1) God [at least probably] exists.

2) God is good.

3) You can’t know anything about God.

I realize that 2) and 3) seem to contradict eachother, but I’ve heard several people say one and then the other. Generally what the person means is something like: “You could know something general about God (like God is good, or God is love) but nothing specific.” ie, you might know some very general things about God but you can’t really KNOW God in the detail or personal way that the Bible suggests.

We could explore the rationale behind the idea that God is unknowable (which, IMHO, ends up being faulty upon closer examination) but I wanted to try a different tack today. I imagined this conversation, which was inspired by starting to read John Piper’s Desiring God (available for free online as an ebook):

Me: So, you think God probably exists and is good?

Agnostic: Yeah.

Me: But it’s also your belief that we can’t really know God in any substantial way?

Agnostic: That’s right.

Me: I think that belief is faulty and based on false presuppositions, but would you say that a God who is good would want to give us what is good?

Agnostic: That seems to make sense.

Me: And would you agree that if God is good, then God by definition would not be merely kinda good, but God would be maximally or perfectly good?

Agnostic: Yes.

Me: Would you say it would be good for God to withhold from us what would be most good for us?

Agnostic: No, I wouldn’t think so.

Me: So then, for God to be good, he would have to give us what is most good for us. What would you say would be most good for us?

Agnostic: I’m not sure.

Me: Well, if God is maximally or perfectly good, wouldn’t what is most good for us to be God Himself? If he is maximally or perfectly good, He would want to share Himself with us.

Agnostic: I’m hesitant to say yes, but it’s hard to imagine what would be more good.

Me: So then: For God to be maximally or perfectly good, He must necessarily share Himself with us. For if God did not do so, He could not be maximally or perfectly good, and wouldn’t be God at all! Therefore, He must share of Himself with us, and we have the opportunity and ability to know Him.

Now, someone might then wonder: If God desires to give us what is maximally or perfectly good, whence comes evil? That takes us into the whole other issue of theodicy (study of the problem of evil) but keep in mind that asking “What about evil?” doesn’t invalidate the argument above, it merely raises an unanswered question regarding its ramifications.

Many scientists today have religious convictions, such as Alister McGrath (who earned two doctorate degrees from Oxford, one in theology, the other in molecular biophysics). Examples like this of course prove nothing about the validity of Christianity or religion in general, but they at least demonstrate that it is possible to be a knowledgeable person of science as well as a religious believer. So how exactly do science and religion co-exist with each other in the world? There are basically three options …

>> Read Science & Religion: Competitors or Companions? on PowertoChange.com

Some previous posts about religion & science:
On ‘Scientism’ and Faith – Why the belief that science is the only way to true knowledge is ridiculous
Scientists with Faith – Discusses an article about Francis Collins which appeared in the Times

Click the “more” link to view (the embedded video unfortunately auto-plays so I had to add the extra step to avoid it playing every time people came to the site).

I just started reading through John Bunyan’s classic The Pilgrim’s Progress (I read part of it for one of my classes, but have never read through it in its entirety) so there may be most posts of this nature in the coming days/weeks.

Skeptic: There is no right interpretation. In fact there have been lots of interpretations over the many years since the Bible was written. Who are you to say you know what the Bible means? We can’t know what it really means.

Christian: So let me see if I understand you correctly. You’re saying that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that there is no salvation without Him.

Skeptic: What? No, that’s exactly what I’m not saying! I’m saying you can’t conclude that, there are many valid interpretations of the texts.

Christian: So you’re saying that there is only one correct interpretation and we should try to find it.

Skeptic: No, no, why are you twisting what I’m saying? You know I’m not saying that.

Christian: Are you saying I am interpreting your words incorrectly?

Skeptic: Yes, you are!

Christian: So, it seems to me that a person could be interpreted wrongly. If that’s the case, then some interpretations about what the biblical authors wrote could similarly be wrong, couldn’t they?

There are no doubt passages of the Bible that are difficult to understand. Perhaps, for some, we will never be sure of the correct interpretation. But most are not so difficult, and even some of the difficult ones are only so because we choose to make them so. As with most things in life, the interpretation with the best reasons to back it up “wins”; we make educated inferences to the best explanation. There ARE correct interpretations of the texts. That doesn’t mean I claim to be 100% right about all of mine, but since I believe there are right answers, and I care about finding them, I will be willing to change my mind if I am convinced otherwise.

I guess it depends whether religion is like insulin or ice cream. For example, I prefer chocolate ice cream, while you might prefer vanilla, or butter pecan, or strawberry, or … great, now I’m hungry. But regardless of what your favorite flavor is, there’s nothing wrong with choosing one instead of another; it’s a personal preference. If someone told me they liked mint flavor best, I wouldn’t respond by saying “What the heck’s wrong with you?” or “How dare you choose mint instead of chocolate, you big jerk!”

The point is this:
That’s the beauty of ice cream – you can choose what you prefer. When it comes to medicine, however, it doesn’t make sense to choose what you prefer. Rather, it’s essential to choose what heals. It would be silly to choose NyQuil over penicillin simply because it tastes better. (Greg Koukl)

When choosing ice cream, you choose what you like. But when you choose medicine, you choose what heals you. Religion isn’t like ice cream, where you should choose whatever “tastes best”. You need to choose what’s true. The truth is often tough, but that doesn’t mean we should just ignore it and choose what we like.

Jesus didn’t claim Christianity is ‘true like ice cream’. He didn’t say “Come, follow me, it’ll be fun!”. He in fact claimed something very specific, contradicting every single religious (or non-religious) person who lived before him. He claimed that it’s impossible to “earn” our way into heaven, and in fact need to trust in God (who Jesus himself claimed to be in human form) instead of trusting our own failing efforts.

But isn’t that pure arrogance? Isn’t that intolerant? Doesn’t it sound presumptuous for Christians to claim they have “the truth” and all other religions are wrong? Well, only if truth is like ice cream. If someone is dying and needs medicine, you need to give them what will heal them, not what they like best. In the same way, Jesus gives us what we need, and ultimately what is best for us.

There are many different paths, but they don’t all eventually lead to the top of the same mountain. Some veer off to the left and the right; others climb entirely different mountains! And if God is real, truth about God is not like ice cream; it’s like medicine, and only what is true can heal.

A response that I’ve seen is that atheism is not a worldview because it is not a belief, rather it is merely a “default position”. The rationale given sometimes compares belief in God to unicorns or some other such mythical animal, in the sense that unbelief in such things (or anything, really) is the default until convinced (or proven) otherwise.

While I can certainly see the reasonableness of this line of thinking and its general applicability, I wonder if it applies equally well to the question of God. There’s at least two reasons to think in this specific case things might be different. First, the vast majority of people throughout history have believed God (or gods) exist(s), a phenomenon which remains the case today. Should a belief be regarded as a default position when the majority believe the opposite?

And secondly, related to the above, if Richard Dawkins and those who agree with him are correct that human beings have evolved a natural proclivity towards belief in God(s) as some sort of survival/social assistance mechanism, should not belief in God be considered the default position, since we are supposedly “hard-wired” for such belief? Shouldn’t such naturally impelled belief be considered the default? Although I would agree with Dawkins that human beings seem to have an innate proclivity towards belief in God, I would suggest that there is different reason why so many people seem to have an innate awareness of God.

While it is indeed lamentable that such things occur, what does this prove about whether the Christian faith is true or not?

I was thinking about this yesterday while spending some time with a friend who is very distrustful of “organized religion”. I don’t know the exact reasons for this distrust, but perhaps it’s because my friend has been exposed to many stories of religious abuse, scandal, and charlatanry. But while this may prove something about humankind, it proves nothing about God.

While I was walking to the mall today (in the brisk -16C Toronto weather) I thought … “Just because people cause problems, does that mean that God is not great?” The latter doesn’t follow from the former.

The latter (“God is not great”) also happens to be the title of a book by Christopher Hitchens, who in my humble opinion is a skilled orator and rhetorician but not necessarily a precise thinker or researcher of facts, which will make his upcoming debate with William Lane Craig very interesting. I hope that Craig realizes this debate will be much different than his usual debates against his philosopher peers.

The basics of Lewis’ “Trilemma” argument can be found at the following Wikipedia entry: Lewis’ Trilemma Argument. Unfortunately, it is only quoted in part, and reading the full chapter from Mere Christianity (full text here, see chapter 8) and the preceding material in the book might make things clearer. Nevertheless …

The Wikipedia entry describes the trilemma as below … Asylum Seeker, the author of the blog post linked above, takes issue with every part of the argument. (Hereafter I’ll refer to Asylum Seeker as “Asylum”, since his real name is not given; and although I am unsure of their gender I will refer to Asylum as “he” for the sake of ease.):

(P) Jesus claimed to be God.
(Q) One of the following must be true.
1. Lunatic: Jesus was not God, but he believed that he was.
2. Liar: Jesus was not God, and he knew it, but he said so anyway.
3. Lord: Jesus is God.
From these premises it follows logically that,
(C) If not God, Jesus is either not great or not moral.

I have edited (Q)1) to remove the word “mistakenly” since, as I explain later and Lewis himself made clear, Jesus’ claim is not the sort of thing a person can make an “oopsie” about.

Re (P), Asylum claims that “that Jesus did not necessarily refer to himself as the “Son of God” and he was only claimed to be after the fact by followers” and later claims that “As mentioned above, Premise P is suspect”. However, no reason is presented for denying that Jesus thought of Himself as God. Even if Jesus never referred to Himself as “Son of God”, the name “Son of Man” still carried similar connotations for his first century listeners. The Wikipedia article contains several suggested reasons that might be given for concluding Jesus didn’t consider Himself to be divine, but also presents equally forceful reasons (I would say, better) for believing Jesus did in fact claim to be God. See for example Glenn Miller’s summary or more comprehensive articles (on the synoptics and John) on the subject. If we take the biblical texts seriously, I don’t see how a case could be made that Jesus considered himself to be anything less than divine.

That’s IF we take the biblical texts seriously, of course. What if, however, as several commenters to Asylum’s original post suggest, that we should not take the biblical text seriously because they are not trustworthy? This is a more popular was of avoiding the conclusion (C) of Lewis’ argument: By positing a fourth way, a fourth “L”, namely Legend. Asylum suggests early in his post that “Jesus could be fictional [and/or] the Gospel could be inaccurate”.

Regarding Jesus being fictional (ie the “Jesus never existed” hypothesis) this hypothesis is dismissed by nearly all serious scholars on the subject, G. A. Wells being the main notable exception. For more details on this topic, see Dr Gary Habermas’ article commenting directly upon Wells’ hypothesis A Summary Critique: Questioning the Existence of Jesus, or a more general article Christ Myth Refuted. Whether the New Testament is accurate, however, is more open for debate. This is certainly a worthy objection to Lewis’ original argument. Of course, Lewis was operating under the assumption that the New Testament is trustworthy. If that assumption is removed, it must be argued for, as I believe I have done in my free ebook on this subject, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament. I encourage you to download a copy and check it out.

There are, in fact, good reasons to believe the New Testament is trustworthy; especially in contrast to some of the other works commonly mentioned by skeptics of the New Testament such as non-canonical documents written in the second century AD and later. In the comments section of Asylum’s post one of the commenters Richelle says “it would have been nice to know what all the other stories of jesus were before they all got destroyed by the church once they decided jesus was going down in history as a superhuman.” Here she is referring to another commenter’s mention of the Council of Nicaea. Of course, the Council of Nicaea did not discuss which books would be included in the New Testament at all, and we have plenty of information about what the earliest Christians thought about Jesus, first from the New Testament documents themselves, and then from the early Christian letters (some from the first century). Larry Hurtado‘s recent book argues that in fact “perhaps within only a few days or weeks of his crucifixion, Jesus’ followers were circulating the astonishing claim that God had raised him from death and had installed him in heavenly glory as Messiah and the appointed vehicle of redemption.” So such ideas are hardly inventions by a church council in the 4th century!

Even if we accepted for the sake of argument that the New Testament is generally untrustworthy and contains numerous errors, Jesus’ divinity is proclaimed or assumed throughout, so it still would be difficult to escape the conclusion that the authors believed Jesus claimed to be God unless we were to discount the entirety of the New Testament as being totally and utterly untrustworthy; as even most ardent skeptics won’t do, for good reason.

This leads us to (Q)1): “Lunatic: Jesus was not God, but he mistakenly believed that he was.” This is a major point of contention for Asylum, who says: “A “lunatic” is hardly crazy about everything. People who have such a delusion can still have insight.” This is true. A person may be perfectly sane in one regard, and completely delusional in another regard.

Yet think for a moment what you might say if someone you know, let’s call him Joe, claimed to be God. Not just for a laugh, but seriously and continuously. He seemed normal in certain other respects (he was able to dress himself and engage in normal social conventions) yet he claimed he was in fact God. Now what if a group of people got sick of Joe’s ranting and decided they’d kidnap him and, if he didn’t stop with this God nonsense, that they would kill him in the most painful way imaginable. What would you say about him if he steadfastly refused to recant and was killed in the most excruciating manner for his claims? I, personally, would not call him sane. Would you?

When Lewis wryly remarks that “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic-on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell” he is saying, with his ‘poached egg’ remark, that Jesus’ self-claims are not trivial, they are entirely foundational. A person calling themselves God is either true, or, if false, akin with claiming to be a poached egg! This is not the sort of thing a person could make an “oopsie” about and we would still call “sane”.

Asylum notes in the comments that he is “not sure if Jesus’s behavior is inconsistent” with Schizophrenia, though he is careful to note he does not think it is per se. It’s worth noting that to be able to suggest that Jesus was Schizophrenic, a person would have to get their information from … the New Testament, so they must be claiming that it is essentially reliable. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. But is there evidence within the New Testament that Jesus had some kinda of mental illness? In fact there doesn’t seem to be anything about Jesus’ behavior which suggests mental illness, let alone Schizophrenia. (Compare for example with what is know about Muhammad, where, while far from conclusive, there are at least suggestions that he suffered from epilepsy or a similar mental illness.)

Gary R. Collins, PhD in psychology from Purdue University, concludes that “I don’t see any signs that Jesus was suffering from mental illness.” Asylum’s point prior in his post is that a person may be sane in some areas of life and insane in others, but as noted above claiming to be God (and willing to be put to death for that conviction) is not the sort of claim that is distinct from a person being sane.

So, if we take the New Testament seriously and Jesus’ words seriously when he claims to be God, and if Jesus shows no signs of mental illness, we are ruling out the Legend argument, (Q)1), the lunatic argument, and (Q)2) the liar argument. Are there other possible alternatives? Kreeft and Tacelli note at least one additional option in their book (available here BTW, with a much nicer cover than my copy has): Maybe Jesus didn’t mean he was literally God, maybe he was just being really mystical and symbolic. They call this the Guru objection. This is rejected, in part, because of the context in which Jesus spoke and lived: He was Jewish, and directed his own ministry primarily to the Jews, no doubt because they (perhaps unlike some of the non-Jewish people around) would not have understood his claims to be mystical. (Certainly those who committed Jesus to death for His perceived heresy did not see the claims as being mystical!) For more on the “mythical Jesus” see for example here: The Persistent New Age Jesus (and other articles on the CAFA site).

All that said, I don’t see Lewis’ argument as an iron-clad proof that Jesus was who he said he was. It is, I think, a more powerful argument than Lewis is given credit for, especially since he was not a philosopher by trade. And the version put forth by Kreeft and Tacelli is I think a definite improvement (expansion) of Lewis’ original. But it is not airtight by any means. When I first read of it, before I was a Christian, I did not drop to my knees and become a Christian immediately afterward.

What’s the point, then? It is one of several arguments that I believe suggest that Jesus, and the Gospel message, are actually true. No one will be convinced to become a Christian by rational arguments alone (because the nature of the trust of faith is not merely rational, but also volitional and emotional) but they may at least convince us that such ideas are worth thinking about.

Related reading:
- A better article on one of our sites than the testimony linked by Asylum’s blog post: Who did Jesus think He was anyways?
- Peter Kreeft’s brief article on the topic on his website: The Divinity of Christ
- Stand to Reason: Christianity worth thinking about

“All Beliefs Welcome, Unless They are Forced on Others”

There is a weasel word used here: “forced”. The original article title mentions “forcing” beliefs on others, while the article itself is really talking about when people “take their theology out in public”. Of course we would never want anyone to try to “force” their religious beliefs; but what’s wrong with sharing our faith (in love) with others?

If Christians truly believe we have found the greatest love, greatest hope, and greatest truth in the world, why would it be wrong to winsomely share that faith? I might argue it would in fact be wrong to keep such a wonderful thing secretly to ourselves!

Recently in an online discussion regarding the reliability of the New Testament, I asked a person engaged in the discussion the following question: “Let’s say, after a few more months on this forum, that your questions regarding the Christian faith and God were answered beyond a reasonable doubt. Not utterly completely proven 100%, but at least plausibly answered. Would you then put your faith and trust in God?”

His reply surprised me: “No, probably not.” He went on to list some of his objections (and straw-man characterizations of Christian beliefs) before concluding that “even if you did manage all that and managed to drive me insane enough to believe in an invisible man in the sky, my common sense would just tell me that that is impossible.” [Thread on SCAE]

I thought back to Russell’s response quoted above. Ignoring for a moment the question of “How much evidence is needed?” that is discussed at length in the linked article, I have to wonder about the honesty of Russell’s response. Let’s paint the scenario: Russell has spent his life arguing that God does not exist, and especially not the Christian God. Now he stands before this God and has been proven utterly and totally wrong. This just, holy, righteous, omnipotent, omniscient, and awe-inspiring God stands before Russell and asks him the question. Instead of being humbled, Hume says he’d flippantly respond by saying “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!”

Given that (in the scenario) God is omniscient, it seems silly to assert that God hadn’t provided enough evidence. Wouldn’t God know better than Russell how much evidence was needed? Wouldn’t it be slightly insane to tell the almighty God of the universe to His face that you know better than Him?

Christians are often branded as being “closedminded” (sometimes for good reason) but often atheists or members of other non-Christian faiths are just as closedminded.

As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. During my conversation with an Internet friend mentioned above, I decided to break off the conversation at that point. When a person states that they will continue to refuse to believe something even if they become convinced that it is true (!) there’s not much point in talking anymore.

Of course, to be fair, this situtation somewhat paraellels my own story, when I first became convinced that Christianity was true, but still wasn’t quite able to take that final step of faith (trust) right away. This is why I think that often issues of faith are, primarily, heart issues rather than head issues; intellectual objections are often legitimate and worthy of discussion, but in reality those sorts of questions merely scratch the surface while a person’s actual underlying concerns go much deeper.