Thoughts on “The Impossibility of the Contrary”

This is a short piece I wrote over a year ago. I thought it is important that it’s shared:

First, a clarification of the individual terms. By "contrary", the apologist is not referring to the technical sense of the term. In logic, contraries could both be false even though they cannot both be true. The appropriate technical term would be "contradictory". So by "contrary", the apologist is referring to anything that contradicts or denies or negates the Christian worldview. 

By "impossibility", the apologist is referring to a  distinct kind of possibility. There are different kinds of possibility: physical/scientific, metaphysical, logical, transcendental, etc. The apologist is utilizing a transcendental argument, so he's appealing to a transcendental possibility. Thus, by "impossibility of the contrary", the apologist is saying that whatever denies or negates the Christian worldview is transcendentally impossible. But what exactly does this impossibility entail?

A "transcendental" is simply a necessary precondition for a certain feature of intelligible human experience. If a view is impossible in this sense, then it simply implies a state-of-affairs in which the transcendentals are contradicted and human experience is unintelligible. For example, a situation where humans can't use logic would be impossible or "absurd" in a transcendental sense. What then does it take to demonstrate the impossibility of the contrary?

We simply negate fundamental Christian tenets and show that such negation contradicts already accepted transcendentals. For example, we can negate the Christian view of the necessity of revelation for human epistemology and show that it renders knowledge impossible. We can negate the Christian view of God as the Absolute Person and how that it contradicts objective moral and epistemic norms. Each of these can rightly be dubbed illustrations of the impossibility of the contrary.

More can be said, but this should help apologists better think about what they're defending.

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