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.

On Absolutes

Many have argued for the existence of moral absolutes by asserting that any claim that there are no absolutes is incoherent. I’d like to examine this claim.

Section One: Is it impossible to deny absolutes?

Here is one formulation of the denial of absolutes.

It is an absolute that there are no absolutes.

Now, here’s the claim by those who reject this as logical. No one can claim that there are no absolutes, for by doing so, one must invoke an absolute.

Here is the more rigorous form of this argument.

p1: Making an absolute claim requires at least one absolute.
p2: Claiming that there are no absolutes is an absolute claim.
p3: There cannot be both absolutes and no absolutes.

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Therefore, the claim as an absolute that there are no absolutes cannot be true.

Because the assertion of absolutes is often made by theists in an attempt to validate their faith, let’s first look to the Bible to elucidate this issue.

Example 1: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9-14

If we are to belief the Biblical account of creation, the Earth had a beginning. It is obvious then that the phrase “there is nothing new under the sun” must have been uttered a first time. Here is how an attack on this claim that there is nothing new under the sun looks when paralleled to the argument above.

p1: Making a claim for the first time means that at least one thing is new.
p2: The initial claim that there is nothing new under the sun is something new.
p3: There cannot be both something new and nothing new.

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Therefore, the initial claim that nothing is new under the sun could not have been true.

If the one claiming that no one can say there are no absolutes is a Bible-believer, this passage from Ecclesiastes undermines their position.

But let’s examine other aspects.

Consider the following statement that is more approximate to the human experience.

Example 2: The only thing that has not changed is the fact that everything changes.

The following is an attempted dismissal of this statement syllogistic form.

p1: If a fact does not change, there is at least one thing that does not change.
p2: There exists the unchanging fact that everything changes.
p3: There cannot be both everything changed and one thing unchanged.

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Therefore, claiming that, the only thing that has not changed is the fact that everything changes, cannot be true.

When examining the logic of the statement, it appears that it is logically incoherent. However, does the statement contain content, or is it nonsensical? Humans can grasp that, what seems to be an incoherency within the statement, does not necessarily change the truth value of the embedded statement “nothing fails to change”. The recognition of this embedding is a clue to why the full statement is merely an apparent contradiction. We will revisit this notion of linguistic embedding at a later point.

The Emotional Substrate Beneath Bloated Ontologies

We are most fundamentally emotional creatures, and the most fundamental realm of meaning is that of emotion. From the time we are infants, our emotional brains are busy sorting through these needy emotions and attempting to carve out a social identity, a set of things we can call “true”, and a code of behavior. But there is nothing as subjectively real as our emotions.

So we are compelled by these emotions to construct an edifice that can comfortably house our emotions by providing psychological, epistemological and moral frameworks over which we can then drape image, and respectably present ourselves to society.

Because the goal is to cloak our raw and muddled emotions under more presentable walls of definition, this enterprise is inherently illusory, and is most commonly self-delusional. Yet by the time we reach adulthood, we have constructed an elaborate edifice that, if matching the expectations of society, can assure our social well-being.

I’d like to deconstruct the various walls of meaning to expose the raw emotions that we often do not want to admit lie at the foundation of being.

• Identity. This is the most transparent. Many realize that identity is static only where it is thought static. Personhood can change significantly over a lifetime. We say “this is who I am” at our peril. Constructing rigid walls of identity lock us into a self that forfeits a more colorful and fuller life. But, to avoid the swirling and persistent uncertainty and fear, our adolescent minds forge an identity that we often find hard to later modify. We begin to see the image that we have constructed upon our emotions as a rigid entity, and prior to our emotions. This self-delusion serves to maximize predictability and minimize risks, but it often leads to marginal lives. If we can recognize that it is emotions that are the substrate to our identities, and take measures to directly address those emotions rather than merely repainting the peeling facade the same color from time to time, life can become much more dynamic and enriching.
  

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Tom Clark On Naturalism

The interview of Tom Clark by Ginger Campbell linked to below is unquestionably one of the best commentaries on the essence and implications of naturalism out there. It confronts head-on the issues of free will, morality, and what it is to be human.

[ MP3 ]   [ TRANSCRIPT ]

Ginger Campbell is the host of both Books and Ideas and Brain Science Podcast, 2 great podcasts that are cherry pie for inquisitive minds.

EXCERPTS FROM THE INTERVIEW

It says that we are all natural creatures, that nature is what there is, and that nature is enough: That we don’t need anything supernatural to describe ourselves, nor do we need anything supernatural in order to lead meaningful, moral, and effective lives.

Religious Reasoning

You’ve heard the saying “If there is no god, then everything is permitted.”

Let’s just go with the dubious assumption that any god that exists must be one that grants or withholds permission.
The statement then is a tautology. It is tantamount to saying “If there is no one granting or withholding permission, everything is permitted.” The utterer has said nothing, and nothing has been learned. At this juncture, there are 2 possible directions to take.

1. Try to determine whether or not there is a “permissioner”.
2. Start with the assumption that there must be behaviors that are granted or denied permission, then look for the “permissioner”.

Why start with the assumption in #2? The following statement I have heard far too many times, and seems to be the reason that #2 is the default starting point rather than #1.

“What would prevent you from being a mass murderer if you did not believe in god?”

This rhetorical question is disturbing for the following reasons.

Scrapping Morality

To be an atheist is to be good for nothing. -Mark Twain

I’ve scrapped morality. Not the concept of a code of behavior. Just the word morality. Here’s why.

Theists argue that the only source of an objective moral code would be a god. They then argue that, unless a moral code is objective, it has no value and renders subscribers to a subjective moral code amoral agents. So, the word morality has been inextricably attached to the notion of god. Those of us who reject the notion of an Abrahamic god are left feeling a bit immoral.

What’s an agnostic to do? I could launch a campaign to redefine the word morality as the gay community did the word queer. This would undoubtedly fail considering the bulk of literature that baptizes morality in theism.

Instead, let me concede the theistic connotations clinging to morality, and disparage this god-dependent morality as a notion that is incoherent, ignoble and valueless.

Let’s begin with the incoherence of the concept.

No Morals

I do not believe in objective morality.

This stance is not very popular. Having taken this stance, I cannot make statements such as the following.

1. Hitler was evil.
2. You shouldn’t intentionally hurt other people.
3. You should live altruistically.

Because I deny objective morality, I cannot use terms such as “evil” or “righteous” in my description of people or actions. I am confined to an ontology that ends at my emotional response to people and their actions. The actions of Hitler make me extremely angry, but they were not evil actions. Attributing evil seems to be merely a human attempt to convert a subjective emotion into an objective quality. This conversion takes place in only in the mind. The term “evil” has no consistent definition, but rather vaguely maps onto emotional dispositions towards particular actions.