Inconsistent Foundations

I wrote in my last post how a newly popular Christian apologetic argument is claiming that God is needed as a foundation for logic. I was trying to classify the argument and the best I could come up with is simply a bundle of talking points I’ll label the Foundation Arguments. What strikes me as particularly fallacious about each example of this type of reasoning is that they clearly don’t take into account the entirety of the deity they argue for. Let’s go over a few.

God is needed as a foundation for logic.

And yet God, as many Christians define him, is omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal--qualities that break logic in several different ways. Examples follow.

• An omnipotent God can’t both make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift and then lift said stone.
• An omniscient God can’t know what is it like to learn considering he has always known all, yet he must know what it is like to learn in order to know all. 
• An omnipotent God can, by definition, commit suicide; yet an eternal God, by definition, cannot die.

I've heard excuses for all these and they all suck. The closest a logical deity can get is mostly powerful (quasipotent?) and mostly knowledgeable (quasiscient?)

God is needed as a foundation for morality.

And yet God, as many Christians define him, violates his alleged good nature regularly in both their holy book and day-to-day life. The lives taken by Yahweh/Jehovah in the Torah/Bible include almost everyone on earth at one point. He is a vengeful, jealous being who allows for cruel and unusual punishment. Outside of myth, Christians must accept that God either causes or allows asymmetrical suffering for every form of life.

God is needed as a foundation for beauty.

And yet ugly things exist. If God is responsible for desirable aesthetics, he is also responsible for the undesirable. Reality isn’t all sunsets and kittens, we also have excrement and maggots.

The Alleged Divine Requirement of Math.

Is it just me or have apologetic arguments become more vague and confusing than ever before? I’ve been seeing the claim that atheism can’t account for the laws of logic and mathematics because they need a foundation in the divine. Upon asking the apologist why they think this is so, the responses vary. Most often they say something about logic and math working on faith because we can’t show why they work. In their minds, this makes atheists have faith in something thereby putting theists and atheists on equal ground. In their minds, it actually gives them a 1-up on atheists in that they can define a source for their faith...which just so happens to be what they have faith in, God--thus showing that their minds need more regular maintenance. This is where we can offer a tune-up.

Math works. I need no faith that math works, I can show that math works. This is evidential, which is right in the unfaithful’s wheelhouse. I don’t even know how to classify the argument that the apologist makes here. Asking why math works is like asking why are we here. It’s assuming a purpose that can only be prescribed by an outside agent--meaning it will only by compelling to those who already believe there is a god. In reality, there need not be a why.

If it’s not an argument of purpose, maybe it falls under the fine tuning umbrella. Are they saying that since the universe is comprehensible enough for us to discover math and logic, that God must have made it as such? If so, this can be dismissed as easily as other fine tuning arguments. We can only have a discussion about math and logic as we define them because they are meaningful; if they weren’t meaningful, we wouldn’t be having the discussion. It’s the anthropic principle at work. More than this, their line of reasoning is actually worse than the standard fine tuning argument of the universe. It’s at least conceivable that the universal constants that make life possible could be different yet aren’t, lending to the necessity of a designer or a multiverse or something to explain it. In the case of math and logic, I can’t see how anything could be fundamentally different. I don’t understand how can a concept like addition may be voided. Does the apologist really think a deity is needed for quantities to be countable? Seriously, what is the alternative? If things exist, said things can be counted. This gives us numbers which gives us math. Does this argument distill down to "why are there things?" If so, this brings us full circle to an assumed purpose.

These attempts to redefine faith as a property of atheism is simply an admission of their own weakness. Apologists, by definition, strive to defend their religious beliefs without relying on blind faith, but when it comes down to it, all their arguments are founded on just that blind faith. Apologists rationalize backwards in an effort to conceal their initial assumption, which is a passably convincing argument only to those indoctrinated to overlook the assumptions as such. I doubt apologetics were ever meant to convert the atheist, but rather to retain to lapsed church-goers. Who else would buy this shit?