Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Inconsistent even in their Misuse of Language

    Leftists cannot even be consistent in their misuse of language. If the January 6th trespassers are insurrectionists, then so are the Hamas supporters who flooded the Cannon rotunda in the Capitol complex.  True, many were arrested. But will they be treated the same as the Jan-sixers? I wouldn't bet on it.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Two Related Political Mistakes

    Stack man strikes again.

    Bill Vallicella

  • A Van Til Response to my Anti-Presuppositionalism

    This is the third in a new series on presuppositionalism. The first installment is here, and the second here. 

    I've been re-reading large chunks of Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, P & R Publishing, 2008. This fourth edition, edited by K. Scott Oliphint, includes the complete text of the original 1955 edition and useful footnote commentary by Oliphint.

    You will recall my claim that with respect to the existence of God there are rationally acceptable arguments for and rationally acceptable arguments against, but no rationally compelling arguments on either side. So I was pleased to find an attempt by Van Til to respond to this sort of objection. (DF 126) He formulates the objection as follows:

    "While a Christian can prove that his Christian position is fully as reasonable as the opponent's view, there is no such thing as an absolutely compelling proof that God exists, or that the Bible is the Word of God, just as little as anyone can prove its opposite."

    Van Til then responds:

    In this way of putting the matter there is a confusion between what is objectively valid and what is subjectively acceptable to the natural man.

    [. . .]

    It is precisely the Reformed Faith which, among other things, teaches the total depravity of the natural man, which is most loathsome to that natural man.

    Turning to p. 352, we learn that the natural man is "spiritually dead." "The natural man does not know God." Or rather, he knows God in an implicit way, but suppresses "the knowledge of God given man by virtue of creation in God's image." On p. 255 we learn that having been made in the image of God we have an "ineradicable sense of deity" within us. This of course is Calvin's sensus divinitatis. Van Til makes bold to say, further, that men's "own consciousness is inherently and exclusively  revelational of God to themselves," and that "No man can help knowing God, for in knowing himself, he knows God."  

    I'll conclude the quoting with a Van Tilian slam against the 'Romanists' as he often refers to them:

    It  is the weakness of the Roman Catholic and Arminian methods that they virtually identify objective validity with subjective acceptability to the natural man. Distinguishing carefully between these two, the Reformed apologist maintains that there is an absolutely valid argument for the existence of God and the truth of Christian theism. (126)

    Respondeo

    'Virtually' is one of those weasel words that good writers either avoid or define.  But let that pass. Speaking for myself and not for the 'Romanists,' I will say that what Van Til is doing above is simply adding a layer of psychologizing to his question-begging.  He is engaging in the opposite kind of pure metaphysical bluster as I accused Galen Strawson of engaging in. Strawson:

    We can, for example, know with certainty that the Christian God does not exist as standardly defined: a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly benevolent. The proof lies in the world, which is full of extraordinary suffering. If someone claims to have a sensus divinitatis that picks up a Christian God, they are deluded. It may be added that genuine belief in such a God, however rare, is profoundly immoral: it shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or indeed any intense suffering.

    What we have here are two opposite forms of pure bluster.  Neither Van Til nor Strawson can prove what they claim to be certain of, and both psychologize their opponents,  the one by appeal to a supposed "total depravity," the other by appeal  to insanity.   

    There is nothing to choose between these two opposite forms of bluster. And so, dear reader, does not my position strike you as the only sane and reasonable one?

    Bill Vallicella

    5 responses to “A Van Til Response to my Anti-Presuppositionalism”

  • Dinesh D’Souza on our Incipient Police State

    Here, with a link to a trailer of his new movie.

    ……………………….

    'Terrorist' is experiencing semantic spread. 

    It emerged in the Congressional FBI whistleblower hearings that the abbreviation '2A' is a "terrorist marker." That came as news to me. (But see here.) I have been using '2A' from time to time as an innocuous abbreviation of 'Second Amendment.'  The context, of course, is the Bill of Rights which are the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution.

    I have written sentences like this:

    2A does not confer, but protects, the citizen's right to keep and bear arms.

    My use of the harmless abbreviation makes me a terrorist, a white supremacist, and what all else in the eyes of the regime.  What does it make the regime? A police state.

    So I suppose it is a good thing that it has been a very long time since I attended a Latin mass. These masses, as is now well-known, are notorious gathering points for insurrectionists, militiamen, and other violent extremists out to overthrow 'democracy.'  Much less known, however, is that these masses are conducted, not in old Church Latin, but in coded Latin.  Thus hoc est corpus meum is code for create mayhem. De mortuis resurrexit means: he rose up and committed insurrection.  There really are very few threats to the powers that be stronger and more insidious than the Latin mass, which is why Pope Francis, that faithful custodian of the depositum fidei, is such a staunch defender of the old mass against the forces of reform.

    Sarcasm aside, part of understanding  the destructive Left is understanding their commitment to the hermeneutics of suspicion.  You can learn about said hermeneutics, and cognate topics, from my essay From Democrat to Dissident section 16.4. It is published in Hillman and Borland, eds., Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.  Available via Amazon where you can read some editorial reviews.

    UPDATE (10/19). Serious punch-back against demento-totalitarian police-state scumbaggery may be coming Spartacus style:

    Something intriguing is happening with bitcoin.  What started as a series of perplexing data “inscriptions” containing classified files from the U.S. government has now been confirmed by Bitcoin Magazine as an ongoing effort to cement information in the public record beyond the reach of government censorship.

    An anonymous guardian of free speech has begun using bitcoin to republish all of the information originally published by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks back in 2010.  Codenamed “Project Spartacus,” the operation seeks to take advantage of several inherent bitcoin attributes:

    [. . .]

    Project Spartacus is just the beginning.  Imagine new social media networks built from decentralized blockchains of information.  Imagine an entirely new internet operating beyond the reach of corporate search engines, regulated addresses, and government permissions.  With no corporation in control of the networks or in singular possession of communicated data on privately held servers, the problem of State-directed censorship disappears.  No longer could corporate oligarchs operate in concert with government dictators to silence public dissent and magnify government propaganda.  No longer would it matter what the Marxist Globalists at Facebook or Google think is true — or what they think should be falsely presented as truth — once ordinary people have a dependable workaround technology that allows them to share information free from Big Brother’s menacing intervention.

    Discreetly shared samizdat has returned.  It will soon run on decentralized blockchain.

    Bill Vallicella

  • 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 of this form as proving that p. Every circular argument of the above form is valid, and some are sound; but none are probative. By that I mean that no such argument constitutes a proof.  That ought to be perfectly obvious.

    'Circularity' in respect of arguments is of course a metaphor: no argument is literally a geometrical circle. But it is a useful metaphor and I propose we extend it by speaking of the 'diameter' of a circular argument.  The logical form italicized above — p therefore p — has a 'diameter' than which no shorter can be conceived.  Its 'diameter' is zero. If a geometrical circle has a diameter of zero, then it is not a circle but a point.  The diameter of a circular argument of the above form is also a 'point,' figuratively speaking, the point being the one proposition that serves as both premise and conclusion.

    A circular argument of zero diameter is said to be 'vicious.' Are there then 'virtuous' or if not positively virtuous then  'non-vicious' circular arguments?  Can one argue in a way that is circular but logically acceptable? Brian Bosse brought up this issue over lunch Sunday as we were discussing my longish entry on presuppositionalism. He may have had John M. Frame in mind.

    Presuppositionalists such as Frame take the Word of God as set forth in the Protestant Christian Bible as their "ultimate presupposition." (Five Views on Apologetics, Zondervan 2000, 209) It is their "ultimate criterion of truth." (209)  This commitment of theirs is faith-based:

    . . . for Christians, faith governs reasoning just as it governs all other human activities. Reasoning is not in some realm that is neutral between faith and unbelief. There is no such realm, since God's standards apply to all of life. (209)

    What causes faith? ". . . God causes faith by his own free grace." (209) What is the rational basis of faith? ". . . the answer is that faith is based on reality, on truth. It is in accord with all the facts of God's universe and all the laws of thought that God has ordained. . . . The faith he gives us agrees with God's own perfect rationality." (209-210)

    We want to know what rationally justifies faith in God and in his Word as found in the Bible. We are told that this faith is justified because it is true, agreeing as it does with all of the laws of thought that God has ordained. God himself, as the ultimate source of all things, including rationality, is the ultimate rational justification of our faith in him and his Word.  The reasoning here is plainly circular as Frame admits:

    There is a kind of circularity here, but the circularity is not vicious. It sounds circular to say that faith governs reasoning and also that it is based on rationality. It is therefore important to remember that the rationality that serves as the rational basis for faith is God's own rationality. The sequence is: God's rationality –>human faith –>human reasoning. The arrows may be read "is the rational basis for." That sequence is linear, not circular. (210)

    Frame's fancy footwork here is unavailing, an exercise in sophistry. He is obviously reasoning in a circle by presupposing the very thing whose existence he wants to prove. But he is loathe to admit that this is what he is doing. So he introduces a bogus distinction between vicious circles and linear circles.  But just as 'linear circle' in geometry is a contradictio in adjecto , so too is 'linear circle' in logic. 

    You are either arguing in a circle or you are not. You are either presupposing what you are trying to prove or you are not. You are either begging the question or you are not. You are either committing the formal fallacy of petitio principii (hysteron proteron) or you are not. That is the long and the short of it. One or the other and no weaseling out via some bogus distinction between vicious and non-vicious circular arguments.

    What Frame wants is a 'knock-down' (rationally compelling or rationally coercive) argument for the existence of the God of the Protestant Christian Bible interpreted along Calvinist lines.  He thinks he can get what wants by way of a transcendental argument,  one that issues in God "not merely as the conclusion of an argument, but as the one who makes argument possible." (220)  He wants God to play a transcendental role as the ultimate and unconditioned condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations including reasoning, whether valid or invalid, sound or unsound. (If his God does play the transcendental role, then Frame can say that the arguments of atheists, just insofar as they are arguments, prove the existence of God!) 

    Now it must be granted, as I granted to Brian over lunch, that if Frame's God exists, then he does play the transcendental role. The question, however, is whether it can be proven that nothing other than Frame's God could play the transcendental role. It can be proven that there is a transcendental condition of all our intellectual operations. (See my earlier entry.) Where Frame goes wrong is in thinking that from the fact that there is a rationally compelling argument for the existence of a transcendental condition of the possibility of all our intellectual operations (forming concepts, defining terms, making judgments, giving arguments, replying to objections offering hypotheses, etc.) it follows immediately that his God exists beyond the shadow of a rational doubt.  How does he know that his God alone could play the transcendental role? Frame may be taxed with  giving the following invalid argument:

    a) If the God of the Protestant Christian Bible exists, then he plays the transcendental role;

    b) It is objectively certain that something plays the transcendental role;

    ergo

    c) It is objectively certain that the God of the Protestant Christian Bible  plays the transcendental role. 

    The premises are true, but the conclusion does not follow from them. For it is not objectively certain that nothing other than the God of the Christian Bible could play the transcendental role. This is because no non-transcendental argument — Frame mentions the "causal argument" — for the existence of God is rationally compelling. Hence no non-transcendental God argument can assure us that the existence of God is objectively certain. 

    Here is another way to see the matter. It is rationally demonstrable that there is a total and unique way things are. (For if you assert that there is no way things are, then you are asserting that the way things are is that there is no way things are.) Now if Frame's God exists, then he is the concrete and personal metaphysical ground of the way things are. But how do we know that Frame's God exists? We cannot simply assume that the transcendental proof of the existence of the way things are is also a proof of Frame's God.  So non-transcendental arguments must be brought into to take us to Frame's God, Frame's "causal argument" for example. But these arguments are none of them rationally compelling. They do not generate objective certainty. So how do we know that something else is not the metaphysical ground of the way things are?

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Argumentative Circles and their Diameters: More on Presuppositionalism”

  • Secular Self-Deception about the Value of Life

    Here

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Secular Self-Deception about the Value of Life”

  • The Politicization of Medicine

    Nothing is safe from politicization by leftists.  And you are still a Democrat? WTF is wrong with you? You geezers in particular need to wake up. This is not the party of Jack Kennedy. 

    Over at Instapundit:

    NYC – Dr. Dana Diab is an ER physician at Lenox Hill (@lenoxhill). Dina Diab took to Instagram rejoicing Zionist settlers [aka jews] were murdered, raped, beheaded, and kidnapped by the Hamas terror group on Saturday October 7th. Jewish patients beware.

    See also: Why Was My Talk at a Medical Conference Canceled?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Political Circularity

    The Democrats circle the wagons.

    The Republicans prefer the circular firing squad.

    The Libertarians favor the circle jerk.

    I trust my meaning is clear.

    Bill Vallicella

  • An Argument for Capacious Magazines

    Here

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: October Jazz

    The 14th already! October's a bird that flies too fast. Time herself's such a bird. I would freeze her flight, but not that of

    Charley 'Bird' Parker, Ornithology

    It's a sad October for me: my main man from college days, Thomas C. Coleman, Jr. died in September, too young, a mere 74 years of age. I left the following memorial note on his obituary page:

    The news that Tom had passed hit me hard. He and I go back a long way, having met circa 1970 at LMU. Books and ideas drew us together and common interests in Nietzsche and Wagner, jazz and Kerouac. I played Sal Paradise to his Dean Moriarty except that I was the driver while he rode shotgun. I have forgotten how many trips we made up California 1 to Big Sur, Frisco, Arcata and where all else in my '63 Karmann Ghia convertible. We stayed in touch over the years with meetings in such improbable places as Fort Huachuca, Arizona where Tom was stationed for a time. We enriched each other's lives. He and I and Kerouac were 'Octoberites' to use a word Tom coined. I'll honor his memory this October by re-reading our correspondence and recalling our adventures. My condolences to his family, friends, Army buddies, and all who knew him.

    Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, Charlie Parker

    Kerouac and Allen, October in the Railroad Earth

    Jack Kerouac, San Francisco

    Mose Allison, Parchman Farm.

    This one goes out to Tom Gastineau, keyboard man in our band Dudley Nightshade, who introduced me to Mose Allison in the late '60s. Tom went on to make it, more or less, in the music business. I caught Allison at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, a couple or three times before I headed East in August of '73.  Heard him on the East Coast as well at a joint in Marblehead, Mass. with a girlfriend  I dubbed 'Springtime Mary'  which was Kerouac's name for his girlfriend Mary Carney.

    Mose Allison, Young Man's Blues

    Mose Allison, I Ain't Got Nothing but the Blues

    Dave Brubeck, Blue Rondo al a Turk

    Herbie Hancock, Watermelon Man

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Presuppositionalist Challenge to My Position

    The presuppositionalism of Cornelius van Til, Greg L. Bahnsen, John M. Frame and others sets me a challenge given some long-held views of mine. I will here explain one of these views and then explain why it is incompatible with presuppositionalism. After that, I will begin to explain my reasons for rejecting presuppositionalism. This third task will require additional posts.

    I have maintained that both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable by beings like us in  our present state. Theism is the view that there is a supreme transcendent being of a personal nature who created ex nihilo everything other than himself.  Atheism, then, is the view that there is no such being. Because the competing views thus defined are logical contradictories, they cannot both be true and they cannot both be false. Not everyone will accept the above definitions of 'theism' and 'atheism,' but if I am not mistaken presuppositionalists do accept them.

    So on my accounting theism and atheism are both rationally acceptable. To appreciate my thesis you must understand that truth and rational acceptability are not the same. Some propositions are true but not rationally acceptable.  It is also easily shown that some propositions are rationally acceptable but not true.  This is because truth is absolute whereas rational acceptability is relative to various indices. Rational acceptability can vary with time and place and other factors; truth cannot. That there are four elements, air, earth, fire, and water was rationally acceptable to the ancient Greeks. It is not rationally acceptable to us. If one were to identify the true with the rationally acceptable, one would have to say that the number and nature of the elements has changed over time.

    To claim that both theism and atheism are rationally acceptable is to claim that good arguments  can be given for both.  A good argument, as I use 'good argument,' is one that has plausible premises and commits no formal or informal fallacy. A good argument, then, is not the same as a rationally compelling or rationally coercive argument.  Every rationally compelling argument is of course good, but not every good argument is rationally compelling. A well-reasoned case for a proposition needn't be a rationally compelling case.  If it is well-reasoned, then I call it 'good.'  Here are the details. (The reader may want to skip the next section (in Georgia 12-pt) the better to catch the drift of this entry, and then come back to it.)

    Excursus

    Philosophers make reasoned cases for all manner of propositions, but their colleagues typically do not find these arguments to be compelling.  But what do I mean by 'compelling'?   I say that a (rationally) compelling case or argument is one that forces the 'consumer' of the argument to accept the argument's conclusion on pain of being irrational should he not accept it.  I will assume that the 'consumer' is intelligent, sincere, open to having his mind changed, and well-versed in the subject matter of the argument. Now it may be that there are a few arguments that are rationally compelling in this sense. But there are no rationally compelling arguments available to us here below (in our present state) for or against the existence of God. Or so I claim.  I do not claim to have a rationally compelling argument for this meta-philosophical claim. I claim merely that There are no rationally compelling arguments for or against the existence of God is rationally acceptable.  It follows that I will not tax you with irrationality if you reject my meta-philosophical claim. I tolerate your dissent: I allow that you may reasonably disagree with me about my meta-claim.
     
    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 of this form as proving that p. Every circular argument of the above form is valid, and some are sound; but none are probative. By that I mean that no such argument constitutes a proof.  That ought to be perfectly obvious. Equally obvious is that one cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it. I trust that the reader understands the standard definitions of 'valid' and 'sound.'  Proofs are demonstrative; they establish their conclusions with  objective certainty. There is of course non-demonstrative reasoning, inductive and abductive.  But no inductive argument, no matter how strong, amounts to a proof. This is a point I share with Greg L. Bahnsen: "Inductive arguments are always inconclusive . . . ." (Presuppositional Apologetics, American Vision, 2021, p. 302) Since every argument has a conclusion, what does it mean to say that an argument is inconclusive? It means that the argument does not amount to a proof of its conclusion.
     
    Now given that no argument can prove its own premises, what reason could one give for accepting the premises of a given argument?  Suppose  argument A has P1 and P2 as premises and that its conclusion C follows logically from the premises.  Why accept P1 and P2?  One could adduce further arguments B and C for P1 and P2 respectively.  But then the problem arises all over again.  For arguments B and C themselves have premises.  If P3 is a premise of B, what reason could one give for the acceptance of P3? One could adduce argument D.  But D too has premises, and if you think this through you soon realize that you have brought down upon your head an infinite regress which is vicious.  The regress is vicious because the task of justifying by argument all the premises involved cannot be completed.
     
    To avoid argumentative regress we need premises that are self-justifying in the sense that they are justified, but not justified by any proposition external to themselves.  Such propositions could be said to be, not just evident, but self-evident.  But what is self-evident to one person is often not self-evident to another.  This plain fact forces a distinction between subjective and objective self-evidence.  Clearly, subjective self-evidence is not good enough if our concern is with things external to consciousness such as God as opposed to what Roderick Chisholm calls self-presenting states such as the state I am in when I feel pain.   In the case of felt pain, subjective and objective self-evidence coalesce. Felt pain is an internal state: to feel pain is to be in pain. Felt or phenomenal pains are such that their esse (their to be) is identical to  their percipi (their to be perceived) But with respect to propositions that are about external things, things that exist independently of finite consciousness, if it merely seems to subject S that p is self-evident, that does not suffice to establish that p is objectively self-evident.  Trouble is, when someone announces that such-and-such is objectively self-evident that too is a claim about how it seems to that person, so that it is not clear that what is being claimed as objectively self-evident is not in the end itself merely subjectively self-evident. 
     
    Example.  Suppose an argument for the existence of God employs the premise, 'Every event has a cause.'  Is this premise objectively self-evident?  No.  Why can't there be an uncaused event?  "Uncaused event,' unlike 'uncaused effect,' is not a contradictio in adiecto. So how does one know that that premise is true?  It is a plausible premise, no doubt, but plausibility is not the same as truth.  (There are implausible truths, and false plausibilities. Exercise for the reader: give examples.) And if you do not know (with objective certainty) that the premises of your argument are true, then your argument, even if logically impeccable in every other way, does not amount to a proof, strictly speaking.  A proof of a proposition is a rationally compelling argument for it.
     
    My point is that there are hardly any rationally compelling arguments for substantive theses about matters external to consciousness.  But one can make reasoned cases for such theses.  Therefore, a reasoned case is not the same as a compelling argument. Again, I do not claim to have a rationally compelling argument for the bolded thesis.  I claim merely that the thesis is rationally acceptable. The thesis is both substantive and self-applicable; it implies with respect to itself that is not provable, strictly speaking, or compellingly arguable. I accept that consequence as I must.
     
    Because people are naturally dogmatic and crave doxastic security, security in their beliefs, they are unwilling to accept my meta-philosophical thesis that there are hardly any compelling arguments for substantive theses about such matters external to our consciousness as the existence of God.  They want to believe that their pet beliefs are compellingly provable and that people who do not accept their 'proofs' are either irrational or morally defective.  Their tendency is to accept as probative any old argument for the conclusions they antecedently accept, no matter how shoddy the argument,  and to reject as non-probative arguments that issue in conclusions they do not accept.  I am not saying that all give in to this tendency in its crude form, but the tendency is there and is operative.
     
    One way to refute what I am saying would be by providing a rationally compelling argument for the existence of God, or a rationally compelling argument for the nonexistence of God.  You won't be able to do it. Or so I claim. But I am open to challenge. If you think you have a rationally compelling/coercive argument for or against the existence of God, send it to me. 
     
    The reader might suspect that it is the fact of disagreement among highly competent practitioners that leads me to hold, or at least plays an important role in leading me to hold, that on the theism-atheism issue (and on many others) both sides are rationally acceptable, but neither is provable, demonstrable, compellingly arguable. If that is what the reader suspects, then he is on the right track. My position is close to the one articulated in Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (Hackett, 1981, 7th edition; originally published in 1907):
    . . . it will be easily seen that the absence of such disagreement must remain an indispensable negative condition of the [objective] certainty of our beliefs. For if I find any of my judgments, intuitive or inferential, in direct conflict with the judgment of some other mind, there must some error somewhere: and if I have no more reason to suspect error in the other mind than in my own, reflective comparison between the two judgments necessarily reduces me temporarily to a state of neutrality. (342, emphasis added)
     
    End of Excursus: Back to the Main Line
     
    Neutrality is the key word here. A stock claim of presuppositionalists is  that there is no neutrality with respect to the existence or nonexistence of God, which for them is the God of the (Christian) Bible.  That is to say: there is no neutral point of view from which to evaluate impartially the arguments for and against the existence of God and thereby objectively adjudicate the dispute between theists and atheists. There is and can be no neutrality or impartiality with respect to God because the existence of God is taken by them to be the ultimate presupposition of  all reasoning such that, were God not to exist, neither would the possibility of correct or incorrect reasoning.  No God? Then no correct or incorrect reasoning. According to John M. Frame,
     
    . . . our [apologetic] argument should be transcendental. That is, it should present the biblical God, not merely as the conclusion to an argument, but as one who makes argument possible. We should present him as the source of all meaningful communication, since he is the author of all order, truth, beauty, goodness, logical validity, and empirical fact. (Five Views of Apologetics, Zondervan 2000, p. 220)
    So if God were not to exist, there would be no meaning, truth, or logical validity. And if that were the case, then atheism could not count as rationally acceptable as defined above. Atheism is rationally acceptable, i.e., reasonable, only if arguments can be adduced in support of it. But if "God makes argument possible," then any argument the atheist gives would presuppose the existence of the very entity against which he is arguing. If "God makes argument possible," then atheism cannot be rationally acceptable, but is instead ruled out ab initio by the ultimate presupposition of all reason and argument, namely, the existence of God.  By "God makes argument possible" I take Frame to mean that the existence of God is a necessary condition of the possibility of both correct and incorrect reasoning about any topic including God.  Following Kant, such a necessary condition of possibility is called a transcendental condition.
     
    The reader should pause for a moment to appreciate just how powerful this presuppositional strategy is assuming it stands up to scrutiny.  If it so stands, then to deny the existence of God would be like denying the existence of truths. Anyone who denies that there are truths presupposes that there is at least one truth, namely, the truth that there are no truths. There is thus a clear sense in which the existence of truths is rationally undeniable.  Surely, there is no neutral point of view from which to evaluate impartially the arguments for and against the existence of truths and thereby objectively adjudicate the dispute between those who assert that there are truths and those who assert that there are no truths. That there are no truths is not rationally acceptable.
     
    Similarly, presuppositionalists think that there is a clear sense in which God is rationally undeniable: anyone who denies the existence of God, presupposes the existence of God.  This is a powerful argument strategy if it works, and vastly superior to the fallacy — the 'logical howler' — of thinking that one can prove a proposition by simply presupposing it, which is what some presuppositionalists sometimes do or at least seem to do. It is perfectly plain that a circular argument for God is probatively worthless. But a transcendental argument for God is not a circular argument.  Might it do the trick?
     
    Here then is the precise place where my long-held view that there are rationally acceptable arguments on both sides of the God question collides with presuppositionalism. If I am right, then the presuppositionalists are wrong, and if they are right, then I am wrong. This is why my intellectual honesty requires me to confront the presuppositionalist challenge. 
     
    The issue is this: Is the God of the (Christian) Bible the ultimate transcendental condition of meaning, truth, and logical validity? That there is such a transcendental condition  I do not deny. What I question is whether the God of the (Christian) Bible is this transcendental condition. Thus I do not deny that we must presuppose the existence of truth in all of our intellectual activities. To seek the truth is to presuppose that there are truths to be discovered.  If someone were to assert that there are no truths, that person would be asserting it to be true that there are no truths, thereby presupposing what he is denying, namely, that there are truths. We, therefore, cannot fail to presuppose the existence of truths when we prosecute our intellectual activities which include forming concepts, making judgments, and drawing inferences.
     
    But this is a far cry from presupposing the existence of the biblical God. There is clearly a logical gap between
     
    1) We finite cognizers in pursuit of our cognitional goals must presuppose the existence of truths
    and
    2) We finite cognizers in pursuit of our cognitional goals must presuppose the existence of the biblical God.
    It is easy to understand how (1) could be true without (2) being true. I will mention two ways. It might be that the truths that we must presuppose, such as the necessary truths of logic,  have a 'platonic' status: they just exist as abstract or ideal objects whether or not the biblical (Christian) God exists. These necessarily true propositions necessarily exist: they don't just happen to exist.  Since they are non-contingent, one cannot sensibly ask why they exist, any more than one can sensibly exist why a necessarily existent God exists. 
     
    The second way is the one suggested by Martin Heidegger in the notorious section 44 of Sein und Zeit (1927), Dasein, Disclosedness, and Truth. Roughly, the truth we must presuppose arrives on the scene with us and leaves the scene with us. I do not endorse this second way and will say no more about it here.  
     
    On the face of it, then, (1) can be true without (2) being true. But Frame seems to think that they stand and fall together. He seems to think that a  transcendental presupposition in a broadly Kantian sense of the term could be identical to a transcendent metaphysical entity such as the biblical God.
     
    Thinking this, however, Frame conflates two different senses of 'transcendental.' In one sense, 'transcendental' means transcendent. The God of the Bible is transcendent in the sense that he is other than the created realm and in no way dependent on it for his own existence. The biblical God exists in himself and from himself, a se.  In a second sense, 'transcendental' has the roughly Kantian sense invoked by Frame when he describes God as "the one who makes argument possible." By conflating the two senses of 'transcendental,' Frame conflates (1) and (2).  
     
    Frame's conflation of the two senses occurs in the paragraph immediately following the one I quoted above:
     
    We can reach this transcendental conclusion by many kinds of specific arguments, including many of the traditional ones. The traditional cosmological argument, for example, argues that God must exist as the First Cause of all the causes in the world. That conclusion is biblical and true, and if it can be drawn from true premises and valid logic, it may contribute to the goal of a transcendental conclusion. Certainly if God is the author of all meaning, he is the author of causality. And if God is the author of causality, the cause of all causes, he is the cause of all meaning. Therefore, the causal argument yields a transcendental conclusion. (pp. 220-221)
     
    This is by no means obvious. What the causal argument purports to yield is a transcendent conclusion. If successful, what it proves is the existence of a transcendent metaphysical entity, a concrete entity, that exists whether or not finite cognizers exist. The truth of (1), however, does not require that the ultimate transcendental presupposition be concrete. For on the broadly 'platonic' approach, the transcendental conditions are of an abstract or ideal nature.   (And if the early Heidegger is right, the truth of (1) does not require that the ultimate transcendental presupposition exist whether or not finite cognizers exist. But we leave Heidegger aside for now.)
     
    By 'concrete,' I mean causally active or passive or both. Thus Socrates is concrete because he both acts and he can be acted upon. Leaving aside the question whether God can be acted upon, the biblical God surely acts by causing creatures to exist. So God too counts as a concrete entity by the definition. And this despite his being outside both space and time. What makes God concrete is his capacity for the exercise of causal power. Whatever is neither casually active nor causally passive is abstract.  Abstract entities lack the capacity for the exercise of causal power.
     
    Now the biblical God is obviously no abstract object. He is after all causa prima, the first or primary cause. So if the causal argument manages to establish his existence, what it manages to establish is the existence of a metaphysical concretum. Could this transcendent concretum be identical to the transcendental presupposition mentioned in (1) above?  Frame and Co. will presumably say, Why not? 
     
    Here is an important difference. The transcendental presupposition of truth (and whatever else truth can be shown to presuppose such as truth-bearers, meaning, etc.) is objectively certain.  The presupposition of truth is rationally undeniable such that to deny the existence of truth is rationally unacceptable.  But that is not the case with respect to the causal argument and the rest of the standard theistic arguments including the quinque viae of Aquinas. These arguments are  reasonably rejected and have been rejected by distinguished Christian theologians. Therefore, Frame is not justified in his conflation of (1) and (2). Equivalently, he is not justified in thinking that the standard theistic arguments constitute specifically transcendental arguments for the existence of God.
     
    There is a lot more to be said, but this entry is already too long. To sum up the argument in the preceding paragraph:  (a) The transcendental argument to truth is conclusive; it is rationally compelling; (b) none of the standard theistic arguments are conclusive, which implies none of them are rationally compelling; therefore, (c) pace Frame & Co. one cannot enlist the causal argument or any of the standard arguments to do the transcendental job; therefore, Frame's presuppositionalism, at least, does not prove the existence of God.
    Bill Vallicella

    8 responses to “The Presuppositionalist Challenge to My Position”

  • Rod Dreher on Leftism

    Here:

    What a clarifying moment this is in the West. We have all seen the jaw-dropping alacrity with which so many leftists, especially within the academy, have rushed to defend the Hamas storm troopers. If you think this is merely about Israel and Hamas, you need to wake up. The people who are celebrating the massacre of innocent Jews in the name of “liberation” are the same people who would celebrate the massacre of you, if they had the chance.

    You think I’m wrong? Today, I write in The European Conservative about the situation in 2017 with Tommy J. Curry, a radical black professor who at the time was on the philosophy faculty at Texas A&M. A reader of mine at The American Conservative who was also either a student or faculty member at A&M brought to my attention how the university flipped out about the racist white activist Richard Spencer coming to campus, but tolerated a black professor making racist comments even more extreme than Spencer. I looked into it, and this, excerpted from my TEC piece today, is what I found:

    As usual, Dreher makes a number of good points, but in the end, as usual, it is all just talk. The one and only person who can turn things around, Donald J. Trump, he hates and refuses to support. And for no good reasons that I can discern. So what's the point, Rod? Are you just going to float above the fray forever? Which side are you on?

    You know it is a war to the death, and yet you refuse to take sides.  We scribblers enjoy the hell out of our daily word-slinging. And if you can turn a buck from it, all the better. So I understand why you write, write, write, and then write some more. You're good at it and people value and like to do what they are good it. But how does this cohere with your 'Benedictine' side? What sort of spiritual life can you possibly have given all this frenetic writing that yet issues in no practical commitment?  When do you have time to pray, meditate, shut off the verbal flow, and enter the Silence? "Be still and know that I am God." (Psalm 46:10)

    Bill Vallicella

    3 responses to “Rod Dreher on Leftism”

  • Robert Paul Wollf on Benjamin Netanyahu

    Substack latest.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Harvard Will Pay a Price . . .

    . . . when its super-wealthy Jewish benefactors withhold their support. Mark my words.

    The most effective way to combat the preternaturally destructive Left is by refusing to fund them. For the common currency of human-all-too-human understanding is the lean green, the filthy lucre, money. Everyone, no matter how twisted, nihilistic, or demon-driven, understands it.

    Meanwhile, prepare quietly, you know how, for you know what. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

    UPDATE (1o/14). I was right. Now the billionaire punch-back begins. CEOs want the names of students who blame Israel for the Hamas attacks. 

     

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Harvard Will Pay a Price . . .”

  • Hannity Shreds RFK, Jr.

    Here:

    Kennedy was already stammering when Hannity asked, “Do you still believe the NRA is a terror group?”

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    Kennedy tried to deflect by saying he supports the Second Amendment and the Constitution.

    But Hannity actually drilled down. “I didn’t ask you if you support the Second Amendment. … In 2018, you said Parkland students are right, the NRA is a terror group.”

    Kennedy was left feebly denying any recollection of saying that, and if he did, he didn’t mean it.

    Fortunately, X had a better memory than RFK Jr.

    Hannity also brought up Kennedy’s support for leftist radicals.

    When I found out that Kennedy had called the NRA a terror group my opinion of him went to zero. And yet I would fully support RFK Jr. if I could be sure that his third-party candidacy would siphon votes from Biden and help Trump win. 

    I have some very nice things to say about RFK Jr. and his latest book here.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Hannity Shreds RFK, Jr.”

Latest Comments

  1. https://www.thefp.com/p/charles-fain-lehman-dont-tolerate-disorder-charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

  3. Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!

  4. Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…

  5. Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…

  6. You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…

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