Category: Transcendental Arguments
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Is Mariology a Part of the Presuppositionalist ‘Package Deal’? A Question for Flood
Full disclosure: I am not a theologian. I am a philosopher of religion who, as part of his task, thinks about theologoumena which, on a broad interpretation of the term, are simply things said about God, a term which therefore includes not only official, dogmatic pronunciamenti of, say, the RCC's magisterium, but also includes conjectures,…
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God, Doubt, Denial, and Truth: A Note on Van Til
Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., P&R Publishing, 2008, p. 294: "To doubt God is to deny him." I take that to mean that to doubt that God exists is to deny that God exists. The obvious objection to this is that doubt and denial are very different propositional attitudes. In…
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The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God: A First Response to Flood
I thank Anthony G. Flood for his The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God Revisited: Toward a Response to Bill Vallicella. Herewith, a first installment by way of rejoinder. Convergence upon agreement is not to be expected, but clarification of differences is an attainable goal. In any case, philosophy is a joy to its…
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Argumentative Circles and their Diameters: More on Presuppositionalism
The day before yesterday, re: presuppositionalism, I wrote: We need to bear in mind that arguments have premises and that no argument can prove its own premises. An argument of the form p therefore p is an argument valid in point of logical form in which premise and conclusion are identical, but no one will take an argument…
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Van Til on an Absolutely Certain Proof of Christianity
Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., p. 381: The best, the only, the absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christianity is that unless its truth be presupposed,there is no proof of anything. Van Til's claim, to employ some Kantian jargon, is that the truth of Christianity is a condition of…
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A Transcendental Argument from Assertion to Truth
We start with a fact: we make assertions. The fact is actual, so it must be possible. What are the conditions of its possibility? What has to be the case for assertion to be possible? I will argue that there has to be truth for assertion to be possible. We proceed by unpacking the concept…