The following is an edited correspondence. It is my response to the so-called "transcendental argument for materialism."

He said that he is going to argue for the transcendental argument for materialism. That is, I must use my physical mouth to say "logic." I must use my physical body to even be at the debate.

As stated here, the argument fails to prove materialism as such. At best, it shows that there is a physical world, and that when we speak, we do so through our physical bodies (but as we will see below, it fails to prove even this). However, materialism affirms that physical matter is the primary or even only reality or substance, that there is no incorporeal mind or spirit. Far from proving this, the argument fails to address this altogether. For example, it does not show that we think with our brains and only with our brains. It offers nothing to contradict (let alone refute) my belief that we think with our incorporeal minds and that brains do not "think" at all.

We may discuss this in greater detail.

With me, that there is a physical world is not a conclusion from sensation or intuition, but a conclusion deduced from Scripture.

And by "Scripture," I mean the "Word of God," or the verbal revelation from the mind of God. This means that I am not just talking about the physical book, as in paper and ink, but the non-physical intellectual content of the physical book. Note that I am not saying that the Bible is not the Word of God — of course it is — but I am saying that, strictly speaking, Word of God is not physical but mental, since we are referring to the portion of God’s mind that he has disclosed to us. That is, if you steal my Bible, cut it up into a million pieces, you have destroyed the physical book, but you have not destroyed the Word of God, which is the first principle of my thinking.

The intellectual content of my worldview, or the Word of God, resides in the divine Logos, and according to God’s ordinary providence, it is directly communicated to my mind on the occasion of the visual sensations that occur when reading the Bible, but apart from the visual sensations themselves. The sensations provide the occasion; they do not communicate any information in themselves. This is one version of "occasionalism." It is not entirely novel, but overlaps with Augustine’s theory of illumination, Malebranche’s occasionalism and "vision in God," and various forms of the "logos doctrine"; nevertheless, mine is not at all identical with theirs — it is more biblical (in that its basis is exegetical, and avoids the unbiblical assumptions in theirs), and it is more "extreme" (read "coherent") in that I consistently apply it to every aspect of reality in my philosophy. But it is really just the necessary implication of the biblical doctrine of God’s providence over every detail of his creation.

So one of the several ways that I can defeat this sort of argument is by proposing that we might be having the debate in a purely mental world, or in a dream. How can we know otherwise? Since my philosophy does not depend on sensation or induction, it does not damage me at all — I can use the same arguments with the same effect whether or not we are debating in the mental world or in the physical world. However, since my opponent is an empiricist and/or a materialist, he depends on the physical world and a physical epistemology, so that he has to first prove that we are having the debate in a physical world.

Of course, I do have a physical world in my philosophy, but I know this not because I feel it or sense it, but because the non-physical Word of God communicates to me that there is such a world.

To summarize, when I face an empirical opponent, I can always push the debate into the purely mental world. This annihilates everything that is physical and empirical that my opponent depends on (since he can't really prove that we are operating in the physical world, or that there is a physical world), but I can function perfectly in the purely mental world while retaining the physical world at the same time.

Recommended:

Vincent Cheung, Ultimate Questions
Vincent Cheung, Presuppositional Confrontations (see ch. 1)

Gordon Clark, Lord God of Truth

Augustine, Concerning the Teacher (De Magistro)

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