The One True God as Described in the Christian Bible Exists

I'd been considering starting a debate on the presuppositional apologetic myself, and am enthusiastic about addressing the Francis Schaffer version of this case (per his post). The Pro case consists of 2 contains. The first is on uniformity, the second on logic. I think it's obvious I need to establish the ability for Con siding with atheists, to reason at all, that is assert logic is fully possible, prior to arguing for a specific fact, the uniformity of nature. So I will address the 2nd contention in this post and address the first in the next round. The flaw in the affirmative case is a bit subtle and it rests partially on the problem that the case makes arguments addressed within the field of logic but uses an imprecision of language which is common in everyday speech. The bulk of my first round rebuttal is simply going to consist of proposing definitions and making a few obvious points. It is my contention that Contention 2 rests on an equivocation and once the proper vocabulary exists the argument falls apart. Let me start by definition the term "propositional calculus" (. http://en.wikipedia.org...) as a formal system for manipulating symbols. The manipulated symbols can be interpreted as "propositions", hence the name. There are many different propositional calculi, and they can be constructed arbitrarily by simply creating rules. The first rule in our standard proposition calculus is: (If p then q; p; therefore q. Called Modus Ponens). The particular the law in the standard propositional calculus my opponent wants is the law of non-contradiction (technically called "tertium non dater"): (for any statement p, it is never the case that both p and not-p are true). We can also create non standard propositional calculus and in fact people, do this for situations when the standard rule logic doesn't work well. For example modal logics allow us to manipulate propositions that are not just true or false, but rather "necessarily true" or "possibly true". Another example is a "many valued logic" where we can manipulate propositions with values like: true, false, indeterminable. SQL (. http://en.wikipedia.org...(SQL)), a computer language which sits under most major applications in use today uses this sort of propositional calculi. Another common example is fuzzy logics (. http://www.fuzzy-logic.com...) which have notions like "very" (i. e. very cold) or "normal". This sorts of logical systems operate many of our safety regulatory devices like the antilock-braking on cars. Intuitionist logic is concerned with "justified" rather than true and thus deletes form the standard logic the rule that (not not x is equal to x for any statement x). So at this point I want to make a series of assertions: 1) There are many propositional calculi, that is many logics not a single logic. 2) Such systems can be constructed essentially arbitrarily.3) These systems by definition allow one to take given sets of propositions and create new ones. I should note that nowhere in these constructions has been any assumption of the existence of god(s) or absolutes. What is missing so far from this more formal definition is any way to determine if a propositional calculus is "true" in a meaningful sense. For example, I could construct a propositional calculus that has a rule like "all statements starting with the letter r are true", and in some deeper sense, the way Pro meant it, this logic will be false. But at least at this point I've proven atheists have equal access to using logic. So let's turn to the truth of logics thus constructed. In practice we've been using standard logic for thousands of years. These rules are obvious, intuitive, and cross cultural boundaries. Once a student is first exposed to the formal definition of standard propositional calculi, they see it as sensible, "oh that's a good way to describe how I already thought". They don't see the standard propositional calculi as some alien way to think. And in the more limited domains where people use alternate propositional logics this also holds. Propositional logics that are valuable are valuable because they are formal representations of truths that were intuitively obvious and they are intuitively obvious because they correspond so directly to observable reality. This strong intuitive correspondence was why Pro thought of standard logic as being unique / distinguished, and in his initial case it is clear he couldn't even imagine there were alternate logics! That is to say the connection between empirical verification of a logic, and the logic is not a complex process. Further, people have independently constructed propositional calculi with totally different rules and statements of the rules to describe similar phenomena. Invariably mathematical logic quickly shows the two logics are equivalent (that is given the same axioms they would both produce the same results). So the proposal for verifying the truth of a propositional calculi is very simple. a) Take true statementsb) Use the propositional calculi to church out other statements. c) Some of these created statements are empirically verifiable. If so verify them. And this (a)-(c) process is exactly what we do when we built propositional calculi. There is nothing in theism or atheism that prevents this process from undergoing its natural course. Now Pro might still retort "Well how do you know you aren't wrong? Sure your logic is working fine across millions of propositions for many billions of people living in thousands of cultures over many thousands of years. But how do you know they didn't miss something? " And the answer is, "they might very well have. But given that tremendous level of empirical verification they would have had to have missed something that is incredibly subtle and infrequent. That is something that is not damaging to thought in any meaningful way what-so-ever. " There may very well be a propositional calculi with tens of millions of rules that is a better one than the standard. Lets assume there were a Perfect-logic. We first note, Perflect-logic would have to agree with standard-logic for almost everything. That is standard logic would have be an excellent approximation for practical use. Were not the case, the flaws in standard-logic would have been discovered. More importantly, Perfect-logic by the very fact that it has these tens of millions of rules is impractical. Just considering arbitrary pairs of rules involves something on the order of a quadrillion calculations, the number of rules squared. This is more thoughts than I or anyone else would be able to complete in an entire life. So such a logic is simply beyond my and everyone else's mental capacity. That is even if I knew for sure about the existence and correctness of Perfect-logic it would be mostly of some sort of theoretical interest. I would still use standard logic for my reasoning, by virtue of the fact that "correct" / "true" logics are those that correspond in a very meaningful way to human thought. And that is the key point, a logic is nothing more than how humans describe collective describe the nature of an empirical reality they are confronted with. The logic is true because it works and it feels right. One can assign probabilities to the possibility that a "false" logic would get through the trillions of empirical verifications that ours has, and the probability is so vanishing small as to be meaningless concern.