An egregious argument for the veracity of the bible.

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. 

Worth a Watch.

This video is worth a watch. It's a brief TED talk given by Megan Phelps-Roper who left the notorious Westboro Baptists. Having been raised from birth to parrot, believe and live by a particular worldview, it's pretty incredible that she was able to have a change of mind as a result of certain virtual relationships and dialogues. Even though this meant that she was excommunicated by her own family. I've been hearing about similar stories lately (Here's a story of a White Supremacist that had a dramatic change of mind and heart as a result of his encounters in college). In some ways it's a bit encouraging that people can change despite having very deeply held views and despite belonging to extremely isolationist groups.

Roper's talk was also a good reminder for me to continue working on my approach in dialogues--to shed more light and generate less heat. I also like what she says at the end about how we tend to think our own positions are self-evident or obvious and not in need of explanation. 

Anderson's fallibility with respect to Fallibilism

It looks like Anderson is making use of some of our exchanges in his courses now. That's partially encouraging, but I suspect that the strawman fallacy abounds. I say this because Gangadeanians in general seem to have a hard time understanding my views as opposed to mere caricatures. This is largely due to the fact that they haven't done their due diligence. They never cared to try and understand because in my experience they tend to be quick to the defense which seems to cloud their abilities to assess things with a clear head.

Anderson in a recent post speaks of fallibilism about knowledge. One should note at the outset that the fallibilism that I am committed to is something like moderate or weak fallibilism--which is just the thesis that knowledge doesn't require maximal justification or epistemic certainty. That's just an existential thesis that might be stated formally in the following way:

Weak Fallibilism: there is at least one subject S and one proposition P such that S knows that P, without having maximal justification for P. 

'Existential' above denotes the quantifier 'at least some' which is to be contrasted with (is sometimes called the 'subalternation' of) to the quantifier 'all'. In other words, I think that we can know things without having maximal justification.

Now to be fair, I supplement this thesis with another. I also think that we don't have maximal justification about most, if not all of our beliefs and by extension, for much or all of what we know. But I'm far less committed to this position. In many of my exchanges with Gangadeanians, I'm happy to not presuppose. The other thing to note is that this second thesis is much weaker than Gangadeanians often attribute to me again due to their lack of due-diligence. To say that we don't have certainty is a claim about actuality. It's not the stronger claim (nor does it entail) that certainty is impossible. To see the contrast, I might say that I don't think that people actually live beyond 140 years, but that doesn't imply that it's impossible for people to live longer.

As it pertains to the Gangadeanian worldview, what I claim is that even if certainty is in principle possible, they haven't shown us a consistent way of ascertaining it. At the "most basic level," they just use intuitions and conveniently switch the label on us. One upshot: suppose that Gangadean were to somehow successfully show that we must have certainty without appealing to intuitions under a different label and without begging the question. Still, that's not the same as showing us how it is that we can attain certainty. Those are just two different things. Now I don't think he's even tried to show us that we need certainty as opposed to simply asserting so much. It's an axiom of his system really (though he wouldn't be caught dead using such a term).

So to be clear, certainty may be possible, but that's not to say very much. If it's a remote enough of a possibility, then who really cares about it? Certainty might even be necessary for certain purposes (though I don't believe this for a minute), but again that's not to have shown much.

The nagging questions are how it is that we can be certain when we have attained certainty? How do we know when something is self-attesting as opposed to merely seeming to us to be self-attesting?Further, is the question that moves beyond possibility to actuality (i.e., can we have certainty vs. do we actually have it?). Further, why does the fact that a proposition is self-attesting count as having achieved certainty of it? You might be tempted to think something like, "that's just what 'self-attesting' means." But how are you so certain that the phrase 'self-attesting' even has an extension? How are you certain that it denotes anything? The Gangadeanian might in turn be tempted to respond with, "well you're using the terms 'self-attesting' and asking how we can be certain that something is self-attesting and so you must be presupposing that it has extension." But that's just confusing the terms of the debate. Here's my response: I'm merely using the word because you've introduced it. For all I've said, it could just as easily be replaced by a variable like 'X' that may or may not have any referent. It's your job to show us that it does!

Yes, I doubt we have certainty of much of anything, which again isn't the same thing as suggesting that certainty is impossible.

Why am I skeptical that we actually have certainty over what we know? Well it's a really high bar. If we equate certainty with maximal justification (as the Gangadeanians do) then this amounts to it not being possible to have more justification for the proposition in question--your epistemic position, as it were, as it regards that proposition couldn't possibly be improved. For the theists among us, you might say that your epistemic position with respect to the proposition for which you have certainty, is no worse than that of God's position. And that just seems crazy to me. It seems to me that we can always improve our epistemic position with respect to what we know even in the things we feel quite certain about (note there's a big difference between mere psychological certainty and epistemic certainty and it's the latter that we're interested in, but I suspect Gangadeanians sometimes conflate to two).

To this the Gangadeanians will no doubt argue in the following manner. We must have certainty, to question anything, including whether we have certainty. Without clarity at the basic level, thinking is not possible and neither is questioning (which presupposes thoughts). The problem is, this is an unproven assumption. As I've pointed out many times in the past, there's just no reason given to accept the claim that we must have certainty for thought or questioning to be possible. It just seems like an intuition that supports their entire worldview.

Anyway, I noticed that Anderson in his post about fallibilism had some of the following "study questions". I'll speak briefly about them since they point to just how mistaken is his understanding of my position as well as fallibilism in general. 

What does it mean for a law to be self-attesting?  Does the fallibilist believe anything is self-attesting?  How could one prove that nothing is self-attesting?

One thing to note here is that it's strange that the fallibilist would be at all interested in trying to prove that nothing is self-attesting. The fallibilist would say that we can know things without proof. Moreover, many fallibilists are externalists about knowledge. So why would they feel any need to prove that nothing is self-attesting in the first place (do we need more than knowledge of things)? This smells like a slip on Anderson's part where he's smuggling in infallibilism + internalism in evaluating fallibilism which is question-begging. 

Can a fallibilist be certain that a statement he made is actually the statement he made?  Must a fallibilist he concerned for intellectual consistency? 

Here, too again is the same sort of slip as above. Why would the fallibilist need or desire certainty about the statements they are making?! A fallibilist would say that they can know what statements they are making and it doesn't require certainty. So what more do you want? Again, he's assuming infallibilist norms in order to in effect, argue against fallibilism which is obviously begging the question. 

Is fallibilism a neutral position from which to criticize others or does it have presuppositions that need to be identified and proven to be true?

And yet again, same mistake! The fallibilist isn't necessarily a neutral position, but neither does it aim to prove things like the infallibilist of Gangadean's vintage. So why would the fallibilist feel the need to prove it's own assumptions if certainty isn't needed for knowledge? The fallibilist allows that they have assumptions like everyone else does, and even goes so far as to say that these assumptions can count as knowledge without proof. So how is this question supposed to suggest an inconsistency with fallibilism? 

A couple of elementary lesson in argumentation do result from this exploration. 

1) You shouldn't use premises that presuppose that your opponent's view is wrong in order to show that their position is wrong. 

2) If you want to point out an inconsistency in your opponents position, you should stick to premises that they accept. You shouldn't characterize their view as having an assumption that you accept, but they that reject.