The Presuppositionalist Challenge to My Position

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One response to “The Presuppositionalist Challenge to My Position”

1. 

   S.C.

   May 4, 2025

   Hi Bill,
   Long time reader, first time commenter. THanks for the article. In general I am sympathetic to your view that both theism and atheism are apriori rationally acceptable – that is, given an experientially neutral set of evidence, no arguments for theism are so compelling that no possible experience could change the mind of a rational person.
   I worry that it is easy to mix this with a separate question, which is whether, given the variety of experiences people have and evidential standpoints they occupy, both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable for each person and each set of evidence. I guess I take it that for some people both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable, but for some people (given different evidence) only one or the other is rationally acceptable. A belief need not be indubitable to be rationally required and I’m unsure whether I want to call believing any claim which is possible to doubt a matter of “faith”; maybe, maybe not. But I take it this is not the question under discussion. Instead, from what you’ve said I take the question the presuppositionalist is raising to be whether a belief in theism is such that it would be rationally required a priori in any possible situation in which one is capable of forming rational beliefs. Is that the presuppositionalist’s idea?
   I agree with you that there is a gap between a transcendental argument for something akin to a Platonic form of Truth and a transcendental argument for the God of Christianity. I wanted to test out, for a moment, whether one can’t just go a couple steps farther to get a transcendental argument for the “God of the philosophers”, however.
   Just as one can’t rationally believe that nothing is true, one also can’t rationally believe that no beliefs are rational to believe, and one can’t rationally believe that there are no objective normative reasons — that is, in forming beliefs on the basis of reasons, one is committed to there being such things as reasons which rightly or wrongly justify beliefs, such things are better and worse reasoning, etc. One is committed to something akin to Platonic form of the Good, in other words, and not just to the form of the True. Anybody who rejects the good either does so on no basis or on some basis; anybody who rejects it on some basis must hold the basis to be good enough to reject it; but then nobody can rationally reject the Good.
   Now, for us the gap between an abstract form of the Good and a concrete God seems pretty big. But I think this is partly due to the messy way in which the abstract/concrete distinction has been drawn. Specifically, some people distinguish the abstract as that which has no causal powers, and the concrete as that which has causal powers (by which God is concrete), while others distinguish the abstract as that which is located in space and time and the concrete as that which is located within space and time (by which God, being unbounded by space and time, would be ‘abstract’). That there is no necessary connection between these two meanings of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ can be seen by the apparent possibility of epiphenomenal objects within space-time, and the apparent possibility of knowledge by concrete beings of non space-time Platonic forms. (Perhaps neither is truly possible, but they’ve at least been thought possible, and do not immediately appear to be conceptually incoherent).
   I suspect (could be wrong on the history) the insistence that abstract objects are causally impotent is a defensive move made by realists in response to heavy criticism from nominalists — that is, in order to lessen the cost of insisting abstract objects exist, the realist sacrifices their efficacy as a dialectical move. I don’t think this in Plato. I think it’s a later, medieval move (where the efficacy of abstracta can be deferred to the efficacy of the mind of God, in which the abstracta subsist). But there’s no obvious reason abstracta have to be causally inert.
   So, suppose we get a transcendental deduction of something akin to The Good. The Good will be abstract in the sense of lacking location in space and time, since it’s a universal. But we have no right to infer from this that the Good is causally impotent. To the contrary: if the good were causally impotent, then no belief could be caused by the goodness of a reason. So, the good must be causally potent.
   Further, for anything which I rationally believe exists within the realm of things I can understand and make sense of, I must believe it to be the sort of thing which operates according to reasons. Were it not, it would be outside the realm of things I could understand (transcendent noumena). So, at least within the realm of things I can understand and make sense of, everything must be governed by something like the principle of sufficient reason, which will take us back to ultimate reasons, and to the ultimate form of the good. And so, we get a transcendental argument back to something like classical theism — e.g., the conclusion of the ontological and cosmological arguments.
   Of course, like any transcendental argument, it doesn’t prove that it is necessarily the case that there is Form of the Good which is the Ultimate Source of explanation. It only purports to show that any attempt to deny that there is one in some way relies on the assumption there is one.
   That’s sketchy, there are still jumps. But it doesn’t seem to me quite like the jump from “Truth” to “God of the Bible”. It’s a broader sort of theistic presuppositionalism. Would something in that direction work for you?

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