The atheistic worldview is predicated on the idea that nothing is to be taken by faith.
Clete, you do go on so, so I decided to hold nothing back and tell you what I really think of your philosophy.
Opening sentence utter bunkum. Science has faith in its methodologies, beliefs, truths, ways of finding truth out.
This is their most fundamental philosophical pillar.
Rubbish. Relativity, quantum physics, cosmology, evolution - all rely on a type of "faith" or belief system not unlike religions. And they have many pillars such as reason, observation, hypothesis, experimentation, blind tests, stats. How can you decide what is their main pillar?
Everything they do, think or say is built on the idea that the veracity of every claim must and can only be established by logic and reason.
This is maybe what science in Socrates day was based on, but now we have observation, instruments like telescopes and microscopes. Of course reason is important to everything from religion to marriage, including science. Many hypotheses are based on hunches.
They do, however, find themselves perched on the horns of a dilemma whenever anyone asks them to establish the veracity of reason itself.
No they don't. They are scientists, not philosophers. Most are taught methodologies.
Reason is common to all humans, and human activities. They don't have to justify reason any more than they justify direct observation, or hypotheses based on hunches.
They can say that logic is axiomatic, which is what they almost always do, but this is the equivalent to being a presuppositionalist in that they are taking the veracity of logic on faith, which is antithetical to their worldview.
Utterly wrong, because of the wrongness of your opening statement, that science is devoid of faith. Nobody can function for a minute awake and doing anything, without faith. Name any human activity, and I will tell you the faith involved. Typing, I have faith my computer will not crash, that when I press send, it will go, that this post may be worth the time it took to type it.
The other option is to attempt to make some sort of argument that defends the veracity of logic.
Wrong, because scientists as a rule take logic for granted, and don't take courses in it, yet win Nobel prises with no courses in logic.
This is question begging, since any argument presupposes the veracity of logic and therefore assumes what they are trying to prove.
Life presupposes the veracity of many things, including that the earth will not just randomly open up and swallow us.
They are forced to either break the laws of reason or else take the veracity of reason on faith.
Or not bother to think of it at all, while they think up ways of making this a better world, by inventing the internet, or devising drought-resistant plants.
They thereby undermine their own worldview every time they make a truth claim or, for that matter, every time they utter an intelligible word. The atheist is therefore FORCED to violate his own worldview at every turn.
Nobody can speak for all science, and there are as many worldview as there are world viewers.
The atheistic worldview is therefore false.
All worldview are false, because such a thing as a worldview is a construct of the mind, and "the heart is deceitful above all things".
Therefore, God must exist because of the rational impossibility of the contrary.
What a long leap off a short pier.
God must exist because of the rational impossibility of the contrary.
You have not brought up God before, so there is no "contrary".
And nothing exists because anyone thinks something.
This supposed proof is a sentence which sits in thin air with no logic to support it. Especially because you never mentioned God before, and because before you were talking about atheistic worldviews which, just because they are wrong, does not prove anything right. One can be wrong in a million ways and this does not make even the opposite worldview correct. And to conjure up God and pop Him into the conversation randomly, and say because atheists think wrong, God must exist - its delusional, irrational, illogical and crazy.
That is a brief presentation of the Transcendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG for short). It is one way of communicating the fact that all truth is predicated on, not just the existence of God, but on God Himself. God must be presupposed in order for reason to work.
Its a terrible argument, because I see no connection between reason and God.
Now that doesn't get you all the way to Christianity since Christianity is only one of thousands of theistic worldviews but establishing Christianity would be far outside the bounds of what I'm trying to establish in this thread. It would, however, be worth my time, I think, to point out that the God of the Bible, and Jesus in particular, is presented to us as Reason incarnate. Note the following passage from the first chapter of John's Gospel...
Again, nuts. Christ is God incarnate. Yes, God uses reason, as we do. Even my cat reasons how to catch that mouse.
John1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. 4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all through him might believe. 8 He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. 9 That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. 11 He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. 12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
In this passage, everywhere you see the phrase, "the Word" the Greek word being used is "Logos". It is important to understand what this Greek word means because the use of "Word" as an English translation just doesn't convey what this passage is teaching. Logos conveys the idea of communication or more specifically, discourse and more specifically than that, rational discourse and/or rational argument. It is the word from which we get the suffix "-ology", as in Biology, Theology, Technology, Climatology, Cosmology, etc. So, the study of living things is "Biology" and the processes in a living creature are said to be biological. Notice bio-LOGICAL. To apply logic to the processes in living things, and thus to understand them, is biology, it is the logos of life. This is the meaning conveyed by "Logos".
So now, with this better understanding of the Greek, lets look at this passage again...
John 1:1 In the beginning was Logic, and Logic was with God, and Logic was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. 4 In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all through him might believe. 8 He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. 9 That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. 11 He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. 12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: 13 who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
14 And Logic became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
And folks accuse me of loose interpretation of scripture. At least I look up what "logos" means and "logic" is not on the translators list of choices for the word.
Now, to be clear, I should point out that I do not worship logic except in the specific sense present above.
You sure bang on about it though.
The bible repeatedly tells us that God is Love and no one has any problem with accepting that notion and no one is every accused of worshiping love except in the sense that God is Love and we do worship God. In the same sense that God is Love, God is also Logic and I worship Him as such. I do not worship the process of right thinking, I worship Him from whom that process emanates and derives its meaning and veracity.
For this reason, and several others, Christianity is not only a rational worldview, it is the only rational worldview.
By the illogicality of that last sentence, you have just proved an example to the contrary.
That is not to say that everything claimed by unbelievers is false.
Don't be too nice to the pagan unbelievers now.
If the God of the bible is Reason, then the closer an unbeliever comes to having reason as his foundation and the more consistently he uses logic correctly, the closer his conclusions will come to the truth and the more in agreement his "true science" will be with "true religion".
And here we are on this thread proving the exact opposite.
The problem is, as I've been attempting to show you here in this thread, they neither have reason as their foundation nor do they use logic consistently. Their paradigm steers them away from the truth because they, in spite of their claims to the contrary, do not merely reject God's existence. On the contrary, they despise the very idea of God and are enemies of those who believe in God, most especially Christians. You would be wise to count them as the enemies that they are.
I try to love my enemies. But unbelievers are not automatically my enemies. And scientists don't burn fellow scientists at the stake, or act intolerant of Christians or those with contrary worldviews.
