Sometimes I think that I might like to study philosophy at a graduate level. To cure myself of this notion, I’ve found it to be effective to simply open up a scholarly journal of philosophy and read some of the articles (or even just the titles). For example:

Does Existence Itself Exist? Transcendental Nihilism Meets the Paradigm Theory - William F. Vallicella

I mean, come ON. (Love the conspiracy-theory-site type design on that site; this article was published in a scholarly collection of philosophy long before being posted here.) I can see how the topic would be of interest to some, but personally I couldn’t endure writing about such a subject. Even as someone who’s interested in epistemology and ontology, I don’t feel the need to debate whether existence exists.

I guess I’ll leave this particular area of philosophy to real pro philosophers.

That said, Dr Vallicella (author of the existence article above) does run an interesting blog called Maverick Philosopher that I read on occasion … it’s where I came across the article, and his blog is worth checking out.

Soup to Nutz Comic

One of the reasons that radical relativism (the idea that all “truth” is always relative) is false is that it is self refuting. All truth is relative … except, of course, the truth statement that all truth is relative! If all truth were relative, the sentence “There is no truth.” could equally mean “I like cabbage.” or “Excuse me sir, do you know the way to Timbuktu?” The comic above is humorous because the boy blatantly changes the rules of the game after the fact. But if radical relativism is true, concepts like fairness, guilt, tolerance, altruism, and shame become meaningless.

Although Greg Koukl and others do a fine job of refuting radical relativism, I don’t see this as being a popular philosophy. It’s just so ridiculous (on both philosophical and intuitive levels) that it seems unlikely that anyone would seriously hold this view (outside of insane asylums and graduate philosophy departments) and even if they did, that after careful scrutiny they would be forced to admit that they do not live consistently with their view.

Am I wrong? Is this a serious view of truth?

It seems to me the real problem is not relativism, or even postmodernism per se, but instead a particular type of intellectual laziness that can sometimes masquerade as “postmodernism”. IMHO people don’t gravitate towards relativism because they honestly think it’s a valid way of looking at the world; they gravitate toward it because it absolves them of the responsibility to have to think about difficult issues. It’s the equivalent of clasping your hands over your ears and going “lah-lah-lah-lah-lah”. Of course, Christians can sometimes be guilty of the very same thing, but at least one thing that the atheist and Christian worldviews share is that one or the other, not both, of these worldviews is true, really true.

Further to my first post about miracles (wow that was almost a year ago) the following thoughts came to mind today as I was reading In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God’s Actions in History, which examines the concept of the miraculous in light of Hume’s essay “Of Miracles” (and later works which expanded upon that essay).

The idea that science disproves the possibility of miracles is, IMHO, extremely misguided. Science is able to confirm that certain things are testable and repeatable, that is, empirically verifiable in the present. Miracles, by nature, are none of these things. For example, today as I rode home on the bus I glanced out the window as the bus came to a stop. To my surprise I saw a rabbit sitting on the grass beside the road. I had never seen a rabbit here before (a fairly built-up area along a heavily trafficked road). This event is still not testable (you’ll have to take my word for it that I observed a rabbit earlier today) and not repeatable (even if we were to get on the same bus, drive along the same road, etc, the circumstances could never be exactly the same) and yet the event really did occur. There is no reason to claim that this was a miraculous event, but even here science cannot test whether this mundane event occurred.

Therefore it’s no surprise that science has not (cannot) confirm (or disprove) the miraculous. Richard R. Purtill notes in his essay “Defining Miracles” (also part of the aforementioned book) that scientists “tend to confine their investigations to the ordinary course of nature and to ignore such exceptions as might be made to the course of nature by God, since exceptions brought about by personal agency cannot be predicted from a study of what normally happens”.

Trying to test whether a supposed miraculous event occurred in history using the scientific method is sort of like trying to determine whether a banana is tasty by sticking it in your ear and listening to it. It’s inappropriate methodology. There’s nothing wrong with the scientific method for testing natural phenomenon. However a miracle is not natural, and therefore it is misguided to dismiss, say, the resurrection by appealing to science that shows that people rising from the dead is impossible. Of course we observe that dead people stay dead, and that’s entirely the point. This wasn’t lost on first century people either: Jesus’ resurrection was a big deal because people knew that dead people are supposed to stay dead.

This does not mean that science has no part in examining the truth claims of miracles, but only that as unique events in history, a miracle claim is more properly investigated as history rather than science.

Further reading: The Facts Concerning the Resurrection: Don’t believe the New Testament is a reliable historical source? I’d argue that the NT is historically reliable, but try let’s throwing out most of what it contains, and only focus on facts agreed upon by the vast majority of scholars, Christian or not. What we find might surprise you!

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. In the last two months, I’ve finished my last full semester for my masters at Tyndale and just got back from some tiring ministry training in British Columbia. Fun times, but very busy. The final course I’ll be taking this summer (the last elective to complete my degree) will be Defending the Faith: Resurrection, taught by a leading scholar on the resurrection, Dr. Gary Habermas. Needless to say, I’m quite excited about taking the course!

Enough about me.

I was reading a magazine today where a man was asked “Is your religion truer than another?” Unsurprisingly, he replied “We’ll never know that.” Is this a reasonable statement? What does this really mean?

I’d like to first preface my comments by pointing out that if God exists, and religions have opposite views about God’s nature, then necessarily one is “truer” than the others. If God exists He really possesses certain attributes, and therefore one of the descriptions given by one of those religions would match most closely to those attributes.

However, the real question lurking here is whether or not we can really know anything about God. “We’ll never know that,” the man says, indicating that he agrees God exists and possesses attributes, but doubts we can know those attributes, let alone know God personally. I’ve found that the majority of people I speak to about spiritual issues believe God exists. However, many of those same people claim we can’t really know anything about God. Now, part of the source of this opinion is due to tolerance overindulgence, and people are just afraid of being branded “intolerant” for voicing their convictions regarding spiritual issues. That doesn’t prove that the belief is wrong (genetic fallacy) but does suggest that people may not have considered the philosophical reasons for their claim.

The claim:

I’ve posted before about why it is deficient to apply the same methodology we use to study mundane things to studying God. That, I think, is an important and valid argument against the idea that we cannot “know” God, because most people making that claim are assuming (knowingly or not) entirely natural methodology.

But here’s another thing to think about. If someone says we cannot know anything about God, ask why. As soon as a person tries to provide reasons by saying “Because God is …” their argument falls apart; it is self-refuting. Greg Koukl would say the argument “commits suicide”. In order to defend the conclusion (that we can’t know anything about God) the proponent must base their conclusion on what they claim to know about God!

Consider this analogy:

Fred: We can’t know anything about Bob.
Jill: Why?
Fred: Because Bob lives alone in a house in the mountains with the windows painted black and never comes outside.

The problem with the argument should be obvious: Fred provides several facts he claims to know about Bob in order to try to prove we can’t know anything about him!

Moreover, even the claim on its own without appeal to other information is self-refuting! The claim we can’t know anything about God is itself making a claim to know something about God: That God is unknowable! It commits a fallacy similar to the liar paradox. So even if no further premises are expounded to support this conclusion (such as that God is infinite and therefore incomprehensible by our finite minds, a poor argument IMHO) the conclusion still fails because it self-destructs.

A much more reasonable position would be we can’t know very much about God, but I think that even without appeal to special revelation (like a holy book for example), we can still know much about God via observation and reflection alone. (See “What about natural theology?“) These are not ends unto themselves, but steps along the way. Faith is (at least in part) a journey and not just a destination; however, people who are searching should not be so intent upon gazing at the sky while they walk that they fail to see the yawning chasm lying just ahead.