hitchens67.wordpress/2013/11/08/just-a-little-background/ Sye Ten Bruggencate (excerpts) Beliefs Ten Bruggencate is internet famous for his aggressive indifference towards any reasoned response to his own argument; which consists of a single idea nowhere near as interesting as he insists it is. Sye’s refusal to accept that, when stripped of semantics, problems of this kind are rendered meaningless by accepting the primacy of existence axiom, often sees him play the hurt feelings card and use language synonymous with the ‘crazy Christian’ stereotype. Ten Bruggencate is extremely sincere in his religious beliefs and enthusiastic about sharing them with others. The Achilles’ heel of his argument is a coupling of his refusal to accept the syllogism at the heart of his own proposal with his eagerness to reassign this characteristic towards anyone who happens to point it out. Ten Bruggencate and atheism Ten Bruggencate subscribes to an all-too-common view of atheism — that atheists are in willful denial of what they know to be true. His most notorious 15 megabytes of fame came when he issued a challenge to the illusionist, public speaker, outspoken atheist, executive producer of the TV series ‘Bullshit’ and one half of the magic duo Penn & Teller, Penn Jillette to debate atheism versus Christianity. There is no evidence Mr. Jillette ever received an invitation to this debate, and the only mention of it ever having been issued may be found on pro-creationist websites to which Ten Bruggencate is either directly or loosely affiliated. Circular reasoning Ten Bruggencate’s one idea comes in the form of a series of straw man arguments and creationist escape hatch questions, for which there is no “yes” or “no,” “right” or “wrong” answer. These questions follow a cascading script of ever more irrational assumptions, so that no matter which answer to whichever question is given, it always leads to the same conclusion; chief among these is the argument that knowledge is impossible without an absolute source, ie. God. In a podcast debate between Ten Bruggencate, Eric Hovind and the hosts of the Fundamentally Flawed podcast, both Hovind and Ten Bruggencate admitted on several occasions that presuppositional apologetics is circular in nature. Hence as a means of proving the existence of Yahweh it is a conclusion drawn from its own proposition and, therefore, any claim to have evidence for the existence of the Christian God is based upon a logical fallacy. Having realized they had inadvertently undone their own argument, the duo went on to assert that this is no different to the atheistic position on sense, reason and memory, since without a belief in God it is “impossible to prove anything,” including Darwinian evolution by means of natural selection, the big bang, the age of the earth and myriad other scientific facts which have cast doubt over the alleged inerrancy of the Bible for hundreds of years. Refutation confrontation Ten Bruggencate denies that his methods are viciously circular (instead dubbing them ‘virtuously circular’), despite that his own website demonstrates this perfectly. The basis of this claim is that because his arguments are based on God, they cannot be circular because God is the ultimate authority and only justification needed to validate his argument. So, basically, he knows he is right because God told him so, and he knows God is right because it says so in a book which tells him God is right. And he knows the book is right because God told him so. Basically, it’s the definition of circular reasoning. His understanding of what constitutes a valid criticism of circular reasoning, versus his denial that he uses exactly the same methods, has led some to speculate that he might be being deliberately provocative, in order to raise his profile as a public speaker... Sye uses a quote from Bahnsen, which explains it. Greg Bahnsen writes: ”In the Christian worldview, however, the Christian is not engaged in viciously circular argument, a circular argument on the same plane. We appeal above and beyond the temporal realm. God’s self-revelation in nature and in Scripture informs us of the two-level universe. God is not a fact like other facts in the world. He is the Creator and Establisher of all else. His existence alone makes the universe, and reason, and human experience possible… … The “circularity” of a transcendental argument is not at all the same as the fallacious ‘circularity’ of an argument in which the conclusion is a restatement (in one form or another) of one of its premises.” ~ (Pushing the Antithesis pg.) 124. For this reason Ten Bruggencate personifies many aspects of Poe’s Law. Ten Bruggencate’s entire argument is therefore predicated upon a semantic confusion between strict definitions of this kind in science, and the informal use of words such as theory and logic in common parlance. Therefore, as is also found with many other presuppositional apologists, his own inability to differentiate between a description of X and an analysis of the description itself, thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, leads him to incorrectly assume that because he cannot delineate what something describes from what it means, no-one else can either. In addition, Sye’s point that you cannot know anything without God is easily proven false by its own conditions. Firstly, if you were to admit that you couldn’t know everything, then you of course could never know that God exists, disproving the basis for his argument. Secondly, Sye’s argument follows a flow of logic which tries to establish that if a person could be wrong about something, then they could be wrong about everything. This is faulty because there is one thing a person can know for certain about their knowledge, and that’s that they don’t know everything. If a person can be sure that they don’t know everything, then they can be sure that they can’t be wrong about everything, because they already know something. And they’re not wrong about that. So, because a person can know this one thing, it is, in fact, possible to know something without God, meaning that God is unnecessary for knowledge. Threats and lies The mental acrobatics Ten Bruggencate has to perform, when presented with the facts about his methods, very often result in a dark satire of religious groupthink and other forms of confirmation bias. That he is completely oblivious to the fact he demonstrates this every time he opens his mouth or sets pen to paper, has made him the unwitting poster-child of circular reasoning in various debating circles, albeit to an extremely limited clique. Ten Bruggencate has a number of outstanding challenges open to him on many websites, blogs and discussion forums, which he rarely responds to directly, except to demand that other people account for his own misunderstanding; choosing instead to respond to his many critics by posting to his own comment-disabled blog, invariably with the aid of quote-mined snippets of text lifted from topics unrelated to the question at hand. This, and his repeated refusals to engage with his many critics on any topic outside of the TAG, has seen him banned from a number of websites and blog comment threads. He frequently justifies his stonewall approach to debating any aspect of Christianity with non-Christians, by threatening them with the fires of hell for their failure to agree that to engage in such a conversation, would require that they first acknowledge the existence of Yahweh. Repeat, ad nauseum. Very often one of the few things both Christians and atheists can agree upon, in on-line debates which Ten Bruggencate has involved himself in, is that he alienates as many religious seeking common ground with non-believers, as he does atheists who demand nothing less than freedom of religious expression for their many interlocutors who, unlike Sye, do not make the case for Christianity by resorting to threats and fear theology. Therefore, albeit to an extremely limited audience of dominionist evangelicals, who are either willfully ignorant of, or genuinely oblivious to the kind of bait and switch debating techniques he employes, Ten Bruggencate’s exclusion from numerous debating forums is merely “yet more proof” that it is his ideas which atheists find uncomfortable, when in reality it is dealing with someone only interested in listening to themselves which proves the bigger challenge. ------------------------------------
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 20:06:41 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015