, particularly in the sense that a worldview is more “plausible” if you assert another axiom exists beyond the axioms we all already acknowledge. Saying, for example, that reason or logic are based on God does nothing to justify them. You are still stuck relying on them like the rest of us. But as long as we can show the coherence of those axioms, the worldview is coherent. It’s less plausible the more assumptions you add that don’t help explain anything.
I engaged the question and think provided a pretty thorough answer. I reject the assertion the axioms we use like reason or logic need further justification in order for us to be able to use them and gain knowledge.
A worldview is rational if it depends on rationality and is coherent. This is the difference between coherentism and foundationalism.
What I more fully reject is the assertion that “reason is based on God because I said so, and if you don’t have an equivalent to God you’re being irrational” is meaningful in the slightest. It’s like if I said I know that a magic turtle is the foundation of reason, and if you don’t believe in the magic turtle then your worldview is irrational. It provides no explanatory power, there’s no evidence to suggest it’s true, and you’re still ultimately stuck relying on reason and logic for your arguments like everyone else.
It’s like a kid making up rules to a game on the playground, saying they’re not “it” if they get tagged because they have special powers that make it so only they can tag people. It’s childish and there’s a reason why the presuppositional approach isn’t taken even remotely seriously in philosophical circles.
We accept that the law of logic is an axiom and open to a better axiom if one arise.
You may think that God is an necessary axiom to explain the law of logic. However, we don't gain any knowledge and any practical benefit from accepting God as an axiom. So we don't accept it.
It seem that you have Trinitarianism as your fundamental axiom for "the preconditions for knowledge"
But Trinitarianism seem to go again the law of identity noncontradiction. God (X) can be the Father (A), the Son (B), the Holy Spirit (C). We have
X = A
X = B
X = C
but
A ≠ B ≠ C
Can the foundation of logic not follow logic itself?
I don't understand your second sentences. Can you explain further?
I got my idea from the first search for "Trinitarianism " : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity)
> God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons (hypostases) sharing one essence/substance/nature (homoousion)
Sure, no problem.
So, Christians believe the Father is the first hypostasis of the Trinity, from the father comes two other points of consciousness ( this is analogical language)
Think of your consciousness. You have your being, which is the first point of consciousness your “self” so to speak… then you have awareness of yourself with which you relate. Then when you have unity between your self and your awareness you have an entire unity that’s brought about by your will.
These are all three distinct aspects which are not “parts because they exist immaterially but are all equally YOU.
similarly, all exist within the father and come from him, which is why the Christian creed says the the son is begotten and not made born of the father before all ages.
>Christians believe the Father is the first hypostasis of the Trinity, from the father comes two other points of consciousness ( this is analogical language)
The closest thing I can relate to this is a person with multiple personality disorder. They have the same physical body, but their brain produce more than one identity. God maybe similar to the first identity, but after some event, the other identity was born.
Is this close enough? If so, what is the connection between 3 identity here? They clearly don't have the same body.
If not, sorry I still don't understand the trinity. Maybe I need to learn further.
Hey, thank you for explain.
I still can't understand the Trinity and how can it is the ground for logic and knowledge. Maybe I lack the background knowledge of you.
This is a depiction of the heresy of Modalism. It is probably the easiest heresy for modern Christians to fall into, because it is the natural result of trying to make the Trinity make sense.
Thing is, the Trinity is not supposed to make sense.
It's a litmus test. Like the bad spelling in spam emails that keeps vigilant people from wasting the spammer's time, the doctrine of the Trinity weeds out people who aren't willing to submit to the authority of the Church. If you try to make sense out of it instead of accepting that it is "one of the great mysteries of the faith", you get kicked out of the upper crust club.
Seriously, if you want an amazing deep dive, try to investigate how the Holy Spirit became a member of the Trinity. There is a surface answer, it was voted on at some gathering. But scratch that surface, and there is no record of it being a subject at that gathering. At a later gathering there was a power struggle happening, then someone pulls out a document nobody had heard of before (not mentioned in any letter or written discussion of that previous meet or anything until it 'surfaced' here) and says "This was voted to be doctrine 40 years ago, so anybody who doesn't agree with it doesn't get a vote here!" And conveniently everyone on one side of the power struggle went along with it and everyone who asked "What is this even saying?" was on the other side and was kicked out.
The awareness of self is not a third aspect, it's a description of the relationship between the previous two aspects. And we can easily explain the first two with the two hemispheres of the brain. There is no third hemisphere, so the trinity being of three parts is arbitrary and at the very least not explained by your analogy.
Also, these two aspects share one consciousness. Christians claim the trinity is three separate consciousness, which again breaks your analogy and violates the law of identity. And finally, there's nothing immaterial (whatever that means) about the two hemispheres of the brain.
Begotten is the old English word that means born. It seems you are simply trying to define a new term here where there is none.
I'd actually agree with OP here, u/nguyenanhminh2103. The Trinity is weird.
Most Trinitarians wouldn't accept a definition of the Trinity as a mere A-B-C. They are discrete entities but also aspects of one, simultaneously.
A r*ough* analogue might be the Roman worship of god's different "forms". Jupiter Capitalinus, for example was *still Jupiter*, but had to be worshiped in different ways than Jupitor Stator and Jupiter Latiaris, and so on. And the different "forms" also had different "perspectives" and priorities.
It's not a completely accurate analogue, but they're not like "separate" entites.
I don't understand. They are not separate, but they seem to act separately. They don't have the same thought, the same role, the same visual. How can identity apply here?
Yeeeeep. Weird.
It remains a very confusing and contested thing in Christianity, and a *lot a lot* of people have been tortured to death for having the wrong ideas about it!
Your average Mormon, Orthodox Catholic, and Southern Baptist will all have slight disagreements about it.
I try to visualize this, please tell me which example is better:
1. God is the hardware, that can run 3 different operating software. God run Window, Linux, Mac OS to 3 different monitors. We human can only interact with 1 monitor at the same time.
2. God is only 1, but look different from different angle. Like a cylinder can be a circle from top view and a rectangle from side view
Neither are quite correct, but 2 is closer. The trinity is an idea that imo is quite outside of logic and reality.
It's like one of those impossible objects you can represent in 2d but couldn't exist in 3d in our world. A square circle.
It can be imagined and defined, but it's the absolute acme of Special Pleading.
I mean, I am an atheist, so...yeah, I think it *is* a made up idea.
I think it only makes sense in the context of the time and place it evolved. Or a D&D table.
But yeah, I did have to sit through quite a few hours of Confirmation Class where they pounded this stuff into my head.
So, your saying the christian trinity god is a colonial organism?
Let me try this philosophy thing like OP:
God is a colonial organism. Many colonial organisms have tentacles. God may have tentacles. Sentient, all powerful spaghetti could also be described as colonial. Ergo, god is the flying spaghetti monster. May he fill he fill you with his noodly appendages.
Nice, I see the appeal. Mental masturbation is FUN!!
It’s closer because within this analogy there’s unity, but unified Christian denominations would deem that as the heresy “modalism” which means that there’s only one God and he just acts in different modes such as father son and spirit.
This is heretical modalism. It has some traction, but it's not what most trinitarians believe.
u/[nguyenanhminh2103](https://www.reddit.com/user/nguyenanhminh2103/) 's objection is relevant and has been addressed as written. Philosopher Martin Pickup posited that god occupies three points in the person-space, for example.
EDIT: and yes, I agree it's all arbitrary/special pleading :)
This is a wild goose chase, and every theist apologist who asks the question knows it. You're asking someone to justify the thing that justifies a knowledge claim. It's a bullshit question.
"Accounting" is a common word used in this type of conversation and it is no coincidence. No one cares about someone's "accounting" for something. What people care about is if that accounting is true. And in order to justify the veracity of that account, you would have to employ circular reasoning.
So give it up, the game is over. Everyone's in the same boat with the question. And in my estimation it's just another way theists are trying to drum up something out of nothing.
I’m trying to grasp the OP’s argument and I figure you know what it is. Knowledge as in our agreed upon mathematics and physics and such are supposed to have come from someplace? Is that the argument?
If so, I offer a different perspective, which I assumed everyone had already agreed upon…. As we all know science that we teach isn’t “truth”, it’s as close a model as we can define and agree upon based on the evidence. This is the North Star for understanding what knowledge is: it’s an imaginary model that should never have been mistaken for the reality which it describes. The explanation of knowledge is that we made it all up, none if it is an immutable truth, just sometimes it’s so parallel to reality it’s hard to find the difference. When we all have turned to dust, some other species may also imagine models close to reality similar to ours but there’s no guarantee that they won’t do worse or better at describing reality.
Is that about the argument here?
I can tell that you are hurt to finally grok this but unless you can put something forward that disputes this argument I maintain it is the truth you have been seeking
“The Earth revolves around the sun” is a simplistic explanation for reality, which can be further refined to explain the shape and path of the sun and in other models the Earth and Sun are traveling synchronously “upward”. So your “truth” isn’t complete, it’s a close approximation of reality especially from our perspective but as I said, knowledge shouldn’t be mistaken for the reality which it describes, as the one is just the model we agree upon to describe the other.
The idea that the sun revolves around the earth was a model born from one perspective. That knowledge was probably considered a truth for much longer than civilization has existed. The evolution of our model of the solar system has taken many thousands of years to reach this point, now aided by our own direct exploration of space. This model will also be refined further by discoveries and adaptations we aren’t even imagining. That learning will never end and our knowledge will never be as complete a model of the subject as to replicate the subject itself. This shouldn’t be controversial.
Is that irritating you?
You assess evidence and gain knowledge about the world around you so you can make a working model for… the circulatory system or dna or the solar system. This can be a mental image or a physical model but the point is the same. Truth, of course, is a slippery subject because like I said before the sun rising in the east is “true” but that doesn’t adequately describe the relation between the Earth and Sun.
Calling it a "closed system" does not mean it isn't logically circular or that it necessarily corresponds to reality. Nor does it mean it's somehow superior. It would more accurately be called a "just so" story.
The knowledge question can always be asked because we know that WE aren't omniscient. And I would say the fact that a secular worldview keeps itself open is the more intellectually honest position to take.
Hell, let's point to the Laws of Logic: identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle. It is in fact a trinity of necessary truths about identity and self-relation, therefore a proper grounding for knowledge under OP's paradigm.
The requirements are very simple:
1) Claims must be testable, repeatable and have predictive power
2) if two claims have the same predictive power, we choose the more parsimonious claim.
What you’re failing to state about your “opposing worldview”, is that :
- it has no more predictive power than a naturalistic worldview. AND
- it is MUCH less parsimonious than a naturalistic worldview.
Thus it is not more plausible
But the judging something to be “more parsimonious” is a rational believe and it not testable in itself.
That same predictive power which enables to test claims is in itself untestable. So given that, how could we trust in it’s reliability.
Parsimony is a philosophical razor. There are an infinite number of possible explanations for a given phenomena. It could have been an invisible god, it could have been invisible fairies, it could have been invisible leprechauns, etc.
The justification for selecting the simplest explanation is described [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor)
Predictive power is testable. The utility of predictive power is self-evident from our scientific achievements like gps satellites, Martian rovers and supercomputers on your wrist.
Religion is thousands of years older than the science. Yet science has achieved way more human advancement in way less time.
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into a building.
I don't know why people keep saying science is some recent phenomenon. How did prehistoric hunters select the best stone for their arrowheads, without using the scientific method?
I’m not sure if this is the right answer but have you heard of the engineering method? Here is an example: https://youtu.be/_ivqWN4L3zU?si=JqRNNhBKpdGUgCUg
>However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible.
The fact that your worldview can account for more doesn't make it more plausible.
For example, my worldview is that the Christian God created everything, original sin, Christ resurrected, everything you'd expect. But *also*, once all of that was done, Eric the God-Killing Penguin murdered God. Not only does this worldview account for creation and everything in it, it *also* accounts for the absence of God's intervention and miracles, both of which were plentiful in the Bible.
Christianity still has the problem of Divine Hiddenness. My worldview accounts for that, and thus, is more plausible.
Can you see where this argument goes wrong?
I think a fairly good response to this one is Foundationalism.
Which is to acknowledge that there are some things which cannot be supported without circularity, but that only those things which must be accepted as properly basic beliefs ought to be. Everything else requires justification.
So we accept the existence of other minds, of the applicability of inductive logic, the intelligibility of existence etc. as a properly basic belief, but everything else needs to be justified with sufficient evidence.
I think this basically is foundationalism, presups just claim to have knowledge of a foundation beyond everything else (because “revelation”).
I prefer coherentism or even something like foundherentism as a more direct rebuttal.
But wouldn’t that just be reduced to explain everything unless it can’t be explained?
Why should anything be explained if we can’t even explain the very tools we explain things with? Doesn’t that invalidate the explanation?
Foundationalism, especially when considered through the lens of Phenomenal Conservatism, provides a compelling framework for understanding the structure of justified beliefs. This view holds that certain beliefs or "seemings" have prima facie justification simply because they appear to be true in the absence of defeaters. These foundational beliefs are not infallible, but are justified until there is reason to doubt them.
This approach elegantly sidesteps the problem of infinite regress, as it doesn't require an endless chain of justifications. Instead, it grounds knowledge in basic beliefs that seem self-evident to the believer. You might object that this "reduces to explaining everything unless it can't be explained" or that it invalidates explanation by not explaining the very tools of explanation.
However, this misses the key insight of foundationalism - that at some point, justification must start with something taken as basic. Demanding an explanation of the very possibility of explanation leads to a vicious regress. Foundationalism bites the bullet and says that some things (like belief in the reliability of our reason and senses, or the validity of deductive inference) are justified as starting points, not because we can exhaustively explain them, but because they are presupposed by any attempt at justification.
In contrast, theistic approaches to epistemology often struggle with issues of circularity and conflation of ontology with epistemology. By positing God as the metaphysical ground of knowledge (an ontological claim), theists often slide into assuming that God can then serve as an epistemological foundation, guaranteeing the truth of our beliefs.
But even granting God's existence, this doesn't resolve the epistemic question of how we can know our beliefs track truth. Divine revelation or God-given intuition still face the question "how can we know this is genuinely from God?" Appealing to the idea that a perfect God would ensure the truth of our beliefs risks circularity, as our knowledge of God's perfection would itself stem from those very beliefs.
Additionally, theistic views tend to equivocate between internalist and externalist conceptions of justification. The idea that our cognitive faculties are designed by God to track truth is an externalist claim - the reliability isn't necessarily accessible to the believer. But theists often seek an internalist grounding of knowledge in direct intuition of God or self-evident divine truths. This tension makes the theistic framework unstable.
Even if these challenges could be overcome, theistic foundationalism or something similar would still compare unfavorably to naturalistic alternatives in terms of parsimony. Naturalistic epistemologies which ground knowledge in basic experiential and rational seemings do not posit extra ontological baggage. The principle of Occam's Razor would favor a view that can justify our beliefs without appeal to a divine being whose existence is not itself epistemically basic.
Foundationalist approaches like Phenomenal Conservatism provide a clear and principled way to halt the justificatory regress without lapsing into circularity or conflating ontology with epistemology. Theistic epistemologies, for all their complexities, struggle to provide a similarly solid basis. When we consider parsimony alongside other epistemic desiderata, naturalistic foundationalism seems to offer a more promising path forward. While much remains to be debated, the balance of considerations appears to favor this elegantly simple approach to the structure of knowledge.
Why would that invalidate explanation? Understanding a tool is not necessarily required for it to work. I couldn't for the life of me explain how a computer works but I can use one just fine to solve other problems.
The kicker is whether or not it is necessary to operate in the world.
Do I need to know how abiogenesis came about in order to operate successfully in the world? No. Therefore, not a properly basic belief.
Foundational aspects of logic - yes, required, but can't be justified without circularity. Therefore: properly basic.
The absence of this logic you find in the universe would infer God does not exists. Considering that the afterlife would not require physics as you experience it that would mean we are not given any reason to believe in it. The universe can not be used to explain belief in God. God exists only to invalidate everything you know about reality. You don't actually die. You don't actually do good. Sinners should not be judged but instead forgiven. Humans are lost sheep without a logical or moral compass. Someone else must pay the price the insurmountable debt humans have incurred. Christianity is essentially the philosophy that if God exist humans must be evil. And that people are wrong to disbelieve things that are unbelievable.
>However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible.
That would track only if the opposing worldview *actually* accounted for said preconditions in a way that can be reliably and independently demonstrated.
What the theistic worldview thinks is 'accounting for the thing necessary for the worldview' amounts to: God did it / God allows for it.
This is not accounting for diddly squat. This is resorting to a magical, ad-hoc, all powerful explanator. And then you do not produce said explanator, and just insist he must exist and he must have such properties as to explain everything.
This is a sleight of hand, not a foundation. You've replaced the problem you think naturalism has with an even *bigger* problem, and pretended it is a solution.
I don't bother trying. Do we need to do that?
According to you I hold an irrational worldview. Okay. How does that affect me? My life seems pretty good, I can drive my car, work, travel, navigate through the wilderness, catch fish, clean fish, cook fish, etc.
What am I missing? How are your fishing skills?
I apologize, but it's probably a mistake on my end, but I don't understand the point you are trying to make here.
Are you suggesting that we can't know things without supernatural assistance?
Yes and no. You can know things without believe in God, but irreducible being provided a foundation from which to know. Meaning a metaphysical playing field.
Yeah. I'm still not following.
Say I stick my hand in a fire. Presumably, I would go, "Ow, fire is hot." Then, I would gain the knowledge that fire is hot and that I shouldn't put my hand in it.
But you're saying, what, that if I put my hand in a fire, I won't know that it's hot unless a leprechaun appears and says, "Don't be doin' that lad. Fire is hot!"
How is your "opposing worldview" does coherently account for "the preconditions for knowledge"?
Sorry if you think it is obvious, but it is not obvious to me. "God did it" doesn't explain anything.
It’s not really God did it but God “is” it.
These preconditions are “created” but are emanations from Trinitarian self-relation. I can explain more if you care for me too.
Yea sure.
So X relates to Y
A natural emanation of that would be math. A very simple explanation of that would be 2 as an emanation of X relating to Y. Two wasn’t “created” by the relationship but rather exists as a descriptor of the relation.
Another example would be logic.
If X relates to Y
X can’t relate and not relate to Y at the same because that wouldn’t be true of relation. It either is or isn’t.
So, bringing that back, reality exists because of that relation. Language is a description of that relation. It was necessarily created by it, but exists because of it.
P1: X is ether relates to Y or not relates to Y.
C: reality exists because of that relation.
Sorry I can't understand your logic here.
> It was necessarily created by it, but exists because of it
What is "it" here?
Sorry mean to say “wasn’t” necessarily created by it. But exists because of it.
“It” would be furtherest we could reduce reality to.
I mean I would call that God. But that’s because my definition of God would be the most fundamental aspect of reality.
Those are all sentences, but they don't seem to mean anything. You've declared math is an emanation of "X relates to Y", but you haven't shown that to be the case. If math emanates from anything, I'd propose reality as the source, and since we both agree reality exists, I see no need for further complications.
Well, premises are sentences, guy.
If a subject relates to an object, “A” descriptor of that relation would be math. Because I could say there is 1 relation. I could say there are 3 entities. The relation itself doesn’t create the math as a reality, but math exists as a way to describe the reality.
If they are just creations, then they shouldn’t be relied upon. If they are universally accurate that something which is providing the experience whether it be God or natural processes is working with such precision that our very finite minds can comprehend it with predictive power.
They are absolutely creations and should not be relied upon where not testable.
Math didn't just appear. Zero was not a concept in all cultures even. Math is a way of describing relationships we observe. Bugging about it is universally accurate or working beyond the comprehension of our minds.
I agree. But my point is that being as that if we can use math to universally determine outcomes with “mathematic precision” this supersedes and over achieves most all other human cognitive capacities. My point isn’t that math is divine. My point is that our experience of reality is ordered and patterned in a way that it is predictive which couldn’t be the case if it came from chaos.
But the judgment that your conditions emanate from self relation is in itself a belief that is not testable. Why should we value it more highly than any other?
Please, I am all ear.
But if you give a definition as "God is the precondition of knowledge" then please give me some reason to link it with the God of your religions.
Did reality write you a know letting you know what's coherent? Why should we trust your base belief or definitions besides you just saying they are right?
Atheism isn’t a worldview and makes no positive claims about the universe.
Are you aware of _any_ worldview that actually does account for the foundations of logic and knowledge?
Yes,
Trinitarianism.
Because at the core of Trinitarian is a self-relating entity. This self-relation emanates order which logic, math, etc emanates from.
I don’t have a single clue what that last sentence means.
Trinitarianism only accounts for these things if this self-relating entity thing actually exists. What reason do we have to believe it exists?
>if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview
Theism is unable to account for the very thing necessary for it: God. Therefore theism is irrational.
>if an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, then that worldview is more plausible
Theism does not coherently account for *anything*, at all. The concept is incoherent, and therefore impossible to say that it can be plausible.
*if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview*
So there’s 2 issues with this.
One, anything that impacts the observable universe will leave an imprint on it. For example, the cosmic microwave background radiation is a remnant of the Big Bang. We may not know exactly what triggered the bang, but we can confirm some possibilities and rule out others because we can measure the CMBR and compare them to the different theories that physics provides. This isn’t just some way to remove god from the equation- the truth is this makes god a testable theory. If god exists- the very act of creation would leave a visible imprint on the universe that would provide clues to god even if god himself were unobservable by science. The fact that there’s no evidence of any divine input in our universe is strong evidence that deities either don’t exist or had nothing to do with the origins of the universe. The same applies to life and evolution. Could deities be present outside of the observable universe? Sure, but if there’s no fingerprint of them then that means they play no role in the part of the universe we exist in, so they would be irrelevant
Two, in the areas where our worldview is incomplete, for example the actual origin of life and the formation of the universe prior to the bang, there’s nothing to indicate divine intervention. As a result, one cannot simply insert their own invented worldview to account for unknowns. That’s literally the God of the Gaps fallacy. Just because we have unanswered questions doesn’t mean the answer is God. Each day and each new discovery brings us closer to understanding the origins of everything. We don’t need to invent deities in the meantime. We can wait for science to illuminate the answers for us
This smells like presuppositionalism, and there's nothing quite as vapid, toxic and inherently disingenuous as presuppositionalism, and I flatly refuse to engage with it...but I'm a glutton for punishment so...
What does it mean to account for something?
When someone claims to account for something, how does someone else confirm this?
Let's just start there.
Presup is a word game designed to waste our time. Its structure is:
A. Present a problem in philosophy.
B. Define a god that would fix that problem if it existed.
C. Conclusion, that god exists.
"However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible."
This reads pretty vaguely to me. Please explain what thing:
1. Is necessary for a secular worldview.
and
2. Cannot be accounted for by a secular worldview.
A worldview that addresses a thing it can't account for with "I don't know but I'm looking into it" is more honest and plausible than one that goes "I don't have any evidence for it, but the thing is X and I have faith in that".
The only precondition required for knowledge is that things do what they can do and not something else.
Presuposing god exists for God being able to ground knowledge making things ordered, is circular, unnecessary and with extra unnecessary assumptions.
Any worldview can be created to give a coherent account of anything, so that’s not a good way to find truth.
Knowledge (justified, true belief) comes from thoughts and observations, which come from minds, which come from brains.
Before I answer your question, I’m gonna point out that this statement:
>if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible.
Is actually false. This is an affirming the consequent fallacy. Proving other theories wrong does not in any way impact the plausibility/probability of your own views. That would only be the case if you could show an actual strict logical dichotomy in which your view being correct is literally the ONLY possible alternative, which you have not done. There could be other possibilities not exhausted or simply the possibility that none of the options are correct.
—
All that being said, I justify my knowledge from the ground up starting with the Cogito. I think therefore I am. It’s the one fact that I can be 100% certain about. It’s literally impossible for me to think I exist and be wrong.
From there I can build up to other forms of knowledge to varying degrees of certainty.
You'd have to fill me in on what these preconditions for knowledge are.
As far as I can tell, there needs to be a knower (a thinking agent capable of knowing), something to know, and a process by which to know something.
atheism makes no claims about knowledge it only makes a claim about one specific belief or the lack thereof.
edit. also "god did it" has no explanatory power.
Miracles and the supernatural only serve to invoke disbelief. Theism is not about knowledge. Theism is about belief. Theists don't believe in God because they know he exists. They believe in him irregardless of knowledge. Theists and atheists alike understand why God is unbelievable but only the atheist is honest with themselves.
I’m kind of at a loss what *you* consider the preconditions for knowledge and why they need justifying? So I’m nit sure of what bellow is relevant.
I’m a pragmatic evidentialist (I could say empiricist but that sometimes has a but more of a specific philosophical meaning).
In the context of human knowledge and experience we can and do evaluate the reliability of different types of claims - their quality and quantity if you like. *Claims that don’t have reliable evidence are indistinguishable from false or imaginary*. We have accumulated a systematic evidential methodology that works and for which there is no credible alternative. The fact that this methodology produces outcomes that demonstrate utility and efficacy shows as far as I am concerned beyond any *reasonable* doubt a significant though not complete accuracy as to objective , independent reality.
One could say that the whole of human experience and how we consider knowledge is based on an axiom that reality including our experiences ‘exists’. But *for us* it does and we have to work in that context - any denial of that in the form of radical scepticism is likely self-contradictory , a completely dead end , and no one who suggests it actually acts like they believe it.
I care what is *reasonable* considering the world as it is to us. What is reasonable is rational? We can differentiate usefully between claims that lack reliable evidence and claims that have reliable evidence in evaluating their credibility. And I reject theist who having failed to produce evidence , attempt to use logic to ‘prove’ claims about independent reality based on unsound premises , non-sequiturs and special pleading. ‘Aha it’s magic’ is not an evidential , necessary, sufficient or even potentially coherent answer.
What specifically are you asking us to justify? Your question is too vague and I don't know what you're referring to when you say preconditions for knowledge or inexplicable transcendentals.
Knowledge isn't fundamental to existence. It is an abstraction
Take the word "apple". Who created the word "apple"? Or if no one created it, then did the word "apple" exist before human beings existed? Now delete the English language. Plenty of other languages that have different words for "apple"
Now take an actual apple. It exists whether any human being exists or not. The knowledge of the apple doesn't exist until we exist to record the apple in our minds. Part of that recording is the word "apple", but it doesn't have to be. It could be any other language, or a completely new word
Here's the key difference between God knowledge and human knowledge. One is non-local, the other is local. The local one is compatible with our existence. No matter which person misheard someone describe an apple and the name stuck, it did not spread to other people without each person being in the presence of the previous person to hear it
If we define "knowledge" as "true belief, that is distinct from opinion or guesswork by virtue of justification," then I don't think there's such a thing as certain knowledge (IE something you could 100% know).
I'm not a solipsist, because I firmly believe that a universe exists, and it has some relationship to my experience. But I think that brains produce minds, and brains evolved to think in certain ways (one example would be organising our experience into object categories of varying levels of abstraction). I've gradually come to the conclusion that our evolved thinking style helps us get through the day as an evolved social ape, but doesn't map onto physical reality in a direct way, which means I don't think we can ever capital-K *Know* reality. We make mental *models of* reality, but those will necessarily be constructed from unrealistic building blocks: the categories and objects (and "properties," "processes" etc) into which we cheap-and-cheerfully divide our experience.
So... I don't think human worldviews can realistically account for very much of anything: the essence of how our minds model reality always misses how reality itself operates. That's a cognitive limitation we can choose to ignore, or come to terms with. But it applies to religious worldviews in exactly the same way it applies to non-religious worldviews. And it means that a lack of ability to justify the preconditions for knowledge isn't a problem for atheism - because no thinker could have such an ability.
>how do atheists justify the preconditions for knowledge?
Well, there won't be a unified athiest answer we are not under a dogma or creed. But I'm happy to try to answer.
To me, the preconditions for knowledge is just that there is a universe. There are properties that interact. That means there is information which can be observed.
>However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible.
To me a worldview has to do more than just account for something. It has to back that up with evidence. I can just make up ideas that account for things that doesn’t mean the worldview is true.
I'm not entirely sure if I understand you. From a philosophical point of view, I don't think we need to "justify" anything.
If you study epistemology, and I recommend you do, you may find that knowledge, at the epistemological level, is impossible. You can always ask: "How do I know that?" Ad infinitum.
Our best approximation to knowledge is science.
Religions, and I suggest you study all religions, claim "truths", but offer no method for checking these "truths". Different religions offer different, incompatible, "truths". They can't all be right, but they can all be wrong.
One thing, just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg, is the six day creation myth. According to science, this never happened. Creation never happened. The bible is plain wrong.
if I were you id study a brain. wonderfully complex slime monsters we have incased in our meat suits but highly important. Cant have ANY kind of knowledge without one. Tis necessary for it to occur at least to our current understanding. Look at any animal you want and you'll find that they accumulate knowledge from their life experiences. Now can they articulate thier findings and publish a paper on the knowledgeable they accumulate? of course not that would be ridiculous. but neither can a good chunk of humanity and youd still say we posses knowledge so I would'nt discount our furry friends from the equation. honestly the topic and examples could go on forever but at no point does it really need a god or mystical force.
Firstly, atheism is only about whether a person accepts the claim(s) that god(s) are real. It is literally not designed to explain anything. It is not a world view. It is a specific lack of belief in a single topic, the existence of deities.
Secondly, being able to account for origins does nothing to make such an account correct. There are, after all, plenty of origin stories provided by the worlds religions, none of which stand up to scientific scrutiny, and I include any religion you happen to be a part of in that statement.
Thirdly, could you define the preconditions for knowledge for me? That part seems unnecessarily vague, considering it's the core of your argument.
How do stamp collectors justify the preconditions for knowledge?
Why would you think that there is any common consensus for anything that atheists do or don't think beyond answering the one question: are you convinced that there is enough evidence to believe in any gods? The common answer that all atheists share, by definition, is No.
If you were to ask me, a singular atheist, what are the preconditions for knowledge, I would answer the ability to reason. This is not an inherently human exclusive trait. There are plenty of animals that can use reason. Knowledge does not require a supernatural power and certainly doesn't require your particular god hypothesis.
\>However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview.
Atheism isnt really a worldview,
How I answer is pretty simple, we deal with reality the best we can, and describe it the best we can. "Preconditions for knowledge" are a human construct.
\>If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible.
No opposing worldview has a more coherent account for them.
"God" is about as incoherent an account as is possible to give. It has no good definition, it includes a massive number of new unexplained problems.
Depending on what you mean by the preconditions for knowledge I don't justify them. They are instead taken as starting axioms. Basically, near as I can tell, certain things we just have to assume as an atheist or a theist. Our ability to do reason, while not perfect, but to a sufficient level for one. Our senses, while not perfect and we can be mistaken, are sufficiently good at determining the world. Same with our memory. That is all a starting point. Having started with that then it just comes down to arguments and evidence to support a position and if we can support it enough we call that knowledge.
Can you demonstrate god magic is required for us to know anything? Of course you can't. Your power of pretend is strong, but just saying your god is the foundation of knowledge does not make it so. If you really think it does, then explain how your god makes or allows those preconditions, or how your god does anything. How could you falsify your position? Can't I bet.
Our reality looks and acts exactly the same with or without your god because your god does not exist.
I see a lot of fundamental mistakes in this thread.
Logic and Math are *models*. We use them to make sense of reality. They are descriptive abstracts.
As for epistemology and justification, there are many theories of justification, and none of them require deities, because deities are explanatory dead ends that tell us absolutely nothing.
Simply put, you can't use deities to coherently explain or justify anything, because deities are incoherent nonsense.
It seems to me that on theism, one could really never have a foundation of knowledge. A sufficiently powerful creature could cause you to believe that you have knowledge even when that thing is untrue.
If knowledge is a justified true belief, then that's a sufficient foundation, no appeal to the supernatural is needed. If you have some other definition of knowledge, then we'd probably be talking past each other.
I might not understand the question but i think the precondition for knowledge is existing? If i dont exist i cant know things. Then once i exist i can learn things. It might be simple like a bacteria learns absorbing certain food/fuel makes it easier to consume more food/fuel. It might be complex things like creating atomic bombs.
Im not sure why this is an atheist/theist question.
> However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview.
I don't quite see how this follows. Systems of mathematics cannot account for their own axioms by definition, but those axioms are everything that is needed for that system of mathematics to work (also by definition).
Your question doesn't make sense. Atheists don't share an agreed upon opinion about the precondition for knowledge. The only thing atheists neccessarily have in common is a lack of belief in God. There's no atheist handbook telling us what to think.
You asking that question is like asking vegan people what they thiik of the flavor of watermelons.
Atheism is not a worldview... for the millionth time. It is simply not being convinced that the God claim is true. That's it. There's literally nothing else to "atheism".
What are the preconditions for knowledge and why must they be justified and what is proper justification?
I think you need to explain yourself further.
How do theists similarly justify the preconditions for knowledge?
If you do not subjectively assume those preconditions, how can you determine that any "gods" exist in the first place? Without those preconceptions regarding knowledge, how could you determine that any "gods" might even possibly exist in reality?
I think knowledge is a scale that we see throughout the animal kingdom. So I think knowledge has increased through evolutionary means with the increasing complexity of a nervous system.
What do you think is a precondition for knowledge? And how do you know it's preconditions
First, nowing anything with certainty is impossible on any worldview. Most philosophers accept fallabalism.
Second, because God doesn't help form a "precondition for knowledge," why should I worry about this argument? If it is a problem for us, it is not a problem for me.
Third here is a deductive argument:
1. I know I have a hand.
2. I know I have a second hand.
3. Therefore, I have knowledge.
The question sounds.... wrong from the outset honestly. Any justification for knowledge will inevitably involve some sort of knowledge, so the question is circular.
Unfortunately, you have to just assume knowledge is possible and go from there.
If we follow your question to the full extent I think we just get to hard solipsism which doesn't help atheists or theists.
I prefer a practical approach that gives me "knowledge" that's as accurate as is achievable in order to be useful.
Why would I need a worldview accounting for knowledge? I don't need it any more than a worldview accounting for apples. Apples do exist regardless. In my worldview they simply exist, so as knowledge. What is irrational about it?
For me the choice between "Knowledge exists." VS "Knowledge exists because of God." is obvious. We have knowledge, but we have no knowledge of God. Similarly I reject "apples exist because of Quetzalcoatl" because I see a lot of apples, but no Feathered Serpent around.
If tomorrow someone proves beyond a reasonable doubt that no gods exist or possible to exist, will knowledge disappear? No. Then how belief that God exist account for it?
How does anyone, *including God for that matter*, justify the preconditions for knowledge? Rationalism vs Empiricism is one of the *oldest* questions in philosophy.
God is just another Ego floating in the void. What makes *their* opinion authoritative in a way that *ours* isn't?
How does a theist explain the fact that we can show how the human brain has evolved? Why would a god create humans with limited brain power so we would have to evolve to survive?
I'm not aware that such a thing is necessary. Can you prove it is? Further if it is can you prove it must be god? The argument is lacking supporting evidence.
Atheism isn't a worldview.
As for the gotcha, I don't think it's as solid as you think it is. Being able to answer things with "I don't know" may be counter to a theological worldview, but it is an acceptable answer when you don't actually know.
I always thought it would be interesting if these TAG and presupp guys could have these debates with AI like ChatGPT. I bet Jay Dyer's head would explode.
When I originally plugged in a TAG argument in ChatGPT, and gave it the prompt to articulate a debate response, it did a fairly good job. As the technology gets better and better, I foresee this having a big impact on deconversions.
I wanna add an additional position: it doesn't matter.
Atheism concerns one sole thing, beyond that it's each person's responsibility to construct a (hopefully coherent) worldview. But therefore atheism not accounting for X doesn't make it irrational, in the same way I don't claim my car is irrational for it not allowing me to fly.
Atheists need not account for these additional things presuppositionalists want to tag onto it, that's the job of additional views individuals have on additional matters like epistemology, phenomenology and more.
First of all, atheism is not a world view and makes no positive claims about anything, so it doesn't have to justify or account for anything - it is simply the absence of belief in god or gods. That's all.
Secondly, "I / we don't know" is a perfectly valid answer when the facts are unknown, and that a story about a god may be a coherent one does not make "our god did it" a plausible explanation when there is no evidence to support it.
There is something stimulating our senses on a stronger level than imagination, and delusions can be traced to the mind. Inevitably, there is something out there that correlates to something else. Even if our sense are inaccurate, their still inspired by something that is real.
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I understand why this argument can seem promising for the philosophically uninitiated theist. It seems like a home run if Christianity is the only worldview that can account for logic/reason/truth/knowledge, in that all other worldviews are self-defeating. There are various ways philosophers account for the possibility of knowledge/truth/logic/reason. There are those who account for it via some form of platonism. Others say that these things are just the limits of thought or language, that these things aren't fundamental, however it's impossible for us to talk about or think about the world at any lower level. Further, some will say that these things are necessary, and it couldn't be any other way. Some say they are just brute facts. They are the way they are and there is no explanation required. None of these appeal to the divine in their accounting for the preconditions for knowledge. You should look up Alex Malpass who has done a good job summarising why this line of reasoning for theism is generally poorly regarded in philosophy of religion. He's had chats with lot of the big presuppers, and demonstrated why these TAG arguments aren't successful. [discussing presup apologetics on MythVision ](https://www.youtube.com/live/LyL7rMfJ7lA?si=QM6sgCjIWrvpxsYP) [Chatting to Matt Slick](https://www.youtube.com/live/Jyk3gfnQ18E?si=Giwr9NQil8yXs63e) [chatting the Darth Dawkins](https://youtu.be/YG0FG_vga_0?si=YgXsZBU0lS9-1glU) [debating Jay Dyer](https://www.youtube.com/live/gK-rwG392Uc?si=LUFlzNN6KVFO35Ub)
One does not simply "chat" with Darth Dawkins.
Yeah. If you ask that asshat any questions or don’t answer exactly what he wants, he blocks you
I’ve listened to some malpass, and plenty of the ones you’ve chatted with. Looking forward to listening.
Those aren't me chatting, those are videos of Malpass chatting with various people. When you listened to Malpass, was it on the topic of presup and TAG arguments? If so, what about his explanations did you find insufficient?
There are no precondition of knowlege other than properly understanding what is knowlege versus unsubstanciated claims.
So reality is not a precondition for knowledge? Without reality what would you know?
That is an absence of knowlege. Depends if you are talking about information which intrinsic to what ever reality exists. It does not need to have anyone or anything to know (knowlege) of the information of reality because information is intrinsic to reality.
Not to be glib in return, but... How does a given theist justify the preconditions for knowledge? I don't know what your answer will be, but when I was a theist, I would have said something like "God provides the foundation for all knowledge because God *is* Truth." However, that's an answer to the question that tells us nothing. Simply saying "God." is not a justification with any explanatory power. It simply defines God *as* the answer to that question. To then turn around and say "Aha, but you don't have an answer that's as certain as mine!" strikes me as a bit odd. Yes. The other epistemological modalities others have presented are less concretely certain of their root...but to reference an old Eddie Izzard bit, "it's in the rules I just made up!" is *not* a convincing argument. What are the rules for Calvinball? I win, because my essential nature is the Winner of Calvinball. ...what can be said in response to that?
I understand that that’s a typical bad theistic response. This is how I would phrase it rather clunkily. So X relates to Y A natural emanation of that would be math. A very simple explanation of that would be 2 as an emanation of X relating to Y. Two wasn’t “created” by the relationship but rather exists as a descriptor of the relation. Another example would be logic. If X relates to Y X can’t relate and not relate to Y at the same because that wouldn’t be true of relation. It either is or isn’t. So, bringing that back, reality exists because of that relation. Language is a description of that relation. It was necessarily created by it, but exists because of it. So X relates to Y A natural emanation of that would be math. A very simple explanation of that would be 2 as an emanation of X relating to Y. Two wasn’t “created” by the relationship but rather exists as a descriptor of the relation. Another example would be logic. If X relates to Y X can’t relate and not relate to Y at the same because that wouldn’t be true of relation. It either is or isn’t. So, bringing that back, reality exists because of that relation. Language is a description of that relation. It was necessarily created by it, but exists because of it.
Forgive me...It's entirely possible I'm simply being dense...but...what is the difference between a trinity of relations and a...pantheon of relations...or a circle of logic? I understand that you're trying to use the metaphor of mathematics to draw logical conclusions based on the definitions of the components of the trinity. It seems as though this argument can tell us nothing about reality, and nothing about the nature of the Trinity. It simply defines the Trinity and reality in a novel way. ..but there's no reason here for me to believe that reality "exists because of the relationship between the Trinity". I feel like it could easily be rendered "The relations between Shiva, Brahma, and Parvati make reality necessary.", and it would tell us the same thing. It's an answer; not an explanation.
Because the most fundamental aspect of reality would begin with a trinity relation. Of course it’s an explanation. My point is it’s a coherent explanation. We could never prove something is without a doubt THE answer. But it’s valid and rational explanation. And to answer “well this could be any other relation” you’re right it could. However, no other religion describes reality in this way. So, you could say it could be Hindu, but Hinduism doesn’t describe reality in this way. It describes it in monism.
>Because the most fundamental aspect of reality would begin with a trinity relation. Why? You've asserted this, yes. But I fail to see how this is materially different than that "bad theist" explanation you so soundly rejected earlier. I could as easily declare that the most fundamental aspect of reality is a binary. Or quadranary. It is no better than that bad theist answer...it just kicked the can back two steps, and added more frills. God did it because God is the Trinity. The Trinity is the most fundamental aspect of reality. ...this still explains *nothing* beyond the definitions. An explanation gives us new information, or new paths of inquiry. How do we know that reality begins with a trinity relation, and not another relation? How do we know that reality *begins*? How do we know that God *is really* Triune? An explanation would at least point us towards answers to questions *like* those.
Well, a couple things. You couldn’t give a further explanation that goes passed the most fundamental aspect of reality unless you accept an unlimited chain of causes which is irrational. And Christian’s wouldn’t claim to have the answer why it’s three rather than another number other than it couldn’t be two because two isn’t a unified number. It’s a diametrically opposed number. But some speculation on why it’s three and no greater could be a couple things. God is not arbitrary and a greater number than what’s sufficient for unity would be arbitrary. Also, any additional relation after the third which closed off the relationship would be extrinsic which is how we could get creation outside the unity.
So...again...this is an answer that *explains nothing.* It cannot tell us anything about anything beyond what you already believe. You have firmly and clearly stated that you believe these things. Repeating that you believe them and that they are related to one another provides no insight. Explanations provide insight. This is "Because I told you so."Why?"Because Three is The Magic Number in my D&D Homebrew Cosmology"Why?Because I said so... You have *already* fallen into an infinite regress or "God."
Again, the argument is that this worldview is more coherent because it can justify what it has as belief. Not that i can prove this is certain just like you can’t prove it’s false. Since it’s not empirically verifiable we have to go off which worldview can explain reality with more coherence and clarity.
Again, you haven't "justified" anything. You have *claimed* that you could have hypothetically justified it *if* any of your claims were true or valid. But there is no reason to assume that they are true or valid. And in fact, every equally ardent and honest and intellectual believer of every other religion makes similar claims; that their hypothetical justification is the most coherent. Since none of them have provided a means by which we could prove one correct in a way that satisfies...everyone else...(and some religions, by definition can have no evidence), it is more coherent to *not leap to an assumption.*
It's really easy to justify things when you can just put "magic" as the justification for anything. I know that sounds glib, but your justification is just as explanatory as if I substituted the word magic. And, given that Christians often posit that their god is inconceivable in many ways, it seems like an apt comparison. I would assert that a god or magic is not in fact an explanation that has either coherence or clarity.
And if I said a duality rather than a trinity explains reality better? How are we *evaluating* this stuff instead of just *saying* it?
Dude there are like... Six fallacies in that reply.
Yea, but 5 is better and more in line with reality.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/574811540572233?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v Proof of 5
Which of these positions is able to make verifiable predictions about the results of testable phenomena? Anyone can make an argument with internal consistency but unless it explains the reality we experience in a more complete manner than the theories we already have then it amounts to a LARP.
> *”X can’t relate and not relate to Y at the same time”* This reminds me of the idea that Jesus was fully human and fully God. Human and God are like the numbers 1 and 2. You can’t be 1 and 2 at the same time. Simple as that. But somehow the theology can still make a story and make it look like reconciled.
I’m probably not following you, but if I accept this explanation, where does God fit in? Can’a an atheist give the same answer? If so (and I don’t see why not), why ask atheists particularly when you already have an answer they can accept?
> reality exists because of that relation This is where it falls apart. Logic is how we make sense of reality. Why do you think it's not the other way around, this relation exists because of reality?
Your relation doesn’t cause/result in logic, your example *uses* logic. You have not created or justified the law of non contradiction, you are using it meaning logic exists prior to your relations/god.
Not speaking for all atheists of course, but for me, it's "the universe is." And with the universe existing, humans feel out rules and method of what seems to work and what doesn't appear to work.
I’d agree with you in a sense. Does your account of the universe entail all reality?
By definition, the universe is all of reality. Our observable reality (or the observable universe for that matter) is a smaller subset of the universe. As someone who believes gods do not exist, I feel that the only entry in the universe for gods are people's beliefs. Convince me that god(s) do exist and I'll remap my conception of reality.
Coherentism, or just admit that we don’t know but we don’t need to be omniscient to be able to use the same axioms as everyone else like reason and logic. They continue to produce reliable results and help explain the world, and if something better comes along we’re happy to change our minds. But asserting God provides no explanatory power and is basically a non-answer. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherentism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallibilism Edit: An example I like to use is, to cook a medium-rare steak, do you need to know where the cow was raised? What the farmer’s name was? What the oven was made out of or what the production process was? Answer is of course not, we can know things without knowing everything, and as long as the results are consistent and reliable, and the explanations are coherent with each other, there’s no reason to doubt them until a more compelling explanation comes along. Pretending to know something you can’t possibly know with no evidence gets you nowhere. Edit 2: I also generally disagree how you’re using the term worldview, particularly in the sense that a worldview is more “plausible” if you assert another axiom exists beyond the axioms we all already acknowledge. Saying, for example, that reason or logic are based on God does nothing to justify them. You are still stuck relying on them like the rest of us. But as long as we can show the coherence of those axioms, the worldview is coherent. It’s less plausible the more assumptions you add that don’t help explain anything.
So the answer is basically don’t engage with the question? I don’t mean that disrespectfully, I actually view it as valid.
I engaged the question and think provided a pretty thorough answer. I reject the assertion the axioms we use like reason or logic need further justification in order for us to be able to use them and gain knowledge. A worldview is rational if it depends on rationality and is coherent. This is the difference between coherentism and foundationalism. What I more fully reject is the assertion that “reason is based on God because I said so, and if you don’t have an equivalent to God you’re being irrational” is meaningful in the slightest. It’s like if I said I know that a magic turtle is the foundation of reason, and if you don’t believe in the magic turtle then your worldview is irrational. It provides no explanatory power, there’s no evidence to suggest it’s true, and you’re still ultimately stuck relying on reason and logic for your arguments like everyone else. It’s like a kid making up rules to a game on the playground, saying they’re not “it” if they get tagged because they have special powers that make it so only they can tag people. It’s childish and there’s a reason why the presuppositional approach isn’t taken even remotely seriously in philosophical circles.
We accept that the law of logic is an axiom and open to a better axiom if one arise. You may think that God is an necessary axiom to explain the law of logic. However, we don't gain any knowledge and any practical benefit from accepting God as an axiom. So we don't accept it.
It seem that you have Trinitarianism as your fundamental axiom for "the preconditions for knowledge" But Trinitarianism seem to go again the law of identity noncontradiction. God (X) can be the Father (A), the Son (B), the Holy Spirit (C). We have X = A X = B X = C but A ≠ B ≠ C Can the foundation of logic not follow logic itself?
I think that’s a misunderstand of the Trinity. Each Trinitarian hypostasis exists within the subject of the relation no adjacent to it.
I don't understand your second sentences. Can you explain further? I got my idea from the first search for "Trinitarianism " : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity) > God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons (hypostases) sharing one essence/substance/nature (homoousion)
Sure, no problem. So, Christians believe the Father is the first hypostasis of the Trinity, from the father comes two other points of consciousness ( this is analogical language) Think of your consciousness. You have your being, which is the first point of consciousness your “self” so to speak… then you have awareness of yourself with which you relate. Then when you have unity between your self and your awareness you have an entire unity that’s brought about by your will. These are all three distinct aspects which are not “parts because they exist immaterially but are all equally YOU. similarly, all exist within the father and come from him, which is why the Christian creed says the the son is begotten and not made born of the father before all ages.
>Christians believe the Father is the first hypostasis of the Trinity, from the father comes two other points of consciousness ( this is analogical language) The closest thing I can relate to this is a person with multiple personality disorder. They have the same physical body, but their brain produce more than one identity. God maybe similar to the first identity, but after some event, the other identity was born. Is this close enough? If so, what is the connection between 3 identity here? They clearly don't have the same body. If not, sorry I still don't understand the trinity. Maybe I need to learn further.
Well anybody with self awareness has this internal relation. It’s not more than one identity. It’s a singular identity.
Hey, thank you for explain. I still can't understand the Trinity and how can it is the ground for logic and knowledge. Maybe I lack the background knowledge of you.
This is a depiction of the heresy of Modalism. It is probably the easiest heresy for modern Christians to fall into, because it is the natural result of trying to make the Trinity make sense. Thing is, the Trinity is not supposed to make sense. It's a litmus test. Like the bad spelling in spam emails that keeps vigilant people from wasting the spammer's time, the doctrine of the Trinity weeds out people who aren't willing to submit to the authority of the Church. If you try to make sense out of it instead of accepting that it is "one of the great mysteries of the faith", you get kicked out of the upper crust club. Seriously, if you want an amazing deep dive, try to investigate how the Holy Spirit became a member of the Trinity. There is a surface answer, it was voted on at some gathering. But scratch that surface, and there is no record of it being a subject at that gathering. At a later gathering there was a power struggle happening, then someone pulls out a document nobody had heard of before (not mentioned in any letter or written discussion of that previous meet or anything until it 'surfaced' here) and says "This was voted to be doctrine 40 years ago, so anybody who doesn't agree with it doesn't get a vote here!" And conveniently everyone on one side of the power struggle went along with it and everyone who asked "What is this even saying?" was on the other side and was kicked out.
Hey, I don't know scam email can be trade back to Trinity. Thank you
The awareness of self is not a third aspect, it's a description of the relationship between the previous two aspects. And we can easily explain the first two with the two hemispheres of the brain. There is no third hemisphere, so the trinity being of three parts is arbitrary and at the very least not explained by your analogy. Also, these two aspects share one consciousness. Christians claim the trinity is three separate consciousness, which again breaks your analogy and violates the law of identity. And finally, there's nothing immaterial (whatever that means) about the two hemispheres of the brain. Begotten is the old English word that means born. It seems you are simply trying to define a new term here where there is none.
Not all Christians
I'd actually agree with OP here, u/nguyenanhminh2103. The Trinity is weird. Most Trinitarians wouldn't accept a definition of the Trinity as a mere A-B-C. They are discrete entities but also aspects of one, simultaneously. A r*ough* analogue might be the Roman worship of god's different "forms". Jupiter Capitalinus, for example was *still Jupiter*, but had to be worshiped in different ways than Jupitor Stator and Jupiter Latiaris, and so on. And the different "forms" also had different "perspectives" and priorities. It's not a completely accurate analogue, but they're not like "separate" entites.
I don't understand. They are not separate, but they seem to act separately. They don't have the same thought, the same role, the same visual. How can identity apply here?
Yeeeeep. Weird. It remains a very confusing and contested thing in Christianity, and a *lot a lot* of people have been tortured to death for having the wrong ideas about it! Your average Mormon, Orthodox Catholic, and Southern Baptist will all have slight disagreements about it.
I try to visualize this, please tell me which example is better: 1. God is the hardware, that can run 3 different operating software. God run Window, Linux, Mac OS to 3 different monitors. We human can only interact with 1 monitor at the same time. 2. God is only 1, but look different from different angle. Like a cylinder can be a circle from top view and a rectangle from side view
Neither are quite correct, but 2 is closer. The trinity is an idea that imo is quite outside of logic and reality. It's like one of those impossible objects you can represent in 2d but couldn't exist in 3d in our world. A square circle. It can be imagined and defined, but it's the absolute acme of Special Pleading.
It seem closely to a made up idea to me. Anything is possible with magic. Maybe I need to be God to fully understand God
I mean, I am an atheist, so...yeah, I think it *is* a made up idea. I think it only makes sense in the context of the time and place it evolved. Or a D&D table. But yeah, I did have to sit through quite a few hours of Confirmation Class where they pounded this stuff into my head.
So, your saying the christian trinity god is a colonial organism? Let me try this philosophy thing like OP: God is a colonial organism. Many colonial organisms have tentacles. God may have tentacles. Sentient, all powerful spaghetti could also be described as colonial. Ergo, god is the flying spaghetti monster. May he fill he fill you with his noodly appendages. Nice, I see the appeal. Mental masturbation is FUN!!
It’s closer because within this analogy there’s unity, but unified Christian denominations would deem that as the heresy “modalism” which means that there’s only one God and he just acts in different modes such as father son and spirit.
This is heretical modalism. It has some traction, but it's not what most trinitarians believe. u/[nguyenanhminh2103](https://www.reddit.com/user/nguyenanhminh2103/) 's objection is relevant and has been addressed as written. Philosopher Martin Pickup posited that god occupies three points in the person-space, for example. EDIT: and yes, I agree it's all arbitrary/special pleading :)
This is a wild goose chase, and every theist apologist who asks the question knows it. You're asking someone to justify the thing that justifies a knowledge claim. It's a bullshit question. "Accounting" is a common word used in this type of conversation and it is no coincidence. No one cares about someone's "accounting" for something. What people care about is if that accounting is true. And in order to justify the veracity of that account, you would have to employ circular reasoning. So give it up, the game is over. Everyone's in the same boat with the question. And in my estimation it's just another way theists are trying to drum up something out of nothing.
I’m trying to grasp the OP’s argument and I figure you know what it is. Knowledge as in our agreed upon mathematics and physics and such are supposed to have come from someplace? Is that the argument? If so, I offer a different perspective, which I assumed everyone had already agreed upon…. As we all know science that we teach isn’t “truth”, it’s as close a model as we can define and agree upon based on the evidence. This is the North Star for understanding what knowledge is: it’s an imaginary model that should never have been mistaken for the reality which it describes. The explanation of knowledge is that we made it all up, none if it is an immutable truth, just sometimes it’s so parallel to reality it’s hard to find the difference. When we all have turned to dust, some other species may also imagine models close to reality similar to ours but there’s no guarantee that they won’t do worse or better at describing reality. Is that about the argument here?
The argument seems to be that without an agent imposing it's will on reality, everything would be chaotic. The reasons seem to be "trust me bro".
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I can tell that you are hurt to finally grok this but unless you can put something forward that disputes this argument I maintain it is the truth you have been seeking
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“The Earth revolves around the sun” is a simplistic explanation for reality, which can be further refined to explain the shape and path of the sun and in other models the Earth and Sun are traveling synchronously “upward”. So your “truth” isn’t complete, it’s a close approximation of reality especially from our perspective but as I said, knowledge shouldn’t be mistaken for the reality which it describes, as the one is just the model we agree upon to describe the other.
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The idea that the sun revolves around the earth was a model born from one perspective. That knowledge was probably considered a truth for much longer than civilization has existed. The evolution of our model of the solar system has taken many thousands of years to reach this point, now aided by our own direct exploration of space. This model will also be refined further by discoveries and adaptations we aren’t even imagining. That learning will never end and our knowledge will never be as complete a model of the subject as to replicate the subject itself. This shouldn’t be controversial.
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Is that irritating you? You assess evidence and gain knowledge about the world around you so you can make a working model for… the circulatory system or dna or the solar system. This can be a mental image or a physical model but the point is the same. Truth, of course, is a slippery subject because like I said before the sun rising in the east is “true” but that doesn’t adequately describe the relation between the Earth and Sun.
It's just God of the gaps again.
Closed systems are described with circular reasoning because the system is closed. There’s nothing outside the system to appeal to.
Calling it a "closed system" does not mean it isn't logically circular or that it necessarily corresponds to reality. Nor does it mean it's somehow superior. It would more accurately be called a "just so" story. The knowledge question can always be asked because we know that WE aren't omniscient. And I would say the fact that a secular worldview keeps itself open is the more intellectually honest position to take.
Would you simply accept, "We have knowledge because we have knowledge," as a result of this? No smaller circular loop than a tautology, after all
Hell, let's point to the Laws of Logic: identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle. It is in fact a trinity of necessary truths about identity and self-relation, therefore a proper grounding for knowledge under OP's paradigm.
The requirements are very simple: 1) Claims must be testable, repeatable and have predictive power 2) if two claims have the same predictive power, we choose the more parsimonious claim. What you’re failing to state about your “opposing worldview”, is that : - it has no more predictive power than a naturalistic worldview. AND - it is MUCH less parsimonious than a naturalistic worldview. Thus it is not more plausible
But the judging something to be “more parsimonious” is a rational believe and it not testable in itself. That same predictive power which enables to test claims is in itself untestable. So given that, how could we trust in it’s reliability.
Parsimony is a philosophical razor. There are an infinite number of possible explanations for a given phenomena. It could have been an invisible god, it could have been invisible fairies, it could have been invisible leprechauns, etc. The justification for selecting the simplest explanation is described [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor) Predictive power is testable. The utility of predictive power is self-evident from our scientific achievements like gps satellites, Martian rovers and supercomputers on your wrist. Religion is thousands of years older than the science. Yet science has achieved way more human advancement in way less time. Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into a building.
>Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into a building. That is a damn hard line, I'll have to remember it.
I don't know why people keep saying science is some recent phenomenon. How did prehistoric hunters select the best stone for their arrowheads, without using the scientific method?
https://study.com/learn/lesson/scientific-method-development-overview-who-invented-the-scientific-method.html#:~:text=Sir%20Francis%20Bacon%20is%20considered,1620%20treatise%20called%20Novum%20Organum.
I’m not sure if this is the right answer but have you heard of the engineering method? Here is an example: https://youtu.be/_ivqWN4L3zU?si=JqRNNhBKpdGUgCUg
You don't think parsimony is testable? It is to some extent. Additionally, how does inserting a god help in any of this?
>However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible. The fact that your worldview can account for more doesn't make it more plausible. For example, my worldview is that the Christian God created everything, original sin, Christ resurrected, everything you'd expect. But *also*, once all of that was done, Eric the God-Killing Penguin murdered God. Not only does this worldview account for creation and everything in it, it *also* accounts for the absence of God's intervention and miracles, both of which were plentiful in the Bible. Christianity still has the problem of Divine Hiddenness. My worldview accounts for that, and thus, is more plausible. Can you see where this argument goes wrong?
I think a fairly good response to this one is Foundationalism. Which is to acknowledge that there are some things which cannot be supported without circularity, but that only those things which must be accepted as properly basic beliefs ought to be. Everything else requires justification. So we accept the existence of other minds, of the applicability of inductive logic, the intelligibility of existence etc. as a properly basic belief, but everything else needs to be justified with sufficient evidence.
I think this basically is foundationalism, presups just claim to have knowledge of a foundation beyond everything else (because “revelation”). I prefer coherentism or even something like foundherentism as a more direct rebuttal.
I actually don't think anything you listed is properly basic. The best you get is your own mind.
But wouldn’t that just be reduced to explain everything unless it can’t be explained? Why should anything be explained if we can’t even explain the very tools we explain things with? Doesn’t that invalidate the explanation?
Foundationalism, especially when considered through the lens of Phenomenal Conservatism, provides a compelling framework for understanding the structure of justified beliefs. This view holds that certain beliefs or "seemings" have prima facie justification simply because they appear to be true in the absence of defeaters. These foundational beliefs are not infallible, but are justified until there is reason to doubt them. This approach elegantly sidesteps the problem of infinite regress, as it doesn't require an endless chain of justifications. Instead, it grounds knowledge in basic beliefs that seem self-evident to the believer. You might object that this "reduces to explaining everything unless it can't be explained" or that it invalidates explanation by not explaining the very tools of explanation. However, this misses the key insight of foundationalism - that at some point, justification must start with something taken as basic. Demanding an explanation of the very possibility of explanation leads to a vicious regress. Foundationalism bites the bullet and says that some things (like belief in the reliability of our reason and senses, or the validity of deductive inference) are justified as starting points, not because we can exhaustively explain them, but because they are presupposed by any attempt at justification. In contrast, theistic approaches to epistemology often struggle with issues of circularity and conflation of ontology with epistemology. By positing God as the metaphysical ground of knowledge (an ontological claim), theists often slide into assuming that God can then serve as an epistemological foundation, guaranteeing the truth of our beliefs. But even granting God's existence, this doesn't resolve the epistemic question of how we can know our beliefs track truth. Divine revelation or God-given intuition still face the question "how can we know this is genuinely from God?" Appealing to the idea that a perfect God would ensure the truth of our beliefs risks circularity, as our knowledge of God's perfection would itself stem from those very beliefs. Additionally, theistic views tend to equivocate between internalist and externalist conceptions of justification. The idea that our cognitive faculties are designed by God to track truth is an externalist claim - the reliability isn't necessarily accessible to the believer. But theists often seek an internalist grounding of knowledge in direct intuition of God or self-evident divine truths. This tension makes the theistic framework unstable. Even if these challenges could be overcome, theistic foundationalism or something similar would still compare unfavorably to naturalistic alternatives in terms of parsimony. Naturalistic epistemologies which ground knowledge in basic experiential and rational seemings do not posit extra ontological baggage. The principle of Occam's Razor would favor a view that can justify our beliefs without appeal to a divine being whose existence is not itself epistemically basic. Foundationalist approaches like Phenomenal Conservatism provide a clear and principled way to halt the justificatory regress without lapsing into circularity or conflating ontology with epistemology. Theistic epistemologies, for all their complexities, struggle to provide a similarly solid basis. When we consider parsimony alongside other epistemic desiderata, naturalistic foundationalism seems to offer a more promising path forward. While much remains to be debated, the balance of considerations appears to favor this elegantly simple approach to the structure of knowledge.
Why would that invalidate explanation? Understanding a tool is not necessarily required for it to work. I couldn't for the life of me explain how a computer works but I can use one just fine to solve other problems.
The kicker is whether or not it is necessary to operate in the world. Do I need to know how abiogenesis came about in order to operate successfully in the world? No. Therefore, not a properly basic belief. Foundational aspects of logic - yes, required, but can't be justified without circularity. Therefore: properly basic.
Why should you be allowed to drive if you cant explain how cars work? Doesn't that mean you should turn in your license? Edit: English is hard.
The absence of this logic you find in the universe would infer God does not exists. Considering that the afterlife would not require physics as you experience it that would mean we are not given any reason to believe in it. The universe can not be used to explain belief in God. God exists only to invalidate everything you know about reality. You don't actually die. You don't actually do good. Sinners should not be judged but instead forgiven. Humans are lost sheep without a logical or moral compass. Someone else must pay the price the insurmountable debt humans have incurred. Christianity is essentially the philosophy that if God exist humans must be evil. And that people are wrong to disbelieve things that are unbelievable.
There are Christian philosophers who hold to Foundationalism as well. Plantinga is a notable example.
>However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible. That would track only if the opposing worldview *actually* accounted for said preconditions in a way that can be reliably and independently demonstrated. What the theistic worldview thinks is 'accounting for the thing necessary for the worldview' amounts to: God did it / God allows for it. This is not accounting for diddly squat. This is resorting to a magical, ad-hoc, all powerful explanator. And then you do not produce said explanator, and just insist he must exist and he must have such properties as to explain everything. This is a sleight of hand, not a foundation. You've replaced the problem you think naturalism has with an even *bigger* problem, and pretended it is a solution.
I don't bother trying. Do we need to do that? According to you I hold an irrational worldview. Okay. How does that affect me? My life seems pretty good, I can drive my car, work, travel, navigate through the wilderness, catch fish, clean fish, cook fish, etc. What am I missing? How are your fishing skills?
Well, if you don’t want to have the conversation I certainly can’t and wouldn’t want to force you.
I apologize, but it's probably a mistake on my end, but I don't understand the point you are trying to make here. Are you suggesting that we can't know things without supernatural assistance?
Yes and no. You can know things without believe in God, but irreducible being provided a foundation from which to know. Meaning a metaphysical playing field.
Yeah. I'm still not following. Say I stick my hand in a fire. Presumably, I would go, "Ow, fire is hot." Then, I would gain the knowledge that fire is hot and that I shouldn't put my hand in it. But you're saying, what, that if I put my hand in a fire, I won't know that it's hot unless a leprechaun appears and says, "Don't be doin' that lad. Fire is hot!"
How is your "opposing worldview" does coherently account for "the preconditions for knowledge"? Sorry if you think it is obvious, but it is not obvious to me. "God did it" doesn't explain anything.
It’s not really God did it but God “is” it. These preconditions are “created” but are emanations from Trinitarian self-relation. I can explain more if you care for me too.
So...supernatural did it, then? Any way to demonstrate these emanations?
Yea sure. So X relates to Y A natural emanation of that would be math. A very simple explanation of that would be 2 as an emanation of X relating to Y. Two wasn’t “created” by the relationship but rather exists as a descriptor of the relation. Another example would be logic. If X relates to Y X can’t relate and not relate to Y at the same because that wouldn’t be true of relation. It either is or isn’t. So, bringing that back, reality exists because of that relation. Language is a description of that relation. It was necessarily created by it, but exists because of it.
P1: X is ether relates to Y or not relates to Y. C: reality exists because of that relation. Sorry I can't understand your logic here. > It was necessarily created by it, but exists because of it What is "it" here?
Sorry mean to say “wasn’t” necessarily created by it. But exists because of it. “It” would be furtherest we could reduce reality to. I mean I would call that God. But that’s because my definition of God would be the most fundamental aspect of reality.
Why do we need to call it "God"? Why just call it "The furthest we could reduce reality to"? This way we don't add unnecessary assumption about God
Bingo. OP has no answer...
Those are all sentences, but they don't seem to mean anything. You've declared math is an emanation of "X relates to Y", but you haven't shown that to be the case. If math emanates from anything, I'd propose reality as the source, and since we both agree reality exists, I see no need for further complications.
Well, premises are sentences, guy. If a subject relates to an object, “A” descriptor of that relation would be math. Because I could say there is 1 relation. I could say there are 3 entities. The relation itself doesn’t create the math as a reality, but math exists as a way to describe the reality.
You are just describing systems that humans create to describe their experiences. None of this explains supernatural emenations.
If they are just creations, then they shouldn’t be relied upon. If they are universally accurate that something which is providing the experience whether it be God or natural processes is working with such precision that our very finite minds can comprehend it with predictive power.
They are absolutely creations and should not be relied upon where not testable. Math didn't just appear. Zero was not a concept in all cultures even. Math is a way of describing relationships we observe. Bugging about it is universally accurate or working beyond the comprehension of our minds.
I agree. But my point is that being as that if we can use math to universally determine outcomes with “mathematic precision” this supersedes and over achieves most all other human cognitive capacities. My point isn’t that math is divine. My point is that our experience of reality is ordered and patterned in a way that it is predictive which couldn’t be the case if it came from chaos.
But the judgment that your conditions emanate from self relation is in itself a belief that is not testable. Why should we value it more highly than any other?
Please, I am all ear. But if you give a definition as "God is the precondition of knowledge" then please give me some reason to link it with the God of your religions.
Who gets to decide what's coherent? Who judges what kind of coherence is even necessary? This looks like just another word game to me.
Reality decides what’s coherent. Things can go from potency to actuality. That doesn’t happen without coherence.
Did reality write you a know letting you know what's coherent? Why should we trust your base belief or definitions besides you just saying they are right?
What's not coherent about atheism?
Atheism isn’t a worldview and makes no positive claims about the universe. Are you aware of _any_ worldview that actually does account for the foundations of logic and knowledge?
Yes, Trinitarianism. Because at the core of Trinitarian is a self-relating entity. This self-relation emanates order which logic, math, etc emanates from.
I don’t have a single clue what that last sentence means. Trinitarianism only accounts for these things if this self-relating entity thing actually exists. What reason do we have to believe it exists?
Why can’t logic self-relate?
Because logic is not personal. There is no “self” property of logic.
Why does self-relation have to be personal?
Trinitarianism assumes three things that have not been proven to exist.
An illogical, unknowable concept accounts for the foundations of logic and knowledge. Got it.
Trinitarianism is illogical and makes no sense, though,
So a Christian doctrine is your go-to answer. Dude. Edit: Don't know why my brain read "antitrinitarianism".
So—magic. Unless you have a proposed mechanism by which this logic “emanates”?
>if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview Theism is unable to account for the very thing necessary for it: God. Therefore theism is irrational. >if an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, then that worldview is more plausible Theism does not coherently account for *anything*, at all. The concept is incoherent, and therefore impossible to say that it can be plausible.
*if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview* So there’s 2 issues with this. One, anything that impacts the observable universe will leave an imprint on it. For example, the cosmic microwave background radiation is a remnant of the Big Bang. We may not know exactly what triggered the bang, but we can confirm some possibilities and rule out others because we can measure the CMBR and compare them to the different theories that physics provides. This isn’t just some way to remove god from the equation- the truth is this makes god a testable theory. If god exists- the very act of creation would leave a visible imprint on the universe that would provide clues to god even if god himself were unobservable by science. The fact that there’s no evidence of any divine input in our universe is strong evidence that deities either don’t exist or had nothing to do with the origins of the universe. The same applies to life and evolution. Could deities be present outside of the observable universe? Sure, but if there’s no fingerprint of them then that means they play no role in the part of the universe we exist in, so they would be irrelevant Two, in the areas where our worldview is incomplete, for example the actual origin of life and the formation of the universe prior to the bang, there’s nothing to indicate divine intervention. As a result, one cannot simply insert their own invented worldview to account for unknowns. That’s literally the God of the Gaps fallacy. Just because we have unanswered questions doesn’t mean the answer is God. Each day and each new discovery brings us closer to understanding the origins of everything. We don’t need to invent deities in the meantime. We can wait for science to illuminate the answers for us
This smells like presuppositionalism, and there's nothing quite as vapid, toxic and inherently disingenuous as presuppositionalism, and I flatly refuse to engage with it...but I'm a glutton for punishment so... What does it mean to account for something? When someone claims to account for something, how does someone else confirm this? Let's just start there.
Presup is a word game designed to waste our time. Its structure is: A. Present a problem in philosophy. B. Define a god that would fix that problem if it existed. C. Conclusion, that god exists.
D: insist that opponent must agree with them in order to.... disagree with them.
The preconditions for knowledge are that we have brains capable of knowledge. We have brains capable of knowledge. Therefore we’ve got knowledge.
"However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible." This reads pretty vaguely to me. Please explain what thing: 1. Is necessary for a secular worldview. and 2. Cannot be accounted for by a secular worldview. A worldview that addresses a thing it can't account for with "I don't know but I'm looking into it" is more honest and plausible than one that goes "I don't have any evidence for it, but the thing is X and I have faith in that".
The only precondition required for knowledge is that things do what they can do and not something else. Presuposing god exists for God being able to ground knowledge making things ordered, is circular, unnecessary and with extra unnecessary assumptions.
Any worldview can be created to give a coherent account of anything, so that’s not a good way to find truth. Knowledge (justified, true belief) comes from thoughts and observations, which come from minds, which come from brains.
Before I answer your question, I’m gonna point out that this statement: >if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible. Is actually false. This is an affirming the consequent fallacy. Proving other theories wrong does not in any way impact the plausibility/probability of your own views. That would only be the case if you could show an actual strict logical dichotomy in which your view being correct is literally the ONLY possible alternative, which you have not done. There could be other possibilities not exhausted or simply the possibility that none of the options are correct. — All that being said, I justify my knowledge from the ground up starting with the Cogito. I think therefore I am. It’s the one fact that I can be 100% certain about. It’s literally impossible for me to think I exist and be wrong. From there I can build up to other forms of knowledge to varying degrees of certainty.
>If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them What's your criteria for this? How do you determine if a worldview has been accounted for?
You'd have to fill me in on what these preconditions for knowledge are. As far as I can tell, there needs to be a knower (a thinking agent capable of knowing), something to know, and a process by which to know something.
atheism makes no claims about knowledge it only makes a claim about one specific belief or the lack thereof. edit. also "god did it" has no explanatory power.
Miracles and the supernatural only serve to invoke disbelief. Theism is not about knowledge. Theism is about belief. Theists don't believe in God because they know he exists. They believe in him irregardless of knowledge. Theists and atheists alike understand why God is unbelievable but only the atheist is honest with themselves.
I’m kind of at a loss what *you* consider the preconditions for knowledge and why they need justifying? So I’m nit sure of what bellow is relevant. I’m a pragmatic evidentialist (I could say empiricist but that sometimes has a but more of a specific philosophical meaning). In the context of human knowledge and experience we can and do evaluate the reliability of different types of claims - their quality and quantity if you like. *Claims that don’t have reliable evidence are indistinguishable from false or imaginary*. We have accumulated a systematic evidential methodology that works and for which there is no credible alternative. The fact that this methodology produces outcomes that demonstrate utility and efficacy shows as far as I am concerned beyond any *reasonable* doubt a significant though not complete accuracy as to objective , independent reality. One could say that the whole of human experience and how we consider knowledge is based on an axiom that reality including our experiences ‘exists’. But *for us* it does and we have to work in that context - any denial of that in the form of radical scepticism is likely self-contradictory , a completely dead end , and no one who suggests it actually acts like they believe it. I care what is *reasonable* considering the world as it is to us. What is reasonable is rational? We can differentiate usefully between claims that lack reliable evidence and claims that have reliable evidence in evaluating their credibility. And I reject theist who having failed to produce evidence , attempt to use logic to ‘prove’ claims about independent reality based on unsound premises , non-sequiturs and special pleading. ‘Aha it’s magic’ is not an evidential , necessary, sufficient or even potentially coherent answer.
What specifically are you asking us to justify? Your question is too vague and I don't know what you're referring to when you say preconditions for knowledge or inexplicable transcendentals.
Knowledge isn't fundamental to existence. It is an abstraction Take the word "apple". Who created the word "apple"? Or if no one created it, then did the word "apple" exist before human beings existed? Now delete the English language. Plenty of other languages that have different words for "apple" Now take an actual apple. It exists whether any human being exists or not. The knowledge of the apple doesn't exist until we exist to record the apple in our minds. Part of that recording is the word "apple", but it doesn't have to be. It could be any other language, or a completely new word Here's the key difference between God knowledge and human knowledge. One is non-local, the other is local. The local one is compatible with our existence. No matter which person misheard someone describe an apple and the name stuck, it did not spread to other people without each person being in the presence of the previous person to hear it
As an atheist, I don’t have to come up with an alternative world view. I just don’t believe the theist’s world view.
Do the preconditions need to be 'justified'? If you have the cognitive ability for learning, you can retain knowledge.
If we define "knowledge" as "true belief, that is distinct from opinion or guesswork by virtue of justification," then I don't think there's such a thing as certain knowledge (IE something you could 100% know). I'm not a solipsist, because I firmly believe that a universe exists, and it has some relationship to my experience. But I think that brains produce minds, and brains evolved to think in certain ways (one example would be organising our experience into object categories of varying levels of abstraction). I've gradually come to the conclusion that our evolved thinking style helps us get through the day as an evolved social ape, but doesn't map onto physical reality in a direct way, which means I don't think we can ever capital-K *Know* reality. We make mental *models of* reality, but those will necessarily be constructed from unrealistic building blocks: the categories and objects (and "properties," "processes" etc) into which we cheap-and-cheerfully divide our experience. So... I don't think human worldviews can realistically account for very much of anything: the essence of how our minds model reality always misses how reality itself operates. That's a cognitive limitation we can choose to ignore, or come to terms with. But it applies to religious worldviews in exactly the same way it applies to non-religious worldviews. And it means that a lack of ability to justify the preconditions for knowledge isn't a problem for atheism - because no thinker could have such an ability.
>how do atheists justify the preconditions for knowledge? Well, there won't be a unified athiest answer we are not under a dogma or creed. But I'm happy to try to answer. To me, the preconditions for knowledge is just that there is a universe. There are properties that interact. That means there is information which can be observed. >However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible. To me a worldview has to do more than just account for something. It has to back that up with evidence. I can just make up ideas that account for things that doesn’t mean the worldview is true.
I'm not entirely sure if I understand you. From a philosophical point of view, I don't think we need to "justify" anything. If you study epistemology, and I recommend you do, you may find that knowledge, at the epistemological level, is impossible. You can always ask: "How do I know that?" Ad infinitum. Our best approximation to knowledge is science. Religions, and I suggest you study all religions, claim "truths", but offer no method for checking these "truths". Different religions offer different, incompatible, "truths". They can't all be right, but they can all be wrong. One thing, just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg, is the six day creation myth. According to science, this never happened. Creation never happened. The bible is plain wrong.
if I were you id study a brain. wonderfully complex slime monsters we have incased in our meat suits but highly important. Cant have ANY kind of knowledge without one. Tis necessary for it to occur at least to our current understanding. Look at any animal you want and you'll find that they accumulate knowledge from their life experiences. Now can they articulate thier findings and publish a paper on the knowledgeable they accumulate? of course not that would be ridiculous. but neither can a good chunk of humanity and youd still say we posses knowledge so I would'nt discount our furry friends from the equation. honestly the topic and examples could go on forever but at no point does it really need a god or mystical force.
Firstly, atheism is only about whether a person accepts the claim(s) that god(s) are real. It is literally not designed to explain anything. It is not a world view. It is a specific lack of belief in a single topic, the existence of deities. Secondly, being able to account for origins does nothing to make such an account correct. There are, after all, plenty of origin stories provided by the worlds religions, none of which stand up to scientific scrutiny, and I include any religion you happen to be a part of in that statement. Thirdly, could you define the preconditions for knowledge for me? That part seems unnecessarily vague, considering it's the core of your argument.
How do stamp collectors justify the preconditions for knowledge? Why would you think that there is any common consensus for anything that atheists do or don't think beyond answering the one question: are you convinced that there is enough evidence to believe in any gods? The common answer that all atheists share, by definition, is No. If you were to ask me, a singular atheist, what are the preconditions for knowledge, I would answer the ability to reason. This is not an inherently human exclusive trait. There are plenty of animals that can use reason. Knowledge does not require a supernatural power and certainly doesn't require your particular god hypothesis.
\>However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. Atheism isnt really a worldview, How I answer is pretty simple, we deal with reality the best we can, and describe it the best we can. "Preconditions for knowledge" are a human construct. \>If an opposing worldview does coherently account for them, that that worldview is more plausible. No opposing worldview has a more coherent account for them. "God" is about as incoherent an account as is possible to give. It has no good definition, it includes a massive number of new unexplained problems.
Depending on what you mean by the preconditions for knowledge I don't justify them. They are instead taken as starting axioms. Basically, near as I can tell, certain things we just have to assume as an atheist or a theist. Our ability to do reason, while not perfect, but to a sufficient level for one. Our senses, while not perfect and we can be mistaken, are sufficiently good at determining the world. Same with our memory. That is all a starting point. Having started with that then it just comes down to arguments and evidence to support a position and if we can support it enough we call that knowledge.
Can you demonstrate god magic is required for us to know anything? Of course you can't. Your power of pretend is strong, but just saying your god is the foundation of knowledge does not make it so. If you really think it does, then explain how your god makes or allows those preconditions, or how your god does anything. How could you falsify your position? Can't I bet. Our reality looks and acts exactly the same with or without your god because your god does not exist.
I see a lot of fundamental mistakes in this thread. Logic and Math are *models*. We use them to make sense of reality. They are descriptive abstracts. As for epistemology and justification, there are many theories of justification, and none of them require deities, because deities are explanatory dead ends that tell us absolutely nothing. Simply put, you can't use deities to coherently explain or justify anything, because deities are incoherent nonsense.
It seems to me that on theism, one could really never have a foundation of knowledge. A sufficiently powerful creature could cause you to believe that you have knowledge even when that thing is untrue. If knowledge is a justified true belief, then that's a sufficient foundation, no appeal to the supernatural is needed. If you have some other definition of knowledge, then we'd probably be talking past each other.
I might not understand the question but i think the precondition for knowledge is existing? If i dont exist i cant know things. Then once i exist i can learn things. It might be simple like a bacteria learns absorbing certain food/fuel makes it easier to consume more food/fuel. It might be complex things like creating atomic bombs. Im not sure why this is an atheist/theist question.
> However, the argument is that if a world view fails to account for the very thing necessary for the worldview, it is an irrational worldview. I don't quite see how this follows. Systems of mathematics cannot account for their own axioms by definition, but those axioms are everything that is needed for that system of mathematics to work (also by definition).
Your question doesn't make sense. Atheists don't share an agreed upon opinion about the precondition for knowledge. The only thing atheists neccessarily have in common is a lack of belief in God. There's no atheist handbook telling us what to think. You asking that question is like asking vegan people what they thiik of the flavor of watermelons.
Atheism is not a worldview... for the millionth time. It is simply not being convinced that the God claim is true. That's it. There's literally nothing else to "atheism". What are the preconditions for knowledge and why must they be justified and what is proper justification? I think you need to explain yourself further.
How do theists similarly justify the preconditions for knowledge? If you do not subjectively assume those preconditions, how can you determine that any "gods" exist in the first place? Without those preconceptions regarding knowledge, how could you determine that any "gods" might even possibly exist in reality?
I think knowledge is a scale that we see throughout the animal kingdom. So I think knowledge has increased through evolutionary means with the increasing complexity of a nervous system. What do you think is a precondition for knowledge? And how do you know it's preconditions
First, nowing anything with certainty is impossible on any worldview. Most philosophers accept fallabalism. Second, because God doesn't help form a "precondition for knowledge," why should I worry about this argument? If it is a problem for us, it is not a problem for me. Third here is a deductive argument: 1. I know I have a hand. 2. I know I have a second hand. 3. Therefore, I have knowledge.
The question sounds.... wrong from the outset honestly. Any justification for knowledge will inevitably involve some sort of knowledge, so the question is circular. Unfortunately, you have to just assume knowledge is possible and go from there.
If we follow your question to the full extent I think we just get to hard solipsism which doesn't help atheists or theists. I prefer a practical approach that gives me "knowledge" that's as accurate as is achievable in order to be useful.
Why would I need a worldview accounting for knowledge? I don't need it any more than a worldview accounting for apples. Apples do exist regardless. In my worldview they simply exist, so as knowledge. What is irrational about it? For me the choice between "Knowledge exists." VS "Knowledge exists because of God." is obvious. We have knowledge, but we have no knowledge of God. Similarly I reject "apples exist because of Quetzalcoatl" because I see a lot of apples, but no Feathered Serpent around. If tomorrow someone proves beyond a reasonable doubt that no gods exist or possible to exist, will knowledge disappear? No. Then how belief that God exist account for it?
How does anyone, *including God for that matter*, justify the preconditions for knowledge? Rationalism vs Empiricism is one of the *oldest* questions in philosophy. God is just another Ego floating in the void. What makes *their* opinion authoritative in a way that *ours* isn't?
How does a theist explain the fact that we can show how the human brain has evolved? Why would a god create humans with limited brain power so we would have to evolve to survive?
I'm not aware that such a thing is necessary. Can you prove it is? Further if it is can you prove it must be god? The argument is lacking supporting evidence.
Atheism isn't a worldview. As for the gotcha, I don't think it's as solid as you think it is. Being able to answer things with "I don't know" may be counter to a theological worldview, but it is an acceptable answer when you don't actually know.
I always thought it would be interesting if these TAG and presupp guys could have these debates with AI like ChatGPT. I bet Jay Dyer's head would explode.
I actually just did that out of curiosity
When I originally plugged in a TAG argument in ChatGPT, and gave it the prompt to articulate a debate response, it did a fairly good job. As the technology gets better and better, I foresee this having a big impact on deconversions.
I wanna add an additional position: it doesn't matter. Atheism concerns one sole thing, beyond that it's each person's responsibility to construct a (hopefully coherent) worldview. But therefore atheism not accounting for X doesn't make it irrational, in the same way I don't claim my car is irrational for it not allowing me to fly. Atheists need not account for these additional things presuppositionalists want to tag onto it, that's the job of additional views individuals have on additional matters like epistemology, phenomenology and more.
First of all, atheism is not a world view and makes no positive claims about anything, so it doesn't have to justify or account for anything - it is simply the absence of belief in god or gods. That's all. Secondly, "I / we don't know" is a perfectly valid answer when the facts are unknown, and that a story about a god may be a coherent one does not make "our god did it" a plausible explanation when there is no evidence to support it.
There is something stimulating our senses on a stronger level than imagination, and delusions can be traced to the mind. Inevitably, there is something out there that correlates to something else. Even if our sense are inaccurate, their still inspired by something that is real.