What follows is my continued evaluation of atheist Jim Gardner's blog article offering some post-debate thoughts about the debate. I'll post the relevant parts below with my commentary in between:
TAG poses a series of questions which are worded to sound simple, but which don’t have a Yes or No answer.Starting @ 8:24, Sye states that Alex and Jim will be unable to answer questions posed to them and as a result it will expose their folly. After a few preliminary questions to determine where each man stood, this is exactly what happened, for the third question that Sye asked these men was never answered. Here's that question starting @ 12:30 and Sye asked that never was answered and we'll let the readers decide whether this question can't be answered with a simple "yes" or "no":
Is it possible for God to reveal some things to us such that we could know them for certain?The question required a simple "yes" or "no" response. Were I the atheists, I would have said "no" for consistency's sake. But had they said "no" Sye would have reduced him to absurdity. This was a simple question that required a simple answer. These men refused to answer it because they didn't want to be backed into an intellectual corner and shown to be the fools that they were. As an aside, their appeal to the common red-herring known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster are addressed in my article here: Twelve Questions for Mockagodafarians
Jim goes on,
It [TAG] employs some extremely disingenuous phraseology and semantic slight of hand, so that explaining why the questioner can’t apply his own question to his own worldview without hitting upon the same problem, is seen as a dodging of the issue. The most obvious of TAG’s flaws arise when you give either a Yes or a No answer to the question, because regardless of whether you answer in the positive or the negative it allows the questioner to go to the next stage of their pre-rehearsed script.Again, this is nothing more than fear-avoidance behavior. Fear of getting intellectually backed into a corner. The intellectually honest thing to do when asked a tough question is to (1) attempt to reason through it, or (2) say something like, "Hey, great question, I'm not sure what the answer is but I'll get back to you later with an answer." That is how rational discourse ought take place, but sadly, it was not modeled by our atheist friends at this point in the debate.
What is even more problematic is that when Sye started asking more fundamental questions @ 21:28/@25:55 (summarized as: "What do you know and how do you know it?") our atheist friends responded with viciously circular arguments (i.e., I sense that my senses are valid) and interact at a level that would challenge their own knowledge claims about reality.
Sye’s argument (as far as I can work out) is that because you can’t say for certain that something exists by experience and empiricism alone, therefore — and I’m not making this up — logic itself is based upon a presupposition that logic is logical and is just as much of a circular argument as saying the bible is true because it says so in the bible; or “You can’t account for my misunderstanding, therefore my argument is valid”.The above paragraph is somewhat incoherent, but it seems that Jim understands Sye to be saying that if a person can't know for certain that something exists through experience and empiricism alone, then they can't say it exists at all. (?) If so, then this is a complete misunderstanding of what Sye is saying. Sye says (along with Scripture) that unless you begin with God in all of your thinking, you undermine all knowledge claims, whether empirical or otherwise (Pro. 1:7; Col. 2:3).
By the way, did I mention that if you don’t believe this is the way in which the creator of the universe chooses to demonstrate his basic existence to people who already believe he exists, but not to those who don’t . . .The above is simply an ad hominem that does nothing to further rational dialogue. This is typical of atheists; they can't, don't, or won't answer the arguments, so they start name-calling. This also begs the question as it mockingly assumes that God hasn't revealed Himself such that people can know some things for certain. This is also typical of atheists; no rational discourse, just mockery. Every time Jim and Alex engaged in such mockery it only further confirmed to the Christian listeners that what God says about atheism is true: They hate the God they deny exists and they hate His followers too (John 16:18ff).
you’re going to be tortured for eternity in a place you can only go to if an all loving God sends you there? It might seem a little harsh, I admit, but trust me it’s in the bible so it must be true.More mockery. Again, further confirmation that they know they are accountable to Him (Rom. 1:32). Not only does Jim mischaracterize eternal judgment and the nature of man by (1) implying that God unjustly punishes innocent people, and (2) that most people are basically morally upright, he goes on to insinuate that Hell is "harsh". But if there's no God, how can anything be "harsh" if there's no objective standard to measure harshness from non-harshness?
In the comments section under the blog article, Jim articulates how he can know things with a high degree of probability:
Senses: . . . my “justification for accepting the validity of my senses” is that my experiences of common phenomena are not unique to me, but are demonstrably shared by other homo sapiens; . . .Jim appeals to the common shared experiences of sensation from mankind as his justification to trust his senses. However, as Sye pointed out in the debate, this is still viciously circular. Why? Because appealing to the shared sensory experiences of others requires you to still empirically evaluate those shared experiences by using your own senses; hence, a vicious circularity. Jim could appeal to as many experiences as he wants, but this will at best leave him with (1) an infinite regress, and (2) appealing to his own eyeball experience to justify his own eyeball experience. This is why the "brain in a vat"/Matrix argument became so popular among secular philosophers in the 1960s and apart from an a priori justification for sensation, the "brain in a vat" analogy has never been answered. Such is the case when men reject God's revelation.
Having accurate senses can only be known by having them grounded in some indubitable, infallible, omniscient, personal, a priori justifying source. For the Christian, this is God (Pro. 20:12). Since our all-knowing, all-powerful God has given us the responsibility of caring for His creation, we trust in the general reliability of our senses because God has created them to work for the specific ends He has in mind. Also, we would not expect the senses to work perfectly all the time because the world has been subject to corruption through the effects of the fall (Gen. 3:1-17; Rom. 8:20-22 - disease, birth defects, injuries, etc.). However, since God expects us to be able to hear and read His word (sensory experiences) so as to obey it, it follows that our senses must still be basically reliable enough to accomplish this. Moreover, even though some blind and deaf people are sensory deprived, many of them still have been exposed to God's word through various mediums, have been saved, and live lives to the glory of God. For more information on this subject, see my article here: Sensation, Reason, and Christian Epistemology.
Reasoning: Do my actions cause harm or affect good? What do we mean by harm? A deliberate action which we know, before we perform it, will decrease the happiness and wellbeing of others. What do we mean by good? A deliberate action for which it is our specific intention to increase the happiness or wellbeing of another. How do we know it’s good to be good? Because we would not wish others to deliberately enact harm upon us and so we treat others the way we would wish to be treated: the Confucian golden rule (which predates Christianity by some 500 years).All of this is arbitrary. Why should Jim's definitions above be the selected standard for determining the difference between harm and good as opposed to some other view? Because Confucius said so? Why not Hitler's standards? How about Pol Pot's? How about Marquis de Sade's? Christians agree with Confucius' understanding of the "golden rule" but not because Confucius said it, but because what he said is consistent with the Judeo-Christian worldview. The fact that Confucius, Buddha, and ancient Jewish rabbi's made such statements is consistent with what the Bible says men already know of God in their conscience and in so knowing, they often (but not always) exhibit similar essential moral norms (Rom. 2:14-15). Notice that Jim is giving evidence that He believes in this God because he, along with Confucius is unknowingly borrowing from the Biblical standard. Given the Christian worldview, we should avoid causing unnecessary harm to people because (1) God says so, (2) people are made in God's image, which means people have inherent, God-given value, but also because (3) God Himself doesn't cause unnecessary harm. This doctrinal teaching has been the philosophical foundation for building hospitals, starting organizations like the Red Cross, and other invaluable ministries of mercy. I can make sense out of those things by starting with the Judeo-Christian God, I just don't know how Jim does without being irrational.
Without appealing to the Biblical God, right and wrong are reduced to mere personal preferences. In a naturalistic worldview, the statement "murder is wrong" is nothing more than a personal opinion on the same level as saying "vanilla is my favorite ice cream flavor." If others have a different opinion, we have no objective basis for arguing against their view, but only personal or societal opinion.
Now I realize that Jim will disagree that God is fair and just to carry out eternal, conscious torment on unrepentant sinners, but what Jim cannot understand is that God is amazingly patient with wicked people like him who spit in His face. God daily provides life, breath, food, shelter, and clothing for Jim, yet Jim hates God for His justice and ignores the many good things God has given him every day and lives as though those good things came from Jim's own hand and not God's. Jim is ungrateful and behaves so wickedly that he debates the existence of the God that he knows exists with people who have lovingly called him to repentance. Then he wonders why God would give him justice when Jim has not only acted against sinfully against the knowledge God hard-wired in him to the point of self-deception, but he has also rejected the message of the gospel that has been presented to him in various ways throughout his life. Should Jim read this blog article, this will be yet another example of his hearing the message to repent and believe in Christ. Let's pray that God gives him ears to hear.
Memory: Our recollection of events is extremely susceptible to outside influence. . . . But our “justification for accepting the validity of our memory” isn’t merely limited to what we see or hear. It is constrained by what is possible.Jim then goes on to define what he thinks is "possible" in typical question-begging fashion. Justifying one's memory is very difficult apart from grounding it in the Judeo-Christian worldview. Jim appeals to various tests to determine whether our memories are accurate, but this is the same problem that he has both with his reason (reasoning that his reason is valid) and sensation (sensing that his senses are valid). If one's memory is tested, that person would have to presuppose a basic reliability of memory in order to determine how well they did on the test, which is a clear case of vicious circular reasoning. Of course, the Christian has justification for this claim since God has made our minds to remember past events, though not always perfectly because of the effects of the fall. But in a naturalistic universe, why should the atheist trust that their brains can recall the past accurately at all? According to them, the brain is the accidental end product of random mutations over billions of years that somehow increased our ability to reproduce. Given that scenario, there's no fundamental reason to think that we should be able to reliably remember the past in an evolutionary universe.
IN CONCLUSION, Jim and Alex need to repent of their sin and put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Apart from that, they will continue in the same folly that Sye and Eric exposed in this last debate with them and worse, they will get what they deserve, which is the unmitigated justice of God. May God open their eyes to see the glorious gospel of Christ lest it be too late (2 Cor. 4:4-6).
