Mitch Leblanc has responded to my criticisms of his post. I will respond first to what I perceive to be the three most central points of contention. I will then make several responses on other matters; those responses will be my last regarding those matters. If Mitch would like to respond to any of those points then I will grant him the last word on them. I expect any further responses I would make in those areas would be primarily iterative.
So, by way of response on salient points:
Source Citation
1.) One of my central points is that Mitch’s post is academically dishonest. He cites a book which he has not read as though he has read it. For those unfamiliar with academic citations, if you are quoting a primary source which is quoting a secondary source, your citation should read something like:
Bahnsen, Greg L. Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis. P & R Publishing, 1998. 277. As quoted in: Choi, Sean. “The Transcendental Argument.” Reasons for Faith: Making a Case for the Christian Faith. Illustrated. Geisler, Norman L., and Chad V. Meister. Good News Publishers, 2007. 238-243.
Or something to the effect that you are quoting someone else’s quotation. Some might think this is no big deal, but this is one of the myriad ways in which people attempt to “beef up” the academic appearance of less-than-scholarly work. This sort of pseudo-scholarship slips by (particularly at the undergraduate level) all the time, but it doesn’t work when someone is familiar with the source material being cited. Mitch’s silence regarding my accusation in this regard is deafening.
Let me put it this way: if he’s read Bahnsen’s book, why did he choose to use this particular footnote as representative of TAG rather than some portion of the 30 or so pages of primary argumentation on the subject found in the same volume? If he hasn’t read the book (and is only borrowing Choi’s footnote quoting a footnote), why did he cite it as though he had? Either case involves a certain level of dishonesty, in the first case by avoiding the strongest presentation of the position he criticizes or in the second by padding his citations.
Conventionalism
Regarding my very brief rebuttal to his equally brief assertions regarding the validity of logical conventionalism Mitch replied, “This is a claim that is thrown around a lot, and it is a claim that is just simply false. There simply is no problem with logic being conventional, while having its principles be necessarily true. Zao is welcome to either read the literature cited in my paper, the brief treatment here or wait for an upcoming article I’m expecting authored by a logician.”
Mitch makes repeated assertions in this regard, but provides absolutely zero argumentation to demonstrate the soundness of his claims. Instead, he offers footnotes (and we’ve already seen problems with Mitch’s source citation). Since no argument has been presented for these assertions, again, no refutation is necessary... or even possible, really.
However, I would simply point out that the “brief treatment” Mitch links to at no point offers any support for his assertion that logic is both conventional and necessary; only that logic can be conventional and objective. Surely I don’t need to explain the difference between necessary and objective. The quoted author does this while embracing the arbitrariness of logical conventionalism as an epistemic axiom, and averring that epistemic justification reduces to linguistic definitions; the adoption of conventionalism is then a matter of pragmatics, of predisposition. As Mitch put it, “So put, conventionalism is the adoption of a system of justification. Other systems could have been chosen, but weren’t and no justification is required for the choice.” This statement of “conventionalist fideism” hardly substantiates Mitch’s claims for the coherence of logical conventionalism.
If Mitch wants to offer an argument in support of his assertions, I’d be glad to see it. Until then I will view all his assertions regarding the coherence of conventionalism as examples of ipse dixitism.
Circular reasoning and a Euthyphro dilemma analog
There are two problems here which I will attempt to untangle as briefly as possible, without reiterating/quoting the background material:
1.) Frame’s statement (C) is circular, but we have been discussing axiomatic presuppositions, which aren’t justified logically, they’re viewed as self-evident. The reason we’re arguing about them is because it is evident to my self but not to your self. To point out that Frame’s reasoning in justifying his most basic presupposition makes reference to his most basic presupposition hardly counts as criticism; it’s stating the obvious. What’s actually remarkable is that Mitch thinks this is an example of petitio principii, but that his argument-less assertion of the coherence of God-independent logic is not. Either we’re both guilty of begging the question or neither of us is. They’re equally ultimate but opposite presuppositions. Mitch believes logic is independent of God and all of his reasoning will assume this, even his argumentation for it; my position would be the opposite. Now, we can just accuse each other of question begging ad nauseam or we can recognize the nature of the discussion we’re in and attempt to elevate the conversation beyond that. I’ll leave it to Mitch to decide which will be the case.
2.) Mitch seems to think that the statement “God thinks logically” is “obvious(ly) incoherent.” He’s willing to bypass this issue in order to consider what it means to say that God thinks logically. He then conflates logical laws with the reasoning process, stating that thinking logically stands in contradiction to omniscience. Now, if Mitch can’t imagine what it means for God to think logically, he might be more well-served to just ask what it means (or to read some primary sources on Van Tillianism), rather than just speculating and pulling up the first contradiction which comes to mind.
Now, on to the second section of responses. As I said above, the following will be my final statements on the issues raised.
Hybrids
In response to my criticism regarding Mitch’s fictitious hybridization of a priori and conventionalist epistemic justifications for laws of logic he states, “I merely rely on the possibility of a system and that this possibility is enough to make the point I wanted to make.” This, of course, begs the question at hand, given that I have argued that no such hybridization is possible without being clearly reducible to one or the other of the two systems. Instead of offering a case for this hybridization, Mitch offers the classic “argument-from-analogy-minu-argument,” referring to hybrid cars. Unfortunately, it would seem that Mitch is not a Prius mechanic. He doesn’t seem to recognize that, at any given moment, a hybrid car is functioning on one of two distinct power sources: either an electric engine or an internal combustion engine, but never on a single “hybrid” engine. This analogy much better illustrates my point that Mitch’s proposed hybrid would likely be reducible to one of the two distinct systems of epistemic justification, just like a hybrid car’s two power sources.
As I said at the outset, Mitch will need to present even the barest sketch of this “hybrid” system before it’s possibility (much less plausibility) can even be entertained.
Presuppositional semantics
I pointed out that Mitch relies on a formulation of TAG which any contemporary Van Tillian worth his salt would reject as a straw man. By way of response Mitch states, “But what real difference does this make to our discussion? If I’m missing something then I wait to be informed, but it seems to me that even under this view the claim that “Both the truth of P or falisity (sic) of P presupposes Q” will reduce, in our discussion, to the claim that “logic presupposes the existence of God” since I am not denying the existence of logic. In other words, what difference does this make to any of my subsequent criticisms insofar as they pertain to the presuppositionalist ideas I mention?”
Since you are waiting and all, I’m willing to inform you of what you are missing, something which is plainly obvious to the Van Tillians who have taken the time to read your post: you know very little about Van Tillian presuppositionalism. You have read no primary source documents on the subject. You are unfamiliar with the role of presuppositional semantics in presuppositional apologetics. You have conflated implication with presupposition and when confronted about it, you wave your hands and say that it doesn’t make any difference. Well, maybe it doesn’t make any difference... unless, of course, part of the goal in your criticism was to accurately represent the position you have chosen to criticize. If that's not the case, please say so.
Axioms
I stated that the nature of an axiomatic presupposition exerts influence in all other propositional beliefs in a given worldview. I think this is uncontroversial; however, Mitch has taken issue with the idea that a “non-Christian” worldview has “not Christianity” included in its axiomatic presupposition. He believes this to be a deduction from a given axiom, e.g. “Bob the Buddhist’s foundational axiom is ‘Buddhism is true.’” Mitch seems to have forgotten that definitions (especially systematic religious definitions) involve delineation. The statement “Buddhism is true” only implies “Christianity is false” if Buddhism is delineated from Christianity by definition, e.g. the definition of Buddhism includes that Buddhism is “not Christianity.” It’s definitional, not inferential. Far from “rendering the term axiom meaningless” (as Mitch claimed), I simply view the axiom as fully-invested with meaning.
Fristianity
I pointed out to Mitch that the Fristianity objection (created by Van Tillians) leaves only two viable worldviews up for debate as providing the necessary preconditions for intelligibility: Christianity and Fristianity. Mitch replied, “The Fristianity objection, if sound, merely shows that the central claim of presuppositionalism is false. That is, if the Fristianity objection holds then it is false that no non-Christian theistic methods can possibly justify X, Y, Z. This is all I was intending to show.”
The Fristianity objection emphatically does not “merely show that the central claim of presuppositionalism is false” no matter how much Mitch wishes that were the case. That may be “all (he) was intending to show,” but the argument proves too much for Mitch then. The objection leaves only two viable options: Fristianity or Christianity. Besides, if Mitch persists in clinging to conventionalism as the defeater for TAG, then why present the Fristianity objection in the first place? It seems rather superfluous at best in that case. I’d wager that he presented it because he didn’t fully understand its implications.
By way of conclusion, since I’ve repeatedly made reference to reading primary sources on Van Tillian presuppositionalism (which admittedly can make for dense reading at times), let me recommend (to anyone interested) starting with a good introductory work like Pushing the Antithesis by Gary Demar. Of more intermediate use would be Apologetics to the Glory of God by John Frame. And in the advanced camp, go read the man himself: Cornelius Van Til. (Some say that he demonstrates that the incomprehensibility of God is a communicable attribute; however, there’s still very much to be learned from him.)
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