Using logic to prove the validity of logic may be the inescapable circular reasoning that Van Til had in mind. It’s an interesting point in its own right. Since abstractions have no existence except as concepts in the mind, if the laws of logic exist eternally and independently of the physical universe, then they point to God’s existence, since as abstractions the laws of logic could exist in only the one rational mind available from eternity, viz., God’s. In addition, the fact that the laws of logic exist independently of the human mind implies that the laws must be grounded in a transcendent Mind. But it was not the laws of logic per se that I had mind, but other, unproven, pre-logical, basal assumptions, such as I mentioned when defending my thesis earlier in the thread, e.g., the assumption that our thoughts correspond to an objective reality external to us and the assumption that there is even an external reality for our thoughts to correspond to. People take these assumptions so for granted that many are not aware of them, but they are still no less assumptions or any less unproven and unprovable. The significance of this is that all knowledge, if knowledge is possible (which is itself an assumption), is ultimately based on self-evident truths (and, it seems, as we apparently agreed, on circular reasoning). My three arguments for theism presented while arguing my thesis (posts #10-76) appealed to self-evident truths. Without these basal assumptions, which Christianity provides a basis for in its doctrines of God and creation, most if not all assumptions and assertions of knowledge become baseless and arbitrary, for our minds are limited and fallible; we do not understand a single fact exhaustively. We cannot rule out, as Nietzsche suggested, that unrecognized deception may be an inescapable condition under which our lives are lived. Moreover, if our brains are the products of impersonal necessity, our mind and thoughts are likewise the results of impersonal necessity, again with no necessary correspondence to truth. We might be Boltzmann brains or self-aware characters in an alien civilization’s video game, as Elon Musk recently suggested. Or reality may simply be an illusion as an Eastern philosophy might teach. The laws of logic might then constitute both an overrated Western construct and an unnecessary limitation of reality to only what our little minds can intelligibly imagine. Why assume the universe (assuming it does exist) is rational and intelligible throughout? In short, if a person might be wrong about everything, then he does not know anything, hence universal skepticism. Or if the universe could exist without God (a giant assumption), then a nihilism like Nietzsche’s logically follows.
If it is cherry-picking to quote others who have reached the same conclusion as oneself, then cherry-picking is valid. Christian morality allows the quoting of examples to illustrate one’s point. Consistent with my assertion that theism alone provides a basis for objective and meaningful morality is this quote from Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ: "The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’ I heard one torturer say, ‘I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.”
