The Error Of Presuppositions

(Unfortunately, an accident led to this post from the beginning of January 2017 being reverted to draft mode.  I am having to upload it again.  I am sorry!)


"Everyone presupposes something," I've been told.

Is this true?

In college I have heard this statement or variants of it from multiple individuals.  I have been exposed to this belief for years, extending back even before I attended a university after graduating high school.  Unfortunately, this view is quite common, particularly within Christian circles.  In this post, first I will explain what it means to presuppose something and then I will demonstrate that this is a dangerous and irrational way to approach reality.

Firstly, some people I have spoken with seem to mean by saying that everyone has a "presupposition" or that everyone needs to "presuppose" something nothing more than that everyone has a foundation for their worldview.  While their terminology is faulty, I do not dispute their conclusion.  This is a correct conclusion, after all--everyone does have a worldview.  But the word presuppose does not mean "to have a foundation"; it means something more like "to assume a foundational premise".  No person can live without a worldview and each individual worldview requires a foundation, but it is dishonest and logically fallacious to claim that everyone has to presuppose or assume the core of their worldview.  Some, especially Christian presuppositionalist apologists, will argue that it is impossible to not assume or presuppose the foundations of one's worldview, whether that worldview is naturalism, supernaturalism, theism, nihilism, etc.

They are wrong.

To presuppose an idea about reality is to have a cracked foundation in
one's epistemology and worldview.

Statements like the following are self-evident, self-verifying, and anyone who denies them must use and therefore subtly acknowledge and prove them in the very process of doing so:


1).  Truth exists.

2).  Some knowledge is possible.

3).  Words can convey truth.

4).  Everyone has a worldview.

5).  Deductive reasoning is reliable (Example: If X is true, Y is true.  X is true.  Therefore Y is true.)

6).  Something is what it is (Law of Identity).

7).  Something cannot be true and false at the same time in the same way (Law of Non-contradiction).

8).  Something is either true or false (Law of Excluded Middle).

In order to know anything at all axioms must be at the foundation of all knowledge.  If there
were not truths that were self-verifying and true by pure necessity, then no knowledge
could be possible because there could be no point from which to begin.

In an earlier post I had elaborated at length on the self-evidence and self-verifying nature of logic [1] (see that post for an explanation of why some of the statements above are self-verifying), and some of these statements were mentioned there as axioms (self-verifying statements that one cannot deny without proving).  These truths and things like them form the core of my worldview.  As you can see, I have started my epistemology with axioms, therefore meaning that assumptions and presuppositions are not the foundation of my worldview.  I do not presuppose that what I call god exists.  I do not assume that logic is reliable.  I do not presuppose that existence has meaning.  With axioms at the foundation, I use deductive reasoning--connecting premises to conclusions that follow logically--to discover other truths that are not self-evident in and of themselves but that can be known as theorems.  I constructed my worldview on reason and verifiability, not presuppositions or logical leaps or fallacies.

And by the way, happy New Year!  May 2017 hold great intellectual and spiritual growth for all of us.


[1].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-self-evidence-of-logic.html