Text of post in full:
The typical Van Till TAG argument goes something like this:
X (God) is the necessary precondition for the possibility of Y(reason/logic) , Y exists therefore X exists.
Somebody who isn't well-adept to TAG but philosophically minded will say this is circular. You're using God to prove the existence of logic....by using logic. Kant struggled with this, but Van Till created an out for the TAG believer by making a discrepancy between viscious circularity and virtuous circularity. He stated that any meta-logic premise regardless will be circular. Naturalism would be viscious circularity because it's assuming "accident" (that is, unguided) reason for reason is incoherent because "accident" assumes meaning and purpose/tautology in the first place; it's saying purpose exists in a purposeless universe which is not a paradox but a contradiction. However, with God you have an all-powerful all-knowing being in whose nature and being is reason/logic.
I was a TAG "debatebro" for a while until I came across a wonderful paper by Amy Karofsky titeld "God, Modalities, and Conceptualism". [note: see this evaluation of this paper here] The paper gave very good arguments against modal arguments for God, from there I found my own critique that is sort of like the Euthrypo problem but tied to modality. Since then I have tried to contact both Dyer and Jimbob in order for them to respond to the video I made but neither has contacted me. I once tried to bring this up in their discord but they treated me so poorly (so much for Christian kindness) that I had to leave. I asked them to watch my video and they said "we don't do self-promotion, just give me your argument" as if I could lay out an entire philosophical counter-argument in a discord comment. Anyway, I will get on with the structure of my argument:If God is responsible for the POSSIBILITY of knoweldge then there are two roads we can take here, either:
A: logic was arbitrarily created, this means that logic could have been anything. According to TAG logic is invariable and eternal. TAG doesn't work here obviously because logic could have been literally anything and have any form. Therefore we can't use what we see as logic now as "proof".
B: Logic was not a possibility at all but within the nature or "Logos" of God. If this is true then logic as it exists was not made by God's will as TAG claims but a necessary feature of his existence.Divine conceptualism and the "logos" does not solve this dilemma
Most TAG opponents will backtrack this fork and state something like: "logic exists within God's divine mind. A is not the case because logic/meaning is eternal and unchanging BECAUSE it comes from God's mind which we have access too. B also is incoherent because God is acting within his nature, God is free to act within his nature therefore he is not 'bound' by anything."
There are two responses to this, I will demonstrate why this isn't a good argument:
Most TAG propenents will hand-wave the "free-will" argument and use God's immutable nature, however, this is a severe problem with TAG. If both God and Logic are necessary then one cannot ground the other, you can't use God to ground logic anymore than you can use any other metaphysical theory. "Necessary" in philosophy means that it MUST exist (as in it cannot fail to exist). If you say that logic is necessary then that means there is no universe in which it cannot exist, it has standalone existince in that nothing decided the way it is or how it works. It exists because it MUST exist. Do you see how you cannot ground God anymore? Logic becomes another brute fact of reality like anything else. TAG then becomes something like this: "The fact that Bachelors are unmarried proves Bachelors exist."
If logic is a necessary feature of God's nature then logic doesn't function as an external precondition proving God, it simply follows from what God is. Describing God's nature is not the same thing as grounding logic. put in propositional form it goes something like this:
1: If something is necessary God could not have made it otherwise
2: If God couldn't have made it otherwise then logic isn't a product of divine choice
therefore: You cannot ground God in logic
