Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism
Dateline: May 31, 2000
Necessary Presuppositions
I have identified what I believe are basic, irreducible presuppositions that are philosophically necessary in any debate or discussion - whether you are a naturalist or a supernaturalist. "Necessary" means here that they cannot be denied without ending up in a self contradictory loop.
They are:
1. The validity of logic.
Logic is presupposed every time we make an utterance designed to urge acceptance of some proposition, even the acceptance or rejection of logic itself. What this means is that in order to make the statement "logic is not true" be a true statement, the contrary statement "logic is true" must be false.
But that is the law of non-contradiction - one of the "laws of logic." Thus for logic to be false, it must be true -a self contradiction. As such logic is a necessary truth.
2. The existence of other minds.
Else who are we trying to convince of anything?
3. The existence of a common mental/perceptual world.
In order for our utterances to convey any meaning or to transfer thoughts and ideas and facts we believe about the world, there must already be some common ground for understanding. We can call this methodological naturalism, although that term may already be preempted with its own definition.
But when we speak of gravity or water or clouds to another who seems to speak our own language we would be somewhat surprised if they didn't know what we were talking about. Common English (or French, or Swahili, but here we use English) words convey, where they convey information about the world, sufficiently similar ideas about that world; where they convey grammatical information about the sentence, sufficiently similar cues, etc. Else communication could not happen.
4. The stability of that common world.
It is necessary for any knowledge at all that we normally be able to trust both our memories and our expectations. That the past has always been like the present, or that the future will continue to be like the past cannot be proven, but that assumption is necessary in order to claim to be able to know anything at all. This was explored more in depth in my earlier article describing the contradiction between this necessary assumption and the assumption of historical miracles in Christian theology.
These are the presuppositions we ALL share whenever we attempt to communicate with anyone at all. But do they either require a prior god belief or logically necessitate a god belief?
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