bad arguments

No Place To Stand Part II

December 8, 2009 / C. L. Bolt / 7 Comments

In response to my previous post Mitch has written this post.

Unfortunately the tendency Mitch has to advance irrelevant arguments continues in this post as well. Presuppositionalism is immune to the criticisms Mitch raises against it because, among other things, the majority position in presuppositionalism which I also adhere to does not involve the claim that logic is contingent as Mitch has stated in several of his arguments but rather that logic is necessary. Thus Mitch has allegedly advanced arguments against presuppositionalism that fall prey to the Straw Man Fallacy and may be submitting an entry to a philosophical …

No Place To Stand

December 7, 2009 / C. L. Bolt / 19 Comments

People have repeatedly called my attention to three posts by Mitch LeBlanc at www.urbanphilosophy.net wherein he makes a “case against presuppositionalism”. There are reasons I have put off writing anything about them other than not having a great deal of time. The arguments contained in the posts are in fact not what they claim to be (arguments against presuppositionalism), but are arguments against the Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God. The arguments presented do not originate with Mitch at all, a fact he readily admits, but are arguments familiar to many presuppositionalists that have been rehashed. Some of the …

Answering An Objection To Christian “Worldview”

December 6, 2009 / C. L. Bolt / 0 Comments

There have been concerns about using Christian “worldview” in a loose fashion, or using it at all. Using the term might downplay the importance or significance of the Gospel, or imply that some people are not Christians when they really are. The danger is in taking Y to be the only position on X that is consistent with the “Christian worldview” where it is dubitable that any position on X is either consistent or inconsistent with the Christian worldview because, as one example, Scripture does not address X.

Yet it is not too difficult to see that the person raising …

Pragmatic Point: The Failure of the Cartesian Method of Doubt

December 6, 2009 / C. L. Bolt / 0 Comments

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes utilizes a method of doubt in order to determine whether or not there is any such thing as certainty. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce later critiques Descartes not necessarily on the basis of what many other philosophers find fault with in Descartes, but rather on the very method of doubt itself. While there appears to be plenty of room for debate about whether or not Peirce is fair to Descartes with respect to parts of Descartes’ method of doubt, Peirce is justified in the main point of his critique which …

An Example of a Red Herring

November 28, 2009 / C. L. Bolt / 2 Comments

In the last post at Choosing Hats an example of the fallacy of Begging the Question was presented along with commentary that it is often helpful to have included in an apologetic arsenal a basic understanding of fallacies. Another popularly used fallacy is called a “Red Herring”. It may be summed up in simple terms as diverting attention away from the subject in question. The use of a Red Herring is a deliberate attempt to change the course of a discussion. This is often done when the individual who is guilty of the fallacy is having some difficulty with …

An Example of Begging the Question

November 27, 2009 / C. L. Bolt / 24 Comments

It is often helpful to have included in an apologetic arsenal a basic understanding of fallacies. One popularly used fallacy is called “Begging the Question”. It may be summed up in simple terms as merely assuming the same thing one is attempting to prove. Do not misunderstand, there is nothing wrong with an assumption or attempting to prove an assumption, but there is something wrong with setting forth a mere assumption as though it constitutes an argument; as though the assumption of the very thing someone is attempting to prove is itself the proof! An interesting illustration of this …

On Divine Simplicity and Malformed Arguments

November 22, 2009 / RazorsKiss / 9 Comments

Reformed theology, as properly expressed, considers the doctrine of God’s unity not as the classical formulation used by Aquinas and the Scholastics, but as a unity of being; in which all attributes of God are distinct in their display, necessarily interrelated but not identical to each other, despite being differentiated expressions of God’s singular, essential nature. The Scholastics (following the lead of earlier writers) may be summed up as follows: “It is commonly said in theology that God’s attributes are God himself, as he has revealed himself to us… It was further asserted by the Scholastics that the whole essence …

Anthropic Arguments and Assumptions

November 20, 2009 / RazorsKiss / 21 Comments

If God is morally perfect then He must perform the morally best actions, but creating humans is not the morally best action. If this line of reasoning can be maintained then the mere fact that humans exist contradicts the claim that God exists.

HT: urbanphilosophy.net

Look at the assumption required for the second half of this sentence. “creating humans is not the morally best action”. Says who? By what standard? As usual, I think we can guess what that is.

Walker suggests that God is morally culpable for creating human beings with defective natures (defective in comparison to God’s).

Is …