Reddit reviews Killing Calvinism: How to Destroy a Perfectly Good Theology from the Inside

Is this in reference to Cage-Stage Calvinism? If so, I recommend this book.

I get it. You want evidence. We've already been over this.

I had not heard of how the null hypothesis and how it relates to Van Til's arguments (at least, named that specifically), but as I suspected as soon as I started reading about it, the writers who relate the two show a complete misunderstanding of presuppositionalism in the first place, to a laughable level. It's as if they read the title of the book and the introduction and then went off as if they were experts. What you and many atheists seem to not-so-ironically miss is the fact that the name "presuppositionalism", as well as "the God of the Gaps", are both intentional misnomers given by apologetics meant to poke fun at those who don't actually understand the arguments. In other words, the apologetics are indeed playing word games with you, and in your ignorance you fell for it hook, line and sinker. Dutcher actually did a similar thing recently in a book he wrote about Calvanism, and of course hilariously people got up in arms about it.

I had actually come to the revelation of the transcendental argument on my own many years ago through my own reasoning and introspection, it was only later after studying philosophy that I learned that others had seen the same thing and put a names to it. Naturally I was initially put off by presuppositionalism just because of the name. Now of course I realize how clever it actually is.

> We can measure knowledge, we can see the effects in CAT scans, we can remove parts of the brain and people lose knowledge in certain areas and even change personalities. You didn't like my definition of knowledge either, that is why you shoehorned the classical definition in the argument. Again, my definition of knowledge is the sum input of our human senses translated by our brains into neural network patterns. Completely physical.

One of the problems that naturalists like to ignore is the fact that they arbitrarily throw words like "knowledge", "mind", and especially "observe" without pondering or understanding what they're actually saying. We know what observation is because we experience it. We all "presuppose" that this abstract thing called observation takes place, but it's not something you can easily define, especially in a naturalistic sense. When you define logic in a physical sense, it's really nothing more than a reaction to a force. Memory is not much more than evidence of past forces. When you look at things like knowledge, memory, or observation in a strictly naturalistic sense, you can't really differentiate between the activities in a human brain and, lets say, erosion. It's a deterministic worldview, it leaves no room for intentions or free will because my thoughts and actions are really just governed by physics. Additionally, that still leaves you in the realms of pantheism because then these subjective things like knowledge, intention, qualia, etc are nothing more than energy in motion. Where that leads the atheist is to try to either isolate the subjective to "the human brain", or deny that the subjective exists altogether. The latter is immediately debunked through direct introspection, the former is at best idealism and at worse solipsism. Still then, you have to account for the fact that the universal laws of nature facilitate qualia, or in other words, you're still stuck with a higher order of subjective qualities regardless of how you try to break it down.

So, at the core of our universe and all truth is observation. Incidentally, the qualities one would require to be called an "observer" aren't that far off from qualities you would assign to God. This is what is meant in the Word when it is said that we are created in God's image. For me personally, I found it quite miraculous that all these complex philosophical issues such as observation and free will (that really haven't been public discourse until relatively recently) are all explained in Genesis, evidently written thousands of years ago by some sheep herders who claimed to be divinely inspired. Of course, if you're going to reject the existence of God I wouldn't expect you to see it that way. Maybe they were just sheep herders who were accidentally really smart, right ;)

Van Til even went so far as to say the atheist was intentionally delusional, which I agree with. The thought that we don't have to be held ultimately accountable for our thoughts and actions is not only comforting, it's a sentiment that's reflecting into society's culture today at an alarming rate. So essentially, the fundamental difference between our worldviews is that the atheist thinks they're a good person. I on the other hand know I'm not a good person. In fact I'm so far off from the infinite that I'm totally depraved.