blogGNOSIS

The Non-Sequitur of "Christian Music"

2011-12-13T14:16:00.000-06:00

Disclaimer: I am a music snob. I admit it. I’m one of those people who “knows” that my own taste is intimately linked to some objective standard by which music ought to be evaluated. I often argue with some of my friends about whose aesthetic taste is more developed in this area. And of course, the answer is “mine.” I’m convinced of this. So much so that if at some point in my relationship with someone I find that that person is really into some band or musician that I deem “unworthy” of such devotion, it is often legitimately difficult for me to resist the temptation to then question this person’s position on matters totally unrelated to music. I realize this is not good. I’m working on it. Sort-of.

That said, there is something about the way evangelical Christians in our culture have approached this particular art for some time that strikes me as counter-productive and, frankly, a little offensive. Strong language, right? Hopefully what follows will show clearly what I mean.

The issue I have in mind has bothered myself and many other like-minded “snobs” for a long time, and it has created no end of tension within the evangelical community. Many otherwise level-headed members of this community—a community I proudly claim, mind you—have for years judged one another to varying degrees over this issue. Some call others “compromisers” for listening to music that is deemed too “secular,” while others label their brothers and sisters “legalists” for attempting to restrict the freedom of the believer. Rarely, however, have I seen anyone offer (much less defend) a clear explication of his or her reasons for holding such a position. My hope is that by taking both sides seriously, we might approach a perspective that is informed biblically and in keeping with the Spirit of Jesus.

I want to make the rather strong claim that the “Christian/secular” distinction in music is a false one, and further that the term “Christian music” is actually a non-sequitur. If you’re not familiar with the term, it is Latin for “does not follow.” It’s used to refer to ideas, arguments, etc., which begin with a set of assumptions and then derive from those a conclusion that does not follow logically. More generally, it refers to ideas which are paired together as though they belong that way, but which actually have nothing to do with one another. So what I’m saying is that the assumptions which lead to the Christian/secular divide do not in fact entail any such thing, and that the term “Christian music” is a pairing of mutually irrelevant ideas.

I was once at a concert and heard an artist generally thought of as being on the “Christian” side of the divide say something like this (paraphrasing): “I don’t make Christian music. There’s no such thing as Christian music. There’s good music and there’s bad music. I try to make good music.”

While I can’t speak for that artist’s intentions, what he said intrigued me and I’ve thought about it a lot since. What I suspect he meant is that what separates good and bad music is not whether it mentions Jesus. Rather, it is what virtually every non-Christian—and every Christian when they’re not wearing their religious hat—knows it is immediately: talent, originality, depth of feeling, honesty, soul, an ability to express what is common to humanity in a way that takes seriously our condition…in short, whether or not it’s art. Whether or not it talks about Jesus or even makes you feel good (for somehow, the latter has almost become sufficient for the label “Christian”) is just irrelevant.

It seems to me that we have taken the term “Christian,” redefined it, and then applied the new, watered-down version to our music. By “Christian,” we mean that the lyrics are “clean,” and that they speak of some aspect of a theistic worldview, though not much emphasis is placed on which aspect of this worldview—the basics generally suffice. By “clean,” we (apparently) mean that it avoids cussing and anything sexual, though some take it even further to mean that it must be in some sense “encouraging” or “uplifting.” In this way, even bands whose members in no way profess a Christian faith publicly, or who live lives any different from your average moderately successful musician, get radio play on “Christian” stations.

Conversely, any music which does not qualify for the new definition of Christian is labeled “secular,” which as far as I can tell is roughly synonymous with “immoral,” “wicked,” “carnal,” or even “liberal.” Whatever it means, it is strongly implied that the real Christian has no business listening to it, and that if they should be caught with Radiohead on their iPod, it’s reason to question their commitment.

I was once myself a victim of this misunderstanding. Like many others I know, I had the legalistic phase during which I got rid of the majority of my music library. My criteria for keeping something was roughly whether or not it was “Christian” in the above sense. Needless to say, I later regretted many of those decisions.

But of course, this definition has nothing to do with historic Christianity. There is nothing in the Christian message that is opposed to strong language or honest talk about sexuality and suffering. There’s also nothing that implies that the themes of our art must be limited to the specific revelations of our faith. Rather, the term “Christian,” as with so many things, actually refers to something much deeper, much less rigid, and much more profound. It refers to the rather astonishing claim that at the center of everything—our world, our values, our existence, our life, our death, our sex, our happiness, our pain, our meaning, the very universe itself—is the God-man Jesus Christ. And this is so whether or not we acknowledge or recognize His place there. Further, it is the claim that in creating us, God put into us something of Himself and His own creative capacity. It is His intention and His pleasure that we utilize this ability to its fullest extent. We are restricted only by the bounds of love itself, which is of course no restriction at all, but freedom.

Because we are made by Him to be like Him and in relationship with Him, when we encounter Him in our lives (whether or not we realize it’s Him), it resonates in us deeply. This is what happens when we experience true art, true creative expression. It literally feeds our soul, and speaks to us—if we will hear—of Him.

But what we have done in creating this Christian/secular distinction is limit the areas over which He has influence. We have, to quote another blog I read recently,¹ made our music about the message rather than the art. But this is to misunderstand both the gospel itself and the nature of reality: the art is the message. Or at least part of it. To offer Jesus to the world wrapped in three chords, a hook, and a style borrowed from whatever “secular” musicians happen to be making money at the moment, is a bit like handing out tracts to hungry people. They’ll never grasp the message until they are fed. When we take the central truths of the Christian faith and dress them in cheap clichés, overproduced pop music, and vague sentimentality, the result is anything but Christian. It’s just bad music.

In his essay “Christian Apologetics” in God in the Dock, C.S. Lewis says, “What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects--with their Christianity latent.” His point here is that the Christian apologist will make much more progress if she can get the non-believer to discover through the sciences and literature that God may in fact be at the center of everything, than she will by writing a book on apologetics. He continues, “…it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble [the materialist]. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market was always by a Christian.” I think that the same goes for the arts. If the best music on the radio or iTunes is being made my committed Christians, then that will go a whole lot farther toward advancing the Kingdom than bad music that preaches.

But of course there’s a flip-side to all this as well. There is a great deal of music—even some that might qualify as art—that the follower of Jesus has no business listening to. Music that glorifies violence, substance abuse, or unhealthy sexual activity. Music that objectifies women, or reinforces their status as second-class citizens. Music that encourages harmful stereotypes or destructive behavior. In short, music that is not compatible with a life ruled by love. In this sense, there are several bands that I never regretted giving up during my ‘phase.’ But it’s important to note, I think, that this list should not only be off-limits to Christians. The thoughtful non-Christian has no business filling her mind with such junk either.²

And all this hints at a deeper problem within popular Christianity, which makes it especially relevant for me and for this blog. The attitude that many well-meaning Christians take to this issue typifies a more general attitude that I’m afraid still pervades much of the church. Put simply, it is a contentment with a shallow and largely impotent Christianity. One that replaces genuine transformation with pop psychology and pseudo-scholarship. The culture’s distinctions and definitions are accepted and Jesus is thrown into the mix. The result is a list of do’s and don’ts (mostly don’ts), with little room left for any real depth of spiritual fulfillment or the life of the mind.

So the next time you turn on your radio or buy a CD, be critical of what you hear. Ask yourself, not if it’s “clean” or “encouraging,” but if it’s in tune with the creative Voice at the base of all things. Does it feed your soul?

That should be your new standard. That is Christian music.

¹See this insightful post by one of the musicians that I take to be transcending this false dichotomy.

²Though, she will have a very difficult time explaining why this is the case. For more on this, see my posts on the moral argument for God here.

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 7)

2011-12-13T10:42:00.000-06:00

Note: see parts one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Finally, how does the Christian account stack up against the naturalistic explanations of the resurrection, when evaluated by the criteria for assessing historical explanation? We have reviewed what I take to be the four strongest naturalistic candidates and found them all wanting. But does the Christian claim fare any better?

Remember, the facts that are being explained are 1. the empty tomb, 2. the appearances of Jesus after His death, and 3. the belief of Jesus’ disciples that Jesus had been raised from the dead. The Christian explanation of these facts is that God in fact raised Jesus from the dead, and that He subsequently appeared to many of his disciples.

Like all the rest, the Christian account easily satisfies the first criteria. Regarding the second, explanatory scope, we see easily that it is broad: it is intended as an explanation of all of our facts, and it applies easily to all of them. As for explanatory power (3), this hypothesis works rather well. It provides a simple and effective explanation of all three of our facts. The tomb was empty because Jesus actually left it; no body need be accounted for. The appearances of Jesus after His death are explained because they actually happened. No appeal to conspiracy or hallucination is needed. Finally, the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection is explained, because this is what their collective experience told them was the case. Indeed, nothing other than this could have put the idea of an individual, bodily, pre-eschatological, resurrection into their minds. What they experienced violated all of their former categories. So they made a new one.

Criteria (4), plausibility, is where this explanation has the most trouble. Here it must respond to the critiques of the miraculous by folks like Hume, who maintain that miracle (e.g. resurrection) is inherently implausible. In fact, given the sum of our experience, it is the most implausible sort of thing there is.

A full treatment of such a view is far outside the scope of this post, but I’ll just say here that in order for this to be an adequate critique, one must begin with the assumption that theism is false, which is of course to beg the question. For if theism is true, then it isn’t much of a step to assume that God could intervene in His creation in a very direct way if He wanted. Also, even if something is prima facie implausible, that does not mean that one is never warranted in believing it. If sufficient evidence were provided to tip the scales toward belief, then no matter how implausible it might seem on the face of it, one might very rationally accept the truth of such a proposition. Here, that evidence comes in the form of our minimal facts, coupled with the insurmountable failure of every non-miraculous explanation. So, unless one assumes from the get-go that the Christian claim can’t be plausible, we have no reason to assume that this explanation fails the fourth criteria.

The hypothesis is not ad hoc (5), since it begins by taking seriously the claims of the historical writers. Nothing outside of their own claim is added to explain our facts. Also, the hypothesis is not disconfirmed by any accepted beliefs (6), since nothing in our intellectual history since has shown conclusively the impossibility of resurrection. Science has not done this, nor has technology or accumulated experience. On the contrary, such an explanation is strongly suggested by our increased knowledge of first century Jewish categories of thought, our better grasp of human psychology, as well as by our improved understanding of medicine and the possibility of a human surviving what Jesus endured.

Finally, the Christian hypothesis fulfills criteria (1) through (6) far better than any of its naturalistic rivals. Therefore, it is only rational to conclude that it is far and away the most likely explanation of our facts.

Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead and that that fact changes everything. And we have good reason.

* I owe much of the structure and content of this series to work by William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, Mike Licona, N.T. Wright, and Greg Boyd, especially Craig's discussion in his Reasonable Faith.

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 6)

2011-11-29T00:21:00.001-06:00

Note: see parts one, two, three, four, and five.

So how do the two most likely naturalistic explanations of the facts surrounding the resurrection hold up under scrutiny? Remember, the facts we are considering—agreed to by nearly all historians, Christian or not—are 1. the empty tomb, 2. the appearances of Jesus after His death, and 3. the belief of Jesus’ disciples that Jesus had been raised from the dead. And again, the criteria we are using to evaluate these explanations are listed in Part 2, linked above.

The Legend Hypothesis

The legend hypothesis says simply that there were no resurrection claims, at least not originally. Much like the childhood game “Telephone,” rumors of Messianic expectations grew rapidly until, before you know it, there were full-fledged resurrection claims, which were then promptly written down and preserved in the New Testament. This hypothesis obviously explains present data and so passes criterion (1), but what about the rest?

Its scope (2) is limited to the appearances of Jesus after His death and the disciples’ belief in the resurrection; it does nothing on its own to explain the empty tomb. Regarding how well it explains the first two (3), it must maintain that the disciples’ belief in resurrection was based on the rumored appearances, which were themselves either just mistaken or invented. However, given the extreme implausibility of the resurrection accounts being simply mistaken (they claim not just to have “heard,” but to know—some of them even claiming eyewitness status), the defender of the legend hypothesis is left claiming that they were invented. This hypothesis thus easily reduces to the conspiracy hypothesis (already discussed), and so suffers all the problems of that one as well.

The legend theory is also highly implausible (4) on its own. First, Jews were inherently resistant to legend, particularly about a divine man; 1st century Palestine would have been entirely the wrong environment for such a legend to grow. Second, there was simply not enough time for legend to grow. All the evidence suggests that from the very beginning, the disciples preached the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Our earliest accounts date back possibly to within 5 years (or even earlier) of the crucifixion itself, and even the very latest are still within the lifetime of eyewitnesses and those who knew them. Third, legends generally reinforce the values of the culture in which they are birthed. The resurrection “legend” did not do this, but rather created a brand new concept of resurrection, defying all Messianic expectations. Finally, legends tend to make heroes of their founders (think Muhammad or Joseph Smith). The five accounts that we have of the resurrection do not do this; they even rely on the testimony of women, which as we have seen, was virtually without value at the time.

The legend hypothesis avoids being overly ad hoc (5), unless of course it reduces to the conspiracy hypothesis, in which case it will need all the same assumptions to function. It is also disconfirmed (6) by our knowledge of Jewish culture and Messianic expectations.

The Hallucination Hypothesis

Interestingly, this hypothesis is probably the most common among non-Christian scholars. In that sense then, it represents the best explanation we have of the facts in question, other than the Christian claim.

As usual, this hypothesis meets the first criteria but then immediately has trouble. Its explanatory scope (2) is rather narrow, since it is really only useful as an explanation of one of our facts: the appearances of Jesus after His death. Neither the empty tomb nor the origin of the disciples’ belief in the resurrection is explained, so this hypothesis would need to be paired with another for its full strength. But even considering the appearances of Jesus post-crucifixion—the fact the hallucination hypothesis is supposed to explain—many holes remain. For example, how can hallucination account for the variety of appearances that are claimed? Perhaps if only one or two of Jesus’ closest followers had ‘seen’ Him risen once, then some sort of psychological phenomenon might be sufficient. But the accounts we have are from multiple, independent sources, and take place in different locations at different times. It might be tempting to claim some sort of connection between the claims, so that only one actual hallucination is needed, and the rest of the disciples merely picked up the story. Such a theory, however, ignores the fact that some of the claims come from skeptics, namely Paul and James, and it also does nothing to account for the diversity within the reports themselves. So much for explanatory power (3).

Regarding plausibility (4), it must rely on either highly suspect psychological theories and read a great deal into the text, or it must again assume that what the disciples are describing are mere visions, a category of experience that we have already shown in the last post would be clearly distinct from a bodily resurrection to a 1st century Jew. Also, we know from years of case studies that hallucinations tend to reinforce expectations (however delusional); however, as we have seen, no Jew expected a resurrection of the sort described. So, as William Lane Craig puts it, “with respect both to its psychoanalysis of the witnesses and its reduction of the appearances to visionary experience, the Hallucination Hypothesis suffers from implausibility.” *

The hypothesis is also ad hoc (5), in that it must invent out of thin air complex psychological explanations of the disciples’ straightforward claims, in order to provide reasons for such powerful hallucinations. Given its reliance on outmoded theories, and its ignorance of the relevant cultural data, the hallucination hypothesis also fails criteria (6), disconfirmation by accepted beliefs.

For all these reasons, it is at best only slightly more plausible than any of the other naturalistic theories. And of course, we have not yet reviewed the Christian explanation.

* William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, 386-7.

Women in Apologetics (Part 7): Having a Heart for the Mind

2011-11-07T15:19:00.000-06:00

The following is Part 7 of the series on women in apologetics from Apologetics 315. See parts one, two, three, four, five, and six.

Apologetics and Women's Ministry: Having a Heart for the Mind - Sarah J. Flashing

Knowing what you believe and why should be a requirement for everyone, no matter their worldview. And as Christians, there is a direct correspondence to the gospel we proclaim and the components of the worldview we say we represent. So as a young mother over 13 years ago, struggling with all kinds of trials, I found myself no longer satisfied with the very sincere and genuine consolations that “God knows your struggles” or “Jesus loves you” or “I’m praying for you.” Of course, I appreciate such affirmations and continue to do so today, but these were statements that, when left unpacked, made a little impact in my spiritual growth. For instance, without or with little understanding of Christ’s substitutionary atonement, “Jesus loves you” offers little more solace than being told by a friend that she loves you.

As I began to probe deeper into the depths of the theological meaning of my faith, I began to ask other questions, like “why Christianity?” “What makes Christianity the superior worldview?” It was from this point of inquiry that I launched into the field of apologetics, the first year or so gathering information while investigating. This was a search for truth, not so that I could feel good about myself but so I could be confident about what I was claiming to know.

The struggles I faced in my life were not unique to me, nor were they the worst possible thing I could experience. But my relationship with God was seriously lacking substance, and over the years as I have learned to give an answer for the hope within, it has helped me in my ministry and friendships with other women. As a ministry leader, I offer no pretense of a “charmed life” and find myself shocked by very little these days...

Read the rest here.

Women in Apologetics (Part 6): An ApoloWhat?

2011-11-05T17:52:00.000-05:00

The following is Part 6 of the series on women in apologetics from Apologetics 315. See parts one, two, three, four, and five.

An ApoloWhat? - Judy Salisbury

I think most of us will agree that men dominate the Christian apologetics ministries. I am perfectly comfortable with this fact, and I thank God for these wonderful gentlemen. They produce excellent materials so that many of us can stand on their shoulders in our attempt to lead people to Christ.

Yes, most apologetics ministries are predominantly male; so when a woman states that apologetics is the focus of her ministry, folks scratch their heads and ask, “How did you become an apologist?” I chuckle when people ask me this question since I never set out to become one. It happened by listening to one of the best apologists as he offered not simply an answer, but the answer to my greatest question and obstacle to conversion: Was Jesus truly God?

I must return to 1991 when I traveled as a salesperson and spent considerable time on the road. Driving and surfing through various radio stations one afternoon, the Lord used one radio broadcast in particular to pique my curiosity and settle that longstanding question. The answer became clear as I heard the late Dr. Walter Martin’s debate with a cultist. It was an embarrassing defeat for the cultist, but it was a big win for me as I finally heard evidence for the deity of Jesus Christ.

Back in my hotel room, I immediately reached for the Gideon Bible tucked in the nightstand drawer. It was late in the afternoon when the Lord – in His grace and mercy – led me to the book of 1 John and revealed my lost condition. At that very moment I fell to my knees and gave Him my life, my ambitions, my dreams, my sin—everything. By the time I got home, my husband had a brand new wife… and a year later, the Lord gave us both a brand new baby girl. Goodbye corporate world – hello full time, stay-at-home mom!

During that first year of my spiritual infancy, I devoured the Bible along with tapes and CD’s from learned apologists, Bible teachers, and other resources. What struck me the most was the fact that there were actually answers to the questions that plagued me. Nagging concerns were finally settled in my mind; questions that others were previously unable or unwilling to address were now answered. I rejoiced to know that when my daughter would eventually have spiritual questions of her own, I would be able to answer them. In fact, that was the main reason I became equipped: I did not want some neighborly cultist (or occultist) to beguile my little girl with a lie – promising her a good life that would actually lead to her spiritual death.

By April 1993, the Lord gave me an opportunity to share a talk with my local congregation during a Sunday evening service. My presentation was based on 1 Peter 3:15 and the basic evidences for Christianity. Yes, my first speaking opportunity as a Christian was as an apologist.

About a month after my apologetic talk, I went to our local Pregnancy Resource Center to donate baby clothes and to see if there was a way I could serve them. I met the director at the door with my bag of blessings and confessed, “Not long ago the Lord Jesus Christ saved me from my sins and from myself. Silver and gold have I not, but maybe you need someone to clean your toilets?” She gingerly informed me that they already had a person who handled that; then she suggested I attend an upcoming counselor training seminar. Through that training, I learned so much about those wonderful ministries – the women who serve in them and what they are up against. The Lord also showed me that I was not to become a PRC counselor; instead, I would train individuals who had a desire to educate their communities on matters of human life. My work would be to help impart skills that would equip them to communicate their message effectively, powerfully, and with love...

Read the rest here.

Women in Apologetics (Part 5): Implementing Apologetics in Women's Ministry

2011-11-03T17:00:00.000-05:00

The following is Part 5 of the series on women in apologetics from Apologetics 315. See parts one, two, three, and four.

Implementing Apologetics in Women's Ministry - Mary Jo Sharp*

In Matthew 22:37, Jesus replies to the question, “What is the greatest commandment?” His reply is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. Though Jesus’ words here mean to love God with our whole being, he specifically emphasizes three aspects. The last aspect is to love God with all of our mind. Are we, as ministry leaders, providing opportunities for the women in our church to love the Lord with all their mind? Women need to be challenged in the area of growing in knowledge of the Lord.

When I speak at a women’s conference, I sometimes ask the audience to share with me how much time they spend in learning Biblical truths or in answering difficult questions about faith in God (through discussion, bible study, reading, but not including time spent at church). The average response amounts to 1% to 3% of a typical day spent thinking on and learning about truths from the Word of God. So, a majority of the day is wrapped up in secular activities. While there is nothing inherently wrong with many worldly activities, women need to keep in check the messages consumed as they go about their day. When a woman turns on the television, reads a newspaper or magazine, surfs the internet, listens to the radio, goes to the movies, goes to work, or even just goes shopping, she will most likely encounter untrue messages about the Christian faith. Some of these messages include that science is the only way we can know truth, religion is the root of all evil, and that religious people are not smart. How are we combating these false messages in our ministry to women?

It is vital to the spiritual growth of our women to address their doubts. If a woman doubts God’s existence or has never investigated her reasons for belief, she cannot reasonably be expected to grow in knowledge of God, find a study of the Word as a priority in life, or share what she believes is the truth about God with the world. However, if a woman has confidence in her belief in God, she can place her trust in God as a real being who can really affect her life.

Hebrews 11:6 - And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.

It is especially important for women to have a safe, loving environment such as a women’s ministry in which to share their doubts and ask questions. In my experience, women are more hesitant to do this in an environment in which men are present. There could be many reasons for their hesitation, but I have found - in candid moments one-on-one - that some women generally do not want to come across as “dumb” in front of their Christian brothers. These ladies will not ask very many questions in the presence of men, if any at all.1 I have also found many women do not feel it is acceptable in the church to have doubts about God. An apologetics element in our women’s ministries would help alleviate these fears while combating untruths assaulting our women’s minds, enabling them to be emboldened in their faith in God.

Three Goals for pioneering this field in women’s ministry:

1) Establish the Need
2) Create an Environment
3) Find/Create a Study...

Read the rest here.

* See Mrs. Sharp's website, Confident Christianity, here.

Women in Apologetics (Part 4): Women Called to the Front Lines of the Faith

2011-11-02T22:13:00.000-05:00

The following is Part 4 of the series on women in apologetics from Apologetics 315. See parts one, two, and three.

Women Called to the Front Lines of the Faith - Tricia Scribner

I was a 20-year-old newly married woman when a Jehovah’s Witness boldly informed me that the word “Trinity” was nowhere in the Bible. Though I had been a believer in Jesus Christ since childhood, I stood mute with no response. This would not be the last time I would be caught off guard by those with other worldviews who seemed much better equipped than I to discuss the evidence for their faith.

Within my profession of nursing I learned that my Christian beliefs were at odds with the prevailing psychology that humans were essentially good and that I needed to be tolerant (accepting as also true) of other people’s beliefs. In anatomy and physiology classes the evolutionary model of the origin and development of complex life forms dominated, and the biblical account was criticized as immature and backward.

I’ve learned that my experience was not unusual. We as women are on the front lines spiritually in every facet of our lives. We weep to hear our college-aged children whom we raised to love the Lord spouting the views of professors who think Christians are weak-minded people who use faith as a crutch because they cannot bear the truth that this life is all there is. As Christian wives we experience divorce at about the same rate as non-Christians. At work we have shut down and shut up about our faith to avoid judgment. We save our faith for Sundays, compartmentalizing our thinking into the sacred and secular, and living spiritually schizophrenic lives.

How the Christian Community Has Not Helped

Churches often provide women’s conferences with sound biblical teaching, fellowship, and worship, but we sometimes fail to equip women to re-enter the battle zones they encounter the moment they return home. Imagine that Wanda returns home from a church conference to an agnostic husband who mocks her for wasting a day worshiping a God no one can be sure even exists. Zoe returns to the college dorm where her roommate Aja, a Muslim, shows where the Bible prophesies the prophet Muhammad is coming. Gina returns home to her 18 year-old who is headed to college where his professor of religion teaches the New Testament is a myth developed by second to third century church leaders. Will the memories of warm fellowship and a spiritually affirming worship experience be enough to strengthen them spiritually so they can stand and arm them with the truth they so desperately need?

What God Says About Women Doing Apologetics

God has commanded us as women not only to share that we believe in Jesus Christ but also the reasons why. Here are some evidences in scripture that God has called women to think, study, and share the reasons for believing in Christianity...

Read the rest here.

Women in Apologetics (Part 3): Argument and the Woman Apologist

2011-11-02T13:47:00.000-05:00

The following is Part 3 of the series on women in apologetics from Apologetics 315. This one is particularly good. If you missed parts 1 and 2, see them here and here.

Argument and the Woman Apologist - Dr. Holly Ordway

Why are there so few Christian women apologists and intellectuals?

They do exist; I should know, I’m one of them. But it’s a small sisterhood. I see women’s ministry leaders, yes; writers of Christian fiction and devotionals, yes; but active apologists and scholars, not many.

Furthermore, in my own experience, I find that my most interesting and stimulating conversations about books and ideas are usually with men rather than women. Yet my female friends are just as intelligent and thoughtful as my male friends. What’s going on?

Of all the possible ways to approach this question, I am going to develop just one particular line of thought here.

I believe that there are different modes of intellectual engagement, and that we often fail to appreciate the way that these modes function. What we often take as a tension between the intellectual life and femininity may really be the product of a mismatch between an individual woman and the mode of argument in which she’s attempting to work.

If we can better understand the different modes of argument, we can better equip both men and women to be effective apologists – serving Our Lord with their unique gifts in the fullest capacity.

I will present these three modes in terms of images: argument as Fight, as Exploration, and as Dance.

Our first image is that of the Fight. In this mode, argument is structured as conflict. In the Fight mode, an argument has a clear winner and a clear loser. Debates are a classic form of Fight argument: the debate opponents have distinct, contrasting or conflicting views, and they take turns striking as hard and effectively as possible, and parrying the rhetorical blows of the opponent. Debates are scored and a winner or loser is declared; the success of a debater lies in his ability to take apart the opponent’s logic or rhetoric and make points that cannot be defended against...

Read the rest here.

Women in Apologetics (Part 2): Heads for Men and Hearts for Women?

2011-11-02T01:51:00.001-05:00

Note: see Part 1.

Heads for Men and Hearts for Women? - Mary Decker

The trend

If you like to potter around apologetics blogs on the internet (my guess, if you’re reading this, is that you do), or if you attend apologetics events, you’ll notice that the ratio of men to women is skewed somewhat towards there being a lot more men involved in such things than women.

Now before anyone thinks this is going to be a feminist diatribe about glass ceilings and male domination, hear me out. I have no problem with there being plenty of men in apologetics. I want every Christian I can get to take an interest in apologetics – male or female. Moreover, I’m a pretty traditional Christian woman who believes in male leadership in the home and church, so a radical feminist agenda is most definitely not my aim. My aim is not to discourage men from taking part in apologetics, or to advocate for any artificially imposed gender balance, but to encourage more women to get involved in apologetics.

To do that, we need to consider why this imbalance exists to the degree that it does.

The demands of motherhood

Not all reasons for an apparent imbalance in this area are inherently bad. More specifically, there are good reasons why there probably should be more men involved on a full-time, paid basis in apologetics work. The sort of work done by William Lane Craig, Greg Koukl, or Mike Licona is a full-time job. Many women will very reasonably realize that the job of being a mom (yes, it is a job!) is a demanding one that doesn’t allow them to put in the same amount of formal apologetics work as their male counterparts. This is not necessarily a bad thing and I will elaborate as to why I think so later.

False dichotomies and misunderstandings

However, there are some reasons for this imbalance that are not healthy. In particular, there is a perception in some circles that apologetics is for men, but not for women. This perception ¬has its roots in a false dichotomy between head and heart, or reason and emotion, as well as a misunderstanding of the nature of men and women. It manifests in an association of head and reason with the male and heart and emotion with the female which does neither sex much good because it denies male emotions and female reason...

Read the rest here.

Women in Apologetics (Part 1): The International Society of Women in Apologetics

2011-11-02T01:45:00.000-05:00

Brian Auten over at Apologetics 315 has kindly given me permission to re-post a series he is doing this week on women in apologetics, each written by a different woman apologist. I will post the first third or so of each post here and then provide the link to the rest. Or, you can simply follow the series from his site. As I am already two posts behind, the first two will be in rapid succession. I should also note that I am in no way endorsing any of the views represented in these posts, and it should not be assumed that I agree with everything each author is saying. In fact, I do not. However, women's rights is an issue that is near to my heart, and I believe that greater awareness of it at nearly any level is a good thing. I simply cannot pass up the opportunity to increase this awareness when it comes from my own field. That said, on to the first contribution:

The International Society of Women in Apologetics - Sarah Ankenman

Why ISWA?

Most often, while sitting at the ISWA table at Apologetics conferences, I get quite a few women who come up to me and ask me the same three questions. First, “why does there need to be something special just for women in the field of apologetics?” Second, “why apologetics at all?” which is usually followed by the statement, “all I need is the Word of God”. Finally, I get the million-dollar inquiry of, “can women even do apologetics? What about Paul saying that women need to keep silent in the church?” In the following paragraphs, I will attempt to answer those questions.

First, let me explain ISWA’s purpose. We are not inventing some new apologetic just for women. When you come to an ISWA event, or read an ISWA article, or watch a DVD of an ISWA member, you are getting the same apologetics any man would get at an apologetics conference. All of the women who teach or write for ISWA have all gleaned from, or have personally sat under, the teachings of great apologists like Dr. Norman Geisler, Dr. Gary Habermas, Greg Koukl, Ravi Zacharias, Dr. Ron Rhodes, Dr. Win Corduan, etc. I love apologetics and fortunately, God has called me into the very field I love, because through His grace He gave me one of the desires of my heart. However, I am also the mother of an energetic three-year-old. I realize that not every woman who enjoys going deeper in her studies, and loves apologetics, has the time to go to seminary. It’s difficult for even myself, and so somewhere along this journey, I realized that there needed to be something for today’s busy woman.

If you have done any apologetics at all, you have probably noticed that the conferences tend to last all day, if not a few days, and the average apologetics book is longer than the time you have to read it. Also, they tend to filled with ideas, theories, and words that are over the average person’s head, my own head included. I often refer to a dictionary or Google when I am doing research or reading, and I have been studying for nine years now. Also, even though I love theology and apologetics, if I have been up all night with my son, the last thing I want to do is sit down and read a book and try to comprehend Metaphysics. I realized that there needed to be something that teaches apologetics, but in an easy to understand manner and in smaller bites...

Read the rest here.

On Loving God with Your Mind

2011-10-27T12:47:00.000-05:00

Perhaps some of you have wondered why the tagline of this blog is “loving God with your mind.” Well, here’s why.¹

In Matthew 22:37-40, Jesus says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (ESV)

Part of the greatest commandment, then, is to love God with “all our mind.” But what does this mean? To love is to sacrifice and to serve. It is to make a commitment to the beloved that is covenantal, not contractual (i.e. not circumstantial). It involves honesty and transparency. And it always leads to action on behalf of the beloved. Therefore, we should expect that loving God with our minds, whatever else it might be, will be an act of service and sacrifice, that it will be honest and transparent, and that it will lead to action of some kind. This means that we should expect it to be difficult. But like most difficult things, also meaningful.

When Jesus elucidated this command, it would have hit very close to home with His Jewish audience. This aspect of loving God was central to their cultural and national identity. A few posts ago, I pointed out that the word “Israel” means literally “to wrestle with God.” I even went so far as to suggest that it was this about the Jewish people that God so valued. I now suggest that, as He has not changed, He values it just as highly in us.

The writer of Hebrews says, “...though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. ²

Loving God with our minds, then, will include seeking “solid food.” It will mean moving beyond the basics of salvation and repentance to a deeper understanding of our faith and an ability to discern good from evil in all contexts, “by constant use” of the resources God has provided for us to learn. The writer was here appealing not to the hearts or souls of his readers, but to their thoroughly Jewish minds.

Similarly, in 1 Cor. 14:20, Paul says, “Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature.” (ESV) The context of this verse is the necessity of letting even the gifts of the Holy Spirit be guided by mature thinking.

What, then, are the actions (mentioned above) that this sort of love leads to? Presumably, they would be methods of training the mind to perform the functions for which God designed it, as well as it possibly can. And since the principle function of that part of our being is to think, the action to which we ought to be motivated (if we really love God) is nothing more exalted than study.

I know it doesn’t sound very "spiritual," but alas, we are more than just spiritual beings, and God wants all of us.

¹For more on this, see my post on childlike faith.
² Hebrews 5:12-14 (NIV)

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 5)

2011-10-24T20:27:00.000-05:00

Note: see parts one, two, three, and four.

So how do the hypotheses used to explain the facts of Jesus’ life stack up against one another? Last time, we looked briefly at the five most prominent of these. Here, we’ll look a little more closely at the first two, using the criteria for testing historical hypotheses from part 2 of this series (linked above). I encourage you to take another look at those so that what follows will make more sense. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to keep both posts open for easy reference.

Again, the facts that are being explained are 1. the empty tomb, 2. the appearances of Jesus after His death, and 3. the belief of Jesus’ disciples that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

The Apparent Death Hypothesis

Criteria (1) and (2) are easily met. But that’s about all that can be said for this explanation. In terms of explanatory power (3) and plausibility (4), this hypothesis has trouble with all three facts: Empty tomb—Given what we now know about flogging and crucifixion in 1st century Rome, how could a man who recently endured these horrors and miraculously survived have had the strength left to remove the large stone from His own tomb and then escape a band of guards posted to ensure that this very thing (the removal of His body) did not happen? Appearances—Similarly, how did this very nearly dead man then visit His disciples and convince them that He was the long-anticipated Messiah, the Defeater of death, hell, and the grave? Resurrection claims—Related to this, from whence come the disciples’ early and consistent claims of resurrection, a novel concept within Judaism and one not at all disposed to be taken seriously? Surely the more likely conclusion is that Jesus just hadn’t died—not the much more complicated claim that He had been raised by God from the dead. Yet, this is precisely what they did claim.

This hypothesis is also pretty ad hoc (5), since any explanation given in response to the above problems will necessarily be an argument from silence. It’s also disconfirmed (6), as we saw, by modern medicine, since we know that no one could plausibly have survived what Jesus went through. Finally, it is even less likely than its naturalistic rivals (7), and so fails 5 of our 7 criteria.

The Conspiracy Hypothesis

This oldest of the naturalistic explanations (see Matthew 28:11-15) fares little better. It, too, satisfies criteria (1) and (2) but struggles with the rest, beginning with explanatory power (3): Empty tomb—If the disciples fabricated the story of Jesus’ resurrection, then why say that the tomb was found empty by women? Indeed, this is one of the worst things the disciples could have done if they wanted to be believed, since the testimony of women carried virtually no weight at the time. Appearances—The appearances of Jesus after the resurrection don’t fit with what one would expect a 1st century Jew to make up. It bears very little resemblance to the theophanies one finds in the Old Testament. More on this below. Resurrection claims—Here is the first nail in the proverbial coffin. If the disciples simply made up the story of Jesus’ resurrection, then why did they willingly and unanimously suffer torture and death, proclaiming to the end that it was true? People do not die for lies that they made up.

When we consider plausibility (4), we find the second nail in the coffin (as though another were needed). As N.T. Wright has argued in great detail, it just makes no historical sense to say that the disciples would have (or even could have) made up the sort of resurrection story we find in the New Testament, since this is not a concept that even existed before then. There would have been no reason whatsoever for a 1st century Jew to invent the idea of an individual, pre-eschatological, bodily resurrection in a story to other 1st century Jews. This is not only a project doomed to failure, but likely an impossible one, since such a thing would never have entered the mind of a Jew of this time. To assume that Christians could have invented the resurrection story is to read our 21st century context into the text of Scripture, rather than to let it speak from its own culture and time.

Like the Apparent Death Hypothesis, the Conspiracy Hypothesis is also ad hoc (5), in that it must meet objections with made-up stories regarding the disciples’ motives and methods for which we have no evidence. It is also disconfirmed (6) by our knowledge of 1st century Judaism and the highly dubious nature of elaborate conspiracy stories. It also fails criteria (7), since there are more likely options, including the Legend and Hallucination Hypotheses, which will be the subject of the next post in the series.

Letters From a Martyred Christian

2011-10-15T21:18:00.000-05:00

My colleague and best friend in the world is about to release his latest book, Letters From a Martyred Christian. Like it sounds, it is a collection of letters from one Aulus Aurelius, martyred in Rome in AD 67. He has been tracking the progress of the church ever since, and has a few things to say.

I can personally attest to the integrity, ability, and theological soundness of the author, and to the creative, engaging, and practical nature of the book. I strongly encourage you to add it to your reading list and to encourage your friends to do the same. If you would like to contribute (even if it's just a buck or two) to the release of the book, and to pre-order your copy, please go here and look through the many options available for you to do so. Every penny of profit goes to charity.

Also, the promo video for the book is featured under the "Featured Video" section of this blog, on the lower right side of the home page. It's only about 4 1/2 minutes and is well worth your time. It will remain there for the next 40 days or so, until the funding deadline for the project ends. Check it out.

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 4)

2011-10-14T14:03:00.000-05:00

Note: see parts one, two, and three.

If you recall, last time we looked at the list of "minimal facts" regarding the life of Christ that nearly all critical historians accept. Now, we will turn to the most prominent explanations of these facts that have been offered.

In theinterest of space, I’ll only consider those facts that are most relevant toJesus’ resurrection, and that need the most explaining: the empty tomb, the appearancesof Jesus after His death, and the belief of Jesus’ disciples (including formerskeptics James and Paul) that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Also, I’llonly consider those explanations which have had the most traction with scholarsover the years, and so are the most likely candidates.

They are, inascending order of credibility (based roughly on the number of scholars willingto accept them, along with my own bias):

1. theApparent Death Hypothesis (a.k.a. the ‘Swoon Theory’)

2. theConspiracy Hypothesis

3. theLegend Hypothesis

4. theHallucination Hypothesis

5. theChristian Account¹

1. TheApparent Death Hypothesis — Jesus was not dead when He was taken down from thecross, but revived some time later and escaped to make the appearances to Hisdisciples.

2. TheConspiracy Hypothesis — Jesus’ disciples stole His body and started the rumorthat He had been resurrected.

3. TheLegend Hypothesis — Jesus’ disciples never claimed that Jesus had literallyrisen from the dead; this was a later embellishment that made it into the NewTestament accounts.

4. TheHallucination Hypothesis — The disciples (and Paul) were under extraordinarypsychological stress following Jesus’ crucifixion, and this somehow led totheir seeing Him alive again, in much the same way a bereaved person might‘see’ her lost loved one after death. On this view, the appearances of Jesus toHis disciples after His death are interpreted as purely psychological phenomenaon the part of the disciples, in the form of visions or hallucinations, or insome cases even some sort of Freudian suppressed guilt and/or complex cognitivedissonance.

5. TheChristian Account — Jesus was raised bodily from the dead and appeared to Hisdisciples.

It should benoted that there is no rule saying that only one hypothesis must be true; it ispossible that several of them might be combined for a stronger case. Indeed,the ones listed above are employed differently depending on the ‘fact’ beingexplained. However, it is not always possible to combine them, as even the‘naturalistic’ ones (i.e. those other than the Christian claim) sometimesconflict. For example, the Apparent Death Hypothesis and the ConspiracyHypothesis cannot both be true. However, the Legend Hypothesis might bestrengthened by considering it in conjunction with, say, the Pagan MythHypothesis (see footnote below). I’ll let the reader choose whatevercombination seems most likely, and stack it up against the Christian claim.

Next time,we will begin testing these competing hypotheses using the criteria we listedin Part 2 of this series (linked above).

¹Some other fairly popular, but less plausible, ones include: 6. the Wrong TombHypothesis, the claim that the disciples simply went to the wrong tomb onEaster morning; 7. the claim that the resurrection accounts in the NewTestament are written in a non-historical literary style; 8. the claim that thedisciples’ belief in the resurrection is explainable from Jewish influences; 9.the claim that the disciples’ belief in the resurrection is explainable frompagan or mythical influences; and 10. the claim that Jesus’ body was‘displaced’ or stolen by someone other than His disciples. If you havequestions about any of these (or if you can think of any others), leave a commentand I’ll be happy to go through them there.

Philosophy...What's the point?

2011-09-21T00:42:00.001-05:00

A friend of mine asked me this question recently. This is my (brief) attempt at an answer. Thought you might be interested:

I'll give you what I take to be the 'point' of studying philosophy in three ways: 1. what it has been historically, 2. what it has largely become, and 3. what it is for me:

1. "Philosophy" translates literally "love of wisdom." Socrates (through Plato) famously said that all philosophy begins with wonder. So in a way, the 'point' is to wonder about stuff. To ask the hard questions about every aspect of life, and thereby to try and gain some understanding of who and what we are and what, if anything, that might mean. This is a very important task, in my mind, from just about any perspective one takes, since a better understanding of our situation can't help but improve us in some way--more wisdom is always better than less. More strongly, there seems to be something about us that craves or is drawn to this sort of search, so that if we neglect it, we have missed a great and valuable (perhaps the most valuable) part of life. As Socrates also said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." We all have hard questions. In this way, everyone does 'philosophy.' The reason, I think, that most people would not consider themselves 'philosophers' has much to do with point 2. below. Another important aspect of what I am calling the 'historical' view is that philosophy is not merely something one does in a classroom, or at least it was not intended to be. It is a way of life, and if the results of our inquiries do not change us in some way, then we have at best missed the point and at worst damaged ourselves.

2. Unfortunately, most people today consider 'philosophy,' if they think about it at all, to be a pointless and even arrogant endeavor. The image of the bearded old man with his head in the clouds and his life more or less separated from the everyday, practical world in which the rest of us live, is all too easy to conjure. "What is the point," people often ask, "of talking about all this stuff when no one ever decides anything?" Even more unfortunately, I believe that this view has been helped along (or at least not disproved) by what one might call the 'institutionalization' of philosophy in the last couple of centuries. Today, it is as rigorous and systematized an academic discipline as any other--indeed, more than most. There is virtually no field it does not touch, and its standards of excellence in all of them have become so stringent that only the best work ever sees publication. This is all good in a way. However, in another way, it can and often does lead to a wider and wider divide between the concerns of the 'professional philosopher' and those of the layperson. Sadly, the view of philosophy as a passionate pursuit of wisdom--wisdom that changes one's everyday life in drastic ways--is increasingly difficult to find, even within philosophy departments. As Quentin Smith once said, having a Ph.D. in philosophy does not make you a philosopher. Though, of course, there is much to be said for getting one, hence my own pursuits.

3. I study philosophy because I have to. For whatever reason, there is that in me which is never quite satisfied with an explanation. I need to know more. As far as I am concerned, you may as well ask me what the point of eating is, for I pursue both activities for the same reason: I must. Accordingly, my study of philosophy has a great deal to do with 1., though I think participating in the process outlined in 2. is probably a necessary means to those more personal ends. In addition to this, philosophy is for me inseparable from my identity as a follower of Christ. To use Anselm's famous phrase, my faith seeks understanding, and it does so because of the kind of thing it is. Similar to the way a husband longs to understand his wife, the more I know Christ, the more I am driven to wrestle with His nature, the objects of His affection (humanity), and the creation that He will one day redeem. Indeed, I think this idea of 'wrestling' is an apt characterization of the relationship God has always intended to have with His people. The word "Israel," as you may know, means literally to struggle, or wrestle, with God. I believe it was this about Jacob that led God to bless him despite his treachery, this about David that compelled God to call him a man after His own heart, despite his lusts and weaknesses. It is a relationship characterized by brutal honesty, difficult questions, more difficult answers, a give-and-take, a struggle to comprehend and live in the infinite revelation of His consuming love for us. This, then, is philosophy for me. Loving Him better. That's the point.

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 3)

2011-07-12T11:48:00.000-05:00

Note: see Parts one and two here and here.

So what is the data that we have about Jesus' resurrection?

Various scholars use what has been called a "Minimal Facts" approach to answering this question. The idea is that from the primary historical documents assembled in the New Testament¹ and the various (though less important) extra-Biblical sources that mention Jesus, we can glean a list of facts about what actually happened. The list is generally pretty short, since to qualify, the fact has to be extremely well-evidenced and also (usually) agreed to by the vast majority of Biblical scholars, whether they be liberal or conservative. These requirements ensure that only the most certain bits of information about Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity will be used as the base 'data,' which will then be interpreted according to some proposed hypothesis. These hypotheses will then, in turn, be evaluated based on the criteria listed in Part 2 (linked above).

The process by which these facts are judged to be 'well-evidenced' is outside the scope of this post, though I will be writing on it soon when we discuss the authenticity of the gospel accounts. In many ways, this is a prior discussion to the current one, but I hope that it will suffice here to say that there are various criteria which historians use to evaluate the likely veracity of some particular claim in an ancient text. The more of these criteria that are satisfied by the claim, the more likely that the claim is true and the event actually happened. The important point for now is that all of the "Minimal Facts" that we'll be considering satisfy enough of these criteria that most (and in many cases, nearly all) serious Biblical scholars consider them to be facts of history.

The list of facts itself varies a bit from scholar to scholar, but these are probably the most prominent ones:

1. Jesus' death by crucifixion.
2. Jesus' burial by Joseph of Arimathea.
3. The empty tomb.
4. The appearances of Jesus after His death.
5. The start and growth of the Christian church.
6. The conversion of Paul, a former persecutor of the "Way."
7. The conversion of James, Jesus' brother, a former skeptic.
8. The various doctrinal shifts within Judaism after Jesus' death.²

That should do.We will not discuss all of them, but it should be reiterated that all of the points on this list (and a few others I've left out) are virtually uncontested by the overwhelming majority of critical scholars. Of course, we have not yet established that the Christian interpretation of these 'facts' is the correct one. But we have at the very least ruled out the possibility that Jesus was merely a legendary figure, at least by the standards of historical scholarship.

Next time, we'll begin to review the most prominent explanations for these facts. Stay tuned!

¹ For the moment, let's try not to think of them as inspired Scripture or even as books of the Bible. For our purposes here, they are simply the best historical texts we possess for studying the life of Christ.

² The facts on this list are defended variously by such scholars as William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, Mike Licona, and N.T. Wright, among others.

Font Issues...

2011-07-10T22:58:00.000-05:00

It has been brought to my attention that the font color of the text in my posts is nearly unreadable if you are receiving the posts in your email inbox. I believe this is because the background on the actual site is black, so I use a white/gray font. I will attempt to resolve this issue, but in the meantime, if you receive my posts in your inbox, simply click the title of the post and it will take you to the site, and you can read the post there. Sorry for the inconvenience.

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 2)

2011-07-09T13:28:00.000-05:00

So I've obviously taken something of a hiatus from the Arguments For God series that I was working on a while back. I managed to get through most of the major ones that I find compelling, including two versions of the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument, and the ontological argument. The last one we covered was Part 1 of the final argument in the series, the Argument from Special Revelation. All of these arguments can be found here. I encourage you to have another look at them, including the comments sections.

In that last post I explained what I mean by "Special Revelation." Basically, this is the argument for Jesus' resurrection. It is the last argument in my series, and it is the most important. It is far less cerebral than some of the others, and many find it more relevant. It is certainly more easily used in conversation. And more important than all this, it reveals the most to us about who God is. It is the very basis and reason for everything that Christianity teaches and everything that Christians are supposed to do. For this reason, it is far more personal than the other arguments (even the Moral). If the conclusion that I am going to draw here is correct, then I have a meaningful and joyous reason for existence, and death has truly been defeated. If it is incorrect, then "we are of all people most to be pitied,"¹ and I see no hope whatsoever for the meaningfulness of our most beloved ideals: love, goodness, beauty, transcendence, justice, hope itself.

That said, the argument:

The way we establish the authenticity of a historical event like the resurrection of Jesus occurs in two stages: first, we see what evidence is available to us. This is the raw data, and in this case, it comes primarily in the form of certain claims recorded in the documents now assembled into the New Testament.

The second stage is what I will call the explanatory stage. This is where we evaluate the data from stage one. This works in much the same way as the scientific method we all learned in middle school: form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis. We then use certain established criteria to determine the success of the hypothesis (e.g. repeatability, controls, etc.). In evaluating the authenticity of a historical event, we do the same thing: we lay out the competing explanations for the event (the 'hypotheses'), and we evaluate those explanations using criteria that historians have established for just that purpose.

In the end, the explanation that makes the most sense of the most data, and follows all of the criteria the most effectively, is the explanation that is most likely to be true.

Here, I'll just lay out what these criteria are. In the next few posts, we'll examine what the historical data is concerning Jesus' resurrection, look at the most influential explanations for it, and evaluate these competing explanations with the following criteria. In the end, I think you will agree that the hypothesis that "God raised Jesus from the dead," as the church has always held, fairs far better than any other explanation.

The criteria:

1. The hypothesis, together with other true statements, must imply further statements describing present, observable data.

2. The hypothesis must have greater explanatory scope (that is, imply a greater variety of observable data) than rival hypotheses.

3. The hypothesis must have greater explanatory power (that is, make the observable data more probable) than rival hypotheses.

4. The hypothesis must be more plausible (that is, be implied by a greater variety of accepted truths, and its negation implied by fewer accepted truths) than rival hypotheses.

5. The hypothesis must be less ad hoc (that is, include fewer new suppositions about the past not already implied by existing knowledge) than rival hypotheses.

6. The hypothesis must be disconfirmed by fewer accepted beliefs (that is, when conjoined with accepted truths, imply fewer false statements) than rival hypotheses.

7. The hypothesis must so exceed its rivals in fulfilling conditions 2-6 that there is little chance of a rival hypothesis, after further investigation, exceeding it in meeting these conditions.²

¹ 1 Cor. 15:19

² From C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 19. Quoted in William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2008), 233.

On H(B)ell

2011-06-18T12:08:00.000-05:00

I just want to take a minute to throw in my two cents on Mr. Bell and his book, and make a couple comments on hell along the way. I think now that most of the fervor has passed, it should be safe to do so. However, as Francis Chan's new book on the same topic is due out soon, I am sure the discussion (argument) will resume again shortly. I will not even attempt to give a full critique of Bell's book, as this has been done by many before me, and much better (and if I am honest, much worse as well). Many blogs, videos, etc. have been devoted to this topic over the last few months. I have read many if not most of the substantive ones. In my opinion, you will find the fairest and best here.¹ Now then, just a few comments.

First, if you are interested in the debate, or just want a popular-level introduction to what the Bible says about hell, you should read the book. It's a quick read, and if you can get past Bell's three-words-per-line writing style, an enjoyable one. As Ben Witherington points out in the review linked above, Bell is a poet, and he seeks to present the Gospel--and difficult issues like hell--in a way that will touch the heart as well as the mind. He does this well and I applaud him for it.

Second, all the hype surrounding the book and the controversy it caused is disappointing. I almost did not even read it myself, since Bell is not a scholar (though he is an educated pastor and seeks to use solid scholarship to inform his views) and I was sure that whatever he had to say about hell had already been said before, and probably better. I was right. However, Bell is up-front about this, saying early on in his book that he is merely re-stating what many have said before, for a culture that in many sectors seems to have forgotten. The controversy is disappointing precisely for this reason. He is not saying anything novel, and the fact that a book like his is able to make such a splash just provides further evidence (as if any more were needed) that Christians don't read. In fact, once I had read enough of the book to realize Bell's actual position, my first thought was "This is almost verbatim C.S. Lewis." Indeed, Bell cites Lewis' The Great Divorce in his bibliography. I was not the only one to notice this. This is interesting since many evangelicals seem to live by what Lewis has to say on most topics. I've even heard people criticize Bell's view of hell and simultaneously affirm Lewis'. All I can assume is that they have misunderstood one or both. However, Bell's book does seem to have re-initiated the discussion of hell and related topics among lay-people, and hopefully will spur them on to go deeper. This is a good thing.

Third, the response of the majority of the evangelical community (yes, the majority) to the book is disgusting. Even before it was out, there were many Christians condemning not only the book but Bell himself. He was called a heretic (see photo) and bid "farewell" by brothers and sisters in Christ who ought to know better. I'm talking prominent Christian leaders. Scholars, theologians, pastors. Major Christian book retailers refused to carry the book. The blogosphere lit up with angry Christians condemning what they had not yet even read. I doubt many of them ever did. Sadly, even after the book was out, the reviews still continued to be rather one-sided and eisegetical.² Most were divided into two camps: one attacking Bell, misinterpreting his arguments and their context, or else generally refusing to acknowledge that he had made any; the other (smaller) one defending him against the onslaught. The charitable, Christlike voice of love and understanding--the one that seeks to comprehend before it judges--was unfortunately difficult to hear.

Fourth, the claim that Bell is a universalist is absurd. I find it difficult to believe that some who ought to know what this term means and who claim to have read Love Wins can still say this. As mentioned above, Bell is no more or less a universalist than C.S. Lewis, and I don't recall hearing anyone condemn him for this. In fact, his views of hell (such as its being "locked from the inside") are often quoted in defenses of the doctrine. Universalism, simply put, merely says that everyone will eventually be with God for eternity. Now to be fair, Bell does not outright condemn this view, but he is very clear about the reality of hell, both in this life and the next, and the possibility that it may be forever. For him, as for Lewis, the deciding factor here is not God's wrath, but rather our choice: "God gives us what we want, and if that's hell, we can have it. We have that kind of freedom, that kind of choice. We are that free."³ Bell is also not a pluralist, in the sense that all faiths are equally valid and lead to God. He describes the Christian view as an "exclusivity on the other side of inclusivity," affirming simultaneously that anyone who is saved will be saved by Jesus and He alone, and that who gets saved by Him is limited only by His infinite grace and their free choice.

Fifth, what we believe about hell is not the most important thing. Indeed, it is possible to be a thorough universalist and an orthodox Christian with respect to everything that Christians have always held to be true.⁴ Pluralism is less clear, though we would certainly not want to say that a pluralist could not be saved. But the important point is that while this doctrine is important (very important) and should be discussed and wrestled with by all believers, it is not in the center circle, and perhaps not even the second circle, of our faith (see here). True, our beliefs about it will likely make a difference in how we view God, humans, and how the two are related. But it should not, I maintain, effect the way we treat people, or even the urgency with which we spread the Good News. And it certainly should not cause us to forsake the Spirit of Christ and resort to senseless division and mean-spirited namecalling.

For Bell, it is not obvious that God's love will eventually win everybody over (this is not what the title means); he is perfectly comfortable leaving that question unanswered and hoping against all hope that the answer is yes. It seems to me that this is exactly the attitude that Jesus carried. He warned severely that not all would be able to follow him, and that many would falsely believe that they were. The future for those people, He said, was horrible. And yet, He exhorted them to choose life, and prayed for the forgiveness of those who hated Him. This is the spirit I find in Bell's book. I wonder how so many Christians can respond to this spirit with either vitriolic hatred or vain condescension.

Which looks more like Jesus to you?

¹ This link is to Part 1 of 8.

² http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/eisegetical

³ Love Wins, pg. 72.

⁴ This is not to say that a universalist would be denominationally orthodox (he likely wouldn't in most circles), only that there is not enough about life after death in the creeds that unite the church to rule out the possibility of some form of universalism.

A Concentric Circle View of Faith

2011-06-10T22:02:00.001-05:00

One of the most common and unfortunate theological mistakes Christians make is assuming that every aspect of their faith is equally important.

One need not look far for examples: a simple Google search for such topics as "creation," "eschatology," or sadly, even "Republican," will turn up countless websites run by sincere believers in Christ who equate their certainty regarding some particular aspect of some debated issue with the very foundation of Christian belief.

For many, the specific nuances of their way of interpreting Scripture (usually in accord with whatever tradition they hailed from) are essential issues. Each one is every bit as important as all the rest, and if you throw out even one, then you might as well forget the whole thing.

The unfortunate and dangerous consequence of such thinking is threefold: it creates needless and counter-productive division within the church, it weakens the message of Christ to those outside the church, and it makes for a very unstable foundation on which to base one's individual faith.

Regarding the first point: Jesus intended His church to be unified.¹ This of course does not mean that we should all worship the same way, or even that we should all share exactly the same beliefs (indeed, I tend to think that some division is actually a good thing - see here). It is, rather, much deeper and more significant than this. The context of the cited passage makes clear that the purpose of the unity is so that the world may know who Jesus is and that God loves them just as much as His own son. And we know from elsewhere that the way the world is to identify followers of Christ is by how they love one another. So it seems that what Jesus meant by unity has much more to do with how we treat one another than with whether or not we agree on everything. But when we assert that every part of our faith is just as important as every other part, we are in effect denying that loving one another is more important than being right about x, y, z. We are saying that Jesus was, well, wrong.

To illustrate the second and third points, a not-so-hard-to-imagine, imaginative scenario:

Susan shares her faith with Bill. Susan is sincere and convincing, and Bill can tell that there is a peace about her that he does not possess. From their conversation, Bill begins to consider Christ in light of the love he saw in Susan, and he comes close to choosing to follow Him. Then Bill meets Dan. Dan attends a particular church in town, where they are certain that their brand of Christianity is the right one, and that it is wrong to begin to question even the smallest part of their theology. Dan invites Bill to church. He goes, and is promptly warned that Susan's brand of Christianity is false and dangerous, because she does not believe the same thing Dan believes about some issue. It is obvious, Dan says, to anyone who really knows Jesus, and besides, it says it right there in the Bible, in plain English. Bill is confused, but he does not know how to respond to Dan. Both of these people claim to follow Jesus, he thinks, but there is no sense in which they are unified. He does not see how his opinion on issue x will give him the peace he thought he saw in Susan, and he leaves the church, frustrated with Christians and their division.

Or an alternate ending:

Bill takes Dan's word for it, and joins his church, accepting that each link in the theological chain is just as important as every other. He then reads a book (or hears a message, or takes a class, etc.), in which one of his church's beliefs is cleanly refuted. This one domino knocked over, his whole faith crumbles, since he has given equal weight to each piece.

The first scenario shows how our insistence on the ultimate importance of every part of our faith weakens it to the point of ineffectiveness in evangelism. The second shows how it weakens it to the point of ineffectiveness in maintaining one's own faith.

This, however, is not the biblical model of faith, nor is it the one with which the church has operated from the beginning.² That model, rather, is something more like what Greg Boyd has called a "concentric circle" model of faith. The idea is simply that at the core of Christian faith are the essentials - the most important things about being a Christian, what the reformers called the sine qua non of the faith. Built on top of these things are the less important things, and the further out you go, the less important the issues become.

In the very center circle would be what a friend of mine calls the "Big, Big Question." Who was Jesus? It is Him, and Him alone, that grounds Christian belief and practice. If He is who He claimed to be and what He taught is true, then we have hope. If not, then we are "of all men most pitiable."³ It is this circle and this circle alone that decides one's eternal fate. This is the hill we die on.

Just outside this would be what we would consider the essentials of orthodox Christianity. These are the things that define what it is to be a "Christian," the things that were set forth in the creeds back in the day, the things that all Christians even today agree on (believe it or not, there are several such things). These are things like God's triune nature, the dual nature of Christ (fully God, fully man), etc. To disagree with these is not to be outside the scope of salvation (we cannot know this), but it is to be something other than historically Christian.

A little further outside this ring are doctrines more specific to particular traditions; outside that are issues that are important but not rigidly defined by any tradition; further out still are things we just like to argue about but aren't really important at all, like what month Jesus was born.

As my pastor puts it, "major on the majors; minor on the minors." Not everything in the Bible is equally clear. Not everything we believe is equally important. Let's try to do a little better job of loving each other, and perhaps focus a bit less on who is the most right about the gray areas.

¹ John 17:20-23

² For a brief overview of what exactly Christians mean by "faith," a word generally synonymous with "trust," see here and here.

³ 1 Cor. 15:19

Anselm on the Trinity - A Devotional Reading

2011-05-09T10:10:00.001-05:00

So this is another paper I wrote for class. It's about the Trinity, how it can be understood using only reason, and how this is in itself a spiritual and devotional discipline. It's relevant to the use (necessity) of thinking deeply about our faith and what it means to "love God with all your mind." Some of you might be interested. If you're not, that's fine. The regular posts should resume very soon. Oh, and if you don't remember who Anselm is, see my posts on his (in)famous ontological argument for God's existence here and here.

On Reading St. Anselm Deviotionally

What attention has been given to St. Anselm’s writings in the contemporary philosophical literature is almost exclusively devoted to his so-called “ontological argument” for the existence of God, which appears in various forms in his Proslogion and subsequent letters. The bulk of this attention is critical. By comparison, almost nothing is said about the rest of Anselm’s extensive writing, or about how his defenses of traditional doctrine and his view of God from the Proslogion as the greatest conceivable being inform one another.[1] Even the relatively few defenses of Anselm’s thought still generally treat his work in the same way one would treat a contemporary piece of analytic philosophy. In this paper I will attempt to read Anselm in another way, a way that I believe to be more faithful to his intentions as a writer. This will involve taking seriously his claim to be writing devotionally; indeed, it will require framing the entire discussion of his thought in light of that consideration.

In order to do this, I will consider a somewhat less-reviewed piece of Anselm’s writing—the Monologion, which was the first of his widely circulated works. More specifically, I will examine his discussion of the Trinity contained therein, and how the human mind might benefit from serious contemplation of such an ineffable mystery. In section one of the present paper, then, I will examine the context of the Monologion, and how it ought to be read in light of that context. In section two, I will lay out Anselm’s analysis of the Trinity, and attempt to deal with a particularly problematic objection to it. Finally, in section three, I will provide an illustration of how Anselm’s thought regarding the Trinity might be considered in its proper, devotional context, with particular emphasis given to what I call the mystical (3.1), perspectival (3.2), practical (3.3), and personal (3.4) dimensions.

§ 1 – Contextual Considerations

Anselm’s intention in writing the Monologion was not to develop a systematic theology. It was, rather, to assist his monks in worshiping God more deeply and with the full engagement of their rational faculties. The truths of God’s nature, including His Trinitarian identity, omnipotence, aseity, etc. were already known by revelation and were clearly laid out in Scripture and the creeds. Further, they had already been expounded on in detail by fathers before Anselm. Anselm was working within this tradition, not in an attempt at originality, but with the hope of using his reason to try to understand these great truths more fully.

It is very important that for him, this was an act of worship. The Monologion itself is a devotional work. The conclusions Anselm draws within it are directed toward the end of deepening the spiritual lives of the monks in Anselm’s charge and of any others who might read them. Anselm took pains to make clear in the Prologue to the work that he had nowhere stepped outside the bounds of Scripture or of the writings of the fathers (particularly Augustine), and that the Monologion should be read as a sort of devotional thinking-out-loud within those parameters. As is clear from the note to the archbishop that accompanied the first untitled manuscript of the Monologion, Anselm was so serious about this intention that he was willing to destroy the entire work if it were found lacking.[2] In fact, it is unlikely that Anselm even would have wanted these works (both the contemplative Monologion and the more prayerful Proslogion) to be circulated anywhere near as widely as they have been; he certainly could not have envisioned their elevation to their current status, nor his own to the status of “father” alongside Augustine himself.

Indeed, Anselm was for a while reluctant to see these works circulated, even among his ecclesiastical superiors, for fear of misinterpretation. Richard Sharpe writes,

Another letter reveals Anselm’s caution in the early stages of distributing this work [the Monologion]. He reluctantly sends a copy, still untitled, to Abbot Rainaldus, who has repeatedly asked for it over a long period, but asks him to show it only to those rationabilibus et quietis (“capable of reason and contemplation”), who will read the work as it should be read.[3]

This is an important point. It does not mean that we should not take Anselm’s conclusions (it may not even be proper to call them “arguments” in this context) seriously, or even examine them critically. We should, and there is surely fruit to be gained from doing so. No, the point is important because it changes how we interpret Anselm in his less-clear moments, some of which have turned out to be rather important. Naturally, we ought to read charitably at all times so far as we can, but this takes on a bit more significance when we realize that the text we are analyzing is a personal meditation intended for at best a small audience of peers, and not a rigorous philosophical treatise intended to be scrutinized for the next thousand years.

§ 2 – The Trinity in the Monologion

Anselm’s argument for the Trinity—which he does not think can be established through reason alone, but rather understood, in the sense that true conclusions can be reached about it—begins with the doctrine of God’s aseity.[4] From the Latin a se (“of itself”), this doctrine holds that God exists and is what He is entirely through Himself and no other. Nothing about Him in any way depends on anything outside Him. Closely related to God’s aseity is His simplicity. Since God is not what He is through some other things in the way that contingent/dependent creatures are, it cannot be the case that adjectives like just, good, true, etc., can be predicated of him in the same way that they are predicated of contingent beings. So, when we say that Solomon was just or that Mother Teresa was good, we mean that the property of justice or goodness could be rightly applied to them.[5] However, when we say that God is just and good, we actually mean that He is justice and goodness, since these things have their meaning in and through Him, and not the other way around. Having established this, Anselm then explains[6] that, “Whatever [God] is in any way, he is in every way and under every aspect. For whatever he in any way essentially is, that is the whole of what he is. Therefore, whatever is truly said of his essence is not understood as expressing what sort of thing or how great he is, but rather as expressing what he is.”[7] So, God cannot be “composite,” in the way created beings are, but He must be simple in His essence, since “every composite needs the things of which it is composed if it is to subsist, and it owes what it is to them,” and this would of course violate God’s aseity.[8]

Anselm then moves on to an explicit discussion of the Trinity. He begins by establishing that God’s utterance is the same as Himself;[9] that is, it is essential to Him. By utterance, he means something roughly analogous to “understanding” or “thought.” For example, before a painter puts any paint on a canvas, she presumably has a plan of action, which is then realized. Anselm considers this a sort of internal speech act, in the language of thought.[10] Thus, anything the painter accomplishes (and analogously, anything God accomplishes) is accomplished through this “utterance.” Anselm then reasons, “For if the supreme spirit made nothing except through himself, and whatever was made by him was made through his utterance, how can that utterance be anything other than what he himself is?”[11] And, since we have already established that God is essentially simple, this utterance, or “Word,” must be one is essence (or “consubstantial”) with Him.

And yet, God (or the “supreme spirit”) and His Word must be distinct in some way.[12] And this way is of course in their relation to one another, for the Word is the word of God, and not the other way around. As Anselm says, “They must be two because of their individual properties. For it is the distinguishing characteristic of the second that he exists from the first, and it is the distinguishing characteristic of the first that the second exists from him.”[13] And so, God and His Word are one in essence and yet distinct in some other way, since the latter is born—or begotten—from the former. The Word depends on the One whose word He is, and is the perfect image of His mental life (i.e. His essence), bearing a resemblance much like a child to a parent. Thus, they can be truly referred to as Father and Son.[14] The Son has His being from the Father, and yet the two are of one essence, and aseity is maintained for both individually. This is not contradictory, since, as Anselm says,

Just as the Father has essence and wisdom and life in himself, so that it is not through someone else’s but through his own essence that he exists, through his own wisdom that he is wise, and through his own life that he lives, so by begetting the Son he grants the Son to have essence and wisdom and life in himself, so that it is not through someone else’s essence, wisdom, and life but through his own that he subsists, is wise, and lives. Otherwise the being of the Father and the Son would not be the same, nor would the Son be equal to the Father. And we saw above quite clearly how false that is.[15]

Anselm also believes that the relationship between the Father and the Son is analogous to the relationship between human memory and understanding.[16] This is an important point, since it will figure prominently in Anselm’s discussion of the Holy Spirit. We have already discussed above how by “utterance” or “word” Anselm means something like “understanding.” He now applies to the Father the concept of “memory”—i.e. the source of the understanding:

It seems that a word is born from the memory, as is more clearly seen in the case of our own mind. For since the human mind is not always thinking of itself, as it always remembers itself, it is clear that when it does think of itself, its word is born from its memory. Hence it is evident that if it were always thinking of itself, its word would always be born from its memory.[17]

William Mann’s interpretation of the difficult italicized portion is helpful here:

“Since a human mind is not always thinking of itself, as it is always…[retaining its capacity to focus its attention on itself], it is clear that when it is thinking of itself, its word [in this case, its concept of itself] is…[brought to consciousness by its faculty of recollection accessing its storehouse of concepts].”[18]

So, the Father is memory through Himself, while the Son is the perfect image of the memory of the Father, His eternally-begotten understanding.

Anselm then moves on to discuss the third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. The Father and the Son love one another, he says, in the way that reason requires that things are to be loved—i.e. according to their nature. Both the Father and the Son are supremely excellent and so must love one another supremely. Indeed, this love is itself as great as the Father and Son, since in each case it is proportional to the greatness of its object, which is infinite. This love, then, is equally as great as God’s memory and understanding of Himself, which are in turn equally as great as His essence.[19] And since nothing can be equal in greatness to the “supreme essence” except that essence itself, it follows that this Love shares in that essence, and is as much God as the Father or the Son.[20]

Just like we saw with the Father and the Son, however, the Love of God must be distinct from the Word and its Source. And, like the distinction between the Father and the Son, the Love is distinct by virtue of its relation to the other two. After establishing that the Love proceeds equally from the Father and the Son,[21] Anselm explains that this procession is a kind of “breathing out” (Latin spiratio), since “it seems there may be no more appropriate expression for the way in which he sends forth his love—which proceeds from him ineffably, not by departing from him but by existing from him—than ‘breathing out.’”[22] Thus, it is appropriate, by way of the method of His procession, to call this love the Spirit. Further, the Father, Son, and Spirit exist equally in one another and are all of one supreme essence, “for indeed the supreme spirit understands and loves his whole memory, remembers and loves his whole understanding, and remembers and understands his whole love.”[23] They are thus coeternal and consubstantial.

In his article in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, William Mann points out a particularly troubling difficulty with Anselm’s analysis as presented.[24] Early on in his discussion,[25] Anselm asserts that no relational term ascribed to God, or any other being, refers to his essence. This follows from Anselm’s conception of God’s aseity: if relations were essential to Him (e.g. the relation that He is greater than His creation), then He would have His essence through those relations. This would of course be a violation of His aseity, and so Anselm concludes that relational (or “relative”) terms must not refer to God’s essence. However, the problem is that “begotten” and “breathed out” are definitely relational terms, and they seem to be applied to God’s essence. Mann argues:

Either the Father begets the Son essentially or not. If the former, then [Anselm’s principle that no relational term ascribed to God refers to His essence] is false. If the latter, that is, if the Father does not beget the son essentially, then it would seem that the Son’s existence is as contingent as the existence of any creature…Anselm is in danger here of capitulating to Arianism.[26]

Since the second horn of Mann’s dilemma is obviously unacceptable, he thinks we ought to reject Anselm’s notion that relational terms do not refer to God’s essence. However, if we do so, not only is God’s aseity called into question (a problem Mann does not seem to notice), Anselm may fall prey to the charge of modalism,[27] since the only thing that obviously separates the persons of the Trinity is their relation to one another, namely, begetting and procession. But if these relational terms are essential, and God is only one essence, then it seems like Anselm may indeed be in danger of unintentional modalism.

Mann solves this problem by reference to another of Anselm’s analogies—that of the Nile. The Nile, Anselm says, is made up of spring, river, and lake, none of which is identical to the others, and yet all of which are correctly said to be the Nile. Lest we think this is still modalist (or tritheistic, depending on how it is construed), he further states that “the whole Nile is the spring, the whole Nile is the river, the whole Nile is the lake.”[28] Thus, thinks Mann, Anselm saves himself from the modalist charge. To my mind, however, this response is inadequate, since all it shows is that Anselm thinks his understanding is orthodox, a claim for which we already have ample evidence apart from the Nile analogy. If Mann’s dilemma is correct, then the problem is that Anselm’s view of relational terms and God’s essence commits him to a modalist position, unintentionally. The Nile analogy does not solve this problem.

How, then, are we to understand Anselm here? If we are to read him charitably—and we should (that is, after all, what this paper is about)—it seems unlikely that he would miss this seeming contradiction; it cannot both be the case that no relations refer to God’s essence and that God is essentially relational by virtue of the Trinity. I believe the answer lies in the second horn of Mann’s dilemma. Referring back to the italicized portion, Mann claims that if the begetting relation between the Father and the Son does not hold essentially, then the Son’s existence is contingent. However, this seems to me to confuse essence with necessity.[29] The opposite of “contingent” is not “essential;” it is “necessary.” It seems that it is possible for the begetting relation between the Father and the Son to be a necessary one without being essential to God’s nature, in the technical, medieval sense of “essential.” And this necessity would be sufficient to maintain the genuine distinctions between the persons of the Trinity and thus avoid the charge of modalism. In fact, it is likely that the model of essence and necessity that Anselm was working with was much closer to that of Aristotle—who maintained a clear distinction between the two concepts (i.e. not all necessary truths are essential truths)—than to our present understanding, which makes no such distinction.[30] We cannot of course be certain of this, as it is a very complex issue, but it does at any rate seem to be the more charitable reading.

§ 3 – A Devotional Reading

Anselm’s discussion of the Trinity thus clearly (I hope) laid out, I will now attempt to provide an example of how he may be read in his proper, devotional context. It seems to me (and, I believe, to Anselm) that serious, demanding contemplation of the doctrine of the Trinity can have devotional and practical significance. Indeed, it is my contention that for Anselm and those like him, discussion of deep theological concepts such as this one, are useless if done in a purely academic manner. Thinking about God ought to change you. There are at least four areas or ways in which theological meditation can effect such change: the mystical, perspectival, practical, and personal.

§ 3.1 – The Mystical Dimension

By “mystical,” I do not intend the modern, typically derogatory meaning of “cultic” or “separated from reality.” Rather, I have in mind the traditional Christian understanding of the inner spiritual life, and the experiences that accompany that life. A good example would be the practice of Lectio Divina, in which the Christian reads, meditates on, and prays over a passage of Scripture, culminating in an intensely personal communion with God and resting in His presence. This is, I think, something like what Anselm had in mind for his Monologion. For him, meditation on the divine essence, using only our reason (the part of us most like God) is perhaps the purest form of worship. So he states:

And so it is evident that just as the rational mind is the only thing among all creatures that can rise up to seek him, it is no less true that the rational mind is the only thing through which the mind itself can best make progress in finding him. For we have already realized that it comes especially close to him through the likeness of its natural essence. So what is more obvious than this: that the more diligently the rational mind tries to come to know itself, the more efficaciously it rises up to know him; and the more it neglects to look upon itself, the more it falls away from seeing him?[31]

Here Anselm beautifully illustrates the mystical dimension of theological contemplation. The more we employ that part of us closest to the divine essence (i.e. our minds), the closer we will come to His presence. And this clearly includes not just contemplation of God, but contemplation of ourselves as well, since the more accurately we know ourselves—being made in His image—the more readily can we come to know Him. Meditation on God’s Trinitarian nature helps to clear away all else but God’s essence and ours, in active communion with one another. As Thomas Williams puts it,

The most excellent created essence, the one that is most like God, is the rational mind. For the mind is the only creature that can remember, understand, and love itself—or better still, remember, understand, and love God—and is thus "a true image of that essence who through his memory and understanding and love constitutes an ineffable Trinity." The mind can therefore serve as "a mirror for itself”; it cannot look upon God "face to face," but by looking upon itself it sees an image of God.[32]

This, then, is how we follow the Biblical mandate to love God with all our mind, as well as with all our heart, soul, and strength.[33]

§ 3.2 – The Perspectival Dimension

Secondly, considering God’s nature puts us in right perspective to him and draws out of us the only appropriate response to grasping a measure of his infinite excellence and, by contrast, our finite depravity: praise and worship. It may be objected here that it makes no sense to praise God for his excellence, since on Anselm’s view, excellence is just God’s nature; He could not be or act otherwise than He does. Anselm, however, understood that the gulf between the infinite God and finite creature is such that there is no way in which the creature could ever stand in judgment to the Creator. God is praiseworthy by virtue of who He is, not by virtue of our evaluation of His performance. As Katherin Rogers puts it,

We may praise one another as more or less successful imitators of the divine, but God we worship. God's praiseworthiness, then, finds not the least echo in creation. In the faith which gave rise to Anselm’s philosophical explorations the first and greatest commandment is that we should worship God alone. No creature is worthy of worship in any way at all.[34]

Devotional contemplation of this truth fills the believer with praise, much like it did the Psalmist when he contemplated the heavenly order and the splendor of creation.[35]

§ 3.3 – The Practical Dimension

Struggling with difficult questions regarding the essential doctrines of our religion is one of the surest ways to build faith and character, where faith is defined as confidence in what we know about God, which motivates us to action. This is especially true when we attempt to understand God’s revealed truth using reason alone, apart from the revelation of Scripture or tradition (which was Anselm’s explicit goal with the Monologion).[36] This is not because reason can give us anything revelation cannot, nor is it true that we can derive the truths of revelation from reason alone. Rather, such rational contemplation can help us to better understand those already-revealed truths. This is the business of theology, and (for Anselm and others) it should also be the business of our devotional lives. Worshiping in this way builds confidence in what we already know and thereby affects the way we act on that knowledge, both where it concerns us and others. Such confidence inspires us to share the truth of God’s message and the Good News of Christ’s atonement with those around us. This is precisely what God wants us to do. It helps to overcome doubt, and more importantly, it helps us to use doubt to better understand God, ourselves, and our relationship with Him and with one another.

§ 3.4 – The Personal Dimension

Lastly, perhaps the greatest way in which serious, methodical contemplation of the divine, Trinitarian essence can effect real change in the sincere believer is by helping her to achieve a deeper, truer understanding of God’s love. As Anselm shows in his discussion of the Holy Spirit, there is no sense in which God can be said to be less than infinitely loving. For His love is literally a description (perhaps the best description) of what He is in His very essence. This knowledge then frames everything else we think about Him, including how we read and interpret Scripture, as well as how we understand ourselves, and how we deal with other people. It gives us a foundation from which we can deal with the more difficult, and less certain, aspects of the Christian story (e.g. how one ought to understand the difficult moral passages of the Old Testament). And most importantly, understanding God’s thoughts toward us motivates change as nothing else can. Once we learn that He values us as He values Himself (since we bear His image and are, of all created things, closest to His essence), how we understand suffering and evil changes, as does how we treat those around us who also bear His image—especially those we might consider enemies.

In this paper I have argued that Anselm, particularly his Monologion and Proslogion were intended to be read, and ought to be read, in a devotional context. I have also tried to provide a brief sketch of how this might be done by considering his penetrating discussion of the Trinity. It should be clear that such a devotional reading does not mean that one must abandon the high standards of evaluation and precision befitting a philosophical project. It does, however, require that one consider the text in light of its intended purpose, and evaluate it primarily based on the extent to which it achieves that purpose. When considered this way, Anselm passes with flying colors.

[1] There are of course exceptions. Prominent among them is Karl Barth’s study Fides quaerens intellectum. See Vincent G. Potter, “Karl Barth and the Ontological Argument” The Journal of Religion 45, no. 4 (1965): 309-25.

[2] See Richard Sharpe, “Anselm as Author: Publishing in the Late Eleventh Century” Journal of Medieval Latin 19 (2009): 16. It may be objected that Anselm must not have been too sincere about this, since Archbishop Lanfranc did apparently recommend that more weight be given to the authority of Scripture, advice that Anselm evidently did not take. However, such action would have been contrary to Anselm’s purposes in authoring the document, since by his own account in the published Prologue to the work, it was written in response to repeated requests from his monks to develop “a sort of pattern for meditating on [the divine essence],” in which “absolutely nothing…would be established by the authority of Scripture.”

[3] Ibid., 17.

[4] Anselm, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2007), 9-13.

[5] The “property” concept is, however, controversial. See Jeffrey E. Brower, “Simplicity and Aseity” in Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 105-28.

[6] Anselm, Basic Writings, 24-5.

[7] Ibid., 25.

[8] Ibid., 24.

[9] Ibid., 38.

[10] See William E. Mann, “Anselm on the Trinity” in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, ed. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 264-5.

[11] Anselm, Basic Writings, 39.

[12] Ibid., 46-7.

[13] Ibid., 47.

[14] Ibid., 47-8.

[15] Ibid., 50-1.

[16] Ibid., 53.

[17] Ibid., 53 (italics mine).

[18] Mann, “Anselm on the Trinity,” 268-74.

[19] Anselm, Basic Writings, 53-5.

[20] Ibid., 55.

[21] Ibid., 55. This is a distinctly Latin doctrine and is the source of the initial split between the Western and Eastern churches during Anselm’s lifetime. It has to do with the wording of the Nicene Creed regarding the Holy Spirit. Initially, the Spirit was described as proceeding only from the Father, but the Roman church eventually officially added the term filioque (Latin for “and the Son”) to show the equal procession of the Spirit from the first and second persons of the Trinity. The East, however, saw this revision as a dangerous subordination of the Spirit to a mere relationship between the Father and Son, and refused the addition. Anselm, however, actively supported the change.

[22] Ibid., 57.

[23] Ibid., 58.

[24] Mann, “Anselm on the Trinity,” 274.

[25] Anselm, Basic Writings, 21-3.

[26] Mann, “Anselm on the Trinity,” 274 (italics mine). Arianism is the 4^th century heresy, which states that the Son was created by and is therefore subordinate to the Father.

[27] “Modalism” is one of two ways one can err regarding the orthodox understanding of the Trinity. Contrasted with “tritheism,” modalism is the view that God is only one person who manifests Himself and is described is three distinct ways. Tritheism, then, is the view that God is three, distinct essences. The orthodox view, set forth in the creeds and upheld by Anselm, is that God is one in essence and three in person.

[28] Ibid., 277.

[29] In contemporary terminology (which may not be best here), necessity is broadly defined as “holding in all possible worlds.”

[30] See David Charles, Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

[31] Anselm, Basic Writings, 65.

[32] Thomas Williams, “God Who Sows the Seed and Gives the Growth: Anselm’s Theology of the Holy Spirit” ATR 89, no. 4 (1986): 619. Williams’ quote is from Anselm, Basic Writings, 65.

[33] Luke 10:27

[34] Katherin Rogers, “Anselm on Praising a Necessarily Prefect Being” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 34, no. 1 (1993): 49.

[35] Psalm 8

[36] See note 2 above.

Out of Our Heads

2010-11-24T07:13:00.001-06:00

So first of all, I realize that I haven't posted in forever. I am very sorry about that. My only excuse is the ungodly amount of classwork I have. But I promise, as soon as it is all done for the semester (which will only be a couple more weeks) I will be back, posting like a fiend. In the meantime, I thought some of you might find a paper I just wrote for class rather interesting. It is a review of a book by a philosopher/neuroscientist titled Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. Obviously, it is about philosophy of consciousness/perception. I highly recommend it. If you're interested, read on; if not, no hard feelings. If you have any questions about anything in the paper, feel free to comment like usual. I'll be back with my regular posts (and the completion of the series I started long ago) soon. Stay tuned.

Philosopher, cognitive scientist, and neuroscientist Alva Noë’s recent book Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness purports itself to be something of a game-changer in the world of neuroscience and the philosophy of perception. Says Noë in the preface: “I am writing the book to change the world. Or at least to shake up the cognitive science establishment. I am aware that that’s a tall order and that in some ways it may seem presumptuous even to try” (Noë xiv). Presumptuous indeed. I will suspend judgment on whether or not he succeeded for now. But there is no doubt that what he proposes here would certainly require a rethinking of what philosophers and scientists in the related fields have taken for granted for some time: namely that consciousness, whatever else it may be, resides in our heads. This Noë denies repeatedly and with conviction, arguing instead for what he calls variously an “ecological,” “embodied,” “enactive” approach. Here I will examine the main ideas and arguments of the book and provide some brief critical comments. As it turns out, Noë is an entertaining writer and illustrates his points well, and so I will be quoting from him extensively.

In chapter one, “An Astonishing Hypothesis,” Noë sets forth the establishment view as epitomized by Nobel laureate Francis Crick:

you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules…This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing (5).

Noë disagrees. Not only is this view not “astonishing,” it is what has been assumed unquestioningly since Descartes himself, if not longer. “It isn’t surprising to be told that there is a thing inside each of us that thinks and feels and wants and decides,” says Noë (5). The only difference between this view and Descartes’ is that the “thinking thing” is now supposed to be physical rather than immaterial. But far from solving the problem of consciousness, Noë says, this distinction merely restates it in new terms. Instead, he proposes what he thinks is “a really astonishing hypothesis”:

…to understand consciousness—the fact that we think and feel and that a world shows up for us—we need to look at a larger system of which the brain is only one element. Consciousness is not something the brain achieves on its own. Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body, and world. Indeed, consciousness is an achievement of the whole animal in its environmental context. I deny, in short, that you are your brain…To have a mind…requires more than a brain. Brains don’t have minds; people (and other animals) do.

In essence, consciousness is not something we have somewhere inside us; it is something we do (24).

To illustrate his point, he critiques the classic “brain in a vat” line of thought experiment, pointing out that such a thing could never amount to what we would call real consciousness without many adjustments. For one, brains don’t have faces, or any of the other markers by which humans are used to identifying consciousness. Also, in order to achieve an even remotely analogous situation to real-life brain processing, what might the vat have to look like? Says Noë, “If you actually try to think through the details of this thought experiment…it’s clear that the vat would have to be, in effect, something like a living body” (13).

Just in case we might think the current discussion one for the academy, Noë brings it a little closer to home by highlighting direct clinical application in cases of patients diagnosed with persistent vegetative state (PVS) and locked-in syndrome. In the former, the patient is thought to be “brain-dead,” often permanently, even though the body will still often respond to external stimuli. In the latter, the patient is by all appearances vegetative, but she remains fully conscious, though unable to communicate. Patients with locked-in syndrome can sometimes learn to communicate by elaborate systems of blinking, and some have even written memoirs describing the experience. Noë asks us to imagine having a family member with such a diagnosis. Would we be content with the brain scan which tells us that our loved one has PVS rather than locked-in syndrome? Is neuronal activity as measured by positron emission tomography (PET) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) a reliable indicator of consciousness? Reliable enough to make a life-ending decision? Of course Noë is not denying the usefulness of such imaging technology, but he is careful to remind us that it does not actually provide us with a direct picture of consciousness in action, as is so easily assumed:

Brain scans thus represent the mind at three steps of removal: they represent physical magnitudes correlated to blood flow; the blood flow in turn is correlated to neural activity; the neural activity in turn is supposed to correlate to mental activity (24).

In chapter two, “Conscious Life,” Noë offers something of a solution to the age-old philosophical problem of how we arrive at and justify the widespread belief that there are minds other than our own. Rather than attempting to solve it logically as so many before him, Noë denies the need to raise it to begin with. This is because “our commitment to other minds is…not really a theoretical commitment at all,” but rather “a presupposition of the kind of life we lead together” (32-3). The knowledge that there are minded beings other than ourselves just comes with living in the world we find ourselves in. It is not an abstract knowledge to be arrived at by inference, but rather a necessary feature of our experience, a natural element of our relationships with other persons. As Noë puts it, “I cannot both trust and love you and also wonder whether, in fact, you are alive with thought and feeling, just as I cannot dance well if I am counting steps and trying to remember what comes next” (33). Noë sees the consciousness-contained-in-the-skull establishment view as promoting a “detached, mechanistic attitude to human beings,” which essentially denies the relational nature of consciousness and encourages an unnecessary problem. Instead, he suggests that the proper perspective from which to study consciousness is the biological one, viewing the organism as a unit that is bound up with its environment. For Noë, “the problem of consciousness…is…the problem of life” (41). He apparently means this quite literally; to live is to be conscious, and vice versa. And of course to be conscious is to be intentionally and actively engaged in one’s environment. Noë grants that there are of course internal neural correlates of consciousness, but points out that “there are external correlates of consciousness too,” namely the activities in which we find ourselves engaged on a daily basis (42). This is further supported by the observation that sudden, significant changes in one’s environment, such as a move or the death of a loved one, are often devastating. This is not surprising when one considers the intimate relationship between consciousness and one’s daily routine. Such a change is quite literally to lose a part of oneself, a theme to which Noë returns frequently later in the book.

Chapter three, “The Dynamics of Consciousness,” provides additional argument for Noë’s novel approach in the form of some very interesting experiments involving ferrets, phantom limbs, and video cameras, respectively. MIT researcher Mriganka Sur “re-wired,” as it were, newborn ferrets, routing the connections between their eyes and brain so that the cells in the eye that normally made neural connections with the “visual” centers of the brain now made those connections in areas of the brain normally thought of as auditory. The result was both surprising and instructive: rather than hearing with their eyes, the ferrets developed vision, even though an entirely different area of the brain was involved. Clearly, the touted neural correlates of consciousness do not tell the whole story. What this experiment shows is that far from being sufficient for conscious experience as the establishment view would have it, “there is no necessary connection between the character of experience and the behavior of certain cells” (54).

Similarly, the phenomenon of so-called “phantom limbs” further illustrates the point. Sometimes after the amputation of a limb, the patient will report the persistence of sensations in that limb. It is not that the patient is having convincing hallucinations of feeling in the missing limb; when touched on the face, the patient actually feels a touch on the hand that is no longer there. This is presumably because the “face region” of the cortex somehow becomes entangled with the “hand region” (apparently they are next to one another), so that a touch on the face activates the hand region of the cortex (albeit by way of the face) and so produces the sensation of being touched on the missing limb. When contrasted with the ferret case, this shows that changes in the stimulation of brain areas do not always result in changes in the character of the resulting experiences.

In case we are still not convinced, Paul Bach-y-Rita’s tactile-visual sensory substitution system (TVSS) ought to do the trick. The late Bach-y-Rita was actually able to devise a system which allowed blind patients to attain some level of what can only be called vision. Basically, TVSS involves mounting a video camera on the patient’s body and wiring to it a system of vibrators that are in turn attached to the subject’s thigh or abdomen. The vibrations correspond with the visual information presented to the camera, and, remarkably, when given a little while to adjust to the system (a matter of hours or even minutes), patients are able to correctly judge the size, shape, and number of objects across the room from them, pick up objects, and even successfully swat a ball with a paddle. It is important to note that the subject is not experiencing the feeling of being touched on the abdomen and then somehow correlating this with the location of spatial objects; she reports an actual visual experience, and apparently an accurate one. As in the ferret case, the areas of the brain usually devoted to touch are changing their function in order to allow for vision. But with TVSS, the brain is not exhibiting the same sort of plasticity we see in the ferret case; it is using fully matured neuronal connections in novel ways to achieve new ends. But how can vibrations on the abdomen allow one to see? Noë is very glad you asked:

We see with Bach-y-Rita’s system because the relationship that system sets up and maintains between the perceiver and the object is, in ways that can be made precise, the sort of relation that we bear to things when we see them. What causes the effects for consciousness of neural activity in the touch-dedicated parts of the brain to change? Answer: the world and our relation to it (59).

“But,” one may object, “can we really call what TVSS accomplishes vision? After all, doesn’t seeing require the use of eyes?” In response to this, Noë points out that normal vision and what TVSS does “share a style.” That is to say, sensory stimulation in each depends on movement in much the same way: things get bigger when they move closer; they disappear when you turn away from them, etc. More to the point still, this movement is what fixes the visual character of TVSS, not the neural activity in the somatosensory cortex. In short, conscious experience is not confined to the limits of the nervous system; it is actively engaged with the world around us. Noë likens the relation between brain and consciousness to the relation between a musician and her instrument, concluding that “the idea that consciousness is a phenomenon of the brain…is as fantastic as the idea of a self-playing orchestra” (64).

In the chapter entitled “Wide Minds,” Noë elaborates on the influence of the external world on our conscious experience. We are, he says, “tangled up…with the places we find ourselves. We are of them” (69). He illustrates this with the “rubber hand phenomenon,” in which a rubber, lifelike hand is placed on a table in front of a subject who is seated at the table, her own hands out of view under it. A second person taps the rubber hand repeatedly, while one of the subject’s hands is simultaneously tapped in synchrony, under the table. Oddly enough, the subject experiences the feeling of being tapped on the rubber hand on the table. Alternately, we may consider how our visual experience affects our auditory perception. For example, we experience dialogue in a movie as coming from the actors’ mouths, even though it is actually coming from speakers elsewhere. Similarly, the ventriloquist utilizes this phenomenon to make it seem as though her own voice is coming from the puppet. Clearly, the environment impinges heavily on conscious experience. In fact, the rubber hand case seems to suggest that “attachment or connectedness is not necessary for something to be a part of me,” or at least to be experienced as a part of me (75). But just how far Noë intends for us to take this connectedness is not entirely clear. He says later, “there is no principled reason not to think of the wristwatch, the landmarks, the pen and paper, the linguistic community, as belonging to my mind” (82). Of course he is not advocating some weak solipsism here; he is merely stressing our involvement in the world and its involvement in our conscious experience. Nonetheless, it raises the question of exactly how far our selves extend. More on this later.

Chapter five, “Habits” expands on this theme with a thorough discussion of the role of habit—and how that habit is shaped by our environment—in our conscious experience. Noë utilizes the distinction between expert and novice, pointing out the interesting fact that for the novice, there is a positive correlation between the amount of deliberate focus on a skill and the success with which it is performed, but for the expert, the opposite is true: the correlation is negative. If an expert attempts to focus on the mechanics of a mastered skill, the performance suffers. If, however, the expert concentrates on something else, say the next pitch from the mound or the next movement in the piece of music being played, the performance improves. Noë draws the analogy between this and our being expert perceivers. Just as the expert musician is automatic and flexible in her performance, so we are with our perception. We are creatures of habit. And those habits are formed by our landscape.

Why then do researchers persist in the establishment view that our brains are somehow sufficient for our conscious experience? In the next three chapters, “The Grand Illusion,” “Voyages of Discovery,” and “A Nothing Reserved for Everything,” Noë deals with this question. “The Grand Illusion” attacks those scientists who want to say that our perception of the external world is merely illusory, i.e. that our brain essentially creates for us a representation (and a crude one at that) of whatever may actually be out there. Noë calls this both “bad philosophy” and “bad science,” pointing out that science in principle couldn’t tell us such a thing if it wanted to, since our interaction with the world around us is presupposed by the scientific enterprise itself (146).

“Voyages of Discovery” treats the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who in 1981 won the Nobel Prize for their research on the neurophysiology of vision. Suffice it to say that Noë is far less impressed with their work than the Nobel committee must have been, since its usefulness and relevance to visual perception essentially depends on their assumption that the mind is a product of events in the brain. Part of this assumption is the still-popular “information-processing” view of the brain, advanced by Marr and others, in which the brain and nervous system are likened to a computer. Detailed analogies are drawn between how a computer processes information and how the brain might do it. Noë does not deny that there are interesting parallels here; he merely highlights what ought to be obvious: that none of this locates seeing in the brain. In fact, it doesn’t even make sense to say that the brain is entirely responsible for seeing. “Computers can’t think on their own any more than hammers can pound in nails on their own…In any case, brains don’t think: they don’t have minds; animals do” (169).

“A Nothing Reserved for Everything” examines the final holdout of the establishment scientist: what Noë calls the “Foundation Argument.” The Foundation Argument is roughly that since we can generate experience by direct stimulation of the brain, the brain itself—and the brain alone—must be the basic ground of experience (173). For Noë, this amounts to one big non sequitur. First, being able to produce some perceptual experience in no way amounts to being able to produce anything like our full, regular experience. Second, even if we could do this, it still wouldn’t follow that the brain alone is sufficient for all of our consciousness, or even for those hallucinations (a manipulating scientist at least is required). And third, producing these experiences by direct stimulation actually involves altering already existing conscious states, not creating them out of nothing (174). Noë concludes, persuasively,

There is no empirical or philosophical justification for the idea that the brain alone is enough for consciousness…there is something perverse about the very idea that we are our brains, that the world we experience is within us. We don’t need to have the world within us: we have access to the world around us; we are open to it (181).

In the end, Noë makes a very compelling case for an enactive approach to neuroscience and biology of consciousness. While some knowledge of the orthodox view he criticizes is assumed and helpful, his representations of it are fair and balanced. And his criticisms of it are, in my view, devastating. There just is no convincing reason that I can see to continue with the assumption (or to posit it to begin with) that the whole of our conscious experience lies within the confines of our skull. However, with the admittedly liberating insight that we are actively involved and co-determinate with our environment, the concern arises that it will now be a bit more difficult to define what exactly the limits of consciousness are, and what are the boundaries of “self.” Of course, this is no reason to abandon the paradigm shift Noë is proposing; we should not run from difficulty, after all. But if the obvious boundary of my skin is not in fact the edge of “me,” then where to draw the line after that point is not at all clear and may in fact be arbitrary. Unfortunately, Noë does not address this criticism in the book. But this is not an argument against anything he says; it is merely a concern regarding the application of his model—a model we can hope is developed and employed more widely very soon.

Noë, Alva. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.

TOMS Shoes

2010-09-14T23:34:00.000-05:00

Before I move on to Part 2 of the argument from special revelation, I want to take this opportunity to make you guys aware (if you aren't already) of the TOMS shoe company. For every pair of shoes you purchase, TOMS will give a pair to a child somewhere without shoes, thereby helping children in about 25 countries now avoid disease and attend school. All because of shoes.

This week, TOMS will give away their one millionth pair. Tonight, I had the privilege of hearing TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie speak at my university. He told the story of how he started the company and its rapid growth in the last four years. He credits the success--rightly, I think--to the power of giving. Sure, the shoes are comfortable. Yes, they look cool. I own three pair. But it's no secret the company never would have taken off like it has without the emphasis on charity. There is something within us that sees children without shoes and a guy with a clever idea, and says, "Yes. I want to give to that."

So what's my point? Well first, that you should seriously consider making your next shoe purchase a pair of TOMS. But there are a couple other things I'd like to point out as well.

TOMS is successful because of generosity. I don't know what your feelings on tithing/giving are, but whether you are a Christian or not, you simply cannot go wrong when you give a portion of your income away. Period. If you don't do this, I challenge you to start.

Second, capitalism is not evil. It is morally neutral. And TOMS is one great example of how it can work very successfully for the betterment of humanity. Mycoskie himself pointed out that his idea worked much better--and impacted many more people--as a business model than it ever would have as a non-profit, charity organization.

And thirdly, and most importantly, charity is supposed to be one of the defining characteristics of the Christian, both individually and corporately. This is why I thought this a worthy topic to interrupt my series on Jesus: this is something He would champion. That's right, I think Jesus would wear TOMS. And in connection with this, TOMS has unwittingly opened the door for God to speak to countless people. Charity and generosity are from God. This means that every time someone (Christian or not) decides to act in a charitable way, they are acting in accordance with the will of God Himself, thereby creating a connection (however slight) between themselves and Him. Maybe they'll feel good about it and ask themselves why. Maybe they'll be moved by poverty and wonder at this. However it happens, the point is this: when charity is there, Christ is present. And Christ changes people.

Apologetics Journal

2010-09-11T17:12:00.000-05:00

Just a brief post to plug a new journal titled Hope's Reason: A Journal of Apologetics.

Spearheaded by Stephen Bedard, the journal is a peer-reviewed, scholarly publication and promises to be a great resource for those of you interested in keeping abreast of current Christian scholarship. I'd recommend it as a good introduction to this level of writing.

You can find more info about it here.

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 1)

2010-09-09T21:31:00.000-05:00

If you've been following this blog for a while, you might remember my brief discussion of the Christian idea of revelation. I'll not rehash what I said there, but I will add briefly the distinction between "general" and "special" revelation.

The difference is fairly obvious. General revelation deals with the aspects of God's nature that can be inferred from the world, or from other sources common to humanity, apart from any direct information (revelation) from God. Up to now, all of the posts in this 'Arguments for God' series have dealt with general revelation.

Special revelation is the more specific type of revelation I was talking about in the earlier post linked above. It goes beyond general revelation in both scope and detail, although it should not contradict it.

As mentioned in that other post, Christianity is one of several 'revealed' religions, meaning we understand our specific knowledge of and beliefs about God to have been given to us by Him directly. The following will be a very brief sketch of why we believe this.

It all revolves around this guy named Jesus who lived roughly two thousand years ago. He began His ministry, which lasted only about three years, somewhere around AD 30.* Jewish by birth, He accepted the authority of the Hebrew scriptures and yet interpreted them in radically new ways. This combined with His highly unusual statements about Himself and His unique relationship to the Jewish God eventually made enough people angry enough to get Him killed. While He was alive, however, He caused quite a ruckus everywhere He went. The blind saw. The lame walked. The hungry were fed, the poor helped, the dead raised, the empty filled.

More important even than all this, this man predicted His own death on several occasions and said that afterward, He would live again. Naturally, His followers had a difficult time with this...until it happened. In the New Testament, we have assembled numerous, independent eyewitness and second-hand accounts of people who knew Jesus while He was alive, saw Him die, and then saw/spoke with/touched Him after He was resurrected. Naturally, a genuine, predicted resurrection tends to validate one's teaching about such things as God and death. Such was the birth of Christianity.

Now before you say it, yes I realize that this is a bit of a fantastic story. Yes, I realize that saying a guy died and then got up seems crazy. I really do. And yet I believe it happened. And in affirming this, I stand on a long tradition of sincere, reasonable, honest people, many of them among the most brilliant minds in history. The least the skeptic could do is give us the benefit of the doubt and listen to our reasons for believing such a tale. We do have reasons.

Next time, we'll dive into them.

* Or 'CE' if you're into the somewhat politically correct time delineations being used these days. However, the dates themselves are still based on the life of Christ, and since it is after all Him we are talking about, I say we go old-school and use 'AD.'

The Teleological Argument (Part 2)

2010-09-02T21:07:00.000-05:00

The argument again:

(1) The fine-tuning of the universe is either due to physical necessity, chance, or design.

(2) It is not due to physical necessity or chance.

____________

(3) The fine-tuning of the universe is due to design.

Last time we discussed briefly what fine-tuning is. We will not even deal with those who deny its existence (I know of no one who actually does this, but I'm sure they're out there somewhere). It is a fact that if any of the cosmological constants were changed even the smallest bit, life as we know it would be impossible. In fact, the universe likely would not have formed at all. This is fine-tuning. That said, let's deal with the premises.

Premise (1) should be relatively uncontroversial. At least, I can't think of any other options. Can you?

Premise (2), then, is where the crux of the argument lies. In order to avoid the conclusion of design, many have asserted alternative explanations of the universe's evident fine-tuning. They fall rather nicely into the categories of physical necessity and chance. We'll tackle them one by one.

The first option, if you can call it that, says that the universe is the way it is necessarily. Consequently, the uncanny precision of the cosmological constants need not be a concern, because they could not have been otherwise.

I don't know about you, but to me this smacks of nonsense. Indeed, it reminds a little of the 'explanation' atheists sometimes give for the existence of objective moral values. The theist asks, "Why should the cosmological constants be so absurdly fine-tuned?" The atheist responds, "By necessity." How is this any different from just saying, "Because"...?

Besides, isn't this just obviously false anyway? Think about what's really being suggested here. When we say that the universe exists the way it does necessarily, we are saying that it could not have been otherwise. That is, if we could wind the clock back to any point in the past and start it again, things would turn out exactly the same way the second time. Every snowflake. Every weather change. Every decision. Everything. But it sure seems like I could have decided not to eat way too much pizza for lunch today. Doesn't it?

Similarly, there is no obvious reason to assume that the constants themselves could not have been different. Especially considering the chaotic randomness that would have been the beginning of the universe on such a view.

The second option offered is simply chance. Yes, the odds are astronomically (pun intended) against it. But it's like the lottery...somebody's gotta win. We just happen to be that lucky universe. Right?

Well...no.

This response is often given in a slightly more sophisticated form and called the 'Anthropic Principle.' Basically, the principle states that we can only observe things that are compatible with our existence. In other words, we should not be surprised to find that the cosmological constants are fine-tuned for human life, since if they weren't we wouldn't be around to know about it. Clever, huh?

But does it work? John Leslie provides us with a nice analogy: suppose you were sentenced to die by firing squad. Suppose further that your executioner is a bit overzealous and provides a squad of one hundred trained marksmen. You are, in good execution style, blindfolded, but naturally you are listening intently. Suddenly, you hear the loud, nearly simultaneous clap of all one hundred rifles. And then...you're still there...listening to the silence. Now, put in this scenario, one could reason as follows: "Well certainly I should not be surprised at the fact of my continued existence. After all, the only worlds in which I could observe that I exist are those where I do in fact exist. Nothing peculiar here."

But of course no one would reason this way. Of course you should be surprised. One hundred marksmen missed! All of them! You ought to wonder about this!

Similarly, the fact that we must live in a universe tuned for our existence in order to observe that it is tuned for our existence does nothing to eliminate our surprise when we find just how unlikely this is. As astronomer Fred Hoyle put it, it sure seems like someone has "monkeyed with physics."

Recognizing this, skeptical physicists have begun to conjoin the Anthropic Principle with various multiverse theories. Put simply, these assume that our universe is only one of a potentially infinite number of actual universes. If this were true, it would explain the unbelievable odds against our universe being finely tuned for life, since if there are an infinite number of universes, then there are going to be some with life (actually, there will be an infinite number of them, but that's outside the scope of this post).

A full discussion of multiverse theories and so-called Many Worlds Hypotheses is far too detailed to cover here (you can bring it up in the comments if you want). I'll just say that there's no evidence for these kinds of claims whatsoever. None. It's not even clear whether there could be, in principle. The fact that physicists have resorted to seriously entertaining such things is a clear indication, I think, of the power of the teleological argument.

Next time, we'll dive into what is in my opinion the strongest argument for Christian theism: the life and work of Jesus Christ.

The Teleological Argument (Part 1)

2010-08-29T16:37:00.000-05:00

The teleological argument for God is based on the idea that the natural order of things in the universe points to a Designer that stands outside of it (the Greek telos means roughly 'end' or 'purpose'). Of the many arguments for God's existence, this one has gotten a bit of a bad rap lately.

Usually associated with guys like William Paley--you may recall his (in)famous 'watchmaker' analogy--the general conception among educated folk these days is that since Darwin, there is no need for such outdated ideas about design.

I beg to differ.

In fact, it seems that the more we learn about our universe--particularly its beginning--the more obviously and readily the inference to design presents itself.

Without further ado, the argument:

(1) The fine-tuning of the universe is either due to physical necessity, chance, or design.

(2) It is not due to physical necessity or chance.

___________

(3) The fine-tuning of the universe is due to design.

And of course if design, then a designer.

In the next post, we'll examine the two premises in more detail, but here I want to get clear on what is meant by 'fine-tuning.' *

If you express the laws of nature mathematically, they contain what are called 'constants.' Basically, these are values that are not themselves determined by the laws; they just are the values they are. For example, in Einstein's famous E = mc², the constant 'c' is the speed of light.

Well it turns out that in order for the universe to permit life at all (much less life at the advanced scale we see), the values of the various cosmological constants must fall within an extraordinarily small range of possible values. Further, there are quite a few of these constants, and they all have to obtain independently, or else no life. This means that in order to calculate the probability of our universe developing complex life, we have to take the already ridiculously unlikely odds of each constant and then multiply them.

These odds are really impossible to illustrate accurately, so I won't even try. Just picture as many blue marbles as there are atoms in the universe and one red one. Now imagine the odds of you picking out the one red marble while blindfolded. If you can picture this, then you still aren't really even close to the kind of odds we're talking about with the constants. Not close at all.

And yet, there they are. And here we are to talk about it. Next time, we'll consider the options that have been offered to explain this other than design.

* For a more detailed explanation of this, see the Featured Video on the lower right side of the page. If you're viewing this in your email inbox, click here to see the video. Also, you may view it full-screen by clicking the icon in the lower right corner of the video. :)

The Moral Argument (Part 3) - Euthyphro's Dilemma

2010-07-30T15:39:00.000-05:00

One issue commonly raised in discussions of the moral argument is what is known in philosophy as Euthyphro's Dilemma (see comments on Part 1).

The name (and the argument) originated, as so many do, with Plato. In his Euthyphro dialogue, the characters Socrates and Euthyphro have the following exchange:

Euthyphro: Yes, I should say that what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious.

Socrates: Ought we to enquire into the truth of this, Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on our own authority and that of others? What do you say?

Euthyphro: We should enquire; and I believe that the statement will stand the test of enquiry.

Socrates: We shall know better, my good friend, in a little while. The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.

This problem has been leveled against proponents of theistic moral theories ever since.

"Are actions moral because God commands them," they ask, "or does God command them because they are moral?"

This is a dilemma because if the theist takes the first option (known roughly as 'Divine Command Theory'), then it seems like what we consider 'moral' is rather arbitrary. God could have, on this view, just as easily chosen to make lying good and truth-telling bad. And then that would be the moral standard. But surely that can't be right.

But if we take the second option, then it seems like what is 'good' and 'moral' is somehow external to God, so that to say that God is good is simply to say that He conforms to some higher standard of goodness, not much different from the way humanity does.

The problem here is obvious. Neither option accords well with traditional Christian belief. If we go with the first horn, morality is arbitrary; if the second, it's supreme and God is subject.*

Either way, God is no longer the standard of moral perfection as Christians have taught. And yet, this is a dilemma, which means these are the only two options. Aren't they?

In short, no.

There is a third, and it is in fact the one that best fits what Christianity has traditionally believed. Morality is neither arbitrary nor external to God, but rather it is grounded in God's nature. That is, moral perfection is not something He chooses (arbitrarily or not); it is essential to His very being.

When God issues commands, they are necessarily in agreement with His nature and therefore good. And when we say that something is either morally praiseworthy or objectionable, what we mean (whether we realize it or not) is just that it either corresponds with God's nature or it doesn't, respectively.

So it turns out that for the Christian, Socrates' dilemma is a false one. It doesn't affect the traditional view of God or morality, and so the Christian need not be bothered by it.

Next time, teleology!

* Options in dilemmas are often called 'horns.'

The Moral Argument (Part 2)

2010-07-23T14:52:00.000-05:00

So what can the atheist do with premise (1): "If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist"?

Last time I mentioned that in order to refute (1), the atheist must either deny that objective moral values exist (which we discussed), or else admit their existence but attempt to explain them apart from God. This is in fact the line taken by most non-theistic philosophers at this point (which is testimony itself of the inadequacy of relativism).

So how can objective moral values exist if God doesn't? I said that we'd examine the best of their attempts to answer this question. Well here it is. Are you ready?

They just do.

...

I'm not kidding.

Once they've admitted that moral values are objective (i.e. independent of human perception)--which most will readily do at this point--if you push them to explain the existence of these values, the best atheist philosophers in the world will literally just assert them with no justification.

Now, to be fair, they'll likely spice it up a bit. They'll use fancy words like 'necessary supervenience of moral properties on natural states' or some such language. But at the end of the day, it boils down to positing objective moral truths as brute fact, without explanation.

One attempt even asserts that maybe objective moral values literally exist as necessary metaphysical entities. If you know Plato, this should sound familiar because it's basically a handy modern version of his Theory of Forms. The problem is, nobody buys that. What does it even mean? How would the value 'Compassion' just exist? And even if it did, how could we relate to it? Further still, how could we get moral obligation from such a concept?

Is it just me or is it painfully obvious what's going on here? Some of the best ethicists in the world are willing to suspend otherwise sound judgment and assent to the explanation "That's just the way it is." And this from some of the same people who would criticize Christians for responding to problems this way.

Why do this? Could it be to avoid a conclusion with consequences?

I'll let you decide.

The Moral Argument (Part 1)

2010-07-19T20:56:00.001-05:00

Terribly sorry for the time since the last post. I took a hiatus of sorts. Without further ado...

The next argument in our series is the moral argument. It reasons from the universal, objective nature of morality (the law) to the existence of God (the lawgiver).

A simple version can be sketched like so:

(1) If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.

(2) Objective moral values do exist.

_________________

(3) God exists.

By 'objective moral values,' we mean moral truths that exist independently of humanity. That is, even if there were no one around to know them, they would still be true.

The form of this argument is what philosophers call modus tollens or 'denying the consequent.' That's because it works by positing a conditional (if-then statement) and then denying its consequent (the 'then' portion of the statement). The result is the denial of the antecedent (the 'if' portion) of the conditional, and it is always valid.

So now that we're clear on the logic, what about the premises? Unfortunately, neither is without controversy. A denial of (1) leaves the atheist with two options: he can either deny that objective moral values exist, OR he must provide a better explanation for their existence than God. And this is notoriously difficult to do. But some attempts have been made, and I will turn to the best of them in the next post.

Denying (2) leaves us with some form of ethical relativism. Most of you have probably heard of the evils of relativism (it seems to be something of a favorite among apologists to pick on), so I won't spend much time on it here. I believe (hope) it is declining in popularity, but there are still enough folks out there who think it's a valid option (mostly first or second year undergrads in the softer disciplines) to make it worth mentioning.

Ethical relativism is basically the view that moral values may differ from person to person or maybe culture to culture. On this view, since they depend on human perspective for their truth, these values are not objective. This idea is often expressed in such popular catch phrases as "Well that may be true for you, but not for me..." There are many problems with this position, not least among them the fact that it is logically unaffirmable. This means that in order for the relativist to assert her position, she has to simultaneously contradict it (e.g. "It is true [objectively] that truth is not objective." or "It is immoral [objectively] to push your moral values onto others.") Not to mention the logical consequences of such a view (all those fun Hitler analogies come to mind).

Fortunately most academics, especially those in the most relevant disciplines--ethics and philosophy--realize that this view is nonsense. Consequently, and contrary to popular opinion, there are very few serious relativists in academia. In fact, it has become something of a derogatory label, along the lines of 'nihilist' or '4-dimensionalist.' * Besides, we all actually believe that objective moral values really do exist, or at least we live as though they do. If you don't believe me, try stealing something from someone (anyone you like) and then explaining to them that your set of moral values is different from theirs. Let me know how it goes.

One more thing should be made clear here. What this argument is NOT saying is that people who don't believe in God cannot be moral. That's nonsense. Of course they can. What the argument IS saying is that without God, morality is neither objective nor motivating (more on that later). Objectively moral behavior doesn't require belief in God--it requires God.

* Occupational humor. Sorry.

The Ontological Argument (Part 2)

2010-06-01T11:01:00.001-05:00

So last time I laid out St. Anselm's argument for God and gave a little history of it. I harbor no delusions that any of you printed it off and agonized over it for hours, but I do hope that at least some of you took a little time to try and understand the basic idea. This post will assume that you have, so if you haven't, perhaps another look wouldn't hurt.

Here I just want to deal with what I take to be the two most important objections that have been offered against the argument and then sketch briefly what use the argument itself may have for the thinking Christian (or the thinking non-believer for that matter).

The first and maybe most popular objection came very early on from a guy name Gaunilo, a contemporary of Anselm. Without going into too much detail, Gaunilo offered a now-famous 'perfect island' analogy. Applying Anselm's own logic, he said, we could quite easily construct 'proofs' for things like perfect islands, perfect beaches, perfect sunsets, etc. This is because, according to Anselm, the very idea of 'perfection' will always entail actual existence. But of course none of these things really exists. So, by counter-example, neither must Anselm's God.

The problem with this objection is fairly obvious upon reflection. It is a simple misunderstanding of Anselm's first premise, which defines God as 'that than which nothing greater can be conceived.' This is not limited to islands or beaches or sunsets, but rather includes all conceivable beings. Without this clarification, the argument does indeed fail.

But Anselm was very clear from the beginning what we are talking about here: not everyday, contingent beings but the Christian God--the necessary ground of all being itself. Indeed, this is what makes the argument work. So Anselm's response here could be something like, "Well of course a perfect island doesn't actually exist! Who would ever think of such a thing? Now back to my argument..."

The second objection comes from Immanuel Kant and is largely regarded as the most important to date. Unfortunately, exactly what Kant had in mind with his objection is not entirely clear, but it has classically been summed up in the phrase "existence is not a predicate."

A 'predicate' in this sense is basically 'what is being said about the subject,' in this case, God. Presumably, by this Kant meant something like 'the idea of something actually existing does not really say anything about that thing.' Think of it this way: picture a chair in your mind and then imagine that someone were able to make an exhaustive list of all of the features--all the predicates--of that chair. Every possible description of it would be on the list. Kant's claim seems to be that adding to the list the fact that the chair actually exists would not be saying anything of substance. It wouldn't add anything to the description we already have.

Again, without going into too much detail, I just think Kant was wrong. I think existence (at the very least necessary existence--the kind we're talking about with God) is a predicate. And fairly obviously so. To paraphrase one of my professors, would you rather have the candy bar in your head or the one in your hand? And if the latter, then existence must add something to the description of the candy bar, mustn't it?

So much for the two best objections. On to the usefulness of the argument.

Obviously, this is not something one should throw out in most conversations, especially those of an evangelistic nature. You'd probably just end up sounding arrogant and confusing your conversation partner. This is because arguments like this one, even if they're sound (which I believe this one is), are hardly ever persuasive. Many people who recognize its power still feel tricked somehow by the end of it.

However, I do believe the argument serves an important purpose. At the very least I think it shows that belief in God not irrational. In fact, going on this argument alone, it is at least as rational as unbelief. And when we supplement it with the other arguments for God we are discussing, we can make a persuasive case indeed.

So while I would probably not use the ontological argument in normal conversation, I do consider it to be sort-of an a priori (known apart from experience) playing field-leveler when it comes to the question of God's existence.

Next time, the moral argument. Stay tuned.

* Be sure to check out Professor John Lennox discussing the self-defeating nature of naturalism and the evidential basis of Christianity in the new Featured Video down on the right. It's only about 7 1/2 minutes long, and well worth it.

The Ontological Argument (Part 1)

2010-05-21T13:09:00.003-05:00

The ontological argument is the earliest and likely most famous (infamous?) argument for God's existence. It was originally formulated in the 11th century by Anselm of Canterbury (later Archbishop and still later Saint).

Like Leibniz, who we discussed before, Anselm was wicked smart. But he was much less concerned with developing a complete philosophy of the world. Rather, he was mainly interested in developing his love for God (and helping his students to do the same) through the exercise of his reason and intellect. He called this "faith seeking understanding."

In fact, maybe the coolest aspect of the ontological argument is that it appears in the middle of the Proslogion, which Anselm wrote as a prayer.

The term 'ontological' was of course not used by Anselm himself, but was applied to it much later. In philosophical discourse, 'ontology' means basically the study of being as such (the root onto- means 'being'). To explain this, I'll borrow an illustration from one of my professors: A biologist's studies might at some point take him to a volcanic area to study some form of life that thrives in that environment. But the biologist does not study the volcano itself. This, rather, is the field of the volcanologist. The biologist studies the volcano for the organisms that live on it. The volcanologist studies the volcano insofar as it is a volcano.

Similarly, ontology is the study of 'being qua being,' or being insofar as it is being. This name has been applied to various arguments for God's existence, beginning with Anselm's, because these arguments all establish God's (necessary) existence from His very being, or the very concept of God itself. In essence (and far too simply), because we have a concept of God, He must actually exist.

Think I've pulled one over on you? Read on.

The argument:

(1) God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. (Definition)

(2) God exists in the understanding but not in reality. (reductio assumption)

(3) Existence in reality is greater than existence in the understanding alone. (Premise)

(4) God's existence in reality is conceivable. (Premise)

(5) If God did exist in reality, then He would be greater than He is. [from (2) and (3)]

(6) It is conceivable that there is a being greater than God is. [from (4) and (5)]

(7) It is conceivable that there be a being greater than the being than which nothing greater can be conceived. [from (1) and (6)]

______________

(8) It is false that God exists in the understanding but not in reality. [from (2) through (7)]

_____________________

(9) God exists in reality. *

Fun, huh?

So this argument works by way of what logicians call a reductio ad absurdum, which means that we assume a controversial premise (in this case, premise 2), and then we draw a contradiction from that premise. Since contradictions cannot be true, we then know that the premise in question must be false.

Anselm's controversial premise is that it is possible for God to exist only in our minds but not in reality. But if we understand God to be the greatest conceivable being (which we all intuitively do), then this is impossible, because it would be greater for him to also exist in reality. So, on pain of contradiction, God must exist in reality.

And all this because we have a (relatively) clear idea of God. Like I said, I love this argument.

Confused? That's alright; it isn't easy. I'll let it simmer with you for a while, and next time we'll deal with some of the major objections that have been given and I'll share what I think is the usefulness of the argument.

* This is roughly Alvin Plantinga's formulation.

Silly Things To Say..."Who made God?" *

2010-05-12T11:40:00.003-05:00

So before I start this post, I'd just like to extend a sincere thanks to the blog Apologetics 315 for adding blogGNOSIS to their notable Christian Apologetics Blog Directory. That can be found here.

So if any of you have read Richard Dawkins' God Delusion or even heard him speak, you are likely to have heard something along the lines of "But cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God just don't work because eventually you still have to answer the question 'Who made God?'"

This question has been forcefully thrown at the theist since long before Dawkins conceived of it, and unfortunately for him, it has been answered for just as long.

Given that we are in the middle of discussing the various arguments for God's existence, I figured it might be useful to take a break and discuss this frequent objection to many of them.

The problem is that the question doesn't make any sense.

Now before you object, "It makes perfect sense to me..." let me explain.

The Christian position is that God is self-sufficient in every way. What arguments for God seek to show, in fact, is that He is in fact a necessary being. For example, the Kalam argument that we covered concludes that there must be a personal cause of the universe. Not that there might be one.

And further, part of the way it shows this is by showing that what philosophers call an 'infinite regress' is impossible. The chain, whether it be of causes or explanations, has got to stop somewhere. What the theist does is simply say, "Wherever it stops, that is God."

So when someone asks "Yes, but who made God?" what they're really saying is something like "Who caused the uncaused Cause?" or maybe "What explains the unexplainable?" When phrased this way, the error becomes clear.

The question also takes a couple other forms. For example, you may have heard someone say something like "But what was there before God made the universe?" or "What did God do for the eternity before creation?"

These, too, are simple misunderstandings of the Christian claim, and of modern science. Scripture teaches that God is an eternal Spirit and that He exists as a Trinity. While this concept is a post for another time, it is worth noting here that it serves to solve the problem of what God 'did' 'before' creation. He existed in communion with Himself--totally self-sufficiently.

Also, we know from modern cosmology that time and space itself began at the Big Bang along with everything else. So to ask what God did 'before' creation makes no sense. There was no 'before' in a temporal sense.

Also, Dawkins' own form of the question involves complexity more than causation or explanation. His argument is basically that regardless of how complex the early universe must have been, whatever caused it must have been at least as complex, and therefore demanding its own explanation.

This sounds clever until one thinks about it a little more closely. There is nothing in Scripture to suggest that God must be complex in His nature, and in fact the church fathers (anticipating such an objection) nearly always maintained that He wasn't. Also, it is not at all clear why a cause must be of equal or greater complexity than its effect. And besides, we have already shown that the only type of explanation that makes sense for the universe is some sort of supremely intelligent mind. And this mind, if identified with God, needs no explanation.

God is unique in this respect. He is the only thing that is completely self-contained. He is Himself the ground of all goodness, morality, reason, life, and being. And He is necessarily so. To ask why He is is simply to misunderstand the point. It is literally a nonsensical question.

This will hopefully become more clear when we consider the next argument in our series: the ontological argument. It is my personal favorite and I love to talk about it, so bring your thinking caps. Stay tuned...

* If you were expecting Part 2 of the Leibnizian Cosmological argument for God, I apologize. It occurred to me after the first one that any real discussion of PSR is just too much for this blog. However, if you're really interested (and it would make me feel very good if you were), feel free to leave a comment to that effect on Part 1. Also, the picture I used is of course the standard Facebook 'no image' indicator. I hope I haven't broken any copyright laws. Sorry Facebook.

** Be sure to check out the new video in the 'Featured Video' section, where several very smart scientists discuss the fine-tuning of the universe.

The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument (Part 1)

2010-05-01T00:05:00.002-05:00

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a 17th century German philosopher and mathematician, and he is responsible for the next argument for God's existence that we will deal with.

Leibniz was crazy. Crazy smart. But also just crazy. (That's him sportin' the awesome wig to the right...)

Many do not realize that he independently discovered infinitesimal calculus around the same time as Isaac Newton. Yep. He just figured it out. In fact, he and Newton had a notoriously rocky relationship, each accusing the other of plagiarism. Unfortunately for Leibniz, Newton apparently had a few more influential friends, and so aside from a few mathematical notations, Leibniz is remembered these days mostly for his philosophical work.

Fortunately for us, Leibniz' argument for the existence of God can stand independently from the rest of his philosophy. This is good because it isn't clear whether anyone in the world really fully understands his philosophy. Like I said, crazy.

So without further ado, the argument:

(1) Anything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in its own nature or in an external cause.

(2) If the universe has an explanation of its existence, then that explanation is God.

(3) The universe exists.

__________

(4) The universe has an explanation of its existence. (From 1 & 3)

____________________

(5) The explanation of the existence of the universe is God. (From 2 & 4)

This argument differs from the Kalam is a couple significant ways. First, it does not rely on causal relations, but rather explanatory ones. And second, it does not need the impossibility of an infinite series of events to make its case. In other words, it would work just as well even if the universe were eternal. This makes sense, since in Leibniz' day we didn't have the compelling cosmological evidence for the beginning of the universe that we discussed in the last post.

For the fans of logic out there, it is clear that the argument is valid (for the others, that just means there's no mistake in how it is formulated). The question then is whether the premises are true. Hopefully, no one reading this doubts premise (3). The first two are a bit more controversial though.

I have already dealt with (2) in a previous post. As I showed there, once we consider what it really means to be the cause of the universe, it is not much of a jump to the theistic God. The same holds for an explanation of the existence of the universe (see especially the second argument I offered for a personal cause in that post).

I do want to point out one more interesting thing about (2): it is logically equivalent to a common atheistic response to the Leibnizian argument. When two statements are logically equivalent, it means that if one is true, so is the other, and vice versa. A popular response is that if atheism is true, then the universe doesn't have an explanation for its existence; it just exists. But in affirming this, the objector is also affirming the opposite of this claim, which is just premise (2). Thus, it seems that even the atheist tends to think that (2) is intuitively obvious. I wonder how many of them realize this...

What about premise (1)? This one, too, seems obvious to most honest people, regardless of their beliefs about God. It's rather difficult to imagine something existing totally inexplicably and our being okay with it. William Lane Craig offers a good illustration of this: Imagine that you and a friend are hiking in the forest when you come across a large translucent ball lying on the ground. You ask why it is there, and your friend simply replies, "What do you mean why is it there? There is no explanation. It's just there." Would you be satisfied with this answer? Of course not. And to make the analogy more interesting, the size of the ball has no affect whatsoever on the inadequacy of the response. We can imagine it being any size--even as large as the universe itself--and its existence still requires an explanation.

Premise (1) is a form of what has come to be called, since Leibniz, the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). There have been whole books devoted to this principle (I know; I read one about a year ago). The discussions involved are very dense and technical, so I won't go into too much detail here. I will say that in the end though, I think that everyone's initial intuition about PSR is probably right.

I'll give some reasons for this and discuss a few of the major objections to the principle in the next post.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument (Part 2)

2010-04-22T10:38:00.002-05:00

For convenience, the argument again:

(1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

(2) The universe began to exist.

__________

(3) The universe has a cause.

Today I want to discuss the premises of the argument. Of course, I cannot cover in great detail all the issues involved, but I do want to mention the most important points.

The first premise should be pretty much self-evident to most. Intuition and accumulated life experience tell us that things don't just pop into existence totally uncaused. Believe it or not though, there have been several objections to this premise.

Because of their generally complex and abstract nature, however, I will not cover these objections here. If you are curious, feel free to leave a comment about it and I'll be glad to discuss it there.

The second premise, on the other hand, requires some support. Especially since until very recently (the last sixty years or so) the prevailing view, even among physicists, was that the universe was eternal.

There are a couple of ways to approach this premise: philosophically and scientifically.

Philosophy: There is a very simple philosophical argument that shows, fairly convincingly I think, that the universe is not eternal. Think about it: if it were eternal, then it would contain an infinite series of past events. But it is impossible to traverse an infinite series, so it seems that we could never have arrived at the present moment. Therefore, the universe cannot have an infinite past.

Here's another. An actual infinite is impossible. If the universe were eternal, then it would be an example of an actual infinite. Therefore, it can't be eternal.

But how do we know an actual infinite is impossible? In short, David Hilbert.

Hilbert was a German mathematician responsible for a very interesting (and mind bending) thought experiment. He asks us to imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms. Once we have this in our heads, imagine that an infinite number of guests arrive to check in, so that the hotel is now full. But then infinitely more guests arrive, also wanting a room, and so the proprietor of the hotel simply moves every guest in room n to room 2n, thereby freeing up an infinite number of rooms. This could obviously continue indefinitely.

The thought experiment actually gets much more complex than this, but to avoid confusion, let's just say that such a hotel results in clear absurdities (even contradiction) and so is obviously impossible in the real world. It is merely an abstraction meant to help us understand infinite sets. Even Hilbert himself said, "...the infinite is nowhere to be found in reality." ¹

But what about the scientific evidence? What has modern cosmology shown us about the beginning of the universe?

A whole lot. In fact, far more than I can even mention here. Suffice it to say that nearly every serious scientist that studies these things today is convinced that the universe had a beginning a finite time ago. I'll give two brief examples.

In 1964, physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally found the straw that broke the proverbial back of the eternal universe idea. After building a new antenna, they noticed a radio noise that was not accounted for, a noise that would later come to be known as 'cosmic microwave background radiation.' It's basically radiation left over from the initial explosion of the universe, and we find it no matter where in the universe we look. Penzias and Wilson were later awarded the Nobel prize for this finding.

Secondly, physicists predicted that this background radiation, though seemingly constant across the universe, ought to contain slight fluctuations since in order for galaxies to form, the density of the very early universe (what we're looking at with this background radiation) would need to vary in places. And sure enough, upon closer examination, scientists found very small fluctuations in this radiation corresponding to galaxy formation. They also won a Nobel prize.

And I haven't even mentioned such important and persuasive topics as the expansion of the universe, redshift, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, or Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. No other theory even comes close to the Big Bang in explaining all these things.

The universe had a beginning. The logical and inescapable conclusion, then, is that it also had a Cause.

¹ From "On the Infinite" in Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. by Benacerraf and Putnam.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument (Part 1)

2010-04-16T09:23:00.001-05:00

So far, most of the posts of this blog have been devoted to responding to objections and/or clarifying often misunderstood points regarding Christian theism. It recently occurred to me that I have not really offered any positive argument for why I believe Christianity is in fact true.

In the next several posts, I want to remedy that.

Before I get started, I should make a couple important points. First, there are far more arguments for the reasonableness of Christianity than I am interested in covering here. I will be targeting only a few that I consider the strongest or most useful.

Second, there are various formulations of all of the arguments I will be presenting, and some are better than others. I will do my best to present each one fairly and in its (so far as I can tell) strongest form.

Third, each of these arguments, without exception, involves extremely complex discussions of often very dense material, and all of the premises are not always uncontroversial. Again, I will do my best to make the material both accessible and fair.

And lastly, each of these arguments is intended to show something a little different. None of them are intended to provide absolutely irrefutable proof of the truth of Christian theism. But taken together, I do believe that they make a cogent case that Christian theism is on the whole more reasonable than its alternatives.

Alright, enough clarifying. Let's get started!

The first argument I want to cover is the Kalam Cosmological Argument. If you read my other post where I discussed arguments for God, then you know that a cosmological argument is one that argues from some contingency in the world back to God. Well in this particular version, the contingency involved is the beginning of the universe itself.

The argument can be formulated very simply as follows:

(1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

(2) The universe began to exist.

__________

(3) The universe has a cause. ¹

Now before you scream it at your screen, I know that a mere cause of the universe is not necessarily the same as the Christian God. But really, it doesn't take much to get there.

Let's consider it for a moment. Any cause of the universe must obviously stand outside spacetime. But what is there that is immaterial that could conceivably act as a causal agent? Well, in the philosophical history of such things, there are really only two contenders: mind and abstract objects. But we know that abstract objects (things like numbers, geometrical figures, etc.) do not possess causal power. That leaves some sort of unembodied mind as the only reasonable candidate.

Or look at it this way: we generally explain phenomena in one of two ways. There are scientific explanations and personal explanations. Scientific explanations utilize initial conditions and sets of laws to explain phenomena, whereas personal explanations utilize the will of a person.

For example, if you walk into a room where I am and inquire "Why is it so hot in here?" I can offer you a couple different explanations. I could give you a long and detailed account having to do with the speed at which the particles in the room are vibrating and how the neurons in your body are receiving this information and then delivering it in highly complex ways to your brain which then interprets this information as the feeling of heat. OR I could just say that it's hot because I turned up the thermostat and that you shouldn't be so warm-natured.

In the first instance, I am giving you a scientific explanation which evaluates the initial conditions (the state of the particles in the room) and the laws of nature (which govern the rest of the process) to help you understand why you are hot. In the second case, I am offering a personal explanation which deals not with physical processes at all but with my own volition.

What is the relevance of this example, you ask? Simply this: There were no initial conditions at the beginning of the universe. The Big Bang proceeded out of what physicists call a singularity. There was nothing. At all. Even what we now call 'laws' had not even been established yet. So clearly, a scientific explanation of the origin of the universe is not possible. This leaves us with only a personal explanation. There was a will involved.

There is yet a third way to tell that this cause of the universe was personal. But I'll warn you, this one is a bit more difficult to grasp. If the cause was impersonal, then we would basically be left with some sort of immaterial conditions that would facilitate the effect (i.e. the universe). In philosopher's lingo, these conditions would have to be both necessary and sufficient and would exist timelessly. Here's the problem with that: if necessary and sufficient causes exist timelessly, then so do their effects. This would entail that the universe is eternal, and we know it isn't (more on this in the next post). So, the only way for a cause to exist and its effect not exist is if the cause has free will. That is, it must be a person.

So just with this simple three-step argument, we already have an immaterial, eternal, personal cause who possesses free will. Clearly this is easily interpreted by any honest person as what we have always known as God. And we have not even considered other arguments which make more of this being's attributes clear. But we will.

Next time, we'll flesh out the premises of the kalam argument. This should be fun.

¹ This formulation (and much of the following discussion) is due to William Lane Craig. The line in the argument denotes "therefore."

Silly Things To Say..."You can't argue anyone into the faith."

2010-04-09T11:27:00.002-05:00

"It is often said that you can't argue people into faith. Well, I don't want to dispute that statement, but I do want to deprecate the idea that it is something worth saying. What can you argue people into?" ¹

Generally, I think people have good intentions when they point out that people do not convert based on argument. In fact, like a lot of silly statements, there is likely a grain of truth here.

It's probably a safe bet that most Christians (or Muslims or Mormons or Hindus or whatever) do not believe what they do solely because somewhere along the way an argument convinced them. In fact, most of them probably aren't even aware that such arguments can be made.

However, there are about three things here that are rarely considered when people say, "You can't argue people into the Kingdom."

First, it just isn't true. There have been many people for whom evidence and intellectual argument played an integral part in their conversion. Sometimes it was even the deciding factor. I won't give a list here, but a couple of the most influential in recent decades have been apologists Lee Strobel and C.S. Lewis himself. Strobel has actually said that he has lost count of how many people have told him that they have come to faith after reading his apologetics material. And Lewis describes his own conversion as a reluctant one, purely intellectual at first.

Also, the fact that argument may not be the deciding role in most conversions does not imply that argument is therefore unimportant. I'll be honest. Generally, I believe what scientists tell me about the world. I believe that the earth spins at seemingly dizzying speeds, all the while hurtling through ice-cold space at an unbelievable pace around a gigantic ball of fire...while I sit here comfortably typing this post.

Mostly, I don't believe this because of any arguments I've seen. In fact, odds are good that I wouldn't understand much of the math involved in such arguments if they were presented to me. No, I believe it because I have it on what I consider to be good authority. But of course, this doesn't mean that the arguments involved don't matter. They matter greatly. And if physicists ever found better arguments that led them to different conclusions about the world, my beliefs would probably change as a result.

Second, even if it were true that people couldn't be argued into belief, this would not be peculiar to Christianity. Yet this is the only context in which I have heard it used. As van Inwagen points out in the essay quoted above (which I highly recommend, by the way), people do not go around claiming that you can't argue people into believing Plato's account of Socrates or some other such thing, though this would probably be equally true. "The fact that people go about saying that you can't argue people into faith," he says, "and saying this as if it were an intelligent thing to say, is simply one more example of ... double standard."

Thirdly, if argument is the wrong way to approach conversion, then someone should have told the apostles. From the hall of Tyrannus ² to confronting the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers on Mars Hill, ³ Paul used argument in his evangelism all the time. In his address to the Jews at Pentecost, Peter reasoned with them about Jesus' miracles and resurrection. ⁴

Eventually, what it all comes down to is what means God chooses to use to bring people to Him. Everybody is in a unique place in their relationship to God, and what works for some will not necessarily work for others.

The person who says that argument can't bring people to faith is committed to saying either that God cannot use argument in this way if He so chooses, or that He always chooses not to.

And that's just silly.

* Be sure to check out John Lennox discussing the 'Evils of Christendom' in the Featured Video section.

¹ Peter van Inwagen. "Quam Dilecta." God and the Philosophers, 46-47.

² Acts 19:8-10

³ Acts 17:16-34

⁴ Acts 2:22-24

The Bigotry of Religious Pluralism

2010-04-02T10:12:00.003-05:00

The title of this post probably offended some of you. If not, then I'm sure the image did the trick. The combination of the two is a sure bet.

Before I get started let me just say that offense is honestly not my intent. But sometimes shock value can be the best way to get people to open up enough in their beliefs to consider another point of view or at least to critically examine their own.

Recently I had a conversation with someone who was a convinced religious pluralist. ¹ "There is one truth," he told me, "and all religions have their own way of getting to it."

Bigot is a really harsh word. It's also a good one, in that it expresses a very specific characteristic of a given person. But like many good words (e.g. 'tolerance'), it has been abused to the point that its original meaning has been largely lost in favor of a watered-down, more popular definition. Bigot used to mean someone who is so convinced of her own opinions that she refuses to even consider contrary views. However, the popular usage now denotes something closer to someone who holds an exclusive position at all, regardless of her views of other opinions.

Of course, this new definition effectively neuters the word since everyone maintains an exclusive position about something. But we don't want to say that everyone is a bigot.

So if mere exclusivity is not enough to amount to bigotry, then what makes the difference? Well, according to the old definition it's a person's attitude toward differing opinions. Does the person take them seriously? Does he accept them on their own terms, consider their merits honestly, and evaluate them based on their strongest representation? Or does he simply reject them outright, or else reduce them to some weaker, more palatable form that allows him to keep his own view intact?

My point is this: in order to be a thorough religious pluralist, one must largely ignore most of the essential claims of most religions, or else re-interpret them into some vague, watered-down version that would be nearly unrecognizable to genuine adherents of the religion. And this requires bigotry.

So how does my friend fare here? Can all, or even most, religions really be different paths to the same truth? Only if one is willing to maintain a contradiction. ² This is because each religion has its own claims about what the truth actually is, or if there even is one. And usually, these claims contradict each other.

For example, Islam claims that one God exists, and that He is in every way one. Christianity claims that one God exists, but that He is a Trinity. Buddhism, so far as it can be adequately understood, requires no deity of any kind and would in fact be strongly opposed to the idea that the divine and the 'natural' are intrinsically separate. The only way that these three views of God can be integrated is to make them mean something other than what they were intended to mean. It amounts to saying that the billions of religious believers in the world are simply wrong about what they believe, and that the lone, objective observer (as though such a thing were even possible) is capable of interpreting the various religions correctly.

Christianity, on the other hand, has never shied away from other claims to truth. It has confronted them head on and has encouraged honest dialogue. It is not coincidence that many of the world's top universities were founded by Christians, and that a lot of them remain committed to a Christian worldview. We trust that the truth we have received is strong enough to withstand criticism and to prevail over competing views for any honest seeker.

It is not bigotry to think you are right. It is bigotry to think that everybody can be right. Let's get it straight.

¹ I will be using the term 'religious pluralist/ism' in this post in the somewhat popular sense of someone who believes that all religions are either equally valid or somehow compatible or paths to the same truth or some other variation of this idea. I do not intend it in any other sense.

² As it turned out, my friend seemed perfectly willing to do just this. This is utterly incomprehensible to me.

* You may have been expecting a post about Easter, but there are quite a few apologetics blogs out there and evidence-for-the-resurrection posts are not hard to find this time of year. As such, I'll just link to two of them. Enjoy.

Avoiding '-ism's'

2010-03-29T23:08:00.002-05:00

A large part of my Christian life, especially since starting college, has been focused on what 'camps' I fall into. It seems that ever since I realized that there was more than one perspective on most issues, I have been trying to figure out which ones were right, or more often, which ones fit best with what I already thought.

This happened in lots of areas.

Philosophy. Am I an empiricist, a rationalist, a monist, an idealist, a realist, a constructivist, a dualist, a materialist, a determinist, a compatibilist, a positivist, a verificationist, a foundationalist, a fallibilist, a perspectivalist, a platonist, a modern, a postmodern...the list is nearly endless.

Theology. Am I a Calvinist, an Arminian, a charismatic, a cessationist, a dispensationalist, a supersessionist, a fundamentalist, a presuppositionalist, a humanist, a kenoticist, an open theist, a satisfactionist, a substitutionist, a millenialist, a preterist, a literalist, an annihilationist, a universalist, a sacramentalist, an Augustinian, a Thomist, an egalitarian, a complementarian, and on and on ad nauseum.

I'll spare you the areas of ethics, Christian living, denominational disputes, history, politics, science, etc.

The point is this: I tried very hard for quite a while to see which 'ism's' were compatible with my Christian beliefs and my view of the world and which were not, and I took a fair amount of pride in deciding which one I was closest to, thereby adopting my new title and learning to defend my new position. Sometimes, it almost gave me a sense of belonging.

Looking back, this was a very foolish thing to do.

In attempting to 'take sides' on some debate or other, I often ended up either imposing the presuppositions of that particular view on the Scriptures and interpreting them accordingly or else missing what they had to say entirely.

If I am to be totally honest, this is still something that I struggle with. When asked about my position on some topic, I am still often tempted to respond with one or another of the above titles, and sometimes for convenience I still will. But this is something I have recently started trying to get away from. No matter how bad I might want to make it, Christianity is not an 'ism.' And it just refuses to fit easily into any pre-existing categories.

These categories existed in Jesus' day, too. Remember the Pharisees and Sadducees? They were divided, among other things, regarding their views of resurrection. And Jesus criticized both.

Now don't get me wrong, categories and titles can be useful. But when we try to fit Jesus and His teachings into them, we inevitably come up short somewhere.

Jesus did not come to give another competing interpretation of the truth. He claimed to be the Truth. As Christians, we have unique and respectable ways of answering life's questions and explaining the world. These are not just our best guesses. They are the truth. And there is no reason to prefer other titles over 'Christian' or to be ashamed of the answers Christianity gives. After all, we have them on good authority.

* The following is for technical blog stuff. You may ignore it. YT4T522P39BD

Why denominational affiliation is generally a good idea.

2010-03-23T00:46:00.002-05:00

How many Presbyterians does it take to change a light bulb?

None. Lights will go on and off at predestined times.

How many Fundamentalists does it take to change a light bulb?

Only one. Any more than that would be considered ecumenical.

How many Calvinists does it take to change a light bulb?

Calvinists do not change light bulbs. They simply read out the instructions and pray that the light bulb will decide to change itself.*

How many Arminians does it take to change a light bulb?

Only one, but the bulb must want to be changed.

How many Baptists does it take to change a light bulb?

CHANGE???

And my personal favorite (since I am):

How many Pentecostals/Charismatics does it take to change a light bulb?

Five. One to change the bulb and four to bind the spirit of darkness in the room.

Ahh, denominations. It seems you're either in one or you hate them, or sometimes both. I can't tell you how many times I have heard people--non-Christians and Christians alike--say something like, "There are just so many denominations out there..." and apparently intend it to be a criticism. To be fair, their point is probably something about how denominations are often formed (or at least changed) for seemingly the wrong reasons and how this creates unnecessary division within the Church. For the present, I'll grant this. What I want to discuss, however, is the fairly recent trend of 'non-denominationalism' and the idea that it somehow solves the above problems while being true (indeed, truer) to the historic Christian faith. ¹

Once in a conversation with a thoughtful Catholic friend of mine, I asked him which of the Protestant denominations he had the least respect for. His answer surprised me. Without really having to think about it he said, "Non-denominationalism."

I'll admit that I didn't really understand what he meant at the time, but the more I have thought about it, the more I think he was probably right. Now, please don't misunderstand: there are many very effective non-denominational churches. And if you happen to attend one of those, then I do not think you are in any way an inferior Christian (or even an inferior Protestant), nor do I have little respect for you. Non-denominationalism as an idea, however, doesn't hold too much water in my book. There are several reasons for this.

First, every Christian is in a denomination. "How is non-denominationalism even possible then?" you ask. To answer this, let's look at what we mean by 'denomination.' What is it that separates denominations, that keeps small towns full of churches and makes jokes like the above possible? Obviously, the answer is the particular beliefs of any one denomination and how they differ from all the others. More precisely, it's the way each denomination interprets the Bible and how it answers various questions that Christians have asked over the years regarding our faith. Generally, different interpretation/answers = different denomination. ²

My point is this: every Christian, whether a member of a denominational church or not, has opinions about those issues. More importantly, every church, whether 'independent' or not, will itself inevitably take a stance on many of them as well. So if declaring some sort of theological position (even if that position is, "We don't talk about those things...") is the basis for a denomination, then every church is a member of one. Even if they happen to be the only one. Calling it 'non-denominational' doesn't make the questions go away.

But it does often do something else, which is my next point. It removes one from the cover and accountability of tradition. Now I know that 'tradition' is a four-letter word for us Protestants, but the fact is Christians have been grappling with basically the same questions for over two thousand years now, and it would serve us well to pay attention to the answers that have been offered. The attitude inherent in the non-denominational ideology is that we--a single congregation--can be autonomous. That we don't need history or tradition or liturgy or (sometimes even) creeds; we can answer these questions satisfactorily on our own. Or worse, we'll just ignore them. This is, if I may say so, rather arrogant.

Thirdly, there is a semantic issue. Often what the term 'non-denominational' really means is 'contemporary music.' Chances are, even at these churches, whatever training the pastor/leadership received came with some kind of denominational bias. If you ask them a controversial question, you are likely to get one of a small number of responses, which will likely correspond to the way the question has been answered in the past...by denominational leaders. Music does not make a denomination. Let's call it what it is.

There's an old proverb about finding out why a fence was put up before removing it. Maybe this is a warning more Christians should heed.

^* To all my Calvinist friends, I am very sorry. I know this is a mean caricature, but I just couldn't help it.

¹ 'Non-denominationalism' is not the same as 'inter-denominationalism,' and I do not want to confuse the two. There are very good reasons a given organization might be inter-denominational.

² I should note that there may be non-theological reasons that denominations could be formed, such as leadership/administrative reasons. The Anglican/Roman Catholic churches might be a fair example of this. The criticisms I give here would of course not apply to these cases.

Apologetics As Offense

2010-03-16T19:52:00.001-05:00

Another primary function of apologetics is what some have called 'offense.' ¹

By this they mean that the task of the Christian apologist is often to attack other belief systems. Of course, by attack I do not mean to insult or belittle, but rather to develop arguments against these belief systems with the purpose of showing them to be false or at least highly dubious.

I realize how arrogant this sounds. Really, I do. One of the biggest things that I dislike about my own faith (and yes, it is okay to be honest about these things) is its exclusive nature. I'm really not a mean guy. I love people. ² I wish that everyone could be right. That somehow, every religion could be a valid path to God. That as a Christian, I did not have to tell sincere believers of other faiths that what they think they know is wrong. If I may say so, I hate this. But unfortunately, my feelings about it don't make it any less true.

That said, this rather bold practice is one of the main tasks of the apologist. The hard fact is, there are many opinions about who God is and what He is like, and most of them have to be wrong. And if I believe that I have been granted access to the truth, and that I am also obligated to share this truth with others, then an inevitable part of that process will be dealing with contrary claims to truth. In order to share the genuine, it is sometimes necessary to expose counterfeits.

This can be done in several ways, as occasion warrants. Sometimes it is through philosophical argument intended to show a particular worldview to be internally incoherent. Sometimes it is more empirical, highlighting various inconsistencies in a system with a realistic picture of the world.

But whatever the specific method, the most important thing is that it be done in love. Some of the best advice I have ever received was that often one's words can be neutral, but it is the attitude in which they are said that makes the difference. People can usually tell what your motives really are.

Think about it. I have been given some pretty hard news on several occasions. And I have no trouble at all picking out the occasions in which the person gave the news in love. The news itself was the same, but the attitude made all the difference.

I have not yet engaged in this type of apologetics in this blog, but I do plan to. When that happens, I will do my best to do it with an attitude of humility, remembering that my coming to know the truth had nothing to do with me. Rather, just like every other Christian, God revealed it to me out of His abundant grace. ³

I should also note that this task of apologetics, though often necessary, is by no means its primary function. Nor should it ever be undertaken by anyone who has not honestly dealt with the position she is attacking.

Next time: denominationalism. (!)

¹ Faith Has Its Reasons. Kenneth Boa and Robert Bowman. Pt. 4.

² Though I must admit this is a fairly recent development. God, however, is persistent.

³ See my post on revelation here.

Apologetics As Defense

2010-03-10T11:56:00.001-06:00

For the next few posts, I'd like to begin discussing the various purposes of and approaches to apologetics. The fact that Blogger just highlighted that word as one that it doesn't recognize only confirms to me that this is necessary.

As most of the readers of this blog are probably aware, the word 'apologetics' comes from the Greek apologia (ἀπολογία), which is usually translated 'defense.' It is used in this sense, for example, in 1 Peter 3:15, the verse that has sort-of become the credo of Christian intellectualism.

Apologetics as a discipline, however, is more nuanced than a simple word-study implies. It has various uses, defense being only one among them. However, it is this one with which I will begin.

Apologetics as defense is the function of apologetics that responds to the various criticisms that are leveled against the Christian faith. When employed in this way, the job of apologetics is not to show that Christianity is true, per se, but only that it is not unreasonable.

In fact, the first three posts of this blog were written with this very purpose in mind (along with the first video). This is important because it is is easy to mistake the intention of the apologist from time to time and critique a defense that he gives as though it were meant to be a persuasive argument. ¹

When using apologetics as defense, we are not attempting to persuade anyone to convert to Christianity, although this is still an important step in that process. What we are doing is clearing away the major objections that keep people from even seriously considering Christianity in the first place. As such, we should not expect arguments offered to this end to be ultimately persuasive regarding Christianity itself.

For example, if someone refuses to even consider the claims of Christ because she believes that Christianity is at bottom irrational (e.g. because the doctrine of the Trinity is logically incoherent), then the first step in talking with this person might be to deal with this objection first.

I've heard it said like this: "The heart cannot delight in what the mind rejects as false." ² Our friend will have a very hard time trusting in Christ's promises if she is still convinced that His nature is contradictory. But it would also be wrong to expect a clear understanding of what Christians think about God's nature to lead this person to repentance.

Another use of apologetics as defense is clarification of Christian doctrine. Often, the unbeliever (and sadly, many times even the believer) has wrong ideas about what Christians believe. In these cases, it might be best to simply share what we actually believe, and more often than not, merely seeing our true position does the job itself. For example, if the person above believed that Christians thought that God was both one and three in the same sense, then a clear explanation of the real doctrine of the Trinity should clear this up. ³

But defense is not the only purpose of apologetics, nor is it always the best route to take in dealing with an unbeliever. I'll move on to another primary use of apologetics next time.

¹In fact, this happened in the comments that followed those first posts.

² I have had some trouble tracking down this quote, although it may belong to Clark Pinnock, Set Forth Your Case (The Craig Press, 1967), p. 3.

³ I'll try to post on this soon.

* Be sure to check out the new video in the 'Featured Video' section.

Silly Things To Say..."I just want to have a childlike faith."

2010-03-04T10:34:00.001-06:00

I don't know about you, but I am excited to begin a new series today that I have been wanting to do for some time: Silly Things To Say. Here I will periodically showcase various sayings, clichés, proverbs, memes, etc. that people--Christians and skeptics alike--throw around like they were things worth saying. Regrettably, the idea for such a series is not original to me; I borrowed it from a similar one over at Parchment and Pen called "...and Other Stupid Statements." I recommend checking it out. I also plan to start a closely related series soon called "Questions That Don't Make Sense." Stay tuned.

"But I just want a childlike faith..." Ever hear anybody use that one? Usually it comes in response to a challenge to educate oneself about his faith in a way that would require more than just reading the Bible straight through. When he discovers that this will require (gasp) work, the recourse seems to often be to this 'childlike faith' stuff.

As best I can tell, this dangerous idea is taken from Mark 10:13-15:

"People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.'" (NIV)

It sure seems like Jesus is advocating a childlike faith here, doesn't it? Unfortunately, when most people use this line, they don't mean that they want a childlike faith in this sense. What they really mean is that they want a childish faith. Suffixes can make all the difference.

A childlike faith says, "I trust you even though I don't understand." A childish faith says, "I don't want to understand." A childlike faith says, "I'll depend totally on You for my sustenance." A childish faith says, "What I already think I know is enough." A childlike faith says, "I will worship You in spirit and in truth." A childish faith says, "Bring out the snakes." A childlike faith says, "I believe your love will bring me through my sanctification." A childish faith says, "What's sanctification?"

Paul says it this way:

"Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature." ¹

A truly childlike faith will be interested in learning more about the Father and in going deeper in our understanding of His word. It will see challenges as an opportunity for this. A childish faith is content merely with what feels good or seems right, seeing no use for things like education, theology, hermeneutics, or apologetics. A childlike faith will allow one to receive the kingdom of God. A childish faith will only gain rebukes like the following:

"...though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil." ²

I am reminded of Luke's story of the young Jesus: "After three days they [his parents] found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers." ³

Moral of the story: Jesus didn't want a childish faith. Neither should we.

Let's grow up.

¹ 1 Cor. 14:20 (NASB)

² Hebrews 5:12-14 (NIV)

³ Luke 2:46-47 (NIV)

What Is Faith? (Part 2)

2010-02-28T18:03:00.001-06:00

So what does a proper understanding of faith mean for the Christian? We talked last time about the misguided assumption that it must be held contrary to evidence. But if faith isn't just blindly assenting to the beliefs of one's church or culture, then what is it?

If you ask any Christian who is somewhat familiar with the Bible for a definition of faith, you will likely get the following response:

"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." ¹

This verse admittedly defines faith for many Christians, and read in isolation it could be interpreted as advocating the very view I wrote against in my last post. The problem is that this verse was not intended as a strict definition of the concept. As one commentary puts it, "[This verse] is not really a formal definition of faith; rather it is a description of what faith does for us." ²

On this more precise understanding, this verse can be interpreted as saying that faith (our loyal belief in and attitude towards God) allows us to feel certainty about the object of our hope and about those aspects of our relationship with God that are not always immediately clear (such as trusting Him through a difficult decision).

My friend H.L. Hussmann (whose blog can be found here) illustrates this idea better than anyone else I've heard. He relates the story of Charles Blondin, a 19th century French tight-rope walker who became famous for carrying all sorts of objects (including his manager) across Niagara Falls on a tight-rope. He asks us to imagine watching Blondin push a wheelbarrow back and forth across the rope several times with no difficulty and then asking the audience if they think he can do the same again, but this time with a person in the wheelbarrow. It is easy to imagine the crowd shouting in approval until the next question comes: "Can I have a volunteer?"

Here is where Biblical faith comes in. Our beliefs that God is and that He can are well-grounded by the evidence. But faith is trusting that evidence enough to take action. And it is the only appropriate response to the revelation that God has given.

This also helps us avoid another alarmingly common misunderstanding of faith: that it is something that will allow us to avoid difficulty of all kinds if only we can get enough of it. This idea treats faith as though it were some metaphysical currency that can be collected and cashed in when needed, but given the definition of faith that we have worked out, it is clear why this is inadequate.

Faith as an attitude and response toward God leaves no place for this escapist understanding. Rather than allowing us to avoid problems (e.g. the problem of too little evidence), Biblical faith pushes us to honesty about our situation and then calls us to trust God to bring us through it. I suppose it is possible for one person to trust more than another (and so have 'more faith'), but the very idea of trust presupposes some struggle. This is precisely why it is so difficult.

I can believe in Blondin's abilities easily from a distance, but continuing to believe from inside the wind-tossed wheelbarrow is another story entirely. This requires genuine faith, not a cheap counterfeit.

¹Hebrews 11:1 (NIV)

²Believer's Bible Commentary. Ed. by William MacDonald

You want me to love who?

2010-02-22T23:01:00.001-06:00

Before I continue with my thoughts on faith, I want to take a brief excursus to offer something that is currently on my mind. My hope is that it will spark friendly discussion, or at the very least introspection.

Tonight I had the privilege of hearing Archbishop Desmond Tutu speak. It is rare that someone's mere presence can command the respect of a room full of hundreds of people with varying backgrounds and ideologies. It is rarer still that this respect is extended even when the message delivered is difficult to hear. And it is nearly unheard of that this respect should remain when the person's words offend some of our most deeply held convictions.

And yet this is essentially what I witnessed tonight. I saw a foreigner tell a room full of red-blooded Americans that what they have called just and warranted is really only a higher form of revenge. That their ideals of national pride are in fact (dare I repeat it?) immoral. That the correct road, the road to real healing, is a much narrower and more difficult one. Could it be that those we have called our 'enemies' are actually the ones we are to love?

And yet, those who received this hard word--to their credit--applauded it. Doubtless, there were many who harbored doubts about his implications, who bristled when he got too specific in his examples, who were made uncomfortable by his boldness. To be transparent, I was one of those people. I thought things like "How dare him bring up 9/11...," "We had good reason to respond the way we did...," "There's more to it than that...," "Homophobia isn't the same as racism...," "But all religions aren't the same...," and a whole litany of other such thoughts.

And in thinking them, I totally missed the point.

I missed the fact that going immediately to these rehearsed answers (while they may even be true and valuable) I ignore the thrust of his message and refuse to recognize the pride in my own heart. The issue here is not one of politics or issues, however much we may like for it to be. It is one of love. Of motive. Of tolerance (in the true sense). Of our very humanity.

Tutu brought this point home well with the story of a woman he knew who was severely injured when a man from a particular 'liberation' group tossed a hand grenade into the room where she was dining. After the woman's long recovery, in the midst of great physical difficulty and pain, she remarked that she'd like to meet her attacker. That she'd like to forgive him. My attempt to avoid tears was broken by her next comment: "I hope he can forgive me."

What a radical idea loving one's enemies is. There is something about it that moves us to applause, even though it breaks us. Especially when the message comes from one who has lived it. Let us not forget in all this the originator of this message; the only One who lived it entirely. Everything about Him offended the leaders of His day. His politics were 'dangerous,' His theology surely unorthodox. The words He spoke were hard. And yet He loved so well that even His executioners were moved to admit, "Truly this man was the Son of God."

Jesus' message was not one of nationalism, or of dignity, or of getting what we are entitled to. It was, and remains, one of self-sacrifice, even for--especially for--those who least deserve it. What an inhuman concept.

Truly this man was the Son of God.

New Video!

2010-02-21T23:00:00.000-06:00

Just a quick note to let you know I've updated the 'Featured Video' section of the blog. I'll try to do this more frequently from now on, so be on the lookout!

What Is Faith?

2010-02-19T12:14:00.003-06:00

"Where we have reason for what we believe, we have no need of faith…"¹

"To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experiment is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid."²

And my personal favorite:

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence." ³

This is how the skeptical community, almost without exception, views religious faith. Are they right?

I cannot speak for other religions, but here I want to provide a Christian definition of faith--one that is rooted in Scripture and the history of the church. I think this will be very valuable for the Christian and the skeptic alike. For this post , I want to deal with the misunderstanding that is so common among critics: that faith is, in essence, blind.

The word generally translated as 'faith' in the New Testament (NT) is the Greek pistis (πίστις). It may surprise you to learn that this was a term sometimes used for 'forensic proof.' For example, it is used in this sense in Acts 17:31, where the NASB translates it as 'proof.' In many more instances, the NT uses it to mean something closer to 'faithfulness' or 'loyalty.' These include the idea of trust in the object of faith (God), as well as fidelity.

This is, like it or not, how faith is used in the Scripture and what it has always meant to the church. My question, then, is where does the idea of its 'blindness' fit into these definitions? All of these concepts--faithfulness, loyalty, trust, fidelity--assume ipso facto that there is a known basis that justifies the act of faith. There is something to which we are faithful, someone to whom we pledge our loyalty, trust, etc. And this is always rooted in--not contrary to--evidence.

Speaking of Christ's resurrection, Paul said it this way, "'I am not out of my mind, most excellent Festus, but I utter words of sober truth. For the king knows about these matters, and I speak to him also with confidence, since I am persuaded that none of these things escape his notice; for this has not been done in a corner." ⁴

It is important to note here what Paul did not say. When charged by his judge with madness, he did not reply "But I have faith! Why do you require evidence? How dare you criticize my faith?!" Rather, he pointed to the evidence in which his faith was grounded, in this case Jesus' resurrection.

Similarly, when Thomas famously doubted the report of Jesus' resurrection, it is important to note what Jesus did not say. He didn't say, "But Thomas, faith is blind. Why must you demand proof? Have faith anyway, my child." No, He said, "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe." ⁵

It should be clear to anyone who looks at this honestly that Christian faith was never intended to be blind in the sense of 'contrary to evidence.' Sadly, I do not exaggerate when I say that this is probably the principal criticism offered of religious belief by the popular atheists, whose writings have reached millions of people. It is a tired objection, and it has no basis in Scripture. Instead, the NT writers understood faith as 'believing what is known to be trustworthy.' Of course, the question of whether or not the evidence actually is trustworthy is still open, but this is a separate issue.

Next time, I will discuss how this more nuanced understanding of faith affects the Christian. Stay tuned...

P.S. For a more in-depth, scholarly discussion of this, see J.P. Holding's article here. Also, see my friend Shan's new blog here. Shan is well read in philosophy and church history, and is just an all-around great guy.

¹Sam Harris. End of Faith. pg. 225.

²Christopher Hitchens. god Is Not Great. pg. 95. Always the joker, that one.

³Richard Dawkins. Lecture from 'The Nullifidian.' The theist can generally count on Dawkins to play right into his hands. Here is a prime example.

⁴Acts 26:25-26 (NASB). Emphasis mine.

⁵John 20:27 (NIV).

Are you sure?

2010-02-13T21:03:00.003-06:00

There's an old proverb that says, "Beware the sound of one hand clapping."

The book of Proverbs says it like this: "The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him."¹

The idea here is that there is always more than one side to an argument, and wisdom dictates that if we are genuinely interested in truth (not just 'seeming right' to others), we should always be careful to examine all sides of an issue.

Unfortunately, this little morsel of wisdom is all too often ignored, even by those who should know better. Just today I read an exchange between some friends about an issue that probably none of them were qualified to speak about, but did that little fact stop them from giving their opinion or even lead them to wonder if there might be a perspective besides their own? You can probably guess the answer to that. As the Avett Brothers say in one of their songs, "Ain't it like most people, I'm no different--we love to talk on things we don't know about."

Regrettably, the church is no exception to this problem. Though it saddens me to admit it, the exchange mentioned above was between Christians, and it was by no means an isolated incident. We all have our own ideas of what God is like and how the church should work, and we rarely pause to examine these ideas, much less compare them with others to see how they fare. Why do we do this? Is it pride? Is it ignorance? Is it just plain laziness?

The answer to all these is probably often yes, but I wonder if the prevalence of this attitude among Christians might go a bit deeper. As Christians (particularly evangelicals) we are taught something unique among world religions: that we can have certainty. In fact, if you read my first post on the knowledge of God, you probably noticed that I began by showing how the Christian can legitimately have this very thing. As Paul himself put it, "I know whom I have believed."²

I wonder, though, if we do not confuse this certainty that we can have regarding our relationship with God with the way that we know most other things. As Christians, our certainty comes not through ourselves but through revelation--it is the gift of God in the form of the Holy Spirit. However, on most every other issue, God has not given this kind of revelation. It is a grave mistake then to assume that we can be as sure of everything as we are of our salvation.

Another problem is that we only know what we are taught, and we rarely seek to learn anything contrary to what we already believe. Josh Billings said it this way: "Education is a good thing generally, but most folks educate their prejudices." When was the last time you intentionally read something that you knew you would disagree with? Now, I am not saying that every Christian should read all the atheist literature or anything like that. As an apologist, I have to and believe me, it (usually) isn't any fun. But I do think that we should be more critical of our attitude when we are confronted with views that differ from our own, especially when dealing with fellow believers.

So, the next time you are about to give your opinion to someone, ask yourself, "Am I really sure enough about this to say what I was about to say?" And if the answer is no, I challenge you to say something more honest instead. Maybe even "I don't know."

^{1 Proverbs 18:17 (NIV)}

²^{2 Tim. 1:12 (NIV)}

Can we even know about God? (Part 3)

2010-02-09T11:35:00.002-06:00

So what is needed to get us from mere theism (the belief that God exists) to Christianity?

In a word, revelation.

Last time we discussed the ability of natural theology to give us knowledge of God. We now turn to what is known as 'revealed theology,' so called because rather than coming through mere reason or observation of nature, it is given, or 'revealed' directly to us by God Himself.

For the Christian, this revelation consists in the Bible (and possibly certain utterances of the corporate Church, but we'll leave the Protestant/Catholic discussion for a later series) and the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. For the Muslim, it's the Qur'an and the prophet Muhammad. Then there's the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith (Latter Day Saints), the Bhagavad Gita and Krishna (Hindu), the Tao Te Ching and Lao Zi (Taoism), and many, many others.

I'll cover in more detail later how we can differentiate between these various and often contradictory claims to divine knowledge, but for now let's just assume that the Christian revelation is the true one. What is it?

The Christian revelation differs from all of the others in that it is principally rooted in the life of a historical figure and the writings about that individual's life. This is decidedly not the story of a mysterious text handed down from heaven, or a vision in the sky, or some otherwise mystical experience. This is a man who lived and gained wide influence in an identifiable region of the world at a traceable time in the past. Further, this man did not claim only to have a more in-depth or complete explanation of a previous revelation, but rather made the much more extraordinary (and falsifiable) claim to be the revelation, the literal Word of God incarnate.

Without going into too much detail here, the idea is basically that if the writings about this man can be trusted to deliver his teachings to us accurately, and further if the man himself can be trusted to have spoken truthfully, then we have here a clear path to genuine knowledge of God.

And it is a much more complete and interesting knowledge than can be delivered through rational argument or even subjective experience alone. From these we can know that God is and even that He is personal and supremely powerful. But revelation tells us what He is like. From Jesus we learn that God is the very embodiment of love, that He cares deeply for us, and that He is interested in how we live.

So, yes, I think knowledge of God is definitely possible, and so this blog can now proceed with working out its various nuances. Disagree? I'd love to hear about it.

blogGNOSIS

The Non-Sequitur of "Christian Music"

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 7)

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 6)

Women in Apologetics (Part 7): Having a Heart for the Mind

Women in Apologetics (Part 6): An ApoloWhat?

Women in Apologetics (Part 5): Implementing Apologetics in Women's Ministry

Women in Apologetics (Part 4): Women Called to the Front Lines of the Faith

Women in Apologetics (Part 3): Argument and the Woman Apologist

Women in Apologetics (Part 2): Heads for Men and Hearts for Women?

Women in Apologetics (Part 1): The International Society of Women in Apologetics

On Loving God with Your Mind

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 5)

Letters From a Martyred Christian

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 4)

Philosophy...What's the point?

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 3)

Font Issues...

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 2)

On H(B)ell

A Concentric Circle View of Faith

Anselm on the Trinity - A Devotional Reading

Out of Our Heads

TOMS Shoes

Apologetics Journal

The Argument from Special Revelation: Jesus Christ (Part 1)

The Teleological Argument (Part 2)

The Teleological Argument (Part 1)

The Moral Argument (Part 3) - Euthyphro's Dilemma

The Moral Argument (Part 2)

The Moral Argument (Part 1)

The Ontological Argument (Part 2)

The Ontological Argument (Part 1)

Silly Things To Say..."Who made God?" *

The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument (Part 1)

The Kalam Cosmological Argument (Part 2)

The Kalam Cosmological Argument (Part 1)

Silly Things To Say..."You can't argue anyone into the faith."

The Bigotry of Religious Pluralism

Avoiding '-ism's'

Why denominational affiliation is generally a good idea.

Apologetics As Offense

Apologetics As Defense

Silly Things To Say..."I just want to have a childlike faith."

What Is Faith? (Part 2)

You want me to love who?

New Video!

What Is Faith?

1 Sam Harris. End of Faith. pg. 225.

2 Christopher Hitchens. god Is Not Great. pg. 95. Always the joker, that one.

3 Richard Dawkins. Lecture from 'The Nullifidian.' The theist can generally count on Dawkins to play right into his hands. Here is a prime example.

4 Acts 26:25-26 (NASB). Emphasis mine.

5 John 20:27 (NIV).

Are you sure?

Can we even know about God? (Part 3)

¹Sam Harris. End of Faith. pg. 225.

²Christopher Hitchens. god Is Not Great. pg. 95. Always the joker, that one.

³Richard Dawkins. Lecture from 'The Nullifidian.' The theist can generally count on Dawkins to play right into his hands. Here is a prime example.

⁴Acts 26:25-26 (NASB). Emphasis mine.

⁵John 20:27 (NIV).