By Mike Robinson
The gift I would like to give every child is skepticism (atheist Richard Dawkins).
If we don’t know that there is such a person as God, we don’t know the first thing (the most important thing) about ourselves, each other and our world. This is because … the most important truths about us and them, is that we have been created by the Lord, and utterly depend upon him for our continued existence (Alvin Plantinga: Warranted Christian Belief).
The verity that absolute truth exists and that atheism lacks the ontological grounding for truth is an ontological reality. Atheists can know what is true (epistemic explanation: relating to what we know); they can know true from false. Nonetheless, atheism lacks an objective, immutable, and perfect ontic ground to account for objective immutable truths. Additionally, atheism lacks the means for atheists to know that they know immutable truths.
Ens per vernum innotescit (reality is known through the true).
We are compelled to admit between the thoughts of a terrestrial astronomer and the behavior of matter several light-years away that particular relation we call truth. But this relation has no meaning at all if we try to make it exist between the matter of the star and the astronomer’s brain, considered a lump of matter. The brain may be in all sorts of relations to the stars no doubt: it is in a spatial relation, and a time relation, and a quantitative relation. But to talk of one bit of matter being true about another bit of matter seems to be nonsense (C.S. Lewis: Christian Reflections).
To a consistent atheistic materialist, the concept of immaterial objective truth is nonsensical. It doesn’t seem to make sense to argue that immaterial objective truth comes from a material-only world; therefore, for the consistent materialist, immaterial objective truths do not exist. I maintain that the only consistent and righteous system of thought comes from Christian theism. It is justified and it is impossible for it not to be true because Christianity supplies the necessary veracity conditions for immutable truth. Mutable materialistic atheism ultimately tumbles into epistemic nihilism.
“I am the truth …” (Jesus: John 14:6).
Atheism is impossible because it falls into absurdity inasmuch as it lacks an ontic base for its epistemic rights; it is self-befuddling. Non-theistic worldviews lead to conclusions that are incongruous with their knowledge claims. A vital question: What will supply the a priori truth conditions that make reality intelligible? The logical actuality is, without the Christian worldview, formally, nothing can make sense. The true and living God is the truth condition for the intelligibility of reality and the understanding of all human experience; He must be presupposed for one to have adequate explanatory power required for the obligatory universal operational features of human experience.
If the world were not as Scripture says it is, if the natural man’s knowledge were not actually rooted in the creation and providence of God, then there would be no knowledge… The non-Christians have made and now make discoveries about the state of the universe simply because the universe is what Christ says it is. The unbelieving scientist borrows or steals the Christian principal of creation and providence every time he says that an “explanation” is possible, for he knows he cannot account for “explanation” on his own (Greg Bahnsen).
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Hey Mike,
I don’t think your blog post on truth is accurate. Atheists aren’t necessarily commited to materialism. They may be platonists.
Mark: Materialism is a specific if not a dominant feature of many versions of atheism; nonetheless the arguments I posit sought to refute all forms of atheism. I wrote in the post: “Atheism lacks an objective, immutable, and perfect ontic ground to account for objective immutable truths.” Diverse platonic forms lack the ontic credentials to be such a ground.
This argument seems backwards to me.
Firstly the atheists ontological grounding for truth is reality itself. If something is said to be true it is said to be true because it accords with this reality.
Secondly if truth comes from a god it is necessarily arbitrary, we can’t really know anything as this god could be deceiving us.
I always find discussing truth slightly difficult because of people’s tendency to treat it like an entity “Truth” when it is simply the characteristic of being true (which is, in accordance with reality).