The hidden premise

Alvin Plantinga

In previous posts in this blog I have mentioned that atheists sometimes try to justify their beliefs by using hidden premises in their reasoning, the most important of which is this:

God does not exist

At the end of their line of thought, they usually conclude that God does not exist, or some equivalent statement. As the starting premise is hidden, they probably don’t notice that they have incurred in circularity, one of the best-known fallacies since ancient times, which tries to prove the truth of a statement, by assuming from the beginning that the same statement is true.

In the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx writes this:

Behavior versus Behaviorism: Tabula Rasa and Gender Ideology

Konrad Lorenz
Nobel Foundation Archive

The theory that holds that we are a blank slate, on which someone (perhaps ourselves) should write our character and our behavior is quite old. It could go back at least to Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and actuality, according to which the human soul is born in a state of potentiality, like an unwritten tablet, and must become an actuality:

What [the intellect] thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing tablet on which as yet nothing actually stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind. (On the Soul).

This idea was recovered by medieval philosophers such as Avicenna and Saint Thomas Aquinas, and later in the 17th century by John Locke in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where he replaced the term Tabula Rasa by White Paper:

For such who are careful... to principle children well... instill into the unwary, and as yet unprejudiced understanding, (for white paper receives any characters) those doctrines they would have them retain and profess.

And later he adds:

Suppose the mind to be, as we say, a white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: How comes it to be furnished?