...and a thought-filled new year

though i would try to not use this blog's title in everyday conversation, this article raises some very good points (italics and bolds mine):

Christians are often scoffed at for their "fideistic" approach to origins. We are told we rely on Sunday School faith spoon-fed to us down through the generations. We argue for the existence of God based on our own misappropriation of biology and neuroscience, to name a couple of examples. We supplant "viable evidence" with our own ignorance that "such and such can't be the case without God", so we simply fill those "gaps" of ignorance with our magical formula: "God did it!"... or so that's what we're told.

Apparently we don't measure up to Atheistic Materialism's standard (a standard taken for granted and accepted as "self-evident"). They rely on the scientific method, logic, and sensory experience. "Clearly, all we are able to know is accessed through the physical world, therefore there is no reason to believe in the supernatural, right?

Sunday School's over, time to turn our brains on and evaluate our beliefs... and let's not get bamboozled in the process. Agreed?

"'Reason' is simply an intellectual tool, rather than an ultimate standard of knowledge, and as such will be affected by the regenerate or unregenerate condition of the man using it" -Greg Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic, pg 146

How many times have you been told by an unbeliever in the midst of an apologetic debate: "Let's be neutral"? As though taking a step back, breathing deeply, then exhaling will suddenly make things "neutral" and the unbeliever and Christian can get along epistemologically. The truth of the matter is that "neutrality" in the mind of an Atheistic Materialist is an assumed autonomy that is never argued for, merely accepted. Atheistic Materialists berate Christians for being irrational and demand we meet the standard of Rationality... as if Logic was supreme, above us and above God (if there is a God).

Reason is a method, not the standard of truth. A way of identifying valid or invalid arguments or thinking processes. In the sense that it is a way of measuring, you can say it is "neutral" if you simply mean "objective"... but our use of it certainly is not neutral...

So when you run into an Atheistic Materialist who tells you that you're irrational, and that the impetus is on you to meet the standard of rationality, you need to recognize he means "you need to meet my standards of autonomy". He has certain beliefs about logic, about reasoning, and he utilizes his faculties in such a way that is controlled by other assumptions. No belief is held independent of another. Each belief is a principle networked among a web of others. We need to evaluate that "web". It should be a bit clearer now that our Atheistic Materialists are not being neutral. They are, in fact, demanding you follow their bias, so we can't simply argue brute facts (there's no such thing), and we can't discuss evidence as though everyone agrees about what constitutes evidence: We must evaluate the measure. Atheists don't go by evidence and Christian by faith (that is the so-called faith of irrationality we're accused of)... rather, Atheists reject a certain kind of evidence and adopt a different kind... whether or not their evidence is valid is determined by the validity of their measure for what constitutes evidence.

Yes, this is where we are talking at the presuppositional level.

Atheistic Materialists will appeal to science and logic. Do they have the foundation that makes their atheistic structure stable? What we need to ask is this: "Based on your assumptions about the world (origin of the universe by chance, life by chance) how is the scientific method intelligible?" We also need ask "If all there is is matter in motion, and we exist as a result of random chance, what makes logic intelligible?"

It is here that most Atheistic Materialists will start scratching their heads...

The scientific method also relies on the trustworthiness of our senses. I would like an explanation from an Atheistic Materialist on how it is that random collisions of chemicals produce "trustworthy" sense experience. Yet more often than not, something as basic as this is taken as a "given". When you get an Atheistic Materialist against the ropes on these issues (uniformity and the trustworthiness of our senses), he will say we can trust these things because we have always trusted them in the past... which is a major fallacy of begging the question. Perhaps our senses have "always worked in the past" because our faulty senses are telling us so. Atheistic Materialists don't have a foundation for making predictability intelligible, yet they use it... and then they project from past experience into the future and will take particular experiences and generalize that experience as though there is a connectedness with others... a connectedness that is inexplicable when you consider everything in the universe is a product of random collisions and chemical reactions... yet the Atheistic Materialist will trust that there is a connectedness, that there is predictability and all of this by relying on their senses during the whole process. It should be apparent that their underlying presupposition of chance doesn't provide them any reason for trusting their sensory experience. Likewise, the presupposition of chance doesn't afford them the blessing of uniformity and predictability.

How about logic? If we are simply matter in motion, what of logic? What determines rationality?

There are many Atheistic Materialists that will bemoan the Christian's belief in the immaterial, or spiritual. "To say something is immaterial", says the Atheistic Materialist, "is to say that thing is not anything. If it is something", he asks, "by what mechanism does the immaterial interact with our material brains?"

If reason is a byproduct of biological processes, is reason material? Some Atheistic Materialists would say "no" and others "yes". I would say on the one hand the Atheistic Materialist has a problem if logic is an immaterial byproduct because his worldview makes interaction between the material and the immaterial impossible. He might say that "supervenience" is the way in which logic and our brains interact, but that still leaves you with an amorphous non-substance that cannot *show* you how they interact. If it is a byproduct of biology, then logic ought not be generalized (i.e. universalized) by particular laws. Differing biology would produce different reactions, meaning logic isn't uniform, necessary, or universal. To apply a standard solely dependent on the individual's biology to the external world would be arbitrary...

It should be clear that Atheistic Materialism requires an illogical leap of faith for its zealots to conclude from chance, and matter in motion, that science and logic are intelligible consequents.

The Emperor is truly naked and his boisterous antics should make his nakedness all the more amusing. He makes great demands on others and parades himself about but we're too concerned about what nasty things he'll say to point out the obvious. His strong belief and, by God's common grace, ability to reason do not give credibility to his claims. Christians, stop giving Atheistic Materialists a pass on "neutral" items such as logic, evidence, and ethics. There are no gimmes here. If an atheist wants to prove his claims, he must make his claims intelligible.