Category Archives: God
Betrayed by Presupposition
Presuppositions can work against our understanding in ways that aren’t usually apparent. Let’s look at one such case.
The presupposition: Uniformitarianism. This is the thought that everything as we observe it now is exactly how it worked in the past. The sedimentary layers in rock are read this way, assuming they were uniformly laid down at regular intervals. So upper layers are new, lower layers are old (sometimes much older). All due to processes that have never changed since eons past, operating in the same way in the same amounts of time.
This is a contention of naturalism, and is not strictly held by theists. There are a few exceptions. Anything existing by necessity, such as God himself or mathematical constructs, won’t change (even after the Fall). The quantity of “two” is always “two” no matter what numbering system you use to designate it on paper, and equations will always retain certain patterns and properties. Though a hexadecimal system will differ slightly from a decimal system, and a binary system from the other two, evident patterns will still emerge in all of them (following from the base number of the system). The Lord doesn’t change, either; he isn’t blown about by the wind.
The second exception would be universal laws. These are built into the fabric of reality and thus remain unchanged through time. This includes moral laws–if it’s wrong to sacrifice a child now, it’s always been wrong to sacrifice a child. Since some cultures practiced that, it means that moral epistemology sometimes must catch up to moral ontology.
According to the Bible, there are differences between things at the outset of creation verses and things as they stand now, due in a large part to the Fall of Man. After the Fall, some rules changed (as punishment) and creation took on new ways of functioning. Read the rest of this entry
Another Reason I Won’t Debate the Historicity of Jesus Christ
Hard as this may be to believe, there are actually people who don’t believe that there was ever a real, historical Jesus Christ. Their arguments are on par with people who deny Shakespeare wrote his plays, Holocaust deniers, AIDS deniers, and Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theory series.
But they won’t go away. Worse, probably 95% of the Internet atheist movement counts themselves among those who deny a man named Jesus of Nazareth, described by the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and many others ever walked this planet and performed miracles before being sentenced to die on a Roman cross.
I’ve decided that I won’t debate the question of the existence of Jesus anymore. It’s really not an open question. No serious scholar of history or of the New Testament, Christian or not, actually questions this issue. Even scholars of comparative mythology question whether or not Jesus’ stories had their origin in pagan mythology! In fact, it may be the other way around.
Well, Christians, historians, and non-Christian comparative religious scholars aren’t the only ones who think that the idea Jesus never existed is preposterous. Of all people, Bart Ehrman, thinks the idea and the arguments supporting it are terrible. And he tells the Infidel Guy so during an interview:
On Originality and Divine Revelation
Peter Breitbart’s short film A Madman or Something Worse is the latest in a line of criticisms of Jesus’ teachings to carry an unspoken, but integral, underlying assumption that divine revelation must somehow be original in order to truly be divine.
So, I would like to pose the following question: Why must something be original in order to be considered divine revelation?
This criticism isn’t unique to Breitbart. When I mention a teaching of Jesus or the Bible, the skeptic counters that said teaching predates the Bible or Jesus by centuries. I see this especially in connection to Jesus’ ethic of reciprocity, the so-called Golden Rule. This little gem predated Jesus by quite a bit; centuries in fact.
The implication seems to be that if the Bible were truly God’s word, that it would be 100% original. Or, that if Jesus were the Son of God, he’d say things that no mortal teacher had ever said.
So pointing out that things like the Golden Rule existed well before Jesus is somehow supposed to mean that Jesus isn’t divine. Or that the Mosaic Law isn’t divinely inspired because similar legal strictures existed 500 or so years earlier in the Code of Hammurabi.
So what?
We humans are made in the image of God. While every fiber of our being is tainted by sin, the fact of the matter is that we still retain part of this identity as God’s special creation. And that means that it is possible for us to know morality when we see it, and that means that moral teachings might come from places other than the divinely inspired texts or the words of Jesus. It is possible that some enlightened individuals, though not divinely inspired in the strictest sense of the term, may have found part of the divine truths by means other than a word from God. Moreover, they might have discovered them before God revealed them in a divinely inspired teaching.
Given that humans are made in God’s image, this isn’t really unexpected.
Morality is absolute and objective. Our knowledge of morality can change, but what is right is always right and what is wrong is always wrong. Child sacrifice is just wrong, whether or not Canaanite society believed it was right and just. The Holocaust was wrong, whether or not 1930s-1940s German society was overwhelmingly in favor of it.
Morality, therefore, is something that we discover as our knowledge increases; not something subjective that we put to a vote. Being made in the image of God means that this morality is written on our hearts and that we can gain a greater understanding of it as time passes. We can find a better path than even the morality on display right now.
And we probably will.
Two thousand years from now, an enlightened society will probably look at America 2011 and think that we are as backwards and as barbaric as we in America 2011 view the ancient Israelites and their Canaanite opposition.
The Bible is the divinely-inspired and objective guidebook to finding this higher morality, but no one is claiming that it is the only source of morality or even the first source of any particular moral teaching.
Now, some folks do claim that the Bible is the source of certain teachings, like the Golden Rule, but they’re misinformed. Since, however, there’s no reason (given that humans are made in the image of God) to believe that a teaching must be unique to the Bible or to Jesus to be true and divinely inspired, let’s just educate the misinformed person and move on. Unless the skeptic is prepared to explain why a teaching must be unique in order to be divinely inspired.
New Proofs on Reply to God is Imaginary
I have completed two new proofs on my slow-going re-write of God is NOT Imaginary, a reply to that unfortunate spectacle of a website allegedly authored by Marshall Brain. The newbies:
As always, enjoy!
Another Round Up of Comments!
I have a confession to make.
I hate answering comments. Seriously. I hate it with an unparalleled passion. That’s why I procrastinate doing it forever. I keep hoping, one day, that my blog will be large enough that I can let my Christian readers defend my points, while I continue to write new posts and articles. But, alas, my readership tends to be atheists who are reading me to disagree with me.
Which might be better, in a way. At least I know that the Gospel message is getting out there. If my readership was entirely Christian, I’d just be preaching to the choir rather than defending the faith.
And so, now I shall wade into the comment sections and pick up the neglected comments.
First up, Boz weighs in on my much derided post on philosophical ignorance. The post was with regard to Monica (@Monicks on Twitter) making a tweet that confuses methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. Atheists, who are metaphysical naturalists, often thought there was no difference (or shouldn’t be). That was completely unexpected. And by completely unexpected, I mean completely expected!
He told me to stop insulting Monica by calling her ignorant. I told him I wasn’t; I proved she was ignorant. To which he replied:
Alexander Johannesen asserted that you were ignorant in the comments of another thread, and you responded that it was an ad hominem/personal insult.
Wrong-o. What Alex said was:
Your surprising ignorance of other religions are quite astounding considering you make such big and bold assertions about them, and right now you stand as a prime example of the arrogance the outside world see when we look in on people like you.
The bolded portion is the ad hominem, and (I thought) quite rude. Alex (in that thread) also thought that I meant the ignorant comment was the ad hominem. But Christians are the shallow thinkers who forgo science and just say that God did it solely because we don’t understand it and don’t want to. Riiiiight.
Next, Alex responds on the same thread to J.W. Wartick and I talking about how metaphysical naturalism defeats itself by providing no way to actually prove itself:
May I remind you both that none of you two can step outside of the natural world to confirm any of your claims? And that, in fact, you don’t need go outside the boundaries of scientific epistemology in order for *any* philosophy to be correct. And who in their right mind could claim a model of thought for correct, anyway?
And this is the type of thinking that led me to post this. I’m claiming that something aside from the material world exists. Alex is claiming otherwise, since he says that we don’t have to look any further than science to find out what is happening here. I’m also understanding him to mean that one cannot claim a thought model correct, since he’s saying no one in his right mind would try. So it seems that since he actually can’t step outside of the natural world either (per J.W.), he’s going to point out that no one can, then say that there’s no way to know who is correct.
If that’s true, then all of us are fighting for nothing. If we can’t know, why bother? But here is postmodernism rearing its ugly head: all opinions are equally valid, and what’s true for you might not be true for me. Sorry, no. Truth is such because it’s true. It corresponds exactly to reality.
That’s the lazy man’s way out–just claim you can’t know it.
All right, now for a couple of quickies on this post. First up, Boz, who links to this category in Wikipedia and then challenges:
Maybe you could response to the slogan: “You’re an atheist to literally thousands of CREATOR gods. I’m only an atheist to one more CREATOR god than you!” ?
Sure, and I’ll respond via link as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/Jesus. He claimed to be the Son of God and backed it up with a Resurrection from the dead, in fulfillment of Scriptures written hundreds of years before his life. I’d say that trumps the other creator gods.
Then, Brian Westley:
Yes, people make up all kinds of gods, some more powerful than others. This doesn’t make your god more likely; in fact, the reverse is true.
So, when more people think of a similar idea, that makes it less true? Your philosophy of language must be really interesting.
In philosophy, however, we should always interpret terrible arguments in the most charitable way possible. So I’ll assume that’s probably not really what you meant. You might have meant (and this is by far the more intriguing argument), that because a plethora of creator gods exist, that makes it a lot harder to know which is the actual creator god. And you have a point. But, it makes your default position of atheism look very apathetic.
For why, let’s assume that everyone in the world has a soul mate (I don’t actually believe this; I think that people choose a mate and then work really hard to build a solid marriage). If you’re single, then somewhere out there is your soul mate, and it is up to you to seek her and then marry her.
If your position were applied consistently, then you’d conclude that because a plethora of women exist, that overwhelms the odds of finding your soul mate. So, you’ll just stop searching. Apathetic.
So, how would I know which creator god is the correct entity? That’s tough to argue subjectively, since Muslims know Allah is the only one, while others are just as convinced (including Christians) that some other entity created this universe. As I answered above, Jesus of Nazareth would be objective confirmation of “my” God.
Okay, join me next time for more from the comment bag. I’ve got to stop letting these pile up!
Twitter and Shallow Reasoning
Recently, on Twitter, I got into a discussion with two users (@LifesPoser and @JoeUnseen) about the existence of God. As usual, they were crowing about how I need to prove that God exists before they’ll listen to me.
https://twitter.com/#!/LifesPoser/status/89019071726759937
So I responded with links to three YouTube videos from Dr. Roland Nash:
https://twitter.com/#!/tucholskic/status/89187665408299008
First of all, I doubt that these guys watched all of the videos. The discussion centered around the first video, where Dr. Nash explains that we as humans take for granted a number of propositions that we are unable to prove. Two such examples are the existence of an external world and the existence of other minds (known as solipsism; and one user even ridiculed my entire argument by saying that when the theist resorts to solipsism, that means he’s beat).
The shallow reasoning in question:
https://twitter.com/#!/JoeUnseen/status/89655045062266880
Not correct, not even a little bit. Just because I’m experiencing the external world, I can’t call that evidence of the existence of the external world. All such evidence–picking up a crayon off my basement floor, sitting in a chair, talking to my wife–is part of the very thing I’m trying to prove.
Consider trying to prove a murder in court. We’re trying to prove that the act itself occurred. We can’t see the act itself, only the evidence produced by the act. Security footage (not the actual act, mind you, but a recording of it–the actual act happened in the past and is not accessible to us). A knife with the defendant’s fingerprints on the handle and the victim’s blood on the blade. Footprints matching the defendant’s shoes in blood fleeing the crime scene. These things are incidental to the act itself, they exist as a record of the act.
With trying to prove the external world, everything that you can point to is part of the external world, not a record of its existence. This is akin to my fellow theists saying that the Bible is God’s word because it says so. You can’t do that; it’s begging the question.
There are equally plausible metaphysical explanations for an outside world. Look at The Matrix. You can’t prove that isn’t what’s happening right now.
So, what?
The take away point is that you are rational for believing in the existence of an external world. Moreover, you are rational for believing that the people you encounter have minds. And, you are rational for believing that there is a shared experience with that other person when we’re standing in the same room. We see the same lamp. We sit together at the same table.
You can’t prove it. But, you’d be irrational to consider The Matrix scenario. You’d be locked up if you came to believe that. That’s how good The Matrix is at detecting and punishing dissent from it. (Ooops! Is that Agent Smith knocking at my door?)
So Alvin Plantinga argues that we are rational for believing in the existence of God without having to provide empirical evidence for it. I’m not proving the existence of God any more than I’m proving the external world. I’m providing rational reasons for my belief in God. These I’ve detailed before:
- The existence of something rather than nothing
- Cosmology points to a universe with an absolute beginning, implying a transcendent cause (a cause cannot be part of the resulting effect)
- Harmony of nature (look at the imbalances caused by transplanting non-indigenous species into a new environment or by the unnatural extinction of a member of that biosphere)
- Complex structure of even inorganic matter
- Appearance of design in biology is best explained by actual design
- Existence of absolute morality (human sacrifice is always wrong, even if the Canaanites, Aztecs, and Mayans [among others] thought it was business as usual)
- DNA is a living language, and languages don’t just “come together” one day
- Conscious existence of humans with a free will
Multiple lines of reasoning (not really evidence or proof) coalesce to make the existence of God much more likely than not. Each of those items by itself makes God very likely, but the cumulative case becomes much, much stronger. Pretty tough to shake, in my own estimation.
Now, I know it’s fashionable among atheists to say that I bear 100% of the burden of proof since I’m the “prosecution” making the positive claim (“The defendant committed the crime, your honor!”). But that’s just American imperialism. Other justice systems make the defendant bear the burden of proof (“I did not commit the crime, your honor!”). Given all this, I’d say the atheist (at minimum) has at least one burden of proof, though he’s not going to like hearing me say it.
He owes me reasons why non-belief is rational. Note that I’m not asking him to prove a negative. I’m asking for what I just gave here–multiple lines of evidence and argument that make the nonexistence of God more likely than not. Given the usual squawking about theistic burden of proof, I’m not holding my breath for these reasons.
Final Question from the Reddit Thread
This is, at last, the very last question from the Reddit thread of questions that theists supposedly can’t answer. It is a three-part question:
- Does free will exist in heaven?
- If so, what’s to prevent god from kicking you out after the fact?
- If not, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of giving man free will in the first place?
In general, as a Calvinist, I’m not overly impressed with questions about free will. We Reformed folks don’t really think that humans have it. In the sense that when faced with path A or path B, do I believe that we can pick either without respect to God making us choose the one he desires? Yes, I think we can do that. But, I also believe that in so doing we are doing God’s will and advancing his plan for our lives as he saw fit to declare from eternity. It seems to be a contradiction, but the Bible affirms both an exhaustive divine decree and the free moral agency of humans. Therefore, the two might appear to conflict to us but in reality work in harmony.
As a Christian theist, I’m also not overly impressed with atheists who bring up free will as a supposed airtight objection to the concept of God. Without God, there could be no free will. In the Westminster Confession of Faith, we see that human freedom is upheld and founded on the decree of God. In fact, metaphysically speaking, it seems illogical given the atheistic commitment to naturalism that we would have a free will. Read the rest of this entry
Questions Theists Can’t Answer, Election/Predestination
More questions from the Reddit thread that proposes questions theists can’t answer. These are focused on election/predestination.
If god knows everything that is and will ever be, and he knows that you will not accept him before you are even born, why would he send you to hell? You are essentially judged before you can do anything. What kind of “good” god would do that?
So, basically, if you don’t accept God’s free gift of grace, it’s his fault? No, no, no, no, no, no. The only way that someone is judged before he has a chance to do anything is if God actually creates the unbelief and decrees the sin leading to, nurturing, and sustaining the unbelief. God doesn’t do any of that; he knows all of that in advance.
“Knowing” that something is so is a far cry from “making” it so. The example I gave recently is rather crude, but it works. Ted gave Bill two choices. Either Bill could watch Eliza Dushku privately re-enact the scene where she models bikinis in The New Guy just for Bill, or Ted can slap Bill in across the face with a wet codfish.
Ted knows without a doubt that Bill will pick the bikini modeling thing. There can be no question in anyone’s mind, even if you haven’t seen Eliza model the bikinis in The New Guy, that Bill will pick that option. Ted didn’t make Bill pick that option. He only knew that Bill would select it.
In other words, God knowing that a creature will do X is not the same as God forcing a creature to do X. Or, more appropriately, ordering the universe in such a way that it is inescapable the creature will do X. Read the rest of this entry
Apt Description of God
Chris Reese from Cloud of Witnesses featured a concise and excellent quote that perfectly describes the nature of God, as cited by Dallas Willard:
God is “the eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from Himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.” [Adam Clarke in Cyclopaedia, vol. 3 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 903-4, quoted by Dallas Willard in Knowing Christ Today, chapter 4, n. 1.]
Let’s break take a look at just a few of these descriptors. Read the rest of this entry
My 3-year Old Thinks Deeper than Some Atheists
It sounds crazy, but I think my three-year old daughter actually thinks more deeply than the average atheist. She understands a distinction in the divine essence that many atheists fail to see.
I, and other apologists like me, out-of-hand reject statements like, “You’re an atheist to literally thousands of gods. I’m only an atheist to one more god than you!” I’ve discussed some reasons here. One of the most compelling reasons to reject such a statement is the very ontology of the gods under discussion.
Polytheism usually starts with two gods, a male and a female. The male generally represents Heaven or the Sky, while the female represents Earth. Immediately, we see that these beings are tied to a material reality, with what Dungeons & Dragons supplements (such as Deities and Demigods) refer to as a “portfolio.” The portfolio is the area of supreme power for that deity.
Sky and Earth then have children, which become the initial gods of the pantheon. In Greek mythology, these children are Cronus and Rhea. Cronus then usurps Sky’s (Uranus) power and becomes king of the entire universe. This represents another common element of polytheism–the supreme god, always dwelling in or characterized by the Sky, is defeated or rendered impotent.
Cronus and Rhea then gave birth to Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Demeter, Hestia, and Hera. None of these gods are the causal agent of the force they control. Zeus controls thunder, and his lightning bolt was fashioned to harness the already extant power. Same with the remaining siblings: Poseidon controls the water, Hades shepherds departed souls, Demeter manages the seasons, Hestia the household, and Hera blesses marriage.
The universe, when discussed, is usually already there. It is never “created” by any god, and the gods master extant powers rather than creating them. Further, the gods are always seen as finite, as having a definite beginning and it always seems possible that they could have an end, in either death or imprisonment.
Contrast that with God, the transcendent creator of the universe. There was nothing before God, and there will be nothing after God. He is eternal, and exists on the pure necessity of his own nature. All that we see, he spoke into being. Light through the darkness, material from immaterial, land out of water, vegetation on the land, fish in the sea, then creatures on the land. He commanded it all into existence; he didn’t harness what already existed.
This concept is weighty, but not so much that Ashleigh couldn’t grasp it, and she’s only three! The atheists I deal with are much older than that, yet seem unable to grasp this concept.
How do I know Ashleigh gets it? Because the other day, I hear her declare to my son, Gabriel, and anyone else in earshot, that she was the “god of weather.” I told her that she shouldn’t claim to be God, as that is very wrong indeed.
She replied, “I’m not God, daddy. I’m only god of weather!”
Indicating she understands the fundamental difference between claiming to be the ultimate creator, and a powerful entity with a limited portfolio (such as “weather”). Maybe I’m reading too much into her comment, but it seems to me that she gets a truth that escapes our atheist friends who make the “I’m an atheist to one more god” claim. Maybe she’ll follow in my footsteps into Christian apologetics.
Back Rome Again 