Sermons Presented In The Book of Acts
Contents
INTRODUCTION 2
I. Worldviews 9
II. History of Philosophy 22
III. Presuppositionalism vs Evidentialism 31
IV. Witnessing to an Unbeliever 44
V. Evidential Arguments for the Existence of God 62
VI. The Verdict of the Evidence 100
VII. Problem Questions and Claims 106
Appendix One 110
Appendix Two 122
INTRODUCTION
The word “apologetics” confuses many into thinking that it refers to some kind of apologizing. Actually this word is not derived from the English world “apology”, but from the Greek word “apologia”, which is a word referring to “making a defence,” especially in the context of a court room. It is used eight times in the New Testament (Acts 22:1; 25:16; 1 Cor 9:3; 2 Cor 7:11; Phil 1;7; 2 Tim 4:16, and 1 Pet. 3:15). But it is the last verse that is most commonly associated with Christian apologetics.
Apologetics is a general term, signifying a formal defence of the Christian faith against intellectual accusations and objections whether they come from hostile sceptics or sincere seekers. An apologist is someone who presents an apology or makes a practice of defending the faith. When it comes to interpreting the world—i.e., self-consciously making a philosophy of life, a worldview—there are two options. One can submit to Scripture as a perspicuously self-attesting authority, or one can autonomously attempt to construct such a philosophy. Our apologetic must not be purely pragmatic (i.e., what we reason will produce the best results), but what is actually biblical. For instance, should we use the Bible as a defence of our position or must we prove Christianity without it?
REASONS FOR APOLOGETICS
Apologetics can be defensive and offensive. These functions of apologetics have differing and complementary goals or intentions with respect to the apologist. There are a number of reasons that we need apologetics:
1) We are commanded to defend the faith (1 Peter 3:15; Jude 3). It is not that God needs us to defend the faith but He does commands us to do so. To suggest that this is wrong is as equally mistaken as the hypercalvinist who reasons we should not evangelise as God will save whom He wills and can make the stones to cry out.
2) To instruct and edify believers about the foundations of the Christian faith and to warn of the many false teachings out there.
3) To demonstrate the error and inadequacy of other competing worldviews to the true faith (2 Cor 10:4-5). Few Christians understand the Biblical and logical problems with non-Christian worldviews.
4) To persuade people of the truth of the Christian position.
THE SCRIPTURES
The Bible was written over a period of 1,500 years with more than 40 authors. Its authorship was diverse, yet its unity is amazing. More than 30% of the Bible is prophecy – no other religious book can make this claim! The Bible has been attacked more than any other book, yet it remains the most historically accurate book of ancient history on the planet. Thanks to archaeological discoveries over the past two centuries, sceptics have been embarrassed repeatedly, yet they never seem to give up. For instance, in the nineteenth century, sceptics frequently argued Moses couldn’t have written the first five books of the Bible because writing hadn't been invented yet (c. 1400 B.C.) However, excavations in 1964 of the ancient city of Ebla (found in modern Syria) unearthed some 17,000 written clay tablets. Ebla was destroyed in 2250 B.C.!
The French philosopher Francois-Marie Arouet, who wrote under the pen-name of Voltaire, once boasted that the Bible would be extinct by 1850. After he died, his house and printing press on the French-Swiss border was taken over by the Swiss Bible Society. Obviously, he was not only a poor philosopher but also an even worse prophet! The Bible has been more viciously attacked, ridiculed and blasphemed than any other book yet it reigns supreme as the world’s best-selling book year on year. In 2002, the United Bible Societies reported[1] that more than 578,029,863 copies had been printed that year alone. Daniel Radosh of The New Yorker observed,
The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased some twenty-five million Bibles—twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book. The amount spent annually on Bibles has been put at more than half a billion dollars[2].
Since 1450, more than 6.5 billion copies have been printed. The nearest rival is Mao Tse-Tung's Little Red Book which was sold or given away to around 900 million. The Bible had by the year 2002 been translated into more than 2,377 languages and no book has influenced the western world more than the Bible. Not bad for a book that was supposed to be extinct by 1850! The U.K.’s Times newspaper marvelled:
Forget modern British novelists and TV tie-ins, the Bible is the best-selling book every year. If sales of the Bible were included in best-seller lists, it would be a rare week when anything else would achieve a look in. It is wonderful, weird ... that in this godless age... this one book should go on selling, every month.
The Bible was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit by over 40 different authors from many different walks of life including: shepherds, farmers, tent-makers, physicians, fishermen, priests, philosophers and kings. Despite these wide variations in background and the centuries it took to write it, the Bible is an extremely cohesive and unified book. The Bible has only one major theme: the progressive revelation of God through the person of His Son Jesus Christ. It identifies man’s greatest problem, sin and it gives one answer, Jesus Christ.
THE AUTHORITY AND SUFFICIENCY OF SCRIPTURE
In a truly biblical worldview, original authority and ultimate authority resides with God alone. Paul explains, “For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Rom 13:1; cf. Psa 62:11; 2 Chron 20:6). This is derived from the very character of God Himself. One writer puts it well,
Where did God come from? He came from nowhere! The reason God came from nowhere is that there was nowhere for Him to come from. Coming from nowhere, He
stood on nothing. The reason He had to stand on nothing is there was nowhere for Him to stand. And standing on nothing, He reached out where there was nowhere to reach and caught something where there was nothing to catch and hung something on nothing and He told it to stay there. Now standing on nothing, He took the hammer of His own will; He struck the anvil of His omnipotence and sparks flew. He caught them on the tips of His fingers, flung them out into space and bedecked the heaven with stars, but no one said a word. The reason no one said anything is that there was nobody there to say anything. So God Himself said, ‘That is very good.’ [3]
The Bible is God’s infallible revelation of Himself to mankind. The Scriptures makes it very clear that its every Word is essential. All of our doctrines, standards, convictions, and our practices are derived from the Scriptures. The doctrine of the Sufficiency of Scripture enables us to confidently appeal to these Words to determine all of our theological and doctrinal boundaries. God’s revelation is authoritative, sufficient, and clear - and ultimately necessary for our existence (Job 23:12; Prov 29:18; Isa 46:10; Amos 8:11; Matt 5:17–18; 16:1–4; John 10:35; Rom 1; 2 Tim 3:15; Titus 1:2; Heb 6:13). The whole system of God’s truth is set forth in the Holy Bible as God’s inerrant, infallible and plenary Word. Even Peter acknowledged the supremacy of Scripture over his wonderful experiences with Christ in 2 Peter 1:16-18. Commentator Samuel Cox wrote,
Peter knew a sounder basis for faith than that of signs and wonders. He had seen our Lord Jesus Christ receive honor and glory from God the Father in the holy mount; he had been dazzled and carried out of himself by visions and voices from heaven; but, nevertheless, even when his memory and heart are throbbing with recollections of that sublime scene, he says, “we have something surer still in the prophetic word.” … It was not the miracles of Christ by which he came to know Jesus, but the word of Christ as interpreted by the spirit of Christ. [4]
Today the Church has accommodated themselves to rationalistic modernism to the point that they hold no longer hold absolute positions, save perhaps for religious pluralism and the Golden Rule. However, the advent of relativism especially in the textual issue is an insidious adversary, for it rejects the real possibility of absolute truth, even if it promotes infinite forms of meaning. One apologist once described this pattern as the “treason of the intellectuals.”
Since the word of God is our only effective offensive weapon, it would be wholly inconsistent with the character of God to send us out into battle with a sword that is not dependable and uncertain. The Word attests to Christ, and Christ attests to the Word - in fact Christ was the Word made flesh! All of scripture was inspired by the Holy Spirit to set forth God’s unique system of truth and thus the system of truth is self-attesting. Robert Reymond shows how absolutely vital the Scriptures are,
We must not forget that the only reliable source of knowledge that we have of Christ is the Holy Scripture. If the Scripture is erroneous anywhere, then we have no assurance that it is inerrantly truthful in what it teaches about him. And if we have no reliable information about him, then it is precarious indeed to worship the Christ of Scripture, since we may be entertaining an erroneous representation of Christ and thus may be committing idolatry. The only way to avoid this conclusion is to keep the Christ of Scripture and the Scripture itself in vital union with each other—the former the Giver of the latter—and to affirm that the latter is true because it was inspired by the former who is Truth itself (John 14:6)[5].
Theologian John Murray makes it clear the desperate state of mankind without the Scriptures,
Without Scripture we are excluded completely from the knowledge, faith, and fellowship of him who is the effulgence of the Father’s glory and the transcript of his being, as destitute of the Word of life as the disciples would have been if Jesus had not disclosed himself through his spoken word.… Our dependence upon Scripture is total. Without it we are bereft of revelatory Word from God, from the counsel of God “respecting all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life.”… It is because we have not esteemed and prized the perfection of Scripture and its finality, that we have resorted to other techniques, expedients, and methods of dealing with the dilemma that confronts us all if we are alive to the needs of this hour … let us also know that it is not the tradition of the past, not a precious heritage, and not the labours of the fathers, that are to serve this generation and this hour, but the Word of the living and abiding God deposited for us in Holy Scripture[6].
As a consequence of the Fall man is estranged from the God of Scripture, giving rise to the many false worldviews that have arisen throughout history. Man’s ability to think logically has been impaired but not erased by the Fall. The consequence of this is that often man’s reasoning is flawed, and can even be logically valid but from the wrong premises. Therefore, it is foolish to make Scripture subordinate or equal to the rational of man.
Throughout the Scriptures, we see perennial attacks by the devil and rebellious mankind on God’s authority. The very first textual critical attack on God’s Words came in Genesis when we are told a serpent who “was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made” cast doubt by posing the question, “Yea, hath God said?” Satan’s strategy deals in doubt and cultivates it by attacking the certainty of God’s Word by changing the truth, which is seen in his temptation of Eve (Gen 3) and of the Lord Jesus (Matt 4). It should be also noted that Eve also was a critic by adding to the Words of God. Like our modern textual critics, Satan and Eve did what they wanted to do with God’s words.
The Bible is very clear that the Devil hates the word of God. He utilized Rome to burn some copies, but his main attack was on the text itself. We are told that Satan questioned it, misquoted it, took it out of context, and attempted to get someone to doubt God’s promises (Gen 3, Matt 4, and all of Job). The Apostle Paul warns of those who “changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator” as heading towards apostasy (Rom. 1:25).
There is a three-fold process in the giving of Scripture: (1) Inspiration, (2) Canonicity, and (3) Transmission. In the seventeenth century an assault was launched by higher criticism on inspiration and by Rome through textual criticism on canonicity and transmission. Both approaches utilised the presuppositions of Rationalism. The Church has elevated these textual critics who are, “wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest” (2 Pet 2:17). Since the Enlightenment, Protestantism had granted science increasingly independent authority and surrendering the Bible’s authority whenever any supposed conflict arose between the two. This superficial accommodation would give a temporary respite, as Science and Scripture were now thought to be once more in harmony.
The zeitgeist of our contemporary apostate age now demands a “new and improved” version of everything including the Scriptures. Our places of worship have dropped the name “church,” reduced worship to entertainment, and promoted effeminate “preacher gurus” in Hawaii shirts to share the latest psychological fad. We have also now a marked subservience to scientism as the dominant cultural standard. Did the church make such a gross error in over 500 years of interpretation? What has primarily changed since the Reformation is the way man defines and uses science. Previously, science could never be utilised to refute the Bible because the Church believed that divine revelation is our only clear window onto the world. Modern scientific opinion has been elevated to the status of general revelation giving it an absolute a priori veto over how we interpret Scripture. So much for singing, ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise!’ Theistic Evolution, Partial Inspiration, Open View of God, Limited Inerrancy, and Textual criticism etc are built on the intolerant foundation of prejudice against the promises of Scripture.
The advocates of these views hold a position that is not some imaginative or honest attempt to follow the truth where it leads, but radical interpretations of biblical texts based on Enlightenment premises. Its motive is driven by the axiom that modern man always seeks out a way of removing His Creator from the source of truth, as autonomous man aspires to fill the vacancy. Their objections to historic doctrines are rooted in philosophical pre-commitments and not exegetical concerns. Theistic evolutionists constantly revise their reading of Scripture with a view to the latest scientific theory. True fundamentalists, especially those of the Reformed faith, will not surrender our historic faith for the gods of Enlightenment thinking just to be seen as acceptable by “progressive Evangelicals.” A Talmudic Proverb instructs us to “Examine the contents, not the label of a bottle” and we should not simply swallow everything offered to us in the name of Christian scholarship. Like Ezra we will prepare our hearts “to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it” (Ezra 7:10) whatever the cost.
As a consequence, today most professing Christians lack a coherent Biblical world view. Many set up a buffer zone between the parts of the Bible they accept and the parts they reject. The reality of objective truth is denied as the Postmodern Church turn to feelings and experiences in replacement for truth, and exchange worldviews as quickly as they try on new clothes. It is increasingly difficult to defend the true faith to a world and a Church that is unwilling to make any judgment concerning truth. We must, however, assert the infallibility of Scripture over the fallibility of human science and we must never allow the latter to drive our interpretation of the Biblical text. In other words, we are not integrationists who accept such as synthesis. We cannot don God-denying glasses with the unbeliever and then try to point God out using them. As Douglas Wilson eloquently put it,
The Bible meets no standard; the Bible is the standard. Conservative defenders of the Word too often act like the Bible is an exceptionally bright student, always acing every test we might devise for it. But the tests we devise are always skewed, and the very idea of testing here is deeply problematic. We have the whole classroom turned around. Our propeller heads in the back row – the scientists – were not enrolled in order to grade the teacher. And those in the second row – the textual critics – need to quit passing notes and listen some more…..The Bible is not a grab bag of infallible truths, thoughtfully provided by God so that we could have an axiomatic starting point for our subsequently autonomous reasoning. The Scriptures are authoritative. We are men, with our breath in our nostrils. We are creatures with little pointy heads. Further, to complicate matters further, we are sinful creatures. We must be under a complete authority, full authority, exhaustive authority. The charge will of course be that we have embraced obscurantism. We are opposed to science, or health, or worse yet, to good food, wholesome air and bright sunshine. But we should remain content, whether the slander sticks or not. As creatures, we cannot function without an ultimate court of appeal. This is true of every man, believing or unbelieving, and the only choice we have is whether or not that ultimate court will be the Scriptures. But surely it should be considered odd when Christians deny that ultimate place to what God has told us[7].
The great attack in the last days is on the existence of God by atheists, God’s Words in multiple translations, and in Christian culture, especially in the realm of worship music (a direct form of teaching as per Col. 3:16). In this course we will seek to build a Biblical defence to these assaults using the presuppositional approach through the “spectacles of Scripture.” Our defence of the faith should have no different ultimate authority than our method of expounding the faith. The Lordship of Christ demands we articulate and practice a Christian apologetic, bibliology, art, science, and music. In doing so, we need to honour God’s Words above the words of any man. We trust His promises and wisdom above that of any man. As Luther warned,
When the devil has persuaded us to surrender one article of faith to him, he has won; in effect he has all of them, and Christ is already lost. He can at will unsettle and take all others, for they are all intertwined and linked together like a golden chain so that if one link is broken, the entire chain is broken and can be pulled apart. There is no article which the devil cannot overthrow once he has succeeded in having reason dabble in doctrine and speculate about it. Reason knows how to turn and twist Scripture in a masterly fashion into conformity with its views. This is very agreeable, like sweet poison.
Baptist musical historian, Scott Anniol writes,
Some believers assume that if the Bible is silent about a particular issue, then we may not make authoritative applications of the Bible for that issue. If there is no explicit command or prohibition about a particular issue, then Christians have liberty to act according to the dictates of their consciences. They argue that this is a correct understanding of the authority and sufficiency of Scripture. A representative example of this may be found in Charles Swindoll’s, The Grace Awakening:
Any specified list in Scripture is to be obeyed without hesitation or question. That's an inspired list for all of us to follow, not someone's personal list. . . . But when questionable things aren't specified in Scripture, it then becomes a matter of one's personal preference or convictions.
This position essentially views the Bible as an encyclopedia of commands and prohibitions that govern the Christian life. The problem with this view, however, is that it essentially limits the authority of Scripture to the times and cultures of the original readers rather than extending it to contemporary issues. This view ends up destroying the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture that it claims to be protecting. 2 Timothy 3.16-17 argue that the Bible is sufficient to “thoroughly equip” men of God for “every good work.” Does that sufficiency not apply to contemporary issues that the original readers never faced? Rather than presenting itself as an encyclopedia of prohibitions, the Bible demonstrates itself to be a window into the mind of God — a revelation of a worldview that should encompass every choice and action for the Christian. For instance, many of the vice lists in the New Testament are clearly representative rather than exhaustive, ending with phrases such as “and things like these” (Galatians 5.21), and the mature Christian is one who has his “powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb 5:14). The Bible is not something to look at as we seek to apply it; the Bible is something we look through.
Chapter One
WORLD VIEWS
The concept of a worldview is derived from the German word weltanschauung an refers to a paradigm to understand inter alia the nature of reality, origin of the world, man’s role in the universe, nature of man, the absence or existence of moral absolutes and the foundation of such, how do we know things and can we know things with certainty, etc. It is basically a framework for organising one’s basic or ultimate beliefs. When Adam was created he viewed the world through the perspective of God’s revelation. There were no competing worldviews until the serpent introduced another.
Every one considers the major questions of life at some stage. This has been true for every culture and period of time. It is impossible to think about the world at large or about facts or experiences apart from some worldview. Even refusing to accept one has an explicit worldview is self-refuting, as this position is in reality a philosophical worldview. Both believer and unbelievers have worldviews based on a set of faith-assumptions.
These worldviews are constructed from axioms that are unproven but presupposed to be rationally consistent with those world views. Atheistic axioms such as autonomous reason and empiricism are as much a “conversation stopper” as an appeal to the axioms of Scripture. All our beliefs have consequences. Harvey Bluedorn illustrates,
There was the man who believed he could fly, so he jumped off of the top of the Sears Tower. As he passed the window of each floor on his “flight” down, he shouted to the onlookers, “So far, so good.” He was flying along pretty well, even gaining speed. But as he approached the pavement below, he suddenly realized that he had made a big mistake. He did not believe he had any landing gear. We may compare our culture to this example. We go contrary to God’s law, and we keep yelling “so far so good.” Just wait until we hit the bottom! Beliefs have consequences.
Many today hold to underdeveloped and disjointed worldviews. Indeed, these assumptions or presuppositions are often only considered when the individual is challenged by someone from a competing ideological worldview. For instance, even those who argue they have no beliefs about God as they feel no need for Him are using a worldview of naturalism based on a leap of faith to argue that they have no need for God. Pluralists who argue that doctrines do not matter are ironically constructing an axiom doctrine of pluralism based upon their view of God. It is no more narrow minded to proclaim that Christianity is the only true faith than to say all religions are true. Both approaches are exclusive in their belief about faith, but in differing ways.
These axioms form a framework by which facts are interpreted. It is vitally important to realize that none of the worldviews are neutral, as both sides interpret the data according to their underlying presuppositions. Ultimately the intellectual conflict between believers and unbelievers is a matter of opposing or antithetical worldviews. Christians have their own set of Biblical presuppositions to construct a way of thinking which enables us to interpret the evidence of the present. Van Til said we must then realize and take seriously that,
the battle is not one primarily of this fact or of that fact. The battle is basically with respect to a philosophy of facts. . . . No one can be a scientist in any intelligible way without at the same time having a philosophy of reality as a whole[8].
The entire Biblical message of redemption presupposes this antithesis between God’s people and the unregenerate culture of unbelief which is at “enmity” (Gen 3:15). The prevailing worldviews are often almost impossible to overthrow in many generations as the current global warming phenomenon illustrates. A non-creationist, Hubert Yockey, observed the stranglehold a paradigm can have:
The history of science shows that a paradigm, once it has achieved the status of acceptance (and is incorporated in textbooks) and regardless of its failures, is declared invalid only when a new paradigm is available to replace it[9].
FORMATION OF WORLDVIEW
Many of our worldviews are formed early in life and are derived from multiple sources. Some inherit it from their family, culture, or religion whilst others deliberately choose one after reflection and analysis. Six major components make up most worldviews,
1) Theology (view of God) – no worldview is neutral on this point e.g. atheists get very heated discussing this issue
2) Metaphysics (view of reality such as the universe) – ultimate structure, nature, and characteristics of reality,
3) Epistemology (theory of knowledge) – origin, nature, limits, and validity
4) Axiology (moral values) – origin, nature, meaning, and criteria of values
5) Humanity (view of human nature) – origin, nature, problems, and destiny of human beings
6) History (the recorded events of human existence) – cyclical or linear? Christian worldview is particularly rooted in history
Although there are competing worldviews in the religious field, James W. Sire explains the actual number of basic worldviews is quite limited:
The fact is that while worldviews at first appear to proliferate, they are made up of answers to questions which have only a limited number of answers. For example, to the question of prime reality, only two basic answers can be given: Either it is the universe that is self-existent and has always existed, or it is a transcendent God who is self-existent and has always existed. Theism and deism claim the latter; naturalism, Eastern pantheistic monism, New Age thought and postmodernism claim the former[10].
As there is only one God who created all things there can only be one true worldview. The ancient world had localized gods and were polytheistic and as a consequence their worldview was inconsistent and their knowledge incoherent.
NATURAL AND SPECIAL REVELATION
Paul Enns tells us that God reveals Himself in Natural Revelation to all men in:
(1) Nature
Psalm 19:1-6 – reveals that God exists and is glorious
Romans 1:18-21 - reveals that God is omnipotent and is Judge
(2) Providence
Matthew 5:45 - reveals that God is benevolent to all people
Daniel 2:21 - reveals that God both raises and controls rulers
(3) Conscience
Romans 2:14-15 - reveals that God placed His law in every heart
This Natural Revelation does not reveal salvation, grace, or mercy. Its purpose is (1) Glorify God (Psa 19); (2) Condemn man for perverting the revealed knowledge of God; and (3) Provide a backdrop for Special Revelation (Prov 30:4; Acts 14:17). God has also revealed Himself in Special Revelation:
1) Direct Revelation – Gen 1
2) Miracles
3) Lives of believers – Matt 5:13-16
4) Jesus Christ – Heb 1:2
5) Scriptures
A simple Christian worldview can be predicated on three central truth-claims:
1. A Sovereign and Personal Triune God exists and is distinct from His creation.
2. God has made a personal self-revelation to humankind via a redemptive history recorded in the Bible.
3. Sola Scriptura: The Bible is the only written Word of God and is the only infallible and accessible verbal expression of God’s truth in the world.
Harvey Bluedorn gives more detail of a Christian worldview,
The three main criteria of a worldview are: What is real? What is true? What is good?
1. What is real? [Metaphysics]
God is real. He is self-sufficient. He needs nothing outside of Himself. He is autonomous, self-ruling, a law to Himself. He is the ultimate reality, and all other reality is His creation. He is completely independent of all which He creates.
God created the universe. The universe is completely dependent upon God for its creation and its continuing existence. Its order and its laws are from its Creator. Hence the Creator and the creature are sharply distinct. God is not a man. God governs the universe by His providence within creation. He sustains all things by the word of His power. He (personally) is everywhere (immanent). He is intimately acquainted with all our ways.
2. What is true? [Epistemology]
God is true. God perfectly and completely knows Himself personally. God perfectly and completely knows everything within His creation. He does not sit outside and observe it. He created its every part, and He governs its every part, and thereby He knows its every part. Nothing surprises God.
God is infinite. Man is finite. God knows everything. Man cannot know everything. In order to know anything truly, one must truly know everything. But man does not need to know everything. He only needs to know the One Who does truly know everything. Man truly knows nothing apart from God. All true knowledge is knowledge with reference to God. Man is completely dependent upon God for everything, including knowledge. Man knows nothing unless God reveals it to him. All revelation is through Christ. This includes special revelation, such as Scripture, and general revelation, such as the work of the law written on the conscience. Unbelievers depend upon God for all of their knowledge, but their knowledge is actually turned into ignorance because it is not known with reference to God. They borrow the laws of logic in order to twist information apart from reference to God in order to argue against God and to suppress the knowledge of God.
3. What is good? [Ethics]
God is good. Jesus said, “Only God is good” – meaning: we cannot define good apart from reference to God. God’s character defines good. There is no standard of right and wrong apart from reference to God.
Any notion of good apart from God is selfish, self-centered, and evil – even if it “outwardly” conforms to some objective standard of good behavior. Just walking down the street – if it is done without reference to God – is a hell-damning sin, worthy of eternal punishment. To teach for hours a day in a classroom school without any mention or reference to God is an aggravating sin which stinks in the nostrils of God. To argue that there is inherent good in nature apart from God is to surrender the argument that God alone is the only source and ultimate reference point for all good.
There are Seven Major World Views
1) Atheism – There is no God
2) Deism – God exists but is detached from the Universe.
3) Pantheism – All is God
4) Panetheism – God is developing along with the Universe.
5) Finite Godism – God exists but is limited and finite
6) Polytheism – There are many finite gods.
7) Theism – Classical Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
[pic]
VALIDATION OF WORLDVIEW
In order to be valid, a worldview must be logically consistent, balanced, provide explanatory power and scope, correspond to well-established facts, be verifiable (truth claims can be verified or falsified), be applicable to real life, address the internal needs of mankind, provide a cumulative and comprehensive approach, and compete in the marketplace of ideas. These and other questions create a filtering framework that reveals how well the prevailing culture’s leading contenders address inescapable questions like: What do you believe about what is true, what is real, and what is good? How did you arrive at that conclusion? Who am I? Where did we come from? How should I live? What kind of God, if any, exists? What has gone wrong? Can it be fixed? When will it end? Is the set of presuppositions complete, so that, at least in principle, it can account for everything?
Through the clarifying lens of these tests, we can looks at the truth-claims of Christianity and those of its chief rivals. Christianity answers the crucial questions of human existence far better than its rivals with beauty, symmetry, coherency, and correspondence to reality. Certainly theism leads us to expect the things that we observe – that there is a universe operating by objective natural laws and human beings exist with an indelible moral sense. One may well doubt the credibility of any philosophy that cannot be coherently upheld in daily life. For instance, naturalism’s physical determinism cannot explain rational intelligence or purposefulness. Also, the empirical idea that “all existence claims are settled on the basis of some empirical scientific method” is a belief that is itself not empirically proven. A Hindu, for example, denies the laws of logic, then borrows those laws to prove his denial.
To reject the truth of Scripture one faces daunting choices: You must either:
(a) explain away the logical contradictions, incoherence, and subjectivity in the competing belief systems, or
(b) justify a stance that rationality, coherence, and objectivity are irrelevant to a viable worldview
Most unbelievers have a worldview that is predicated on the axiom that all beliefs should be based upon observational evidence. Also, most atheists believe that all phenomena have naturalistic causes. For instance, atheists believe there is no God, even though observational evidence indicates that the universe has a cause that cannot be detected observationally. Therefore, despite the lack of observational evidence for a naturalistic cause for the universe, an atheist believes that the universe has a naturalistic cause thereby contradicting his axiom that all beliefs should be based upon observational evidence. So, any atheist who denies the possible existence of God violates his own worldview. Various widely-held worldviews contain rational justifications that necessarily presuppose concepts that are explicitly denied by that worldview. In mounting a defence of such a worldview it is found to be self-contradictory and, therefore, irrational. A good example of testing the axioms is pointing out the limitless flexibility of the arguments for evolution. Steve Hays observes,
In fact, in my reading of evolutionary literature, there seems to be tremendous flexibility built into the way the theory is positioned in relation to the evidence. Different Darwinian writers make allowance for graduated, punctuated or even quantum evolution; for convergent or divergent evolution; for progressive or regressive evolution, or coevolution or sequential evolution; for biotic or organic adaptation, preadaptation, coadaptiation, nonadaptive traits and spandrels; for specialization and despecialization; for analogies, homologies and homoplasies; for ancestral or derived homologies; for primitive or acquired traits; for diversification or downsizing, &c. Yet a theory consistent with everything is a theory of nothing.
PRESUPPOSITIONS
We all justify our beliefs in terms of other beliefs. Every system of knowledge, theology or philosophy must have starting presuppositions that is assumed and do not go outside themselves for justification. To the Christian this is the Word of God, whereas the unbeliever must look elsewhere. Gordon Clark would often illustrate this from geometry, where theorems known as axioms, such as the Pythagorean theorem, are deduced logically from elemental principles of geometry.
Francis Schaeffer defines a presupposition as “a belief or theory which is assumed before the next step in logic is developed. Such a prior postulate often consciously or unconsciously affects the way a person subsequently reasons[11].” Hence, presuppositions are the central pillars, which support the foundation from which we can begin any independent interpretation of data, determining possibilities.
Unbelievers often point to human reason as the ultimate authority (rationalists) or sense experience (empiricists) – however, both presuppose the authority of reason or sense experience in their philosophy. If the secularists exercise their privilege of basing their theorems on axioms, then so may Christians. Therefore, the unbeliever cannot legitimately object in principle to the believer basing his worldview on an indemonstrable axiom. Are sceptics sceptical of their own scepticism? An unbeliever who argues that only natural phenomenon can be used to explain reality has made a philosophical presupposition – not a scientific finding. Alvin Platinga compares him to a drunk who insisted on looking for his lost car keys under the streetlight only on the arbritary grounds that the light is better there.
The unbeliever believes he has the autonomy to interpret reality, to self-consciously construct a philosophy about the world. A biblical approach presumes that natural men are completely wrong (in principle) in their entire worldview and need to drop their autonomous presupposition. We cannot establish everything we know about God independent of Biblical revelation. Natural revelation can only take you so far in revealing the attributes of God. Just as looking at the sun directly will blind you, so it is better to understand its existence by looking at the world it reveals. As C. S. Lewis said, “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.” Nature will provide some clues to this in areas such as its divine fingerprints of design and cumulatively these natural clues have a lot of force, but they can never get us all the way to salvation. We can only see absolutely clearly through the revelation of Christ and the Word. Thankfully, God wrote Himself into history through the life of His Son.
However, believers are mandated to think God’s thoughts after Him (Isa 55:9), which requires a scriptural presuppositional approach to all questions. We are to endeavour to answer the devil and his disciples in the same way our Lord answered him in the wilderness – by appealing to the authority of Scripture. A presuppositionalist must fit his beliefs into Scriptural presuppositions for in order to reason about anything at all we must first assume certain things about reality. The most basic of these for a believer is that a personal God has revealed Himself to man as revealed in the Bible in a full and complete manner for man to live this life. Another Biblical presupposition clearly shows God as the highest authority, and depicts His Word as being self-attesting and authoritative. There can be no competing sources of authority from which believers can legitimately draw their conceptions of God, man, or the Bible. As Cornelius Van Til puts it, “The Bible is thought of as authoritative on everything of which it speaks. And it speaks of everything[12].”
All of our theological presuppositions are interconnected, working as one to formulate a web of basic beliefs that shape our worldview grid of nature. As these presuppositions, are simply taken for granted our worldview is ultimately a faith-view. We are called to approach Scripture with deductive arguments in which the truth of the conclusion is thought to be completely guaranteed and not just made probable by the truth of the premises. Believers who adhere to a biblical worldview do not rely upon their own arbitrary assumptions as a tool to judge the truth-claims recorded in the Bible.
You can adopt a worldview of authority based upon:
1) External Revelation – such as the Bible
2) Autonomous Man – such as rationalism or empiricism.
3) External Matter – such as nature
4) Another Man – such as a cult leader
5) An organisation - such as a Church
However, can we trust our senses? As Harvey Bluedorn argues, “Of course we cannot. We are fooled every day and we love to have it so. Artificial flavors, artificial fabrics, artificial scents, stereo amplifiers and special video effects fool our five senses all of the time, to our delight. In fact, we love being fooled, and many people make a living fooling us. Magicians make a living from optical illusions. Politicians make a living from election-time illusions.” What about “science?” Sadly, it changes every day and its inductive premise can only approximate and speculate. Bluedorn evaluates other alternative sources of knowledge,
1. Tradition (Conservatism). Can we rely upon tried and true tradition? Tradition slowly changes also. It is now traditional to send children to state-controlled schools. It used to be traditional to teach children at home. Since traditions conflict with one another, how do we choose which tradition we can trust?
2. Common Sense. Can we trust our gut judgement – our sixth sense of intuition – in all matters? In any matters? Maybe you can trust your common sense, but mine does not work very well. My wife claims hers works better than mine, but I do not think the statistics match her claims.
3. How about dreams, visions, and unusual experiences – can we trust them? Again, they often conflict with one another, so how do we determine which ones we can trust?
4. Speculations. In other words, guesses. The coin came up heads three times. I guess it will be tails the next time. The Cubs have been out of the series 54 years. I guess it will be 55 years. Not too reliable.
5. Feelings – Emotions. Can we find truth in feelings? Feelings change. Truth never changes, for if it did, then it would contradict itself. Then truth would not be true.
6. Public Opinion. If everybody did depend upon public opinion, then nobody could depend upon public opinion because then there would be no public opinion – everybody would still be waiting for it. If nobody depended upon public opinion, then there would be no public opinion because nobody could depend upon it. If only some people depended upon public opinion, then how many person's opinions would it take to amount to a true measure of public opinion: a plurality? A majority? And who would measure it? And how would it be measured?
7. Chemical balances in the brain. The mind is nothing more than the brain – a complex chemical machine. "The brain secretes thoughts as the liver secretes bile." Whatever I happen to think at any moment is all the truth I can ever know. Biochemical stimuli determines all truth. But, then again, how can we ever know if what we believe is true to reality, or if it is merely a biochemical anomaly.
The Bible teaches that we are what we think.
For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee. (Proverbs 23:7, KJV)
But the materialist deduces:
We think what we are (materially).
We are (materially) what we eat.
Therefore, we think what we eat.
That explains those bad dreams at night after eating sauerkraut and pickle pizza – we think what we eat.
8. Life is an illusion. I am not really here. You are not really there. We really do not know anything because there is not anything to know. If this is true, then what am I doing arguing about it? I need to go get a life – or, wait a minute, I cannot! There is no life to get! Obviously, if we do not exist, then we are completely out of touch with all truth and authority – because there is none to be in touch with!
DEPRAVITY OF MAN
Every man comes to factual evidence through his own worldview, a network of presuppositions which are understood and related. Therefore, an atheist is not presuppositionally neutral in his approach to factual questions and disputes. As there are many worldviews, it is these that must be dealt with in apologetics and not mere arguments about facts. Our view of apologetics should be based upon what the Bible describes as the facts. When a believer departs from the authority of God’s Word he will inevitably do what is right in his own eyes (Judg 21:25). Like Adam, all men want to flee from God rather than face responsibility for their sins. Unbelief is a futile form of escapism from this responsibility. One of the reasons some Christians turn to “reason” in order to argue with an unbeliever is because they have a wrong view of the character of an unbeliever.
Romans 1 tells us that unbelievers know God clearly but suppress that knowledge by denying it, repressing it, exchanging it for a lie and honouring those who rebel against it. There are two major sources of unbelief – idolatry and unbelief. Both reject divine revelation. Man is adept in his depraved mind in synthesizing his own belief system from these two positions. Even atheism is the elevation of man into the Divine place of Absolute Sovereignty. Douglas Wilson explains in a reply to atheist Christopher Hitchens,
All law is the imposition of morality, and all law systems are codified moral systems. At the head of each codified moral system is the god of the system. When you have found the source of law, you have found the god of the system. This was the case in Moses' Israel, in Confucian China, in Marxist Russia, and in secularist Manhattan. It would be the case in any societal blueprints drafted entirely by Christopher Hitchens. The systems differ because the gods differ. But Hitchens has a worldview which is entirely invisible to him. He sees that other people believe what they do, and they build their law orders accordingly. But when he proposes a law order, it is suspended in mid-air, based on nothing other than what “everybody knows.” But everybody doesn't know it, and so the system has to be modified to what “everybody who matters knows.”
All cultures are the incarnational outworking of a religion or combination of religions. When you deny a transcendant God, this does not eliminate the need for a god at the top to make the system coherent. It just means that the applicants for the position of deity are all, to use one of Hitchens' favorite words, mammals. It can be just one mammal, as in North Korea, or it can be fifty million mammals with a system of primary elections, a general election, topped off with an electoral college election. If there is no God above the system, then the system is god. All societies are religious organisms, not just the ones with a religious exoskeleton.
Natural revelation is just as authoritative as Scripture but we need the latter to correct and supplement our view of the world. This will occur only as we obey the Word. That invariably means that Scripture takes precedence over natural revelation as a source of knowledge. Natural revelation seen through the lense of Scripture does declare the glory of God (Psa 19:1) and explains how man bears the image of God. Greg Bahnsen gives a good summary of the unbeliever:
In 2 Timothy Paul said that attacks on our faith come from fools (a word which did not have the belligerent tone that it does in English), and scripture has a lot to tell us as to the nature of a fool's thinking: it rejects Christ's words, building rather upon the sand (Matt. 7:26), it says there is not God (Ps. 53:1), it does not understand the depth and greatness of the Lord's thoughts (Ps. 92:6), it levels charges against God (Prov. 1:22), it trusts in itself (Pr. 28:26), its way is right in its own eyes (Pr. 12:15), it is self-confident (Pr. 14:16), its vision is bound to the earth (Prov. 12:24), it delights in discovering itself (Pr. 18:2), it utters its own mind (Pr. 29:11), it despises wisdom and instruction (Pr. 1:7) it refuses to know God and glories in man (1 Cor. 1-3), it suppresses the perspicuous revelation of God and honors a formation of the creature instead (Rom. 1:22) [13].
Whilst the unbeliever is restrained by the action of common grace so he can see true facts such as scientific principles, he can rebelliously hold onto his ungodly presuppositions to reject the only logical source of these. Because of common grace he is able to make a positive contribution to society by borrowing the clothes of our Christian epistemological capital. He does this by viewing these facts through coloured glasses rather than the clear spectacles of the Word of God. The Creator God made the atheist, reveals Himself continually to them through nature, through their conscience, and through their very use of reason.
Unbelief is rooted in a heart problem not a mere intellectual one. This is because “the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Rom 8:7) and are “alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works” (Col 1:21). We should never forget that “men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). The Apostle Paul teaches that men are not neutral, but are actively hostile to God. Their evil desire is “to be as God” determining good and evil for themselves, without submitting to God’s command (Gen 3:5; Rom 8:7). Indeed, Satan tempted Eve my implying she must remain neutral in order to decide what was right, rather than accepting God’s word as authoritative and conclusive. The Apostle Paul warned us of this neutral methodology in 2 Corinthians 11:3.
The only cure for this rebellion is not an intellectual one by a persuasive argument, but regeneration of the Spirit of God. Therefore, any apologetic must be based upon the premises of the Word of God and strike at the unbelievers repressed knowledge of God – not the unbeliever’s autonomous will and reason. We can present testifying evidences for God’s existence, but always predicating them on God’s Word and never apologizing or retreating from maintaining the circular argument of the self-attesting Scripture.
Unbelievers are like the man who thought he was dead. When he was shown a medical text that dead men cannot bleed, they pricked him with a pin and showed he was bleeding. He replied, “What do you know, dead men do bleed!” Rather than face up to the contradiction of his worldview, he used logic to alter his view of dead men bleeding. A critical way the unbeliever suppresses the truth about God is by utilising the laws of logic, science and morality despite their presuppositional world view being unable to account for them. Greg Bahnsen shows how the unbeliever rejects Theistic presuppositions,
Men know the truth about God - not a god, but the living and true God with all His divine attributes but attempt to suppress it (Rom. 1:18ff.). Paul says that God has revealed it to them (all of them!), and not left it up to natural theology or philosophic argumentation; they know the truth about God inherently and confront it everywhere they look around their environment: natural, social, psychological. The Almighty God is able to speak without stuttering, without ambiguity, without confusion, and Paul declares that He has spoken. God (even outside the written word) has made his word plain to all creatures made in His image. And because of their sin (which to recognize would entail too much emotional trauma and changing of one's ways of life and thinking) they push down that revelation, putting a pseudo-god in the Creator's place (e.g. self-reliance, finances, intellectual prowess, etc.). Yet without that revelation from God there would be no connection between the particulars of experience and the principles of logic, no uniformity to be discerned in nature, no harmony between the one and the many (unity and diversity), etc., etc. So when men who work from humanistic assumptions come to refute the gospel, they oppose themselves and are prevented from finding the truth[14].
The contemporary atheist philosopher, Thomas Nagel writes in his book, The Last Word candidly concedes his presuppositional bias as an atheist,
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that....I am curious whether there is anyone who is genuinely indifferent as to whether there is a God – anyone who, whatever his actual belief about the matter, doesn’t particularly want either one of the answers to be correct…..My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning and design as fundamental features of the world. [15]
In other words, Nagel is admitting that rather than religion being an opiate for the masses or a crutch for the fearful it is atheism that serves as a crutch! As one commentator opined about the religion of Darwinism,
Do they venerate icons of Charles Darwin? Do they have an atheist version of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father, Random Chance, thank you for acting on matter so I can be here…” Do they sing hymns? What sort of hymns would those be? “I Sing the Mighty Power of Chance”?....They could use a text from Origin of Species, perhaps. Instead of Sunday School papers featuring the Lord Jesus, they will no doubt be handing out replicas of the evolution chart or doing flannel graph presentations showing the evolutionary progression from ape to liberal pastor.
None of us are neutral judges on the question of God’s existence or the truth of Scripture as we all have an inherent bias based upon how we live our lives. This does not mean that every facet of a non-Christian worldview is erroneous (as the wiles of the devil lead him to deprave and distort often only the basic truths). B. B. Warfield argues this very point:
Christianity does not stand in an exclusively antithetical relation to other religions. There is a high and true sense in which it is also their fulfilment. All that enters into the essence of religion is present in them no less than in it, although in a less pure form. They too possess the idea of God, the consciousness of guilt, the longing for redemption: they too possess offerings, priesthood, temples, worship, prayer. Israel’s Promise, Christianity’s Possession, is also the Desire of all nations[16].
LIMITATION OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
We should also note that all men have a problem of knowledge. Richard Ramsay explains this by the use of an apple,
First, there are an infinite number of details related to an individual apple. We cannot possibly know them all, since our minds are limited. For example, what color is an apple? How does this particular apple I am holding differ from an orange?...We may not know the answer to all these questions, but we could find out, even if it took a long time. However, we could think of other apple-related questions that most likely we could not answer in a whole lifetime; for example, are there apples on some other planet?...Finally there are questions that we simply cannot answer at all; for example how many apples existed in the year 4000 BC? Will there be apples in 2,000 years time? What happens to the apple when I eat it? Does it still exist? These changes are disconcerting and force us to look behind the particular items to find something universal that does not change.
Also, the idea of absolute freedom is illusory. Who is free to jump to the moon? All of us are constrained in the freedom we exercise. Often we think that philosophers are certain of their beliefs. However, most have been driven by their fear of the unknown and their uncertainty to speculate in this field.
Christianity solves this epistemological problem. God has infinite knowledge and His communicated revelation is in harmony with nature and man’s experience. Therefore, man does not have to know everything exhaustively but can trust truly His Creator in a step of faith. This is different from an irrational blind leap of faith.
Chapter Two
HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Frequently, we read that the philosophy has evolved through a positive process so humans are becoming progressively enlightened over time. This is often applied to religion and evolutionists claim that man has emerged through a process of polytheism to monotheism and finally an enlightened atheism. The Bible paints a different picture and shows that God has revealed Himself to man from the beginning. As a consequence of the Fall, man over the centuries has in his depravity “devolved” into greater perversions of the truth. As a consequence of Common Grace, we see some residues of the original revelation of truth retained in many philosophies and religions such as guilt, morality, expiation, sacrifice and a sense of eternity. The history of philosophy is man’s search for his intimate nature, first causes and ultimate destiny as the original tradition of revealed truth was in time gradually obscured and mixed with error. This led to diverse speculations on the nature and the origin of the world, giving rise to philosophic systems.
The first philosophy that was introduced was in Genesis 3 when Satan urged man to think autonomously about reality. The serpent cast doubt on objective truth and since then man has been characterised by uncertainty. In the Fall, man sought to establish himself as the ultimate judge of truth. When he took the fruit, he was seeking to be as autonomous as God. Pilate questioned “what is truth?” yet like fallen man never waited to hear from the true Source of truth but, “when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.” (John 18:38)
This rapidly degenerated till man was engaged in the spiral of worship and depravity evidenced in the Pre-Flood and the Tower of Babel as delineated in Romans 1. The earliest systems especially that of the Greeks, began with the crudest guesses at truth. Their view of knowledge was antithetical to Christianity as they rejected God as the source of understanding and all truth. Instead, they turned to reason and empirical methods alone. The metaphysicists such as Thales (c. 585 – 548 BC) speculated that the world was in reality based on water. Others held that everything in the world was composed of air, fire, or earth. Protagoras (c. 481 – 420 BC) would disagree and famously argue that “man is the measure of all things.” Pythagoras and his followers developed a system attempting to explain the essence of things by numbers.
Socrates would begin the Golden Age for Greek philosophy and take this quest further by speculating that virtue was identical with knowledge, hence arguing that man cannot knowingly do wrong, as ignorance was the source of moral evil. Therefore, through dialectical dialogues with others a man could clear his mind of evil and come to objective conclusions. He concluded that beyond the physical universe there was an order of reality that the mind can discover in its forms or ideas.
Plato went much further than his teacher, Socrates. He elaborated a vast and consistent system of philosophy that ideas were the ultimate objective reality. These ideas he said were independent of the human mind and were eternal patterns on which the material universe were approximately based e.g. a beautiful flower is a copy of the idea (or ideal) of beauty. To Plato, man lived in darkness but believing he was observing reality. It was only when he is “converted” that he can discern the eternal pattern in of the spiritual world. He also believed our souls pre-existed in an ideal world before our birth before being banished and united to our bodies.
Aristotle (born in 384 B.C.), was for twenty years a pupil of Plato at Athens. He would shift the focus of Plato’s ideas to the empirical world. He argued our knowledge is not independent of our mind in eternal objectives ideas but is grounded in the physical objects of the material world. Knowledge is first taken from the objective reality, and is therefore conformable to that reality. Hence Aristotle establishes the ultimate grounds of things inductively in intuitive axioms or presuppositions. These axioms or presuppositions are only discovered by observation and induction and then become the ultimate premises from which reason discovers further knowledge. Aristotle grounded his hope in logic. Once these basic premises are recognised man reason by logic such as syllogism. Aristotle defines syllogism as “a discourse in which, certain things having been supposed, something different from the things' supposed results of necessity because these things are so.” A categorical syllogism consists of three parts:
1. the major premise,
2. the minor premise, and
3. the conclusion
For example:
Major premise: All humans are mortal.
Minor premise: Some animals are human.
Conclusion: Some animals are mortal.
The problem for Aristotle is determining the initial axioms. He argued that this be determined by reason alone. Therefore, he concludes that man’s autonomous reason is reliable, good, and self-sufficient. He rejected the revelation of Scripture for the basic presuppositions for all thinking.
After Aristotle, the Greeks declined rapidly as they sought to overthrow this rigid system of logic and sought inner peace by sensory experiences. Some became sceptics and despaired of ever finding true knowledge and some sought then Stoicism (living conformably to nature) and hedonistic Epicureanism to live by. We will see the same cycle in Modern Philosophy of a search for certainty independent of God which ends in relativism, scepticism, and unrestrained hedonism. Even at the height of Greek philosophy, the greatest thinkers failed to reconcile eternal invisible values to material objects. This would lead to the depravity set forth in Romans 1 as the history of Greece and many all civilizations that turned their back on God’s revelation in the Scriptures. The Greeks laid the foundations for Western naturalistic humanism that would flourish again in the Enlightenment. Even today, many cling on to the futile hope that man’s reason can ultimately guide him to all truth. The writings of the Greeks continue to fascinate every subsequent generation as the problems they wrestled with create the profound uncertainty in the heart of man estranged from his Creator.
MODERN PHILOSOPHY
Until two or three hundred years ago, virtually everyone belonging to the church believed that the Scriptures are the Word of God. Even the Roman Catholic Church which burned those who sought to translate it into the language of the people never questioned that the Scriptures were the Word of God. The ubiquitous absolute belief in the Bible produced the Reformation and gave birth to Protestantism. Indeed, before the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, no one who declared himself a Christian doubted that the Bible is true.
Liberalism, however, as a theological system of belief did not arise in a vacuum. The formative forces of the Higher Critical movement were rationalistic forces seeking to realise the essence of Christianity from the ashes of the fire of what is known as the Enlightenment (so named because of its belief that other ages were dominated by ignorance). Immanuel Kant called the Enlightenment “man’s emergence from a self inflicted state of minority. [17]” Some see the Enlightenment period beginning with the publication of John Locke’s famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 and closing in the year 1781 with the appearance of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. This movement was nothing new as the famous doctrine of Protagoras (c. 481 – 420 BC) was that “man is the measure of all things.”
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the educated elite began to drift away from Christianity toward alternative world views conceived by speculative philosophy. It was an age characterised by a restless spirit of inquiry, when truths and traditions which had been long venerated became the objects of searching investigation and criticism. This initiated a process of secularization which began in Western Civilization during the Age of Reason, so called because there was an insistent demand for the free play of the individual judgment based upon the supposed light of reason. Many of the intelligentsia of Europe viewed their day as one of unparalleled advances in the realms of science, art, music, architecture, and philosophical thought and certitude in external measures to establish truth grew steadily. The Renaissance had been a severe assault on religion, but the Age of Reason or Enlightenment would have a more damaging consequence.
The Enlightenment was, therefore, an intellectual movement during the eighteenth century which elevated human reason to near divine status and ascribed to it the ability to discern truth of the phenomena of human existence without appeal to supernatural divine revelation. Life was thought to be now able to be pursued without any regard for God or religion. This would lead to the conclusion that mankind must be content with a working morality predicated on prudence and expediency and one must seek to live fully for the present as reason holds to hope of future immortality. It has rightly been called the “modern paganism. [18]”
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was perhaps the first philosopher whose work was critical to this decline. Hobbes was an atheistic materialist who “found in sense experiences all the answers he needed.” René Descartes (1596-1650) of France began a school of philosophy known as rationalism. He sought to establish everything including his existence by only individual human reason and rational knowledge. Another philosophical tradition, known as empiricism, began with the Unitarian scholar of Christ Church, Oxford, John Locke (1632-1704). Locke taught that man derives all knowledge from two sources only - sense perception and experience, and he developed his philosophy by reflection on this experience. To Locke, man’s mind is a blank slate and that man can subsequently learn and improve through conscious effort. Now, using natural reasoning, Protestantism was being conditioned to believe that a man could ascertain truth through his own rationality independent of the Bible. This rational apologetic was being promoted to relegate God to the First Cause only and science was being called upon to prove the God of the Bible! Locke was a religious man, but his morality and his methods were firmly grounded on enlightenment principles of reason over faith. He believed that when reason was had completed its investigations then we should take those conclusions and assign them to God.
Enlightenment philosophers engaged in debating the status of human knowledge. The Enlightenment ended in a philosophical stalemate between the Renaissance rationalists who argued that knowledge is the product solely of the mind and the Enlightenment empiricists who posited that knowledge comes from sense experience. Although Descartes and Locke did not reject Christianity directly, others soon used their presuppositions to do so. Now men like the Anglo-Irish philosopher, George Berkeley (1685-1753), could boast of, “that ocean of light, which has broke in and made his way, in spite of slavery and superstition[19].”
Although Western atheism has its roots in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, it did not emerge as a distinct world-view until the late Enlightenment. The first known atheist who threw off the mantle of deism, was Jean Meslier (1664 – 1729), a French priest who lived in the early 18th century. He wrote a book-length philosophical essay promoting atheism and denounces all religion. It does not take a major pre-suppositional shift to substitute Deism with atheism and a religion of nature and a worship of reason. The atheistic conclusion had always been there in this movement in satan’s strategy but he had to prepare the ground carefully. In the period leading up to the French Revolution, the debauched writer, Marquis De Sade (1740 – 1814) openly admitted humanism’s true end point, “The goal of humanism is the death of God! Man will not be free until God is abolished, until there is total freedom to believe and live anything and everything contrary to the Bible.” De Sade was a perverted proponent of extreme licentiousness, unrestrained by morality, religion or law, with the pursuit of personal pleasure being the highest principle.
Alongside the religious discontent the French Revolution of 1789 created a wave of social discontent amongst much of Europe. James Webb records that, “in the short but significant upheavals of 1848 over fifty violent attempts took place to topple established governments[20].” The Revolution was predicated on this rationalism which believed society can only be transformed from below. This was reflected in the songs of the revolution, such as the the second verse of the socialist anthem the Internationalé which stated that, “No Saviour from on high delivers.” Extreme Socialism became prominent inspired by the dialectical writings of Karl Marx (Capital) and Frederich Engels. In France, the instability reached a violent apex with the rise of Maximilien Robespierre, who initiated the so-called Reign of Terror of 1793–1794, beheading more than 15,000 suspected enemies and dissenters at the guillotine. Disillusioned with this, many ordinary French citizens rejected the Enlightenment and reverted to a military dictatorship under Napoleon that lasted fifteen years.
The writings of David Hume (1711-1776), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and later, Charles Darwin are sometimes credited with causing or contributing to the decline of Deism. They questioned whether we as human beings are truly able to perceive the world around us with any degree of accuracy. These men helped to undermine the first cause argument and the argument from design, turning many (though not all) potential deists towards atheism or panendeism.
Through these men, Deism evolved into, and contributed to, other religious movements. Hume was an empiricist who believed that all of our knowledge derives from sense impressions. He attacked the viability of the existence and knowability of God into serious doubt with his insistence that belief can never be rational and certainly religious belief was not capable of fully explaining anything. He questioned whether the senses, and thus perception, could be trusted for a consistent view of the world around us as just because something is observable today such as gravity may not mean it will be tomorrow. Hume declared that matters of faith were not matters of “fact” but of “value” and thereby declared the autonomy of human reason. He mocks,
The primary religion of mankind arises chiefly from an anxious fear of future events; and what ideas will naturally be entertained of invisible, unknown powers, while men lie under dismal apprehensions of any kind, may easily be conceived. Every image of vengeance, severity, cruelty, and malice must occur, and must augment the ghastliness and horror which oppresses the amazed religionist.... And no idea of perverse wickedness can be framed, which those terrified devotees do not readily, without scruple, apply to their deity[21].
The German, Immanuel Kant built on Hume’s arguments and he probably was the man who more than anyone else shifted the emphasis off the propositions of the Word of God, and on to man’s reason. He rejected the Enlightenment debate over rationalism and empiricism as he felt both were right as the development of knowledge was a combination of the senses drawing from empirical data alone from outside of man. Kant has been called “the highest summit of rationalism” as he made a radical dichotomy between what he argued were the phenomenal and noumenal realms. He denied that it was possible for science or philosophy to reach knowledge of the substance or essence of things as distinguished from the phenomena, with the result that the common arguments used generally to prove the existence of God were worthless.
Kant argued that man is born with his own ideas and perceptions of the world and, as such, can never distinguish between what is “real” and what is “our perception.” As a consequence, because nothing really exists separate from its existence in the eyes of the observer, it follows that perceptions and empirical observations in the world cannot be trusted. All that can be known is things as they are experienced. Kant ultimately rejected that man can know anything objectively. However, this is self-refuting as it amounts to the objective claim that objective knowledge is impossible. Indeed, the ability to challenge the truth of any claim presupposes a capacity for truth and, by implication, objectivity. Our capacity to identify and express subjective states is ultimately derived from our capacity for objectivity. As Norman Geisler states:
For if one knows something about reality, then he surely cannot affirm in the same breath that all of reality is unknowable. And of course if one knows nothing whatsoever about reality, then he had no basis whatsoever for making a statement about reality…. It follows that total agnosticism is self-defeating because it assumes some knowledge about reality in order to deny any knowledge of reality. [22]
Kant did not allow the possibility that God could break into the realm of history (the phenomenal realm) and reveal Himself. Now, God could be “thought” but He could not be “known” in the sense of not being an object of theoretical judgments as He no longer made any scientifically verifiable forays into his creation; hence removing religion from the arena of intellectual discussion. Kant did not reject completely the existence of God, immortality etc and accepted that we could look to religion as a matter of “practical” reason for ethics and morality, but we could not seek God cognitively known as a matter of “pure” reason.
Throughout his adult life Kant never made any claims to being a Christian, nor would he enter a Christian Church. This would now open the door to the rejection of external revelation, with the resultant dogmatic indifference. Many postmodern thinkers have followed Kant in abandoning the notion of objective truth. Recently, Richard Rorty in a 1991 book argued that “there is no such thing as ‘the best explanation’ of anything; there is just the explanation that best suits the purpose of some given explainer” and asserted that logic is merely “a learned body of scholarly lore.”
Kant so changed the way humanity subsequently thought that philosophers still refer to “Kant’s Copernican Revolution.” His basic pre-supposition was to free himself from any external revelatory control such as the Bible as he argued enlightened thinking was,
man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage, Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another[23].
Now, this would lead the way logically to an attack on the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy, with the Bible a completely culture-bound book. The Scriptures would simply be seen as the record of the religious experiences of men and not as the infallible, inerrant revelation of all truth.
Another German philosopher, Georg Hegel (1770-1831), introduced a new school of thinking and spoke of truth progressively unfolding through the clash of opposite concepts, a process called the dialectic. Paradoxically, he argues that we initially understand an aspect of truth, called the thesis and its counterpoint called the antithesis. Hegel says that when we combine these two seeming contradictions, we attain a higher level of truth than either of the opposites called the synthesis. He concluded that by this historical evolution there is no absolute, ultimate truth, but we must continually struggle for truth. Hegel had a profound influence over the entire 19th century giving it an optimistic liberal worldview which assumed the progress in history and the perfectibility of humanity.
Later another theologian who blended rationalism with revelation arose, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) of Denmark. Kierkegaard introducing a new philosophy called existentialism, which emphasizes the existence and experience of the individual. He is an important philosopher, as his ideas are the pre-suppositions of the philosophy of the modern Charismatic Movement. This philosophy is embraced by rock groups such as the Rolling Stones and The Beatles. John Lennnon classically articulated this in his song “Imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try, no hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people living for today.” On the heels of Kierkegaard came Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who discerned that the people of Europe lived as though God were dead, so he made atheism the cornerstone of his existential philosophy. He satires,
“Wither is God,” he [the madman] cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him-you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?...Are we not straying through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of an empty space? ...Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves[24]?
We now saw prominent academics openly espousing atheism in Europe. The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled in 1811 from Oxford for writing a pamphlet defending atheism called The Necessity of Atheism. In this he argues, “Mankind had only to will that there would be no evil and there would be none” and that he had “refuted all the possible types of arguments for God’s existence.” America did not escape this Enlightenment Deistic influence and implemented many of the ideas that European philosophers could only talk idly about. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence drew heavily from Enlightenment themes directly from Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. Thomas Paine (1737–1809) especially popularized Deism when he published his treatise The Age of Reason (1793–94). Typical of Paine’s attack was his claim,
Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was its author, on which only the strange belief that it is the Word of God has stood, and there remains nothing in Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies[25].
From these pernicious influences of rationalism, Deism, atheism etc, there now arose, for the first time, those such as the Neologians (or Innovators) who pioneered the work in biblical criticism and denounced openly the belief of biblical inspiration. This satanic infiltration birthed both higher and lower Biblical Criticism along with Liberalism, Modernism, and divergent theologies such as Neo-Orthodoxy, and Situational Ethics. For 18 centuries, the absolute accuracy of the Bible was generally held by all of Christendom. The Confessional walls erected around the stable Received Text were now being assaulted and an “Enlightenment Bible” sought for these “new thinkers.” Higher Criticism now approached the Bible as any other secular book through Enlightenment presuppositions. The higher critic begins with no preconception as to what the Bible ought to be, but studies it with rationalistic pre-suppositional tools to discover what it actually reveals regarding its origin and nature. Higher Critics examines the authorship, date of composition, purpose in writing, and compared Biblical parallels to other forms of literature.
These critical scholars built on the tradition of Enlightenment and Rationalist thinkers such as Hermann Samuel Reimarus, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Lessing, Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Hegel and the French rationalists who reasoned that, if Christianity was to survive, it had to reform itself from within. The Enlightenment philosophical musings detached faith from knowledge and demanded that man was emancipated from Biblical revelation, church creeds, theological statements, or any certain world view or presuppositions. A dead, barren Protestantism now left a spiritual vacuum in Europe that fertile, atheistic minds were only too glad to fill. The fruits of that were seen in the unprecedented barbarity, immorality, and social breakdown of the twentieth century. The dominance of scientism over Scriptures in Western society can be neatly summarized in the words that Sir Richard Gregory (1864-1952), one of Britain’s leading scientists, proposed as his epitaph:
My grandfather preached the gospel of Christ;
My father preached the gospel of socialism;
I preach the gospel of science.
Chapter Three
PRESUPPOSITIONALISM vs EVIDENTIALISM
As a consequence of the clear Biblical mandate in passage such as 1 Peter 3:15, it is clear that believers are called to defend their faith. However, what has proven more polemical is the proper method and approach to use in fulfilling this Biblical obligation. There are two basic apologetic methods common among Reformed theologians: evidentialism and presuppositionalism. Some divide evidentialism into classical apologetics (where the apologist utilises logical criteria (for example, the law of noncontradiction) in determining the validity of competing worldviews) and pure evidentialism (which attempts to show the probability of the Christian faith primarily on empirically and historically verifiable facts). However, in this study we will simply conflate both terms into “evidentialism.” Most apologetic materials are written from an evidentialist point of view.
EVIDENTIALISM
To the evidentialist, apologetics is a form of pre-evangelism by an intellectual preparation preceding the actual claims of the gospel. Their strategy is to formulate an argument for a general notion of God prior to introducing specific Christian claims. This, in effect, means that we should set aside the authority of Scripture and the reality of God’s existence to avoid the charge of circular argumentation. This, they argue, would only serve to alienate the unsuspecting listener by offending his sense of reason. Instead, the evidentialist maintains, we should seek a common ground based upon neutral philosophical and empirical principles to engage a discussion on. Three such areas of common ground proposed are the premises of logic and science: the law of non-contradiction, the law of causality and the reliability of human sense perceptions. Thus the evidentialist approach assumes facts are neutral i.e. that they “speak for themselves.”
Using this approach the evidentialist believes we can demonstrate the philosophical necessity of the existence of a supreme being, and the empirical probability of the truth claims of Scripture. An evidentialist builds a case for theism by demonstrating how it conforms to rational criteria used to evaluate the truth claims of competing worldviews. These evidentialist apologists argue that “reason must judge the credentials of any alleged revelation[26].” They believe that if a man would simply consider the “facts” presented and using his innate common reasoning sense he would be rationally compelled to believe the truth of Scripture. As Gordon R. Lewis argues, “To be responsible before the Bible, the unbeliever must have enough judgment to know why he should determine his lifestyle by Scripture rather than the Koran or the Book of Mormon. The use of systematic consistency to distinguish the Bible from the Koran in no way detracts from the Bible’s authority. It verifies the Bible’s claim above all competitors.”[27]
Norman Geisler elaborates this two-step method in a series of “Twelve Points that Show Christianity is True”:
1. Truth about reality is knowable.
2. The opposite of true is false.
3. It is true that the theistic God exists.
4. If God exists, then miracles are possible.
5. Miracles can be used to confirm a message from God
(i.e., as an act of God to confirm a word from God).
6. The New Testament is historically reliable.
7. The New Testament says Jesus claimed to be God.
8. Jesus’ claim to be God was miraculously confirmed by:
a. His fulfillment of many prophecies about Himself;
b. His sinless and miraculous life;
c. His prediction and accomplishment of His resurrection.
9. Therefore, Jesus is God.
10. Whatever Jesus (who is God) teaches is true.
11. Jesus taught that the Bible is the Word of God.
12. Therefore, it is true that the Bible is the Word of God (and anything opposed to it is false).
PROBLEMS OF EVIDENTIALISM
The key problem with evidentialism is that it uses evidence from all of the unreliable sources of truth such as sensory evidence in combination with the scientific method. If we believe that everything necessary for faith and life (including apologetics) is either expressly set down in scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from it, then we should use this tool as our primary means to refuting antichristian worldviews. Such “neutrality” is dangerous, for as Robert South (1634–1716) argues, “He who would fight the devil with his own weapons, must not wonder if he finds himself overmatched.”
Inductive reasoning can only render probable conclusions. Therefore, if we accept only “probable” the evidence for God, to be logically consistent, one must admit that given the standards of reasoning employed, there must be some, albeit lesser evidence against God’s existence. The Enlightenment philosopher David Hume agrees and argues, “Nothing can be more unphilosophical than to be positive or dogmatical on any subject.”
Evidentialists believe that man can reason his way independent of Special Revelation to the knowledge of God’s existence. This ignores the effects of depravity as Romans 1 tells us that man clearly sees and knows intuitively that God exists but actively suppresses the knowledge. Evidentialism also fails to specifically identify the God of Scripture. All they do, at best, is delineate that God could be deistic, polytheistic, pantheistic or monotheistic.
Another major problem of evidentialism is that it misconstrues general revelation as this is accessible to all people at all times, so these new arguments based upon recent scientific discoveries cannot, by definition, be termed general revelation. Also, reason is a necessary but insufficient criterion of truth. The most powerful logical tool, deductive logic critically lacks the power to actually determine that a worldview is true and, at best, can only test the falsity of a worldview. Disproving non-theistic worldviews and philosophies of life does not necessarily prove theism.
Finally, evidentialism will ultimately fail as it is predicated on the forlorn assumption that a depraved sinner can reason truth concerning God, such as the Virgin Birth or the Trinity. It forgets that an atheist can even accept the fact that Christ rose from the dead and not be a Christian. A good example of the failed approach is that of B.B. Warfield who said, “In dealing with sceptics it is not proper to begin with the evidence which immediately establishes Inspiration, but we should first establish Theism, then the historical credibility of the Scriptures, and then the divine origin of Christianity[28].” In effect, he is saying we do not presuppose inspiration but we must argue for it through factual historical evidence such as the resurrection. Hence, he places the self-attesting authority of Scripture at the end of the apologetic argument.
Such an approach was advocated by the evidentialist, C.S. Lewis who explained his latent apologetic purpose in his diverse literary genres by noting that “any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it.” [29] He argued that we need to trick people by bypassing the “watchful dragons” that hindered their reception of doctrine by diluting stripping Christian truths “of their stained-glass and Sunday school association.” [30]
However, consistent Reformed Theologians have always regarded Reformed doctrines such as the Sovereignty of God and self-authenticating witness of Scripture as the most consistent expression of Biblical Theology. For if Christianity is only probably true, then Christianity we must accept theoretically is also possibly false. As such, the starting point is that a Sovereign God inspired, preserved and continues to speak through the Bible as the propositional revelation of God. Hence, it alone can be the ultimate test for truth and knowledge. As Cornelius Van Til argues, “It is the genius of Protestantism to make the God of the Scriptures the final reference in all predication[31].” He maintained that because God, speaking in his word, is the ultimate epistemological starting point, there is no way of arguing for the faith on the basis of something other than the faith itself.
Joseph Butler (1692-1752) and William Paley (1743-1805) were two of the leading proponents of an evidential approach to apologetics. Edward F. Hills explains the sad consequences of their concessions:
The Butler-Paley apologetic system accomplished much immediate good, in the long run its effect was detrimental to the Christian faith because it presented Christianity as merely a probability and not as the truth. Also it made the starting point of Christian thought dependent on the whims of unbelievers, since, according to the Butler-Paley system, we build our defense of the Christian faith upon the truths on which all men agree. And, finally, the Butler-Paley apologetic system, by its emphasis on probability and on a common starting point with unbelievers, encouraged orthodox Christians to think that they must deal with the text of holy Scripture in the same way in which unbelievers deal with it. Hence the Butler-Paley apologetic system contributed greatly to the spread of naturalistic textual criticism in orthodox Christian circles.[32]
CASE FOR PRESUPPOSITIONAL APOLOGETICS
Christians must be committed to biblically-warranted procedures for defending the faith. The Bible offers no proof for the existence of God, but asserts and assumes His existence (Gen 1:1). The evidence for order, design, morality, purpose can only be understood on the testimony of Scripture. Presuppositional apologetics deals with the presuppositions of those who oppose Christianity, because presuppositions affect how a person views evidence and reason.
All theological and philosophical positions must begin with an indemonstrable axiom. This supreme norm is the ultimate principle in any worldview through which truth can be distinguished from falsity. Indeed, if one could prove the doctrinal proposition that the Bible is the inspired and inerrant Words of God, then the proposition would not be the starting point. A presuppositionalist understands that his mind is part of creation, and therefore is dependent on revelation from God in order to function properly.
No presupposition, no axiom, no observation, or experience can be greater than a promise from God, “because he could swear by no greater, he sware by himself.” The Westminster Confession of Faith, also makes clear that “The authority of the holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, depends not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is Truth itself), the author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the word of God.” In the Biblical view, a proposition is true because an omniscient God thinks it to be true. In an interview with Christianity Today (December 30, 1977) Van Til made clear, “There are two ways of defending the faith. One of these begins from man as self-sufficient and works up to God, while the other begins from the triune God of the Scriptures and relates all things to Him[33].”
The Roman Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) sought unsuccessfully to synthesize the rationalist axiom of sense experience of Aristotle, and the Scriptural axiom of revelation by arguing persuasively for human intellectual autonomy. However, true Reformed believers reject Rome’s soteriology and bibliology because they are both predicated on this synthesis which is doomed to failure. This is because objective knowledge of truth cannot be known outside the revelation of God. As New Testament believers Christ must be the ultimate authority over our theories of epistemology as we must “sanctify the Lord God in your hearts” (1 Pet 3:15). Paul also warns us that we must be, “Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God,” and then “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor 10:5). Thus all of our methodologies and conclusions as to the textual questions must be controlled by the explicit revelation of Scripture. The Scriptures make clear that God’s providential actions answers to no one, “He giveth not account of any of his matters” (Job 33:13; cf. Deut 29:29). We need to adopt the same spirit as the Virgin Mary and say “Be it according to Your Word, O Lord” (Luke 1:38). We must reason by presupposition.
Greg Bahnsen argued that we should approach an unbeliever at the level of his worldview, on a set of operating assumptions about the source and nature of knowledge. He summarizes,
Everybody thinks and reasons in terms of a broad and fundamental understanding of the nature of reality, of how we know what we know, and of how we should live our lives. This philosophy or outlook is “presupposed” by everything the unbeliever (or believer) says; it is the implicit background that gives meaning to the claims and inferences drawn by people. For this reason, every apologetical encounter is ultimately a conflict of worldviews or fundamental perspectives (whether this is explicitly mentioned or not). [34]
In Pushing the Antithesis edited by Gary DeMar he explains how we use presuppositionalism to undermine the antithesis of the unbeliever by forcing the unbeliever to live consistently with his rationalistic and materialistic presuppositions that underlie and seemingly support his worldview,
Consider the resurrection. Since the universe was created by God out of things that are not visible (Heb. 11:3), and man was formed “of dust from the ground” (Gen. 2:7), then reanimating a dead body would not be a major task for God. Paul makes the point to King Agrippa: “Why is it considered incredible among you people if God does raise the dead?” (Acts 26:8). The logic is simple: Since God creates; He can certainly recreate. Accounts of supernatural (from our point of view) events found in the Bible are easily accounted for when the operating presupposition is that the Creator of the cosmos is behind the events. The Bible begins with the operating presupposition that “God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). If this is not the starting point, then nothing makes sense. There is no way to account for reason, logic, love, goodness, personhood, or meaning of any kind in a random, matter-only cosmos. “In short,” Dr. Bahnsen argued, “presuppositional apologetics argues for the
truth of Christianity ‘from the impossibility of the contrary.’ Someone who is so foolish as to operate in his intellectual life as though there were no God (Ps. 14:1) thereby ‘despises wisdom and instruction’ and ‘hates knowledge’ (Prov. 1:7, 29). He needs to be answered according to his folly—demonstrating where his philosophical principles lead—‘lest he be wise in his own eyes’ (Prov. 26:5).”
This approach will show that unbelieving naturalists that matter-only presuppositions are inconsistent and ultimately lead to nihilism (a belief that the world and man are wholly without meaning or purpose) which is described by RC Sproul as “the darkest continent of the darkened mind—the ultimate paradise of the fool.”
Presuppositionalism is not blind fideism as we believe it is rational to believe in the authority of Scripture as self-evident (as all Christians believe in practice), and so doing results in the only way to have an accurate worldview. We can trust this logic not because of logic itself but because the Bible tells us we can in delineated areas (e.g. see Paul’s appeal to logic in Rom 5:10). We must reason by presupposition as the assumption of God’s existence is essential to all reasoning. However, we must not begin with reason or evidence first but the Scriptures as Van Til made clear in Toward a Reformed Apologetics,
Rather than wedding Christianity to the philosophies of Aristotle or Kant, we must openly challenge the apostate philosophic constructions of men by which they seek to suppress the truth about God themselves, and the world... It is only if we demand of men complete submission to the living Christ of the Scriptures in every area of their lives that we have presented to men the claims of the Lord Christ without compromise. It is only then that we are truly biblical first and speculative afterwards. Only then are we working toward a Reformed apologetic. [35]
Bahnsen echoes,
Reasoning is a God-given gift to man, but it does not grant to him any independent authority. The Christian concept of God takes Him to be the highest and absolute authority, even over man’s reasoning: such a God could not be proved to exist by some other standard as the highest authority in one’s reasoning. That would be to assume the contrary of what you are seeking to prove.
Evidentialism argues that the truths of Christianity may be “proved” only in the same sense that other factual claims can be proved—with some degree of probability, stopping short of rational certainty. Reformed apologetics seeks to prove Christianity as well, but in a different way. By arguing from the impossibility of the contrary, presuppositional apologists show that one must presuppose the truthfulness of Christianity in order to have a basis for attempting to critique Christianity or indeed anything in the first place! An atheistic worldview is irrational and cannot consistently provide the preconditions for reasoning and science – the very method atheists look to for refuting Christianity. As Van Til says “Christianity does not thus need to take shelter under the roof of a scientific method independent of itself. It rather offers itself as a roof to methods that would be scientific.” [36]
We reject the evidential approach as it is wrong to concede even the hypothetical possibility of an autonomous worldview independent of God that can successfully function and be successfully understood in terms of the axioms of “neutral” logic and science. These concessions ultimately compromise the very essence of Biblical Christianity as this means abandoning Christ who gives epistemological light “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3). God is the most basic of all realities and not logic as Christ “is before all things, and by him all things consist” (Col 1:17). Indeed, there is no such concept as “mere human logic” for Christ is “the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9). The greatest commandment teaches us to love the Lord our God with all our minds (Matt 22:37). There is no such thing as autonomous reason, i.e., reason that is unaided by divine revelation. Leon Morris correctly notes, “The Bible was the only book Jesus ever quoted, and then never as a basis for discussion but to decide the point at issue.”
The rationalistic evidential apologetic is summarized in the statement associated with Thomas Aquinas, “I believe because I understand.” The presuppositional apologetic is summarized in the statement associated with St. Augustine of Hippo, “I believe; therefore, I understand.” Tertullian also showed the distinction in elevating reason to equivalence with revelation when he made the famous antithetical quip “what indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Believers are mandated to presuppose the Scriptures in all of their thinking and practice as the ultimate criterion of truth, whereas unbelievers resist this obligation in every aspect of thought and life. Presuppositional apologists claim that there is no neutrality (Matt 6:24), as there can be no compromise between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world (2 Cor 6:14; Matt 12:30).
However, our presuppositional faith is the evidence and substance (Heb 11) we have in what God has spoken! Everything we need to make us perfect or mature as a believer is found in the Scripture (2 Tim 3:15-16). Such a believer studies to show “himself approved unto God” (2 Tim 2:15). We must interpret evidence in light of faith through special and then general revelation, not vice versa. Reason cannot produce truth in and of itself as reason needs prior knowledge by which to reason. Behind all human reason is God’s reason, and the only place we can objectively encounter God’s reason is in Scripture. Every use of reason therefore presupposes the Infinite, Eternal and Unchangeable as everything in the world is in constant change and needs an unchanging point of reference to validate it.
If the ultimate point of validation does not exist, then laws of logic are not self-evident laws, but mere temporary conventions. Presuppositionalists believe that, because of contrary presuppositions that permeate to affect one’s entire worldview, believers and unbelievers have absolutely no common ground in principle. If unbelievers were consistent with their unbelief, they would be reduced to raving lunatics (which at times many exhibit); but God is merciful and providentially restrains their debased thinking. As a consequence of God’s providential restraints, unbelievers are generally forced to accept specific beliefs about the world, those that they simply cannot distort by virtue of their anti-theistic presuppositions (e.g., belief in the universe as behaving according to rational and logical rules). These specific beliefs provide the presuppositional apologist with a “bridge” to show the inconsistency of unbelief and silence their scepticism.
When clear biblical truth is found, as A.W. Tozer would say, “never do we dare to stand in judgment of that truth; rather, that truth always stands in judgment of us!” Kevin Bauder makes a good observation of this vital principle in the context of creation,
If you had no other source of information, you would assume that this world had been in existence for ages, not for mere hours. Interpreted within your normal frame of reference, the facts indicate an old world. At this point you must make a choice. You may choose to interpret the facts within your normal frame of reference and believe in an ancient world, or you may accept what the Creator said, and then search for some other interpretation of the facts. This choice can never be made on the basis of the evidence itself. The evidence is what requires explanation. It does not explain itself. If you know that the Creator is capable of making Himself understood, and if you know that the Creator means to be understood and does not deceive, then you will believe in a young creation. If, on the other hand, you choose to interpret the evidence according to your normal assumptions, then you must conclude that perhaps the Creator is mistaken, or that He means to mislead, or perhaps that He is incapable of expressing Himself; at any rate, His words must be construed differently than He plainly intended…..Christians must begin with an absolute commitment to the infinite‐personal, faithful, apseudes God. This God can and does say exactly what He means. What He affirms is always true. Since the Bible is always His Word, it may always be trusted in anything that it asserts. The Bible is never to be interpreted by the facts of general revelation[37].
The absolute rule for theory selection is that we should prefer those textual or scientific theories that do not conflict with the biblical data. This is why theology was once ubiquitously understood as the “queen of the sciences.” The Westminster Confession of Faith (1:6) concurs,
The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.
Now, either this creedal statement is true or it is not. There simply is no higher authority than the Word of God. Naturally, this confessional position can only work when one can particularise his starting point of where this self-authenticating revelation of God is perfectly found. Richard Muller insightfully observes,
The orthodox definition of the truth of Scripture - like the orthodox definitions of infallibility and authority - treads a very narrow line. Scriptural truth is never allowed to rest upon empirical proof: truth depends upon divine authoriship and can be defined as a “truth of promise” or as an intentional fidelity or veracity upon the part of God as author[38].
We must presuppose the primacy of Scripture alone as providing the foundation for all proof. Scripture itself teaches us the priority of Scripture in theological matters. Although many decry this as circular and unacceptable, it should be noted that one either starts with God or with man. Greg Bahnsen summarises the need to argue presuppositionally,
The Believer must defend God’s word as the ultimate starting point, the unquestionable authority, the self-attesting foundation of all thought and commitment. . . . The fact that the apologist presupposes the word of God in order to carry on a discussion or debate about the veracity of that word does not nullify his argument, but rather illustrates it[39].
The book of Ecclesiastes is the autobiography of the wisest sinner to have ever lived and his conclusion is given in 12:13-14 is that a proper worldview must always begin with the fear of God. The Apostle warned us, “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Col 2:8). The etymology of the word “philosophy” (philosophia) shows that it means “the love of wisdom” and Paul warns us here that our knowledge or philosophy must always be “after Christ.” Jesus Christ is Wisdom personified and in Him “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3; cf. Prov 8:22-36; John 1:1-3, 14; 1 Cor 1:24, 30) so what He says on this subject must be received absolutely. Fallen man does not fear God and so cannot reason with true wisdom and knowledge (Prov 1:7; 9:10) as he has lost the true source (Isa 59:1–2; Col 2:2–3). There can be no compromise between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of this world. The Church Father, Ireneaeus a disciple of the godly Polycarp makes clear, “The Scriptures are perfect. In the scriptures let God always teach and man always learn!” This is the Reformed Position as Douglas Wilson explains,
Sola Scriptura does not claim that the Bible is the only religious authority in the lives of believers. Rather, the claim is that the Bible is the only religious authority in the lives of believers that has the two particular characteristics of infallibility and ultimacy. Infallibility means that Scripture, as the very word of God, does not make mistakes, does not err. It is the ultimate standard of what is right, and so I must always conform myself to it, and not go the other way around. I must not bend the Scriptures to fit what I (or others that I know) think might be more accurate, that accuracy determined elsewhere[40].
A Christian epistemology begins with the Bible as the Word of God; this is the indemonstrable axiom, from which all true theories are to be deduced. As a consequence of it being an axiom, it cannot be proved. For instance, the Bible is predicated upon the fundamental law of logic sometimes called the Law of Non-Contradiction. This cannot be proved as any attempt to prove the law of contradiction would presuppose the truth of the law. Although, many ridicule us for believing what the Bible says, the Apostle Paul declared,
But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets (Acts 24:14).
The great Apostle was willing to stake his faith and die for it on what was written. He made the ultimate ground of Christian authority as the Word of God and clear he would be, “judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers” (Acts 26:6). Paul refused to preach anything but, “Having therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day, witnessing both to small and great, saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come” (Acts 26:22; cf. Acts 28:23). The only “evidence” Paul accepted as certain was God’s revelation. It is true that Paul would cite facts and evidences of the resurrection in his reasoning, but only in accordance with the presuppositions of a Biblical epistemology.
Since the Scriptures are an expression of the mind of God (1 Cor 2:16), they are God’s logical thoughts. Logic itself demands a thought process whereby one moves from antecedent to consequent. This logic must emanate from a rational mind where the antecedent and the consequent are validated. As Gary Crampton explains this is directly related to the actual Words and not just the message of Scripture,
The very first verse of the Bible, “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” necessitates the validity of the most fundamental law of logic: the law of contradiction (A is not non-A). Genesis 1:1 teaches that God is the Creator of all things. Too, it says that he created “in the beginning.” It does not teach, therefore, that God is not the Creator of all things, nor does it maintain that God created all things 100 years after the beginning. The verse assumes that the words God, beginning, created, and so forth, all have definite meanings. It also assumes that they do not mean certain things. For speech to be intelligible, words must have univocal meanings. What makes the words meaningful, and revelation and communication possible, is that each word conforms to the law of contradiction[41].
Even though man’s nature is depraved, this does not imply that the laws of logic themselves are impinged as they are fixed and universal. Therefore, a believer may be able to logically deduce from the eternal logic of Scripture all things necessary for our faith and life. Presuppositionalism, by definition, excludes the use of proofs for the presupposition. If we could prove it then it would not be the starting point. Supreme epistemological norms are inescapable. Even empiricism or evidentialism begins with axioms. Robert Reymond explains,
Believing that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7), that “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ” (Col. 2:3), and therefore that the triune God (and/or the self-attesting Christ) is the transcendental, necessary ground of all meaning, intelligibility and predication, the presuppositional apologist maintains that the truth of God’s self-authenticating Word should be presupposed from start to finish throughout one’s apologetic witness. Accordingly, while the presuppositionalist values logic he understands that apart from God there is no reason to believe that the laws of logic correspond universally to objective reality. While he values science he understands that apart from God there is no reliable basis for doing science. While he values ethics he understands that apart from God moral principles are simply changing conventions and today’s vices can become tomorrow’s virtues. While he affirms the dignity and significance of human personhood he understands that apart from God man is simply a biological machine, an accident of nature, a cipher. And while he values the concepts of purpose, cause, probability and meaning he understands that apart from God these concepts have no real basis or meaning. Therefore, he thinks the Christian evidentialist is being untrue to his own faith when he grants to the unbeliever the hypothetical possibility of this being a non-theistic world that can successfully function and be rightly understood in terms of the laws of logic and the human sciences. And to suggest that the law of noncontradiction, the “law of causality,” and “the basic reliability of sense perception” are more non-negotiably certain in this world than God himself is to deny the existence of the sovereign God of the universe “for whom and through whom and to whom are all things” (Rom. 11:36). To do so is also to abandon the Christ who “is before all things, in whom all things consist” (Col. 1:17), “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3), and without whom man can do nothing (John 15:5). He reminds the evidentialist that it is not God who is the felon on trial; men are the felons. It is not God’s character and word which are questionable; men’s are (Job 40:1, 8; Rom. 3:4; 9:20). And it is not the Christian who is the unauthorized intruder in this world. This is his Father’s world, and the Christian is “at home” in it[42].
John Frame also notes that “there is no ‘purely empirical’ inquiry. We never encounter ‘brute,’ that is, uninterpreted facts. We only encounter facts that have been interpreted in terms of our existing commitments[43].” All facts are they in terms of the purpose and interpretation of God. However, presuppositionalists want to begin with God, whereas evidentialists with man. Van Til points out how both Romanism and Arminianism have both altered the gospel of the sovereign grace of God, to give comfort to man in his desire to be autonomous from his Creator. This he argues produces a defective theology and a defective apologetic. In doing so, “they tell the natural man that he has the right idea about himself, the world and God so far as it goes, but that he needs some additional information about these subjects.” [44]
It is true, for instance, that atheists are able to think logically, prove things, use science and laws of morality, but it is that their worldview does not account for this. In regard to three of the most important issues philosophically that men must face- logic, science, and morality - the atheist has no answer in his worldview how to account rationally or objectively with those things. Greg Bahnsen in his debate with atheist Gordon Stein refutes that the laws of logic are mere conventions and not universal,
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 is impossible to prove anything. And that's because in the atheistic world you cannot justify, you cannot account for, laws in general: the laws of thought in particular, laws of nature, cannot account for human life, from the fact that it's more than electrochemical complexes in depth, and the fact that it's more than an accident. 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 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 what happens inside my brain. Therefore, what happens inside your brain is not a law. It doesn't necessarily correspond to what happens in mine. In fact, it can't be identical with what is inside my mind or brain, because we don't have the same brain. As 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 to limit debate is just define a new set of laws and ask for all who want the convention that says, “Atheism must be true or theism must be true, and we have the following laws that we conventionally adopt to prove it,” and see who’d be satisfied.
Bahnsen humorously concluded,
If there are no laws of morality, I'd just take out a gun right now and say, “OK, Dr. Stein, make my day: is there a God or not.” You see, if he says, “Oh no, you can’t murder me because there are laws of morality,” of course he has made my day, because I’ve won the debate. That shows that the atheist’s universe is not correct. But if he says “Oh no, there are no absolute standards; it's all by convention and stipulation,” then I just pull the trigger and I win the debate anyway. Except you wouldn’t expect me to win the debate in that fashion. Absolutely not. You came here expecting rational interchange.
There is fundamentally an antithesis in the way a believer or an unbeliever receives God’s knowledge. Rationalists and Empiricists have merely traded the exchanged infallible propositional revelation for fallible sense experience based on secular axioms. In a moment of candour, the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard who advocates atheistic evolutionism admitted concerning his fellow scientists, “Our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective “scientific method,” with individual scientists as logical and interchangeable robots, is self-serving mythology[45].” Previously in 1982, Gould also warned,
People need to realize that scientists are human beings like everybody else and that their pronouncements may arise from their social prejudices, as any of our pronouncements might. The public should avoid being snowed by the scientist’s line: “Don’t think about this for yourself, because it’s all too complicated[46].”
To counterarguments by other religious systems (such as Islam) that they also have explanatory power as the axiomatic starting point Clark simply responds: “Since all possible knowledge must be contained within the system and deduced from its first principles, the dogmatic answer must be found in the Bible itself. The answer is that faith is the gift of God. . . . The initiation of spiritual life, called regeneration, is the immediate work of the Holy Spirit. It is not produced by Abrahamic blood, nor by natural desire, nor by any act of human will.” Ultimately, then, for Calvin, Clark, and Van Til, we only truly know that the God of the Bible is the true God because of salvation through the illumination of our minds in regeneration.
Chapter Four
WITNESSING TO AN UNBELIEVER
The question arises naturally how to witness to an unbeliever when both parties have already adopted contradictory worldviews. Some like Abraham Kuyper in recognising the antithesis regarded apologetics as redundant. However, when objections are raised to Christianity, it is our duty to proclaim reasoned answers in defence against the enemies of God’s truth. The apostles quite obviously engaged in arguments with unbelievers, although they pointed out wrong ways to do this. Note the apostle Paul’s conduct,
Acts 9:22 But Saul increased the more in strength, and confounded the Jews which dwelt at Damascus, proving that this is very Christ.
Acts 17:2 And Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and three sabbath days reasoned with them out of the scriptures,
Acts 19:8-9 And he went into the synagogue, and spake boldly for the space of three months, disputing and persuading the things concerning the kingdom of God. But when divers were hardened, and believed not, but spake evil of that way before the multitude, he departed from them, and separated the disciples, disputing daily in the school of one Tyrannus.
As apologetics is use in evangelism, we often over look we are dealing with blinded sinners who rebel against the light of God by refusing to submit to His Lordship. It is deceptive to argue to an unbeliever that we have common ground and are utilising the same standards of truth, rationality, and knowledge as he is, as the unbeliever seeks to always subvert the truth by depravity. The unbeliever has an autonomous, rationalistic, secular worldview that is always antithetical to the faith of the believer. Evidential arguments such as historical evidence, logical evidence, or existential evidence will be evaluated by the unbeliever to its degree of veracity or probability by the secular assumptions of his worldview. Unsaved man has rebelled against the truth, although he knows it. This rebellion is morally, not intellectually rooted and so he needs a regenerated heart and mind, not more facts and reasons. For instance, the debate over abortion or creationism/evolution is not just about the evidence. As Bahnsen argues,
The only tool an apologete needs is the Word of God, for the sinner will either presuppose its truth and find Christianity to be coherent and convincing (given his spiritual condition and past experience) or he will reject it and never be able to come to a knowledge of the truth (Luke 16:31). Then Christ met with two travelers on the road to Emmaus and found them doubtful about the resurrection, He rebuked them for being slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken (Luke 24:25). Rather than offering them compelling evidence for His resurrection (by immediately opening their eyes to recognize Him), He made their hearts burn within them by expounding to them the Scriptures.
Therefore, for moral, methodological, material, and pragmatic reasons, we should see the impropriety of arguing for the resurrection of Christ in an evidentialist fashion. Although evidence has a part in the Christian apologetic, it is not the pivotal and foundational part. While we may momentarily silence the belligerent claim of the skeptic by showing that even on his tacit assumptions the resurrection is not a sheer impossibility (as evidence would indicate), our central defense of the faith had better be made of stronger stuff. As Paul at Athens, we must demand a complete, change of world-outlook and presupposition (based on the authority of God’s Word) and not just a mere addition of a few facts.
Therefore, the unbeliever must be confronted by the presuppositional truths of the Word of God, as this is what brings faith. Since they adhere to a different authority for their worldview, there is little point in trying to argue for the truth of Christianity without first shattering their intellectual stronghold. It is the underlying worldviews that need to be confronted, not simply evidences or experiences. Biblical apologetics is both defensive and offensive in nature by challenging the unbeliever. As Bahnsen says, “apologetics should bring out the irony of the fact that those who demand a defense from God are thereby the ones who in the end stand most in need of philosophical and personal defense.” We must always remember we are submitted to the Lordship of Christ and presuppose this in our apologetics as we call unbelievers to do the same. John Frame illustrates the problem:
These facts pose a problem for apologetics. Non-Christians do not share the presuppositions we have discussed. Indeed, they presuppose the contrary, as they suppress the truth. The job of the apologist, trusting in God’s grace, is to persuade the non-Christian that the biblical presuppositions are true. What sort of argument can he use? If his argument presupposes the truths of Scripture, then his conclusions will be the same as his presuppositions. He will argue from Christian presuppositions to Christian conclusions. But since the unbeliever will not grant the Christian presuppositions, he will not find the argument persuasive. But if the apologist presents an argument that does not presuppose the truths of Scripture, how can he be faithful to his Lord? And how can he produce an intelligible argument unless he presupposes those conditions that are necessary for intelligibility?
Many schools of apologetics (sometimes called “classical” or “traditional” or “evidentialist”) either ignore this question or take the second alternative: they present arguments that avoid any use of distinctively Christian presuppositions. When they take the second alternative, they defend their faithfulness to biblical revelation by saying that the presuppositions they adopt are neither distinctively Christian, nor distinctively non-Christian, but “neutral.”
Presuppositional apologists claim that there is no neutrality, invoking Jesus’ saying that “one cannot serve two masters” (Matt. 6:24). There can be no compromise between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world. Unbelief leads to distortion of the truth, exchanging the truth for a lie (Rom. 1:25). Only by trusting God’s Word can we come to a saving knowledge of Christ (John 5:24, 8:31, 15:3, Rom. 10:17). And trusting entails presupposing: accepting God’s Word as what it is, the foundation of all human knowledge, the ultimate criterion of truth and error (Deut. 18:18-19, 1 Cor. 14:37, Col. 2:2-4, 2 Tim. 3:16-17, 2 Pet. 1:19-21). So the apologetic argument, like all human inquiries into truth, must presuppose the truths of God’s Word.
Some presuppositionalist such as Gordon H. Clark, argue that although Scripture (like mathematics) cannot be proved as it is an axiom, we can test it and competing worldviews to explore (1) their logical consistency, and (2) which worldview is most useful in explaining the basic questions of life. At the end of his most celebrated book, A Christian View of Men and Things, Clark concludes, “that Christian theism is self-consistent and that several other philosophies are inconsistent, skeptical, and therefore erroneous.” [47] John Frame comments,
Clark admits that more than one system of thought could be logically consistent, and that fruitfulness is a relative and debatable question. So Clark’s method is more like an exploration than like a proof. By renouncing proof, he avoids the circularity of having to prove the axiom by means of the axiom. But if Christianity is not provable, how can Paul say in Romans 1:20 that the clarity of God’s self-revelation leaves unbelievers without excuse?
By contrast, Cornelius Van Til rejects the weakness of Clark’s arguments and recommends a kind of “indirect” argument:
The Christian apologist must place himself upon the position of his opponent, assuming the correctness of his method merely for argument’s sake, in order to show him that on such a position the “facts” are not facts and the “laws” are not laws. He must also ask the non-Christian to place himself upon the Christian position for argument’s sake in order that he may be shown that only upon such a basis do “facts” and “laws” appear intelligible[48].
Van Til argued that the great error of evidential apologetics was that they concluded that the truths of Christianity are probably true. Christ never gave empirical reasons for His statements on earth yet people accepted His authority as “Never man spake like this man” (John 7:46). When He spoke this resonated with the true elect. Van Til believed such an approach detracted from the certainty of faith and the absolute authority of Scripture as the written word of God. By contrast, he argued for a presuppositional apologetic by two steps. Firstly, an apologist should attempt to show that non-Christian worldview is incapable of accounting for rationality and morality and ultimately collapse into irrationalism. Within the unbeliever’s worldview, nothing is intelligible – not even objections to the Theistic viewpoint. In the most fundamental sense, unbelief destroys the basis for all knowledge. Van Til argues that we should challenge unbelieving assumptions in the nature of a “head-on collision.” Initially, questioning the unbeliever by letting them speak has the effect of putting them on the defensive and prevents them snapping that we are “twisting their words.”
The uniformity of nature is predicated on the assumption that the future will be like the past. Without this basic premise, science and indeed all reasoning would be impossible. At the very minimum an empiricist atheist’s worldview should be able to account for uniformity, which is a necessary precondition for science. Philosophers like David Hume exposed any attempt to argue inductively using naturalistic processes is flawed. James Nance a logic teacher at Logos School in Moscow, Idaho illustrates the differences between deductive logic and inductive logic,
Inductive logic draws conclusions from experience, conclusions which go beyond the premises but which can be strengthened by further experience as more data is made available. For example: Observations tell us that hammers fall faster than feathers, and big rocks dropped from a high bridge fall faster than coins. We conclude, inductively, that heavier objects always fall faster than lighter ones. Note that this conclusion is universal, and goes far beyond the initial observation. But then we see a video of an astronaut on the moon dropping a feather and a hammer, and see that they fall at the same speed. We find ourselves modifying our initial conclusion as we gather more data. This is the process of inductive reasoning. You can see that inductive logic is the logic of the experimental sciences.
The conclusions of inductive reasoning are either strong or weak, depending on how well the evidence supports the conclusion. The conclusions of deductive arguments, on the other hand, are either valid or invalid. If valid, the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. If the premises are true and the argument is valid, the conclusion must be true. For example, if God commands all men everywhere to repent, and you are a man, then you must repent. This is a valid, deductive argument. If the premises are true, the conclusion is certain. Inductive conclusions go beyond the premises, but deductive conclusions are contained within the premises. Finally, deductive arguments, to be valid, must employ universal premises (such as “All men must repent”), which the arguer believes his hearers will accept as true. Such premises are generally called axioms.
|Deduction |Induction |
|Based on axioms |Based on experience |
|Arguments are valid or invalid |Arguments are strong or weak |
|Conclusions are certain |Conclusions are probable |
The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia says, “Hume suggested two possible justifications (for induction) and rejected them both. The first justification is that, as a matter of logical necessity, the future must resemble the past. But, Hume pointed out, we can conceive of a chaotic, erratic world where the future has nothing to do with the past – or, more tamely, a world just like ours right up until the present, at which point things change completely. So there is nothing logically necessary about the principle of induction. The second justification, more modestly, appeals only to the past reliability of induction – it’s always worked before, so it will probably continue to work. But, Hume pointed out, this justification is using circular reasoning, justifying induction by an appeal that requires induction to gain any force. The problem of justifying induction is still with us.”
The atheist Bertrand Russell echoes this and stated in his book The Problems of Philosophy,
The inductive principle, however, is equally incapable of being proved by an appeal to experience. Experience might conceivably confirm the inductive principle as regards the cases that have been already examined; but as regards unexamined cases, it is the inductive principle alone that can justify any inference from what has been examined to what has not been examined. All arguments which, on the basis of experience, argue as to the future or the un-experienced parts of the past or present, assume the inductive principle; hence we can never use experience to prove the inductive principle without begging the question…Thus all knowledge which, on a basis of experience tells us something about what is not experienced, is based upon a belief which experience can neither confirm nor confute, yet which, at least in its more concrete applications, appears to be as firmly rooted in us as many of the facts of experience. The existence and justification of such beliefs…raises some of the most difficult and most debated problems of philosophy.
However, in attacking a non-Christian worldview we do not establish grounds per se for a Christian worldview. It may be that both his worldview and ours is false. Therefore, in the second place, the apologist then should follow this up by presenting the Biblical worldview as the only viable presuppositional foundation for thought and life. An atheistic worldview is incapable of accounting for the uniformity of nature, and as such is incapable of justifying the use of science. Therefore, an empirical epistemology cannot provide the justification for inductive reasoning.
However, the Christian worldview does provide the necessary fundamental assumption concerning human experience. We read in Colossians 1:16-17, “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” Therefore assuming the Christian worldview, we can posit that God created the world, and therefore this world reflects the uniformity that He Sovereignly imposes upon it.
Van Til’s approach is hence more indirect as he believes that practically we should encourage the unbeliever to state his worldview and then attack the reductio ad absurdum (i.e. reduce a point to its absurd conclusion) of the unbeliever’s worldview. He argues, “logical laws must operate in a vacuum unless they are based on the presupposition of Christian truth. They operate as laws of thinking implanted in man’s constitution as the image-bearer of God.” This will delineate the unintelligibility of the unbeliever’s position without reference to God. For instance, it is contradictory for atheists to believe that the universe is basically open and contingent i.e. anything can happen, but then argue that it is rationally structured by universal, immaterial laws of logic.
The Christian worldview gives true meaning to the laws of logic as we believes in universal, immaterial, invariant (something that does not change under a transformation) entities because God is himself omnipresent, immaterial, and invariant. Therefore, the laws of logic are not created by God but are contingent on God, as they reflect the way God has eternally thought. The law of non-contradiction stems from God’s self-consistent nature. God cannot deny Himself (2 Tim 2:13), and so, the manner in which God upholds the universe will necessarily be non-contradictory. Thus, rational reasoning would be impossible without the biblical God. In the atheist’s materialistic worldview these laws of logic are immaterial and therefore illusory. Despite this, he inconsistently steals these laws from the Christian worldview to argue against a theistic worldview. Jason Lisle of Answers in Genesis gives good answers to any atheist’s attempt to avoid this problem,
The atheist might say, “Well, I can reason just fine, and I don’t believe in God.” But this is no different than the critic of air saying, “Well, I can breathe just fine, and I don’t believe in air.” This isn’t a rational response. Breathing requires air, not a profession of belief in air. Likewise, logical reasoning requires God, not a profession of belief in Him. Of course the atheist can reason; it’s because God has made his mind and given him access to the laws of logic—and that’s the point. It’s because God exists that reasoning is possible. The atheist can reason, but within his own worldview he cannot account for his ability to reason.
The atheist might respond, “Laws of logic are conventions made up by man.” But conventions are (by definition) conventional. That is, we all agree to them and so they work—like driving on the right side of the road. But if laws of logic were conventional, then different cultures could adopt different laws of logic (like driving on the left side of the road). So, in some cultures it might be perfectly fine to contradict yourself. In some societies truth could be self-contradictory. Clearly that wouldn’t do. If laws of logic are just conventions, then they are not universal laws. Rational debate would be impossible if laws of logic were conventional, because the two opponents could simply pick different standards for reasoning. Each would be right according to his own arbitrary standard.
The atheist might respond, “Laws of logic are material—they are made of electro-chemical connections in the brain.” But then the laws of logic are not universal; they would not extend beyond the brain. In other words, we couldn’t argue that contradictions cannot occur on Mars, since no one’s brain is on Mars. In fact, if the laws of logic are just electro-chemical connections in the brain, then they would differ somewhat from person to person because everyone has different connections in their brain.
Sometimes an atheist will attempt to answer with a more pragmatic response: “We use the laws of logic because they work.” Unfortunately for him, that isn’t the question. We all agree the laws of logic work; they work because they’re true. The question is why do they exist in the first place? How can the atheist account for absolute standards of reasoning like the laws of logic? How can non-material things like laws exist if the universe is material only?
As a last resort, the atheist may give up a strictly materialistic view and agree that there are immaterial, universal laws. This is a huge concession; after all, if a person is willing to concede that immaterial, universal, unchanging entities can exist, then he must consider the possibility that God exists. But this concession does not save the atheist’s position. He must still justify the laws of logic. Why do they exist? And what is the point of contact between the material physical world and the immaterial world of logic? In other words, why does the material universe feel compelled to obey immaterial laws? The atheist cannot answer these questions. His worldview cannot be justified; it is arbitrary and thus irrational.
The atheistic world view is irrational and cannot consistently provide the presuppositions of intelligible experience, science, logic, or even morality. Even the agnostic physicist, Paul Davies concedes,
Even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested by a lawlike order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.
Our Lord when confronted by hostile crowds used the effects of a well placed question to make His point often:
Luke 20:4 The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men?
Luke 20:44 David therefore calleth him Lord, how is he then his son?
Mark 2:9 Whether is it easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk?
Christ also interrupted Nicodemus, who wanted to discuss theology with him, by making clear that he needed new presuppositions. In Proverbs 26:5 we are told, “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.” This means we need to expose to the unbelieving fool the true implications of his own worldview. The warning in Proverbs 26:5 “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him” is then seen as forbidding us to utilize the same methodology of the fool in searching for knowledge as this will collapse into irrationalism and relativism. As Bahnsen argues,
In the apologist’s case; lest you be like the fool, don’t answer him according to his folly, foolish presuppositions, but answer him according to your own revealed presuppositions and outlook. Such a procedure can resolve the tension, the debate, the antithesis, between competing authorities and conflicting starting points because it asks, in essence, which position provides the preconditions for observation in science, for reasoning and logic, for absolutes in ethics, and for meaningful discourse between the believer and the unbeliever. The presuppositional approach is basically a setting out of the preconditions of intelligibility for all human thinking.
Often unbelievers have a high level of moral indignation about issues such the environment or discrimination of sodomites. However, on the presuppositions of their worldview, they have no objective basis for their indignation. In the absence of God, reality is simply the random movements of atomic particles, so why should it matter which way the atoms move? This delineates how atheists surreptitiously borrow many of the principles of Christianity in order to attack Theistic belief. For instance when a materialist argues on the basis of materialistic axioms he has no material basis for such an argument in the first place. So in reality, he is cutting off the branch he’s sitting on. They are like the man who denied the existence of air right to his last dying breath! It is not that you cannot be an atheist and have morality – it is just that you cannot account for it. People use the Laws of gravity without understanding them. Ultimately, as a rebellious son of Adam, man is cognisant of the truth of God, but despises it. Bahnsen shows the Van Tillian thought,
Van Til says that unbelievers cannot even do math or the simplest operations in science. By that he means the unbeliever's espoused worldview or philosophy cannot make counting or measuring intelligible. Now why is that? Briefly, because counting involves an abstract concept of law, or universal, if there is no order. If there is no law, if there is no universal, if there is no order, then there is no sequential counting. But the postulation of an abstract universal order contradicts the unbeliever's view of the universe as a random or chance realm of material particulars. Counting calls for abstract entities which are in fact uniform and orderly. The unbeliever says the world is not abstract - but that the world is only material; the universe is not uniform, but is a chance realm and random. And so by rejecting God's word - which account for a universal order or law - the unbeliever would not in principle be able to count and measure things. As it is, believers do in fact count and do in fact measure and practice science, but they cannot give a philosophical explanation of that fact. Or as Van Til loved to put it: unbelievers can count, but they cannot account for counting.
Ken Ham gives a good illustration of how to do this,
A young man approached me at a seminar and stated, ‘Well, I still believe in the big bang, and that we arrived here by chance random processes. I don’t believe in God.’ I answered him, ‘Well, then obviously your brain, and your thought processes, are also the product of randomness. So you don’t know whether it evolved the right way, or even what right would mean in that context. Young man, you don’t know if you’re making correct statements or even whether you’re asking me the right questions.’
On another occasion, a man came to me after a seminar and said, ‘Actually, I’m an atheist. Because I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in absolutes, so I recognize that I can’t even be sure of reality.’ I responded, ‘Then how do you know you’re really here making this statement?’ ‘Good point,’ he replied. ‘What point?’ I asked. The man looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘Maybe I should go home.’ I stated, ‘Maybe it won’t be there.’ ‘Good point,’ the man said. ‘What point?’ I replied. [49]
Jonathan Sarfati also observes,
Man can initiate thoughts and actions; they are not fully determined by deterministic laws of brain chemistry. This is a deduction from the biblical teaching that man has both a material and immaterial aspect (e.g. Genesis 35:18, 1 Kings 17:21–22, Matthew 10:28). This immaterial aspect of man means that he is more than matter, so his thoughts are likewise not bound by the makeup of his brain. But if materialism were true, then ‘thought’ is just an epiphenomenon of the brain, and the results of the laws of chemistry. Thus, given their own presuppositions, materialists have not freely arrived by their conclusion, because it was predetermined by brain chemistry. But then, why should their brain chemistry be trusted over mine, since both obey the same infallible laws of chemistry? So in reality, if materialists were right, then they can’t even help what they believe (including their belief in materialism!). Yet often call themselves ‘freethinkers’, overlooking the glaring irony that their thoughts are governed by the fixed laws of chemistry! Genuine initiation of thought is an unsuperable problem for materialism.
Man can think rationally and logically, and that logic itself is objective. This is a deduction from the fact that he was created in God’s image (Genesis 1:26–27), and from the fact that Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity, is the logos. This ability to think logically has been impaired but not eliminated by the Fall of man into sinful rebellion against his creator. (The Fall means that sometimes the reasoning is flawed, and sometimes the reasoning is valid but from the wrong premises. So it is folly to elevate man’s reasoning above that God has revealed in Scripture.) But if evolution were true, then there would be selection only for survival advantage, not rationality.
The essence of the Presuppositional Apologetic is to show that the unbeliever's worldview drives him to subjectivity, irrationalism, and moral relativism. It is like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. A philosophical rationalist must be challenged to prove why he believes that his reason is the supreme arbiter of truth, which exposes the circularity of his argument in appealing to human reason. By drawing this information out from the unbeliever it will demonstrate: the contradictions of his worldview (i.e., morality is relative, but he will not consistently live his life on that basis); the arbitrariness of his position (i.e., absolute morals exist, but he cannot account for absolutes without God); the weaknesses of his supreme norms (i.e., he may lay claim to knowledge through empirical observation, but he cannot demonstrate the scientific method by the scientific method, etc). Richard B. Ramsey writes:
The Christian alternative is to accept God as the judge and source of truth. When you keep backing up a Christian to his ‘final answer,’ it should be that ‘God says so.’ It is true because God says so. How do I know God says so? Because He says so! As a Christian, I cannot back up any further than God Himself; I cannot elevate something above Him. If I appeal to an authority superior to God, I have just contradicted my own worldview and destroyed the foundation underneath me.
This of course is in contrast, as Ramsay points out, to the non-Christian who “essentially makes himself the judge of what is true and false and right and wrong.”
A good challenge to a person who does not believe in objective truth is to ask him why he is debating you, as by doing so he is conceding that he believes at least his position is objectively true! Apologist Greg Koukl gives a good challenge to a philosophy teacher who taught this,
Professor, I am confused about your comments. Is this insight you have offered us true or false? I don’t think you’d knowingly teach us something false, so you must think it is true. And that’s what is confusing me. But if this is just you’re perception of reality, why should anyone take it seriously? We have our own perceptions. Since none of us have objective truth, who’s to say who is right or who is wrong? can you clear this up for me?
Those who advocate moral relativism do not want to have this practiced on them. Unbelieving moral relativists self-refute themselves when they claim:
( “All truth is relative” – are you relatively sure?
( “There is no such thing as truth” – is this statement the truth then?
( “There is no such thing as absolutes” – are you absolutely sure?
( “All truths are meaningless” – is your statement meaningless then?
( “Never say never” – you just did!
( “What is true for you is true for you” – so, I can never be wrong?
( “You should be tolerant of all religious beliefs” – do you tolerate my religious intolerance belief of pluralism?
( “You should not judge” – are you judging me? Clearly you have no problem applying a concept while declaring that it doesn’t exist. As Alan Keyes states, “Anyone who asserts that people should not be ‘judgmental’ and then decries racism or homophobia is guilty of the same illogic.”
( “I accept the principle that one should only believe in things that have evidence to support them” – do you have evidence to support this principle?
( “I can only believe in what I can see” – but are not beliefs, such as the one expressed here, conceptual and not visible?
( “You can only know truth by experience” – what experience taught you that truth?
( “We should not tell others how to live” – are you not telling me?
( “It is wrong to force your views or values on other people” – are you not doing that to me?
( “You cannot legislate morality” – can legislation ever not have a moral element?
( “Everyone’s view is a product of his culture or persona biases” – are yours not then?
( “Language is not meaningful” - what do you mean by that?
They are like the man that said, “I used to believe in reincarnation, but that was in a former life” or the man who counselled “always go to other people’s funerals or they will not go to yours.” Prof Thio li-Ann a nominated MP spoke recently in the Singapore Parliament and made this point, “Bald assertions must not be allowed to masquerade as arguments. For example, chanting the mantra of being “inclusive” evades the more basic question of what to include or exclude, and why.” Douglas Wilson also observed,
Naturalism (the philosophy that underpins evolution, namely that matter and energy are all there is) cannot provide ethics; it simply is not capable of providing meaning. This problem runs deep, undercutting even the basis of rationality itself. In the atheist’s naturalistic worldview, thoughts and reasoning are just the results of chemical reactions in the brain. ‘A debate and a couple of soda bottles in the front of a room fizzing are just different types of chemical reactions. The atheist cannot put forward, within his own framework, a justification for why reasoning is trustworthy, or even worthwhile. Of course, as a Christian, I believe we can reason as human beings created in the image of God. But the atheist can’t account for reason if there is no God. On naturalistic principles, there’s no explanation for why a debate is more important than the two soda bottles fizzing. So you could say that, by showing up for the debate, the atheist has already conceded.’
Atheist William Provine, professor of the history of science at Cornell University admits,
Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us, loud and clear, and I must say that these are basically Darwin’s views: there are no gods, no purposive forces of any kind, no life after death (when I die I am absolutely certain that I’m gonna be completely dead, that’s just all, that’s gonna be the end of me), there is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans either … The question is, ‘Can atheistic humanism offer us very much?’ Well sure, it can give you intellectual satisfaction, and I’m a heck of a lot more intellectually satisfied now that I don’t have to cling to the fairytales that I believed when I was a kid. So life may have no ultimate meaning but I sure think it can have lots of proximate meaning[50].
The unbeliever thus behaves like a paranoid man with a false interpretation of facts because of a deluded and perverted world view. Frame explains,
There is something enormously irrational about the unbeliever’s whole enterprise. Like Satan, he knows God, yet he disowns him. He knows that his actions deserve death (Rom. 1:32), yet he does them anyway. He knows that rebellion against God is doomed, yet he rebels anyway. There is a craziness about sin. In saying that I do not at all mean to reduce the unbeliever’s responsibility, as might be suggested by the modern medical model of “mental illness.” The craziness is chosen; it is the unbeliever’s responsibility. He would rather live in a dream world, a world of his own creation, than to acknowledge God as Lord. Therefore he contends against reality. As apologists, we must seek to bring him back.
Van Til held to the position that the Ontological Trinity is the source from whom all other facts derive their meaning and intelligibility. In a Christian worldview we can demonstrate a legitimate source for logic, rationality, reality, purpose, morality, etc. It is also a legitimate exercise to expose an unbelievers’ use of logical fallacies, self-contradictions etc. For instance, the atheist’s dogmatic assertions turn out to no more than arbitrary personal preferences. Van Til would often use the illustration of a little girl on a train slapping on father, but points out that she could not have done so if she was not sitting on his knee. Van Til uses this incident to demonstrate that the unbeliever must depend on the principles of a Theistic worldview in order to refute it. This approach is self-refuting – like stating “I am lying now.” Van Til would often argue that an unbelieving worldview was thus both rationalistic and irrationalistic at the same time. This can be shown by pointing out that the greatest form of irrationality is to believe in rationality when that rationality was supposedly ultimately produced by non-rational random collisions of atomic particles. Atheists are like people who can immediately tell when a fine painting has been spoiled by vandalism, but who don’t believe that an artist produced the painting. C S Lewis made this point eloquently,
If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset[51].
Another good example is the genetic determinist who wants to argue for individualism and free will or the moral relativist who wants to impose anti-discriminatory legislation. This dialectic characterises the humanistic worldview. We must question our humanistic listener to determine the emphasis he gives as some major in rationalism and minor in irrationalism. As Greg Bahnsen explains,
The unbeliever says that he knows that miracles are impossible, that a personal almighty God does not exist, that ethical principles are not normative across cultural boundaries, etc. Or the unbeliever says that the believer cannot know that the Bible is God’s Word, or that Jehovah exists, or that Christ was His Son, etc. The Christian apologist must seek to uncover what this unbeliever’s personal convictions are regarding metaphysical and (coordinated with it) epistemological matters which are relevant: e.g., what is the nature of things which are real, how does the world operate, where did it come from, what is man’s place in the world, what is man’s nature, are there moral or epistemological norms which are not chosen by the individual, what are the criteria of truth, what are the proper methods of knowing, is certainty possible, etc.? Once the believer has a fairly good grasp of the general kind of worldview assumed (or explicitly advocated) by the unbeliever, we can suggest that it should be compared to the worldview of the Christian.
The Christian can show that the particular objections raised by the unbeliever would, within the Christian outlook, not prove to be legitimate objections or intellectual problems at all. Thus, who really “knows” what he is talking about, the Christian or the non-Christian? The cogency of each side’s theory and practice of knowing must be tested within the broader worldviews of which they are a part. The apologist explains how rationality, communication, meaning, science, morality, man’s redemption and renewal are quite understandable, meaningful, coherent, or intelligible within the Biblical worldview-within “the picture” of thinking God’s thoughts after Him. The apologist then engages in an internal critique of the unbeliever’s worldview to show that it is (1) arbitrary, and/or (2) inconsistent with itself, and/or (3) lacking the preconditions for the intelligibility of knowledge (language, logic, science, morality, redemption, etc.). Since that is the case, the unbeliever cannot “know” the things which he urges against Christianity-indeed, could not know anything at all and loses all claim to rationality. The Christian has proven the rationality and necessity of His scripturally based worldview[52].
It is true that unbelievers can use mathematics, logic reason to engage in rational activity. However, he can do this intellectually, but he cannot give an account of it within the worldview he has advocated or espoused. In doing so, the sceptic is borrowing from the Christian worldview, which is tied up in their knowledge of God (Rom 1:19; Job 12:7-9) who is the source of man’s intellectual efforts. Thomas Brooks once said the world was “but a sheet of royal paper, written all over with the wisdom and power of God.” John Calvin argued, “There is within the human mind and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity. . . . To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty.” As Sam Storms comments, “when man rejects God he does not cease to be religious. Indeed, he becomes religious in order to reject God. He substitutes for God a deity of his own making, often himself.” He also comments,
Calvin has read Paul rightly. His conclusions are therefore on the mark. There is no such thing as an honest atheist. There are those aplenty who with their mouths scoff at the notion of God and formulate their arguments to “prove” he does not exist. Perhaps there are even some who from years of willful rebellion and self-induced hardening of heart have anesthetized their souls to God’s powerful presence. Perhaps there are some (many?) whom God has simply “given over” (Romans 1:24,26,28) to the deeper cultivation of their self-delusion, some (many?) who have degenerated to such a degree that they’ve rendered themselves impervious to the clearest and most persuasive of evidence. But in any and every case, they are still “without excuse” (Romans 1:20). The plea of ignorance will not suffice at the final bar of judgment.
Do not go in search of an honest atheist. You won’t find one. Turn, instead, to the heavens above which “declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1a). Turn, instead, to the sky that “proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1b). “Lift up your eyes on high and see” the trillions and trillions of stars and worship the One who “brings out their host by number” and calls “them all by name,” whose power alone sustains them so that “not one is missing” (Isaiah 40:26). And then worship! And then share these glorious truths with a “professing” atheist and direct him to the revelation of Christ in Scripture and pray that the God who said “Let light shine out of darkness” might shine in his heart “to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).
Unbelievers do not actually live in conformity with their espoused beliefs. The key reason is that they actually live in the world God created and bears His image, despite their attempt to distort that image and suppress the truth of God. As Bahnsen has said, it is like a person arguing that air does not exist, all the while breathing air as a precondition for his ability to argue. An unbeliever is living on borrowed capital as he enjoys a world of moral values, meaning, order, and beauty, but he paradoxically then denies the only source that makes this possible. Van Til gives a good example of a conversation with an unbeliever in Why I Believe in God,
To be “without bias” is only to have a particular kind of bias. The idea of “neutrality” is simply a colorless suit that covers a negative attitude toward God. At least it ought to be plain that he who is not for the God of Christianity is against Him. You see, the world belongs to Him, and that you are His creature, and as such are to own up to that fact by honoring Him whether you eat or drink or do anything else. God says that you live, as it were, on His estate. And His estate has large ownership signs placed everywhere, so that he who goes by even at seventy miles an hour cannot but read them. Every fact in this world, the God of the Bible claims, has His stamp indelibly engraved upon it. How then could you be neutral with respect to such a God? Do you walk about leisurely on a Fourth of July in Washington wondering whether the Lincoln Memorial belongs to anyone? Do you look at “Old Glory” waving from a high flagpole and wonder whether she stands for anything? Does she require anything of you, born an American citizen as you are? You would deserve to suffer the fate of the “man without a country” if as an American you were neutral to America. Well, in a much deeper sense you deserve to live forever without God if you do not own and glorify Him as your Creator. You dare not manipulate God's world and least of all yourself as His image-bearer, for you own final purposes. When Eve became neutral as between God and the Devil, weighing the contentions of each as though they were inherently on the face of them of equal value, she was in reality already on the side of the devil!
However, in any factual discussion, it is vital to draw a distinction between the ideas both sides have prior to the interaction and those we gain in the course of the discussion. This is important in drawing out the assumptions the unbeliever has that led him to his conclusion including his methodology of investigation. For instance, scientific imperialism” or “scientism” (the belief that science alone yields genuine knowledge) can be shown to be self-refuting because this claim cannot be deduced scientifically. Giants of the faith, like Abraham, are contrasted favourably in Scripture with those like Eve who, in Gen. 3:6, allowed the evidence of her eyes to take precedence over the Word of God. As Bahnsen shows,
Because all autonomous perspectives take man’s interpretation of the world to be “original”-to be the primary ordering of particulars or “rationalizing” (making systematic sense out of) the brute facts, it puts man at the center of the knowing process-and pays the price for doing so by slipping in subjectivism and skepticism ultimately (when consistent and driven to the logical outcome of his presuppositions). The only alternative-the Christian worldview-places the creative and providential activity of the Triune God “back of” all of man’s experiences and intellectual efforts, thereby solving the fundamental problems of epistemology which leave the unbelieving critic nowhere to stand. Only Christianity can account for or make sense of the intellectual accomplishments of the unbeliever. The critic of the faith has been secretly presupposing the truth of the faith even as he argues against it; his own arguments would be, upon analysis, meaningless unless they were wrong and Christian theism were true[53].
This will result in the following,
the powerful essence of that presuppositional argument is just this: “The only ‘proof’ of the Christian position is that unless its truth is presupposed there is no possibility of ‘proving’ anything at all.” What the Christian sets forth as the Bible’s worldview-as authoritatively revealed by God-is the indispensable foundation for proof itself-for the intelligibility of reason and experience, the ability to make sense of knowing anything whatsoever. At this point, the unbeliever’s choices are either to acknowledge the truth revealed by God’s Word (and repent of his sins, including intellectual autonomy) or to reject rationality itself. He had demanded that the Christian “give a reason” for his firm conviction (“hope”) about Christ and His Word (cf. 1 Peter 3:15), and the non-Christian must now accept the Christian's reasoning (involving his concrete worldview) or retreat from the task and normativity of “giving reasons” (for rationality, intelligibility, meaning, logic, science, morality, etc.). In either case, the apologetical encounter has been successful for, and in favor of the truth of, the Christian position.[54]
Some may argue that this approach will mean that other Theistic religions win by default but Bahnsen shows how other religions will fail also as ‘the only religious concepts which can make philosophical sense out of life are those definite, concrete, truths revealed infallibly by God in His own word.” He takes the example of Islam:
In some people’s minds it is the Muslim faith, however, which presents a threat to presuppositional apologetics because, it is imagined, Islam can counter(feit) each move in the Christian's argument. This too is an inaccurate preconception. The two worldviews are dissimilar in pivotal ways when one reflects on Islam’s unitarianism, fatalism, moral concepts, lack of redemption, etc. Islam can be internally critiqued on its own presuppositions. Take an obvious example. The Koran acknowledges the words of Moses, David, and Jesus to be the words of prophets sent by Allah -- in which case the Koran may be, on its own terms, refuted because of its contradictions with earlier revelation (cf. Deuteronomy 13:1-5)….Then again, the Islamic worldview teaches that God is holy and just toward sin, but (unlike the theology of the Bible - see here the words of Moses, David, and Jesus) there can indeed be “salvation” where guilt remains unremitted by the shedding of blood of a substitute for the sinner. The legalism of Islam (good works weighed against bad) does not address this problem because a person's previous bad works are not changed by later good ones, but continue on one's record in the very sight Allah (who supposedly cannot tolerate sin but must punish it).
We can then invite the unbeliever to try viewing the world through Christian Theistic glasses and note the difference it will make. No atheist can stand long in the ring with the infallible Word of the living God without getting out or collapsing in defeat. At the conclusion of such an approach, the unbeliever will have two options:
1. Acknowledge the truth, or
2. Reject rationality
USE OF EVIDENCE
Evidences are useful only once we have the same philosophy of the facts. For example, creationist arguments are useful evidential arguments after we have accepted the fact of the Genesis account. Presuppositional Apologetic does not discount the use of evidences in apologetic reasoning, but rejects their use in appealing to the authority of the unbeliever’s autonomous reasoning. Man’s deepest and most pressing need is to be confronted with the Word of God that alone can generate saving faith. We must never forget that it is the Word that is powerful (Isa 55:11; Rom 1:16; Heb 4:12). God gave Adam his purpose for living by Words (Gen 1:28), and the fall was blatant rebellion to God’s Word (Gen 2:16; 3:11). God’s Word of God must be our ultimate criterion of truth. Education and clever logic does not change hearts; we just get educated depraved sinners.
Evidential arguments are useful as a testimony, not as a true defence of the faith, but as a means of removing obstacles to true faith and casting doubt on other belief systems. Evidential arguments are not provable but they can be used to cast doubt upon equally un-provable anti-Theistic arguments such as evolution. As a refutation of their arguments one can point out various evidential arguments that undermine their position and delineate that they are already cognisant of God’s existence. Dr Alan Cairns explains,
On the presupposition of the Ontological Trinity, each form of argument has merit and appears in Scripture. But on any other presupposition, no argument can demonstrate the truth of God’s existence, for truth cannot be established by presupposing a lie. A consistently Christian way of arguing for God’s existence rests upon the implications of God’s revelations of Himself as the I AM. God is. He is not one fact among others, to be proved as a mathematical formula or logical proposition may be proved. He is not the most probable way of explaining the observable data of the universe that may be satisfactorily interpreted without reference to Him at all. He is the necessary ground of all facts and all predication. The only reason there is anything to know, and the only reason anything has any meaning so as to be knowable, is the reality that God is. He is back of all the facts of the universe giving them reality and meaning (John 1:1-3; Col 1:17).
Because of the truth of this line of argument we may say that it is only the presupposition of the great I AM that the facts of the universe “fit.” If they find their true meaning in God their Creator they cannot be consistently interpreted on any other basis than the acceptance of God’s existence. Without God, they become a meaningless jumble. Thus, one of the uses of rational argument is to shew that any other presupposition than that of the Ontological Trinity of Scripture is incapable of making sense of the facts of the universe. It is only because God is that anything is (Psa 19:1-3; Rom 1:19-20)
John Frame gives another more sophisticated way of avoiding the charge of circularity,
I would say that it is best for presuppositionalists to respond to the question of circularity as follows: (1) As Van Til says, circular argument of a kind is unavoidable when we argue for an ultimate standard of truth. One who believes that human reason is the ultimate standard can argue that view only by appealing to reason. One who believes that the Bible is the ultimate standard can argue only by appealing to the Bible. Since all positions partake equally of circularity at this level, it cannot be a point of criticism against any of them. (2) Narrowly circular arguments, like “the Bible is God’s Word, because it is God’s Word” can hardly be persuasive. But more broadly circular arguments can be. An example of a more broadly circular argument might be “The Bible is God’s Word, because it makes the following claims…, makes the following predictions that have been fulfilled…, presents these credible accounts of miracles…, is supported by these archaeological discoveries…, etc.” Now this argument is as circular as the last if, in the final analysis, the criteria for evaluating its claims, its predictions, its accounts of miracles, and the data of archaeology are criteria based on a biblical worldview and epistemology. But it is a broader argument in the sense that it presents more data to the non-Christian and challenges him to consider it seriously.
MODE OF PRESENTATION
We should never compromise on the truths of Scripture just to gain a hearing. Too many are willing to give away Genesis 1-3 too soon hoping to get a more favourable hearing for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. All this does is to scratch where people itch, hoping that they will be more open to the gospel because you have earned their trust. We should never be intimidated by someone’s reputation or academic scholarship. Our primary concern should be “What pleases God?” and not “What pleases the unbeliever?” It is one thing for them to inform you of their opinion, but few will be able to logically and consistently show you why they hold it. This is where a “scholarly” unbeliever is at his most vulnerable. Don’t settle for opinions. Often their reason is illogical, their facts mistaken and they are influenced by their presuppositional biases. We should be confident in our message but not in ourselves.
Whilst we are commanded never to dilute the truth of the Word of God or reflect God as inconsistent (2 Tim 2:13), we are told to season our speech with salt. We can disagree with those of opposing viewpoints and even refuse to speak to them without being disagreeable. Peter tells us to “be courteous” (1Pet 3:8) and instructs us to engage in apologetics with proper attitudes toward both the non-Christians with whom we are speaking and the Lord about whom we are speaking, “with meekness and fear” (1Pet 3:15). It is not wrong to be assertive or challenging, but we should avoid being abusive. We are looking to at the very least “put a stone in their shoe” by making them uncomfortable. Paul wrote to Timothy, “And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient” (2Tim 2:24). The besetting sin of apologetics is intellectual pride and we must be “speaking the truth in love” (Eph 4:15). We should heed Blaise Pascal, who wrote, “it is false piety to preserve peace at the expense of truth. It is also false zeal to preserve truth at the expense of charity.”
We must never be content with simply superficial answers to difficult intellectual questions, but search the Scriptures in order to answer every man. Christian apologetics is not served by puerile obscurantism and banal generalities. Francis Schaeffer’s apologetic motto was that we must give “honest answers to honest questions.” Many unbelievers do have good questions, but the Bible has the perfect answers. The Apostle Paul was fully trained to reason with the Jewish leaders from the Scriptures, “he expounded and testified the kingdom of God, persuading them concerning Jesus, both out of the law of Moses, and out of the prophets, from morning till evening” (Acts 28:23). However, conversely Hosea 4:6 warns that ignorance of God’s Word is dangerous as “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”
However, there are times when we should simply avoid the argument and not engage. Christ warned “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you” (Matt 7:6). Other times when confronting apostates, “Jesus gave him no answer” (John 19:9). If the unbeliever wants to leave let them go, but try and give them something tangible such as a tract of leaflet to ponder later. Finally, we should always be humbly appreciative of where the true knowledge and power of this world lies, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” (2 Cor 4:7). Christian humility is an arresting apologetic in and of itself.
Chapter Five
EVIDENTIAL ARGUMENTS FOR EXISTENCE OF GOD
“The greatest question of our time,” argues historian Will Durant, “is not communism versus individualism, not Europe versus America, not even East versus the West; it is whether men can live without God.” We are living in the age when this question is being tested to the limits. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dissident Soviet author once opined,
If I were asked today the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that has swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Atheism is defined as the “disbelief in the existence of God or gods[55].” Theism, by contrast, is the “belief in the existence of God or gods [56].” This certitude of atheistic belief is incredible when you consider that even prominent atheists like Thomas Edison admit: “We don’t know a millionth of one percent about anything.” Indeed, we still don’t know what 90% of the universe is made of. What is gravity? What are the fundamental particles of matter such as electrons, quarks, protons composed of? What is energy? Why is it a gram of rose petals contains an identical amount[57] of energy as a gram of uranium? We don’t even know how these things work let alone why. It certainly therefore takes faith to be an atheist.
“But you cannot see God,” a student complained to me. “True,” I replied, “but you cannot see electrons, music, magnetic fields, your mind or the wind, yet you do not doubt their existence.” Believing in God is not like believing in the fairy godmother but more like believing in sub-atomic particles. The process is identical as one must study the evidence that you can see in order to conclude the existence of something you cannot see. The Russian astronaut, Major Gherman Titov, who on August 7, 1961 became the second man to orbit the earth, boasted when attending the World’s Fair that he had looked around space “very attentively” but had not seen God or any angels. His comments led someone to wittily reply: “Had he stepped out of his space-suit he would have!”
Another common complaint is that there is not enough evidence for the existence of God. The famous atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell was once asked, “If you meet God after you die, what will you say to Him to justify your unbelief?” “I will tell Him that He did not give me enough evidence,” Russell proudly replied. The Bible tells us unequivocally that there is more than enough evidence to show God exists.
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse (Rom 1:20)
The problem isn’t about lack of evidence but simply a suppression or willful neglect of the evidence. As Abraham Lincoln said:
I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God
In this section we will evaluate some of this evidence but we cannot do anything about the stubborn pride of a man like Prof. Thomas Nagel of New York University who said:
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that[58].
Often the charge that is leveled against Christians is that they blindly believe in faith. This claim pre-supposes that atheists alone are the guardians of reason in contrast to those “irrational religionists.” The truth is that our whole lives are based on faith. We have faith that our dentist and doctor are qualified to treat us, we have faith that the brakes in our car will work when we apply them, we have faith that our milk and sugar in our cornflakes have been produced to the standards claimed by the manufacturers. You cannot live life without faith. David Hume, the eighteenth century philosopher, railed against theism boasting that the test for anything meaningful was:
Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion[59].
The irony here for Hume is that his own test does not pass the test! If to be meaningful a belief has to be numerically or scientifically verified, then Hume’s test is meaningless as it cannot be verified in this way. So, before committing the Bible to the flames, perhaps Hume should light it with his own books! As one commentator put it,
Unfortunately, Hume'sHH
Hume's standard dooms his own works to ashes. Of course, thorough-going relativists may well shrug off the charge of inconsistency by objecting that, since they are repudiating logic, why should they be concerned with consistency? The difficulty is that, once they leave the shelter of their studies, even relativists must behave rationally in order to survive in their daily lifes. They can hardly stop reading newspapers, traffic signs, and labels on medicine bottles. The fact that they cannot live out their worldview demonstrates its practical, as well as rational, absurdity.
It takes just as much faith to be an atheist (indeed, more as we will show in this book) than to believe in God. For to be atheistic concerning religious beliefs requires the atheist being a believer in a completely different series of beliefs! If we cannot see God, then we should evaluate the testifying evidence to the Scriptural statements for His existence using the same method we use to discover those things that we cannot see, namely their effects.
There are diverse and complicated arguments to evidence the proposition that God exists. In this section, however, we will only look at a summary of five of the simpler to understand of these.
(1) COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
In 1916 a young German born scientist of Jewish extraction called Albert Einstein published a paper detailing a new theory of the origin of the universe. Einstein, who had mixed educational success growing up (having once failed an exam to qualify as a teacher), held a research position in the Prussian Academy of Sciences together with a non-teaching chair at the University of Berlin. His paper was to have monumental historical significance and would make Einstein world famous.
Einstein’s mathematical theorem of General Relativity suggested that the known universe is expanding and had a definite beginning to all time, all space and all matter. Before that, nothing existed and the laws of physics break down. Up to this time, atheists had clung to the idea that the universe was eternal. Einstein’s theorem was to have devastating implications for this much cherished belief. After Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity (TGR) many scientists, including Einstein (who called it “irritating”), were unhappy with the implications of his discovery, as they wanted to believe the Universe never had a beginning. When British eclipse expeditions in 1919 appeared to confirm his predictions, Einstein was hailed as a genius by the popular press.
In 1927 Einstein’s theory achieved international scientific recognition when astronomer Edwin Hubble was the first to actually observe the expansion of the universe through his 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson Astronomy in California. Hubble recorded observing a discernable difference in the colour of light from different galaxies within 6 x lO17 miles of the Earth was receding over time. This was substantive evidence that the galaxies were moving apart and the universe was expanding. Even Einstein was forced to admit, albeit reluctantly:
New observations by Hubble... make it appear likely that the general structure of the universe is not static
Today most scientists now accept that the vast bulk of observational scientific evidence supports TGR, which implies the universe had a beginning and is expanding! Leading atheist, Anthony Flew in a debate in 1998 speaking about TGR admits this and states:
If it was a matter of my preference, I would certainly prefer a cyclical universe exploding and contracting, and so on. This idea has apparently been empirically ruled out…it is certainly the dominant theory today and the one, therefore, we have to work with[60].
TGR is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for what is referred to traditionally by philosophers as the Cosmological Argument. The Cosmological Argument is simply the argument from the beginning of the world. The form of this argument is relatively straightforward.
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being.
2. The universe had a beginning.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being.
The fundamental basis for modern science is the Law of Causality, which simply expresses that everything that had a beginning had a cause. It is conceptually similar to the statement that whatever has an effect has a cause. If we didn’t have this law, then all science would be meaningless for science is fundamentally a search for causes. If someone tells you they don’t believe in this law, simply ask them “What caused you to come to that conclusion?” World-famous physicist, author and evolutionist Paul Davies accepts, “There is no known law of physics able to create information from nothing.” It also creates another problem. John Frame explains,
That every event in the world has a cause means that everything in the world happens for some reason. But suppose that there is no first cause at the beginning of the process. In that case, there is no complete explanation, no complete reason why any event takes place. If there is no first cause, the process of explanation keeps going on and on- an infinite regression in which there is no ending point. But if there is no end, then there is no “cognitive rest.”
The world cannot be causeless as it is not self-existent and self-explanatory. The order of the material world is linked to the order of rationality, logic, and morality. That only can come from a Personal Being. The search for causes must ultimately rest on the Triune God.
Some sceptics claim that Premise 1 is wrong and maybe something comes from nothing! Imagine if Christians taught such absurd theology – we would be mocked in every newspaper and science journal with “join the church that believes trillions of stars came from nothing by nothing!” or referred derisively as the church with a holy book that says: “in the beginning nothing created something.” Someone quipped, “if your bank account has no balance, there is no sense in checking the statement every month to see if you have earned interest!” To paraphrase the atheist, Christopher Hitchens, “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” As Harvey Bluedorn observed,
Men simply become fools trying to deny their Creator. Consider the Big Bang theory for a moment. There is no Creator, so the universe created itself. First there was nothing, then it exploded, and all of the complex and intricate order – from the atom to the DNA molecule, from planets to galaxies, from genes to life, from viruses to man – it all came from that chaotic explosion breaking down for billions of years. We have to be very desperate and go to college for a very long time in order to become fanciful enough to dream up a theory like this, or stupid enough to believe it.
Atheist philosopher, Prof. Kai Nielsen sums it up rather well when he illustrates:
Suppose you suddenly hear a loud bang…and you ask me, “What caused that bang?” And I reply, “Nothing, it just happened.” You would not accept that. In fact, you would find my reply quite unintelligible[61].
So, if Premise 1 is incontrovertibly true can we show that Premise 2 is also and the universe had a beginning?
Second Law of Thermodynamics
“I just don’t believe I can beat Father Time,” declared the 38 year old former boxing heavyweight champion of the world “Iron” Mike Tyson[62] as he announced his retirement on 12 June 2005. Tyson illustrated well by his comments the effects of the Second Law of Thermodynamics on a human. This law states in simple terms that the universe is running out of useable energy and all things are growing older, wearing out, becoming more disordered and decaying. We all know, for instance, that heat spontaneously flows from a hot body to a cold one (never the reverse), flowers wither, iron rusts, colours fade, men die, everything will eventually degenerate. There is no known exception to this law. Dr. Norman Geisler explains the significance of this law to theistic belief:
The First Law of Thermodynamics states that the total amount of energy in the universe is constant. In other words, the universe has only a finite amount or energy (much as your car has only a finite amount of gas). Now, if your car has only a finite amount of gas (the First Law), and whenever it’s running it continually consumes gas (the Second Law), would your car be running right now if you had started it up an infinitely long time ago? No, of course not. It would have run out of gas. In the same way, the universe would be running out of energy by now if it had been running from all eternity. But here we are – the lights are still on, so the universe must have begun in the finite past. That is, the universe is not eternal – it must have had a beginning.[63]
Also, if our universe is becoming less ordered – then where did the original order come from? For, if the naturalistic blind process of chance universally results in progressive disorder, how could this same process logically account for the universe’s original state of optimal order? Indeed, why are there orderly laws? Why not chaos? For if atheists struggle to explain how nothing produces something, then they will have even greater difficulty explaining how natural laws could come from nothing that give rise to purposeful and highly specific achievements.
Radioactivity
Chemistry has shown that radioactive elements decay over time until in the end they become a different element. We know, for example, that radioactive uranium eventually ionizes into lead. However, if all the uranium atoms were infinitely old, surely they would all have been converted into lead? As this has clearly not happened, we can conclude the universe is not infinitely old.
Conclusion
Founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies and arguably the greatest astrophysicist of his time Robert Jastrow, a self-proclaimed agnostic, appropriately described what has happened to his sceptical colleagues as they have measured the cosmos:
Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world….for the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries[64].
The evidence that the world had a beginning is now so overwhelming that even the strongest atheists have accepted it, albeit with bad grace. Facts are very inconvenient things! Einstein’s contemporary and British cosmologist, Arthur Eddington wrote of it:
Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of nature is repugnant to me…I should like to find a genuine loophole….it leaves me cold[65].
Unfortunately for atheists, there is no loophole as Eddington was forced to admit:
The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural[66].
Jastrow also commented on the Bible and the scientific evidence:
The astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and the biblical accounts of Genesis are the same. The chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.
So overwhelming is the cosmological argument for the existence of God that it has been reported that many scientists have renounced atheism. Newsweek reported a sharp increase of belief in theism by scientists in a 1998 edition:
Forty percent of American scientists now believe in a personal God - not merely an ineffable power and presence in the world, but a deity to whom they can pray[67].
Indeed, Newsweek columnist, George Will began his November 9, 1998 column by joking:
Soon the American Civil Liberties Union, or People for the American Way, or some similar faction of litigious secularism will file suit against NASA, charging that the Hubble Space Telescope unconstitutionally gives comfort to the religiously inclined.
Cosmological science has now provided abundant evidence that our universe had a beginning. This beginning now requires an explanation. We can conclude from the cosmological evidence that the First Cause of the universe must be self-existent, immaterial, timeless or eternal and nonspatial – since the First Cause created all of these.
Norman Geisler often adds another argument of the impossibility of time extending backward infinitely (what is known as an infinite regress). This concept of an actually infinite series of moments or events into the past he argues is inherently irrational and argues deductively,
1. 1. Some limited, changing being(s) exist(s).
2. 2. The present existence of every limited, changing being is caused by another.
3. 3. There cannot be an infinite regress of causes of being.
4. 4. Therefore, there is a first Cause of the present existence of these beings.
5. 5. The first Cause must be infinite, necessary, eternal, simple, unchangeable, and one.
6. 6. This first uncaused Cause is identical with the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. [68]
The major weakness with this evidential argument is that it does not definitively identify the First Cause as the God of Christianity. This has led many presuppositional apologists to reject it as untenable. Others argue that it is useful in a secondary sense as providing confirmatory evidence like archaeology to the Scriptural narrative.
BUT “WHO MADE GOD THEN?”
Some sceptics ask: “Then, who made God?” Remember, the Law of Causality states that everything that has a beginning has a cause. It was God’s first action of creation that brought the space-time continuum into being. Therefore, God is outside space, time, and matter as He did not have a beginning, so He therefore does not need a cause! It is like asking “To whom is the bachelor married?”
We cannot fully comprehend a person like God who is outside all time, all space and all matter (it hurts our head to try). How can we the finite mind comprehend the infinite? For instance, we may think we can conceptualise the end of all space in the universe, as set out in the TGR, but if we were to travel there – what would be behind it? Interestingly, atheists have no problem believing in an uncaused first cause like nature or a big bang, just so long as it is not supernatural. Just don’t ask them to explain who is the Big Banger or Mr Nature! Robert Jastrow explained why so many atheistic scientists refuse to bow to the inevitable:
Scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause. Now science ….asks, “What cause produced this effect? Who or what put the matter into the universe? And science cannot answer these questions.”
A good example of this refusal to accept the obvious was John Echols, a Nobel laureate in neurophysiology, who said in 1968:
The odds are against the right combinations of circumstances occurring to evolve intelligent life on earth. The odds are about 400,000 trillion trillion trillion trillion to one. Evolution is fantastically improbable. I believe that it did occur, but that it could never occur again on any planet or any other solar system.
Now, that is Faith!!
(2) TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
Late in 2004, shock waves resounded through the world of atheism as a leading atheistic philosopher, Anthony Flew indicated a change of mind about theism. One of the newspapers covering the story, The Times of London referred to Flew as “one of the most renowned atheists of the past half-century, whose papers and lectures have formed the bedrock of unbelief for many adherents.” Flew, although born the son of a Christian clergyman, was a champion of atheism in debates and books for most of his 81 years. He acknowledged the persuasive nature of intelligent design as compelling evidence for the existence of a Creator God. In an interview with Christianity Today[69], Flew stated his acceptance of an intelligent designer of the universe and cited his affinity with Einstein who believed in “an Intelligence that produced the integrative complexity of creation.” Einstein openly affirmed his belief in an intelligent designer:
We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent being toward God. We see a universe marvellously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand those laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations[70].
The form of this argument is also simple and straightforward.
1. All designs have a designer.
2. The universe has highly complex design.
3. Therefore, the universe has a designer.
Teleological means “pertaining to purpose or goal.” The most famous advocate of the Teleological argument was William Paley who, writing in the eighteenth century, illustrated this with the example of someone finding a watch while walking in the countryside. Paley argued that because the watch had designed features such as spring, gearwheels, pointer, it was only logical to conclude that it had a maker who “comprehended its construction and designed its use.” Paley applied this analogy to the evidence of design in the eye and other organs of the body to imply an intelligent Creator. Indeed, as for back as 44 BC, the Roman writer, orator and statesman, Cicero (106–43 BC), used this concept in his book De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods) to refute the evolutionary ideas of the contemporary philosophers of his day. As science has discovered more about the universe we are beginning to understand just how incredibly complex the design of this universe is. Overall, the universe seems perfectly ordered to facilitate life, personality, critical thinking and reasoning. Even to the casual observer, the order and beauty of nature touches something deep within us and fills us with awe.
It is important to note when we refer to “intelligent design” throughout this study, we are not speaking necessarily of optimality or perfection of design but simply referring to “intelligent” agency (irrespective of the skill of the designer). Theology has provided the answer why some things in the universe may have increasingly sub-optimal or less than perfect designs[71]. Ironically, those atheists who point to sub-optimal designs in the universe imply that they know what optimal design is and therefore intelligent design is observable and testable. This also implies that they access to an absolute source of rationality and truth to make their claims – hence another tacit admission of the existence of a Personal God.
In all other fields of human experience we find that design necessitates a designer. It is also important to note at this point that making design inferences is an established and a fundamental part of modern science. We see this in many disciplines, including archaeology, anthropology, forensics, criminal jurisprudence, copyright law, patent law, reverse engineering, crypto-analysis, random number generation, and even to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Indeed, the logic of the latter search led Dr. Charles B. Thaxton, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemistry at Harvard University to comment:
An intelligible communication via radio signal from some distant galaxy would be widely hailed as evidence of an intelligent source. Why then doesn't the message sequence on the DNA molecule also constitute prima facie evidence for an intelligent source? After all, DNA information is not just analogous to a message sequence such as Morse code, it is such a message sequence[72].
We can infer intelligent design because it leaves distinctive hallmarks that in the complete realm of human experience point to an intelligent cause. Therefore, we can infer design in the examples below based on what we know of the distinctive signature of intelligent agents. Put simply, it is the only credible show in town that adequately explains how we have designs and complexities in our universe that exceed enormously those we know are produced by agents of intelligent design. Atheists need to explain how do we get from absolutely no blueprints at all to the first set of blueprints. As one writer states, “Mutation and natural selection cannot work until there is something there to mutate, and struggling entities there to select for survival.” Chance can explain complexity, but not specification. If we have a logical and credible explanation, why should we search for some “magical” natural selection process to try to explain this design complexity? As Geisler explains:
The central principle in forensic science is the Principle of Uniformity, which holds that causes in the past were like the causes we observe today. In other words, by the Principle of Uniformity, we assume that the world worked in the past just like it works today, especially when it comes to causes. If a coded message requires an intelligent cause today, then any similar message from the past must also require an intelligent cause. Conversely, if natural laws can do the job today, then the Principle of Uniformity would lead us to conclude natural laws could do the job in the past[73].
The Bible says in Proverbs 3:19 “The LORD by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens.” Let us now look at see if the complexity and specification of design in nature matches up to this claim.
Cell
Cells are the fundamental building block of life. We have approximately 100 trillion of them. Until the advent of molecular biology, many scientists thought the cell would be a simplistic structure. Instead, we find the complete opposite! Apart from the brain, the cell is the most complex structure in the universe. For instance, a British team discovered a cellular F1F0-ATPase enzyme with an in-built rotary engine no bigger than ten billionths by ten billionths of a metre[74]. One scientist recently described a single cell organism as a high-tech factory made up of 10 million atoms and complete with:
artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principles of prefabrication and modular construction… and a capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of hours[75].
Remember, all of us reading this started out as a single cell nine months before we were born. Nine months later this single cell had incredibly divided into trillions of cells that had differentiated into two hundred different varieties (each with differing functions such as kidney cells, brain cells, and liver cells, everything that will make us a complete functioning human). M.I.T. researcher, Dr. Gerald Schroeder illustrates:
Each cell in your body, is selecting right now approximately five hundred thousand amino acids, consisting of some ten million atoms, organizing them into preselected strings, joining them together, checking to be certain each string is folded into specific shapes, and then shipping each protein off to a site, some inside the cell, some outside, sites that somehow have signaled a need for these specific proteins. Every second. Every cell. Your body is a living wonder.[76]
When in the history of science or engineering did such an advanced machine as the cell arise simply by “chance?” Agnostic biologist, Dr. Michael Denton agrees:
The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle[77].
DNA
Inside each of our 100 trillion cells there is coiled 2 metres of DNA[78] which weighs about 6 trillionths of a gram. Each cell has 30,000 genes in 23 pairs of chromosomes, which can yield as many as 20-25,000 different kinds of proteins. DNA contains vast stores of information that the cell uses to make the proteins for living. Russell Grigg notes, “the amount of information that could be stored in a pinhead’s volume of DNA is equivalent to a pile of paperback books 500 times as tall as the distance from Earth to the moon, each with a different, yet specific content.” In all known cases, information requires an intelligent message sender. Bill Gates stated that: “DNA is like a software program, only much more complex than anything we’ve devised” – which raises the suggestive question why would chance create informative DNA when it cannot create any of Microsoft’s programs? I don’t imagine Mr. Gates has contracted “Employee No 9999 Mr. Chance” for the development of Microsoft’s Next Generation Windows package even if he agrees to work for the next billion years!
Speaking of the complexity of DNA and RNA, agnostic biologist Dr. Michael Denton comments:
It is astonishing to think that this remarkable piece of machinery, which possesses the ultimate capacity to construct every living thing that ever existed on Earth, from the giant redwood to the human brain, can construct all its own components in a matter of minutes and weigh less than lO-16grams. It is of the order of several thousand million million times smaller than the smallest piece of functional machinery ever constructed by man. [79]
The information content in DNA of one cell of the three billion codes of the human genome is equivalent to more than 75,000 copies of the New York Times newspaper. Could this information have arisen by chance through physical laws like snowflakes or crystals? Berkeley Law Professor, Philip Johnson explains:
Information is an entirely different kind of stuff from the physical medium in which it may be temporarily recorded. It would be absurd to try to explain the literary quality or meaning of a book as an emergent property of the physical qualities of its ink and paper. The message comes from an author; ink and paper are merely the media. Similarly, the information written in DNA is not the product of DNA. Where did all the information come from? Who or what is the author?
Physical laws cannot be the answer. These laws do produce some fairly complex structures, such as snowflakes and crystal. In such cases the laws produce the same structure over and over again, with chance variations. Repetitive order has a very low information content[80].
So, if physical laws cannot produce this information because of its highly specified nature, who exactly is the author? As former atheist Prof. Anthony Flew confessed:
I think the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it ….It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design[81].
Eye
The eye is one four-thousandth of an adult’s weight and has 120 million photosensitive cells in the retina that translate light into nerve impulses that reaches the brain through the optic nerve. There are around 40,000,000 nerve endings that make up the optic nerve. In fact, we will all blink our eyes around 400 million times during our lifetime (try getting your windscreen wipers to do that without replacement). If you lose your eye, the best eye surgeons in the world can only offer you a coloured glass “marble” to cover the hole. Why? The design and creation of an eye is beyond replication by “intelligent” scientists today. Yet, we are supposed to believe it evolved by chance! Even Charles Darwin admitted the difficulty of this for atheists:
To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree[82].
Brain
In 2008 Los Alamos National Laboratory announced in a blaze of publicity the launching of the world’s most powerful supercomputer IBM’s PetaVision which cost $120 million. The prefix “peta” stands for a million billion, also known as a quadrillion as the Roadrunner supercomputer can process a million billion calculations each second. This computer we are told
PetaVision models the human visual system--mimicking more than 1 billion visual neurons and trillions of synapses. Neurons are nerve cells that process information in the brain. Neurons communicate with each other using synaptic connections, analogous to what transistors are in modern computer chips. Synapses store memories and play a vital role in learning.
Synapses set the scale for computations performed by the brain while undertaking such tasks as locomotion, hearing or vision. Because there are about a quadrillion synapses in the human brain, human cognition is a petaflop/s computational problem.
To date, computers have been unable to match human performance on such visual tasks as flawlessly detecting an oncoming automobile on the highway or distinguishing a friend from a stranger in a crowd of people. Roadrunner is now changing the game.
On Saturday, Los Alamos researchers used PetaVision to model more than a billion visual neurons surpassing the scale of 1 quadrillion computations a second (a petaflop/s). On Monday scientists used PetaVision to reach a new computing performance record of 1.144 petaflop/s. The achievement throws open the door to eventually achieving human-like cognitive performance in electronic computers[83].
But human brains are still superior to supercomputers in many respects. Brains are portable; PetaVision fills a whole room. The average brain is 56 cubic inches and weighs 3.3 pounds. The brain is a 3 pound piece of matter that has 10 billion neurons (nerve cells) with a trillion connections and can do the work of supercomputers. Atheist, Isaac Asimov described it as “the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe”[84] and fellow atheist, Carl Sagan conservatively estimated:
The equivalent of twenty million books is in the head of every one of us….The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy. The circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans[85].
Michael Denton explains its complexity:
The human brain consists of about ten thousand million nerve cells. Each nerve cell puts out somewhere in the region of between ten thousand and one hundred thousand connecting fibres by which it makes contact with other nerve cells in the brain. Altogether the total number of connections in the human brain approaches 1 ( 10 15 or a thousand million million. ... a much greater number of specific connections than in the entire communications network on Earth[86].
The brain has around lO15 nerve connections and has the processing power of 100 trillion instructions per second. If a computer simply takes in information, processes it, stores it and gives it out (and no sane person would deny that it is the product of design and creation), then why would anyone think the infinitely more efficient and impressive brain “supercomputer” was designed and created by chance? If the building of the PetaVision (which incidentally took the best minds in the world and $120 million to construct) is described as a real tour de force in engineering, then why does any rational person think the brain is not also? It does not take a major extrapolation of logic to see the inductive parallel here. No matter how sophisticated supercomputers develop they are not conscious appreciators of the meaning of information or creative initiators of novel though processes.
Laws of Nature
There are many laws in nature that govern the existence and maintenance of this universe such as the Laws of Thermodynamics, Gravity and so on. This begs the obvious question: Who was the Law Giver that gave us these laws? Who maintains them? This is not a leap of faith but a step of intelligent reflection. For instance every cell in our body needs to make two thousand proteins every second. The balance of these laws and their precision we are now learning is incredible. Indeed, we read regularly in our newspapers of potential catastrophe if the earth’s temperature rises by one or two degrees in temperature. For instance, if the gravitational force was altered by 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001%, our sun would not exist and neither would we[87]!
It is obvious that the Law Giver created the world as a place of order as only in a universe where natural law ordinarily operates could all of us even recognize an event as a miracle. Indeed, atheists point to this very order to dispute the possibility of miracles such as the Virgin Birth. For if children were conceived in random and disorderly ways, there would be no logical reason to rule an event as the Virgin Birth out. The most famous contemporary physicist, Prof. Stephen Hawking stated:
The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron....The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life[88].
Astrophysicist, Hugh Ross calculated the probability that the 122 constants of the laws of nature such as speed of light, electromagnetic force etc the earth requires to exist could exist for any planet (including earth) by chance in the universe as: one chance in 10138! There are only 1070 atoms in the whole of the known universe![89] It should be noted that all these constants have to be present not just in the initial conditions of the universe’s beginning but also throughout its existence. They do not evolve! Does the fine-tuning of the universe imply intelligent purposeful design? Head of the Human Genome project and Theist, Dr. Francis Collins admits,
When you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe, it looks as if it knew we were coming. There are 15 constants -- the gravitational constant, various constants about the strong and weak nuclear force, etc. -- that have precise values. If any one of those constants was off by even one part in a million, or in some cases, by one part in a million million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, there would have been no galaxy, stars, planets or people. That's a phenomenally surprising observation. It seems almost impossible that we’re here. And that does make you wonder -- gosh, who was setting those constants anyway? [90]
British astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle echoes:
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question[91].
As so many constants and parameters must be fine-tuned to such unimaginably precise degree, no other conclusion seems possible. Just to illustrate some of these odds. A stack of 500 sheets of paper is around two to three inches high. A stack 1 ( 10 24 would reach from the earth to the sun more than a million times. Astrophysicist, Michael Turner of the University of Chicago and Fermilab, describes the fine-tuning of the universe with a simile:
The precision is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bull’s eye one millimeter in diameter on the other side.
As one mathematician quipped, “Give chance a chance? No chance!”
Irreducible complexity
In 1996, a Roman Catholic Biochemist, Prof. Michael Behe struck a devastating blow to Atheistic Darwinism in the publication of his book Darwin’s Black Box. The book became a best seller and the main thrust of the book was to set out the failure of Darwinism to account for the irreducible complexity found in cellular structures. Behe illustrated this concept with the common mousetrap. A simple mousetrap has a wooden base, metal hammer, spring and metal bar to hold the hammer back when the trap is set. If any of the components are missing, then the trap fails to function and the mouse “can dance all night” on the base.
Behe demonstrated that there are numerous examples of parts of the body that cannot function without most or all its component parts being present at the same time and that each cellular structure only functions in coordination with others. For instance, DNA is mutually dependent on proteins or enzymes and the heart cannot function without the liver, lungs, brain or kidneys. Other examples include the intricate interdependent more than 20-step process of blood clotting. Prof. Behe (who is no creationist) explains the insurmountable impossibility of explaining how these all arose simultaneously:
as biochemists have begun to examine apparently simple structures like cilia and flagella, they have discovered staggering complexity, with dozens or even hundreds of precisely tailored parts. It is very likely that many of the parts we have not considered here are required for any cilium to function in a cell. As the number of required parts increases, the difficulty of gradually putting the system together skyrockets, and the likelihood of indirect scenarios plummets. Darwin looks more and more forlorn. ….Darwinian theory has given no explanation for the cilium or flagellum. The overwhelming complexity of these systems pushes us to think it may never give an explanation.[92]
Despite high level attempts by atheistic Darwinists to debunk Behe’s thesis[93] it remains robust and so far unassailable. If Behe’s hypothesis is correct it certainly would be the death knell for Charles Darwin theory of evolution as Darwin admitted that:
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down[94].
Sorry Mr. Darwin, it looks like you are out of business. You have failed your own test!
Conclusion
Atheistic scientists Francis Crick, Carl Sagan and L.M. Murkhin[95] have estimated that the probability of a human evolving by chance processes alone is one chance in 10 2,000,000,000 – mathematicians generally assume that anything more than one chance in 10 50 to be outside the realms of possibility! Some atheists argue that there may be trillions of universes and it is inevitable that one would be fine-tuned for life. Alvin Platinga responds,
We are playing poker; each time I deal I get all the aces; you get suspicious: I try to allay your suspicions by pointing out that my getting all the aces each time I deal is no more improbable than any other equally specific distribution over the relevant number of deals. Would that explanation play in Dodge City (or Tombstone)?
Recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistry Ilya Prigogine summed up the scientific evidence for a Creator:
The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero[96].
Why should we accept that unguided processes can achieve what highly educated scientists cannot manage collectively or cumulatively? Even if one scientist did manage to create an eye or a cell in a laboratory it would be self-defeating as they would have used “intelligent design” to initiate and guide the process. Einstein was so moved by the obvious design of the universe that he stated:
I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.
When you consider these staggering odds for chance, many people are confused why atheistic scientists blindly insist that the ordered complexity as described above does not need an intelligent designer. Is it because they can’t see the evidence for design? A quick glance at their writings shows that this is not in the least true. Richard Dawkins in trying to build a case for chance to make organs like the eye called one of his books “Climbing Mount Improbable”- he should have been honest and called it “Climbing Mount Impossible!” In another book he admitted:
Biology is the study of complicated things that gives the appearance of having been designed for a purpose[97].
Francis Crick was so worried in case any scientist would spot the obvious that he warned:
Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved[98].
Roger Lewin marvelled with more than a hint of irony:
Like Darwin, we stand in awe at the wonderful creativity of nature, with an understanding of its laws enhancing its beauty for us, not diminishing it[99].
Harvard atheist and geneticist, Richard Lewontin openly admits atheistic science’s pre-suppositional bias against intelligent design:
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life….because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover that materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door[100] (emphasis added).
What Lewontin is simply saying is that no matter what the evidence is and how stupid it may seem rationally, he will not consider any alternative to materialistic atheism. Here he is candidly conceding that his apparatus of science is rigged to produce philosophically acceptable answers. Atheists come ups with conclusions that reject any supernatural intervention because their philosophy demands it. Now, who is peddling myths and behaving as a “fundamentalist obscurantist?” Who is holding back “the search for truth?” Who is the “dogmatic philosopher ignoring the evidence?” Some evolutionists like Robert Matthews even admit their cardinal weaknesses. Speaking in 2009 he said:
What’s truly amazing is that creationists aren’t giving scientists a harder time over all this … they could cause some real aggro by pointing out that science can’t explain how life exists in the first place. Come on guys, get stuck in. [101]
Instead of accepting such foolishness, we should follow the rational logic of Nobel Prize winner and physicist Arthur Compton who said:
For myself, faith begins with the realization that a supreme intelligence brought the universe into being and created man. It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for it is incontrovertible that where there is a plan there is intelligence - an orderly, unfolding universe testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever uttered - “In the beginning God.”[102]
Nobel Physics Laureate, Arno Penzias summed up the dilemma for atheists:
Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan[103].
Like Anthony Flew, other former atheists have been forced to admit their error when they come up against the logic of the design argument. Professor of Mathematical Physics Frank Tipler wrote:
When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics[104].
The real reason many atheists resist acknowledging intelligent design is because if they accept the fact that there is design in the universe, then they know this design could not be the work of evolved intelligence. Instead, it must be the product of a transcendent intelligence and the options for this in “Who’s Who?” are restricted, with God as the leading suspect. As George MacDonald the Scottish writer puts it “to give truth to him who does not love the truth is only to give more reasons for misinterpretation.” Or to put it another way, atheistic evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups!
The cosmological argument logically reveals only that God is eternal, immaterial, personal, and immensely powerful. The teleological argument reveals that He is intelligent and can produce complex and highly ordered systems. The major weakness with this teleological argument is that it also does not definitively identify the Designer as the God of Christianity. Almost all the major religions view their god or gods as the designer of the cosmos.
This has led many presuppositional apologists to reject these arguments as untenable. Others again argue that it is useful in a secondary sense as providing confirmatory evidence of the Biblical description of God. Both the cosmological and teleological arguments implicitly assume that one’s worldview plays little or no role in determining whether God exists or not i.e. autonomous man could simply follow his own reasoning to its logical conclusion and recognise the existence of God.
(3) MORALITY
Popular author and speaker, Ravi Zacharias was speaking at a forum on a university campus and he recounts the following challenge:
“Ah,” a sceptical student questioned, “Is there not too much evil in the world to be a God?”
“But, surely,” said Zacharias, “when you use the term “evil” you are pre-supposing good and if there is objective good then there must be a moral law to reflect this. But when you admit there is a moral law, then you must admit a moral law giver – but then that’s what you are trying to disprove and not prove!
So, if there is no law giver, then there is no good or evil – so what is your meaningless question?[105]”
This encounter demonstrates a major difficulty for atheism. If there is no God, then there can be no objective good or bad moral values. There can only be our subjective views as we have no standard to determine good or bad with. Morals standards do not just appear from nothing. If they did, then how can we logically ask people to follow them? We all believe in moral standard independent of us by which we evaluate moral feelings. Moral values are strange as they are not material yet we all believe they exist. They must emanate from a Sovereign Personal Moral Law Giver as no impersonal entity could set these forth and demand allegiance to them. This Absolute Person must be one as there can only be one final absolute standard of morals and knowledge. If these moral values, have emerged from random chance movements of particles, what obligation do we have to pure chance? However, obligations and loyalties only arise from interpersonal relationships or theologically – through a covenant.
Just as violating physical laws have consequences, so violating moral ones have also as “the wages of sin is death.” Some try to differentiate by arguing that you cannot directly violate physical laws, but there are times that we have to wait for violations of these to take effect e.g. prolonged exposure to background radiation.
The form of this argument is also simple and straightforward.
1. There are objective moral laws
2. Moral laws come from a moral lawgiver
3. Therefore, a moral lawgiver exists
Leading atheist, Prof. Richard Dawkins in writing a published letter to his 10 year old daughter advised:
Next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: “what kind of evidence is there for that?”[106]
So, Prof. Dawkins what kind of objective evidence have you got that your daughter should follow your moral parental advice? When Dawkins appeals to things like objective morals, doing so as an evolutionary atheist, he is functioning as an illusionist. Professor of the philosophy of science, Michael Ruse, makes similar statements, “Morality is a biological adaptation, no less than are hands and feet and teeth … Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction[107].”
If all morality is relative, then all moral judgments are equally valid. So, how can we consistently condemn evils such as: child abuse, Hitler murdering 6 million Jews or 9/11? Surely, if killing Jews is consistent with Hitler’s moral framework then moral relativists must accept that his framework is as justified as theirs. Indeed, at the Nuremberg trials the sole surviving senior Nazi on trial, Hermann Göring claimed that the Nazis were not guilty of any crime because their laws allowed the persecution of the Jews. Göring recognised that moral relativism would get him off the hook. Interestingly, Chief U.S. Prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson, disagreed[108] and described the Nazi regime as morally as well as legally wrong and that they had violated “the moral sense of mankind.” Prof Thio li-Ann a nominated MP spoke recently in the Singapore Parliament and highlighted this very thing admirably,
Concerned citizens will always want to speak to the moral or ethical basis of law and policy and their views will differ, depending on the religious or non-religious philosophies shaping their moral beliefs. Intellectual honesty knows there is no neutral ground in public debate over moral issues: anyone who believes in a system of ethics must make moral judgments and discriminate between right and wrong. If you tell someone “Thou shalt not judge”, they may retort “but thou art judging me.” Or in more contemporary parlance, ‘Who died and made you king?’
A relativist may argue there are no moral absolutes - it all depends on the person. However, in saying “there are no moral absolutes”, the relativist is being inconsistent in making an absolute statement about morality. If morality is subjective, a consistent relativist cannot defend the correctness of any contingent moral position.
If there truly is no God, then we should drop words that are inherent to our lives like: “ought not/ought to,” “should not/should do,” “responsible” “must/must not” from our laws, newspapers, codes of conduct and relationships as what right have we to impose obligations on others? Also, it would be impossible to logically criticise war, oppression, and crime or alternatively to praise, love or promote human rights. For how can we say something is absolutely wrong if we don’t know what is absolutely right? If there are no absolute morals, can child abuse ever be morally neutral or even good? Is choosing to engage in racism, slavery, and torture really no different to a preference for strawberry instead of chocolate ice cream? Why do we condemn Hitler for practicing eugenics but praise a cattle breeder for selecting the best cattle for future stocks? The disapproval of God meant nothing to Stalin, and the disapproval of any atheist today would have meant just as little.
Atheist Christopher Hitchens wrote recently, “No supernatural force was required to make the case against racism.” Douglas Wilson replied,
That sounded very confident. No transcendant reality is necessary in order for us to just know that to despise another human being on the basis of his race is objectively wrong and evil. Okay, then. We have now banished all talk of supernatural forces, angels, demons, the gospel, and the Holy Ghost. They are gone from the discussion. We have gathered in our chairs to hear Hitchens give the lecture that he now needs to deliver. The flyer caught my attention the moment I saw it. “The Atheistic Basis for Moral Absolutes.” I am all ears, and am actually starting to fidget in my seat. In a world where we can speak confidently of ineffacable crimes, and filthy injustice, and in that same world where supernaturalism is unnecessary in making the case against racism . . . well, then, let's hear it. Lay out the premises of your vaunted atheism, and then draw your objective moral conclusions from it. I hope they left time for a question and answer session.
The reason we know what is evil is because we have a standard in mind – a moral scoring system that allows us to determine evil as falling below this. If moral laws are the product of a purposeless, blind system, why should anyone obey them? A moral law is a command and commands are features of minds. A moral duty is something owed to someone. A morally perfect God is the only adequate standard to make objective judgments on these issues. Since God must exist to allow us to see evil as intelligible, evil cannot be used as evidence against God. There can only be a problem of evil if God exists.
Yes, morals can be taught as well as innate but does that negate their objectivity – does teaching mathematics make it subjective? John Frame makes some good observations in a debate with an atheist,
If I say that ethics requires God, I do not mean that atheists and agnostics never recognize moral standards. Even the Bible recognizes that they do (Romans 1:32). Indeed some say they believe in absolute principles, though that, of course, is rare. I contend, rather, that an atheist or agnostic is not able to give an adequate reason for believing in absolute moral principles. And when people accept moral principles without good reason, they hold to them somewhat more loosely than others who accept them upon a rational basis. Nor do I wish to suggest that people who believe in God are morally perfect. Scripture tells us that isn't so (1 John 1:8-10). The demons are monotheists (James 2:19), but belief in the one God doesn't improve their morals. Something more is needed to become good, and that, according to the Bible, is a new heart, given by God's grace in Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17, Ephesians 2:8-10).
He goes on to point out,
Why then should we believe that morality depends on God? To say God exists is to say that the world is created and controlled by a person – one who thinks, speaks, acts rationally, loves and judges the world. To deny that God exists is to say that the world owes its ultimate origin and direction to impersonal objects or forces, such as matter,
motion, time, and chance. But impersonal objects and forces cannot justify ethical obligations. A study of matter, motion, time, and chance will tell you what is up to a point, but it will not tell you what you ought to do. An impersonal universe imposes no absolute obligations. But if this is God's world, a personal universe, then we do have reason to believe in absolute moral principles. For one thing, as Immanuel Kant pointed out, we need an omnipotent God to enforce moral standards, to make sure that everyone is properly rewarded and punished. Moral standards without moral sanctions don’t mean much. More important, we should consider the very nature of moral obligation. We cannot be obligated to atoms, or gravity, or evolution, or time, or chance; we can be obligated only to persons. Indeed, we typically learn morality from our parents, and we stick to our standards at least partly out of loyalty to those we love. An absolute standard, one without exceptions, one that binds everybody, must be based on loyalty to a person great enough to deserve such respect. Only God meets that description[109].
On the contrary, we are all conscious of a moral faculty in our minds that gives rise to a “moral experience.” I have never met anyone yet, who from their earliest recollection does not remember the probing of the conscience about what they “ought” to do when arriving at a potential moral conflict. As C.S. Lewis puts it:
Human beings all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in[110].
It is true that not all moral codes in every corner of this earth are the same in every aspect but there is a commonality of “core values.” For instance, respect for parents and the elderly is universally admired, whereas disrespect has never been admired. Notwithstanding time or culture, there is a innate concept of normative conduct, a universal sense of “ought” and “should.” Whenever atheists condemns the moral behaviour of others they do not simply show that atheists can be moral too, but that they are incapable of following their own premises out to the end of the road they have embarked on. Atheists often are cognisant of the moral law without accepting the theistic source, but such a law cannot have real validity apart from the existence of God. This example delineates a failure in their reason, which as one writer states, “unfortunate for them because it is a failure of their god.” To quote Lewis again:
Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to - whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked[111].
Truth is ethical as if it were merely subjective we would be free to believe, speak whatever we liked unconstrained by evidence, logic, or revelation. If there are no objective truths (and morals are truths), then why bother studying, researching or seeking to discover new information about the universe. Can two plus two sometimes not equal four? I have never met an atheist yet who is willing to jump out a window at the top of a tower block to demonstrate that the Law of Gravity is just a subjective truth! Should we be open-minded about a car speeding towards us as we cross the road? Moral relativists in fact actually get themselves into a philosophical twist. If relativity were really true, then it follows there must be something to which all things are relative, but which is not relative itself. In simple terms, something must be absolute before we can understand that everything is relative to it. Norman Geisler tells an amusing story of a student who was a strong advocate of moral relativism:
One student, an atheist, wrote a paper on the topic of moral relativism. He argued, “All morals are relative; there is no absolute standard of justice or rightness; it’s all a matter of opinion; you like chocolate, I like vanilla,” and so on. His paper provided both his reasons and his documentation. It was the right length, on time, and stylishly presented in a handsome blue folder.
After the professor read the entire paper, he wrote on the front cover, “F, I don’t like blue folders!” When the student got the paper back he was enraged. He stormed into the professor’s office and protested, “F! I don’t like blue folders!” That’s not fair! That’s not right! That’s not just!
Raising his hand to quiet the bombastic student, the professor calmly retorted, “Wait a minute. Hold on. I read a lot of papers. Let me see….wasn’t your paper the one that said there is no such thing as fairness, rightness, and justice?”
“Yes,” the student answered.
“Fine, then,” the professor responded. “I don’t like blue. You get an F!”
Suddenly the lightbulb went on in the student’s head. He realized he really did believe in moral absolutes. He at least believed in justice[112].
No atheist has ever explained how an impersonal, amoral initial cause through a random amoral process has produced a moral basis for human life, while at the same time denying any objective moral basis for good or evil. As Dave Hunt reminded us “There are no morals in nature. Try to find a compassionate crow or an honest eagle – or a sympathetic hurricane.”[113] Atheist Oxford Professor, Richard Dawkins accepts the moral relativist consequences of atheism and adds:
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Leaving aside how in a world, as described above, Dawkins can deduce what “design, purpose, evil and good” is, why do we care and why do we know then? Do computers know each other? Do computers sympathise with each other? Maybe Dawkins would like to tell the victims of Hitler that he was just dancing to his DNA! What kind of criminal justice system would we have if courts were told that criminals just danced to their DNA? Why has the Western world just fought a war with Bin Laden if he was just dancing to his DNA? Ironically, atheists criticize the Bible as immoral. Dawkins wrote to a British Newspaper[114] protesting that it was “morally repugnant” for a UK Government Department to conduct experiments on apes. Obviously, his DNA cares about such things. Dawkins in another classic example of hypocrisy derides creationists as “intolerant” and states that he and his atheistic colleagues “despise[115]” them – tolerance obviously does not apply to Christians whose “DNA just is!”
Conclusion
We are all instinctively aware that absolute truths and moral values exist and, indeed, conduct our lives on that premise. Even the person who denies that absolute values exist, values their right to state this. Some argue that morals have evolved for evolutionary advantage. However, often we engage in acts of selfless heroism such as jumping into the water to save a drowning man because of an innate sense of obligation. Such an innate obligation has no obvious evolutionary adaptive advantage. In fact, often it has the opposite effect. Some argue we obtain indirect reciprocal benefit, but this does not account for selfless acts that no one is aware of. Douglas Wilson writes of the Virginia Tech shootings,
If the two of us were looking at a news report of the latest atrocity, I would want to say that at some point in the future, in some fundamental way, that will be put right. You want to say, as an atheist, that it will not ever be put right. But you refuse, for some reason, to take the next step and say that there is nothing wrong with it now.
Given atheism, the Virginia Tech shooter is now in the same condition as Helen Keller, Mother Teresa, John Paul II, Ted Bundy, John Lennon, and Dolly Madison. The nirvana of non-existence is now his, and he successfully escaped to that haven from every claim of justice. That rampage is an atrocity which Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens all believe will never be put right. Justice will never be applied to it. And this lack of justice is just the way it is. So what is wrong with this lack of justice now? Given atheism, nothing is wrong with it. But even the new atheists cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this. This is because they are created in the image of God, and they know better. So my charge is not that they approve of such things. Of course not. Not a bit of it. My charge is that they are purveyors of an impotent disapproval. The shooting has stopped, the shouting has died down, the bullets are all spent, and the shooter has begun to decompose. And the infinite concourse of atoms that constitutes all reality continues to roar by us heedless, continuing, as always, to not give a damn.
Dostoevsky’s argument from the consequences of positive Atheism
1. If atheism is true then man is “the chief of the earth”
2. If man is “the chief of the earth” then he can abandon absolute standards (i.e., morality)
3. If man can abandon the absolute standards then “everything is permissible”
4. Therefore, if atheism is true, everything is permissible
A student of mine once told me there were no absolute values. I asked him in what context would he say it was permissible to kill a healthy new born baby? He replied that if the world population was too great then that would be a valid reason. I then asked him what his reaction would be if the class decided that the baby should live and he should die simply because they did not like the colour of his coat. He replied that this would be unfair as that was not a valid justification for making such a decision. I then simply pointed out to him that his moral relativism was self-defeating as he had just demonstrated by his words that he clearly believed in the absolute moral position of justice and fairness. G.K. Chesterton summed up other inconsistencies of atheists:
For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book in which he insults it himself. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything[116].
Atheists all want absolute truths when it suits them. They want their doctors, politicians, medicine labels, and spouses to be absolutely true with them. They definitely want them to be morally obliged to tell the truth! As Augustine put it, “We love truth when it enlightens us but we hate it when it convicts us.” It is said of the atheist Voltaire that when he had atheist friends over for dinner they boasted openly, while being served, of their atheism. However, Voltaire told them to keep quiet, as he didn’t want such unbelief in front of the hired help because if they believed this they might murder him in his sleep and rob him. If, we don’t have absolute morality, then we have to accept the consequences of this. Atheistic Princeton professor Peter Singer openly advocates infanticide of disabled newborn children and states:
Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons……The life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee[117].
Ironically Singer is reported[118] as spending his own money to look his mother who is suffering from Alzheimers disease – one wonders why he thinks she is any more a person than a disabled child? Richard Dawkins also openly states his support for eugenics:
If you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability[119]?
Speaking of the mentally disabled, another atheist goes further:
What are we to say about them? The natural conclusion….would be that their status is that of mere animals. And perhaps we should go on to conclude that they may be used as non-human animals are used – perhaps as laboratory subjects, or as food[120].
Convicted mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer before his death stated:
If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behaviour to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing, and I've since come to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is truly God, and I believe that I, as well as everyone else, will be accountable to Him[121].
One atheist has even published an academic book arguing that rape is simply a by-product of evolved differences between the sexualities of males and females or an adaptation. When challenged on what grounds he personally felt rape was wrong he admitted he had no absolute standard for judging as it[122] was simply was his own opinion.
James Watson, the Nobel Prize winning discoverer of DNA and the first director of the Human Genome Project, also promotes eugenics and in his polemic at a conference at UCLA in 1998 stated:
I think it’s complete nonsense ... saying we’re sacred and should not be changed…to say we’ve got a perfect genome and there’s some sanctity? I’d like to know where that idea comes from because it's utter silliness.
However, he admitted the reason why he felt at liberty to advocate such a view was the absence of an objective source of absolute morality, “If we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn't we do it? What's wrong with it? Who is telling us not to [do] it?”[123]
The choice is to accept the God of the Bible or choose to deny objective morality, objective truth rationality of man, and the rational knowability of the universe. We cannot prevent people choosing to live in unbelief but they do so in irrationality. As Frame says,
Believing in an irrational universe is not believing at all….But if someone has resolved to live without logic, without reason, and without standards, we cannot prevent him. He will, of course, accept logic and rationality when he makes his real life decisions, and so he will not live according to his theoretical irrationalism. In many apologetic situations it is useful to point this out. But for a tough-minded irrationalist, logical inconsistency is not a problem. Still at some level he knows he is wrong. God still speaks, around and in the unbeliever.
Atheists need to make their choice: either God exists and there is an absolute standard of morality or He does not and as Fyodor Dostoevsky said everything is permitted.
(4) CONSCIOUSNESS
An atheistic student, Chang stated in an English Major class of mine: “the only thing I believe in is chemicals.” I pointed out to him that: as his statement of belief in materialism was not made of molecular “chemicals” so his belief was self-defeating and illogical. He had failed his own test! It would be like me saying: “I cannot speak English” – when I have just proven by my statement that I can.
However, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt his error I offered him the chance to test his hypothesis. The challenge I gave him was to go with me to the local mortuary and there choose one dead body of “chemicals” and I would allow him to use any chemical to make that recently dead person live again. After all, I reasoned with him, this should be easy to an intelligent scientifically trained young man as “chance” managed to bring this “chemical consciousness” to over six billion people. Despite also offering him the chance to utilise the services of any skilled doctor or scientist, he unsurprisingly declined to test his theory!
Why? You don’t need a PhD from Harvard to know that the human body has a conscious soul that is different from its materiality. If our emotions are material, can you weigh your “thoughts” or bottle “love” or “envy” and sell these “chemicals” at your local Wal-Mart? Are chemicals to be held responsible for people falling in love? Even Einstein confessed “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.”
One of the great absurdities of the atheistic worldview of consciousness is that if they believe the brain is the product of irrational, unguided mechanisms then how can they trust it to be correct? How can they trust their power of reasoning that creationism is wrong and atheism is the best interpretation? It maybe that their brains haven’t fully evolved yet to the level of creationists in order to comprehend the evidence for creationism! If atheism is true, then we have no way of knowing anything is true as chemicals do not rationalise they just react. Just think, would you trust a surgeon to operate on you who told you his surgical procedures were blindly governed by “random movements of chemicals?”
Atheistic Biologist, Richard Dawkins said that anyone who denied evolution was “ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).[124]” Which raises the question – if our thinking and morality is simply a by-product of accidental chemical reactions, why is Prof. Dawkins so confident he can rationally identify ignorance, stupidity and wickedness? As far as we can comprehend, the world has a rational structure, which mirrors the rationality of the human mind. If the world evolved by chance it would be highly unlikely that human experience would replicate the reality of the world the way we conclude it does. Theologian, Prof. John Frame explains:
The hypothesis of absolute personality to explain the formation of the universe explains the data far better than the hypothesis of ultimate impersonality. An absolute personality can make a rational universe and his plan for creation and providence is therefore rational. The absolute personality is able to make man in His image and to equip him to understand the universe as much as he needs to.Why should we prefer a hypothesis of ultimate impersonality when that creates such an enormous gap between the nature of the Creator (non-rational) and the nature of the universe including human beings (rational)[125]?
Our ability to rationalise can only come from either a pre-existing intelligence or from pure atomic matter. As one apologist commented,
Man can initiate thoughts and actions; they are not fully determined by deterministic laws of brain chemistry. This is a deduction from the biblical teaching that man has both a material and immaterial aspect (e.g. Genesis 35:18, 1 Kings 17:21–22, Matthew 10:28). This immaterial aspect of man means that he is more than matter, so his thoughts are likewise not bound by the makeup of his brain. But if materialism were true, then ‘thought’ is just an epiphenomenon of the brain, and the results of the laws of chemistry. Thus, given their own presuppositions, materialists have not freely arrived at their conclusion that materialism is true, because their conclusion was predetermined by brain chemistry. But then, why should their brain chemistry be trusted over mine, since both obey the same infallible laws of chemistry? So in reality, if materialists were right, then they can’t even help what they believe (including their belief in materialism!). Yet often call themselves ‘freethinkers’, overlooking the glaring irony! Genuine initiation of thought is an insuperable problem for materialism.
No atheist has ever explained how you can get something completely different in the form of conscious thinking, feeling, believing, purposeful and worshipping creatures from atomic matter that does not possess any of these qualities. That’s truly getting something from nothing! Some “clever” atheists have even suggested that consciousness is a “by-product of biological processes,” not realising that they are now implicitly adding “spooky” and “spiritual mental powers” to what they maintain is “pure atomic matter!” Theologian and philosopher, Prof. J.P. Moreland summed up the difficulty for atheism in explaining how you get from molecular atoms to living consciousness:
If you start with particles, you may end up with a more complicated arrangement of particles, but you are still going to have particles. You are not going to have minds or consciousness.
However, if you begin with an infinite mind, then you can explain how finite minds could come into existence. What doesn’t make sense – and many atheistic evolutionists are conceding – is the idea of getting a mind to squirt into existence by starting with brute, dead, mindless matter. That’s why some of them are trying to get rid of consciousness by saying it is not real and that we are just computers. However, that’s a pretty difficult position to maintain while you are conscious[126]!
Conclusion
Some sceptics try to deny that there is any logic in the world and that there is nothing that is truly “knowable.” This was the view popularised by influential philosopher, Immanuel Kant who maintained that, “you can’t know anything about the real world.” The fatal flaw in this position, which Kant never explained, is how does he know what the “real world” is then? Also, his claim is self-defeating, as by claiming you cannot know anything about the real world; Kant claimed to know that the real world is unknowable! This reminds me of the story of student who asked his philosophy professor: “how do I know that I exist?” The learned professor looked down from his notes and fixed his eyes at the young man and replied, “And whom shall I say is asking?”
Deep down in our sub-conscience we all have a vacuum that only God can fill. All of us have an intuitive understanding of guilt. It is worth pointing out that the reason we have this is feeling (and it is cross-cultural) is because we are actually guilty! That is why universally man is searching for forgiveness and peace. The answer to guilt is not denial. Atheism has no answer to this fact. Surely, the existence of the desire for God in all cultures a clue that He is there? Whilst the existence of a particular desire does not prove that the object of the desire exists, in general we find that innate desires correspond to real objects to satisfy. For instance, an appetite for food demonstrates that food actually exists.
In 1999, Religion Today reported that even children who had not been exposed to organised religion manifest this:
Children believe in God regardless of whether they are exposed to religious faith, a study found. Oxford University psychologist Olivera Petrovitch and her research assistants found that children they studied in Britain and Japan gave similar answers when asked who created various natural objects, she reported in the magazine Science & Spirit. The children, who had not been influenced by concepts of God from organized religions, had abstract notions of a creator. Petrovitch’s researchers in Japan said they were surprised at the children's responses. “My Japanese research assistants kept telling me, We Japanese don't think about God as creator - it's just not part of Japanese philosophy,” she said.[127]
Clearly, there is a faculty in the human mind to worship a power greater than themselves and children cannot fail to observe beauty in God’s creation unless explicitly indoctrinated to the contrary. The same evidence was replicated by Dr Justin Barrett, a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Anthropology and Mind. He argued in the Daily Telegraph in 2008 that children have a predisposition to believe in a Supreme Being because they assume that everything in the world was created with a purpose,
The preponderance of scientific evidence for the past 10 years or so has shown that a lot more seems to be built into the natural development of children's minds than we once thought, including a predisposition to see the natural world as designed and purposeful and that some kind of intelligent being is behind that purpose.
Barrett argued that “there is evidence that even by the age of four, children understand that although some objects are made by humans, the natural world is different.” He even claimed that anthropologists have found that in some cultures children believe in God “even when religious teachings are withheld from them.” He argued,
If we threw a handful on an island and they raised themselves I think they would believe in God. Children's normally and naturally developing minds make them prone to believe in divine creation and intelligent design. In contrast, evolution is unnatural for human minds; relatively difficult to believe[128].
The ultimate irony of this argument is that any one reading it, whether atheist or not, has conceded the point merely by studying it in a logical and rational manner. In order to review this evidence as a real exercise in truth finding, and not merely a chance encounter between bundles of genetic matter, the reader assumes: that the universe is coherent, consistent, and orderly; that there is genuine rational thought (and communication of ideas) and that truth, design, predictability and natural law actually govern the processes of the universe.
Put simply, the reader has assumed a theistic worldview (despite not acknowledging it) that God exists, created mankind, and created the world in which we find ourselves. For, to say the universe is not designed, atheists must know what design is. To say theism is not true, atheists must know what is true and so on. This would be like using the laws of science to prove that the laws of science cannot be trusted. C.S. Lewis summed up atheistic circular reasoning:
A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument, which proved that no argument was sound-proof that there are no such things as proofs - which is nonsense[129].
(5) MEANING OF LIFE
In China in March 2005, 100,000 people attended the funeral for a schoolteacher Yin Xuemei who died from injuries from being hit by a car after pushing her pupils out of the way in order to save them[130]. I questioned an atheistic Chinese student who visited me, “If there is no God and no life after death, then why do the Chinese people think this teacher did something the newspapers say was an “heroic” act and which we “should learn from?” Surely, she did the stupidest thing in the world for her and her family? Should she not have saved herself first, even if it meant the children died? Is it not foolish to die for others and to give up her brief chance of the only life she will ever have? He admitted there was no rational atheistic answer.
For, if there is no God, then the evil of men goes unpunished and the good done in the world un-rewarded. Why be generous? Why be faithful to your wife and family? Why be loyal to your country? Why not be the most selfish person you can be? Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot murdered millions, yet none of them ever faced a court of law for their crimes – did they literally get away with murder? It certainly is a bit tough on atheists like Karl Marx who at the end of his life stated “I have sacrificed my whole fortune to the revolutionary struggle.”[131] Atheists want to live as if their lives are meaningful but this is simply illusory. As Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist argues,
What is life for? To die? To kill myself at once? No, I am afraid. To wait for death till it comes? I fear that even more. Then I must live. But what for?
Most atheists live inconsistently to their beliefs and instinctively praise heroic acts like that of Yin Xuemei. This is because, in all cultures and religions of the world people have an intuitive understanding that there is more to life than our transient presence on earth. We are all conscious deep in our hearts of an afterlife with a “day of reckoning” to follow. Even if we were to accept that such altruistic traits “accidentally evolved” surely they would have died out by now as mankind strives for the “survival of the fittest.” Yet, here we are 150,000 years after evolutionists tell us man first inhabited this earth, and benevolence is still with us. As one writer explains:
The prevalence of altruistic acts—providing benefits to a recipient at a cost to the donor—can seem hard to reconcile with the idea of the selfish gene, the notion that evolution at its base acts solely to promote genes that are most adept at engineering their own proliferation[132].
This final heading could be summarized as the search for the answer why is there something rather than nothing? Or, why is there an “is”? Without God, the past would be chaos from which order could never emerge and the future also. If there is no God, then both mankind and this universe are inevitably doomed so life has no purpose or meaning for a universe cannot generate its own meaning or value. This universe, as we saw in our review of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, is running out of useable energy and will one day burn out and all matter will collapse into black holes. Mankind is therefore slowly dying so we are like prisoners on death row just awaiting the execution call. Has our life really no purpose or ultimate significance? This reminds me of a story from N. Ireland that is told of an atheist who had just died and one mourner quipped at his funeral wake when looking into his casket “There is Johnny – all dressed up and nowhere to go.”
Clarence Darrow was a renowned criminal lawyer and atheist who once famously defended John T. Scopes, a teacher accused of teaching the evolutionary origin of man, rather than the doctrine of divine creation. At the end of his life he confessed, “My colleagues say that I am a success. Many honours have come my way, but in the Bible is a sentence, which expresses the way I feel about my life. That sentence is this: “We have toiled all night and taken nothing.”[133]
Ironically, atheists think that if they could get rid of God, they can live free from the shackles that bind them. Instead, they discover that by removing God, they remove the only meaning for their life. Paradoxically, often the most ardent atheists are keen to push what they regard are meaningful agendas and are extreme feminist, environmentalist, homosexual and animal rights lobbyists. If there is no meaning in life and no future for this planet, why do they care so much? Their indignation is a floating indignation that is not anchored in any objective meaning. Douglas Wilson replies to Dawkins,
But there is a deeper question. Why does the human creature need consolation? A desperate longing thirst in the desert doesn't turn every mirage into water. But surely it argues that there is such a thing as water. Why would natural selection develop such an odd dead end? It would be as though we were all thirsty in a world without water, or hungry in a world without food, or full of sexual desire in a world without another sex, and so on. When we long for consolation, Dawkins tells us that it need not be God that we are longing for. He probably isn't there, and so we should just deal with it. All right. What is it that we are longing for? And why does atheism fail, in a spectacular way, to address this particular need? Scripture says that God has placed eternity in our hearts, which accounts for this longing for the transcendent. But on Dawkins' account, this longing is entirely illusory, and so he offers us something else. But why does that something else fail to satisfy? It is as though I am fainting from thirst because I want to drink from one of the brooks cascading off one of heaven's mountains, and Dawkins offers me a bowl of sawdust paste instead.
Richard Dawkins tries an inconsistent explanation. He maintains that while he is an atheistic Darwinian as a scientist (meaning that our brain is a product of purposeless chance) he is passionately anti-Darwinian when it comes to how we should conduct our human affairs[134]. Essentially, Dawkins dishonestly want to have the benefit of having God, without the cost of obeying Him. Talk about trying to have your cake and eating it! He claims our “brains can thwart Darwinian designs.” In other words, he is arguing that the creature has somehow (no explanation is offered how) evolved to usurp his creator. Another person once foolishly believed he could do the same, “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”[135]
Another problem for atheism is that if there is no God and all our thoughts, desires, actions are just random chemical processes in our brain governed by the fixed laws of nature then there is NO FREE WILL! For if man is a totally material entity, then any apparent freedom is illusory as the “fixed laws of nature” govern our actions. The Oxford University chemist and prominent atheist, Peter Atkins said as much:
Free will is merely the ability to decide, and the ability to decide is nothing other than the organized interplay of shifts of atoms[136].
So, why do we even waste time trying to punish criminals if their behaviour is fixed by the environment or genetics? Why do we make a distinction in law from crimes committed with full mental faculties and those done by insane persons? Why do we blame ourselves and feel guilty when we make a bad choice? However, natural selection is indifferent to the truth or falsehood of your beliefs; it cares only about adaptive behaviour. If our beliefs are neurological structures based on evolutionary adaption rather than truth, then why do atheists and evolutionists assume that their beliefs dependent on or caused by that neurophysiology will be mostly true? Why should we trust the conclusions of a mind kicked up into the universe by chance? Atheist Thomas Nagel accepts, “The reductionist project usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical—that is, behavioral or neurophysiological—terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed—that conscious experience, thought, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts.” [137] Alvin Platinga also observed, “It’s as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.”
However, if God created us in His image then it follows that we can assume that our cognitive faculties can be, for the most part, rational and reliable in being able to form true beliefs and achieve knowledge. Darwin himself worried about the logic of this,
With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? [138]
Richard Dawkins when confronted in 2006 with the problematic question of freewill on a radio debate tried to avoid the problem:
I’m not interested in free will what I am interested in is the ridiculous suggestion that if science can’t say where the origin of matter comes from theology can. The origin of matter… the origin of the whole universe, is a very, very difficult question. It’s one that scientists are working on. It’s one that they hope eventually to solve. Just as before Darwin, biology was a mystery. Darwin solved that. Now cosmology is a mystery. The origin of the universe is a mystery; it’s a mystery to everyone. Physicists are working on it. They have theories[139].
Atheism simply says we are no different from plants or animals? But, what plant or animal manufactures high-tech products, practices hobbies, solves mathematics problems, enjoys art, laughs at jokes, thinks abstractly, obeys a conscience and worships a higher being? What animal has a complex vocabulary, uses written symbols, observes laws of grammar, and thinks up rhymes and poetry? By way of aside, no atheist has ever come up with a credible reason how, if the man has been on earth for more than 155,000 years, it took man 150,000 years to learn to communicate in written form as the oldest known language is only just over 5,000 years. After all, a two year old child can write the alphabet! Is what we call “beauty” really just a neurological hardwired response to physical data?
Conclusion
The ultimate irony here is that atheists aggressively try to rationally “convert” theists to their “atheistic religious system” when they presumably know better than any of us that we are “fated to believe” our theism because of our chemical make-up, irrespective of the persuasiveness of their arguments. Perhaps, they would do better to shake us or inject us with another chemical so that the arrangement of molecules in our brains would make us atheists. But, no – they argue with us! Why? John Byl comments, “reductionist biologist Richard Dawkins’ boast that Darwin’s evolution ‘made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist’ becomes rather hollow when the truncated world of naturalistic evolution denies us our very intellect.” C S Lewis also quips in his essay Is Theology Poetry?,
If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the tree.
John Eccles wryly comments,
If physical determinism is true, then that is the end of all discussion or argument; everything is finished. There is no philosophy. All human persons are caught up in this inexorable web of circumstances and cannot break out of it. Everything that we think we are doing is an illusion and that is that...the laws of physics and all our understanding of physics is the result of the same inexorable web of circumstances. It is not a matter any more of our struggling for truth to understand what this natural world is and how it came to be.… All of this is illusion. If we want to have that purely deterministic physical world, then we should remain silent.
What is manifestly unfair is that evolutionary atheists are applying their scepticism to what believers’ minds tell them about God, but not to what their minds tell them about evolution. Editor of New Republic, Leon Wieseltier points out, “evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.” Evangelical minister, Tim Keller in his book The Reason for God suggests they must do one of two things:
They could backtrack and admit that we can trust what our minds tell us about certain things, including God. If we find arguments or clues to God’s existence that seem compelling to us, well, maybe, he’s really there. Or else they could go forward and admit that we can’t trust our minds about anything….if, as the evolutionary scientist say, what our brains tell us about morality, love and beauty is not real – if it is merely a set of chemical reaction designed to pass on our genetic code – then so is what their brains tell them about the world. Then why should we trust them?
Keller also challenges the inconsistency of atheists directly,
Though you have little reason to believe your rational faculties work, you go on using them. You have no basis for believing that nature will go on regularly, but you continue to use inductive reasoning and language. You have no good reason to trust your sense that love and beauty matter, but you keep on doing it….if a premise (‘There is no God’) leads to a conclusion, you know isn’t true (‘napalming babies is culturally relative’) then why not change the premise?
Writer, Annie Dillard lived for a year beside a creek in order to observe nature. She recorded in her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that nature has no moral code but is ruled by the violence of the strong against the weak,
Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. ... I had thought to live by the side of the creek in order to shape my life to its free flow. But I seemed to have reached a point where I must draw the line. It looks as though the creek is not buoying me up but dragging me down. Look: Cock Robin may die the most gruesome of slow deaths and nature is no less pleased; the sun comes up, the creek rolls on, the survivors still sing. I cannot feel that way about your death, nor you about mine or either of us about the robin's ... We value the individual supremely, and nature values him not a wit. It looks for the moment as though I might have to reject this creek life unless I want to be utterly brutalized.
Either this world, my mother, is a monster or I am a freak.
Consider the former: the world is a monster. ... There is not a people in the world who behavesas badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there's no right or wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept. Precisely: we are moral creatures in an amoral world. ...[A] monstrous world running on chance and death, careening blindly from nowhere to nowhere, somehow produced wonderful us. [This world runs on chance and death and power, but I cherish life and the rights of the weak versus the strong.] I crawled out of a sea of amino acids and now I must whirl around and shake my fist at that sea and cry Shame! ... We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first.
Chapter Six
THE VERDICT OF EVIDENCE
Science has improved our understanding of life but it cannot account for everything. As William Lane Craig cited in his debate[140] with atheist Peter Atkins, science cannot explain:
1) Mathematics and logic (science cannot prove them because it pre-supposes them),
2) Metaphysical truths (such as, there are minds that exist other than my own),
3) Ethical judgments (you can’t prove by science that the Nazis were evil, because morality is not subject to the scientific method),
4) Aesthetic judgments (the beautiful, like the good, cannot be scientifically proven) and, ironically
5) Science itself - the belief that the scientific method (i.e. searching for causes by observation and repetition) discovers truth can’t be proven by the scientific method itself. Science itself is simply a product of the mind.
If science cannot explain all of the above, the way is surely open for alternative explanations with religion being the leading candidate to fill the vacuum. Christianity, especially, can provide meaningful answers to these most fundamental questions. To all reasonable people, this would seem an eminently sensible approach.
If I were instructed by a client with a litigation brief to argue that God does not exist against the overwhelming cumulative evidence that demonstrates that He does, I would advise my clients to settle out of court or drop it immediately! No honest lawyer in his right mind would advise otherwise. Yet, so many unsuspecting atheists are still trusting these phoney lawyers that masquerade under the title “evolutionary scientist” or “atheistic philosopher” that they have a legitimate case. If God were put on trial for withholding evidence of His existence, no reasonable judge or jury on earth would convict Him!
Many claim attributes about themselves but few are able to evidence them. Muhammed Ali, the famous and charismatic boxer, was once on an airplane when he was asked by a stewardess to fasten his seatbelt during some turbulent weather. “Superman don’t need no seatbelt,” he boasted. “Superman, don’t need no airplane either,” the stewardess quickly retorted. This Emperor clearly had no clothes!
The question of God’s existence is something that very few people are indifferent about. Indeed, atheists often have the strongest emotions in a discussion concerning it which itself is suggestive. Journalist and Yale educated lawyer, Lee Strobel investigated the existence of God and concluded that if he were to embrace atheistic Darwinism and its underlying premise of naturalism he would have to believe that:
( Nothing produces everything
( Non-life produces life
( Randomness produces fine-tuning
( Chaos produces information
( Unconsciousness produces consciousness
( Non-reason produces reason[141]
Frankly, that is just too many coincidences for any rational person to accept. Yet, atheists look you in the eye and boast that they believe this foolishness. We can conclude from the five categories of evidence set out in these five chapters that the First Cause of the universe must be independent of it and have the following characteristics:
( Be self-existent, immaterial, timeless and nonspatial – since the First Cause created all of these;
( Be incredibly powerful and intelligent – to design and create such a precise and vast universe; and
( Be personal – we know that the Creator is timeless as He is outside of time. Since timeless impersonal forces (such as mathematical entities) do not have freewill so they cannot choose to convert nothing into something – therefore, the First Cause must also be personal.
In fact, these characteristics sum up the Bible’s description of God. Interestingly, this characterization of God in this way is a unique concept among early world religions. Why with all this overwhelming evidence for the existence of God do men, especially educated men, refuse to acknowledge their Creator? Are they “educated beyond their intelligence?” To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, “through what strange process has these learned scientists gone in order to make themselves blind to what all rational and logical men except them can see?” The Bible puts it more directly:
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, (Romans 1:20-22)
Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves:
Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste. (Isaiah 28:15-16)
An atheist once scoffed, “If there is a God, may he prove himself by striking me dead right now.” Nothing happened. “You see, there is no God.” A wiser person commented, “You’ve only proved that He is a gracious God.” Incidentally, all such a test can show is that if God does exist, He is not under the control of the whim of fallible man like a circus animal who can be cajoled into performing. Atheists often mistake the grace and patience of God for weakness. It is amusing to hear atheists scoff at the power of God and they cannot even look directly at the sun! The number of known stars is approximately equal to the number of sand grains in the world. As logic tells us that the effect cannot be greater than the cause just imagine the power of God who simply spoke all of those planets into existence without drawing breath. Yes, God is merciful and longsuffering but He is also a just God and He warns:
He, that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy. (Proverbs 29:1)
However, there are many kinds of gods in the world today and it is popular to advocate the pluralistic view that there are many gods or that there is one God with many ways to reach Him. To such an illogicality, God Himself challenges the pluralist:
To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One. Produce your cause, saith the LORD; bring forth your strong reasons, (Isaiah 40:25; 41:21)
ARGUMENTS FOR MONOTHEISM
A young man was cycling through the heat of India and after spotting a cremation site he stopped to converse with the Hindu priest. He pointed to the pile of ashes that represented the remains of the cremated corpse and asked the priest where the dead person was now.
“Young man,” the Hindu priest replied, “that is a question you will be asking all your life and you will never find the answer.” Disillusioned the young man cycled on having thought that if a priest does not know what hope had he of ever discovering the answer. Years later in a hospital bed, the same disillusioned young man was handed a Bible. Turning to John 14:19 he read, “Because I live, ye shall live also.” He had found the answer. After receiving Christ as his Saviour, the young man called Ravi Zacharias became a theistic apologist and author.
All religions do not point to God and are not the same. Indeed, all religions do not agree that all religions are the same. At the core of every religion is an exclusivity of defining how a man can or cannot have a relationship with God. Anyone who believes that all religions are the same is simply showing their ignorance of the teachings of world religions. The U.K.’s Prince Charles typified this ignorance when he declared in 1996 that if he became King in succession to his mother he wanted to be known as: “Defender of Faith” rather than the exclusive Christian title of: “Defender of the Faith.” Even some secular journalists noted the illogicality of this and one commented, “You cannot defend all faiths – at least not at the same time – because each has beliefs that renders those of the others false.[142]”
In philosophy and the reality of life we have what is called the Law of Non-Contradiction. This law simply says that contradictory claims cannot both be true. For instance, if you ask my wife and I where I was born and I told you that I was born in U.K. but my wife replied that I was born in Singapore you would be confused. Now, you don’t think at this point that I was born in two places; just that one of us has made a mistake or misunderstood your question. One thing you would be sure of and that is that my wife’s reply and mine could not be both correct! This is because as the Law of Non-Contradiction says contradictory claims cannot both be true. In fact, anyone who tries to refute the Law of Non-Contradiction is actually affirming it by implying that it is wrong and his or her belief is right. The law of Non-Contradiction is both self-evident and unavoidable.
[pic]
Applying the Law of Non-Contradiction to religion gives us interesting results. Firstly, we know that atheism and theism cannot both be true – either God exists or He does not. Also, it helps us to understand the difference between Christianity and other religions. Either God is a personal transcendent God as Christians say or He is the universe as Hindus say. Either Jesus is the Son of God, died and rose from the dead or he is just a prophet and did not as the Qur’an says. Either non-Christians are going to hell when they die or they are caught in an indefinite cycle of re-incarnation as Buddhists believe. The more you study world religions you realise they have many more contradictory beliefs then similar ones and differ widely on the fundamental doctrines of Faith. The following diagram illustrates this well as it deals with the five possible arguments for the deity of Christ:
1) Jesus really was God
2) Jesus knew he wasn’t God (a liar),
3) Jesus mistakenly thought he was God (a lunatic).
4) Jesus did not make the claims to deity reported in the Gospels (legend)
5) Jesus’ claims to deity is to interpreted them in an Eastern religious sense (lama)
Some people like to patronise Christians and say that Jesus was a good man who taught good things but He wasn’t God. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity summed up the inconsistency of this:
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.” That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic, on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg, or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
Atheists like to portray Christianity as narrow-minded because of the exclusivity of the claims of Jesus Christ. Yet, they never realise that they are guilty of the same intolerance when they state as a fact that Christianity is true and atheism is correct.
A tale that is told illustrates the Law of Non-Contradiction to religion. A pompous liberal preacher was visiting in a conservative Church and met what he regarded was “old fashioned holy roller” woman there. “Do you really believe that Jonah was swallowed by a whale?” the preacher questioned condescendingly. “Of course,” the lady replied and added, “Indeed, if my Bible said that Jonah swallowed the whale I would believe it.” “Could you tell us how a whale could swallow a living man?” smirked the preacher. “I am not sure,” the lady replied, “but, when I get to heaven I will ask Jonah how it happened.” “But,” purred the liberal preacher, “what happens if you get to heaven and you find out that Jonah is not there?” “Well then,” she retorted back, “you can ask him.”
The Law of Non-Contradiction demonstrates in a humourous way in this story that either the Bible is correct in its statement about the existence and salvation of Jonah or it is not.
We know from the cosmological and divine design (teleological) evidences of the universe that God must be infinite because He created all space, all time and all matter from nothing. Infinite simply means that He is self-existent, non-spatial, immaterial, timeless, personal, unimaginably powerful and supremely intelligent etc. In other words, there is nothing lacking in Him.
The fact that God is infinite impliedly rules out all pantheistic religions such as the New Age Movement, Hinduism and some forms of Buddhism that equate God to the universe as we have seen that universe is not infinite as it had a beginning and was designed by another cause.
This fact also disproves polytheistic religions (the belief that there are many gods) such as Mormonism, as there logically cannot be more than one omnipresent infinite being. Let me explain more simply:
If there was more than one God (e.g. God “A” and God “B”), then to distinguish one from the other they must differ in some way. If God “A” is infinite then God “B” must be less than infinite
i.e. INFINITE minus (–) SOMETHING (?),
as the definition of infinite means that God “A” lacks nothing.
Therefore, if God “B” is less than infinite he is not God!
Therefore, we can only logically conclude that there can only be one Infinite Being or God who is transcendent or outside all time, all space and all matter.
There is a push on today based on pragmatism to make us give up the exclusivity of Jesus Christ. Recently a Lipscomb University theologian told an interfaith gathering at the university, “The most basic Christian commitment … is that we say we believe in the Lordship of Jesus. But, if we claim that, how can a Muslim or Jew trust us, if we say Jesus is the Lord of all Lords?”[143] The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw has famously said that “There is only one religion though there are a hundred versions of it.” John Macquarrie, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford in his book, Twentieth Century Religious Thought concludes,
Our survey, however, has undoubtedly pointed us in the direction of a degree of relativism. Absolute and final truth on the questions of religion is just unattainable...Although absolute truth is denied us, we can have partial insights of varying degrees of adequacy, glimpses that would make us less forlorn...What we are driving at is that just as we have no absolute answers, so we have no absolute questions, in which everything would be noticed at once. Only God could ask or answer such questions. Our questions arise out of our situation, and both questions and answers are relative to that situation. This need not distress us for it could not be otherwise - it is part of what it means to be finite.
[We] have seen, there are many possible ways of understanding religion, and...no one way is likely to be the final truth...This is the situation in which finite man has got to make up his mind - an agonizing situation, if you like but also a challenging and adventurous one. So Kierkegaard viewed Christianity - not as a cozy convention but as a decision to be taken and a leap to be made. [144]
However, such a position is itself a presuppositional worldview and fails to do justice to the essential truths of each religion. When truth-claims are taken seriously, sharp and irreconcilable contradictions become obvious. Indeed, many invoke the eastern parable re-told by Lillian Quigley of several blind men all feeling different parts of an elephant’s anatomy to demonstrate pluralism.
The first blind man put out his hand and touched the side of the elephant. “How smooth! An elephant is like a wall.” The second blind man put out his hand and touched the trunk of the elephant. “How round! An elephant is like a snake.” The third blind man put out his hand and touched the tusk of the elephant. “How sharp! An elephant is like a spear.” The fourth blind man put out his hand and touched the leg of the elephant. “How tall! An elephant is like a tree.” The fifth blind man reached out his hand and touched the ear of the elephant. “How wide! An elephant is like a fan.” The sixth blind man put out his hand and touched the tail of the elephant. “How thin! An elephant is like a rope[145].”
The problem for this parable is that the storyteller himself is not blind and understands they are all wrong so it is self-defeating. You cannot logically say “Each of us is blind,” and then add, “but I'll describe what the world really looks like.” This is a clear contradiction. It also presumes that Christians are blind to the teachings of other religions in our rejection of pluralism.
However, Christians reject other religions because of the fact that we are aware of their contradictory beliefs to those of Jesus Christ. We have the truth of God revealed to us through the person of Jesus Christ, the Bible and Creation. A better analogy is to ask a pluralist, “Aren’t you glad your airplane pilot doesn’t think there are many places apart from the runway to land your plane?” It may make you the most popular person to argue for religious pluralism and get you on the NY Times Bestseller List but it is not the truth.
The evidence delineates that the world has been created by an Absolute Personality who cares about the behaviour of His creation by establishing moral absolutes. We would expect this Person to reveal Himself to man and demand obedience. The Bible is the only book that claims to be the place where God infallibly speaks to man. Virtually, all the major cults and false religions are also deriving their authority from the Scripture, but err by distorting their conclusions. Therefore we are only faced with two ultimate conclusions – the wisdom of Christ in Scripture or the wisdom of the world.
Chapter Twelve
PROBLEM QUESTIONS AND CLAIMS
(1) Socrates questioned Euthyphro and caught him on the horns of a dilemma by asking:
1. Is something good because God proclaims it to be good? (i.e., making goodness an arbitrary construct which God can change at a whim).
2. Or, does God proclaim something to be good, because it is good?
God is good and is the standard of goodness. That’s one of the presuppositions to the Christian world view. Jonathan Sarfati answers:
God does not merely exhibit attributes; God is the attributes, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Thus, God did not have arbitrarily to invent ethics; God’s very nature is the ethos. So the solution is that it is a false dilemma—perfect goodness is an essential part of His character, not something outside Him. God indeed commands things which are good, but the reason they are good is because they reflect God’s own nature. So the goodness does not come ultimately from God’s commandments, but from His nature, which then results in good commandments.[146]
(2) The Scientific Age arose when man threw off the shackles of the Bible
Peter Harrison, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, points out:
It is commonly supposed that when in the early modern period individuals began to look at the world in a different way, they could no longer believe what they read in the Bible. In this book I shall suggest that the reverse is the case: that when in the sixteenth century people began to read the Bible in a different way, they found themselves forced to jettison traditional conceptions of the world[147]
Had it not been for the rise of the literal interpretation of the Bible and the subsequent appropriation of biblical narratives by early modern scientists, modern science may not have arisen at all. In sum, the Bible and its literal interpretation have played a vital role in the development of Western science. [148]
Also, it is worth noting that the most openly Theistic nation on earth, the USA, is the most scientifically advanced and during the period after the Scopes Trial when evolution was effectively banished in US schools and colleges, American schools produced more Nobel prizes than the rest of the world combined.
(3) Miracles can never happen as the laws of nature cannot be broken
Can you show me how the methods of science have disproved the possibility of supernatural events? If you cannot, do you accept that you have simply assumed this a priori according to naturalistic principles. Since God created the laws of nature, He can intervene and manipulate them at His choice. Ironically, the Big Bang advocates have no problem suspending these laws for the “big bang.” It also is a false premise as biblical miracles are not anti-natural but supernatural and so are not contrary to nature as they are the work of God who transcends nature. Former atheist, C. S. Lewis, offered a classic response to David Hume’s arguments against miracles:
Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely ‘uniform experience’ against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle. [149]
(4) You should give up your faith if you cannot answer the question
If an evolutionist demands that you renounce your faith unless you can answer a particular objection, you can simply point put that evolutionists do not when they had and remain to have unsolved problems.
(5) Religion is just an adaption of the evolutionary development not based in reality
You can simply point out that they are caught in the same logic. Question what evolutionary process led to their evolutionary ideas, and can they also be dismissed as not comporting to reality.
(6) What about all the evil things done in the name of Christianity?
An atheist has a problem here has he has no objective grounds to determine “evil.” The Christian worldview makes great sense of even such atrocities done in the name of Christianity, since it has a doctrine of sin and a source and standard of righteousness. Such an atheistic argument evidences a shallow understanding of history - a myopic selection of some events to make sense of the whole. We don’t judge the history of medicine on the behaviour of quack doctors and neither should we with true Christianity. It is also worth pointing out that evil done in the name of Christ is inconsistent with Christ’s teachings whereas the awful atrocities done on the basis of evolutionary pre-commitments are not inconsistent with evolution. Incidentally communism has led to more bloodshed than Christianity in the last century – China, Russia, Cambodia etc.
(7) If God’s existence cannot be proved, then atheism must be presumed until convincing evidence for God is established.
This is an argument from ignorance. Just because God’s existence cannot be proved does not mean it is disproved. This is mere arbitrary intellectual imperialism.
(8) I support a women’s right to have an abortion if the child is the result of incest.
Would you apply the same logic to a two year old child born under the same circumstances.
(9) I reject capital punishment as unjust and barbaric.
I take it you are a pacifist then, as killing in war is even more unjust as the dead combatant may be a conscript or an innocent bystander.
(10) Homosexuality is a natural genetic phenomenon
Why do you think the state of nature is an appropriate guide for morality? Why did nature give men bodies designed for reproductive intercourse with women and then give them desires for homosexuality? If homosexuality is natural, then it would be unnatural to allow homosexual couples to adopt as parenthood would be unnatural and therefore immoral. Also, what if disapproval of homosexuality is natural – is it right for you to oppose my views then? The correct position is to fight the impulse to give into immoral impulses – not give into them and hide behind the guise of some “genetic tendency.”
(11) Consenting adults should be free to do what they like in private
What about cannibalism, incest, polygamy, organ selling? The idea of a totally inclusive society is an illusion as every value and right is not shared by everyone. Do we “include” or do we “exclude” paedophiles, murderers? A curb on unrestrained freedom is necessary to liberate us to fulfil the reality of our nature and capacities. A fish can only be free if it is placed in the environment that allows it to flourish. We all need to be governed by liberating restrictions e.g. to learn a musical instrument requires a restriction on one type of freedom in order to liberate a richer kind of freedom by harnessing the natural talent with discipline.
(12) Just as Governments were wrong in the past to deny interracial marriages so they are wrong today to deny homosexual unions.
You are trying to play one set of moral values off against another. Governments approved slavery in the past – does that mean we should approve them now? Also, interracial marriages have the approval of nature as procreation can follow and the other cannot. Race is an inherited characteristic whereas homosexuality is a lifestyle choice. There is no such thing as an ex-black but there is an ex-gay. However, if we have been mistaken in limiting marriage to heterosexuals, why are we not also mistaken in limiting it to couples?
(13) Who gives you the right to say what is true and what is not?
Ultimately, the person who has the best reasons is in the best position to say what is true and what is not. That is the way the world has always progressed.
(14) The Bible must not be infallible as people make mistakes.
Why do you think you are the exception to the rule in making this statement then?
(15) You were conditioned to believe in God by your environment and culture.
This cuts both ways. Every person is conditioned by its environment. You were as thoroughly conditioned not to reject belief in God as I was to believe in God. Therefore we should take great pains to think things out and avoid bias as we come to our conclusions. This should be true equally for you as an unbeliever as for me.
(16) Science has shown the earth is 16 billion years old.
This view is predicated on the belief of how light behaves now. It is certainly not verifiable as no one has lived long enough to attest to this. Evolutionists love to say that light evolves so it is surely open to possibility that the speed of light may change by evolving. Also, the Bible makes clear that the earth was created with the appearance of age such as the maturity of the plants and animals so the planets could well have been created with the appearance of age.
APPENDIX ONE
Theologian Douglas Wilson and atheist Christopher Hitchens debated on whether religion is pernicious. Below is Wilson’s replies in their exchange, one in a series that appeared in Christianity Today website in June 2007. Douglas Wilson is author of Letter from a Christian Citizen , senior fellow of theology at New Saint Andrews College, and minister at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. He is also the editor of Credenda/Agenda magazine
From: Douglas Wilson
To: Christopher Hitchens
Re: Is Christianity Good for the World?
I want to begin by thanking you for agreeing to—as the diplomats might put it—a "frank exchange of views." And I certainly want to thank the folks at Christianity Today for hosting us.
P. G. Wodehouse once said that some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant—better left unstirred. I am afraid that I find myself sympathizing with him as I consider atheism. I had been minding my own business on this subject for a number of years when I saw Sam Harris's book on the desk of a colleague, and that led to my book in response, not to mention a review of Richard Dawkins's most recent book, and now a series of responses to your God is Not Great, all culminating in this exchange. I am afraid that my problem is this: The more I stir the bowl, the more certain fumes, mystery meats, and questions keep floating to the surface. Here are a few of them.
Your first point was that the Christian faith cannot credit itself for all that "Love your neighbor" stuff, not to mention the Golden Rule, and the reason for this is that such moral precepts have been self-evident to everybody throughout history who wanted to have a stable society. You then move on to the second point, which contains the idea that the teachings of Christianity are "incredibly immoral." In your book, you make the same point about other religions. Apparently, basic morality is not all that self-evident. So my first question is: Which way do you want to argue this? Do all human societies have a grasp of basic morality, which is the theme of your first point, or has religion poisoned everything, which is the thesis of your book?
The second thing to observe in this regard is that Christians actually do not claim that the gospel has made the world better by bringing us turbo-charged ethical information. There have been ethical advances that are due to the propagation of the faith, but that is not where the action is. Christians believe—as C. S. Lewis argued in The Abolition of Man—that nonbelievers do understand the basics of morality. Paul the apostle refers to the Gentiles, who did not have the law but who nevertheless knew by nature some of the tenets of the law (Rom. 2:14). But the world is not made better because people can understand the ways in which they are being bad. It has to be made better by Good News—we must receive the gift of forgiveness and the resultant ability to live more in conformity to a standard we already knew (but were necessarily failing to meet). So the gospel does not consist of new and improved law. The gospel makes the world better through Good News, not through guilt trips or good advice.
In your second objection, you gaily dismiss the Old Testament, "which speaks hotly in recommending genocide, slavery, genital mutilation, and other horrors." Setting aside for the moment whether your representation of the Old Testament is judicious or accurate, let me assume for the sake of discussion that you have accurately summarized the essence of Mosaic ethics here. You then go on to say that we who teach such stories to children have been "damned by history." But why should this "damnation by history" matter to any of us reading Bible stories to kids, or, for that matter, to any of the people who did any of these atrocious things, on your principles? These people are all dead now, and we who read the stories are all going to be dead. Why should any of us care about the effeminate judgments of history? Should the propagators of these "horrors" have cared? There is no God, right? Because there is no God, this means that—you know—genocides just happen, like earthquakes and eclipses. It is all matter in motion, and these things happen.
If you are on the receiving end, there is only death, and if you are an agent delivering this genocide, the long-term result is brief victory and death at the end. So who cares? Picture an Israelite during the conquest of Canaan, doing every bad thing that you say was occurring back then. During one of his outrages, sword above his head, should he have stopped for a moment to reflect on the possibility that you might be right? "You know, in about three and a half millennia, the consensus among historians will be that I am being bad right now. But if there is no God, this disapproval will certainly not disturb my oblivion. On with the rapine and slaughter!" On your principles, why should he care?
In your third objection, you say that if "Christianity is to claim credit for the work of outstanding Christians or for the labors of famous charities, then it must in all honesty accept responsibility for the opposite." In short, if we point to our saints, you are going to demand that we point also to our charlatans, persecutors, shysters, slave-traders, inquisitors, hucksters, televangelists, and so on. Now allow me the privilege of pointing out the structure of your argument here. If a professor takes credit for the student who mastered the material, aced his finals, and went on to a career that was a benefit to himself and the university he graduated from, the professor must (fairness dictates) be upbraided for the dope-smoking slacker that he kicked out of class in the second week. They were both formally enrolled, is that not correct? They were both students, were they not?
What you are doing is saying that Christianity must be judged not only on the basis of those who believe the gospel in truth and live accordingly but also on the basis of those baptized Christians who cannot listen to the Sermon on the Mount without a horse laugh and a life to match. You are saying that those who excel in the course and those who flunk out of it are all the same. This seems to me to be a curious way of proceeding.
You conclude by objecting to the sovereignty of God, saying that the idea makes the whole world into a ghastly totalitarian state, where believers say that God (and who does He think He is?) runs everything. I would urge you to set aside for a moment the theology of the thing and try to summon up some gratitude for those who built our institutions of liberty. Many of them were actually inspired by the idea that since God is exhaustively sovereign, and because man is a sinner, it follows that all earthly power must be limited and bounded. The idea of checks and balances came from a worldview that you dismiss as inherently totalitarian. Why did those societies where this kind of theology predominated produce, as a direct result, our institutions of civil liberty?
One last question: In your concluding paragraph you make a great deal out of your individualism and your right to be left alone with the "most intimate details of [your] life and mind." Given your atheism, what account are you able to give that would require us to respect the individual? How does this individualism of yours flow from the premises of atheism? Why should anyone in the outside world respect the details of your thought life any more than they respect the internal churnings of any other given chemical reaction? That's all our thoughts are, isn't that right? Or, if there is a distinction, could you show how the premises of your atheism might produce such a distinction?
Part 2
I am glad that you found my response mildly amusing. I am also grateful we share an appreciation for Wodehouse. And I am extremely glad that you would like me to begin talking about the death of Christ for sin—which I fully intend to do. But the pattern the New Testament gives us is to address the need for repentance first and then to talk about the need for faith in Christ as Savior. Within the boundaries of our discussion, repentance would be necessary because you have embraced the internal contradictions of atheism, all for the sake of avoiding God (Rom. 1:21; Ps. 14:1-2). So we will get to the gospel, but I am afraid I am going to have to ask you to hold your horses.
So, back to the business at hand, the business of intellectual repentance. Dismissing something as casuistry is not the same thing as a demonstration of casuistry, and refusing to answer questions because the other guy is being evasive is quite a neat trick … if you can pull it off.
I am afraid you misconstrued my acknowledgement that—with regard to public civic life—atheists can certainly behave in a moral manner. My acknowledgement was not that morality has nothing to do with the supernatural, as you represented, but rather that morality has nothing to do with the supernatural if you want to be an inconsistent atheist. Here is that point again, couched another way and tied into our topic of debate.
Among many other reasons, Christianity is good for the world because it makes hypocrisy a coherent concept. The Christian faith certainly condemns hypocrisy as such, but because there is a fixed standard, this makes it possible for sinners to fail to meet it or for flaming hypocrites to pretend that they are meeting it when they have no intention of doing so. Now my question for you is this: Is there such a thing as atheist hypocrisy? When another atheist makes different ethical choices than you do (as Stalin and Mao certainly did), is there an overarching common standard for all atheists that you are obeying and which they are not obeying? If so, what is that standard and what book did it come from? Why is it binding on them if they differ with you? And if there is not a common objective standard which binds all atheists, then would it not appear that the supernatural is necessary in order to have a standard of morality that can be reasonably articulated and defended?
So I am not saying you have to believe in the supernatural in order to live as a responsible citizen. I am saying you have to believe in the supernatural in order to be able to give a rational and coherent account of why you believe yourself obligated to live this way. In order to prove me wrong here, you must do more than employ words like "casuistry" or "evasions"—you simply need to provide that rational account. Given atheism, objective morality follows … how?
The Christian faith is good for the world because it provides the fixed standard which atheism cannot provide and because it provides forgiveness for sins, which atheism cannot provide either. We need the direction of the standard because we are confused sinners. We need the forgiveness because we are guilty sinners. Atheism not only keeps the guilt, but it also keeps the confusion.
Part 3
There are a few slight confusions that I would like deal with briefly within the scope of my first few paragraphs. Weather permitting, I would then like to take just a short space to address the central point which you have (again) missed. The remainder of my time will be spent on your claim concerning the origin of ethical imperatives. I would like to do all this in order to set the stage for our unfolding discussion of the central reason why Christianity is good for the world—it is good for the world because Jesus died for the life of the world.
First, the confusions. The point of citing Psalm 14:1 was not to infer that I thought you were "dumb." In the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, folly is a moral question, not a matter of intelligence. I am quite prepared to cheerfully grant (and not for the sake of the argument) that you are my intellectual superior. But our discussion is not about who has more horsepower under his intellectual hood—the point of discussion is whether your superior car is on the right road. A fast car can be a real detriment on a dark night when the bridge is out. And you insist on continuing to wear the sunglasses of atheism.
Now the second confusion concerns your citation of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The popular name for the parable should have been a giveaway—you acknowledge that the protagonist of the story was "from Samaria," but you miss that this was an ethnic and racial issue and not a question of where he happened to live. The man beat up by the side of the road was a Jew, the priest and Levite who passed by on the other side were Jews, and the man who stopped was a despised half-breed, a Samaritan. But you say that it was probable that the Samaritan was a Jew, which inverts the whole story and indicates to me that you have not really been reading the text very closely (Luke 10:27-37). But to answer your point in even bringing the story up, the Samaritan did not need the teaching of Jesus to do what God desired here. Jesus cited the story as an exposition of the second greatest commandment, which is to love your neighbor as yourself. A certain lawyer had asked Jesus to "define neighbor" in order to justify himself, and Jesus then told this story to illustrate the point of an ancient law. So the duty to love our neighbor was revealed to Old Testament writers about a millennium and a half before the Samaritan fulfilled it in his charitable act.
You say, incidentally, that this kind of law was bringing coals to Newcastle—Moses came down from the mount and told people that murder, theft, and perjury were wrong, and all the assembled rolled their collective eyes. "We already knew that!" But the problem is that ancient man didn't know that, and modern man still doesn't know it. To state some of the issues that are subsumed under just one of the three categories you mention is to point to controversies that continue down to this day. Consider some of the issues clustered under the easiest of these three to condemn—murder. We have abortion, infanticide, partial-birth abortion, euthanasia, genocide, stem-cell research, capital punishment, and unjust war. Murder is the big E on the eye chart, and we still can't see it that clearly.
Man, both ancient and modern, certainly knows the entire law of God if it is his own ox being gored, but the purpose of a law code is to have one standard in place for all parties when individuals want to set aside the standards of civilized life to suit themselves. And we need as much help with that as ancient man ever did.
Now we really need to address the point you continue to miss. I am not talking about whether atheists must do evil, or if they can do evil. I have denied the former, and you have now granted the latter. But that is not the point. We are not talking about whether your atheism compels you to run downtown this evening to shoot out the street lights. I grant that it does not. And we are not talking about whether atheists can do vile things. You grant that they can. We are talking about (or, more accurately, I am trying to talk about) whether or not atheism provides any rational basis for rational condemnation when others decide to misbehave this way. You keep saying, "I have come to my ethical position." I keep asking, "Yes, quite. But why did you do so?"
So the point is not whether we could rustle up some nice places governed by atheists or some hellholes governed by Christians. If given a choice between living in a Virginia governed by Jefferson and living in a Russia under the czars, I would opt to live under your beloved Jefferson. Fine. But this is not a concession, because it is not the point.
Take the vilest atheist you ever heard of. Imagine yourself sitting at his bedside shortly before he passes away. He says, following Sinatra, "I did it my way." And then he adds, chuckling, "Got away with it too." In our thought experiment, the one rule is that you must say something to him, and whatever you say, it must flow directly from your shared atheism—and it must challenge the morality of his choices. What can you possibly say? He did get away with it. There is a great deal of injustice behind him, which he perpetrated, and no justice in front of him. You have no basis for saying anything to him other than to point to your own set of personal prejudices and preferences. You mention this to him, and he shrugs. "Tomayto, tomahto."
I am certainly willing to take the same thought experiment. I can imagine some pretty vile Christians, and if I couldn't, I am sure you could help me. The difference between us is that I have a basis for condemning evil in its Christian guise. You have no basis for confronting evil in its atheist guise, or in its Christian guise, either. When you say that a certain practice is evil, you have to be prepared to tell us why it is evil. And this brings us to the last point—you make the first glimmer of an attempt to provide a basis for ethics.
Part 4
You refer to the faithful "creating a mystery where none exists." May I get you to agree that the question "Why is there something here rather than nothing at all?" does not fall into that category? If you and I were standing on a little thought-experiment balcony watching either the moment when the cosmic boilers blew, giving us the Big Bang, or watching the first glorious creational response to God's fiat lux, can we agree that at that moment Ockham's razor would be of absolutely no use to either of us?
If Jesus had told a story about a black man stopping to help a beat-up white guy in Mississippi in the 1950's, and you retold the story later with the merciful one now suitably white, I think it would be appropriate for me to point out the inversion, and that the story had been significantly changed and weakened. And when I said that the Good Samaritan fulfilled an ancient law, I did not say that obedience to this law was dormant during the intervening time. Of course it was not. But neither was disobedience dormant, and Jesus was confronting a particular form of institutionalized disobedience—religious hypocrisy.
On the question of morality, you say that you are "simply reluctant" to say that if religious faith falls, then the undergirding decency must fall also. But your behavior goes far beyond a mere "reluctance to concede." Your book and your installments in this debate thus far are filled with fierce denunciations of various manifestations of immorality. You are playing Savonarola here, and I simply want to know the basis of your florid denunciations. You preach like some hot gospeler—with a floppy leather-bound book and all. I know the book is not the Bible and so all I want to know is what book it is, and why it has anything to do with me. Why should anyone listen to your jeremiads against weirdbeards in the Middle East or fundamentalist Baptists from Virginia like Falwell? On your terms, you are just a random collection of protoplasm, noisier than most, but no more authoritative than any—which is to say, not at all.
You say that I need to admit that a "good person can be born" who can't get his mind around what I am saying about Jesus. But my initial claim has been far more modest. I am simply saying that a good person needs to be able, at a minimum, to define what goodness is and tell us what the basis for it is. Your handwaving—"ordinary morality is innate"—does not even begin to meet the standard.
There are three insurmountable problems for you here. The first is that innate is not a synonym for authoritative. Why does anyone have to obey any particular prompting from within? And which internal prompting is in charge of sorting out all the other competing promptings? Why? Second, the tangled skein of innate and conflicting moralities found within the billions of humans alive today also has to be sorted out and systematized. Why do you get to do it and then come around and tell us how we must behave? Who died and left you king? And third, according to you, this innate morality of ours is found in a creature (mankind) that is a distant blood cousin of various bacteria, aquatic mammals, and colorful birds in the jungle. Your entire worldview has evolution as a key foundation stone, and evolution means nothing if not change. You believe that virtually every species has morphed out of another one. And when we change, as we must, all our innate morality changes with us, right? We have distant cousins where the mothers ate their young. Was that innate for them? Did they evolve out of it because it was evil for them to be doing that?
Now this is how all this relates to the assigned topic of our debate. We are asking if Christianity is good for the world. As a Christian discussing this with an atheist, I have sought to show in the first place that atheism has nothing whatever to say about this topic—one way or the other. If Christianity is bad for the world, atheists can't consistently point this out, having no fixed way of defining "bad." If Christianity is good for the world, atheists should not be asked about it either because they have no way of defining "good." Think of it as spiking your guns—so that I can talk about Jesus. And I want to do that because he is good for the world.
Jesus Christ is good for the world because he came as the life of the world. You point out, rightly, that loving our neighbor as we love ourselves is impossible for us, completely out of our reach. But you take this inability as a state of nature (which the commandment offends), while the Christian takes it as a state of death (which life offers to transform). Our complete inability to do what is right does not erase our obligation to do what is right. This is why the Bible describes the unbeliever as a slave to sin or one who is in a state of death. The point of each illustration is the utter and complete inability to do right. We were dead in our transgressions and sins, the apostle Paul tells us. So the death and resurrection of Christ are not presented by the gospel as medicine for everyone in the hospital, but rather as resurrection life in a cemetery.
The way of the world is to abide in an ongoing state of death—when it comes to selfishness, grasping, treachery, lust, hypocrisy, pride, and insolence, we consistently run a surplus. But in the death of Jesus that way of death was gloriously put to death. This is why Jesus said that when he was lifted up on the cross, he would draw all men to himself. In the kindness of God, the Cross is an object of inexorable fascination to us. When men and women look to him in his death, they come to life in his resurrection. And that is good for the world.
Part 5
I am afraid your argument is tangled up with greater difficulties than the ethnicity of the Samaritan, and so that issue really need not detain us any longer. I have been asking you to provide a warrant for morality, given atheism, and you have mostly responded with assertions that atheists can make what some people call moral choices. Well, sure. But what I have been after is what rational warrant they can give for calling one choice "moral" and another choice "not moral." You finally appealed to "innate human solidarity," a phrase that prompted a series of pointed questions from me. In response, you now tell us that we have an innate predisposition to both good and wicked behavior. But we are still stuck. What I want to know (still) is what warrant you have for calling some behaviors "good" and others "wicked." If both are innate, what distinguishes them? What could be wrong with just flipping a coin? With regard to your retort that my "talent for needless complexity" has simply gotten me "God's coexistence with evil," I reply that I would rather have my God and the problem of evil than your no God and "Evil? No problem!"
After this many installments, I now feel comfortable in asserting that I have posed this question to you from every point of the compass and have not yet received anything that approaches the semblance of an answer. On this question I am tempted to quote Wyatt Earp from the film Tombstone—"You gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?"—but I think I'll pass. Earp was not very much like the Good Samaritan.
But it is interesting that the same thing happens to you when you have to give some warrant for trusting in "reason.". I noted your citation of LaPlace in your book and am glad you brought him up here. LaPlace believed he was not in need of the God hypothesis, just like you, but you should also know he held this position as a firm believer in celestial and terrestrial mechanics. He was a causal determinist, meaning that he believed that every element of the universe in the present was "the effect of its past and the cause of its future."
So if LaPlace is why you think belief in God is now "optional," this appeal of yours actually turns into quite a fun business. This doctrine means (although LaPlace admittedly got distracted before these implications caught up with him) that you, Christopher Hitchens, are not thinking your thoughts and writing them down because they are true, but rather because the position and velocity of all the atoms in the universe one hundred years ago necessitated it. And I am not sitting here thinking my Christian thoughts because they are the truth of God, but rather because that is what these assembled chemicals in my head always do in this condition and at this temperature. "LaPlace's demon" could have calculated and predicted your arguments (and word count) a century ago in just the same way that he could have calculated the water levels of the puddles in my driveway — and could have done so using the same formulae. This means that your arguments and my puddles are actually the same kind of thing. They are on the same level, so to speak.
If you were to take a bottle of Mountain Dew and another of Dr. Pepper, shake them vigorously, and put them on a table, it would not occur to anyone to ask which one is "winning the debate." They aren't debating; they are just fizzing. You refer to "language in which to write this argument," and you do so as though you believed in a universe where argument was a meaningful concept. Argument? Argument? I have no need for your "argument hypothesis." Just matter in motion, man.
You dismiss the idea that the death of Jesus—the "torture and death of a single individual in a backward part of the Middle East" — could possibly be the solution to the sorrows of our brutish existence. When I said that Jesus is good for the world because he is the life of the world, you just tossed this away. You said, "You cannot possibly 'know' this. Nor can you present any evidence for it."
Actually, I believe I can present evidence for what I know. But evidence comes to us like food, and that is why we say grace over it. And we are supposed to eat it, not push it around on the plate—and if we don't give thanks, it never tastes right. But here is some evidence for you, in no particular order. The engineering that went into ankles. The taste of beer. That Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, just like he said. A woman's neck. Bees fooling around in the flower bed. The ability of acorns to manufacture enormous oaks out of stuff they find in the air and dirt. Forgiveness of sin. Storms out of the North, the kind with lightning. Joyous laughter (diaphragm spasms to the atheistic materialist). The ocean at night with a full moon. Delta blues. The peacock that lives in my yard. Sunrise, in color. Baptizing babies. The pleasure of sneezing. Eye contact. Having your feet removed from the miry clay, and established forever on the rock. You may say none of this tastes right to you. But suppose you were to bow your head and say grace over all of it. Try it that way.
You say that you cannot believe that Christ's death on the Cross was salvation for the world because the idea is absurd. I have shown in various ways that absurdity has not been a disqualifier for any number of your current beliefs. You praise reason to the heights, yet will not give reasons for your strident and inflexible moral judgments, or why you have arbitrarily dubbed certain chemical processes "rational argument." That's absurd right now, and yet there you are, holding it. So for you to refuse to accept Christ because it is absurd is like a man at one end of the pool refusing to move to the other end because he might get wet. Given your premises, you will have to come up with a different reason for rejecting Christ as you do.
But for you to make this move would reveal the two fundamental tenets of true atheism. One: There is no God. Two: I hate Him.
Part 6, Conclusion
Let me begin my final installment with my thanks to you for agreeing to this debate, as well as my thanks to Christianity Today for being such an amiable host.
Turning to our discussion, I would like to begin by noting several points of minor agreement. First, I do enjoy our shared appreciation of Wodehouse—although I have to say I was disappointed with your failure to pick up the Wodehousian echoes in my "Hallmark" conclusion.
Secondly, I quite agree with you that we ought not to "resist evidence that may at first sight appear unwelcome or unsettling." But this is not really a deep agreement, for we immediately go on to differ over which one of us is failing to honor this quite obvious principle. I have shown that you refuse to consider evidence for the fact that your assumption of what the universe actually is does not allow for valid descriptions of that universe to arise from within it. If one were to spill milk accidentally on the kitchen floor, and someone else came in and wanted to know what had happened, the one thing we can be sure of is that such an inquiring mind wouldn't ask the milk. The milk wouldn't know. It's the accident.
On the question of morality, you again attempt an answer: "My answer is the same as it was all along: Our morality evolved." There are two points to be made about this reply. The first concerns evolved morality and the future, and is a variation on my previous questions. If our morality evolved, then that means our morality changes. If evolution isn't done yet (and why should it be?), then that means our morality is involved in this on-going flux as well. And that means that everything we consider to be "moral" is really up for grabs. Our "vague yet grand conception of human rights" might flat disappear just like our gills did.
Our current "morals" are therefore just a way station on the road. No sense getting really attached to them, right? When I am traveling, I don't get attached to motel rooms. I don't weep when I have to part from them. So, in the future, after every ferocious moral denunciation you choose to offer your reading public, you really need to add something like, "But this is just a provisional judgment. Our perspective may evolve to an entirely different one some years hence," or "Provisional opinions only. Morality changes over time"—POOMCOT for short. It would look like this: "The Rev. Snoutworthy is an odious little toad, not to mention a waste of skin, and his proposal that we prosecute the brassiere editors of the Sears catalog on pornography and racketeering charges is an outrage against civilized humanity. But … POOMCOT."
This relates to the second point, which concerns evolved morality and the past. When dealing with people whose moral judgments have differed from yours, do you regard them as "immoral" or as "less evolved?" The rhetoric of your book, your tone in these exchanges, and your recent dancing on the grave of the late Jerry Falwell would all seem to indicate the former. In your choice of words, the people you denounce are to be blamed. The word fulminations comes to mind. You write like a witty but acerbic tenth-century archbishop with a bad case of the gout. But this is truly an odd thing to do if "morality" is a simple derivative of evolution. Are you filled with fierce indignation that the koala bear hasn't evolved ears that stick flat to the side of his head like they are supposed to? Are you wroth over the fact that clams don't have legs yet? When you notice that the bears at the zoo continue to suck on their paws, do you stop to remonstrate with them?
Your notion of morality, and the evolution it rode in on, can only concern itself with what is. But morality as Christians understand it, and the kind you surreptitiously draw upon, is concerned with ought. David Hume showed us that we cannot successfully derive ought from is. Have you discovered the error in his reasoning? It is clear from how you defend your ideas of "morality" that you have not done so. You are a gifted writer, and you have a flair for polemical voltage. But strip it all away, and what do you have underneath? You believe yourself to live in a universe where there is no such thing as any fixed ought or ought not. But God has gifted you with a remarkable ability to denounce what ought not to be. And so, because you reject him, you have great sermons but no way of ever coming up with a text. When people start to notice the absence of texts, the absence of warrant, the absence of reasons, you adjust and compensate with rhetorical embellishment and empurpled prose. You are like the minister in the story who wrote in the margin of his notes, "Argument weak. Shout here."
Your invitation to us to try to "name one moral action … that could not have been performed or spoken by an atheist" shows that you continue to miss the point. We have every reason to believe that such atheists, performing such deeds, will be as unable as you have been to give an account of why one deed should be seen as good and another as evil. You say you have no alternative but to call sociopaths and psychopaths "evil." But you surely do have an alternative. Why not just call them "different"?
A fixed standard, grounded in the character of God, allows us to define evil, but this brings with it the possibility of forgiveness. You reject forgiveness, but at the end of the day this means that you don't believe there is anything that needs forgiveness. This means you have destroyed the idea of evil, regardless of what you might "call" behaviors that happen to be inconvenient for you.
I noted from your book that you are a baptized Christian, so I want to conclude by calling and inviting you back to the terms of that baptism. Everyone who has been baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is carrying in their person the standing obligations of repentance, belief, and continued discipleship. Your Christian name Christopher means "bearer of Christ," your baptism means the same thing, and the Third Commandment requires you not to bear or carry that name in vain. Some, as you have done, revolt against the terms of this discipleship, but it does not mean that the demands of discipleship are somehow negated or revoked. I do not bring this up in order to upbraid you. I do not know if you departed from the faith because you drifted from it, bolted from it, or were chased out by hypocritical Christians. Regardless, the kindness of God is revealed to all of us in Christ, and everyone, whatever their story, has to come to terms with this kindness.
Jesus was not just one more character in history, however important—rather, he was and is the founder of a new history, a new humanity, a new way of being human. He was the last and true Adam. But before this new humanity in Christ could be established and begin its task of filling the earth, the old way of being human had to die. Before the meek could inherit the earth, the proud had to be evicted and sent away empty. That is the meaning of the Cross, the whole point of it. The Cross is God's merciful provision that executes autonomous pride and exalts humility. The first Adam received the fruit of death and disobedience from Eve in a garden of life; the true Adam bestowed the fruit of his life and resurrection on Mary Magdalene in a garden of death, a cemetery. The first Adam was put into the death of deep sleep and his wife was taken from his side; the true Adam died on the cross, a spear was thrust into his side, and his bride came forth in blood and water. The first Adam disobeyed at a tree; the true Adam obeyed on a tree. And everything is necessarily different.
Christ told His followers to tell everybody about this—about how the world is being moved from the old humanity to the new way of being human. Not only has the world been born again, so must we be born again. The Lord told us specifically to preach this Good News to every creature. He has established his great but welcoming household, and there is room enough for you. Nothing you have ever said or done will be held against you. Everything will be washed and forgiven. There is simple food—bread and wine—on the table. The door is open, and we'll leave the light on for you.
APPENDIX TWO
Exchange Between an Atheist Student and a Teacher
Student: Believing in the existence of God is like believing that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy are real.
Teacher: How many people do you know who started to believe in Santa Claus in adulthood?
Student: But Chinese people do not believe in God. We believe we control our own destiny.
Teacher: Really? Can I ask you five simple questions to test that accuracy of your claim?
Student: Why of course, Sir.
Teacher: Question 1: Did you know when you were going to be born?
Student: Errrr….No.
Teacher: Question 2: Did you know in which country you were going to be born?
Student: Errrr….No.
Teacher: Question 3: Did you know who your parents were going to be before you were born?
Student: Errrr….No.
Teacher: Question 4: Did you know what IQ level you would have when you were born?
Student: Sorry….No.
Teacher: Question 5: Do you know when and how you will die?
Student: Mmm….No.
Teacher: So the five most important facts that influence your destiny in life you do not control – is this correct?
Student: I guess so.
Teacher: So, what do you control of your destiny?
Student: Oh… I can control for example who I marry and what job I will accept.
Teacher: Really, what happens if the person you want to marry refuses and the Chinese economy crashes just as you graduate?
Student: Errrr….good question. Show me God exists.
Teacher: The problem with this is because of your presuppositions. You will not accept the supreme norms that I use to determine truth because of your biases. You cannot deny absolutes without smuggling it in the back door.
Student: How so?
Teacher: I must see what your presuppositions are and work either with them or against them. If I showed you prophecies from the Old Testament that were fulfilled in the New Testament, you would simply reject them on the basis of forgery or they are not real prophecies since your presupposition won't allow it. Let me put you to the test: what kind of evidence would you accept that would prove God's existence?
Student: I just don’t believe in something I cannot see.
Teacher: You cannot see music, your thoughts, electrons, your mind or the wind so do you not believe in these things also? Can you see the existence of the existence of other minds? Can you even prove they exist? Surely, we know our mind better than the material world, as whatever we know about the outside world is filtered through the mind. Moral values are also rather strange. We cannot see them, hear them, or feel them, but we cannot doubt they exist. If someone steals from you your disgust is not merely a feeling, like feeling hot or sad.
Actually by saying that there is no God you are trying to disprove a universal negative. For when you say absolutely there is no God, this means you know all information about every person in the whole universe at this moment in time. Therefore, you must be everywhere in the universe now, so you must be omnipresent and you would have to know everything about every part of the universe also, so you would be omniscient. However, by being omnipresent and omniscient you would by definition be God…..but His existence is what I thought you were attempting to disprove?
Student: Clever answer….but why is there so many evil things in the world if there is a real God in control of all things?
Teacher: Can you define for me what “evil” is? However, the existence of evil must presuppose the existence of good. And “good” must be defined by an objective moral law standard. If there is a moral law, there must be a moral law-giver. Evil could not be defined as evil if there were no God. What we call evil would just be stuff that happens that we don’t like, or at least that some of us don’t like. Pure practical reason will not lead you to morality. There are many wicked people in the world, which make bad choices in their lives because of their sinful nature. These bad choices or sins affect those around them. Remember evil is not a person – it the result of choices we make.
Student: Oh, sin…that is just cultural influence.
Teacher: Really, so did your mother say to you when you were a small child, “today I will teach you to lie at 1pm, at 3pm I will teach you to steal and tomorrow morning I will teach you to say bad words?”
Student: No! Of course not!
Teacher: The reason your mother didn’t have to was because there was a law inside you that taught you instinctively how to do these things!
Student: That is just your subjective conscience.
Teacher: Conscience senses right or wrong like the eye senses colour. However, the eye does not create colour. Do you think your conscience then creates right or wrong? If you say yes, then what objective grounds have you to follow them or ask anyone else to do so? My ability to hiccup is innate, but my hiccups are not authoritative. On what basis do we say that my own conscience is a morally authoritative, even with regard to my own affairs? It should also be noted that no finite material entity creates or has the right to demand any absolute moral obligation. Absolute and moral obligations presuppose loyalty only to an absolute Person.
Student: Ok then, why did God not make us perfect so we could not sin if He is so powerful?
Teacher: Your question pre-supposes that God exists, as you obviously believe that there is a “perfect” standard of moral good. But, how do you know what is morally perfect unless there is an objective standard external to you? Therefore, your basic premise against the existence of God is self-refuting as you’re really arguing that there cannot be a Supreme Being who is the standard of goodness because there are departures from that standard of goodness in the world.
Student: What purpose has God in allowing evil if He is all powerful?
Teacher: The Bible does not fully explain the reasons why. We are simply told that God works everything out for good (Rom 8:28). Assyria was a rod of wrath in the hands of the Almighty, levied by providence to crush a hypocritical nation (Isa 10:5-19). Assyria meant it for evil, but God meant it for good (Gen 50:20). We tend to judge evil from our finite knowledge and our segment in history and come to general conclusions. The only One who could ever know that good can come from evil is God. The Triune God is infinite in His thinking and He follows a wise plan (Psa 104:24; Jer 10:12) which is for His Glory and not ours.
One of the great things about God is that He is capable of taking a bad thing and making good come out of it. If the existence of evil was foreordained by a Sovereign God, then there is hope— for evil is restrained by an infinitely wise God for a higher good. However, if evil is freely willed outside of God’s control, then there is only despair as it has no boundaries in time and space. Remember, God as the Sovereign Creator and Sustainer of the universe is under no obligation to share every piece of information with us. He has revealed more than enough truth for us to trust Him in the areas He chooses to remain silent. As Greg Koukl explains,
By the way, what’s the alternative? If you conclude there's no God because of the existence of evil, then there’s no possibility of ever redeeming that evil for good. British philosopher Bertrand Russell said that no one can sit at the bedside of a dying child and still believe in God. My response to Mr. Russell is, “What would you say to a dying child?” What could an atheist say? “Too bad?” “Tough luck?”…You see, in that circumstance, there’s no possibility of redemption for that evil. In fact, it doesn't seem to make sense to even call it evil at all if there is no God. But with God, at least there's the possibility that the evil can be used for good. That's the promise of the Scriptures.
And so, instead of the syllogism, “God created all things, and evil is a thing, therefore God created evil,” we start from a different point. “All things God created are good-which is what the text says-and evil isn’t good, therefore God didn’t create evil.” Then we can progress to, “If God created all things, and God didn't create evil, then evil is not a thing.” You see, those two syllogisms are just as valid as the first one (if God created all things, and evil is a thing, then God created evil), and it seems that the premises are more reliable. The premises seem to be accurate and true.
The questions we have to ask ourselves are: Do we have reason to think that God is good, and do we have reason to think that evil is not a thing? If we have good reasons to think those two things, then our new set of syllogisms work. We can then strongly trust that when God does allow a privation of good (evil) to influence our lives, He does it not for evil designs, but ultimately for good purposes.
Student: Surely, if there was a good God in the world He would not let evil things happen like a Tsunami.
Teacher: Those who object to this are the same people who are equally quick to say that God could not punish. If God is indifferent to wickedness, His goodness is called into question. Yet if He punishes sin, His love is questioned. Humanity is in outright rebellion to God. As Sovereign Creator, God has the right to ordain events in order to get our attention to the fact that we need to be restored to a right relationship with him. We kick God out of Christmas and then a tsunami hits, and we wonder where God was. Atheism is even more ineffective as an explanation as it postulates a universe in which all evil has to be understood as “non-evil.”
Student: Ok… then why does not God remove evil people from the world?
Teacher: Supposing he starts with you – is that ok?
Student: I am not as bad as many people?
Teacher: By what objective standard? Remember by pre-supposing an objective standard of good you are implying the existence of an external source of objective good.
Student: Let’s not go down that path again. Anyway I just believe in Science. If something can be proved by experiment, I will believe it. This is the Scientific Method.
Teacher: Can you prove scientifically that the Science Method is correct then?
Student: You are just playing philosophical games.
Teacher: No I am merely proving to you the limitations of the so-called Scientific Method.
Student: I thought science could explain everything.
Teacher: Can science explain mathematics, logic, aesthetic beauty, moral choices, and metaphysical truths?
Student: Mmmm….I guess not. But you can never know anything absolutely.
Teacher: How do you know you cannot know anything absolutely?
Student: This is because all truth is relative.
Teacher: Is that statement relatively true then? However, is the Law of Gravity just a relative truth? Would you be willing to jump out of the top storey of this ten-storey building to demonstrate that the Law of Gravity is not an absolute truth?
Student: But to believe in God is a religious belief. Faith does not come into reality.
Teacher: All of us have a faith-based belief. If you believe that there is no God that is your faith-based belief. You are no different from Christians in that respect. Secondly, all of us exercise faith every day that the brakes in our car will work when we use them, that our milk and cereal in the morning are free from life-threatening bacteria that our surgeons exercise due care and attention when operating on us. We simply cannot live life without exercising a huge amount of faith.
Student: But science has proven to us that we have come from monkeys and fishes.
Teacher: Explain the process.
Student: Ok…Put simply, we started off as one cell, then it evolved into two cells, then into a fish, then a monkey and then a man. This process takes a long time of course – billions of years.
Teacher: If man is the highest state of evolved status, why today do we still have so many one and two cell organisms, fish and monkeys? Why are they still breeding such stable species pools of their type? What is stopping them evolving?
Student: Err….
Teacher: I note you said this process takes billions of years. I am assuming you then believe that there are millions of intermediate species between the change for example between a monkey and a man or a fish and a monkey?
Student: Yes of course. It is a very gradual process.
Teacher: I am a little confused. Today on the earth there are billions of fish, millions of monkeys and more than 6 billion humans. If your theory is credible, then we would expect to see billions of intermediate species such as ¾ fish/ ¼ monkey, ½ fish/½ monkey, ¼ fish/ ¾ monkey – have you seen any of these anywhere?
Student: Err…we have found some bones that appear to be intermediate species.
Teacher: Is that the best you can do? A few weird shaped bones? That is not evidence but the theory arranging the evidence. Surely, as you are so confident that these intermediate species existed, you must have seen some in the zoo, on the television or at least on the Internet?
Student: Sorry ….no
Teacher: So let me get this right. You believe in that humans evolved from millions of intermediate species over billions of years yet you cannot give me a single example of anywhere in the world that we can see such an intermediate species? This is despite the fact that there are billions of examples on the earth today of the foundation species that all these intermediate species are derived from! Do you really believe evolution is therefore a fact?
Student: Emmm…well it is just a theory. No one can prove it 100%…….I’m not a scientist myself….
Teacher: This does not deal with the problem for you anyway. Where did the first cell come from, as a single cell has more complex machinery such as the mitochondria than a computer factory? Where did the energy to catalyze the first division of a one-cell organism to become a two-cell organism come from? Who designed, guided this extremely complex and delicate process? Where did the extra elements come from that allowed the one cell organism to double in size?
Student: Errr…nature
Teacher: Is nature a person or a thing? Can “things” create or design anything?
Student: This is silly – my parents created me.
Teacher: Really? Did they decide your personality, IQ, skin colour, health, height and weight for example? Can they make another identical copy of you?
Student: Err..No.
Teacher: The reality is that your parents are just like a cup holding water. The cup doesn’t create the water – it is just a vessel for containing it. Your parents were in reality like this. They did not create you but were simply the instruments God used to contain much of the substance that He used to create you.
Student: Anyway the burden of proof is not on me to show God does not exist, it is up to you to demonstrate He does.
Teacher: Well we both accept that we cannot see God.
Student: Correct.
Teacher: So how do we know something is real if we cannot see the thing or person?
Student: Not sure….
Teacher: Well, we study their effects. That’s how we often know for example a person has committed a crime by his fingerprints or we recognize a computer must have a designer because we see the organized complexity of the design.
Student: How does this show there is a God?
Teacher: If we take your brain for example. Your brain can store more than ten times the information of the fastest computer on earth, which happens to be the Blue Gene IBM supercomputer that was built in 2005. Your Brain can process information faster as well. So if the Blue Gene Supercomputer is designed and created why do you think the much more complex “Brain Supercomputer” which after all does the same functions in taking in, processing, storing and giving out information was not designed and created?
Student: May be one day we can build a brain?
Teacher: That proves my point, as currently we cannot build one, so a person outside of nature must have created it i.e. a Supernatural Designer. Secondly, even if in the future we could build a brain as your statement implies we would need intelligent design to create it so it demonstrates my point that our brains are intelligently designed by someone!
Student: You cannot compare a human brain with a computer.
Teacher: Why not? If there is no God, then our brains are just purposeless matter like a computer. However, you raise a good point as you are implying that our brains have additional qualities that are not just material. Consciousness is not just matter.
Student: Surely our brains and consciousness are just matter?
Teacher: Are you willing to test your theory?
Student: How?
Teacher: I will take you with me to the local mortuary and there you can choose one dead body of “chemicals” and I will allow you to use any chemical to make that recently dead person live again. After all, this should be easy to an intelligent scientifically trained young person like you as “chance” managed to bring this “chemical consciousness” to over six billion people.
Student: No one can come back from death.
Teacher: Exactly, because the consciousness has left the body – the chemicals are still there that were present before death. The body weighs the same. So as energy cannot be created or destroyed, where has the life of the dead person gone?
Student: I don’t know…….
Teacher: Can science give you this answer?
Student: No…
Teacher: Are you familiar with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity?
Student: Of course!
Teacher: Einstein proved mathematically that the universe had a beginning and is now expanding. At the beginning of the universe time, space and matter began but before this point there was nothing.
Student: Yes…I agree. How is this relevant?
Teacher: Well, the foundational law of science is the Law of Causality that says whatever has a beginning must have a cause. So who caused the whole universe of 1022 planets from nothing?
Student: They just came from nothing.
Teacher: You really expect me to believe that 1022 planets came in less than one second from nothing? Now, who is the one believing in irrational faith now? Could you show me a single science experiment or paper where nothing has produced something?
Student: That’s amazing – I never knew science could provide evidence that God exists……However, if God made the universe, who made God?
Teacher: Your question pre-supposes that God needs a cause. Remember, Einstein’s theory shows that Time started at the beginning of the universe. If God caused the universe He must logically be outside of time and therefore He does not have a beginning or end and therefore does not need a cause.
Student: There are many gods in the world how do you know there is only one?
Teacher: We know from the cosmological and divine design evidences of the universe that God must be infinite because He created all space, all time and all matter from nothing. Infinite simply means that He is self-existent, non-spatial, immaterial, timeless, personal, unimaginably powerful and supremely intelligent etc. In other words, there is nothing lacking in Him.
If there was more than one God (e.g. God “A” and God “B”), then to distinguish one from the other they must differ in some way. If God “A” is infinite then God “B” must be less than infinite
i.e. INFINITE minus (–) SOMETHING (?),
as the definition of infinite means that God “A” lacks nothing.
Therefore, if God “B” is less than infinite he is not God!
Therefore, we can only logically conclude that there can only be one Infinite Being or God who is transcendent or outside all time, all space and all matter.
Student: So if there is really a God how do I find Him?
Teacher: If you are in a new city and you are lost, how do you find your way to a person’s house?
Student: You either ask someone or you consult a reliable map.
Teacher: Exactly, to find God you either can ask someone who knows or look for Him in the map He has given us – the Bible.
Student: But the Bible is full of contradictions and mistakes.
Teacher: Could you show me some?
Student: Err…I don’t know off the top of my head. Ah yes…the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath and the God of the New Testament is a God of love.
Teacher: Have you read Revelation lately?
Teacher: Would you like me to show you what the Bible says about you?
Student: Yes….. please
-----------------------
[1]
[2]
[3] S. M. Lockridge as quoted by permission in Richard Mayhue, Seeking God (Fearn, Ross-shire, Great Britain: Christian Focus, 2000) 186.
[4]Samuel Cox, cited in Marvin Vincent, World Studies in the New Testament: II Peter (reprint; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980) 687.
[5] Robert Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 72.
[6] John Murray, “The Finality and Sufficiency of Scripture,” in Collected Writings of John Murray (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1976), 1:19–22.
[7] Douglas Wilson, “Refined Seven Fold,” online at accessed 20 April 2009.
[8] Cornelius Van Til. The Protestant Doctrine of Scripture, 51
[9] Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology, (Cambridge University Press, UK, 1992), 336.
[10] James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, 3d ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1997), 194.
[11] Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (Downers Grove: IVP, 1968), 179.
[12] Cornelius Van Til, The Defense Of The Faith, 8.
[13] Greg Bahnsen, “Prolegomena To Apologetics” online at 179 accessed 20 June 2009.
[14] Greg Bahnsen, “Prolegomena To Apologetics”
[15] Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (OUP,1997),130.
[16] B. B. Warfield, “Christianity and Revelation,” in Selected Shorter Writings of Benjamin B. Warfield, edited by John E. Meeter, (Nutley: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1970), 1:23.
[17] Quoted in Harvie M. Conn, Contemporary World Theology, (Nutley: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1974), 3.
[18] Harold Lindsell, The New Paganism, (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 46–47.
[19] Cited Ulrich Im Hof, The Enlightenment, trans. William E. Yuill, (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1994), 4.
[20] James Webb, The Occult Underground, (LaSalle: Open Court Publishing Company, 1974), p.14.
[21] David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, (London: J. Jones, 1822), 437.
[22] Norman Geisler, Christian Apologetics, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1976, 20.
[23] Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment?, (New Jersey: Prentice Hall Inc, 1997), 83.
[24]Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Madman,” in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Viking, 1954), 95-96.
[25]Thomas Paine, Collected Writings, (Library of America, 1995), 746.
[26] Richard L. Purtill, Reason to Believe (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 119.
[27] Gordon R. Lewis, Testing Christianity’s Truth Claims: Approaches to Christian Apologetics (Chicago: Moody, 1976), 204
[28] Archibald Alexander Hodge and Benjamin B. Warfield, “Inspiration,” Presbyterian Review 6 (April 1881): 227.
[29] Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. W. H. Lewis (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966), 167.
[30] C. S. Lewis, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 3.
[31] Cornelius Van Til, The Intellectual Challenge of the Gospel (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co, 1980), 10.
[32] Edward F. Hills, The King James Version Defended (Iowa: Christian Research Press, 1993 edition), 85.
[33] Eric H. Sigward, “Obituary: Dr. Cornelius Van Til” dated 18 April 1987 online at accessed 16 March 2009.
[34] Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic: Readings and Analysis (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1998), 30.
[35] Cornelius Van Til, Toward a Reformed Apologetics (N.p., n.d.) 24-28.
[36] Cornelius Van Til, Christian Theistic Evidences, 56
[37] Kevin Bauder, “Directions in Evangelicalism” from In the Nick of Time online at accessed 20 April 2009.
[38] Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1993), 323.
[39] Greg Bahnsen, Always Ready (Atlanta: American Vision, 1996), 72.
[40] Douglas Wilson, “Theology With the Chambermaid,” online at accessed 20 April 2009.
[41] W. Gary Crampton, “Review of “Logic” by Clark” dated 2001 online at accessed 16 March 2009.
[42] Robert Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith, 146.
[43] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1987) 117.
[44] Van Til, Reformed Apologetic, 3.
[45] Stephen Jay Gould, “In the Mind of the Beholder,” Natural History (1994) 103 (2): 15.
[46] Stephen Jay Gould, “How Science Changes with the Political Climate” U.S. News & World Report, March 1, 1982, 62.
[47] Gordon Clark, A Christian View of Men and Things: An Introduction to Philosophy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952; reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 324.
[48] Van Til, Defense, 100-101
[49] Ken Ham, “Creation: ‘where’s the proof?’” online at
[50] Stated during a 1994 debate with Philip Johnson at Stanford University entitled, Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy?, also known as, Evolution: Science or Dogma?
[51] C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven, (Fount Paperbacks, 1984), 97.
[52] Greg Bahnsen, “Presuppositional Procedure” online at
[53] Greg Bahnsen, “Presuppositional Procedure”
[54] Greg Bahnsen, “Presuppositional Procedure”
[55] Concise Oxford English Dictionary of Current English, Seventh edition, Clarendon Press, 1109.
[56] Concise Oxford English Dictionary of Current English, 54.
[57] E = mc2 Einstein demonstrated that all matter contains the same energy as cited by Gerald Schroeder, The Hidden Face of God, (Free Press, 2001), 25
[58] Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (OUP,1997),130.
[59] David Hume, On Human Nature and the Understanding (Collier Books, 1962),163.
[60] Stan Wallace, Does God Exist? The Craig-Flew Debate (Ashgate, 2002), 41
[61] Kai Nielsen, Reason and Practice: A modern Introduction to Philosophy (Harper & Row,1971), 48
[62]
[63] Norman Geisler, I don’t have enough Faith to be an Atheist (Crossway, 2004), 76
[64] Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (W. W. Norton, 1978), 116.
[65] Arthur Eddington, Nature (Vol. 127, 1931), 450
[66] Arthur Eddington, The Expanding Universe (Macmillan,1933), 178
[67] Newsweek, “Science Finds God,” 7/20/98
[68] Norman Geisler and Winfried Corduan, Philosophy of Religion, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1988), 175
[69] Anthony Flew renunciation in April 2005
[70] Einstein, in a 1929 interview, in Denis Brian, Einstein: A Life (NY: J. Wiley, 1996), 186
[71] The fall of man and the curse of creation – see Genesis Chapter 1-3
[72] Charles B. Thaxton, The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories, (Philosophical Library, 1984)
[73] Norman Geisler, I don’t have enough Faith to be an Atheist (Crossway, 2004), 117
[74] This tiny motor includes the equivalent of an engine block, a drive shaft, and three pistons. It is a variable speed motor that runs at speeds between 0.5 and 4.0 revolutions per second. The structure was discovered by John E. Walker from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1997.
[75] Franklin M. Harold, The Way of the Cell (OUP, 2001), 205
[76] Gerald Schroeder, The Hidden Face of God, (Free Press, 2001), 62
[77] Michael Denton, Evolution: Theory In Crisis (Adler, 1986), 264.
[78] One DNA strand is only 50 trillionths of an inch wide. If the DNA in all the cells of one person is strung out and placed end-to-end, it would extend from the sun to Jupiter and back about 118 times.
[79] Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, (Adler, 1986), 338
[80] Phillip E. Johnson, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, (IVP,1997), 73
[81] interview with Dr. Gary Habermas
[82] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 175.
[83] “World-record Supercomputer Mimics Human Sight Brain Mechanisms” online at
[84] Isaac Asimov, "In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can't Even Break Even," (Smithsonian, June 1970), 10.
[85] Carl Sagan, Cosmos, (Random House, 1980), 278
[86] Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, (Adler, 1986), 330–331
[87] quote from correspondence with Jeffrey Zweerink, research physicist, UCLA October 2003 as cited in Norman Geisler, I don’t have enough Faith to be an Atheist (Crossway, 2004), 102
[88] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (1988),125
[89] Hugh Ross, Why I am a Christian: Leading Thinkers Explain Why They Believe (Baker, 2001), 138
[90] Discussion with Francis Collins by Steve Paulson in August 07, 2006 online at
[91] Fred Hoyle, The Universe: Some Past and Present Reflections (University of Cardiff, 1982), 16
[92] Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (1996) 73 - for graphics and further examples see
[93] William A. Dembski Still Spinning Just Fine: A Response To Ken Miller, 2.17.03 – see
[94] Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, p. 179.
[95] Carl Sagan, FH Crick and L.M. Mukhin, Extraterrestrial Life, (MIT Press, 1973).
[96] I. Prigogine, N. Gregair, A. Babbyabtz, Physics Today 25, 23-28
[97] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, (Norton, 1987),1
[98] F. Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery, (Penguin Books 1990),138
[99] This quote by Roger Lewin was excerpted from Philip Whitfield, From So Simple A Beginning, (Macmillan, 1993), 7
[100] Richard Lewontin, review of Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, (New York review of Books, January 9,1997)
[101] Matthews, R., Beware of over-hyped breakthroughs: The media can hardly be blamed if scientists give their findings more spin than Rafael Nadal. BBC Focus, 200:98, March 2009.
[102] Arthur Compton, 1927 Nobel Prize in Physics, (1936), Chicago Daily News.
[103] Margenau, H and R.A. Varghese, Cosmos, Bios, and Theos. (Open Court, 1992), 83.
[104] F.J.Tipler, The Physics Of Immortality, (New York, 1994), Preface
[105] abridged version of story in Can man live without God by Ravi Zacharias (World Publishing,1994), 182
[106] Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain, (Mifflin, 2003), 248
[107] Michael Ruse, Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics, in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge), 1989, 268.
[108] yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/11-21-45.htm
[109] “Do We Need God To Be Moral?”Free Inquiry, Spring 1996, 4-7
[110] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (Macmillan, 1952), 21
[111] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (Macmillan, 1952), 19
[112] Abridged from Norman Geisler, I don’t have enough Faith to be an Atheist (Crossway, 2004), 174
[113] Dave Hunt, In Defense of the Faith, (Harvest House Publishers, 1996), 41
[114] Daily Telegraph, 4 February 1997.
[115] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Norton, 1987), 229
[116] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Doubleday, 1959), 41
[117] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, (Cambridge University, 1979), 122-123
[118] Peter Berkowitz, Other Peoples Mothers?,New Republic, 10 January 2000
[119]
[120] James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (OUP, 1990), 186
[121] Dateline NBC program, on November 29, 1994.
[122] See interview transcript
[123]
[124] Richard Dawkins, Book Review of Blueprints: Solving the Mystery of Evolution ( New York Times, April 9, 1987), 34
[125] John M. Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God, P & R Publishing (February 1, 1994)
[126] interview in Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, (Zondervan, 2004), 264
[127] Religion Today, , November 2, 1999.
[128] “Children are born believers in God, academic claims” by Martin Beckford dated 24 Nov 2008 online at .
[129] C. S. Lewis, Miracles, (Simon & Schuster, 1975), 23-4
[130]
[131] Cited by Saul K. Padover, Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography, (NAL), 280
[132] Karl Sigmund et al., “The Economics of Fair Play,” Scientific American, Vol. 286, January 2002: 87.
[133] Cited in Knight’s Treasury of 2,000 illustrations (Eerdmans,1992), 6
[134] Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain, (Mifflin, 2003), 11
[135] Isaiah 14:14 speaking of the fall of the devil from heaven
[136] P.W. Atkins, The Creation, (WH Freeman & Co), 7
[137] Thomas Nagel, “The Fear of Religion,” review of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, The New Republic 235 [23 October 2006]: 25-9
[138] Letter to William Graham (Down, July 3, 1881), in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), Volume 1, 315-16.
[139]
[140] The entire debate can be viewed online at offices/billcraig/docs/craig-atkins.html
[141] Lee Strobel, The case for a Creator, (Zondervan, 2004), 277
[142] Janet Daley, Daily Telegraph, 28 May 1996.
[143]
[144] John Macquarrie, Twentieth Century Religious Thought (London: SCM Press, rev. 1971), 372,373.
[145] Lillian Quigley, The Blind Men and the Elephant (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959)
[146] Jonathan Sarfati, “What is ‘good’? online at
[147] Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge University Press), 1998
[148] Peter Harrison, The Bible and the rise of science, Australasian Science 23 (3):14–15, 2002
[149] C.S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: The Macmillan Co.), 1947, 123
................
................
In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.
To fulfill the demand for quickly locating and searching documents.
It is intelligent file search solution for home and business.
Related download
Related searches
- the book of acts summary by chapters
- overview of the book of acts
- synopsis of the book of acts
- book of acts pdf
- what is the book of acts about
- outline of the book of john pdf
- commentary of the book of john
- the church in the book of acts
- the book of acts explained
- sermons on the book of acts
- the book of proverbs in the bible
- jessica fisher lindsay davis thesis a thesis presented to the faculty of the de