Anderson on TAG and other worldview issues

The argument for God from logic

https://www.proginosko.com/tag/argument-for-god-from-logic/

Has presuppositionalism evolved?

Has presuppositionalism evolved? By presuppositionalism I mean the Van Tilian tradition, not the Clarkian tradition–which is a different animal.

Van Til championed the transcendental argument. And think that's due in large part do his eccentric view of divine incomprehensibility (which builds paradox into his definition of divine incomprehensibility). If God is incomprehensible in Van Til's sense, then you can't argue directly for his existence. Rather, you argue that God's existence is a necessary condition for everything else. Van Til's view is similar in that respect to transcendental Thomism. 

So Van Til's argument was essentially an epistemological argument for God's existence. Transcendental arguments are epistemological arguments, to refute skepticism.

However, in the hands of Greg Welty and James Anderson, the argument has shifted to modal metaphysics. So there's been some evolution and reorientation in the argument. 

It may be the case that Kant's argument is more epistemological, in part because he doesn't have a robust theology to ground it. Kant might even be a closet atheist. And he's skeptical regarding our knowledge of the external world. So he can't say much of anything to back it up in terms of bedrock ontology. 

Although Van Til's version is partly epistemological, he tries to ground it in the metaphysics of Reformed theism. Greg Welty and James Anderson develop that neglected potential in more detail. This is also because there's been a lot of work done on modal metaphysics which wasn't on the horizon in Van Til's time. In addition, Welty was never a champion of theological paradox. And that's conspicuously missing from Bahnsen as well. 

Van Til and Vallicella

The proof presupposes the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), and I am willing to grant that LNC and the other laws of logic can be argued to presuppose in their turn the existence of an omniscient necessary being. One argument to this conclusion is the Anderson-Welty argument which I critically examine here. I conclude that, while the argument is not rationally compelling, it does contribute to the rationality of belief in God.  In other words, the Anderson-Welty argument is a good reason to believe in the existence of God. It does not, however, establish the existence of God in a definitive manner. It does not show that the existence of God is absolutely certain.

At the very most, then, one can plausibly argue to, but not prove, the existence of an omniscient necessary being whose existence is a presupposition of our rational operations in accordance with the laws of logic.  But this is a far cry from what Van Til asserts above, namely, that the truth of Christianity with all its very specific claims is a condition of the possibility of proving anything. Trinity and Incarnation are among these specific claims. How are these doctrines supposed to bear upon the laws of logic? [emphasis mine]

https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2019/01/van-til-on-an-absolutely-certain-proof-of-christianity.html

i) Is a philosophical argument a failure unless it can establish a claim with absolute certainty? Isn't that a retrograde definition of a successful philosophical argument? Aren't nearly all philosophical arguments failures by that austere standard? Is that a deficiency of the argument, or an artificial standard of success? 

ii) What if your aim was never to prove the truth of Christianity by one particular argument? Is your argument a failure if it misses a target it was never aiming for?

What if your particular argument is part of a cumulative case strategy? No one argument gets you to the finish line, but each argument combines with other arguments towards that objective? 

A Selection of Presuppositional Arguments

"A Selection of Presuppositional Arguments" by Prof. James Anderson.

What's more certain: God or my hands?

I think the title of this post is a useful way to frame the issue. Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore once attempted to prove the existence of an external world by saying:

How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand’, and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another’ 

Now, some people might find it preposterous to say God's existence is more certain than whether my hands are real, but that's deceptively simplistic. To begin with, we need to distinguish between certainty and certitude. By "certitude", I mean a psychological state of absolute conviction or confidence. Let's say that I have greater certitude in the reality of my hands than I have in the reality of God.

Now, let's compare that to certainty in the sense of a logical or mathematical rigor. A mathematical proof might be rock solid. The gold standard of proof. Demonstrably true. 

But even though a mathematical proof is more certain than the existence of my hands, I might have greater certitude in the existence of my hands. For one thing, some mathematical proofs are fiendishly complex, and there's the nagging doubt that it may suffer from some subtile but undetectable fallacy. 

And yet, certitude in the existence of my hands can be misplaced. Moreover, this doesn't require outlandish thought-experiments. When I dream, I dream that I have a body. In the dream, I'm sure I've got a pair of hands. But my hands are imaginary in the dream. 

Likewise, someone who's psychotic may be utterly convinced that his hallucinations are real. Take the famous title of a book by Oliver Sacks: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. So, if you think about it, the notion that your hands might be illusory isn't that far-fetched. 

Another way to approach the issue is to ask how much hangs on the denial of each alternative. What must the world be like if your hands don't exist? What must the world be like if God doesn't exist?

In the case of illusory hands, you don't necessarily have to make any adjustments to a common sense view of the world. I just gave two examples. Dreaming and psychosis are consistent with a physical world. External objects. 

There is, of course, a more radical interpretation. And that is idealism or virtual reality. Where what we take to be the external world is a computer simulation, a la The Matrix. That's a very different kind of world. A drastic departure from our common sense view of the world.

But even though most of us find that hopelessly implausible, it is coherent. It seems to be hypothetically possible. 

By contrast, if God exists, then everything else depends on God. There are, moreover, Christian philosophers who formulate arguments for aspects of that claim.

In that event, God's existence is fundamentally more certain than the existence of my hands. A world could still exist even if my hands are illusory. That might or might not require some adjustments in what the world is like. But no world of any kind can exist apart from God. 

Retooling TAG

i) I'm going to take another stab at TAG. It's not my objective in this post to expound Van Til or be faithful to Van Til. If what I say is consistent with his original vision, fine. But this shouldn't be a personality cult. 

Likewise, I don't care whether I ended up defending what is technically a transcendental argument, or merely something like a transcendental argument. All I care about is whether there's a good argument to be had–and not the pedigree of the argument.

ii) One preliminary issue is whether TAG is worth salvaging. This has been kicking around for decades. It was controversial at the time. It's still controversial. Not much progress has been made in turning Van Til's programatic claims into a full-blown apologetic. 

So we should be open to the possibility that this is a failed idea. It seemed to be promising, but the more it's scrutinized, the less is has going for it. Frankly, there's a certain amount of Reformed chauvinism that's responsible for clinging to this argument no matter what.

That said, I will, in fact, be defending TAG, or a variation thereon.

iii) One difficulty is the interpretation of TAG. In this respect, TAG is like the ontological argument. One of the things that makes the ontological argument difficult to evaluate is attempting to understand what Anselm's claim amounts to. Did he offer one or two different versions of his own argument? What do they mean? You can't even assess the argument unless and until you interpret the argument, although it's possible to give alternative interpretations, then handicap each one.

Of course, Scotus, Descartes, Leibniz, Gödel, Plantinga, and Lowe have all offered their own versions of the ontological argument, so it's possible to bypass Anselm. 

iv) A limitation of transcendental argumentation is that this is essentially concerned with epistemology rather than ontology. Here's one definition:

Transcendental arguments are partly non-empirical, often anti-skeptical arguments focusing on necessary enabling conditions either of coherent experience or the possession or employment of some kind of knowledge or cognitive ability, where the opponent is not in a position to question the fact of this experience, knowledge, or cognitive ability, and where the revealed preconditions include what the opponent questions. Such arguments take as a premise some obvious fact about our mental life—such as some aspect of our knowledge, our experience, our beliefs, or our cognitive abilities—and add a claim that some other state of affairs is a necessary condition of the first one. Transcendental arguments most commonly have been deployed against a position denying the knowability of some extra-mental proposition, such as the existence of other minds or a material world. Thus these arguments characteristically center on a claim that, for some extra-mental proposition P, the indisputable truth of some general proposition Q about our mental life requires that P. 

http://www.iep.utm.edu/trans-ar/

I don't think that definition is necessarily a problem for TAG. However, if the pretension of TAG is to present the only adequate argument for God's existence, then this limitation is a serious problem. Surely arguments for God's existence should include metaphysical evidence, and not merely what is needed to ground our mental life. Epistemological arguments shouldn't be the only arguments for God's existence. 

v) What is TAG trying to get at? In my view, TAG is not so much a direct or positive argument for God's existence as it is an explication of the consequences which follow from denying God's existence. Depending on the consequences, that, in turn, becomes an indirect argument for God's existence.

Technically, this may not be a transcendental argument, but I'm not a purist. 

What have you got to lose by denying God? What's at stake? What's the cost? Once you deny God, what else must you deny? What does that commit you to? After the dust settles, what's left?

The force of TAG depends on how damaging the repercussions are of denying God's existence. After making some minor adjustments, can we leave everything important still intact? Or is the denial of God's existence a universal acid that dissolves everything of consequence? 

vi) In that respect, TAG is not one argument, but a family of arguments. Arguments of a kind.

Put another way, TAG is not in itself an argument, but an argumentative strategy. It selects for or develops arguments that share that particular orientation. In that respect, we could regard TAG as a research program. 

By the same token, this means there may be some good theistic arguments that don't pertain to that strategy or family of arguments. 

vii) If successful, this approach has number of advantages:

a) There are preexisting arguments that dovetail with TAG. Take the "argument from reason" (Lewis/Reppert) or Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. Take the moral argument for God's existence. And so on and so forth. 

Even if these aren't specifically "transcendental," the approach I'm suggesting can point them in that direction. What's there to lose by denying God? 

b) Conversely, consistent secular philosophers make damaging concessions. 

c) It puts the unbeliever on the defensive. 

d) It supplies a unifying principle for a number of otherwise disparate theistic arguments. 

viii) But to succeed, it is necessary to develop detailed arguments. For instance, what's the status of abstract objects in a Godless universe?

An unbeliever may say abstract objects are explanatorily necessary, but offer a secular alternative for grounding them. Platonic realism. If so, a Christian philosopher or apologist must show the inadequacy of that alternative.

Or an unbeliever may say abstract objects are explanatorily unnecessary. He may propose secular alternatives which do the same work at a lower metaphysical cost. Fictionalism or structural realism. If so, a Christian philosopher or apologist must show the inadequacy of those alternatives. 

And, of course, a Christian must propose a positive model for how God grounds abstract objects. 

ix) A casualty of this approach is that TAG ceases to be a silver bullet. It's no longer a snappy comeback to stop the mouth of the unbeliever. For the real work has just begun. Formulating the arguments is painstaking work.

However, the silver bullet was always a blank. The simplicity was illusory. To seriously engage secularism, TAG has to become very sophisticated, to operate at the same level as the best of the secular competition. 

x) Finally, whether someone is an evidential or presuppositional apologist can often have less to do with the merits of the respective positions than the aptitude of the apologist. Some people have a knack for sifting historical evidence, but no great philosophical aptitude. Take Kenneth Kitchen or Richard Bauckham. They operate at a very concrete level. Historical particulars. 

Others have greater aptitude for abstract reasoning. Take Alvin Plantinga.

Plantinga and Kitchen simply have different skill sets. They couldn't do what they other does even if they tried. 

So a certain degree of pluralism in apologetic methodology is to be commended. We need people who excel in different things.

Van Tilian Old Calendarists

In this post I’m going to comment on some recent criticisms of James Anderson and Greg Welty by Nate Shannon and Vern Poythress.

In recent years, James Anderson, David Reiter, and other scholars have shown interest specifically in TAG, the transcendental argument for the existence of God. This philosophically rigorous discussion overlooks the fact that in the context of van Til’s apologetic, the transcendental argument amounts to the claim that Christianity is true, and everything contrary to it false. There is no indication in van Til’s writing that he had any interest in formal transcendental argumentation apart from positive Reformed, Christian presuppositions. I think Lane Tipton is correct when he says, “van Til never viewed his transcendental method as operating outside of a trinitarian theology and a corresponding ‘revelational epistemology.’ To construe van Til’s approach as attempting to establish his theology on the basis of philosophical argumentation is simply to misunderstand his approach at a very basic level. This would be to grant a priority to philosophy that van Til’s system in principle prohibits” (Lane G. Tipton, “The Triune Personal God: Trinitarian Theology in the Thought of Cornelius van Til” [Ph.D. diss., Westminster Theological Seminary, 2004], 170).

N. Shannon, “Christianity and Evidentialism: Van Til and Locke on Facts and Evidence,” WTJ 74 (2012).

i) So philosophical argumentation is, by definition, non-Christian? Whatever happened to “taking every thought captive”?

ii) Didn’t Van Til say things like: “there is an absolutely valid argument for the existence of God and for the truth of Christian theism,” “the argument may be poorly stated, and may never be adequately stated. But in itself the argument is absolutely sound”?

Doesn’t this suggest Van Til was convinced that there was, in principle, a rigorously formulatable version of TAG? Doesn’t he present this as a hypothetical ideal which Christian apologists should aim for, even if they fall short? 

iii) Does TAG merely “claim that Christianity is true, and everything contrary to it false”? A claim in contrast to a reasoned argument? So it just comes down to competing claims? What about the claim that atheism, Buddhism, Mormonism, Islam, Scientology, or Hare Krishna (fill in the blank) is true, and everything contrary to it is false? 

iv) Likewise, suppose Tipton and Shannon are correct in their interpretation of Van Til. So what? Is the purpose of apologetics to stay faithful to Van Til, or to defend the faith? The attitude of Tipton and Shannon reminds me of the Old Calendarists, who felt it was impious to deviate even slightly from Russian Orthodox tradition. Apologetics is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. The objective of apologetics is not to defend Van Til’s methodology, but to defend Christian theology.  Van Til is not the object of faith.

v) They haven’t learned the lesson of the Peter Enns affair. His claims can’t be allowed to go unchallenged. They need to be directly rebutted. How well did the Tipton/Shannon/Oliphint strategy work at out at WTS? How would invoking “covenantal apologetics” be effective?

vi) I skimmed Shannon’s blog (the entries from 10/11-2/13). From my admittedly cursory review, Shannon appears to be preoccupied with methodological purity. In that respect he falls into a trap all-to-common among Van Tilians: he devotes nearly all his time to talking about how to do apologetics rather than doing what he talks about. Leaves without fruit (Lk 13:6-9).

It’s like designing the perfect racecar, when you have no intention of ever racing the car. The car is always in the garage, as you keep refining your technology. Something to look at rather than drive. Something to admire. Buff and polish. But heaven forbid you should ever do anything with it.

v) Van Til talked about the metaphysics of knowledge. James and Greg are turning that programmatic claim into an actual, full-fledged argument. Redeeming the IOUs. That makes a significant advance in Van Tilian apologetics.

They are rewarded for their efforts by aghast expressions. How could they be so presumptuous as to stray beyond Van Tilian flash cards to unpack the claim and furnish supporting arguments!

Now I’m going to comment on Shannon’s recent “Necessity, Univocism, and the Triune God: A Response to Anderson and Welty.” (I simply copy/pasted excerpts from a PDF. This resulted in some transcriptional infelicities, but I won’t take the time to tidy that up.)

To put it another way, a proposition is essentially 'about' something, as AW note; propositions are essentially intentional (333-5). (This quality of intentionality or 'aboutness' serves AW as the link between propositions and personal minds.) So a proposition is essentially parasitic on whatever it is about. Apart from the thing it is about, a proposition has no referent and no meaning and thus cannot bear truth-value.6 The law of identity is an attribution, a de dicto sort of thing, of de re necessity to the state of affairs A=A, but the attribution itself—the law, the proposition—can have only de dicto necessity.

In an attempt to make them more like the sorts of objects that can have necessity, AW affirm that the laws of logic exist; but this is irrelevant. Real existence, particularly mental, intentional real existence, does not change the fact that the modality of propositions, just like their truth-value, is derivative and dependent upon a state of affairs distinct from any proposition 'about' that state of affairs. Quite the contrary. Affirming the mental existence of propositions in fact emphasizes the intentional and thus derivative nature of propositions and confirms that the modality of a proposition is merely de dicto.

Suppose God thinks to himself, “I am omnipotent,” or “I am the Son of the Father.”

Are divinely self-referential and/or intratrinitarian propositions derivative, parasitic, de dicto entities? Do they lack de re necessity?

If there is no possible world in which the law of noncontradiction is false, it does not follow necessarily that the LNC is true in all possible worlds. For to not be false, a proposition does not have to exist; a proposition might not exist at all and still be not false. But to not fail to be true, it must exist.

What does it even mean to say “a proposition might not exist at all”?

According to the doctrines of divine simplicity and aseity, God's mind and thoughts are identical to his being; the only necessarily existing thing, because God did not have to create…

Actually, isn’t the theory of divine simplicity in tension with divine freedom? Doesn’t divine simplicity make it difficult to finesse a principled distinction between necessary truths and contingent truths? Between intrinsic and extrinsic relations? Between what God is and what he wills?

…is God himself; thus God does not necessarily think anything other than himself. No thought content can be imputed to God essentially, in the possible world which is only God, short of implying that the thought content is identifiable with the being of God. Neither the proposition in question, nor any of the laws of logic, are part of the essential being of God: they are not God.

But that’s a false dichotomy, for possible worlds can be a subset of God’s self-knowledge. God knows what God can do. Possible worlds are variations on divine omnipotence.

Univocal mind. Univocal terms imply unitarian ontology.

How does that implication follow? Does the Father have a univocal concept of the Son? If so, does that imply unitarianism rather than Trinitarianism?

Wouldn’t it make more sense for Shannon to claim that univocal terms imply a pantheistic ontology? Of course, I don’t think that’s correct, but if he’s saying univocity blurs the Creator/creature distinction, wouldn’t pantheism be the corresponding category, rather than unitarianism?

 AW use  “mind,” “thought,” and “proposition” univocally. In their argument, all of these terms, familiar to us in the created realm, in the context of our knowledge and familiarity, are applied univocally to the mind and being of the uncreated God. When we say “a thought requires a mind,” what do we mean by mind? If no distinction appears, the use of the term suggests that there is one kind of mind; and of that kind, AW argue, there must be at least one which exists in all possible worlds, but that 'necessarily existing' mind is essentially of a kind with minds that exist in only some possible worlds.

He’s committing the word-concept fallacy. The fact that the same word is used doesn’t mean one can’t draw conceptual distinctions between the nature of God’s mind and the nature of man’s mind. At the same time, they share some things in common–which makes them both mental.

The problem with couching possible worlds in terms of logical necessity should be obvious: it is tautologous to say that the laws of logic are true in all possible worlds, and it is pure stipulation. It clearly indicates that we have reached the explanatory limits of this explanatory category.

i) To begin with, what’s wrong with reaching explanatory bedrock? Isn’t that inevitable at some point in the analysis? The only question is whether we stop prematurely.

ii) Moreover, it’s not tautologous, but linear. It’s not saying the same thing in different words, but explicating and grounding one thing by reference to something else.

In other words, possible worlds delineate, by pure stipulation, the boundaries for metaphysical speculation. We who use them for that purpose endorse this surrender to the laws of logic as the most basic and non-negotiable principles of intelligibility; we agree to play by those rules because we can neither find nor imagine any less controversial ones.

James and Greg aren’t treating the laws of logic as the most basic and non-negotiable principles of intelligibility. Rather, they are nesting the laws of logic in the mind of God. So there is an underlying explanation. Again, we need to distinguish between the metaphysical level at which the laws of logic subsist and the explanatory level.

The problem of a univocal notion of necessity comes to the fore in of apparent paradox. In 2 Kings 6 an axehead floats; it rises to the surface of the waters of the Jordan river.

i) First of all, that would be a contingent fact, not a necessary truth.

ii) Second, how is that paradoxical? The miracle involves changing the natural, normal conditions in some way or another. Could involve changing the properties of water into something that’s not water, or changing the composition of the axehead, or changing the relationship between water and a heavier object by interfering with gravity at that particular time and place. We could speculate on how it happens. But I don’t think it’s paradoxical.

iii) How can he even use that example if he rejects univocity? In that event, what do the terms refer to? What’s an axehead?

In John 2 Jesus changes water to wine.

i) A contingent fact, not a necessary truth.

ii) How is that paradoxical? It’s not saying water has the properties of wine. It’s not simultaneously ascribing contradictory properties of the same object. Rather, one kind of thing is changed into another kind of thing. Where’s the paradox? Unless we say change itself is paradoxical, a la Zeno, McTaggart, et al. but that wouldn’t be confined to miracles.

 On a larger scale, there are the problems of freedom and election and of providence and evil. All of these are thought to be at least apparently paradoxical. And the reason for this perception, and for the tremendous efforts it evokes toward resolution, is that it is assumed that notions of logical relations and of logical necessity operate univocally; it is assumed that they apply equally to man and to God.

The alleged problem of freedom and election or providence and evil isn’t logical, but moral or metaphysical. We’re not denying the God unconditionally elects some while reprobating others. We’re not denying that God providentially governs all events. The terms are not ambiguous.

It is assumed that the laws of logic, as we articulate them and have come to understand them, obtain identically or are equally true in all possible worlds, even in eternity past, before creation. If, however, we confess first the unique ontological self-sufficiency of the triune creator God, and, indeed, the (moral) authority and (epistemological and soteriological) necessity of divine self-disclosure in Scripture, then we always have ready in hand the derivative, dependent, and partial nature of the laws of logic. There is no possible world in which an iron axehead floats; This one did.

Why is there no possible world in which an iron axehead floats? Where’s the argument? What makes his assertion even prima facie plausible?

This is a true or even only an apparent contradiction only if it is assumed that our logical tools exist independently of God, and apply equally to creator and creature.10

i) Who said a floating axehead was an apparent (much less true) contradiction? At best, it would only be contradictory if ordinary conditions obtain. But the miracle presupposes a new and additional factor: God doing something that alters the usual conditions.

ii) He also fails to distinguish between a logical proposition and a concrete object.

It's likely that the incentive for positing these second order thoughts in the divine mind, distinct from content rich first order thoughts, is largely the preservation of the purely formal nature of the laws of logic, which is crucial to their existing (or being true) necessarily. God must think the laws of logic because the laws of logic exist necessarily. So this much is clear: AW are theologizing by the sheer force of logical necessity alone.

In an attempt to maintain pure formality and sustain the notion of necessity they've built their argument upon, AW claim that on some level distinct from his first order thoughts, God thinks exclusively about the form of his first order thoughts. That claim depends on the separability of form and content in God's first order thoughts, which is to lean on a broken reed. For second order thoughts to be purely formal, they must have as their content only the abstracted logical relations of God's first order thoughts. And if the content of first and second order thoughts is distinct, isn't the obvious implication that there are distinct first and second order divine minds?13 In that case the second order thoughts and the second order mind, rather than the first order, are more properly said to exist necessarily, as they only are purely formal.

And so why not say that God essentially thinks only the laws of logic, and these give form to his other thoughts, should he have any other thoughts? What is God at this point anyway—is he not merely logic thinking itself? Or, put it this way: what now of God's first order thoughts? What are those thoughts about? What is the stuff that God subtracts from his thoughts in order to think about them qua thoughts? And if only thoughts about thoughts qua thoughts are necessary, why suppose that God has first order thoughts at all? Aren't these thoughts contingent? The notion of thoughts about thoughts as thoughts in the divine mind is incoherent.

Doesn’t Trinitarianism imply second-order thoughts? What about this thought: “I am the Son of the Father”?

It is also pure fiction, forced upon AW by their commitment to a univocal notion of necessity, and standing in the place where AW should have been led to consult the riches of historical theology in which one finds orthodox protestantism consistently denying that God thinks discursively, infers one thing from another, or has propositional knowledge.14

i) Really? Orthodox Protestantism denies that God has propositional knowledge? How did he pull that out of the hat?

ii) There is no process of inference in the divine mind. No temporal succession. But God timelessly understands timeless implications.

iii) The standard Reformed position is that God doesn’t learn about the world from the world. God is not dependent on the world for anything he knows. Indeed, God has nothing to learn in the first place. God knows the world indirectly by knowing his plan for the world. In that sense, God lacks inferential knowledge of the world.

But I don’t think James and Greg deny that in their paper.

However, God's self-knowledge involves God's timeless knowledge of all logical relations.

This leads to a third theological concern. According to the doctrine of divine simplicity, God's thoughts are identical to his being. Indeed, AW think this much is true of any mind: “. . . thoughts belong essentially to the minds that produce them” (336 n.31). So if we think thoughts that are essential to God's being—exactly those thoughts that God thinks about his own thoughts as thoughts—are we not participating in the divine essence? The same thoughts—univocal thoughts—belong essentially to our minds and to God's mind. Given simplicity, in other words, unless we deny that our thoughts are ever identical to God's, we flirt with pantheism or apotheosis.

That confuses knowing the same truths with being what you know. Must I be a tree to know something about trees?

Or, hoping to maintain simplicity and the ontological distinction between God and creation, we may say that the laws of logic are abstract objects existing independently of both God and man.15 In that case, perhaps God knows the laws of logic in all possible worlds because he is omniscient in all possible worlds and the laws of logic exist in all possible worlds, not because he essentially thinks the laws of logic.

Of course, James and Greg expressly reject that model.

Even more troubling is this question: would we be able to affirm in this case that God's Word is essentially—necessarily, in all possible worlds—self-consistent and trustworthy?

If anything, it’s it harder to maintain the trustworthy, self-consistent character of God’s word when he rejects univocity. Doesn’t that mean the Bible is just partially logical, partially true? What we have in Scripture isn’t verity, but verisimilitude.

Traditionally there are three choices in terms of the meaning of theological language: equivocal, univocal, and analogical. AW implicitly reject the thesis that language and concepts are equivocal and say nothing intelligible about God. For readers of this journal, this is uncontroversial. Enjoying equally broad consensus in the history of Christian theology is a rejection of univocism: when we say “God is good” and “John is good,” it is clear that the predicates are not identical.16  Orthodox protestant thought takes theological language analogically and grounded in verbal divine self-revelation.

Analogy and univocity aren’t necessarily opposed. You can have a theory of analogical predication which allows for univocity if you compare two things at the relevant level of generality or abstraction.

On the basis of the voluntary self-revelation of God, we have true knowledge, and yet, since God is incomprehensible to the creature, our knowledge is never exhaustive. Add to this the metaphysics of the Creator-creature relationship: the creation is a contingent image of the Creator. All things are from him, to him, and through him (Rom 11:36, indicating aseity); and everything that was created was created by and through the Word (Col 1:6, John 1:3, indicating the triune economy of the act of creation). So we understand our theological knowledge and categories as applying to God truly but incompletely, imitatively and derivatively. So our concepts are analogical.  Not only the nature of the relation as analogical, but the order figures in as well: God is the original or the archetype, and we—and our knowledge—are the analogue, or the ectype. As in any analogy, there is an original and there is an analogue, and the order is irreversible—in the Creator-creature analogy more than in any other. God is the original; we and the created order are derivative. In sum, the irreducible ontological distinction between Creator and creature, and precisely this archtypal-ectypcal or original-analogue order, give us revelationally grounded, analogical theological predication. We have true knowledge, so we reject equivocism; but because of the 'ontological distance' between the Creator and the creature, our knowledge is ever partial; so we reject univocism.

There’s a sense in which I can agree with this. However, Shannon is simply using buzzwords like “ectypal” and “analogical.” He’s not giving the reader a model of analogical predication or ectypal knowledge. He’s not fleshing out the concepts. And he’s skating over the complexities and difficulties of articulating a satisfactory theory of analogy. He attacks James and Greg on philosophical grounds, but he doesn’t present a philosophically rigorous alternative. Instead, he just retreats into pious formulas. These don’t solve any problems. They are merely verbal placeholders. All the hard work remains to be done–assuming it can be done.

So in Christian thought, triunity is more basic than either threeness or oneness…

That’s modalistic. That makes Trinitarian oneness and threeness secondary to something more primary. A projection or epiphenomenon of something more basic.

Now I’m going to comment on some statements by Vern Pothress, in his forthcoming book on Logic: A God-Centered Approach to the Foundation of Western Thought.

Before I comment, I’d like to say that to his credit, Poythress isn’t one of those Van Tilians who spends all his time talking about apologetic method. Poythress does practice apologetics in books like Redeeming Science, Redeeming Sociology, Inerrancy and Worldview, Inerrancy and the Gospels.

Something similar to this argument can be found in James N. Anderson and Greg Welty, “The Lord of Non-Contradiction: An Argument for God from Logic,” Philosophia Christi 13:2 (2011): 321–338. But it appears to me that this article does not take into account the presence of analogy and the Creator-creature distinction in logical reasoning about God (see chapter 24 below).

If he’s saying the Trinitarian relations are merely analogous to logical relations, that’s a problem, for that would generate three layers of reality: Trinitarian relations, logical relations (which are somehow distinct from Trinitarian relations), and concreta. If logical relations are analogous to Trinitarian relations, then they have a realty that’s distinct from God, without being creatures. Entities which are analogous to Trinitarian relations, but not identical. So what's their metaphysical status?

The problem, in relation to the ontology of logic, is that theological analogy usually involves a contrast between transcendent reality and mundane reality. And, presumably, logical relations would be on the transcendent (=divine) side of the distinction–although they’d have concrete analogates. If, however, logical relations are merely analogous to the Trinity, then what are they? What’s their ontological status? Are they transcendent, but different from God? Are they a tertium quid? Not quite divine and not quite mundane?

If any concrete piece of reasoning is, by theological definition, an imperfect creaturely representation of uncreated logic.

Isn’t the claim that “any concrete piece of reasoning is, by theological definition, an imperfect creaturely representation of uncreated logic” itself an imperfect creaturely representation of uncreated logic? So is that claim an imperfect representation of a truth?

We need to distinguish between logical arguments, and arguments for the ontology of logic. Needless to say, Greg and James are using ectypal logical arguments, in the sense that their arguments reflect their human understanding of logic; but that's distinct from what they are arguing for or arguing about. They are arguing for or about the archetypal logical truths or logical relations constituted by God’s mind.

Can we have one term, father, that applies both to God and to human creatures who are biological fathers? Clearly we can. But God’s fatherhood and human fatherhood are not on the same level. So the relation between the two is one of analogy rather than strict identity.

One problem with this comparison is that formal logic is fact free (“topic neutral”). A formal system of entailment relations that doesn’t make constantive claims. Rather, it provides an abstract framework into which you can plug factual premises or truth-claims. Formal logic isn’t comparing one thing with another, is it? We need to distinguish logic from what we do with logic. James and Greg aren’t talking about the content which we plug into logical syllogisms, but the necessary metaphysical system of entailments.

He seems to be confusing whether logic is worldview neutral with whether logic is content neutral? There’s an obvious sense in which the ontology of logic is worldview sensitive, viz. conceptualism, constructivism, fictionalism, platonic realism. These go with different views of reality. And you have the whole effort at a naturalized logic, to match a naturalistic or materialistic worldview.

In that sense, logic is not neutral. But of course, James and Greg weren’t arguing for neutrality at that level. Just the opposite. They were presenting a theistic foundation for logic.

Conversely, that kind of “neutrality” is very different from topic neutrality.

God and Propositions: The Saga Continues

http://www.proginosko.com/2012/07/god-and-propositions-the-saga-continues/

Arguments from experience

Like many Christian apologists, William Lane Craig deploys a variety of arguments. These include a priori arguments, as well as arguments from evidence in the public domain.

However, Craig also keeps in his back pocket (as it were) the argument from religious experience. Specifically, his appeal to the witness of the Spirit.

Needless to say, this argument doesn’t originate with Craig. Subject to various refinements, that argument has been around for centuries. Indeed, it’s one type of evidence which Bible writers like St. John and St. Paul invoke.

But Craig’s appeal to religious experience really gets under the skin of some atheists. Loftus is one example. He takes a swipe at that argument in TCD. I responded to his objection in TID. Loftus has since replied to me, and I have offered yet another rejoinder.

However, I’d also like to discuss this at a general level. The appeal to religious experience isn’t an esoteric appeal–like a mystical trance. At the risk of stating the obvious, every experience is essential private. Even a collective experience can only be privately accessed by each individual percipient. We don’t have a group consciousness. While it’s possible for two different individuals to share the same object of experience, your first-person perspective is intransitive.

Indeed, this is traditionally been a seedbed for skepticism. And I don’t think there’s a direct counterargument in the offing.

But here is one of the areas in which transcendental theism is helpful. If God made human beings with the same cognitive apparatus and sensory relays, then my private experience can be analogous to your private experience.

Of course, there’s also a vast philosophical literature endeavoring to distinguish between a veridical experience and a delusive veridical experience. Claiming to have a personal experience, religious or otherwise, isn’t necessarily bed-rock. Some experiential claims are defeasible. But, pace Loftus, we can’t very well dismiss the argument from religious experience as if experiential appeals are simply out of bounds. Loftus would have nothing left to work with if he made that move. Indeed, we generally use experience to correct experience.

(Strictly speaking, every experience is veridical. What is not necessarily veridical is our interpretation of the experience.)

What's a presupposition?

Dan Chapa seems to be confused about what Van Til meant by “presuppositions.” He makes oddball statements like “If God's existance [sic] can be demonstrated, then why presuppose it?” “Well given my observation that I have arms, my also presupposing that I have arms is minimally irrelevant, if not downright impossible.”

However, I don’t think there’s anything mysterious about Van Til’s usage. From my reading, Van Til uses “presuppositional” as a synonym for “transcendental” reasoning. Indeed, one synonym for presuppositional apologetics is transcendental theism.

So what does it mean to reason presuppositionally (i.e. transcendentally)? Well, as one scholar defines it:

Transcendental arguments are partly non-empirical, often anti-skeptical arguments focusing on necessary enabling conditions either of coherent experience or the possession or employment of some kind of knowledge or cognitive ability, where the opponent is not in a position to question the fact of this experience, knowledge, or cognitive ability, and where the revealed preconditions include what the opponent questions. Such arguments take as a premise some obvious fact about our mental life—such as some aspect of our knowledge, our experience, our beliefs, or our cognitive abilities—and add a claim that some other state of affairs is a necessary condition of the first one. Transcendental arguments most commonly have been deployed against a position denying the knowability of some extra-mental proposition, such as the existence of other minds or a material world. Thus these arguments characteristically center on a claim that, for some extra-mental proposition P, the indisputable truth of some general proposition Q about our mental life requires that P.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/trans-ar/

Van Till gives this type of argument a specifically Christian twist.