Usually I don’t bother paying any attention to The Bahnsen Burner, a blog run by an Atheist named Dawson Bethrick, and it would take less than five minutes at his site for a person to see why. It has almost nothing to do with the actual merits of his arguments and everything to do with the fact that locating and identifying an argument within his landslide argumentum verbosium is just too laborious a task. I share the same view as Joshua Whipps over at Choosing Hats: until Bethrick decides to express arguments or criticisms with succinct perspicuity instead of proof-by-verbosity, [1] I simply can’t be bothered to engage his material. It requires more time than I have available.
The only reason that I am even aware Bethrick had recently tackled my “Arrogance of Atheism” articles [2] is because one of our staff members, Mathew Hamilton, directed me to it. I would have otherwise never known. And so for Hamilton’s sake alone I have reviewed Bethrick’s piece, shouldering the laborious task of locating and identifying his arguments in order to respond to them. I shall not repeat this endeavour (even though Bethrick will probably be unable to resist carving out an entertaining albeit verbose Chewbacca Defense), as this response will suffice to demonstrate that there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the bankruptcy of Atheist objections.
And no, Bethrick, our staff will not publish your loquacious tomes in the Comments field to this (or any other) article. Comments must be composed with succinct perspicuity. If you want to do a verbal dump, there is always The Bahnsen Burner—where no one has to see it unless they masochistically want to. I will return to ignoring you, although you are free to continue directing traffic here by writing about our articles.
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Over at UrbanPhilosophy.net is a Philosophy of Religion student from the University of Toronto, Mitchell LeBlanc, who has been endeavouring to make a case against presuppositional apologetics. Coursing a new direction from his original first three drafts, [1] perhaps due to the daunting scope of such a task or perhaps due to the criticisms from Chris Bolt and others at ChoosingHats.com, [2] the final draft version of the article [3] targets the Transcendental Argument for God (TAG) as argued for by the late philosopher Greg L. Bahnsen from Covenant Media Foundation.
As did his mentor Cornelius Van Til, Bahnsen defended the transcendental argument as singularly the only cogent and self-consistent Christian apologetic method by virtue of being uniquely grounded upon the distinctive presuppositions of revelational epistemology. [4] Van Til’s extensive work is considered by some to be a contribution to Christian philosophy of Copernican dimensions, [5] wherein he demonstrated by indirect proof the existence of God as the necessary precondition for the intelligibility of reality and the human experience thereof, such that God, as affirmed by Christian orthodoxy, is not a conclusion drawn from rational argument (evidentialism) but is logically prior to any reasoning at all (presuppositionalism). [6] As Van Til framed the matter in his An Introduction to Systematic Theology, “Unless God exists as ultimate [and] self-subsistent, we could not even know anything; we could not even reason that God must exist, nor could we even ask a question about God.” [7]
LeBlanc at this point holds a considered view that the TAG is not merely debatable but in fact false, taking as his point of evaluation the fundamental laws of logic, concluding that they “cannot depend on the Christian God” and therefore the TAG “is not sound”—and must remain so “pending further defense” thereof. His bold conclusion notwithstanding, we may inquire with skepticism whether or not LeBlanc really has successfully defeated the TAG as it already stands, never mind its further defense.
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