TAG

TAG, the Transcendental Argument for the existence of God, is an argument that is popular among some sects of Christian apologists. The argument claims that without an omnipotent god there is no reason to believe that logical absolutes should be necessarily true and thus no reason to be able to use logic and have knowledge. For reference, the logic absolutes to which this argument refers are what is referred to as “the law of equality” the “law of excluded middle” and the “law of non contradiction”. The law of equality says that anything is equal to itself, the law of excluded middle says that every statement is either true or false, the law of non contradiction says that a false statement is not true and a true statement is not false.

The TAG misrepresents what these logical absolutes are, it presents them as laws of reality that cannot be assumed to remain true without a god holding them up, but what these “laws” really are are descriptions of truth falsity and equality and what we mean when we use these concepts. Truth is a meaningful concept, people will understand you when you say that something is true, like any meaningful concept it needs a definition its definition and the definition of the related concepts of falsity and equality are given by the logical absolutes.

So can an atheistic world view account for the truth of these logical absolutes? yes. These absolutes are true because the way we define and understand the concepts of truth falsity and equality forces them to be true. If the logical absolutes that are true were not true it would not imply a fundamental difference in the nature of reality but rather a fundamental difference in the nature of the concepts that we use to describe reality.