Alright, so finally to talk about the debate I've been wanting to talk about. Here's the debate:

If you skim through the comments, you'll see my knee-jerk reactions in them. I'm almost embarassed to point it out, because I commented mid-video and then commented again on my own comments, and because nobody took the bait; maybe because I wrote too much. I'll restate those comments here in this blog, so please don't read them as I would be embarrassed if you knew that they were made by the same Zac who writes this blog. And even moreso, don't check my youtube profile, where you may find me admitting defeat in a debate about tithing. I leave that video on YouTube as everlasting proof that I'm don't think too highly of my own opinions to occasionally admit being wrong.

So this debate was between Himes, a member of an atheist club in CT, and Alex, a Christian family man with an appetite for presuppositional apologetics. (I use Himes' last name and Alex's first name for brevity).

So, Alex did a great job presenting the presuppositional apologetic as it is taught and issued by apologists Durbin, Sye, and others. More importantly, he did an excellent job presenting the straight-forward message of the gospel in his opening and closing statements. I might not have put as much of an emphasis on the prospect of avoiding eternal hellfire, but Jonathon Edwards was effective as such, and so I know that God uses all types for the expansion of His Kingdom. Alex, if you ever read this, I applaud your effort for the Kingdom. I loved the contrast between your introductions, too. Look at all the pomp atheists ascribe to themselves these days! A Christian spends just a few years studying the Bible diligently every day, and he goes toe to toe with "The Director of Something Something Atheism".  Good job, and God bless you.

However, from a strictly technical standpoint, and in order to emphasize the points I will make, I'm going to side with the atheists in their critique of this debate by saying that Alex lost the debate.

Why do I say that he lost the debate?

Every single debate I've seen between a presuppositional apologist and an atheist has included the same exact questions from the atheist. It's always something like: "If not Atheism, then why Christianity and not Islam?". The question is especially troublesome to answer, as issued by the atheist, because even if the Christian somehow gave an excellent one-minute answer to "why not Islam", the atheist would just propose another religion; "why not Hinduism?", and the question would still be equally valid. The unanswered status of that question itself is not enough to say that the Christian lost the debate, since as Alex points out, the debate is between an Atheist and a Christian, so to rebut every single other religion at once is both out-of-scope and something for which there may not be enough time in the world if they took a conventional approach. However, I do believe that the question is answerable in a reasonable ammount of time, and with respect to all other religions simultaneously; the method I take is to examine the characteristics which an ultimate foundation must have in order to satisfy the preconditions for intelligible experience (more on this later).

I say that Alex lost the debate because, in addition to the above, Himes did something which I have not seen an atheist do in formal debate yet, and it is something which undercuts a typical application of the presuppositional argument. Himes gave an answer for the question, "how do you know that?". Himes proposed an ultimate standard which he said was consistent with atheism -- logic. Specifically, he grounded his assertions on Peano's Axioms.

I'd never heard of Peano prior to watching that debate. I read his wikipedia article, and it seems like the stuff he proposed is not too different from the axioms of thought, or the fundamental principles of boolean arithmetic I learned in school. Nothing new here, but boy Himes sure did sound smart when he named "The Axioms of Peano Arithmetic". I think that it's counterproductive in a debate to use references to things which your opponent does not know as a way to beat their argument. What if Alex had a great rebuttal to Himes' dependence on Peano's Axioms, but just didn't know those axioms by the name "Peano"? Indeed, I think that a knowledge of Peano's Axioms as such is not really necessary for a rebuttal, and I'll explain why.

The general form of the presuppositional argument is an attack; the Sye/Durbin application first attempts to destroy the atheist worldview by pointing out its lack of a foundation, and then to build up the Christian worldview in its place. (I hope my readers don't need me to explain what I mean by "foundation". If so, I recommend my post on March 18, 2018, which makes reference to a bunch of other blogs where I talk about it a lot.) If you watch presuppositional debates, you'll see that typically a short verbal bludgeoning leaves the atheist saying something to the effect of, "I'm content not knowing anything with absolute certainty", and perhaps, "we don't need absolute certainty of anything", which is bread and butter for the experienced presuppositional apologist. I think I differ from common presuppositionalists here, in that I think it's not productive to argue in favor of absolute certainty in such broad terms the way they do, since first of all I've often seen Christians fall into the trap of attempting to extrapolate absolute certainty to the rest of their physical experience, and second I maintain that if an atheist can prove to me "by scripture and plain reason" that I am wrong about God or the existence of God, then perhaps I'm wrong. I prefer to argue in favor of the strict necessity of an absolute foundation which must be capable of providing preconditions for intelligibility, and then to examine what can be readily assessed about the preconditions for intelligibility in order to demonstrate their distinct likeness with the description of God in scripture. I leave open the possibility that I may be proved wrong about the nature of that foundation, but I insist, like Himes in this case, that the foundation itself is discernible by means of our reason and faculties, although the utilization of it is not entirely dependent on our conscious acknowledgement of it. I disagree with Himes in that I assert that our reason and faculties themselves are incapable of functioning as that foundation. This insistence is not incompatible with Christianity, as indeed Romans 1 says, "...what can be known about God is known to them, since God has made it plain to them.", and after God makes himself known, Psalm 19 says, "Day to day pours forth speech.".

I think that, as far as descriptions of reality go, Peano's rules seem efficacious to say the least. However, it is precisely because they are descriptions that they are not eligible candidates for epistemological ultimacy. A description of something may be true despite our knowledge of it, but it must be learned and verified before it can serve us as an antecedent for any knowable conclusion. Anything which is learned is itself a conclusion, and the means by which it is learned is the antecedent. As it happens, we depend on our internal faculties to provide us with antecedent for knowledge about everything learned. So, the question for Himes was, from what source do we learn that our internal faculties are reliable? Indeed, if we suppose that they are generally reliable, then we can readily ascertain instances where they have been unreliable, or where other people have used their own faculties unreliably. (I'm not just talking about our sense perceptions, but the entire use of them in conjunction with our capacity for reasonable interpretation). Given that our internal faculties are unreliable, it follows that the information they provide is unreliable. Furthermore, since we have no reference point to measure them against other than themselves, they are unreliable to an unpredictable degree.  It is for this reason that when Alex asks, "what if 2+2 does not equal 4, relative to the simulation?", Himes is at fault for utilizing Peano's Axioms to say that it is impossible for Alex's hypothetical scenario to be the case; he learned Paeno's axioms by means of the same unreliable faculties with which he utilizes Paeno's axioms.

Here's where absolute certainty comes into play, and only here. We all must, and do, have absolute certainty about the information by which the ultimate foundation makes the world intelligible to us. That information is unique, because we may not even be able to easily quantify what that information is by means of ordinary words. These are the axioms; the "pathologies" that Himes mentioned.

We have absolute certainty of them; Himes is right. But we cannot say that we have absolute certainty of them if we learned about them by means of, (and if our knowledge of them is dependent on), our unreliable internal faculties; Himes is wrong.

Since our internal faculties are not sufficient to provide us with the information which we so self-evidently have, we are left with only one option: the information came to us from an external source.

Talking about the specific characteristics necessary for an ultimate foundation takes a lot of space, and this blog is pretty long already. I'll update/restate those characteristics as I now understand them in a future blog, but for the time being you can check out my post on April 15, 2017, which is my most recent attempt at qualifying them.

Last thing, as to the specific "contradiction" in scripture to which Himes kept referring, I'm honestly a bit curious if he ever Googled it... because I did after the debate, and I was quite satisfied with the answers I found after some studying. He says he's very interested in an answer, but I'm not sure that he is, or he might have done more research on that point prior to the debate. In any case, I'm surprised he would expect any Christian debate opponent to have, off the top of their head, an answer to such an obscure detail about Scripture. Himes, if you ever read this, that was silly of you.

"For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened."