2. Does God Exist? Archives | CrossExamined.org - Christian Apologetics Resources

The “omnis” of theology – omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, etc. – are under increasing attack, and not just from what are recognized as more theologically liberal camps of Christianity. Examples abound – even from within evangelicalism — of various attributes of God being seemingly “picked off” by scholarly fire, or compromised among the laity to the point the meaning of the term is lost, and along with it, the force that would inspire worship and awe.

What is at the root of this “fading away” of a traditional understanding of God? It’s almost as if a lynch pin has been removed that kept these attributes anchored in place.

On this week’s episode of Why Do You Believe? Dr. Richard Howe gives name to that lynch pin: classical theism.

Classical Theism

Classical theism is a theology of God emphasizing His simplicity. The term classical here means grounded along the contours and categories of Western thinking arising from the ancient Greeks, the Christian church fathers, and subsequently the medieval Scholastics.

Under this framework, God is pure actuality, or infinite, unchanging existence, and not a being composed of metaphysical parts like everything in the created order (e.g. angels are composed of form and existence, human beings are composed of form, matter, and existence, etc.).

All God’s attributes, such as the “omnis,” immutability, and more, follow from this metaphysical principle of simplicity (attribute being a characteristic of God’s nature or His actions that can be known from creation [general revelation] and from His word [special revelation]). God’s attributes are entailed and connected in such a way as to imply and support one another, and if one attribute is removed or altered, the others collapse as well.

In other words, the ostensible individuation of God’s attributes is really the attempt of our finite human understanding to break God’s magnitude and majesty into digestible bites, and when we tamper with the cornerstone of divine simplicity, or any individual attribute, the entire house shakes.

Who Pulled the Pin?

So, if simplicity is the grounding for the various attributes of God, why has simplicity largely fallen by the wayside in modernity? Dr. Howe credits this discard largely to a lack of skill in hermeneutics. He demonstrates in this episode that a compromised and erroneous view of the nature and attributes of God will follow the discard of this cherished and enduring principle of theology, which followed an inconsistent and inappropriate interpretation of the text. Where classical theism honors God as being in a class by himself as a necessary and simple being, other systems can often impose human, finite, and compromised characteristics onto God.

What Our Perpetual Fight With Entropy Tells Us

2. Does God Exist?, Atheism, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Al Serrato

Many years ago, when I was younger and much less wise, I decided it would be a good father-son project to invest in an older car that I could restore. (Note to fathers: it’s a much better bonding idea to find something your kids like than the other way around). So, after some searching, and mindful of my meager budget, I ended up finding an ’87 Mustang convertible that was in pretty good shape overall. It wasn’t difficult for me to envision that with a little elbow grease, and a website that specializes in Mustang parts, I could make this car showroom quality in no time.

After the novelty wore off, and my kids’ interest waned from little to none, I found that I had a solitary project on my hands that had this very annoying habit of making negative progress. That’s right. No matter how many items I crossed off the to-do list, more kept getting added. And I found that things always went from good to bad, from working to broken, from clean to dirty. Window switches that were working one day stopped working the next. Motors that keep the windows moving smoothly up and down began to groan and then stopped. Fuses blew, over and over again. Amazingly, the process never worked the other way. No matter how long I waited, broken switches never fixed themselves. Cracked pieces of trim, or a broken taillight, never repaired themselves. Rust in the metal always appeared, where it wasn’t before, and never gave way to clean and shiny metal. Yes, the law of entropy was fully in effect, and the only way to reverse that process was to invest time, energy, and money.

This of course comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever owned anything. Nor is it a surprise to anyone who has considered the way nature operates. Scientists tell us that this law – entropy – is a characteristic of the universe. Entropy is, put simply, a measure of disorder, and it seems that a universal law is in operation moving everything from states of higher to states of lower order. In other words, nature has a particular direction to it, and that direction is down.

Christianity and atheism are competing worldviews. Each one claims to be able to make sense of the world so as to explain the way things really are. And despite the increasing popularity of atheism, and the increasing disdain for historic Christianity, the atheistic worldview is utterly incapable of making sense of the world. As it relates to entropy, atheism must explain why it is that the “evolution” of life has escaped this universal law. How is it that incredibly complex human beings evolved from lower life forms? When DNA is subjected to random change, the result is often lethal – it’s called cancer. But somehow, atheists insist, given enough time, a simple single-celled life form acquired the instructions necessary to produce a complete human life, instructions that must perfectly direct the assembly and interworking of dozens of systems. And if that were not hard enough, how can life have emerged from inert – lifeless – material? Leave a rock alone for a few millennia and you end up with, well, a rock.

The Christian worldview, by contrast, can provide that explanation. The Big Bang event that started this downward slide in progress is the result of a massively powerful and immensely intelligent being, who provided the laws we see in nature, and who wrote the instructions that scientists are beginning to decipher within DNA. The reason life “evolved” on earth is because an Intelligent Designer designed it to and provided the energy source to power the process. Recognizing the need for such a “first cause” is not unscientific. Indeed, modern science began with the presupposition that intelligent minds could untangle the mysteries of nature because these mysteries were not random but were themselves the product of an ordered mind, of intelligence.

Fighting the obvious, as atheists do, is even less successful than fighting entropy. They would be better off using their time in more productive pursuits.

Problems with Evolutionary Biology

2. Does God Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Al Serrato

“Let me see if I understand,” I said to my daughter’s high school biology teacher. “The human eye is the evolutionary product of a light-sensitive spot on the skin. Is that right?”

“Right,” she said.

“And by evolution, you mean a mindless, random process that didn’t really have an end in mind. In other words, there was no “designer” for the eye or the body for that matter. Am I getting that right?”

“Right again,” she replied.

But how could an undirected process produce such highly functional complexity, I wondered aloud. She gave me a look that said, “you really don’t have the time or, probably, the background to understand, so do we really have to go there?”

We did, and I persisted, trying another tack that I had been wondering about for a while.

“Okay, well let me ask you just a few questions” I countered. “Would you agree that evolution as you understand it is a gradual process of adaptation over time, where changes that are advantageous accumulate?”

“Yes,” came her quick reply.

“Would you agree that over time these gradual adaptations would lead to the development of complex systems, such as organ systems?”

“Yes, that makes sense,” she said.

“Would you also agree,” I pressed, “that, generally speaking, the more complex the system, the longer it would take for these gradual adaptations to evolve so that a complex system would take longer to evolve than a less complex system?”

“Yes.” The response was a bit slower, more thoughtful.

Shifting gears a bit, I asked, “In the field of human biology, would you agree that generally speaking, the human female reproductive system is considerably more complex than its male counterpart?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she queried.

“Well,” I started, “the male half of the equation involves dividing cells to get to 23 chromosomes and providing a, uh, delivery mechanism. The female system involves the production of eggs, the delivery of the eggs to a specific location, the means for implantation, and if that occurs, the creation of a placenta that is fine-tuned to support the development of the life that is growing. The whole system must work in conjunction with the woman’s body, provide for correction of any mistakes occurring to minimize miscarriages, screen the fetus from harmful substances in the woman’s blood, connect the fetus to the mother by means of a two-way umbilical cord, and provide a method for the baby to be safely delivered into the world. More amazingly, the two systems must somehow recognize each other and work together, so that the 23 chromosomes from each half form a single cell that has the complete instructions for a new human life to begin. This seems like a pretty complex, interconnected, and interdependent system requiring multiple components to work just right. And yet it does work right millions and millions of times.”

“I suppose there’s something to that, but” she hesitated, “what’s your point?” Her tone matched her more serious expression.
“Just this,” I responded. “What exactly were all those men doing generation after generation waiting for the first fully functional female to evolve?”

She stared at me, no doubt wondering whether I was trying to mock her. But, though my question was of course facetious, I wanted to know where my logic was flawed. After all, the premises seem valid. If designed, it makes perfect sense that God could create a system in which some parts are more complex than others, and still have them work together for a purpose. But how could mammalian sexual reproduction – involving separate male and female individuals -ever evolve simultaneously? I wanted to know where that very first human male and very first human female came from. She took a deep breath and began her answer…. and it didn’t have anything to do with God.

“Well, it didn’t work that way,” she said. “Evolution occurred gradually, over time, as the predecessors to humans slowly began to change.”

“Fair enough,” I responded. “So, tell me about that first pair of monkeys, the very first male and female monkey from which you say we evolved.”

“Well,” she began, formulating her thoughts, “it didn’t work that way.” I gave her a quizzical look and she continued. “Those predecessors also evolved slowly, over time, from still more primitive forms of life.”

I was patient. “Like what?” I asked. I don’t think anyone had pressed her for answers like this, but after all I wasn’t worried about getting a grade. My daughter, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t be too thrilled about dad’s efforts at higher learning. Luckily, she wasn’t nearby.

In answer, the teacher started to explain that monkeys had evolved from still lower forms of life. It was a long process with smaller animals making adaptations, adding features, becoming larger. It all sounded quite vague and fuzzy, as she painted the picture of a planet teeming with life of various kinds, widely dispersed, and being driven by this engine of evolution.
I tried to stay on track with her. Then she made the jump that I was expecting – she started talking about life emerging from the primitive seas. Single-celled life forms that began to replicate and pass their DNA on to the next generation. She paused when she saw me starting to shake my head.

“Wait a sec,” I said. “You’re getting ahead of me, or perhaps more precisely, you’re moving back too far. I’ll grant you that life first began in the seas, but even if I grant you the ‘primordial soup’ theory, you’re still making quite a jump. What I want to focus on are the first male and female land mammals. If we wind the clock back, there must be a point on the early Earth in which there are no mammals walking the land. None whatsoever. Whatever life exists, it hasn’t yet evolved to sexually reproducing, warm-blooded mammals. Before that point, maybe there’s life in the sea, but the land is barren; after that point, the land begins to get populated. You with me?”

She nodded.

“I’d like to know what model science has to explain how that first began. That first couple.”

She was still formulating an answer, so I pressed on. “I can understand that once you have thousands of fully functioning mammals that over time they may begin to change, especially if subjected to some environmental challenge. That makes perfect sense, whether it is directed by the genes, as I believe was designed into them, or whether it’s a random process. But tell me how the first pair appeared on the land.”

I was hoping to get an answer, because I had been wondering for a while how Darwinists made sense of that rather large step, from single-celled asexually reproducing life to complex, sexually producing mammals. But it was not to be. “Coach.” We both looked in the direction of the voice. The bio teacher was also a coach, and someone was trying to get her attention. She smiled and said, “Let’s continue this later.” Was that a look of relief that crossed her features? Probably, I eventually decided. We never did finish the conversation.

Perhaps Darwinists have a plausible model for this transition, but I have yet to hear it. Instead, what I have heard is always along the lines of what’s recounted above – vague and fuzzy references to a planet teeming with evolving life, and then a jump to the oceans, where DNA first appears. But this jump appears to be a “just so” story, with a vague promise that someday science will make it all clear, will discover these missing links that just “must be there.” But common sense, and reason, tell me that when those original sexually reproducing mammals first appeared on Earth, they were able to reproduce in that fashion immediately, making use of an incredibly complex and interdependent system, a system that has all the hallmarks of design. And a system that couldn’t take long periods of time to evolve because, unless it’s working properly and completely on day one, there won’t be a next-generation upon which evolution could act.

Perhaps, like Frank Turek puts it, I just don’t have enough faith to be an atheist. Until I do, then, I guess I’ll just keep believing that the incredible complexity of life is what it appears to be – the telltale sign of an intelligent designer that set it all in motion for a purpose. After all, every time I see a complex, highly organized, interdependent system – like a watch or a plane or a car – I don’t struggle trying to figure out how it assembled itself. So, why do people struggle so hard when it comes to something even more complex – like life?

Why indeed.

From Laws of Physics to Reasonable Faith

2. Does God Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Luke Nix

Many may be surprised to find that knowledge is actually the foundation for faith in God.

A Blind Faith And God’s Hiddenness

Two common challenges to the truth of the Christian worldview are the seeming hiddenness of God and the accusation that Christianity requires a blind faith. Many people see the great amount of suffering in the world and in their own lives and wonder where God is and why He doesn’t seem to care to alleviate the suffering. Many skeptics also see Christians making claims about reality that are demonstrably false, and those people conclude that Christians’ faith is a belief despite evidence to the contrary- a blind faith.

The skeptic knows that there must be continuity between the present and the past (and the future) for us to reasonably believe that what happens in the present can be used to infer what has happened in the past (or make predictions about what will happen in the future). Armed with knowledge of the past, there is a solid, logical foundation to conclude something about the future. This also means that without knowledge of the past, there is no solid foundation to trust something with the present or the future.

This is how the skeptic believes they are being logical as they conclude that the Christian God is hidden (if not non-existent) and unfaithful, and how they also conclude that Christians’ faith is blind. Today, I want to take some time to show an understanding of the physical world will demonstrate that the skeptic has made a mistake in their reasoning to both conclusions about God’s supposed hiddenness and the supposed blind faith of Christianity.

Is Faith In God Really Blind?

Let us start with the very book that claims to accurately describe the Christian God: the Bible, and with the actions of this God: creation. If the Bible accurately describes the Christian God, then we have this series of arguments regarding faith in God for present and future experiences:

If the laws of physics are constant, then God’s character is constant (Jeremiah 33:25-26).
The laws of physics are constant.
If God’s character is constant, then His character can be trusted to be the same across all time.
God’s character is constant.
If God’s character has been faithful in the past, then His character will be faithful in the present and the future
God’s character has been faithful in the past.
Therefore, God’s character will be faithful in the present and the future.

This faith is a reasonable faith that is grounded in what we already know and have experienced. For the skeptic who wishes to claim that Christianity is an illogical and unreasonable faith, they must face in inconvenient reality: If they believe that Bible describes the Christian God, then it necessarily follows from Jeremiah 33:25-26 that the Christian God is faithful to His promises, and our trust in Him (faith) for present and future difficulties and sufferings is logically grounded in God’s past faithfulness through difficulties and sufferings. This means that our faith in God is a most logical faith.

What If The Laws of Physics Are Not Constant?

However, the soundness of the argument and our trust in the constancy of God’s character is dependent upon the reality of the constancy of the laws that govern the heavens and the earth (this universe). If these laws are not constant and have changed and if God is just as constant (the first premise in the argument), then God’s character can change. This means that if the laws of physics change, then God’s character changes, which necessarily implies that God’s promises can be rescinded, His faithfulness is laughable, and He is certainly not to be trusted.

If the skeptic were to deny constant laws of physics to avoid the conclusion that the Christian faith is a reasonable and logical faith, then they would suffer the logical consequence of the collapse of the entire scientific enterprise. While some (non-scientific) skeptics may be willing to live with this logical implication, many would be unwilling to do so. But they would be unwilling to do so at the cost of logical consistency. Because consistency is a necessary feature of logic and because reality is consistent, both logic and reality are abandoned with such a philosophical move.

When logic and reality are abandoned, though, all we have is a delusion guided by blind faith. Ironically, it is the skeptic who would refuse to surrender knowledge of the natural world (the goal of the scientific enterprise), in order to avoid the logical conclusion of God’s faithfulness (or even His existence), who is the one committed to a delusion and blind faith. (See the post “6 Ways Atheism Is A Science-Stopper” for more details on this line of reasoning.)

Now, if the Christians were to deny constant laws of physics for whatever reason (see “Is Genesis History” for an example), they then would suffer the logical consequence of the collapse of God’s faithful character. For a Christian who denies the constancy of the laws of physics, yet affirms God’s faithfulness, they, like the skeptic, do so at the cost of logical consistency- an abandonment of reason. Again, when logic and reason are abandoned, all that is left is a blind faith. And in a second move of irony, the skeptic who complains about a Christian’s blind faith does so only while affirming their own blind faith. (See the post “How Naturalism Defeats Science As A Knowledge Discipline“).

Interestingly, when the skeptic looks at the beliefs of Christians who deny the constancy of the laws of physics, they have an excuse for believing that the Christian faith is a blind faith; however, if the skeptic examines nature, they have no such excuse (Romans 1). So, if we bring together the idea that the Bible accurately describes the Christian God and the idea that the laws of physics are constant, then we have the conclusion that trust in the Christian God is necessarily a reasonable faith.

God’s Hiddenness

But how does this address the idea of God’s apparent hiddenness? If God has been faithful in the past, then it necessarily follows that He will be faithful in the future. As we read through the Bible, we see time after time that God has been faithful despite the sufferings. As Christians get older they often look through their lives and see how God has carried them through their sufferings and has remained faithful to them through the process. We have testimonies of God’s past faithfulness despite suffering from people of the ancient past (the Bible), the recent past (writings of past Christians in history), the present (friends, family, and the rest of the current Church), and even in our own personal lives. It is through his knowledge—this strong body of evidence of God’s past faithfulness and the constancy of God’s character evidenced by the scientific study of the natural realm—that we know that God is being faithful now and will be faithful in the future. Even if we cannot “see” how God is working right now, we can be assured that He is at work and our trust in Him is properly and reasonably placed.

Why the “Odds” Favor the Existence of a Creator

2. Does God Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Al Serrato

With each passing year, science is providing more evidence that the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to support human life. Change any one of dozens of scientific parameters by even a small amount and life on Planet Earth would never have arisen. These findings provide strong support for the Christian argument that behind this universe lies an all-powerful, super-intelligent Designer who set this all in motion.

Many atheists try to sidestep the problem these scientific discoveries create for their worldview. Darwinism, after all, made belief in the possibility that life simply arose from inert matter a bit more respectable, so discoveries that make this seem unlikely, indeed implausible, cannot be ignored for long. After decades of Darwinism giving them false solace, atheists face a serious problem making sense of these discoveries, which challenge the wisdom of believing in random self-assembly over a long period of time as an adequate explanation for the magnificent complexity of the life we find on Earth.

A favorite way to dodge the issue goes something like this: there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about fine-tuning in the universe because, had it not been so, we would not be here to make any observations. We simply happened to arise because we just happen to be in a universe – probably one of an infinite number – that can support our form of life.

This is a clever argument because it makes the extraordinary nature of the universe seem, well, ordinary and in fact predictable. But the argument does not survive scrutiny, because it deliberately misses the point of the fine-tuning argument. It assumes that there is no designer, then asks to make sense of this fine-tuning we see all around. It does this by assuming that other universes exist, and with enough such universes, the existence of our particular universe, with its unique characteristics, becomes inevitable. But there is no evidence – at present anyway – that we inhabit one of a limitless number of other universes. In fact, since these other universes are separate and apart from ours, there is no way to even test for their existence, no way to establish whether they are there or not. The existence of this infinite number of alternative universes, this “multi-verse,” is assumed so that our presence in this one can be viewed as “no big deal.” It is apparent that the skeptic is assuming the conclusion he wishes to reach. Instead, the question we are trying to answer is whether such fine-tuning can truly be an accident – a true “billion to one shot” – or whether, by contrast, this evidence of design is the result of, well, a Designer. Because our existence is the result of the coinciding of hundreds of highly improbable events, basic probability theory tells us that to determine the cumulative probability requires that we multiply these probabilities. Increase the number of “just so” parameters and life becomes incredibly unlikely to have arisen by chance.

Some examples might help make the point. The Apollo 11 mission successfully landed men on the moon and returned them safely to Earth. Imagine that on his return, someone asked Neil Armstrong to comment on the stunning success of the mission. If he thought like the new atheists, he might have said: “There was nothing amazing about the mission’s success. After all, if something failed, I wouldn’t be here to discuss the effectiveness of the mission.” Such an answer is ludicrous; it simply avoids the question of what the odds were that each of hundreds of systems would work as designed. That such novel technology achieved its goals is a tribute to the intelligence and workmanship of its designers. To say that Armstrong just happened to live in the universe in which his mission succeeded is, in reality, to say nothing at all.

To this, the atheist will likely respond: your example is flawed, because we already know that the Apollo mission was designed by an intelligence, and we don’t know that about the universe. But this too misses the point. The Apollo mission was fine-tuned for success. If the universe shows signs of similar fine-tuning, then we can logically conclude that it too bears the marks of an intelligent designer.

Which leads me to a different example: a condemned man stands before a firing squad, awaiting the crack of rifles that will precede his demise. The signal is given, he hears the shots and feels the bullets whizzing nearby, but not a single round strikes him. He has survived the execution and is here to comment on the probability of so unlikely an event. Imagine if he answered: “there was nothing special about this execution. After all, I wouldn’t be here to comment on it if it had been otherwise.” But this too would be so much nonsense. The question is whether we can infer from this result that each of the marksmen just happened to miss, or whether the better inference would be that missing was “designed,” that the marksmen were following a plan to miss.

Following the evidence where it leads should cause skeptics to question their deeply held beliefs. But if they do, the odds are in their favor that they will eventually find the truth – the universe is exquisitely fine-tuned to support life because it was designed that way.

Grappling with Divine Hiddenness: Why Does God Not Make His Existence More Obvious?

2. Does God Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

One of the most challenging objections to the existence of God is the problem of divine hiddenness. Closely related to the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness asks “Where is God?”; “Why doesn’t God make His existence more obvious?”; “Why does God leave any room for doubt?” Surely God, if He existed, would not need apologists to make the case for His existence — couldn’t He have made it more immediately apparent? Related to these concerns is the problem of unanswered prayer. Why do so many peoples’ prayers go unanswered, often despite years of persistent prayer? The problem is even connected to the problem of evil, since one may ask why God apparently fails to show up to put an end to evil and unjust suffering in our world. These are indeed difficult questions that deserve to be taken seriously and thoughtfully considered.

The Biblical authors also recognized and grappled with divine hiddenness. For example, the Psalmist asked “Why, O LORD, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Ps 10:1). Another Psalm likewise says “Awake! Why are you sleeping, O Lord? Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust; our belly clings to the ground. Rise up; come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!” (Ps 44:23-26). One could continue in a similar vein for some time. The problem of divine hiddenness is, in my judgment, one of the best arguments against the existence of God. It has its most articulate and erudite defense, to my knowledge, in the work of Canadian philosopher John L. Schellenberg (see his book The Hiddenness Argument — Philosophy’s New Challenge to Belief in God).[1]

The problem is particularly difficult on an emotional level. Schellenberg draws the analogy of a friend describing his parents: “Wow, are they ever great — I wish everyone could have parents like mine, who are so wonderfully loving! Granted, they don’t want anything to do with me. They’ve never been around. Sometimes I find myself looking for them — once, I have to admit, I even called out for them when I was sick — but to no avail. Apparently they aren’t open to being in a relationship with me — at least not yet. But it’s so good that they love me as much and as beautifully as they do!”[2] This analogy should give a sense of the impact of this argument, rhetorically and emotionally.

While it may be admitted that the argument from divine hiddenness is one of the most perplexing issues for the theist to come to terms with, especially emotionally, the real question that needs to be addressed is that of whether it offers sufficient ground to overhaul the powerful cumulative positive reasons to believe that God exists and that He has revealed Himself through Jesus Christ. I will argue in this article that the answer is ‘no’.

A Lack of Obviousness Does Not Mean Poor Evidential Support

Why does God not make His existence more obvious? The first point I will make in response to this question is that God’s existence not being obvious does not entail that it is not well evidentially supported. We know from physics, for example, that a physical object like a table or a chair is comprised of mostly empty space. This is not at all obvious (in fact it would seem to be almost obvious that it is not the case) and yet we have good evidential support that it is so. One may reply that whereas we know scientifically that the chair is mostly comprised of empty space, we nonetheless still live our lives as if though it is not — our day-to-day choices and beliefs are not based on how we scientifically understand things to be, but how we experience them in our daily lives. However, I can think of counter-examples where we do act against what we feel in accord with the available evidence, even when we are putting our lives on the line. For example, despite being a frequent flyer, I get anxious about being on an airplane. Even though I know rationally that flying is the safest way to travel (statistically, your odds of being involved in a fatal plane crash are less than 1 in 12 million), flying – especially in turbulent conditions – just doesn’t feel like it is safe to me. Nevertheless, I frequently overcome my fear of flying by stepping onto an airplane, often for very long distances. In that case, I am literally committing my life to what my rational faculties tell me, and disregarding what my emotions and feelings tell me, because I know that generally my rational faculties are a more reliable gauge of what is actually true than my feelings.

Someone recently asked me why God cannot be more like the force of gravity, which we experience directly. However, while we do have direct experience of the effects of gravity, it is not immediately obvious what causes things to gravitate towards the ground. The law of gravity was not articulated before Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Indeed, in attempting to explain why unsupported bodies fall to the ground, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle put forward the idea that objects simply moved towards their ‘natural place’, the center of the earth (which in Aristotle’s cosmology was the center of the Universe), and that objects fall at a speed proportional to their weight. So perhaps gravity is less ‘obvious’ than one might think (though something which nonetheless enjoys strong evidential support). I would argue that the evidence of God is all around us, so we do in a sense experience God in a similar way to how we experience gravity. Just as we observe the effects that gravity has all around us but do not see the gravitational force that actually causes those effects, we also see the many things that God has made all around us, even though we do not see the being who actually caused those things to exist.

One may still object here that it should not take us a lot of work to discover that Christianity is true. Rather, the truth of the gospel, granting what is at stake, should be readily apparent. I shall return to this objection in due course. However, I will note here that I do not think God requires more than it is reasonable for a serious enquirer to give to an issue of this much importance. Some enquirers are better placed than others, and God looks for us to exert ourselves according to the light we have been given. I have heard, for instance, many stories of Jesus revealing Himself to people in dreams and visions in Muslim-majority countries, presumably since those are parts of the world where it is harder for people to otherwise hear the gospel. In the west, we have ample access to the gospel and to the tools needed to do our due diligence in investigating its claims.

I think we have to trust the goodness of God, since presumably God, in his omniscience, knows what every person would have done had they had more evidence — i.e. whether they would have chosen to enter into a relationship with God or to reject Him. We know from plenty of Biblical examples that not everyone who is presented with conclusive evidence for God (whether by miracles, predictive prophecies, or direct manifestations) submits to Him. If God knows that a given individual is not going to enter into a good, lasting relationship with Him, then why would God ensure the person believes? Furthermore, Scripture also indicates that people are judged in accordance with the amount of light they have rejected (e.g. Mt 11:21-22; Jn 12:47-48). Even many contemporary public atheists have essentially said that no amount of evidence could change their mind. For example, Richard Dawkins was asked in a conversation with Peter Boghossian what it would take for him to believe in God. Dawkins said that not even the second coming would be enough evidence. When Boghossian asked him whether any amount of evidence could change his mind. He replied, “Well, I’m starting to think nothing would, which, in a way, goes against the grain, because I’ve always paid lip service to the view that a scientist should change his mind when evidence is forthcoming.” It could, therefore, be seen as an act of mercy for God to withhold from them more evidence if they were going to reject it anyway and thereby bring upon themselves greater judgment. This adds yet further plausible motivation for God not to ensure that everyone had greater access to evidence for His existence, which would thereby render them more culpable. This point has been independently made by Travis Dumsday in a paper in the journal Religious Studies.[3]

This last point may be challenged by the skeptic by pointing to the existence of non-resistant non-believers. As Schellenberg puts it, “If there exists a God who is always open to a personal relationship with any finite person, then no finite person is ever nonresistantly in a state of nonbelief in relation to the proposition that God exists.”[4] However, I would contest that there is such a thing as long-term non-resistant nonbelief. My own view is that the evidence for Christianity is such that anyone who is fully informed and takes it upon himself to impartially examine it — with a heart open toward accepting God as Lord — will, in the long term, come to find Christianity to be true and well supported. In any case, human psychology, particularly at the subconscious level, is so complex that I doubt that it is demonstrable that any nonbeliever is completely nonresistant.

Couldn’t God Have Given Us Stronger Evidence?

A related objection is that it is possible for the evidence for Christianity to have been stronger than it in fact is. Surely, if God existed, He would have given us the strongest possible evidence. However, I do not think that we need expect something that goes beyond perfectly adequate evidence for the serious inquirer. Many atheists are under the mistaken impression that God wants people to believe in Him no matter what they are going to go on and do with that knowledge. It is never contended anywhere in Scripture that it is a commendable thing to believe in God yet reject a relationship with Him. In the Old Testament, the Jews had no doubt that God existed – they had seen many miracles performed before their eyes – and yet they went off time and again into idolatry. Even those who saw Jesus’ miracles before their very eyes didn’t believe in Him (e.g. John 12:37) and wanted to put Him to death – e.g. see the reaction of many after Jesus raised Lazarus (John 11:45-53). The eighteenth century lawyer and Christian thinker Joseph Butler (1692-1752), in his Analogy of Religion, put forward the idea that our time on earth is a period of probation.[5] For some people in particular the form that that probation may take is a form of testing whether they are willing to engage in the intellectual inquiry that is necessary to give themselves a fair examination of the evidence.

An objection I sometimes encounter is that, if God exists, then there should not be any reasonable arguments against His existence at all. However, this complaint, it seems to me, boils down essentially to the dubious claim that, if Christianity is true, there cannot be any puzzles that require mental effort to work out. Another point to bear in mind is that many people are not even presented with these as puzzles that seriously compromise the evidence that they already have. For some people, working through the problem of evil is part of their probation here in this life. And if they are diligent, they will work through it. Even if they cannot find adequate and satisfying answers to why there exists so much suffering in the world, they can learn to trust in the goodness of God, and find in the problem of evil insufficient ground to overturn the positive confirmatory case for Biblical theism. Either they will find adequate answers, or they will find enough positive evidence to make the fact of their inability to find those answers not, in the end, sufficient to undermine their faith.

Why Does God Require of Us So Much Work?

I often hear the objection that in order to really be compelled by the evidence for Christianity, one has to take a very deep dive into esoteric scholarship. Surely, if God were real, the truth of the gospel should be a lot more self-evident. Indeed, this is actually also an objection to my epistemology that I frequently encounter from some Christians as well – namely, that my hard line evidentialism implies that Christians cannot be rational in believing the gospel unless they become an academic and invest hundreds of hours in the study of the evidences for Christianity. Since not everyone has the aptitude and access to resources necessary to undertake such deep study, so the objection goes, this cannot be God’s normative way of imparting rational confidence to believers that the gospel they have entrusted is indeed true.

However, I want to be careful here to draw a distinction between what I call an explicit rational warrant and what can be called an implicit, or tacit, rational warrant for Christian faith. Every Christian, I would argue, can have at least an implicit rational warrant for believing that God exists and that He has revealed Himself in the Bible. Romans 1:20 teaches that God’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” The Greek word translated “without excuse” in this verse is ἀναπολογήτους (literally, “without an apologetic”). Furthermore, the Psalmist wrote that “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork,” (Ps 19:1). I do not think the Scriptures are envisaging people having to do PhDs in astrophysics or molecular biology, or master probability theory, in order to see the hand of God revealed in nature. Every time we step outdoors and behold the things that God has made – especially living organisms – we intuit that things have been made for a purpose, even if we couldn’t explicitly express why that is the case. Indeed, throughout history, the vast majority of people who have lived have been theists.

This implicit or inarticulate sense of the case for theism explains, I think, why some people come to believe that there must be a God when they hold their newborn child in their arms for the first time – they see the incredible design and elegance that is inherent in the process of development from a fertilized egg to a new born infant. They recognize, even if only implicitly and intuitively, that this is a process that required a high level of foresight to bring about – since it involved a high-level objective – which points to the involvement of a conscious mind in the programming of developmental pathways.

Those with an implicit rational warrant for belief in God may not be able to hold their own in a debate with a learned atheist scholar. This is why we hear so many ill-formulated attempted arguments for God that are along the right lines but not sufficiently nuanced to pass for sound argumentation. But I would argue that they nonetheless have sufficient rational warrant for their belief that God exists. Over time, as a believer matures, I would argue that the rational warrant for belief that was in the first place implicit should become more and more explicit and articulate.

In fact, even a biologist as staunchly atheistic as Francis Crick (co-discoverer with James Watson of the double-helical structure of DNA) said that “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved,”[6] Richard Dawkins similarly said at the beginning of The Blind Watchmaker that “Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose,”[7] Dawkins then spends the remainder of the book trying to argue, in my opinion unsuccessfully, that this design is not real but only apparent.

People also have a moral compass and have an implicit sense that there are objective moral norms and duties in the world – something which makes much better sense if theism is true than if atheism were true. Besides general revelation (i.e. what may be known about God from the created Universe), this sense of objective moral norms and duties also provides people with an additional witness, even if only implicit, to the existence of God.

People can have a similarly implicit rational warrant for believing that God has revealed Himself in the Bible. This is not something that you need a PhD in Biblical Studies to discover. I think for many believers they read through the Bible and encounter the cumulative force of various prophetic passages like Isaiah 53, recognizing Jesus in them. They might not be able to express the argument explicitly enough to debate a learned Rabbi. But they nonetheless, I would argue, have an implicit rational warrant. Likewise, they might read through the New Testament accounts and perceive implicitly some of the hallmarks of verisimilitude, such as the criterion of embarrassment, or unexplained allusions, or undesigned coincidences. They might begin to recognize the evidential value of the testimonial evidence we have in the New Testament in regard to events such as the resurrection. Many of those categories of evidence are actually not at all hard to grasp and may be perceived through common sense.

This is what, I suspect, many Christians in fact are talking about when they say that they just know that Christianity is true. I think often-times Christians can confuse an implicit rational warrant for belief in Scripture (which is based on evidence) with some sort of mystical inner-witness that Christianity is true. For example, one may have an inarticulate sense of the power of the whole case for Christianity without realizing that it is, in fact, a rational response to a cumulative case argument.

So, where am I going with this? I would argue that discovering evidence for God is not actually that hard. Rather, it has been made artificially hard by bad scholarship and poor standards that insist that the simplest answer cannot actually be the correct answer. This is true in science as well as Biblical scholarship. A lot of the ink spilled on these issues, therefore, is ink spent answering really bad arguments that should never have gotten traction to begin with but, because they provided an excuse for unbelief, they have become widely accepted and highly esteemed, even among academics who should know better.

Where is God?

A common objection to God’s existence is that, if the God of Scripture exists, then He would be reasonably expected to still be working in the world today. The skeptic reasons, then, that the failure to observe God working in a tangible and detectable way in the world today should be taken as not merely evidence against Christianity but, more than that, as a defeater of any evidence that may be offered from ancient documents. I wonder though what sort of evidence the skeptic would accept as sufficient reason to think that God is still working in the world in a tangible way. Would it need to be a direct personal experience, or would he or she accept reliable testimony from others that they had the sort of direct personal encounter that he or she is seeking for?

Testimony, popular atheist protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, is a valid form of evidence. When any person makes a claim to have witnessed an event, there are three – and only three – categories of explanation for that claim. Those are (a) they deliberately set out to deceive; (b) they were honestly mistaken; and (c) their claim was actually correct. I think those broad categories of explanation are mutually exhaustive (though I can imagine some situations in which they might be at work in combination). As either one of the two former claims becomes less plausible as a result of the evidence one adduces, this leads to a necessary redistribution of the probabilities, leading to option (c) becoming more probable than it was previously. This, then, provides evidence confirming scenario (c). The greater the extent to which options (a) and (b), in any given case, are disconfirmed by the evidence, the greater support is enjoyed by option (c). This method can be applied to modern claims just as well as it can be applied to ancient ones. An individual’s track record of habitual trustworthiness and reliability can count as evidence against the hypothesis that they were deliberately setting out to deceive. The plausibility of the hypothesis that they are honestly mistaken will depend on the particulars of the case.

I am not talking here about testimonies of healing that are easy to explain by some kind of sensory illusion or sleight of hand, or that plausibly would have gotten better anyway. I am talking about cases that seem to defy naturalistic explanation. Dr. Craig Keener has compiled a two volume set on claims of such miraculous occurrences.[8] To take one example, he discusses a friend of his, Leo Bawa, the former director of research at Capro, a prominent Nigerian missions movement. One intriguing miracle (of several) that he told Dr. Keener about is that “among some tribes in Adamawa and Taraba State, I had instances where no interpreter was available and the Lord gave me understanding and ability to speak the people’s languages, a feat I never performed before or since after that incident.”[9] Keener notes that “Other accounts of this phenomenon exist, though many of these are secondhand”[10]. In a footnote, Dr. Keener elaborates[11],

“I have direct accounts in which others recognized the languages from Dr. Derek Morphew (Nov. 12, 2007); Pastor David Workman (Nov. 12, 2007); Pastor David Workman (April 30, 2008); Dr. Medine Moussounga Keener (Aug. 12, 2009, secondhand about Pastor Daniel Ndoundou); my student Leah Macinskas-Le (April 25, 2010, regarding her Jewish mother becoming a believer in Jesus because she understood the Hebrew prayer of an uneducated pastor’s prayer in tongues); Del Tarr, personal correspondence, Sept. 30, 2010 (noting three cases he has witnessed, including a recent one involving Korean; cf. also Oct. 5, 6, 2010).”

I have heard about this sort of phenomenon from others as well, and it does not seem to be the type of thing that could be explained naturalistically. I trust Dr. Keener and I presume that he trusts his sources since these are personal contacts of his (the fact that the phenomenon is multiply attested helps as well). So, it seems unlikely in these cases that Keener’s sources are all lying to him, and these also seem to be phenomena about which it would be quite hard to be honestly wrong.

Now, one might object at this point that in this case the testimony is coming from someone whom they do not know personally. With public figures such as Dr. Craig Keener, though, one can, to a certain degree, evaluate whether this is someone who is likely to make stuff up. This is true especially of high-profile scholars such as Dr. Keener since one can get a sense, through careful reading of their academic work, whether they are careful and reliable in their reportage of information. Dr. Michael Brown (another public figure and Biblical scholar) has also told me (on public record) about similar events to those described above, both that he was a witness to and testimonies of friends of his (including one individual, who was a cessationist and therefore not predisposed already to believe in miraculous events, who reported the incident to Dr. Brown in shock). The fact that this sort of occurrence is multiply attested by different credible sources leads me to think that something miraculous is indeed going on here. I chose this particular category of miracle claim as an illustrative example since this is one type of phenomenon that seems to defy naturalistic explanation and also seems to be something that it would be very difficult to be honestly wrong about having witnessed.

There are also accounts from sober-minded people whom I trust of radical experiences of the presence of God (e.g. see this one from Paul Washer).

My question, then, to the skeptic is, as I said above, is the only type of evidence that may be admitted for God acting in the world today a direct personal encounter, or would one be prepared to accept testimonial evidence from other people? If one is only prepared to accept a direct personal encounter but not testimonial evidence, I would argue that that is not a rational approach. On the other hand, if one is willing to accept testimonial evidence that such encounters do indeed exist, then I would ask what the qualitative difference is between the testimonial evidence that is available in the present day and that which is present in the 2000 year old documents we know as the New Testament. Presumably the same principles of evaluation would pertain to those.

What About Unanswered Prayer?

As for unanswered prayer, this is a recurring thing that comes up in my conversations with ex-Christians – that is, that answered prayers do not seem to be distinguishable from chance and the act of prayer often feels like talking to the wall or the ceiling. This feeling during prayer is something I can relate to myself experientially, so it is not simply a theoretical issue for me. If Christianity is true, however, this entails that prayer is legit. Our belief in prayer should not be predicated on our evaluation of our feelings while praying or on our later examination of the result of prayer. To do this is not to evaluate prayer in a manner consistent with what Scripture teaches us concerning prayer. Nowhere in Scripture are we promised that prayer will be accompanied by an internal sense of being heard. Rather, prayer is supposed to be accompanied by a conviction that our prayers are heard in Christ, since it is through Him that we have access to God.

We are also not in a position to determine whether something is providentially caused by God or not. The Biblical view is not to look around for obviously miraculous causes and give God credit for those only, while presuming non-miraculous events would have happened anyway. Rather, we should view God as sovereign and credit Him with providential control over all things. So greatly has a twenty-first century naturalistic bias permeated our thinking that we in fact often fail to give God sufficient credit for His daily providence.

Prayer, then, should not be evaluated on the basis of a mystical sensation of being heard, or our impression of miraculous divine action in response to prayer. To do so is to judge prayer by a criterion which we were never given by God. How, then, should we evaluate the validity of prayer? We should evaluate it by the validity of the work of Christ and our faith in Him. If we are trusting in Christ then we have true and valid prayer. There is more that can be said, of course, about limiting our appreciation of prayer to when God says “yes” to a request, but my point here is simply that evaluating prayer by these standards is a problem from the start. Our belief in prayer stems from our beliefs in Christ and the two should never be separated. If we believe in Christ because of the evidence for His resurrection, then we are being inconsistent to fail to believe in prayer.

Another thing I will say about prayer is that there is, I think, what I would call an epistemic asymmetry when it comes to prayer. An epistemic asymmetry is where making an observation might be strong confirmatory evidence for your hypothesis but not making that observation is only weak, or even negligible, evidence against it. To take an illustration, imagine I see a spider crawling along my desk as I sit here and type this article. That would be excellent evidence for the hypothesis that, somewhere in my apartment, there is a spider. But suppose I do not see a spider in front of me. That is only very weak, even negligible evidence, that there is no spider in my apartment (since there are many other places where a spider might be). That is an example of what I call epistemic asymmetry.

So, how does this relate to prayer? I would argue that specific answers to prayer are relatively strong confirmatory evidence but apparently unanswered prayer is only comparatively weak disconfirmatory evidence. The reason for this is that there could be many explanations for why your prayer went unanswered. Perhaps God, in his omniscience, said ‘no’ because He knows (better than you do) that what you asked for is not good for you. Or perhaps there is unconfessed sin in your life. Both the Old and New Testaments teach that sin can hinder our prayer life. For example, Proverbs 28:9 says, “If one turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination.” 1 Peter 3:7 says, “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.” There could thus be any number of reasons why your prayer was not answered and it is not necessarily particularly improbable that, if Christianity is true, many of your prayers will not be answered in the way that you desired. We have plenty of Biblical examples of prayers going unanswered. David’s prayer for the life of his illegitimate child by Bathsheba was unanswered (or answered negatively, depending on how you prefer to classify it). The same is true of Jesus’ prayer that the cup might pass from him in the Garden of Gethsemane. In the latter example, Jesus’ prayer included the qualifier “If it is possible…” And the answer was, “No, that can’t happen.” It would probably be classified as the most spectacular unanswered prayer of all time by the atheists, except for what happens afterward with Jesus being raised from the dead.

The answered prayers, on the other hand, depending on their level of specificity, can in principle be relatively strong confirmatory evidence for Christianity. Even if you cannot point to specific examples in your own life, there are writings by other people that would potentially document such examples (presuming them to be accurately reported). For example, George Müller (1805-1898) was a Christian evangelist and the director of the Ashley Down orphanage in Bristol, England. There was a time when the orphanage at Bristol had run out of bread and milk.[12] Müller was on his knees praying for food when a baker knocked on the door to say that he had been unable to sleep that night, and somehow knew that Müller would need bread that morning. Shortly after, a truck carrying milk broke down, directly in front of the orphanage door. There was no refrigeration. The driver begged Müller to take the milk, which would go bad if it were not consumed. It was just enough for the 300 children in the orphanage.

Conclusion

To conclude, while the problem of divine hiddenness is, on first inspection, a thorny issue, further analysis reveals it to be not as weighty a concern as it first appeared. Given the existence of plausible explanations of divine hiddenness (e.g. God’s knowledge, in His omniscience, of how different individuals will respond to the evidence of His existence), I would argue that the problem of divine hiddenness, though a complete answer eludes us, is not sufficient to overturn the extensive and varied positive confirmatory evidences of Christianity.

Footnotes

[1] John L. Schellenberg, The Hiddenness Argument (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[2] Ibid., 41-42.

[3] Travis Dumsday, “Divine hiddenness as divine mercy”, Religious Studies 48, no. 2 (2012): 183-198.

[4] John L. Schellenberg, The Hiddenness Argument (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 53.

[5] Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion: Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1897).

[6] Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 138.

[7] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 4.

[8] Craig S. Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, Volume 1 (Michigan: Baker Academic, 2011).

[9] Ibid., 328.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid., 1769.

[12] Roger Steer, George Müller: Delighted in God (Rosshire: Christian Focus, 1997), 131.

How Reason Supports Belief In The Existence of God

2. Does God Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Al Serrato

Many atheists today hold the view that faith and reason are opposites. They view Christians as believing in God “despite the evidence” instead of because of it, and as long as they hold that view, they will not be open to considering the evidence for God’s existence. In my last post, I discussed the importance of precision in language, so as to convey the correct notion that reason underlies faith, as it underlies all sound thinking. Skeptics who realize that there is nothing irrational about “having faith” may eventually be open to considering the evidence for the God of the Bible.

As a picture paints a thousand words, good analogies can go a long way toward making intellectual concepts like this clear. They can help the listener see that they do in fact rely on “faith” all the time. Because no one can know all things with complete certainty, a decision to believe that something is true – that it describes the way things really are – is a decision that relies on faith. We all do it, often intuitively and without much thought because it is simply the way our minds work.

Since the specific question at issue when considering God’s existence is whether “someone” is there, analogies that make that point can be helpful. Of course, the easiest way to know someone is there is to actually see the person. That would constitute direct evidence. But you can also know someone is there by deduction or inference. The footsteps you see in the sand are pretty powerful indicators that someone was recently walking by. Mail-in your mailbox did not spontaneously appear. Or imagine being a police officer coming upon the scene of a burglary; you will strongly suspect someone is inside if you see the broken front door lock and hear movement inside. You may be wrong, but it would be rational for you to conclude that someone is there. If you bring in a police dog that moves to a particular closet in the house, you can be quite sure that someone is behind the door. Despite lacking direct or conclusive knowledge, you would not dismiss these conclusions as being based “on faith,” but would instead recognize that you are employing reason to form conclusions about things you cannot directly see.

Now at this point, the atheist may say “Okay that makes some sense. I can deduce ‘someone is there’ from circumstantial evidence, but I already know that people exist, so it is no surprise that a particular person might be on the beach, or delivering mail, or hiding in the house. Now you want me to believe in a God that no one has any direct experience with?” Yes, in fact, I do.

While certainly different in magnitude, the universe – like the sand on the beach or the contents of the mailbox – is a canvas upon which evidence of God’s existence can be seen. Ponder for a moment the exquisite order and complexity of the universe, the information embedded in life, the existence of consciousness, morality, music, and math – all these bear witness to the Designer’s hand. They are discrete bits of evidence upon which a comprehensive circumstantial case can be built. Science, in other words, can provide the tools, and furnish the support, for a well-ground belief in the need for a transcendent Creator.

The scientific community is already embarked upon a similar exercise, in the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence. All around the globe, radio telescopes are probing the distant reaches of space, hoping to pick up the telltale signals of intelligent life. Frequency ranges have been devoted to this pursuit by international agreement, so as to increase the chance that signal pollution from Earth-bound sources does not interfere. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been committed to this effort to find what no one definitively can say exists – life in the cosmos. The effort is called SETI – the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.

These are not religious fundamentalists at work; they are highly educated and trained scientists who know what so many in academia refuse to acknowledge – that reason can be employed to conclude that “something is out there.” What are these scientists hoping to find? Because they believe they can distinguish random noise – things naturally occurring – from signals that are specified and complex, they believe they can see the blueprint of intelligence in signals that are not random but instead designed to convey information. They look primarily for mathematical equations, trusting that universal laws will be knowable to any sentient being and will be a means to communicate, even if our spoken languages are different. NASA did something similar with its deep space probes Pioneer and Voyager; information encoded in the universal language of math and music even now hurtle further into the abyss, awaiting, perhaps, discovery by some advanced intelligence.

Now, let’s suppose that these scientists begin receiving a coded message. With effort, they eventually decode the language, finding that it consists of four letters. These four letters are arranged into billions of lines of code, which the scientists ultimately realize constitute a blueprint to build an extremely complex machine – a self-replicating machine with thousands of interdependent parts that must assemble themselves, correct errors as they occur and continue functioning in harmony decade after decade. What if scientists could begin working with this code to make changes and to alter the natural order of things? Would this not be enough to convince even the most skeptical that “something” highly intelligent and incredibly powerful was out there? That we are not alone?

So why aren’t more people convinced. After all, we already are the recipients of such directed intelligence. The four-letter language that codes billions of lines of instructions to build a complex machine is, of course, DNA. In short, while the scientific community remains largely materialistic, that façade is starting to crack, as more is learned about the incredibly information-rich nature of DNA, as well as the fine-tuned nature of the laws of the universe. Such information, and such laws, are not random. While some continue to insist that DNA evolved from lifeless matter, they have no mechanism to explain the beginning of DNA. Even the earliest single celled life form required such massive amounts of information that self-assembly is simply implausible.

We all know it intuitively: information requires a source. This alone does not prove the God of the Bible. But knowing that “something” is out there is not a matter of “faith.” Reason itself demands it.

There are none so blind as those who, despite the evidence, continue to refuse to see.

The Necessity of a Cosmic Mind

2. Does God Exist?

By Brian Chilton

Anyone who is anyone in apologetics has heard of the kalam cosmological argument. Short, concise, and powerful; the kalam argument notes the causal agency behind the origins of the universe. Simply put, the kalam argument holds:

Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause (C&M, 102).

After further researching the kalam argument, it was discovered that an ontological reality underlies the argument. That ontological reality is that one cannot escape the necessity of a Cosmic Mind for three reasons.

1. Necessity from Absolute Beginning of All Physical Universes. Physicists like Stephen Hawking and others posit that this universe is but one of many endless universes. Some theories contend that an endless movement of branes (not brains) collide and cause universes to “pop” into being. Other theories hold that an eternal multiverse gave rise to universes like ours. However, William Lane Craig and others have noted that the BGV theorem, named for its founders (Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin), indicates that any and all physical universes demand an absolute beginning. I do not deny that a multiverse could exist. A multiverse is entirely possible as are many other universes. Neither is problematic for the Christian worldview. When one notes the enormity of God’s Being, multiple universes become child’s play for such a God. Nonetheless, mindless universes cannot be the answer to why something exists as they too would require an explanation for their existence.

2. Necessity from an Impossibility of an Infinite Regress. Second, it is impossible for an infinite regress of physical past events to have occurred. That is, endless physical events of the past are impossible. There comes a point where something beyond the scope of the physical world is required to explain physical origins. Craig offers two philosophical arguments to verify this claim.

An actual infinite cannot exist.
An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite.
Therefore an infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist (W&D, 390).

While mathematical infinities can exist, Craig notes that such infinities are a different story when considering physical infinities. Craig does not dismiss infinities. Rather, he holds an Aristotelian model of time where time is viewed as eternal but broken into segments (C&M, 114; W&D, 398-399). However, infinite past physical events are impossible given that actual infinities do not exist in spacetime.

Additionally, Craig argues,

A collection formed by successive addition cannot be an actual infinite.
The temporal series of events is a collection formed by successive addition.
Therefore, the temporal series of events cannot be an actual infinite (W&D, 396).

Herein, no universe or universes could hold an infinite number of additions in time’s past. Thus, physical universes are temporal and finite.

3. Necessity from the Inability of Forms to Explain the First Cause. Some, like Erik Wielenberg, agree that the answer to the finitude of the universe is not found in an infinite regress of events, but rather in transcendent entities. However, these transcendent entities are not God, per se, but mindless Platonic Forms. Yet this is a fairly simple objection to answer. Mindless entities can do nothing. If mindless entities exist in the world of Platonic Forms, they just are. They do not do anything. They exist. Thus, a transcendent Mind is the only logical answer to this problem. This Cosmic Mind would need to be, as Swinburne and Craig note, “immaterial, beginningless, uncaused, timeless, and spaceless” (C&M, 193). Interestingly, the Cosmic Mind that is necessitated sounds a lot like the God of the Bible.

If one follows the trail of necessities, one lands at the necessity of a Cosmic Mind. While this does not necessarily connect the God of the Bible with the Cosmic Mind implied, the similarities are so intricately connected that it would take more faith not to connect God with the Cosmic Mind than to connect the two. This Cosmic Mind knows all and sees all. Thankfully, this Cosmic Mind eventually became the Incarnate Son who provided redemption for all who would receive him.

Source

Craig, William Lane, and J. P. Moreland, eds. The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Walls, Jerry L., and Trent Dougherty, eds. Two Dozen (Or So) Arguments for God. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018.

The Fire-Breathing Dragon in The Garage vs God

2. Does God Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

In the year 2018 the debate “What Best Explains Reality: Theism or Atheism? (Frank Turek vs. Michael Shermer)” took place. Frank presented his case for the existence of God as the best explanation for some facts about reality, such as the origin and fine-tuned of the universe and the objective moral values and duties. One of Shermer’s arguments to demonstrate the deficiency of the hypothesis of God was to present the famous analogy of “The Dragon in The Garage”, used for the first time by Carl Sagan in his book The Demon-Haunted World.

This is the original analogy:

Suppose I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely, you’d want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle–but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.

“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.

“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”

Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”

You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

“Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.”

And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

Shermer’s version has some variants to ridicule Frank’s stance on the existence of God as an explanation of the origin of the universe, the objective moral values, and duties and the fine-tuning of the universe. The main objective of Shermer is to prove that the existence of God is impossible to refute in the same way that theists can’t refute the existence of the dragon in the garage. But is this a good argument? Not really. Let me explain why.

The first thing that Shermer wants us to believe using Sagan’s analogy is that the properties of God that the theists attribute to him are mere gratuitous affirmations without any evidence. Here Shermer has in mind the revealed theology, those attributes that we know that God possesses through his word revealed to us. But in the debate with Frank one does not affirm the attributes of God as in the case of the dragon in the garage. And although it is not necessary, let me compare the fire-breathing dragon and God with their respective attributes.

The case for the Fire-Breathing Dragon in The Garage

Invisibility. This attribute is granted without any evidence.

Floating in the air. Neither is inferred based on any evidence.

Cold Fire. Like the previous ones, there is no argument to attribute this property to the dragon; moreover, the property is self-contradictory.

Immateriality. Zero arguments, and like cold fire-breathing, this is a contradictory property of a dragon. For a dragon to be a dragon, it must have a body with certain essential properties of a dragon, it can’t be incorporeal.

The case for God

Creator, metaphysically necessary, self-existent. These attributes are inferred through the argument of contingent beings and the ontological argument.

Transcendent, personal cause, beginningless, uncaused, timeless, non-spatial, immaterial, extremely powerful. These attributes are required given the nature of a cause that transcends the universe and through the cosmological kalam argument.

Designer and extremely intelligent. These attributes are inferred by the fine-tuning argument of the universe.

Perfectly good whose nature is the standard of goodness and whose mandates constitute our moral duties. And this last attribute is concluded through the moral argument.

As we can see, the fire-breathing dragon is completely deficient in comparison to God.

Shermer also qualifies the hypothesis of God as a fallacy of the special pleading, but we have seen with this comparison that this is not the case. No serious apologist in a debate intends to refute the objections against the arguments in favor of the existence of God affirming that the atheist can’t understand the properties of God as the best explanation to some facts of reality.

Another important point is that Shermer also uses the dragon in the garage as a parody of God as an explanation to the following facts about reality: the absolute origin of the universe, fine-tuning, and the foundation for objective moral values and duties. But his parody fails miserably for two reasons: the first is, as we have already seen, that some of the attributes that the fire-breathing dragon possesses are self-contradictory, more than enough reason to determine that such a dragon is impossible to exist. Second, for the sake of argument, I will be very kind in modifying the dragon by removing all its contradictory properties and adding the property of omnipotence. Can the dragon be the transcendent cause of the origin of the universe being that it has enough power to bring the universe to exist? ¡Of course not! An essential property of the dragon is that it has to be material/corporeal/physical, without that property it would cease to be a dragon. But if our version of the omnipotent dragon is corporeal, if it is a physical being, then it can’t be the cause of the origin of the universe, because one of the properties that the transcendent cause must have is to be immaterial, it can’t be material because matter arrives at existence with the origin of the universe. The same goes to be the foundation of the objective moral values and duties, our dragon can’t be eternal, it had to come to exist together with the universe, therefore, it is contingent, and no contingent being can be the foundation for the objectivity of morality.

Conclusion

We have seen that the analogy of the fire-breathing dragon in the garage as presented by Michael Shermer as an argument against the hypothesis of God is deficient for four reasons:

Thanks to the contradictory properties of the dragon in the garage, we can affirm that its existence is impossible.
The properties of God are inferred using deductive arguments, which does not happen with the fire-breathing dragon.
Defend the properties of the dragon in the way Shermer presented, surely it is to commit the fallacy of special pleading, but it is not in the case of God.

Even if we were to grant the Dragon possible existence by removing its contradictory properties, it would fail to be the transcendent cause of the absolute origin of the universe.

How Do I Know that I Know?

2. Does God Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Richard Howe

In 2013, I had the privilege of participating in both a written and panel dialog/debate with K. Scott Oliphint of Westminster Seminary and Jason Lisle founder of the Biblical Science Institute. Oliphint is a theologian and Lisle is an astrophysicist. Both are proponents of the apologetic method of Presuppositionalism in the tradition of Cornelius Van Til.

Recently a student of mine asked me how I would respond to one of Jason Lisle’s challenges to me.

I contend that all knowledge begins in the senses and is completed in the intellect.

(Lest the reader misunderstand what I specifically mean by my use of the term ‘knowledge’ in this context, he is encouraged to read my blog article titled “Discussing Aquinas” here.) Lisle asked:

“How does he know that he’s not in the ‘Matrix’ and that his sensory experiences have nothing to do with the real world?”[1]

In helping the student by answering Lisle’s question directly, I also wanted to take the occasion to set Lisle’s question in a broader philosophical context to see how his question conceals certain philosophical assumptions that need to be surfaced and examined.

Lisle’s question is ultimately impossible. I claim that it is undeniable that one can know reality through the sensory faculties—seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling. The reader should note the subtle shift here. Above, I said that all knowledge begins in the senses. Lisle’s challenge is in effect asking how any knowledge can arise from the senses. More to the point, Lisle is asking how I can know that my senses are reliable—how can I “know” that I “know.” Lisle’s challenge is less complicated to answer than my original contention is to defend. I will take the less complicated route here. It remains that the fact that any knowledge can arise from the senses is a necessary condition for the claim that all knowledge arises from the senses (and is completed in the intellect).[2]

The most common responses or challenges to my claim are this one that Lisle poses (how do you know your senses are reliable?) and questions to the effect of how can one acquire knowledge about non-physical truths like logic, morality, metaphysics, and God by means of the senses.

He makes the charge (in teeing up his challenge) that I have “tacitly presupposed (among other things) that our senses correspond to reality.”[3] As we shall see, I have done no such thing.

Lisle’s question implies that I could know that I know reality only if I know that my senses are reliable. Let’s momentarily grant his point for the sake of argument. I’ll come back to answer it directly. For now, consider what questions one would need to ask about Lisle’s challenge. Since my senses are themselves part of reality, how could I know that my senses are reliable when I claim that it is in them that my knowledge of reality has its origin? In other words, whatever means (be they other faculties besides the sensory faculties or something else) I use to deliver to me the conclusion that my senses are reliable, I would then have to ask how I know that this means was itself reliable. By whatever means #2 I might offer as to how I would answer that, how could I know means #2 is reliable when it tells me that the first means was reliable in telling me that my senses were reliable in telling me about reality? If I posit means #3 to tell me that means #2 is reliable when it tells me that the first means is reliable when it tells me that my senses are reliable in telling me what reality is, then ….

You get the picture. You have an infinite regress. Lisle thinks that he doesn’t have an infinite regress because he thinks he knows that God has told him about reality (or, more strictly, that God has told him that his senses are reliable). But how does Lisle know that God told him that? He thinks it’s because he has the Bible. He says, “Sensory experience is only reliable if our senses correspond to reality; and only the Christian worldview can rationally justify this.”[4] Lisle goes on, “Presuppositional apologetics is the method of defending the Christian faith that relies on the Bible as the supreme authority in all matters.”[5] But how can Lisle know that the book he’s referring to is a Bible and that the words he’s reading off the page are what he thinks they are? Isn’t Lisle using his eyes to read his Bible? But how can Lisle know that his eyes are telling him the truth of what’s written there, or, for that matter, whether there’s anything written at all? He can’t use the conclusions he gets from what his eyes are telling him he’s reading in the Bible to give him the certainty that he’s reading a Bible that tells him that he’s reading a message from God that is telling him that his eyes are reliable. It’s a vacuous, vicious circular argument.

Surprisingly, Lisle gladly acknowledges that his position is circular, though he will deny that it either vacuous or vicious. He seems to think he’s on to something when he says:

“It may surprise some people to learn that circular reasoning is actually logically valid.”[6]

But this is a trivial observation about validity. It would not surprise anyone with a basic understanding in formal logic. By definition, an argument is valid just in case it is impossible for the argument to have all true premises and a false conclusion.[7] This allows one to prove an argument is valid by showing how it would be impossible for a given argument to have a false conclusion where all the premises are true.

Consider this in light of what it is to be circular. A circular argument is one where the conclusion of the argument is the same as one of the premises in the argument. Being the same would mean that the conclusion and the premise would have the same truth value. If the conclusion is true, then the premise that makes the same claim as the conclusion would also be true. If the conclusion is false, then the premise that makes the same claim as the conclusion would also be false. Note, therefore, how this makes it impossible for a circular argument to be invalid. If the conclusion was false (to apply the test for invalidity by having a false conclusion with all true premises), then the premise to which it is identical would have to be false. Thus, it would be impossible for the argument to be rendered invalid since a false conclusion would necessitate one false premise (since they affirm the same thing and, thus, have the same truth value). Since such an argument cannot be rendered invalid, it is proven to be valid.

As it turns out, to point out that a circular argument is valid is to say nothing particularly significant about the argument.

Neither is it saying anything important about circularity. After all, any argument that has at least one premise that is a contradiction could not fulfill the conditions of invalidity either. This means that any argument that has a contradictory premise is valid.[8] Suppose someone accused Lisle of having a premise in his argument for Presuppositionalism that was a contradiction. How silly would it sound for Lisle to respond “It may surprise some people to learn that any argument where one of the premises is a contradiction is actually logically valid!” If Lisle is interested in putting forth a cogent deductive argument for his Presuppositionalism, what really matters is not merely whether the argument is valid, but whether the argument is sound—a valid argument with all true premises.

Having made his relatively unimportant comment about circularity and validity, Lisle then retorts that every epistemology is circular and proceeds to try to show why his circularity is not vacuous while the circularity of all other epistemologies is vacuous. He comments,

“The notion that circular reasoning is always wrong reveals a bit of philosophical naivety. In fact, all ultimate standards must be defended in a somewhat circular way (by a transcendental argument).”[9]

In this he is echoing what his presuppositional mentors have directed. Van Til says,

“To admit one’s own presuppositions and to point out the presuppositions of others is, therefore, to maintain that all reasoning is, in the nature of the case, circular reasoning. The starting point, the method, and the conclusion are always involved in one another.”[10]

Greg Bahnsen carries on Van Til’s position.

“So if, when it comes to the fundamental question of Christian faith, arguments are ultimately circular (since metaphysics and epistemology depend on one another), then the matter reduces to one of submission or rebellion to the authority of the revealed God. … Hence a Christian’s apologetical argument (working on a transcendental level) will finally be circular …”[11]

Scott Oliphint is right in line with the presuppositional orthodoxy.

“I admitted to him that I certainly was arguing in (some kind of) a circle. … Then I made clear to the other presenters that they were all asking that their own views, based on their own reasoning and sources, be accepted as true. In every case, I said, every other presenter appealed to his own final authority. ‘So, ‘ I asked, ‘on what basis should I accept your circle over mine?’”[12]

Are the Presuppositionalists right in maintaining that all reasoning is circular? No, they are not. Before I am done, I will explain why. For now, I should like to turn my focus back to the question at hand. In reading Presuppositionalists, I have discovered how often it is that they offer their Presuppositionalism as the only “solution” to philosophical problems that arise (for the most part) out of modern and contemporary philosophy (i.e., from the 17th century onward). By offering their Presuppositionalism as the “answer” to these problems, they show their tacit commitment to the assumptions of the very philosophy that created the problems in the first place. In Part Two of this article, I will, God willing, explore several of these philosophical problems.

Such a concession to the assumptions of modern and contemporary philosophy is never more evident than with Lisle’s challenge to me. He (perhaps unwittingly) has bought into the philosophical method of critical realism.[13] Critical realism is the approach to epistemology that tries to maintain the conclusions of philosophical realism (we will see in a moment what philosophical realism is) with the methods of critical philosophy (the otherwise legitimate expectation philosophers have of reasons or arguments demonstrating philosophical conclusions).

The term “realism” and its cognates have several different usages.

A person who sees himself as one who avoids romantic delusions about his circumstances or about the world might call himself a realist. In philosophy, the term is used in two very important yet distinct ways, only one of which concerns me here. One way has to do with whether one grants the reality of “universals” and, if so, how one regards the nature of a universal, especially in relation to “particulars.”[14] The other use has to do with whether one maintains that there is a physical world that exists external to us as knowers and that this world can be known by us as humans.

This kind of realist would deny that the world around us is somehow largely or entirely the ideas in our own minds (as opposed to physical objects external to our minds) and/or is the result of God’s imposing upon our minds the ideas out of which that world is constituted. These are variations upon the view called Idealism. Critical realism maintains that philosophy is obligated to “prove” or “justify” its claims that there is a world external to us as knowers. It insists that philosophical realists must somehow “prove” or “justify” philosophical realism; that is, that one must “prove” or “justify” the claim that one is not in the Matrix. Lisle’s challenge is quintessential critical realism.

Questions that have occupied philosophical realists through the millennia aim at exploring how it is that we know this external world.

Is it partly or entirely through the senses? Are there some aspects of the external world that can be accessed only through the mind with the faculty of intuition? Are there certain innate ideas that assist us in knowing some of the external world? Are there other options?

Notice what the philosophers are not asking or, at least, should not be asking if they are philosophical realists. They are not asking whether we know reality. Instead, they are asking how we know reality. My own view goes by different names, almost all of which employ the term ‘realism’.

It is a tradition arising from Aristotle (385-323 BC) and which finds its greatest expression in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). One will find a number of students of Aquinas scattered throughout the philosophical world. The number is perhaps small relative to those philosophers who reject Aquinas’s thinking. This is not to say, however, that all of those philosophers who reject Aquinas’s thinking would necessarily reject philosophical realism. The number is even smaller within Protestant Christianity and is very close to non-existence with evangelical Christianity.

My seminary, Southern Evangelical Seminary, is the only evangelical seminary in the world of which I am aware that deliberately embraces Thomistic philosophy.

The version of philosophical realism in this Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition has been called Moderate Realism,[15] Classical Realism, Scholastic Realism,[16] and Thomistic (or Thomist) Realism. Sometimes it goes by the simpler moniker of Thomism.

My direct answer to Lisle is to deny the coherency of his question. The Thomist—indeed, I would insist every “normal” person—already knows he’s not in the Matrix. The only reason the movie plot works is because the movie viewer is in the theatre and not in the movie itself. The very fact that we are in a world not of our own making that exists external to us as knowers is undeniably self-evident. To try to “prove” that self-evident reality, is to set up a process that inevitably makes the proof impossible. Historian of philosophy Etienne Gilson puts it deftly.

After passing twenty centuries of the very model of those self‑evident facts that only a madman would ever dream of doubting, the existence of the external world finally received its metaphysical demonstration from Descartes. Yet no sooner had he demonstrated the existence of the external world than his disciples realized that, not only was his proof worthless, but the very principles which made such a demonstration necessary at the same time rendered the attempted proof impossible.[17]

Lisle’s challenge is actually begging the question in favor of Idealism against Realism. As humans, we encounter the existing things of the external world by means of the senses. That world is reality (though, as Christians, we know that’s not all there is in reality). It is incoherent to demand that the knower somehow get back behind the sensible reality we know, and from there put together some “proof” or “argument” which arrives at the conclusion that there’s an external world out there that he knows. To put it more facetiously, if the world of sensible objects right in front of me is not enough for me to know that it’s there, then how can any argument about the sensible world be more compelling? The argument is itself one step removed from the world. And, as I argued above, from what “reality” could that argument arise that already doesn’t employ the very faculties to know it, for whose reliability Lisle demands a proof? It should be clear why Lisle’s Presuppositionalism is completely inadequate. If it is not clear, I shall, God willing, expand on my response as I explore in Part Two some of the other philosophical assumptions that Presuppositionalists make in laying out and defending their Presuppositionalism.

To complete my thoughts about circularity, Van Til et al. are certainly wrong in their contention that all reasoning is circular.

The mistake they make is assuming that reasoning starts with presuppositions (or assumptions, to use Bahnsen’s term). But human reasoning does not start with assumptions or presuppositions. These are all cognitive terms having to do with the activity of the intellect. But the intellect has to have some object to know. We don’t merely begin reasoning with reasoning itself. Instead, we begin reasoning with our encounter with the objective, sensible world. The things we encounter in the objective, sensible world are not propositions or assumptions or presuppositions. Rather, we encounter things—people, dogs, trees, etc. But the conclusion of an argument is a proposition.

A proposition is about reality. It is not, as a proposition, itself external reality.

Thus, the starting point of reasoning is not the same as the conclusion of the reasoning. It is manifest that for philosophical realists like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas there is no circularity in their overall epistemology.

Presuppositionalists think that reasoning is circular largely because, when they think of epistemology, they think of it in the same terms that many modern and contemporary philosophers define the task of knowing. Modern (and, more so, contemporary) philosophers often couch knowing questions fundamentally along the contours of cognitive elements (propositions; assumptions; beliefs; logic) or consciousness elements (properties; qualia; thoughts, etc.). In contrast, the classical philosophy of Aristotle will define knowledge as beginning with the formal identity of the knower (via the intellect) and the known (without leaving out, when necessary and where appropriate, the cognitive and consciousness elements listed). Here, ‘formally’ means “employing the metaphysical aspect of the Form of sensible objects.” The specter of circularity comes up precisely because the elements according to which some philosophers cash out knowledge are themselves elements of the knowing process, without regard to factoring in the metaphysics of what it is to be a knower and what it is to be a known. As long as epistemology tries to “justify” itself only in terms of itself, it can hardly avoid being circular in some way. This the Thomistic model does not do.

While Lisle does not raise the following objection, I think it is important to deal with it nonetheless. It will do no good for someone to insist that we need a “proof” of the reliability of our senses since there are particular examples where our senses fail to tell us accurately what’s going on in the world.[18] Optical illusions can be known to be illusions only because we know the truth about a matter to which the illusion stands in contrast. If I think I see a pool of water ahead in the desert only to discover that it was a mirage, what were the means by which I discovered that it wasn’t really a pool of water after all? If everything is an illusion (or, as some have put it, if everything is a dream (Lisle’s Matrix challenge)) then the word ‘illusion’ doesn’t mean anything.

If one claims that everything he experiences is a dream, he has just exchanged the term ‘real’ for the term ‘dream’.

His dream is just what the rest of us call real. A dream is a dream only because it is in contrast to the real.[19] Without that contrast, one is committing what is known as the fallacy of lost contrast. Neither challenge—(1) challenging the reliability of the senses by offering a particular instance where the senses fail to tell us the truth about a situation or (2) globally challenging the reliability of the senses—offers any solace for the anti-realist or the Presuppositionalist.

While some of these types of challenges from the Presuppositionalist might have some force against modern and contemporary versions of empiricism, they are completely irrelevant to the classical empiricism of Aristotle and Aquinas. All the less are they demonstrations of the viability of Presuppositionalism.

References

[1] Jason Lisle, “Young Earth Presuppositionalism,” Christian Apologetics Journal 11, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 110, available at http://richardghowe.com/index_htm_files/CAJPresuppositionalism.pdf, accessed 06/08/20.

[2] In fairness to me, one should note that my specific claim to which Lisle was responding was: “As a Classical (or Scholastic) Realist I would submit that our sensory experiences of reality also deliver to us metaphysical truths.” [Richard G. Howe, “Classical Apologetics and Creationism,” Christian Apologetics Journal 11, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 93] This should allow me to confine my thoughts here to the weaker of the two claims. It remains for another occasion to address my contention about that we can know metaphysical truths from sensory experiences.

[3] Jason Lisle, “Presuppositional Reply,” Christian Apologetics Journal 11, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 110.

[4] Jason Lisle, “Presuppositional Reply,” 110.

[5] Jason Lisle, “Young Earth Presuppositionalism,” 65.

[6] Lisle, “Young Earth Presuppositionalism,” 80.

[7] Another way to say this is an argument is valid when the truth of the premises necessitates the truth of the conclusion. For a valid argument, if the premises are true, the conclusion has to be true.

[8] “Any argument at least one of whose premises is a contradiction is necessarily valid.” Robert Baum, Logic (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975), 191.

[9] Lisle, “Young Earth Presuppositionalism,” 81.

[10] Cornelius Van Til, Apologetics (unpublished syllabus), “IV – The Problem of Method,” p. 62, emphasis in original.

[11] Greg Bahnsen, Presuppositional Apologetics: Stated and Defended (Power Springs: American Vision Presuppositionalists; Nacogdoches: Covenant Media Press, 2008), 86.

[12] K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics: Principles and Practice in Defense of Our Faith (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013), 24.

[13] For a treatment critical realism, see Etienne Gilson, Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge, trans. by Mark A. Wauck, (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1986).

[14] An example of a universal is vividly displayed in the Nuremburg Trials. The justices in the trials were from the Soviet Union, France, the UK, and the US. The Nazi defendants could not be tried on the basis of the laws of these nations since they were not citizens of these nations. Neither could the Nazi defendants be tried on the basis of German law since none of their atrocities of the holocaust were in violation of German law. Instead, the Nazi defendants were indicted as having committed “crimes against humanity.” One would need to ask exactly what is a “humanity.” Is it male or female? Is it white, black, or some other race? Is it young or old? Is it rich or poor? Is it sick or well? One can see that “humanity” is none of the particular things. Instead, “humanity” is what philosophers call a universal. The question then is this: is the universal “humanity” real or not real in any meaningful sense of the term ‘real’? If you say that it is not real in any meaningful sense of the term ‘real’ (perhaps because you say it is nothing more than a concept in the mind), then how can one possibly commit a crime against it? If you say that it is real in some meaningful sense of the term ‘real’, then I submit that your understanding of the nature of the reality of that universal is likely going to be somewhere along the lines of the thinking of Plato or somewhere along the lines of the thinking of Aristotle—two of the most significant philosophers whose philosophy has help forge the contours of Western civilization. I am indebted to philosopher Joseph Koterski for this illustration from his lecture “Natural Law and Human Nature” in The Great Courses audio series.

[15] The ‘moderate’ of moderate realism comes from the fact that Aristotle’s view of universals falls between the extreme realism of Plato and the anti-realism of later philosophy.

[16] I am indebted to philosopher Edward Feser for this expression. It seeks to distinguish Thomas Aquinas’s view of universals from that of Aristotle’s regarding how universals are understood vis-à-vis the God of Christianity and the Christian doctrine of creation.

[17] Etienne Gilson, Thomist Realism, p. 27. For a scaled-down version of Gilson’s point in this work, see his Methodical Realism, trans. Philip Trower (Front Royal: Christendom Press, 1990). Reprinted Methodical Realism: A Primer for Beginning Realists (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011).

[18] For a treatment of how epistemologies throughout history have sought to account for error in light of their accounts of knowledge, see Leo W. Keeler, The Problem of Error from Plato to Kant: A Historical and Critical Study. (Rome: Apud Aedes Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae, 1934). For a treatment of the issue within the context of Thomistic Realism, see Francis H. Parker, “On the Being of Falsity,” in Philosophy of Knowledge: Selected Readings. (Chicago: J. B. Lippincott, 1960): 290-316.

[19] I don’t mean here that there no sense in which a dream, as a dream, is real. My dream is real in a way that the dream of a fictional character in a novel is not. Rather, I’m saying that a dream about, for example, sunning on the beach is not the same as actually sunning on the beach.

Classical Theism

Who Pulled the Pin?

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Recommended resources related to the topic:

A Blind Faith And God’s Hiddenness

Is Faith In God Really Blind?

What If The Laws of Physics Are Not Constant?

God’s Hiddenness

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Recommended resources related to the topic:

A Lack of Obviousness Does Not Mean Poor Evidential Support

Couldn’t God Have Given Us Stronger Evidence?

Why Does God Require of Us So Much Work?

Where is God?

What About Unanswered Prayer?

Conclusion

Footnotes

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Source

Recommended resources related to the topic:

The case for the Fire-Breathing Dragon in The Garage

The case for God

Conclusion

Recommended resources related to the topic:

I contend that all knowledge begins in the senses and is completed in the intellect.

The most common responses or challenges to my claim are this one that Lisle poses (how do you know your senses are reliable?) and questions to the effect of how can one acquire knowledge about non-physical truths like logic, morality, metaphysics, and God by means of the senses.

As it turns out, to point out that a circular argument is valid is to say nothing particularly significant about the argument.

The term “realism” and its cognates have several different usages.

Questions that have occupied philosophical realists through the millennia aim at exploring how it is that we know this external world.

My seminary, Southern Evangelical Seminary, is the only evangelical seminary in the world of which I am aware that deliberately embraces Thomistic philosophy.

To complete my thoughts about circularity, Van Til et al. are certainly wrong in their contention that all reasoning is circular.

A proposition is about reality. It is not, as a proposition, itself external reality.

If one claims that everything he experiences is a dream, he has just exchanged the term ‘real’ for the term ‘dream’.

References

Recommended resources related to the topic: