Here’s something a bit unusual. I’m going to start this week’s discussion by agreeing that Pastor Feinstein has a point with some validity to it. I think it’s based more on a misunderstanding between himself and Russell, but he does correctly summarize a legitimate logical error. He quotes Russell as saying the following:

“I don’t see any compelling reason to accept your premise that the existence of consistency depends on the existence of an absolute, trinitarian, universe-ruling God.  And if I were to somehow accept that consistency depends on this, we still would be no closer to justifying the claim that this God exists.”

Pastor Feinstein correctly points out that if A is necessary for B, then B cannot be true unless A is true also. Thus, if God were indeed necessary in order for the universe to exist, the existence of the universe would be sufficient to demonstrate the existence of God. Conversely, of course, if the universe exists and God does not, then that proves that God is not, in fact, necessary. I think that Russell’s point is more in line with the latter, i.e. that if God does not exist, then He cannot be necessary, especially given the flimsy and superstitious arguments that Pastor Feinstein provided as justification for the claim that God is necessary. Still, from a strictly technical standpoint, Pastor Feinstein is correct in objecting that you cannot logically accept the premises and then reject the conclusion, and that’s worth mentioning, not the least because of its rarity.

For the rest of his discussion, though, he wields logic like a sword with no hilt, heedless of the wounds he is inflicting on himself.

For example, he tries to defend himself against the charge of arbitrariness by insisting that the axiomatic principles of logic are also arbitrary.

You appeal to the Axiomatic Theory of Truth and claim it is not arbitrary, but your entire basis is that it is an established principle of philosophy. Established by whom? On what grounds? It is not wrong to ask you, or the entire field of philosophy to justify this theory of truth… The Axiomatic Theory of Truth is itself contingent rather than necessary given that it is rule that is caused (by a mind), determined (by reality), and sustained (by a uniform universe). Furthermore, it is dependent upon other theories of truth such as the Correspondence Theory, Coherence Theory, Pragmatic Theory, and Semantic Theory. Each of these must exist, but then again finite human epistemology could never justify any of them.

Like I mentioned before, superstitious thinking has a terribly toxic effect on your ability to reason clearly, and here we see several ways in which Pastor Feinstein is confusing himself in order to avoid recognizing some pretty fundamental truths. He starts by substituting what he calls “the Axiomatic Theory of Truth” for the axioms themselves. That’s a key substitution, because the laws of logic themselves are indeed axiomatic—they’re true because it is logically impossible for them to be false. Human theories about logic, however, can be false, and Pastor Feinstein gives us a good example right here, with his theory that the laws of logic must be caused by a mind. That’s obviously false, because if we imagine a mind capable of creating logic, that mind itself would need to be logical, which would mean that the laws of logic already existed and thus the mind could not cause them.

He also contradicts himself by offering a finite human epistemology which he says justifies “Correspondence Theory, Coherence Theory, Pragmatic Theory, and Semantic Theory,” and then declaring that finite human epistemology can never justify any of them. What he means, of course, is that it’s not possible when atheists do it, but it’s perfectly possible when believers do. His whole argument for God as a necessary being is an argument based on the idea that humans can, and must, justify the existence of logical axioms by (superstitiously) attributing them to God. But apart from the superstition, his whole argument depends on the truth of the axioms of logic. To the extent that he can create doubts about the validity of Russell’s logical axioms, he also invalidates his own conclusion that God is logically necessary. If logic itself isn’t necessarily reliable, then God isn’t necessarily the source of logic, and if He’s not necessary, then the existence of logic does not prove that God exists.

Think for a moment what it would mean if the laws of logic were arbitrarily created rather than being axiomatic. God, we suppose, could say that a certain premise leads to a certain conclusion, but since there’s no underlying, axiomatic, logical reality behind His declaration, it’s no different from Mitt Romney saying that the government will have more money if it collects fewer taxes. You can arbitrarily associate premise A with conclusion B, but if there’s no material reality underlying your claim, if there’s not an actual, objective relationship between the two, then it’s essentially meaningless. Sure, you can claim that if logic exists, then God must necessarily exist, but if there are no logical axioms to establish a materially real connection between the two, then it’s an empty claim. Indeed, without axiomatic laws of logic, nobody‘s arguments are genuinely valid, not even God’s (if there were a god).

Furthermore, I would only be guilty of arbitrariness if I did not justify the existence of God as the necessary presupposition of inductive inference. Once again, I refer you to the discussion of contingent versus necessary. If something contingent exists, then by default it is required that something necessary exists. Thus, my proposition is not arbitrary.

Referring to his discussion of contingent vs. necessary, we see that Pastor Feinstein repeatedly made arbitrary designations as to what was contingent and what was necessary, often reversing the fundamental dependencies in order to arrive at the superstitious conclusion that a wise, rational, all-knowing God had to create a number of fundamental principles on which the existence of wisdom, reason, and knowledge all depend. A less-arbitrary consideration of the truth would lead to the conclusion that these fundamental principles are the real “necessary being” upon which all else, including any gods, would have to be contingent. But if the gods themselves are contingent upon the same axiomatic principles as logic and reason and “uniformity,” then the gods are not necessary, and the axiomatic principles, being truly and literally necessary, are their own justification.

Do we need more documentation of the arbitrary nature of Pastor Feinstein’s argument?

It is also ironic that you brought up Occam’s Razor to disprove my position, when the man who provided the verbiage of it was a Christian. That is neither here nor there, but I do find it ironic. Your entire statement concerning it seemed to miss the entire point about necessary versus contingent. The universe cannot be uncaused because it carries the attributes that belong to a contingent object. God, by definition, has to be uncaused because He is the necessary being. So your application of Occam’s Razor entirely fails.

Notice, “God, by definition, has to be uncaused because He is the necessary being.” It’s not that God’s nature is free from any attribute that would be contingent on something other than Himself. He has lots of contingent attributes, which a truly necessary being cannot have. But that’s not a problem because we just define God as being the necessary being, and then accuse our opponent of being arbitrary. Point for Slytherin!

And of course, if you’re going to wield your sword by the blade, what better target to take a swing at than geology and evolution?

Furthermore, we are not neutral when interpreting the geological record and the fossil record. So how do we determine who’s interpretation corresponds more with reality? By assuming uniformitarianism and punctuated equilibrium? Or by assuming catastrophism and special creation? Both sets of assumptions are difficult to falsify in a science lab, and so once again we have to start comparing presuppositions and leaning back on the preconditions of intelligibility.

Pastor Feinstein’s approach to science is based on two things: believing what people tell you, and believing that everything is fundamentally intentional. Or, to use a couple shorter terms, on gullibility and superstition. Since Christians reach their conclusions by just believing whatever the ancient stories tell them, they assume that scientists also reach their conclusions just by believing what evolutionists tell them. Neither party is neutral, so you can’t trust either one, and you have to just decide who you want to believe, and your choice is just as valid as anyone else’s. It doesn’t occur to Pastor Feinstein that we don’t have to just take people’s word for it, and that we can continually compare our conclusions to the infallible standard of objective reality in order to refine our understanding and reach a coherent set of answers that corresponds to reality. It’s just a question of putting your faith in what men say, and men are fallible, so believe what you want.

Given this sort of worldview, the ad hominem argument seems almost appropriate.

Just prior to your final summary, you wrote of my apparent obsession concerning smoke and mirrors and traps. I am not insecure in this as you claimed, but instead I am attempting to clarify for our readers that this is what atheists do. They shroud their attempts to arbitrarily take their positions for granted in academic vernacular. It takes a clever reader to spot it out.

Yes, only the foolish and incompetent would think the emperor was naked, but you, clever reader, can see what wonderful fabrics have gone into the making of his new clothes.

Well, this is getting long, so let’s wrap up here.

To conclude this, I would like to quickly address the scorecard at this point. Apparently you are under the impression that I am the only one who needs to prove my case, otherwise I lost the debate.

Well, yes, Pastor Feinstein is claiming that a Trinitarian Christian God is “necessary,” and that atheism is impossible. That’s his case, and to the degree that he fails to eliminate all possibility of God’s non-existence, he has indeed failed to meet his own self-selected criteria for winning. Whether or not Russell builds a satisfactory counter-claim, Pastor Feinstein has come nowhere near building any kind of rational, non-superstitious argument that renders atheism obsolete, and in fact much of his argument serves to demonstrate a certain fundamental incoherence and self-refutation from within the Christian understanding of God itself. And though he explicitly addresses his next remark to Randall, there seems to be more than just a bit of autobiographical tone in his pouty complaint.

I guess in a world where you get to take things for granted and be arbitrary, you can also set arbitrary rules that make you the victor even if you truly lost.

Amen, brother. Amen.

One of the most important reasons why creationism does not belong in the classroom is because creationism promotes superstitious thinking, which is the antithesis of scientific thinking. Trying to think superstitiously about science really screws things up, and in today’s excerpt from Pastor Stephen Feinstein’s reply to Russell Glasser, we find an almost prototypical example.

Pastor Feinstein begins by reiterating his somewhat garbled understanding of naturalism.

I demonstrated that nature is uniform and that we need it this way just to be able to learn things. I then demonstrated that in a random universe such predication and uniformity is actually impossible.

As Russell Glasser points out, the key flaw in this argument (or one of the flaws, anyway) is that Pastor Feinstein is conflating “random” with “undirected.” These are two words that have a number of meanings, some of which overlap, and that’s where Pastor Feinstein’s superstitions get in the way and confuse things. So let’s number each of the meanings of these terms in order to better keep track of which versions Pastor Feinstein is using in his discussion below.

There are two ways a thing can be directed. One is if some person has some goal in mind and then initiates a series of causes and effects in order to achieve the desired goal. But sometimes there is no goal, nor any person to seek it. Things are just guided by unthinking mechanistic forces. Gravity, for example, doesn’t have any specific goal in mind when directing water to flow downhill, it just influences everything the same way.

Thus, there are two kinds of “directed” phenomena:

• Directed#1—guided by an intentional desire to achieve a specific objective
• Directed#2—constrained by natural but non-intentional influences, like the laws of physics.

Now let’s consider “random.” There are multiple meanings possible here as well.

• Random#1—there are multiple possible outcomes and each has an equal chance of occurring, regardless of environmental influences.
• Random#2—the outcome is determined by specific rules of cause-and-effect, but the factors involved are so numerous/subtle/complex that it is humanly impossible to track them all well enough to predict the outcome.
• Random#3—the outcome follows a specific pattern, however the pattern is so long and complex that the outcome appears to be one of the other types of randomness.
• Random#4—the outcome occurs without reference to the law of cause and effect, and is thus unrelated to any prior condition which occurred before it.

The scientific understanding of the world, thus, is that it is directed#2 and not directed#1, except to the extent that real men and women operate on the world to achieve their own objectives. Some aspects of the evolution of life on earth are random#2, although that’s diminishing as we better understand the specific rules of cause-and-effect that operate in the biological world. Like the weather, though, evolution will always contain a certain amount of random#2-ness, but it never has been and never will be random#1, because evolutionary events are directed#2.

As we’ll see, the wildcard here is going to be the word “chance,” which can be used to mean either “not directed (#1 or #2)” or  “random (#1, #2 or #3).” With a bit of effort, you can even use it for random#4 as well. The term “chance” is the shell in the old shell game that shuffles them around so fast your audience can’t keep track of which is which. Ready? Here we go.

I guess I need to ask a question. Do you believe that time and chance account for both the existence of and the evolution of the universe and life? I often wonder how many times has it been written on the whiteboard in Biology 101 that time + chance equals an orderly universe and life? What my professor meant by this is that the universe is “directed” by time and chance. In other words, it is directed by randomness.

As far as I know, the equation “time + chance = universe” only ever shows up on creationist whiteboards, at least insofar as “chance” means random#1 or random#4. Scientists will tell you that evolution is not directed#1, meaning that it is directed#2 and random#2. Pastor Feinstein, however, assumes that the universe must either be directed#1 or or it must be random#4, hence his example. He believes he has trapped the atheist into asserting that the universe must be directed#1 by random#4 “chance”, and therefore, aha, gotcha.

Where was my bait and switch?

The switch was the dual substitution of directed#1 for directed#2, and random#4 for random#2.

By you implying that the universe is directed, you imply uniformity. But you fail to identify from your presuppositions what is directing it. Well, if you agree with the run-of-the-mill materialistic atomist, you would say that time and chance accounts for the universe.

Here’s where superstitious thinking interferes with scientific understanding. Pastor Feinstein superstitiously attributes everything to God (including preconditions that God Himself would also require, go figure), and because he uses the same superstition to account for everything, he assumes that science must also come up with one single source that accounts for everything: evolution, the Big Bang, gravity, logic—everything. This causes him to conclude that science thinks time and chance account for everything.

But science isn’t like superstition. It doesn’t just pick one thing and then arbitrarily use that one thing as the source for everything else. Science traces out the objective, reality-based relationships between things, and assigns each effect to the verifiable factors that can be observed to cause it. And different effects have different causes. The mechanisms by which stars and galaxies came into being are different from the mechanisms by which new species come into being, which in turn are different from the mechanisms by which living organisms and proto-organisms arise from non-life. And science is learning more and more about all those mechanisms, and how they work, and how they differ. But to Pastor Feinstein, all science is doing is saying that everything is caused by time and chance, one size fits all. That’s superstitious thinking.

Yet, would not uniformity already have to exist for time and chance to create and sustain anything? So in other words you are saying the universe is directed by uniformity. I was saying the exact same thing. The difference is, uniformity within a contingent object is caused, sustained, and determined by something outside of it. Time and chance cannot create uniformity, but instead there would already have to be uniformity to make time and chance cause stellar evolution. So your position requires uniformity to be the precondition of chance, yet as I said last time, these are antonyms. So then, how do you the atheist account for uniformity?

Here’s the shell game again. The atheist’s position requires “uniformity” to be the precondition of “chance.” But which “chance” are we talking about here? The atheist’s chance is undirected#2 and random#2, but Pastor Feinstein says that uniformity is the opposite of “chance.” Clearly he’s talking about uniformity as the opposite of random#4, which he has substituted for the random#2 and undirected#2 conditions science actually observes.

But notice the weird contradiction he gets himself into in the middle of his erstwhile debunking. He claims that “uniformity within a contingent object is caused, sustained, and determined by something outside of it.” But what do those words really mean? In order for science to be possible, and in order for inductive reasoning to be possible, the specific type of “uniformity” you need is a consistent cause-and-effect relationship between the causes and their effects. Our ability to predict the future based on what we’ve seen in the past is an ability that depends on having specific causes that consistently produce specific effects. Apart from this specific type of “uniformity,” all bets are off: future conditions are random#4.

The trouble is, this requirement applies to all causes and effects. Pastor Feinstein claims that “uniformity (i.e. cause-and-effect) within a contingent object must be caused by something outside of it.” But you can’t cause the law of cause and effect, because whatever you propose as the cause, it can’t have a cause-and-effect relationship with anything else unless the law of cause and effect already exists. But if it already exists, then you can’t create it!

This uniformity, which Pastor Feinstein says atheists can’t account for, is another aspect of necessary preconditions for reality—what Pastor Feinstein calls “necessary being” and what Russell calls “axioms.” Pastor Feinstein superstitiously and insensibly gives God credit for causing the law of cause-and-effect, and then defies the atheist to fall into the same self-contradiction, and gloats because the unbeliever refuses.

Nevertheless, I think Pastor Feinstein himself is aware, at some level, of the shell game he’s trying to pull here, because he keeps belaboring the point and trying to defend himself, this time by playing the dictionary game.

If time plus chance equals the universe and life, then I ask you to explain the following definition of chance from dictionary.reference.com: “The absence of any cause of events that can be predicted, understood, or controlled.” That was the first definition, and the only other one that applies to how we are syntactically using the word was the third definition, which said, “A possibility or probability of anything happening.” So help me out here. Where is my bait and switch?

He found a dictionary definition for “chance” that combines random#1, random#2 and possibly random#4, plus another that refers to chance in the sense of probability. And the dictionary is correct: “chance” can be used in any of those ways, without making certain important distinctions as to why we humans find ourselves unable to predict, understand, or control the event in question. But just to help out Pastor Feinstein (per his request), the bait and switch lies in the way he’s using “chance” to obscure the important differences between directed#1, directed#2, random#2 and random#4.

I have personally been taught within the university system the time plus chance formula, I have read it in books, and the very philosophy of materialistic atomism assumes it. Do you atheists mean something entirely different by chance than the understood definition? If so, then your whole camp is guilty of deconstructive arbitrariness. I pulled no bait and switch. By the understood definition of chance within our syntactical use of it, it is an antonym of uniformity and predication.

And here is the bait and switch laid plain once again. Pastor Feinstein himself gave one of the definitions of “chance” as being the probability of a thing happening. Entire industries are based on the uniformity and predictability of “random chance,” because in many or even most real-world cases, chance is random#2 rather than random#4. What’s the chance of rain on Thursday? What’s the chance that a single male driver under the age of 25 will have a claim on his care insurance policy? What’s the chance of drawing an ace and a face card in blackjack? Real-world chance is uniform and predictable, in the aggregate. You can almost literally take it to the bank. And that’s exactly the same kind of uniform, predictable chance that scientists observe in evolving populations. But Pastor Feinstein swaps in random#4 chance as the antonym of uniformity and prediction, and thinks he has scored big points by doing so.

If [chance] is the governing principle of the universe, as many materialists presuppose, then it is impossible for us to have a uniformity in nature. We do in fact have a uniformity of nature. Therefore, the universe is not governed by chance and therefore materialistic atheism is patently false. Thus once again, I have shown atheism to be illogical, untenable, and impossible. For some reason you do not want to admit this, but that’s fine. You can write that I have failed to do this until you are convinced, but as it stands now, I have in fact won this debate. And I was not kidding when I said I was just getting started.

He wasn’t kidding, he’s just been misled by his own superstitions and thus has completely failed to understand what science is really saying. A scientific understanding of the universe depends on the same consistent law of cause and effect that any god would require in order to be the cause of any particular, contingent effect. God is therefore not axiomatic or necessary, since His proposed divine power is contingent on the same operational laws as are necessary and sufficient for the “uniformity” needed by science. Since the law of cause and effect is not and cannot be contingent on God, and since it must necessarily be true even without any gods, materialism needs no superstition in order to account for the universe we see around us. Pastor Feinstein is kidding, but not intentionally, and even then he’s only kidding himself.

Back when I was hosting this blog on my own server (well, a rented one anyway), I noticed the way some of Jesus’ self-professed followers seem to be operating under a curse.

It’s like a scene from an old B-grade black-and white horror flick: Jesus is walking down some dank alleyway in Jerusalem and carelessly bumps into an old gypsy woman, knocking her in the mud and muck, and then thoughtlessly laughing at her misfortune. Her deepset eyes blaze, and she scowls at him. “A curse upon you,” she mutters. “From now on, your followers and supporters will be unable to accuse their critics of any fault or fallacy without being guilty of the same thing themselves.” He, like all B-grade movie heroes, doesn’t take her seriously until her curse starts coming true. Only then does he realize, to his horror, that the curse is inexorable, inescapable, and infallible.

I think that old gypsy woman would cackle with glee if she were to read the material Pastor Feinstein has for us today.

Let’s start with Pastor Feinstein’s video game analogy (or parable, as he calls it).

I do apologize for the length of the parable, but it was necessary to demonstrate why I will not let you simply take your assumptions for granted when I know in advance that your preconditions render your assumptions impossible. I would be a fool if I did that.

Pastor Feinstein tells us that logic itself must have preconditions, and he assumes that the ultimate precondition for logic must be God, because only God could be wise enough to invent logic. If that’s the case, however, then God must be insane, irrational, and illogical. You cannot create something that already exists, so the only way God could create logic would be if He Himself did not already possess any. An insane and irrational God, however, would be too crazy to invent logic. Pastor Feinstein’s preconditions render his assumptions impossible. And logic is just one of the preconditions that would be required in order for a sane, powerful, omniscient deity to exist.

Nevertheless, Pastor Feinstein crows about how thoroughly he has backed Russell into a corner. He even deigns to answer one of Russell’s questions, just for the sake of fair play and not because he needs to or anything.

Of course, I do want to play fair and thus it is important that I answer you on your question, “How do you justify (or account for) the existence of God?” That question makes me wonder if you read my last response closely. There was a reason I spent time on the subject of contingent beings. Only they require presuppositions and preconditions.

Russell not only read Pastor Feinstein’s argument, he understood it so well that he was able to predict pretty much exactly how Pastor Feinstein would respond to his question. He predicted that Pastor Feinstein would reply, “Stupid question.  God is not in that category.” And then he explained why this would be an insufficient answer.

This is why the magic tiara comparison is completely apt.  As long as you can invoke an entity which doesn’t obey the rules you describe, you can claim to have come up with a plausible (to you) solution to the problem that you claim needs addressing.  The selection of a God to fulfill that role is completely arbitrary.  The magic tiara has always existed; it sits outside the universe; its one and only function is to create the laws of logic, and its existence has been irrelevant since then.

Or, if you think talking about a useless stand-in object like a tiara is foolish and a waste of time, you can just accept my proposal that the laws of logic are the axiomatic concepts which need no explanation, and we can proceed from there like sensible people.

There was a reason why Russell took the time to explain his magic tiara analogy, and an old gypsy woman might wonder whether Pastor Feinstein read Russell’s subsequent discussion closely. Russell’s objections were not based on failing to understand that Christians would put God in a different category (necessary being). Quite the contrary in fact. But Pastor Feinstein addresses Russell’s question by explaining, at some length, that he puts God in a different category. Not only does he fail to address the point Russell is making, but seems not to have noticed that it was even there. Instead, he gloats some more.

You are trapped by this answer. There is nothing that you can legitimately say to it, other than your accusation that I am inventing a new category that doesn’t follow the rules of every other category. Well, no, not exactly. I am inventing nothing. … I am agreeing with you that the world is real, but I am taking it one step further and I am saying since the real world is contingent, by its very definition it requires a necessary being that is categorically different in order to account for it. And by the very nature of that “necessary” category, the chain stops there requiring no other presuppositions or preconditions, for by definition these would be impossible to apply to that which is “necessary.”

There’s a lot of what he says here that’s almost correct. He’s arguing his way down towards Russell’s axioms, but before he gets there, he’s injecting his own superstitious presuppositions about the ultimate necessary being, as a person of some sort. Worse yet, he’s arguing that the real world—reality itself—is contingent on some necessary being in some different category. That’s a triumph of superstitious thinking, but in fact things that are categorically different from reality are things like lies, myths, delusions, and fiction. And personally, it doesn’t strike me as plausible to claim that reality was invented by a fiction. It is reality itself which must be the ontological entity that is “uncaused, unsustained, and undetermined by anything outside itself,” since whatever lies outside of reality is false.

So the real issue here is that Russell is using axioms in roughly the same role as Pastor Feinstein is using “necessary being”—that is, as a category of things that are self-existent and need no further justification—and Pastor Feinstein is simply assuming that axioms do have preconditions and do need to be justified. Hence Russell’s observation that a magical tiara could do just as well as the presumed source for logical axioms. If we’re going to be superstitious about where logic “comes from,” we might as well make up anything we like.

You could imagine, for instance, a tiara that was one tiara made of many silver wires woven together, thus accounting for Pastor Feinstein’s spurious rendition of the one-and-many problem, and you could even give it credit for having actual thoughts (since magical objects do sometimes have actual personalities, according to the stories). Like Russell said, the choice of God as the “necessary being” is completely arbitrary, since you’re arriving at it by superstition rather than by following through on the logical implications of the facts. But it doesn’t look as though Pastor Feinstein realizes that this is where the issue lies. And so the gypsy strikes again.

The fact that you continued to bring up the magical tiara causes me to think that you either a) did not understand this or b) you simply ignored the point altogether and smuggled the tiara back into the debate hoping that it still satisfies your camp.

*evil cackling in the distance*

You failed to demonstrate that a magical tiara could be “necessary.” Through the one and many problems, the existence of persons, the laws of logic, etc. I did in fact demonstrate that the God of the Bible can be and is this necessary being.

In fact, all that’s required to be ontologically necessary is for the necessary being to be the source of all contingent beings, and to be itself uncaused, unsustained, and undetermined by anything outside itself. A magical tiara could have these qualities in exactly the same fashion as God gets them: by people assuming it/He would have them. Pastor Feinstein is the one who failed to demonstrate that the God of the Bible can be and is this necessary being. As we saw earlier, his arguments were a mishmash of appeals to animism, superstition, polytheism, and dogma. Just scratch the surface, and you start finding inconsistencies, like the fact that God can’t cause logic to exist unless logic is absent from His own nature.

Pastor Feinstein does at least attempt to address Russell’s argument above.

I find it ironic that after the magical tiara nonsense you then made the statement, “… you can just accept my proposal that the laws of logic are the axiomatic concepts which need no explanation, and we can proceed from there like sensible people.” Russell, I do not think you are getting it yet. … I agree with you that logic exists, but I disagree with the notion that it needs no explanation. This brings us right back to the video game parable. … I can see why the atheist is so fearful to talk about preconditions. Your worldview is hopeless to account for logic and inductive inference, and so you blindly ask the Christian to take it for granted like you do. Not a chance, for I have you right where I want you.

The reason why Pastor Feinstein thinks atheism is “hopeless to account for logic and inductive inference” is because he is assuming (a) that the existence of logic needs to be accounted for, and (b) that the only possible explanation is for it to be intentionally created by a divine person more or less identical to the Christian God. His own presuppositionalism requires either that a contingent property (logic) is part of God’s nature, thus making God Himself a contingent being, or else that God, as a necessary being, possesses no logic whatsoever and would thus be too insane to create anything as ordered and self-consistent as logic. Either way his worldview is hopeless to account for the origin of logic. So cue the gypsy again.

The irony in your statement is that you assume that if I agree with you, only then am I sensible and only then can we proceed. Once again, this is you trying to set the rules of the game that allow you the necessary handicap needed just to survive.

It’s fascinating how often you can find the flaw in a believer’s argument just by looking at what they accuse the atheist of doing wrong. It’s not just that they accuse the atheist of doing things wrong in general, but surprisingly often they accuse the atheist of doing the specific wrong thing that they themselves are doing right now. Pastor Feinstein accuses Russell of trying to smuggle atheistic assumptions into the debate because Russell is not granting Pastor Feinstein’s assumption that axioms need to be justified.

The sensible thing for Pastor Feinstein to do would be to either admit that he’s making an arbitrary assumption about axioms needing to be justified, or else to show some kind of argument that would justify drawing the conclusion that axioms need to be justified. But by simply assuming that axioms need to be justified, and worse, that Russell himself has to make the same assumption, Pastor Feinstein is doing exactly the thing he’s accusing Russell of doing.

From here we go off on another anti-evolution riff, trying to show how evolution really disproves atheism, but we don’t have the time and space for that now, so we’ll pick that up next week. Stay tuned.

In his response to Pastor Feinstein’s third post, Russell Glasser raises 5 very good points:

1. Both Stephen and Russell should agree that some concepts are axiomatic, requiring no explanation.  For Stephen, the axiom is God.  For Russell, reality and logic are axiomatic, and God is a needless insertion.
2. Stephen cannot assert that the existence of logic requires justification, unless he also attempts to offer a justification of God.  If he believes that this is unnecessary, then he should grant point (1).
3. If the assumptions for all parties are arbitrary then Russell should win this debate, since Stephen failed to meet the burden of proof that he implied when stating that atheism is impossible.  If the belief in God is merely Stephen’s preferred assumption, then it is not necessary, and may be discarded due to Occam’s Razor.
4. Stephen’s claim that a godless universe must be a random universe (where “random” is used to mean “inconsistent,” “illogical,” or “haphazard,” as opposed to merely “undirected”) requires justification, otherwise I reject the premise.
5. Stephen should justify how a God would go about “creating” the laws of logic, without himself being subject to logic.

Sounds like Pastor Feinstein has his work cut out for him.

Before we get into the meat of Pastor Feinstein’s fourth post, I want to talk for a minute about materialism. A lot of believers (and even some non-believers) have some serious misconceptions about materialism, which in turn leads to some significant misunderstanding. The biggest misconception is that materialism means believing that only things made of atoms can be real. If you’re a believer, that’s a handy misconception to have, because it does two things for you: it allows you to imagine a spiritual realm not made of atoms, outside the boundaries of material reality, and it allows you to “disprove” materialism by pointing out some of the many things that are not made of atoms.

Obviously, materialists have always known about things that are real without being made of atoms. The distance between two atoms is not itself made of atoms. Time is not made of atoms. Even atoms are not made of atoms. Material reality is not “only those things which are made of atoms,” but rather “that which exists in and of itself, independently of any observer’s perceptions,” as distinct from subjective reality, which does depend on an observer’s perceptions for its existence and character. Material reality does not rule out the possibility of some higher dimension capable of interacting with our own, but it does require that any such dimension must exist in and of itself, independently of our (mis)perceptions, beliefs, feelings, or misconceptions about it. As such, if it is truly interconnected with our dimension, it must be scientifically verifiable as well as mystically “perceived.”

But that’s enough of that for now. Let’s look at Pastor Feinstein’s summary of the debate thus far.

Russell, … you are dodging the transcendental argument altogether and are attempting to smuggle your assumptions a priori into the argument without attempting to justify them. When I say “justify,” I simply mean that on the basis of your presuppositions, you cannot account for your assumptions. In fact, if your presuppositions about reality are true, then your assumptions cannot be true at the same time due to inconsistency and arbitrariness. Therefore, you are seeking to take the discussion out of the realm presuppositions so that you would not have to justify anything, but instead get to take your assumptions for granted. I see right through this. In fact, I believe that you realize if we continue the course that I have been directing the debate, that it will be clear that you have lost. Unless you do something serious soon, it is only going to get worse.

Clearly, Pastor Feinstein has a very different perception of the debate than Russell has. Interestingly, if you look at Russell’s summary of his points above, you’ll notice he is quite specific about the points that still remain to be addressed, some of which are directly cogent to the transcendental argument Pastor Feinstein is making, Pastor Feinstein’s smug dismissal notwithstanding.  Pastor Feinstein’s response, by contrast, is filled with vague but triumphant generalities and assertions, not to mention a repetition of the exact same double standard as Russell accused him of at the very beginning of his third post. He insists that Russell “account for” the existence of reality and logic, but denies that Christians need to “account for” God’s existence in the same way. Russell’s axioms have to be contingent on some kind of superstitious precondition, but Pastor Feinstein’s assumption—God—does not.

And then he warns us that it’s going to get worse. Oy.

The first point that you tried to make was that your assumptions are axiomatic. I reread your points a few times trying to see where the problem is and I do agree that miscommunication is going on, but I do not believe it is on my end. There are only two options that I can think of: a) You did not understand the nature of my argument in the last response; or b) You did understand it and you realize the precarious position it puts you in, and so you are attempting to move us away from the discussion about preconditions and thus have us begin with your assumptions.

I’ve noted before that Pastor Feinstein seems not so much to be engaging Russell’s points, but rather, engaging the role given to atheism by some kind of presuppositional script. That seems to be the case here. Russell’s argument was that both he and Pastor Feinstein are proceeding from some kind of fundamental, axiomatic presupposition that requires no further justification than itself. In Pastor Feinstein’s case it’s God as the “necessary” being, and in Russell’s case it’s the existence of logic and reality. Rather than engage this argument, either to agree with it or to dispute it, Pastor Feinstein addresses the scripted “atheist” position in which only atoms are real, and the atheist is trying to say we have to assume this without justification.

I told you that I agreed with your assumptions, but I do not agree with you concerning the notion that we do not have to justify them. I understand why you are appealing to your assumptions as axioms, but even an elementary level of epistemology overturns the axioms and requires us to discuss preconditions.

Pastor Feinstein’s argument is that Russell’s assumptions don’t deserve to be classified as axioms, and that it’s trivial to show that they have logical preconditions. His first example, however, is a bit bizarre.

For example, how do you (or the dictionary you cited) know that any given self-evident truth requires no proof?

Duh. We know that a self-evident truth requires no proof because “self-evident” means “that which requires no proof (other than itself, hence self-evident).” How do we know that Pastor Feinstein is called Pastor Feinstein? Just as “Pastor Feinstein” is the name we use to refer to Pastor Feinstein, “self-evident” is the adjective we use to describe things that require no further proof. A little further down, he’s going to argue that “preconditions only apply to contingent beings and objects, and by definition cannot apply to a necessary being.” How does he know? Because “necessary being,” in this particular philosophical context, means that which has no preconditions. It’s the same thing.

[What] authority do you (or any human) have by which you can arbitrarily declare that your three assumptions require no proof or explanation?

Notice how this distorts Russell’s argument. Russell is saying that his three assumptions—that reality exists, that we perceive reality through our senses, and that we need good reasons for what we believe—require no more proof than the assumption of a Creator does. This is an argument that neatly circumvents the double standard Pastor Feinstein is trying to apply, because Pastor Feinstein is accusing atheists of arbitrarily making their assumptions whilst simultaneously insisting that one can assume a Creator without addressing an equivalent number of preconditions for their assumption. In short, Pastor Feinstein is simply making the arbitrary assumption that Russell’s assumptions have preconditions, and his own assumptions do not.

It is very convenient to place inductive inference under the category of axioms. After all, if I grant this, then you can still believe in the validity of science despite the fact that materialistic atomism undermines the very idea of the uniformity of nature. I will not grant this, and thus as far as I am concerned, you have not answered the dilemma.

Actually, the reason inductive inference is valid is because material reality is and must necessarily be consistent with itself. By “material reality,” of course, we mean not just “that which is made of atoms,” but everything that exists in and of itself, independent of any subjective perceptions. It is this self-consistency that makes induction both possible and reliable. God has nothing to do with it, obviously, since God Himself requires a self-consistent material reality in order to have His own meaningful existence.

You said, “And yet, regardless of what presuppositions you may have, at some point we must reach a position that is simply asserted to be true and requires no explanation.” I disagree with you on this, as I have said many times now.

And yet, at the same time, Pastor Feinstein also agrees with Russell, since he himself proposes a Creator for Whom no explanation is possible, because God, as the “necessary” being, can have no prior causes to explain. This is the double standard that Russell speaks of. Pastor Feinstein disagrees with the need for axioms when employed by atheists, but he gladly asserts that a necessary being is both possible and axiomatic. But that’s because it’s the Christian asserting the axiom this time, which is why it’s ok.

The bottom line is that transcendental logic is necessary, even on the most fundamental assumptions. I will illustrate this with something rather simple. If you and I were playing each other in Call of Duty on the Playstation 3, it is obvious that the video game is real and that you and I are playing it. … The question is, “What preconditions have to be true for us to play this game?” Well, first, we have to have electricity and a high definition TV (otherwise what’s the point). … And from here we could keep going, until we have then asked about the preconditions of each of the other preconditions. At some point it will end (with the Christian God) because preconditions only apply to contingent beings and objects, and by definition cannot apply to a necessary being.

So he’s arbitrarily assuming that God (the Christian God no less) is the necessary being, at which point the explanations cease. Pastor Feinstein can explain how he arrived at the conclusion God exists, but he cannot explain the origin of God. Just as Russell said, we reach a position that is simply asserted to be true—no prior cause can serve as the explanation for God’s existence, because God has been arbitrarily designated as a being who has no preconditions. Except of course that He does: He cannot be logical and reasonable unless logic and reason exist; He cannot possess all knowledge unless knowledge exists; He can’t know about anything other than Himself unless there’s something besides Himself to know; He cannot cause anything to exist unless the law of cause and effect exists; He can’t know the future unless time exists; and so on.

What Pastor Feinstein is doing with his PS3 analogy is simply projecting his assumptions onto Russell’s argument. In the analogy, Russell’s three assumptions are equated with the end product: the game manufactured by the company and played on the game console. But Russell’s three assumptions are that reality exists, that we perceive reality via the senses, and that we need good reasons for what we believe. Those aren’t end products, or at least the first and last ones aren’t. We could just as well re-tell this analogy with God as the end product, and we’d be a lot better off, since the only place we ever see God show up in real life is in the perceptions of men, which sounds a lot more like an end product than the existence of reality does.

The bottom line is that Pastor Feinstein’s “transcendental logic” boils down to an elaborate rationalization for a superstitious and animistic assumption that everything we see must ultimately be caused by something very much like ourselves, only bigger, more magical, and less visible. Russell is trying over and over to get Pastor Feinstein to address the questions in the summary I posted at the beginning of this post, and all he is receiving in return is the relentless presumption that Pastor Feinstein’s worldview is correct, and that he (Russell) is somehow “dodging” the issue by questioning those assumptions instead of blindly embracing them.

In Pastor Stephen Feinstein’s opinion, his debate with Russell Glasser was already over by the end of his (Feinstein’s) third post. According to the script he seems to be reading from, it is now time to take a few bows, acknowledge the cheers of the crowd, and review how easily he was able to knock down all the unbeliever’s futile arguments.

That’s the problem with scripts like this. They never take into account the possibility that the atheist might have more and better things to say that what you’ve got written down for them in the script. The script, after all, is designed to be effective at convincing believers, not atheists.

So let’s go back over Pastor Feinstein’s review and self-congratulations.

I would like to conclude here by responding to your conclusion. You asked me to offer some suppositions that we can both agree to. I did in my last response, but since you apparently missed them, I will repeat them here: 1) The world is real; 2) We learn from our sense experiences; 3) We learn from logic; 4) Reasonable standards are necessary; and 5) Bald assertion proves nothing. I made that clear then. I am asking you now to truly deal with the issues. Each of these assumptions has necessary preconditions. These need to be addressed in a non-arbitrary manner. They need to be applied to sound logic (a reasonable standard). It truly seems like you blew past some important statements in my response, which causes me to wonder if you really are seeking to have a discussion in good faith.

Notice point numbers 3, 4, and 5 here. Number 3, “We learn from logic,” was introduced by Pastor Feinstein himself (though of course Russell would make the same assertion, if asked). I would amend number 3 by saying “We learn from correct logic.” Misunderstood or misapplied logic doesn’t necessarily lead to knowledge, and can often be used to support fallacious reasoning and conclusions. We need reasonable standards (#4), and we need to make sure that our claims live up to those before accepting our conclusions as justified. As Pastor Feinstein reviews what he considers his great victory, we can take the opportunity to review all the ways his argument thus far has failed to live up to those reasonable standards. No doubt we’ll have the opportunity to review supposition #5 (“Bald assertion proves nothing”) as we go along.

Here are a few more suppositions that you should honestly agree to: 1) You and I are not neutral and we do not interpret evidence neutrally (otherwise you would not have said God has never been observed for I believe the evidence greatly shows that He has);

Isn’t that great? “If you interpreted the evidence neutrally, you would never have said something that contradicted my beliefs.” He doesn’t say “You and I disagree and therefore at least one of us must be biased.” No, you and I are not neutral, and therefore my beliefs are the standards against which neutrality must be judged. I wonder if he even knows he did that?

The thing about neutrality is that neutrality only exists with respect to something else. If I like broccoli better than spinach, and you don’t believe that anybody could like broccoli, we are both biased with respect to a conclusion like “Broccoli tastes good,” but I am neutral with respect to a conclusion like “Deacon Duncan likes broccoli better than spinach.”

When a believer asks us to agree that we are not neutral, therefore, we need to first ask, “Neutral with respect to what?” Neutrality requires some common standard which can be fairly applied to both sides, to discover whether or not a given perspective is accurately representing the facts. In the case of philosophical questions such as those raised by Pastor Feinstein, the objective standard is material reality itself (i.e. that which exists in and of itself, apart from how it might be perceived by any third party).

The point to remember regarding neutrality is that the way to achieve neutrality is by frequent reference to the standard. There are indeed many ways we can fail to practice neutrality and objectivity, but the existence of such failures is not an excuse to abandon the standard and just believe whatever you like. The neutral party is the party that does not trust their own perceptions and intuitions carte blanche, but rather continually tests and re-examines their conclusions in the light of objective, material reality. And people who take this approach to truth are called “skeptics.”

So, then, even if we suppose that no one is ever absolutely neutral, we can still be more neutral than otherwise as long as we commit ourselves to skeptical critical thinking. Pastor Feinstein’s first additional supposition ought to read, “You and I are not neutral, and therefore we need to take pains to be more skeptical.”

2) Epistemology is extremely relevant in addressing our positions and assumptions; and 3) If you really believe it is better not to believe something is true without good reasons then you need to also apply that standard to your own brand of atheism.

Here, at least, Pastor Feinstein is covering non-controversial ground. Yes, epistemology can be extremely relevant at times, especially when debating people who base key components of their philosophy on epistemological errors. And absolutely we need—and have—good reasons for rejecting Christian theology, some of which Pastor Feinstein is bringing to light by his own arguments, though not intentionally of course. So no real argument concerning points 2 and 3. And now for some congratulations.

To be honest, I don’t see me as losing anything in this debate so far. I believe in each post I have interacted with your comments much better than you interacted with mine. Furthermore, in my last response I refused to allow you to box me into any traps where I surrender the philosophical nature of this argument.

This is actually a reference to the beginning of Post 3, not his last response at Post 2, but I know what he means. Here’s his refusal to let Russell box him in.

You accused me of “trying to inject the irrelevant and unnecessary assumption” that God is the necessary precondition of intelligibility and you asserted that I am the only one trying inject such a thing. I often wonder if you apply your own standards to yourself. You are tacitly injecting the notion that a random-chance universe can account for intelligibility. Rather than acknowledging this, you are putting up smoke and mirrors claiming that you have no burden of proof, but instead you get to happily assume your assumptions with narrow circularity, and if I am going to debate you, I then have to play by your rules and assume that these agreed assumptions exist without any preconditions. I am sorry, but that is poor logic and it creates a dishonest debate.

Pastor Feinstein assumes that intelligibility can only exist if there is a personal Creator God Who is the source of intelligibility, which means that any universe without such a God must be a universe that is random, chaotic, and unintelligible. That in turn means that Russell cannot prove that a random universe could be intelligible (as Pastor Feinstein sees things), and therefore it would be unfair to allow Russell to win this point simply by assuming that a random universe can be intelligible. It’s a fair rebuttal IF we assume that intelligibility can only exist where there is a personal Creator God Who is the source of intelligibility. So yes, once again, Pastor Feinstein is trying to inject his irrelevant and unnecessary assumption.

The reason why Russell has no burden of proof here is that we have no reason to believe that intelligibility would be any less likely without gods than with them. Pastor Feinstein might like to start from initial premises and argue his way to a conclusion that gods are necessary, but that does not mean that Russell is under any obligation to begin his own argument by assuming that Pastor Feinstein’s conclusion is true. It’s telling that Pastor Feinstein’s assumption of a chaotic and random universe is merely an extension of his assumption that a deity is the only possible source of order in the real world. He is, in effect, arguing that if we assume that God must necessarily exist, then atheism would have to be false. Um, well, yeah, but the problem is we have no reason to make that assumption.

In my last response I said that I was going to say, “Let’s start by assuming the Bible is true and let’s start by assuming atheism is true.” Well, I did this very thing in this present response concerning the necessary precondition of intelligibility for inductive inference. Assuming materialistic atheism was true and the universe was random, we could not have inductive inference. Assuming the Bible is true, we could and should have inductive inference.

What Pastor Feinstein is overlooking is the fact that he’s not comparing atheism and the Bible. At no point does he ever assume that atheism is true. What he’s really arguing is, “Assuming the Bible is right about materialistic atheism and the chaos that would result without God, we could not have inductive inference in a godless universe.” He’s not assuming atheism and then assuming the Bible, he’s just assuming the Bible twice, and then calling one alternative “the atheist assumption” even though it’s nothing at all like what atheists actually assume. His whole argument is just a verbose exercise in assuming one’s conclusion.

Furthermore, going beyond just the uniformity of nature, I spoke on contingent beings/objects and how in the atheistic universe we run into more transcendental problems. Yet, in the Biblical universe, we have the only philosophically proper necessary being who accounts for all contingent beings and objects.

Technically, what he has is not the “philosophically proper necessary being,” but only the superstitiously satisfying being, to Whom all things are arbitrarily attributed by believers. The problem is that this Being Himself is a contingent being, Whose own identity, nature, motives, and powers require a number of preconditions. That’s true for all non-pantheistic First Cause deities, but Trinitarian theology makes it even worse.

Finally, I brought up the one and many problem. In a random universe there is no unity of plurality, but instead everything would be unrelated to each other, disconnected, and in constant chaotic change. In the Christian universe, the God who is the original unity of plurality is the logical ground of the same derivative versions within the universe. I applied this to the attribute of personhood as well.

Once again, Pastor Feinstein “refutes” his opponent by assuming that Christian assumptions are true, and then showing how the atheist’s argument is inconsistent with them, and therefore the atheist is refuted. But there’s nothing in atheism that would require a godless universe to be chaotic or disjoint, and in fact the properties that give rise to order and meaning in material reality are qualities that would be required for any sane, non-chaotic, cohesive deity that wanted to exist. This fact means that order and meaning transcend even deity, and cannot depend on gods for their existence. Without gods, we would expect no less order and meaning in the universe, and in fact we’d find a great deal more, since there wouldn’t be any magical miracles to add unpredictability to the arrangement.

As for the one-and-many problem, there’s a fine line between Trinitarianism and polytheism, and Pastor Feinstein couldn’t help running across it numerous times in trying to make the universe somehow reflective of the way 3 Persons can be one God. Be a polytheist, or be a pantheist, if that’s what you really want, but if you value your Trinity you’d better not expose it to such comparisons or it will break.

So in each case of transcendental reasoning, I assumed both of our worldviews, and yet yours is absolutely hopeless when it comes to accounting for anything that we see and observe in the universe. So now I have given you the real argument you asked for.

That’s good to know, because that means we’ve covered essentially the whole presuppositional script. He had to invent an imaginary atheist to give him all the right cues so that he could display all the punch lines written in the script, but now he’s been through them all, and we can fairly say that we’ve seen his evidence, and found it very sadly wanting. It’s all superstition and fallacy, gilded with vanity and shored up with ignorance.

We’ll close with one final bow:

If you simply brush this off and say it is not a real argument, then fine. It shows me that you are not serious in this debate. It shows me that when atheists don’t get to set the rules in a way that is entirely in their favor, then they don’t want to play the game. It shows me that they don’t care that the very ability for them to offer arguments and evidence depends on the very preconditions that their presuppositions deny. It shows me that by virtue of you showing up to this debate, I have already won.

No comment.

We are roughly half-way through Pastor Feinstein’s 5-post series (not counting his unscheduled addendum after the official debate was over), and it’s time for him to begin taking bows and acknowledging the cheers of thousands before whom he believes he has made atheism look untenable.

I think I made a strong logical argument based on transcendental logic that the Biblical God is the necessary precondition of the uniformity of nature, which in turn is one of the necessary preconditions of intelligibility. This is simple logic, it is easy to follow, and you will not be able to casually dismiss it without looking ridiculous to the thousands that are now reading this.

At the top of the third post, as with the previous two, Pastor Feinstein notes that comments on the post have been turned off, and he promises that they will be enabled when “Russell and I agree that the debate is done.” Well, the debate has been done a good few months now, but comments on this post, like those on the first two, have not been re-enabled. That in itself, I think, suggests what the real verdict was from the thousands that have read it, even from where Pastor Feinstein is sitting.

At this point in the mental script Pastor Feinstein seems to be following, the debate is essentially over. The atheist has had his rhetorical legs chopped out from under him, and there’s nowhere for him to run, even if he were able to do so. All the believer has left to do is to gloat and rub the atheist’s nose in it.

Your random materialism, if it were true, would render the uniformity of nature impossible, and therefore destroy intelligibility. Thus, with this one argument, I did exactly what I said I was going to do in that thesis. And truly, I am just getting started.

I think a big source of confusion in Pastor Feinstein’s mind is his failure to distinguish between order and intention. Look at the argument he’s offering. If superstition is not the ultimate truth—if it’s not the case that everything is deliberately and magically caused by some invisible, magical person—then there can be no order in the universe. He’s assuming that the absence of intention is exactly equal to an absence of order. Order and intention, in his mind, have become the same thing. In other words, he has fallen into animistic superstition. Everything that happens is the result, not of undirected cause-and-effect, but of intention. There is no order (Pastor Feinstein assumes) other than intention. Consequently, a universe in which there was no divine intention would be a universe in which there was no order.

It goes without saying, I would hope, that this kind of equivalency is utterly fallacious. Intention itself cannot exist apart from a number of ordered preconditions, such as the existence of the properties of identity and non-contradiction. To intend something means to perceive a difference between conditions as they exist right now, and conditions as you wish for them to exist in the future. It also means that predictable cause-and-effect relationships exist, such that you can propose a chain of events leading from present conditions to the conditions you desire. Both of these require the presence and operation of the dimension of time, which is one of the dimensions of the material universe. Intention lies at the end of a significant chain of preconditions, of which intelligibility is one of the earlier links. To try and claim that intention is the source of intelligibility is nonsense.

Truly, Pastor Feinstein has not even gotten started, because he has only followed his superstitions back as far as his idea of God, and has failed to progress past that to the preconditions that are necessary in order for a God Himself to exist as a person with intelligible intentions. But let’s not interrupt Pastor Feinstein, because he’s got his script out, and is going to give us his version of the battle between King Arthur (himself) and the Black Knight (the scripted atheist).

You might try to recover from the problem of induction by saying the future “probably” will be like the past, since at all times in the past it always happened this way… If you said the future would probably be like the past, you are assuming past information… It does not matter how many times something occurred in the past if nature is not uniform. However, since nature is uniform, we can project past experiences into the future. So either way, this typical atheist attempt to squeeze out of this problem still presupposes the uniformity of nature; something a random universe could never account for.

I’ve shortened it a bit, since a lot of it is just what actors call “stage business.” There’s no real argument here. His scripted atheist never points out the fact that Pastor Feinstein is confusing order and intention in order to reach the conclusion that a universe without intention would be a universe without order. The poor Black Knight isn’t even allowed to spit out, “Come on, have at you!” Arthur gets the last word, and we’re done. Let’s see what the next bit of script has for us.

So yes, you do need my God to have relative certainty that the marker will fall to the ground in the future. Of course, I doubt you would ever admit this because as Romans 1:18-19 says, you in “unrighteousness suppress the truth, for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.” The text goes on to say that it is obvious in creation that God is the creator. In this post, I have shown that something as simple, yet necessary, as the uniformity of nature transcendentally depends on the God of the Bible.

It’s interesting that he quotes no less authority than the Bible itself as justification for embracing the Prime Superstition: that everything we see ought to be attributed to the magical actions of invisible spirits. And if you’re not superstitious, then you’re unrighteous, and are trying to suppress the truth, so nyah. Again, not really an argument here so much as it’s just a bit of stage business, with the Black Knight framed so as to appear legless, and Arthur easily circling him shouting that his battle is now futile. Cue the travelling music, cut to next scene.

You have to depend on my worldview to even be able to do science in the first place. It doesn’t mean you have to believe in my worldview. It is perfectly possible for someone to be convinced that air does not exist, and yet at the same time breathe it in to form the very words of their argument to claim that air doesn’t exist. I see the atheist being in a similar position – an utterly irrational position.

Again, Pastor Feinstein’s problem (and I think this is a key problem with presuppositionalism in general) is that he is confusing two different things. Just because you have a superstitious opinion about the origin of real things, and just because the skeptic refers to real things, does not mean that the skeptic is relying on your superstitious opinions being true. You can make a completely fallacious argument about a true conclusion, but that does not mean that your argument is vindicated when someone else reaches a true conclusion by means of different, valid logic.

Yes, skeptics can make rational arguments, but that’s because material reality itself has the proper preconditions for intelligibility, such as the properties of identity and of non-contradiction. And these are the preconditions that would be necessary in order for God Himself to exist as a person who could know things and who could have intentions regarding conditions in the future. The skeptic’s ability to do science owes nothing whatsoever to anyone’s superstitious beliefs in a living, thinking “First Cause.”

It’s a bit perplexing to know how to argue with “logic” like Pastor Feinstein’s. It’s not that he can’t recognize a simple converse fallacy when he sees one, it’s that the Prime Superstition takes precedence over the application of logic. Try to take him past that wall of superstition, and he just stares at you blankly, as though he can’t follow the implications of “necessary being” past the point where they can be used to derive a divine, personal First Cause.

What is your escape? Will you take the arbitrary route of the atheist Gordon Stein in his debate against the Christian Greg Bahnsen? Stein was so bewildered by the nature of this argument, that in an attempt to save face he asserted that the inherent properties of matter caused it to behave in a uniform way. What kind of answer is that? How does Stein know what the inherent properties of matter are, and even if he did, how does that allow for randomness to account for uniformity? In effect, all he did was use academic language to say, “That’s just the way it is.” What if I said, “The inherent properties of creation cause matter to behave in a uniform way?” Would the atheist accept that? No! By the way, I have not done that here. Instead, I argued that the absolute person, that is distinct from creation, who is sovereign and triune created the universe and sustains it in a uniform way, and I logically showed how He is the necessary precondition of the uniformity of nature.

When Stein points out that you can derive the necessary properties of material reality using evidence and reason, Pastor Feinstein objects, “What kind of an answer is that?” Well, Pastor, it’s a lot like the answer you give when you try to use similar arguments to get to the conclusion that an “absolute person” is “the necessary precondition of the uniformity of nature.” The only difference is that we continue applying the same principles consistently, and are thus able to see past the wall of superstition to the actual properties that must be inherent in reality itself, with or without any real God. But Pastor Feinstein can’t take it that far. He needs some kind of absolute person at the end of his chain of superstitions, so for him “inherent properties” are perfectly satisfactory when applied to a hypothetical person, and absurd when derived for anything more fundamental than that.

Pastor Feinstein’s confusion even takes him to the point of embracing outright pantheism (which is where all “necessary being” arguments eventually lead, if you’re consistent).

Nature’s contingent uniformity depends upon it being designed this way by the necessary being. And just to note, Hume’s critiques against the teleological (i.e. design) argument is irrelevant here since I have cut to the chase and am talking about “ultimate reality,” rather than contingent reality (e.g. watches and landscapes). The whole contingent universe is grounded in some sort of ultimate reality. You believe that the ultimate reality is impersonal random chance. Well, it is impossible for that to be the necessary precondition of uniformity. Yet, the Biblical God as the ultimate reality totally and certainly accounts for the uniformity of nature since He is the ground of the entire contingent creation and designed it in a uniform way.

The problem with reality is that there can be only one. If you have two realities, then either one isn’t really the real reality, or else they are both part of some larger, ultimate reality. If there is a God who is the ultimate reality, then ultimately either you and I are part of God, or else we are not real. A Creator God, whose creations are both real and not-gods, can only be a part of that ultimate reality whose inherent properties give us the uniformity and intelligibility required in order for us (and any gods) to exist. And that means that God’s own properties are derived and contingent, thus refuting the core premise upon which Pastor Feinstein’s whole argument is based.

We’ll close this week’s review with one last snippet from the end of his script.

Atheists cannot function without the uniformity of nature, but the truth of it actually contradicts their worldview, thus demonstrating their position to be hopelessly inconsistent.

That may be what it looks like when seen through Pastor Feinstein’s confused and superstitious presuppositions, but in fact the only thing atheists are demonstrating—and demonstrating very well in fact—is that the universe, and science, both get along just fine without the need for any superstitious presuppositions. The real world is full of non-intentional order, and also of human beings who perceive intentions where there are none. Even in our own interpersonal relationships, we are frequently misled and deceived by this habit of assuming intentions whenever we see a chain of events (e.g. road rage). How much more, then, should scientists and philosophers work to rid themselves of this pernicious superstitious tendency? It’s a human weakness, not a source of infallible insights into the fundamental nature of the universe. We may find it satisfying, because we love to be superstitious, but when it comes right down to it, it’s just not truth.

If pastors would take this into account, perhaps they would have fewer blog posts with disabled comments.

My first order of business today has to be a correction. At the end of last week’s post, I said “…Pastor Feinstein is going to declare to us how this “necessary Person” also has to be a Trinity. Not a Quadrinity or a Quintinity, a Trinity.” I misspoke. Pastor Feinstein’s argument does not establish that his superstitiously-defined Necessary Being is necessarily a three-person deity. In fact, the terms of his argument lead much more directly to the conclusion that the Necessary Being is a race of deities composed of any number of divine persons, or in short, polytheism. Maybe that’s why Genesis 1:1, literally translated, says, “In the beginning, gods created the heavens and the earth.”

Let’s look first of all at Pastor Feinstein’s explanation of why he thinks God must be one being composed of many things. (Bear with me, it’s a longish paragraph.)

Furthermore, the fact that God is a Trinity is relevant too. This universe of many contingent objects is made of a plurality of atoms. In fact, the field of philosophy has struggled with the “one and many problem” for centuries. Is all reality one, or is it many? If all is one, then plurality is the illusion. I don’t truly exist, you don’t truly exist, but instead, only one thing exists (whether it is matter or something else). Yet, if all is many (plurality), then unity is the illusion, and instead the universe is nothing more than a whole bunch different objects completely unrelated to each other thus rendering all meaning as meaningless. Yet, if the universe is both one and many, then it is a unity of plurality. So I am one united person comprised of a plurality of atoms; the social world is one system comprised of plurality of people; the solar system is one system containing a star and plurality of planets; the galaxy is one galaxy containing a plurality of solar systems; and the universe is one universe made up of a plurality of galaxies. It seems clear that the way we think and live as intelligent sentient beings is under the assumption of both one and many. And yet the entire one and many arrangement of the universe is still contingent, and therefore it is caused, sustained, and determined. The transcendental precondition of all of this is a necessary being who is the foundation of one and many, or the foundation of a unity of plurality. Only the Christian position speaks of the God who is One God that is comprised of three persons. He is the original unity of plurality, just as He is the original person. We are all derivative unities of plurality and derivative persons. If you really think a magical tiara somehow is just as valid of an argument for the transcendental preconditions of the universe, then truly logic and reason is lost on you. Truly, you have traded rationality for absurdity.

We live in a world where bigger things are made up of smaller components. Molecules are bigger than atoms, and are composed of atoms. The atom is not the molecule, nor is the molecule any one atom; it is composed of atoms which combine to create the molecule. A person is made up of atoms and molecules, yet no one molecule or atom is the person; the atoms and molecules combine to make up the person. A race (as in “human race”) is made up of persons, no one of which is the race, etc. And so on.

This property of composition is one of the characteristics of material reality (the ultimate “necessary being”). The fact that things can be composed of other things is one of the types of order that material reality imposes upon real things. It’s also one of the preconditions upon which persons themselves are contingent. It should be obvious that no person can be the cause for this pattern of composition, since the person themselves would have to be composed of a mind and a memory and some kind of faculty for perception and a will and so on. The real source for this principle of composition is the nature of reality itself, uncaused, non-contingent, and unsustained by anything other than itself.

I say it should be obvious that no person is the cause for the property of composability. Sadly, superstition can make even obvious things obscure, as Pastor Feinstein demonstrates in his argument. Look again at this part:

It seems clear that the way we think and live as intelligent sentient beings is under the assumption of both one and many. And yet the entire one and many arrangement of the universe is still contingent, and therefore it is caused, sustained, and determined. The transcendental precondition of all of this is a necessary being who is the foundation of one and many, or the foundation of a unity of plurality. Only the Christian position speaks of the God who is One God that is comprised of three persons.

He’s so jazzed about finding something in the real world that he can compare to a Trinity, that he fails to notice that he has just defined God in a way that makes Him a contingent being. Look at what he is saying. It’s not just that the universe is contingent, it’s the one-and-many arrangement itself that is contingent. By saying that God must have the same arrangement, he is leading us to the conclusion that God Himself must be caused, sustained, and determined. Otherwise either He can’t have that arrangement, or else that arrangement is not contingent.

He wants to say that Creation is just reflecting the nature of its Creator, but he’s backed himself into a corner. The obvious way out is to appeal to the true origin for the property of composition: material reality itself. In order to say that God’s nature is composed of multiple persons without God being caused, sustained, or determined, we have to be able to say that composability is a property that is likewise not caused, sustained, or determined. That means that the compositions we see in the material world are derived, not from anything God has done, but from the nature of reality itself: real things are composable because reality itself says so. Trinity versus monotheism has nothing to do with it.

Pastor Feinstein also gets himself into trouble with this argument because persons are not composed of persons. A race (as in human race) is composed of persons, a family is composed of persons, and a company is composed of persons, but a person is not composed of persons. In making the superstitious argument that the Creator has to be a plurality of persons like the one-and-many compositions we see in the real world, the conclusion Pastor Feinstein is leading us to is that there must be a singular race of divine persons, whose character and intentions define the qualities of the visible universe. In other words, polytheism, not Trinitarianism.

Earlier in his third post, Pastor Feinstein promised (threatened?) that “by definition there cannot be more than one necessary being, but I will save any explanation of this for you if you should so choose to push the issue.” I assume he means to disqualify polytheism as an option, but the way he has framed his argument leaves him little room to maneuver. His argument for the Trinity is based on the way we see the one-and-many property manifested in the real world. If the argument “there cannot be more than one necessary being” means there cannot be more than one divine person, then the Trinity is disqualified due to being more than one person. If, on the other hand, multiple persons can be combined into some larger conglomerate, like, say, a godhead or a divine race, then a polytheistic divine race, as a singular necessary being, is no less logical than a Trinity.

In point of fact, though, the polytheistic divine race is far more consistent with the real-world one-and-many principle that Pastor Feinstein is appealing to, because it fits the one-and-many relationships we actually see. The Trinity does not. In the real world, when you have one thing composed of multiple components or elements, no one component is the whole thing, nor is the thing any one of the components. That corresponds exactly to the way humans compose the human race: no one human is the whole race, and the whole race is not any one human. Or substitute “god” and “divine race” for human and human race. It’s the same thing, an exact match.

Not so the Trinity. The Father is God, but God is not the Father, because the Son is also God, but the Son is not the Father. Yet they are one God. That’s not how the one-and-many principle works in real life. There’s a disconnect there that turns Pastor Feinstein’s argument on its head. He’s making the argument that the one-and-many pattern we see in the visible world must be a reflection of the nature of the necessary being, yet this pattern is explicitly not the pattern that defines the nature of the Trinity. A single, polytheistic race of gods would be a much better fit.

Of course, the best fit of all is to eliminate superstitious anthropomorphisms, and just acknowledge that composability is one of the forms of order that material reality itself imposes on the nature of real things. Composability isn’t something that some invisible, magical person thought up, because persons themselves cannot exist unless real things are composable. A person is composed of things like thought, perception, and will, that are not themselves complete persons, which is a circumstance that can’t arise unless the nature of reality is such that bigger things can be composed of smaller components.

Let’s close (for now) with this ironic tidbit:

We are all derivative unities of plurality and derivative persons. If you really think a magical tiara somehow is just as valid of an argument for the transcendental preconditions of the universe, then truly logic and reason is lost on you. Truly, you have traded rationality for absurdity.

What he means, of course, is that in his presuppositional script, he has the imaginary atheist trading rationality for absurdity, and grovelling in despair over how inexorably and irrefutably Pastor Feinstein has demonstrated that Christianity is the only possible truth. It’s no doubt an enjoyable fantasy for the believer, but I’m afraid it’s no more than that. A tiara is one tiara composed of many jewels and braided silver wires and so on, so even a magical tiara fits the real-world one-and-many pattern better than a Trinity does. Nor is it any great stretch of the imagination to attribute a mind and will and omniscient perception to a magical tiara, so if we’re going to be all superstitious about it, we can easily come up with a magic tiara who is responsible for creating us as “derivative unities of plurality and derivative persons.” The absurdity lies not in the choice of a tiara, but in the use of mere superstition as though it were a compelling philosophical argument. And that’s something Russell was doing hypothetically, to illustrate a point, but Pastor Feinstein really means it.

At this point in his third post, Pastor Feinstein introduces a new set of errors and false assumptions, so we’ll stop here and pick up again next week. Stay tuned.

In last week’s post, we looked at how Pastor Stephen Feinstein took Russell Glasser’s “magical tiara” example and tried to debunk it. Saying that all logic and order in the universe are due to a magical tiara is nothing like saying all logic and order are due to God. Because, well, a tiara is different from a god, or something.

That argument doesn’t really do the job, so he’s going to try again, from a different angle.

A magical tiara is not sovereign or intelligent. Nor is it personal. Furthermore, it is not a unity of plurality. In the universe we see persons and non-persons (e.g. a tree). We have seen persons come from other persons, but we have never seen persons come from non-persons. Given that we are in a universe that is governed by causality rather than randomness, what are we to assume based on our observations and abilities of deduction? Persons came from non-persons? Life came from non-life, etc.? Given that these things have not been observed even under the great conditions of the earth as it is now, would it not be arbitrary to assume that it happened in such a way?

Who’s the uniformitarian now, eh?

As I’ve pointed out before, the main ingredient in Pastor Feinstein’s presuppositional apologetics appears to be superstition: you see some real world phenomenon whose origin you do not understand, and so you attribute it to an arbitrarily-chosen, magical, invisible person consistent with your personal beliefs, in the absence of any verifiable, plausible, non-magical connection between the invisible person and the thing you’re trying to explain. Take away the superstition, and you take away the heart of presuppositionalism.

But there’s another factor here as well, a satisfying, intuitive, and reassuring assumption about the nature of personhood. Persons are magic, you see. They can only come from other persons, and therefore at the very beginning of the chain of causality, there has to be a person. It’s an argument that is simple, naïve, and flattering—a real crowd-pleaser, but of course badly flawed.

Let’s start with the most obvious flaw: where people come from. We have seen persons come from persons, but how? By physical, sexual reproduction. We have never seen one person make another person just by saying some magic words. Persons come from other persons the same way bears come from other bears and oak trees come from other oak trees. So where did people come from? The Father having sex with the Son? Kinky.

Let’s suppose, though, that the first Persons had some way of making people without having sex with each other. Suppose, for example, they start with a single cell, and let it grow, and gradually add to it whatever it takes to form a person. You know, like we see in evolution and gestation. What then becomes of Pastor Feinstein’s logic? If persons can come into existence by some means other than persons having sex together, do we still need to assume that only a person can employ this other method? I’m trying not to be superstitious here. If we only see new things come into existence from earlier things of the same kind, does that necessarily mean there must be some original uncreated thing of the same kind? If so, we need to assume not only the existence of a personal god, but the existence of a bear god and an oak god as well. Not a good line of reasoning.

What is a person, anyway? Is it something that has human DNA? Hair has human DNA, while God supposedly does not. Yet God supposedly is a person, while human hairs are not. So is a person a living organism with two arms, two legs, an opposable thumb, and so on? Amputees are persons, lemurs are not. Is a person, therefore, whatever comes from other persons? No, placentas are not persons, and there are other abnormalities that also come out of the human womb that are not persons. And contrariwise, some persons are born with birth defects that are also abnormal, yet without preventing them from being persons.

Ironically, God Himself can help us out here, because when we talk about God being a person, we’re unconsciously separating out what it means to be a person from what it means to be a physical member of species Homo sapiens. God, as a supposed person, has none of the physical attributes we might associate with a human person, like any particular DNA, or body shape, or brain cells. What, then, does His supposed personhood consist of?

The answer: His mind, including His will, His emotions, His perceptions and memories, and so on. By declaring to us that God is a person, Pastor Feinstein is declaring to us that personhood is something distinctly different from the physical body, because God doesn’t have a physical body (even if you count the Incarnation, which according to the story didn’t happen until after God had already been a person for a very long time).

That means that Pastor Feinstein is not telling us the truth about where persons come from, because personhood is something we do not see emerging until after the baby is born. We see rudimentary stimulus-response reactions such as can be observed in a wide range of non-person species, and we can watch as the infant develops mental cognition and emotion and perception and memory. We see the baby become a person, and we frequently classify them as already persons in anticipation of what they will eventually become, but the actual personhood, the actual mind and thought and will and so on, are qualities that emerge over the course of a few years.

The scientifically-accurate equivalent to Pastor Feinstein’s statement, therefore, is that we see persons initiate a biological process that assembles non-personal elements into a structure with no mind, will, perception, memory, or any other attribute of personhood, and then this non-person develops biologically until its neural infrastructure is sufficiently well-developed to allow a new person to emerge. Where Pastor Feinstein declares that we never see a person come from a non-person, the actual fact is that every person we see has emerged from what was originally a non-person—a biological structure without mind, will, or perception. In the early stages of human life, the things that, say, the zygote has are things that are not required for personhood (since God is not supposed to have them) and the things that are required for personhood are things that the zygote does not have. Persons, all persons, come from non-persons.

There’s lots more that could be said about Pastor Feinstein’s argument, like the fact that in the 1950′s nobody had seen a man walk on the moon, or the fact that we do see the emergence of intelligent life in the geological and archeological strata. I’m going to stop short, though, and put on my boots, because it’s about to get deep around here.

I am not sure how familiar you are with Thomas Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument. By the way, the basic junior college dismissal of it doesn’t count. Have you studied the 10-step argument as outlined in Summa Theologica I, Question 2, Article 3? Just for the purpose of classical education, I recommend it. Although I reject the semi-pelagian presuppositions of the classical argumentation for the existence of God, Aquinas actually gets somewhere good between the 5^th and 6^th step. He previously demonstrated, philosophically speaking, that only two types of beings can exist: necessary and contingent. Contingent beings are caused, sustained, and determined by factors outside of themselves, and thus when we look around at all things in the universe, they are contingent since they fit into those parameters. A necessary being, then, could not be contingent and therefore would be uncaused, unsustained, and undetermined by anything else outside of itself. This means that the universe cannot be the necessary being since it caused, sustained, and determined. If you try to ascribe this to randomness, you are going to lose that point in a moment.

Everybody duck, he’s dropped the Big TA bomb!

As an aside, one of the problems with indoctrination as opposed to education is that those who have been indoctrinated have to do a great deal of work in order to master the doctrines they’re being indoctrinated in, and they have a tendency to equate the amount of work with the accuracy and importance of the material they’ve studied. Consequently they tend to feel superior to anyone who has not expended the same amount of time and effort on the doctrines, even when those doctrines are now known to be flawed, superstitious, and inconsequential.

Another problem is that sometimes the terminology can be confusing, such as when the philosopher uses “being” to refer to “existing,” only to have his students use “being” as a synonym for “person.” We can see Pastor Feinstein preparing to fall (if not outright leap) into this trap in the paragraph above. And that’s a big mistake, because no person could possibly be the necessary be-ing that philosophers refer to.

All persons are contingent “beings” (i.e. existences), because their existence is preconditioned on a greater reality which imposes certain specific types of order on the nature of real things. For example, one of the characteristics of reality is that real things must be the same as themselves. You can’t have real persons without this law of identity, because without identity, you have nothing to apply the quality of personhood to—and even then, personhood would not be the same as personhood, so the person would not be a person even if you did apply personhood to it. Ergh.

The necessary being (meaning the necessary be-ing) is the greater reality itself. Reality is the one thing about which it is necessarily true that it is not caused, sustained or determined by anything outside itself, since that would mean reality was dependent on something that was not real. Since the necessary being is reality itself, it follows that the existence of any and every person is contingent. Miss this important distinction, and you could end up making grandiose, but futile, declarations like this:

The point in all of this is that our very personhood is contingent upon the necessary person. The necessary person then cannot be part of the physical universe since the physical universe is contingent. This is why I said in my first post that God is distinct from creation. God is affected by none of the same temporal limitations that we are bound by. He is uncaused, timeless, unsustained, and undetermined. So the foolish argument of, “If God made us, then who made God,” is a terribly ridiculous argument since it tries to reduce God to a contingent being, thus missing the point of the entire argument. Transcendental logic demonstrates that a necessary being is just that, necessary! Thus, the precondition of a uniform universe of nearly innumerable contingencies is the singular transcendent necessary being, who sovereignly controls the entire universe and purposefully causes and sustains predictability (Genesis 8:22).

That is really a strikingly triumphant and heroic pose, and it’s a shame he’s wasting it on a simple confusion between being and person. All that work to try and build up the Christian God as a necessary truth, and all for naught, because of a simple, superstitious mistake right at the very beginning. A few mistakes, in fact, because he’s also still making the assumption that persons cannot come from non-persons, even though virtually everything we see originally came from something that was not the thing we see today. Bears originally came from something that was not a bear, oaks came from something that was not an oak, oceans came from something that was not an ocean, and so on. That’s true even by Pastor Feinstein’s theology. So to assume that persons cannot come from non-persons is contrary to everything else we see.

It gets better, though: from the lofty heights of Mount Aquinas, with the stone tablets of transcendental logic in his hands, Pastor Feinstein is going to declare to us how this “necessary Person” also has to be a Trinity. Not a Quadrinity or a Quintinity, a Trinity. In the interests of giving this argument my full attention, though, I think I’m going to call a halt right here for now, and save the Trinity for next week. Stay Tuned.

In his debate with Russell Glasser, Pastor Stephen Feinstein has so many answers, he could write a book. No wait, he already has! It’s a book that explains everything that’s wrong with atheism, and a whole lot more. It might even explain too much, because it also explains everything that’s wrong with the Bible.

Oops.

Pastor Feinstein wants to explain the fact that the universe is not just real, but is also orderly and “uniform.” Such uniformity could never arise in a random universe, he reasons, and therefore God must exist in order to give meaning and uniformity.

The following is an excerpt from a book that I have written on this subject. I hope to publish it soon:

The Christian can justifiably go to the science lab since he/she knows there is a sovereign personal God who governs this universe, controls it, and has made it regular so that we could learn about it through projecting past experience into the future, and therefore have dominion over the world. The Christian can understand why we can govern certain chemical reactions, build automobiles and airplanes, and launch rockets into space because the Christian worldview can make sense out of projecting from the past what will work in the future. But why would the atheist go to the science lab? In a random universe of chance, why expect regularity or uniformity? In an uncertain material cosmos, why anticipate predication is possible since ultimately the dice can roll the other way at any time? This is a destructive criticism against atheism. The science they claim to believe in would not even be possible if their worldview were true. They have no right to rely on inductive inference or to expect causality, and therefore they have no basis for doing science. Biology, Physics, Astronomy, Psychology, Mathematics, and even Grammar are all destroyed without inductive inference. The Christian worldview makes complete sense out of inductive inference.

How far we’ve come in the past few years. Christians used to believe that there were effectively two distinct realms, natural and supernatural, each with its own rules. Yes, the natural world was orderly and understandable to a certain point, but when it came to phenomena that were too complex and unpredictable to understand, like the weather, or disease, then the supernatural realm could be seen intruding into the natural. Not only gods, but demons and angels as well, could interfere with fleshly, material, mundane laws and cause things that controverted natural order. The material and the spiritual were separate, self-contained, and incompatible, and therefore conflict between them was understandable if not downright inevitable.

This conflict between the material and the immaterial, however, is lost when you adopt the view that reality is essentially chaotic and meaningless, and that all order and meaning are bestowed upon the universe by God. Suddenly the natural order is no longer the antithesis of deeper, more spiritual truth, but is in fact one and the same order as created and upheld by God Himself. Supernatural phenomena are no longer the manifestation of God’s glory, but are instead the violation of His perfect will, the sinful rejection and destruction of the perfect order and uniformity that are His real glory.

Taken to its logical conclusion, Pastor Feinstein’s new argument informs us that the Christian can justifiably go into the science lab because he alone has a valid basis for knowing that no supernatural manifestation is going to introduce chaos into his experiments and observations. What’s more, the Christian also has a valid basis for knowing that no supernatural interventions have ever opposed God’s created order in the past, either. Books claiming to record miraculous interventions and manifestations are denying that order and meaning come from God, insisting instead that “anything can happen,” that God is a God of chaos, and that He is the author of confusion and disorder. Blasphemy!

Some might argue that God created natural laws and is therefore entitled to break them, but that’s the same as saying that God, as the creator of Truth, can also lie. Pastor Feinstein’s whole argument is that meaning and intelligibility themselves are caused by God, which means that He creates the order that distinguishes truth from lying. To violate His own perfect order is to sin, whether by the lesser offense of lying or the greater violation of breaking His own laws.  And the counter-argument—that God would never want to violate His own rules—is precisely why He would never behave in a way that violated His own perfect order, or why, in other words, He would never work any miracles. The Bible must therefore be a lie, since it blasphemously accuses God of sinning against His own perfect order, meaning, and purpose.

Worse yet, by making God Himself the true source of all meaning and purpose in life, at the level he proposes, Pastor Feinstein is making God the sole true source of evil and sin. Sin wouldn’t be sinful if God weren’t continuously creating and upholding the sinfulness of sin and the evilness of evil. In the old days, before God was the sole exclusive source of all meaning and order, evil was able to exist in a domain apart, and still be a meaningful entity. Pastor Feinstein does away with that distinction, and makes God, and God alone, the creator and upholder of the existence of sin and evil. Sin and evil are not self-existent deities in their own right, and Pastor Feinstein denies that their meaning and nature can be derived from the nature of reality itself apart from God. That leaves God alone as the source of all real sin and evil.

Needless to say, I wish him the best of luck in getting his book published. I would love to see that approach gain some traction among believers.

The problem with Pastor Feinstein’s view is that it boils down to militant superstition. He sees meaning and order in the universe, and arbitrarily picks his own personally-preferred deity to take the credit for it all. Muslims could just as easily give credit to Allah, Jews to the non-Trinitarian Yahweh, Mormons to one of their many polygamous supernatural patriarchs, Hindus to any of the zillions of deities in their pantheon. You could even just make something up, like a magical tiara, and say, “This magical tiara is magically causing the universe to have order and meaning,” and it would be the same thing. Not that Pastor Feinstein will admit this.

This is quite different than believing in a magical tiara. We have a material universe that is orderly and uniform, and all things ever observed work through the process of non-random causation. This is pretty simple stuff. Do you really think it is rational to believe that from nothing, the material universe began (or from some mysterious compressed dot of matter), and through continued randomness has provided uniformity, even when everything is still supposed to be random? The entire idea is totally inconsistent.

Exactly. When you assume that there’s a magical tiara that magically imposes order and purpose on the universe, you’re providing an “explanation” that rejects the idea that the universe is random. The only difference between Pastor Feinstein’s belief and Russell’s hypothetical example is that they make different choices as to who or what will be arbitrarily given the credit. Meanwhile, such qualities as order, causation, meaning and existence all depend on a certain atheistic precondition: that reality itself is well-ordered, intelligible, and self-consistent with or without any God(s). This specific contingency exposes the flaw in all superstitions like Pastor Feinstein’s, because the gods themselves cannot exist in any meaningful way unless reality already supplies the qualities the gods are being arbitrarily invoked to “explain.”

Everything in the universe has a cause. They are all contingent. They are caused and sustained by other objects that they have no control over. This is true of all physical things that have ever been observed. Yet, you (if I understand your position) believe it is rational to think the universe itself (something that is entirely physical) is uncaused and unsustained.

This is something that’s not just rational, but necessary, or at least the part about the universe being uncaused. Time is an ordered dimension of material reality, an aspect of the material universe. Believers commonly make the mistake of assuming that before the Big Bang, there was an indefinite period of time in which nothing existed (or at least, nothing natural existed). We’re so used to having time around that we forget that things like cause and effect, or creation, or beginnings, are things that only exist within time. When we say a thing begins to exist, we mean that at some point in time, the thing did not exist, and then at some subsequent point in time, it did exist, and the moment in time where it made the transition from non-existent to existent is when it began to exist.

Obviously, time itself is not going to have a beginning, strictly speaking. There is no moment in time when time itself does not exist. Time can have a minimum value, just like when you come to a complete stop, and thus can no longer slow down. Just as there’s no speed slower than immobility, there’s no time earlier than the earliest value of time. Time, therefore, cannot be created, because there has never been any time when time did not already exist. And the same goes for the material universe, of which time is only one ordered dimension. The material universe is uncaused because even though there’s a minimum value for time, there has never been a time when the material universe did not already exist, and therefore no opportunity for anything else to cause it.

Part of Pastor Feinstein’s confusion stems from the fact that he’s trying to draw conclusions about the nature of reality—its order, its meaning, its intelligibility—but he’s limiting himself to considering only a relatively small subset of things as they exist within time, within reality, within the immediate vicinity of our ability to observe and make simple, first-order deductions. He wants to draw deep, philosophical conclusions, using only the primitive tools of superstitious animism. And it just doesn’t work. It’s too arbitrary, and too magical.

So naturally, the next point Pastor Feinstein will raise will be to accuse Russell of being arbitrary.

In philosophical terms, you are guilty of arbitrariness. Arbitrariness is to believe something without any justification whatsoever. Well, you have never observed something come from nothing, so to assume the entire universe happened this way is to be guilty of arbitrariness. Furthermore, you believe that random materialism accounts for your assumption that world is real and that sense experience is reliable, but once again have you ever observed absolute randomness create anything that is orderly and predictable? No. Furthermore, by definition such a thing could not happen, otherwise it would not be truly random (hence the sand dune example). This is why I believe you wanted me to simply start with your assumptions, and not ask you to justify them. I agree with your assumptions, but I am the only one here who can account for them.

And by “account for them” he means “I can arbitrarily ascribe them to a magical deity without any demonstrable or even describable justification for doing so,” just as he arbitrarily and without justification ascribes to Russell the position of believing that the universe is “random” (i.e. chaotic) and that it created itself from nothing. This secular, “random” universe, however, is simply one in which you have no justification for superstitiously attributing natural phenomena to the magical actions and/or intentions of invisible spirits. That’s not a chaotic universe, that’s a reasonable one. Even if we supposed that there were a creator god, why would we assume that He would prefer a world in which superstition was the most valid epistemology? To do so would be to insult the very idea of reason and meaning.

Pastor Feinstein has drifted slowly but steadily away from debating what Russell is actually saying, having mostly substituted a pre-scripted exchange with an imaginary atheist who believes that reality is chaos that created itself from nothing. Fortunately, Pastor Feinstein doesn’t have lung power to keep blowing into his own sails forever, so we’ll stick around a while longer and see if he drifts into anything interesting. Stay tuned.