| See A note on "Presuppositional" |
Sye Ten Bruggencate gives us this proof. Why is God Necessary For:
http://www.proofthatgodexists.org/why-is-god-necessary.php
Knowledge: Unless one knows everything, or has revelation from someone (God) who does, something we don't know could contradict what we think we know.
Truth: If our thoughts are the mere by-products of the electrochemical processes in our evolved brains, you would not get "truth" you would get "brain-fizz." Chemicals do not produce "truth" they just react. As Doug Wilson said, it would be like shaking up a can of Mountain Dew, and a can of Dr. Pepper, opening them, and watching them fizz. Neither fizz is "true," they just are. For truth you need someone (God) who transcends the natural realm.
Universal, immaterial, unchanging logic: For universal, immaterial, unchanging logic, you need someone (God) who is universal (Psalm 90:2), not made of matter (John 4:24) and unchanging (Malachi 3:6). Without God, who has universal knowledge, we could not know anything to be universally true. Without God, who is Spirit (not made of matter), we could not make sense of immaterial things. Without God who is unchanging (and logic is a reflection of the way He thinks), we would have no basis for expecting logic not to change.
He also starts out with a road to the proof, a road which is also labelled proof. Here is first page, transcribing button inscriptions as ordinary text, and going on between pages:
4 options:
- absolute truth exists
- absolute truth does not exist
- I don't know if absolute truth exists
- I don't care if absolute truth exists
(Absolute Truth - True for all people at all times everywhere)
I pick
absolute truth exists
and I get 2 options
- I know something to be true
- I do not know something to be true
(Knowledge - Justified, true, belief)
I pick
I know something to be true
and I get first a text and then two options:
You have acknowledged that absolute truth exists, and that you know some things to be true. The next step towards the proof that God exists is to determine whether you believe that logic exists. Logical proof would be irrelevant to someone who denies that logic exists. An example of a law of logic is the law of non-contradiction. This law states, for instance, that it cannot both be true that my car is in the parking lot and that it is not in the parking lot at the same time, and in the same way.
- Logic exists
- Logic does not exist
I pick
Logic exists
and I get a text and two options:
To reach this page you have acknowledged there is absolute truth, that you know some things to be true, and that logic exists. Next we will examine what you believe about logic. Does logic change?
- Logic does not change
- Logic changes
I pick
Logic does not change
and I get a text and two options:
To reach this page, you have acknowledged that absolute truth exists, that you know some things to be true, that logic exists and that it is unchanging. The next question is whether you believe that logic is material, or is it immaterial? In other words, is logic made of matter, or is it 'abstract'?
- Logic is not made of matter
- Logic is made of matter
I pick
Logic is not made of matter
and I get a text and two options:
To reach this page, you have acknowledged that absolute truth exists, that you know some things to be true, that logic exists, that it is unchanging and not made of matter. The next question is whether you believe that logic is universal or up to the individual. Are contradictions invalid only where you are, and only because you say they are, or is this universally true?
- Logic is Universal
- Logic is Person Relative
I pick
Logic is Universal
and I get two pages in sequence (I intersperse a bit of critique of his interpretation of Bible [in square brackets] so you can seen what I added):
To reach this page you have admitted that absolute truth exists, that you can know things to be true, that logic exists, that it is unchanging, that it is not made of matter, and that it is universal.
Truth, knowledge, and logic are necessary to prove ANYTHING and cannot be made sense of apart from God. Therefore...
The Proof that God exists is that without Him you couldn't prove anything
While this proof is valid, no one needs this proof. The Bible teaches us that there are 2 types of people in this world, those who profess the truth of God's existence and those who suppress the truth of God's existence. The options of 'seeking' God, or not believing in God are unavailable. [Not quite true!] The Bible never attempts to prove the existence of God [Not quite true either] as it declares that the existence of God is so obvious [could it be via some proof?] that we are without excuse for not believing in Him.
Romans 1 vs. 18 - 21 says:
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
God does not send people to Hell for denying what they do not know [denying what one does not know would at least involve presumption and hypocritically seeing "lack of seen proof" as "seen proof of lack"], but for sin against the God that they do know.
Why is God necessary for truth, knowledge, and universal, abstract, unchanging logic?
http://www.proofthatgodexists.org/why-is-god-necessary.php
As said, last link on that second page was already cited.
There is actually a third page, after the second, with two options:
Note that the proof does not say that professed unbelievers do not prove things. The argument is that you must borrow from the Christian worldview, and a God who makes universal, immaterial, unchanging laws possible in order to prove anything.
This type of logical proof deals with "transcendentals" or "necessary starting points," and the proof is called a "transcendental proof." Any contrary view to the God of Christianity being the necessary starting point for rationality is reduced to absurdity. You have to assume God in order to argue against Him.
- I believe that God exists
- I do not believe that God exists
I pick
I believe that God exists
and I get back to main.
So, for fun:
I pick
I do not believe that God exists (not true of me, but since the computer program has no mind, I am lying to no one, and I am telling my readers the truth of why I pushed it.)
and I get this page:
Denying belief in God is not unbelief, but "professed unbelief" - an exercise in self-deception. You may know things, but you cannot account for anything you claim to know. Arguing against God's existence would be on par with arguing against the existence of air, breathing it all the while.You admit that absolute truth exists, but cannot account for it without God. You claim to know things to be true, but cannot justify knowledge or truth according to your own worldview. You use universal, immaterial, unchanging logic in order to come to rational decisions, but you cannot account for it. Truth, knowledge and logic are not the only ways God has revealed himself to you, but they are sufficient to show the irrationality of your thinking, and expose your guilt for denying Him.
There is a reason that you deny the existence of God and it has nothing to do with proof. I can show this to you. Examine what your initial reaction was to the proof of God's existence offered on this website. Did you think that you could continue to deny God because you are not a scientist, or philosopher but 'Surely somewhere, sometime, a philosopher or scientist will come up with an explanation for truth, knowledge and logic apart from God?' Did you try to come up with an alternate explanation on your own? OR Did you even consider that the proof was valid?
Hoping that an alternate explanation for truth, knowledge, and universal, immaterial, unchanging logic can someday be found apart from God, is a blind leap of faith, or wishful thinking. Isn't it interesting that this is exactly what professed unbelievers say about Christians?
Please examine the real reason why you are running from God. It is my prayer that God will open your eyes and change your heart so that you may be saved from your sin, embraced by His forgiving love in the person of Jesus Christ, and come to know the peace which passes all understanding.
That was more practical than logical, more ad hominem than ad probationem.
How do I agree with the proofs offered, as finally given, apart from the road there?
Knowledge: Unless one knows everything, or has revelation from someone (God) who does, something we don't know could contradict what we think we know.
NOT a proof. The uncertainty given as consequent of not having revelation from an omniscient is of what we only think we know, yes, but of what we really do know? No.
Truth: If our thoughts are the mere by-products of the electrochemical processes in our evolved brains, you would not get "truth" you would get "brain-fizz." Chemicals do not produce "truth" they just react. As Doug Wilson said, it would be like shaking up a can of Mountain Dew, and a can of Dr. Pepper, opening them, and watching them fizz. Neither fizz is "true," they just are. For truth you need someone (God) who transcends the natural realm.
Totally agreed on this one. It is the C. S. Lewis proof, basically, in very short, of an eternal mind. Though CSL - in Miracles and in his debate with Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe - is using it more on logic and on morals. Back to Sye Ten Bruggencate. Who is using perhaps something else about logic, or perhaps going a bit "shorthand":
Universal, immaterial, unchanging logic: For universal, immaterial, unchanging logic, you need someone (God) who is universal (Psalm 90:2), not made of matter (John 4:24) and unchanging (Malachi 3:6). Without God, who has universal knowledge, we could not know anything to be universally true. Without God, who is Spirit (not made of matter), we could not make sense of immaterial things. Without God who is unchanging (and logic is a reflection of the way He thinks), we would have no basis for expecting logic not to change.
Something - to me - needs spelling out here. I will try to do it.
Man has an immaterial component, but it is not universal. It is left to the imagination, or left out, that universality cannot be just an abstract, but the universal mind also must be a person.
If finite personal minds are in any way derived from it, it can be more than personal, like Tripersonal, but certainly not less than Personal. If finite personal minds were not in any way derived from it, it would not be the logical option it offers itself as, to suppose there is an universal mind. Actually, much of the difficulties, I will not say of Theism as such, but of historically unfolding Theistic philosophy, and these preparing the way for Atheism, are related to difficulties in imagining the relation of our finite personal minds to God.
Shall I resume what I think true, now, in a manner which seems to me a bit more complete than that of Sye Ten Bruggencate? Though less so, than the whole book by C. S. Lewis, as said, Miracles (1947).
So, in order for Atheism to be true, or Evolution to be true, or Heliocentrism or Big Bang to be true, or, as many of them Atheists think, Marxism or Freudianism to be true, it is not sufficient, but certainly necessary that there be such a thing as truth.
For there to be such a thing as truth, there has to be a relation, which has not yet been boiled down to a physical one, namely of one thing to be about another. Like the statements "two and two are four" and "two and two are not four" being about abstract mathematical items usually called numbers - or even being about only the concrete items one happens to think of. But one must be about the other. Otherwise they would be equivalent. Otherwise one could not label one of them as self evident (or nearly so) and other as paradox.
Computers can imitate such a relation, but never do it. No programmer (as such) can explain how x can be about y. Except, to the user, not to the computer. To a user and a site builder, a button like "I believe there is a God" is (with the exception I permitted myself above) about the one pushing the button and about his making habitually a statement about whatever he means by God.
No programmer can make anything in the computer itself to the computer itself be about anything else in the computer itself. And by "anything in the computer" I include anything that is in it as occurrences, while it is running, while executing programs.
So, the relation of being about something else is an immaterial relation.
After this relation existing, it is also necessary that such a relation be permanent.
Atheism doesn't make sense if God sometimes exists and sometimes doesn't. Fortunately for Atheists, a being that only existed sometimes would not be God. But then, unfortunately for them, this would only help them if this always held true.
Evolution does not make sense if we sometimes live after ancestors that were fish and sometimes do not live after them.
Heliocentrism does not make sense if Sun is only sometimes where (even if only relatively to Solar System) Newtonian formulas about its position in Solar System would put it - and at other times in the daily rotation round Earth I believe our senses (sight and equilibriocetive) demand us to accept.
Big Bang would not make sense if we only sometimes lived after a singularity expanding in the past and sometimes not.
I think all of these are false, but that they make even as falsehoods more sense than they would if there were no such thing as the relationship of a statment being about a truth, or if there were no such thing as such a relationship being permanent.
BUT the Atheist already knows this. He already knows (and never pretends otherwise, except when trying to argue against proofs for God's existence) that statements have the immaterial relation of being about truths, and that this immaterial relation has the uncannily matter-unlike quality of being permanent.
However, if he is a materialist, he is going to say that x being about y is a complex secondary quality of matter, a bit like colour, and one which is so complex that it hasn't been fully understood yet, but when it will be, computers will be constructed that really can think and not just process information in non-informational ways.
You know, like when each sound is being emitted from the vocal chords and tongue and palate and nose and teeth and lips, these phonetic processes are processing information coded in language sounds, but not processing them in an informational way, unlike the minds of speaker and hearer. It is only the fact of processing them in phonetic and physical ways.
Or like when each letter is being traced in handwriting, the physical tracing of line after line in it is a processing of the information it carries, but there also not directly, so the tracing of the letter is processing information in non-informational ways.
The Atheist can hardly deny this, even if he is not habitually thinking of it.
What beats me, and I never was a hard core Atheist, though one might say I was sometimes a non-Theist or very oblivious Theist, so I have no personal memory of dealing with it as an Atheist either, is how Atheists can pretend that all it takes for non-informational, physical, processing to become informational is some extra level of physical complexity.
So, truth must exist, it must be immaterial, it must be universal.
It nearly follows even from there, that there must be an universal mind. Here is where it becomes a bit tricky, since there are two options of how to relate the universal mind to our non-universal ones.
Creation or emanation of some sort - or some kind of partial identity.
That option of some kind of partial identity, like our minds being really only minds when touched by the universal mind for truth, but not being minds at all when in error (Averroism), or like our minds being a kind of personas in which the universal mind forgets itself and forgets part of its truths (Hinduistic Pantheism), can of course also be refuted. But Sye Ten Bruggencate did not take the trouble to do so. C. S. Lewis did.
Averroism and Hinduism are not strictly speaking Atheism. Rather, they are a kind of denial of our personal selves, as such and as fully minds. But of course, denying us as minds, equals denying the kind of God who created us as embodied minds - the one God Christianity is talking about. So, apologetics has a reason to refute them too, whenever they are imminent. Today they are. More than one Muslim, probably, more than one Jew or Mason, certainly, is into Averroës and Spinoza. I have even had to break off a friendship with a man who was recommending me to become an Averroist as a preparation for accepting Spinoza. Obviously, I will do no such thing! And Hinduism has been imminent in the Western mind since Blavatsky.
On the tour I made of Sye Ten Bruggencate's site, I saw no proofs against Averroism and Hinduism, but perhaps he will add them. C. S. Lewis' Miracles first establishes an universal mind and then refutes Averroistic and Hindoo interpretations of how it relates to us. If the universal mind could forget itself so as to make errors in us (Hindooism), how could it be the universal mind and guarantee of logic's universality? If we were not thinking at all when in errors not attributable to the universal mind (Averroism), we would not be trusting logic either, as we would not be able to know it was accessible to us when we were in error - or we would be very loth to admit error, precisely so as to retain our right to use logic. In social practise, Averroism (or what I suppose to be such in my observation of Westernised Muslim élite manners) works out as little people having to opt out of logic and élite as having to opt out of admitting errors.
St Thomas actually does refute Averroism and Hindooism and not quite unlike the way of C. S. Lewis, especially for Averroism. But his own proof of God (in Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, Quaesto Secunda, Articulus Tertius, after quoting Exodus 3:14), is not the kind of presuppositions even Atheists must actually admit while reasoning. Plus addition of refutation of Averroism. It is more direct, if you will.
A very short cut of it as given in Prima Via just after quoting Exodus 3:14, and as given in Contra Gentes, and as given in or alluded to in the follow up, is this: we see that the Universe is turning around us. But it is so big that only God could do that. Back when people still believe the obvious testimony of sight and equilibrial sense, very few men were Atheists. Even Averroism wasn't denying the existence of God - only the existence of us. That is the kind of obviousness that St Paul was talking about.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
St Bridget of Vadstena
8-X-2014
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