A worldview that welcomes sense-making (instead of making it problematic) is our birthright, as it were. We spontaneously receive a world in which logical (mathematical) laws, moral absolutes and nature’s observable regularities all cohere, even though those three classes of things are wildly disparate kinds.
It’s also a world in which you and I are not the only persons. We intuit, not infer, the personhood of certain other beings, who also make sense of the world, negotiating their cognitive business with the help of logic, morality, natural law, each irreducible to the others. Persons have fallible yet reliable (or reliable yet fallible) memories, and we know that fact about everyone we meet before we meet them. (Even the preceding sentence is true only in a certain worldview.) As I noted and asked last time around:
. . . our “person-realism” is no more deducible or otherwise inferable from our nature’s logical side from our capacity to evaluate; or either is from our inductive ability; or either is from our realism about the world and the many who are “not me.” 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?
Further:
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 . . . “non-negotiables”: we won’t give up any of them. Apart from that network, none is intrinsically intelligible.
Leading to this claim:
Exactly one network of non-negotiable beliefs, argues this Christian apologist, adequately explains the unity required by this diversity because it identifies and affirms its one absolutely indispensable member: the Triune God of the Bible.
I argued that the intelligible predication we all depend on presupposes the equal ultimacy of unity and diversity; any reduction of either to the other destroys the possibility of predication. (Think Parmenides and Heraclitus). I left for a future post—this one—an argument to the conclusion that the godhead’s plurality is not just any multiplicity, but a triunity or trinity, consisting of not more or fewer than three persons. Only an argument for that is an argument for Christian theism, not a theism that bears a family resemblance to it. Continue reading “Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them. Part 2”