Presuppositional Arguments For God Are Incoherent Fallacious Nonsense!

Thanks…. Con.. I. Preface I am sat here in disbelief at my opponent’s rebuttal, which was largely a massive strawman, and largely irrelevant to this debate. My arguments aren’t overly complex, especially considering this is an epistemological argument which Pro is attempting to show is invalid and ‘incoherent nonsense’, as such he is required to use and understand a certain threshold of the relevant philosophy. It would be absurd for someone to claim to refute Pythagoras’ theorem, or Evolution without a grounding in the respective fields first. Anyway… II. Sye Ten Bruggencate & Christianity Pro commits both a straw man and ad homenum fallacy in attacking Sye Ten Bruggencate. While Sye does engage in presuppositional apologetics, his arguments simply aren’t representative of all what presuppositionalism is. Attacking Sye Ten Bruggencate does in no way make headway on the argument itself, and as such becomes ad homenum (since he’s attacking the person using them and now the arguments).[1] Pro commits the strawman fallacy by deliberately ignoring the bulk of my arguments and continuing to attack Sye Ten’s representations of them, I hardly care for what Sye Ten thinks or has presented. I have presented my own arguments in this debate which also fall under the presuppositional argument umbrella, which if valid and coherent would clearly negate the resolution.[2] Moreover I have made absolutely no reference to Christianity, and I explicitly stated in my opening round that my arguments do not argue for any specific God, that and I gave a very specific definition of God in my opening round. I am rather flabbergasted that this basic point went over my opponent’s head. Hence I have absolutely no idea why he’s attacking the Adam & Eve story for instance. III. Plato & Morals Pro’s repeatedly attacks on Plato’s philosophy (why?). To be fair I am not fully familiar with it, but I am familiar enough to know I have not engaged with it. Why on Earth is Pro attacking Plato? I can only assume he thinks I am using Plato’s work because of the title of my references, which if opened people would quickly see it’s actually a title of a philosophy encyclopaedia, and a very comprehensive one where Plato is just a brand. Pro continues to defend morals from naturalism, to which I hardly see the relevance to this debate, presuppositional arguments are epistemological arguments, not moral arguments. I explitly stated that morals are at best a collary to what the arguments conclude. By what basis can one conclude something is ‘moral’? To do so would require the use of logic and reason, and knowledge of what moral actions generally are. Yet I have demonstrated that these are things Pro cannot justifiably use. IV. Justification Holy crap, I have already written an entire page on correcting strawmen and other irrelevancies, now to refute Pro’s more relevant points. Pro asserts that justification comes from experience, and gives numerous examples of this, however this falls foul of exactly what I have mentioned earlier: 1. It presupposes reliable sense faculties 2. It presupposes reliable cognitive faculties 3. It presupposes the reliability of his logic and reason 4. It presupposes the existence of perceived reality Essentially, Pro’s justification all beg the question and necessarily make numerous unsupported assumptions in their own justification. A good example of a world in which reality doesn’t exist as it appears ‘prima facie’ is a solipsist world.[3] In such a universe, the only thing that exists is your own mind, and everything around you are mental constructs. The very computer you are using to type on only exists within your mind, as well as other people. This may sound somewhat absurd, but it is widely regarded within philosophical circles to be a logically consistent version of reality. That and there is no internal way to distinguish between a ‘material reality’, where objections and other people really do exist as material entities, and a ‘sollopsist reality’. Given this to be the case, there is absolutely no way Pro can actually justify his examples, such as your hand having five fingers, or the existence of an alarm clock via perception alone. As such these cannot be ‘knowledge’ as defined, they are just beliefs. Even presupposing material reality to exist, it may well be the case Pro has six fingers, but he will never know about it, because his cognitive and sense faculties don’t perceive the sixth finger. To give an example of this very real phenomena, we each have a blind spot ten times bigger than the full moon, yet we clearly do not perceive this large hole in our vision, as our brain apparently hallucinates it into focus.[4] Take the optical illusions below, which both apparently have the same colour square, yet our mind perceives a different colour to what it being projected. Clearly our sense cognitive faculties do not perceive reality as it really is, assuming it even exists. How can Pro trust his faculties then on more significant issues? Pro quite nicely attests to this problem that the atheist/naturalist will run into with the ‘Problem of Knowledge’. Which in summary demonstrates that we cannot know anything via. purely a posterori experiences, and must be grounded a priori. However according to naturalism, there is no way for one to have anything reliable a priori either, as such we must presuppose supernaturalism lest we commit epistemological suicide. V. Alleged Fallacies I would encourage Pro to research the definitions of these logical fallacies, to which he has claimed two of them. The argument from ignorance and special pleading fallacies. I will use Rationalwiki to give the respective definitions, especially considering it is an atheist-biased source. Argument from ignorance: “Argument from ignorance or argumentum ad ignorantiam in its most formal definition is a logical fallacy that claims the truth of a premise is based on the fact that it has not been proven false, or that a premise is false because it has not been proven true.” Special Pleading: “Special pleading is a formal logical fallacy where a participant demands special considerations for a particular premise of theirs. Usually this is because in order for their argument to work, they need to provide some way to get out of a logical inconsistency — in a lot of cases, this will be the fact that their argument contradicts past arguments or actions. Therefore, they introduce a "special case" or an exception to their rules.” With these definitions in hand we can assess Pro’s reasons for my arguments, and indeed all Presuppositional arguments are guilty of these fallacies: “Thus Presuppositionalist Assertion that all knowledge and morality originates from God, is an Argument From Ignorance Fallacy!” That is not the presuppositionalist assertion, it’s an argument that states without presupposing God, we cannot have knowledge (as defined). Moreover it doesn’t have anything to do with the argument ad ignorantum fallacy since it doesn’t assert something true because it hasn’t been proven false (which is the definition of the fallacy). I have not asserted God’s existence based on the its lack of disproof, nor the argument’s truth for lack of refutation. As such Pro’s claims of an argument ad ignorantum are flat out false. “Assertions without Evidence as Presuppositional Apologetics Assert, can only be False Claims.Because no evidence exists for them! Since they put God outside of Humans ability to Question this God Assertion.They are making special excuses for belief in their God.In Philosophy this is called a Special Pleading Fallacy.” It is only a special pleading fallacy if I am trying to make a special case for God, or special rules. However I have shown in my opening round and this round that the argument is actually about showing that the denial of God’s existence is self-defeating, and also the acceptance of naturalism is self-defeating. As such we are forced to conclude God’s existence lest our reason and perception of reality be reduced to absurdity. So God’s exception to these conditions is something I have demonstrated, rather than just asserted/defined. VI. Conclusion I beg Pro to keep his rebuttals on-topic and on-target for his closing. Back to Pro! VII. References 1. http://rationalwiki.org... 2. http://rationalwiki.org... 3. http://www3.sympatico.ca... 4. http://www.scientificamerican.com... 5. http://rationalwiki.org...