CX

I was recently listening to the 1985 debate between Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Stein at UC Irvine. Stein seemed somewhat taken off guard by the Transcendental Argument. It occured to me that I have never given much thought to this particular argument, because it seems like question begging on the face of it. I looked around, but I've had difficulty finding a coherent statement of this argument that didn't amount to, "I think there can't be logic or morality without god, therefore if you argue on moral or logical grounds against god then god must exist." Is it just a really bad argument or am I missing something?

fundamental spawn

It's a ridiculous argument because it pre-assumes that morality is transcendental in nature.

What we call morality is a device for man to live socially. We gave up some individual freedom to band together to better manage a hostile environment filled with enemies that were faster, stronger, with sharper claws and more powerful jaws. That freedom given up to the social order is called "morality." It is an evolutionary development, nothing more.

CX

Agreed, but what about logic? It appears that the rules of logic ARE transcendental rather than conventional. Of course this does not presuppose the existence of god as the TAG asserts because we could just as easily say that logic and the Laws of Nature derive from some platonic realm or that they are a product of the regularity found in nature or any of a number of other places. It seems to me the TAG does not address why such transcendental entities must come from the Xian god.

Dr. Retard

In my experience, the gist of the problem is:

"Hold on, how it is that naturalistic accounts of logic, induction, and morality are inadequate? And how is a theistic account of these things supposed to be any better?"

"They just are, and it just is!"

fundamental spawn

Why would the laws of logic appear to be transendental in nature? How can we know these laws/concepts transcend anything when all we know of them is earthbound? All tests of logic I am aware of are grounded in materialistically bound processes, even mathematics if you consider the mind itself as a series of chemical and electrical impulses.

Thomas Metcalf

Originally posted by CX :

Indeed. The proper response is: "I believe in brute-fact objective epistemic foundations, and my epistemic foundation is more parsimonious than yours."

In my experience, the transcendental argument has completely disappeared from the literature. "They" say philosophers don't make any progress, but here's another example where we've clearly reached a widely-accepted conclusion.

fishbulb

I don't think so. We appeal to logic for the same reason we appeal to empiricism: not because it embodies some sort of abstract truth, but because it happens to be a consistent and consistently useful tool for making predictions that turn out right.

Logic is just a way of thinking about things. A line of reasoning is logical if it follows certain rules, and it is not logical if it doesn't. Why this is so isn't particularly important; we would continue to use logical reasoning even if it were discovered to be "wrong" in some metaphysical sense, because such a discovery wouldn't change the fact that it is consistently useful in making predictions that work.

Put another way, logical thinking works because it happens to (or appears to happen to) be mostly consistent with the way the universe happens to work. Humans employ many methods of analysis and thought. Some produce very poor results, others produce better results. Logic is just one way that happens to work very well in most circumstances. But it is by no means infalliable or complete. Logic cannot give us insight into the "beginning of time." Both the "something from nothing" notion and the "exists but was never created" notion seem to defy all rational and logical justification. One could take it on faith that logic is infalliable and therefore both of those notions are wrong but that still doesn't tell us what, if anything, did happen), but it could also be the case that logical reasoning simply doesn't model the universe well enough to make that kind of prediction.

CX

To reiterate a question from the OP, does anyone know where I can find a coherent statement of the TAG?

Secondly,

Do we agree that prohibition against A & NOT A is a universal logical rule? On what basis? If it is not can we say anything meaningful?

Bill Snedden

I posted the following in this thread about a month ago:

In fact, it can be formulated as a syllogism. David Byron posted the following possible formulation on the VanTil mailing list in Feb. of 1998 (I've corrected some of the typos and included his comments on the steps as he did, in {}):


That's the long version. The short version goes like this:

P1: Without the Christian God of Reformed Theism, human experience would be unintelligible
P2: Human experience is not unintelligible
C1: The Christian God of Reformed Theism exists

Obviously, there are gaps in this thing wide enough to drive a convoy of Mack trucks through...

It does indeed seem to me that the law of non-contradiction must be a universal rule in the language and logic system we use. We would be quite unable to build definitions or navigate reality without it.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

CX

I guess I keep thinking there HAS to be mroe to it than this, because every formulation I've seen has seemed like a nonargument. How on earth can one rationally establish the major premise as true?



AHA! The theist shouts, "Where did it come from?"

Obviously the default answer is JHVH so unless you can come up with a different answer the existence of the Xian god is hereby proved.

Theism makes my head hurt.