This moring I found myself in yet another debate with a Christian. As I stumbled upon the timeline of one of my friends I saw her arguing with a special type of apologist: A Presuppositionalist. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term here’s a brief explanation: A Presuppositionalist already presupposes that the Christian God Yahweh exists, that everybody already knows that God exists or in other words words there aren’t any atheists (they justify this with Romans 1: 19-20) and that the Bible is the infallible word of God. Then they proceed to argue that logic,knowledge, reason, evidence and morality all presuppose God’s existence. Their tactic is to corner Unbelievers by asking them for absolute knowledge. While there are certain axioms that we can know for absolutely certain the honest person will, without better knowledge, say that he/she doesn’t know anything for certain. Then they’ll argue that the Nonbeliever can’t know anything and has no basis for claiming anything and can’t object to the Presupps dishonest tactics.
As I was getting ready to argue, a pretty evil thought popped into my mind:
What if I were to give him a taste of his own medicine? What if I were to argue exactly what he argues, that he can’t know anything if the Christian God does exist?
It is my belief that when you believe that every sentence in the Bible is true, your position is intrinsically self defeating. Here are the 2 scripture based arguments I used:
- My first argument was that the Bible explicitly states that the Christian cannot lean on his own understanding. This however creates a major problem because without using your understanding you have no way to assess whether what you read in scripture is actually true, whether you interpret it correctly, whether what you’re reading in the Bible is actually what it says in the Bible etc. by accepting this verse you have no way to understand whether what you think scripture tells you is either true or false. I also illustrated my point here (If you’re interested in it, you can contact me and I’ll send it to you):
- my second argument was based on 2 Thessalonians 2: 9-12 and on Exodus 7: 3-4 : In these 2 verses God directly deceives people in order to make them do what he wants. Aside from the fact, that these actions don’t fit in the picture of a good God, it also shows that God has a tendency to manipulate and deceive people into doing and believing things that aren’t actually true. If God is at the very least willing to do that to certain people, then the Christian can’t know whether he isn’t one of the deceived ones and only thinks he has certain knowledge when in actuality he is one of God’s puppets. He can’t even rule out the possibility of being a brain in a vat (if he is honest that is, which of course the Presuppositionalist isn’t).
One last example that I didn’t bring up was the fact that the Christian necessarily believes in miracles which completely flies in the face of the uniformity in nature. For all the Christian knows God could be suspending the laws of nature right now in order to make a miracle happen. Therefore he has no basis for assuming it.
Now I don’t recommend trying to convince a Presuppositionalist for the simple reason that they can’t be but if you ever come across a Presuppositionalist and you wanna have some fun I find this to be a good way of trolling them. And what’s even better is that I find these points to be actually sound!
Goodbye from yours truly,
Rene von Boenninghausen @Renevelation
Tarsier Renevelations 