An infinite number of circular arguments like this could be generated, and this person would have no grounds on which to reject them. Sophistry is alive and well.
Anyone who asks us if “we believe in the existence of Snarks,” automatically (per the objective rules of reason) has a burden of proof to explain what they mean by “Snark,” and defend any claims they make about the existence of “Snarks.”
If this standard is denied, the one who denies it collapses their entire position, as they can no longer validly demand proof for any claim that opposes or contradicts their position.
This is why nearly all scientists ignore it. They’re too busy actually doing science.
I don’t much like the word validity (because it only refers to form) so maybe we ask, when is philosophy valuable?
The answer is simple: when it intelligently uses reason (not against reason to destroy reason) but to expand knowledge with reason.
Philosophy that uses reason correctly, and creatively (this introduces a new element) to refute error and expand knowledge, has value.
The problem with this is that Critical Thinking already does this with far more precision and less confusion and vanity, whereas philosophy entangles itself in jargon and irrelevant semantics, often departing from reason.
The claim that reason leads to God fails at the very first step of definition. When logical arguments are used to deduce a 'First Cause,' reason must immediately demand a strict clarification of what 'God' actually means. It is here that the house of cards collapses.
The apologist invariably shifts from a vague, metaphysical placeholder to a specific, personal deity, stocked with a detailed list of attributes. But once this definition is brought to light, reason demands justification: the apologist must prove that this 'God' is a mind-independent reality, rather than a mere primate abstraction, a fairy tale projection of the human mind.
Because reason requires both logical coherence and empirical verification, it cannot accept a deity that exists solely within the confines of wordplay. Without evidence, the definition remains a human invention, and the argument falls apart.
Reason is actually the enemy of God, precisely because reason demands specificity about God. (Luther understood this quite well).
If we simply approach the question rationally and honestly, we find that reason dictates what we must do. And what we must do, to be rational, is define exactly what we mean by God. But this leaves us clenching a deity that cannot withstand the scrutiny of reason.
It is irrational to argue: “the Bible says God is a Trinity, therefore God is a Trinity.”
But this is the argumentative form that all Christians are left with because they cannot deduce the attributes of their desired God from the universe.
[If one wanted to use reason to arrive at the conclusion of the existence of a God, at best, they would only be able to arrive at the speculation of a pantheon of mysterious and imperfect builders (likely psychopathic beyond psychopathic, and likely long extinct) or some kind of pantheistic biological machine.]
This post isn’t just an argument against the existence of God from reason, it’s an argument that reason, in its very essence, stands diametrically opposed to theology.
The so-called “New Atheism” is, fundamentally, a form of Scientific Skepticism. This distinction matters, because many of the criticisms directed against it arise not from science, but from assumptions internal to philosophy itself, particularly the assumption that philosophical analysis is an authoritative or superior mode of inquiry.
One of the standard charges leveled against the “New Atheism,” especially by apologists and religious intellectuals, is that it is “shallow,” “unsophisticated,” or lacking in “depth.” But what exactly is meant by these accusations?
What critics generally mean is that the “New Atheism” does not engage theology through the technical framework of contemporary analytic philosophy (the style associated with “Christian philosophers” such as Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, William Alston, Peter Van Inwagen and J. P. Moreland).
In other words, the criticism is not merely that New Atheist arguments are wrong; it is that they do not participate in or reflect a particular philosophical form. They are judged “superficial” because they do not mirror the conventions, terminology, and argumentative structures of analytic philosophy.
But this raises an important question: is substance being identified with actual explanatory power, or merely with stylistic sophistication?
Too often, what is being praised as “depth” is simply conformity to a complex philosophical form. The analytic style itself (dense terminology, layered abstractions, technical epistemology) comes to function as a marker of profundity independently of whether the conclusions reached are persuasive, evidentially grounded, or even coherent.
What is occurring, then, is frequently less an evaluation of argumentative merit than a reflexive deference to a recognized intellectual form. This can be seen clearly in the work of Alvin Plantinga himself (and this is Planting’s simplified version):
“To recount the essential features of the [Aquinas/Calvin epistemology] model: the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit working in concord with God’s teaching in Scripture is a cognitive process or belief-producing mechanism that produces in us the beliefs constituting faith, as well as a host of other beliefs. These beliefs, of course, will seem to the believer to be true: that is part of what it is for them to be beliefs. They will have the internal feature of belief, of seeming to be true; and they can have this to various degrees. Second, according to the model, these beliefs will be justified; they will also have at least two further kinds of virtues. In the first place, they are rational, in the sense that the believer’s response to the experience she has (given prior belief) is within the range permitted by rationality, that is, by proper function; there is nothing pathological there. And in the second place, the beliefs in question will have warrant: they will be produced by cognitive processes functioning properly in an appropriate environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at the production of true belief. To be sure, the process in question is not like the ordinary belief-producing mechanisms we have just by virtue of creation; it will be by a special work of the Holy Spirit.” Alvin Plantinga, “Knowledge and Christian Belief” p.67, Eerdmans Publishing 2015
The question is not whether this passage is sophisticated in form. The question is whether its content and claims can be substantiated by, correspond to, evidence/explanatory substance, or whether the appearance of rigor is being generated primarily by technical vocabulary and philosophical architecture.
The “New Atheists” reject this sophistry because they do not regard theological claims as problems solvable through increasingly elaborate conceptual analysis. They approach religion instead as a set of empirical, psychological, historical, and sociological phenomena, subjects better addressed through scientific skepticism than through the semantics of metaphysical speculation. (No matter how complex the form, evidence is still required for extraordinary claims).
For that reason, accusations of “shallowness” often amount to little more than the complaint that scientific skeptics refuse to play by the rules of analytic theology.
Christianity had once met its match, but Luther revived it with his scripturalism (Nietzsche complained about this). But scripturalism had also met its match as science began to establish its epistemological authority in the world. Christianity was rolling downward to its grave, but then philosophy came alone, specifically Analytical Philosophy, and provided it with a new sophist form that it is still monopolizing to this day.
Analytical Philosophy is the sophist form that is legitimately used by theists*: Plantinga, Swinburne, William Lane Craig and many others, have all found subterfuge in the abstractness of this form. And because humans bias abstract complexity, assuming it to be proof of greater and deeper truth, the form alone has been enough to insinuate the validity and intellectual legitimacy of the claims of Christianity. (People like Alex O’Connor have added to this public image of legitimacy).
Don’t get me wrong, Christianity is still rolling down to its grave, per empirical evidence, but this is partly because its social practice is archaic and diametrically opposed to the short attention span of social media culture.
The more important question is, what happens to these individuals who impulsively reject Christianity when they actually pay attention to its apologetics? (Many get indoctrinated into it). Most people do not reject Christianity at this level, they don’t even know that this level exists. They just don’t like sitting in Church listening to people make archaic declarations from a book they can’t relate to. Because Christianity has clashed with modern egoism, therefore it is highly unappealing to the modern egoistic man.
There’s a reason why philosophy empowered the discourse of theism, while Critical Thinking and Scientific Skepticism did not, and do not, and this is because philosophy is itself a theological form.
*Theists were even conscious of this form. In 1998 the book, “The Analytic Theist” appeared, Eerdmans Publishing Company
Apologists reply to this by demanding a justification for the word “bad,” silently insinuating that they possess “Objective Morality.” That is, first they wield a radical skepticism against any claim of “good,” “bad,” “justification,” or any other operative term. Secondly, they exempt their own claims from this standard. (This is the simple tactic that has been working for a long time, and still works exceedingly well, because people in general, aren’t educated in reason).
Their radical skepticism demands an absolute justification, thereby fallaciously stacking the deck against any claim of knowledge (including their own).*
What’s ever-so-pathetic, is that their own claims of morality are far more flimsy and rationally indefensible than any of the positions they seek to criticize.
At the end of the day, reason proves that all morality is reduced to premises and must appeal to reasons/evidence in order to distinguish themselves from mere theological assertions— which is all that the Christian position is.
Where reason really bites the “Christian ethic,” is where it asserts moral premises with which the Christian must disagree, such as slavery, rape and genocide.
* [Though the laws of logic, which have nothing to do with any religion, not only meet this standard, they obliterate the skepticism.]
I never learned virtue as a Christian, I only learned it after I read Socrates. I had a caring heart, but I didn’t understand how virtue worked. As A. C. Grayling’s “Good Book” says, “Character is what you are in the dark.”
Christianity teaches obedience, it doesn’t teach morality.
In Socratic virtue, if you harm another, you actually harm the quality and substance of your own character, which is true. One’s virtue is then leveraged by a commitment to the highest development of self. In Christianity it’s just obedience to God, and eye-service to one’s fellow believers. There is an idealist coercion aspect of losing rewards in heaven. Not to mention the morality is permeated with authoritarian superstitions, and superficial, external conformities.
It’s not complicated:
They attack identity by using the authority of identity, and they’re not aware of this. (Attacking truth while special pleading it for themselves and their claims).
They claim that identity is “insignificant,” a mere “tautology,” even through they use it to establish and give meaning to everything they consider to be significant— including their claim that identity is just a “mere, insignificant tautology.”
They manufacture complex linguistic mazes and paradoxes to confound the pursuit of truth. When cornered by logic, a sophist won't concede; they will pivot to semantic games, obfuscation, or clever paradoxes designed to make the listener doubt reality itself. They weaponize intellectual exhaustion, treating a debate not as a pursuit of truth, but as a game of rhetorical Calvinball* where they rewrite the rules mid-sentence to ensure they can never be held accountable to any standard apart from their shifting subjectivity.
Egoistic indifference to their own contradictions. They decouple words from reality, treating language entirely as a tool for power and compliance. To a sophist, words don't have stable meanings rooted in facts; they have utility. They will happily redefine a word on the fly, exploit ambiguities, or use emotionally charged buzzwords to manipulate an audience. Because they don't believe in an objective truth to begin with, communication isn't about sharing or discovering knowledge, it's about winning compliance, securing status, and dominating the narrative.
*Calvinball is a fictional game from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where players make up rules on the fly and are not allowed to play the same way twice. The term is now used metaphorically to describe situations where rules are self-servingly changed as you go.
The actual function of your reading is that it will serve to isolate you, except from other readers of philosophy, but readers of philosophy are also isolated. The reading of philosophy leads to the reading of philosophy leads to the reading of philosophy, leads to…
Meanwhile, life and the world are passing you by. And what do you obtain for all your labor? Magical insights with which you strive to impress— who exactly?
What is the concrete fruit of all your reading? Will you lead a revolution, will you solve a significant problem that is more than just one concept piled on top of another concept on top of another concept, from which you then seek to deduce more attributes of concepts to see how high you can stack the attributes of the abstract deck?
If philosophy is truly making you greater, how exactly is it making you greater? You feel empowered by it because it gives you the ability to traverse and comprehend jargon, and even create some jargon of your own? (And oh how you love wielding that jargon against your fellow humans!)
But you are small time, and will always be small time, so why philosophy? Are you sure you didn’t get caught up in the very form of a cult?
Philosophers seem to only be good at preaching philosophy, which is what exactly? The claim of absolute truth against all truth— telling men what they cannot know? And yet, the world is full of acting knowers who are actually building things that improve lives, and getting involved in people’s lives in ways that substantively transform lives (not just inducing feelings of power and significance through esoteric prose).
What is a philosopher? A vain person? A person seeking what, exactly? We know the answer isn’t “truth,” so what is the philosopher seeking through philosophy? Some kind of praise? To be revered by hermits the same way he reveres philosophers through his own solitude? One wants to be looked up to as an authority? Doesn’t a philosopher really just want to be a well respected teacher? He wants men to listen to him and fawn over his theories and praise him as a “great thinker of genius.”
If this isn’t the motive, if this doesn’t in any way capture the ambition of philosophers, then what does?
If we were to remove ego from philosophy, what would be left? Could one still achieve its scholastic form if there was never a chance of another human praising the “brilliance” of that form?
Academics at least get paid, but what do you get, are you just some kind of sucker?
Is it just a subjective term, wherein it becomes all things to all men? Or does philosophy have a clear objective and pursuit?
We know its etymology is “a love for wisdom,” but this is not a definition that pleases philosophers. They see it as an offensive reduction.
Then what exactly is it concerned with? Most philosophers are fond of saying that it’s concerned with the understanding of reason. But if this is the case, then it should be pursuing reason, but it only ever seems to be pursuing narratives about reason.
If it’s concerned with understanding reason, then it must first begin by finding out what reason is. And if it is to find out what reason is, what standards should it use to do the finding?
The claim is that “a philosopher is trying to get at truth,” but I have a hard time believing this. This is not what I see in philosophy. I see philosophers trying to construct theories. And while the reasons might vary, they all seem to be doing it because they think it is the right way to go about (doing what exactly?). What is it they hope to get once their theory is constructed? I see them merely seeking praise, the motivation of egoism and vanity.
They want to wield their theory in place of reason, and they want some kind of credit or praise for their theory.
LLMs have made this transparent, as everyone is now trying to construct a philosophical theory.
I do not think philosophical theories are great, I think the Reason that allows us to engage in the act of constructing theories, is great.
The answer is through the application of The Laws of Logic.
Without the Law of Identity a piece of evidence couldn't even be itself. A fossil couldn't be reliably identified as a fossil from one second to the next.
Without the Law of Non-Contradiction evidence could mean two completely opposite things simultaneously, rendering it utterly useless. And the act of evidence contradicting a claim wouldn’t even be possible.
And without the Law of Excluded Middle (a claim is either true or false, with no middle ground). Without it, we could never arrive at a definitive conclusion or a final verdict; thought would just hang in limbo forever. (Those who try to bypass this law, simply re-assert it in ignorance).
———-
Do you have a different answer? Look carefully, in every instance, you will see that the application of The Laws of Logic are what reside at the foundation of the progress of all thought.
Here is a claim, rather a theological like assertion, that philosophy is the foundation of all knowledge.
This is the most dogmatic engagement I have ever had with a person who defends philosophy. Indeed, this person claimed to be a professor of philosophy. Their reasoning was:
-Philosophy is the foundation of all knowledge,
-Therefore, any instance or claim of knowledge proves the necessary truth of philosophy.
This form is exactly the same technique utilized by Presuppositional Apologists, except in their case, they claim that “Christianity,” the “Triune God,” or the “Protestant Canon” are the presupposition of all knowledge. But the authoritarian form is the same.
The problem with this is that we can’t merely assert what the presupposition of knowledge is— just because we want that thing, or need that thing to be the foundation of knowledge, so that we can then assert the authority of our theology.
The foundation of knowledge cannot be anything other than what it is, that is, it can only be the thing that knowledge requires to function and be made intelligible, and the identity of this thing is not a vague notion of “philosophy,” just because we want philosophy to occupy the space of ultimate foundational authority.
This is dogmatism plain and simple. It’s also a form of authoritarianism, the same as in Presuppositionalism. I have crashed into it many times engaging philosophers.
If you read rationally [see above], then you will notice that this sophist is claiming that “logical axioms” are contingent on philosophy. But what exactly is it that is specific to philosophy that “logical axioms” are and must be derived from? What is this thing in philosophy???
At this point the sophist cited a series of foundational terms, merely assuming [not establishing or demonstrating] that these terms were and must be derived from philosophy (simply because that’s what was claimed). So the question, again, was not answered, but more terms that were in need of explication and justification were introduced.
So how exactly were these foundational terms derived from philosophy? No philosopher will connect the dots here, because it is not philosophy that we use to establish the meaning of terms, but The Laws of Logic, which are not philosophy.
This technique is exceedingly effective because it makes it appear as though the philosopher has actually demonstrated the foundational necessity of philosophy, merely by claiming that it is responsible for establishing the meaning and intelligibility of the terms it claims it generated.
But these assertions are very easy to falsify. For example, one of the terms the sophist claimed that philosophy established, was the meaning of the concept of “intelligibility.”
But what is it specifically in and about philosophy that establishes (or enables us to establish) the meaning of this term? This question cannot be answered by philosophy, because it is not philosophy (but the law of identity and non-contradiction) that establishes the meaning of this term. And this is an act of Logic, not an act of philosophy!
There should be a name to swiftly expose this error of trying to smuggle in philosophy as the unfalsifiable foundation of all meaning and knowledge. Perhaps the, “Philosophy-as-Foundation Fallacy?”
If “philosophy” really is the foundation of all knowledge, predication, Logic, then it should be able to demonstrate this, instead of merely assert it.
By defining "philosophy" as the container for all rational thought, our professor was trying to rig the game. If we use logic to argue against him, he simply smiles and says, "Aha! You are using logic, which is a branch of philosophy, thereby proving my point." It is an unfalsifiable, circular trap designed to protect philosophy, in this context, from collapsing into irrelevance.
“There is a principle in things, about which we cannot be deceived, but must always, on the contrary recognize the truth,-viz. that the same thing cannot at one and the same time be and not be, or admit any other similar pair of opposites.” Metaphysics, Book XI Part V
Here Aristotle does not lay down a mere formal suggestion or “model,” he expounds a law of thought, intelligence, reason and meaning. This law draws a line, it demarcates those who are ignorant from those who are willfully incoherent.
Anyone who rejects this or attempts to contradict it, merely affirms it— they shout, as from the highest mountaintop, that they belong to the most common species of “Stupid.”
This law renders the irrationalist functionally mute. The moment they open their mouth to deny it, they have used it. They are like a man using his lungs to argue that air does not exist.
To ignore this principle is not "brave" or "subversive,” it is a surrender to a self-inflicted lobotomy. One cannot "deconstruct" the floor they are standing on without falling into the basement of idiocy.
Is society really experiencing a critical thinking crisis, or is something else blocking modern inquiry?
I am not sure if this is the absolute best subreddit for this topic, but I am specifically looking for answers from a philosophical perspective.
Lately, I have noticed a widespread narrative that a modern lack of critical thinking is driving society's decline by creating deep divisions across politics, religion, culture, and race.
My current thesis is that this deficit in critical thinking breeds intense cognitive dissonance. Because people lack the tools to objectively evaluate data, they over-identify with their own beliefs. Consequently, when confronted with opposing views, they perceive a challenge to their ideas as a direct attack on their personal identity. This ego-defensiveness prevents individuals from considering opposing arguments, let alone questioning their own assumptions or embracing better ideas. The result is a highly fragmented society trapped in ideological echo chambers.
My question for the community is twofold: Are we truly witnessing a contemporary decline in critical thinking skills? Or are there other modern mechanisms—psychological, technological, or systemic—hindering our collective capacity to pause and ask "why," which sits at the very heart of the philosophical tradition?