Friday, December 15, 2023

Logical Necessities And Fallible Evidences: The Innermost Depths Of Christian Apologetics

Logical possibility is not what makes something true.  No, this only means it is possible!  It is possible that I will be abducted by aliens within the next few minutes, that I am hallucinating the vast majority of my sensory experiences, or that electricity and radioactivity will suddenly behave differently than they do now.  That does not make these things true.  They are still of course logically possible because they do not contradict logical axioms or what follows from them, all of which cannot be anything other than true in themselves.  All else hinges on them or is lesser than them.  Many Christian apologists are not rationalists, though they all might pretend to be more than subjectivists hoping to arbitrarily persuade others with fallible evidences.  In all of there emphasis on how many secondary sources reportedly agree that Jesus existed as a first century Jew, they might ignore the primary sources that are of true relevance, also avoiding the fact that logic is inherently true and historical evidences of any kind are not.  Out of an obsession with subjective persuasion based on their own assumptions, they tend to wholly neglect the deepest of philosophical truths and issues that are of far more significance than whether random parts of Biblical narratives are historically documented (this too is significant, but far less so in many ways).

Does the Bible, for instance, ever say that logical axioms are false or that they are created things (which would require that they were not true before their creation, an impossibility)?  No!  Neither Genesis 1 nor John 1 says God created everything, which would include himself and the intrinsic (or necessary) truths of logic.  The latter only says that Christ and God jointly created all things that have been made (John 1:3)  For the former, the Bible already says God preceded the universe, time, and human and animal creations, as well as angelic beings, though the last of these is ultimately only mentioned in passages like Ezekiel 28.  Thus, the Bible would already contradict itself and thus be false if Yahweh is supposed to have created everything.  Moreover, he could not have created himself, performing such an act or any act at all when he did not exist.  That this is a logical impossibility is far more crucial than that it is a doctrine foreign to the Bible.

It is inherently impossible for logical axioms and the other necessary truths that follow from them to be anything other than true and thus in existence even if no deity had ever created or if God was to cease to exist.  If the Bible was not consistent with such philosophical truths, then more foundational parts of its metaphysics would be impossible no matter how much historical evidence there is for things like the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  It is an unfortunate fact that more Christian apologists do not simultaneously recognize the inherently true, metaphysically supreme, and epistemologically self-evident nature of logical axioms and that the more important issues of Christian apologetics are about Christianity's compatibility with rationalism, not its psychological relevance to modern life or its overlap with historical and scientific evidences, which are always potentially illusions and utterly secondary to reason anyway.

For another example of this besides the intrinsic, eternal existence of logical truths independent of the uncaused cause, there is the fact that non-rationalists cannot deserve to exist.  The nonexistence of moral value and obligation would mean that no one has a right to anything, including to exist or not be killed.  If anything at all is good or obligatory, however, reason dictates its nature, and thus reason must also be good and alignment with it must be obligatory.  A non-rationalist disregards or intentionally remains ignorant to knowable truths and would by necessity be less valuable than people who seek awareness of reason and the important truths it grounds.  To misunderstand or neglect reality is irrationality, and nothing that is true or good could not rely on reason: since reason cannot be false without still being true, everything else that is even possible must be consistent with it.  The Bible acknowledges and is consistent with this by presenting the deserved fate of the unrepentant wicked as reduction to nonexistence (Ezekiel 18:4, Matthew 10:28, John 3:16, Romans 3:23).

These and other logical facts are things the Bible affirms or does not deny even if it might seem to non-rationalists inside or outside the church that this is not the case.  Gender egalitarianism is another such thing.  If the Bible really did teach that men and women have psychological differences and not merely physical ones, it would be objectively incorrect on this issue, because it does not follow from having a certain set of body parts or physiological functions that one has a given personality or talent, as these are distinct matters.  Similarly, if it said that there are moral obligations for only men or only women, it would also be wrong.  There could be no such thing as morality, but if something is morally good, it is good no matter who does it, and if it is evil, it is evil no matter the gender of who carries it out.  The Bible clearly teaches gender egalitarianism (Genesis 1:26-27 and Exodus 21:26-29 address this, and verses people think teach the opposite are misinterpreted through assumptions).  Again, it is the Bible's agreement with logical necessities that makes it possible, not how there are numerous genuine evidences for many of its tenets on the level of historical documentation or scientific perceptions.  An apologist who does not quickly come to realize that logical necessity is more vital to Christianity's probable truth than fallible evidences is a horribly inept thinker indeed.

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