At the close of the last post, I spoke of the concept of a transcendental argument, and using a reductio ad absurdum to disprove a worldview. This post will hopefully expound more on those. I will disclaim this post by saying that I have literally no formal knowledge of philosophy; anyone is free to correct me.
First I will start with the idea of a transcendental argument. Transcendental arguments were first used by Immanuel Kant to prove the existence of outside minds. He, to over-simply it, stated that, while we are free to not believe in the existence of outside minds, doing so reduces us to insanity and irrationalism. Outside minds must exist because the idea of them not existing is not conceivable; they exist because of the impossibility of the contrary. That is the idea behind a transcendental argument.
There is a bit of a controversy over the proper, formal symbolic definition of a transcendental argument, but below is what I believe to be the best formulation. “M” is the possibility operator.
1) P
2) ~M(P & ~Q)
3) Q
Read aloud, that would be said: “P is the case; it is not possible that P is the case and Q is not the case; therefore, Q is the case.” It should be clear that it could again be said that Q is true because of the impossibility of the contrary. If P is true, it is not possible that Q is not also true. The power of transcendental arguments should also be somewhat clear; the greatest struggle, though, comes in showing that P necessitates Q and only Q. If R could also be the case instead of Q, then Q is not shown by P.
Kant’s usage of this in proving outside minds was quite a bit more complicated in that he had to show that no outside minds led to irrationalism, but the basic concept remains the same.
Since I have hopefully established, in the last post, the premise that there are no truly neutral philosophical positions, then we know that arguments, and any ideas at all, are, at base, question-begging. This means that by making any argument against a philosophical position, we are open to the charge of begging the question. Presumably, then, the only way to argue against another position is by reductio ad absurdum — taking the philosophical position’s statements and showing that the logical conclusion of the position’s own beliefs do not make sense or lead to contradiction.
A reductio ad absurdum argument is where the argument’s own premises are taken to their logical conclusion to show that the argument is not valid (absurd), e.g., “That is the case when pigs fly!” The person proposing the argument is free to accept the absurd conclusion rather than give up their argument.
By arguing reductio ad absurdum we are able to avoid the charge of begging the question because we are not using our own position’s beliefs, but rather the opposing position’s self acknowledgements.
Using these two things, a transcendental argument and an argument ad absurdum, we can make a powerful argument for the truth of Christianity. The argument is known as the Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God (TAG) and defending using a systematic apologetic know as presuppositional apologetics (PA). The basic TAG is formed like this:
1) The world is intelligible, and uniform.
2) It is not possible that there can be a world in which the world is intelligible and the Christian God does not exist.
3) Therefore, the Christian God exists.
Hopefully it is obvious how this fits the form of a transcendental argument. It should also be obvious that most people do not readily accept the middle part of the argument: that only the Christian God can lead to a world of intelligibility; but this is where an argument ad absurdum and presuppositional apologetics come in. The presuppositional apologist shows that the other philosophical position, whatever it may be, does not allow for a world of intelligibility, or is self-contradicting. In my next post I hope to show that this is not such an outlandish idea as it may seem.
