Matt Slick's TAG Conclusion: FIVE Counter Arguments

In the YouTube video finale on a joint "TAG-team" effort with my good friend and fellow YouTuber Deconverted Man, at analyzing Matt Slick's Transcendental Argument for God straight from his carm.org website, I presented four counter-arguments to his conclusion. Here is Slick's beginning "simplifed summation" so as to understand the context of these counter-arguments:

The oversimplified argument, which is expanded in outline form below, goes as follows: The Laws of Logic exist. The Laws of Logic are conceptual by nature--are not dependent on space, time, physical properties, or human nature. They are not the product of the physical universe (space, time, matter) because if the physical universe were to disappear, The Laws of Logic would still be true. The Laws of Logic are not the product of human minds because human minds are different--not absolute. But, since The Laws of Logic are always true everywhere and not dependent upon human minds, it must be an absolute transcendent mind that is authoring them. This mind is called God. Furthermore, if there are only two options to account for something, i.e., God and no God, and one of them is negated, then by default the other position is validated. Therefore, part of the argument is that the atheist position cannot account for the existence of The Laws of Logic from its worldview.

There are fallacies run amuck in the above simplification as well, let's point out the major one that may not have been covered in our video series, and that's in Slick's disjunctive syllogism of "God or No-God." At issue is the term "God" which is by nature equivocal and multi-faceted: how is this "god" defined? In order to determine "everything else" we need to know what the opposite of "everything else" is, and that premise also needs to be validated.

But hold on!  Enter Alex Malpass, a post-graduate in philosophy who, in the FIFTH and probably most devastating counter argument to TAG, demonstrates that  the disjunctive syllogism Slick uses (shown in bold in the block quote from carm.org above) validates its own conclusion by positing the conclusion in the premise through the disjunctive syllogism, and hence is begging the question.  A simple way to show how it is begging the question might be this:

Premise 1:  God  ("conclusion") OR
Premise 2:  No God
Premise 3:  No god is negated
Conclusion:  God  (see Premise 1)

Therefore, the premise and the conclusion are one in the same.  It should also be pointed out that other educated philosophers, most notably Ozymandias Ramses, agree with Alex's objection to TAG.

YouTube channel "darkhorse" presented this easy-to-understand diagram in a recent video.

Alex recently explained all this (more comprehensively) to Matt Slick on the Biblethumpingwingnut podcast and YouTube hangout.  Slick seemed to think this was all a matter of "presentation" even though it effectively reduced his entire argument to, as Alex termed it, a "triviality."

Nevertheless, the following are the four basic responses (from the final video on TAG as published by Deconverted Man)  to Slick's final point that "since The Laws of Logic are always true everywhere and not dependent upon human minds, it must be an absolute transcendent mind that is authoring them. This mind is called God."

Counter Argument 1: Begging the question--Primacy of Existence

A year or so ago as many of us tackled the open-ended question from presuppositonalists, "Name one thing you are absolutely certain about" with a popular response "I am certain I exist"--referring to the primacy of existence, the objectivist axiom. We were told in a video by Ozymandias Ramses that the primacy of existence was not a problem for presuppositionalists when it comes to this question of certainty. The primacy of existence equates to the law of identity, the first of the three laws of logic, when it comes to the existence of a god.

While it may not be a problem for presuppositionalists when it pertains to certainty questions, it IS a problem for them when it comes to god's existence, for there is no way to establish god's primacy over it, because even self-existence presupposes existence. As the owner of the website "Religion Refuted" Fergus Duniho asks in his review of TAG: Can God revoke the law of identity? According to Slick and Sye Ten Bruggencate, God can only do what is logically possible, so Slick and Sye would probably dodge the question, excusing themselves with their god's ineffability (god works in ways beyond description). But IF the answer is no, God cannot revoke the law of identity, if God can only do what is logically possible, it means that God is subject to or contingent on the law of identity, and therefore it (or the laws of logic) cannot emanate from him. In other words, how does the law of identity apply to god, or his nature if the law of identity is a reflection of the nature? How does his god have supremacy over the law of identity since he must first necessarily exist or have an identity himself?

There is another logical point at issue here that Slick has not addressed. Either God can or cannot revoke the law of identity. If he can, then the law of identity is contingent and is not a logical absolute. If God cannot revoke the law of identity, then the law of identity is sovereign and God is one of its subjects. In that case the logical absolutes lack any divine imprimatur.  (Fergus Duniho)

In other words: when you refer to anything, even God, even the law of identity, you're using the law of identity.

Counter Argument 2: Begging the Question--Occam's Razor

In our debates with presuppositionalists we often use the question: "Do the laws of logic hold (obtain) if god does not exist?"   Presups will often resist answering, because with either a yes or no, they are in a bind. If the laws of logic hold, then god is not subject to them, rendering him unnecessary via Occam's Razor. But presuppositionalists know they cannot put the laws of logic outside god, so they will respond that they do not hold without God's existence and are "reflections of god's mind" as Slick so aptly puts it. But if god's mind is the source, then the argument is begging the question, because god is now a metaphor or label for reality.

Counter Argument 3:  Argument from Ignorance/Dichotomous Assertion

Positing a mind called his god which reflects these laws, and the lack of evidence to the contrary, or a demand for such in the case of Slick, does not validate that the source of these laws is his god. As Matt Dillahunty told Matt Slick in their debate on the Biblethumpingwingnut Podcast/YouTube hangout:

You're constructing a dichotomy on the fly and asserting this is the case and saying if you can't come up with some other explanation, I'm sticking with the one I've got, which is an argument from ignorance fallacy.

The dichotomy is that the laws of logic are conceptual, or not conceptual, and if conceptual, then they must necessarily "be the reflection of" the mind of a perfect being...and we know who that is. Slick's position is, if you (the reader, the atheist) can't come up with anything else, for lack of any other answer, it must be from the mind of his god, which is an argument from ignorance. Slick leaves it up to his atheist (I presume) readers to demonstrate why the laws of logic are not conceptual. My response in the video was via appeal to legitimate authority, that is, I pointed out two scholars (Michael Shenefelt and Howard Bloom) who called the laws of logic anything else but a concept, although as abstracta they could be termed concepts. But even if they called them concepts, I don't think they would agree that this would demonstrate they are from the mind of a god.

Counter Argument 4:  The Euthyphro Dilemma and the Divine Command Theory of Logic

As long as logic depends upon God, God’s existence is beyond all reason and cannot be established by it.    (Fergus Duniho)

I am throwing this statement out there for viewers' consideration, but I want to note that Deconverted Man and I have been pondering this and I may make a video in the future to delve into it further, as Duniho did not explain this sufficiently. I would say it may be related to is the divine command theory of logic, which is similar to the divine command theory of morals, in that both are subject to the Euthyphro Dilemma. In the words of Michael Shenefelt in his book If A then B: How the World Discovered Logic:

This divine-command theory [of logic] seems entirely plausible when considered in itself, but the trouble is that it appears to make nearly all other talk about God— most of the central questions of theology— futile. The reason is that it deprives God (if there is one) of any rational qualities.

The divine command theory of logic might go like this: Either God commands A=A because it is logical; or A=A is logical because God commands it. Now it must be noted that if this is true, then all other god arguments--the ontological, teleological, etc.-- are futile as well, since they use logic to conclude an entity not subject to logic.

The divine-command theory seems to make God thoroughly and irreducibly arbitrary; it excludes from the idea of God any objectively rational qualities that would make a human being revere a god in the first place.  (Michael Shenefelt)

Dan Courtney also alludes to this problem when he quotes Dr. Jason Lisle, a well known presuppositionalist, who stated that logic is contingent on God (which would be contradicting Slick's position that logic is absolute, because if logic is contingent it is not absolute. It would also mean the laws of logic are not necessary since they are contingent on god.) Courtney states that making logic contingent on God puts God in the position of not being subject to the laws of logic. In other words, Courtney also implies that God is deprived of any rational qualities, so trying to prove his existence in terms of those rational qualities which he is deprived of and which he is not subject to, which are now by definition arbitrary, would not be rational.

Lastly, I'd like to note that I did not include a problem found earlier (see my video explaining this further) in Slick's assertion that the laws of logic transcend space and time because they are "independent of" space and time.  The laws of logic are expressed as "point in location and time" as they cannot hold any other way.  They are therefore dependent on space and time.  Since Slick tries to detach them around Point 4 or 5 in his argument, I make the above arguments "detached" as well.  But including this makes his arguments even weaker, since his claim of their being "transcendent" is invalidated.