What
Could be Wrong With the Arguments for the Existence of God? Romans 1:28-32
Like
most of the Word this next passage is simple enough for a child to understand
but to get into some of the details and mechanics it may challenge some of our
brain cells. The bottom line is that it gives us great confidence in our
witnessing because it ultimately emphasizes the fact that the real power and
authority is in the Word of God and the Spirit of God; and it is not in our
intellectual ability, our ability to master a certain number of facts or certain
ways of argumentation, but it puts the focus on the truth of God’s Word. But we
have to make sure that when we are talking to people who are unbelievers we
have to really understand the questions they are asking and we have to
understand how to answer them in a correct manner.
By
correct manner is not meant answering necessarily with the right facts. We are
really dealing with issues related to strategy and ultimately it just comes
down to the same basic principle that goes through all the Christian life,
which is trust and obey. We just trust what the Word of God says and assume
what it says to be true. But so often what happens is that in our strategy in
talking to unbelievers, for various reasons—sometimes it can be because
of our desire to be accepted by them, sometimes by our desire not to come
across as being radical, sometimes because we don’t always understand the
implications of questions that are asked—we build our answers on the
foundations or assumptions of their questions. But Scripture says we are not to
answer a fool according to his folly. A lot of times when we answer certain
questions or we approach them a certain way inadvertently what happens is we
are assuming a non-biblical position—not for the sake of argument but we
just inadvertently slip across the line.
In
the process of communicating the gospel to people we have to exercise
discernment. We can’t just go to drive-by evangelism, quote Acts 16:31 and say,
'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved' because there is not
necessarily an understanding on their part of who Jesus is. And what does it
mean to be saved? What exactly is “believe”? Saved from what to what? We may
think that the answers to those questions are obvious because we have been in
Christianity for so many years we can’t think like an unbeliever anymore. When
we talk to unbelievers we have to have a strategy and we have to have certain
tactics that we use. By that is meant we mean certain question we might ask,
certain ways we might explain things, and it takes time to learn that. We only
learn by doing, which is the hard part.
It
is always helpful if we start with an assumption and we know something about
this other person, about every human being, that they don’t believe and they
don’t know, but God tells us it is true, and so we have to build everything
that we say on that foundation. This is something that in the theological arena
is called pre-suppositional apologetics, because it presupposes the truth and
the authority of God’s Word and God’s Word alone in any kind of communication
with an unbeliever.
So
Romans 1:18, 19 tells us NASB “For the wrath of God is revealed from
heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the
truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident
within them; for God made it evident to them.” One of the characteristics of an
unbeliever is that he is a truth suppressor. When we are talking to an
unbeliever his knee-jerk reaction is suppress truth. He has developed
consciously or unconsciously a lot of techniques to keep God at as much of a
distance that he possibly can. There is an internal and an external knowledge
of God that they recognize. We know and God knows that this is going on in the
person we are talking to and it is God the Holy Spirit who is the ultimate
agent in making the gospel clear, and as we are explaining the gospel He is
going to be working internally and tickling the latch on that box where they
have stuffed God. That lid is going to come open, God is going to come out and
scare him to death. So we never know how the reaction to that is going to be.
Romans
1:20 NASB “For since the creation of the world His invisible
attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being
understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” His
invisible attributes are clearly seen; this is what God says.
What
Romans chapter one is pointing out is that man’s problem is spiritual. There
may be intellectual, social, educational, moral arguments that are then
imported in order to suppress the truth but the issue in truth suppression has
nothing to do with a person’s IQ in terms of their intelligence—if I could just say it
the right way, if I could present the right structure of the argument then we
would convince them that the God of the Bible exists. The issue here is that if
we are talking to an unbeliever and are making a truth claim, and are saying
the gospel is true and if you don’t believe it then there are eternal
consequences, then we are appealing to something above us as truth. That is an
authority issue. What authority can we go to that both we and the unbeliever
will accept? If we go to an authority the unbeliever accepts we have already
lost the argument because we are assuming his suppressed view of the world; you
are assuming his distorted human viewpoint system as having some level of
validity.
We
have rationalism and empiricism that are both built on a same method. When we
talk about method, how we do something, remember a right thing done in a wrong
way is sometimes right, especially if they end up getting saved. That proves it
was right, doesn’t it?
No,
it doesn’t prove it was right. A right thing done in a wrong way is wrong, it
is just that the grace of God sometimes overrides our failures—more
frequently than not. So both rationalism and empiricism are built on an
independent use of logic and reason because it is dependent on truth that comes
from Scripture, which should be the foundation of our thinking. It is built on
reason independent of anything else, just autonomous reason. And both
rationalism and empiricism can come to lower case truth but not upper case
truth: they can’t really answer the question of why is all this here? They can
tell us what is here, observe what is here, but they can’t answer the question
of why or what the meaning of all of these things is. Then there is mysticism
which is just rationalism gone to seed. You don’t have any evidence for your
position anymore but you are going to believe it in spite of the facts, so this
is independent again, just as the other two are—independent of God. It is
not logical, not rational, and it is not verifiable.
This
stands in contrast to revelation. We are talking about revelation of the order
of what God said to Adam in the garden. When God said Adam could eat from any
tree of the garden except this one, the only way Adam could have ever learned
that was from somebody telling him, speaking to him with the voice of
authority. This is the only basis for objective truth. In revelation there is
the dependent use of logic and reason. Paul reasoned with the Athenians. He
used reason. The Bible is not anti-reason; it is against the use of independent
reason.
The
question before us is: how do we as a believer committed to the authority of
Scripture talk to the unbeliever who is committed to unbelief without
sacrificing the authority of God and the truth of Scripture in the process?
That is an important question; it may never have occurred to us.
One
of the ways that people think that you can communicate with people is through
what has been laid down as arguments for the existence of God. In Christianity
one of the most significant expressions of this was Thomas Aquinas who was
considered to be the systematic theologian of Roman Catholic theology but
actually it goes back to the five ways of Aristotle, and these arguments for
the existence of God simply can’t get you out of the order of creation. If you
start with creation you end up in creation; you can’t get out of creation. You
have to make a leap to get over into the realm of the creator. All of these
start with human experience; you can’t start with the finite and ever get to
the infinite, it is logically impossible.
The
teleological argument is the argument that in its manifestation today is more
popularly referred to as the intelligent design argument. It goes back to a
book written by William Paley in 1802 that was called Natural Theology. Remember: special revelation and general
revelation. General revelation focuses on God’s revelation of Himself in
creation, or nature. That general revelation came to also be called natural
revelation. Then that developed into an autonomous view that natural revelation
had the same level of authority as special revelation. That basically split off
on its own and the assumption was that you could go to anything in creation and
get as much specific information about God and argue for the existence of God
as from special revelation. Paley basically took the idea of God as a watchmaker.
You have an extremely sophisticated watch; you look at it and think about it in
its entirety. It is a group of systems that are brought together, it is not
just individual parts but each part represents a number of sub-parts and some
of those sub-parts represent even more sub-parts. All of this comes together
into an extremely complex whole and it works magnificently. But if one of those
little parts in any of the systems of sub-systems is off then nothing works and
it is not a viable watch. So using that argument Paley argues that we can look
all over the universe and wherever we go we can see all of these systems that
fit within the whole of the creation of planet earth. So therefore we come to a
conclusion that based on the fact that we can observe order and purpose in the
universe chance cannot account for this, therefore only an omniscient, infinite
designer could account for this.
How
can we get to an omniscient designer from looking at all the intricacies of the
creation? How do we make that leap from finite to infinite? All we can really
say is that whoever designed it knows a heck of a lot, a whole lot. But we
can’t say He knows everything, we can just say that He knows everything about
this system of the universe. We can’t say He is omniscient; that is a universal
claim and the evidence that we have under the rules of empiricism can’t allow
us to go quite that far because we don’t know anything about who the designer
is. So if we say that the designer is God how do we know if it is Yahweh Elohim of the Old Testament? It
is just some being that is a lot more powerful and knowledgeable than anything
we can imagine. So this is the argument that is used from teleology. Psalm 19:2
talks about design and purpose in the universe, and there is. But on the basis
of what the unbeliever thinks, does the design and purpose get us to the
burning bush, the existence of the self-existent God that is revealed in the
Scripture?
Then
we come to the anthropological argument for the existence of God. It says that
since man is a moral, intelligent and living being he can only be explained if
there is a moral, intelligent and living God. The presupposition that is the
assumption that is brought here is that since man manifests these qualities
(man is a person) then he must have come from a creator that is also a person.
Something that is non-personal cannot create something that is personal.
Scripture that is sometimes used to support this is Psalm 94:9 NASB
“He who planted the ear, does He not hear? He who formed the eye, does He not
see?” That is not really an anthropological argument; that is an argument that
starts with God and ends with man. The anthropological argument, like these
others, starts with something in the creation and tries to go to God, but the
Bible always starts with God and goes to anything within creation. That is an
important distinction to make.
The
moral argument is that the moral laws, the fact that we believe in a right and
wrong, and that this is universal to the human race, implies that there is a
universal morality, a universal truth, a universal right and wrong. Therefore
since everyone believes in a moral law that implies that there is an objective
moral law and therefore there must be a moral law giver. Once again we see that
there are some weaknesses within this argument. They all come down to the same
problem, i.e. moving from the finite created world and universe and crossing
that boundary from the creation to the creator. What is distinct about the
Judeo-Christian God is that He is a self-existent God who stands completely
outside of everything in creation. In paganism there is what is called the
chain of being. Aristotle was the first to utilize this, and in the chain of
being everything shares in the same essence or being from the gods all the way
down to the smallest molecule, the smallest atom. Everything is in the same
chain of being; there is nothing outside of that chain.
What
is distinct about Scripture is that God is presented as a self-existence,
personal, infinite God who exists for eternity without any creation, without
any universe. He is not dependent in any way on the universe and the being that
the creation has is not derivative being, it is creative being. These are huge
distinctions. This is why all the other systems (basically the chain of being)
are just an early form of the same thing that is present in Darwinism.
So
we are going to have a conversation between an unbeliever and a believer—two
different kinds of believers. One believer is thinking pretty much like the
world thinks, like the unbeliever thinks. He is a believer but he has the same
basic assumptions about life and existence and creation as the unbeliever. Then
we will have a believer who is consistently thinking about everything on the
basis of the Bible.
The
believer who is thinking like an unbeliever is trying to convince the
unbeliever of the truth of Scripture. The first issue that he has to deal with
(he may not talk about it but it is embedded in all of this conversation) is
the issue of authority. For the unbeliever what is the ultimate authority? It
is either going to be reason or experience, or a combination thereof, or it is
going to be his intuition as a mystic. Those are his only options for him to
appeal to. It has to be consistent within his experience or it has to somehow
resonate within him—the burning in his bosom, or an inner mental hot
flash or insight into reality. So for the unbeliever his own abilities, reason
and intellect, becomes his ultimate judge and arbiter of truth through
rationalism, empiricism or mysticism. The believer who is thinking like an
unbeliever is still making reason and experience or mysticism his ultimate
authority, because he doesn’t recognize that in the total radical authority
demand of Scripture—which is typical of most evangelicals. For the
Bible-based believer he accepts only the authority of God’s Word and he
believes that the unbeliever is exactly what God says the unbeliever is, and
that in communicating the gospel to the unbeliever he is not communicating to
somebody who somehow has a measure of objectivity, who is basing his thought on
something epistemologically neutral; that his ability to reason, his experience,
his interpretation of experience is spiritually neutral. So the believer says
no, he is an unbeliever; he knows God exists; he is suppressing that truth in
unrighteousness.
If
you are a believer talking to one person and you think that they have the ability
to objectively evaluate the data and come to truth, and there is no hidden
agenda coming up within his soul, then your strategy is going to be different
from if you are talking to somebody that you know already knows the truth but
is suppressing it in unrighteousness; and the ultimate one who is revealing
truth in the conversation is the Holy Spirit and He is just using you to do the
best you can to communicate the gospel and answer the questions this unbeliever
has. So for the believer who is thinking like an unbeliever, the compromise
believer, he is going to appeal to either reason or experience to prove the
claims of the Bible. He has accepted the same assumptions as the unbeliever. He
thinks that reason and his ability to interpret reason and interpret experience
are valid. Remember, the problem with rationalism and empiricism is that it is
an autonomous use of logic and reason; it is independent of the use of
Scripture. That means it is built on a foundation of unbelief that isn’t clear.
So the real issue is, again, authority. The believer acting like an unbeliever
is adopting the same ultimate truth authority as the unbeliever, and by
thinking he is not going to argue with that person on the authority of
Scripture, he is saying to the unbeliever, just like you, I’m going to reject
the authority of Scripture. So the real issue is being consistent with our
belief that the Scripture presents absolute truth.
The
Bible-based believer recognizes the unbeliever knows what the truth is; he just
doesn’t want to admit it. He is just going to suppress it as much as he can, so
he is approaching the whole discussion with a warped view of truth, a warped
view of reason, and a warped view of experience. Which tells us what? That as
you discuss things with them there are going to be a lot of inconsistencies and
problems. Part of what we might choose to do as part of our tactic is to ask
questions like, how can you explain how a loving God can allow the holocaust to
take place? We might respond, before I answer that let me ask how do you
explain it? Well we just live in a random universe. So if we just live in a
universe that is random how can you really make these judgments of what is
right or wrong? How can you ask the question you ask on the basis of your
assumptions? You can’t. So the strategic approach is not necessarily to prove
the truth of the Scripture, but by assuming the truth if the Scripture you can
expose the presuppositions of the unbeliever.
When
it comes to looking at general revelation in terms of nature of the creation
the claim of the unbeliever and the claim of the believer that is thinking like
the unbeliever, that general revelation is a book of truth that is no different
from special revelation; it has the same authority. It doesn’t have any words,
so how can you learn anything specific out of a picture book? All you have is
pictures. The failure with this position is that all of nature is being
interpreted by the unbeliever in terms of truth suppression. He is looking at
all the data and is suppressing it. The data says: God made me. And in his soul
there is something that is resonating with that and he is just stuffing it down
and suppressing it as much as he can. When the unbeliever looks out at a tree
and all of the factors related to the leaves, the cells and everything else, he
says anything can happen here. Isn’t it marvellous? Just give it enough time
and it can just happen. It is irrational on the believer’s assumptions; it is
not irrational on the unbeliever’s assumptions, because on his assumptions
given enough time anything can happen. It is a random product of chance.
The
believer operating on the assumptions of Scripture is going to look at
everything in creation differently from the unbeliever. The believer operating
on the assumptions of the unbeliever says, okay I’m going to take him on a tour
of the planet. So they go all over the planet, all over the universe, and go
over all of the marvellous and intricate facts of God’s creation; then he’ll
believe in God. But the unbeliever, based on Scripture, doesn’t have a problem
with knowing that God exists, he has the problem of accepting the God exists.
He is suppressing all of that truth.
The
point being made in all of this is to show that the believer who is operating
like an unbeliever is using a method and a strategy that is assuming the same
ultimate truth authority as the unbeliever. He is trying to start with that to
get him over into truth. He is saying, okay under your assumptions we are going
to end up with God. The unbeliever then comes along and he says we see cause
and affect, order, design, and all of these things exceed anything that man is
capable of doing, but all it gets us is to the probability that there exists
something that is a greater cause or designer. It doesn’t get us to certainty;
it doesn’t get us to absolute reality; all it gets us to is probability.
Probability rests on possibility, and so all that argument gets anyone is the
probability that God exists. But the probability that God exists is also the
probability that He doesn’t exist. Since probability is built on the foundation
of possibility it doesn’t get us a self-existent God, it just gets us a
contingent God.
The
God that the Bible presents is not a God that is just possible, not a God that
is contingent upon anything; it is an eternally existent self-existent,
omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God, and by going to these kinds of
arguments what suddenly happens is you’ve bought into a smaller God view, a God
that is built into a false view of natural theology, and you can’t cross the
line from finite to infinite.
In
conclusion what we see is: a) each of the four arguments start from finite
experience and attempt to argue to infinite reality, and it can’t cross that
line; b) these views use the idea of cause and effect, purpose, human morality
and design, and assume that they are just as intelligible and mean the same
thing to the unbeliever who is suppressing truth as they do to the believer who
accepts truth. But remember, the unbeliever is suppressing truth, so how can
you assume that his truth position is anything different from his truth
suppression? How can we go over to his view and argue from what is wrong to
what is right? It can’t be done; it is logically impossible; c) each view
attempts to start with ideas of cause and effect, morality and purpose; but it
treats them as being autonomous. God is the one who creates cause and effect,
design and purpose, and defines what those mean; God does not have autonomous
ideas of purpose and meaning, and design and cause and effect behind them.
Those are not autonomous realities in the universe; they are what they are
because God made them that way.
Those
five ways all are based on what is call a
posteriori: what comes after creation is observed. You observe different
things in the creation and then you try to argue to universal truth. That
didn’t work so there was the development of what is called a priori, i.e. prior to—prior to looking into the elements
within creation. So the ontological argument is based on a certain
understanding of the meaning of being or existence itself; that if there is a
perfect being He must necessarily exist. Anselm was the first to articulate
this in his book Proslogion. He said
that because we have an idea of a most perfect being, because the idea of a
most perfect being includes existence since a being otherwise perfect who did
not exist would not be as perfect as a being who did exist. Therefore since the
idea of existence is necessarily contained in the most perfect being that most
perfect being must exist.
Where
does this idea come from? It is the idea that an absolute being that did not
exist is not as perfect as an absolute being that did exist, so therefore since
we have the idea of an absolute being that exists he must exist. Once again we
get into some basic problems, and that our basic concept of existence and
necessity are defined within a creaturely finite concept, and we are trying to
argue from creaturely finite over into the infinite. Since the time of Emmanuel
Kant (late 1700s) this argument has not been accepted.
Essentially
to believe any of these is because you already believe God exists. That leads
us to talking a little bit about the importance of Christian evidences and
apologetics. Apologetics is defined as the way we defend what we believe and
present the content of it. A lot of the details relate to Christian evidences
of Christian, evidences of the resurrection, evidences of the veracity of
Scripture, evidences for the correct transmission of Scripture, have more to do
with building the confidence of the believer and what he believes than in
convincing an unbeliever to move from unbelief to belief. Because his problem
isn’t essentially an absence of knowledge or information, his basic problem is
negative volition and is spiritual. That is not to say that there aren’t
unbelievers who have legitimate questions because they have been brainwashed
with a lot of garbage and we have to flush out some of that garbage by exposing
them to the truth; and God uses that. But the ultimate issue is presenting the
truth of the gospel and answering questions that are necessary.
What
this takes us back to ultimately is what Abraham said to the rich man in
Tartarus. Luke 16:27 NASB “And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father,
that you send him to my father’s house—[28] for I have five
brothers—in order that he may warn them, so that they will not also come
to this place of torment.’” The rich man is thinking like an unbeliever and is
looking at empiricism as the ultimate arbiter of truth. He is begging Abraham
to let Lazarus be raised from the dead so that on the basis of that empirical
reality my brothers will believe in God. [29] “But Abraham said, ‘They have
Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’” The authority isn’t in empiricism,
not in a miracle; authority is in the Word of God, because the Word of God
speaks with authority. The voice of God, which is the Word of God, carries
embedded within it the authority that is self-authenticating, it is not a
circular argument, because on the basis of what the Scriptures teach God isn’t
part of the finite chain; He is outside of it. So He is the ultimate reality
and when God speaks because He is God there is no higher court of appeal for a
higher authority or a higher truth. It is the voice of God that is
self-authenticating and it is God the Holy Spirit who works in the soul of the
individual to make that clear. They reject it not because there is not enough
evidence. That is what Luke 16 points out. Those brothers aren’t rejecting God
because there is not enough evidence; there is more than enough evidence. They
are rejecting God because they are suppressing the truth in
unrighteousness.