Presuppositional Arguments For God Are Incoherent Fallacious Nonsense!

Thanks Pro. I. Preface I am bitterly disappointed in my opponent’s last round, and somewhat annoyed, especially given he concedes he pretty much ignored most of my first round. Anyway, I will make a handful of rebuttals and tie things off. II. Straw-Men I am literally screaming at my computer screen at some of the things I read in the second and last rounds by Pro, let me provide a definition of a straw-man to make things crystal clear. “A straw man is an intentional misrepresentation of an opponent's position, often used in debates with unsophisticated audiences to make it appear that the opponent's arguments are more easily defeated than they are.”[1] Pro has done this time and time again in this debate, he has continued to attack Christian Apologetics, which has nothing to do with this debate whatsoever, despite being corrected on this in every single round. There is nothing inherent in presuppositional arguments that necessitate a Christian God and theology. I provided a very specific definition of the God I was arguing for in my opening round: “God – Entity in which knowledge and logic are grounded” That’s IT. Pro later commits the most blatent straw man argument I have ever seen in my life when he deliberately re-writes my syllogism to say something completely different, and attacks the rewritten argument!!! “P1 Without presupposing (Yahweh (7th Century BCE Invention of Bedouin Pastoralists) one cannot justify their reasoning (ability to think) and Logic ( thinking framework)… …Premise 1: Is a Blank Assertion or an assertion without evidence or an Argument from Ignorance fallacy!” Well… no sh*t! Fortunately I never made anything remotely like this argument! Pro later makes another strawman: “These destroy the Presuppositional Apologetics claim that all humans are born with a concept of God” No they don’t, it doesn’t logically follow from the presuppositionalist position. Some apologists may advocate for this but that is not representative of ‘presuppositional arguments’ in general, and has nothing to do with what I argued. Pro also falsely states I believes he was being oversimplistic, I only said he needs an appropriate philosophical competence in order to refute epistemological arguments in a way to show them ‘incoherent and fallacious’, as the resolution demands. III. Personal Knowledge. Pro attempts to qualify some sort of knowledge as ‘personal knowledge’, which he defined as: “Personal, Knowledge is whatever an Individual considers to be Truth.” Well, that’s just the definition of ‘belief’, and there is nothing to say that this belief corresponds with reality, which is the objective truth, which is the only thing that matters when it comes to knowledge. Pro cannot justify these beliefs, and hence cannot possess knowledge as defined. Pro seems to affirm this later: “Even if we were brains in vats, we would still hold personal perceptions of what we believe to be real. This is personal knowledge of what we perceive it to be true.” Believing something to be true in spite of what objective reality is called a delusion. As such, Pro has already lost this debate. Pro attempts to justify his beliefs by appealing to the ‘cumulative consensus of humans’, but this is just a blatent ad populum fallacy. The number of believers has no bearing on the objective truth of a claim.[2] IV. God Note that I never advocated for any ‘special knowledge’ or ‘revelation’, I only argued that presupposing God and supernaturalism is necessary to have reliable and dependable logic and reasoning. I argued that denying this is a self-defeating proposition. Pro asserts my P1 is a blank presumption, but ignores the definition of God I gave, which is that god grounds logic and reason. A mechanistic explanation is not necessary, although some argue for it being part of God’s nature, for example.[3] V. What the Presuppositional Argument Isn’t The presuppositional argument doesn’t in any way argue that atheists and naturalists cannot reason and use logic, not at all, it only argues that their beliefs (or lack of) are self-defeating. People clearly can hold false beliefs and be able to reason logically. The distinction is that only people who believe in God as defined can have truly justified true beliefs, whereas the atheist can only hold ‘true beliefs’, which is not enough to qualify as knowledge, and is in an epistemically self-refuting, self-defeating position. If God did not exist then the world WOULD be reduced to absurdity, is what follows from my arguments, since there would be no way to justify beliefs, period. All of Pro’s examples of knowledge, justification etc all make presuppositions which reduce to irrational causes, and as such cannot be rational themselves. He simply has not touched the presuppositional position. VI. Summary Sigh. Virtually all of Pro’s argument is centred around straw man arguments, and I am rather glad this debate is over now. Pro has not adequately addressed ANY of my arguments, and has missed the mark with most of his. He has not at all attempted to negate my claims that the atheist/naturalist position is self-refuting, and concedes this debate on many levels. I thank Pro for offering this debate, and voters for reading and voting. Please vote Pro! VII. References 1. http://rationalwiki.org... 2. http://rationalwiki.org... 3. http://carm.org...