“God-Fearing Apologetics”

As many of you know, I am a strong advocate of Presuppositional Apologetics (PA).  I believe it to be the only approach which reflects both the thrust of Scripture as revelation from the Creator to the fallen creature, but also the necessary corollary to the Biblical Worldview.

Here is an excellent piece by Fred Butler on why he advocates presuppositionalism against “evidentialist” approaches.

http://hipandthigh.blogspot.com/2012/03/god-fearing-apologetics.html

The comments are well worth reading too, as they are constructive and civil, even where there is clear disagreement with PA.

Roger Olson on Atheism

Historical theologian Roger Olson, though I may have my differences with him, has posted four fine pieces on Atheism which will repay your time.  The first post is here.  Don’t miss the comments section either.  The atheist comments he permits are, well….. head-scratching!

Harvard Physicist’s Preprogrammed Ignorance

One would think that someone bright enough to teach physics at Harvard would at least have the sense to know when they are talking nonsense and undermining everything educational institutions should stand for.  Alas, such is not the case.

Lisa Randall believes everything is deterministically predestined by the onward roll of the laws of physics; even her own thoughts.  Then she writes to complain that faith in God has no place in science, and that no person who calls themselves a scientist ought to believe in God.  Ms Randall can’t help believing this, and, according to her thesis, those she opposes can’t help believing what they believe either…only they ought to help it!  I suppose she is predetermined by the laws of physics to think that people she disagrees with should not be predetermined by those same laws to think differently than she does?  No doubt the laws of physics force her to believe that she is writing public truth.  I’m sure she thinks that a student who botches an experiment was only doing what his molecular activity allowed him to do.  And she is preprogrammed to fail the student until the laws of physics raise the bar to allow the student to get it “right.”

Whatever, here is John Byl’s response to this madness.  Take a little time to read it:

How (Atheist) Scientists Lose Their Way

More Apologetics Posts

Here are some more of my posts on Apologetics.

As many of you know, I take a presuppositional (Van Tillian) approach to defending the Faith.  For examples of how this approach works in practice, here is a little debate I had a while back:

A Brief Summary of Presuppositional Apologetics

Presuppositionalist Stonewalling: a Friendly Response

Rejoinder To some Comments On Presuppositionalism and Christianity

The Biblical God: The Precondition of Intelligibility

The Great Explanation – Atheist-Style (pt.1)

The Great Explanation – Atheist-Style (pt.2.1)

The Great Explanation – Atheist-Style (pt.2.2)

The Great Explanation – Atheist-Style (pt.2.3)

In Pursuit of Anything But the Truth: A Summation

My wish was to answer this unbeliever in a friendly and respectful manner, while being firm enough for her to see the seriousness of employing a faulty worldview.

For an Introduction to Presuppositionalism:

Presuppositional Apologetics: An Introduction (1)

Presuppositional Apologetics: an Introduction (2)

Presuppositional Apologetics: An Introduction (3)

Apologetics Articles

I really hope my present crazy schedule slows down soon so that I can get back to posting regularly.  Till then, here are some Apologetics articles you may have missed.  Your brother, P.

Some Book Reviews:

Christian Apologetics by Cornelius Van Til

The Apologetics Study Bible

New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics

Letter From A Christian Citizen by Douglas Wilson

Cornelius Van Til: Reformed Apologist & Churchman by John R. Muether

The Devil’s Delusion by David Berlinski

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies by David Bentley Hart (parts one and two)

The Bible Among The Myths by John W. Oswalt

 

Short assessment of the Dawkins/Lennox Debate

This is followed to my reply to an atheist rant on the above.

There is also a short piece I wrote to a local rag about their misrepresentation of Intelligent Design, called “Pink Fairies and Proto-Wings“

Then there’s a series of four articles which note the crucial importance of Worldview matters in the Defense of the Faith, called ‘A Clash of Worlds’ (one, two, three, four)

Three more articles deal with Ancient Near-East Creation Myths in contrast to the Bible (one, two, three)

In Pursuit of Anything But the Truth: A Summation

Introduction.

I must give credit where credit is due.  Although there is a good deal in her arguments with which I have real problems, Dormant Dragon, unlike many atheists I have come across, has tried to stick to the point and has done so without resorting to “effing and blinding” as the English say.  She has been forthright but not obnoxious.

I want to add that I have not tried to capitalize on her ability as a philosopher.  She may tighten her basic argumentation in the coming years, but she will discover that her objections will roll from rationalism to irrationalism however proficient she may become.  If I have given the impression that I am going after her as a “soft target” I want to correct it, and I apologize if that came across.  My objective was only to handle her main arguments and to demonstrate the presuppositional approach to defending the faith.

DD continually enters the debate without demonstrating any logical connection between her avowed worldview and her day to day experience of the world.  She does not show how her naturalism provides her with the warrant to take her sense perceptions and her brain’s interpretation of them for granted.  She says we must start with the ultra rationalist Descartes, not seeming to see that he at least understood that one must posit God in order to have a reliable external anchor to tether veracious experience to.  If one does not have God (i.e. if, as with DD you only have “Self”), there is no way to move from the cogito to reliable logical experiences.  The subject-object relation cannot be shown to be anything but a trick played on us by our neurons.

1. In responding to her initial charge of Stonewalling I asked a very pertinent question which has not been addressed:

Are the laws of logic material?  [I did not ask, 'are brain impulses material?']. If not, can you explain how the material universe produces immaterial realities?  And if these immaterial realities govern rational thought, don’t they then govern how we should think and talk about matter?  By trying to trace the source of logic back to things like primeval gases (unless you have another non-biblical explanation for the universe), are you not attempting to ground rationality upon ultimate irrationality? (unless, of course, you think hydrogen has beliefs).   And if reality is ultimately irrational, whence logic, morality, and truth?

These queries were dodged, although later DD reintroduced the matter of ultimate irrationality safely detached from this context.

This reply, plus another related post, dealt much with showing how the Biblical Worldview (BW) can account for the varied aspects of reality.   DD has claimed that the Bible cannot, in fact, do any such thing, but she has not shown it, and has based most of her counters on her own lack of biblical knowledge or else on the equally unreliable spin of evolutionary “science.”  Now I would, for example, be happy to engage her supposed scientific objections to the Flood, and may do so at another time, but that isn’t the issue.  The issue is presuppositions and worldviews (which determine what one accepts as evidence).  In any case, this discussion centers on DD’s objections to presuppositional apologetics.

In closing the ‘Stonewalling’ post I asked her a very simple and practical question.  I asked,  “In your “bio” you say you are seeking, among other things, “the ethical pursuit of happiness.”  That is commendable.  But upon what do you base your ethics?  And why shouldn’t someone seek happiness unethically?“  No answer!  These issues were never joined.

2. In the ‘Rejoinder‘ I put it to her that her statement that “our reason evolved in this universe” placed her on the horns of a serious dilemma:

by tying the laws of logic to the “evolving universe” you are strongly implying the mutability of logic.  If the “laws” of logic are mutable (changing) then they are not static.  If they are not static they are not “law-like.” Thus, you are building your worldview on the shifting sands of unlaw-like logic!

Again, the question was avoided.  Along the same lines I made another epistemological point which has been dodged.  That point again asks for her warrant for believing what she says she believes:

If you believe logic is changeable it is a wonder you appeal to it.  If you don’t you will have to explain how laws of logic evolve yet remain static.

Has she done so?  She has said much but she has not once given herself to this vital worldview issue.

3. The Great Explanation 1 (hereafter GE1) began by ironing out DD’s misrepresentations of the things she was supposed to be objecting to.  She ought to have taken stock of her deficiencies in these areas and been content not to spout forth any further nonsense about God, the Bible, or presuppositionalism (she persists in this tiresome pattern to the present hour).  Although once or twice showing some glimmers of reticence, she could not hold back the tide of her prejudices and her blog posts and comments have regularly featured mischaracterizations of my position.  In her latest she appeals to some other blogger for support of the following thesis:

Nor is it clear that we must know the preconditions of some phenomenon’s existence before said phenomenon can be intelligible to us. This is largely a case of confusing the order of being with the order of knowing…(my emphasis).

Of course, no one said anything of the kind!  Now either this reveals that DD has once more gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick, or it shows she is intent on avoiding the problem of demonstrating how her view of the world supports her right to make the truth-claims she makes.  Actually, I think it is a bit of both.  For example, her reason for rejecting the phrase “precondition of intelligibility” is because it is a Van Tillian term.  But what sort of invalidation is that?  One suspects that she would rather avoid the whole issue!  In that she would join a long line of unbelievers.  As I thought I made clear previously, the Christian Worldview, to the extent it is in line with Scripture, presupposes the God of Scripture as its ultimate Explanation for the world.  That is our presupposition!  Any person who rejects that must come up with another explanation of the world.  DD’s explanation is that everything that is has gotten here via the supposed potentialities within mass/energy – that’s all!  And her mission ought to be to derive a meaningful theory of reality, of knowledge, and of morality from this premise.  Has she even made a start?  I don’t think so.

As far as I can see her big fallback is what seems to her to be reasonable.  Her post entitled ‘Idols of the Mind’ includes this peach:

It’s not obvious that the Christian god is a precondition for, say, relationships – not in the same way that it’s obvious why our evolution as social animals is a precondition for our ability to form relationships with other members of our species.

Jolly good as an exemplification of blind faith!

This first “Great Explanation” post also dealt a lot with DD’s professed allegiance to Descartes, and showed it to be both disingenuous and unworkable.

We showed in GE1 that Descartes’ starting point is a false start.  We also showed how DD didn’t really rely on the assumptions of the rationalists.  In fact, a quick perusal of her writing provides more than adequate proof that she is, in fact, not an epistemological rationalist at all, but an empiricist!  She starts on the opposite side of the tracks than Descartes (while ignoring Descartes’ and other rationalist criticisms of sense impressions).  As a philosophical materialist (all reality is matter), she repeats the mantra over and over that we MUST trust our experiences.

Very well, but this smothers Descartes!  Now she has another “essential” starting point, and it is the exact reverse of her first one.  Enter DD the empiricist!  But when you adopt empiricism as a theory of knowledge you have to face the specter of David Hume.  We trundled Hume out and showed how empiricism turns out to be mere subjective pragmatism after Hume is through with it.

But DD would not be warned!  She sallied forth with her evolutionary faith and asserted things like this:

“they [people] base their knowledge and understanding upon experience, and they interpret their experiences such that they arrive at what might be termed functional knowledge – knowledge that enables them to move and act within the world. These philosophies also seem to me to be comfortably compatible with naturalistic pantheism.”

“Class concepts would not exist without material entities to group into classes. It’s an efficient means of understanding the world, and the survival benefits to ancestral groups of hominids ought to be obvious.Morality is explicable as a result of our evolution as social mammals. Its existence is dependent upon our relationships to our fellows, and the decisions we make in interacting with the world. What has been called ‘proto-morality’ has also been observed in other social mammals, such as wolves and dolphins, and even some bird species.

I have commented on the repercussions of her evolution-based pragmatism below.  Another thing she said is:

I am suitably horrified by the fact that live vivisections of dogs and other small mammals were carried out in Descartes’ time.

So I said, “Only if she abandons her atheism will her views on live vivisection be of any moral import.”  Does anything DD has said, be it about God, the Bible, presuppositionalism, laws of thought and nature, or, as here, morality rise above the level of opinion?

The Great Explanation – Atheist Style (Part 2 . 3)

This post will be followed by a Summation of this dialog in which I will highlight the particular arguments that have been made against DD and her atheist worldview.

7. Information and Observation

We noted earlier that raw energy will of itself do nothing to take one state of affairs (e.g. a recipe or dirty laundry, not to mention the building blocks of life) and upgrade it.  Indeed, such a thing has never been observed.  Dormant Dragon and other atheists believe that matter and energy (originally gas in their scenarios) came together and produced life.  She does this despite the obvious fact that scientists, with all the best equipment and millions of dollars at their disposal, have never been able to create (note the word) anything approaching a living cell (in fact, they cannot even make a snowflake akin to the wondrous hexagonal structures produced every winter).

Energy must be controlled and directed to achieve particular goals and complete certain tasks, often entailing detailed specificity.  This is to say, in every instance we have observed (and recall that “experience” is DD’s great hope) it requires a code and finely-tuned constants to produce complex specific characteristics such as we see all around us in the world, from photosynthesis to DNA and a thousand instances beside.  Our increasing awareness of this fact, in tandem with what is now known of the amazing complexity and breathtaking precision of living systems has brought the concept of information center-stage.

To give just one example: Every cell contains at least 10,000,000,000,000 bits of information.  It contains the whole code needed to build the organism of which it is a part!  It contains factories and distribution systems which make two thousand proteins every second!  It would take (at time of writing) a supercomputer 10 to the 127^th power (10 followed by 127 zeroes) years to achieve what real proteins do in seconds in terms of generation!  And we are supposed to believe matter and motion and the laws of physics evolved it?

It is no longer enough to talk wistfully about the supposed properties of matter and time and chance and necessity.  Information as a basic constituent of reality is banging on the door!  One characteristic of proteins is that they require specificity of both shape and arrangement.  The function of the protein is dependent upon these properties.  But further, it takes a protein to make a protein.

The onset of the computer age has put Information on the map as a third aspect of reality which must be contended with.  A worldview that ignores the science of information or that cannot account for information at the most rudimentary level of existence is not an accurate account of the world (something that DD seems to think a worldview doesn’t have to do!).

Bruce Alberts, former President of the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. has said that scientists will have to take design courses in order to help them comprehend what is being uncovered.  It is this kind of thing which is persuading more and more young scientists that intelligence must lay behind the fabric of the universe.

Of course, if they want a career they had better toe-the-line (e.g. Ben Stein’s “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” chronicles this fact).  And it is not without important implications for the future that it takes the law courts to protect the hegemony of scientific reductionism and methodological naturalism based on the “theory” of evolution.

Everyone knows that matter is the main vehicle for information.  But as Varghese rightly asks, “How did it become a vehicle for codes and blueprints?  We know it takes intelligence to decode the information transmitted by matter.  But if decoding requires intelligence, how about the encoding?  If information exists prior to matter, what is its source?” – R. A. Varghese, The Wonder of the World, 423.

A little earlier he notices that Noam Chomsky says that human language cannot come from animal communication systems because of the presence of syntactical and semantic rules (417).  Indeed, anyone who knows anything about the languages of the ancient world is aware of the fact that the further back one goes, the more complicated the languages become.

Professor Werner Gitt, former Head of the Dept. of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Physics & Technology, has said, “Information originates as a language; it is first formulated, and then transmitted or stored.” – In The Beginning Was Information, 60.

Dr Gitt’s presents a set of scientific Theorems in his book, among which is this one:

Theorem 23: There is no known natural law through which matter can give rise to information, neither is any physical process or material phenomenon known that can do this. (80).

Further down the page he comments:

Any natural law can be rejected the moment a single counter example is found, and this also holds for these information theorems.  After many talks by the author at colleges and universities, both abroad and at home, no researcher could mention one single counter example.

DD thinks she can:

It seems, in my experience, to be a common criticism of materialism that it cannot account for things we experience as ‘immaterial’, such as thoughts, ideas, emotions, creativity and so forth – there is fierce resistance to the notion that such things could come from ‘mere matter’…

Ideas and creativity are prerequisites for language and “all information is language.”  This is my defense for my “fierce resistance to the notion that such things could come from ‘mere matter.”!  It’s a “notion” all right.  But not a very good one.

In their essay entitled “Complexity, Chaos and God,” Wesley Allen and Henry Schaefer state that,

“Complexity theory views the essence of life as independent of its particular physical medium, consistent with Christian belief.”  – Darwin’s Nemesis, ed. William A. Dembski, 300.

Schaefer is one of the most oft quoted scientists in the academic literature and is a recognized expert on chaos theory.  The author’s also note that naturalistic science cannot explain the presence of information in systems.  They cite approvingly the words of Overman who said, “The paradigms for the emergence of life are algorithms which must contain at least as much information content as the genetic messages they claim to generate.” (299).

Here we encounter the issue of “Garbage In=Garbage Out”.  To put it more positively, nothing can arise from a thing that does not already have this property in it, or the power to produce it.  As Varghese quips, “a collection of…systems can only produce what is collectively present in them.  Rocks can produce pebbles, but not flowers or minds.” (131).

This is what I have been saying all along, and by way of rebuttal DD keeps lobbing over the same answer: “the self-ordering properties of matter.”  And each time her answer splats unceremoniously on the cold floor of reality.

The Great Explanation – Atheist Style (Part 2 . 2)

Because of the inordinate length of this reply to an atheist who blogs as Dormant Dragon, it has been divided into parts.  If you want the context please make sure you read part 1 and part 2.1 before reading this.  I have made this reply far longer than I intended it to be, and that means I shall require one more installment (Part 2.3).  For this I again apologize to those wanting a quick read.

4. No Small Failure

We have seen so far that the atheist take on reality and experience does not acquit itself at all well when a little pressure is applied in the realms of natural laws, logic, or ethical mores.  As a matter of fact it reduces them either to banality or absurdity. This is no small failure! Any world-picture which trips over itself in explaining such crucial fields of experience ought to be consigned to the intellectual dustbin. Contrariwise, the biblical worldview (BW) does supply us with solid reasons for believing in the uniformity of nature and laws of science, and its moral teaching is far in advance of the nebulous moral conventionalism of the best atheists. It is no coincidence that the rise of the sciences corresponded with the rediscovery of the BW at the time of the Reformation: it is well known that practically all the founders of modern science (Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Newton, Ray, Linnaeus, Lavoisier, Faraday, Pasteur, Maxwell, Kelvin, etc.) were strongly influenced by the BW. Commentators ranging from A. N. Whitehead to Mary Hesse have testified to this historical fact.

Likewise, as David Aikman shows in The Delusion of Disbelief, the Founding Fathers of the United States, whether they were Theistic or Deistic, all to a man believed that human freedoms could only be insured against what Nietzsche would call “the will to power” by the inculcation of religious, specifically biblical morality. Atheism by contrast, wherever it has gained power, has always violently curtailed individual and social freedoms just because it has no system of normative morality to hold itself up to (this is one of the areas where biblical Christianity must be differentiated from Roman Catholicism).

The starting-point for atheism is (supposedly) “reason” – but their “reason” has its source in the unreason of matter and energy. The forces of matter and energy are non-rational.  If a person really believed that all there is to make the wonders in the world is mass/energy they would have no expectation, let alone any justification, to believe in laws of nature, uniformity in nature, the reliability of their brainwaves to correspond to the extended world outside their brain; nor laws of logic, nor moral norms of anything but a descriptive psychological sort.  I have both expectation and justification because the BW gives me every reason to believe just the opposite to DD.

If I were committed to evolution (as I once was), I might not like some of its attendant dogmas, but that by itself would not make it untrue.  Or if I were a Hindu, I might not enjoy the thought that I was on the perpetual wheel of karma. But again, not liking something does not make it false.  DD sometimes (though not as much as some of her fellow atheists) mixes her personal feelings about God – whom she cannot bring herself to use the correct capitalization on – with the BW.  Feelings have nothing to do with matters of truth.  The reason I reject non-Christian worldviews is not because I don’t like them, but because they make nonsense of my experience, while the BW supplies the preconditions for it.

For instance, in his book Redeeming Science (20), the Christian scholar Vern Poythress writes:

Rationality is a sine qua non for scientific law.  But, as we know, rationality belongs to persons, not to rocks, trees, and subpersonal creatures.  If the law is rational, which scientists assume it is, then it is also personal.

He says the same thing about language.  Language presupposes rationality and personality. The alternatives proffered by evolutionary theorists not only contradict our everyday experience (all languages we know about presuppose rationality and personality), they are positively comic-bookish; comparable in their patent absurdity to the dream that flaps of skin turned into feathers as critters launched themselves off branches in continual ludicrously ill-fated proto-flights.

But enough of that for now; we need to give a quote from DD.

…Christianity starts to resemble the vulgar mystery-cult clone that it is when you don’t spend all your time trying to pretty it up with fancy explanations – like yours for the trinity – that might look good on paper and roll easily from the tongue, but don’t make any sense in relation to the real world.

There is not much weighing of the evidence going on here!  I have already referred readers to John Oswalt’s study, The Bible Among The Myths, which gives short shrift to these silly mystery-cult claims.  Those that make them show thereby that they have not looked too carefully into it.  It is one thing to say “I don’t like that…” in the same way one doesn’t like butter on sandwiches.  It is another to say “I don’t like that” and then give erroneous reasons for ones dislike.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not, of course, illogical.  What-is-more, it accounts for the one-and-many problem; the problem of relating individual instances of things to their universals (concepts).  This problem has stymied philosophers from before the time of Plato.  John Frame says,

The Trinity shows us, at least in very general terms, how ultimate unity and diversity can be reconciled…if they are seen not as abstract qualities, but as qualities of a [P]erson. – Cornelius Van Til: An Analysis of His Thought, 76.

The English theologian Colin Gunton did some penetrating work centering on the Trinity; work that cannot be dismissed with a wave of the infidel hand. He again took pains to stress the personal dimension. So there is much to be said for the explanatory value of the doctrine of the Trinity, nevermind its theological importance or its uniqueness when contrasted with the world’s religions.

5. The Preconditions of Our Understanding

Presuppositional Apologetics (PA) asserts that unless the God of Scripture is presupposed it is not possible to make sense of anything.  DD wants to ground her understanding in experience, but she has not realized that her atheistic pantheist outlook makes nonsense of experience. DD and others will of course say that they do make sense of many things. Conspicuously absent from her web of belief has been a coherent connection between the inert properties she begins with and the conscious rational percepts she is using to argue for her starting point. Indeed, there is no connection possible within her scheme of things. By contrast when one begins with an Absolute Personal Creator as depicted in the Bible the connections are only to be expected. What this amounts to is that the atheist worldview predicates our experience on things which could never explain that experience. Like trying to explain Michelangelo’s intensely moving Rondanini Pieta by pointing at the ground: there is no causal connection at all!

Throughout this correspondence DD has denied our assertions, and she has accompanied these denials with her belief that the universe has the principles of its own order within itself.  She has lobbied for the necessity of a theory of knowledge based upon experience.  With respect, I believe there is some cognitive dissonance going on.  Has she ever relied on the properties of nature to mix her cooking ingredients or type out her objections to God?  Truly she could stand there a billion years and it would never happen.    For starters, the law of entropy would put paid to her expectations.  Things don’t go from disorder to order, but from order to disorder. That is our collective experience!

It might be said that the second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems, and our earth, with its constant supply of heat energy from the Sun, is an open system.  I’ll run with that.  So DD takes her ingredients outside and waits for the Sun to mix them – what will happen?  The energy is there, but it is not purposefully directed energy!  So the recipe remains unmixed – and then the law of entropy still takes over!

So let’s compare her assertions of “experience” and then ask whether she or anyone else has ever experienced them occurring.  We do this while remembering the bottom line beliefs she has at her disposal.

She avers,

In fact, it is my belief that energy is the fundamental ‘stuff’ of the universe – matter is energy in a different form. We don’t yet know all the possible properties and capabilities of different arrangements of matter and energy, but this is a prompt for further inquiry, not a reason to declare certain things impossible just because we have yet to fully understand them.

Notice a number of important things in this quote:

First, note the admission of ignorance regarding “all the possible properties and capabilities of different arrangements of matter and energy.” Due to our finitude humankind does not know everything. In fact, as Einstein often reminded scientists in his day, we know very little of the mysteries of the cosmos and are like little children in a large library filled with books in strange languages. We need to be humble. But when we then ask “what, then, is your ultimate authority for knowledge?” the answer we get back from DD is that it is the human mind. What this boils down to is this: for the atheist the human mind is the ultimate criterion of knowledge, but the human mind is finite and limited and is ignorant of very many things. Hence the atheists’ final court of appeal is their own finitude. Yet from this finitude they dogmatize about ultimate reality. As should be obvious, they are caught within the contradiction of having to explain reality from their immanent finite vantage point, and yet also having to admit that they are ignorant regarding much of reality.

Lest it be replied that everyone has the same limitations, it needs to said that atheists like DD have no way out of this predicament.  For atheists, with their immanent finite starting point for knowing, truth claims are left suspended on air.  By way of comparison the Christian can admit his or her finitude, but can then point for final explanation, not to that finitude (the human mind), but to the transcendent Lord of the Universe who is also present with His creatures and gives them His Word. What this produces is a clear contrast between ultimate criteria of believer and unbeliever.

I repeat, for people like DD the human mind is the ultimate standard for knowledge, but this standard is a long way from comprehending a lot of reality. So what happens is, after dispensing with (or rather overlooking) the BW, the unbeliever is stuck with the impossible task of interpreting the world in ways which will never explain it. Thus, the seemingly rational starting point of the atheist ends up becoming mystical in its statements about ultimate reality; “the Great Explanation” as I’ve called it – unless that is, the BW, which gives the explanation, is pilfered for its explanatory materials. This mysticism can be seen, for example, in the assigning of automatically self-ordering, developmental, information-rich properties to matter and energy. (This is much like the reification of the forces of nature by pagan religions who shared the same immanentistic starting point as DD). The trick is to make it sound as if “the Great Explanation” is sustained on the same ‘rational’ sounding footing as the pretended rational starting point. This is accomplished through the skilled use of empty rhetoric (e.g. “evolution found a way”; “beneficial mutations”; “self-generating laws,”; “man does not need God to be moral.”)

The Rise of the Revisionists: Positivism in O.T. Studies

While I iron out my priorities I thought I would give this article another turn.  This is a rerun for an old post which speaks to the radical atheistic reinventing of OT Israel by what has come to be known as “the Copenhagen School.”

Rewriting The History of Israel

Since about the beginning of the 1970’s a group of radical “revisionist” historians of Israel have been producing ever more virulent books and journal articles claiming to debunk the historical picture as set out in the Old Testament. Building upon the work of German scholars (one thinks especially of Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth), and utilizing a leftist sociologist brand of historiography, these scholars are now making pronouncements that, if even half-true, would destroy both the credibility of the Bible, and threaten the national identity of the nation of Israel. To quote two recent liberal writers:

“There is no more “ancient Israel.” History no longer has room for it. This we do know. And now, as one of the first conclusions of this new knowledge, “biblical Israel” was in its origin a Jewish concept.”

“Biblical historiography is not a product built on facts. It reflects the narrator’s outlook and ideology rather than known facts.”

These are the sorts of cocksure assertions that are routinely made by non-evangelicals today. In this study our aim is to rebut the types of brash claims as the ones just quoted. This survey can only scratch the surface of the present state of Old Testament historiography in the broader Church. We shall, however, be taking a look at the critical assumptions that drive the work of these individuals, and sampling some of their main contentions. To help us to gain a feel for the situation we shall be quoting two slightly more moderate revisionist books; both of which have been published in the last couple of years. Along the way, we shall also be making corrective observations from some of the latest evangelical literature. Our purpose is twofold: 1. By citing the liberal scholars themselves we hope to alert Bible-believers to adopt a less complacent attitude toward the “consensus of the results of contemporary scholarship” that we sometimes hear about from some evangelical sources. 2. We also want to give reassuring and faith-building responses to these revisionists in order that those interested can turn to their Bibles with renewed trust in God’s infallible Book.

Inspecting The Assertions.

Let us take another look at the two quotations from Thompson and Ahlstrom. I want to ask whether we can see behind these over-confident avowals to the prior commitments of their authors.

“There is no more “ancient Israel.” History no longer has room for it. This we do know. And now, as one of the first conclusions of this new knowledge, “biblical Israel” was in its origin a Jewish concept.”

“Biblical historiography is not a product built on facts. It reflects the narrator’s outlook and ideology rather than known facts.”

The first part of Thompson’s declaration is mere bravado. The second part, though, claims that “History no longer has room for it.” By “History” we take him to mean the study of history (or “Historiography”). Thompson implies that this statement is not just his own opinion. It is, rather, the certain conclusion at which any intelligent person who has “the facts” will arrive. We may not know everything, but “This we do know.” So Thompson thinks that scholarship has come to this assured resolution. Anyone who would attempt to gainsay him is obviously not sufficiently apprised of the facts, or, he is simply in error (perhaps because he/she is not a competent historian?).
Well, Thompson and his fellow revisionists have spoken, who then can make trouble? So having built on such a solid foundation of historical certitude, Thompson feels it his duty to announce, “And now,” being, as he is a custodian of what he calls “this new knowledge,” he must tell his audience that the whole edifice that is “biblical Israel” was all made up by the Jews and has no claim on the words “history” and “fact.” That is quite a thing to say! If he is to be believed, there is no confirmatory evidence, historical, archaeological, literary, or otherwise, that the Old Testament has got its facts right in any part.

Now on to Ahlstrom’s assertion. He is sure that the Bible’s relating of Israel’s ancient history is the product of individuals whose interests were quite other than to record factual information about the events that they wrote about. Ahlstrom assures his readers that the “known facts” reveal an altogether different scenario than that found in the Old Testament. The reason for this is simple. The stories of the Old Testament reflect “the narrator’s outlook and ideology.” The “known facts” can be paraded before us all by these experts, and can be proven to be at variance with the idealized tales of the Jewish authors. After all, intimates Ahlstrom, “the narrator’s outlook and ideology” makes him far from a neutral observer. By “outlook” he probably means the post-exilic world of someone trying to write past history as though he were actually there observing the events; a ridiculous idea given that these men are convinced that the Bible was not composed until then. The other word, “ideology,” is one of those loaded expressions that are intended to lull the “informed” (read, “misled”) reader into assuming that having any set of beliefs (especially religious ones) automatically disqualifies a person from being a reliable reporter of historical circumstances.

The Great Explanation – Atheist Style (Part 2 . 1)

This post is written on the assumption that my previous ones have been read, especially Part 1 of this particular article.  As this second part is too long for a single post I shall have to “do a Karl Barth” and make this Part 2.1 and follow it up with 2.2 (for everyone’s sake I shall try to keep it at that ).

Introduction:

In this reply to Dormant Dragon’s (DD’s) attack on Presuppositional Apologetics (PA) and more importantly, Biblical Christianity, I shall be again examining her claims about how she knows what she knows, and interacting with more of her posts.  It will be quickly seen that she contradicts herself severely and that her attempts to stabilize a sinking ship are unsuccessful.   I shall be providing some further material on “preconditions” and why only the Triune God of the Bible supplies them.  Prior to that I want to look at the character of the laws of nature and ask what makes them law-like?  Then I shall ask about what we all experience and how this fits with atheistic evolutionary explanations.  It will be shown that the atheist worldview reduces to nonsense everywhere it pronounces upon experience.

I know very well that the atheist will always have something more to say.  They are motivated and compelled by an almost “evangelical” zeal to argue incessantly against a God they say doesn’t exist.  They do this by simply avoiding tough questions and redefining terms so that they can continue arguing.  DD to her credit has tried to supply answers here and there, but has failed to see where her answers would take her were she to pursue them to their logical outcome.  I shall demonstrate this, but it should not be missed that the real issue here is not evidential but rather ethical (Rom. 1:18-32).

Naturally, the question of how DD can even trust her own reasoning is taken for granted by her without explanation from her outlook.  Contrariwise, in order to show the adequacy of the BW I shall show how presupposing it does account for the reality we know and experience from the biblical outlook.

We shall also see (in 2.2) how DD makes an attempt at a precondition for knowing with Descartes, but soon abandons him and simply asserts a naive empiricist dictum that she must be able to trust her senses.  It is not that I disagree with DD that our impressions of the world are generally reliable – I would expect this within the Biblical Worldview (BW)  – but I do not see how DD can assume it must be so from where she says she’s coming from (and she does assume it).  David Hume (whose ethical animus against Christianity protruded through his life and writings), shall be brought in to show her that this belief of hers constitutes no safe haven at all.  She is all along assuming things which her stated belief-system contradicts – thereby showing itself unworthy of her allegiance.

Throughout this post it ought to become clear that the atheist interpretation of the world destroys all meaningful discourse about the world.  At least it would were its adherents to follow through on it.  This just isn’t possible, so the atheist actually presupposes the biblical worldview (BW) while continuing to argue for their inept one.

I intend this to be my last post in this debate since I must move onto other matters.  There is a lot to wade through and I shall concentrate here on part two of her “pantheistic response” to PA, her “Reality Denial” post, plus some things from her answers to things she was challenged on.  I have tried to prioritize rather than tackle every assertion DD has made.  This is possible because if her epistemological foundations are shown to be built on shifting sand it follows that her other assertions are even less securely anchored.  The jibes against “an ancient book” etc., will be bypassed, not because evidences to the contrary are not easily provided, just that that particular line of argument always involves a lot of educating of the people who make them.  I don’t have time to do it and the effort would be wasted in any case because that isn’t the real trouble anyway.  As I say, the real trouble is ethical not intellectual in nature.  To put it in Van Til’s words, “Their epistemology is informed by their ethical hostility towards God.”  The intellect is employed in service of the sinner’s hatred of God.  For this same reason I shall not interact with the confused and theologically naive philosophizing of Godlessons, although I may write something on it in the future.

All atheists draw assumptions which do not cohere with their interpretations of the world. It is essential to understand that we are starting where they (in this case DD) say they start and seeing where it leads (not where they would like it to lead). All we are doing is showing that to adopt a non-Christian worldview is to opt out of ultimate explanations at the beginning and only join the argument once presuppositions, which can only be grounded within the framework of the BW, have been set out.

My thanks to Dormant Dragon for a stimulating discussion.  Once again, nothing said here is meant as a personal attack on her or any other atheist.

1. The Laws of Nature

Dormant Dragon has repeatedly espoused her faith in all things naturalistic and evolutionary, including things like the laws of thought (epistemology), the laws of morality (ethics), and the laws of nature (metaphysics).  Let us start by looking at the latter (all emphases are mine):

In fact, it is my belief that energy is the fundamental ‘stuff’ of the universe – matter is energy in a different form.

It would be a tautology to say all the material universe is composed of matter and energy, but DD, in true atheist form, claims that is all there is.  This makes her a materialist monist.  In the BW there are immaterial realities like logic, morality, class concepts, beauty, spirits and, back of all, God.  DD does not believe in the last two and gets logic, morality, concepts, beauty, plus other things like number and specified information, from inanimate matter.  For her, lifeless matter is amazingly creative and productive:

If, as I suppose as a naturalist, we are products of natural processes, it seems extremely odd that these would ultimately produce beings fundamentally unlike and incompatible with the world of which we are a part.

This paragraph is reversible, making it another empty tautology.  All it is saying is that the world is a fit habitat for its beings and we are fit beings for the world we inhabit.  The only thing of consequence in the statement is that natural processes alone made it so.  These processes were not teleological.  They were blind and were not and are not goal-oriented.  That they ended up making endless purposive and teleological things is a miracle to outdo the resurrection of Jesus (which btw was both predicted by Jesus and predicated on the necessary existence of a God who can easily perform such miracles by a special providence).  For DD everything must be  explainable via the innate properties of undirected matter and energy.  This includes, of course, the laws of matter and energy.

The naturalistic worldview invokes cosmic and macro evolution.  This is a train which once one has stepped onto cannot be disembarked.  It must be ridden to its terminus.  Matter and motion (or energy) is constantly evolving into new things, and so are we.

What, then, is a law of nature?  Any science textbook will say about the same thing, though in differing ways.  A natural or scientific law is a statement about observational structures and phenomena concerning the regular interplay between matter and energy which is universally valid.  These laws are not technically provable, but have been observed to be true in every instance to which they apply.  Thus, Ohms law states that ‘voltage equals current times resistance.’  Farady’s law states that ‘the quantity of matter separated out during electrolysis, is proportional to the electrical current and its duration.’  The law of conservation of energy (1st law of thermodynamics) stipulates that ‘energy cannot be created or destroyed’  in the observable world.  If people did not presuppose the regularities of the laws of nature they would never build an airplane, let alone board one.  They would never produce a cooking recipe, never mind follow it!

These laws are law-like because they always turn out to hold in every experiment that involves them.  Further, they always disallow outcomes which go contrary to them.  Thus, they are seen as pertaining everywhere at any time.  They are immutable.  And even though it may be theoretically possible to falsify a law of nature, no counter examples have ever been observed.

Now what does this do to the atheist conception of an evolving universe?   Atheists claim that these laws of nature are inherent in the raw material of the universe.  They allow and even produce the processes which gave rise to our reality.  Thus, DD expects inanimate undirected forces to deliver up reality, together with our experiences of it.  But these undirected forces, while obeying the laws of nature, could very well have delivered up a very different universe.  As Stephen Jay Gould famously quipped, if we could rewind the tape of evolution and then press the “play” button, we would get a different result.  This means that our world is very far from being inevitable (what might have been expected) on the atheist view.

It follows that all assertions about the inevitability of our world are contrary to this arbitrary scenario.  Perhaps then DD’s lack of surprise at the way the world is has more to do with a psychological need rather than a rational or scientific one?  This is an observation we shall have to keep returning to. In her worldview any talk about ultimate significance or purpose is ruled out automatically.  Things could easily have been very different.    This becomes important when one gets around to speaking of truth or right and wrong, or good and evil.

Moreover, on this outlook the laws of nature are simply “there” without any explanation of why they are there. Now, if we couple together the “thereness” of these natural laws with the undirected and arbitrary direction of these laws, we are left with a meaningless existence which is “just there!”  Hardly a cheerful point of view (unless, of course, it grants ones wish of forgetting about God).   So, when the atheist says they find their naturalistic atheism personally and intellectually satisfying they are at best only supplying us with a bit of autobiography.  What they are not doing is saying anything meaningful about the world beyond themselves.  This does not make metaphysical naturalism necessarily untrue, it just makes it metaphysically impoverished.

2. “Experience Rules!”

It goes without saying that no one has seen or heard of natural laws creating anything, let alone living systems.  All the fancy experiments and computer programs that have been so carefully devised to “prove” there was no intelligence or goal in the processes which produced life have been conceived by intelligences who always had strict goals in mind when they devised and created their “proofs.”  It’s interesting to see DD stake so much on experiences which neither she nor anyone else have actually ever experienced (even if we were to allow for the moment that she can trust her perceptions if her naturalism is right – see 2.2).   

“they [people] base their knowledge and understanding upon experience, and they interpret their experiences such that they arrive at what might be termed functional knowledge – knowledge that enables them to move and act within the world. These philosophies also seem to me to be comfortably compatible with naturalistic pantheism.”

Alright, so the statement itself does not qualify as “knowledge” by its own definition.  Still, “experience” supposedly lies behind all possibility of knowledge, but that knowledge is, note, only pragmatic in nature (“functional knowledge…that enables them to move and act”).  What it doesn’t do is tell us where or how to move and act.  (One senses the nagging presence of the moral ought in the air!).  For example, why ought a person or community not achieve functional knowledge by intimidation, lies and propaganda?

What must be resolved from this is the question of why I should bother about anything or anyone else unless my “bothering” has some present functional value for me?  Notice that this “knowledge” is not necessarily true or false, it is simply “functional.”  This all equates nicely with the “survival of the fittest,” but then so did Eugenics and Hitler’s Final Solution.

Leaving that aside for the moment, what about laws of thought? 

‘Immaterial’ realities exist upon a base of material entities. Logic is an abstraction of concepts derived from experience of material reality, such as identity and noncontradiction – that is, something is generally not observed to be itself and not itself at the same time.”

Notice again that our perception of material reality is taken for granted.  DD assumes she has reliable access to the world outside via her experiences.  The laws of thought (logic) are predicated on the reliability of her sense impressions or perceptions of the world.  We shall see that this is a massive leap of faith for someone who says they believe what DD believes.

What is more, the laws of logic must be emergent since they derive from “our” aggregate experience; – presumably from the time our sub-human ancestors began reflecting on more than food and flee bites?  This is the evolutionary view of logic.  Logic comes from thought; thought comes from minds, and minds evolved from lifeless matter and energy.  The upshot is that logic was once not what it is today (since our brains were not as developed as they are now).  What once appeared quite reasonable and non-contradictory may now appear the epitome of irrationality.  And as our brains evolve no doubt so will the laws of thought.  Unless, of course, the laws of logic are resistant to the “natural processes” which produced them in the first place?  But this would mean their existence does not depend on these evolutionary processes.  Evolution would have been transcended somehow!  But recall that the atheist worldview demands that logic is tied to ongoing physical processes, making such transcendence impossible!  Logic and evolution are tethered together in atheism.  Atheism bundles the laws of logic onto the moving train of evolutionary processes whether they raise a protest against it.

The dilemma here is that the atheist worldview has real difficulty with establishing static unchanging laws of logic.  And if perchance they wish to just take them for granted, they must be asked to explain how these laws of thought remain static through evolutionary time.  Why don’t the laws of logic keep evolving, and if they do how can we call them “laws”?  But I believe I am repeating myself.