I state in my previous article that I would mainly focus on Kwaku El. I wish to comment on the case provided by the Christian pastor. Now, in general, I agree with most of the things he stated. Here is the previous article for background:

http://spirited-tech.com/Council/index.php/2019/11/30/is-god-immaterial/

1. While I’m a presuppositionalist, I find the question about “being wrong about everything you know” a bit unhelpful because he fails to explain why that is a problem. In contemporary epistemology, many fallibilists exist. The issue is he needs to step further and explain what the issue is. I think Pastor Jeremy Howard fails to cash out the issue he was trying to expose. A good example of individuals that do such are Chris Matthews and Jimmy Stephens:

The main problem with this is that induction itself is unintelligible on worldviews other than Christian theism. How do you justify that the future will be like the past, guaranteeing the truth of inductive arguments, on your worldview? You cannot. For sure, it could be the case that something discovered in the future could undermine your belief in the reliability of induction. See how pervasive your admission is? Conclusion Ultimately, the questions come down to one thing: you cannot provide for the preconditions of intelligible rational thought without the truth of Christian theism. The reasoning has been that: since you are not omniscient, you cannot know whether some fact yet to be known will defeat your currently-held knowledge claims. This, in turn, defeats the possibility of all knowledge ─ including knowledge of whether knowledge is impossible (which is self-refuting). This reduces to absurdity. Christian theism provides a way out of this predicament. The previous line of reasoning can be formulated along the lines of an epistemic trilemma (credits to @Necessitarian): Humankind can be omniscient (per impossible); we can have access to an omniscient Source (e.g., revelation from the Christian God), or knowledge is made impossible (per impossible). This illustrates the essential unity of knowledge. We can put this in terms of a formal argument that is deductively valid (cf. Anderson 2005):

P1. If no one has comprehensive knowledge of the universe, then no one can have any knowledge of the universe. P2. Only God could have comprehensive knowledge of the universe. P3. We have some knowledge of the universe. C: Therefore, God exists. Furthermore, to add another kilogram of weight to the corpse of unbelief, you appeal to induction without realizing that only Christian theism can justify the uniformity of nature (and hence, inductive reasoning).

http://spirited-tech.com/Council/index.php/2019/09/01/the-unity-of-knowledge/

I wish to see a deeper and more in-depth analysis of Kwaku’s worldview. I wanted to know why he thinks LDS theology solves the one and the many and the problem of induction. We simply don’t have that discussion and it would’ve been a great moment to introduce such transcendental critique in such debate. He does this well when discussing abstracta but I wish it would go further.

2. I think an argument that Pastor Howard stumbled on was not stressed enough about God filling up the creation. The idea the God “fills up” the creation is sometimes looked at as a pantheistic being filling the entire universe but according to Kwaku God is a localized entity. So, which description takes precedent? I used the same argument in my conversation with an Open Theist that maintains the God is physical:

http://spirited-tech.com/Council/index.php/2019/01/23/god-isnt-open/

3. Another issue is that Christ is not merely identified as God, but as Yahweh, the God of Israel. The Father is the God of Israel and yet the Israelites only worship one God. But in Mormonism Yahweh(Jehovah) is merely identified with Christ but we see the Father identified as Yahweh(Jehovah) but also identified with being the Jewish Monotheistic God. So, the Elohim/Yahweh distinction that Mormons maintain is clearly false.

4. Jeremy Howard answers a question in regards to the ontology of God and I think this was my biggest place of disagreement came in the Q and A. He states that no ontological difference exists between the Father and Son. But Trinitarian theology has always maintained that some distinction exists between them in order to show they aren’t the same person. In Nicene theology, they would posit eternal generation/procession to distinguish the persons. I don’t subscribe to that but it is one model to show that people ontologically try to posit something that makes one different than the other.

All in all, it was an interesting debate and I appreciate the interesting topic and the professionalism of the debaters. I think Pastor Howard performed better than Jeff Durbin and James White in their debate with Kwaku. These criticisms aren’t to say that he did a bad job (I believe that he did an excellent job), but merely things that I wish he would have done that would have made his presentation better.