Friday, December 28, 2012

Transcendental argument

One of the most typical and popular forms of the so-called "transcendental argument for the existence of God" is that the laws of logic exist, are immaterial and must have been created by something.

This argument makes no sense. The laws of logic are simply concepts that describe something (eg. existence.) Claiming that the laws of logic must have been "created" makes as much sense as saying that, for example, the concept of "roundness" must have been created.

We describe a ball as "round." Roundness is a concept that we use to describe a geometric property of certain things. Nothing needed to first "invent" this concept for round things to be possible, or for us to be able to describe them with such a concept.

The geometric property which we describe with the concept "round" is not something that "exists" on its own, independently of anything. If absolutely nothing existed, then there would be no concept of "round" either. The concept is completely tied to what it describes. It's simply a notion we use to describe a property that we can find in existence.

Moreover, the concept of "round" does need to be "created" or "invented" or anything before it becomes possible (as a description of something.)

The people who use the TAG argument seem to have this weird notion that the laws of logic are somehow "existent" on their own right, independent of anything, rather than simply being notions we use to describe something in the same way as we use "round" or "square" or "twice as large", etc.

(And of course, like every single other such argument, this one also falls into the same fallacy of jumping from "an unknown caused X to exist" to "God" with no justification whatsoever. This is not only a completely fallacious jump in logic, it's also completely useless because it tells us absolutely nothing. It just puts a label on an unknown, which is completely useless.)

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