TAG, you're it

In my opinion, the Transcendental Argument for the existence of God (TAG for short) provides one of the most compelling reasons to reject Naturalism and embrace Theism. Back in the mid 1980's, Gorden Stein an atheist debated the existence of God with Dr. Greg Bahnsen. Below is a small excerpt from the Bahnsen/Stein debate in which Bahnsen brilliantly articulates TAG. You can find the entire text of the debate here.

"The transcendental argument for the existence of God then, which Dr. Stein has yet to touch, and which I don’t believe he can surmount is that without the existence of God it’s impossible to prove anything; and that’s because in the atheistic world, you cannot justify and cannot account for laws in general (laws of thought in particular), laws of nature cannot account for the human mind, and the fact that it’s more than electrochemical complexes and events, and cannot give us moral absolutes. That is to say, in the atheist conception of the world, there’s really no reason to debate, because in the end as Dr. Stein has said, all these laws are conventional. All these laws are not really law-like in their nature, they’re just… well if you’re an atheist, and a materialist, you’d have to say they’re just something that happens inside the brain. But you see, what happens inside your brain is not the same as what happens inside my brain, and so what happens inside of your brain is not a law. It doesn’t necessarily correspond to what happens in mine. In fact you can’t be identical with what is inside of my mind or brain, because we don’t have the same brains. If the laws of logic come down to being materialistic entities, then they no longer have their law-like character.

If they are only social conventions, then of course what we might do tonight to win the debate is just define a new set of laws and we’ll say that all those that want the convention that says atheism must be true or theism must be true, and we have the following laws which we conventionally adopt to prove it, you see we’ll be satisfied.

But no one is satisfied. That’s not a rational procedure to follow. Laws of logic cannot be avoided. Laws of logic cannot be accounted for in a materialistic universe, therefore the laws of logic are one of many evidences that without God, you can’t prove anything at all."

Or as CS Lewis states, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."