Debate: Jason Roberts vs Phil Stilwell – Absolute Certainty
Proposition:
Participants:
- Jason is rational in his 100% certainty he has a relationship with his god.
Participants:
- Pro: Jason Roberts
- Con: Phil Stilwell
Debate
- Jason | Pro | 500 words
My contention and my belief is that I have a personal relationship with God the Father through God the Son by the witness of the Holy Spirit. I am 100% certain of this belief.
(Jason was reminded that he had been allotted 500 words, but gave assurances he was satisfied with his statement.) - Phil | Con | 500 words
Jason has made the same blunder millions of theists have made over the centuries. He has confused the feeling of certainty with the objectively certain existence of the referent. This is a trivial mistake, but a mistake that serves as the foundation of faith the world over. I wish to dismantle this foolish notion comprehensively. Let’s first consider the following rigorous syllogism that contains the essence of my argument.
Definition: Rational certainty is the degree of certainty commensurate to the degree of the available evidence.
P1. All humans acquire knowledge through a medium/mechanism.
P2. Knowledge that is acquired through a medium/mechanism is only as rationally certain as the reliability of the medium/mechanism.
P3. The reliability of any medium/mechanism must be assessed inductively.
P4. Any inductive assessment is, by definition, less than 100% rationally certain.
P5. Jason is human.
Conclusion. Jason does not have 100% rational certainty. (P1-P5)The syllogism is valid. All that remains is for Jason to logically dismiss any one of the assumptions. He won’t. He can’t. With the exception of P5, all these assumptions have endured the test of time.
Jason has warm and fuzzy feeling about his god. Fuzzy feelings contribute not an iota to the substantiation his god-claim. Yet, as demonstrated above, emotional absolute certainty is the only type of absolute certainty Jason can possess. He possesses no rationally-obtained epistemic certainty that is commensurate to the degree of the inductively-derived evidential justification for that epistemic certainty. His entire worldview is based on wishes that have evolved into an emotional feeling of certainty. This is clear from the logical syllogism above. To the degree that Jason has confidence in the reliability of logic, to this degree he now understands his logical blunder in imagining he, as a human, has absolute knowledge in anything. The impossible infinite chain of mediums/mechanisms necessary to substantiate his claim will be forever missing.
Jason claims the Holy Spirit is the medium of his 100% certainty that he has a relationship with his god. The next obvious question is, through what medium/mechanism did he assess the reliability (not to mention the existence) of the Holy Spirit? This is required for him to substantiate his claim that his epistemic certainty is rationally positioned at 100%. Any medium/mechanism Jason will employ to establish as 100% the reliability of the Holy Spirit will itself need to be assessed for reliability by yet another medium/mechanism such as his (fallible) mind which itself must be assess by yet another medium/mechanism…ad infinitum. Human knowledge is constrained to sub-absolute-certainty by this infinite regress of inductive assessment.
Logic shows that Jason is wrong in his claim he has 100% certainty that he has a relationship with some god. Prior to this explanation, Jason might have been simply misguided. Assuming Jason does subscribe to logic, and is intellectually competent to follow the arguments, if he now persists in his claim, he is lying.
- Jason | Pro | 300 words
- Phil | Con | 300 words
- Jason | Pro | 100 words
- Phil | Con | 100 words
Notes:
- Comments will be allowed only after the debate has been completed.
Bringing it home. Debating Apologists on what counts.
The good news is that today’s apologists find their own core belief indefensible. This is leading to an attempt to draw the debate away from the many core logical absurdities found in the “gospel”, and to a focus on arguments absent from what has lead most of them to their faith. These are just a decoy. Any proposal of a spherical cube of gold can be immediately dismissed due to the impossibility of a spherical cube, evidence of gold not withstanding. In like manner, any proposal of the logically impossible Christian god can be dismissed based on the impossibility of that god, in spite of proffered evidence of “changed lives” or “fine tuning” or perceived weaknesses in evolutionary theory or the need for “objective purpose”. Whatever gods may exist, the logically impossible god of the Bible is disqualified as a candidate due to his logical incoherence. Let’s avoid the intentional distractors, and bring the argument home to the apologists, smack-dab in their incoherent backyard of redemption.
Is Biblical Faith Rational
A response to a christian claiming biblical faith was rational.
This notion that faith is rational is a new invention recently promoted by apologists who increasingly find the irrational faith happily promoted for centuries untenable in a world that increasingly values rationality. This might be considered a good step in a good direction were it not so mendaciously inconsistent with what the bible says about faith. Until recently, faith was proudly considered to be an irrational commitment to some god, and the more the gulf between your faith an the evidence, the more virtuous you were. Luther called reason a “whore”, a consistent notion throughout all the history of christianity. Were the millions of christians consciously and proudly accepting Jesus based on this irrational faith actually damned to hell? Are you willing to say that, those now admitting their faith is irrational, can not be real christians?
In the bible you actually have a man coming to Jesus to request that he heal his son. When Jesus asks whether he believes, he actually responds, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief”. This is biblical faith; when in doubt about the credibility of someone, ask that someone to help you believe more. Jesus also blesses those who believe without actually seeing the evidence rather than those who request evidence.
Your claim that your faith is rational would seem much less dishonest if you were first teaching little children the foundation of rationality BEFORE you introduced them to your particular god. However, what you are doing is the opposite; you first get them to commit to “Jesus”, then build your “rationality” around that. Do you understand how absurd it then sounds when you claim your faith is based on rationality?
Finally, simply consider where prior commitments to faith or rationality take people. Those who contemplate gods prior to learning rationality often end up believing quite the opposite to someone doing the same on the other side of the world. In contrast, those who are first introduced to the basics of rationality BEFORE they are introduced to various notions of god tend to converge in their conclusions; most consider a personal god improbable, and an Einsteinian god uncertain. Simply consider the converging philosophies of all the world’s scientists who grew up in various religious contexts, yet were taught the proper need for rationality prior to assessment.
So, this silly claim that your faith is rational does not stand up historically, biblically, nor experimentally, and runs counter to your own practice of promoting your god to children before equipping them with the tools of rationality.
Rationality and the impossibility of absolute knowledge for subjective beings.
This essay will be dealing with the concepts of rationality and knowledge, and the abuse of these terms by presuppositionalist apologists.
I will first make statements of my own personal beliefs that will be clarified and defended in subsequent expanded arguments.
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I have no absolute knowledge of anything outside my subjective perceptions, nor does anyone else.
(This will be true of every statement in this essay. But read the next point carefully.) - Having no absolute knowledge does not equate to an inability to assess the likelihood of various propositions since I have access to my perception of regularity.
- Making statements about things for which I have a high degree of belief does not require that I have absolute knowledge in those statements since the default conventional definition of truth does not imply absolute knowledge.
- A rational position does not necessarily equate to an objectively true position.
- I am rational in my high degree of belief that an objective world exists based on the high degree of regularity I perceive.
Sye Ten Bruggencate and His Mendacious Pals
A case study in the inherent dishonesty of presuppositional tactics
(More about Sye now at http://syetenbruggencate.wordpress.com.)
Sye Ten Bruggencate is a Christian presuppositionalist. He does not think you have any basis for rationality other than his choice of a god. After centuries of emphasizing faith, Christianity was forced by the success of science to focus on its “evidences”, and having manifestly failed there, is now justifiably cowering in the face of scientific scrutiny, and is desperately employing increasingly absurd tactics in an attempt to destroy the utility of rationality in order to salvage a god who, most Christians admit, would eternally torture all those who follow a nature they neither requested nor can avoid. Sye is a prominent promoter of a new tactic that attempts to wrest the right to rationality away from those rational enough to reject the bible myth by irrationally suggesting that, in the very use of rationality, those promoting rationality must acknowledge the god of the bible as the author of rationality.
The Irrational Foundation of Faith
They were passing out bibles just outside Shibuya Station the other day, and I thought I’d stop by for a chat. The young American man heading the operation (we’ll call him Tom) was kind enough to engage me in dialog, and soon both of us were presenting our positions on the question of the existence of the biblical god.
I began by questioning the very notion of faith, suggesting that, unless the degree of belief matches the degree of the evidence, the belief is irrational and certainly not anything any creator of rational humans would consider virtuous.
Tom countered by suggesting there was more than sufficient evidence to Continue reading
