Series 103: presuppositionalism vs. progression to a worldview
some religious believers also deny progression by analysis to a worldview concerning God’s existence and characteristic; Presuppositionalists (Scriptural and Theological); inerrancy; Presup tactic sometimes used for ‘safely grenading’ opponents; resistance to this hardly a sign of sinful intransigence (same people also resist similar attempts against them!); better usage: preserving a set of already established beliefs; kind of ignores how those beliefs established in the first place; Presups put those beliefs first as the only possible way of successfully interpreting reality; Scriptural Presuppositionalist: only God can be ground for any true proposition, and only way to discover aspects of God is through inspired scripture, thus scriptures must be used as standard for deciding truth of any other proposition; doesn’t usually involve trying to answer every question by scripture, but rejects any answer that contradicts ‘clear’ meaning of scriptural teaching; ‘clearness’ can be more than a little muddy!; would deny that an answer (on theological/metaphysical/philosophical topics) reached ‘apart from scripture’, even though in agreement with scripture, could not have actually been reached apart from scripture; more on inerrancy theory; Theological Presuppositionalist puts full worldview first (as a more technical procedure); attempts to illustrate that God’s presumed characteristics allow us to account for more of reality than another presuppositional set; as abductive argument, not necessarily faulty method; sometimes attempted as deductive argument, though, to protect presuppositional set from falsification; this is cheating (circular argument worthless); glorious circularity no help to sceptic; can be played just as easily by sceptic, too!; Script-Presup has even harder job; claims of self-grounding written material cancel out each other; “Bible!” “Koran!” “Bible!” “Koran!” “Little Red Book!”, blam; abductive system-check duel of some good use, however; pick at perceived problems in each other’s systems while defending; last one with a working system may be considered winner!; but no motivation and no provision for keeping entire complex argument of any side in view; highlights and magnifies adversarial aspect; ‘loser’ always has infallible escape hatch; deductive progress ironically more tolerant, inviting shared discovery; must proceed from shared common grounding, though; presuppositions still necessary for beginning, but identify shared presups–to be attempted later
(wave at Jeff!); even simple math statements would be ultimately unreliable if infinite regression is true; reasons deploying or appealing to an infinite regression (such as against Christianity or atheism being true) would also be ultimately unreliable if infinite regression is true; also, inf-reg proposals end up necessarily implying a final explanatory fact after all; turtles all the way down (for example) must be turtles all the way down and not even possibly explainable in terms of something else more fundamentally basic; an infinite regress must be self-existently what it is and there is an end to it; but that’s an Independent Fact, not an infinite regress; infinite regressors must make tacit exception against infinite regression being true, even to try to seriously propose or appeal to it as true; the IF (including any supposed ‘infinite regression’) cannot be explainable by further appeal to something else; a deployment of this concept by philosophical naturalists against a too-simple supernaturalistic argument; the too simple supernat argument tacitly assumes that anything we can ask the question of origin about, must have an origin instead of being self-existent; naturalists rightly complain that this leads to an infinite regression unless the too-simple supernaturalist cheats in his own favor; no escape for infinite regression by this route either: how did infinite regression “come to exist”?; we end up, whichever way we go, explicitly or implicitly requiring the existence of an ultimate Fact that is not dependent on anything else, and so is not caused by anything else; infinite regressor complains that uncaused cause is contradiction, thus no worse than his own position; uncaused causation may in fact be self-contradictory proposal; self-causing causation, however, is not; the principle difference between privative and positive aseity; at least one non-contradictory option, therefore; (but leaving aside final decision between privative and positive aseity until later); various ways different philosophies agree with existence of an Independent Fact; but how far can they be in agreement with each other?