Ben Wallis’s counter-apologetics blog

Seminary student Sungyak Kim has an unusual vision of Christian apologetics. Quoting Soren Kierkegaard, he laments the existence of that apparently typical apologist who naively attempts to "deal with every accusation, every falsification, every unfair statement, and in this way is occupied early and late in counterattacking the attack." And who exactly does he have in mind, here? Well, it's hard to say exactly, but at the beginning of his piece he drops the names of William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga.

The complexity of philosopher Alvin Plantinga's well-known evolutionary argument against naturalism (hereafter EAAN) affords the skeptic a variety of avenues for criticism. Of these, I prefer to focus on the objections that, first, we cannot be rationally obligated to stop depending on our cognitive faculties since it is quite impossible for us to rationally do so, and second, the sort of skepticism which Plantinga describes, if indeed it poses any danger at all, applies as well to the theist as it does the naturalist unless we already have reason to suppose that theism is true.

Consider a skeptical hypothesis H, such as "I am a bodiless brain in a vat," and an ordinary knowledge claim O, such as "I have hands." Adapting the suggestions of Keith DeRose (1995, "Solving the Skeptical Problem," The Philosophical Review 104.1), we may claim the following: (1) I don't know that ~H; (2) If I know that O, then I know that ~H; (3) I know that O. From these three individually-plausible premises a contradiction appears to follow, and this motivates us to seek a solution to what we can term the "skeptical problem." DeRose's solution is to appeal to epistemic contextualism , which may allow us to affirm (1), (2) and (3) all at once without contradiction. In particular, an epistemic contextualist is free to suggest that the knowledge we have of O is a different sort of knowledge than that we seek for H. On this view, there is a context C1 in which we don't know that ~H, and a context C2 in which we do know that...

This post originally consisted of an entirely different topic. However the comments for the post took on a life of their own, and so I'm re-posting the original topic here , and leaving this post open for further discussion on Sye's view. It comes after we interviewed him on the Goodness Over God podcast this past Thursday. To summarize, Sye wants to know how we justify reason itself, and hence our subjective view of the world which we base on our reason. However I take justification to be a part of our reason, and so this is akin to asking, how does a person justify justification? My position is that we don't need justification for using any particular standard of justification as long as that standard is consistent with itself, and with its own application. While this situation may not satisfy us completely, it's the best we have available to us, since any would-be justification for our standard of justification must necessarily have a circular character. In Sye...

Let us take inductive inference to consist in extrapolating the broadest-according regularities of our experience to universal laws, each within some larger domain or context than the experiences themselves. On a small scale this is easy to envision, and we can appeal to such canonical examples as the inference that all swans are white from a large random sample of uniformly white swans. However, we must also take inductively-inferred laws to "accord broadly" with all of the regularities of our experience. For instance despite the fact that we have only ever personally encountered white swans, perhaps we have heard from a reliable source (wikipedia?) that there exist black swans. To infer that all swans are white under these circumstances might accord narrowly with our first-hand experiences of swans, but not broadly with our other non-swan experiences, namely the experiences which lead us to decide that our source for information on black swans is reliable. So inductive...

Philosopher Patrick Grim since the early 1980s has advanced an argument against the existence of God which turns on an incoherence he sees in the concept of omniscience, an essential property of God as understood by most orthodox incarnations of the Abrahamic religions. [ 1 ] It runs as follows: There does not exist a set T of all distinct truths. For suppose towards a contradiction that T exists. Let f be a mapping from T into the set P(T) of all subsets of T, and consider the subset S of T of every truth q which is not contained in the set f(q). By definition of S, no truth q is mapped by f to S, and we conclude that f is not surjective. Since f is an arbitrary mapping from T into P(T), it follows that no such map is surjective. Now define a map g from P(T) into T. For each subset A of T (where A is a member of the set P(T)), define g(A) by the truth expressed by the sentence "A is a subset of T." Since every member of P(T) is distinct, then g maps them to distinc...

Philosopher and Calvinist apologist James Anderson, in Paradox In Christian Theology , devotes a chapter spanning 62 pages to outlining the epistemic status of Christian theism. I would like to highlight two observations regarding this chapter which I think are important for best understanding his position: First, he does not present an argument for the existence of God, nor does he attempt to lay out any good reasons for taking a theist position; and second, he neither attempts to show that Christian theism is warranted, but only defends the more modest assertion that it is warranted if it is true . Given these observations, we are obliged to conclude that Anderson's purpose in this chapter is not to secure a convincing case for the existence of God, nor for the truth of Christianity.

Over the course of my various exchanges with presuppositionalist apologist Chris Bolt, he has repeatedly and mistakenly boasted that he has a satisfactory answer to the problem of induction which involves the Calvinist God (he calls it the "Christian" God). Until now, I've largely ignored this unusual (and, as we shall see momentarily, obviously false) claim, instead preferring to vigorously defend my own view of induction. It's usually fairly easy to go on the offensive, and poke holes in another person's argument; but it's considerably more challenging to defend one's own positive arguments for a given position. So, I've been more interested in meeting that challenge of defending my views than I have been in the comparatively simpler task of criticizing Chris's. In the case of induction, I think I've presented a solid case for my view over the course of my Skype debate with Chris and our subsequent written correspondence in the blogospher...

Here I respond briefly to James N. Anderson's online essay entitled "The Theistic Preconditions of Knowledge: A Thumbnail Sketch" (2006) by pointing out two serious problems I see in his outlined case for theism. To that end, I critique his central argument against naturalism, as well as his contention that epistemic normativity cannot be subject to human convention. Following a tradition of presuppositionalist apologetics, Anderson takes up the position that God stands among the necessary preconditions for knowledge itself, and that we must assume the existence of a divine author of the universe if we are to free ourselves from a paralyzing epistemological skepticism. He bases his outlined case, a kind of transcendental argument for theism, on the observation that one of same notorious difficulties of metaethics also frustrates inquiries into epistemology, namely the question of how normative standards can arise out of the impersonal properties of the universe; for t...