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A VISIT TO THE CREATION MUSEUM

1/20/2015

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Ken Ham's “unnatural history” museum in Petersburg, Kentucky is, as you probably already know, devoted to a literal interpretation of the Bible. It claims to present evidence that the earth is about 6000 years old, that dinosaurs coexisted with humans, that there was a worldwide flood around 2348 BCE, and so on. It is a bizarre experience from the moment you walk in.

One of the first things you come across inside is an animatronic display of a child next to a couple of velociraptors. (Dinosaurs are a big part of the attraction here, starting with the stegosaurus on the parking lot gate: the owners know it's a way to get kids to want to visit the place.)

That velociraptor display is problematic, however, and not just because it's on the scientific level of The Flintstones. You see, according to Ham and his people, all creatures were vegetarian prior to the Fall: this means that lions could sleep with lambs and, apparently, children could play with velociraptors. It was the eating of the forbidden fruit that introduced hardship into the world and turned some animals into predators. The problem, though, is that there were no children until after the Fall. Up until then, only Adam and Eve were around. Moreover, the child in this display is clothed, which is something no one would be before the Fall, for as everyone knows, until they ate the fruit, the first man and the first woman were nudists.


Once you get past the velociraptor display, you enter the main exhibits. Here, visitors are first informed that different scientists can view exactly the same data yet come to radically different conclusions: some see fossils and think they are millions of years old, others understand them to have been around no longer than a few thousand years; some see the Grand Canyon and think it formed gradually, others see it and conclude it was the result of an immense flood; it all depends on how you interpret things. As one sign puts it, “dinosaur fossils don't come with tags.” 

Skepticism about science is juxtaposed with claims about biblical authority. Since the empirical evidence is open to more than one interpretation, to truly know the past we need the evidence of one who was there and who wrote it all down: God. In one of the displays, a boy is shown saying (by means of a speech bubble) that he's never heard any of this stuff in school.

The message that one can either trust fallible human reason or God's infallible word is repeated throughout. The fact that one has to use human reason to conclude that the Bible is God's word is conveniently ignored, however.


Ignoring God's word is the cause of the modern world's problems, and this leads to the next section, the “Culture in Crisis” exhibit – a dark, subway-like tunnel in which all the evils of the modern, Darwin-believing world, are represented: there is lots of graffiti, and talk of teen pregnancy, infidelity, and abortions.

Visitors then go through a history of the world that takes them from the creation of light through the garden of Eden, the Fall (dramatically described as the worst day in the history of the universe), Noah's ark (where you can see dinosaurs embarking), the repopulating of the world after the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and finally a film (which I didn't see) about the last Adam, Jesus.

Many of the claims made throughout are supported by nothing more than the authority of scripture. For instance, to the question, “did dinosaurs evolve from birds,” the answer given is that “God made birds on day 5 and land animals on day 6. Dinosaurs are land animals, so they were created the day after birds.” This is obviously something that all those scientists who believe birds are descended from dinosaurs failed to consider.

Other times, though, they try to provide more elaborate explanations. Mostly, these hardly make sense. For instance, the reason they give for why marsupials “were the first mammals buried and preserved after the flood” is that marsupials, “which have pouches, can nurse their young while moving,” whereas placental mammals, “which nurse their young in the womb, spread out more slowly.” Other times, the claims are just outlandish. My favorite is their suggestion that the super-continent Pangaea broke apart to form today's continents as a result of the Flood.

The burning question I most wanted answered was why there are no longer any dinosaurs. After all, according to the Creation Museum, they were taken aboard the ark, so they didn't all perish in the Flood. One possible answer they give is that people “killed them for food or sport.” Another display, however, actually claims that, though unlikely, there might still be dinosaurs around today that no one has yet found.

It must be admitted that the Creation Museum is entertaining for nonbelievers. With so much emphasis on dinosaurs, it feels sort of like a cross between the Bible and the old Raquel Welch movie One Million Years B.C. But even though it is funny, it's also sad, especially when one sees the children who are taken there to be misinformed and who will no doubt become confused when they are taught real science in school. If only they didn't have all those animatronic dinosaurs.

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DINOSAURS INSIDE NOAH'S ARK
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PRESUPPOSITIONALISM, PART 2 - LOGIC

1/13/2015

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As explained in part 1, presuppositionalists maintain that without God, there could be no such thing as logic, knowledge, ethics, and several other things besides. Pastor Douglas Wilson, taking this line of thought to a new level of irrationality, even objected to Christopher Hitchens' use of “vibrant and engaging prose” because, as Wilson put it, “If there is no God, then yammer, yamber, yaw&^%...” – and no, that's not a typo. The point of presuppositionalism is to imply that the atheist's worldview is self-defeating: any claim or argument the non-believer makes is rejected as incompatible with non-belief itself.

Here, I want to concentrate on the view that logic presupposes theism, using as my example Sye Ten Bruggencate's defense of this claim, which you can see in the unintentionally humorous “interview” with Eric Hovind titled Episode 2 – Logic.


According to Bruggencate, logic is one of the “fundamental assumptions of the unbeliever.” After all, one cannot conclude that atheism is correct or that religious belief is incorrect without making use of it. The problem, according to Bruggencate, is that atheists cannot justify their use of logic. To do so, they need to use logic itself, and so end up arguing in a circle. His solution is to maintain that God grounds logic and reveals it to us so that we can know that it is justified. As Eric Hovind puts it, “logic is only consistent with the God of the Bible.” (Why the God of the Bible, as opposed to the God of the Koran, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster for that matter, isn't explained.)

One obvious problem with this entire approach concerns how presuppositionalists themselves arrive at it. What is their starting point, their “fundamental assumption,” as Bruggencate might put it? Bruggencate would of course answer that it is God. But clearly that isn't the case. Like everyone else, presuppositionalists make use of logic right from the start. They argue, in other words, as for example when they conclude that the nonbeliever cannot account for logic's validity without circular reasoning, or that God is the only possible foundation for logic because he is eternal and immutable. This isn't to say that their arguments are good ones, of course. They aren't. When Bruggencate points out that the laws of logic are universal, immaterial, and unchanging, and that these same three attributes apply to God as well, he is making a very weak argument by analogy. And his reasoning is even worse when he argues that the atheist cannot account for unchanging logical laws in a universe that is constantly changing. In fact, these arguments are so bad they're laughable. But they are arguments nonetheless, and as such, they presuppose logic. This shows that in order to arrive at the conclusion that God is the source of logic, presuppositionalists must already accept logic.

Now, my point here isn't that the presuppositionalists make a mistake in starting with logic. The mistake they make (besides misusing logic in their flawed arguments) is to suppose that that's not what they're doing – to suppose instead that they are beginning with God. The irony here is that the one thing that one must be a presuppositionalist about, in a matter of speaking, is precisely logic. This is because any claim whatsoever implicitly uses the laws of logic. One cannot say “logic is valid,” or “x is true,” or anything else coherent without presupposing the law of identity, for to say that x is anything is to say something about the thing whose identity is x. Bruggencate may think that he begins with God – that he only accepts logic because God has told him he should – but in order to even think such a thought, he had to use logic.

The laws of logic are necessarily true because what they describe applies to every possible scenario. This is why they are implicit in every statement. And because the laws of logic are necessarily true, logic cannot be contingent upon anything, including God. In Episode 2, Bruggencate says – and this is one of the few instances where he is correct – that logic cannot be man-made, as some atheists claim. If it were, then it might have been different. “Could the universe,” he asks, “have both existed and not existed at the same time and in the same way?” But once again there is a bit of irony here, because in his view there would be no logic without God – and that means that a godless universe could both exist and not exist at the same time. By making logic contingent on God, Bruggencate is no better than those who make it contingent on humans.

One final example of the kind of confusion one gets into by denying the necessity of logic can be seen in how Bruggencate ends up justifying the law of non-contradiction. Logical contradictions, he says, are not allowed “because logical contradictions amount to lying, and God tells us not to lie.” This is such an amazing statement that I can only quote his interviewer and say, “Wow!” According to Bruggencate, the law of non-contradiction is valid for moral reasons! I guess it's just not very nice for the universe to both exist and not exist at the same time: it offends God.


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presuppositionalism, PART 1 - KNOWLEDGE

1/8/2015

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Presuppositionalism states that the existence of God – and more specifically, of the Christian God – is a prerequisite for such things as reasoning, knowledge, and morality. Its real purpose is to prevent other people's arguments from ever getting off the ground. By maintaining that God is presumed in any argument or claim, the presuppositionalist attempts to stop the opponent in his tracks before he even has a chance to get started. Thus, if an atheist says she has a reason why she doesn't believe in God, the presuppositionalist will immediately interrupt to ask how the atheist can justify reasons without God, and if she claims to know that something is the case, the presuppositionalist will object that on the atheistic worldview knowledge isn't possible. The best description of this entire approach I've come across was given by Matt Dillahunty in a debate with presuppositionalist Sye Ten Bruggencate: "Kindergarten theology coupled with kindergarten philosophy, presuppositionalism is the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and refusing to listen to reason." 

Here, I will focus on the argument dealing with knowledge, using Bruggencate's particular version of it as an example. A second post will address Bruggencate's views on logic or reasoning.

Bruggencate argues that knowledge is possible only if an omniscient being is the source of that knowledge, for otherwise one could be mistaken. That is, since our minds are finite, if we are dependent on our own abilities, there could be something we don't know that invalidates what we think we know. It follows, according to this "logic," that in that case we don't know anything. The solution is to have God reveal absolute knowledge to us. And this, Bruggencate argues, is what God has in fact done: we have knowledge, but only because there is a knowledge-giver.

Bruggencate's claim can be broken down into two parts. The first is that without God knowledge isn't possible, and the second is that with God the problem is resolved. As we will see, the argument fails on both counts.

Let's begin with the first part. We aren't omniscient. Does it follow that left to our own devices we wouldn't be able to know anything? Of course not. Knowledge is true belief that is properly justified. If I believe something that is in fact the case and have proper justification for believing it, then I have knowledge. Perhaps Bruggencate and other presuppositionalists imagine that proper justification is impossible without omniscience because they believe that knowledge requires certainty. For instance, I claim to know that the earth is round, yet logically speaking I could be wrong. I might be a brain in a vat in a universe that doesn't even have an earth. Doesn't it follow that I don't really know that the earth is round? No, not at all. For if in fact the earth is round then my belief is true and, since I believe it for the right reasons - namely, the evidence that demonstrates the earth's actual roundness - then I do know that the earth is round. It follows that if the earth really is round, then my belief that the earth is round qualifies as knowledge even though I am not, strictly speaking, certain of it. Knowledge does not require complete certainty.

However, even supposing that it did, Bruggencate's argument wouldn't work, for as it turns out there are things each of us does know with certainty. For instance, I know that the experience I am having at this moment exists, just as you know that about your current experience. One cannot deny that without contradiction. (Bruggencate would of course object that I'm using logic unjustifiably here, but that's something I'll ignore for now since it will be covered in the next post.)

The claim that knowledge is impossible without God doesn't hold up. But if there were a problem here for the atheist, would the introduction of God solve it? Again, the answer is no. For by Bruggencate's own criterion, even if God did reveal something true to us we still wouldn't have knowledge - not unless God also made us omniscient. Remember, Bruggencate maintains, first, that without certainty you don't really have knowledge, and second, that you can't be certain unless you are omniscient. How then does the introduction of God as a source of information change anything? How, in other words, does God impart certainty to us?

I've never seen this difficulty addressed. Bruggencate appears to be unaware of it. However, he might very well reply that, since God himself knows all and can be trusted wholeheartedly, any information he reveals to us is true and properly justified. So, for instance, if God tells us that the earth is round, then we can be certain that it is.

But unfortunately, there is an obvious gap in this argument. By Bruggencate's own standards, one of the things we must know with certainty in order for the above to work is that the information we are receiving (e.g., that the earth is round) in fact comes from an omniscient and wholly trustworthy being. And how would we know that? Bruggencate has two options here: he can say that we know it because God reveals it to us, or he can say that we know it for some other reason. If he answers that we know it because God himself tells us that he is the one imparting the information, then he's caught in an infinite regress: for now the question becomes, how do we know that it is God telling us that it is God imparting the information? If on the other hand Bruggencate says that we know it for some other reason, then he has given up on the entire basis of his argument - namely, that God is the only possible source of knowledge.

Another, simpler, way to see that the argument can't work is by bringing up the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment once more. Could you be a brain in a vat who is fed the information that a god is revealing truths to you? Yes. Then how does Bruggencate know that he isn't in that situation? In other words, how is he in a better position than the atheist?

What all this shows is that if Bruggencate were correct and knowledge required certainty which could only come from omniscience, then we finite minds couldn't know anything, period. His argument therefore fails in every respect. Bruggencate is wrong that without God one cannot have knowledge and he is wrong that God would solve the problem.

His argument with regards to logic, however, is if anything even worse, as I will show in the next post.

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