This is a good example of binary thinking (my husband is going through all these atheist experience clips at the moment)
Basically the guy is trying to use prepositional logic and talking about having a statement, such as God exists, and if you negate that preposition then your new statement is true and the original must be false.
The problem is that he is assuming that True and False exist. That's like saying that 1 exists. There is nothing that you can point to and say is 1. You apply the concept of 1 to something else, such as that is one egg. But there is no number existing by itself that is not somehow applied to something else.
This is because these are concepts that we humans use to represent and reason about the natural world. And as with a computer program it is also Garbage In Garbage Out. You can get garbage that you want out from it by carefully selecting the garbage that you pass in. So while prepositional logic is useful, it is being applied incorrectly in this instance.
But the binary thinker can't comprehend this. Everything for them is true or false, one state or another.
Watch this clip from 5:20
There are things in the Bible that are true, but the Bible itself is not. The caller then says that Matt is contradicting himself until Matt has to point out that there are different versions of the Bible and that it also contains many things that are wrong. Yet you know that the caller won't go away thinking that wow, things do not have to be one state or another and can be a mixture of the two. Instead he'll go away and forget about that conversation and probably assume that he was temporarily caught out with a proper comeback.
What I get from this though is that even though theists have real trouble thinking in terms of degrees and have a natural tendency to think in binary terms, it's not actually always impossible for them.
Basically the guy is trying to use prepositional logic and talking about having a statement, such as God exists, and if you negate that preposition then your new statement is true and the original must be false.
The problem is that he is assuming that True and False exist. That's like saying that 1 exists. There is nothing that you can point to and say is 1. You apply the concept of 1 to something else, such as that is one egg. But there is no number existing by itself that is not somehow applied to something else.
This is because these are concepts that we humans use to represent and reason about the natural world. And as with a computer program it is also Garbage In Garbage Out. You can get garbage that you want out from it by carefully selecting the garbage that you pass in. So while prepositional logic is useful, it is being applied incorrectly in this instance.
But the binary thinker can't comprehend this. Everything for them is true or false, one state or another.
Watch this clip from 5:20
There are things in the Bible that are true, but the Bible itself is not. The caller then says that Matt is contradicting himself until Matt has to point out that there are different versions of the Bible and that it also contains many things that are wrong. Yet you know that the caller won't go away thinking that wow, things do not have to be one state or another and can be a mixture of the two. Instead he'll go away and forget about that conversation and probably assume that he was temporarily caught out with a proper comeback.
What I get from this though is that even though theists have real trouble thinking in terms of degrees and have a natural tendency to think in binary terms, it's not actually always impossible for them.
