The length of this post might suggest otherwise, but I’m not going to reproduce my book, Philosophy after Christ, here but Maverick Philosopher and friend William “Bill” Vallicella (the subject of several posts, e.g., here, here, and here) recently posted essays on theistic argumentation, and I thought it deserved a response.
Preamble: if the God of the Bible, who created human beings in his image to know and love him and to know, value, and rule the rest of creation under him (hereafter, “God”), exists, then we know one way that the conditions of intelligible predication (IP) can be met. The preceding sentence includes key aspects of the Christian worldview (CW)—the Theos-anthropos-kosmos relationship—expressed on the pages of the Bible.
If no alternative explanation for IP is possible, then Biblical theism is necessarily true (which is what the CW predicts).
Knowing whether IP has conditions and that they’re met is a “big deal.” It underlies everything one does, not something one can take for granted. And yet virtually every thinker, yea, every philosopher, takes the satisfaction of those conditions, which must obtain, for granted. This taking is arbitrary, and being arbitrary does not comport with philosophizing.
If no worldview other than the Christian (CW) can account for IP, if (as I now hold) an alternative to the CW when it comes to accounting for IP cannot even be conceived, then to hold out for an alternative, as though doing so were an expression of rational exigency (“demandingness”)—that to reserve judgment somehow accords with epistemic duty—models only dogmatic stubbornness, not tolerant liberality.
Referring to the transcendental argument (TA) laid out in Chapter 13 of my book, I will call Bill’s bluff. After reading it, he may still say, “Well, Tony, I remain unconvinced”; if my argument goes through, however, then I will interpret such a response as an expression of his commitment to what he calls his “characteristic thesis” (CT). To paraphrase Brand Blanshard, it wrong to leap to a conclusion that argument’s premises don’t entail, but it is no less wrong to fail to draw an inference that they do entail.
Bill’s series began with “The Holocaust Argument for the Existence of God,” to which he appended my comment:
Bill, woven through your well-wrought argument . . . . is your insistence (but I’m sure it’s more than that) that there are no knock-down (rationally compelling, not merely rationally acceptable) arguments for any substantive philosophical position [“about matters external to consciousness”]. . . . Do you have an argument for that? Is your claim more than a gambit or posture, a bluff that someone can call? Might the auditor of a rationally compelling argument simply be psychologically impervious to its objective rational power? Is there a rationally compelling argument for your “non-substantive” philosophical position? Or is it merely rationally acceptable? Can you “rationally coerce” me to accept your universal negative claim? . . .
Your essay reminded me of a possible issue with my putative transcendental argument in . . . [Philosophy after Christ]: an exclusive disjunction (P v ~P); the elimination of ~P, namely, the class of non-Christian worldviews; ergo, P. Arguably one weakness is that it’s impossible to show that no non-Christian worldview can account for rational predication (etc.). . . .
Bill thanked me for my comment, but added that I “ignored [his] footnote which was intended to blunt the force of the objection/question that [I] pose . . .”:
In fact, in an email message whose content I invited him to publish, I said his note was the source of “the coercive/acceptable contrast that informed my questions.”
It follows, of course [Bill continues], that there are no rationally coercive arguments for my characteristic meta-philosophical thesis. I accept this consequence with equanimity. I claim merely that my characteristic thesis is rationally acceptable.
His “characteristic thesis” (CT) is a universal negative proposition, one that a “rationally coercive” argument for a substantive philosophical position—e.g., biblical theism—can falsify.
That is, if my exclusive-disjunction argument is sound—if the aforementioned “weakness” is only apparent—then Bill has no grounds for maintaining that there are no rationally compelling arguments for biblical theism. His CT would be “rationally acceptable” because it meets certain norms, but false. To continue to maintain it would be an arbitrary failure to draw an inference. That continuance would have to be explained.
Indeed, such persistence would heighten my conjecture that psychological resistance is at work. For there’s a game-like aspect to dialectic, including a competitive spirit replete with attempts to psych out the other guy rhetorically by, say, referring to his personality. We must not even give the appearance of engaging in any form of ad hominem. Bill did not commit that fallacy, but he did invoke our alleged psychological differences. Bill writes:
If we assume . . . that meta-philosophy is a branch of philosophy, then, given that my characteristic thesis is a thesis in meta-philosophy, it follows that my characteristic thesis cannot be rationally coercive, i.e., rationally compelling.
I’ll accept arguendo that meta-philosophy is a branch of philosophy, if only because I can’t imagine anyone other than a philosopher trying to “do” meta-philosophy, not because I think it’s on logical par with metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics; I’ll have to give that classification more thought.
For his CT Bill claims only rationally acceptability.
And so, being the nice guy and classical liberal that I am, I tolerate your [Tony’s] dissent. I will not tax you with logical inconsistency should you reject my characteristic thesis.
Well, that’s a relief, but in that liberal spirit I offer my approach to proving the existence of the God of the Bible on the basis of the necessity of the CW that includes the affirmation of God’s existence.
If, however, my argument must be accepted on pain of contradiction, that would just be the way the cookie crumbles, not a polemical victory I’d celebrate. A thesis underlies his profession of liberality:
You ask whether I can “rationally coerce” you to accept my “universal negative claim.” No, I cannot, nor do I want to. I want to live in peace with your [sic; you?]. I will now insert a psychological observation that I hope is not inaccurate.
My question is whether this psychological observation will be relevant to evaluating my argument.
You started out a Catholic, became a commie—a card-carrying member of the CPUSA [Communist Party United States of America] if I am not mistaken—and then later rejected that adolescent (in both the calendrical and developmental senses of the word) commitment to become some sort of Protestant Christian presuppositionalist along the lines of Cornelius Van Til and Greg L. Bahnsen. What you have retained from your commie indoctrination is your polemical attitude which, I speculate, was already present in nuce in your innate psychological makeup and perhaps environmentally enhanced and molded by your life-long residency in NYC.
If I were conditioning my reader to take what I write with a grain of salt, I couldn’t have done better.
First, I only asked whether Bill could, not “want” to “rationally coerce” me into accepting his CT. And I didn’t express any interest in being rationally coerced. Wants are irrelevant: if an argument for a substantive philosophical position like “The God of the Bible exists” can be framed as an exclusive disjunction and one of the disjuncts is falsified, then (a) the other is thereby proven and (b) it’s one’s rational duty to accept it.
Second (again), what is the relevance of Bill’s speculation about my biography and psychology to our question? He doesn’t spell out an answer, but I’ll try to divine one from the following:
You [Tony] see philosophy polemically, as a matter of worldview. (You are psychologically like Ed Feser in this regard, but I’ll leave my friend Ed out of it for now.) I do not see philosophy polemically, or as matter of worldview. I see philosophy as inquiry, not worldview, Wissenschaft, not Weltanschauung. And so, I distinguish philosophy from politics, which is not to be confused with political philosophy. Philosophically, I have friends, but no enemies. Politically, I have both enemies and friends.
In the email that Bill was free to publish, I said:
That you accept with equanimity that there are no rationally coercive arguments for your meta-philosophical thesis suggests to me . . . that people are just “wired” differently and so we approach Big Questions differently.
Some people accept X with equanimity; others, more anxiously. You make a psychological observation about me based on autobiographical tidbits I’ve disclosed (which you reported accurately). I’m polemical in my approach to philosophy (I blush at being compared, however remotely, to Ed Feser); you’re not. At some point, you seem to be saying, a difference is unarguable: ultimately, you see things one way; I, another. Should it touch a grave matter and we cannot adjudicate a difference rationally, what would be left with?
What did Bill intend to achieve by sharing his observation? There is a psychological aspect to our topic that is germane to how we negotiate our meta-philosophical business: the attitude of neutrality. Bill writes:
A stock claim of presuppositionalists [like me] is that there is no neutrality with respect to the existence or nonexistence of God, which for them is the God of the (Christian) Bible. That is to say: there is no neutral point of view from which to evaluate impartially the arguments for and against the existence of God and thereby objectively adjudicate the dispute between theists and atheists. There is and can be no neutrality or impartiality with respect to God because the existence of God is taken by them to be the ultimate presupposition of all reasoning such that, were God not to exist, neither would the possibility of correct or incorrect reasoning. No God? Then no correct or incorrect reasoning. According to [Van Tilian philosopher] John M. Frame,
. . . our [apologetic] argument should be transcendental. That is, it should present the biblical God, not merely as the conclusion to an argument, but as one who makes argument possible. We should present him as the source of all meaningful communication, since he is the author of all order, truth, beauty, goodness, logical validity, and empirical fact. (Five Views of Apologetics, Zondervan 2000, p. 220)
But is this what Frame had in mind when he refers to neutrality? In the Van Tilian literature, including Frame’s contribution thereto, neutrality is an ethical issue: every created image-bearer either is in willing submission to God or sinfully suppresses one or another truth about God, including his existence (Romans 1:18-20). On the basis of the CW, no ethical neutrality toward God is possible; any pretense to the contrary will affect one’s approach to theistic argumentation.
The object of the proof, the God of the Bible, is Jesus Christ who declared, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Matthew 12:30). That’s the God Whose existence is at issue: He’s Lord of creation who has revealed himself in creation and the Scriptures, not a piece of metaphysical furniture. To presuppose otherwise is to prejudge the issue against God.
According to the CW, the professed atheist is not the open-minded inquirer Bill makes him out to be, but a benighted rebel; insistence to the contrary arbitrarily rules out of court the Christian God’s view of the fool (Psalm 14:1). I won’t speculate about where Bill got this impression of the atheist, but it wasn’t from the Bible.
Bill discusses Van Tilian philosopher John Frame, whose square of religious (or worldview) opposition I use in my book to sort out worldviews, e.g., Christian vs. non-Christian, immanence vs. transcendence. What Bill has not yet done is evaluate that book’s argumentation.
IP involves many things. Here’s an excerpt from my book, selected for its resonance with Bill’s thinking of philosophy as inquiry:
When we ask questions, we bring into play (at least) two disparate, mutually irreducible things. For one, we value truth. For another, in the pursuit of truth, we draw conclusions from premises.
Now, logic and the pursuit of truth are inseparable in our experience, but they are as different from one another as two things can be. How is it that they . . . “hang together” (Colossians 1:17)?
Let’s add our incorrigible belief in a world populated with people like us. We don’t “infer” its existence or theirs: we intuit it. The first sentence of every article or book presupposes the truth of this intuition. This intuition is not identical with the ability think logically or value truth, yet we cannot have that intuition apart from the other two.
Then there’s our (fallible, yet more or less reliable) memory of people, places and things. We also detect and remember patterns in their behavior; we depend on our (imperfect, yet corrigible) grasp of them. That is, we generalize about nature’s regularity. For theoretical as well as practical purposes, we act on that law-like behavior. We assume it even as we investigate it.
We also generalize, more or less reliably, about other persons as persons, as selves with memories, fears, loves, hatreds, and so forth. We vary in our capacity for empathy and sympathy, but (except in the psychotic) it’s there. And we can no more deduce our nature’s logical side or our capacity to evaluate from our “person-realism” than we can from our inductive ability; or either from our realism about the world and the many who are “not us.”
We take these radically different yet mutually comporting things for granted every waking minute of every day. What is the justification for taking for granted a network of basic beliefs that functions as a worldview? Or is question-begging acceptable as long as we’re begging a lot of them all at once all the time? (Philosophy after Christ, 50-51)
Later in that chapter (7) I wrote:
These wildly disparate aspects—logic, the love and pursuit of truth (and other absolute values), world-realism, person-realism, pattern-grasping, the reliability (and fallibility) of memory—form a network of what [Van Tilian philosopher] Greg L. Bahnsen called “non-negotiables”: we refuse to give up any of them. Apart from that network, none is intrinsically intelligible.
Exactly one network of non-negotiables, argues this Christian apologist, adequately explains the unity required by this diversity because it identifies and affirms its one indispensable member: the Triune God of the Bible. Philosophy after Christ, 52)
And that brings up another aspect of the God in question, perhaps the key aspect (besides the indefensible and ethically offensive presumption of neutrality): triunity. As Bill knows, not all monotheisms are alike. Only one affirms that God subsists in three coequal persons, but not three gods. (I discuss Brant Bosserman’s contribution to trinitarian theology later in the same chapter.) In the godhead, therefore, is the equal ultimacy of unity and plurality, in which lies the CW’s unique “solution” to the perennial one-many “problem.” Every non-Christian worldview
is gravitationally “pulled,” if you will, in two, polar opposite, predication-destroying directions: to regard plurality as an illusion, “not really real” or to pulverize any asserted unity into “atoms,” rendering the unity suspect. That’s the fate of the unbeliever’s thinking. (Philosophy after Christ, 128)
In the comment that Bill did publish, I suggested that my argument is an abductive one to the best explanation of intelligibility in case the elimination of every possible member of ~P (the class of non-Christian worldviews) is not achieved. This is the aforementioned possible “weakness.” I now hold that there are no grounds for suggesting such a thing. (In any case the CW doesn’t countenance it.)
[(P v ~P) ∧ ~P] ⇒ P.
Therefore, the God of the Bible exists. Q.E.D.
That this rationally “coerces” one to favor P over ~P has nothing to do with one’s pugnacity or geniality, narrow-mindedness or liberality, or polemical or irenic “bent.”
In Philosophy after Christ, I explored the argument outlined above. In two chapters, as Bill knows, he figures prominently. Instead of defending Frame against Bill’s critique I prefer to wait for his evaluation of my book, from which analysis I’m sure I will learn. With respect to the charge of “question-begging,” never far from discussions of presuppositionalism, including Bill’s, I recommend Chapter 7, “Christian Worldview Apologists Don’t Beg Questions: We Ask Them.” Its roughly identical ancestors may be read on this site, here and here.
Bill will, I hope, tell me what he thinks I got wrong and what I should address the next time, but this is the best I can do for now. I wish I could have done it more concisely.