Answering An Interesting Objection to TAG

Hey, welcome back to another episode of Revealed Apologetics. I'm your host Eli Ayala, and today I have a very special guest with me. He is a returning guest, and he actually, if you guys are familiar with the name, Dr. Chris Bolt, he actually was over there at the Choosing Hats website.

Maybe he can share a little bit about that when I formally kind of introduce him here. But Dr. Chris Bolt is a friend of mine, and he is an excellent Christian apologist, Christian philosopher, and he is very knowledgeable in the sorts of things that we discuss on this channel.

So I'm super excited to have him on. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about the Transcendental Argument, and we're going to be responding to an interesting objection to the Presuppositional Approach.

And this is a big deal because when you write comments in the comments section, okay, I don't know if folks know this, if I don't respond to you right away, there might be a number of reasons why. Okay, if you're nice, I try.

If you're not nice, I just ignore it. But when the videos drop, the new video drops, it's not live, so I'm not usually in the chat. Sometimes I am. I might be working, driving home from work while the video is going, and so people are talking to me, I can't actually respond.

But I do scan the comments and try to find questions that I think are interesting and well thought-out. And this one that we're going to be covering today, dealing with the, I don't know how to pronounce it, but the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem.

I know that there's a specific way to pronounce that, and I don't know how to pronounce it, but I am familiar with the theorem, and Dr. Bolt is as well, and so we're going to talk about the suggestion that that theorem disproves the Presuppositional Approach, the Transcendental Argument, so on and so forth.

And so every now and then, when I scour through the really, really bad objections in the comments section, there's one that's interesting, and I think worthy of taking a look at. So I'm super excited to have Dr. Bolt to discuss that today.

Now without further ado, Chris, why don't you introduce yourself and tell a little bit about your academic background before we kind of jump right into the topic for today?

Yeah, well, thank you very much for having me on again. It's always a joy to be on here on your channel. I really appreciate the work that you're doing, and what Apology Estudios is doing as well, and so I'm happy for that.

Partnership over there between you all. Well, academic background, so I have a bachelor's degree with a double major in philosophy and religion, and then I went on to get my MDiv in Christian ministry in particular, and then I have a doctor of philosophy, a PhD in philosophy, and that was an interesting degree because they did split it into majors and minors, and so I have a major in philosophy, and then I have minors in systematic theology and world religions, and so I'm not technically an apologetics PhD, but the way I view apologetics, I have all of the parts, and so the apologetics is just the outward-facing part that I was already doing, right?

So I can't remember if you if you had asked anything else. I will say my current position now, I'm back in Virginia, which is my home state. We're actually at Commonwealth, but it's back in my earthly home, not too far from where I'm originally from, and I am working to build what is called the Reformed Baptist Institute, and for those of you who are not Calvinists, don't let that scare you away.

We simply mean Reformed in the historic sense. We are not Roman Catholic. We're not Eastern Orthodox. We are actually Baptist in that history with the five soul laws of the Reformation, so reformedbaptist .com is the website address there.

I am doing some speaking, and so I was just looking at my calendar yesterday. It's filling up fairly quickly, but you can go to that website, reformedbaptist .com, and go to the About section, and then look at my section there, and there should be a speaker forum.

We're gonna be working on that some more, but there are also, from time to time, some courses that you may be able to take through there, even if it's online, but if you're in the Richmond, Virginia area, I would invite you to take a look for sure at the Reformed Baptist Institute.

Also, if you would, please take a look at my podcast that works with that through Converge Studios, and that is Christ or Chaos, and I say these things, Eli. I don't like plugging myself. I don't like talking about myself.

Truly don't, but I haven't been on your channel in a while, and a lot has changed since I was last on. Well, that's perfectly fine.

I mean, one of the great things about having a guest who has resources is that when someone comes on and they share those things, that allows people who watch and are interested to be like, hey, there's more stuff that I could access, whether it's signing up for a class or, you know, purchasing a book or, you know, checking out a blog or something like that, so when I have a guest, I do not mind at all if they give a big commercial.

As long as they don't say, if you call the number in the bottom of the screen, we will send you this anointed, then we'll have to cut you short, but I don't mind at all. Now, why don't you tell a little bit about your podcast and the website, Choosing Hats.

Now, I know it's been a while. I'm not sure if it's an active website, but there's definitely material there that sometimes I'll go and kind of brush up on some stuff. You have like a blog series on.

Presuppositional apologetics. Why don't you say a little bit about that? Yeah, if I'm not mistaken, we started that in 2006. That was Brian Knapp and me. We founded it, and then we brought some other guys on as we went, and that site is still available, I believe, at choosinghats .org.

I want to say it could be .com, but I think it's .org, and it is a bit messy. Someone is simply paying to keep it up at the moment, and it is defunct, essentially. Okay. I moved away from it when I took on a full-time pastorate, lead pastor role, which was back in, I don't know, like 2015.

It's probably about the last time you'll find fresh articles on there, but if you go to the post series, there are some good, really good series there, and Choosing Hats was around really before presuppositionalism kind of exploded onto the Internet.

I don't think you were around yet on YouTube. Not quite yet, and Jeff Durbin and Apologia, they were doing things, but not to the extent that they are now. You just didn't. It was very difficult to find good resources for presuppositional apologetics, and so I'm grateful to have been involved in that frontier work, I guess, is what it was.

Our goal was to try to take difficult topics within presuppositionalism and break it down to an understandable, you know, for anyone to understand and use. Unfortunately, there were, you know, atheists who had come along and tried to take it into the clouds again, so we went there when they went there, but yeah, some information there.

In fact, I was reading one today, and I don't remember the title of it. I think it's a response to Pat Mefford, M-E-F-F-E-R-D, and it is on multivalued logic and dialetheism and the impossibility of the contrary, and so it gets fairly heady, and there's some comments there as well from some folks who know philosophy way better than me, and or logic in particular, but that's actually not totally unrelated to what we're talking about tonight.

It's an analog of sorts, but anyway, so, but I would check out that series that you mentioned a moment ago. I think it's called an introduction, brief introduction to covenantal apologetics, and so all of those series posts should be there, even if they don't link between one another.

I hope to take some of that material someday and, you know, put some new, put a new suit on it, I guess, for my podcast. Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with going in-depth.

I know that there are a lot of people, like laypersons, who are like, hey, I really want to learn presuppositional apologetics, but it can be really complicated, and that's not, I want to encourage you, that's not essential, that's not an essential feature to the presuppositional approach.

I think the reason why it can be heady is because the folks that we typically are interacting with are bringing it to that level or talking about those things, and we have to address, just as Vantill was doing in his own day, when you read Vantill's work, it can be very difficult to follow, and that's partially due to Vantill himself, but it's also partially due to the thinkers and the philosophies that he was interacting with.

So we have to kind of learn to speak the language of the people that we're speaking with, so yeah, so don't be discouraged. There are easy resources. There's a really good book, I keep suggesting people check this one out, that can be purchased over there at American Vision, The Objective Proof for Christianity, The Presuppositionalism of Vantill and Bonson, and then there is a one that, let me see if I can grab it down here real quick.

While you do that,.

I'll just say, that's not unique to presuppositionalism, that things can get heady. Correct.

That's right, that's right, and I like to suggest this one here. It's a very good book for beginners, but it's pretty solid and good as a starter. Every Believer Confident, I kind of wrote an endorsement here on the back here, and I've said about this book, one of the best introductions to presuppositional apologetics available today.

So it is, I used to suggest Bonson, which Bonson simplifies Vantill, but this is super, super simplified, but very practical, so highly recommend folks who are like, I don't know all that philosophy stuff, but give me something I could chew on.

This is a really good book. I might even get the author back on. I had him on a while ago, where we discussed his previous edition. So Every Believer Confident, this is a good one here. Introducing All Access, your premium gateway to deeper apologetic and theological insights.

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Visit ApologiaStudios .com and click join to get started today. All right. Well, let's jump right in, Chris, and I want to talk a little bit about first the transcendental argument, because I hear, it seems like a lot of the objections that I hear on YouTube, not like the sophisticated objections where people kind of know philosophy and are familiar with some of the issues.

I just, the comments, not even the comments just on my videos, just like comments in YouTube sections can be pretty bad. But there is this kind of this misconception that like the transcendental argument is something like presuppositionalist made up.

You know, and that's obviously not the case. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of transcendental arguments and why they're not strange arguments. They are a particular kind of argument that's right there in line, not of the same sort, but in line with something like a deductive argument or inductive arguments and things like that.

It's just another kind of argument. Can you hash that out for us?

Yeah, certainly. So, and I think I've done this a number of times, maybe even on your channel, but, you know, you can look at this theologically, you can look at this philosophically. To approach it theologically, you can draw from scripture itself.

And I'm gonna go minimal on this just because I do want to get to the philosophical aspect or approach here. So, theologically, you can look at the distinction, for example, between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent that's prophesied there in Genesis chapter 3.

You have God cursing the serpent and on his belly he will go. You have life promised through Eve. Her name means the mother of all living. And so Adam and Eve, even though they are told that they will die if they eat the fruit of the tree, they recognize that there is ongoing life.

They didn't immediately die physically as well, even though they will. And so, there is that promise that there's gonna be war between the seeds, war between the offspring, war between the children of the woman and the serpent.

And so, this is a spiritual reality of the seed of the woman, the seed of the serpent, that plays out collectively and individually, where the seed of the serpent will strike the heel of the seed of the woman, but the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent.

That's a fatal blow that's prophesied in what's called the Proto-Evangelium all the way back in Genesis chapter 3. And so, what you have immediately after Adam understanding and receiving that promise of life by calling his wife's name Eve, she gives birth.

And so, she has Cain and Abel and she says, I've gotten a man from the Lord, this sort of thing. And then, of course, Cain kills his righteous brother Abel. Cain had offered the fruit of the ground, much as Adam and Eve had sewed the fig leaves together to try to cover their sin.

It took a blood sacrifice on God's part. God sacrificed an animal, put the bloody skins around Adam and Eve. Of course, I don't know if they were bloody by the time they went on their bodies, but you get the point.

And then, Abel had offered an actual blood sacrifice in that way. His was acceptable to the Lord. Cain's was not. The text does not explicitly say why this was the case, but I've just stated some facts from which you may possibly draw some.

But where did Cain get his wife? Boom! Bible defeated.

Yeah, I always like getting into that because I ask people, well, how does this work exactly in an evolutionary view where they're not two people at some point? And watching the meltdown, people try to figure that out.

I do. Although actually it happened with two people all over the world. Yeah, that makes it more likely. Anyway, moving forward then, so then you have, you know, Israel and Egypt. You have, you know, the Lord calling Israel his firstborn son, his beloved child, and then you have the Egyptians and God says immediately to them, you know, he's gonna say through Moses, let my son go or I will kill your firstborn son.

So you see the seed play out in an individual level as with Cain and Abel on a collective level as with Israel and Egypt. So what I'm doing here is a biblical theology of what presuppositional apologists would call the antithesis.

There's this antithesis between the view of Christians and the view of non-Christians, the view of believers and the view of non. There are Old Testament theologians who object to this type of systemization or so-called biblical theological approach to scripture and they'll say, you know, what do we do when we get to the Psalms?

Well, I would just argue you've got the righteous and the wicked all through the Psalms. There's the antithesis. What about the Proverbs? Well, you've got the wise and the fool all through the Proverbs.

And when you move into the New Testament, you get the same sorts of things even direct fulfillments of some of those more shadowy prophecies and figures and types and all that in the Old Testament. So that's one way to think of it.

And so the argument would be, look, you believe in God, you give him the credit that's due his name and if you don't, if you suppress that truth in unrighteousness, that results not only, it's not only that you've lost original righteousness.

It's not only that you have that spiritual separation from Almighty God. It's that your whole nature is corrupt by the fall. There are noetic effects of sins that do, of sin, that does affect the intellect, the emotions, the will.

It's not so much that the intellect is pitted against the emotions or something as it is that sin is the enemy, as it were, of all of those, right? So it's not that we're as bad as we can be, but it's that sin has affected us in each of our faculties throughout.

So we're not utterly depraved, but we are totally depraved. We're spiritually unable to come to Christ apart from the work of his spirit and his drawing us to him. Obviously, you know, Christ makes that sacrifice on the cross for our sins in our place after having actively obeyed God, perfectly fulfilled his law.

He bears the wrath of God toward sin so that all who trust in him, who turn from their sins and trust in him, will be forgiven of their sins, counted righteous in God's sight. That is the serpent, as it were, striking the heel of the seat of the woman, and the woman crushes the head of the serpent.

And this is not necessarily for the unbeliever, necessarily. If you're an unbeliever watching this, this is, this is helpful to you because describing the theology of it all allows you to see where we're coming from when we say the things that we're saying.

So this obviously is to reinforce the, to the Christians, like, this idea of antithesis is rooted in Scripture and should inform the way we engage unbelievers. If you're an unbeliever watching this, you'll be like, oh, that's why the presuppositionalist always talks about, you know, you know, the the fool says in his heart and, you know, this, that, or the other thing, or without God.

It's related to our framework. I mean, we're trying to expound biblical categories when we are engaging with the unbeliever. So this is not, you know, you just picture an unbeliever saying, well, you're saying all this, but prove it.

That's different. We're giving the theology of the apologetic. We're not providing the justification, but perhaps we can get into that in a little bit. But yeah, that's a good layout in terms of the antithesis.

If anyone's interested in this concept of antithesis, you can not only find that in the writings of Dr. Bonson, but Rush Dooney's work, By What Standard, I think it's called. By What Standard, there's a whole section in there where he goes really deep into the the biblical categories of this antithesis, starting from the Protoevangelium in Genesis 3 .15 and moving onward.

So if folks are interested, you know, you're like the theology part of that. You can totally check that out. Dr. Greg Bonson was a renowned Christian apologist, philosopher, and seminary professor, and his life's work is now at your fingertips with Bonson U.

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Again, go to ApologiaStudios .com and start your journey today. Now, when this is manifested then within the apologetic context, transcendental arguments are not—they weren't invented ex nihilo. I mean, you could even see this in elements of it in like Aristotle when you're dealing with logic.

Can you kind of give us a brief kind of reconnaissance of the history of transcendental arguments philosophically and then how it comes to head in the work of, say, someone like a Cornelius Fantil? And then we'll kind of take it from there.

Yeah, and what I was going to say there is, you know, theologically speaking, when I just presented there, sometimes unbelievers are like, okay, but where's the argument? We're getting to it, right? It's like I'm fleshing this out for two reasons.

One, you see the consistency of the Christian view. If I'm then able to go on and build on this philosophically, as I will try to do in just a moment, so I do believe that presuppositionalism in the transcendental argument is a philosophical manifestation of what Scripture already tells us, theologically speaking, right?

And so an unbeliever can intellectually understand, oh, there's some form of consistency within their view. And the unbeliever can also understand that, hey, your unbelief even is taken into account in the Christian worldview.

It's not like we're bothered by this. Because we know that you believe in God and that you have a second-order belief whereby you say, oh, I don't really believe in God and this sort of thing.

So you said you just put that out there. I have an entire video where we talk about the first and second order beliefs and how they can be in conflict. We talk a little bit about what it means to be self-deceived.

No, we get it. I mean, the unbelievers can be like, man, this is the kettle calling the pot black, right? Obviously, the Christian is deceived. We get the reversible aspect of that. But we actually argue that we can demonstrate that you're self-deceived and justify the fact that we're not.

You might not believe that, but that's the argument we put forth that we could actually justify. It's not being just put out there as a name-calling kind of thing. So I just wanted to let folks know that.

Maybe if I remember, I'll put the link to the video where I cover—the entire video is just on the issue of the apologetic implications of self-deception. So I'll try to put that in there. But go ahead.

Absolutely. I mean, in order to argue for a claim, you have to be able to understand what the claim is in the first place. That's all we're setting up there, right? So yeah, sure. You believe in God, but you suppress truth and righteousness.

We'll prove it. Okay. So let's move philosophically then into kind of just a brief history of transcendental argumentation. So I did want to note that because in the Hebrew record, in the Jewish record, in the Christian record, because we have to remember, too, that Aristotle potentially had access to those documents as well.

But Aristotle comes to logic, and this is very much a paraphrase, but he says something to the effect of this. He's thinking about logic, and he's thinking, well, how do we go about proving these first principles?

How do we go about showing that logic is true or whatever? So he's talking about classical laws of logic, like the law of identity, the law of excluded middle, the law of non-contradiction. And he does think of logic in a very metaphysical sense.

However, when it comes to arguing for logic, you wind up, it seems, kind of arguing in a circle. If you use logic to prove logic, then you're arguing in a circle, it would seem. If you try to argue for logic using something other than logic, well, then you've sacrificed or given up on, anyway, your first principles.

It's like, well, we can prove logic by something other than logic doesn't seem to be consistent with what we want to say of logic. So there's a third option, perhaps, that we just argue against logic.

But to argue against logic, we would have to use logic, right? And so this gets to the gist, I want to say, of transcendental argumentation. It's this idea that to argue for or against something, you actually have to presuppose that thing as a precondition.

Now, there are different senses of presupposition that I don't really want to get into. But just in general, this is the type of form that a transcendental argument would take. You know, you can move forward.

And another classic example that helps us to understand this in terms of illustration would be like philosopher René Descartes and his cogito ergo sum, you know, I think, therefore, I am, from which we can make all sorts of different jokes and whatnot.

He's not saying that he thinks epistemologically and therefore, metaphysically, this is the case. He's not saying, I think in terms of my thoughts, right, in terms of my knowledge, and therefore, reality follows that.

That's not what he's saying. What Descartes is doing is he's following this procedure, which really has wrecked modern philosophy, by the way, but he's going about seeing what he can doubt. He's using this method where I'm going to doubt everything I can doubt.

And anything that's left that's undoubtable is certain knowledge. He's looking for this certain knowledge. And so this does push him into rationalism. It pushes him into what he believes is kind of an a priori position.

There are problems with this, but I'm not going to get into all that because that's not what I'm after here. What I'm after is to illustrate what transcendental argumentation looks like. And so Descartes says, look, one of the things that I cannot doubt is that I am a thinking thing, because when he thinks clearly, that's upon the basis that he's thinking.

When he tries to argue against that and say, I am not thinking, well, in saying I am not thinking, you are thinking. And so there does seem to be within what we would call the negative transcendental critique, some type of reductio ad absurdum, a reduction to the absurd, to the incoherent, to the inconsistent, logically or otherwise.

There's been a lot of work that's done on this in terms of self-refuting statements and self-stultification and self-defeat and all that. And there are distinctions between those. That's more nuanced philosophy.

But in general, what we're talking about, again, with Descartes, as with Aristotle, is that if you say this thing positively or negatively, there's a precondition or a set of preconditions behind that.

There are other philosophers moving forward quickly. So Immanuel Kant famously used transcendental method. Now, he does have scholars, Kantian scholars, who would argue that there's nothing like a formal transcendental argument in Kant necessarily.

Again, another topic for another day. But in general, Kant appears to follow this transcendental method where he thinks that we, as humans, bring these categories to our experience. And so we have this raw experience.

Think of that, to borrow Ron Nash's illustration, think of that as this like discombobulated mess. It's like meat. It's sausage before or whatever meat before you put it in the meat grinder. OK, so you put the meat in at the top.

It's all misshapen and unformed and whatnot. And so the substance kind of goes in there and then you crank the meat grinder and it comes out the other side in shapes. OK, your sausage links or whatever it is.

And so that is kind of what Kant is saying that we do. You can also think of it as almost a film projector, like we're walking around with these categories of experience in us by which we interpret the world out there.

Now, there are problems with Kant here again, and I'm not giving way to Kantian thought. For one thing, it looks as though Kant is thinking down both sides of thought. It seems as though he's talking about things he says we cannot talk about, you know, that whole realm that's out there.

But it's also the case that Kant seems to be assuming things about a human nature that you can't necessarily get to, given his own view. It does become very inherently and radically subjective in nature so that knowledge now of the world and even metaphysics, as it were, turns on the individual or the subject of knowledge rather than the object.

I heard somebody say, when you study, when you study Immanuel Kant, you quickly learn that with Kant, you can't know anything. That was a helpful way to remember the implications of his epistemology and his metaphysics.

Yeah, absolutely. And so that what Kant is doing, though, in positing those categories. So, like, let's say I bring this idea of causality to my raw experience. I impose that category upon my experience.

And he's arguing you have to do that. It's necessary. And that's that's kind of the transcendental method or argument. And there are different ways he questions this out. He was a brilliant thinker. I just think he was wrong.

Sure. But he he's also very boring to read. Yes. And wordy. But he you can see then what he's saying is you can't deny those categories without using those categories. So here again, we get that transcendental thrust to it.

You have later philosophers, P .F. Strawson, A .C. Grayling, I believe he was at Oxford. I mean, these are no philosophical slouches.

A .C. Grayling has an I think he wrote a didn't he write an entry on transcendental arguments in his history of philosophy, which I thought was was good.

It was good. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. He's he wrote a lot of the transcendental argument and others. And so then you get to Cornelius. I'm sure I've skipped some. And I do believe that we've got an episode. I wasn't on camera for it.

And it was on your channel. I think my favorite episode I've ever done on any of politics.

Really? Oh, that's awesome.

And I think it was like Chris Bolt and Eli talk presuppositionalism or something.

I think that might have been the first time you came on. And I remember it was a really good discussion. I'll try my best to remember to put all of my interviews with you, because a lot of people, people like, oh, you know what?

The problem with presupp is that, you know, people from other religions can use a transcendental argument. And it's like we have an entire video on that. I think that was the second time you have. So we have addressed that.

And that's not a deficiency of the argument. Anyone can use any argument. The issue is, can they pay the bills on the actual argument? So that's not a deficiency. That's just a normal. Yeah, obviously, you know, I formulate my argument typically with three premises.

So, you know, if knowledge is possible, the Christian worldview is true. And if I'm talking to an analytic philosopher, what do you mean by the Christian worldview? I have ways to describe and narrow it down.

But if knowledge is possible, the Christian worldview is true. Knowledge is possible. Therefore, the Christian worldview is true. And I tell people you can substitute the Christian worldview with the Muslim worldview or the Hindu worldview.

That's possible. The question is, do those worldviews actually pay the bills on the transcendental claim? And so maybe we can talk about that a little bit. But I interrupted you got.

Oh, you're good.

I mean, I'm going to skip over Cornelius Ventile, actually, and then I can come back to him. Because all I'm trying to say here is there is a transcendental methodology, a transcendental argument. It's not the transcendental argument, but this is a common thing in the history of philosophy.

And so when philosophers insult Ventilean presuppositionalist by mocking the whole concept of a transcendental argument, I understand not agreeing with it. That's fine. If you want to argue that they're not good arguments.

What I don't understand is pretending to be ignorant or maybe you actually are ignorant. But there's a whole history of these in philosophy. And I've barely scratched the surface. Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig admits this in the Five Views book edited by Stephen Cowan.

You know, Alvin Plantinga uses transcendental styled arguments at the very least. Some of those people have debated. They are transcendental arguments. And then you get someone who's a follower in his vein who early on was heavily influenced by Greg Bonson.

And I do believe he's a Roman Catholic now. But Tyler McCann, yes, is doing work in transcendental arguments now in print, in academic books and papers. So, you know, this is not something that is way out, you know.

But the problem but the problem is, Chris, Dr. Bolt, OK, that everybody knows, everybody knows. I mean, everybody knows that the precept transcendental argument is circular question begging. Right. And I love how people they'll write it or they'll say it as though this is some kind of like, oh, my goodness.

Like, it's question begging. Oh, my goodness. Why don't we why don't we address that? Can you and I make this distinction, too. Can you go through the distinction between the presupposition of an argument and the premise of an argument?

Or maybe talk a little bit about direct arguments and indirect arguments and how that relates to the whole claim of circularity? Because because I would readily admit, and I know you would as well, that there's a sense in which I do presuppose the truth of the Christian worldview.

But when I laid out my argument just a moment ago, right, if knowledge is possible, the Christian worldview is true. Knowledge is possible. Therefore, the Christian worldview is true. The conclusion isn't baked in one of the premises in some fallaciously circular fashion.

Can you kind of hash that out for folks who think that it's just a hand wave, like it's a complete knockdown? It's just circular, bro. Everybody knows it. It's it's just so cringy. But if you could address it.

Well, it's been a while, but I'm just going to pull a lot of toys out on the table. OK, so, you know, one thing and I do know that I noted this in our very first video we did together, even though I haven't listened to it since then.

You didn't listen to it before you came on here?

Come on, man. No, but I was too busy studying what you have me addressing in a little while. So but anyway, the you know, the objection is out there that the transcendental argument, as used by presuppositionalists, cannot be formulated.

Well, if that's the case, then you cannot also raise the objection that the transcendental argument as formulated by presuppositionalists is circular.

Correct. That's right.

In a logical sense. I mean, you can have one or the other. You cannot have both because you have to have an argument that's formalized in some sense or some regard in order to charge it with logical circularity.

That's one issue. Another issue you asked to distinguish between presuppositions and premises in an argument, which I think is an interesting way to put it, and then also talk about direct versus indirect.

So you could do a direct deductive argument, you know, with. So let's use the Kalama cosmological argument. That's one of my favorites. I think it's a good argument.

Can you say it like William Lane Craig? It's been so. I hear you say, well, there are three premises. Premise one, you could just walk through it.

Here's the thing. Most of my experience with Bill Craig was reading his debates on leader you back back before the world of social media, back before we had. I mean, I think it was before Facebook.

Oh, my space. Maybe it was my space, though.

Yeah, it was. It may have been my space days or a little prior, but so I don't really know how he says it. I do know some of what you're talking about, I guess. But anyway, everything which begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being.

The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. By the way, he does have a communications degree, and that's why he talks that way. Oh, does he get at it? OK, anyway, everything which begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being.

The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. So that's a direct argument. That's a deductive, logical argument. I believe that argument is sound because it's certainly valid in argument form, deductively valid, and it has all true premises.