Periander A. Esplana (03/30/08)
http://www.geocities.com/perianthium786
http://perianth.tripod.com
Five years ago, this author published a challenge in his BIBLEMATHEMATICS website which attracted many critics and skeptics. The title of the challenge is “Three Unanswerable Basic Questions for Infidels, Skeptics and Critics” or “3Q Challenge.” The challenge has been expressed as follows:
Mind-blowing Questions for Pseudo-intellectuals:The above three questions (3Q) which represent the three major fields of study in philosophy are unanswerable. They cannot be answered by any skeptics, agnostics, atheists, mystics, and infidels, no matter how cute and smart they are! They can only answer the 3Q if and only if they will first assumed the truth of God who revealed the Bible.
I challenge anyone who claimed to be in his or her sane mind even though they do not believe the truth of Christianity to answer the 3Q. I will publish his or her answers with my refutations unless he or she requested me not to do so. I will not publish those answers which assumed Scriptural truth.
The following are the names of those who try to answer the 3Q, click the name to read the answer with my reply:Many infidels, skeptics and critics have indeed attempted to “answer” the three questions (3Q) but none of them came up with any substantial answer that’s why this author ignored them all. Either their answers were mere assertion of their blind faith to unbelief or their answers included inconsistent assumption from Bible truth. In either case, the so-called answer is disqualified for publication. But there is one infidel who is persistent enough to display his “answer” which he published in a forum or on-line discussion board (www.lostinthecosmos.com). [In this internet forum, this author participated for a long time on the question of the meaning of life. The collision of two ultimate worldviews (Biblical and Non-biblical) will be clearly seen in the exchanges between this author (with other Christian apologists such as Josh McDowell) and the infidels, unbelieving “free”-thinkers, mystics, skeptics, religionists, New-Agers, critics, etc. This writer printed one hundred twenty-five pages of them which he hope to publish someday.] This author intentionally ignored it but the infidel published again his “answer” insisting that the 3Q Challenge has already been answered. The infidel wrote the following:
Periander, I notice that you still claim on your website that no one has tried to answer your "three unanswerable questions". I'm sure that a good Christian like yourself wouldn't lie, so I must conclude that you haven't seen my response here. To save you the trouble of looking for it, I repeat it here:
*****************************************I use two criteria: self-consistency, and consistency with sense-data. That is, those things that fit with the other things that I "know" I consider more probable than those things that do not fit; and those things that accord with what I experience I consider more probable than those things that do not accord with my experience. In accordance with the scientific method, all knowledge is provisional. I place very high confidence in some propositions, and lesser amounts in others; and there are some statements that I do not pretend to be able to evaluate the truth value of.
There are fundamental questions about the reliability of sense data and the nature of logic which I will go into if need be, but keep in mind that a believer's knowledge of the Bible is through the senses and his understanding is mediated by logic, so if they are unreliable for me they are unreliable for you too.
"2. Why is there something (or order) rather than nothing at all (or chaos right now)?"I don't know how it came about that the singularity that began the big bang sprang into existence. That this universe has physical laws, hence is ordered, seems to have been essential to its nature. I contend that it is meaningless to ask "why" this event occurred, if what is meant is something other than an enquiry into its cause(s), because intentionality implies the existence of a conscious being. It may also be meaningless to ask about the cause(s) of the big bang--it may have been causeless, at least in the sense that things in this universe have a cause. The very laws of causation, after all, were created with the universe.
You may, if you like, answer your question with the assertion that a god did all this, but you can't say how, or where this god came from, so you have only pushed back the question and raised another.A statement or belief is true to the extent that it accords with objective reality. True beliefs will therefore serve better to help us reach our goals than false ones. Deception is the intentional misleading of one person by another, and is usually harmful in that it will lead the deceived individual to do things that are not what he/she would have done were the accurate information imparted.
"b. right is better than wrong?"The moral sense is part of human nature. As a human, I will of necessity think that what I apprehend as "right" is better than what I apprehend as "wrong". The process by which we assign actions their moral values is partly instinctive, partly learned, and subject to individual variation. No two people, including Biblical figures, have ever had precisely the same moral codes; and everyone's moral code changes over his/her life to some extent. There is no reason to suppose that there is a divinely mandated moral code. The elements common to nearly all societies and religions are inspired by our social instincts.
"c. good is higher than evil?""The above three questions...are unanswerable." "They cannot be answered by any skeptics, agnostics, atheists, mystics, and infidels no matter how cute and smart they are!"
Clearly, that is not the case. You have answers, I have answers. It may, however, be impossible for us to identify for sure which answer is correct. I do maintain that we can make some judgments as to which of them is more likely to be correct.
Now I'm blushing.You do understand, of course, that assuming the answers to questions is a technique that anyone can use. A Hindu has assumed different answers to the above than you have; how is one to decide whose assumptions are correct? But please show us how your answers are better than mine.
"I challenge anyone who claims to be in his or her sane mind even though they do not believe the truth of Christianity to answer the three questions. I will publish his or her answers with my refutations..."Because it has been published in a renowned forum, this author decided to refute it not only for the benefit of this infidel but also of many infidels like him who joined the forum. The refutation received no formal reply from infidels which proved that the 3Q Challenge is really unanswerable. It has only been ridiculed as nothing but an expression of Biblicist, Fundamentalist, or Judeo-Christian thinking. Thus, the 3Q Challenge remained unanswerable until this day. This refutation must be read in its entirety to understand the undeniable force of the biblical argument:
You did not offer any true answer to my 3Q Challenge that’s why I ignore it. You are unaware that you merely deepened and reproduced your problems. You merely raised further questions by your “answer” to the three unanswerable basic questions for infidels, skeptics and critics. You did not think enough to understand the 3Q Challenge, let alone to answer them. Below are your so-called answers which can be found inside the brackets without omission or addition. My demonstration that they are not answer at all follows which begins with P.E. and ends with *****.
[ Periander, I notice that you still claim on your website that no one has tried to answer your "three unanswerable questions". I'm sure that a good Christian like yourself wouldn't lie, so I must conclude that you haven't seen my response here. To save you the trouble of looking for it, I repeat it here:
*****************************************I use two criteria: self-consistency, and consistency with sense-data. That is, those things that fit with the other things that I "know" I consider more probable than those things that do not fit; and those things that accord with what I experience I consider more probable than those things that do not accord with my experience. In accordance with the scientific method, all knowledge is provisional. I place very high confidence in some propositions, and lesser amounts in others; and there are some statements that I do not pretend to be able to evaluate the truth value of.
There are fundamental questions about the reliability of sense data and the nature of logic which I will go into if need be, but keep in mind that a believer's knowledge of the Bible is through the senses and his understanding is mediated by logic, so if they are unreliable for me they are unreliable for you too.]
P.E. – Basically, your criteria of knowledge are logic and sense-experience. These represent, if you know, two epistemological theories respectively: coherence theory of the rationalists and correspondence theory of the empiricists which are contradicting
one another in the intellectual history. The problems raised by each theory against one another are now your problems. How can you really know self-consistency and consistency with sense data which you pretend you know as your criteria? How can you really know that a certain belief is consistent or not? As Ludwig Wittgenstein has pointed out, any system of false beliefs can also be self-consistent. “Consistent-initself” criterion does not even warrant logical validity. Any competing systems can also be self-consistent thus there can be more than one fully coherent system. Which of them, among those contrary systems, is really true? You did not know at all. They cannot be all true for they are contradicting each other even though they are all “selfconsistent” and “consistent with sense data” as interpreted by their own ultimate presuppositions and thus your “self-consistency and consistency with sense data” cannot adjudicate which of them is true. The meaning of self-consistency and consistency with sense data varies from one belief-system to another depending upon its presuppositions. All the sense data can easily fit in any self-consistent system as interpreted by its assumptions but, as Kurt Godel has proved, any logical system contains questions which cannot be proved or disproved within that system by using its axioms. This merely points to the fact that there can be more than one true system, if and only if self-consistency and consistency with sense-data will served as the criteria, which contradicting each other thus canceling out the consistency itself. In other words, to use self-consistency and consistency with sense data as means of knowing what you know is self-defeating and thus you don’t really know what you pretend you know in the final analysis. If you will now use your sense-experience with reiteration, how can you really know that you have indeed an access to “facts” which you pretend you know through sense-experience? How can you really know that your sense-experience is reliable which you pretend you know? How can you really know that your senseexperience can really provide a link between your ideas and the reality outside of yourself which you pretend you know? How can you know that you really know that your interpretation of your sense experience is indeed true which you pretend you know? Your “answers” raised many Hume-like and Kant-like considerations which you will have no answer at all thus your egomaniacal, egotistic boast of “answers” to my 3Q Challenge merely begat myriads of questions and problems. You cannot really make your personal experience in particular and human experience in general as your ultimate criterion, adequate test, inerrant standard, and final authority of all truth. It is so obvious to those who really know. You used your experience as a means of knowing the truth but the truth does not originally reside in your experiences. You used your experience as your means of understanding the truth but the interpretation of truth will not be found in your experience. Your experience is not the source of truth; it is not even self-interpreting. You must have some basis how to know whether your interpretation of your experience is true or false, right or wrong, truth or deception, etc. You cannot experience all things, you cannot experience nothing, you can only experience something and that something must be define in order to distinguish it from what it is not so that you can understand it. You cannot look into a bark of a dead tree and said that it is a living dog which barks at you unless you are just lying, joking, have an illusion, etc. You cannot look to yourself through a mirror and said that you are really President Bush who does not beat around the bush, let alone the God of gods, unless you have delusion, delirium or you are insane, demon-possessed, demented egomaniac, illogical fool, etc. In any case, experience must be interpreted correctly. Your interpretation of your experience may not be always true. Your own experience is meaningless unless you interpret it in the context of what you consider you know based on your belief system, paradigm, memes, presupposition, framework, and philosophy of life. Of course, your present posteriori knowledge has also been introduced to you through, or you based it on, your previous experiences which you have also interpreted by what you “know” at that act of consciousness in the context of your belief system, etc. Without doubt, it is a cycle of knowledge-belief-experience inside the circularity of your conceptual framework of heart-commitment which forms a long chain of reaction as long as you live by interacting in the world in which you live. But the question that you must answer is: what is your basis of understanding your personal experience with self-consistency which is consistent with sense data? How can you know that your framework of interpretation, criteria or adequate test for truth are not false, wrong, or deceived? You contradict your very criteria by believing what your experience rejects. It is an expression of inconsistency to believe in self-consistency and consistency with sense data as your criteria which presupposed Bible truth which you assumed in order to live and at the same time your worldview does not allow consistency to exist as such because of your infidelity to God and His Word. You believed that you are a product of an explosion from nothing that evolved from an impersonal matter through a long period of time by chance. No reason, no truth, no law, no hope, no good, no love, no right, no certainty, and no consistency. You have no category sufficient to treat machine as machine, nature as nature, animal as animal, and man as man. You have no adequate universal that will give meaning to the particulars. Your worldview left you nothing but absurdity as Jean-Paul Sartre have pointed out: “If you have a finite point and it has no infinite reference point, then that finite point is absurd.” Your coherent, correspondent and pragmatic choices have no reference point beyond human egomaniacal egotism. You know that you can do what you want to do as circumstance and situation allows but you never do it because you voluntarily limit yourself. There is a “want” and there is a “need”. You consciously imposed self-limitation on what is possible. You just don’t take what you need and do what you want. Form and freedom must not be separated. Reason and knowledge must not be separated. You know that not everything you can do is the right thing to do. You know that you must use self-consistency and consistency with sense data as your criteria of truth. You know that you must choose consistency instead of inconsistency. But that is the very question: How do you know that you really know what you pretend you know? You have no answer. Your very criteria were annihilated by your own belief system. You do not know that you really know what you pretend you know. You merely assumed with no rational basis whatsoever that you really know what you know. You do not know that you really know what you pretend to know using self-consistency and consistency with sense data as you criteria for you admit at the outset that your knowledge is provisional and merely probable with no absolute certainty for you have no absolute standard to base upon. Assumption of an existence of consistency is not synonymous with knowledge. It might be a true belief but not knowledge in the epistemological sense. How do you know that self-consistency and consistency with sense data are really your criteria which you used for knowing what you claimed you know? How do you know that there is indeed such abstract “thing” which exists called consistency? How do you know that you really know what you pretend you know? You have not really answered the first question so are the remaining two questions as you will see.*****
["2. Why is there something (or order) rather than nothing at all (or chaos right now)?"I don't know how it came about that the singularity that began the big bang sprang into existence. That this universe has physical laws, hence is ordered, seems to have been essential to its nature. I contend that it is meaningless to ask "why" this event occurred, if what is meant is something other than an enquiry into its cause(s), because intentionality implies the existence of a conscious being. It may also be meaningless to ask about the cause(s) of the big bang--it may have been causeless, at least in the sense that things in this universe have a cause. The very laws of causation, after all, were created with the universe.
You may, if you like, answer your question with the assertion that a god did all this, but you can't say how, or where this god came from, so you have only pushed back the question and raised another. ]P.E. – You start your “answer” to the second question with the words “I don’t know” which self-refute the answer you provide for the first question. You never provide a real answer to this question for you admit that this is meaningless to your belief-system or paradigm. I know that you have never studied the Big bang theory for you do not know the “reasons” for believing it. Let me give you a brief overview with a thorough refutation of this cosmic evolution theory that you have accepted by blind faith with no reason at all. The Big bang theoreticians gave us only four key observations as supporting evidence for its occurrence. The first is the so-called cosmic background black body radiation which is supposed to be light from their primordial fireball redshifted down to long wavelengths of low intensity. The second is the abundance of helium which is supposed to be the remnant of the nuclear processes from “the first three minutes” before the formation of stars. The third is the so-called Hubble’s red shift relationship with galaxy velocity which is supposed to mean that the pair of galaxy were close together in the past at the same time in an expanding universe. And the fourth is the radioactive isotopes which are supposed to indicate that the age of our galaxy is about 10-20 billion years (the “calculated” age of expanding universe). All of these socalled evidences do not require Big bang at all for their explanation. In fact, they can only be adequately explained by the Creation science: the anisotropic nature of the background radiation in the inhomogeneous universe and its horizon problem, the transformation of helium from the hydrogen fuel of stars and its distribution as a supernova by explosion, the explanations of the red shifts between associated galaxies involving gravity, photon interaction and second-order Doppler effect, the problems and false assumptions of present radioisotope dating demonstrated by latest experiments, the curvilinear motions of the stars and galaxies, the nonuniformity observed in the scattering of agglomeration of matter and empty spaces, the impossibility of star formation from clouds of gas, the accumulation of matter to form stars and galaxies, the absurdity of explosion from the squeezed nothingness, and the design and order of the cosmos. These are just some of the established facts which thoroughly refute the Big bang theory. There is no adequate time for even this theory to occur. Those evolutionary ages given by the evolutionists are all inaccurate. Pb-206/U-238, Pb207/U-235, Pb-208/Th-232, and Sr-87/Sr-86 all give discordant ages. The radioisotope dating has many false assumptions: constant decay rate (uniformitarianism), no loss or gain of parent material or daughter material (no world-restructuring catastrophe), known original quantity of daughter material (no supernatural creation), and an old earth (evolutionary age). All natural phenomena indicates a young earth and universe: rapid rate of inflow of aluminum, antimony, barium, bicarbonate, bismuth, calcium, carbonates, chlorine, chromium, cobalt, copper, gold, iron, lead, lithium, manganese, magnesium, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, potassium, rubidium, silicon, silver, sodium, strontium, sulfate, tin, titanium, tungsten, uranium, and zinc into Earth’s oceans from rivers, rapid rate of leaching of calcium, chlorine, and sodium from Earth’s continents, rapid decay of short-period and long-period comets, lines of galaxies, Earth’s magnetic field, natural plutonium, potassium with entrapped argon, uranium with initial “radiogenic” lead, natural remanent paleomagnetism, and carbon-14 in Precambrian wood, influx of radiocarbon to the earth system, of juvenile water to oceans, of magma from mantle to form crust, of sediment to the ocean via rivers, and of small particles to the sun, efflux of helium-4 into the atmosphere and of oil from traps by fluid pressure, formation of radiogenic lead and radiogenic strontium by neutron capture, formation carbon-14 on meteorites, rapid rate of growth of active coral reefs, of river deltas, of oldest living part of Earth’s biosphere, and of human population, existence of volcano on moon of Jupiter (Io), of escaping methane from Titan, of very large stars, of helium in hot rocks (zircon crystals), of lead in zircon crystals in deep granite cores, and of significant instability of Saturn’s rings, accumulation of dust on the moon, of calcareous ooze on sea floor, and of sediments for Earth’s sedimentary rocks, extinction of interplanetary dust due to stellar radiation, rapid rate of cooling of Earth by heat efflux, of soil and rock erosion of Earth’s continents, of change of moon’s distance from earth, of submarine oil seepage into oceans, of lithification of sediments to form sedimentary rocks, of shrinking of the sun’s diameter, lack of proof for the existence of field-galaxies, low mass of well-isolated groups or clusters of stars, deceleration of earth by tidal friction, expanding interstellar gas, maximum life of meteor showers, etc., etc. Cosmic, biochemical and biological evolution cannot occur in time. Used your own criteria of self-consistency and consistency with sense data and it will refute your belief to evolution: explosion always produces disorder, non-living things cannot produce living things, and mindless chance is impossible to produce intelligent laws. Evolutionary theories are indeed unscientific and illogical. It is admitted by all evolutionists that there are missing links in the evolution of man. There are missing links for there are no such links at all in the fossil record (historical/origin science) and even in the observable phenomena of today (empirical/operational science). These so-called missing links were just invented by fanatically bigoted evolutionists to supply their Bible-rejecting theory with imaginary evidence that does not exist for until now they are still looking in vain for such “links” to fill up the existing clear-cut gaps between primitive plants and modern plants, between eukaryotes and prokaryotes, between unicellular organisms and multicellular animals, between invertebrates and fish, between fish and amphibians, between amphibians and reptiles, between reptiles and mammals, between land mammals and sea mammals, between non-flying mammals and bats, between apes and human beings. There is no such thing as ape-man. Apes are always apes, men are always men but there is no ape-man: hoax – Piltdown man, pig’s tooth – Nebraska man, lost – Peking man, composite of man and gibbon – Java man, diseased man – Neanderthal, etc. But man “devolve” into a brute beast when he rejects the God who created him in His image as revealed by the Bible truth: “Man that is in honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish” (Psalms 49:20). “The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished: but chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptuous are they, self-willed they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities. Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusation against them before the Lord. But these, as natural brute beasts made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not, and shall utterly perish in their own corruption;” (II Peter 2:9-12). Even though there is no evidence for the evolution “theory,” the evolutionists still faithfully based their ideas of evolution in the “geologic column” which they invented to support their religious contention. It is nothing but based on the fallacious reasoning of circularity. They based the fossil “sequences” on the geologic “ages”, the geologic “ages” on fossil “evolutionary stages”, and the fossil “evolutionary stages” on the fossil “sequences”. Thus, evolutionists today, if you do not know, were academically divided into two camps of monkey-man: the Dawkinians (neo-Darwinists) who believed in the slow, gradual evolutionary change, and the Gouldians (Punctuated-equilibriumists) who believed in the rapid, abrupt transformation of species. No surprise, the one attacked the other by following the Darwinian creed: “survival of the fittest”. The former pointed out that it is genetically improbable for evolution to take place rapidly through the quantum leap of speciation. But the latter pointed out that it is paleontologically undemonstrable for evolution to take place slowly through mutation by natural selection. In fact, both refutations are correct as proved by evidences from biochemistry and paleontology: evolution is really impossible to take place at all. Evolution has no single scientific proof to support it so we must not include it in the study of sciences. It is presented as a “theory” but it has no single fact that it can explain to be accounted even as a hypothesis. Evolution exists only as a word and as an idea in the minds of those who believed in it, it is a fairy tale for grown-up, it has no objective reality. There is no scientific evidence for evolution; all are mere assumptions and misconceptions. Creation science, on the other hand, is well supported by scientific evidences (biochemistry, genetics, geology, paleontology, physics, biology, chemistry, zoology, botany, astronomy, meteorology, anthropology, biophysics, astrogeophysics, oceanography, hydrology, thermodynamics, hydraulics, etc. etc.). If the biochemical/biological evolution have many unlinkable missing links (i.e., obvious loopholes) so is the cosmic evolution or the Big bang theory: missing origin of the original concentrated cosmic energy, missing fuse to ignite the Big bang otherwise it would remain as a kind of universal black hole of cosmic egg forever, missing star formation because explosion always result expansion of gas and radiation, missing antimatter for there are only small traces of it and thus no equal production with matter as required by the Big bang, missing time for the postmodern dating method indicates that the universe is as young as 10,000 years old and not 10-20 billion years of the Big bang, missing cosmic mass which refutes the oscillation of the universe as implied by the Big bang, missing life in the universe for if the Big bang is true there must be many Carbon-based life distributed in the entire universe, missing gravity to explain the maintenance of the formation of stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, missing neutrinos which must flood the earth from the fusion process of the sun if the Big bang is true. Because of these surmountable problems and difficulties there are many rival theories which have been proposed as alternatives like the Steady-state theory, Inflationary theory, Plasma theory, Cold Big bang theory, Chronometric theory, Fractal geometric theory, Quasi-steady-state (Extra-galactic) theory, and other “Get-rid-of-theBible” theories. But like Big bang theory which you blindly believed with fanatic bigotry, they are all causeless, unexplainable, unscientific, illogical opinionated opinions in the light of speculative speculations. If the Big bang or any of the other Bible-rejecting theories were true, then there would be no existence of natural laws at all. There would be no existence to say the worse. But God is the ne
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