Matt Slick’s Transcendental Argument – Debunked (TAG / Presuppositionalism Refuted)

Over my short time here on YouTube I’ve had a fair amount of requests to take on Matt Slick’s Transcendental Argument for god, and I can understand why. On the surface the argument seems hard to understand, and in turn, hard to debunk, but as the philosopher Alex Malpass demonstrated to Slick himself, it’s not. It’s actually easy to convey and easy to debunk. The difficulty is in how Slick presents it, and in how he conflates it with another one of his arguments – which I’m not going to take on within this video. This, is Matt Slick’s Transcendental Argument – Debunked.

So first and foremost, links, all the links!

• Alex Malpass destroys Matt Slick

• Alex Malpass destroys Matt Slick again

• Matt Dillahunty destroys Matt Slick

• Scoot Clifton… you guessed it, DESTROYS Matt Slick

Now with that out of the way, I want to stress that within this video I expose and explain several flaws and fallacies within Slick’s Transcendental Argument in detail, but for a brief summary (extremely brief), here’s a shorter version.

Black and White Fallacy:

When Slick states that “if the no-god position, atheism” he is conflating the ‘Christian god does not exist’ proposition with, and only with, the atheist position (which is not the only ‘Christian god does not exist’ position); Buddhism is a ‘Christian god does not exist’ position; Hinduism is a ‘Christian god does not exist’ position; Egyptian Polytheism is a ‘Christian god does not exist’ position; and the list goes on and on and on and on, meaning that even if the atheist position cannot account for logical absolutes (which is an assertion I don’t accept), it does not logically follow that only the Christian god can.

Or in other words, Slick’s third premise commits a subtle, but game-ending, Black and White Fallacy, because it implicitly asserts that only one of two positions can account for logical absolutes (that being Christianity or atheism), when, as we’ve just demonstrated, these aren’t the only positions.

Find and Replace:

And finally, I’m going to point out just one more ridiculous flaw with Slick’s argument… if we switch the word ‘god’ with ‘Zeus’ then the argument proves the existence of Zeus, because, ‘If the no-Zeus position, atheism, clearly fails to account for Logical Absolutes from its perspective, then it’s negated, and the other option is verified.