Sye Ten Bruggencate
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| − | '''Sye ten Bruggencate''', a.k.a., Sye TenB., is an internet personality who subscribes to the ''Transcendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG)'', a branch of Christian apologetics. | + | '''Sye ten Bruggencate''', a.k.a., '''Sye TenB.''', is an internet personality who subscribes to the ''Transcendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG)'', a branch of [[Christian apologetics]]. |
==Beliefs== | ==Beliefs== | ||
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==See also== | ==See also== | ||
*[http://www.proofthatgodexists.org/about-me.php Official website] | *[http://www.proofthatgodexists.org/about-me.php Official website] | ||
| − | *https://godsthatdontexist.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/sye-ten-bruggencate/ | + | *[https://godsthatdontexist.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/sye-ten-bruggencate/ Gods that don't Exist: Sye Ten Bruggencate] December 2, 2011 |
==Footnotes== | ==Footnotes== | ||
Revision as of 05:40, 14 December 2011
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Sye ten Bruggencate, a.k.a., Sye TenB., is an internet personality who subscribes to the Transcendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG), a branch of Christian apologetics.
Contents |
Beliefs
Ten Bruggencate is internet famous for having one idea, which isn’t nearly as interesting as he asserts it is. He is also a regular contributor to Eric Hovind’s ‘Creation Today’ web series of videos on anti-science, and biblical literalism; the videos disseminate incorrect information about certain scientific facts, with the goal of indoctrinating children and vulnerable adults.
Ten Bruggencate is extremely sincere in his religious beliefs and enthusiastic about sharing them with others. The Achilles' heel of his argument is a coupling of his refusal to accept the syllogism at the heart of his own proposal with his eagerness to reassign this characteristic towards anyone who happens to point it out.
TAG apologetics rises and falls on a reworking of a very old problem in the philosophy of mind; how do we know what we know is true, if we judge the reliability of our understanding in a given area, according to attributes which are inherent to the very knowledge we wish to measure.
Taking morality, as an example of that which we wish to measure, ten Bruggencate’s position is that we can only know the difference between what is right and what is wrong, if we have an absolute standard of morality by which to judge our actions against. As a Christian, Sye’s absolute standard of morality is the God of the bible, Yahweh.
Presented with the fact that, in the Yahweh myth, His adherents are repeatedly commanded to carry out acts of genocide, rape, enslavement, torture and the genital mutilation of infants, ten Bruggencate’s position is that those who point out this obvious challenge to Yahweh’s moral authority, are in no position to judge God’s actions, since the atheistic worldview cannot account for an absolute standard of morality.
He repeats this over and over on the assumption it will eventually either make sense, or distract attention away from the fact that the non-theistic position on morality doesn’t depend on the kind of absolutism he nevertheless insists it does.
Ten Bruggencate and atheism
Ten Bruggencate subscribes to a typical Christian view of atheism — that those who describe themselves as such, are merely in willful denial of what they know to be true. His most notorious 15 megabytes of fame came when he issued a challenge to debate atheism versus Christianity to the world famous illusionist, public speaker, outspoken atheist, executive producer of the TV series ‘Bullshit’ and one half of the magic due Penn & Teller, Penn Jillette.
There is no evidence Mr. Jillette ever received an official invitation to this debate, and the only mention of it ever having been issued is contained on pro-creationist websites, to which ten Bruggencate is either directly or loosely affiliated.
Circular reasoning
Ten Bruggencate's one idea comes in the form of a series of straw man arguments and creationist escape hatch questions, for which there is no 'yes' or 'no', 'right' or 'wrong' answer. These questions follow a cascading script of ever more irrational assumptions, so that no matter which answer to whichever question is given, it always leads to the same conclusion.
In a podcast debate between Sye, Eric Hovind and the hosts of the Fundamentally Flawed podcast, both Hovind and ten Bruggencate admitted on several occasions that presuppositional apologetics is circular in nature. Hence as a means of proving the existence of Yahweh it is a conclusion drawn from it's own proposition and, therefore, any claim to have evidence for the existence of the Christian God is based upon a logical fallacy. Having realised they had inadvertently undone their own argument, the duo went on to assert that this is no different to the atheistic position on sense, reason and memory, since without a belief in God it is "impossible to prove anything"; including Darwinian evolution by means of natural selection, the big bang, the age of the earth and myriad other scientific facts which have cast doubt over the alleged inerrancy of the bible for hundreds of years.
Ten Bruggencate denies that his methods are circular, despite that he demonstrates a perfect understanding of what constitutes a circular argument on his own website. A page of buttons on his Proof That God Exists web page appear to ask a series of multiple choice questions on logic and rational thinking. Each button literally links back on itself in an infinite loop, until the reader either clicks an answer button which makes a demonstrably false statement or is so ambiguously phrased that it couldn't possibly have been written by someone genuinely concerned in resolving their own confusion.
If, however, the reader continues to choose answer buttons which are intellectually honest, they are eventually directed to a cartoon website from the Walt Disney Corporation. But if the reader chooses an answer button which leads to the exit page the author always intended for them to reach, the promised proof that God exists is finally displayed, which simply reads, “The Proof that God exists is that without Him you couldn’t prove anything".
In 1920, the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists declared metaphysical truth-claims of this nature as essentially meaningless, so as to clarify the definition of concepts in empirical science as an exploration of their immediately observable content. This strict definition was later relaxed by Karl Popper, who favored the falsifiability of a theory over the verifiability of a hypothesis.
Ten Bruggencate’s entire argument is therefore predicated upon a semantic confusion between strict definitions of this kind and their informal meaning; a blurring of the line between a description of X and an analysis of the description itself.
Threats and lies
The mental acrobatics ten Bruggencate has to perform, when presented with the facts about his methods, very often result in a dark satire of religious group-think and other forms of confirmation bias. That he is completely oblivious to the fact he demonstrates this every time he opens his mouth or sets pen to paper, has made him the unwilling poster child of circular reasoning in atheist debating circles, albeit to an extremely limited clique.
Because of this, it has been argued that to merely engage him on the intellectual level he incorrectly assumes he is capable of operating, is to give the fish all the oxygen he needs to outgrow his small pond. Others have argued that it is better to examine his ideas and reveal their weaknesses, than allow him to continue operating under the delusion that they are not without merit.
Ten Bruggencate therefore has a number of outstanding challenges open to him on many websites, blogs and discussion forums, which he rarely responds to directly. His repeated refusals to engage with his many critics, on any topic outside of the TAG — despite his eagerness to make assertions on a number of other topics himself — has seen him banned from a number of these sites. He often justifies his stonewall approach to debating aspects of Christianity, with non-Christians, by threatening them with the fires of hell, unless they first agree to play the game by his rules, which change according to whichever lie he is caught telling.
Unfortunately for the moderators of sites which are then given no choice but to ban him for using threatening language, this merely plays into his underlying persecution complex, leading him to play the hurt feelings card with anyone willing to listen to his side of the story.
To his limited audience of fundamentalist evangelicals, who are either wilfully or genuinely oblivious as to the kind of bait and switch debating techniques he employes, his exclusion from numerous debating forums and blog comments is merely "yet more proof" that it is ten Bruggencate's ideas which atheists find uncomfortable, when in reality it is dealing with someone only interested in listening to themselves which proves their biggest challenge.
See also
- Official website
- Gods that don't Exist: Sye Ten Bruggencate December 2, 2011