Round 2 9/7/05

From Brady 

After reading and thinking over Mr. Tremblay’s introductory remarks I would like to respond to both his epistemological statements, and then his straw-man attacks on Christianity.

Tremblay wrote:

A little later he continues:

This is more of an extension of the previous point, in that all knowledge is based on some form of induction. More specifically, all knowledge uses concepts, and most concepts are formed through an inductive process (and those that are not, are based on concepts that are). I am of course referring to conceptualization. We form concepts by observing individual existents and how they change, and by integrating their similarities.

In these two passages Mr. Tremblay lays out his epistemology as some sort of naïve empiricism. This is not a pejorative, but merely points out that this view of induction and empiricism is rejected by those, such as John Locke, David Hume and others, who identify themselves as empiricists. The reason it is rejected is because it does not deal, in any meaningful way, with the problems associated with empiricism.

For instance, Mr. Tremblay writes that “all knowledge is based on some form of induction.” Yet, there is no form of induction that can tell us if that statement of Mr. Tremblay’s is true or false!

Inductive reasoning can never get to universals, even though Mr. Tremblay suggests that it can. Induction never gets to 100% certain conclusions. Inductive conclusions are always probable conclusions. One reason for this is because inductive conclusions are always based on conditions, and since we can never know all the conditions that surround the item studied, we can never know with certainty that our conclusions are true. There is always the possibility (in some case it, be it ever so small) that we missed something. So, we can only say that inductive conclusions are probable. Logicians recognize this in there descriptions of inductive conclusions compared to deductive conclusions. A deductive conclusion is termed as “necessary” or “sound,” but the term used to describe a good inductive conclusion is “strong.”

Let’s look at the example given by Mr. Tremblay, “If we see the Sun ‘rise’ every single day of our life, we expect that it will "rise" tomorrow.” Can we say this with certainty? Doesn’t Mr. Tremblay really mean, if all conditions stay the same, it is probable that the sun will “rise” tomorrow? What if conditions were to drastically change? Scientists tell us that someday they will. We will eventually reach a point where the Sun is no longer shining and the earth is no longer rotating, and everything will be lying motionless and dead in space. Will the Sun “rise” then? The answer is, no. But that is a long way off in the future. What about tomorrow? Can’t we say with certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow? It is famed Atheistic Philosopher Bertrand Russell that points out the logical fallacy of that:

Induction is based on perceptions and experience. But, as Descartes point out, our perceptions are not always correct. When Tremblay observes a reed in a pond and the reed looks bent, does that observation correspond to reality? Is the reed truly bent or is that an optical illusion?  In other words, isn’t it the case that his observation does not correspond to reality? You and I know that it is more likely than not that the observation is faulty. That it does not correspond to reality. When Tremblay looks up at the night sky and sees the full moon, then lifts his hand and holds out his thumb, does he not see that his thumb blocks out the entire moon? Should he not conclude from this observation that his thumb is larger than the moon? Or should he understand that his observation does not correspond with reality and needs to be tempered with knowledge of distance, optics and physics? When you see the Sun “rise,” is your perception that the Sun is moving around the earth correct or do you understand that the earth is really rotating and it just looks like the Sun is moving?

The fact is that everyday of our lives we have many perceptions that we know are not accurate, but need to be tempered by knowledge of other mitigating conditions which are not immediately apparent. So, what makes Mr. Tremblay think that any of his perceptions are accurate? Could it not be the case that there are mitigating conditions for all his perceptions? But, how does he know about mitigating conditions? Didn’t he perceive those also? And couldn’t there be mitigating conditions to his perception of the mitigating conditions? You see, given Mr. Tremblay’s naïve empiricism, all perceptions come into question.

Mr. Tremblay’s naïve empiricism is unable to answer empiricist David Hume’s questions. Take this one: How does Mr. Tremblay know that an item still exists when he does not perceive it? When he goes out of the kitchen and no one is there to perceive his oven, what makes him think that his oven still exists? This may sound like a simple and even absurd question to ask. But, you will find that Mr. Tremblay and his naïve empiricism will be unable to answer. You see, induction is based on perception, if there is no perception, there can be no answer. He may “assume” his oven is there, he may “believe” his oven is there, but he can never “know” his oven still exists when it is not being perceived.

Hume points out another, greater problem for Mr. Tremblay: When we observe causes and effects, we observe that causes are mostly unlike their effects. For instance, when I light a match, the flame is very different than the firm paper that makes up the match or the cool chemicals that go into making the head of the match. When I drop a bowling ball, the “thud” it makes is very different from the hardness of the ball or the floor. So, we see with all sorts of other things too, that the effect is unlike its cause. With that said, let us look at our perceptions. Perceptions are effects caused by the world around us. But if causes are not like effects, what makes Mr. Tremblay think that his perceptions (the effects) are anything like the world (the cause) around him? He may “assume” they are and he may “believe” they are, but he has no way of “knowing” they are.

But Mr. Tremblay’s problems don’t end there. Russ Manion in his essay, “A Brief History of Knowledge, points out a number of other epistemic issues that Mr. Tremblay will be unable to explain. These include:

· Justification of an external world

· Deduction

· Universality of Logic

· The ontology of Logic

· The nature of causality

· Belief in the existence of the Self

The problem lies in Mr. Tremblay’s worldview, as I pointed out in my introductory statement. If Mr. Tremblay’s worldview does not have the elements to get him to any kind of knowledge; it doesn’t have the elements to get him to any kind of specific knowledge, including an inductive principle or universals. Since all he begins with is just matter in motion, all he can end with is just matter in motion. To have a thought independent of matter in motion is impossible from his worldview. Everything is necessarily determined from his worldview, and any attempt to just say it is not, simply lacks the weight to tip the scales.

With all this said, please don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that Mr. Tremblay is not using induction and deduction or universals. I am only saying if his cosmology is true, he could not use that knowledge. Atheists, for the most part are rational people, except when it comes to dealing with the contradiction between their rationality and their worldview. You see, this is not a question of the atheists just needing smarter people to figure out the puzzle. It is a matter of their cosmology deliberately excluding any possible element needed to get to knowledge. So, if his atheistic cosmology is true, there can be no such thing as knowledge. The fact that he concedes the existence of knowledge is a direct confirmation that his worldview is false.

To put this to bed should be easy for Mr. Tremblay, simply show the elements from the atheist cosmology that allows you to get to knowledge! If he can do that, my argument is over. There is no need for a round three. If he can’t, then his argument is over. It is that cut and dry.

The web site, “The Fallacy Files” describes the Straw-man fallacy this way, "’Straw man’ is one of the best-named fallacies, because it is memorable and vividly illustrates the nature of the fallacy. Imagine a fight in which one of the combatants sets up a man of straw, attacks it, then proclaims victory. All the while, the real opponent stands by untouched.”

This description sums up the entire attack by Mr. Tremblay on Christian theology. He sets up numerous false arguments, attacks them, then he claims victory over Christianity. I will expose several of them here. If the reader needs verification on the rest, it is easy to find the real arguments. After all, they have been given by hundreds of authors over the last two millennia. That is the insulting part! It is apparent that Mr. Tremblay takes both me and our readers for fools. He apparently thinks we all are so uneducated as to not know the real arguments or he believes we are not able to look up the real arguments, therefore hoping we would all fall for his misrepresentations.

Let’s take a look at the some of these straw-men.

Tremblay writes: “Most Christian sects claim that the Christian god is triune and yet one. They waste a great deal of energy making up incoherent rationalizations for this belief.”

Mr. Tremblay insinuates that there is some logical problem in the doctrine of the Trinity. By simplistically misstating the doctrine, he attempts to fool those have never studied the subject. The doctrine actually says that in the nature of the one God, there are three persons, the Father, the Son and The Holy Spirit. You will notice the two categories of “nature” and “persons.” Had the doctrine stated that in God there is one nature and three natures, or that there is one person and three persons, then there would be the problem that Mr. Tremblay suggests. But, that has never been the teaching in regards, to the Trinity. Here it is defined in the Athanasian Creed from the fourth century A.D.:

“Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith. Which Faith except everyone do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.”

So, we see that Mr. Tremblay has not stated the doctrine as it is, but how he would like it to be. The doctrine clearly details two categories, that of nature (substance) and persons. Mr. Tremblay would have us believe that one category is being discussed.

But perhaps, I am being too hard on Mr. Tremblay. Perhaps he is not intentionally trying to mislead our readers. Perhaps he is just clueless as to the real doctrine. But, then one would have to wonder why he came to this kind of a debate so ill prepared. And why he would offer such arguments without doing the appropriate research on the topic. He must know that this type of blunder would make him look like a liar or an idiot. And it would be bad enough if he did it with just one example, but that is not the case.

Tremblay writes: “Most Christian sects claim that the character "Jesus" was both man and god, yet the properties of men and the properties of gods are contradictory.”

Here Tremblay tries the same thing as he did with the Trinity, and he commits the same error. The doctrine is called the Hypostatic Union. It states that in the person of Christ there are two natures, that of God and that of man. Yet, there are not two persons, but one person. We, as Christians, do not divide the person, nor do we confuse the natures. So, once again, there is no logical contradiction. Mr. Tremblay may not like the doctrine, in fact the reader may not like it either, but liking it is far different from it being a real contradiction.

At another point Mr. Tremblay writes:

Here Mr. Tremblay tries to attack on some sort of epistemic grounds, but completely missed the point, because he clearly has not studied Christian theology. Mr. Tremblay makes three statements that he thinks are incompatible between Christianity and induction. The first is that God can make it so that “A is not-A.” First, Mr. Tremblay misses the fact that this is an analytic statement and not an synthetic statement. Therefore it has nothing to do with induction in the first place. Only synthetic statements can determined inductively. Second, Mr. Tremblay thinks that logic is willy-nilly determined by God. That is not what Christianity teaches. Christianity teaches that logic is objective, because it is part of God’s nature. So, God could no more make a square-circle than we could. A-ha! Says the atheist, then God is not all powerful. But then again the atheist hasn’t studied and has no clue what omnipotent means. Omnipotent means that God has all the power to keep this entire universe operating every second. And he has the power to do what he wants with it. If God wanted to stop the earth rotating and keep everything in place he could do so; after all, he has the power to create this whole universe and exerts the needed power to keep it going every second. Without God exerting this power, we would all just evaporate into nothing in one second.

The last problem Mr. Tremblay brings up is a moral ploy. He says that God could willy-nilly make gratuitous evil, good. But in Christianity, morality, like logic is an objective part of the nature of God, not an ad hoc decision. Once again, Mr. Tremblay’s argument fails. It fails on two counts: 1) because it is a bad argument, 2) because it does not address the real Christian position.

I understand that an atheist reading this may not like, and even rejects the Christian positions I have outlined here. I understand that, after all the atheists reject all of Christianity, but it cannot be denied that they are the Christian position and that Mr. Tremblay’s attack is based upon straw-men characters and not the true Christian philosophy.

But, there is more to Mr. Tremblay’s problem than just missing the point concerning Christianity. Mr. Tremblay calls himself a “moral realist.” If he is using this term in the usual philosophical sense this means that morals have a real objective referent. And according to Mr. Tremblay you will have to be able to find this objective referent via induction. Good luck buddy! Please show us how you see, hear, touch, taste, or smell goodness? You may say that you see people being good, but don’t you have to know what “good” is before you are able to identify it? So, please when and where in matter in motion have you or any atheist ever perceived the objective referent, “Good.” What is its chemical or molecular make up? If you say it has none, then it probably is something other than matter and energy. But of course your world view doesn’t allow for anything other than matter and energy, does it!

Here is one last example of the way Mr. Tremblay horribly butchers Christian doctrine to his own demise:

“Christian doctrines claim that everything popped out of nothing (divine creation ex nihilo). This contradicts the fundamental logical fact that a lack of potentiality cannot engender anything.”

Potentiality deals with necessary conditions to actualize a thing or event. For instance, to build a chair you need the conditions necessary to build a chair. You need the material (be it wood or plastic or something else), you need the tools to fashion the chair, you need some sort of plan and you need a person or machine to work the plan and the material into the chair. All of these conditions are necessary to build the chair. With these conditions present the potentiality for building a chair is there. This means the potential to build a chair is there, not that it necessarily must be built. If one or more of the necessary elements are missing, there is no potentiality to build the chair.

Mr. Tremblay suggests that Creatio Ex Nihilo (creation out of nothing) means that the necessary conditions are not there to make the universe. What Creatio Ex Nihilo really means is that God did not make the universe from already existing materials. It means that God created the universe from brand new stuff He made. God is the only necessary condition that is required to create the universe. So, Mr. Tremblay’s “fundamental logical fact” is not a logical fact at all, but merely Mr. Tremblay’s misrepresentation of the doctrine.

Any Christian systematic theology text can clear up all of Mr. Tremblay’s errors. So, I will not take any more time or effort with his introductory presentation. If Mr. Tremblay wants to research the doctrines he attacks and come back with a more informed presentation, I will be happy to deal with it. If all he can come up with is more of the same, I will refer him to the books he needs to read before engaging in this type of debate.

But, of course, if Mr. Tremblay can just come up with those elements in his cosmology that let him get to knowledge, none of these theological issues would even be relevant. We are doing theology as a red herring because Mr. Tremblay is unable to do epistemology.

From Francois 

Mr. Lenardos and I are about as opposite as two people can be, epistemically speaking. This is not usually solid grounds for a productive debate. But we do agree on a few things. We agree that matter exists and takes definite forms that we can conceptualize and reason about. We agree that such forms change in a deterministic way, and that this is where science's awesome power of prediction comes from.

And we come to the central point of this debate - where does this deterministic necessity come from? Not from the subjectivist universe of Christianity. In fact, if we are to believe the Biblical fables, even the rise of the Sun cannot be relied on! The central doctrines of Christianity all deny deterministic necessity, from the divine creation of everything from nothing, to imputing a moral responsibility on human beings from nowhere (it certainly does not come from the material facts), to an avatar appearing out of nowhere and rocketing back into nowhere. In essence, Christianity tells us that the laws of nature are fooling us about the true nature of the universe, its divine origins and moral struggle.

Such necessity can only exist in a self-contained universe, which is to say a materialist universe. In such a universe, entities change according to their identities (law of causality) without interference from an acausal element, such as a "supernatural" god. In this ordered, causal universe of ours, only a deterministic event of incredible proportions could stop the Earth from rotating.

In Mr. Lenardos' magical Christian universe, God's hand could have stopped the Earth in its tracks so one of his followers can slaughter as many people as possible. In his subjectivist universe, how are we supposed to judge if the Biblical fables are true or not anyway, or by extension, judge anything as true or false? As I discussed in my opening case, to reject materialism is to reject induction and to reject induction is to reject knowledge.

I also agree with Mr. Lenardos that what he calls "Negationism", the idea that reality is an illusion, is an epistemic dead-end. If we label the entirety of reality "illusion", then we are only switching labels around, and not saying anything meaningful (note that you can say the same thing about the label "Creation", but let's skip that for now).

We do not, however, agree that "Naturism" - I'm pretty sure he means "naturalism" here - falls under the same banner. He asks:

"[W]hat elements in this cosmology get us to knowledge? What elements of this cosmology allow us to be independent of or to rise above the deterministic nature of mere matter in motion, so that we are able to make free decisions, and not simply act as we must like some predetermined programmed mechanism?" (emphasis mine - note the insidious pejorative "mere matter")

And here we have a blatant circular argument. For to accept that "rising above deterministic nature" is a prerequisite for knowledge, is to assume that God is a prerequisite for knowledge, which is exactly what he is trying to prove. In a naturalistic universe, nothing can "rise above deterministic nature" by definition, but he has not demonstrated that such imagined inability is a problem.

Mr. Lenardos is trying to make this debate about knowledge into a free will/determinism debate. But he has failed to prove that the free will/determinism debate is relevant. All he has done is point out that the nature of knowledge is different under a determinist worldview than under his subjectivist, dualistic worldview. By doing so, he tells us nothing new! I already know that our view of knowledge differs: that is why we are having this debate in the first place.

Yet a cursory look at daily experience alone refutes his position on knowledge elegantly. Take the proposition "When I flip the light switch, the light turns on". I know this because of previous experiences. I flipped the light switch, and the light turned on. Later, I flipped the light switch again, and the light turned on again. Repeat a few thousand times. Given all these experiences, I came to the conclusion that flipping the switch would turn on the light. And when the light does not turn on, I acknowledge it as an unusual situation and look to other material causes for an explanation (the light bulb is burnt out). How I gain this understanding - through freely willed action or deterministic causality - is irrelevant to all of these points.

For the record, by the way, I am a compatibilist. My position is that free will and determinism do not co-exist in the same respect, and that there is no contradiction because of this. But my conclusion is based on the notion of the block universe, a notion which is not available to any believer of the Christian worldview, and so any debate on this issue would be futile unless we first resolved the truth or falsify of the Christian worldview, which is beyond even this debate.

But I will say this: Mr. Lenardos' argument assumes that the mind is not determined. That's ridiculous! The mind is material, has an identity that can be determined by science, and is subject to causation. So how is it not determined? If he wants to get anywhere at all with his free will/determinism side issue, he needs to justify this absurd premise first. Then it might be worthy of being taken seriously. Until then, it is nothing more than a bare assertion.

But most importantly, for his entire argument to go anywhere, he needs to tell us where deterministic necessity comes from in his subjectivist, dualistic worldview. Otherwise it cannot be the case that "theism is necessary for knowledge to exist", as knowledge is founded on induction, which is founded on deterministic necessity, as I detailed in my opening case.

These are grave questions against the Christian worldview that decades of presuppositionalists thought have failed to answer. They have been long on straw man attacks, but very thin on defending their own beliefs. I am very grateful that Mr. Lenardos is not using any straw man attacks, but I honestly don't expect much in ways of a defense. Either way, I am looking forward to his third round.