Specter of Reason

Here is the next installment in my series of responses to the Triabloggers. In the last one , I presented a proof showing that presuppositionalists cannot maintain both that all valid arguments do not beg the question and that all knowledge presupposes the existence of God. Thus, they must either abandon their presuppositionalism or claim that some valid arguments beg the question. If they claim that some valid arguments beg the question, then they should provide a compelling argument for why the rest of us should abandon such a basic rule of logical argument. At this point, it seems we have a choice between logic and presuppositionalism. I'm choosing logic. I will now turn my attention to theological noncognitivism. This is the view that theological terms (such as “God” and “the supernatural”) are non-sensical, and cannot even be entertained as concepts. I will focus here on the term “God” as defined and used by Steve Hays, one of the Triabloggers. The term “God” has ...

A guy named Steve is currently trying to mangle my views into submission. Here's my response to his latest post . Steve: “by your own definition of morality, fascism is a social convention. A social contract.” That doesn’t follow from my understanding of morality. By my definition of morality, fascism is the negation of contracts, because it denies the ability of individuals to negotiate contracts. You said Nazi Germany satisfied my conditions for morality. Yet, Nazi Germany was not based upon the most rational arguments available. It does not meet my criteria. You say that “a process of negotiation assumes at the outset that we have a right to enter into contractual negotiations.” No, it need not make that assumption. You say, “We can observe an event, but the rightness or wrongness of an event is unobservable. Moral properties are not empirical properties. We can observe a bank robbery, but the bank robbery doesn’t look or sound or smell or taste or feel right or wrong.” This i...