On Presuppositional Apologetics, Generally

Presuppositional Apologetics was the subject of the talk at our 9th AAFSA meeting the other night, where Prof. Witmer dissected these arguments and showed their fallacies in a few different ways. I want to go through his outline and highlight his major points (as best I can, if they don't make much sense it's my poor phraseology). He will be passing along to me the full talk before long which he has given me permission to publish as a resource. (*update: see it here*)

Basically his questions brought to the fore in my mind, "Can logic be 'accounted for' at all, or is it irreducible and self-evident?" Does the word "exist" make any sense when applied to abstractions like logic, 2+2=4, and other universals/abstractions?

Suffice it to say that it seems to me that if the theist and nontheist have a similar ontology, there is no good reason why they can have no common ground.

Their claim seems valid only if the nontheist is committed to, say, physicalism, which definitionally excludes "spirit", and for that matter, all substances other than matter/energy. It does not seem that their claim could be right for another reason -- that if reason itself is

He mostly focused on the method of argument, he touched on classical foundationalism and "properly basic belief", etc. He also showed the problems with assuming that all alternative explanada are false, and declaring your own explanation right by default. He talked briefly about i) the false dichotomy, and ii) the possibility of a future explanation being offered which was true.

For example, i) why the Christian God is needed to explain X, versus the Muslim Allah, or a deistic concept of God, is rather unclear on the face of the argument -- it isn't "atheism or Christianity", in other words; ii) it is perfectly possible that no one has "given an account of" X that is satisfactory to them that they have encountered yet, or maybe no one at all in all the earth's history, but they must be able to go through and refute every attempt in order to declare a present victory, and they must somehow eliminate future explanada as well.
Recently, I received a comment from an old sparring partner of mine, Peter Pike, aka CalvinDude. We've butted heads many times, but so far, no ugliness or impolity has come from his corner, which cannot be said for many of the Triabloguers (a group blog of presups).

Now, CalvinDude (CD) commented on my post in which I replied to Prov. 3:5-6 by pointing out that the abandoning of reason, aka faith, is a sad thing, and is not why I came to UF. I pointed out that a campus preacher is functionally in the wrong place when he spouts such nonsense.

CD brought up the favored line of questioning -- what is my "account of" reason? CD doesn't try to abandon the pursuit of knowledge, as Joey insisted I should, but insists that there is no neutral ground upon which the theist and nontheist can reason. This is a common claim among presups. I think that it fails, but I won't go into details in this post, but I will in some in the near future.