







I'm a bit grumpy right now. I have written more calmly on this issue here . But today I am grumpy.I have this True Believer friend who constantly tries to reconvert me. He uses C. S. Lewis' Argument from Reason all the time, but he infects it (bad as it already was) with presuppositionalism.His contention is that atheism is solipsistic and therefore has no ontological ground for reasoning. This is precisely backward. Theism is solipsistic. Lewis was a solipsist. I get there in two ways. One is through Hitchens who so tersely demonstrated that the assumption that the cosmos was designed by a being with oneself in mind, and pretending that this is a humble belief, is irresolvably dissonant.The cosmos is not yours, and it is not your dad's, and it is not your inheritance. So much for solipsism. Now, as for presuppositional arguments from reason. Again, I can depend on the rigors of empiricism because that method makes no prior metaphysical claim. One simply designs tests to discover what is, not what is within one's worldview. If there is a God mucking with the gears, empiricism will discover it.Theism, though, lacks the exact ontological ground that the argument from reason is complaining about. If the cosmos is the "spilled milk" of chaos, as Lewis complains, why should that impede our ability to know and study it? If the cosmos is the spilled milk of god, however, over which she claims constant dominion, there is a HUGE defeater to the knowledge of it. This is that she might decide to make of the cosmos any other thing she likes, or she might decide to hide its true identity. This method cannot even seek the gears for the monkey that guards them.Anyway, what do you think?