The Biblical Worldview (Against All Others)

Since we have been without power for several days and it probably won’t come back on for a day or two, I thought I would repost this piece from a talk I gave few years back. It’s quite long, but I hope it is profitable.

Introduction.

Let me begin with a few lines from T. S. Eliot:

“Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, but ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. 

Where is the Life we have lost in living?  Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?  Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – Choruses from ‘The Rock’ 

I want to add to this the words of Jesus in John 8:12:

“I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”

We live in a world suffused with the information of which the poet speaks, and much of it trivial.  If we don’t prioritize correctly we will never be wise.  But what information we prioritize depends much on how we view our lives and our world.  Some questions are bigger and more solemn than others.  It is a shame when men and women settle for explanations which do not explain; answers which do not answer.  The ‘choice’ of worldview is a determining choice.

Before I launch fully into my talk I want to make 2 clarifications:

• No Neutrality: Everyone has an angle (Dawkins, Krauss, etc., are classic examples of no neutrality). All assertions about reality and ethics are to a large extent controlled by prior beliefs.  These beliefs emanate from the picture of the world which a person holds in their heart.  So for someone to claim that their outlook is neutral while that of those who disagree with him is biased is both naïve and absurd.  We all have our biases, and these must be declared so that they can be compared.  To ignore them or to forget about them is a form of self-deception.

Many atheists I’ve dealt with seem to hold the attitude, “Let the Xtian give up his biases; I’ll stick with mine.”  (By bias I mean “an opinion or inclination towards something.”)  Not all biases are bad.  E.g., a bias for an umbrella over a paper bag when it’s raining outside.

• A Proper definition of ‘Faith’ – “persuasion of Divine truth” (J. Frame). It is common for New Atheists to wrongly define faith as “belief in something without evidence.” (The multiverse hypothesis would exemplify this definition).

This definition of faith is nonsense.  In the Bible, “through faith we understand…” (Heb. 11:3).  Though there is such a thing as blind faith, this is not the biblical understanding.  Faith is not credulity.  Scripture tells us to “prove all things.” (1 Thess. 5:21).  Faith is never blind, it is always reasonable, and, indeed evidence based.  Blind faith can be coerced.  True biblical faith cannot be coerced.  Faith properly defined is essential to all knowledge.

You don’t have to be a Christian to see this.  Renowned physicist Max Planck said,

“Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith.  It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.” – Science, Faith and Revelation, 350.

This is because, as physical chemist and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi noted, “all acts of knowing include an appraisal by the knower.” (Personal Knowledge, 17).  And as Polanyi said further on in his book ,

“No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside [of] a fiduciary framework.”  – Personal Knowledge, 266.

The Puritan William Gouge wrote, “Faith is in the understanding.” – Faith is implicit in all understanding!  Faith is thinking God’s thoughts after Him.  Any view of biblical faith which opposes it to reason and evidence is a red herring.

The Bible says and Polanyi explains, faith is necessary to know.  Faith in God anchors both mind and soul.

What if we try to exclude God from our attempt to explain the world?

Just here let me introduce a quotation from the French post-modern critic Roland Barthes, from his The Death of the Author: “to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God.”  Barthes said there is no such thing as a fixed meaning of a text (or the world).  Meaning is assigned, not by the author (or God as Author), but by the reader.

Of course, in order to believe what he said what have you got to do? – believe Barthes, the author!

1. A Place To Stand: We all have a perspective  

So I am here to talk about the biblical worldview, and in doing that I shall be commenting on other outlooks.  A worldview is the lens through which a person views reality.  It is a commitment or inclination of the heart.  To qualify as a worldview, any picture of life should be able to comment on and offer explanations of our varied experience, and then to put the pieces together.  In other words a worldview must tackle the array of data to do with ourselves, our environment, and our beliefs: it must deal with God, Man and the World.

A worldview must confront the big questions about purpose and significance.  E.g., Is the world an illusion?  Are my experiences unreal?  Or is the world uncaused, unguided and therefore purposeless.  Or is it created?  And if so, by Whom?  And why is there is nagging sense that things are not the way they ought to be?  The contemporary artist John Mayer caught some of this when he wrote, “Stop this train.  I wanna get off and go home again.  I can’t take the speed it’s movin’ in.  Honestly, won’t someone stop this train?”

The biblical worldview makes sense of our experience as humans in a multifarious environment, and it all starts with the biblical God.  The God of the Bible is the great Fact underlying every other fact.  All goodness, truth, knowledge, power, justice, beauty, purity, and love comes from Him.  The Bible declares “God is love.”  He is referred to as “the God of all Truth,” as “the Almighty,” “all [Whose] ways are justice,” etc.  As the Psalmist puts it, “all our springs are in Him.”  We see ourselves and life rightly when we ourselves in relation to Him.  In His light we see light (cf. Psa. 36:9).

God transcends His creation but He acts within it.  He is both transcendent and immanent, He is Lord above and within the world.  (“Know therefore today, and lay it to your heart, that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.” – Deut. 4:39).  Creation has been made with its own integrity.  Yet all our abilities are derived, just as all our knowledge is derived.  Knowledge itself, in the biblical worldview, is that which corresponds to the reality which God has made.  Complete objectivity, therefore, is only possible to God, yet objectivity is attainable to humans.  Further, God has made the extended world for us and made it amenable to us: we are told to investigate the world analytically and ethically; to do science and to treat other creatures with care as custodians of the earth, under God’s eye.

2. The Place We All Stand: Everyone Stands within the Biblical Worldview

When I say that we all stand within the biblical worldview, I know that I have some explaining to do. I want to say right away that I am not claiming that we all acknowledge this. In fact, the Bible says we act to suppress the knowledge of God. But it protrudes here and there since it must. For God must be already there in order for anything else to be there. Cornelius Van Til called God “the precondition of intelligibility.” He meant that the existence of the God of the Bible was necessary in order for us to assert anything about anything – even if that assertion is false. Hence, the Christian-biblical worldview is the environment in which we all live, even though many of us wish it were otherwise, and try to construct other “explanations” for things like love, truth, justice, logic, number, information, good & evil, the external world, consciousness & personhood, etc., or even if that means throwing up our hands and saying (in something akin to blind faith) “it’s just there.”

Let me give a few examples of this suppression of truth:

• A solipsist is someone who denies the reality of anyone or anything but their own existence. As such they are exceedingly rare creatures! I once spoke with someone who told me he thought that solipsism was the most rational philosophical position to take. I asked him who he thought he was talking to?
• So, many Hindus believe the external world isn’t real. They believe all is one. Yet in propagating it and its central doctrine of reincarnation Hindus actually presuppose the objective reality of an external world to be re-born in to (e.g there is the cycle of samsara and there is the transcending of it). They believe their views are reasonable, although they must hold that the laws of reason are essentially unreal since these laws of logic make distinctions between things, which is a denial of the monism that undergirds much Hindu belief.
• A church member called me last week after she had been talking with a friend who held Panthesitic New Age beliefs which deny the existence of evil. She told me she had asked her friend about the Holocaust and was told that it wasn’t evil, just necessary. I think a worldview which denies evil is obstinately myopic. It is a denial of the world.
• Naturalistic materialists may tell us that we are mere bio-chemical machines with no freewill, just dancing to the music of our DNA, but they will take those “machines” to a graveside, to a Shakespeare play, or to the coffee house, or to the university (where they got this stuff from), or even to events like this; and they believe they are free to agree or disagree with other people’s viewpoints. They believe that their views are rational, despite the fact that they must hold that the non-physical laws of thought evolved as our brains evolved, and point towards, not truth, but merely pragmatic ‘aids’ to survival. Laws of thought require a mind to think them. The brain is not the same as the mind.  Intentionality and consciousness are not reducible to the laws of physics. As one of my favorite writers, David Bentley Hart, observes in showing up the obvious difference: “Software no more “thinks” than a minute hand knows the time or the printed word ‘pelican’ knows what a pelican is.” – The Experience of God, 219.

These are accounts of the world.  But as G. K. Chesterton put it, these worldviews are, “complete in theory and crippling in practice.”

I say that there is a cognitive dissonance here. Many worldviews just cannot be lived out in the real world. But this dissonance too is explained by the biblical worldview, namely, the sinful suppression of the knowledge of the Creator, and the replacement of the biblical-Theistic picture with another picture (an idolatrous one).

God is necessary:

Logic/Reason…..precondition ……. God who is immaterial perfect rationality

Morality…………..precondition ……..God who is righteous

Truth……………….precondition ……..God who is unchanging Truth

Uniformity……….precondition ……..God who upholds regularity (providence)

Love………………….precondition ……..God who is Love and demonstrates it

Personality………….precondition ……..God who is Personal

Relationship………..precondition ……..God who is social

Science………………..precondition ……..God who gives skills & conditions for analysis

History………………..precondition ……..God who created & guides with a telos in view

Hope……………………..precondition ……..God who raises Christ from the dead

Meaning & Significance...precondition ……..God who made us in His image

Now, you take God out of all this and all these things cry out for an explanation. They hang like half-inflated balloons, untethered from a central hub which lends them value and coherence (recall my quotation of Barthes earlier!). They are needing to be related to each other, and to us!
Therefore, it is not the case that deciding to disbelieve in God leaves a person with nothing to prove.
It is rather the case that there is an immense about of work to do to make sense of oneself and the world without the biblical God (a job which I say is impossible to complete – see Rom. 1:18-22).  The canvass must be completed, but how?

In Scripture Creation leads to purpose and order. I teach the Bible Story as “the Creation Project” – a project to be consummated; a project full of hope. There is a Creation Mandate for us to explore the world and to analyze it – to do science. All the founders of modern science believed this creation mandate. It is simply wrong to think you can exclude God and not pay the price.  For example, if you were walking down a dark alley and you saw a group of young guys coming towards you, wouldn’t you be relieved to see them carrying Bibles in their hands?

Listen to these words by atheist philosopher Jurgen Habermas:

“For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical re-appropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance,… everything else is idle postmodern talk.”

We have built on a Theistic foundation.  But the Bible Story records the entrance of sin and death which mark our independence from God and the misuse of God’s gifts, from love and reason to community, and the natural world itself. You cannot make sense of things without the God of Scripture. Logic, consciousness, the necessity of a second and third person perspective, number, truth – these cannot be traced back to nothing. Neither can they be grounded in a capricious or absentee deity. Neither can they be explained in terms of illusion.

We live in the west in an age of scientism – the naive belief that science can answer every question and that any question it can’t answer isn’t a proper question. Today’s intellectual climate is like a sitting room where only the naturalists are allowed to sit in the chairs, then anyone who is not sitting in a chair is told (in the name of tolerance) to leave. MIT Nuclear Physicist Ian Hutchinson calls the belief that all knowledge comes from the natural sciences “a ghastly intellectual mistake” – Monopolizing Knowledge, ch. 1.  It again is self-evidently false, since the dictum “all true knowledge comes from the natural sciences” is not a statement testable by the natural sciences.  Scientism is the cultural imperialism of the Western academic world.

And what about our inability to live up to even our principles? What about all the thoughts we have had which we knew were wrong and harmful? Envy, lust, ingratitude, pride, dishonesty, partiality, anger, cowardice, malice, greed, etc., we’ve all felt them. These things come from within us and express themselves in our lives – in some more blatantly then others. We are part of the problem. How then are we to be the cure? No, we “suppress the truth in unrighteousness,” and on our best days we know we do. And in all this there is a message. It concerns the sacrificial love of God.

In closing I want to refer to the 8th chapter of the Gospel of Mark.
– Jesus encounters Pharisees who disingenuously ask for a sign (Jesus is exasperated)
– Then Jesus gets a little frustrated with His disciples because they don’t grasp His true identity
– And then Jesus is asked to heal a blind man; and at first He only half-heals him. He asks the man, “What do you see?” The answer was “I see men as trees walking.” That’s how we often see others. But the Bible tells us that we are made in the image of God! The story goes on to relate how Jesus completely healed the man, and it says, “and he saw all things clearly.”

Religion opposed and killed Jesus.  His followers sometimes don’t have their heads in the game.  The biblical worldview corrects both of them.

They say “love is blind.” But love is not blind. Loves knows! Love sacrifices. It is sight-producing! God is love. So we look unto Jesus. Jesus says in John 8:12, 

“I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”

Review of ‘Can We Trust The Gospels?’ by Peter J. Williams

A review of Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust The Gospels? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 153 pages, pbk. 

This excellent little book by the English biblical scholar Peter J. Williams (not to be confused with the apologist Peter S. Williams) is a readable and informative introduction to some of the main questions people have about the four Gospels.  In eight tightly argued but entertaining chapters Williams, who acts as principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge, dispels common myths and furnishes many enlightening facts about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, avoiding dogmatic overreach but still making a very solid case for their trustworthiness.

Williams’ first chapter surveys external sources such as Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Josephus to corroborate many features in the Evangelists.  Tacitus reported on the “vast multitude” of Christians in Rome in AD 64, the year of the great fire (23).  Since there is a distance of over 2,000 miles between Rome and Jerusalem, this testifies to the extent to which the new Faith had spread throughout the Roman Empire in Apostolic times.  Incidentally, such witnesses as Tacitus seem to give the lie to the more conservative estimates for the extent of Christianity in the first centuries (cf. also 27).  These non-Christian sources also confirm the execution of Jesus in the time of Pontius Pilate.

A real reature of this chapter, which continues throughout the book, is the way Williams appeals to common sense and reasonable expectations to make  his points.  For instance, on page 34 the author observes,

Skeptical readers…might naturally assume that these beliefs [i.e. about the virgin birth] arose through exaggerations over time as word of Jesus as Messiah spread.  The problem with this is finding a context in which such embellishments could spread…According to 1 Corinthians 9:5 (written ca. AD 56) not just one brother, but “brothers” of Jesus traveled with their wives, spreading the Christian message.  This suggests a situation in which the sprouting of novel beliefs about the family origins of Jesus would have been hard.

Notice here how Williams allows for the force of the unbeliever’s argument (“might naturally assume”) while giving an answer which is scriptural and provides food for thought.  This ability of the writer to converse with those dubious of the Bible’s claims provides a model for effective communication with unbelievers.

The second chapter, “What Are the Four Gospels?” identifies them as ancient biographies, early in date, and surprisingly many (four) for an ancient figure (39-41).  It deals with why the Gospel of Thomas is not on a par with the biblical Gospels, and the important matter of the the traditional authorship of the Gospels (43).

Chapter three asks whether the authors got their geographical and cultural facts right, while the next chapter explores the fascinating subject of “Undesigned Coincidences” in the four Gospels, utilizing Lydia McGrew’s recent work on the subject [Hidden in Plain View].  By this term is meant the converging of independent details in different authors which complement and reinforce one another, but without any clear signs of interaction between the sources.  Examples include the way personality traits are noted by Luke and John in separate incidents concerning the sisters Mary and Martha (88-89), or Jesus asking Philip where to buy bread (Jn. 6).  This looks like a random enquiry until we read John 1:44 and Luke 9:10, which informs us that Philip was from the town of Bethsaida, which is close to where the miracle was performed (92-93).

Chapters about whether we still have Jesus’s words; if the the text of the Gospels has been changed (a particular strength of Williams), and contradictions follow.  All are good, especially the first two, although I would have like a little more interaction with alleged contradictions; a few more examples would have helped.

The final chapter is titled “Who Would Make All This Up?”  He begins the chapter with a typically sensible statement:

There are many particulars in the Gospels that the authors would be unlikely to have invented.  Although one can usually think of complex reasons why someone might invent them, those are not the simplest explanations.  The simplest explanation is that these reports are true. (121)

In this chapter the author tackles miracles and the Resurrection, before reaching his conclusion – that the Jesus presented in the Gospels and predicted in the Old Testament is who the Gospels claim He is.  The NT does not simply say that Jesus died, but that He was buried.  Who would bury a convict who had been crucified?  Answer, Jews!  They would make sure that people were buried (133).  And then there are the resurrection appearances.  In a terrific passage Williams sums up the all the varied details of those appearances (134).

Scholarship has well established the strong links between Second Temple Jewish belief and the emergence of Christianity from its milieu (see e.g. Larry Helyer, Exploring Jewish Literature of the Second Temple Period).  On the back of this Williams comments,

One can make a good argument that the concept of the bodily resurrection of one person in advance of others would have been very odd within Judaism, and therefore it is unlikely that early Christians would have invented it in an effort to continue the Jesus movement after the death of their leader. (135).

The apologetic method employed could best be described as evidentialist, but since the writer is clear that he is presenting a case for the trustworthiness of the Gospels this should not be seen as a flaw.

In summary, Can We Trust The Gospels? is a fine book which packs a lot of important information within its brief compass.  It deserves a very wide readership and would be an excellent gift for any growing Christian or non-believer with an openness to its message.

This book was provided to me by the publisher without any obligation to give a positive review.

A Review of J. P. Moreland, “Scientism and Secularism”

A Review of J. P. Moreland, Scientism and Secularism, Wheaton: Crossway, 2019, 222 pages, pbk

J. P. Moreland is a seasoned Christian philosopher who has provided the Church with some very good tools in defense of the Faith and the Christian Worldview.  He has been Professor of Philosophy at Biola for many years.  This timely book is most welcome as it engages one of the most pernicious false ideas that has arisen from man’s innate hatred of God (Rom. 1:18-25).

Scientism is essentially the belief that only science, especially the hard sciences, can give us solid knowledge of the world.  Although many of its advocates do not come right out and say it in such blunt terms, that is their faith.

Moreland refers to  “hard scientism” and “soft scientism”, the difference between them being that the softer variety allows that other fields of study may have something to say, but nothing as authoritative as the pronouncements of “science.” (29-30).  This belief in the magisterium of the lab coat has come about because of a shift in the “plausibility structure” in the society (32-33).  The organized and heavily guarded groupthink that permeates school and university curricula and the media.  Behind this is the ever-potent force of people not wanting God to be there. (191-194).

In the third chapter the writer relates how the universities were transformed into bastions of secularism, and this was chiefly done by the acceptance of scientism.  This shift did not occur because of evidence.  “Rather, it was merely a pragmatic sociological shift.” (48. Italics are the author’s).

The short fourth chapter is entitled “Scientism Is Self-Refuting.”  This little chapter is important because it not only shows that self-refuting stahttps://drreluctant.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/further-thoughts-on-the-call-to-the-ministry/tements are necessarily false (51), but that scientism is ironically not even a scientific position.  Scientism is “an epistemological viewpoint about science; it is not a statement of science.” (52, cf. 57).  From this position Moreland shows that philosophical presuppositions (say, about the nature of truth) are necessary before any science can get underway (ch. 5).

Unsurprisingly, Moreland spends time on the matter of consciousness and mental states.  Consciousness is and always will be a first-person phenomenon.  Neurologists depend upon the honest reports from the subject to gather their data (86-90).  But of course many neuroscientists have bought into physicalism, wherein the human being is viewed simply as the accumulation of active molecular parts – a machine (90-105).

Further chapters engage the Hawking/Mlodinow thesis that everthing came from nothing (ch. 10).  He takes several shots at methodological naturalism (121, ch. 13), includes a fine section on Fine-Tuning (143-149), and near-death experiences (92-94), and useful chapters on the integration of Christianity and Science (chs. 14 & 15).

The book does not analyze secularism as such.  It’s main aim is against the rampant scientism in our culture and to help Christians understand and critique it.  He rightly inveighs against “using watered-down, intellectually vacuous, simplistic preaching that is always applied to a parishioner’s private life while failing to deal from the pulpit with the broad cultural, intellectual, and moral issues facing us all” (39-40).  There is a helpful bibliography of recommended books at the end.

Scientism and Secularism sometimes seems to lack the cut and thrust of more polemical works, but it is recommended reading for anyone who wants to be conversant with a culture saturated with the canons of irrational scientism.

Repost: Should ‘Presuppositional’ Apologetics Be Rebranded As ‘Covenant’ Apologetics?

Recently K. Scott Oliphint of Westminster Seminary, Philadelphia has published a book which he has called Covenantal Apologetics.   I reviewed the book here and recommend it.  But I expressed reservations about the writer’s agenda of rebranding Van Til’s apologetic teaching in line with the book’s title.  Coming as it does from one of the foremost representatives of Van Til’s presuppositional approach around the thesis deserves attention.  As I said in my review, by “Covenantal” Oliphint means the ‘covenants’ of covenant theology.

Now nobody is going to disagree that Van Til often spoke about fallen man as a covenant-breaker.  And no one will dispute that by that designation he had in mind the theological covenants of Reformed Covenant Theology.  You cannot read Van Til very far before running into statements he makes about ‘the Reformed apologetic.’  For example,

All men are either in covenant with Satan or in covenant with God. – Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th edition, edited by K. Scott Oliphint, 300.

This is the kind of thing covenant theologians say (or used to say).  Van Til did not refer to his approach as ‘Covenantal Apologetics’, but I think he might not have minded too much.  Still, is it right?

Van Til’s argument for allying his apologetics with the resources of covenant theology should be seen against the backdrop of his conflating covenant theology with Reformed Calvinistic theology.  But any reader of the Jacob Arminius is well aware that he too was a covenant theologian.  This needs to be noted because Van Til’s point is mainly anthropological and soteriological.  He memorably observes,

We should add that according to Scripture, God spoke to man at the outset of history.  In addition to revealing himself in the facts of the created universe, God revealed himself in Words, telling man about what he should do with the facts of the universe.  Since the fall, all men, as fallen in Adam (Rom. 5:12), continue to be responsible for this twofold revelation of God given to man at the beginning of history. – Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 19

This is a point which can be made from the Bible through exposition of Romans 1:18-32 or Psalm 19.  Among his other contributions to theology Van Til stressed this revelatory nature of knowledge before and after the Fall:

For Adam in paradise God-consciousness could not come in at the end of a syllogistic process of reasoning.  God-consciousness was for him the presupposition of the significance of his reasoning on anything. – The Defense of the Faith, 113

But he did not always appeal to the Bible for his authority.  Like so many covenant theologians of the past and present he counted on the Westminster Standards to support his contentions.  So right after the above statement we read this one:

To the doctrine of creation must be added the conception of the covenant.  Man was created an historical being.  God placed upon him from the outset of history the responsibility and task of reinterpreting the counsel of God as expressed in creation to himself individually and collectively.  Man’s creature consciousness may therefore be more particularly signalized as covenant consciousness.  But the revelation of the covenant to man in paradise was supernaturally mediated…Thus, the sense of obedience or disobedience was immediately involved in Adam’s consciousness of himself.  Covenant consciousness envelops creature consciousness. In paradise Adam knew that as a creature of God it was natural and proper that he should keep the the covenant that God made with him. – Ibid.

Here, as Oliphint explains in a footnote in this edition, Van Til is appealing to the WCF 7.1.  The “covenant” to which Van Til is referring in this quotation is not any covenant found in the description of paradise in the first chapters of Genesis.  The “covenant” is the ‘covenant of works’ invented, along with the ‘covenant of grace’, by covenant theologians as a theological explanatory device to describe our relationship with our Creator.  No Scripture is provided to show the presence of this covenant, and for good reason: there is none.

In arguing for the name covenantal apologetics, Oliphint uses the same method.  In all his argumentation for the idea there is a noticeable dearth of scriptural appeal.  For instance, for his definition and understanding of the term “covenant” he does not go to the Bible but to the Westminster Confession (See K. Scott Oliphint, Covenantal Apologetics, 39, 49, 61-62, 93).  The Confession does indeed refer to God’s condescension in relating to us as “covenantal.”  But is that the way the Bible itself uses the idea of covenant?  I think not.

For one thing, it begs the question to have the Westminster Confession authorize the name-change from presuppositional apologetics to covenantal apologetics.  Without reinventing the wheel, I have tried to show in other places (e.g. here), that covenant theologians have misread biblical covenants, like the New Covenant, in fitting them into their extra-biblical inferential scheme.  Oliphint himself does this on page 59 of his book when confusingly quoting Hebrews 6:17-18, which refers back to the Abrahamic covenant (6:13), and forwards to the New covenant, of which Christ is the Mediator (Hebrews 8 and 9 go on to explain this).  But Oliphint’s quotation is not in reference to either of these biblical covenants, but (as we saw with Van Til) in service of a supposed covenantal relationship enacted at the outset of creation.

Covenant theology has often been criticized for making their theological covenants ride roughshod over the clear covenants of the Bible, effectively stripping them of any specifications not required by their approach.  The example just given is quite typical.

Like Van Til Oliphint wants man’s knowing to be covenantal (44, 82, 152).  But this is neither necessary nor particularly relevant.  It is not necessary because our relationship to God need not be viewed within the terms of covenant.  We would do better and would stay within the boundaries of the biblical text to speak of “creaturely obligations” or “image-accountability” than introducing covenant language.  Although covenants in the Bible do establish relationships and commitments, no one is free to read and then define the terms of a covenant for which there is scarcely any warrant.  And interpreting our knowing as covenantal is not relevant  for two reasons.  First because Arminians have often been adherents of covenant theology and Van Til was often at pains to try to show that only Calvinism could support his position (see, e.g. A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 81ff.).  Therefore, his real emphasis while using the Westminster Confession should more often than not be understood to be Calvinistic.  Second, because nowhere in the Bible is our knowing depicted this way.  While all assent that the new birth brings with it new outlooks (cf. Rom. 12:1-2; Eph. 4:17-5:17), such things were hardly necessary in Eden.  Divine covenants obligate God to do something.  But in paradise we read of no such Divine obligation; still less do we read of a covenant oath!  In Scripture, all the covenants which are plainly discoverable come after the Fall: indeed, they come after the Flood!  Covenants are not required where the relationship is not sundered and in need of reconciliation.

In truth, while the genius of covenant theology may be brought to bear on Van Til’s apologetic, the real issue is whether his approach is supportable from the text of Holy Writ.  And the answer to that question is certainly Yes!  As Greg Bahnsen showed in his Always Ready, there is plenty of biblical justification for presuppositional apologetics, without the need to appeal to covenant theology.  While Bahnsen was a proponent of covenant theology, he wisely sought to establish his apologetics on a different and firmer foundation.  What we want to know is whether Van Til’s apologetic is biblical, and indeed it is.  Because that is so the question of nomenclature might be easily solved by calling it, as a recent fine exposition does, simply Biblical Apologetics.

The question of whether covenant theology is biblical is much harder to prove.                

It is my opinion that even Van Til’s insistence that his apologetics demands allegiance Calvinistic Reformed theology is also unpersuasive, and for many of the same reasons.  Van Til was rightly concerned with the “absoluteness” of God to be the ultimate environment of thought.  He did not think Arminianism allowed such a thing because of its idea of free choice.  Although I am not an Arminian I do think that Arminius has a very strong conception of God’s primacy in choosing.  Not all Arminians do.  But then again, many Calvinists have deferred to concepts akin to natural theology in their writings.  This opens the door to viewing men and women as operating in a revelatory and so accountable realm, and a (functionally) non-revelatory realm where they are free to decide upon matters of truth independently of special revelation.

What it all comes down to in the end is not whether or not Van Til or Oliphint would prefer it if their apologetics was referred to as “covenantal,” but whether it would be right to insist on the connection.  If we base our apologetics on the clear statements of Scripture, including the covenants of the Bible, our base will never crumble.  but if we seek to base our apologetics upon ‘covenants’ which we are unable to prove from the Bible, we expose that apologetic approach to the same heavy biblical criticism with which covenant theology has been assailed.  Presuppositional Apologetics might not be the best label, but it is far more satisfactory than an attenuated name like Covenantal Apologetics; especially when ‘covenantal’ refers, not to the biblical concept of covenant, but to the strained idea of covenant within covenant theology.     

Now Complete: Twelve Videos on Apologetics & Worldview

Here are the 12 video presentations on Apologetics & Worldview: An Introduction I recorded last year before a group of lay Christians who ranged from ages 15 to 70+.  I cite quite a few authorities, and I hope to place these in readable form in the future.  The average running time for each video is around one hour and thirty minutes.  

1. The Field of Vision
2. The Background of Creation
3. The Creator – Creature Distinction
4. Dependent Reasoning
5. Stressing the Antithesis
6. Science and Personal Knowledge
7. The Myth of Naturalistic Science
8. Scientism and Circularity
9. Faith, Reason and Truth
10. Preconditions, Facts, and the Historical Christ
11. Evidence in Real Time
12. Concluding Thoughts – A Cohesive Worldview

I pray that this teaching is a help to many.

“Leaving Mormonism” – A Review

I was sent this book (and another that I must review soon) before Christmas and the publisher, quite understandably wishes me to review it.  I am very happy to do so since this is a fine resource

A Review of Leaving Mormonism: Why Four Scholars Changed Their Minds, edited by Corey Miller & Lynn K. Wilder, Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 311 pages, paperback, 2017

This book is an great idea.  Four former Mormons with academic credentials and a passion for the truth write about why they left Mormonism and add a critique of it from their own perspectives.  Each writer communicates clearly.  None is mean spirited in their criticism of their former belief, though all are keen to inform readers not only of the errors of the Latter-Day Saints; errors which lead to a particular worldview, but also of the chameleonic nature of Mormon teaching as it seeks to adapt to criticism and exposure.

Corey Miller’s chapter, “In Search of the Good Life” asks whether experiencing the good is objectively possible under Mormon teaching.  His answer begins with his personal testimony of being a Mormon with descendants reaching all the way back to acquaintances of Joseph Smith himself.  His essay deals with the nature of Mormon testimony and the difficulty of achieving “salvation.”  Miller is a philosopher and has provided excellent notes to go with his essay, even briefly outlining Alvin Plantinga’s response to de jure objections to Christian faith in his Warranted Christian Belief (70 n.41).

The next chapter is by LaTayne Scott, “I Was There, I Believed.”  She has been given enough room to write a long but interesting chapter consisting, as all the contributions do, of her testimony and an analysis.  Scott’s testimony is eloquently written and of real help for someone trying to understand the grip that Mormon culture exerts upon its members.  Of particular help in this chapter is the way the author persuades the reader to look upon Mormonism as a worldview with its distinctive (and false) approach to truth.

Lynn Wilder’s piece includes her discomfort at encountering many contradictions concerning things like racism and polygamy.  There is also her son’s story, wherein he was challenged while on mission to read the New Testament.  Upon returning to testify he got up and confessed that a person needed Jesus and Him alone (163).  This son, Micah, begged his parents to simply read the NT like a child would.  Wilder read John’s Gospel and her eyes began to be opened, though not for some time did she and her husband leave the fold (in 2008).  The “reasons” part of her article details numerous social problems with Mormonism, again focusing on racism and polygamy, but expanding on each.

The last of the four writers is the scientist Vince Eccles.  He became a rebel against religion after learning about his divorced mother’s being judged for some of her choices.  He writes about his fascination with parts of the Bible (e.g. Matthew and Exodus) and his investigations into the reliability of the Scriptures, but he does hold to a non-literal reading of the early chapters of Genesis, and to theistic evolution, and there are certainly one or two liberal-critical influences upon him.  He records crises of faith which even had him contemplating becoming an orthodox Jew.  He also seems to have universalist leanings.  Of the four authors in the book I felt Eccles was the least satisfying.  In fact, even though his essay is of interest, I think it was a mistake to include him in the book.

Miller and Wilder complete the book with a chapter on the New Atheism.  They inserted this chapter because many ex-Mormons become disillusioned and fall pray to the arguments of these people.  It’s a nice bonus at the end of the book.

This is an absorbing book, written with head and heart.  I liked the first two contributions to be the most helpful; the one by Eccles was a disappointment.  I think the book, Eccles’ chapter apart, is a very good buy.

Three Videos on Science & Christianity

I have been putting my introductory lectures for Telos on Apologetics & Worldview up on YouTube.  There are several more to come, but I thought it would be useful to place the three classes dealing with Science together in a post.  Throughout the classes I quote from quite a number of authorities.  I hope this is more helpful than it is distracting.

The first, “Science and Personal Knowledge” includes a study of Michael Polanyi’s theory of knowledge, which is important for dispelling the false notion of dispassionate objectivity in science.

The second lesson, “The Myth of Naturalistic Science” tries to demonstrate how belief in scientific materialism or naturalism is unsustainable:

The last video is entitled “Scientism and Circularity” and attempts to show that the facts are stacking up to overwhelm the classic rhetoric of naturalistic evolutionary ‘science’, although adherence to scientism and its circular reasoning (based on the dogma that ‘naturalism must be true’) still makes it impervious to the facts:

Review – Darwin’s House of Cards

A review of Tom Bethell, Darwin’s House of Cards: A Journalist’s Odyssey Through The Creation Debates, Seattle: Discovery Press International, 2017, 293 pages, pbk.

The widespread public acceptance of biological evolution in Darwin’s day was probably a product of the simultaneous faith in Progress.  Darwin’s theory was accepted as readily as it was because it shared in the general belief that things were getting better.  It’s not that the organisms themselves were being swept along, but that European and then American intellectuals believed that everything was improving. – 256

This is the way Tom Bethell ends his entertaining book attacking the reigning scientistic consensus of evolution.  Darwin’s House of Cards is a fully up-to-date survey of the mechanics and effects of evolutionary theory; a theory which Karl Popper concluded was “not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program” (14).

As to the general optimism which provided the conditions for the enthusiastic acceptance of Darwinism in the middle of the nineteenth century, Bethell writes,

[A]s I hope to show in the following chapters, the science of neo-Darwinism was poor all along, and supported by very few facts.  I have become ever more convinced that, although Darwinism has been promoted as science, its unstated role has been to prop up a philosophy – the philosophy of materialism – and atheism along with it. (20).

In the nineteen chapters which follow the author reports on and dismantles numerous evolutionary claims and “evidences”, showing among other things that common descent, natural selection, and random mutations are either pure fiction, tautological, or terribly over-plugged.  He challenges the dogma of the tree of life, noticing along the way biochemist Craig Venter’s denial of it (53-54), and paleontologist Colin Patterson’s frank admission that the nodes in the tree of life diagrams are always empty (55-56).  Why?  Because there is no real evidence for it.

Speaking of Patterson, who was chief paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London until his death in 1998, Bethell interviewed him several times, and chapter 12 reviews those conversations.  Although Patterson remained a thoroughgoing evolutionist, he came to the opinion that it conveyed no scientific information at all.  As Bethell reports it, he said that scientists could do very well without it (149).

In the same chapter we are told about two world-renowned experts in their fields who admit that the funding for their respective fields is minimal compared with digging up fossils.  Nevertheless, both said that “you don’t find out much from fossils”, and that they could find out much more by studying living things (146-148).

This book’s short chapters are so well written that the author is able to cover a great deal of territory in a relatively short space.  This means that along with the usual problematical areas for evolution; natural selection (chapters 5 & 6), the fossil record (chapter 11), homology (chapter 9), DNA and Epigenetics (chapter 15), etc., he also tackles less well documented issues like extinction (chapter 7), and convergence (chapter 10).  There is also a useful chapter about Richard Lenski’s long-term experiments with E-coli (chapter 16).

As to homology, for example, he notes, the propensity of naturalists to invoke design while supposedly trying to explain it away.  Homologists, or those who rely on them, often write of the relative similarities in structures from different organisms without being forthright enough to declare that these similar features often are derived from different sets of genes! (109-112).

To take a few more examples, despite the recent demonizing of humanity and our deleterious influence on nature by many progressives on the left, no one knows why extinctions happen (86-92).  As for “convergence”, the belief that differing species evolve similar traits due to their experiencing the same kinds of environmental and ecological pressures, evolutionists again beg the question.  Evolutionists have tended to substitute their imaginations for proof, and nearly always simplify extremely difficult matters in the process.  So on page 119 Stephen Jay Gould is quoted as saying that in certain flying creatures, “highly adaptive forms that are easy to evolve arise again and again.”  Bethell responds that if flight is so easy to evolve, “Someone should tell Boeing engineers how that was achieved.”

As we’re on the subject of engineering, chapter 13 is given over to “Intelligent Design and Information Theory.”  At the start of the chapter Bethell mentions the work of Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Douglas Axe (155-161).  He deftly dispatches theistic evolutionist Kenneth Brown’s attempt to oppose Michael Behe’s “irreducible complexity” findings (155-156), and then states the obvious truth that, contrary to creationism, “Intelligent design theory… does not identify a designer, any more than we can identify the designer of Stonehenge.” (157).  Why then the resistance to ID?  For instance, citing Wikipedia’s slanted presentation:

Numerous attempts have been made to change…derogatory comments, but all such changes are promptly reversed on Wikipedia – sometimes within minutes. (161)

The thought-police are very active.  But of course the reason has already been given.  The reigning view of the intellectuals is naturalistic atheism.  Therefore, the facts will always be made to comport with the theory, however vicious the contortions have to be.  Chapter 14 describes the link between “Darwinism and the Philosophy of Naturalism.”  This chapter includes a good discussion of freewill, or the denial thereof by many of these “Freethinkers”, although the irony of their calling themselves by this term seems to be totally lost on most of them!  Bethell’s responses to this are effectively structured around the work of Michael Egnor and Thomas Nagel.

Lectures on Apologetics & Worldview

I am going to release a series of introductory video lectures on Apologetics and Worldview.  The lectures were given earlier this year to people whose ages ranged from about 15 to 70.  I tried to be quite low-key and to strike a balance between a full-on presuppositional apologetics presentation and Christian worldview course.  That means that I was not focused so much on just one or the other, but a blend of the two.  I think it worked well sometimes and other times it just worked.

I shall post (DV) one video per week at my TELOS channel.

Anyway, I hope these lectures will be used to edify saints and perhaps even evangelize non-believers.  May God be glorified through them.

Book Review: Douglas Axe’s ‘Undeniable’

A review of Douglas Axe, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, New York: HarperOne, 2016, 304 pages, hdbk.

Readers of Stephen Meyer’s two important books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, will know the name of Douglas Axe.  Axe’s work on probability theory and gene folding feature quite prominently in those works.  This book is a compliment to Meyer, but it is also a companion to William Dembski’s books like The Design Inference and No Free Lunch.  I suppose the nearest thing to it is Dembski’s book Intelligent Design.

But Undeniable is not simply a repetition of the type of arguments one will find in those books.  In the first place, Axe’s main concern is to provide Joe Public with an assuring and accessible guide on his own ability to detect invention no matter what the Science pundits tell them.

This book tries to get behind the sane intuition all of us have that incredibly complex functionality is not and can never be a result of any kind of unguided randomization.  It never is in our day to day experience of living.  Only in the imaginings of those who cannot see the difference between a scientific pronouncement and a metaphysical one does the idea gain currency and the power to veto competing ideas.  But this so characterizes the furtiveness of the spokespeople who try to shove evolutionist just-so stories down the throats of the populace, without facing the arguments brought against them.  The author thinks evolution is wrong; that it “can’t possibly be defended as clearly and convincingly as it can be refuted.” (59).  I’m on board.  I’m also totally fine believing that “Atheists have a pronounced leaning toward scientism” (7), which explains why they slide so easily from science-talk into bad philosophizing.

Axe engages the reader with what he calls “common science”.  Common science is the sort of enterprise we all do to get along in life.  And we do it by following a “design intuition”, and by inventing stuff.  The author believes that “everyone validates their design intuition through firsthand experience”, and he thinks this validation is of a scientific nature (60).  He sounds like Thomas Kuhn when drawing attention to pressures among the scientific class to conform to an institutionalized agenda (54); like Michael Polanyi when he says that prior understanding is essential for deeper knowledge (61), and gets a little Aristotelian (in the right way) when he quips that little actions are meaningful when “they produce a significant end”, one that clearly looks intended (67).

Axe is good at giving analogies to help his reader grasp his thesis.  He speaks about the discovery of “a revolutionary new soup” (16).  This “oracle soup” when cooled reveals instructions for constructing a helpful new gadget, and it does it every time it cools down!  Skeptical?, the author asks, that’s because this fabled soup goes right against our design intuition.  We will just not accept that physical laws plus chance as explanations for the miraculous qualities of oracle soup (18).  Common science stops us from settling for clearly obvious nonsensical answers – if we heed it. But just here problems arise.  What if nonsense is what you need in order for the world to be the way you would like it?

We should by all means trust the scientific community to tell us how many moons orbit Neptune or how many protons are packed into the nucleus of a cobalt atom.  Why would anyone distort facts of that kind? Matters where everyone wants to see things a certain way, however, are a completely different story. With those we should always apply a healthy dose of skepticism. (38)

In chapter 6, “Life is Good”, the writer refers to what he calls “Busy Wholes” and “Whole Projects”.  Whole Projects are the result of bringing many smaller things together in just the right way.  “Busy wholes” are the things which, when properly combined, make up a “whole project.” (69).  “Busy wholes tackle their projects by breaking them down into smaller projects in an organized way.” (70).  This means that we intuit complex wholes as “projects”, and such things “ought to be so” (76).  He gives the example of the pandas thumb, a favorite target of evolutionists of dysteleology, or bad design.  But Axe observes simply that,

I find myself evaluating the people rather than the panda.  None of these people, however earnest they may be, have any deep grasp of the principles of design and development underlying sesamond bones or thumbs, to say nothing of pandas. (78).

Because they eschew teleology, and are often not skilled engineers, those who complain about the pandas thumb are not saying anything of value.  (This same attitude holds true when it comes to information theory).  To sum up,

When we see working things that came about only by bringing many parts together in the right way, we find it impossible not to ascribe these inventions to purposeful action, and this pits our intuition against the evolutionary account. (87)

He poses a central question: “whether evolutionary theory is more in touch with our observations than our design intuition is” (88).  The book argues strongly that the answer is No.  The evidence is stacking up in favor of an agreement between the evidence and our design intuitions.