62 Sermon Illustrations on Philosophy

A COMPARISON OF APOLOGETIC METHODS

A lecture given by T.E. Grover Gunn on March 11, 1997, at the apologetics conference sponsored by Christ Presbyterian Church in Elkton, Maryland.

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C. H. Spurgeon in his famous sermon "Free Will, A Slave" makes the statement:

"If a man talks very slowly, he may speak in a fine manner; but when he

comes to talk fast, the old brogue of his country, where he was born,

slips out."

For example, some hymns by Charles and John Wesley sound like they were written by a Calvinist. The same is probably also true of some of their sermons. It is when they are talking slowly and trying to write a consistent work of theology that their Arminianism becomes most evident.

I would guess that the same thing often happens in apologetics with regard to evidentialists and presuppositionalists. Some godly and learned men believe in evidentialistic apologetics. I would probably agree with many of their efforts to defend the faith in the context of evangelism. I would probably be able to give a hearty "Amen" to many of their sermons. It is when we debate each other or when we engage in our more detailed explanations of our apologetic that our differences become most evident.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENT

I want today to look at the basic difference between how a presuppositionalist defends the faith and how an evidentialist defends the faith. I will start by looking at how we use the transcendental argument.

The phrase "the transcendental argument" sounds intimidating, but it is really a simple concept. At times we accept something, not because we can directly prove it, but because of "the impossibility of the contrary." We cannot prove a certain position, but we can show that the inevitable consequences of rejecting that position are simply unthinkable. The price of rejection is beyond any possibility of payment.

There are two children's books which I believe are good examples of a limited use of the transcendental argument. They are Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Mr. Carroll was a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford back in the nineteenth century, and he was author of the book Symbolic Logic. In his two children's books, this scholarly logician created a world where absurdity reigns. Here's a short selection from Alice in Wonderland:

Alice ... tried another question. 'What sort of people live about

here?'

"In THAT direction," the [Cheshire] Cat said, waving its right paw round,

"lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction," waving the other paw, "lives

a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad.

You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

And here is a short selection from Through the Looking Glass:

Alice laughed. "There's not use trying," she said: "one can't believe

impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the [White] Queen. "When

I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why,

sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before

breakfast...."

Here is a fantasy world where everyone is mad and where people believe impossible things. One thing we soon learn when we read these two books is that living in a world where absurdity reigns would be impossibly frustrating. This is a transcendental argument for the validity of logic. You cannot use logic to directly prove logic, but you can show the impossibility of an absurd world.

The transcendental argument is used to prove foundational presuppositions. Every system of thought goes back to some foundational axiomatic truths that are self-evident and self-authenticating. Dr. Greg Bahnsen stated it this way:

"... every argument chain must end in a self-authenticating starting

point; every world view has its unquestioned and unquestionable

assumptions, its primitive commitments."1

The only other alternative is to have an infinite regress: A is implied by B, B is implied by C, C is implied by D, and so on and so on ad infinitum.

Presuppositionalism does not use the transcendental argument to prove secondary axioms such as the validity of logic. Presuppositionalism uses the transcendental argument to prove what is truly life's most ultimate axiom. According to presuppositionalism, if Christianity is not true, then there is no possible proof of anything. Nothing can be known with any certainty unless the living and true God can be known.

The Greek scientist Archimedes said, "Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand, and I can move the world." It doesn't matter how long your lever is, you can't move anything without a solid place to plant your lever's fulcrum. Similarly, it doesn't matter how sophisticated your world view is, you can't prove anything unless you start with at least one axiomatic, self- evident, self-authenticating truth. You must have a solid place upon which to stand or else you are lost is a world of relativism and flux.

THE WORLD VIEW SCALES

Let's change our metaphor now. We've compared a world view to a fulcrum and lever. Let's now compare it to a set of scales, a device for weighing. A world view is like a set of scales in that you use your world view to evaluate truth claims. You use your world view to weigh evidence. There is, however, one thing you cannot weigh in your scales, and that is the scales themselves. To validate the scales in which you weigh everything else, you need a more subtle approach, an indirect approach. You need the transcendental argument.

Here's the solution. You get the official Bureau of Standards to send you a set of authenticated weights with the official weight stamped on each unit. You take these and weigh them on one scale. According to that scale, your five pound weight is heavier than your ten pound weight. You must reject that scale as defective because of the impossibility of the contrary. If that scale is not defective, then five pounds weighs more than ten pounds, and that's impossible. That scale is defective because of the impossibility of the contrary.

You try another set of scales, and according to it, all your authenticated weights weigh exactly what is stamped on them. Either that set of scales is correct, or all your official, authenticated weights have the wrong weight stamped on them. Since that is impossible, unthinkable, out of the question, that set of scales must be correct. You have authenticated your scales using the transcendental argument. You have demonstrated the scales to be accurate because of the impossibility of the contrary.

Now for this to work, you have to have that set of those official, authenticated weights with the exact weight stamped on each unit. You need something as an indicator of impossibility. Now in terms of our world view, do we have anything like that? Yes, we do. God gave each us a set of authenticated, official weights with the exact weight stamped on each unit when he created us in His own image.

THE IMAGE OF GOD

What does it mean to be created in the image of God? Negatively, man's creation in the image of God does not mean that God has a literal body after which He patterned the human body. Almost no one teaches this except the Mormons. According to the Mormon scripture Doctrine and Covenants, "The Father has a body of flesh and bone as tangible as man's." This bizarre Mormon teaching is related to their teaching that God the Father is an exalted finite man.

The Bible teaches that God is a Spirit (John 4:24) and that spirits do not have material bodies (Luke 24:39). During the Old Testament, God at times appeared to men in bodily forms (cf. Genesis 18:2,13); these, however, were veiled manifestations, revelations in forms accessible to finite man. No man has ever actually seen God in a direct sense (John 1:18; 1 Timothy 1:17; 6:16; Exodus 33:20).

The Bible also speaks of God in terms of human body parts, but these are figures of speech. For example, God's speaking to Moses face to face was a figure for God's speaking to Moses with the same personal intimacy with which a man speaks to a friend (Exodus 33:11,20). The fingers of God refer to God's creative ability (Psalm 8:3), and the arm of the Lord refers to God's power to save (Deut. 4:34). God no more has literal fingers and arms than He has literal wings and feathers (Psalm 91:4). Man's claim to uniqueness is his being created in God's image (Genesis 1:27-28; Psalm 8). To say that this refers merely to the form of man's physical body is to say that man's uniqueness in creation is relative and that animals like the ape with physical forms similar to man's are created nearly in God's image.

The image of God in man is not found in man's physical form, and there are certain attributes of God that cannot be reflected in man or any other element of created reality. Only God is eternal and without any beginning in time. Only God is a non-derived, non-created being. The image of God in man must refer to nonmaterial characteristics of man where the finite creature can reflect the infinite Creator.

The New Testament teaches that in regeneration man is renewed "according to the image of Him who created him" in knowledge, righteousness and holiness (Col. 3:10 & Eph. 4:24). Thus man as a rational and spiritual creature upon whose heart is written the law of God reflects the Person of God. One can think of many other areas where man reflects certain divine attributes. Man is a creature of language, and God is a God who speaks. God, while not subject to irrational passions, displays love, anger and many other emotions which are reflected in human experience. God creates, and man is creative; God is Lord, and man was given dominion over the earth; God judges and rules, and man judges and rules. God has a will, and man has a will; God has plans, and men have their plans. God imputes value to things ("God saw everything that He had made, and it was very good"), and man is an economic creature. God experiences personal relationships within the Triune Godhead, and man is a social creature who exists both in diversity as individuals and in unity as a race. This social aspect of man is most basically expressed in the marriage relationship: "... God said, Let US make man in OUR image, ... So God created man in His own image; ... male and female He created them."

In short, man's creation in the image of God means that Adam was created like the Creator in every way it was possible for a finite, limited creature to be like the eternal Creator God. That includes our rationality. Rationality is a very important aspect of the divine image within us, but the image of God is not limited to rationality. There are many other innate predispositions and abilities and instincts and conceptions that are the stamp of the divine image upon the very core of our being. The French mathematician, scientist and theologian Pascal said, "We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart... The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."2

The image of God is complex, and people are different. The question, "What will touch and arouse the divine image in that particular person?" is similar to the question, "What would cause that particular person to laugh?" The good apologist develops the art of probing human hearts to answer that first question. Also involved is a divinely given gift of intuition, and the Holy Spirit has distributed the gifts as He wills.

What about the effect of the fall, especially the noetic effects of sin; that is, the effects of sin upon the way we think?

THE NOETIC EFFECTS OF SIN

The Bible teaches that fallen man in his natural state is at enmity against God and cannot please Him (Romans 8:7-8). He does not seek after God and he does not do good (Romans 3:11-12). He has gone astray and has turned to his own way (Isaiah 53:6). Apart from the gift of God's regenerating grace, he is morally unable to come to Christ in saving faith (John 6:65; 10:26; 12:39- 40). Emotionally, he loves moral darkness (John 3:19) and the things of Satan (John 8:44), and he hates God's light (John 3:20). Intellectually, the things of God are foolishness to him (1 Corinthians 2:14) and his understanding is darkened (Ephesians 4:17-18; 2 Corinthians 4:4; John 8:43,47). Volitionally, he has been taken captive by the devil to do his will (2 Timothy 2:26; John 8:44). In regard to his total being, he is spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1; John 5:25).

Humanity was created in God's image, that image was shattered by the fall, but that image was not obliterated. It remains because creation in the image of God is the distinctive defining characteristic of humanity. It still exists deep within the heart of fallen man as a testimony to God's truth. This inner voice does not have the power to raise fallen man from his state of spiritual death, but it is a sufficient inner testimony to hold fallen man accountable for his sin on judgment day. Perhaps the clearest passage on this is Romans 2:11-16. Every person has "the work of the law written in [his heart], [his] conscience also bearing witness."

DIVINE FINGERPRINTS

We have discussed the inner stamped weights which God has given us. There are also external stamped weights, and that is the whole of creation which surrounds us. Creation is the work of God's fingers (Psalm 8:3). The whole world is pulsating with the revelation of God; there is no escaping it. Knowledge of the true and living God bombards fallen man (Psalm 19:1-2).

In order to avoid these external stamped weights, fallen man has to project a fantasy world. I believe a science fiction series such as Star Trek, The Next Generation is an interesting commentary on this fantasy world. We have Mr. Data, a sophisticated robot who (notice I said, "who") is practically human. Since humans are only complex chemical machines, a computer such as Mr. Data must be given as much respect and granted as much dignity. In the episode "The Measure of a Man," Captain Picard successfully defends Mr. Data in court from an official attempt to disassemble him for research purposes by arguing that Mr. Data has "sentience," the capacity for sensation.

In the episode "Silicon Avatar," the Crystalline Entity is a huge primitive life form which has devoured all life, including human life, on many planets. Yet Captain Pichard opposes its destruction unless absolutely necessary. After all, who are we to judge another life form that is just innocently following its instincts?

The evolutionary origin of species is obvious in this fantasy series. There are multitudes of planets with multitudes of life forms. There are humans, Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, and other species. Despite all their diversity, it is curious that all these evolved species have two legs, two arms, two eyes, two ears -- a basically human structure. Might that be some evidence of a common Creator, a master Designer? How could the randomness of chance account for such substantial commonality? One episode, "The Chase," was devoted to answering these questions. It turns out that eons before, an intellegent species from the planet where life first evolved distributed "seed codes" in "the primordial oceans of many worlds" to direct their evolution toward a certain physical form. That episode explained the common design that remains evident in spite of the bizarre diversity among species such as humans, Klingons, Romulans, and Cardacions. We are thus assured that we have no need to assume a Creator. Also, the studio has no need to try to portray characters with significantly non-human body structure, which would probably be very inconvenient and expensive.

We can maintain our fantasy to a degree in the world of theater, but it is more difficult in the more mundane world of our daily existence. The stamped weights are out there, and they constantly chant their message: "God exists! Praise His name!"

PULLING DOWN STRONGHOLDS 2 Corinthians 10:4

Let's review for a moment. We have the set of scales. That is a person's world view, his basic understanding of reality which he uses to measure truth claims. We also have the set of official weights with the weight stamped on each unit. There are internal stamped weights, the image of God bearing testimony deep inside the heart of every man. There are also external stamped weights, the whole of creation covered with divine fingerprints.

Now what we do in apologetics is to challenge people to weigh the basic issues of life on the scale of their world view. We challenge them to be honest in acknowledging the logical and consistent implications of their view of reality. We challenge them to compare these readings with what they know to be true in their heart of hearts, even if they will not consciously admit it. Using this method, we bring to bear upon their consciences the challenge implicit in Paul's rhetorical question, "Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" (1 Corinthians 1:20).

Let us say that we are dealing with someone who rejects God and believes in naturalism. The material world has always existed and is all that there is. There is no immaterial reality such as the human spirit or God. The human mind is nothing but the chemical reactions of the human brain. As one writer put it, "the brain secretes thoughts as the liver secretes bile." Human beings are evolutionally advanced animals or complex chemical machines. Death is the end of all personal existence. History has no meaning or purpose or goal.

MORALITY

Ask such a person to weigh morality on their scales. What do the scales say? Morality is nothing but a human convention based on majority opinion. Human sacrifice, for example, is immoral in our culture at the present time. It was not immoral in Aztec society. It may not be immoral in our society in the future.

If there is no reality beyond the material world of energy and matter, then any sense of morality which we may have is nothing but a naive fantasy and illusion. Deny God and all that remains of ethics is varying opinions and alternate lifestyles and cultural conventions. In such a world, who are we to impose our values upon others such as the Nazis?

How does the secularist avoid the conclusion of Alexander Pope's poem Essay on Man, "One truth is clear, whatever is, is right"? That is what the world's scales say, if we will but read them honestly. Deep inside every person, an alarm goes off. Something shouts out, "That's unthinkable!" Charles Dickens made a comment about "the precept, that 'Whatever is is right'" in his novel A Tale of Two Cities. He referred to it as "an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that was, was wrong." This "aphorism" is sometimes called the naturalistic fallacy. It is what the secularist scales say about morality, but the human heart protests that such a morality is itself immoral.

HUMAN DIGNITY

What about the question of human dignity? Human life is sacred only because humanity is created in the image of God. Deny God, and there is nothing unique or special about human life. Human suffering becomes only a series of biochemical stimuli in a meaningless world. If the human race is nothing but an evolutionary fluke that arose from a primordial soup, if the human being is only a sophisticated biological organism, then killing a human belongs in a category with slaughtering a cow and felling a tree. One day the sun will burn out, all self-conscious and personal life will be extinct, and not even the memory of humanity will survive.

SCIENCE

What about science? The world says that all significant knowledge about the objective world is empirical in nature; that is, based on the appearance of things through sense experience. That very statement, however, is self- contradictory because it is not the result of empirical testing and experience. Instead it is a statement of faith, a religious commitment which is the creed of scientism.

People so often fail to notice how much they have assumed as a faith commitment as opposed to what they have proved through scientific tests. How can finite humanity ever prove the uniformity of nature? How can humanity know that "nature" behaves the same out in the unexplored recesses of space, or even in the unexplored regions of planet earth? How can science prove that "nature" will behave the same tomorrow as it behaves today? The fact that the sun has arisen in the east every day for millennia is no proof that it will do so tomorrow. If there is no knowledge beyond what finite humanity is able to discover on its own, then there is no adequate basis for science.

SOLIPSISM

Are you familiar with solipsism? This is the world view which says that I alone exist. Everything else is a projection of my mind. How can you logically refute that? No one can get beyond their sense perceptions to verify the existence of something out there that is more than a projected appearance. We cannot logically disprove solipsism, but very few people have ever accepted it. Something deep inside rebels against the idea. We are created in the image of the triune God, and therefore we are social creatures. We cannot accept the idea that we are the only personal being in existence, that we are in reality solitary and isolated, that our contact with other personal beings is all an illusion based on self-deception.

Bertrand Russell stated that he had once received a letter from the eminent logician, the late Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist and was surprised nobody else was. Russell remarked, "coming from a logician, this surprise surprised me."3 Do you see the contradiction between this woman's heart and head? In her head, she believed that she alone existed. In her heart, she desired others to agree with her and to share her philosophy.

We could go on and on and on. Weigh every aspect of life on the scales of secular atheism or some similar world view, and the readings on the scale will contradict those test weights which God has implanted in the human heart and in the creation.

DISHONEST SCALES

One has to put pressure on the non-Christian to read his scales honestly. He has a tendency to be like the butcher who puts his thumb on the scale to make the meat he is selling cost more. The Bible condemns dishonest scales (Deuteronomy 25:13-16), and we should also.

The non-Christian at times wants to believe that his world view scales register the weight which that testimony deep in his heart says it should register. Presuppositionalists call this "operating on borrowed capital." The atheist rejects God, but he wants to believe that he nevertheless has a consistent basis for morality and aesthetics and logic and science. The presuppositionalist pressures the non-Christian to read his scales honestly. Apart from a belief in the true and living God who is revealed in Scripture, a person does not have even a consistent basis for making a simple statement of predication such as "I exist" or "1 + 1 = 2." Belief in the God of the Bible is the only possible consistent "precondition for intelligible experience and meaningful thought."4

TAKING EVERY THOUGHT CAPTIVE 2 Corinthians 10:5

The next step is to weigh the evidence on our scale, which is the Christian world view. We believe that the Bible is self-authenticating truth. It is our ultimate axiom. We believe the true and the living God has revealed Himself in the Scriptures, and that is the essence of our world view. In this case, the consistent reading of the scales agrees with the testimony of the inscribed weights deep in our heart of hearts. Let's look at some examples.

KNOWLEDGE

Let's consider the issue of knowledge. How can we know anything with any certainty? The answer is that God can have knowledge with an absolute certainty, and God has spoken to us.

God has a certainty that is beyond anything we can attain. God made everything, God knows every fact, God is in control of every development, God is everywhere in the fullness of His being, and God knows the past, present and future simultaneously. God is able to evaluate and analyze each individual fact in the light of His comprehensive knowledge of all current facts, all past influences, all future developments and all possible contingencies.

We know so few of the facts, and the one fact we do not know can change our understanding of all the other facts. I remember an episode from the TV show The Twilight Zone from when I was a child. It was about some space aliens who visited earth. People were quite alarmed, but these creatures from space assured everyone that there was nothing to fear. They had come on a mission of mercy to primitive earth, which they viewed as a "third world" planet. They even had a missions manual entitled "To Serve Mankind."

With their advanced technology, these aliens began their impressive work of service. They enabled farmers to produce unprecedented harvests, they prevented natural calamities, they healed incurable diseases. These visitors from space soon won the trust of the world. Then some began to ask about the visitors' home planet, and the aliens began offering tours to whomever wanted to go. Most who went chose not to return to primitive earth. The main character of the story, one of the few remaining skeptics, finally decided to go on one of these intergalactic tours. Just as he was entering the spaceship, his girlfriend shouted to him from the crowd below. "Stop!" she cried, "Don't go! We've deciphered their language. The book "To Serve Mankind" ... it's a cookbook!"

All of this is to illustrate one point: you don't know anything for certain unless you know everything. For the one thing you don't know can change the meaning of everything else. As Christians who accept the Bible, we know the One who possesses absolutely certain knowledge, and He has spoken to us.

LOVE

Let's weigh love on the scale of our world view. In our world view, the most ultimate reality is not an impersonal universe, it is the triune God of Scripture. There is but one true God, but He exists in three Persons. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are each fully God and thus perfectly suited as intimate companions for each other. They are an "I" and a "You" and a "He" within the one being of the one true God. They have loved each other, communicated with each other, and had fellowship with each other from eternity past. In our system, personal love is consistent with, not contrary to, the most ultimate reality.

MORALITY AND AESTHETICS

Christians don't have to argue for the existence of some abstract, impersonal principle of morality or beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but when that beholder is God, it is an absolute aesthetic standard rooted, not in an abstraction, but in the personal taste of an absolute and infinite Person. Likewise, morality exits only as a personal opinion of what is right, but when that opinion is God's opinion, it is an absolute moral standard rooted, not in an abstraction, but in the holy character of an absolute and infinite Person. Because we believe in God, we have a consistent basis for believing that there is an absolute and universal moral ought. Because we believe in God, we have a consistent basis for believing that there is absolute and universal standard of aesthetics.

SCIENCE

God took a world that was without form (chaotic) and void (lifeless) and then transformed it into an ordered cosmos teeming with life. This fact is the basis for the orderliness in nature that is the prerequisite for science to work.

David Hume, the philosophical skeptic, observed that the simple fact that we have seen the sun rise day after day in no way guarantees that it will rise tomorrow. In terms of his world view, Mr. Hume was correct. In contrast, the Christian knows that God made this world as an orderly and predictable creation. He also knows that God upholds His creation with the hand of providence. These two facts are the Christian's guarantee that the sun will rise tomorrow.

The fact that there is a design in creation confirms our belief in an intelligent Designer. We are learning more and more about the complexity of life. And even on a microscopic level, many of the extremely complex molecular structures of living matter are like little machines that are useless except in their final, complex form. There is no possibility of their having obtained complexity through gradual improvements because they are useless in less complex stages. They are like the mousetrap. You can't use the wooden base to catch a few mice and then add the spring and catch a few more. You can't catch any mice with a mousetrap until all the parts are present and assembled in their proper working relationship. This "irreducible complexity" of the building blocks of life even on the microscopic level of molecules is consistent with and confirms our belief in God.5

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE

We do have historical evidences for the proof of Christianity: the resurrection of Christ, the conversion of the apostle Paul, the fulfillment of ancient prophecies. We weight these on our scale, and they confirm its accuracy in a special way. I will not cover these historical evidences in detail here because there are so many apologetic works which discuss these so thoroughly. I will note their special importance. Christianity is not a religion rooted in human philosophical speculation. It is a religion rooted in historical events which actually occurred.

We could go on and on and on. We weigh every conceivable area of life, every possible issue of any significance. On the scales of unbelief, if we will read the scales with consistency and honesty, something is wrong. Issues that should carry great weight have no weight at all on the scales of unbelief. Yet the readings on the scales of belief are consistent with what we know to be true in our heart of hearts. Nevertheless, the world loves its skewed scales and will try to read them dishonestly before admitting that the scales themselves are the problem.

To use another metaphor, God has implanted a tuning fork deep within the heart of every human created in His image. When the message of the Bible goes forth, that tuning fork resonates and cries out, "This is truth! This is meaningful! This is light and life!" Of course, fallen humanity is deaf to this cry. The deafness is a self-imposed moral deafness for which one will rightly be held accountable. Only the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit can overcome this deafness.

EVIDENTIALISM

Evidentialists also use the transcendental argument, but they have a different ultimate presupposition which they view as self-attesting and self- evident:

the validity of the law of non-contradiction.

the validity of the law of causality.

the basic reliability of sense experience.

These three principles have to be true because of the impossibility of the contrary. These are the assumptions necessary for life. Human logic is dependent on axiom one, and all scientific endeavors require axioms two and three.

The evidentialists says that both he and the non-Christian accept these three principles based on a transcendental argument. This is the common ground between the God-denying pagan and the Bible believing Christian. Using the tools provided by this area of agreement, the Christian can first prove the philosophical necessity of a divine being. Then using these same tools and the witness of the Bible as a historical book, the Christian can demonstrate the probable truth of Christianity.

There are two very basic things wrong with this.

When you weigh the claims of God and Christ on those secular scales, the scales are going to register rejection.

We have first told the nonbeliever that he can basically trust himself as an independent thinker. We then hope to argue from there to the conclusion that the nonbeliever should rely wholly on the Lord instead of trusting himself, that he should submit to the Lord in all of life instead of being a "free thinker" You can't get from that point A to the desired point B.

Look at the price the evidentialist has had to pay to accept the non- Christian's scales as common ground. He has set aside the authoritative claims of God, Christ and Scripture. He has granted the hypothetical possibility of a world independent of God that can successfully function and be successfully understood in terms of the axioms of logic and science. He has conceded that man can successfully use logic and science to analyze and judge reality irrespective of the truth of Christianity.

When you weigh on these scales the Christ "in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:3), these scale are going to register rejection.

When you weigh on these scales the sovereign God of Scripture "for [whom] and through [whom] and to [whom] are all things" (Romans 11:36), these scales are going to register rejection.

When you weigh on these scales the Christ who "is before all things, and in [whom] all things consist" (Colossians 1:17), these scales are going to register rejection.

There is a frustrating futility in asking the non-Christian to weigh our evidence of his scales. We point out that every cause appears to have an effect, and we ask if the need for a final cause points to a Creator. We point out the intricate design of our world, and ask if such a design points to a Designer. If we found a watch in the woods, wouldn't we assume the existence of a watch maker? If we found a garden on an isolated island, wouldn't we assume that somewhere on that island lives a gardener? We put these questions on the world's scales, and what do they read? We immediately encounter problems because the very validity of the world's scales as an autonomous measure of reality depends upon the assumption that the sovereign God does not exist.

The world's scales also depend upon the epistemological ability of finite humanity . For that reason, these scales have a natural tilt toward skepticism. Measuring reality is a task infinitely beyond finite humanity's autonomous ability. This built in skepticism is often conveniently ignored when measuring secular systems, but it is stressed when weighing evidence for God's existence. In that context, many questions are raised. How do we know there is any true causality? How can we prove that what appears to be cause and effect is not coincidence? How do we know that there is not an infinite regress of causes? Even if there is a God, how can we be sure that there can be a cause and effect relationship between the eternal and the finite? How do we know there is not an evolutionary principle at work which causes design and order to arise naturally from the original chaos?

These skeptical questions have as much validity as do the world's autonomous scales. The fatal mistake of the evidentialist was to acknowledge the validity of the world's scales at the onset of the discussion.

We put these same issues on our scales, and we get an entirely different reading. The world about us is far too complex, too orderly to have just happened. The general tendency in nature is not to go from chaos to order but to go from order to chaos. We are reminded of this every time we have to straighten up the office or the house. The world about us is far too wonderful just to have happened but the world about us is also not nearly wonderful enough to be self-generating and self-explanatory. This data confirms the message of the Bible. The Bible says that the sovereign Creator God is so wonderful that He alone is an uncaused Cause, a non-derived Being who is self-generating and self-explanatory.

Evidentialism is like the tower of Babel. The evidentialist has built a human foundation on earth and is trying to build up from it into the heavens. Presuppositionalism is like Jacob's ladder. Heaven has come down to earth and has given us a divine foundation upon which to build. Jesus said, "No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven" (John 3:13). Jesus, the one who has come down to us from heaven, has provided the only adequate foundation upon which to build our understanding of things both earthly and heavenly. "For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11).

We put the data on the world's scales, and the reading is skepticism about God. We put the same data on our scales, and the reading is confirmation that the God of the Bible exists. You can't win this argument if you begin by abandoning the Christian scales and adopting the world's scales in the name of establishing a common ground for discussion.

Here is the second major problem with the evidentialistic approach: the evidentialist has told the non-Christian that his scales are working well and giving an accurate reading of reality.

These scales are basically the world view of the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. Instead of saying, "Hey, your scales work great!", we should be saying, "Hey, get your thumb off of those scales! You're cheating!"

There may be some unthinkable consequences if the law of non-contradiction is not valid and if the law of causality is not valid and if sense experience is not reliable. Nevertheless, those unthinkable consequences are unavoidable is the non-Christian world view is true. That is the point we should be stressing. The apologist should be pressing the non-Christian to the line of despair instead of giving comfort and shelter to the enemy by catering to his illusions.

The true common ground between the Christian and the non-Christian are not the philosophical assumptions of the Enlightenment. The true common ground are those internal and external stamped weights which God has given us. Both the Christian and the non-Christian are created in God's image. Both the Christian and the non-Christian live in a world created by God and covered with His finger prints.

Dr. Greg Bahnsen contrasted evidentialism with presuppositionalism this way:

"[Manifesting the foolishness of this world's 'wisdom'] calls for much more than a piecemeal attempt to adduce vague probabilities of isolated evidences for the reasonableness of Christianity. It requires, instead, the full scale demonstration of the unreasonableness of anti-Christianity in contrast to the certainty of truth to be found in God's word."6

CONCLUSION

Let's conclude by considering the parable of the wise man and the foolish man found at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:24-27:

24 "Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will

liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock:

25 "and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat

on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the

rock.

26 "Now everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them,

will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand:

27 "and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat

on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall."

We should invite the non-Christian to watch as we build our world view house on the solid rock of Jesus Christ. We should invite him to bring against our house the rain and floods and winds of criticism. The house will not fall, for it is founded on the rock.

We should also invite him to build his world view house on the sands of his ultimate commitments and presuppositions. Then we should bring against it the rain and floods and winds of critical examination. It will fall, and great will be the fall thereof.

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FOOTNOTES

1. Greg L. Bahnsen, "Always Ready" (Atlanta, Georgia: American Vision and

Texarkana, Arkansas: Covenant Media Foundation, 1996), 68-69.

2. William Edgar, "Reasons of the Heart" (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book

House, 1996), 14.

3. Joseph Gerard Brennan, "The Meaning of Philosophy," Second Edition (New

York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1953), 131, footnote 6.

4. Greg L. Bahnsen, "Always Ready," 70.

5. Nancy R. Pearcey, "The Evolution Backlash: Debunking Darwin" in World,

March 1, 1997 edition, pages 12-15. The mousetrap is Mr. Michael

Behe's favorite example of irreducible complexity; see page 14.

6. Greg L. Bahnsen, "Always Ready," 60.

For more information about the apologetics conference, email T. E. Mike Chastain at DeoRex@aol.com.

These lectures are available from Southern Presbyterian Press, the publishing arm of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. For more information, email Mr. Andy Wortman at awortman@carol.net.

*

During construction of Emerson Hall at Harvard University, president Charles Eliot invited psychologist and philosopher William James to suggest a suitable inscription for the stone lintel over the doors of the new home of the philosophy department.

After some reflection, James sent Eliot a line from the Greek philosopher Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things."

James never heard back from Eliot, so his curiosity was piqued when he spotted artisans working on a scaffold hidden by a canvas. One morning, the scaffold and canvas were gone. The inscription? "WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ARE MINDFUL OF HIM?"

Eliot had replaced James's suggestion with words from the Psalmist. Between these two lines lies the great distance between the God-centered and the human-centered points of view.

________

Warren Bird; Suffern, New York

Doxa: My Testimony

---------------------------------------

EARLY DAYS OF ATHEISM.

I was born in Dallas Texas, in the mid 1950's, and raised in a clean, white, southern middle class setting, complete with old civil war sentimentality and country values. Our family had been staunch members of a certain fundamentalist sect, as far as I can tell, from before the civil war. They were probably in on the founding of the group and may have been based in Barton W. Stone's Cane Ridge Revival, in the Kentucky of that period known as “The Second Great Awakening.” It was a very exclusivistic group called “the Church of Christ.” They were almost cult-like in that they believed they were the only true church, and all others were going to hell, (even the Baptists and Catholics -- especially the Catholics). They were so self-righteous they didn't even use instrumental music because they thought that made them more holy. In the 1960s, when I hit the upper grades of elementary school, I began opposing the war in Vietnam (age 12). I identified with the anti-war movement (especially SDS), the hippies, Bob Dylan and the Byrds. I had a childhood crush on Joan Baez (that never really ended). I couldn't wait until I grew up and went to college so I could join SDS and protest the war (which I was sure would still be going -- and I only missed it by a couple of years).I began to question the truth of the Christian religion when I was 13 in rebellion against the strictness of a private school I was sent to which was ran by the church of Christ. At 16 I went to public high school, having continued to believe in God but in more of an eastern vein.

However at 15 or 16 I decided that I was an atheist. It seemed outmoded and childish to believe in God. After all, we didn't need God to explain the existence of the world, we had evolution and the Big bang. I knew there were mistakes in the Bible and found them every time I looked for them. And it was a fact that the world was filled with pain, suffering, injustice. How could there be a loving God? Above all else I resented injustice! I was curious about thought and about the world, I began to read history, psychology, literature, and to study about other world religions (I had actually began doing this in 6th grade but about the age of 15 I made a big big push to learn as much as I could).

In my junior year of high school, I began missing church, and abstaining from the classes. One Wednesday night my parents asked me to go with them, so I did. I even attended the class. They showed a film about the decline of the Inca empire, and the film concluded that the Inca's fell because they weren't Christians and didn't know God. It was a very ethnocentric, simplistic and extremely badly done bit of fundamentalist propaganda. Angered at this one-sided rendition of history, I asked if I could get up and do a bit of film criticism. They allowed me to do this, the youth director was really not a bad guy. And I lambasted the Bible and all of belief after giving a little lecture on history, the rise and fall of empires and how racist their film was. It ended in a shouting match and I determined never to go back. In fact I never did. My parents were horrified. We had several shouting matches about it. But they couldn't force me to go to church. They tried the “as long as you live in my house...” Line and I threatened to quite school and move out. They gave in. I know it hurt them terribly, I could see real pain in their eyes every time they came home from church and found me watching TV or just waking up. But I didn't care. I had to be independent. I had to shape my own beliefs, and I couldn't see the importance of going just to please them. I would do that today If I had it to do over just because I know it hurt them and it wouldn't hurt me to go. In any case, that shouting match set me on a course for the next several years. I became determined to disprove Christianity and to demonstrate its falsehood to the world. I usually spend Saturday nights and Sunday morning from then on reading skeptical books and doing research to disprove the Bible.

SUMMER OF HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION.

The summer I graduated from high school, I was invited by the old youth director to go on a trip with the seniors to the Grand Canyon. I hadn't seen them in a long time, a couple of years, and the bitterness of the last meeting had gone. We had a wonderful trip. They were all fun and nice and I enjoyed playing chess on the bus and getting to know them again. I was almost sorry I hadn't gone to church in those years for my parent's sake. But it seemed more important to be true to my beliefs. I read Mark Twin's Letters from the Earth on that trip, while I wasn't playing chess on the bus. At the Grand Canyon the youth director let me make a little speech to the group talking about my beliefs. I don’t' think he really knew what I was going to say. I think it was hard for him to believe that I was really an atheist. Again I really gave it to them.

I explained evolution and talked about other religions and how absurd it was to think that all those other people are going to hell just because of the time and place in which they were born. I answered all their objections, shot them to pieces, answered all their arguments and left it with them saying things like “someday God will open your eyes,” “Jesus loves you,” “think with your heart,” which I took to be a total victory. The Youth director's face was so crest fallen. He clearly wasn't expecting this and was probably saddened to see how far-gone I was. A couple of weeks after we got back, the youth director came to my home with a man who taught at the Church of Christ's “School of preaching.” He had a doctorate in Biblical studies and was clearly far more knowledgeable than I. His wife was there too, and she wasn't a bad apologist either. Together the three of them shot me to pieces. They even brought a couple of others along to give themselves an audience. I was outraged but covered it up pretty well.

It amazed me that there really were good answers and that the Bible really could be defended, but that only made me all the more determined to disprove it. That was a remarkable summer, the summer I graduated form high school. The previous summer I had spent about a month researching the Bible and thought I had it disproved. This summer (graduation) I went to the Grand Canyon, read 100 books, sometimes four a day! I read great literature, such as James Joyce, Saul Bellow, Herman Hesse, and not to forget the Mark Twain atheist stuff. I finished out that summer doing more Biblical research and that practice would become a habit which I still practice to this day (well over 20 years) of concentrating on Biblical studies in the summers. But for the rest of my time as an atheist I would pursue my project of research to debunk the Bible every summer and I had huge files demonstrating the weaknesses of the inerrancy position. Unfortunately, what I didn't realize was that the Church of Christ had biased my outlook to such an extent that I just ruled out the true greatness of the Christian tradition. I assumed that if the C /C was wrong surely the rest of it was even worse.

So what I took for anti-Christian works were largely made up of liberal scholarship, much of it believing. People such as B.H. Streeter made up the bulk of my research. Streeter was a true scholar, the canon reader at Cambridge, but also a true believer and very devout. Every so often I would come across one of his statements of faith and devotion and would be totally puzzled as to how he say such a thing when he could surely see that all the evidence he gave pointed to a Bible full of mistakes and far less than perfect (see the Revelation and Canon page). Once college began, however, I discovered Jean Paul Sartre and existentialism. That became the center of my thought life throughout college. In my freshman philosophy class someone asked the professor if there were really people who didn't believe in God. I said that I really didn’t' believe in God, and called myself an atheist, and the whole class began shouting at me! Some even threatened to beat me up! But held my ground and argued against the whole class of about 100 people. That was before the big "Hate Christianity" fad, and it was in Texas, so the majority were raised in the Bible belt and raised not to think.

FIRST STEP TOWARD BELIEF AND FORMATION OF ATHEISTIC WORLD VIEW.

There I was in college, I was still an atheist but my zeal for arguing about it waned as I got into more of college life; debate, traveling to debate tournaments and lots of research, sociology, gaining some understanding of literature and philosophy, which I read in high school and loved, but in college I was actually learning something about it. I really got into existentialism. It was the late '70s and that was a hold over from the early 60s at least on Texas campuses. And Dope. Dope was a huge part of my college experience. Watching the original Saturday Night live with Belushi and Chase and Laraine Newman etc., stoned and at a college debate tournament, that was a huge part of my college experience. But every summer I was still doing my anti-Bible research. In the summer of '79 my parents had their 40th wedding anniversary (my brother and I were born to them late in life).

My sister's friend came to town with her family. She was an older woman, married, at first I dismissed her as one my my sister's “crazy Jesus freak friends.” My sister and brother-in-law had been missionaries in Latin America. They were Church of Christ missionaries, but it was in Latin America that they encountered the charismatic movement in the form of the dreaded Catholics, and they became “filled with the Spirit.” In the early 70's they drove me crazy with their wild “Jesus freak” stuff and their miracle stories. I was determined to ignore her friend, but as we talked at the anniversary shindig, held in a church of Christ, I discovered that this woman was really pretty bright and well read. My bother invited her to join us, and our best friend, in a discussion back at the house after the party. So latter at my parent's house we sat in my old room and talked.

Sure enough, she had a lot of really amazing miracle stories and I thought she was insane. But she was too “together” to be insane. In many ways she just seemed like the “neatest” person I'd ever met. She had a great personality and somehow made us feel that she really cared. And she was fairly bright and yet she claimed to have experienced amazing things; healings, demons; God's presence, etc. That got my attention. When I went back to my apartment and resumed preparations for school in the coming year, I thought quite a bit about that talk, and determined that that year I would seek out how it was that all the liberal scholars I'd been quoting against the Bible could actually be Christians (I had noticed that many of them made great statements of faith, and yet to my Church of Christ mind they were debunking the Bible because they didn't accept inerrancy). I couldn't see how they could be aware of so many “anti-Bible” facts and yet have faith in God. During that year I read the four Gospels sporadically, and compared them to Eastern Religion, studying that with a friend who had approached me with the proposal that we two figure out “the religion thing.” Everyday after class he would come over, listen to Ravi Shankar albums, drink Miller highlife beer, get stoned and read from the Tao te Ching and the Bahagavod Gita.

It's too hard to give a rundown on the intellectual issues that I had to work through at that time. I fancied myself an existentialist, but it was probably just an undergraduate thing. My knowledge of it was pretty superficial. That's what's so funny about many skeptics who make all these claims about Christians not thinking, because even though I read and thought avidly before, I learned a lot more about philosophy and gained more of a dedication to getting it right and being scholarly after -- but that may be due to age more than religion. I guess the three main issues that I was concerned about at that time were:

1) the historicity of the Bible, especially in light of my researches.

2) the justice of God; hell and pain in life, etc.

3) and the hypocrisy of the Church; all the devilment it has caused throughout history.

These were not mere excuses not to believe they were real impediments to belief. I had stated on a number of occasions that I could never be a Christian because of these things. And of course all of this against the background of the sheer existence of God in the first place. I couldn't see how God could exist when there was 'no proof' but more importantly, we didn't need God as an explanation of anything. Science demonstrates the workings of the world, the evolution of life, and the regularity of scientific law argues against the probability of any supernatural realm beyond this one; maybe such a realm exists I argued but it serves no purpose for us, and how can it intrude into this realm when we are constantly witnessing a regular universe that operates by cause and effect and never observe violations that can't be explained by psychology and so on. (Hume's argument against miracles essentially).

Now I'm going to do a part II because my browser stinks and I can't load really long posts, but it’s almost finished. I think some of the major objections, such as the evil doings of the institutional church in the Middle Ages, were answered by my sister's friend, and largely just because she took the problem seriously, but pointed out that that was not the Gospel and that historical accidents placed the reigns of the church in the hands of unscrupulous men via institutionalization. But I think taking the problem seriously made a lot of difference. Too often in witnessing Christians think they must disown the proper values of human dignity and the sanctity of life and to defend the church at all costs. We don’t have to do this. The Church has gon off track many times. We can admit this, and until we do the learned atheists will never take the Gospel seriously.

SECOND STEP TO BELIEF; READING THE GOSPELS CRITICALLY BUT NOT SKEPTICALLY; EXAMINATION OF JESUS HIMSELF.

As I read the Gospels I began to feel that Jesus was a really the coolest person. I began to really admire him. He was always focussed on the individual, the one in need, always opposing hypocrisy, and undermining the authority of the power structure. He was full of compassion, but wasn't weepy. It makes a big difference not to read it just to find contradictions. But I was still bothered by the three Issues I'd mentioned. I couldn't figure why B.H. Streeter was a Christian when he constantly gave evidence that the Bible was not divinely inspired. It would be years and years before I fully worked that out, and I had to go to seminary to do it. But gradually I began to realize that the Church of Christ had brainwashed me against other forms of Christianity so that it never dawned on me that there was this wider tradition of which the Church of Christ was only a small part. The historicity of the Bible: I'd done enough research to see that a good case could be made for it. There's too much on that to get into here, but I did realize that even though the Bible is not inerrant, it can be trusted at least in the sense that the four Gospels are probably the only trustworthy account of what Jesus said and did, and that the likelihood is that he said and did very similar things to those recorded in the NT. I also began to admire his ethical teachings so much it seemed like those things didn't matter. so what if he didn't give the whole sermon on the mount at one time, he must have said; otherwise it's like saying Sartre didn't really write Roads to Freedom Trilogy (well maybe not but whoever did is one of my favorite novelists and it couldn't have been made up by just anyone). If Jesus’ followers somehow made up his character and teaching then they were literary geniuses and maybe that in itself is reason enough to be at least a liberal nominal Christian.

INITIAL CONVERSION EXPERIENCE

The justice of God issue: I began to piece together my own free will defense the more I read of the Bible. And as I think just being able to stop and think about it without trying to poke holes in it all made a lot of difference. I began to have a growing feeling that there must be something to it all, religious belief and the Gospel. One night a friend came to my door, and he was in dire shape. He was having a bad reaction to some medication. He said he felt like demons were running through his body. He was freaking out. (Do they still say that?). I went back to his apartment with him and he kept getting worse. I wanted to take him to a hospital but he had a certain reason not to want to go and refused. I didn't know what to do. HE was writhing around on the floor and screaming, I was going to call an ambulance but he kept screaming at me not to. I didn't know what to do. In desperation I actually prayed and said “OK, Jesus, God, if you are really there, please make him stop!” I had just enough time to think “what if it doesn't work?” when I noticed that he began to settle down. He just wound down and went to sleep in about 30 seconds. I just stared at him sleeping peacefully and thought “what just happened?” I kept thinking I said “If you are there...” and the condition was met. Well I wasn’t going to break down that easily. It was obviously a coincidence. But it stuck in my mind that the condition was met. So wasn't it incumbent upon me to think even more deeply about it all.

One night I was reading the Bible and I decided to get high and than perhaps I would really see the deep spiritual truths (ho ho ho right?) I lit up the old bong and toked the best Columbian [marijuana] my roommate could buy, and after reading for about five minutes was as un-stoned as before. So I smoked another bowl, flying, read some more, and each time I repeated this process I'd be as sober as a...Christian. But I did find the passages extremely moving that time. I decided I didn't need dope and never touched it again, after about 6 years of smoking heavily. Not long after that I saw a special on PBS done back than with Jacob Needleman whom I had read in my sociology of religion class and knew to be non-Christian and scholarly. That had a pretty profound affect upon my thinking about religion. It was positive to religion but universalistic in perspective; Christianity presented as just one in a number of approaches to God, all of which reflect some aspect of truth. But then the Eastern guy (the guy I was studying with) stepped in. He was trying to prove to me that Jesus was an Eastern guru and everything in the Bible was really Toaism ala Rom Dos (or Hinduism really I guess). But in the middle of all that it hit me that verse in Romans 2:7 about the Pagans not born under the law are a law unto themselves and it occurred to me that this universalism could work in reverse too. What if these Eastern guys are getting glimpses of the truth and that doesn’t say who Jesus is.

So I began to study the claims he made about himself. It was clear to me that he was claiming to be the Jewish Messiah and not the “song of god” in some eastern sense (we are all sons of god because we are all god etc). That verse “ye are all gods” I found a study Bible my mother gave me that year and talked to my sister's friend about it when I saw her at Christmas, so learned the word Elohim doesn’t necessarily mean divine, it can mean many things, etc. So it looked to me like he was making unique claims about himself “I am the way the truth and the life no one comes to the Father but by me.” So the old C.S. Lewis thing hit. If this guy is so great to be such a wonderful teacher and so together that hey could not have been insane, and yet says he's the only way to God, maybe he had some insight no one else does?

BORN AGAIN!

One weekend I went to my parents house and was studying for test at 3:00 a.m. I began to think about my life, my motives, etc. all that had been going through my mind. I thought about Sartre and self-authentication -- then it hit me -- Kierkegaard, Christian existentialism. Merely reverse Sartre and you get Kierkegaard. And why do that? Self authentication. How could Sartre think any less of me if I made a Sk's [??] leap of faith as my form of self-authentication? That would be My unique authenticating act. Who could complain? And why do it? God made my friend settle down, and I asked him to, etc. but more than that the long search people, the human nature of religious faith -- it is the ultimate authentication. So I laid on the couch and prayed. I don't remember my payer except i said “I want to change and find the truth, I wont to find the self fulfillment of these people who know you and I want to know Jesus, so please born me again.” And at that moment I began to feel a presence, it was fait at first, just a sense of something, then stronger -- clean, it was looking at me, it loved me, and it was love. I felt it totally washing over me and in me. I did feel born again. For the first time in since childhood I felt love for myself and that God loved me, this presence loved me. And I remembered it from childhood. This was the feeling of goodness I had as a kid. The next two months I just glided around. I'd stay up all night reading the Bible and the next day go look at the sun rise and feel like I'd stumbled on to some really amazing thing no one knew about. The Eastern guy came over and I told him about it and he said “I knew you'd say that! I knew you'd cave in and sell out to the Christians!” I said, but we agreed to stick with whatever we discovered the truth to be, no pre-set conclusions.” “But you are arriving at pre set conclusions,” he said. The last time I saw him he was shouting at me and going 'can God make a rock so big he can' lift it?” I swear the he tried to pull that. That sense of the presence continued. It grew stronger every time I prayed. I was beginning the happiest phase of my life.

One night I felt something hitting my bed and turned on the light and there was nothing there. So I prayed and it stopped. I wondered if I was going insane, but somehow it didn’t work like insanity because rather than tearing my life down it was building it up. I began apologizing to people I had hurt, I was renewing old friendships, feeling love for my parents, feeling self acceptance for the first time since childhood and so on. After that point the objections I had amassed for years melted away very quickly. The mass of Xerox copies from all manner of scholarly books and articles demonstrating the inadequacy of the Bible some how seemed hollow and inconclusive. I began to think about Streeter's faith and how he was able to believe and use what he knew to back that belief despite its seeming skeptical nature. I also knew that the Christians had good answers to most of it and it seemed that all one needed was a reason to take up one set of assumptions or the other. With one set of basic assumptions all the counter evidence disappeared, and vice versa. But which assumptions to make? These experiences gave me the push I needed to take up the Christian assumptions, and faith began to pile up almost in a cumulative process; or so it seemed. I also suddenly began to think of new answers or to look at the evidence in a new way. For example, one author used Streeter's account of the conversion of an Indian mystic name Sadu Sundar Sing as proof that St. Paul's conversion was based on psychological guilt. The evidence; Sing had a similar Damascus Road experience, after hating and mocking Christians. But in light of my own experience I was more willing to believe that maybe Sing's experience really was like Paul's, maybe it was a revelation from God and that doesn’t prove anything either way. And maybe the guilt release thing came into it just because God is in the business of forgiveness?

BAPTISM OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

That summer I found the charismatics. I prayed for baptism of the Holy Spirit, my sister's fiend was a Charismatic so I thought that was the thing to do. I was alone in my room, moved back home that summer, and as I prayed nothing happened. Two hours of praying and nothing. So I just raised my hands as I'd seen Charismatics do and thanked God for the 'gifts' just taking on faith that they had been bestowed. Suddenly I felt my arms raising as though I wasn't doing it. A sort of magnetic like force was raising them. I felt an energy pouring over me. It was like electricity, I could physically feel it, but it didn't hurt, it felt good, and in a strange way it felt like love. I felt as though my palms were on fire, and It was so strong I was knocked standing out of my chair. I felt this “electricity” pour over me for about two hours and I praised God and felt great, peace, love, joy, and an amazement as if watching myself from afar and wondering if it was happening. Eventually I found it hard to move my mouth and found my self saying words that didn’t make sense. Latter that summer I would find those words in a national Geographic; they were Mayan place names. Why? I haven't the foggiest. Although I would like to explore the notion that even though the Mayan religious was idolatrous and seems brutal, it also made a great deal of the notion of the King shedding his blood on behalf of the people. I don’t know if that figures in to it or how.

REFLECTIONS ON FAITH AND PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD.

Up to that experience, like a participant observer in my own conversion process (due to my sociology training) I had sort of been keeping tabs on things. Every new turn in the road I would examine form two perspectives. In one sense I would come to new insight and new levels of faith, and in another I would mark it and relate it to some theory of sociology I had learned as if watching myself in a process, or as if tricking myself into infiltrating a cult for sociological research. But at the same time I would find objections to the sociological theory and move on to the next plateau, yet somehow leaving a mental book mark “this is how the subject moved beyond this point.” But after this experience which I call “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” I stopped this somehow (though I was aware of doing it, it wasn't planned) and just began moving on with faith, determined to know God as fully as possible at all costs! That experience I have never forgotten. I know it sounds crazy and I don’t balme you for thinking that. I would have thought the same thing just a few months before it happened. But there is was and I couldn't explain it but I couldn't deny it.

I searched through all the sociological and psychological stuff I'd been studying in school to show myself I was being tricked by some hidden desire to believe, but for everything I found I could find an answer as well. I had actually been doing that sense that incident with my freaking out friend so I was pretty much through that phase by this time and after this my commitment was total. I didn't even care about philosophy I just wanted to pray form then on. And I did pray and I felt that presence every time i prayed, though never again that strong. And I had other similar experiences I can't deny them, I know they happened and I know they had manifestations that were not mere psychology. A few months latter I began reading philosophy again and this time the arguments for the existence of God were opened to me. I could see they made perfect sense. I went on to learn more about philosophy than I ever knew and to harmonize my views with my faith. About 10 years latter I went to seminary and got a Masters in theology. I thought my way out of the Charismatics by that time and weathered the storms of Reaganism (I was about the only charismatic that wasn't for him). But I still believe in the gifts and have seen many healings had many other miraculous things. The thing that makes my sister's friend so amazing is not just that she has seen many such miraculous things, but that she's a neat and strong woman who fought for her social conscience and didn't fit in with the Churches and was led by God to stand alone many times.

It is the life of a person that really speaks of the truth of God, not so much their ideas alone. Seminary was a leading liberal seminary and I wanted to be a theologian. I got my theology worked out, and changed it and worked it out again. But that game me a synthesis of the two ways of life, the intellectual and the spiritual so that they are not in conflict. I went to a secular doctoral program for my Ph.D. which I'm trying to finish now, in the history of ideas. I began that to study postmodernism and did study it but got into history of science and the Enlightenment, which is what pisses me off so much with people like the glob fly because I do know what I'm talking about on that stuff. So I've been a Christian since April of 79, and I still feel God's presence and it is a satisfying and fulfilling and consistent way of life. What I find from all of this is that faith is self-authenticating. I don't say self-validating because any sort of belief is self-validating. What matters in terms of proof is falsifyability. At least according to Karl Poper. But in any case, I'm a Kuhnian, and I say all our ideas take socially constructed form by the time we talk about them. The authenticity of first hand religious experience, however, cannot be reduced. To try and reduce it to counter causality to to dismiss it in any way is simply to lose the data and transform the experience into something else. Now it doesn’t' really prove anything, because others have their own experiences too.

But in a different sense it is "self-authenticating.” It is an expression of our own decision making, and it is an authentic sense of what it is to be human to live in the world. It is not reducible to anything else, despite the lack of proof, it must be taken on its own terms. And as such, to the extent that it cumulatively stacks up to a consistent way of life over time, has the same sort of validity that any of our big choices in life have. It is a leap of faith, it is a decision to believe, and to the extent that it forms a consistent way of life is as real to the believer as the world of our daily experience is to all of us. To take the first step is to initiate a process whereby faith will confirm it's own validity as the “evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11) And after 20+ years I can say Jesus has not let me down. I'm not yet to the point of receiving the final reward of faith, eternal life, but I have been re-convinced countless times, and know with full assurance; God is there, Jesus is real, he is a rewarder of those that diligently seek him, and hope in him does not disappoint.

Perhaps one of the greatest minds of the 19th Century was Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche had a power with language, and a penetrating view of reality unmatched by any of the thinkers of his day. Indeed, he spoke with such passion and such foresight that he still influences much of philosophy today. But Nietzsche was bitterly anti-God and he absolutely despised Christianity. He considered it a slave religion.

Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. He stated:

“I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and

innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for

which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground,

and too petty.”

For all his learning and intellect, Nietzsche died in 1900 after 11 years of insanity brought on by syphilis.

By what authority do you know about God? Our society contains a panoply, a cacophony even, of voices telling us about God. Who He is, or how He isn't, or that the He is actually a She. How do you unmix the Babel, separate the wheat from the chaff?

The contenders for the authoritative voice on God are plentiful. Philosophers, possibly with theological envy, tell us many things about God. Churches, mosques and monks, also have something to say on the matter. Family and friends seem to stake a rightful claim on the topic, too. And certainly our experiences seem like they should have a seat at the table, so to our feelings.

But our choice is not as simple as deciding between the philosopher and the priest, or our feelings and what our friend says – for we still would have to decide which philosopher, which priest, which feeling, which friend. All these different sources of knowledge about God are not themselves univocal. Each source itself contains many and often contradictory voices. This is easy enough to see within the discipline of philosophy since there are philosophers of every theological stripe: atheist, pantheist, and theist. And certainly the plethora of religions and the numerous sects within each major religion demonstrates that religions contradict each other. As for family and friends, my agnostic friend tells me one thing while my Christian mother has told me the opposite.

We are in the same sort of fix when it comes to our experiences and feelings. They also contain contradictions. At one time I feel God to be very close, at another very far away. Today, I have experienced His grace, but there certainly have been days where God did not enter my conscious experience as far as I could tell. So on the basis of experiences and feelings, we are still left with a question mark: how do we get reliable knowledge about God?

This is a question that I have struggled with for many years, and I still struggle with today. The answer that I have come to trust is not in a book or in a tradition. It comes from a person, a special kind of person, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Yes, I know, I said it wasn't from a book, let me modify that: the gospels introduced me to Jesus, but thankfully, He did not remain on the page. He has met me in my life.

Go find Christ in the Gospels. Ask Him about God, and expect Him to meet you in your life.

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Copyright © 2002 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

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What kind of god would be plausible in this postmodern age? Taken by itself, that question represents the great divide between those who believe in the God of the Bible and those who see the need to reinvent a deity more acceptable to the modern mind.

After all, the answer to that question would reveal a great deal about the postmodern mind, and nothing about God himself. Unless, that is, you believe that God is merely a philosophical concept, and not the self-existent, self-defining God of the Bible.

That distinction is apparent in A PLAUSIBLE GOD by Mitchell Silver, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The book’s subtitle is “Secular Reflections on Liberal Jewish Theology,” and Silver’s work is an attempt to construct a concept of God that modern secular people will find plausible. The book is directed to a Jewish readership, but the issues Silver raises and the arguments he proposes are precisely those found among many liberal Protestant theologians. Most, however, are less candid and clear-minded as Professor Silver.

The key to understanding Silver’s argument is his distinction between the “old God” of biblical theism and the “new God” of the secular philosophers. Growing up as a secular thinker, Silver rejected belief in a personal God who created the world and now rules over it. He saw those who believed in a personal and transcendent God -- a God who is objectively real -- as superstitious.

Yet, he observed that many people he thought to be intelligent thinkers DID believe in God, and this fact perplexed him. Then came the big realization that these intelligent people DO believe in God, but not in a personal God who is objectively real. Instead, they believe in a “new God.” This new God is the only God imaginable, he suggests, to secular moderns.

“My fundamental premise is that the modernist has only two options consistent with her modernism: new God or no God,” he writes. That sentence communicates a powerful insight with absolute clarity. Belief in the old God, he argues, is simply too laden with impossible beliefs and immoral assumptions.

Indeed, one of Silver’s stated purposes is to reveal just how little deity is associated with the new God, and in so doing he considers Protestant theologians such as Paul Tillich and Rudolph Bultmann. As Silver rightly observes, the views of God represented by Tillich and Bultmann are not “substantially different” from atheism. These theologians retained “references to the divine,” but stripped theology of belief in a personal God. He makes similar observations of Jurgen Moltmann’s “theology of hope” and the works of the process theologians such as Charles Hartshorne. What is rejected by these theologians, to one degree or another, is SUPERNATURALISM.

Such thinkers are theologians who are not theists, Silver reports. Furthermore, the “God” of much popular belief is hardly more theistic. “With all the particulars left unspecified,” Silver asserts, “our public theism is probably a riot of equivocations in which there are many new-God beliefs among the rioters.”

God is reduced to “deep feelings, fundamental values, basic attitudes, and humane hopes.” Many modern people, including both Jews and many who identify as Christians, have, as Rabbi Jonathan Gerard related, “merely lost faith in an older and unacceptable notion of God.”

The new God is a philosophical concept that its proponents use to ground a potential for goodness in the world. When believers in the new God speak of God in personal terms, they do so metaphorically. One key insight in Silver’s book is his argument that even secular people need to express gratitude in personal terms. As he explains, “God-talk may be the only language adequate for the expression of certain emotions.” Speaking of a personal God in this sense is a “trope” or “just a manner of speaking.”

The new God becomes “whatever there is in nature that makes good things possible.” But, lest we over-read this statement, Silver adds: “God has no will, intentions, or desires.” In no sense is the new God a personal God. This God is a principle, a concept; not a person.

The God of the Bible is dismissed as a rational impossibility. Supernaturalism is itself ruled out of bounds within the closed box of the materialist worldview. Many would go further and argue that the God of the Bible is immoral -- ethnocentric, violent, and oppressive. But all this goes away with the new God, who is not a person, does not need to “exist,” has no will or intentions, does not intervene in history, and is thus not morally accountable at all. The new God is not an agent who acts, and thus cannot be an immoral agent.

The old God, the God of the Bible, the God described by Silver as the “God of our fathers,” is simply not plausible. Thus, as Silver eloquently suggests, modern secular people turn “from the God of our fathers to the God of our friends.”

A PLAUSIBLE GOD book is a brilliant exposition of the vast shift in thinking about God that marks so much modern theology -- Jewish and Christian. Many theologians continue to speak of God without believing in the God of the Bible. Those who are unaware that the “new God” of modern theology is not the “old God” of biblical theism may well be either deceived or confused. Mitchell Silver’s clarity is refreshing, even as it is tragic.

We are not called upon to make God plausible to the modern mind or the postmodern age. The God of the Bible cannot be accommodated to the secularist assumptions of so many modern people. The “God of our friends” fits easily into this modern secular framework and is easily received by a postmodern culture. The God of our friends neither wills nor acts.

In other words, only “the God of our fathers” can save.