You Can't Prove It

Sometimes I marvel at the clever and creative ways theists come up with arguments to prove their cases in support of theistic beliefs or against naturalist beliefs.  They always find ways to disguise logical fallacies in such a way that they are easy to overlook, and so present an argument that appears valid.

Take, for example, the point that Victor has been trying to make about evidentialism.

Scientific Proof - A Red Herring

In my previous post, I showed that there are people (especially creationists) who are distrustful and skeptical of the motives and methods of science because a scientific investigation of their own beliefs would cast those beliefs into serious doubt, if not destroy them altogether.  These people will do everything in their power to discredit science and anyone who thinks that its epistemological foundations (ie empiricism) are the best way to gain knowledge.  So they create a straw man view of the empiricist's epistemology that they call "scientism", and create straw man views of science itself, as Ilíon has done by making claims that science purports to have the same level of authority as religion in revealing "Truth".

And Victor Reppert, himself a defender of creationism and and ID pseudo-science, is playing the same game.  He would have us think that evidence as a justification for belief is logically absurd.

It's the regress problem. Here is a discussion by Maverick Christian.

Suppose we define evidentialism as follows:

A belief B is justified just in case there is a justified proposition C, which constitutes sufficient evidence for B.

I used to call this "the prove-it game." You need proof for everything you believe, and then proof of the proof, and then proof of the proof of the proof, and then proof of the proof of the proof of the proof, and then proof of the proof of the proof of the proof of the proof, until you finally get tired and give up. - Reppert

Loftus, Reppert, and the Courtier's Reply

Victor Reppert made a remark about the Courtier's Reply that puzzled me:

One saving grace for John is that he has criticized the overuse of the Courtier's Reply, which essentially says "Your position is so stupid that we don't even have to bother to understand it to attack it."

I was puzzled because this definition of the Courtier's Reply is not what I understand it to be.  The Courtier's Reply is actually what theists use to attack atheists who reject belief in God without necessarily understanding all the details of every theistic argument or every particular religion they are rejecting. 

Theistic Arguments Series: On the Impossibility of an Actual Infinite

One of the key concepts found in some theological arguments such as the Kalam Cosmological Argument is the assertion that the universe must have had a beginning, which is based on the notion that it is logically impossible for an "actual infinite" to exist.  Theists have made numerous defenses of this assertion.  It appeared in my previous post, where my interlocutor said:

This is a metaphysically untenable position. Why can't there be an eternal succession of people? Well, person one (p1) is going to have to give birth to them-self before they can give birth to p2. How can p1 give birth to them-self if they don't exist. Since contingent p1 can't be accounted for contingent p2...pn are not accounted for, and so the whole chain fails to exist.