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Tag: apologetics

21

Published on 21 Comments on We’ve all got our circularities

I believe the Bible is the word of God because in it God speaks.  This is not an unfortunate circularity.  At the end of the day nothing could convince me it's God's word except that God speaks.  You could tell me it's great history, it's logically coherent and displays incredible internal consistency as a library of books over many centuries.  Great, I believe all those things.  But that doesn't make it God's word.  The only thing that could authenticate the Bible as God's word is if God personally speaks through it.  And at that stage I'm essentially saying that it's God's word because it's God's word.

Or to shift that argument to christology, I believe that Jesus is the Radiance of the Father's glory because in Him I've met the glorious Father.  Yet this Father is met only in the face of the Son.  In other words, I know that Jesus is Lord because I see in Him the kind of Lord that only Jesus reveals.  There is a self-authenticating majesty to Jesus such that I say, along with Lord Byron, "If God's not like Jesus, He ought to be."  Jesus is the kind of God that I believe in - the kind of God that Jesus uniquely reveals.  He's IT.  And I know He's IT because, well, look at Him!  Jesus is Lord because Jesus is Lord.

At this point you'll note how inter-related these two circularities are.  And also the integral role of the Spirit in both.  He brings us God's written word with divine authority, illuminating Christ so that, in Him, we might see and know the Father.

Now "circular arguments" get a bad name.  For one thing it sounds like buying into them will trap you.  Actually, if you find yourself in the right Circle, you'll finally be free.  The Circle of Father, Son and Spirit doesn't limit you.  No these ultimate realities (because they really are ultimate) enable you to move out into the world all the wiser for knowing their Lordship.  With the Spirit-breathed word, and the Lens of the Father's Son... then you can really get somewhere.  From this knowledge you'll find all sorts of other things illuminated by God's Light.

But still, people will cry foul.  "You can't reason in a circle" people will say.  But hang on, we all employ circular reasoning whenever we make claims about ultimate reality.  Didn't your mum ever justify her pronouncements with "Because I'm the mummy"?

It's inevitable that your ultimate ground of authentication must authenticate itself, or it isn't ultimate.

Now this plays out in all sorts of areas.  But think, for instance, of the naturalist assumption that the "natural" realm is best placed to judge any hypothetical "further realm".  If a "further realm" exists, they say, it must play by the rules of naturalism.  This, of course, radically limits the kinds of realms the naturalist would be willing to admit and means that the gods they consider can only be superbeings within the world.

Now the naturalist cannot establish such a priority via naturalism.  It is, by definition, beyond the ability of the natural sciences to pronounce on the existence of realms beyond their scope.  Yet naturalists assume that the "natural" realm is all there is, was, or ever shall be.

Naturalism, they say, is the best explanation of ultimate reality because other explanations fail naturalistic tests.  Or, to put it most simply, naturalism is true (or our best bet) because naturalism says so.

Now let's be clear - belief in naturalism is not a groundless leap of faith.  It's a faith commitment that springs from compelling evidence (true faith always does).  The evidence is this: trusting our own powers of perception and reasoning has produced great success in the natural sciences.  I.e. it works, it explains things, when we move out into the world on its basis things make sense.

But,

1) The Christian does not deny the explanatory power of the naturalistic sciences.  The Christian believes that such sciences have sprung from a broader Christian world-view and rejoice in the fruits of the gospel here.  Christians simply deny that such knowledge is the only or surest knowledge.

In fact,

2) The Christian sees that naturalism is horrifically reductionistic and harmful when seeking to be applied beyond the natural sciences.  As the old saying goes, If all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  To treat human personhood and relationships, ethics and aesthetics, to say nothing of a relationship with God, as a mere interplay of matter and energy is to misunderstand these things greatly.  The explanatory power breaks down here in a catastrophic way.  And yet, these things - love, forgiveness, beauty, goodness etc - are the most precious realities in human existence.

In the discussion between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams the other day, Dawkins said he "believed" we would find naturalistic explanations for consciousness - explanations which we do not now possess.  That is a consistent faith position within his world-view.  Naturalism has produced the goods in many spheres of enquiry - he trusts that consciousness will be one more success story for the natural sciences.

Yet all the while an explanation for personal reality presents itself to Dawkins.  One which does not rule out science but underpins it.  And one which accounts for the priority of the personal which is the most blindingly obvious reality which we encounter moment by moment. Nothing else accounts for it like this accounts for it...

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning.  Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.   (John 1:1-4)

I honestly don't know why Dawkins - or anyone - can't see it.  How can there be darkness when the Light of Christ is so dazzlingly obvious?  But then I would say that.  I'm in the grip of the ultimate Circularity!

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Published on 4 Comments on We all have our creation stories [repost]

Brian Cox - dream-boat physicist, not craggy-faced actor - recently said this:

 Our civilization was built on the foundations of reason and rational thinking embodied in the scientific method, and our future depends on the widespread acceptance of science as THE ONLY WAY WE HAVE to meet many, if not all, of the great challenges we face. (here)

Well now.  Them there's fighting words.  Therefore, I thought it was time to repost this from two years ago (see how cutting edge CTT is?  Discussing Cox two years ago!)

......

Just watched this documentary on the Large Hadron Collider: "The Big Bang Machine." (BBC4) presented by Brian Cox.

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kaRKpQ5QvUQ&feature=channel]

Here's an extract from around 4:20 - 7:20.

Physics is stuck and the only thing left to do is recreate the universe as it was a fraction of a second after the big bang.  That's what the LHC is designed to do.  To smash bits of matter together at energies  never before achieved so that we can stare at the face of creation...

So here's the aim - to stare at the face of creation.

And this is the means - to smash particles together.

Notice the disjunct between the stated aim and the means!   Cox excites us about the scientific quest promising us a 'face' to creation.  Of course "face" says communicative, conscious.  It says personality.  It's no wonder that Cox wants to reach for this kind of language because at bottom it's personal reality that we long to see.  But all Cox can give us is particles.  This is the trouble.

What do you say of a person who promises you a face but gives you only particles?

What do you say of an enterprise that can describe a face only in terms of its sub-atomic particles?

He continues...

...Every civilization has its own creation story.  The ancient Chinese, indian mystics and Christian theologians all place a divine creator at the heart of their creation stories.  Science too has an elaborate story that describes the universe's genesis.  It tells us how the fundamental constituents of the cosmos took on their form.  The difference with this story is that we can test it.  We can find out if its true by tearing matter apart and looking at the pieces.  All you need is a machine powerful enough to restage the first moments after creation...

This was the sentence that made me sit up and take notice: "Every civilization has its own creation story."  And Cox puts 'science' in there among Indian mystics and Christian theologians.  Ok good.  We're all telling stories about the world around us - scientists included.  But what does Cox say is the difference with science?  Answer: "we can test it."  Hmm.  How will science be tested?  Tearing apart matter and looking at the pieces.

Well now that's a very sensible test if you think that matter is what explains everything.  If you have a story about the world that says everything came about via material means then test matter.  Yes indeed that's testable.  But it's not the only thing that's testable.  What if your story about the world says 'Everything came about via the Word who was with God in the beginning and then became flesh and dwelt among us.'  Is that testable?  You betcha!  Every bit as much as the 'science' story.  It's just that you test this story in ways appropriate to its nature.

All science works by testing its object of study in accordance with its nature.  You don't do astronomy with a microscope - your means of testing is adapted to the thing tested.  So if you think it's all about matter, you study matter.  But if you think it's all about the Word then you study the Word.  Theology in this sense is completely scientific.  It is taking its Object of enquiry completely seriously and pursuing thorough investigation according the nature of the Word - ie it is listening obediently to Him.  That's good science.  And it's our only hope of actually seeing the Face that explains our world.  Particles won't get you to the Person - but the Person can help you explain particles...

Cox continues...

In the beginning there was nothing. No space, no time just endless nothing.  Then 13.7 billion years ago from nothing came everything.  The universe exploded into existence.  From that fireball of energy emerged the simplest building blocks of matter.  Finding experimental evidence of these fundamental entities has become the holy grail of physics.

Notice first that this creation story is just as miraculous as any other.  "From nothing came everything".  No explanations are given.  None ever could be.  This is the astonishing miracle at the heart of our modern creation story.  It is not the case that only primitive 'religion' believes in miracles.  The 'science' creation story is equally miraculous.

And again do you how science proceeds?  It proceeds like theology.  The scientific worldview says there must have been simple building blocks of matter that existed after the big bang.  Of course we've never observed these.  Nonetheless the worldview tells us they must have existed.  Therefore science seeks after evidence of what it believes to be true even without the evidence.  It has faith (an assurance of things hoped for (Heb 11:1f)) and from this faith it seeks understanding.  That is the scientific pursuit and it is no more or less a faith-based enterprise than theology.  And that's no bad thing, it's just the way things are.  It would just be nice if scientists came clean about it!

The point is this - don't let anyone tell you science is about matter not miracles or fact and not faith.  The truth is we all have our creation stories.

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Published on 7 Comments on Apologetics and “reluctant conversion”

I'm working on a talk whose title was given to me in advance: Liar, Lunatic or Lord.

It's the famous trilemma popularised by CS Lewis.

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. 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 the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to...."

It's brilliantly put and it highlights the absurdity of a mild reaction to Jesus.  The Son of  God splits the world.  Amen.

But just read on to the rationale that's informing Lewis's argument:

... Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God."  Mere Christianity

Does that strike you as odd?  "Drat and blast, I'm logically impelled to worship Christ as Lord!  I wish it were otherwise but I'm trapped by the logic of it."

Of course, that was Lewis's own testimony - "the most reluctant convert in all of England."

But Lewis was also brilliant at capturing the imagination - narrating Narnia then inviting us through the wardrobe.  Yet how often do we simply follow the approach of this passage in Mere Christianity?  "I know you won't want to admit Jesus as Lord, but here's the water-tight argument that will force your hand!"

If that's the note we strike - are we really communicating the kind of Lord that Jesus is?

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Published on 7 Comments on “A universe with a god would look very different to a universe without one.”

"A universe with a god would look very different to a universe without one.” Richard Dawkins.

It's one of the wisest things Dawkins has ever said. Believers and unbelievers alike should take heed.

Let's tease out some implications of it.

1) Dawkins clearly has a doctrine of "god" in mind as he makes the statement.  The flying spaghetti monster wouldn't affect the kind of universe we inhabit.  But Thor might.  Allah in a different way.  And the triune God, different again.  Therefore it's not a straight binary choice.

2)  I would look different depending on the existence of God or not.  Dawkins seems to imagine two states (a theistic and an atheistic universe) as alternatives lying before him.  And who is the great unmoved mover in this scenario?  Who is the neutral observer, the one enthroned above all worlds?  The scientist!  But no, Dawkins' thought experiment - if it takes the word "God" with any seriousness - is one in which everything must be re-imagined.  If I am a creature, made by the Father's Word, intended for life in communion with God, then everything changes for me.

3) I would look differently depending on the existence of God or not.  If I was a creature of the Word, and if the world  is a creature of the same Word, I would look through the lens of His Word.  I would see all things in relationship to Christ the Creator.  That would simply be good science if the Christian God existed.

But here's something strange...

4) Dawkins ridicules Christian scientists who do actually deliver a different vision of the universe to his own.  Yet how could they do otherwise, if "a universe with a god will look very different"?

Which only makes me think...

5) Dawkins has not entered into his own thought-experiment for even a minute.  Has he really considered the revolution involved in actually reconceiving Self and World and God according to the Christian vision?  Of course not.  To do so would mean repenting of his position as all-seeing Arbiter.  Or in other words:

"Unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."  (Matthew 18:3)

 

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Published on 1 Comment on Jesus is God-sized. God is Jesus-shaped. [repost]

When preaching on John 1:1-2 (audio here), my last two points were this:

Jesus is God-sized

and

God is Jesus-shaped

I wonder whether much of our evangelism is aimed at persuading people of point number one.  And I wonder whether that emphasis, if divorced from the second point, is quite dangerous.

Here's what I mean - when we tell an unbeliever that Jesus is God, this is what they hear:  "You know the god of the pub discussion - the distant, arm-chair deity, uninvolved and uncaring?  Actually Jesus is that guy!"

"Oh" says the unbeliever.  "Because Jesus looks quite different to that."

"Yeah, I know" we say.  "But you need to look past all that stuff.  Deep down he's really 'the god you've always believed in' All that other stuff is just Jesus' human nature.  Yeah, that's like window-dressing.  Deep down he's The Big Guy."

And what's the result?  Well how many Christian testimonies run something like this...

"I have always believed in some kind of god.  And then I met Jesus.  And the preacher told me that Jesus is the god-I-always-believed-in.  So now I've added faith in Jesus to my bedrock belief in a deity."

Do you see what's happened here?  Some supposed natural knowledge of God is determining a person's view of Christ and determining it from the outset.

It should be the other way around.  Knowledge of Jesus should revolutionize our view of God. We should tell people not only that Jesus is God-sized, we should tell them that God is entirely Jesus-shaped.  Let's introduce them to the God they didn't know.  Let's offer them the Christ-like God.

As Archbishop Michael Ramsey once said (riffing on 1 John 1:5): "God is Christlike, and in Him there is no unchristlikeness at all."

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Published on 21 Comments on Help with sermons please

I've got four sermons at the start of February answering the following questions:

How can a loving God not accept everyone?

Does God even exist?

If there is a God, why does he allow suffering?

Aren't all religions basically the same?

What should my passages be?

What should I say?

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Published on 6 Comments on Christians make the best atheists

Wonderful article by Alastair Roberts on Atheism and Christianity.  Every paragraph's a winner, how about this to whet your appetite:

The target of much atheist protest is the god that secures all meaning and makes sense of the world, the religion that serves as a crutch and underwrites the social order, the faith that inures one to truth and reality and gives birth to dulling and enslaving illusion. This is the god in whom they don’t believe. They might be surprised to find that Christians stand alongside them in attacking this deity: we don’t believe in that god either.

Read the whole thing here.

And Happy New Year!

 

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Published on 2 Comments on “Isn’t it petty for God to reward ‘faith’ and send ‘unbelievers’ to hell?”

A common question.  How to respond?

Well let's think about the assumptions underlying the question.  If I'm detecting them rightly they go something like this:  Faith is an attribute which 'believers' rustle up and which God accepts as payment for heaven.  Having accepted the "faith" token from the righteous, God then rewards them with a whole "preferred customers package" of benefits (eternal life, forgiveness, feeling's of love and purpose, etc).  Meanwhile, God finds 'unbelievers' lacking in this attribute called faith and so consigns them to this other place called hell.

So the question then comes, How can that be right?  And of course, if that's what "God", "faith" and "eternal life"mean, then it isn't right - it's an absurd and capricious set-up which every Christian should repudiate.  Thankfully, it's nothing like the gospel.

The gospel is this: God gives us His Son by the Spirit.  Christ is Himself eternal life (1 John 5:20).  To receive the gift of Christ is what we call faith (John 1:12).  To refuse Christ is to resist the Spirit.  And it is also, by the very nature of the case, to refuse eternal life.  

Therefore God does not sit back and then reward an attribute called "faith" which sinners bring to the table.  God actively offers Christ to sinners.  As Christ says,

Whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the LORD, but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.  (Proverbs 8:35-36)

 

Published on Leave a comment on Atheist converted through online witness

The story of Richard Morgan, converted after a Scottish Pastor braved the underbelly of richarddawkins.net...

it was his interest in evolution that led him to follow Richard Dawkins. Upon finding the author’s actual website, Morgan was excited to communicate with scientists and philosophers who could offer more insight into evolution.

But rather than discussing the nature of evolution in the “oasis of clear thinking,” Morgan was horrified to discover in his first forum that more than half of the people devoted their time saying rude things about believers using extremely foul language.

“I don’t know if you’ve seen ‘The Social Network’ but there’s one point where a girl says to the main character ‘Just stay in your dark room and make snide remarks because that’s what the angry do these days.’”

After witnessing the discussions firsthand, the newly minted evolutionist agreed that the Internet was more a place where people could hide behind their anonymity and say rude things as a kind of therapy.
Still searching for answers however, Morgan continued to be a part of the community, drawn particularly to a discussion on David Robertson’s open letter replying to Dawkins’ first chapter of The God Delusion.

Prompted to write a response to each of Dawkins’ chapters in the book, the Scottish pastor eventually compiled all the letters into a book called The Dawkins Letters.

Criticizing the book in the forums, members began to attack the letters until one day Robertson himself appeared in the discussions and began defending the points he made.

“I don’t know how many hours he must have spent just replying very calmly and politely to people who were sending out the most vilest insults and criticisms,” Morgan recalled. “He just kept coming back and occasionally with a few words of Scripture thrown into his general discourse.”

Unable to understand what was wrong with Robertson, Morgan himself posed a question on the discussion boards asking members why the pastor kept coming back and what result he expected. One of the seasoned and experienced posters on the forum commented, “It’s just another Christian attention seeker.”

“Yes, David Robertson was seeking attention but it wasn’t for David Robertson. We all know for whom he was seeking attention,” expressed the now Christian Morgan.

For several days the attacks continued, until one day someone replied that David Robertson was a liar. But Morgan throughout all of the threads had not noticed this and asked where the pastor had lied, bringing him a bout of criticisms as well.

“I was probably too unintelligent to see where he was a liar,” remembered Morgan.

As time went on, he began to see more and more the brutality and harshness of the chats, recalling one shocking post where the site administrator had published an article about an extremist Russian prophet who tried to commit suicide when his prediction for the date of the end of the world failed to come true.

A couple of posters in response to the story regretted that the fallen prophet had failed in his attempt to put an end to his life. Stunned by the level of inhumanity, Morgan wondered how any civilized person could say they wanted to see anybody die. Writing a protestation to some form of humanity in the forums about his shock and disappointment in the members, one respected member on the site simply replied to his post with an LOL– laugh out loud.

It was then that Morgan realized he did not want to be a part of these people. “I’m not condemning all atheists,” he clarified in the interview. “I’m talking about anonymous atheists on internet discussion boards and the messages they express which are extremely negative, puerile, [and] full of hate…”

Coming back to Robertson’s replies to all the “nastiness and unpleasantness,” which Morgan himself was a part of, composing a piece of music just to insult the pastor, Morgan reread the debates and was impressed at several aspects of Robertson’s participation.

First, his persistence and continual presence in the discussions astounded Morgan. Robertson always came back and sometimes got up two hours earlier in the morning to give adequate response time to the criticisms.

Secondly he defended himself in a robust manner while not hesitating to wish everyone well. He wasn’t the meek and mild kind of Christian who said "I love you all and you’re all nice," but the kind of Christian who stood up for what he believed in.

Printing out over fifty pages of Robertson’s posts, Morgan read through all the posts again and found no lies. What he discovered instead was humility, intelligence, sensitivity, and several references to the Bible.

In his confused state, without God or a community of atheists to turn to, Morgan started to post on The Free Church of Scotland’s forum, which the Scottish pastor was a part of.

Writing to Robertson about how he appreciated his responses and comments, Morgan shared how he couldn’t believe in God. “I’m not an atheist because I want to be an atheist. I’m not a happy atheist. I’m an atheist because I can’t believe in God."

In response to Morgan’s post, Robertson, the “resident fruitcake” at the Dawkins’ forums, asked him two questions which subsequently changed his life: 1) Why don’t you believe in God? 2) What could make you believe in God?

Dismissing the first question as dumb, Robertson’s initial reaction to the second question was “certainly not proof and evidence.”

At that moment, Morgan's instinctive response conjured up to his memory, probably from his previous Mormon days, the verse, “We love because he first loved us.” And in that instant, Morgan understood the expression “amazing grace.”

“I was certain without having any rational explanation that God existed, that he loved me without waiting for me to love him, that he loved me unconditionally without waiting for me to deserve it.”

Whole article here.

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