Biblical circularity.

[BloodyHeretic]

BloodyHeretic Wrote:
Why do you make a presupposition about "the transcendental truth of God and his self-revelation"?

Let us not open that Pandora's Box in this thread.

That's a handy way of not answering the question. Perhaps a better way of phrasing the question is on what basis do you make a presupposition about "the transcendental truth of God and his self-revelation"?

Given the nature of God..

I'm not giving you that, sorry. Unless you account for where your getting your information about "the nature of God", you just can't say things like that. Which god? They have different natures, apparently. You really will have to answer this question to continue the argument. If the answer is 'the bible', you expose yourself to your own criticism of "vicious circularity".

BloodyHeretic Wrote:
There is no alternative to this, though [the assumption that the world our senses perceive is real].

Yes there is. One alternative is that the world is a computer-generated Matrix ("You think that's air you're breathing now?"). If this world is a computer-generated Matrix, then both natural selection and what your senses perceive are nothing more than the epiphenomena of the programming code; it seems real but actually is not. You reject this as an improbable alternative, of course, but on what basis? If on the basis that it conflicts with what is true given your world view, then that invalidly begs the question, as I pointed out. Moreover, there is also what your Dawkins lecture indicates with honesty, that your senses are reliable with regard to what is useful for our evolution, but not reliable with regard to truth and knowledge, thus drawing you back to the very issue Statler raised (knowledge).

I thought you might say that. My point about there being no alternative, is that there is no alternative to living your life making the presupposition that there is an objective reality. Of course there may be no objective reality, but's it's immaterial because how else can you live your life? We don't have a choice about it. This is not the same as presupposing anything about a god. We have a choice there, in whether we presuppose a god/gods at all, which god we presuppose, and the nature of said deity. These two things are not equivalent, which I've said before. Yes there is a presupposition about the objective reality to accept our senses, but it's not justification for presupposing deities or anything about them. As for the Dawkins link, that was merely to demonstrate to what extent I think our senses are reliable, and why this makes sense (in terms of natural selection).

BloodyHeretic Wrote:
Not believing there is an objective reality is not remotely equivalent to not presupposing anything about a divine creator ...

True. But there is, however, the thorny problem of accounting for and explaining objective reality consistent with your atheism (the problem being, of course, that you cannot do so). Of course you presuppose objective reality, along with pretty much everyone else, as do such things as reason, knowledge, and science (i.e., their intelligibility rests upon objective reality), but your atheism cannot account for it. In other words, you believe there is an objective reality but you have no valid justification for that belief consistent with your atheism.

This has been answered already, see FaithNoMore's post. I already answered why I believe in objective reality above, because I don't see I have a choice about it, in practical terms. How you arrived at the conclusion that this wasn't consistent with atheism is baffling, but then so are a lot of your conclusions.