Archive for the 'Transcendental Argument for God'

I’m actually typing this with about 15 minutes left to go in the program. But we’ve already had the epic 48-minute sequel discussion with Matt Slick, and I’m sure people will have a lot of feedback. Generally speaking, I think Slick really got his deer-in-the-headlights thing on when Matt D. pointed out the distinction — which Slick pointedly refused to recognize, whether he really didn’t or was just pretending not to in order to defend his position — between logical absolutes as essential properties of reality, and the discipline of logic which we as thinking beings use to understand reality. In an uninhabited universe with no minds, a rock is still a rock and not a mushroom. Slick insisted this could not be the case, conflating the logical process by which we understand “A=A” with the physical object “A,” the rock. Then, in order to take control of a discussion that was getting away from him, he got Matt D. bogged down by demanding that Matt D. define a “third option” beyond “physical” and “conceptual”. I think Matt D. slipped up a little here, in that he let himself get flustered and angry at Slick’s little Mexican Hat Dance around his salient criticism of TAG, as well as by Slick’s aggressive subject-changing and obfuscation. I wish Matt D. had just asked, “So is God conceptual?” On the whole, though, Matt D. mopped the floor with Slick, because Slick’s only response to Matt’s pointing out the contradiction in claiming absolutes to be both conceptual and not contingent on minds was to say, basically, “Nuh-uh.” Slick’s exercise in distracting and flustering Matt was quite intentional. Having done this for years, I recognize the argumentation tactic of “if you can’t beat ‘em, piss ‘em off” that apologists employ as a matter of course. But did you catch the part where Slick...
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I’m never prouder of the Atheist Community of Austin than when we all manage to pull together in a discussion about serious topics of philosophy and presentation strategy. Last night six of us got together in an Austin coffeehouse to discuss several issues for the show, and for the first hour we went over Matt Slick’s Transcendental Argument for God (TAG) with a fine-toothed comb. I see that Martin has already outlined several conclusions of that conversation admirably, so I won’t need to go over all of it. I’ll defer to his well-written response. At this point people who are interested in arguments and not a glimpse at behind-the-scenes process might want to skip down to the bold header below, where I will take up one final argument against TAG. We have received a veritable flood of comments about the Matt Slick call: by email, on the blog (both here and here), on the Iron Chariots forum, and on my favorite hangout, the Atheist Fools board (115 posts at the time of this writing). All told, there have been several hundred comments about that episode, which I think probably makes it one of the most talked-about episodes ever. That didn’t necessarily make it a good episode, of course. The feedback has been mixed, and I’ve listened to all kinds of criticism that I take very seriously. Matt D called me almost as soon as the show was over to vent his frustrations about some aspects of the call. While most of the email and online comments have been positive, an uncomfortably high number of them have also said that Don and I handled the call “disgracefully,” that we were rude and impatient, and that Matt Slick was right to call us out for interrupting him a lot. A couple even said it put them off the show permanently. I don’t dismiss these comments. We’re only human. In a 1997 article from the Internet Infidels library, Michael Martin says: “Ignorance of TAG is hardly surprising since it...
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As I’ve been away from the blog for way too long, I thought it’d be a prime opportunity to get back in the swing of things with my tuppence on the last AE TV show, and the whole dustup with CARM’s Matt Slick over his use of TAG, the Transcendental Argument for God. I’m going to comment, not on the show — which, sue me, I still haven’t seen, but which sounds to me like it was a terrific episode, due to the response it’s gotten from viewers both pro and con; I judge the show’s merits by how passionately it engages our audience, and not how well the hosts did or didn’t do, as you always find yourself Monday-morning-quarterbacking the damn thing once it’s done — but the argument as Slick presents it on CARM’s site. He is known to boast that no atheist has ever been able to respond to it, which I find hard to believe, since its flaws are readily apparent. I won’t make this as epic a post as my recent two-parter replying to questions from apologists like Habermas. And it isn’t going to be the ultimate in comprehensive refutations of TAG either; there’s a lot more that other writers have said than I even begin to touch on here. I’ll just cut to the chase: the argument essentially tries to establish that the universe operates logically, and that it could not do so if the Christian God had not set it up that way. When discussing what he terms logical absolutes, Slick is largely correct. The three laws are accurate as far as I can determine, and he’s right when he says that truth cannot be self-contradictory and so on. If there were no minds in the universe to think about these things, a rock on a barren planet would still conform to the law of identity. It would be what it is, and not be what it isn’t. Slick’s sound on his premises more or less, but keep in mind that what he’s talking about here are logical absolutes — that is to say, unadorned,...
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On the February 15th episode of the Atheist Experience, we got a call from a “Matt Slick” from the Christian Apologetics Research Ministry. Unfortunately, Matt Dillahunty had been arranging this call Read more
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