So Chris Bolt and I have been having an exchange and I think it has ultimately run its course. I’m a little disappointed by Chris, I don’t think he returned the level of charity or care in reading that I gave him. This is not to say he was uncivil, but I didn’t care for passive aggressive comments like this:
Pat includes the Greek text in his post. Whether he is showing off or genuinely thinks it adds to the discussion I do not know.
There is a lot I could say about this, but I won’t. I’m really not interested in rhetoric and performance, but I’m getting the feeling that Chris is interested in it. I started getting that suspicion in his first post when he made comments like this:
Frankly, if that is the best one can do, then I feel pretty good about my apologetic.
and
I feel as though presuppositionalists are in good shape.
I wondered, “Why include such things? Who needs reassurance?” but over the course of the discussion he went from reaffirming that he feels good about his apologetic to adding in little observations like this:
Perhaps Pat is showing off in switching to x and y
Even his parting remark was a shot at me:
Only time will tell if our atheist friend is stubborn enough to defend claims like “Liars always lie” or “Hyperbole does not exist” or “The Apostle Paul self-consciously affirmed non-classical logics.” Concession is the alternative. Pat needs to put down his shiny new logics and find a new line of argument.
Now compared to the typical discourse that takes place on the internet between atheists and Christian apologists, this is below mild. Still, it bothers me because I think I failed in my personal assessment in Chris, I may have ended up projecting something on to him that he simply wasn’t. I set myself up for that disappointment, if it is the case.
I wonder about two things; how closely Chris read anything I wrote and how closely he studied the issues at hand. For just one example of the former, he made this remark in his latest post:
What Pat should do is forthrightly address the view that the Apostle Paul, following the poet he quotes, is using hyperbole to communicate the truth that Cretans are generally liars. There is nothing in Pat’s post that takes away from this traditional apologetic response to the charge of contradiction in Titus 1.12-13a.
And what did I post on the 16th of December on this very topic?
Now I can respect that Paul was making a rhetorical point in citing Epimenides, he was as Greek as they come. To most Christians (and to most apologists) this isn’t much of an issue, but it is for the Presuppositional/Covenantal apologist. Here we have a proposition embedded in scripture that is both thought of by unregenerate and regenerate minds, both Jew and Gentile, that simultaneously affirms and denies its own truth value.
This proposition exists. It is a contradiction. How does it stand in relation to the Triune God? How is this proposition grounded in Almighty God? How does Chris account for it?
The purpose of me using Titus was merely an example of showing the proposition exists for both of us and if it exists for both of us then both our worldviews must account for it. It isn’t some argument against scripture itself. What Paul cites is a liar paradox, how and why Paul does so isn’t relevant to the minor point I was making and I thought I explicitly made that clear. Perhaps I didn't.
As I said above, I’m beginning to doubt Chris is paying much attention to the issue I’ve raised. He has been promoting responses to me by another blogger that leave a bit to be desired, but I’ve ignored them since I considered it a rabbit trail. I don’t think Chris would have promoted the blog posts unless he considered them substantial, so I’ll show an example:
Tarski’s proposal is that we can save consistency in the face of the Liar Paradox, not for natural languages, but for restricted and regimented artificial languages, wherein no language contains its own truth predicate. At the bottom level, we have the “object language,” which does not contain words like “true” or “false” at all.
This does not accurately describe what I laid out:
Let us say that the following the following takes place in language ln. In this case ln is an object language and a meta-language; ln-1 is an object language from ln and ln+1 is the meta language for ln. Each language ln contains every wff from ln-1 and has a predict that belongs to every true wff and only true wffs of ln-1, let us call this Tn. Tn cannot apply to any wff of ln unless that wff also belongs to ln-1.
There is no bottom level object language that does not contains words like ‘true’ or ‘false’. This is made explicit. It goes on to read (wikipedia link removed):
However, if we want to contend with the truth-value of an assertion made in the meta-language, we would need further recourse to a meta-meta-language to consider whether or not the truth predication of the meta-language (regarding the object-language) is correct. What if there’s a question regarding the truth ascribed in the meta-meta-language? Well, we need a meta-meta-meta-language. See the pattern? It’s turtles all the way down.
An infinite regress isn’t a mistake or a problem. Infinite regression is fine n dandy in mathematics, such as the creation of an infinite set of natural numbers through successive application of the successor relation to zero. Same concept here and asking me where the hierarchy stops is to assume to the collection is finite instead of infinite. It doesn’t stop, it runs to completion in the same manner that Bertrand Russell shows that Tristram Shandy can finish his biography in 'Principles of Mathematics'.
Now I’m not disappointed that Chris made an oversight or didn’t read me carefully. We all do that. But I’m disappointed that I feel that I’ve fallen prey to something I’ve warned about to numerous other atheists in real life, don’t become the object an apologist uses to showboat. I may have just become that object.
I blame myself, I tricked myself into thinking I could have a good discussion with a fellow philosopher over complex topics in a spirit that didn’t frame the conversation like some kind of zero-sum duel where only one person comes out the victor. I didn’t get that, instead I got backhanded remarks and condescension, probably for a crowd.
I hope I’m wrong, but I’m going to close the matter and wish Chris a happy new year and move on to other topics.