My apologies for my absence as of late--my days have been quite busy. Anyway, today I found myself perusing the page of the Tempe, AZ chapter of Ratio Christi (which is run by a Gangadeanian) and I encountered the following argument.
1. God’s existence and God’s moral law are clear to reason.
2. Humans have failed to know God and obey the moral law.
3. God cannot forgive without atonement.
4. Only the Bible shows how sin is atoned for.
5. Therefore, the Bible is true.
In my view, the Gangadeanian worldview is fraught with bad arguments. But this one is particularly offensive. In fact, it was this very bad argument that was sort of the "last straw" for me when I was still a member of the congregation. That is, it was this very issue concerning how it is that we could know (with Gangadeanian certainty) that the bible was the word of God (i.e., genuine special revelation) which eventually got me kicked out of the church. It was this issue initially which lead to discussions with Gangadean and others where I was able to see just how spurious Gangadean's reasoning really is and how closed off he is to having his basic beliefs examined critically. In a way, I owe a lot to this bad argument.
So onto the content. The main issue that arises is that Gangadean's impossible epistemic standards for knowledge, held consistently, leads to skepticism. One area that this skepticism will be most strongly felt for the Christian is on the matter of the veracity of scripture. So the Gangadeanian offers an argument to show how we can come to know (with Gangadeanian certainty) that the bible contains only truths. Note, I'm setting aside the complicated question about what all is entailed by the claim that the bible is "special revelation" or "divinely inspired." After all, it isn't obvious that divinely inspired text needs to be infallible or inerrant--likewise, infallibility and inerrancy of a particular text is also not sufficient to make it "divinely inspired." For now let's just focus on the infallibility claim.
My claim is that the Gangadeanian argument above, call it the egregious argument for the veracity of the bible (or the EAVB for short) is both invalid and also such that a Gangadeanian ought not to accept any of the premises as true, based Gangadean's own professed epistemic standards.
If you've been around these parts you know that premise 1) is false. God's existence is not "clear to reason". Perhaps it seems subjectively obvious to Gangadeanians, but that's not enough. Gangadean simply fails to prove that the God of Christian theism exists at least according to his own standards of proof. I won't get into much detail on this point since I've already written about it, but basically he takes for granted the assumption that reality is composed only of 2 possible substances, matter and spirit. He argues against the eternality of matter and, by way of disjunctive syllogism, he "deduces" that what is eternal must be spirit. But he never bothers to prove the dichotomy (all is either spirit or matter and nothing else) to begin with. Furthermore, his argument against the eternality of matter (really he's got to show that it's logically impossible for matter to be eternal) are also bad. He appeals to empirical findings which by their very nature are not going to provide proofs in the sense that he demands. He merely claims that we lack positive reason to believe that matter is eternal which isn't the same as having shown that matter can't possibly be eternal (compare: I don't have any evidence to believe that bigfoot exists vs. it's logically impossible for bigfoot to exist). So much for premise 1).
At the risk of being pedantic, let me note that premise 2) is clumsily stated. It reads, 'Humans have failed to know God and obey the moral law.' Philosophers and linguists call that a generic statement and this is an issue about quantification. What premise 2 doesn't say is "All humans have failed to know God". Nor does it say "at least one human has failed to know God...". All generics like, 'Dogs have four legs' are weird because they don't fit nicely within the scheme of quantifiers in standard logic. Just ask yourself how many dogs need to have 4 legs in order for the statement, 'Dogs have four legs' to be true? Half? 1 more than half? 1/3? Who knows...
Surely, though, the Gangadeanians believe that "All humans have failed to know God..." I know this not only from personal conversations, but also because being the Calvinists that they are, they believe in doctrine of total depravity. But this gives way to a problem. If the argument above (EAVB) is given in order to prove that the Bible contains only truths, then we can't assume any of its teachings to be true in giving the argument--that would be to assume what you need to prove. Now Calvinists generally adopt the 5 points of Calvinism based on a certain reading of the bible which presupposes the bible is true (at least the pertinent "proof texts"). What this means is that for a Gangadeanian to believe that all humans have failed to know God, they must have independent (non-scripture based) proof that all humans (present, past, future) will fail/have failed to know God and to obey the moral law. But how can Gangadean, his followers, or anyone for that matter come to prove a thing like that?
Notice what won't work. I can already hear a Gangadeanian appealing to the presence of natural evil in particular, in the form of physical death. If we can know that all humans are mortal (assuming we could know a thing like that with Gangadeanian certainty), then we can know that all humans are afflicted by natural evil, and this shows that they are basically sinners which is failing to obey the law and further this is fundamentally failing to know God despite its being clear that God exists.
There are at least two problems with this approach. As I flagged above, they would need to prove that all humans are mortal (past, present, and future). I'm not saying I doubt this claim. I assign a very high credence to the proposition that all humans are mortal. That's not the point. All I'm saying is that my grounds for believing this (induction or some presumption that it's part of the concept of a biological entity that it is mortal) doesn't satisfy the Gangadean's demands for certainty. So I'd press Gangadean for a proof from indubitable premises to the conclusion that all humans are mortal (i.e., a proof for the claim that all humans are afflicted by natural evil as a call back from moral evil).
Second, and more substantially, as I've already shown, Gangadean helps himself to lots of assumptions when he speaks of the function and nature of natural evil (and it's relation to moral evil) in his failed attempt at giving a theodicy. These assumptions are load-bearing, but they remain unsupported assumptions and so ultimately fall under pressure. So to move from 'all humans get old and die' to 'all humans have sinned' is tenuous at best. Of course, premise 2) could be true (we can say that about a lot of propositions), but the point is Gangadean and his standards for justified belief and knowledge require that he prove its truth beyond all doubt. So the Gangadeanian ought not to accept premise 2).
Premise 3) God cannot forgive without atonement.
I've called into question this premise before as well. What I noticed is that Gangadean "supports" claims like this on the basis of some mysterious lexicon of the English language. Basically, Gangadean has in mind a particular (and quirky) notion of justice. But as I've shown elsewhere, there's no way for him to prove that his concept or definition of 'justice' is the correct one. He can indoctrinate his followers with his special dictionary till the cows come home, but surely he doesn't get to decide the meaning of a word in a given language or the content of a concept by fiat! Nor should we assume he has some privileged access to the "correct concept" or "correct definition."
More importantly, his views on the nature of divine justice are simply confused. As I've already argued elsewhere, a priori, there's no reason why God cannot forgive without atonement. The whole Christian idea of divine grace via the passion of Christ is anything but the kind of justice that Gangadean has in mind which is basically "treating things according to their kind" or "treating like with like." As I've posed before, how can the sins of the world be "justly" taken on by a single person (Jesus) who is without sin? That is far from "treating like with like." So premise 3) likewise seems false. One thing to keep in mind in thinking through the appropriateness of this premise (and the others) is this: in the current dialectic Gangadean can't dip into the bible as proof texts to support it--that would be question begging since the truth of the claims that make up the bible is the very thing at issue.
Premise 4) Only the Bible shows how sin is atoned for.
This is just plain silly. How on earth can anybody know that the bible is the only written text in the entire world/universe (both past, present, and future) which shows how "sins are atoned for"? Remember Gangadean requires certainty for knowledge. On this standard, it's hard to see how anyone could know that premise 4). I'm merely asking him to make good on his own requirements! The answer of course is that there's simply no way to know premise 4) with any amount of certainty because it's an empirical claim!
Furthermore, as I've raised before, there's a problem of criteria. On Gangadean's worldview, we need the bible (or special revelation) to tell us how divine mercy interacts with divine justice--that's the whole bit about "how our sins are atoned for". The idea is that we can't possibly figure this stuff out by reason alone. It was not possible for us to connect the dots from general revelation (what we know from reason alone) to the contents of the gospel message and that's why we have the good news given to us via divine revelation. Otherwise, if we could reason to it all, we wouldn't need a message from God in the first place! But if we can't reason to the correct account of how we are to be forgiven of our sins, how are we to know (with certainty) what it is that we're looking for? That is, how are we to recognize the correct account as the correct one? It seems like we need to know what makes for a correct account of the atonement of our sins in order to recognize the correct one as such, but if we know what makes for a correct account, then we don't need special revelation.
Finally, the argument above is simply invalid. That is to say, the premises, even if they were true wouldn't entail the truth of the conclusion. For one thing, "the bible is true" is again a kind of generic statement. Presumably, what the author of the EAVB intends is that every claim in the bible is true. But it's not clear how the truth of the premises would entail that. See here where I discuss this point and others I've raised above in more detail. Since validity is necessary for soundness, the argument is unsound. So what you have here is the worst kind of argument--sort of the "opposite" of a sound argument. It's invalid and all the premises are false.
