[ARCHIVED] - The attributes of the Christian God exhibit logical contradictions.

[Ryft]

Opening Remarks
by Arcanus

11 September 2009

I am one of the newest members at the AtheistForums.org web site, having joined not much more than two months ago at the beginning of July. Although I cannot recall how I came to discover the site, I recognized it almost immediately as a highly opportune environment to have my ideas and beliefs critically engaged in a ruthless fashion, given the sharp antithesis expected between an orthodox Christian Weltanschauung and their atheistic convictions. With the Socratic method of elenctic apologetics, [1] informed and influenced by the presuppositionalist school in the Reformed tradition, [2] I wanted to confront whatever arguments that might be raised against Christian theism—to observe (a) through fiery trial whether it can withstand scrutiny or not, and (b) whether that scrutiny itself is valid or not.

Through my experiences on that atheist message board I have encountered a large number of arguments critical of Christian theism, some of which—such as analyses of the Transcendental Argument—have been particularly informative and enjoyable. But one species of argument that had really caught my attention recently was being promulgated in a few different threads by a young woman named Saerules, which was essentially the position that God simply cannot exist. She reasoned that certain divine attributes claimed about God are in fact contradictory, such that God is a logically impossible being. It was the consistency with which she had been raising such arguments through several threads that finally enticed me to invite her to defend those arguments in a formal debate, in addition to the fact that others shared her thinking. Instead of chasing the arguments through the different threads they happened to appear in, I wanted to confront them fully in one single location and demonstrate once and for all how bankrupt such arguments are, in the hopes that she would finally abandon them in favour of arguments that are not so weak.

With respect to historic, orthodox Christian doctrine about the nature of God, some of the most frequently targeted attributes have been those 'omni' ones (e.g., omnipotence, omniscience, etc.), which can be found in such arguments as, for example, man's free will seeming to preclude a God who is omniscient, or the existence of evil seeming to preclude an omnipotent God who is all-loving, and so forth. They are also the subject of arguments that seek to prove God as a logically impossible being, such as the horribly popular rhetorical question, “Can God create a rock he cannot lift?” It is my contention that none of these arguments manage to achieve their goal, and sometimes for rather embarrassing reasons. For example, consider the rock-too-heavy argument. Although there are a few different ways to critique it, two of them prove especially embarrassing.

First, it invalidates itself by committing the Loaded Question fallacy [3] (Lt. plurium interrogationum), which is identified by the presence of a stultifying presupposition that the respondent would otherwise disavow and usually begs the question. The common example widely used in basic philosophy texts to illustrate the Loaded Question fallacy is, “Have you stopped beating your spouse?” The question-begging assumption at center here coerces direct answers into serving the questioner's agenda; [4] viz. that the respondent is beating or has beaten his spouse. Whether the direct response is yes or no, either answer is forced into admitting spousal abuse by that question-begging presupposition. The same analysis is made of the question, “Can God create a rock he cannot lift?” Whether one answers with yes or no, both are coerced into admitting that God is not omnipotent—not because of any problem intrinsic to omnipotence, but rather because the question in itself has already assumed that God is not omnipotent. It assumes that a rock which God cannot lift is logically possible. But if an Immovable Object and an Irresistible Force are mutually exclusive, then by presupposing as possible the existence of the former one has necessarily denied as impossible the existence of the latter—i.e., commits the question-begging fallacy.

Second, if the rhetoric is implying that real omnipotence should be able to trump logical contradictions, such that a truly omnipotent being should, for example, be able to produce a square circle, then it destroys itself in a cloud of self-defeat by throwing out the baby with the bathwater. To suggest that nothing is impossible if given sufficient power—omnipotence—is to deny that real contradictions exist; i.e., if the impossible could become possible or actual simply by applying sufficient power to it, then it was never impossible to begin with but merely difficult. However, it should be obvious that this tosses the entire argument out the window. One who makes such an argument accidentally proves too much: if neither logic nor real contradictions exist, well then, the very objection one started out with vanishes (that God cannot exist in virtue of logical contradictions).

When an atheist familiarizes himself with the principles of sound reasoning and rigorously applies them to his thinking and argumentation, he discovers that such a commitment to rationality not only pulls the rug out from underneath many of what he thought were his strongest arguments against the God of Christian theism but also dismantles completely every single argument which attempts to prove that God is a logically impossible being. All such arguments always fail, and in practically every case that failure is due to some logical fallacy or another, either due to some logical fault in the argument itself or due to some misunderstanding about the nature of God (e.g., arguments involving the omniscience of God fatally omit the spatio-temporal implications of his omnipresent immanence). There are a number of arguments which attempt to prove that God is a logically impossible being, but instead of trying to obviate them all, for the purposes of this debate I shall wait to evaluate the ones that Saerules chooses to put forward. That is to say, given the limitations of this debate, it is practically impossible for me to deny the resolution of the debate (that God is a logically impossible being) for I would have to obviate every conceivable argument for it, and I simply have neither the word-count nor time allowances to accomplish such a feat. During the proposal stage, Saerules was encouraged to make her case on what she believes to be the three strongest arguments for it. So I will attempt to make my case once I have those arguments in hand.

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1,070 words

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Notes:

[1] Vlastos, Gregory. "The Socratic Elenchus." Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1 (1983): 27-58. Print; Turretin, Francis. Institutes of Elenctic Theology. Trans. G. Musgrave Giger. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1992. Print.

[2] Sproul, Robert C., J. Gerstner, A. Lindsay. Classical Apologetics. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984. pg. 183. Print.

[3] Walton, Douglas. "The Fallacy of Many Questions: On the Notions of Complexity, Loadedness and Unfair Entrapment in Interrogative Theory." Argumentation 13 (1999): 379-83. Print.

[4] "Loaded question." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 21 Aug 2009, 01:36 UTC. Accessed 8 Sep 2009.

Edits:

Cleaned up bibliography (11/Sep/09, 23:30 hrs Pacific).

Changed this sentence, "...it is practically impossible for me to support my side of the debate (that God is not a logically impossible being)..." replacing it with this sentence, "it is practically impossible for me to deny the resolution of the debate (that God is a logically impossible being)..." (11/Sep/09, 23:37 hrs Pacific).[/size]

Altered this Notes section to reflect the format used in subsequent posts (27/Sep/09, 03:37 hrs Pacific).