Can Presuppers Escape from Brain in the Vat Scenarios?

Solipsism, Brain in a Vat, and the Challenge of Escape

That yes, we could go into solipsism and get to the point where we're nothing more than a brain in a vat. Or we are.

Now do you escape that? How do you escape that on your own principles?

Just to hear from the original question, if you've answered that and you can go on to the next one, just want to make sure you have a chance to finish your answer to the first question. I don't know. I'm not sure.

Maybe I forgot the first question. I'm old.

Okay, so sorry. I'll let you guys keep going. All right. Again, I presuppose. I presuppose I am not there. I look at it as it is a possibility. That's arbitrary. Well, so is yours. How do you get out of that other way?

How do you get out of the same trap without saying God has revealed it to me? And then when I say, how do you know that God revealed it to me? You say, because I believe it or because it's axiomatic or because I was the revelatory power of God over

I said, okay, again, when I'm not just saying it's axiomatic, I'm saying my claim is transcendental in nature. Deny it and I'll be stuck in your perspective, which you just stated, which does not provide the preconditions for intelligibility.

When you say, how do I know it apart from God revealing it? I don't know it apart from God revealing it. My claim is that the revelation of God is part of the system. Now you might not hold to that, but in that system, I have the preconditions for intelligibility and knowledge.

Given your system, I don't see, by just positing arbitrarily, I exist, I don't know what I'm composed of. You don't even know if you are matter in motion. There's no way for you to know that. Your ontological starting point is based upon an arbitrary picking of an axiom.

Axioms are unjustifiable, and so anyone can pick any axioms. You've just chosen matter in motion, I exist.

And in my opinion, you have, as Clark would say. Well, I'm not a Clarkian. Again, okay, so as Van Til would kind of say. Not say, he wouldn't say that. I don't know, but anyhow, you are picking a set of conditions that say, this allows me to do this.

I'm doing the exact same thing. The only difference How do you know that?

How do you know, and I don't mean to say this in a sarcastic way. When you say, I'm just picking a system, you're presupposing the falsehood of the Christian worldview, since on the Christian worldview, I did not just pick it.

It was revealed to me.

Competing Worldviews and the Status of Christian Revelation

Because wait a second, in my perspective, I still allow for the Christian worldview. No, you don't. Yes, I do.

No, because what did I say at the beginning? What did I say at the beginning, Ned? That even the perspective, let me clarify this at the beginning when I started, that there are only two worldviews. There's the Christian worldview and the non-Christian worldview.

And that, well, that's fine, but all the non-Christian worldviews have one thing in common, that they implicitly or explicitly assert the falsehood of the Christian worldview. Even a worldview that says Christianity is possibly correct, that's implying the negation of the Christian worldview since the Christian worldview states that all men know that God exists.

You don't have to affirm that, but it's a negation of that worldview perspective.

It's a negation of that singular statement,.

Not the entire worldview. Right, but we don't take the singular statement out as though we can look at them. We can't look at them independently of the worldview context. You don't, that doesn't mean I can.

I'm not constrained by the same things you are. Well, if you're going to posit that we can talk about individual things apart from a context, then I would say that you're proving my point that knowledge is impossible, since knowledge is impossible if you disconnect specific things from a worldview context.

There's no way to define those things.

No, what I'm saying is, is that is just as we can go, and maybe this is another discussion for a different time, but just as we can go into the Bible and see that there are blatant errors that do not reflect what we would perceive.

External Critique of the Bible

External critique.