Within two weeks I will resume my college classes at HBU, including classes in the HBU honors college. Contrary to my hopes and expectations, the vast majority of people I have met or conversed with in the HBU honors college do two extremely asinine things: 1) they doubt things that cannot be false and believe in things that either cannot be validated or that cannot be true, and they also 2) want me to do the same. I've targeted the people in this group before [1]; I want to target them again. Their fallacies seem relentless, and I will summarize some of their most prominent errors in methodology here.
For example, an alarming number of them deny that we can know if truth exists or if logic is reliable as they chastise me for not accepting the claims of Plato/Socrates and agreeing with their subjective moral preferences (which aren't rooted in the Bible, but cultural or personal beliefs). I've been given looks of surprise and shock as I have denied that there is any epistemological or ontological basis for believing in Plato's forms, said that conscience is an utterly subjective and therefore unreliable source of moral knowledge, and explained why a private emotional experience does not in any way demonstrate the existence of God, much less that he loves humans. I have also encountered a bizarre tendency for people to elevate subjective preferences about aesthetics to the status of knowledge about objective beauty and emphasize entirely subjective moral emotions as pathways to legitimate moral knowledge, and I have been scolded for pointing out that subjective perceptions do not serve as a reliable basis for knowledge about values. During one semester people even seemed quite inclined to speak very well of the Roman Empire, when I have yet to read of a more depraved, sadistic, vile example of a country seized by a values system opposed to Biblical ethics in almost every way. None of these conclusions or the arguments I used to prove them are false or unsound. Indeed, I've explained these very things on my blog before. But a significant number of them rejected what I proved and opted for fallacies instead.
An unexpectedly large number of them have used reason in laughably self-defeating and futile attempts to persuade me not to cling to reason all while they encourage me to believe in things that contradict reason or lay far beyond my ability to ever know in an entire lifetime of human existence. I am criticized both for being rightly skeptical of the many absurd things which they want me to believe and for not denying things that cannot be false, things that I have absolute certainty about (necessary truths, logical truths, truths about my own self and consciousness, my perceptions, etc).
I recall being asked questions similar to the following:
"What if we're in some box where logic applies and outside of it contradictions can exist and what we think has to be true isn't?"
"It seems to me like truth has to exist, but what if it doesn't?"
There is no such thing as some world or dimension we can escape to where logic does not apply. The world outside the box would still be the world outside the box and not what is inside the box, and thus the logical law of identity remains true by necessity. As for truth, it is impossible for there to not be a way reality is; even if someone tries to hypothesize a world where truth does not exist and there is no way reality is, they would have actually done nothing but hypothesize a world where there is a way reality is! If truth didn't exist, then it would be true that truth doesn't exist, meaning that truth still exists because it's impossible for it not to. How can people overlook such elementary and foundational contradictions? I am not criticizing people for asking these questions about logic and truth, only for failing to realize the very obvious answers to them. One cannot serve both reason and fallacies at once.
Logic itself is infallible, inescapably true by necessity and omnipresent and binding on all things. Sure, it is not difficult for me to find someone who does not grasp logic properly and thus misapplies it through the construction of fallacious arguments. But even if the entire human race constantly wallowed in fallacies, logic itself remains infallible by its very nature; it is impossible for logic and necessary (self-evident) truths to not be true. That's just the way reality is, and any attempt to deny this or deviate from reality will fail. Logic cannot be escaped or falsified because logic cannot be either limited in its applications or false.
As for the claim from some Christians, often presuppositionalists, that the Fall destroyed the human ability to reason correctly and thus reliance on reason is a faulty epistemological methodology, I have written this:
"The fact that people can align themselves with reason or refrain from doing so means that people can indeed, within certain boundaries, actively resist reason. Some people take this to signify that reason itself is unreliable, but this represents a self-refuting misrepresentation of what actually takes place when people reject reason--after all, if reason is unreliable then we could never have any basis for claiming it is unreliable! Logic still exists and is reliable by pure necessity. From the standpoint of Christian theology, just because the Fall darkened the human intellect by enabling humans to come to false conclusions and succumb to fallacies does not mean that reason itself lost its innate reliability, a thing impossible to come about. [2]"
Anyone who denies reason denies any basis he or she could have for claiming that or anything else, contradicting himself or herself, denying facts of reality that cannot have been any other way, and undermining any reason someone could have for taking him or her seriously. I wrote this to provide one more explanation of why logic itself cannot be anything other than infallible before I return to the frustrating environment of a group of allegedly intelligent and Christian students who attack truth and embrace error. This is thus part venting and part intellectual elaboration. Rational people will indeed, in some senses, find more obstacles in life than irrational people, for they will not only have to deal with the usual problems and trials of human existence, but will also have to coexist with the seemingly unshakeable stupidity of a great portion of other people. People who reject reason will end up like the students at the HBU honors college who are intellectually lost and philosophically naive--they will exchange truth for error and, all while thinking themselves in the right, they will attack reason and embrace absurdities.
(I want to once again thank my fellow Christian rationalist and best friend Gabi, who now attends HBU with me! You've made my time there far more bearable and I am unspeakably grateful for your presence there!)
[1]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/a-critique-of-my-college-education.html
[2]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-fallacious-mind.html
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