No Dumb Question Tuesday - (2019-11-05)

I don't see any value in making a distinction between penultimate and ultimate presuppositions.

We've said a lot of words here but come no closer to answering the original challenge, which I suspect you have conceded at this point.

Empiricism alone is insufficient to establish any sort of universal truth.

But you don't know anything about "supernatural" stuff, or that there even is such thing as the Bible, or any of the things you mentioned, except by means of reason and senses, the legitimacy of which you must and do in fact ultimately presuppose. Your belief in Scripture in this sense is still entirely dependent on all the sensory and rational sources of all these other beliefs, not just in a linear temporal order but also in a necessary logical and epistemological order.

I will be honest that I'm a little confused as to why you're struggling with this.

Let's use learning to run for example. First, as a little baby, I have to learn to sit by my own strength. Then, I learn to crawl. After that, I start to walk. And finally, I can learn to run.

I had to follow a linear progression of learning to be able to run, but now that I can run, is my ability to run dependent in any way on my ability to sit on the floor?

Definitely not.

Furthermore, as I have stated before, I do not believe that knowledge can be constrained by the linear temporal nature of acquiring it or any necessary logical and epistemological order.

We might be able to say that the process of acquiring knowledge is constrained in this way, but not the actual ability to posses belief in a specific proposition once we obtain the knowledge.

For example, my ability to understand what I have read is not dependent on my ability to read after the fact.

The knowledge I acquire is not intrinsically linked with the method in which I acquired it.

Attempting to argue the opposite is a very confusing position.

You cannot actually presuppose it in an ultimate sense, even knowing there is a Bible is ultimately grounded on the presupposition that your sight of its text is reliable. You can penultimately presuppose it for a number of potential beliefs and arguments, but it cannot (in the strongest sense of impossibility) presuppose it ultimately.

Sure I can, and I have repeated that presupposition now many times.

I'm sorry if that bothers you, but your feelings on the matter don't invalidate it.

/r/Reformed Thread Parent