 I wanted to clarify some points raised during the Magic Sandwich show this weekend. For those who missed it, we had on Eric Hovind and Cyton Bruggenkate. The regular panel were all there, Thunder, DPR, and me and Aaron joined us from down under at the World Atheist Convention, though his voice was nearly gone from trying to outvolume a bullhorn. It says something about Aaron that he claims to have won and I don't think anyone doubts it. Unfortunately, as usual, we had technical issues and the format was very challenging for the kind of discussion I hoped to have. My thanks to our guests and the rest of the panel for their patience with my long-winded comments. I feared surrendering the microphone because I knew it would be a long time before I had a chance to follow up with my points. So why did we bother with two people that very few atheists have any respect for, at least after their performance at the Reason Rally? Why were Sai and Eric offered a chance to step on the Street Preacher's platform once again? Personally, I wanted to accomplish two things. One, to confront them about their behavior, and two, to prepare any future victims of their ambush interviews with a counter-argument. Sai 10 Bruggenkate is an amateur apologist, but his apologetics represent something new for me in terms of tactic. Most logical arguments attempt to persuade the other party of the soundness of your premises and conclusions. His tactic is to prevent his opponent from being able to contest his bland assertions. This is such a shocking idea to me because the discussion between people of different faiths or none has always been for me an honest exchange of views that relies on each person to present their worldview and defend it against challenge. Sai on the other hand never defends, never presents. His apologetic is a bit of an insult to both sides because not only does he attack the very right of a non-believer to present arguments, but he makes no attempt to defend his own worldview. The presuppositional apologist's strategy is never to allow for neutral ground on which to debate, and that's not my assertion, it's Sai's. It catches people unprepared, especially non-theists who are used to simply defending the skeptical position that a god has not been demonstrated to exist. It's that logical bedrock that Sai is attempting to detonate. I'll show in a minute how his own argument can be effectively used against him. So let's state Sai's argument, his version of the classic transcendental argument for the existence of God, henceforth called tag for short. Sai asserts that only a Christian worldview is sound because only a Christian is capable of accounting for logical, scientific, and moral absolutes. Logical absolutes are the description of how things appear to behave in reality, things like the law of identity, A equals A, and the law of non-contradiction, A cannot be not A, and the law of the excluded middle, which can be stated simply as everything can only either be A or not A. Sai says that these logical laws are absolute, immaterial, and unchanging, and that this nature can only be accounted for if the laws reflect the nature of God. Hence, anyone who attempts to deny that his God exists cannot use logic. Because we all rely on these logical laws to make arguments or to validate the evidence of our senses, anyone not arguing from a Christian worldview can't make an argument about anything. This gives Sai an excuse to dismiss all contrary views. He's fond of certain questions like, how do you know your reasoning is valid? Or tell me something you know absolutely? Because it highlights the fact that we all use, as a basal assumption, the existence of reality as an empirical test for our own reason. For example, we know that a rock is a rock, and that it cannot be a non-rock, because we have never observed it to be. We make logical inferences using our logical inferences, and that is circular. We assume the evidence of our senses is accurate, at least provisionally, so that we can go about our daily business, and use our reason to tell green from red so we don't hit another car going through the intersection. My counter-apologetic is easier to explain if we have an analogy as a starting point. Let's imagine a kingdom, I'll call it Godlandia. In Godlandia, every citizen has a chip implanted in their brain at birth, and the chip can alter the thoughts of the citizen at the control of the king, who has the master control device. The people of Godlandia are aware of the chips and their influence. Every time someone has a thought that they find surprising or troubling, they're reminded they can't entirely trust their own thoughts. They can't be sure if, when they're happy or unhappy, angry or joyous, they're truly experiencing those emotions, or simply that the king pushed a button on the master control device. With regards to the king, he could be a very good king, but the people of Godlandia have no way of trusting their own judgment about him. They could think him a very good king, simply because they have no choice to do otherwise. The king could hold a giant demonstration where he promises never again to alter the thoughts of the citizens, where he appears to smash the master control device. But the people still can't be sure that they weren't being deceived. They have no way of knowing anything about reality for sure, and the very presence of the chip in their brains makes them always suspect their own reason. On the other side of the mountains from Godlandia, we'll put Naturalia. Here the people don't have chips in their brains, so far as they know. It's true that the people of Naturalia have no way of proving this, but since the idea never recursed to them that their own thoughts are compromised, they trust their own reasoning. Now they could be wrong, the king of Naturalia could be doing exactly the same thing as Godlandia, but the fact that the people of Naturalia assume reality to be real means that they don't constantly suspect their own logic. In our analogy Sai is arguing that because the king, his God, promises to be good, and never to actually use the mind control device, that Sai can always rely on his own reason. As we've established though, Sai can never reason about his God, because at any time his God could be deceiving him, including convincing him that God is incapable of deception, even his assertion that his God reveals truth to him through magical means, that can't be challenged, can be rejected if Sai's reasoning is subject to his God who may be deceiving him. Any argument Sai tries to make is defeated by his own inability to trust his God-given reason. The atheist, or more accurately we should say metaphysical naturalist, believes that she has no motivation to assume that her reason should be doubted. Things in the universe have a nature that governs their behavior. The law of identity is simply an observation of how things are, and it's subject to revision when it's no longer useful in logical inference. The naturalist might be deceived by supernatural beings, and her reason might be faulty, but there's no specific reason to believe this is so. In fact, Sai's worldview, by asserting that logic has a subjective nature, that it's not a property that things have, but rather it's a property imposed by a mind. Remember, A only equals A because it's concordant with God's wishes, or nature, or whatever. By asserting that logic is subjective, we now have two epistemic uncertainties. The question of how we can know reality, and the question of whether we can trust subjective logic, the naturalist, atheist, whatever, simply asserts that the logical or scientific laws are properties of the things themselves. So they need only make the assumption that these things have a nature that we can understand. Here's a good analogy for this. Suppose you're lost in the woods, but you have a compass. You might be uncertain about the accuracy of the compass's ability to point to true north. Now imagine that instead of you having the compass, it's in the hands of a stranger who is also lost with you. The stranger refuses to let you see the compass, insisting that he will tell you truthfully and accurately what the true north is. Sai argues that by trusting the stranger's truthfulness, it means he can trust the status of true north. But in fact, he now has uncertainty, not only about the accuracy nature of the compass, but also the truthfulness of the stranger. If the compass is malfunctioning, but the stranger is truthful, or the compass is functioning, but the stranger is untruthful, there are more possibilities to account for in Sai's belief than logical and scientific absolutes are the result of a mind that cannot absolutely be trusted. I feel like I'm belaboring the point a little, but it's so important. On the left is the circularity of a naturalist worldview, reason is tested for coherence against our empirical observations, which is interpreted with our reason. Things have properties so far as we can tell, which we can call their nature. And those properties are modeled and tested to derive the logical and scientific laws. On the right is Sai's worldview. It's not just that he's inserted an unnecessary God into the process, a being that is itself complex and improbable and requires explanation. He's actually reversed the flow of circularity. His God forces things to behave according to specific laws rather than the laws arising from the nature of things. Those laws are subjective and contingent on the nature of his God. But since we now have two steps that require explanation, it's actually a much weaker argument. Sai refers to circularity versus vicious circularity. He thinks that because the circularity goes outside his own head, it somehow becomes more reliable. But his magical revelation isn't tested outside his head. It's tested inside against his reason. He just refuses to recognize that. I know this is getting a bit confusing because we're talking in logical abstractions and analogy. It gets easier when we focus on the same argument applied to the laws of science and morality. As a metaphysical naturalist, I believe scientific laws emerge from the properties of the universe, the nature of things. The law of conservation of momentum, for example, is the result of forces that we can understand through inductive means. You throw a rotten tomato at a street preacher. It complies with the laws of gravity and four sequels mass times acceleration and so on. Now there may be cases where these laws don't apply. If you throw a neutrino at a street preacher, it may not behave in exactly the same way as a rotten tomato. But we believe that this behavior is inherent in the nature of the thing itself. That is, it is an objective property derived from the object. It's absolute. It's a law that applies to all such things. The metaphysical naturalist, the atheist, can account for objective and absolute laws like this simply by assuming they're the properties that objects have in the same way she can assume that the laws of logic derive from the nature of the universe she lives in. Remember, they describe the nature of things. They are not commandments by a divine being. In fact, Sy's Christian worldview says that scientific laws are the result of his God's nature. That is, the law of conservation of momentum is only true so long as it is consistent with God's existence. There are many instances in his holy book where these laws are reported to have been suspended or violated. So Sy believes in laws of science and logic and as we'll see, morality that are subjective. That is, not in the objects themselves but rather derived from a mind. Sy sees the laws of logic and science as being rules that we are forced to follow rather than descriptions of the nature of things in our universe. They're also not absolute as they were in the atheist's worldview but rather limited to all objects except his particular God. Let's illustrate this last point by switching to moral standards. Sy is very fond of saying he follows an absolute objective moral standard. But it's a standard that is derived from his God's mind. Hence it is subjective and it also doesn't apply to his God. His God can murder and that murder is subjectively moral. His God can promote slavery and that slavery is subjectively moral. So there are two moral standards, one for his God and one for everyone else. Hence it is neither absolute nor objective. So we can clearly establish that Sy's Christian worldview and I don't mean to tar every Christian with the same brush but Sy's worldview that he claims can account for objective and absolute laws of logic, science and morality does nothing of the sort. Sy has been concealing the massive flaw in his argument specifically that it confuses absolute and objective for limited and subjective. Fortunately, as we discussed earlier, Sy can't rely on his reasoning about his God or his God's revelation so his entire argument is easily dismissed. Now Sy, when presented with this argument may be tempted to argue that it is the nature of his God to be logical and that logical nature is therefore instilled into the universe. But either God commands logic to be in which case it is subjective and limited or the universe is logical because it is the nature of the universe to be logical which if you recall is exactly what the metaphysical naturalist asserts. In other words, Sy's only escape from this argument is to assume the atheist worldview to convert to atheism so that he can reason about his God. Therefore, the proof that God doesn't exist is that with him we can't know anything. There's your counter apologetic, the transcendental argument for the non-existence of God. Now if Sy or someone like Sy ambushes you you really have three choices. You can refuse to engage them, walk away from a very juvenile non-argument but I suspect that it only encourages them to continue. They confuse disinterest for fear. You can engage them and expose the self-contradiction in their own argument though it will be a painful process. However, there is a third option that will work well if you refuse to lose control of the conversation. Every question they ask you and remember they aren't interested in defending a position merely attacking yours. Simply reframe it back to them. If they ask you what is one thing you know absolutely send the question back and force them to follow it to the very end where they must concede that they're only out is a basal assumption of subjective logic based on an unreasonable belief in magical revelation. Thanks for watching.