Reply to Stephen Feinstein, round two
This post is part of an ongoing discussion between Russell Glasser and Pastor Stephen Feinstein. Here are all the previous posts in the series.
As before, I’ll be disabling comments in this post, as it is supposed to be a conversation only between the two of us.
Stephen,
I want to take a moment to remind our readers again of the first thing that you said in this discussion. You promised to make the case that “atheism is untenable, irrational, and ultimately impossible.” That was a pretty bold acceptance of the burden of proof that you took on. In fact, I’d venture to say that if you don’t start clearly progressing towards making this case, it will be as good as a concession that you’ve lost the debate.
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I’m not saying that you can’t do it, obviously; but after two rounds of posting, you haven’t done much to reach your goal. So far the main thing you’ve done is to casually dismiss every possibility of a common starting point. I started by proposing what I thought would be fairly uncontroversial common ground: “We both probably agree that the natural world exists in the first place.” Your response was the following:
“It is not good enough for me to say, ‘Russell, I agree with you that this world is real, that we learn from the senses, that reasonable standards are necessary, and that bald assertion fails to prove anything.’ By the way, I agree with you on all of these things, but with one revision. However, I want us to account for these things.”
So… that’s interesting. As I read this statement, you’re not even going to bother from the beginning to grant the premise that there is something rather than nothing, starting at least a few steps short of what philosophers generally see as the most basic of all questions. This seems to put you in an extremely odd position. It’s fine to say that you’re going to “account for” the real world, but unless you unconditionally grant that there is a real world at all, there is obviously nothing to account for.
What do you hope to accomplish by this approach? If you are trying to make some sort of reductio ad absurdam based on this — i.e., by asserting “We can’t assume that the real world exists unless my other presupposition X is true” — then that can’t get you anywhere, as long as you’re following through with your insistence that the real world might not exist at all. You could perhaps say “The consequences of the world not existing would be ridiculous” but that won’t fly either, because you haven’t granted the premise that we need any kind of logical standards.
With that in mind, here’s the one and only thing you have really bothered to say in defense of your assertion that God exists, after two messages:
Moving on, when you commented on the Biblical definition of God, you then asked me how I plan on justifying any of it since you personally agree with none of it. This too will come as we advance further in the debate, but for now I am going to advance a preliminary argument that will sound absurd to you. Here it goes. The Biblical God must exist, because if He does not exist, then we can know nothing at all. Or let me put it this way. Christianity must be true because without it we lose all intelligibility.
I’ll tell you why I have no difficulty whatsoever rejecting this unwarranted premise. Unless you’re willing to grant that intelligibility does exist, “justifying” the existence of intelligibility is a pointless task. You’re already launching into a circular case for God, namely: “Unless God exists, then intelligibility cannot exist. And intelligibility must exist, because my logical argument for God’s hand in creating it depends on it.”
I was offering you a way to bypass this circularity by assuming that reality exists and that we need logical standards, but you rejected this. I, in turn, reject your starting point of God. Are we at an impasse here? I could say something almost identical and it would still be just as valid as your frame. There exists a magical tiara, and it is because of this tiara that the laws of logic exist. Problem solved: I’ve accounted for logic in just as rigorous a way as you have, at least so far.
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