Chris Bolt was kind enough to offer a lengthy reply to one of my posts concerning Presuppositional/Covenantal apologetics. The reply was insightful and clearly pointed out where I did not make issues clear enough. I’m going to take things a bit out of order for organizational purposes, so if I get anything out of context I accept the full blame. I'm also going to split my two posts up, to make it easier to read instead of giant post. This first post should be rather uncontroversial, I just want to explain myself better and explain some of Chris’ remarks to atheist readers. The second post will deal with the issue of a semantic paradox and the Presuppositional/Covenantal options for response.
Chris opens with:
Atheist Pat Mefford offers a rather ingenious means of getting around the transcendental method as used in covenantal apologetics. Now, I know Pat, so let me begin with a bit of friendly ad hominem. The argument of Pat’s post strikes me as illustrating the dangers of familiarity with a little bit of philosophy and a lot more sin.
I took this as quite the compliment. One of my friends from the philosophy program thought this was a bit of a backhanded comment, but I’m pretty confident there was no intention of that.
Chris has read a lot of atheistic material. He has probably waded through more atheist material and attacks on theism than I have three or four times over, he typically knows more about varieties and defenses of popular atheism* than most self professing atheists. Picking an issue he hasn’t seen a dozen times before isn’t easy, and I’m glad I was able to offer him something different to think about.
As for the remarks about sin, it is a pretty standard observation from people who come from the Reformed perspective. He isn’t accusing me of much, just making an observation he would make to just about anyone. For example, he is not making an accusation that I don’t know much about philosophy, just that what I do know pales in comparison to the amount of sin in my life. What he calls a friendly ad hominem is more like a call to repentance, which is a big reason he does what he does.
A little bit later her remarks:
In any event Pat has quoted me extensively in such a way that the second option is not available to me.
This is true, but I have to point out two things here; first is that Chris has been doing this far longer than I have, and not just blogging but debates and interviews as well. Second is that Chris inherits a great deal from his own religious tradition that I simply don’t have the luxury of.
Pat proposes non-classical views of logic (in some cases held by an extreme minority of philosophers) in an attempt to overturn a presuppositional apologetic argument. Frankly, if that is the best one can do, then I feel pretty good about my apologetic.
I don’t think I made it clear just what exactly is meant by classical and non-classical logics. Classical logic is (now at least) generally understood to be a first order predicate calculus with a 2-valued sentence calculus, with a completeness theorem (careful to note that not all completeness theorems are alike nor are they all philosophically interesting). It also needs to be said that was is considered “classical” is always shifting due to innovations. For example, this quote comes from Kant in 1800 in his textbook on logic:
Logic, by the way, has not gained much in content since Aristotle’s times and indeed it cannot, due to its nature. But it may well gain in exactness, , definiteness and distinctness . There are but few sciences that can come into a permanent state beyond which they undergo no further change. To these belong logic, and metaphysics. - Section II, part five of the introduction. Translation by Hartman and Schwarz and published by Dover in 1988
Western philosophy didn’t even have a good material conditional until Frege formalized one 79 years after Kant published this. That means the classical apparatus of Kant’s time didn’t even have the “if…then” component most people learn about when they are introduced to logic! I’m mentioning all of this to disabuse unwarranted notions of conservatism when it comes to the advancement of logic. I think in reflection that my post makes it sound like I’m rejecting some kind of established orthodoxy of logical analysis, which isn’t the case and I’ll need to explain why.
Now, when you begin to take on philosophical logic past the basics, you learn how to build systems of logic. To do this building requires one to construct an object language from a meta (or natural) language. The classical logic apparatus is an object language that is stripped of a lot of baggage that crowds our own natural (or meta) language to allow for clean and strict mathematical reasoning.
The problem is that the classical apparatus can’t accommodate all the different ways we use language when making arguments and it suffers terribly when there is anything that begins to hint at semantic ambiguity. Now there are a couple of ways a logician could help rehabilitate her system to accommodate arguments expressed in natural language but don’t fit in with a classically conceived system.
First, is that she can offer what is often called “extension logics” which add new operators with new axioms. So things like tense operators or Kripke style modal operators can be added on to take on things like imperative and interrogative sentences or concepts about contingency and necessity.
Another option would be to keep the vocabulary of the classical apparatus but introduce a new set of theorems and valid inferences, such is the case with multi-valued logics. These kind of logics are considered deviant logics.
A logic can both be an extension and a deviation of the classical apparatus. When I wrote (emphasis mine):
Chris can agree with his opponent (or me) and do away with classical logic and replace it with some a multi-value logic, but this will require a major revision of the whole concept of the thesis and antithesis, Christianity versus Not Christianity.
I should not have said the bolded section. It isn’t true that taking on a multi-value logic means you throw away the classical apparatus in toto, rather the apparatus gets subsumed into the new system. It is also common to use the classial apparatus to talk about and define extensions and deviations.
Lastly, notice this comment from Chris’ conclusion here:
Pat is thinking about MVL. Possibly he’s considered dialetheism. He is doing so in order to respond to the IoC. Given the current status of dialetheism and other deviant logics, I feel as though presuppositionalists are in good shape.
Now we can ignore everything about dialetheism, I wasn’t even aware of that term until I read Chris’ post. I know who Graham Priest is, but I know very little about paraconsistent logic, so there is no need to go there. Chris needed a hypothetical example to work with and since I didn’t provide one, he had to make his own. I’m mentioning this because a few friends thought this to be a straw man of me, but I disagree, Chris makes it explicit that this is purely hypothetical.
Second, Non-classical logic isn’t some obscure trick that I dug up to avoid IoC. To demonstrate my point, I headed over to David Chalmers’ survey of philosophers, and did a fine grained search of professional philosophers (PhD or faculty) who selected Logic and Philosophy of Logic as their Areas of Specialty. The results showed this:
Accept: classical 44 / 148 (29.7%)
Accept: non-classical 30 / 148 (20.3%)
Lean toward: classical 25 / 148 (16.9%)
Accept both: 18 / 148 (12.2%)
The question is too unclear to answer: 8 / 148 (5.4%)
Lean toward: non-classical: 6 / 148 (4.1%)
There is no fact of the matter: 6 / 148 (4.1%)
Agnostic/undecided: 3 / 148 (2.0%)
Accept another alternative: 3 / 148 (2.0%)
Accept an intermediate view: 3 / 148 (2.0%)
Other: 2 / 148 (1.4%)
I’m well within the bounds of standard philosophical analysis (such as it is) to raise this sort of objection. Now, I think Chris has a right to say tu quoque and not because of some trivial and artificial notion about who has the burden of proof, but because it is too easy to offer problems and far harder to craft solutions. So in that respect I’m going to offer a tentative solution to this paradox.
Finally, I’d like to thank Chris for taking the time to read my blog. I really think our exchanges are substantive and useful for us both (though our goals are quite different). I hope Chris doesn’t mind that I didn’t directly respond to his suggestion that I take more time considering who Jesus is and why I need him in my life, but brevity and topic forced me to leave it unaddressed. Know that it didn’t go unread.
With all this established, I’m ready to move on to the argument at hand…
* I use the term popular atheism to refer to atheistic beliefs that are informed by popular books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. I also include documentaries like Bill Maher’s ‘Religulous’ and ‘The God Who Wasn‘t there’, and internet culture that surrounds places like Freethought Blogs and Reddit. Basically, if what you know about atheism and religion derived from that kind of media, you’d fall under the category of adhering to popular atheism and almost by default don’t read this blog or don’t like me.
