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Sunday, August 06, 2006

TANG

***QUOTE***

How might TANG proceed? Consider logic. Logic presupposes that its principles are necessarily true. However, according to the brand of Christianity assumed by TAG, God created everything, including logic; or at least everything, including logic, is dependent on God. But if something is created by or is dependent on God, it is not necessary--it is contingent on God. And if principles of logic are contingent on God, they are not logically necessary. Moreover, if principles of logic are contingent on God, God could change them. Thus, God could make the law of noncontradiction false; in other words, God could arrange matters so that a proposition and its negation were true at the same time. But this is absurd. How could God arrange matters so that New Zealand is south of China and that New Zealand is not south of it? So, one must conclude that logic is not dependent on God, and, insofar as the Christian worldview assumes that logic so dependent, it is false.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/martin-frame/tang.html

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1.God did not “create” logic. Logic is not an effect of divine mentality.

Rather, logic is constituted by the mind of God. Martin is confusing a necessary condition with a causa process.

The logical laws are mentalistic. They are conceptual relations.

They are dependent on the mind of God in the sense that anything mental is dependent on the existence of a mind. If there were no mind, there would be no mental properties or conceptual relations.

Human logic is a property-instance of divine mentality.

2. X can be “dependent” on Y without either X or Y being unnecessary, just as a set is dependent on its members (e.g. the Mandelbrot set).

Logic is necessarily dependent on a necessary Being.

That doesn’t make it contingent, in the sense that it could be otherwise—anymore than an abstract object like the Mandelbrot set is a contingent object.

3. Martin also fails to state his secular alternative.

Continuing with Martin:

***QUOTE***

Consider science. It presupposes the uniformity of nature: that natural laws govern the world and that there are no violations of such laws. However, Christianity presupposes that there are miracles in which natural laws are violated. Since to make sense of science one must assume that there are no miracles, one must further assume that Christianity is false. To put this in a different way: Miracles by definition are violations of laws of nature that can only be explained by God's intervention. Yet science assumes that insofar as an event as an explanation at all, it has a scientific explanation--one that does not presuppose God [2]. Thus, doing, science assumes that the Christian worldview is false.

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1.This is a stipulative definition. But shouldn’t our first concern be with realty rather than methodology or semantics?

2. What does it mean to say that science disallows the miraculous?

There are first-rate scientists who don’t define science that way. That’s not how Isaac Newton defined science. That’s not how Don Page defines science.

3.Of course, the Bible doesn’t define a miracle as a violation of natural law.

4. There are competing definitions of natural law in the philosophy of science. Is a natural law descriptive or prescriptive?

5. I deny that science presupposes the uniformity of nature. What it presupposes is that a uniform cause will yield a uniform effect.

Given a certain type of cause, a certain type of effect will follow.

A miracle doesn’t “violate” that principle. At most, a miracle changes the underlying cause.

6. The aim is not to make sense of science. Rather, the aim is to make sense of reality. Science is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. At most, the question at issue is not making sense of science, but science making sense of reality.

Martin’s definition is prejudicial. What science can discover the miraculous is just that—a question of observation.

7. Martin is also assuming scientific realism, but that’s not the only game in town.

Continuing with Martin:

***QUOTE***

Consider morality. The type of Christian morality assumed by TAG is some version of the Divine Command Theory, the view that moral obligation is dependent on the will of God. But such a view is incompatible with objective morality. On the one hand, on this view what is moral is a function of the arbitrary will of God; for instance, if God wills that cruelty for its own sake is good, then it is. On the other hand, determining the will of God is impossible since there are different alleged sources of this will (The Bible, the Koran, The Book of Mormon, etc) and different interpretations of what these sources say; moreover; there is no rational way to reconcile these differences. Thus, the existence of an objective morality presupposes the falsehood of the Christian worldview assumed by TAG.

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1.This is simplistic. Morality is not a function of God’s arbitrary will.

Rather, God’s law is preadapted to the nature of the creature, as well as the nature of the world. God designed human nature, and God also designed the natural habitat of man.

God wills his creatures to have a certain nature. And God, by creation and providence, emplaces his creatures within a certain type environment—which he also designed.

Divine law, human nature, and providential circumstances are mutually preadapted.

2. To say that “determining the will of God is impossible since there are different alleged sources of this will (The Bible, the Koran, The Book of Mormon, etc) and different interpretations of what these sources say,” begs the question in a couple of key respects.

It assumes, without benefit of argument, that one cannot verify a genuine revelation or falsify a spurious revelation.

It also assumes, without benefit of argument, that all interpretations are equally good or bad.

But Martin doesn’t believe this. As an atheist, he denies all revelatory claimants. Yet he would be in no position to do that unless he had some criterion for the validation or falsification of revelatory claimants.

In addition, Martin would be unable to critique the Bible or the Koran unless he were able to interpret the Bible or the Koran for himself.

Clearly he believes that he is able to rightly construe the meaning of the Bible or the Koran for purposes of refuting the same.

8 comments:

  1. To me, it's a mystery why atheists use Martin to criticize the transcendental argument for the existence of God. His critique totally misunderstands the argument. That's why I'm not surprised Martin chumped out on his debate with Bahnsen.

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  2. Go here and check out Scott Oliphint's audio titled "Something Much too Plain to Say." Oliphint is critical of "Martin and his minions" with dealing with different attributes of God.

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  3. Could you elaborate more on your defense of morality and how we can know it and the refutation of TANG's argument against it. I found what you wrote a litte unclear (at least for my feeble mind).

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  4. Anonymous,

    Martin is claiming that, according to Christian ethics, morality is an arbitrary divine fiat. When, God could decree the opposite from one day to the next.

    But this is a completely artificial analysis of Christian ethics.

    God is not merely the Lawgiver, but the Creator. He endowed human beings with a certain nature. So God's laws are suited to the nature which he designed for us.

    God also created the world we live in. The world is the field of our decision-making.

    So God's laws are also suited to the nature of the situation we find ourselves in.

    God's laws are therefore preadapted to human nature and human circumstance alike.

    We know them primarily by knowing God's revelation in Scripture.

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  5. God is not merely the Lawgiver, but the Creator. He endowed human beings with a certain nature. So God's laws are suited to the nature which he designed for us.

    Right. God had no choice in the matter - He could only create what a God like Him could create, nothing more, nothing less. How can God create more or less than what He has created? God had no choice in what kind of nature He gave to man, and no choice in the kind of laws that are suited to that nature. Therefore, Martin's conception of Christian ethics is wrong, for Martin assumes that God has this ability to choose whatever. But God had no choice in these things. God could not have chosen that lying at a job interview, for instance, is good. God could not have chosen that disrespecting a parent is good. And even though these laws are naturally suited to our nature within the field of our decision-making, there's no way we could have discovered this without revelation. For God had no choice in his inability to create man with an intellect that could discover such things on his own. God had no choice but to create man completely helpless intellectually. That's why man needs revelation: he needs to be told. Martin is too immersed in his autonomous worldview even to grasp this. He assumes that, just because he can discover truths through his own intellect, that man was meant to discover truths through his own intellect. But that's not the case. How does Martin know that the truths he's discovered are true without God's confirming revelation? At best he's only guessing. But why put faith in his guessing? It's not like he was created with such abilities.

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  6. Organ donor,

    Or you going out of your way to be obtuse, or does this come naturally to you?

    Nothing I said implies that God has no choice over what he makes.

    But given choice A, certain relations obtain. Given choice B, other relations obtain. A possible world involves a set of interrelated elements.

    Also, the way you frame the issue is nonsensical. By definition, the only nature that man can have is a human nature.

    God could make a creature with a different "kind" of nature, but if it didn't have a human nature, it wouldn't be a human being.

    That's what makes a human being a natural kind.

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  7. Hey Thanks Steve! Your second post cleared things up.

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  8. Organ donor,

    One organ I don't want you to donate is your brain....


    Thanks

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