Bumbling presuppositionalists

Uh, presuppositionalism, uh, is represented on YouTube by people like Paleocrites and Antiplagion. I imagine it goes down very well with Christians, and it's full of snappy sound bites like "the impossibility of the contrary." It allows you to say to your atheist opponent conversation-stopping things like, "How can you even make an argument when your worldview doesn't provide the necessary preconditions for rationality?"

Um, and especially if you're sick and tired of being called superstitious and deluded, it gives you a chance to respond by saying atheism itself is irrational and inconsistent. But presuppositionalism remains completely unconvincing for people who are non-theists. In this video, I'm going to read through something I prepared, which talks about one area in which the presuppositionalist loses his non-theist audience.

One of the things I think presuppositionalism gets right is the realization that we all have basic assumptions that we use in order to evaluate other things. These presuppositions can't be explained in terms of prior causes; we just accept them. What the theist tries to do, then, rather than directly argue that his presupposition, God exists, is correct, is that he tries to show that the atheist's presuppositions don't gel with how he actually lives his life.

So, he tries to give an internal critique. For the sake of the discussion, the theist temporarily accepts the worldview of the atheist and tries to show some inconsistency. The first problem that the theist has is that atheism doesn't imply a particular worldview at all. All it says is that the atheist worldview doesn't include gods. Unless the atheist has explicitly stated their worldview, the theist is in a poor position to begin a meaningful critique, but he goes ahead anyway.

He critiques an imagined atheist worldview that he mistakenly believes is a fair representation of materialism. Now, either he hasn't done any research about what materialists believe, or his own Christian notions are so ingrained into his way of thinking that he isn't even aware that he's mixing worldviews, or probably both. Because the worldview he ends up critiquing is a crippled hybrid of materialism and Christianity, and it's no surprise that it topples easily.

For instance, the Christian complains that intangible things like the laws of logic cannot exist in a materialist universe. The reason he says this is that he's imported his own Platonic notion of abstract concepts as material entities—sorry, as immaterial entities that exist out there in a supernatural realm. Needless to say, no materialist believes this, and so this internal critique is of no relevance to anyone who subscribes to materialism.

At this point, the impossibility of the contrary looks like nothing more than a theist bundling his attempt at an internal critique and failing to notice that he's messed up. Errors are made in all three areas of philosophical inquiry. In ontology, the theist asks the atheist to account for the existence of love, justice, logic, etc., without bothering to find out what the atheist thinks that these things are.

Speaking for myself, the laws of logic, according to my worldview, aren't out there governing reality, but they supervene on our brains and are an accurate reflection of the most general aspects of the reality in which we find ourselves. In axiology, when the theist complains that an atheist has no way of determining what is moral, he's ignoring the fact that an atheist has a completely different conception of where morality comes from and what it is.

If you're going to provide an internal critique of an atheist's worldview, you'll need to understand what the atheist's conception of morality is. And please, don't commit the fallacy of division. Here's how it looks in case you're not sure: premise one, humans are made of molecules; premise two, molecules don't deserve to be treated with kindness; conclusion, humans don't deserve to be treated with kindness.

In epistemology, be careful not to assume that the atheist feels the need for the same level of certainty as you do. Don't forget that in a materialist worldview, the fact that something complex has arisen from non-conscious processes doesn't make it arbitrary, since everything ultimately arises from non-conscious processes in materialism. In fact, the opposite is true.

In my worldview, our most fundamental sense of right and wrong is an emergent property of millions of years of evolution and an inherent part of what it means to be human. From this perspective, a morality that depends on the whim of a super dictator is a textbook example of arbitrariness. So, if you feel tempted to use the word "arbitrary" anywhere in your internal critique of materialism, it's probably a sign that you haven't left your Christian beliefs at the door. Please back up and try again.