_ __          =[ basis for logic ]=            __ _

"Naturalism leads directly to nihilism. the sooner you embrace this, the sooner you will stop pretending to debate with other atoms. Your feelings of awareness and knowledge are simply the result of atoms bouncing in complex patterns in your brain. nothing more. Are you suggesting there is something else that controls my behavior besides the laws of chemistry acting upon my atoms?"

Some Naturalists may argue that the basis for logical application is in to be found through empiric evidence (i.e., by the senses). But this cannot be so, since laws of logic are abstract, that is, they do not extend into space and thus cannot be perceived by the senses. Laws of logic are also universal, but sense experience is concrete and temporal. This being the case, it should be painfully obvious that laws of logic are not founded in the empiric realm. If reality can only be apprehended and conceived by these very laws, then clearly those principles cannot be based upon reality themselves.

But some have claimed that logic can be affirmed by predictable experimentation. This is an absurd claim since the amount of the universe that has been sampled empirically by humans as an aggregate is infinitesimal. There is no rational basis to suggest that an experiment that seems to instantiate a particular law of logic is a sufficient representative to proclaim that particular principle of logic as a universal law. Someone might claim that the particular principle under consideration may possess an ability to predict real phenomena. But that begs the questions as to the sample space that an allegedly successful prediction must have. An opponent may claim that the sample space depends upon the phenomena, but this is erroneous. No person could, in an entire lifetime, sample enough cases that would warrant the generalizations that a cause-effect relation existed. That is, unless the person had warrant for laws of logic in advance of the experimentation. As should be obvious, this sort of experimentation assumes the very principles in which it hopes to instantiate. As Alcuin has pointed out;

"You see, the possibility of empirical science requires a framework within which the procedures of science make rational sense. And pure naturalism can provide no such context, because naturalism cannot account for the laws of logic and probability, the possibility of induction, and the persistence of identity."

The important difference between Naturalism and Theism in the foundation for logic is in their presuppositions. Presupposing God as the foundation for proclaiming a universal and invariant mode of human intellection is a sufficient ontological ground for things like logic and order. The grounding is found in God's conceptual ontology, that is, His being omniscient, omnipresent, eternal, logical, personal, etc.. Naturalism has no such conceptual ontology and consequentially has no rational basis to affirm laws of logic.

Naturalism assumes that nature orders itself, which can't be demonstrated, hence the paradigm falisfies itself. It does not have the necessary tools to give an account of itself, so it must either postulate things as brute uninterpreted facts, arbitrarily or explicitly borrow them from some other paradigm which can. As Sean Choi has said. "...natural laws are contingent. So, the laws of logic would be contingent too, if the laws of logic simply are 'part of nature.'"

Ryan Jankowski: August 26th, 2001, 1:37pm