Lecture Series: Lecture 18: The Problem of Unity and Diversity and The Trinity

I will here suggest a "social model" for the doctrine of the Trinity. This model is by no means new. It is as old as the Church, but is perhaps neglected in the west due to our analytic rather than mystical leanings. I think the glory of this model is that it is still faithful to logic, but asks us to think beyond it as well.

It should first be noted that the doctrine of the Trinity does not violate the axioms of logic because it only suggests that God is three in one sense and one in one sense. It does not ask us to imagine this in a spatial/numerical sense. God is not three bodies and one body at the same time. He is not three in the same sense that He is one. Such thinking will take us in quite the wrong direction. In the language of the creeds, God is simply three in person, one in essence.

There is only one "Godness" in the world; one substance that may be referred to as "God." But that substance is expressed through three dynamic personalities, and it is even expressed in their dynamic interelations. And since this is the language of the Trinity, then spatial/mathematical models merely oversimplify the case. God is not simply 3 and 1 and yet 1 and 3, etc. God is a dynamic interaction of individual personalities that constitute a perfect unity, an essential oneness. The language of society, of community, of relationship, is far nearer the truth of the glorious Trinity.

Lewis is helpful here: He suggests in his Mere Christianity that we experience on our dimension personalities combining in various ways (say the closeness that occurs in marriage or in close friendships). But can we imagine a dimension in which personalities combine in new ways, in perfect ways, so that there is on that plane of existence a perfection of unity and diversity. Lewis says that our experience is like lines combined in two dimensions to form a square. In three dimensions, squares can be combined to form a cube. Notice that a cube is not wholly unlike a square; it is merely a fuller expression of the simplicity of the square, or a new combination of squares in three dimensions. It is in a sense a development along the same trajectory. God's dimension and experience of unity and diversity compared to ours is something like the relationship of the cube to a two-dimensional square.

Or another illustration: Imagine calculus to a first year math student. It would seem irrational. But if he follows the path of logic laid down for him and continues to experience the forms of mathematics he can now understand, he will grow into an understanding of calculus. Calculus is an extension along the same trajectory; it is not a whole departure from simple reason or simple experience. It is an emersion into a deeper and richer expression of reality. In the same way, the unity and diversity in the Trinity is not a departure from our experience. If we could imagine continuing in growth in our relationships, we could see the road carrying us into the "happy land of the Trinity," as Sanders puts it.

Now what does this mean to us? Well, it means everything! Belief in the notion of love requires a robust philosophical answer to the problem of unity and diversity, and the only worldview that can provide such an answer is Christianity. Triune love unifies the distinct while giving distinction to the unified.

Perhaps the most fundamental philosophical problem is the problem of the one and the many. Is there only one thing or one will in the universe, or is there a diversity of things or wills and no meaningful unity in the universe? Early philosophers like Thales believed that everything was essentially unified--his view was that everything was water. Others concluded that everything was essentially separated, like Heraclitus' view that you cannot step into the same river twice. To this day the question holds our interest.

There are scientists in our day who believe that we are essentially products of chance, and chance is by definition the antithesis to any unifying principle. If we are products of chance, then obviously there is no agency that knits the universe together. As many consistent atheists have noted, we are merely accidents that have been "thrown into" this random interrelation of energy and matter. Bertrand Russell, the famous British atheist proclaimed confidently that the destiny of the universe is material particularization. Any stability or order we perceive in the universe will eventually disintegrate, and frankly, it could be nothing more than an arrogant perception now.

If men like Russell are right, then only one ethical choice remains--live for today and live for oneself. Of course logically, even this conclusion can be questioned if Russell's nihilism is true. Nihilism, by definition, means nothing matters. But if nothing matters, then even the view that a person should live a selfish life is another example of the irrelevant and impotent prattling molecules adrift in a violent sea. The curious thing about believing that there are only particulars in the universe is that to do so causes one to lose the value of those particulars. Relativism in the long run is meaningless without some stable and unchanging center by which relative position may be both anchored and understood. If the world is merely filled with random opinions about this or that matter and no truth can be found in them, then ideas are not relative to anything. They are mere by-products of synapses randomly firing in a vacuous ether of uncoordinated happenings. They are not relative happenings because they are not related to anything. They are pure, individual, and irreproducible occurrences, as men like Hume suspected. In an atheist universe, we are not only alone, but even the thought of our loneliness is also alone, isolated from all other thoughts in its vanishing pointlessness. Every thought is jettisoned into the unknown, unimportant and uncoordinated ocean of nihilistic noise, for nihilism is not the absence of something, but is rather the presence of everything but meaning in none of it. The Christian at least dignifies their enemies by arguing with them. The atheist would have us all believe that no man or woman does anything other than litter the universe.

But if the atheists are right and the universe is merely a collection of random happenings, then one can find no meaning in either the whole or the parts. Most cope with this by simply asserting individual will against the universe. As Crane's poem says it, we can shout to the universe that we exist, but it will only answer back, "yes, but the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation." The atheist is forced to be a champion of individuality and can offer no meaningful unity. Thus love becomes impossible, or reduces to individuals deluding themselves into believing that it is something more than meaningless and isolated chemical reactions swallowed up by a purposeless universe.

The Pantheist has the opposite problem of the atheist. His philosophical foundation eliminates the possibility of any meaningful individuality. The interesting thing in this worldview is that there is little attempt to hide this. Pantheists will confidently proclaim that one must abjure the need for individual dignity and embrace the whole. The problem we all face is that we are caught up in a powerful illusion. We actually believe we have a self, and worse, that that self deserves to enlarge its boundaries and become more perfectly self actualized. The Pantheist believes that through various spiritual practices and eventually through birth and rebirth, the individual soul will be absorbed into the universal and all permeating essence of all things.

In the Bhagava Gita, the Hindu holy text, a prince named Arjuna is visited by the Avatar of Brahman called Krishna. Krishna appears individually to Arjuna to lead him in the path of enlightenment. He teaches Arjuna that individuality is a powerful illusion. Now apart from the logical problem here (Why would not Arjuna simply conclude that Krishna also is a part of the illusion?), the real issue is the naked denial of individuality. Love requires an object and a subject and in Pantheism there is only one reality. Love is a matter of relationship, one person relating to another. But if there is no person there, in reality, then surely there can be no love. In Pantheism an individual appeal is made to embrace the idea that individuality doesn’t exist. But it should be clear that if singularity exists without multiplicity, then there can be no love.

Only the Christian worldview can hold unity and diversity together, and the reason it can is because Christian teaching is rooted in the nature and character of a God who is unified and diverse. The Triune God is the source of unity and diversity. Without a Triune concept of God, one is left to turn to other worldviews, none of which can provide a rational foundation for unity and diversity.

Consider how practical this matter can be. In governments that go wrong, the tension between unity and diversity is not maintained. In communism, there is a kind of unity, but individuality is lost. The state is more important than an individual. In a dictatorship, the will of one man is imposed upon the populace, and as such individual dignity is compromised for one uniform voice. One will absorbs the collective of wills. Democracy has the opposite problem. In a democracy, often disagreement is the only agreement. People boldly exercise their right to voice their individual views, and special interest groups often try to manipulate the political process in order to secure their own individual needs without much concern for the common good. Capitalism works well in a democracy because it rewards individual competition. The individual will is held to be more valuable than a sustainable unity of wills. The extreme example of a governmental system that denies unity for individuality would be either libertarianism or anarchy. In the case of anarchy the concept of a common will is totally abandoned and individual survival or advantage alone is sought.

The point here is that in something as mundane as a governmental system we see that the core problem is a failure to harmonize with the Triune reality of complete unity and diversity simultaneously.

And even more practical than governmental systems, consider the simple everyday reality of interpersonal relationships. In bad marriages, for example, unity or diversity diminishes over time. Some marriages polarize naturally, and in such cases individuality is preserved, but meaningful unity is lost. Some marriages are places of endless contention, with both individuals passionately asserting their right to be right. Obviously in such cases individuality is preserved at the cost of unity. In other marriages, one partner forfeits her will to the other, or is overpowered by the other. A marriage can be a place where unity is forged at the cost of one person’s individuality.

If we really were made in the image of a God who is the perfection of unity and diversity, then we would expect that our hearts would yearn both for connection to God and others and we would expect to find in ourselves a desire for the realization of our highest individual potential.

Divine love unifies the distinct while giving distinction to the unified.

(For a treatment of how the Trinity idea provides meaning to the whole educational enterprise, see the article titled “The Trinity and Education.”)

Lecture Series: Lecture 17: Philosophical Problems with Islam

It must be obvious that Christianity and Islam are in an adversarial relationship towards each other. And it is just philosophically inane for any people pleasing postmodernist to suggest that their differences are not that significant. Oprah and her largely ignorant legions try to convince the world that the differences that exist between religions like Islam and Christianity do not really exist, or are superficial, even cosmetic, differences.

What I find striking about this attitude is the arrogance in it, which of course is ironic since it is meant as a countermeasure to the arrogance of "one truth" religious positions. And the arrogance of Oprah and others who make this argument is much worse, in my estimation. First, she reduces all religious claims to mere matters of taste. But why should we believe that she has the right to do that? Religions claim that their understanding of truth is correct. Surely it is arrogant to suggest that all of these people the world over who think they have discovered the truth about God, the afterlife, morality and the like are merely wrong to think so. How does she know? Why not just think her arrogant for thinking she is right that no one can be right?

Secondly, her arrogance is revealed by the implications of such a statement. She knows what all religions teach, down to the fine details of each world system, and she knows that really everyone believes the same thing, even though all of their best scholars would disagree on this point. No matter. Apparently we should trust Oprah over Muslim and Christian scholars who claim these differences are significant. We must conclude that Oprah has a near divine level of knowledge to be able to supplant the best scholars of the worlds various religions, especially Islam and Christianity.

Thankfully, thinking people don't take Oprah seriously on this point. We simply must recognize that the differences between Christianity and Islam amount to a near complete incompatibility between the two religions. With that factual starting point, let us explore the simple question, why Christianity and not Islam?

I will attempt to organize this by discussing doctrines of the Islamic faith that I believe are at the very least problematic, and thus create serious doubt in the truthfulness of Islam.

Doctrine 1 - Mercy and Justice in Islam

While Christianity can account for the mercy and justice of God, Islam cannot.

There are two angles to take at this point. The first involves the actual transaction when God offers mercy and the other involves the process of "earning" God's mercy.

If Islam is correct, then it is clear that God need not punish his son for our sins or any other human representative for that matter. God needs only to "commute" the sentence, laying aside the guilt and all punishments associated with it. And while at first that seems reasonable--after all, when we forgive someone, it seems a wholly subjective affair, in which we just say, "okay, I forgive you." We don't say that there needs to be some just countermeasure to our actions. We don't go looking for our neighbor's cat to offer sacrifice as payment for the forgiveness we offered him. So while this seems to appeal to our common sense, it is an inadequate understanding of justice and mercy.

For example, if my neighbor has stolen from me and I forgive him, it is not as if penalty has not occurred. I have been punished already, in a sense, for his crimes, but that in itself is not just. Surely God will require fairness in all things, including this exchange. It is simply not right for a man to "get away" with stealing from another simply because he has been forgiven.

In short, for God to forgive men, he will have to stop being just. It is simply unjust for God to allow the universe to absorb the sins of men. The damage is done and cannot be undone. What can be done is a just recompense for these actions. But in Islam, God simple "turns aside" his wrath, or "looks away" from the damage done.

Perhaps a Muslim could answer this by suggesting that in mercy God has allowed a time for people to restore justice by doing what is right to compensate for the sins they have committed. In other words, God establishes a works system that "pays down" the debt owed to him. But taking this to the end, it must be clear that if men have time to overcome their bad deeds by performing sufficient good deeds, then they are merely keeping their end of God's bargain. God would be required, in pure justice, to let them into heaven because they fulfilled the conditions He himself set out for them to fulfill. It seems to be the case that mercy need not fit into the equation, since man is merely doing what he was rightly supposed to do with the time afforded and earning his way back to God. And practically it bears noting that a Muslim probably wouldn't labor under these conditions with any sense of the mercy of God affording him all the necessary time, resources and support to achieve the appropriate good works. He would most likely labor under a crushing burden of fear and uncertainty, with the thought of God's justice rather than any sense of mercy prominent in his mind.

Islam has a pendulum problem here: When concerns about the place of mercy in a works oriented system are raised, the Islamic answer is that God is really forgiving the sins of the past; and when concerns about the justice of merely "laying aside" these sins are raised, the Islamic answer is the justice of a works oriented system. Concerns about God's justice are solved by giving us only a just God while concerns about God's mercy are solved by giving us only a merciful God. And yet among the 99 names of Allah, the Qur'an makes it clear that He is both merciful and just. This is a serious logical problem.

This matter cannot be deferred to mystery either, and the reason surely is that the Qur'an explains God's justice and mercy.

A religious mystery is an area indicated but not fully explained (such as God's role in specific evils, if any). These areas need not be contradictory, and presumably Islam includes some of these.

But that is not what we see in the matter of mercy and justic in God. It is plainly explained that salvation is earned and that prior sins are simply laid aside. But these are clearly logical problems, as has already been explained. It is philosophically irresponsible after these observations are made to seek refuge in the notion of "God's mysteries."

Doctrine 2 - The Derivative Nature of Islamic Doctrine

The best ideas in Islam are borrowed from Judaism and Christianity. If one were to take out of the Qur'an every reference to the Old Testament story, one would find the Qur'an a very thin book indeed. This is so striking that anyone who reads the Qur'an will be amazed at the lack of original material in it. It will almost read like a Jewish cult rather than a separate religious tradition.

The troubling part in the Qur'an is the additional or manipulated material, such as the role of Ismael, the legal changes and the rejection of Jesus as the Son of God. On these grounds Christians must of course reject Islam, but surely there is much the two religions share in common.

Doctrine 3 - Evidentiary Problems with The Islamic Doctrine of Sin

One of the teachings in Islam that is at odds with Christianity and Judaism is the doctrine of sin. Muslims are essentially Pelagian (the Christian heresy that taught we do not inherit a disposition toward sin). In Islam, people are born with a capacity to keep God's law. There is no doctrine of "original sin." A person can, in theory, live a sinless life, provided he or she tries hard enough. This of course is immediately rejected by Christian teaching.

The problem here seems obvious. If we are born with a capacity for sinlessness, why are there not more sinless people in the world? To say that we fall into sin merely because of "peer pressure" is inadequate as an explanation of pervasive sin in the world. If human beings have the ability to do right, then the assumption is that they have knowledge of what is right. And if they have knowledge of what is right, and the capacity to do what is right, it follows that no exposure to what is wrong need deter them from doing what is right. In fact, if anything it would give them more incentive to do right, since there are so many examples of ruined lives all around them.

Does it not seem that the cleanest explanation for our experience--namely, that everyone we know is a sinner--is the Christian doctrine of original sin? G.K. Chesterton said it this way, "The only doctrine for which Christians have ample empirical evidence is the doctrine of original sin." What he meant is that daily we are exposed to evil both in our own lives and in the lives of others. The best explanation for the fact that sin comes so naturally to us is that humanity is messed up. The evidence supports Christian doctrine and not Islamic doctrine.

Doctrine 4 - Islam and Unity and Diversity

There is no love in Allah which he can share with anyone. Of the 99 names for God in Islam, the name love is strangely missing. The reason is clearly that he need not show love because he does not experience love in his own nature. Only a Triune God can experience love. Only when there is a dynamic interaction of wills can there be love. There must be a subject/subject relation in order to have love. When we speak of "loving ourselves," we must surely mean that there is something about us that is worthy of loving. Imagine for a moment that you were the only being in all of existence. Could you love anything then, standing in infinite space, with no other being in the universe with whom to relate? Surely love is meaningless without relationship and relationship is meaningless without another will that can converse with you. What would love mean then if it cannot be given to anyone? In Islam, God is alone, and none can understand or appreciate him. His creation is a feature of His sovereign power and not an expression of love. God is not creating to disclose himself to creation so that they might know and love Him. God creates to ensure the implementation of his unilateral will.

The question is this: If God need not bother about love, then why should anyone else? If God is not winning people by love, then why should his followers be constrained to do anything different? If God exists to enforce a set of directives without love, then his people can surely do the same.

Lewis once said that "monstrous nations have a monstrous conception of God." Is it any wonder most people the world over would not want to live in any consistently Muslim country, including probably most Muslims.

Doctrine 5 - Islamic View of History

It is because of the Islamic conception of God that Islamic history is what it is. Islam spreads by the blood of its enemies; Christianity, by the blood of its founder and His disciples for generations. Surely this by itself tells us something about the practical outworking of the ideas of each system. Islam spreads by conquest. Christianity spreads by martyrdom. Islam conquered the Mediterranean world in a short time using the methods of Alexander, Julius and other conquerors. Christianity conquered the Mediterranean world in a way unseen up until that point or since--by a sacrifice that transformed the heart of Rome. Islam contains and controls foreign ideas; Christianity penetrates and transforms them. People submit to Islam out of fear; they submit to Christianity out of love.

It is true that Christians turned at times to the efficiency of conquest in order to spread its position in the world. Thankfully, Christians now know that those times constitute a bold departure from the gospel of Jesus Christ. They are to be confessed among the Christian community as periods of great internal disease and sinfulness. You will wait a long time before you hear any Muslim scholar admit that the conquests of North Africa, Persia, Spain and Constantinople were sins in Islam.

Doctrine 6 - Islamic View of Salvation

In short, your performance saves you. We have already discussed the logical problem here. If you can perform your way back into God's good graces, then salvation cannot be a matter of mercy. If we can perform so as to overcome our sins, then the granting of salvation is a just recompense for having performed as one ought to perform.

The other dimension to this is the psychological state of the performer. Will he be burdened by fear or freedom in his pursuit of moral excellence? He can never be assured of his salvation until a sufficient number of good deeds compensate for any bad deeds he has committed. What if he runs out of time? What if the quality of his good deeds is not good enough though he has perhaps done many? And what will his lifelong motivations be?

Surely the Muslim operating in this performance mindset will see threat of punishment and promise of reward as his singular motivation in life. He will become an ethical egoist. Life will be about his own comfort in the end. He is not trying to know and love God and enjoy him forever. He can't know or love God since God is unmatched and unknowable. Thus his entire motivation with respect to God is to secure some payoff from him and to stave off any punishments coming from such a powerful being.

The curious thing about this is that even atheistic ethicists recognize the inferiority of ethical egoism. It turns everything in the universe into an excuse to feed self-interest alone. But what if everyone felt this way? What if everyone in my life only cared about me because I was somehow enriching their experience in life? There would be no one who could think of me as a "good" in and of myself. Strangely this attitude is consistent with the Muslim notion of God, who in effect has turned us into things to be used to achieve his purposes rather than subjects to be loved for who we are. But then the Muslim God should not be surprised when they respond to Him in precisely the same fashion, turning Him into a source of personal payoff rather than someone to love for who He is.

Doctrine 7 - Islamic View of Heaven

In keeping with the Islamic notion of God and the performance relationship of his subjects, heaven is merely a sensual reward for those who keep God's laws. There are virgins, succulent foods and serene scenes in God's oasis. In essence, one is given a cleaned up and exaggerated version of the pleasures of earth forever and ever. This of course all fits with an egoist ethic. The problem is that the egoist ethic is dreadful!

Lecture Series: Lecture 16: Evolution v. Creationism

And now we begin an assessment of the question of evolution. Since I am better equipped to handle philosophical questions than scientific ones, let me offer a philosophical point to begin:

Evolution is a tautology. Remember a tautology is a statement that is definitional and not explanatory, but it is often cited as an explanation. In other words, tautologies are definitions masquerading as arguments. An example of a tautology would be, "Either God exists or He doesn't." This statement is necessarily true, but it is useless and uninteresting. Another example would be, "a bachelor is an unmarried male." Yep, but again useless and philosophically void.

Here is the tautology of evolution: The confident evolutionist says, "Only the best creatures survive." And I ask, "What makes them the best?" And he says, "Because they survive." Or put plainly: "The evolved creatures are the ones that survive and the reason they are the most evolved is that they survive."

Of course it is plain when stated this way that evolution as a theory has virtually nothing to do with this tautological evolution. Evolution as a process would not be interested in ensuring that the "best" or "most evolved" would survive. Of course this has to do with what we mean by the "best" creatures. And surely this is the center of my point--namely, that evolution merely definitionally associates "best" with "survivor." But then the theory of evolution seems to indicate that living creatures began with a simple common ancestor and "developed" into the spectacular variety of living things we now encounter, among which are creatures that are more intelligent, altruistic, and in that sense "better" than their distant ancestors. In other words, evolution as a theory suggests that things are progressing through the ages by the refining power of natural selection. But is this so, other than merely definitionally? (in other words, because they tell us it is happening)

If evolution as a theory is true then it would not ensure "refinement" in the least. It would only ensure value-neutral change, genetic drift. One could not watch the change occur and then say after the fact that it was an improvement, because that would imply that evolution is a perfecting process and would beg the whole question.

In other words, evolution, at least as it has been explained by evolutionists, ensures only that random changes in an environment meet random changes in organisms, and when by happy accident the creature has the traits to survive in that environment, then it passes its genes to the next generation. That is it! It seems to me obvious that this kind of process would not "care" about producing something better over time. In fact over time this planet will become uninhabitable to humans, leaving only bacteria to survive. At that point, would it be reasonable to suggest that bacteria would be the "most evolved" creatures? Is it reasonable to suggest it now, since bacteria can survive myriad environments and we are less adaptive. Or consider this another way. Perhaps there are aliens in the universe whose intelligence exceeds ours at least as much as ours exceeds that of bacteria. Are they the most evolved, even if in colonizing our planet they should be destroyed by a simple virus?

And now we turn to the matter of evolutionary science and how a Christian can respond to it. First, let's establish a few key terms, as we are want to do in this class:

1. Evolution: Organisms develop in complexity over time, descending from a common, albeit simple, ancestor.

2. Natural selection: Only organisms suited to the environment survive to pass their genetics to the next generation. This is perhaps a more accurate definition of evolution itself, given the explanations most generally offered.

3. Theistic evolution: God is the creative causal agent behind the evolutionary process, perhaps in a merely Deistic or detached manner.

4. Punctuated equilibrium: The view of Stephen J. Gould that genetic changes in organisms happen so rapidly that the intermediary forms have little time to leave a fossil deposit.

5. Big bang cosmology: There is a residual echo of the big bang (traceable expansion, slowing), which demonstrates an absolute beginning to the universe.

6. Law of biogenesis: Creatures produce after their own kind. Chickens produce chickens and humans produce humans.

7. Second Law of Thermodynamics: Heat loss and loss of order occur in a closed system. Also referred to as entropy.

8. Irreducible complexity: Some organs/organisms do not appear to have any conceivable need of perfecting. In other words, some things in nature do not appear to be able to go through a developmental or emergent process. All the necessary parts need to be in place simultaneously (such as the bacterial flagellum, the eye, etc), which implies that the information system that coded for the creation of these systems (DNA) had to be in place prior to assembly as well.

9. Mutations: Mistakes in genetic duplication. These create changes in the way an organism functions. This is said to be the mechanism of evolutionary development. Generally this would require a slow process of genetic differentiation to create new systems, thus creating significant innovative changes  (sea mammal to land mammal, etc.).

10. Spontaneous generation: The view that life on earth came from the constituent chemicals of which the earth is made. It is said that non-living chemicals "came to life" or "self-assembled" as a result of a random interaction of these chemicals with an external energy source (such as lightening).

In confronting the matter of evolution, the Christian must face his most significant evidentiary challenge--namely, the age of the earth. Of course this is a significant problem because the Scriptures seem to indicate a rather young earth (6 - 15 thousand years).

What evidence is there of age? The two primary sources of this information come from the rocks (geological evidence) and from stars (cosmological evidence).

Radiometric dating is the process of discerning the age of rocks from the half-life of various elements within them. Christians are fond of claiming that radiometric dating is unreliable, and since I am no scientist, it occurs to me that I would not have the authority to counter or confirm this claim. For the sake of argument, let us assume that radiometric dating is roughly accurate. If it is, then surely the earth cannot be as young as Genesis indicates. It would have to be much older, on the order of 4-5 billion years.

Carbon dating looks at the half-life of carbon in a sample to find its approximate age. I'm told that it works only to about 50,000 years since that is the longest possible age signature carbon can leave.

Perhaps the strongest evidence for the age of the earth is the cosmological evidence. We know that the closest star to the earth is our sun, which is roughly 93 million miles away from us. That means that the light from our sun left 8 minutes ago. We are looking at a developing photograph that was taken 8 minutes ago. If that weren't amazing enough, consider that many of the stars we see in the night sky ceased to exist many millions of years ago, since the light traveling from those stars left millions of years ago. When we finally see the supernova of those stars, it is a time delay of several million years. Surely this indicates a very old universe indeed!

These evidentiary points cannot be brushed aside. They require some reasonable response from Christians. Now I highlight a few Christian responses to the age problem:

1. Theistic Evolution: Some Christians have adopted a compromise position between creation and evolution known as Theistic Evolution. The basic idea is that the universe is old and that God has chosen to use the slow process of evolution to create. God is the creative force behind phenomena that are as yet unexplained by evolutionary science, such as the origin of life from non-living chemicals, the wealth of necessary beneficial mutations and order from disorder.

One problem with TE is that it must turn the early Genesis account into an allegory (a symbolic story, or poem) of creation. One wonders where the allegory ends? One wonders whether Adam and Eve were real people?

Another problem with TE is that God is seen to use a method of creation that seems unworthy of Him. Why would God use such a slow and even imperfect process to bring about the emergence of man? Surely the Genesis account indicates that God, who is perfect, creates a world that is perfect, or at least harmonious, and then it deteriorates from that state into the imperfect state we see now. Evolution would seem to suggest the exact opposite paradigm.

And finally, TE would also involve the messy struggle for survival as its method of "creation." The Genesis account seems to indicate that death is a result of the fall and not that it is a tool of creation.

Having said all of this, perhaps there are ways of facing such challenges and offering a plausible Theistic Evolutionary model. Certainly many intelligent Christians have adopted it as their answer to the age question.

2. The Day Age Theory: This would be the interpretive framework for Genesis supplied by the Theistic Evolutionist or the model of Hugh Ross and his compatriots. It is said that the days of Genesis represent epochs of time. The word"yom" in Hebrew can have such a meaning, and as such it perhaps refers to an era or epoch. A strong counter to this is the Exodus 20 reference, in which the plural for "yom" is used, as in "In six days (yamim) God created the heavens and the earth..." Any time the plural "yamim" is used in Scripture, meaning "days," it refers to a succession of literal 24 hour days. This would seem to be a problem for the Day Age Theorist. Nevertheless, such an objection may reasonably be faced, thus giving the Day Age Theory stronger footing.

3. The Gap Theory: An unusual theory, to say the least. It is built on the notion that a gap of perhaps billions of years exists between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth... and the earth was formless and void..." The contention is that God created the world, then rendered it formless and void as the result of His judgment on a pre-Adamic race. The earth was in this formless and void condition for billions of years, after which God begins a recreation. This is not a widely held theory due to the fact that it reads far too much into the phrase "formless and void."

4. The Literalist Theory: It is still maintained by some "short age" creationists that God could have created the world in 6 literal 24 hour periods of time. They maintain that the matter of age is a matter of appearance--that is, God created the universe in a state of material maturity. It is said that God could have built a history into the rocks of the earth as well as a history into the Cosmos. The evidence for this is the maturity of the garden and the maturity of Adam and Eve. They were not created as fetuses, but as fully grown adults. In that sense, the chicken indeed came before the egg for the literalist.

The problem with the literalist theory is its relationship to the evidence for age and its explanations for the appearance of age. For example, in order for the universe to give an appearance of several billion years when it is only 6000 years old would require God in a sense deceiving us as to the light signature of distant stars. We see a light signature of stars 7 million light years away, and yet those stars presumably don't exist. It seems that such a theory would require that as we look at the night sky, the only stars that really exist are the the ones at or within the universal boundary of 6000 years, indicating that all the rest are "representations" of stars. And that would indicate that we are functioning within something like a giant "dome," as in the movie "The Truman Show."

Or it could be that the stars exist, but God accelerated the light to arrive on earth and then slowed the light again to the constant rate for light that we now know.

And consider the fossil question. This theory would indicate either that dinosaurs lived only 6000 years ago or that God deposited fossils of creatures that never really existed. But both strain the limits of credibility.

5. Schroeder's Theory (Quasar Theory): Perhaps not a widely known theory because it requires an ability to conceptualize Einstein's theory of relativity and its implications with respect to time. Perhaps the best thing to do here would be to link you to Schroeder's article on this: http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48951136.html

In essence, this article indicates that the universe looks 15 billion years old from our vantage point in the expansion of the universe. Our relative position in the universe causes us to see the universe as that old, but if we were located at or near the point of the big bang, events would be radically accelerated and yet you wouldn't "feel" that they were. To get an idea of this, imagine for a moment teleporting to a distant galaxy on a planet where time didn't move as quickly. You are there, from the perspective of that planet, for 10 years and then you teleport back to earth only to learn that everyone you knew was now in their 80's. You aged ten years while they aged 60+ years. Einstein taught us that time does not function the same everywhere in the universe. In some places in the universe an orange could theoretically last for months. At the point of the big bang, events are rapidly accelerated, but if you were there you would not perceive this rapid change.

I personally like Schroeder's theory and think that it's merit lies in that if true it would demonstrate that the universe is both young and old at the same time. Looking forward from the point of the big bang would grant a short time frame, but looking back from our position in the expansion and slowing of the universe grants a long time frame.

So is it true that modern evolutionary science is at odds with Christian faith? Theistic Evolution, Short Age Creation and Schroeder's Theory offer plausible methods of resolving the age considerations within the creationist model. The real question is this: Is modern science at odds with modern science? In other words, is the evolutionary theory consistent with modern science? It seems the answer is a resounding no!

Now I would like to discuss a few problems with Naturalism:

1. The mind is the product of purposeless chance. We have discussed this already, so I won't labor the point. Suffice it to say that if our minds are the products of a purposeless process, there can be no objective reason to think that in using them we are doing something purposeful. But if there is no purpose to using the mind, then science surely is left without a motivational foundation. We can do it perhaps to cure boredom, but surely a party is more fun than the science lab.

2. All of human history is moving toward total annihilation. This is another point that has been raised, but it surely must be the case that if all of human history will become nothing more than a particularized junkyard of inert matter, then there can be no meaning in the things we are doing with our time now. In point of fact, if naturalism is true, then the universe is nothing but totally randomized shrapnel from a giant explosion. But if this is really true, then one might as well spend one's time finding pleasure in whatever will afford it rather than doing science.

3. Another problem in evolutionary "science" is that assumptions are passed of as observational facts.

For example, spontaneous generation is passed off as fact when every scientific test employed to confirm it has actually reinforced the fact that the opposite is true--namely, that life exploding from its constituent chemicals is impossible. Life does not spontaneously generate from chemical parts. Nature herself is insistent on this point. This is no canon of religious dogmatism (stubborn belief). Observationally, we have seen only that life comes from pre-existing life. Even in Darwin's own work, it is plain that he conceived of evolution as taking over once there was a creature in place that had reproductive capabilities. Darwinism itself simply doesn't make sense unless there exists some common ancestor with the requisite encyclopedic genetics necessary to reproduce itself.

Another assumption of modern evolutionary theory is that mutations are sufficient to create biological innovations on their own. It should be understood that a mutation is actually a random mistake in genetic duplication. These mistakes are often then passed on through successive generations of genetic duplication. This causes a kind of corruption of genetic information, usually resulting in too much information here or too little information there. As a result, mutations are almost wholly destructive to living things, or at least cause a less than optimal functionality. For example, genetic disorders such as down's syndrome or sickle cell anemia cause those who have these disorders to live more difficult and often shorter lives. This process of mutative change over time is the only meaningful mechanism for evolutionary development, and yet it seems almost totally destructive.

Another question persists: How many constructive and coordinated mutative genetic steps must there be to cause the transition of a sea-mammal to a land-going mammal, for example? Would it have to be on the order of millions? Does this not strain the limits of credibility?

On the question of mutations, the case of fruit flies is instructive. The life cycle of fruit flies is very short, which allows scientists to tinker with their genetics through cross-breeding, in the hope of demonstrating how mutations can be a source of biological innovation. The equivalent of many human generations of genetic drift can be traced because of the short life cycle of fruit flies. And what has been the result of this study? Scientists have found that strangely there seems to be a kind of genetic barrier surrounding the species "fruit fly." Many exotic forms of fruit flies are produced in these studies, but what is curiously missing is any leap to biological structures that would be considered novel to fruit flies. The point is that there is only so much information available in the gene pool of the fruit fly. One cannot expect that a random reconfiguration of the raw parts of DNA will produce additional information, especially the kind and quality necessary for constructive and coordinated mutative steps forward in development.

The last glaring assumption of evolutionary science is the notion of naturalism itself. I have also discussed this elsewhere, but it bears repeating that there is no way to scientifically demonstrate the God does not exist. It is philosophical position. To say that "everything has a naturalistic explanation" is self-contradictory, for surely the statement that "everything has a naturalistic explanation" does not itself have a naturalistic explanation. It is philosophical, which means it is an interpretation of the facts and not a fact itself. But those principles by which we interpret facts are not facts themselves and are not even discerned from the facts. The problem of course is that the assumption of God's non-existence is passed off as though it is fact, which is absurd.

The Factual Problems with Naturalism:

4. Mutations: Observationally they are bad or neutral and not beneficial in a substantially creative or emergent sense. Fruit flies with four wings are cool looking and fun to produce through cross breeding, but they die even more quickly than other fruit flies. X-Men is a great movie, but it is after all just a movie!

5. Fossil Record: There are significant glaring gaps in the fossil record. And not only that, but abundant and multiple complex life forms all appear together in what is known as the Cambrian rock layer, and in other explosive events. There are no common ancestors in the fossil record for most of the animals that come into existence in these "explosions," which seems to indicate that multiple creatures of different genetic trajectories came into existence simultaneously.

Darwin himself noted that if his theory were to be vindicated, there would have to be multiple transitional forms scattered throughout the fossil record. We should see literally millions of transitional forms between sea-mammal and land-going mammal, much less the rest of the fossil record. And that is not what we find. Scientists claim that the reason for this is that the conditions required for laying down fossils are exceedingly rare. But apparently the problem is significant enough to prompt a new theory championed by Harvard biologist Stephen J. Gould. His theory suggests that the genetic changes that create new species happen much more abruptly than previously thought, so that perhaps setting down a fossil record would be compromised. Rapid coordinated changes happen and thus no record is left between groups. This theory is called "punctuated equilibrium" to suggest that the evolutionary periods are rapid, followed by long periods of evolutionary calm.

The curious thing about this new theory is that it seems to suggest that evolution is happening so rapidly that one won't find a fossil record. Of course, the argument has been that evolution is happening so slowly that we can't see it now either. So what that means is that it is invisible both to our observations now and in the fossil record historically, but we must trust that it is happening--after all, how else are we going to explain the facts of our experience?

6. Irreducible Complexity: Michael Behe, in his book, Dawrin's Black Box, discusses this idea. He illustrates by discussing the various parts of a mousetrap. To be functional, a mousetrap requires that all five parts function symbiotically. Another way of saying this is that each of the parts of the mousetrap were created anticipating the necessary relationships between the various parts. The whole is the reason for the parts, so to speak. But surely if we find things like this in nature, then we will be led to conclude that certain structures in nature cannot go through an unguided developmental process and that perhaps they were intentionally arranged in the ways that they are. A mousetrap missing even one of the essential five parts is wholly non-functional. It is questionable whether it can even be referred to as a mousetrap. Is this also true of the bacterial flagellum or the first cell or other irreducibly complex structures in nature? Behe says yes, and many scientists agree with him.

7. Time and Probabilities: Remember Dr. Stenger offered a "low-probability argument," essentially stating that low probability events happen all the time (people win the lottery, people are hit by lightening, etc.), so one should not rule out that naturalistic evolution has occurred since we see low probability events every day.

I suggested to you that this is a dreadful argument, for the following reasons:

One, it is a logical fallacy (called Affirming the Consequent).

If evolution occurred, the improbable is possible.
The improbable is possible.
Therefore, evolution occurred.

But clearly it is ridiculous to make the leap from some improbable events to all improbable events, or from one class of improbable events to the class of improbable events to which evolution belongs. To illustrate,

If dogs are typing Shakespeare on the moon right now, then the improbable is possible.
The improbable is possible.
Therefore, dogs are on the moon right now typing Shakespeare.

The other response to Stenger would be that of Aristotle. Aristotle notes that chance events do occur, but within ordered boundaries. If that is true, then chance occurrences do not in the least threaten the Christian position. We can simply state that God's ordered design includes parameters wide enough to allow for chance events. The lottery is instructive here. From the perspective of the designer of the game, it is assured that someone will win it. From the perspective of the players, the winner is wholly random. No thinking person would conclude that because a chance event took place within the game that the game itself is a chance event.

8. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics: Christians are fond of citing the second law against evolution, but to do so requires that we accurately address the arguments of our opponents. Scientists note that the second law does not preclude evolution on this planet because the second law only dictates that entropy will occur in a closed system. The earth is not a closed system. It is constantly irradiated by a primary energy source, our sun. The sun is the engine that drives evolution.

But is this response adequate? If entropy occurs in a closed system, we must ask if the universe is a closed system? It seems that most would either say yes, or would be led to conclude that we can make no other assumption given the evidence. As such, it seems clear that the second law is a serious obstacle to evolution on a universal scale. One could perhaps state that what we experience is global evolution amid universal devolution. The solar system is in decay. One day, perhaps many millions of years hence, it will unravel, the sun will explode or burn out its fuel, and nothing but diminished (less useful) matter will exist.

Another interesting thought is this: If the universe is devolving from some organized original state prior to the big bang, wouldn't that state be the most "evolved" state? Can we meaningfully think of the present state as more evolved than the big bang itself? Why arbitrarily conclude that living matter is more evolved than supremely organized non-living matter? What gives us that right--that is, what gives us the epistemological right to assess matter along a scale? No river can rise higher than it's source, and so the state just before the big bang is the most evolved state--that is, if evolutionary theory is to be consistent.

9. Law of Biogenesis: All our observations of nature indicate that creatures contain set parameters of genetic information that they invariably pass down to successive generations. And while mutations occur, they only manipulate this information and do not generate new and more complex information from it. That is where centuries of scientific observations have led us.

10. Big Bang Cosmology: The residual echo of the big bang is evidence of an absolute beginning, get this, not merely of motion in the universe, but of matter, time and space itself. Now that we know the atomic structure of matter, it seems impossible to conceive of matter locked in complete inactivity. And if the matter of the big bang was excited into motion, how was it so excited? Could it have provided for its own atomic motion by itself if it was frozen motionless at the beginning?

But matter in motion cries out for a creator or an absolute beginning to motion because of the Kalam argument. If there was no beginning to this motion, then the past is an infinite series of movements, or events. But this is rationally absurd because if the past is infinite, then the present could not have arrived.

Lecture Series: Lecture 15: Philosophy and Science

Perhaps the first thing to say about the relationship of Christianity and science is that events do not interpret themselves. Science is not a value neutral enterprise. Some worldview is logically anterior to the events in question and serves as the interpretive paradigm by which the events are understood, their insights appropriated and applied.

This is why any understanding of science must first answer fundamental questions, perhaps best understood as the "philosophy of science."

This is where we begin. We must first develop a reasonable philosophy of science before we can rightly interpret the insights afforded to us by science. We will organize this by discussing certain fundamental questions in the philosophy of science.

Question 1: Is all knowledge discerned through the five senses? Is strict empiricism possible?

Answer: No! If there is anything that the history of philosophy has demonstrated, it is that there must be some content to our understanding that comes to us a priori (prior to sense experiences). This knowledge is necessary in order for us to make sense of the experiences we have. Some philosophers refer to this content of knowledge as features our our "noetic structure" (mind structure). Others talk about them as "properly basic beliefs." The point is that some ideas are innate, hard-wired into us by virtue of the way the mind is built to function. An example of this kind of knowledge would be mathematical and logical principles. Kant included time/space relations and causation in this content of a priori truths we simply know about. Others include moral law. And still others would suggest that knowledge of God is also a feature of our a priori knowledge.

But why is it the case that it is impossible for all our knowledge to come from our sense experiences? Well, think about it. What is the problem with the statement, "all our knowledge comes from sense experiences?" Clearly the statement, "all our knowledge comes from sense experiences" did not itself come from sense experiences. One could experience everything in the universe and it still would not bring down the philosophical conclusion that "all knowledge is restricted to the domain of the five senses." Such an idea is not physically discerned. Clearly not all ideas are derived from experiences. Ideas are used to interpret experiences in many cases.

Another point here: Can you even imagine shutting off all your senses? What would that mean for you? Could you really have knowledge? Now consider the opposite question: What would it mean if you had a constant stream of sense experiences, but no "operating system" to process the experiences? Surely knowledge would be impossible in either case. But of course this entails that there are some things we know about a priori. And surely this is one of the conclusions of philosophical history--namely, that it is impossible to imagine human knowledge without a harmonious relationship between the knowledge we learn from experience and the knowledge we possess prior to experience.

Question 2: Is science a value neutral exercise? (an exercise totally unclouded by bias)

Answer: No! This point will relate somewhat to the previous point. The fact is that science and scientists presuppose things about the nature of reality. And these presuppositions color everything about the conclusions they draw from the science lab.

Here is a short list of principles scientists take for granted as true, but without any scientific proof of their existence:

1. The universe is intelligible.

2. The rational structure of the mind relates to a rational structure in the world. (In short, I'm not just perceiving things; I'm actually figuring out how the universe really works)

3. The principle of causation. (We can thank David Hume for moving this one out of the realm of observational truth and into the realm of presupposition.)

4. Knowledge is possible.

5. The inductive principle holds because of the uniformity of nature (the idea that the future will be like the past... i.e. fire will burn in the future because it has in the past).

Every one of these principles has in common the fact that they are not learned by experiences of the world. They are assumptions about the world imposed upon our experiences and employed in order to give meaning to our experiences. I'd like to know how the scientist is going to go about demonstrating in a laboratory or field research that the universe is intelligible without first assuming that the universe is intelligible in order to demonstrate that the universe is intelligible.

Here is the simple point: Every scientist is a philosopher and every philosopher is a scientist. The two are inextricably linked. The key is to be precise about what knowledge comes from our observations of the universe and what knowledge comes from other sources. It is totally irresponsible and unfair for any scientist to suggest that philosophers have nothing to say; and it is equally irresponsible for any philosopher to suggest that scientists have nothing to say.

Question 3: Since all science proceeds on the assumption of causation, is there good reason to trust this assumption?

What if the world is just a random collection of events and the order we perceive is merely a human phenomenon? In other words, perhaps the idea that the world is knit together by a series of causal connections is only an idea subjectively maintained in the mind of man. Can we prove causation?

According to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, causation cannot be proved. He argues that our perceptions of the world are divided into impressions and ideas. Impressions are the lively encounters we have with the world (things imprinted on the mind via our senses). Ideas are what the mind does to interpret and string these experiences together. An example here: We have impressions of horses, and then we have impressions of horns. We put the two together to form the idea of Unicorns. But of course we have no simple impression of Unicorns; Unicorn is a mere idea we formed from sense impressions.

Now let's go a bit deeper: We experience events that follow one another in the world. For example, we hear a rooster crow and then the sun comes up. We hit a billiard ball into another and then the second ball moves. Here is our dilemma: How can we know that there is any causal relationship between the events we perceive in sequence? We have simple impressions of the events, but not the principle of cause and effect. All we have experienced is one event following another. For all we know, there is no causal connection between events. Perhaps what is happening is that we are imposing the idea of causation on events that are not really related. Every time I hit a billiard ball it causes the movement of the other, but is it at least possible that tomorrow I will hit a billiard ball and the second ball will remain motionless when struck by the first? All I know for sure is that every time I've experienced the first ball hitting the second, it moved, but does that prove there is a magical principle called causation holding the universe together? What if causation is not "in the world," so to speak; what if it is only in me? In other words, it is at least possible that the universe is a wholly random collection of events, and that the belief that events are ordered causally is something I am "doing to it."

Hume acknowledges that we live as if there is such a thing as causation, and it has "worked" for us to this point. But his point is that it cannot be proven, in which case a person could theoretically live as if it isn't real.

The implications of this are startling! Essentially, Hume suggests that the very foundational principle of science is subject to a serious and debilitating skepticism. The question must be asked, "why do science if we can't know for sure that we are discovering the nature of the world?" Surely all of science proceeds on the opposite assumption--namely, that the reason we study things like the human body is so that we can figure out how it actually works, and not merely to delve more deeply into our perceptions about how it works.

Now if Hume's conclusion is that causation itself is to fit in the category of a priori truths, or properly basic truths, then he is merely acknowledging that some truths are known without reference to experience and they are confirmed by their pervasive use and capacity to guide experience. Obviously we don't say that we learned about logic through experience, but surely logic guides us in interpreting experience. Perhaps causation is something like logic in this regard. It is not perceived by the senses, but it informs and governs what the senses "bring in."

What else can be said by way of response to Hume? If he is saying that we cannot know causal connections between events and thus cannot know reality--that we are little more than human "perceivers," then his view seems self-refuting. In essence, he would be saying that we cannot know anything of a philosophical nature for sure. But of course, to say that we cannot know anything of that kind is to state something he thinks he knows.

And finally, one can ask, as have Geisler and Bocchino, "Did Hume assume causation in order to follow a path of cause and effect reasoning to arrive at his conclusion?" Did his thinking have a causal relationship to his doubt? If it did, then even the act of his thinking about causation affirms causation--that is, to question causation he has had to employ it, which is self-refuting as well.

Question 4: Where would philosophical skepticism lead us?

If Hume is right and we are only human "perceivers" who cannot know for certain that our ideas have any relationship to the "real world," then perhaps we should all become skeptics. The skeptic claims that we cannot have certainty about anything other than the irreducible brute facts of experience. Anything the mind does to construct ideas from this raw material is grounded only in our thinking, and perhaps not in reality. In the end, we have cause to doubt our beliefs about the world.

Now aside from the fact that even this is self-refuting (after all, if we can doubt all ideas in the mind, then surely we can also doubt the idea that all ideas are doubtful), let us consider what the idea would lead to if it could be true.

If we can doubt all ideas, then relativism must emerge. And the reason is simple: no reliable ideas means that all ideas are equally unreliable. All ideas have the same value, or lack thereof.

If all ideas have the same quality of unreliability, then none of them really matter. No idea can be truer or better than any other, which in the end must mean that all ideas are worthless--a mere chatter of pointless perspectives. Thus nihilism emerges, which is the philosophical position that the world is meaningless and nothing matters in the end.

If nothing really matters, then how is one to cope with such an idea? The answer is hedonism. The only real coping mechanism as a mere sensing being is to minimize the pain introduced to those senses and to maximize the pleasure that any stimulation of them might provide.

Thus, if a person is a hedonist, it could be because he is a skeptic. Perhaps he believes that we cannot know about God and morality and human dignity and the afterlife. Curiously many who believe such things default to a lifestyle of temporal hedonism.

5. Does Quantum physics indicate that we cannot trust the principle of causation?

Some scientists have noted that the indeterminacy principle in physics suggests that we cannot know whether causation operates at the most foundational level in the physical world--that is, at the atomic level. Upon the disintegration of the atomic nucleus, particles are generated and emitted that did not exist before this event. It seems that they just pop into existence without any direct cause. Thus, some have suggested that causation is dethroned by such phenomena.

But the curious thing is that causation was a precondition for discovering the indeterminacy principle. Scientists were asking, from whence comes these particles? And they discovered that the cause is unknown. Many Christians scientists and philosophers ask simply, "why believe that the particles generated in radioactive decay come from nothing?" "Why not believe that they simply have an unknown cause?"

The implications of the belief that there is no such thing as operational causation at the foundational level of existence are staggering. If causation does not exist at that level, then perhaps it does not exist at any level, in which case all science would conceivably be rendered meaningless again.

And consider the implications in ethics. What if my decisions in ethics do not flow from any causal factors, but are spontaneously generated and thus wholly unpredictable? I can just see new defenses for criminal behavior sounding something like this: "Your honor, I am not guilty because causation does not reign in nature, and thus I am not the cause of my behavior. My behavior happens to me and not the other way around, your honor!"

In conclusion, it must be clear that science is not a worldview-neutral exercise. Science itself requires a worldview robust enough to support its search for truth. Obviously it undermines the search for truth to suggest either that there is no truth to be found or if there is we will never know it.

Lecture Series: Lecture 12: The Problem of Evil

If God is good, why is there so much evil and suffering in the world? The logic of the problem works something like this:

If God is good, then he would intervene to stop gratuitous suffering (after all, we would).
God does not act to stop gratuitous suffering.
Therefore, God is not good (or does not exist).

Hence, the problem of evil. It should be understood that the real sting of the problem, in my estimation, is in the matter of the origin of evil and the analogy to human decisions when faced with evil.

How did evil come into existence if God created the world perfect in its original design? Assuming there can be no evil in God, then evil has no meaningful source. On the origin question we face two issues: one is a matter of definition and the other a matter of causation.

The first issue to consider is the definition of evil. As Augustine noted, God is the creator of all things--that is, things that have "being" or "substance." But evil is not a "thing in itself." It does not possess substance as good possesses substance. Evil cannot stand on its own, so to speak. For example, a flower is good, and it is good in itself. What we might term a "bad" flower is one that has lost its original glory or design somehow, perhaps a diseased flower. Thus Augustine's definition of evil is a "privation of the good." Just as cold is a privation, or loss, of heat, so evil is a loss of original goodness, purpose and proper relatedness to other goods. This must be understood on a grand scale. Imagine for a moment a symphony with its numerous parts played together in harmonious intricacy. Are there any bad notes in a symphony? Of course not, but there may be a player who decides he does not like the conductor's notes and will not bother about them. He decides to remove his notes from the whole sound, or worse still, decides to add his own blaring contribution at whatever juncture he feels is most artful. He in fact will destroy the whole symphony. He will break harmony. The total glory of the symphony has been diminished because he used his goodness in a manner for which it was not designed.

Another way of looking at evil is a misuse of the good. Evil comes into existence in our lives when we choose to elevate our derived goodness to the position of an original good. When we therefore act on the assumption that we can independently determine the use of our goodness, we become evil. This is why so many Christian writers have spoken of evil as a "parasite" or a "corruption of the good," etc. There can be no pure evil. Even Lucifer was originally good and chose to use the goodness God established in Him to assert his own glory rather than that of His creator.

Christians will occasionally speak of evil as the "opposite of good," or as "necessary to know the good." The idea is something like Hegel's thesis, antithesis, synthesis model. Without good there would be no evil and without evil there would be no good. These are pantheistic notions and not Christian ones. Adam and Eve knew that their experience in the garden before the fall was good. They may not have named the experience "good," in the way we now understand a contrast between good and evil, but that does not mean their experience was any less good ontologically. They were experiencing good before the fall. As such, evil is not an equal opposite counterpart to good. If evil and good are simply equal opposites, then a serious logical problem emerges. If there is not something higher up and further back than what we call evil and good; if in fact they alone exist as merely contrasting forces, or equal powers, then why call one good and the other evil? Why not just refer to them as opposing powers rather than protagonist and antagonist? There can be no value judgment claiming that one set of behaviors or inclinations is evil and another set is good when there is nothing outside of the two forces to determine which is good and which is evil. Lewis makes this very point in Mere Christianity. If there are only two equal powers behind everything in the universe, and they both believe they are good, then something must arbitrate between them to determine which of the two powers conforms to the moral ideal, etc.

Now when speaking about redemption and the good of redemption, it does appear to be the case that such a good is dependent for its existence on the nature of evil. Without human sinfulness, God's great glory in redemption could not be displayed. Thus the argument is that good in this case is dependent on evil for its existence. Christians will sometimes speak of the "best of all possible worlds" argument, in which the world is fallen, evil, but God uses this evil to bring about a greater good. It is important to note, however, that Christians do not argue that good and evil have no relationship; we argue that they do not posses an interdependent eternal relationship, and thus evil is not "original." Certainly God's active work of redemption is related to the problem of human sin, and, in theory, if there had been no human sin, the act of redemption would be an unknown good. But then there is no infinite regress here:  redemption is dependent on sin, but sin is dependent on God's originally established goodness. God's original good design stands as a singularity at the beginning. Sin takes from this good and corrupts it.

On the matter of causation, perhaps Aristotle would be of some help. Aristotle noted that not all causes are equal. He denotes four different kinds of causation, but two in particular are of interest--material causes and efficient causes. If it is true that God created the world from Himself, then surely it can be no other than good, since He is good. But what if God could create other efficient causal agents--that is, other beings that can cause things, at least within the limitations of their capacity for efficient causation? Then God could set a creation into motion that was indeed complex, involving his primary causation, but then admitting the possibility of a billion subsequent causal contributions.

Such is the case with the origin of evil. God provides the material cause of all things, including free will. God is the cause of the causes of evil. One could say that Boeing is the material cause of the 9/11 tragedy, but of course no one is going to blame Boeing for that event. The reason is that the efficient cause is the blameworthy cause, because in an efficient cause there is an active will interacting with both subjects and objects and influencing them causally.

Of course this does not quite get us out of the difficulty here. The difference between God and my Boeing illustration is that God knew perfectly what would happen when he created beings with wills. He knew they would misuse them, bringing ruin upon themselves, and yet he chose to go through with it.

This raises the final and perhaps most disturbing aspect of this problem. God knew that people would misuse the gift of freedom, damning themselves to an eternity in Hell. And he has been active in history to stop evil at certain points. Thus one must conclude that evil is "in" God's design. Perhaps we can logically say that God is not the causal agent, but He certainly could have scrapped the idea at the beginning. This forms the core of one objection to this answer to the issue of evil--namely, that God should not have created at all.

The argument is something like this: A good God, with perfect prescience to all human choices, would not proceed with a creation that would involve the damnation of the majority of beings he created. Non-existence is better than existence with the probability of damnation.

Surely you can see the logical fallacy of such an emotionally appealing argument. To make such an argument one must compare two realities: non-existence and existence as we now know it. But of course, "non-existence" is not something with which anything can be compared. One can never have the experience of non-existence and then claim that it is better than existence. Not only that, but non-existence is by definition the absence of any experiences for any being other than God. But surely it is meaningless to compare such a state to our present state and suggest that the former would be "better" for us.

The world certainly could have been made differently than it is. God could have made beings without free will, without the capacity of rebelling against The Good. But then doing so would, presumably, be to make a world that is less than perfect.

Very well then, free will, evil and the goodness of God are not incompatible realities.

Plantinga's Defense:

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga developed a powerful argument that many philosophers have referred to simply as "Plantinga's successful free will defense."

Here are the basic points:

1. Adam and Eve were given true "creaturely freedom," meaning they really could have done right by God or could have rebelled against God. We know how that turned out, but it was at least possible for them to live sinless lives.

2. God knew that Adam and Even would sin. In fact, He knew that in "all possible worlds" they would misuse the true creaturely freedom He gifted to them.

3. This means that some worlds are impossible for God to "actualize." In the same vein, God cannot create a world in which He is not creator. He can't make square circles or free creatures that are not free. He can't do the rationally absurd, because He is the source of rationality Himself.

4. God cannot actualize a world of free creatures never misusing freedom without their help, so to speak. But God knows this help is not going to be forthcoming, and so His choices are reduced to two: don't create or create under these conditions. We have already logically eliminated the first option, so the second option is the only one left.

Now Plantinga's argument raises another disturbing question: If God can make beings that are free and never misuse their freedom in heaven, why could he not have done this initially? In heaven, we will surely be free creatures, and yet we will also never sin. If this is possible ultimately, why not originally?

One answer comes from Augustine's views on creation. He believed that creation was seeded with potentiality. In other words, it was good but not perfect, in the sense that its whole potential was not yet in full bloom. It was something like a perfectly planted garden that required creative tending to unlock its full synergy and beauty. Thus human beings had some options available to them. They could trust God and cooperate with Him in cultivating creation to actualize its potential, including their own potential. Or they could resist God and "deprive" creation of its optimal glory. They could so practice good that it would become impossible to do evil, as is surely the experience of the unfallen angels. Unfallen angels have become impervious to the "external" allure of sin.

But the other option for Adam and Eve is that they could fail to practice good, strive against design and potential, and even therefore corrupt the use of God's good creation. In short, Augustine uses two Latin phrases that capture his teaching on this point well. If Adam and Eve had not fallen, and had they cooperated with God in actualizing creation's potentiality, then non passe pecarre et mori would be the case. In other words, it would be impossible to sin and die, because, like the unfallen angels, they would have become so practiced in the good that they would be impervious to the allure of evil. But because they fell, it is now non passe non pecarre et mori (it is impossible not to sin and die).

All of this leads to the conditions now necessary to bring us to the point that we are free and yet choose only the good. True freedom is the freedom to choose the good at every moment. We will do this in heaven, but how? Surely this is only possible through the glories and mysteries associated with the Redemption. Christ is our source of new humanity, which enables us to desire and then choose the good. As such, it is only through the redemption that we can be brought to the condition required to choose good alone for all eternity. And God willed that His creation would demonstrate his glory in redemption.

Lecture Series: Lecture 11: The Reliability of Scripture

Though I am somewhat obsessed with the presuppositional method of Christian Apologetics, I also recognize that it is not enough. It is not enough merely to demonstrate that other worldviews are rationally inconsistent while Christianity remains rationally consistent. I think perhaps this is the most glaring sin of omission among the presuppositionalists. It is possible that one can be coherent logically and yet wrong. G.K. Chesterton reminded me of this in his essay concerning the madman. The madman is the most perfectly logical man among us. He can offer air tight arguments as to why he must be Jesus Christ, for example. Any challenge you offer will be quickly met by a wholly reasonable explanation.

Similarly, good stories are tightly contained little worlds, sometimes encompassing an intricate architecture of thought in which every conceivable detail has been meaningfully knit together. One would be hard pressed to find some logical inconsistency in the worlds created by Tolkien, Tolstoy, Shakespeare or Dickens. But notice that the worlds they create don't exist! They are brilliant and meaningful fictions and nothing more.

Perhaps Christianity is nothing more than a brilliant and meaningful fiction. Even the staunchest defender of Christianity must acknowledge this possibility. Unless, that is, there is some good reason to believe that there is a confluence of Christianity's robust logical consistency with abundant evidence that recommends it over other worldviews.

In simple terms, Christian apologists have traditionally favored two approaches: One, the presuppositional method; and two, the evidentiary method. Today our focus will be upon the evidentiary method. In short, we will defend the premise that there is significant historical evidence to suggest that Christianity is true. This evidence is supremely visible in two areas of study: the claims of the Bible and the resurrection. (Note: the area of design is another, but we have already covered it)

We begin with evidence for the Bible. It might be best here simply to point you to the work of men like Bruce Metzger, Norm Geisler, Josh McDowell and others, but what follows is a brief summary of some of the central arguments you will find in the work of these men:

1. Defining Terms: The first step along our journey to see the merits of the Biblical text is to establish a few important terms.

A. Autograph - An autograph is an original document. Autographs of the apostle Paul do not exist today, and neither do Autographs of any other book in the Bible. This should not shock or surprise anyone, since these books are over 2000 years old. No book of that age exists in its original form anywhere in the world. What we possess of these ancient books is manuscripts.

B. Manuscript - An copy of an autograph.

C. Historicity - The degree to which various manuscripts can be said to recreate the Autograph. When we study the historicity of a text, we are examining the manuscript evidence in an attempt to reconstruct the original document. Some texts possess relatively better historicity than others because of the wealth of manuscript evidence for those texts.

D. Tests of Historicity - Criteria developed by manuscript historians and scientists to determine the reliability of an ancient document.

The first test is the number of available manuscripts. There should be at least 5 manuscripts available for comparative analysis. If, for example, 4 out of the 5 include a particular phrase, but the latest does not, then it is probably reasonable to conclude that the other 4 contain the original wording, and that the 5th has been changed for some reason. If one only possesses one copy of the document, then it becomes nearly impossible to test the document for accuracy of transmission.

The second test is the gap between the original and the copy. There should be no more than 1000 years separation between them. The greater the gap, the greater the possibility of corruption in transmission, even if there are many manuscripts, because how can one know whether the original is the source or a distant manipulated copy is the source?

The third test is the language groupings and geographical regions in which the manuscripts are found. If, for example, a particular document possesses early manuscript evidence in various geographic regions, then the process of comparative analysis is greatly enriched. Not only that, such a document would be clearly an important text to humanity, since it was not merely a "local narrative." Also, local narratives, if totally isolated from other people groups, can perhaps be nothing more than local myths or hero legends. A book that transcends geographic and language boundaries is less likely to be a local creation meaningful only to a particular tribe.

The first assertion of many Bible critics is that the Bible has been changed over time. Surely it was later theologians who manipulated the text to include things like miracles, the Trinity, etc. I think it can be stated that, when applying the criteria that scientists use to test any other ancient text, we can flatly deny this allegation. In fact, it can actually be proved to a high degree of certainty that the Bible has not in fact been changed over time.

The best procedure to adopt when proving this claim is to compare the Bible to other ancient texts. Here is a short list:

Tacitus - Only 20 ancient copies exist and all of them are separated from the original document by over 1000 years.

Homer - 643 copies (2nd to the Bible) and all are separated from the original by more than 1000 years.

Caesar - 10 copies, again all separated by more than 1000 years.

It is important to note that most historians don't question that what we have of Homer or Tacitus is a reasonable facsimile of what each man originally wrote. And yet each possesses credentials that are laughable when compared to the Bible. In fact, NT scholar Bruce Metzger once stated that the weight of Biblical manuscript evidence in comparison with other ancient texts is, "an embarrassment to the other ancient texts of the world's history."

So, what exactly are the Bible's credentials? Get ready for this:

Total Greek texts within 1000 year separation from the originals: 5686

Total texts (all language groups) within 1000 year separation from the originals: 24286

Let me briefly list some notable ancient manuscripts:

The Ryland Papyrus - Sections of John's gospel from chapter 18, dates to c.a.d. 125. This puts these 5 verses from John at roughly 30 years from its original. There is no other ancient manuscript in the world that is closer to its original than the Ryland Papyrus. And get this, if you knew Greek and could read it and then translate it to English, it would read exactly as your Bible does today!

The Codex Sinaiticus - In the 19th century, the most treasured Bible in the world was discovered by a man named Count Tischendorf. He made a journey to the monks of St. Catherine's monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai in the Sinai Peninsula. There he discovered this immense treasure. It was a complete copy of the Greek New Testament dating to the time of Constantine.

The Codex Vaticanus - Another complete copy of the Greek New Testament dating to the time of Constantine, held in the Vatican library.

Again, the remarkable thing about this wealth of Biblical manuscripts is that it allows scholars to recreate the original text to a degree incomparable to any other ancient text. In fact, through text reconstruction, it is clear that the Bible has been preserved from the time of its originals with an astonishing degree of textual purity--a full 98%. In short, we can say with a 98% degree of assurance that the Bible we now read is exactly what the original authors wanted us to read. There is literally no other book in the world like that!

There is another problem. Even if we prove that the Bible is preserved with a 98% degree of textual purity, there is still the matter of author intent. Perhaps it was the author's intent to initially set forth mythology. Or perhaps the authors did not intentionally set forth myth, but what they believed was myth nonetheless.

To prove that the Bible has sound credentials as an ancient document does nothing to address this problem.

It must be acknowledged at the beginning of any attempt to answer this challenge that we are not going to be able to prove our position here. We can perhaps offer numerous evidences, but this will fail to close the circle of proof. Proof on this point would require being able to see the events themselves, but when discussing history one is deprived of that option--that's why it's history!

So here are the points of evidence that suggest the Bible is more than a "historically reliable myth" or a "well preserved myth:"

1. Luke and Acts - Liberal historians and conservative historians agree that Luke is a first rate historian. Your textbook for the class (Unshakable Foundations by Geisler) includes numerous events reported by Luke that have been confirmed in archaeology and extra-biblical sources. It is believed that he reports the events with a keen eye for historical accuracy. Liberal scholars of course reject his claims to miracles, but it does seem curious that they would respect his competency as a historian and then arbitrarily deny his claim that these miraculous events took place in time and shaped events.

2. The Embarrassment Factor - If the NT was the construct of the apostles, then one would expect certain events to be changed in it. For example, most of the disciples are depicted as ignorant and arrogant simpletons. They never seem to understand what is happening. If they were trying to establish their authority, one would expect them to change at least some of this in their favor.

Another peculiar fact concerns the women. Jesus is shown to be a friend of women, which is strange indeed for the 1st century and would undercut his credentials as Messiah. He would be seen as effeminate and weak in the first century world. Women are the first witnesses to the empty tomb and report the discovery to the disciples. This is scandalous since women could not even be witnesses in court in the first century world.

These are two examples of facts mentioned in the Scriptures that are curious if one is reading an attempt to deceive the world concerning Jesus, His disciples and the Christian faith in its infancy. If one were trying to concoct an impressive lie, there are certainly better ways of doing it.

3. Why Die for Publishing a Lie? Clearly the message of the early Christians was not well received. Each of the original disciples died a violent death, with the exception of John (who died of natural causes only after suffering torture under the Roman Emperor Domitian). And yet they believed it so strongly that they did not merely spread it by word of mouth; they set it forth in writing so that it might be preserved and transmitted the world over. But this is yet another way of providing the Romans and the Jews with ample evidence of their treason.

It should be noted that many people die preserving lies, but it is rare indeed for a person to die preserving a lie that he himself authored. One would at least expect one of the disciples, on threat of death or torture, to say that they were making the whole thing up. And if not them, then some contemporary could surely have exposed them.

4. Prophetic Internal Confirmation - This is a tricky area, but one that can yield some fruit. According to McDowell, there are 300 plus Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. Jesus fulfills all 300 of them. Matthew's gospel was written to suggest to the Jews that Jesus is the fulfillment of Israel's Messianic hopes. Both McDowell and Geisler offer some analysis of specific prophecies Jesus fulfills.

5. Extra-Biblical Confirmation - It is perhaps not well known that Jesus shows up in more than just the writings of Christians. He is reported, for example, by Josephus, the Roman Jewish Historian, as well as by Tacitus and Lucian. Josephus even indicates that Jesus was a well known "wonder worker," but then mentions that the Jews questioned the source of his miracles. Note that they did not question the miracles, but they did question how Jesus did them.

Lucian and Tacitus mostly recount details about the early Christians and their claims, but the fact is that both must address this new movement as one rooted in historical claims.

6. Habermas' Minimal Facts Argument - This is perhaps the strongest argument to suggest that the miracle claims of the Bible could be grounded in fact. Gary Habermas is a philosopher with Liberty University in Virginia. He has worked for years with the evidences for the resurrection event. Recently he published his work and in it he develops his now well known "minimal facts argument." He studied several hundred sources written between 1976 and 2004 on the topic of the resurrection. Those he studied represented the whole spectrum of theological enquiry on the question, including the liberal perspective.

Habermas' Thesis at the end of the study: Scholars are in general agreement concerning five key facts concerning the life, death and resurrection of Jesus:

A. Jesus died by crucifixion. Habermas discovered that no serious scholar rejects this idea. It is a confirmed fact of history that Jesus died at the hands of the Roman empire.

B. There was an empty tomb phenomenon in Jerusalem in the early years of the Christian movement. In fairness, Habermas estimates that it is about 75% of the scholars he studied who concur on this point. There were many who wanted to destroy Christianity in its infancy, and surely they could have done so by producing a body. How is it that Christianity grows to several thousand on the claims of a literal physical resurrection in the very city where this event took place if the tomb was occupied or the body had been produced? All the theories cited to explain this away are unsatisfactory. It is not reasonable to believe the disciples stole the body, claimed he had risen, and then were tortured and killed for this claim. It is also not reasonable to suggest that Jesus did not die, but was only seriously injured. It is also silly to believe that the disciples hallucinated, since group hallucinations might occur if all were affected by drugs, but would they all hallucinate the same thing? And then would they confidently proclaim it was real the morning after?

C. The Disciples Claimed They Saw Him - All scholars agree that the disciples were deeply affected by something after Jesus' death--something that convinced them to proclaim he was risen. It transformed them into fearless witnesses who stared death in the face with little concern.

D. The Radical Conversion of James - Scholars also agree that James, Jesus' half-brother, was radically transformed after the alleged event of Jesus resurrection. He was a skeptic during Jesus' life and then became leader of the Jerusalem Church after the resurrection, in the end dying for his claims regarding Jesus' resurrection.

E. The Radical Conversion of Paul - Scholars also agree that the Apostle Paul was radically changed after allegedly seeing the risen Jesus. There can be no more pronounced turnaround than the one we see in the life of Paul. He went from being one of the primary figures leading a crusade to annihilate the Christians to becoming their most vocal advocate.

Habermas' Conclusion: Habermas asks the simple question, "What is the best explanation for these five facts agreed upon by all reputable historians?" The best and cleanest explanation is the resurrection itself, as radical an explanation as it is.