The Argument
The TAG is a transcendental argument that attempts to prove that God is the precondition of all human knowledge and experience, by demonstrating the impossibility of the contrary; in other words, that logic, reason, or morality cannot exist without God. The argument proceeds as follows:
- If there is no god (most often the entity God, defined as the god of the Christian bible), knowledge is not possible.
- Knowledge is possible (or some other statement pertaining to logic or morality).
- Therefore a god exists.
Cornelius Van Til likewise wrote:
We must point out that reasoning itself leads to self-contradiction, not only from a theistic point of view, but from a non-theistic point of view as well... It is this that we ought to mean when we say that we reason from the impossibility of the contrary. The contrary is impossible only if it is self-contradictory when operating on the basis of its own assumptions. —(A Survey of Christian Epistemology, p. 204).Therefore, the TAG differs from Thomistic and Evidentialist arguments, which posit the probable existence of God in order to avoid an infinite regress of causes or motions, to explain life on Earth, and so on. The TAG posits the necessary existence of a particular conception of God in order for human knowledge and experience to be possible at all. The TAG argues that, because the triune God of the Bible, being completely logical, uniform, and good, exhibits a character in the created order and the creatures themselves (especially in humans), human knowledge and experience are possible. This reasoning implies that all other alternatives such as Buddhism and Islam, when followed to their logical conclusions, descend into absurdity, arbitrariness or inconsistency.
Read more about this topic: Transcendental Argument For The Existence Of God
Famous quotes containing the word argument:
“My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“Our argument ... will result, not upon logic by itself—though without logic we should never have got to this point—but upon the fortunate contingent fact that people who would take this logically possible view, after they had really imagined themselves in the other man’s position, are extremely rare.”
—Richard M. Hare (b. 1919)