Elliott – Lesson 8 – The Kardi Argument

This is the second-to-last lesson in this series; I have based them on the arguments Elliot has posted on his blog - 9 in all. I understand that he has a few more that he mentions on one of his Face Book pages (I think he gives them the title "The 11 Pillars of Truth"), but I am only addressing the ones he has posted on the blog itself.

The Kardi Argument

P1: life is not eternal in the past

P2: life cannot come from non-life on it's own without a designer

C : life is designed

“Structure: the "kardi argument" is a deductive 3 part syllogism which includes two 2 premises and a conclusion. We feel that the argument is sound and valid and in order for one to defeat the arguments conclusion they would have to defeat one of the premises.”

Elliott; this one has already been dealt with quite effectively by others, but I’ll reiterate their observations as you may not have seen their commentary (I know you tend to delete comments before you read them on your Face Book sites).

The problem with this argument lies in the second premise, in which you presuppose the conclusion of your own argument. This is a classic example of “begging the question”, or more formally the fallacy of circular reasoning.

This can be more easily seen if we unpack the second premise to make the semantics more clear. It is evident that the phrase “Life cannot come from non-life, on its own & without a designer” is semantically identical to “All life is designed”. As soon as we do this, the problem with the argument becomes evident. Essentially the argument becomes:

P1 Life is not eternal in the past

P2 All life is designed

C: Life is designed

Clearly, this is not a valid argument. Once again, what you need to do here is develop an argument that logically supports your contention that life is designed, either by appealing to complexity or through some other means. All of the material you have supplied in the exegesis of this argument can work as a defence of the contention that some elements of life are irreducibly complex, but they do NOT support this argument as either valid or sound; that is a matter of logical construction, not supportive evidence. This is an error you make in many of your exegeses; you assume that factual evidence in support of a contention means logical support of an argument’s structure, when this is emphatically NOT the case.

Of course, many “arguments from design” have significant problems, but there are some good examples around in the literature which are quite robust; you should look at the work of Michael Behe and Jonathan Sarfati with regard to this, though Behe is on record as saying that the levels of complexity he discusses do not necessarily rule out evolutionary development, and Sarfati is a young-Earth Creationist, so I’m not sure how either of them would sit with your own theories. Keep working on this problem and I’m pretty sure you could develop an argument that does not turn back on itself as this one does.

Addenda: there is also something of a problem with P1, although it is slightly more obscure. P1 states that “Life is not eternal in the past”. The problem here is that, if this premise is true in all possible worlds (an argument easy to make since you do not specify which ‘past’ you are referring to), you have essentially stated that God cannot be alive – or at least cannot have been alive eternally in the past and therefore cannot be the God defined in the Christian tradition. I understand that you have claimed that your arguments do not necessarily support the UC option (and therefore do not support the Christian theory of God), but I’m pretty sure you did not intend to kill Him off in this manner. You need to modify the premise to reflect this.