God Isn't Getting Smaller

Recently I hosted a series called Towards Belief. This was an interesting experience for a whole lot of reasons, but the thing I really liked about it was that people were engaging with big issues. Forget everything else. If I was to summarise my reason for being involved, that would be it. The world we live in is a world of fast paced world, full of distractions (I'm as guilty of this as anyone- I'm often, not consistently but often one of those 1 in 5 people who checks their phone every 10 minutes).

But there we were every Tuesday night at my church talking about BIG issues. Big issues of Faith, God, The Bible, Science and everything else.

One Tuesday night, someone raised the issue of modern medicine and how it interacts with Christian faith. They told a personal story about a prominent church leader they knew. This leader had an unsuccessful course of chemotherapy, after which he started getting prayed for and his condition has since improved. This raised the question of whether it is unfaithful to automatically go to the doctor first and to the prayer healing team second. You might be thinking: Why not just pray anyway- whether in the car on the way to the doctors, beforehand or both? This is really a secondary question and the details on this aren't actually that important. The bigger thrust behind the question - and other surrounding discussion in our group- was best illustrated by that particular question and that particular story, but the bigger thrust was wondering whether we've lost faith in God and let ourselves lose touch with God because of our modern technologies, medicines and amenities. 

We sometimes think that if we pray for something and it happens, then God was at work. But if we go to a doctor and the doctor prescribes some medicine and something happens, then the doctor and "medicine" was at work (and by implication God wasn't at work in that situation).

But this all neglects the simple and profound truth that God is God over everything.

The God of Christian faith is a God who both sustains and transcends the entire universe. He is also everywhere- with you as you read this. He's in Los Angeles. He's here with me as I type this out. If he does exist, then he is the God of everything. He's the God of the Bible and he's simultaneously God over the book of nature. He is the God who raised Jesus from the dead almost 2,000 years ago, from the Roman cross to the throne. And he's also the God who gave us science and modern medicine. There can't be any real contradictions in what is true, because all truth is God's truth.

You might respond to this by asking: What about all the people who deny God and justify their denial using science and modern medicine? It is true that many people look at our advancing knowledge and no longer see a need for God. But why, as Christians, should we hold ourselves captive to this faulty false dichotomy and facilitate its continued prominence? According to the Christian view, that view is merely a false understanding of God leading to a denial of his very existence. God isn't getting any smaller.


(Written Oct 2013)

Should Christians Engage in Natural Theology?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mm2H5dQ84Oc


C Stephen Evans

Hayward Lectures 2012, Acadia Divinity College, Acadia University Nova Scotia.

Lecture 1:

Should Christians engage in Natural Theology?

 And if so, how do we go about it?

God has always called some to defend him: Ancient World. Atheists (rejection of local Gods), superstitious- Miracles, subverters due to social stances. Justin Martyr.

1 Peter 3:15- Give reason- faith is reasonable.

New Atheists: Four Horsemen- Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris.

• -          Distinguishing Factor: Religion is not just wrong but it is dangerous.
• -          None of them have much experience, knowledge or awareness of philosophy of religion.
• -          Some atheists are embarrassed by them.

Dawkins has a novel argument: Designer must be more complex.

• -          But: Divine simplicity.
• -          There is no real reason to believe this premise.

Brash confidence:

• -          They want to write best sellers.
• -          Religion is not just wrong but Ethically and socially harmful.
• -          Questioning the idea of religious tolerance.
• -          Reversal of previous thoughts. Previously, people thought LACK of religious belief was so bad that we should be wary of it. Could be harmful. Now, have we gone full circle?
• -          Baptists stood up for religious freedom in this environment.

So, how should we respond?

• -          Theologians and Biblical Scholars should point out the flows in how they read the Bible in wooden ways.
• -          Plantinga, John Polkinghorne, Collins etc (Recommended) have shown the science and religion are compatible.
• -          Christian doctrine of sin shows that ethical failures of Christians shouldn’t be surprising.
• -          But New Atheist analysis of ethical actions of Christians is one sided. They exaggerate wrongs but don’t give credit where it is due.
• -          Justice, rights and wrongs: Wolsterstorff. Doctrine of human rights stems from Biblical faith and nowadays there is no adequetae replacement for Biblical vision.
• -          Jeffrey Burton Russell: Clearing the air, exposing the myths about Christianity.
• -          Stark: The Victory of Reason. May go too far in answering. Starks analysis may be unbalanced towards the other side! But, makes a convincing historical case- science etc stem from faith, not from some secular ideas. 
• -          Good to point out their weaknesses in social analysis/ethics etc. However, at a basic intellectual level we must show why a reasonable person can believe in Christianity. Failure to clearly articulate this simply plays into the New Atheists’s hands. 
• -          First sin of religious believers in their eyes is not to follow reason.
• -          A central idea of Christianity (and some other faiths) is: God exists.
• -          Response from Christians has been Natural Theology. Eg: Mere Christianity.
• -          Philosophers have done Natural Theology. However, it is not prominent in theology. Some view it with suspicion.
• -          This has given NA’s some ground. They see religious belief as Zero grounds, all faith which means no evidence. Eg: Dawkins at Cambridge.
• -          “Defined themselves into epistemological safe ground”. No public voice makes it appear that no serious case can be made. “What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof” (Hitchens).
• -          NA’s are evidentialist in their epistemology.

How to respond?

• -          Attack their epistemology. Eg: Reformed epistemology. Sensus divinitas NOT belief by evidence. That kind of belief in God can be ”Properly basic”. It is a foundational belief. No argument or evidence? That’s ok.
• -          I am sympathetic towards it .Plantinga/Wolsterstorff. It’s simple contentions are correct. But, it shouldn’t be our whole response. To argue that religious belief can be grounded without arguments or evidence is not the same as arguing that there are no good arguments or evidence.
• -          There is both propositional and non propositional evidence.
• -          Views of RE’s can be re stated.
• -          However in simple terms it looks like confirmation of NA claims. Ie: There is no evidence (if we say “religious belief can be grounded without).
• -          2 stage apologetics- One: Reasons why faith in God can be rational THEN two- reasons why revelation rational.
• -          Why NT not prominent amongst protestant theologians?
• -          Perhaps enlightenment views have debilitated NT.
• -          Other reasons: Widespread suspicion that it undermines centrality of revalation.
• -          But NT is revelation too. But, “Special” revelation from General revelation. Karl Barth. I am sympathetic to some of his reasons against NT.
• -          “Transcendence” and above us. We will end up creating God in our own image.
• -          Paul Moser has criticised. NT leads to thin theism. Abstract metaphysical claims. IF there’s a God, he isn’t interested in us knowing propositions, rather he is personal and wants us to know him. Spectator Evidence doesn’t cut the mustard of personal transformation.
• -          (TDE Note: Craig response to evil borrows heavily from this).
• -          We submit to God’s terms not vice versa.

Anti Naturalism

• -          We can accet all of these claims and STILL see value in NT response to New Atheism.
• -          Value can be in “Anti naturalism”.
• -          Imagine not religious believer, what shou;d they think? Is the most reasonable view of our universe, naturalism? “Nature is all there is”? Should reasonabke non believers be atheists? No. There are problems with naturalism. There are difficulties. We reconceive NT as a defense of anti naturalism. Point to aspects of our natural world that point beyond nature. Natural Signs. Points towards a profound mystery. NT articulates questions that a reasonable person ought to ask. Even if N theologians cant adequetyl answer them, NT will point us in the direction of being open to the kinds of Answers that Barth and Moser would like.
• -          I deny that naturalism is the most reasonable view of reality that one can take, even if they aren’t a believer.
• -          Epistemic situation of someone who is confronting the reasonableness of naturalism vs rivals.
• -          Where does burden of proof lie? What kind of evidence would we expect there to be if God exists and wants a relationship with us?

Burden of Proof

• -          Flew’s the presumption of atheism.
• -          They think of God as if he were one more thing in the universe. Eg “We all agree the universe contains dogs, cats, quarks, black holes”. Theist goes beyond this basic common ground. Like believing in the Loch Ness monster.
• -          If this were the case YES believer would have a burden.
• -          It’s about does the universe have a certain character or not? Is there a sustaining power behind it all?
• -          Is there a purpose? Or does everything exist on it’s own? Is the universe one big brute fact among many brute facts??
• -          Theist and naturalist don’t just disagree about God, they disagree about everything.
• -          Atheist mistake: Confuse commitment to naturalism (metaphysical) with commitment to science. But, theists and atheists don’t disagree about scientific facts and data!
• -          Question of naturalism: Is nature all there is?
• -          Science investigates the natural world, but it is not fit to investigate whether there is more than the natural world.
• -          Theist holds that scientific laws hold because of God’s creative activity. Atheist has no explanation. But, ultimately the question of whether there is more is a philosophical question. Like most philosophical question,s this can’t be strictly proven either way. If by prove we mean an argument that no reasonable person could doubt.
• -          God’s existence cnnot be proven. But neither can naturalism. Proof in this sense is an ideal.
• -          What is reasonable is asking which rival worldview makes the most sense?

Evidence

• -          What kind of evidence should we expect to find, if God did exist.
• -          If God is a hypothesis, we should ask what consequences would follow if that hypothesis was true.
• -          Some kind of knowledge would be available and widely available. It would be bizarre if you had to have a phd in philosophy or understand quantum physics to have a knowledge of God. We’d expect it to be fairly pervasive and easy to find.
• -          Christianty theology assumes a certain kind of r’ship: Freely, motivated by God’s goodness not coercion or fear. If God’s existence was too obvious, that would not make sense of this. It would have to be dismissable. Ambigious. Able to be explained away. Easily resistible.
• -          Pascal Pensees quote. Signs seen by those who seek but not by those who deny.
• -          WAP and ERP. Two Pascallian constraints on evidence for God’s existence.

To do NT, we must have three things right:

• 1.       Anti naturalism, rather than positive, complete knowledge of God. It’s goal is to tell us that there’s something beyond the natural world.
• 2.       Burden or proof must be right. No presumption of atheism. All rival worldviews are accountable to reason.
• 3.       Right view of the kind of evidence that it is reasonable to seek.
•  

Questions

Constantly changing evidence. Don’t wanna hitch our wagon to the latest scientific evidence. Eg: If we had to wait until modern physics was finalised to know whether there was a God. Eg: Fine Tuning argument which is based on relatively recent science. There may be value a nd something in these arguments but ultimately We would expect universal aspects of human experience. WAP principle. BUT Can still be “defeater” against WAP. So defeaters must be considered. Defeaters of signs must be considered. My view is that the signs are neither supported by nor threatened by scientific evidence.

NA a fad? Probably not. It has a cultural influence and impact. It’s stretched far. Atheists joining together.

Affecting families? Yes. Need to show not just intellectual but understand the attraction of their writing etc. Stuents with fundamentalist readings or no knowledge or bible can be easy pickings.

Calvinism- no need for apologetics? Do the Pascallian constraints lend themselves to this kind of thinking?

Evidence doesn’t have to be propositional. Signs can have an immediate impact. Sign becomes focus of reflection and we articulate them. That’s where the arguments come from. Don’t impact everybody but always retain appeal.

Common Sense Realism George Marsden. Are you opening yourself up to the dangers that this kind of thinking opened itself up to.

Science and Ethics

A few weeks ago John Dickson finally made it onto ABC's Q and A program. This was a long time coming because, being a big fan of Dickson, I'd noticed people suggesting he should go on for quite a while. Notably, after Cardinal Pell's appearance with Richard Dawkins.

I highly recommend watching the episode- it covered topics such as what Christianity says about science, what science says about ethics, the teaching of creationism in schools and more. It's good to see Dickson showing the Australian public a reflective, thought out, reasonable Christian position on many issues, in contrast to the brilliant mind of a brilliant scientist appearing unintelligent and poisoned by his scientistic philosophical bias.

Anyway, I have a minor claim to fame from last week's episode- a tweet of mine appeared on the show! See the above video at 8:22.

My tweet was:

Science helped create the atomic bomb. Ethics?

To elaborate, my tweet was prompted by Krauss's response to the first question of the night, where the audience member asked where our values will come from if we place our future hope in science instead of religion, given that science has no ethical boundaries. Krauss's response was incredibly disingenuous. He claimed that truth telling and full disclosure is central to science, and therefore science promotes ethics.  

If Osama Bin Laden orchestrates a terrorist attack and then admits his involvement, is he then being ethical because he's telling the truth? No. Ethics is much bigger than that. Science tells us what is (eg: "This is a cell") but it cannot tell us what we ought to do ("We ought to save lives by cloning this cell"). The motivations for deciding what we should or should not do with information must come from somewhere external to the impersonal scientific method. In other words, even if science can consistently manage to progressively find the truth about the universe, this doesn't mean it can then tell us what to do with that truth. It tells us nothing about that.

Cosmological Explanation and Occams Razor

Various quotations are taken from here. As usual quotes are in italics and myself in normal font.

So, has our scientific knowledge of the universe, of all that there is, progressed to the point that we can explain all that there is without having to invoke an uncaused causal agency? First, before one proceeds with any scientific account for an explanation, one must notice the metaphysical aspect of the question. This question is a philosophical question, not a scientific question. Can we extrapolate all causes to have the first cause be self-caused?  Using something within the system of “all that there is” to explain the system itself (“all that there is”) is circular. The whole notion is self-defeating.

The ancients tended to lean towards the simplest explanations (a tendency still practiced today with Occam’s Razor). The simplest explanation then seemed to be causal agency–attributing complex events to the will of the gods.

The ancients would attribute storms at sea to the god of the sea and volcanic eruptions to that respective god and so on. Perhaps we don’t need many gods to explain complex various events. It seems that if a god is needed to explain anything then we are left with one God.

Is the simplest explanation of all there is one uncaused causal agent or zero?

It seems that if we use Occam’s Razor to trim the causal agencies down to zero then we no longer have any explanation for anything. 1

Using a causal agent as an explanatory hypothesis doesn’t seem to be an arbitrary ad hoc explanation either, it seems to be the only appropriate explanation that sufficiently fits the explanandum. In the end, having one uncaused causal agent is the best answer to why there is something rather than nothing.

[1]Perhaps there simply is no explanation. Or at least, our tiny finite homo sapien brains simply can't know. But I suggest that it is perfectly reasonable to posit that there is an explanation of some sort- this is in line with our experience, and science itself. That is, things require an explanation, both in our experience and as William Lane Craig said in a recent debate, this is a key principle in science. And following the train of thought taken in the quotes here, it's reasonable to posit an unspecified uncaused agent as that explanation.

Where the conflict really lies

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga's new book Where the Conflict Really Lies seeks to show that a popular belief about science and religion is backwards- the popular claim is that there's deep conflict between science and Christian faith. Plantinga claims there's superficial conflict but deep concord. This is definitely going on my "to-read" list.

Articles about the book have been all over the place this week, for example the New York Times and Christianity Today, but the most in-depth interview to appear was one conducted by Philosophy News 6 months ago. Meanwhile this interview by Brian Auten of Apologetics 315 combines some of Plantinga's thoughts on his new book with more general comments about Philosophy of Religion and apologetics. It's well worth listening to.

Plantinga is someone who has revolutionised the entire discipline of Philosophy of Religion. He is referred to so incredibly often by contemporary Christian apologists and philosophers that one cannot help but be in awe of his colossal influence. His arguments on reformed epistemology- basic beliefs, the need or otherwise for evidence- and his evolutionary argument against naturalism have changed the dynamic of the entire discipline and will be debated for years to come.

Feser on scientism

Catholic Philosopher Edward Feser is a blogger at edwardfeser.blogspot.com, and I'm a regular reader of this page. He mainly seems to focus on three things: As a philosopher of mind who espouses substance dualism, a thomist who writes about the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, and a right wing idealogue who promotes conservative Catholic social positions. I don't agree with all of Feser's positions (especially on the conservative issues) but generally I find that he has lot of potent points to make, and that he's a rhetoritician capable of putting a serious sting in the tail of his writings.

Recently he wrote a two part series on scientism:

Here- Part 1- Blinded by scientism

and

Here-Part 2- Recovering sight after scientism

In Part 1 Feser argues that scientism is either self refuting or trivially true and thus should be rejected. In Part 2 he suggests we need to return to traditional philosophical metaphysics. Part 1 was more convincing that Part 2. I'd like some more detail on exactly what's so special about Aristotle and Aquina's, and I suspect there's some very strong counter arguments which may contend that there's some very good reasons why modern day intellectuals have moved away from those ancient ideas. For this reason, Feser's The Last Superstition is a book I wouldn't mind reading one day.

Here are some quotes that best summarise his main ideas from the two articles:


The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods. Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not something that can be established scientifically. For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle. And if it cannot even establish that it is a reliable form of inquiry, it can hardly establish that it is the only reliable form. Both tasks would require “getting outside” science altogether and discovering from that extra-scientific vantage point that science conveys an accurate picture of reality—and in the case of scientism, that only science does so.


Here we come to the second horn of the dilemma facing scientism. Its advocate may now insist: if philosophy has this status, it must really be a part of science, since (he continues to maintain, digging in his heels) all rational inquiry is scientific inquiry. The trouble now is that scientism becomes completely trivial, arbitrarily redefining “science” so that it includes anything that could be put forward as evidence against it. Worse, it makes scientism consistent with views that are supposed to be incompatible with it


If a certain method of studying nature affords us a high degree of predictive and technological power, all that shows is that the method is useful for dealing with those aspects of nature that are predictable and controllable. It does not show us that those aspects exhaust nature, that there is nothing more to the natural world than what the method reveals. Neither does it show that there are no rational means of investigating reality other than those involving empirical prediction and control. To assume otherwise is fallaciously to let one’s method dictate what counts as reality rather than letting reality determine what methods are appropriate for studying it. If wearing infrared night vision goggles allows me to perceive a certain part of the world remarkably well, it doesn’t follow that there is no more to the world than what I can perceive through the goggles, or that only goggle-wearing methods of investigating reality are rational ones.


If we are to know what that inner nature is, and to know of anything else about which empirical science is silent, we must go beyond science—to philosophy, the true “paradigm of rationality,” as John Kekes puts it.

But can philosophy really tell us anything? Don’t philosophers notoriously disagree among themselves? Even if it is conceded that there is more to the world than science tells us, mightn’t we nevertheless be justified in throwing up our hands and concluding that whatever this “more” might be, it is simply unknowable—that scientism is a reasonable attitude to take in practice, even if problematic in theory?

The trouble is that this is itself a philosophical claim, subject to philosophical criticism and requiring philosophical argumentation in its defense.



The right answer, in my view, is a return to the philosophical wisdom of the ancients and medievals. Their physics, as Galileo, Newton, Einstein and co. have shown us, was indeed sorely lacking. But their metaphysics has never been surpassed. And while they certainly had disagreements of their own, there is a common core to the tradition they founded—a tradition extending from Plato and Aristotle to the High Scholasticism of Aquinas and down to its descendents today—that sets them apart from the decadent philosophical systems of the moderns. This core constitutes a “perennial philosophy” apart from which the harmony of common sense and science, and indeed even the coherence of science itself, cannot be understood. And it is also in this perennial philosophy that the rational foundations of theology and ethics are to be found.