Month: December 2010

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth! I did not do a blog last night as I was still really out of it, but I made it through my surgery just fine. I’m still really sore, but my wife is taking excellent care of me. However, I prefer to jump right back into the swing of things. Tonight, I’d like to look at another atheist sound bite, as we’ve been looking at several lately. This will be the one that we don’t need God to be good.

First off, for those of us who are Christians, there is a point that should bring shame to us. Often, our lives are not any better morally than those whose worldview we criticize, and we’re the ones claiming to have the Holy Spirit in us. If they are looking at us and not seeing something that they don’t have, perhaps we should be living our lives differently. Christians are to be salt and light. We’re not called to be transformed by the culture. We’re called to transform the culture.

However, let us look at this argument. Writers like Dawkins and Stenger and others will regularly make a big deal about how unbelievers can do good things. Now I don’t deny that. No Christian should. Somehow, this misconception has come about that Christians seem to think nonbelievers are just living in sin all day long and just thinking about ways to be evil.

I don’t see it that way largely because our world has been, what I prefer to call, Christianized. Even if you’re not a Christian, most countries in the world have had their ethical cultures shaped by Christian values. However, I suspect that the farther a country moves away from that Christianization, the more that country will decline morally.

A good many nonbeliever you meet could be someone in many ways like you. He wants to love his spouse, raise his family right, and be a good citizen where he lives. I wonder however about the younger generation coming up. We have a nation of hedonists in our midst. It is the culture that seeks to please self without thinking about the past or the future.

In that sense, an unbeliever does not need God to be good. The problem is, the atheist who raise this argument do not seem to understand the Christian argument. It is said that all religions seem to agree on basic moral principles. Well of course they do! This is what I’d expect as a Christian since the Bible tells about the Natural Law written on our hearts. We all know right from wrong on at least fundamental principles. That’s how God can judge the world after all. He can judge us on what we already know about right from wrong. No one will be able to say “I didn’t know X was wrong” on the last day, granted X is one of those basic principles, such as “Do not murder.”

Then what is the argument really? The argument is that you need God for goodness to have an ontological basis to it. For the concept of “good” to have objective meaning, you need God. Well suppose you want to deny objective morality? If that’s the case, then Hitchens’s book goes out the window as there’s nothing good being poisoned by religion. No one can complain about the evil of 9/11 caused by “religion” or how oppressive and intolerant Christians are.

Goodness is either real and a real something that we read out of an object or concept of some sort (And I can include a person or God in the category of object in this case) or else it is something we are throwing onto that object or concept. What we have to ask is if we want to know the things in themselves, or think that we can only have the idea of things and that idea just doesn’t match reality.

When I hear the new atheists use this argument, I get more evidence that they just don’t do their homework. The old atheists would have been embarrassed by this as the new atheists simply use argument from outrage more than anything else.

Actually, the more I think about the moral argument, the more I really don’t like how it’s phrased nowadays. We phrase it so there’s no distinction from right and wrong in ethical actions if there is no objective morality, and I agree. Goodness has to do with more than just morality. Goodness of actions is about morality. What about goodness of substance and goodness of results and other kinds of goodness? Those also need an ontological basis. Our predecessors of Aristotle and Plato spent much time telling us about goodness. It behooves us to listen to what they say. (It amazes me how many atheists refuse to look in the Nicomachean Ethics at my request to see the definition I use of goodness when it’s in fact the first line of the work!)

When we get that definition of goodness down, I think we have an even stronger argument I can go into another day where you no longer have a basis for right and wrong if God does not exist, you no longer have a reason to do anything if he does not exist. Perhaps alert readers can find out why.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth! Before I get to tonight’s blog, I’d like to state first off that I do have some responses coming to emails. I try to break as much as I can on Sunday however. I do not know when I will be able to answer for sure. Tomorrow, I have to have gallbladder surgery. If there’s no new blog tomorrow, don’t worry. I could just be not feeling up to writing a blog.

We’ve been looking meanwhile at atheist sound bites. Right now, I’d like to answer the charge that evidence is not scientific.

What is surprising is that in our day to day experience, we would never make such a charge. It doesn’t mean that we don’t look at evidence. It means that we know the evidence is not scientific. When I was preparing to propose to my wife, I looked at evidence for that decision being the right one. (It was) None of that was scientific. You would not test it in a lab.

Yet somehow, we think that when it comes to religion, science should be the decider. If a claim is made that is directly scientific, by all means test it scientifically, but if it is not, then you simply cannot test it scientifically. The question “Does God exist?” is not a scientific question. It is a question relating to metaphysics rather than to physics. (Something that made me think even the title of Stenger’s book was hysterical. When the title commits a category fallacy, you know you’re in for some fun reading)

Does that mean science is useless? No. Consider fine-tuning as an example. Suppose it is agreed that the universe is fine-tuned. That can lead to us drawing philosophical inferences that there is a god of some sort. That can in no way however tell us who this god is. Is it the god of Christianity or the god of Islam or some other? For that, we will need to study philosophy and the claims of any religion we think could match the deity we believe created.

What it means is that we do not elevate science to the position where it is the final authority. Why do we get tempted to put it there? It is because we are all a materialistic people who believe in getting all that we can get and focus on the material. When that is the way a people think, is it any shock that that which tells us about the material is what matters most?

In this, we have lost sight of such concepts as beauty, morality, truth, and goodness. Each of these has been attempted to be relativised by someone. Why? They are not scientific. It is a result of swinging the pendulum too far. In no way should we slow down science or cease doing it. We should rather increase our efforts to understand the above topics that matter far more to all of us. Many young people today can tell you Newton’s Laws of Motion. All good and well. How many can tell you definitions of beauty, morality, truth and goodness?

Give science its proper place, but don’t give it every place.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth! We’ve been looking lately at atheist sound bites. These are claims that are made by atheists in the blogosphere. Tonight, we’re going to be looking at ECREE which is “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

I understand this one goes back to Carl Sagan. (Why does it seem that scientists seem to think they’re good at philosophy when they’re not?) This was his response to those who held theistic beliefs. A lot of times today, it’s given as a stopper to Christian beliefs. Many a Christian has been unable to respond to this sound bite.

To begin with, if anyone has the claim that would be seen as extraordinary, it would have been Sagan. After all, most people in history have been theists and even most people today are theists of some sort. Most people probably thought Sagan’s claim of “The cosmos is all there ever was, is, and ever will be” was extraordinary.

That gets us to the first problem with this. The idea of what is extraordinary is subjective entirely. Who determines what is and isn’t extraordinary? I find Sagan’s claim to be extraordinary. He finds my claim to be extraordinary. Is there any neutral party between us?

We can also ask what constitutes extraordinary evidence? As one of my professors said in response to this claim when he was given it, “Does it glow?” As it is in the first problem we have with this sound bite, the term “extraordinary” is just way too ambiguous to know what is meant by it.

Let’s suppose also a claim was made that I found to be hilarious. Does that mean that the evidence for the claim would have to be hilarious? Whether something is hilarious or not can differ from person to person. What we need is a different measure whereby to determine what kinds of evidence are to be given for an argument.

Here’s my solution. First off, if you are making a claim of science, your evidence should seek to be scientific. If you are making a claim of philosophy, you should seek philosophical evidence. Historical claims are to be backed by history. Mathematical claims are to be backed by Math.

Who has the burden of proof? Anyone making a claim does. Of course, the inability of one person to back their claim does not prove the other is true, but it can weigh heavily in their favor. If Sagan says “The cosmos is all there was, is, and ever will be,” then that’s a claim and it needs to be backed. If I say “There is a God,” that’s also a claim and it needs to be backed.

What about evidence? You give the reasons for believing what you believe and so does your opponent. If you find an argument faulty, you tell why. If you don’t find the data convincing, you tell why. ECREE is a sound bite that simply stops debate and sadly assumes atheism as it is atheists who use it the most.

That gets us into a topic for another day however.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth! We’ve spent a lot of time lately looking at atheistic soundbites that one will regularly encounter in the blogosphere. Tonight, I’m going to look at one that I think really shows the new atheist movement for what it is.

Before that however, let’s be clear about words. The meaning of a word is inherent in the text the word is in. I cannot go to what you say, attribute my own meaning to the words you use, and make you mean something different. No. I need to seek to understand how you mean the word to be used and if it’s a word in an ancient book, I need to understand how the people of the time used that word and not how people today use it.

For instance, we can read about marriage in the Bible and while it is still a relationship between a man and a woman that’s monogamous and sexual and life-long, that does not mean everything is the same. We will be hard-pressed to find information about choosing your spouse in the Bible and how to behave on a date. The concept just wasn’t around back then.

I’d like to apply this to faith. Go through the new atheists be it their books or their audio debates and hear how they talk about faith. See constantly how they berate people believing something for which they say they don’t have evidence. The irony is rich and it should be something that the new atheists deserve to be shamed for.

Each of them should know better, and none of them apparently do. Dawkins knows Alister McGrath. He can disagree with McGrath, but he surely knows McGrath doesn’t believe without evidence. Harris is supposed to be a graduate in philosophy from Stanford. He should know about the philosophical arguments for God’s existence from Christian philosophers.

Consider also Victor Stenger who regularly makes this kind of claim as well. Oh Stenger will every now and then reference Craig and Zacharias, but he will not really interact with them. In his book “The New Atheism: Taking A Stand For Science and Reason” he will counter apologists who argue against the new atheism. Now I find nothing wrong with that. I think if you’re of a belief and you think an argument against your belief is faulty, you should argue against it. However, I also think if an argument is for your belief and faulty, you should argue against it. I certainly don’t want my viewpoint to be presented with bad arguments.

The problem is Stenger will give the impression that there are no arguments for theism. In fact, his total jump to science shows this. Oh we’ve heard the philosophy and the theology before, but we all know that doesn’t matter! Let’s go to science and if science says it’s not true, then it’s not true! It’s the priesthood of science that I’ve spoken about here. Forget philosophy and forget theology. They don’t matter. I think atheists would rightly reply with scorn if a Christian said “Forget science! All we need is Jesus and the Bible.” Heck. I’d reply with scorn. That’s not a Christian attitude at all since we are to be people of truth. That’s not just biblical truth. That’s ALL truth!

However, the sad irony of all of this is while the new atheists condemn faith as believing something without evidence, I have never seen them give any evidence that this is what the biblical writers meant by faith. Readers. I ask you this and you can tell me if I’ve missed it. Have they ever once cited a Greek lexicon that says this is the definition of faith? Have they pointed to any Greek authorities? Have they shown any research abilities whatsoever in looking up what faith means?

I have a few copies of Vine’s in my room. Vine’s does not say that this is what faith is. Faith is instead to be granted to that which is trustworthy and reliable. To have faith in Jesus means to say that you find Jesus to be one who is worthy of trust and you choose to side with him.

Where do the new atheists get the idea? The first place I checked is the abomination that causes misinformation. Here’s what the first sentence on Wikipedia is about the topic:

“Faith is the confident belief or trust in a person, idea, or thing that is not based on proof.”

Well to begin with, very few of our beliefs are based on absolute proof. You do not have proof that that box of cereal at the grocery store contains cereal. You do not have proof that the surgery you’re going to undertake will succeed and you’ll walk away more healthy. You do not have proof that that airplane you’re about to board will get you where you want to go.

What’s really bad about the Wikipedia definition however is that it gets its definition from a dictionary. That’s just fine if you want to use a word in its modern sense and I can agree that sadly to many moderns, faith means believing something without evidence. To argue against the Bible however, you must take the word as the writers of the Bible took it to mean.

For instance, when the Christmas carol says “Don we now our gay apparel”, we don’t look at that and say “They want us to dress like homosexuals?” We know that “gay” meant happy. Today, it’s been twisted to mean something else. It doesn’t mean we look back and think the writers of the Christmas carol had some sexual fetishes we don’t know about.

The new atheists however don’t do that. For them, shoddy research has been their calling card. God belief is not something any rational person would believe to them a priori so why spend any real time studying it? Why also think any readers would do the same? The new atheists say that this is what faith is, so let’s just have all the drones repeat it. (For people claiming to be free-thinkers, you’d think some of them would actually think differently)

Even if atheism were true, I think arguments like this should be enough to discredit the new atheists as not doing appropriate research. What’s the result of this? They end knocking down a straw man that doesn’t exist, having several atheists think Christians don’t have real arguments, having some Christians think likewise, and destroying the false faith of many who really do believe without evidence.

Not only that, it is just intellectual dishonesty. When you present your opponents’ viewpoints, you present them in their best possible light with the best arguments that you can possibly come up with. The new atheists do not do this and I cannot think of any good reason why they do not.

If you are a follower of the new atheists, I urge you to consider this. If they’ve done this bad of research on a basic point, can you trust them on greater points?

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth! I’ve said I’d like to look at some atheist sound bites. Fear not however. I will be looking at some Christian ones as well and there very well could be more Christian sound bites that cause me grief than atheist ones. Tonight on the atheist side, I’d like to look at the topic of how some claim science makes them naturalists.

The problem with this statement is that it is actually a statement that assumes a certain kind of theology. Whenever I deal with such people, I like to grant them as much as I can for the sake of argument. You believe in macroevolution? Fine. I’ll accept that. You believe in an eternal universe? Fine. I’ll accept that. You believe in a multiverse instead? Fine. I’ll accept that. Whatever they believe, I will accept.

Now what’s their argument?

The idea is that God must be necessary to fill in some gaps in the scientific record. Somewhere along the way of natural processes, there must be some sort of gap and lo and behold, this is where God steps in. Now let’s be fair here. It could be that there are some gaps in science in which the answer is that God did indeed act. I believe every Christian scientist should be open to that. I do not see how this should be seen as a science stopper. We can ask how he did it instead if possible.

Or, we can look and use science as a tool to ask why he created something that way. Imagine for instance if somehow we could find the very first cell that ever was and somehow know that God made it the way it is fossilized. We would all want to study that cell and compare it to cells today and say “This is the prototype. Why is it this way? Is this the best or is it meant to improve from here?”

The Christian can be open to any way however. If God did do it, whatever it is, then fine. He did it. However, the atheist cannot be open to any way. The answer cannot be that God did it. While the Christian can often be accused of being closed-minded, it is the atheist who must be closed-minded. His system cannot admit of any supernaturalism whatsoever. The Christian system can freely admit of naturalistic hypotheses.

However, let us suppose natural causes were found for all that goes on in our universe. The Christian is not in trouble and the atheist is still making a leap from a physical claim to a metaphysical claim. He can say that he thinks it less likely that God exists. To say that science demonstrates this is nonsense, a lesson it would have been good for Victor Stenger to learn.

Consider Dawkins in the same way. Dawkins has a whole book on this called The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins believes that once he has demonstrated macroevolution, then theism is dead. Even the Christian who does not believe in macroevolution need not fear Dawkins. Evolution can be an instrumental means for instance. God could have used evolution to bring about humanity. Some might find the idea abhorrent or just flat-out wrong, but even if you do, why not grant it for the sake of argument? Your goal is not to get your potential convert and disciple to affirm a scientific view but to affirm a theistic view.

Ultimately, the problem with this idea is that it defines God by function rather than by essence. Christians believe God would be God even if He had never created a universe. Why? What is it about Him that makes it so that he just exists even if nothing else does? Just think about it. Does he have a derived existence or not? Does God have a nature plus existence? If so, can God’s nature, which is to be, be without being? (Note that He says it is His nature to be in Exodus 3:14)

I am not saying the ontological argument is valid. I do not believe the idea of God can produce the reality of God. However, if by our reasoning we come to see that God is that which exists by nature, then it naturally follows that God exists. He cannot not exist. Of course, I refer the reader to my studies in the Summa Theologica on this blog for more information.

For too long scientists have been the new priesthood. I fear that when we give science the highest authority, then we are stating something not just about God but about man and reality as well. We will be stating that the greatest matters are those which are purely physical. None of us I know of believe that, but in giving science the highest grounds, we affirm it.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth! I’d like us to start taking a look at some atheist soundbites that are often thrown around the blogosphere. Some of these can be found in the books of the new atheists as well, which isn’t surprising, though it’s something I wonder of who borrowed from whom.

Anyway, one that I have seen frequently is that for several atheists, they claim that reading the Bible is what made them atheists.

I find such a claim as highly exaggerated and would reveal poor thinking on the part of one who came to such a conclusion. To begin with, there are some atheists who would say that reading the Bible made them Christians. In fact, I would in a way disagree with that statement as well.

The Bible does not have some magic power in itself to make someone become something. If it did, everyone would lead a more holy life by reading the text. The knowledge that the devil and the demons have of the text would enable them to be pure and holy angels. (Of course, I don’t believe fallen angels can repent)

What matters is how the person approaches the text and what their will is. We all know that if we want to find fault with something we usually can. Of course, if that something has no fault, such as God, then we are not seeing Him as He is, but as we want to picture Him.

Picture instead someone coming to the Bible not really knowing about the book. They don’t know that it claims to be the Word of God. Naturally, they will see this as they go along in the text. However, they just pick it up and read and start at the beginning seeing the existence of a God that created the world.

Will they find things that puzzle them? Yes. Will they find things they like? Yes. Will they find things they don’t like? Yes. The question is, how will they respond? Will they see if the things they like are really as they see them and rejoice in them? Will they study the things that puzzle them? When they find things they don’t like, will they study that as well and see if first off that might be something in them wrong that indicates dislike, or if maybe it isn’t what they thought it was after study?

Let’s suppose we focus on the parts of the Bible that people don’t like often, such as the wars in the Old Testament and the doctrine of Hell in the New Testament. Let’s suppose that someone decided that there was no justification for these. I think that would be incorrect, but let’s take it for the sake of argument.

How could you wind up at the doctrine that there is no God from that alone? You haven’t tackled natural theology or other religions or philosophy of any kind. You might have in your minds a disproof of the God of Christianity, but does it follow that you have disproven theism? After all, Christianity could be false and theism still true.

Could it in fact be the presuppositions some come to the text with? They don’t like a God who judges sin. (All the while asking why God doesn’t do anything about evil in the world. When he does nothing, they complain. When he acts, they also complain.) Could it be a belief in a God who does not do miracles? Could it be that you don’t think God should judge you or someone you know?

If that’s the case, it’s not reading the Bible that does it. It’s the ideology one has and uses the reading of the Bible to justify that ideology. Rather than spending time arguing presuppositions, it is just easier to come to the Bible and not let it shape your worldview, but let your worldview shape it. (I don’t think we should do that with any book for that matter. When we read a work, we should take what we can from the author’s worldview to better understand it. We might find a deficiency in our own to improve, or we might even agree with his at the end.)

Frankly, it’s the presuppositions that I think matter. Even if you could prove that there is justification for Hell and the wars in the Old Testament, it does not follow that God exists or Christianity is true. Deal with ideas like an anti-supernatural bias and the standard of good and evil first. Then you are prepared to approach the Bible and be ready to give it the benefit of the doubt. That doesn’t mean believing blindly. It means letting the text speak for itself and have it be innocent until proven guilty.

Watch for this one on the blogosphere, and don’t fall for it.