The following is taken from Richard C. Vitzthum's "Materialism: An Affirmative History And Definition," Prometheus Books, 1995, pp. 230-232
"The essential component of the material order is a substance whose nature even in our cosmos is not yet and may never be fully known or understood... Terrestrial life is an accidental realization of one of a large, perhaps infinite number of different kinds of being possible to material substance. The laws of nature at the macrophysical level assert themselves unconsciously, indiscriminately, and invariably...
[a]t the microphisical level... they embody laws of probability that are equally implacable and nonhuman in their total effect... Organic life evolved during a period of two to three billion years from accidental circumstances on the surface of the earth, itself a product of the evolution of the cosmos... The key event in organic evolution was the random combination of inorganic matter into units capable of self-reproduction... Biological death, or the breakdown of organisms into their chemical components, is total and irreversible. Nothing of the organism's identity survives.
Human thought and feeling is the most complex, versatile, adaptive, sensitive, perceptive, creative, purposeful, and voluntaristic product
of terrestrial evolution and perhaps cosmic evolution as a whole... It creates all the value and meaning that humans find inside or outside
of themselves. The material order outside of human self-enclosure and self-definition is empty of human value and meaning, consisting as it does of an aimless interplay of natural process dictated by invariable physical laws. Its amoral indiscriminateness contrasts sharply with the human compulsion to discriminate and judge. This compulsion evolved from the billions of years of biological adaptation to earth's environment that transformed simple cells into multicelled animals.
Human thought and feeling is a material offshoot of this very indiscriminateness. It consists of neural events that individually are insensitive, unthinking, and unfeeling as all other basic chemical reactions but that collectively are capable of processing raw electromagnetic signals into emotional and intellectual information. Although the process is not yet well understood, it may consist of computation that mathematically measure incoming arrays of signals against synaptic weightings in the brain's neural networks....
The wide variety of human response to the material reality humans
find themselves a part of is less interesting than reality itself. Powerful but contradictory and often volatile human impulses-- for example, to cooperate, to include others in or to exclude others from social structure, or to love or to hate-- have produced radically different yet more or less workable systems of religious, ethical, political, and social value."
So, in other words: Everything real is material, but we don't really know what the substance matter is, yet we ask theists to define the substance of God since we're arbitrary and are not bothered by intellectual hypocrisy. We're here due to one big accident, and we are determined to do what we do and think what we think because of the imposition of accidental, unconscious, and nonhuman laws upon a lump of matter (what's that) inside our head. Random combinations of things ultimately caused by an explosion brought about order, why(?), well we don't know but we're working on it. If we don't find out, no big deal, because we only live once so grab for all the gusto you can get. Human thought is just amazing and awesome, but it's an accident and we don't really understand how it all works, but it must have since we're here! Our thoughts are the product of unthinking electro-chemical reactions that happen inside our lump of custard in our head. Everything is subjective. There is no value, morality, purpose, or meaning. Our emotions are chemical reactions, so loving my wife and son is something like a complicated hiccup. You're bothered by our findings? So what! My findings are uninteresting and, though maybe powerful, they are contradictory. Indeed, when my atheistic, scientifically minded friends include me in their scholarly world that is contradictory, but who cares? Oh, by the way, religion is a product of evolution and religious tenets are determined by the unthinking laws of physics operating upon our custard pudding in our noggin, but we'll contradictorily act as if certain religions are "bad" and man should (I know, there's no moral statements, but let me slide) seek ( but there's no freedom, so let me slide) to be "scientifically" minded. Then we can all not know what the heck we're talking about and take things on blind faith. Amen.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Atheism's Doomed, No Matter Which Way You Look At It!
In The Descent of Man Charles Darwin writes:
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."
In The Natural History of Religion David Hume writes:
"Look out for a people entirely void of religion, and if you find them at all, be assured that they are but a few degrees removed from the brutes."
Well now! It looks like if Charles Darwin is correct, and if David Hume is correct, then atheists had better be on the look out becuase they may be "exterminated and replaced" because they are "savage brutes."
But, it gets worse. Jehovah says, in Psalm 2:
1 Why do the nations rage, And the peoples meditate a vain thing? 2 The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together, Against Jehovah, and against his anointed, saying, 3 Let us break their bonds asunder, And cast away their cords from us. 4 He that sitteth in the heavens will laugh: The Lord will have them in derision. 5 Then will he speak unto them in his wrath, And vex them in his sore displeasure: 6 Yet I have set my king Upon my holy hill of Zion. 7 I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my son; This day have I begotten thee. 8 Ask of me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance, And the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. 9 Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. 10 Now therefore be wise, O ye kings: Be instructed, ye judges of the earth. 11 Serve Jehovah with fear, And rejoice with trembling. 12 Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and ye perish in the way, For his wrath will soon be kindled. Blessed are all they that take refuge in him.
I'd say things are looking pretty grim for the atheist, no matter which way you slice it.
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."
In The Natural History of Religion David Hume writes:
"Look out for a people entirely void of religion, and if you find them at all, be assured that they are but a few degrees removed from the brutes."
Well now! It looks like if Charles Darwin is correct, and if David Hume is correct, then atheists had better be on the look out becuase they may be "exterminated and replaced" because they are "savage brutes."
But, it gets worse. Jehovah says, in Psalm 2:
1 Why do the nations rage, And the peoples meditate a vain thing? 2 The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together, Against Jehovah, and against his anointed, saying, 3 Let us break their bonds asunder, And cast away their cords from us. 4 He that sitteth in the heavens will laugh: The Lord will have them in derision. 5 Then will he speak unto them in his wrath, And vex them in his sore displeasure: 6 Yet I have set my king Upon my holy hill of Zion. 7 I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my son; This day have I begotten thee. 8 Ask of me, and I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance, And the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. 9 Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. 10 Now therefore be wise, O ye kings: Be instructed, ye judges of the earth. 11 Serve Jehovah with fear, And rejoice with trembling. 12 Kiss the son, lest he be angry, and ye perish in the way, For his wrath will soon be kindled. Blessed are all they that take refuge in him.
I'd say things are looking pretty grim for the atheist, no matter which way you slice it.
Intelligent Design And Non-Christians
In another thread, Andrew wrote:
"The statement 'many IDers are not even Christians' is plainly untrue. With the exception of professional crackpot David Berlinski, all of the major players in ID are Christian creationists. Every person on their publications list, all the folks hired as Fellows, and of course all of the donors to the Discovery Institute's CSC, just for starters....So let's be adults about it. ID was manufactured as a 'big tent' philosophy to try and unite young- and old-earthers against 'Darwinists.'"
I follow issues of origins to some extent, but it isn't an area I've studied in much depth. I don't know it as well as I know some other fields. However, I know enough to recognize that claims like Andrew's are misleading and erroneous.
Why should we only examine "major players"? Most scientists aren't "major players" in their field of research or in any larger movement. And how is Andrew defining "creationists"? Michael Behe, for example, believes in common descent. He's a Roman Catholic, but if Andrew is including believers in evolution among "creationists", then he's using a definition that's unusual. And speaking of unusual definitions, Jonathan Wells is a Moonie. Why should we consider that group "Christian"? Michael Denton is prominent in intelligent design circles, and he isn't a Christian. Lee Spetner isn't a Christian either. Antony Flew isn't a Christian. Dave Scot, who moderates William Dembski's blog and writes some of the material for the site, is an agnostic. Etc.
Even among advocates of intelligent design who are professing Christians of some sort, what are we to make of those who supported evolution initially, perhaps for decades of their professional life, then expressed skepticism toward evolution or accepted intelligent design later in life? The fact that a person is a professing Christian of some sort doesn't prove that his position on issues of origins was arrived at by means of religious argumentation.
As far as the Discovery Institute is concerned, the agnostic David Berlinski is a senior fellow. I'm not familiar with some of the other fellows affiliated with the organization. There may be others who aren't Christians. Jonathan Wells is a senior fellow, and he's a Moonie. It would require a broad definition of "Christian" to include him under that category. On a FAQ page we read:
"Discovery Institute is a secular think tank, and its Board members and Fellows represent a variety of religious traditions, including mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, and agnostic. Until recently the Chairman of Discovery's Board of Directors was former Congressman John Miller, who is Jewish. Although it is not a religious organization, the Institute has a long record of supporting religious liberty and the legitimate role of faith-based institutions in a pluralistic society. In fact, it sponsored a program for several years for college students to teach them the importance of religious liberty and the separation of church and state."
Non-Christians like Michael Denton and Christian believers in common descent, like Michael Behe, have received prominent attention in intelligent design circles for years. It's not as though the intelligent design movement just recently began associating itself with such people. You would expect most people in such a movement to be Christians in a nation like this one, but there are agnostics and other non-Christians who hold such views in this country, and the concept of intelligent design is popular among Muslims and other non-Christians in other parts of the world.
For some examples of the categories I've referred to above - non-Christian advocates of intelligent design, Christians who accepted evolution before rejecting it, etc. - see here, here, here, and here. People who follow these issues in more depth than I do surely could cite many other examples and a wider variety of examples.
The issue here isn't whether critics of intelligent design can accept what I've mentioned in this post, yet object to intelligent design on other grounds. Anybody could alter Andrew's argument so as to keep it from being falsified by evidence such as what I've mentioned in this post. That's not the issue. The issue is whether claims like those made by Andrew are an accurate reflection of the intelligent design movement. They aren't.
"The statement 'many IDers are not even Christians' is plainly untrue. With the exception of professional crackpot David Berlinski, all of the major players in ID are Christian creationists. Every person on their publications list, all the folks hired as Fellows, and of course all of the donors to the Discovery Institute's CSC, just for starters....So let's be adults about it. ID was manufactured as a 'big tent' philosophy to try and unite young- and old-earthers against 'Darwinists.'"
I follow issues of origins to some extent, but it isn't an area I've studied in much depth. I don't know it as well as I know some other fields. However, I know enough to recognize that claims like Andrew's are misleading and erroneous.
Why should we only examine "major players"? Most scientists aren't "major players" in their field of research or in any larger movement. And how is Andrew defining "creationists"? Michael Behe, for example, believes in common descent. He's a Roman Catholic, but if Andrew is including believers in evolution among "creationists", then he's using a definition that's unusual. And speaking of unusual definitions, Jonathan Wells is a Moonie. Why should we consider that group "Christian"? Michael Denton is prominent in intelligent design circles, and he isn't a Christian. Lee Spetner isn't a Christian either. Antony Flew isn't a Christian. Dave Scot, who moderates William Dembski's blog and writes some of the material for the site, is an agnostic. Etc.
Even among advocates of intelligent design who are professing Christians of some sort, what are we to make of those who supported evolution initially, perhaps for decades of their professional life, then expressed skepticism toward evolution or accepted intelligent design later in life? The fact that a person is a professing Christian of some sort doesn't prove that his position on issues of origins was arrived at by means of religious argumentation.
As far as the Discovery Institute is concerned, the agnostic David Berlinski is a senior fellow. I'm not familiar with some of the other fellows affiliated with the organization. There may be others who aren't Christians. Jonathan Wells is a senior fellow, and he's a Moonie. It would require a broad definition of "Christian" to include him under that category. On a FAQ page we read:
"Discovery Institute is a secular think tank, and its Board members and Fellows represent a variety of religious traditions, including mainline Protestant, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, and agnostic. Until recently the Chairman of Discovery's Board of Directors was former Congressman John Miller, who is Jewish. Although it is not a religious organization, the Institute has a long record of supporting religious liberty and the legitimate role of faith-based institutions in a pluralistic society. In fact, it sponsored a program for several years for college students to teach them the importance of religious liberty and the separation of church and state."
Non-Christians like Michael Denton and Christian believers in common descent, like Michael Behe, have received prominent attention in intelligent design circles for years. It's not as though the intelligent design movement just recently began associating itself with such people. You would expect most people in such a movement to be Christians in a nation like this one, but there are agnostics and other non-Christians who hold such views in this country, and the concept of intelligent design is popular among Muslims and other non-Christians in other parts of the world.
For some examples of the categories I've referred to above - non-Christian advocates of intelligent design, Christians who accepted evolution before rejecting it, etc. - see here, here, here, and here. People who follow these issues in more depth than I do surely could cite many other examples and a wider variety of examples.
The issue here isn't whether critics of intelligent design can accept what I've mentioned in this post, yet object to intelligent design on other grounds. Anybody could alter Andrew's argument so as to keep it from being falsified by evidence such as what I've mentioned in this post. That's not the issue. The issue is whether claims like those made by Andrew are an accurate reflection of the intelligent design movement. They aren't.
'At's a spicy meat balla!
Last year, Bobby Henderson wrote a mock open letter to the Kansas school board over the inclusion of ID theory in the curriculum.
His parody wasn’t especially clever, but it’s caught on.
Its popularity reveals far more about the intellectual level of ID opponents than it does about the intellectual level of ID proponents.
Let’s take a few examples:
“I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.”
i) This is disanalogous to ID. ID theory is opposed to naturalistic evolution, not to evolution, per se. An ID theorist could be a theistic evolutionist.
ii) In addition, an ID theorist who opposes evolution does not oppose it even though “overwhelming scientific evidence” supports evolution.
To the contrary, an ID theorist who opposes evolution does so on scientific grounds. For him, the scientific evidence either undercuts naturalistic evidence, or undercuts evolution altogether.
iii) No ID theorist dismisses the “overwhelming” evidence for evolution as “coincidence,” attributable to divine deception.
Continuing with Henderson:
“Some find that hard to believe, so it may be helpful to tell you a little more about our beliefs. We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power.”
Once again, this isn’t parallel to ID theory, since an ID theorist isn’t appealing to the Bible to make his case.
His argument for a divine creator is an inference from the scientific data.
“We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence.”
How is this analogous to ID? The ID community is not a secret society, like the Free Masons.
And ID appeals to observable evidence.
“What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is.”
Several more disanalogies:
i) Henderson is conflating ID with YEC. But ID theory is neutral on the age of the universe.
An ID theorist can be an OEC or a theistic evolutionist.
ii) Even on its own grounds, YEC does not maintain that God designed the world to make us think it’s older than it really is.
iii) In addition, it’s not as if modern science is committed to naïve realism in matters of dating.
According to the theory of an expanding universe, stars are younger than they appear to be to an earth-bound observer.
Likewise, time dilation is a feature of special relativity. Identical clocks run at different rates when in relative motion (moving clocks appear to go slower).
Continuing with Henderson:
“But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage.”
i) Once more, this is not analogous to either ID or YEC.
ii) I’d add that it’s rather gullible, even childish, to treat the universe as if it were a clock telling us the time.
While there’s nothing wrong with trying to date an object by reference to a periodic process, and extrapolating from the present back into the past, we need to remember that a periodic process is not, in fact, a natural chronometer. It was not designed to tell us the time.
That’s a secondary, human application. So there’s no reason to assume that if we ask a natural process to tell us something outside it’s natural function, it will yield a reliable result. Its purpose and our purpose are two different things.
No one’s more credulous than an unbeliever. Having denied that God made the world with him in mind, he continues to act as if the world were designed for his benefit.
Tree rings exist to tell him the time. That’s why Mother Nature planted the tree. Big Ben with leaves.
Continuing with Henderson:
“We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.”
i) As I’ve said before, ID doesn’t appeal to the authority of Scripture.
ii) Does Henderson only believe what he can see with his own two eyes?
iii) Does Henderson believe that nothing can pass through matter?
In his parody, what Henderson has given the reader is an argument from analogy minus the argument and absent the analogy.
A parody is most effective when it is, in fact, analogous to the thing it satirizes.
Likewise, there’s a difference between a spoof that’s used to illustrate an argument, and an illustration that becomes a substitute for reasoned argument.
Henderson’s letter was intended to belittle the intellectual standards of the antievolutionary community.
Ironically, the popularity of his letter serves, instead, to document the anti-intellectual standards of evolutionary community.
As is so often the case, the unbeliever is only concerned with projecting the image of intellectual superiority rather than demonstrating his intellectual superiority.
In practice, he operates at the same mental level as the hillbilly Bible-thumper he so disdains.
His parody wasn’t especially clever, but it’s caught on.
Its popularity reveals far more about the intellectual level of ID opponents than it does about the intellectual level of ID proponents.
Let’s take a few examples:
“I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.”
i) This is disanalogous to ID. ID theory is opposed to naturalistic evolution, not to evolution, per se. An ID theorist could be a theistic evolutionist.
ii) In addition, an ID theorist who opposes evolution does not oppose it even though “overwhelming scientific evidence” supports evolution.
To the contrary, an ID theorist who opposes evolution does so on scientific grounds. For him, the scientific evidence either undercuts naturalistic evidence, or undercuts evolution altogether.
iii) No ID theorist dismisses the “overwhelming” evidence for evolution as “coincidence,” attributable to divine deception.
Continuing with Henderson:
“Some find that hard to believe, so it may be helpful to tell you a little more about our beliefs. We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power.”
Once again, this isn’t parallel to ID theory, since an ID theorist isn’t appealing to the Bible to make his case.
His argument for a divine creator is an inference from the scientific data.
“We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence.”
How is this analogous to ID? The ID community is not a secret society, like the Free Masons.
And ID appeals to observable evidence.
“What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is.”
Several more disanalogies:
i) Henderson is conflating ID with YEC. But ID theory is neutral on the age of the universe.
An ID theorist can be an OEC or a theistic evolutionist.
ii) Even on its own grounds, YEC does not maintain that God designed the world to make us think it’s older than it really is.
iii) In addition, it’s not as if modern science is committed to naïve realism in matters of dating.
According to the theory of an expanding universe, stars are younger than they appear to be to an earth-bound observer.
Likewise, time dilation is a feature of special relativity. Identical clocks run at different rates when in relative motion (moving clocks appear to go slower).
Continuing with Henderson:
“But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage.”
i) Once more, this is not analogous to either ID or YEC.
ii) I’d add that it’s rather gullible, even childish, to treat the universe as if it were a clock telling us the time.
While there’s nothing wrong with trying to date an object by reference to a periodic process, and extrapolating from the present back into the past, we need to remember that a periodic process is not, in fact, a natural chronometer. It was not designed to tell us the time.
That’s a secondary, human application. So there’s no reason to assume that if we ask a natural process to tell us something outside it’s natural function, it will yield a reliable result. Its purpose and our purpose are two different things.
No one’s more credulous than an unbeliever. Having denied that God made the world with him in mind, he continues to act as if the world were designed for his benefit.
Tree rings exist to tell him the time. That’s why Mother Nature planted the tree. Big Ben with leaves.
Continuing with Henderson:
“We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.”
i) As I’ve said before, ID doesn’t appeal to the authority of Scripture.
ii) Does Henderson only believe what he can see with his own two eyes?
iii) Does Henderson believe that nothing can pass through matter?
In his parody, what Henderson has given the reader is an argument from analogy minus the argument and absent the analogy.
A parody is most effective when it is, in fact, analogous to the thing it satirizes.
Likewise, there’s a difference between a spoof that’s used to illustrate an argument, and an illustration that becomes a substitute for reasoned argument.
Henderson’s letter was intended to belittle the intellectual standards of the antievolutionary community.
Ironically, the popularity of his letter serves, instead, to document the anti-intellectual standards of evolutionary community.
As is so often the case, the unbeliever is only concerned with projecting the image of intellectual superiority rather than demonstrating his intellectual superiority.
In practice, he operates at the same mental level as the hillbilly Bible-thumper he so disdains.
Does Combining Isaiah 22 With Matthew 16 Lead Us To A Papacy?
I recently received the following in an e-mail:
"What do you think about Isaiah 22:22. Catholics use that verse to support their belief that Peter is the vicar of Christ on earth. I see the parallel: Christ could be the 'king' in the verse, and peter the 'prime minister.' How are Protestants to interpret this verse? It seems to scream 'PAPACY!' yikes."
Whatever relevance Isaiah 22 would have to Matthew 16, it would have some relevance for Matthew 23, Luke 11, and other passages that use such imagery as well. And any Catholic appeal to Isaiah 22 would have to be a partial appeal, not a complete parallel, since a complete parallel wouldn't favor the claims of Roman Catholicism. God is the one who gives the key in Isaiah 22, so an exact parallel would put Jesus in the place of God, not in the place of the king. If Jesus is God and Peter is the prime minister, then who is the king? Some church official with more authority than Peter? What about Isaiah 22:25? Should we assume that Popes can "break off and fall", and that the keys of Matthew 16 can eventually pass to God Himself (Revelation 3:7) rather than to a human successor? If Catholics only want to make a general appeal to Isaiah 22, without drawing an exact parallel, then how can they claim that papal authority is implied by the parallel? Why can't the Isaiah 22 background convey a general theme of authority without that authority being of a papal nature? For example, ancient Jewish tradition applied the imagery of Isaiah 22 to teachers without concluding that those teachers had something like papal authority (John Nolland, The Gospel Of Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2005], pp. 679-680).
John Nolland, after discussing some of the differences between Isaiah 22 and Matthew 16, such as the difference between "opening and shutting" and "binding and loosing", comments:
"So, in the absence of any support for a move from the language of opening and shutting to that of binding and loosing, despite the initial promise of a link between Mt. 16:19 and Is. 22:22 the search must in the end be abandoned." (ibid., p. 680)
Any relevance Isaiah 22 has in interpreting Matthew 16 is a vague relevance. There isn't anything specific enough to lead us to the conclusion that Peter was a Pope, much less that Roman bishops throughout church history would have papal authority.
"What do you think about Isaiah 22:22. Catholics use that verse to support their belief that Peter is the vicar of Christ on earth. I see the parallel: Christ could be the 'king' in the verse, and peter the 'prime minister.' How are Protestants to interpret this verse? It seems to scream 'PAPACY!' yikes."
Whatever relevance Isaiah 22 would have to Matthew 16, it would have some relevance for Matthew 23, Luke 11, and other passages that use such imagery as well. And any Catholic appeal to Isaiah 22 would have to be a partial appeal, not a complete parallel, since a complete parallel wouldn't favor the claims of Roman Catholicism. God is the one who gives the key in Isaiah 22, so an exact parallel would put Jesus in the place of God, not in the place of the king. If Jesus is God and Peter is the prime minister, then who is the king? Some church official with more authority than Peter? What about Isaiah 22:25? Should we assume that Popes can "break off and fall", and that the keys of Matthew 16 can eventually pass to God Himself (Revelation 3:7) rather than to a human successor? If Catholics only want to make a general appeal to Isaiah 22, without drawing an exact parallel, then how can they claim that papal authority is implied by the parallel? Why can't the Isaiah 22 background convey a general theme of authority without that authority being of a papal nature? For example, ancient Jewish tradition applied the imagery of Isaiah 22 to teachers without concluding that those teachers had something like papal authority (John Nolland, The Gospel Of Matthew [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2005], pp. 679-680).
John Nolland, after discussing some of the differences between Isaiah 22 and Matthew 16, such as the difference between "opening and shutting" and "binding and loosing", comments:
"So, in the absence of any support for a move from the language of opening and shutting to that of binding and loosing, despite the initial promise of a link between Mt. 16:19 and Is. 22:22 the search must in the end be abandoned." (ibid., p. 680)
Any relevance Isaiah 22 has in interpreting Matthew 16 is a vague relevance. There isn't anything specific enough to lead us to the conclusion that Peter was a Pope, much less that Roman bishops throughout church history would have papal authority.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
A Reformed Critique of Middle Knowledge
Articles on this topic are few and far between on the internet. Steve's thread reminded me that our friends at Monergism.com are hosting a good article on this. See here.
Soul-sleep
***QUOTE***
The Meaning of “Soul”
My dear -,
So good to hear from you. We need to talk more often.
“Soul” in both OT Hebrew and NT Greek is (I believe) equivalent to “life.” More and more NT scholars are recognizing that the idea of the soul as a separate, constituent segment of man is a Greek, not a Biblical, invention. In Gen. 1-2 we learn that God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul; God did not give him a soul — he became a soul. A dirt-formed human body into which God breathes life (spirit) = soul. Paul seems to tie immortality to the resurrection body, not to an immortal soul (1 Cor. 15). When we die, the breath (pneuma-spirit) returns to God, and it will reanimate the body at the resurrection.
http://www.andrewsandlin.net/?p=321
***END-QUOTE***
Several problems with this argument:
1.Sandlin is half-right. You can’t extract dualism from the bare meaning or isolated occurrence of the word “soul” in Scripture.
That would be semantically anachronistic, by conflating dogmatic usage with Biblical usage.
But Sandlin is half-wrong, for he makes the same mistake in reverse by supposing that you can extract dualism from the bare meaning or isolated occurrence of the word.
2. We do have a doctrine of the intermediate state in Scripture, and that dovetails with dualism.
The locus classicus is 2 Cor 5:1-10. Murray J. Harris, in the NIGTC volume, winnows the exegetical options.
Other prooftexts include Ps 73:24-25; Lk 16:19-31; 23:43; Acts 7:59; Phil 1:23, Rev 6:9-11; 7:9-10, & 14:13.
Indeed, the Book of Revelation is founded on the hope that while the world may do its worst to believers, martyrdom is a portal to heaven.
3. We also have a category of visionary revelation, which is described in terms of an out-of-body experience.
4. Not to mention the OT prohibitions against necromancy, which presuppose the survival of consciousness (e.g. 1 Sam 28).
5. Moses and Elijah appear to Jesus at the Transfiguration (Mt 17).
6. Annihilationism was the doctrine of the Sadducees (Mt 22:23; Acts 23:8).
7. The business about Platonic dualism is a musty canard. Belief in a discarnate afterlife was a commonplace in the ANE. That antedates, and is more culturally diffuse, than Platonic dualism. Platonic dualism was bound up with reincarnation.
I’m not going to rehearse all of the supporting arguments in detail. This is well-trodden ground. Standard treatments include:
J. Cooper. Body, Soul, & Life Everlasting (Regent 1995).
E. Fudge & R. Peterson. Two Views of Hell (IVP 2000).
G. Habermas & J. P. Moreland. Beyond Death (Crossway Books 1998).
A. Hoekema. The Bible & the Future (Eerdmans 1994).
P. Johnston. Shades of Sheol (IVP 2002).
R. Longenecker, ed. Life in the Face of Death (Eerdmans 1998).
C. Morgan & R. Peterson, eds. Hell Under Fire (Zondervan 2004).
Continuing with Sandlin:
***QUOTE***
The classic statement of this stuff is actually Oscar Cullmann’s Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?
Sam Bacchiocchi’s [book] Immortality or Resurrection? is even more definitive.
***END-QUOTE***
This is a very revealing recommendation. All I can say is that if Sandlin really sees eye-to-eye with Bacchiocchi, then his Presbytery should put him on trial for heresy and duly defrocked.
I’ll say nothing more, but let the book speak for itself. Here are some excerpts:
http://english.sdaglobal.org/dnl/bacchi/books/immorres.pdf
FOREWORD
by
Clark H. Pinnock
Let me welcome another splendid book from Dr. Samuele Bacchiocchi. In the tradition of Oscar Cullmann, Dr. Bacchiocchi has demonstrated in a much fuller way the contrast between the primitive Christian hope for the resurrection of the dead and the Hellenistic expectation of the survival of the immortal soul. In this fine new book, he offers a thorough biblical study of human nature as an indivisible unity and draws out implications for our destiny and many other matters.
Anthropological dualism has done such a serious harm in weakening our blessed hope of Christ’s appearing and in distorting our understanding of the world to come…Worst of all, it has given rise to the sadistic teaching that God makes the wicked suffer unending conscious torment in hell, which has been such a burden to the Christian conscience and such unnecessary offense to many seekers.
A large number of scholars agree with the author as regards human nature but no one has so courageously drawn out many of the necessary implications. This book is much needed in order to combat the persistent but mistaken opinion among Christians that the soul is an immortal substance, a belief which is both unbiblical and harmful. I congratulate Dr. Bacchiocchi and thank him for this decisive volume.
INTRODUCTION
Why write a book on the Biblical view of human nature and destiny?
The massive scholarly assault on the traditional dualistic view of human nature eventually will filter through the rank and file of Christian denominations. When this happens, it will cause intellectual and personal crisis to Christians accustomed to believing that at death their souls break loose from their bodies and continue to exist either in the beatitude of paradise or in the torment of hell. Many Christians will be sorely disappointed to discover that their beliefs in the after life are a delusion.
There is no question that Biblical scholarship is bound to cause a great deal of existential anxiety to millions of Christians who believe in going to heaven at death with their disembodied souls. Any challenge to traditionally held beliefs can be devastating.
Dualism defines death as the separation of the soul from the body; the state of the dead as the conscious existence of disembodied souls either in the bliss of paradise or in the torment of hell; the resurrection as the reattachment of a glorified material body to a spiritual soul; the Christian Hope as the ascension of the soul to the bliss of paradise; the final punishment as the eternal torment of body and soul in hellfire; and paradise as a spiritual, heavenly retreat where glorified, spiritual saints spend eternity in everlasting
contemplation and meditation.
By contrast, Christians who accept the Biblical wholistic view of human nature, consisting of an indivisible unity of body, soul, and spirit, also envision a wholistic type of human life and destiny. They define wholistically death as the cessation of life for the whole person; the state of the dead as the rest of the whole person in the grave until the resurrection; the Christian Hope as the expectation of Christ’s return to resurrect the whole person; the final punishment as the annihilation of the whole person in hellfire; paradise as this whole planet earth restored to its original perfection, and inhabited by real people who will engage in real activities.
Author of Foreword.
Among the many authors I have read in preparing for this book, Prof. Clark H. Pinnock stands out as the one who made the
greatest contribution to the development of my thoughts. Pinnock is a highly respected evangelical scholar, author of numerous books, and a former president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is to be commended not only for challenging with compelling Biblical reasoning the traditional dualistic view of human nature and of unending conscious torment in hell, but also for being willing to face courageously the harassment from those evangelicals who disagree with his position. There are evangelical scholars who share Pinnock’s views, but they prefer to keep their convictions private to avoid unpleasant negative reactions. Pinnock has shown that he is not afraid to take “the heat” for challenging what he considers unbiblical teachings.
What Christians believe about the make-up of their human nature largely determines what they believe about their ultimate destiny. Those who believe their nature is dualistic, that is, consisting of a material, mortal body and a spiritual, immortal soul, generally envision a destiny where their immortal souls will survive the death of their body and will spend eternity either in the bliss of paradise or in the torment of hell.
Special attention is given to the study of hell in chapter 6, in view of the widespread rejection of the traditional view of hell as conscious torment.
Human beings do not possess a mortal body and an immortal soul; they have a wholistic mortal body and soul which can become immortal. Immortality or eternal life is God’s gift to those who accept His provision of salvation. Those who reject God’s plan for their salvation ultimately will experience eternal destruction, not eternal torment in an ever-burning hellfire. The reason is simple. Immortality is given as a recompense to the saved, not as a
retribution to the unsaved.
Philosophers and scientists also have contributed to the massive assault against the traditional dualistic view of human nature. Philosophers have attacked traditional arguments that the soul is an immortal substance that survives the death of the body. They have proposed alternative theories according to which the soul is an aspect of the human body and not a separate component.
Scientists, too, have challenged the belief in the independent existence of the soul by showing that human consciousness is dependent on and influenced by the brain. At death, the brain ceases to function and all forms of consciousness stop. To scientists the cessation of all mental functions at death suggests it is highly unlikely that the mental functions ascribed to the
soul can be carried out after death.
These concerted attacks on dualism by Biblical scholars, church historians, philosophers, and scientists have led liberal and even some conservative Christians to reject the traditional dualistic view of human nature.
There is no question that modern Biblical scholarship is causing great “existential anxiety” to millions of sincere Christians who believe in their disembodied souls going to heaven at death. Any challenge to traditionally cherished beliefs can be devastating.
Tactics of Harassment.
In some cases, the reaction has taken the form of harassment. Respected Canadian theologian Clark Pinnock mentions some of the “tactics of harassment” used to discredit those evangelical scholars who have abandoned the traditional dualistic view of human nature and its related doctrine of eternal torment in a fiery hell. One of the tactics has been to associate such scholars with liberals or sectarians like the Adventists.
Despite the tactics of harassment, the Biblical wholistic view of human nature which negates the natural immortality of the soul and, consequently, the eternal torment of the unsaved in hell, is gaining ground among evangelicals. Its public endorsement by John R. W. Stott, a highly respected British theologian and popular preacher, is certainly encouraging the trend.
“In a delicious piece of irony,” writes Pinnock, “this is creating a measure of accreditation by association, countering the same tactics used against it. It has become all but impossible to claim that only heretics and near-heretics [like Seventh-day Adventists] hold the position, though I am sure some will dismiss Stott’s orthodoxy precisely on this ground.”
Stott’s plea for a “frank dialogue among evangelicals on the basis of Scripture” may be very difficult if not impossible, to realize.
To be an “Evangelical” means to uphold certain fundamental traditional doctrines without questioning. Anyone who dares to question the Biblical validity of a traditional doctrine can become suspect as a “heretic.” In a major conference held in 1989 to discuss what it means to be an evangelical, serious questions were raised as to whether such persons like John Stott or Philip Hughes should be considered evangelical, since they had adopted the view of conditional immortality and the annihilation of the unsaved. The vote to exclude such theologians failed only narrowly.
Why evangelicals are so adamant in refusing to reconsider the Biblical teachings on human nature and destiny? After all, they have taken the liberty of changing other old traditional teachings. Perhaps one reason for their insistence on holding to the dualistic view is that it impacts on so many other doctrines. We noted at the beginning of this chapter that what Christians believe about the make-up of human nature largely determines what they believe about human destiny. To abandon dualism, also entails abandoning a whole cluster of doctrines resulting from it. This may be called “the domino effect.” If one doctrine falls, several others fall as well. To clarify this point, we briefly consider some of the doctrinal and practical implications of classical dualism. This should alert the reader to its complex ramifications.
Implications of Dualism
Doctrinal Implications.
The classical dualistic view of human nature has enormous doctrinal and practical implications. Doctrinally, a host of beliefs derive from or are largely dependent upon classical dualism.
The Reformers eliminated the doctrine of purgatory as unbiblical, but they retained the doctrine of the immediate transit after death of individual souls to a state of perfect blessedness (heaven) or to a state of continuous punishment (hell). Again, if the belief in the survival and functioning of the soul apart from the body is proven to be unbiblical, then popular beliefs about purgatory, indulgences, and transit of the souls to heaven or to hell must be rejected also as ecclesiastical fabrications.
The work that the Reformers began by eliminating purgatory now
would have to be completed by redefining paradise and hell according to Scripture and not ecclesiastical traditions. It is unlikely that such a monumental task can be undertaken by any Protestant church today. Any attempt to modify or reject traditional doctrines is often interpreted as a betrayal of the faith and can cause division and fragmentation. This is a very high price that most churches are not willing to pay.
The Meaning of “Soul”
My dear -,
So good to hear from you. We need to talk more often.
“Soul” in both OT Hebrew and NT Greek is (I believe) equivalent to “life.” More and more NT scholars are recognizing that the idea of the soul as a separate, constituent segment of man is a Greek, not a Biblical, invention. In Gen. 1-2 we learn that God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul; God did not give him a soul — he became a soul. A dirt-formed human body into which God breathes life (spirit) = soul. Paul seems to tie immortality to the resurrection body, not to an immortal soul (1 Cor. 15). When we die, the breath (pneuma-spirit) returns to God, and it will reanimate the body at the resurrection.
http://www.andrewsandlin.net/?p=321
***END-QUOTE***
Several problems with this argument:
1.Sandlin is half-right. You can’t extract dualism from the bare meaning or isolated occurrence of the word “soul” in Scripture.
That would be semantically anachronistic, by conflating dogmatic usage with Biblical usage.
But Sandlin is half-wrong, for he makes the same mistake in reverse by supposing that you can extract dualism from the bare meaning or isolated occurrence of the word.
2. We do have a doctrine of the intermediate state in Scripture, and that dovetails with dualism.
The locus classicus is 2 Cor 5:1-10. Murray J. Harris, in the NIGTC volume, winnows the exegetical options.
Other prooftexts include Ps 73:24-25; Lk 16:19-31; 23:43; Acts 7:59; Phil 1:23, Rev 6:9-11; 7:9-10, & 14:13.
Indeed, the Book of Revelation is founded on the hope that while the world may do its worst to believers, martyrdom is a portal to heaven.
3. We also have a category of visionary revelation, which is described in terms of an out-of-body experience.
4. Not to mention the OT prohibitions against necromancy, which presuppose the survival of consciousness (e.g. 1 Sam 28).
5. Moses and Elijah appear to Jesus at the Transfiguration (Mt 17).
6. Annihilationism was the doctrine of the Sadducees (Mt 22:23; Acts 23:8).
7. The business about Platonic dualism is a musty canard. Belief in a discarnate afterlife was a commonplace in the ANE. That antedates, and is more culturally diffuse, than Platonic dualism. Platonic dualism was bound up with reincarnation.
I’m not going to rehearse all of the supporting arguments in detail. This is well-trodden ground. Standard treatments include:
J. Cooper. Body, Soul, & Life Everlasting (Regent 1995).
E. Fudge & R. Peterson. Two Views of Hell (IVP 2000).
G. Habermas & J. P. Moreland. Beyond Death (Crossway Books 1998).
A. Hoekema. The Bible & the Future (Eerdmans 1994).
P. Johnston. Shades of Sheol (IVP 2002).
R. Longenecker, ed. Life in the Face of Death (Eerdmans 1998).
C. Morgan & R. Peterson, eds. Hell Under Fire (Zondervan 2004).
Continuing with Sandlin:
***QUOTE***
The classic statement of this stuff is actually Oscar Cullmann’s Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?
Sam Bacchiocchi’s [book] Immortality or Resurrection? is even more definitive.
***END-QUOTE***
This is a very revealing recommendation. All I can say is that if Sandlin really sees eye-to-eye with Bacchiocchi, then his Presbytery should put him on trial for heresy and duly defrocked.
I’ll say nothing more, but let the book speak for itself. Here are some excerpts:
http://english.sdaglobal.org/dnl/bacchi/books/immorres.pdf
FOREWORD
by
Clark H. Pinnock
Let me welcome another splendid book from Dr. Samuele Bacchiocchi. In the tradition of Oscar Cullmann, Dr. Bacchiocchi has demonstrated in a much fuller way the contrast between the primitive Christian hope for the resurrection of the dead and the Hellenistic expectation of the survival of the immortal soul. In this fine new book, he offers a thorough biblical study of human nature as an indivisible unity and draws out implications for our destiny and many other matters.
Anthropological dualism has done such a serious harm in weakening our blessed hope of Christ’s appearing and in distorting our understanding of the world to come…Worst of all, it has given rise to the sadistic teaching that God makes the wicked suffer unending conscious torment in hell, which has been such a burden to the Christian conscience and such unnecessary offense to many seekers.
A large number of scholars agree with the author as regards human nature but no one has so courageously drawn out many of the necessary implications. This book is much needed in order to combat the persistent but mistaken opinion among Christians that the soul is an immortal substance, a belief which is both unbiblical and harmful. I congratulate Dr. Bacchiocchi and thank him for this decisive volume.
INTRODUCTION
Why write a book on the Biblical view of human nature and destiny?
The massive scholarly assault on the traditional dualistic view of human nature eventually will filter through the rank and file of Christian denominations. When this happens, it will cause intellectual and personal crisis to Christians accustomed to believing that at death their souls break loose from their bodies and continue to exist either in the beatitude of paradise or in the torment of hell. Many Christians will be sorely disappointed to discover that their beliefs in the after life are a delusion.
There is no question that Biblical scholarship is bound to cause a great deal of existential anxiety to millions of Christians who believe in going to heaven at death with their disembodied souls. Any challenge to traditionally held beliefs can be devastating.
Dualism defines death as the separation of the soul from the body; the state of the dead as the conscious existence of disembodied souls either in the bliss of paradise or in the torment of hell; the resurrection as the reattachment of a glorified material body to a spiritual soul; the Christian Hope as the ascension of the soul to the bliss of paradise; the final punishment as the eternal torment of body and soul in hellfire; and paradise as a spiritual, heavenly retreat where glorified, spiritual saints spend eternity in everlasting
contemplation and meditation.
By contrast, Christians who accept the Biblical wholistic view of human nature, consisting of an indivisible unity of body, soul, and spirit, also envision a wholistic type of human life and destiny. They define wholistically death as the cessation of life for the whole person; the state of the dead as the rest of the whole person in the grave until the resurrection; the Christian Hope as the expectation of Christ’s return to resurrect the whole person; the final punishment as the annihilation of the whole person in hellfire; paradise as this whole planet earth restored to its original perfection, and inhabited by real people who will engage in real activities.
Author of Foreword.
Among the many authors I have read in preparing for this book, Prof. Clark H. Pinnock stands out as the one who made the
greatest contribution to the development of my thoughts. Pinnock is a highly respected evangelical scholar, author of numerous books, and a former president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is to be commended not only for challenging with compelling Biblical reasoning the traditional dualistic view of human nature and of unending conscious torment in hell, but also for being willing to face courageously the harassment from those evangelicals who disagree with his position. There are evangelical scholars who share Pinnock’s views, but they prefer to keep their convictions private to avoid unpleasant negative reactions. Pinnock has shown that he is not afraid to take “the heat” for challenging what he considers unbiblical teachings.
What Christians believe about the make-up of their human nature largely determines what they believe about their ultimate destiny. Those who believe their nature is dualistic, that is, consisting of a material, mortal body and a spiritual, immortal soul, generally envision a destiny where their immortal souls will survive the death of their body and will spend eternity either in the bliss of paradise or in the torment of hell.
Special attention is given to the study of hell in chapter 6, in view of the widespread rejection of the traditional view of hell as conscious torment.
Human beings do not possess a mortal body and an immortal soul; they have a wholistic mortal body and soul which can become immortal. Immortality or eternal life is God’s gift to those who accept His provision of salvation. Those who reject God’s plan for their salvation ultimately will experience eternal destruction, not eternal torment in an ever-burning hellfire. The reason is simple. Immortality is given as a recompense to the saved, not as a
retribution to the unsaved.
Philosophers and scientists also have contributed to the massive assault against the traditional dualistic view of human nature. Philosophers have attacked traditional arguments that the soul is an immortal substance that survives the death of the body. They have proposed alternative theories according to which the soul is an aspect of the human body and not a separate component.
Scientists, too, have challenged the belief in the independent existence of the soul by showing that human consciousness is dependent on and influenced by the brain. At death, the brain ceases to function and all forms of consciousness stop. To scientists the cessation of all mental functions at death suggests it is highly unlikely that the mental functions ascribed to the
soul can be carried out after death.
These concerted attacks on dualism by Biblical scholars, church historians, philosophers, and scientists have led liberal and even some conservative Christians to reject the traditional dualistic view of human nature.
There is no question that modern Biblical scholarship is causing great “existential anxiety” to millions of sincere Christians who believe in their disembodied souls going to heaven at death. Any challenge to traditionally cherished beliefs can be devastating.
Tactics of Harassment.
In some cases, the reaction has taken the form of harassment. Respected Canadian theologian Clark Pinnock mentions some of the “tactics of harassment” used to discredit those evangelical scholars who have abandoned the traditional dualistic view of human nature and its related doctrine of eternal torment in a fiery hell. One of the tactics has been to associate such scholars with liberals or sectarians like the Adventists.
Despite the tactics of harassment, the Biblical wholistic view of human nature which negates the natural immortality of the soul and, consequently, the eternal torment of the unsaved in hell, is gaining ground among evangelicals. Its public endorsement by John R. W. Stott, a highly respected British theologian and popular preacher, is certainly encouraging the trend.
“In a delicious piece of irony,” writes Pinnock, “this is creating a measure of accreditation by association, countering the same tactics used against it. It has become all but impossible to claim that only heretics and near-heretics [like Seventh-day Adventists] hold the position, though I am sure some will dismiss Stott’s orthodoxy precisely on this ground.”
Stott’s plea for a “frank dialogue among evangelicals on the basis of Scripture” may be very difficult if not impossible, to realize.
To be an “Evangelical” means to uphold certain fundamental traditional doctrines without questioning. Anyone who dares to question the Biblical validity of a traditional doctrine can become suspect as a “heretic.” In a major conference held in 1989 to discuss what it means to be an evangelical, serious questions were raised as to whether such persons like John Stott or Philip Hughes should be considered evangelical, since they had adopted the view of conditional immortality and the annihilation of the unsaved. The vote to exclude such theologians failed only narrowly.
Why evangelicals are so adamant in refusing to reconsider the Biblical teachings on human nature and destiny? After all, they have taken the liberty of changing other old traditional teachings. Perhaps one reason for their insistence on holding to the dualistic view is that it impacts on so many other doctrines. We noted at the beginning of this chapter that what Christians believe about the make-up of human nature largely determines what they believe about human destiny. To abandon dualism, also entails abandoning a whole cluster of doctrines resulting from it. This may be called “the domino effect.” If one doctrine falls, several others fall as well. To clarify this point, we briefly consider some of the doctrinal and practical implications of classical dualism. This should alert the reader to its complex ramifications.
Implications of Dualism
Doctrinal Implications.
The classical dualistic view of human nature has enormous doctrinal and practical implications. Doctrinally, a host of beliefs derive from or are largely dependent upon classical dualism.
The Reformers eliminated the doctrine of purgatory as unbiblical, but they retained the doctrine of the immediate transit after death of individual souls to a state of perfect blessedness (heaven) or to a state of continuous punishment (hell). Again, if the belief in the survival and functioning of the soul apart from the body is proven to be unbiblical, then popular beliefs about purgatory, indulgences, and transit of the souls to heaven or to hell must be rejected also as ecclesiastical fabrications.
The work that the Reformers began by eliminating purgatory now
would have to be completed by redefining paradise and hell according to Scripture and not ecclesiastical traditions. It is unlikely that such a monumental task can be undertaken by any Protestant church today. Any attempt to modify or reject traditional doctrines is often interpreted as a betrayal of the faith and can cause division and fragmentation. This is a very high price that most churches are not willing to pay.
1 Tim 2:4
To my knowledge, Philip Towner is not a Calvinist, so his interpretation cannot be chalked up to partisan sympathies:
“The purpose of the reference to ‘all people,” which continues the theme of universality in this passage, is sometimes misconstrued. The reference is made mainly with the Pauline mission to the Gentiles in mind (v7). But the reason behind Paul’s justification of this universal mission is almost certainly the false teaching, with its Torah-centered approach to life that included either an exclusivist bent or a downplaying of the Gentile mission,” The Letters to Timothy & Titus (Eerdmans 2006), 177.
“Paul’s focus is on building a people of God who incorporate all people regardless of ethnic, social, or economic backgrounds,” ibid. 178.
“The possibility that this text expresses a thoroughgoing ‘universalism’…is removed by the consistent emphasis on faith for salvation in 1 Tim (1:16; 3:16; 4:10; cf. 2 Tim 1:5),” ibid. 178, n.38.
“The purpose of the reference to ‘all people,” which continues the theme of universality in this passage, is sometimes misconstrued. The reference is made mainly with the Pauline mission to the Gentiles in mind (v7). But the reason behind Paul’s justification of this universal mission is almost certainly the false teaching, with its Torah-centered approach to life that included either an exclusivist bent or a downplaying of the Gentile mission,” The Letters to Timothy & Titus (Eerdmans 2006), 177.
“Paul’s focus is on building a people of God who incorporate all people regardless of ethnic, social, or economic backgrounds,” ibid. 178.
“The possibility that this text expresses a thoroughgoing ‘universalism’…is removed by the consistent emphasis on faith for salvation in 1 Tim (1:16; 3:16; 4:10; cf. 2 Tim 1:5),” ibid. 178, n.38.
Freer or fairer?
Alan: It is not potential b/c though "everyone" "could" choose Christ, very few actually *will* (see Christ's comments on the narrow way vs. the wide way).
SH: It’s precisely the could/will discrepancy which makes it potential rather than actual
Alan: Everyone does not have an *equal* chance to be saved, but everyone does get at least a chance to be saved, some more than others. God decides who gets more chances than others (ie, who will be born in Texas vs. who will be born in Saudi Arabia) but everyone gets at least a chance to make a real choice.
SH: That’s a compromise position. In a way, the Arminian doesn’t have a choice (pardon the pun).
His principles are egalitarian, but the real world is very inequitable.
So, to some extent he is forced to adjust his egalitarian principles to the grim reality.
Hence, he’s left with a compromise position.
Suppose you had two football teams in which one side only had half the players of the other side.
The team with half the compliment of players will still have the off chance of winning once in a blue moon, but the odds would be unfair, and since Arminian theology is all about fairness, it isn’t enough for one team to play at such a disadvantage—just on the outside chance that it might possibly win.
This is why some contemporary Arminians like Davis, Bloesch, Fackre, and Walls resort to the makeshift expedient of postmortem evangelism.
It’s a stopgap to putty over the discrepancy between their egalitarian theory and the inequitable reality.
Alan: (Obviously, this kind of implies that the 5-point Calvinist position does not allow for a "real" choice on the part of the person in question. Perhaps you'd like to comment on that, too. It would be relevant.)
SH: Rather than rehearse the usual arguments for compatibilism, I’d just point out that the deeper problem is internal to Arminianism.
If we attribute sin to the abuse of (libertarian) freedom, then one free agent is free to use his freedom in order to infringe on the freedom of another free agent.
So you very quickly degenerate into a situation where some free agents are far freer than others.
Thus, you have this tension at the heart of Arminian theology. A tug of war between freedom and fairness.
To be free is to be free to be unfair to your fellow free agent. If it’s free, it isn’t fair—if it’s fair, it isn’t free.
SH: It’s precisely the could/will discrepancy which makes it potential rather than actual
Alan: Everyone does not have an *equal* chance to be saved, but everyone does get at least a chance to be saved, some more than others. God decides who gets more chances than others (ie, who will be born in Texas vs. who will be born in Saudi Arabia) but everyone gets at least a chance to make a real choice.
SH: That’s a compromise position. In a way, the Arminian doesn’t have a choice (pardon the pun).
His principles are egalitarian, but the real world is very inequitable.
So, to some extent he is forced to adjust his egalitarian principles to the grim reality.
Hence, he’s left with a compromise position.
Suppose you had two football teams in which one side only had half the players of the other side.
The team with half the compliment of players will still have the off chance of winning once in a blue moon, but the odds would be unfair, and since Arminian theology is all about fairness, it isn’t enough for one team to play at such a disadvantage—just on the outside chance that it might possibly win.
This is why some contemporary Arminians like Davis, Bloesch, Fackre, and Walls resort to the makeshift expedient of postmortem evangelism.
It’s a stopgap to putty over the discrepancy between their egalitarian theory and the inequitable reality.
Alan: (Obviously, this kind of implies that the 5-point Calvinist position does not allow for a "real" choice on the part of the person in question. Perhaps you'd like to comment on that, too. It would be relevant.)
SH: Rather than rehearse the usual arguments for compatibilism, I’d just point out that the deeper problem is internal to Arminianism.
If we attribute sin to the abuse of (libertarian) freedom, then one free agent is free to use his freedom in order to infringe on the freedom of another free agent.
So you very quickly degenerate into a situation where some free agents are far freer than others.
Thus, you have this tension at the heart of Arminian theology. A tug of war between freedom and fairness.
To be free is to be free to be unfair to your fellow free agent. If it’s free, it isn’t fair—if it’s fair, it isn’t free.
"No Other Name": A Muddle Knowledge Perspective on the Exclusivity of Salvation Through Christ
I recently argued that only Calvinism can logically support the proposition that we are saved by faith alone through grace alone in Christ alone.
Victor Reppert has countered this claim by appealing to William Lane Craig’s Molinist alternative. See here:
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/middle2.html
And here:
http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/08/if-exclusivism-then-calvinism.html
I will therefore offer a running commentary on the article adduced by Dr. Reppert.
“The conviction of the New Testament writers was that there is no salvation apart from Jesus.”
This is ambiguous. It can either mean:
i) Christ is the only Savior, simpliciter.
Or:
ii) Christ, as the only Savior, will save all those and only those who believe in him.
Throughout his article, Craig oscillates between these two propositions. But they are hardly interchangeable.
Moving along:
“But with the so-called ‘Expansion of Europe’ during the three centuries of exploration and discovery from 1450 to 1750, the situation changed radically.{6} It was now seen that far from being the universal religion, Christianity was confined to a small comer of the globe. This realization had a two-fold impact upon people's religious thinking: (i) it tended toward the relativization of religious beliefs. Since each religious system was historically and geographically limited, it seemed incredible that any of them should be regarded as universally true. It seemed that the only religion which could make a universal claim upon mankind would be a sort of general religion of nature. (ii) It tended to make Christianity's claim to exclusivity appear unjustly narrow and cruel. If salvation was only through faith in Christ, then the majority of the human race was condemned to eternal damnation, since they had not so much as even heard of Christ. Again, only a natural religion available to all men seemed consistent with a fair and loving God.”
Here Craig is making a historical observation without necessarily stating his own position. But it’s still worth commenting upon.
The exclusive claims of Scripture were not framed in ignorance of the alternatives. To the contrary, they were framed in explicit contrast to the alternatives.
Both the OT and the NT were revealed in a religiously pluralistic culture.
In the same vein, Craig also quotes something from John Hick, under whom he studied:
***QUOTE***
For understood literally the Son of God, God the Son, God-incarnate language implies that God can be adequately known and responded to only through Jesus; and the whole religious life of mankind, beyond the stream of Judaic-Christian faith is thus by implication excluded as lying outside the sphere of salvation. This implication did little positive harm so long as Christendom was a largely autonomous civilization with only relatively marginal interaction with the rest of mankind. But with the clash between the Christian and Muslim worlds, and then on an ever-broadening front with European colonization through the earth, the literal understanding of the mythological language of Christian discipleship has had a divisive effect upon the relations between that minority of human beings who live within the borders of the Christian tradition and that majority who live outside it and within other streams of religious life.
Transposed into theological terms, the problem which has come to the surface in the encounter of Christianity with the other world religions is this: If Jesus was literally God incarnate, and if it is by his death alone that men can be saved, and by their response to him alone that they can appropriate that salvation, then the only doorway to eternal life is Christian faith. It would follow from this that the large majority of the human race so far have not been saved. But is it credible that the loving God and Father of all men has decreed that only those born within one particular thread of human history shall be saved?{11}
***END-QUOTE***
This is not representative of Craig’s own position. But I’ll comment on it anyway:
There are several problems with Hick’s contention:
i) As noted above, both OT and NT Jews were very conversant with the phenomenon of religious pluralism. That was, indeed, a perennial threat to the integrity of their own religious affiliation.
ii) The fact that the Incarnation may be divisive is irrelevant to its veracity. Is Hick staking out the position that nothing true can be divisive?
iii) Related to (ii), the divisive consequences of the Incarnation are irrelevant to the correct interpretation of NT Christological claims.
Hick is superimposing his own viewpoint onto the perspective of the NT writers. The fact that he is tolerant (as he defines tolerance) doesn’t mean they were tolerant.
And the further fact that the Incarnation might be divisive doesn’t mean that they ever intended their claims to be mythopoetic rather than literal.
iv) Hick can only justify his religious pluralism by treating “God” as ineffable or inscrutable.
But in that event, Hick forfeits the right to invoke the loving fatherhood of God.
Back to Craig:
“According to the New Testament, God does not want anyone to perish, but desires that all persons repent and be saved and come to know the truth (2 Peter 3.9; 1 Timothy 2.4).”
I disagree with Craig’s interpretation. His appeal to 1 Tim 2:4 commits the intensional fallacy by equating the sense of the universal quantifier with its referent.
His appeal to 2 Pet 3:9 fails to take into account the observation of Bauckham that “the author remains close to his Jewish source, for in Jewish thought it was usually for the sake of the repentance of his own people that God delayed judgment,” 2 Peter, Jude (Word 1983), 313.
Along the same lines, Craig’s case is also prized on divine “omnibenevolence.” But Paul Helm has written a provocative article in which he argues that the idea of divine omnibenevolence is incoherent inasmuch as it treats human beings as if they were discrete units rather than social creatures. Cf.
"Can God Love the World?" Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God, K. Vanhoozer, ed. (Eerdmans 2001), chap. 8.
Continuing with Craig:
“Those who make a well-informed and free decision to reject Christ are self-condemned, since they repudiate God's unique sacrifice for sin.”
Here’s another problem. Throughout this article, Craig uses the adjective “free” without defining his terms. But this is a key issue. For there’s a basic difference between a compatibilist and a libertarian definition of free agency.
Here’s a contrast between one definition and another:
***QUOTE***
According to compatibilists, we do have free will. They propound a sense of the word 'free' according to which free will is compatible with determinism, even though determinism is the view that the history of the universe is fixed in such a way that nothing can happen otherwise than it does because everything that happens is necessitated by what has already gone before (see Determinism And indeterminism).
Suppose tomorrow is a national holiday. You are considering what to do. You can climb a mountain or read Lao Tse. You can mend your bicycle or go to the zoo. At this moment you are reading the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. You are free to go on reading or stop now. You have started on this sentence, but you don't have to... finish it.
In this situation, as so often in life, you have a number of options. Nothing forces your hand. It seems natural to say that you are entirely free to choose what to do. And, given that nothing hinders you, it seems natural to say that you act entirely freely when you actually do (or try to do) what you have decided to do.
Compatibilists claim that this is the right thing to say. They believe that to have free will, to be a free agent, to be free in choice and action, is simply to be free from constraints of certain sorts. Freedom is a matter of not being physically or psychologically forced or compelled to do what one does. Your character, personality, preferences, and general motivational set may be entirely determined by events for which you are in no way responsible (by your genetic inheritance, upbringing, subsequent experience, and so on). But you do not have to be in control of any of these things in order to have compatibilist freedom. They do not constrain or compel you, because compatibilist freedom is just a matter of being able to choose and act in the way one prefers or thinks best given how one is. As its name declares, it is compatible with determinism. It is compatible with determinism even though it follows from determinism that every aspect of your character, and everything you will ever do, was already inevitable before you were born.
If determinism does not count as a constraint or compulsion, what does? Compatibilists standardly take it that freedom can be limited by such things as imprisonment, by a gun at one's head, or a threat to the life of one's children, or a psychological obsession and so on.
It is arguable, however, that compatibilist freedom is something one continues to possess undiminished so long as one can choose or act in any way at all. One continues to possess it in any situation in which one is not actually panicked, or literally compelled to do what one does, in such a way that it is not clear that one can still be said to choose or act at all (as when one presses a button, because one's finger is actually forced down on the button).
All circumstances limit one's options in some way. It is true that some circumstances limit one's options much more drastically than others; but it does not follow that one is not free to choose in those circumstances. Only literal compulsion, panic, or uncontrollable impulse really removes one's freedom to choose, and to (try to) do what one most wants to do given one's character or personality. Even when one's finger is being forced down on the button, one can still act freely in resisting the pressure, and in many other ways.
Most of us are free to choose throughout our waking lives, according to the compatibilist conception of freedom. We are free to choose between the options that we perceive to be open to us. (Sometimes we would rather not face options, but are unable to avoid awareness of the fact that we do face them.) One has options even when one is in chains, or falling through space. Even if one is completely paralysed, one is still free in so far as one is free to choose to think about one thing rather than another. Sartre (1948 ) observed that there is a sense in which we are 'condemned' to freedom, not free not to be free.
Of course one may well not be able to do everything one wants - one may want to fly unassisted, vapourize every gun in the United States by an act of thought, or house all those who sleep on the streets of Calcutta by the end of the month. But few have supposed that free will, or free agency, is a matter of being able to do everything one wants. That is one possible view of what it is to be free; but according to the compatibilists, free will is simply a matter of having genuine options and opportunities for action, and being able to choose between them according to what one wants or thinks best.
http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014SECT1
Those who want to secure the conclusion that we are free agents do well to adopt a compatibilist theory of freedom, for determinism is unfalsifiable, and may be true. (Contemporary physics gives us no more reason to suppose that determinism is false than to suppose that it is true - though this is contested; for further discussion see Determinism and indeterminism .) Many, however, think that the compatibilist account of things does not even touch the real problem of free will. They believe that all compatibilist theories of freedom are patently inadequate.
What is it, they say, to define freedom in such a way that it is compatible with determinism? It is to define it in such a way that a creature can be a free agent even if all its actions throughout its life are determined to happen as they do by events that have taken place before it is born: so that there is a clear sense in which it could not at any point in its life have done otherwise than it did. This, they say, is certainly not free will. More importantly, it is not a sufficient basis for true moral responsibility. One cannot possibly be truly or ultimately morally responsible for what one does if everything one does is ultimately a deterministic outcome of events that took place before one was born; or (more generally) a deterministic outcome of events for whose occurrence one is in no way ultimately responsible.
http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014SECT2
“By ‘libertarian freedom’ is mean freedom such that the agent who makes a choice is really able, under exactly the same circumstances, to choose something different from the thing that is in fact chosen. The choices in question, then, are not causally determined to occur as they do; libertarian freedom is inherently indeterministic. This means that there is nothing whatever that predetermines which choice will be made, until the creature is actually placed in the situation and makes the decision,” (W. Hasker), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, M. Peterson & R. VanArragon, eds. (Blackwell 2004), 219.
***END-QUOTE***
For further discussion, cf.
R. Kane, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (Oxford 2002)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/
As we shall see, Craig apparently combines a Wesleyan version of grace with a libertarian version of freewill.
Prevenient/sufficient grace restores the fallen will to a state of libertarian freedom.
Another basic failing of Craig’s article is that he assumes a libertarian version of action theory without ever defending it.
Moving along:
“By spurning God's prevenient grace and the solicitation of His Spirit, they shut out God's mercy and seal their own destiny.”
On a related note, Craig is assuming rather than defending a Wesleyan theory of grace. But this is open to challenge. Cf.
T. Schreiner, “Does Scripture Teach Prevenient Grace in the Wesleyan Sense?” T. Schreiner & B. Ware, eds. Still Sovereign (Baker 2000), 229-46.
Craig can only salvage sola gratia by defining grace as resistible and ineffectual.
Continuing:
“They, therefore, and not God, are responsible for their condemnation, and God deeply mourns their loss.”
Perhaps this is a semantic distinction, but Craig seems to use “responsible” as synonymous with “blameworthy.”
I, however, would distinguish the two. God is responsible for everything that happens, although he’s not solely responsible, and he blameless for whatever happens.
“One could maintain that God graciously applies to such persons the benefits of Christ's atoning death without their conscious knowledge thereof on the basis of their response to the light of general revelation and the truth that they do have.”
Yes, that theoretical option is available, but it comes at a cost:
i) Craig can only salvage solus Christus by sacrificing sola fide. This would confirm my assertion of an internal relation between Reformed particularism and the Reformational soli.
ii) Is it Scriptural to dump sole fide?
Moving along:
“Even as He did in the case of Old Testament figures like Job who were outside the covenant of Israel.{12}”
A problem with this sort of appeal is that Job and other OT saints of Gentilic extraction were not saved by general revelation, but by special revelation. They came to a saving knowledge of the true God via their contact with the covenant community.
“If we take Scripture seriously, we must admit that the vast majority of persons in the world are condemned and will be forever lost, even if in some relatively rare cases a person might be saved through his response to the light that he has apart from special revelation.{13}”
Actually, there are Reformed postmils who deny this by combining a doctrine of universal infant salvation (in case of infant mortality) with a postmil eschatology.
However, I’m inclined to agree with Craig on this point.
Moving along:
“Now all of these questions appear, at least, to presuppose that certain counterfactuals of freedom concerning people's response to God's gracious initiatives are true, and the last two seem to presuppose that God's omniscience embraces a species of knowledge known as middle knowledge (scientia media). For if there are no true counterfactuals of freedom, it is not true that certain persons would receive Christ if they were to hear the gospel, nor can God be held responsible for the number of the lost if He lacks middle knowledge, for without such knowledge He could only guess in the moment logically prior to His decree to create the world how many and, indeed, whether any persons would freely receive Christ (or whether He would even send Christ!) and be saved. Let us assume, then, that some such counterfactuals are true and that God has middle knowledge.{14}”
One of the problems here is not with his appeal to counterfactuals, per se, but with the way he defines counterfactual freedom in libertarian terms.
Once again, he’s assuming what he needs to prove.
For example, a Calvinist could affirm the counterfactuals of freedom, but define freedom in compatibilist terms.
Likewise, a Calvinist could affirm the counterfactuals of freedom, but assign them then to the agency of God rather than the agency of man.
Craig is simply supposing that you need to index counterfactual freedom to the human will rather than the divine will.
No supporting argument is offered to warrant his presumption.
Counterfactual knowledge does not entail middle knowledge.
Moving along:
“In the first, unconditioned moment God knows all possibilia, not only all individual essences, but also all possible worlds. Molina calls such knowledge "natural knowledge" because the content of such knowledge is essential to God and in no way depends on the free decisions of His will. By means of His natural knowledge, then, God has knowledge of every contingent state of affairs which could possibly obtain and of what the exemplification of the individual essence of any free creature could freely choose to do in any such state of affairs that should be actual.”
Just as he fails to define “freedom,” Craig also fails to define a possible world. What is a possible world? What makes a possible world possible?
A Calvinist can affirm possible worlds without endorsing Craig’s ontology.
Craig seems to assume that a possible world is, in part, a scenario about what human agents could possibly do rather than a scenario about what God could possibly do.
But there are many different way of modeling possible worlds. For example:
***QUOTE***
If we are to be realists about alethic modal truths, then the natural question is: What makes modal propositions true? What are they true of? In general, an objectively true proposition must be true of some aspect of reality. One way of spelling out this intuition is to say that in order for a proposition to be true, it must have a truthmaker, something in virtue of which it is true. The truthmaker is something worldly, and for propositions about concreta, it is something concrete.
What, then, are the truthmakers of alethic modal claims? This question is deeply puzzling, since many alethic modal claims prima facie concern non-existent things such as unicorns. One proposed answer is that the truthmakers of alethic modal claims are possible worlds, and we have already seen that we have good reason to believe in possible worlds even apart from this. So this brings us to the second question: What are possible worlds?
In his paper in this volume, William Lycan discusses six approaches to the problem of how to make sense of talk of non-existent possibilia, grouped into two wide groups. The actualist accounts reject any non-actual entities, any entities not found in the actual world, and thus must provide an account of the truth of modal claims in terms of this-worldly actual entities. The concretist accounts, on the other hand, say that there are concrete non-actual entities, such as unicorns existing concretely in concrete physical worlds different from ours, which serve as the truthmakers of modal propositions.
Leibniz, who started the whole debate about possible worlds, argued that necessary truths, including modal truths such as that unicorns are possible, must exist somewhere. Finding Platonic entities too queer, he wanted to locate these truths as acts of thought or ideas in the mind of an omniscient, necessarily existent God who contemplates them. He then gave an account of possible worlds that matched this. A Leibnizian possible world is a maximally specific consistent thought in the mind of God of a way for the world to be.
These acts of thought are actual entities, then, and so Leibniz has an answer as to what possible worlds are. Moreover, one might argue that Leibniz’s account makes some progress with respect to the question of how it is that the entities which are possible worlds represent concrete things. Recall that one difficulty with the Platonic approach was that of picking out which relation between concrete things and propositions was to count as the relation of representation. If one takes the controversial view that our thoughts are innately representative, the Leibnizian account may get around this problem by saying that that relation between divine thoughts and concrete things counts as the relation of representation which is the relation produced by that faculty in God’s mind which is analogous to the faculty of intentionality in us, and we can perhaps point out which of our faculties is the faculty of intentionality by ostension. There are many difficulties here, including first of all the Leibnizian’s very controversial commitment to thoughts being innately representative or to a faculty of intentionality. But if we find appealing the intuition that we can have a better grasp of what thoughts are, even divine thoughts, than we can of Platonic entities, because thoughts are something that we after all have direct experiential knowledge of, then we might prefer the Leibnizian account.
However, this does not solve the main problem with the Platonic approach which was its failure to give an adequate account of what makes possibilities possible. The Leibnizian account does not help there at all, since those divine ideas that are singled out for being dubbed “worlds” are singled out in virtue of being consistent, that is possible. Their possibility is prior in the order of explanation to their being known by God to be possible (cf. Adams, 1994, p. 191). And so this approach is not relevantly different from singling out some collections of propositions for being dubbed “worlds” on the grounds of their being consistent. Positing a God who contemplates possible worlds as described above does not in any way help with Aristotelian intuitions about possibility being grounded in actuality, since, as far as the account goes, the thoughts could be just as causally inert as Platonic abstracta.
However…there is a natural way to combine this account with Leibniz’s, by identifying the Aristotelian first cause with Leibniz’s necessarily existent God. Then, one could have both possible worlds, namely certain thoughts in the mind of God, and an answer to the problem of what makes these worlds possible, namely God’s power for initiating a causal chain capable of leading to their existence. The God of this theory would not only be omniscient but also omnipotent, then.
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85/papers/ActualAndPossible.html
***END-QUOTE***
On this general view, a possible world is a picturesque way of describing what-all God could possibly do, and not what the creature could possibly do.
God knows what the creature would do because he knows what he would do with the creature. So God’s counterfactual knowledge is a species of self-knowledge.
Continuing with Craig:
“In the second moment, God possesses knowledge of all true counterfactual propositions, including counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. That is to say, He knows what contingent states of affairs would obtain if certain antecedent states of affairs were to obtain; whereas by His natural knowledge God knew what any free creature could do in any set of circumstances, now in this second moment God knows what any free creature would do in any set of circumstances. This is not because the circumstances causally determine the creature's choice, but simply because this is how the creature would freely choose.”
i) One problem with this framework is that it’s either Platonic or viciously circular.
On the one hand, it looks like possibilities inhere in some autonomous, free-floating plenum. God is free to choose which possible world to instantiate, but the possibilities in and of themselves are ontologically independent of God.
Since I assume that Craig subscribes to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, he cannot very well affirm the existence of some coeternal substance or absolute alongside God.
If, on the other hand, the possibilities are constituted by the divine mind, a la Leibniz, then it’s viciously circular to say that God is choosing in accordance with what the human agent would do, for whatever properties the hypothetical agent would have are due to God’s mentally and freely assigning a certain set of properties to the hypothetical agent in the first place.
ii) Another problem with Craig’s construction is his failure to explain how God could know what a free agent would do if free agency is defined in libertarian terms.
At most, God would know every possible outcome.
iii) Related to (ii), to say that God knows what contingent states of affairs would obtain if certain antecedent states of affairs were to obtain is only cogent if the antecedent state of affairs is a sufficient condition of the subsequent outcome. But that would be deterministic (pace libertarianism).
iv) Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Craig’s framework is cogent, middle knowledge would be causally dependent on the creature (i.e. on what the creature would do). If so, then we must jettison divine aseity.
Moving along:
“On Molina's view predestination is merely that aspect of providence pertaining to eternal salvation; it is the order and means by which God ensures that some free creature attains eternal life. Prior to the divine decree, God knows via His middle knowledge how any possible free creature would respond in any possible circumstances, which include the offer of certain gifts of prevenient grace which God might provide. In choosing a certain possible world, God commits Himself, out of His goodness, to offering various gifts of grace to every person which are sufficient for his salvation. Such grace is not intrinsically efficacious in that it of itself produces its effect; rather it is extrinsically efficacious in accomplishing its end in those who freely cooperate with it. God knows that many will freely reject His sufficient grace and be lost; but He knows that many others will assent to it, thereby rendering it efficacious in effecting their salvation. Given God's immutable decree to actualize a certain world, those whom God knew would respond to His grace are predestined to do so in the sense that it is absolutely certain that they will respond to and persevere in God's grace.”
On this semi-Pelagian view, God doesn’t actually save a single soul. Instead, resistible grace makes in possible for a sinner to be saved, while predestination instantiates a sinner who saves himself by submitting to resistible grace.
Other issues aside, Craig has made no effort to show that a Molinist version of predestination is the least bit Scriptural.
All we have here is a paper theory.
Moving along:
“Years ago when I first read Alvin Plantinga's basically Molinist formulation of the Free Will Defense against the problem of evil, it occurred to me that his reasoning might also help to resolve the problem of the exclusivity of salvation through Christ, and my own subsequent study of the notion of middle knowledge has convinced me that this is in fact so.{17}”
One of the primary problems with this section of Craig’s paper is that he’s juggling two different models of salvation.
On the one hand, he allows for the possibility of salvation apart from faith in Christ. On the other hand, he also has his Molinist solution.
But this is redundant. If a sinner can be saved by a positive response to general revelation, then Molinism is superfluous to “the soteriological problem of evil.”
After all, Craig goes on to say:
“Since Jesus and his work are historical in character, many persons as a result of historical and geographical accident will not be sufficiently well-informed concerning him and thus unable to respond to him in faith. Such persons who are not sufficiently well-informed about Christ's person and work will be judged on the basis of their response to general revelation and the light that they do have.”
If this were true, then Molinism would be a solution to a pseudoproblem. At most, Molinism is true—but useless.
Moving along:
“7. There is no world feasible for God in which all persons would freely receive Christ.”
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is true, Molinism only pushes the soteriological problem of evil back a step: why should there be “transworld damnation” in the first place?
Sinners need to be saved because they are sinners. Craig is presupposing the fall. But if Molinism offers a solution to the soteriological problem of evil, then it must also explain why there is a problem that needs to be solved.
Moving along:
“God in His providence has so arranged the world that as the gospel spread outward from its historical roots in first century Palestine, all who would respond to this gospel, were they to hear it, did and do hear it. Those who have only general revelation and do not respond to it would also not have responded to the gospel had they heard it. Hence, no one is lost because of lack of information due to historical or geographical accident.”
i) This is remarkably speculative. Why should anyone take it seriously?
No a single individual living in 1C India or China or Japan or Russia or Sub-Saharan Africa or North America or South America or Australia would have exercised his libertarian freedom to believe the gospel?
ii) Moreover, Craig’s position is incoherent. For he appears to say that there are some sinners who would respond favorably to natural revelation, but respond unfavorably to the gospel.
On the one hand, he says that no one who never had a chance to hear the gospel would have believed the gospel had he been given the opportunity.
On the other hand, he says that there are sinners who never heard the gospel, but they will be saved anyway because they lived up to the light they had (natural revelation).
Moving along:
“I think that it helps to put the proper perspective on Christian missions: it is our duty to proclaim the gospel to the whole world, trusting that God has so providentially ordered things that through us the good news will be brought to persons who God knew would respond if they heard it.”
Why is it our duty to proclaim the gospel to people who could be saved apart from the gospel?
Craig is trying to screw one half of one soteriology into the bolt of an alternative soteriology. The two halves don’t make a whole, because the screw belongs to one kit, and the bolt to another kit.
Victor Reppert has countered this claim by appealing to William Lane Craig’s Molinist alternative. See here:
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/middle2.html
And here:
http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2006/08/if-exclusivism-then-calvinism.html
I will therefore offer a running commentary on the article adduced by Dr. Reppert.
“The conviction of the New Testament writers was that there is no salvation apart from Jesus.”
This is ambiguous. It can either mean:
i) Christ is the only Savior, simpliciter.
Or:
ii) Christ, as the only Savior, will save all those and only those who believe in him.
Throughout his article, Craig oscillates between these two propositions. But they are hardly interchangeable.
Moving along:
“But with the so-called ‘Expansion of Europe’ during the three centuries of exploration and discovery from 1450 to 1750, the situation changed radically.{6} It was now seen that far from being the universal religion, Christianity was confined to a small comer of the globe. This realization had a two-fold impact upon people's religious thinking: (i) it tended toward the relativization of religious beliefs. Since each religious system was historically and geographically limited, it seemed incredible that any of them should be regarded as universally true. It seemed that the only religion which could make a universal claim upon mankind would be a sort of general religion of nature. (ii) It tended to make Christianity's claim to exclusivity appear unjustly narrow and cruel. If salvation was only through faith in Christ, then the majority of the human race was condemned to eternal damnation, since they had not so much as even heard of Christ. Again, only a natural religion available to all men seemed consistent with a fair and loving God.”
Here Craig is making a historical observation without necessarily stating his own position. But it’s still worth commenting upon.
The exclusive claims of Scripture were not framed in ignorance of the alternatives. To the contrary, they were framed in explicit contrast to the alternatives.
Both the OT and the NT were revealed in a religiously pluralistic culture.
In the same vein, Craig also quotes something from John Hick, under whom he studied:
***QUOTE***
For understood literally the Son of God, God the Son, God-incarnate language implies that God can be adequately known and responded to only through Jesus; and the whole religious life of mankind, beyond the stream of Judaic-Christian faith is thus by implication excluded as lying outside the sphere of salvation. This implication did little positive harm so long as Christendom was a largely autonomous civilization with only relatively marginal interaction with the rest of mankind. But with the clash between the Christian and Muslim worlds, and then on an ever-broadening front with European colonization through the earth, the literal understanding of the mythological language of Christian discipleship has had a divisive effect upon the relations between that minority of human beings who live within the borders of the Christian tradition and that majority who live outside it and within other streams of religious life.
Transposed into theological terms, the problem which has come to the surface in the encounter of Christianity with the other world religions is this: If Jesus was literally God incarnate, and if it is by his death alone that men can be saved, and by their response to him alone that they can appropriate that salvation, then the only doorway to eternal life is Christian faith. It would follow from this that the large majority of the human race so far have not been saved. But is it credible that the loving God and Father of all men has decreed that only those born within one particular thread of human history shall be saved?{11}
***END-QUOTE***
This is not representative of Craig’s own position. But I’ll comment on it anyway:
There are several problems with Hick’s contention:
i) As noted above, both OT and NT Jews were very conversant with the phenomenon of religious pluralism. That was, indeed, a perennial threat to the integrity of their own religious affiliation.
ii) The fact that the Incarnation may be divisive is irrelevant to its veracity. Is Hick staking out the position that nothing true can be divisive?
iii) Related to (ii), the divisive consequences of the Incarnation are irrelevant to the correct interpretation of NT Christological claims.
Hick is superimposing his own viewpoint onto the perspective of the NT writers. The fact that he is tolerant (as he defines tolerance) doesn’t mean they were tolerant.
And the further fact that the Incarnation might be divisive doesn’t mean that they ever intended their claims to be mythopoetic rather than literal.
iv) Hick can only justify his religious pluralism by treating “God” as ineffable or inscrutable.
But in that event, Hick forfeits the right to invoke the loving fatherhood of God.
Back to Craig:
“According to the New Testament, God does not want anyone to perish, but desires that all persons repent and be saved and come to know the truth (2 Peter 3.9; 1 Timothy 2.4).”
I disagree with Craig’s interpretation. His appeal to 1 Tim 2:4 commits the intensional fallacy by equating the sense of the universal quantifier with its referent.
His appeal to 2 Pet 3:9 fails to take into account the observation of Bauckham that “the author remains close to his Jewish source, for in Jewish thought it was usually for the sake of the repentance of his own people that God delayed judgment,” 2 Peter, Jude (Word 1983), 313.
Along the same lines, Craig’s case is also prized on divine “omnibenevolence.” But Paul Helm has written a provocative article in which he argues that the idea of divine omnibenevolence is incoherent inasmuch as it treats human beings as if they were discrete units rather than social creatures. Cf.
"Can God Love the World?" Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God, K. Vanhoozer, ed. (Eerdmans 2001), chap. 8.
Continuing with Craig:
“Those who make a well-informed and free decision to reject Christ are self-condemned, since they repudiate God's unique sacrifice for sin.”
Here’s another problem. Throughout this article, Craig uses the adjective “free” without defining his terms. But this is a key issue. For there’s a basic difference between a compatibilist and a libertarian definition of free agency.
Here’s a contrast between one definition and another:
***QUOTE***
According to compatibilists, we do have free will. They propound a sense of the word 'free' according to which free will is compatible with determinism, even though determinism is the view that the history of the universe is fixed in such a way that nothing can happen otherwise than it does because everything that happens is necessitated by what has already gone before (see Determinism And indeterminism).
Suppose tomorrow is a national holiday. You are considering what to do. You can climb a mountain or read Lao Tse. You can mend your bicycle or go to the zoo. At this moment you are reading the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. You are free to go on reading or stop now. You have started on this sentence, but you don't have to... finish it.
In this situation, as so often in life, you have a number of options. Nothing forces your hand. It seems natural to say that you are entirely free to choose what to do. And, given that nothing hinders you, it seems natural to say that you act entirely freely when you actually do (or try to do) what you have decided to do.
Compatibilists claim that this is the right thing to say. They believe that to have free will, to be a free agent, to be free in choice and action, is simply to be free from constraints of certain sorts. Freedom is a matter of not being physically or psychologically forced or compelled to do what one does. Your character, personality, preferences, and general motivational set may be entirely determined by events for which you are in no way responsible (by your genetic inheritance, upbringing, subsequent experience, and so on). But you do not have to be in control of any of these things in order to have compatibilist freedom. They do not constrain or compel you, because compatibilist freedom is just a matter of being able to choose and act in the way one prefers or thinks best given how one is. As its name declares, it is compatible with determinism. It is compatible with determinism even though it follows from determinism that every aspect of your character, and everything you will ever do, was already inevitable before you were born.
If determinism does not count as a constraint or compulsion, what does? Compatibilists standardly take it that freedom can be limited by such things as imprisonment, by a gun at one's head, or a threat to the life of one's children, or a psychological obsession and so on.
It is arguable, however, that compatibilist freedom is something one continues to possess undiminished so long as one can choose or act in any way at all. One continues to possess it in any situation in which one is not actually panicked, or literally compelled to do what one does, in such a way that it is not clear that one can still be said to choose or act at all (as when one presses a button, because one's finger is actually forced down on the button).
All circumstances limit one's options in some way. It is true that some circumstances limit one's options much more drastically than others; but it does not follow that one is not free to choose in those circumstances. Only literal compulsion, panic, or uncontrollable impulse really removes one's freedom to choose, and to (try to) do what one most wants to do given one's character or personality. Even when one's finger is being forced down on the button, one can still act freely in resisting the pressure, and in many other ways.
Most of us are free to choose throughout our waking lives, according to the compatibilist conception of freedom. We are free to choose between the options that we perceive to be open to us. (Sometimes we would rather not face options, but are unable to avoid awareness of the fact that we do face them.) One has options even when one is in chains, or falling through space. Even if one is completely paralysed, one is still free in so far as one is free to choose to think about one thing rather than another. Sartre (1948 ) observed that there is a sense in which we are 'condemned' to freedom, not free not to be free.
Of course one may well not be able to do everything one wants - one may want to fly unassisted, vapourize every gun in the United States by an act of thought, or house all those who sleep on the streets of Calcutta by the end of the month. But few have supposed that free will, or free agency, is a matter of being able to do everything one wants. That is one possible view of what it is to be free; but according to the compatibilists, free will is simply a matter of having genuine options and opportunities for action, and being able to choose between them according to what one wants or thinks best.
http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014SECT1
Those who want to secure the conclusion that we are free agents do well to adopt a compatibilist theory of freedom, for determinism is unfalsifiable, and may be true. (Contemporary physics gives us no more reason to suppose that determinism is false than to suppose that it is true - though this is contested; for further discussion see Determinism and indeterminism .) Many, however, think that the compatibilist account of things does not even touch the real problem of free will. They believe that all compatibilist theories of freedom are patently inadequate.
What is it, they say, to define freedom in such a way that it is compatible with determinism? It is to define it in such a way that a creature can be a free agent even if all its actions throughout its life are determined to happen as they do by events that have taken place before it is born: so that there is a clear sense in which it could not at any point in its life have done otherwise than it did. This, they say, is certainly not free will. More importantly, it is not a sufficient basis for true moral responsibility. One cannot possibly be truly or ultimately morally responsible for what one does if everything one does is ultimately a deterministic outcome of events that took place before one was born; or (more generally) a deterministic outcome of events for whose occurrence one is in no way ultimately responsible.
http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014SECT2
“By ‘libertarian freedom’ is mean freedom such that the agent who makes a choice is really able, under exactly the same circumstances, to choose something different from the thing that is in fact chosen. The choices in question, then, are not causally determined to occur as they do; libertarian freedom is inherently indeterministic. This means that there is nothing whatever that predetermines which choice will be made, until the creature is actually placed in the situation and makes the decision,” (W. Hasker), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, M. Peterson & R. VanArragon, eds. (Blackwell 2004), 219.
***END-QUOTE***
For further discussion, cf.
R. Kane, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (Oxford 2002)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/
As we shall see, Craig apparently combines a Wesleyan version of grace with a libertarian version of freewill.
Prevenient/sufficient grace restores the fallen will to a state of libertarian freedom.
Another basic failing of Craig’s article is that he assumes a libertarian version of action theory without ever defending it.
Moving along:
“By spurning God's prevenient grace and the solicitation of His Spirit, they shut out God's mercy and seal their own destiny.”
On a related note, Craig is assuming rather than defending a Wesleyan theory of grace. But this is open to challenge. Cf.
T. Schreiner, “Does Scripture Teach Prevenient Grace in the Wesleyan Sense?” T. Schreiner & B. Ware, eds. Still Sovereign (Baker 2000), 229-46.
Craig can only salvage sola gratia by defining grace as resistible and ineffectual.
Continuing:
“They, therefore, and not God, are responsible for their condemnation, and God deeply mourns their loss.”
Perhaps this is a semantic distinction, but Craig seems to use “responsible” as synonymous with “blameworthy.”
I, however, would distinguish the two. God is responsible for everything that happens, although he’s not solely responsible, and he blameless for whatever happens.
“One could maintain that God graciously applies to such persons the benefits of Christ's atoning death without their conscious knowledge thereof on the basis of their response to the light of general revelation and the truth that they do have.”
Yes, that theoretical option is available, but it comes at a cost:
i) Craig can only salvage solus Christus by sacrificing sola fide. This would confirm my assertion of an internal relation between Reformed particularism and the Reformational soli.
ii) Is it Scriptural to dump sole fide?
Moving along:
“Even as He did in the case of Old Testament figures like Job who were outside the covenant of Israel.{12}”
A problem with this sort of appeal is that Job and other OT saints of Gentilic extraction were not saved by general revelation, but by special revelation. They came to a saving knowledge of the true God via their contact with the covenant community.
“If we take Scripture seriously, we must admit that the vast majority of persons in the world are condemned and will be forever lost, even if in some relatively rare cases a person might be saved through his response to the light that he has apart from special revelation.{13}”
Actually, there are Reformed postmils who deny this by combining a doctrine of universal infant salvation (in case of infant mortality) with a postmil eschatology.
However, I’m inclined to agree with Craig on this point.
Moving along:
“Now all of these questions appear, at least, to presuppose that certain counterfactuals of freedom concerning people's response to God's gracious initiatives are true, and the last two seem to presuppose that God's omniscience embraces a species of knowledge known as middle knowledge (scientia media). For if there are no true counterfactuals of freedom, it is not true that certain persons would receive Christ if they were to hear the gospel, nor can God be held responsible for the number of the lost if He lacks middle knowledge, for without such knowledge He could only guess in the moment logically prior to His decree to create the world how many and, indeed, whether any persons would freely receive Christ (or whether He would even send Christ!) and be saved. Let us assume, then, that some such counterfactuals are true and that God has middle knowledge.{14}”
One of the problems here is not with his appeal to counterfactuals, per se, but with the way he defines counterfactual freedom in libertarian terms.
Once again, he’s assuming what he needs to prove.
For example, a Calvinist could affirm the counterfactuals of freedom, but define freedom in compatibilist terms.
Likewise, a Calvinist could affirm the counterfactuals of freedom, but assign them then to the agency of God rather than the agency of man.
Craig is simply supposing that you need to index counterfactual freedom to the human will rather than the divine will.
No supporting argument is offered to warrant his presumption.
Counterfactual knowledge does not entail middle knowledge.
Moving along:
“In the first, unconditioned moment God knows all possibilia, not only all individual essences, but also all possible worlds. Molina calls such knowledge "natural knowledge" because the content of such knowledge is essential to God and in no way depends on the free decisions of His will. By means of His natural knowledge, then, God has knowledge of every contingent state of affairs which could possibly obtain and of what the exemplification of the individual essence of any free creature could freely choose to do in any such state of affairs that should be actual.”
Just as he fails to define “freedom,” Craig also fails to define a possible world. What is a possible world? What makes a possible world possible?
A Calvinist can affirm possible worlds without endorsing Craig’s ontology.
Craig seems to assume that a possible world is, in part, a scenario about what human agents could possibly do rather than a scenario about what God could possibly do.
But there are many different way of modeling possible worlds. For example:
***QUOTE***
If we are to be realists about alethic modal truths, then the natural question is: What makes modal propositions true? What are they true of? In general, an objectively true proposition must be true of some aspect of reality. One way of spelling out this intuition is to say that in order for a proposition to be true, it must have a truthmaker, something in virtue of which it is true. The truthmaker is something worldly, and for propositions about concreta, it is something concrete.
What, then, are the truthmakers of alethic modal claims? This question is deeply puzzling, since many alethic modal claims prima facie concern non-existent things such as unicorns. One proposed answer is that the truthmakers of alethic modal claims are possible worlds, and we have already seen that we have good reason to believe in possible worlds even apart from this. So this brings us to the second question: What are possible worlds?
In his paper in this volume, William Lycan discusses six approaches to the problem of how to make sense of talk of non-existent possibilia, grouped into two wide groups. The actualist accounts reject any non-actual entities, any entities not found in the actual world, and thus must provide an account of the truth of modal claims in terms of this-worldly actual entities. The concretist accounts, on the other hand, say that there are concrete non-actual entities, such as unicorns existing concretely in concrete physical worlds different from ours, which serve as the truthmakers of modal propositions.
Leibniz, who started the whole debate about possible worlds, argued that necessary truths, including modal truths such as that unicorns are possible, must exist somewhere. Finding Platonic entities too queer, he wanted to locate these truths as acts of thought or ideas in the mind of an omniscient, necessarily existent God who contemplates them. He then gave an account of possible worlds that matched this. A Leibnizian possible world is a maximally specific consistent thought in the mind of God of a way for the world to be.
These acts of thought are actual entities, then, and so Leibniz has an answer as to what possible worlds are. Moreover, one might argue that Leibniz’s account makes some progress with respect to the question of how it is that the entities which are possible worlds represent concrete things. Recall that one difficulty with the Platonic approach was that of picking out which relation between concrete things and propositions was to count as the relation of representation. If one takes the controversial view that our thoughts are innately representative, the Leibnizian account may get around this problem by saying that that relation between divine thoughts and concrete things counts as the relation of representation which is the relation produced by that faculty in God’s mind which is analogous to the faculty of intentionality in us, and we can perhaps point out which of our faculties is the faculty of intentionality by ostension. There are many difficulties here, including first of all the Leibnizian’s very controversial commitment to thoughts being innately representative or to a faculty of intentionality. But if we find appealing the intuition that we can have a better grasp of what thoughts are, even divine thoughts, than we can of Platonic entities, because thoughts are something that we after all have direct experiential knowledge of, then we might prefer the Leibnizian account.
However, this does not solve the main problem with the Platonic approach which was its failure to give an adequate account of what makes possibilities possible. The Leibnizian account does not help there at all, since those divine ideas that are singled out for being dubbed “worlds” are singled out in virtue of being consistent, that is possible. Their possibility is prior in the order of explanation to their being known by God to be possible (cf. Adams, 1994, p. 191). And so this approach is not relevantly different from singling out some collections of propositions for being dubbed “worlds” on the grounds of their being consistent. Positing a God who contemplates possible worlds as described above does not in any way help with Aristotelian intuitions about possibility being grounded in actuality, since, as far as the account goes, the thoughts could be just as causally inert as Platonic abstracta.
However…there is a natural way to combine this account with Leibniz’s, by identifying the Aristotelian first cause with Leibniz’s necessarily existent God. Then, one could have both possible worlds, namely certain thoughts in the mind of God, and an answer to the problem of what makes these worlds possible, namely God’s power for initiating a causal chain capable of leading to their existence. The God of this theory would not only be omniscient but also omnipotent, then.
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85/papers/ActualAndPossible.html
***END-QUOTE***
On this general view, a possible world is a picturesque way of describing what-all God could possibly do, and not what the creature could possibly do.
God knows what the creature would do because he knows what he would do with the creature. So God’s counterfactual knowledge is a species of self-knowledge.
Continuing with Craig:
“In the second moment, God possesses knowledge of all true counterfactual propositions, including counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. That is to say, He knows what contingent states of affairs would obtain if certain antecedent states of affairs were to obtain; whereas by His natural knowledge God knew what any free creature could do in any set of circumstances, now in this second moment God knows what any free creature would do in any set of circumstances. This is not because the circumstances causally determine the creature's choice, but simply because this is how the creature would freely choose.”
i) One problem with this framework is that it’s either Platonic or viciously circular.
On the one hand, it looks like possibilities inhere in some autonomous, free-floating plenum. God is free to choose which possible world to instantiate, but the possibilities in and of themselves are ontologically independent of God.
Since I assume that Craig subscribes to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, he cannot very well affirm the existence of some coeternal substance or absolute alongside God.
If, on the other hand, the possibilities are constituted by the divine mind, a la Leibniz, then it’s viciously circular to say that God is choosing in accordance with what the human agent would do, for whatever properties the hypothetical agent would have are due to God’s mentally and freely assigning a certain set of properties to the hypothetical agent in the first place.
ii) Another problem with Craig’s construction is his failure to explain how God could know what a free agent would do if free agency is defined in libertarian terms.
At most, God would know every possible outcome.
iii) Related to (ii), to say that God knows what contingent states of affairs would obtain if certain antecedent states of affairs were to obtain is only cogent if the antecedent state of affairs is a sufficient condition of the subsequent outcome. But that would be deterministic (pace libertarianism).
iv) Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Craig’s framework is cogent, middle knowledge would be causally dependent on the creature (i.e. on what the creature would do). If so, then we must jettison divine aseity.
Moving along:
“On Molina's view predestination is merely that aspect of providence pertaining to eternal salvation; it is the order and means by which God ensures that some free creature attains eternal life. Prior to the divine decree, God knows via His middle knowledge how any possible free creature would respond in any possible circumstances, which include the offer of certain gifts of prevenient grace which God might provide. In choosing a certain possible world, God commits Himself, out of His goodness, to offering various gifts of grace to every person which are sufficient for his salvation. Such grace is not intrinsically efficacious in that it of itself produces its effect; rather it is extrinsically efficacious in accomplishing its end in those who freely cooperate with it. God knows that many will freely reject His sufficient grace and be lost; but He knows that many others will assent to it, thereby rendering it efficacious in effecting their salvation. Given God's immutable decree to actualize a certain world, those whom God knew would respond to His grace are predestined to do so in the sense that it is absolutely certain that they will respond to and persevere in God's grace.”
On this semi-Pelagian view, God doesn’t actually save a single soul. Instead, resistible grace makes in possible for a sinner to be saved, while predestination instantiates a sinner who saves himself by submitting to resistible grace.
Other issues aside, Craig has made no effort to show that a Molinist version of predestination is the least bit Scriptural.
All we have here is a paper theory.
Moving along:
“Years ago when I first read Alvin Plantinga's basically Molinist formulation of the Free Will Defense against the problem of evil, it occurred to me that his reasoning might also help to resolve the problem of the exclusivity of salvation through Christ, and my own subsequent study of the notion of middle knowledge has convinced me that this is in fact so.{17}”
One of the primary problems with this section of Craig’s paper is that he’s juggling two different models of salvation.
On the one hand, he allows for the possibility of salvation apart from faith in Christ. On the other hand, he also has his Molinist solution.
But this is redundant. If a sinner can be saved by a positive response to general revelation, then Molinism is superfluous to “the soteriological problem of evil.”
After all, Craig goes on to say:
“Since Jesus and his work are historical in character, many persons as a result of historical and geographical accident will not be sufficiently well-informed concerning him and thus unable to respond to him in faith. Such persons who are not sufficiently well-informed about Christ's person and work will be judged on the basis of their response to general revelation and the light that they do have.”
If this were true, then Molinism would be a solution to a pseudoproblem. At most, Molinism is true—but useless.
Moving along:
“7. There is no world feasible for God in which all persons would freely receive Christ.”
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that this is true, Molinism only pushes the soteriological problem of evil back a step: why should there be “transworld damnation” in the first place?
Sinners need to be saved because they are sinners. Craig is presupposing the fall. But if Molinism offers a solution to the soteriological problem of evil, then it must also explain why there is a problem that needs to be solved.
Moving along:
“God in His providence has so arranged the world that as the gospel spread outward from its historical roots in first century Palestine, all who would respond to this gospel, were they to hear it, did and do hear it. Those who have only general revelation and do not respond to it would also not have responded to the gospel had they heard it. Hence, no one is lost because of lack of information due to historical or geographical accident.”
i) This is remarkably speculative. Why should anyone take it seriously?
No a single individual living in 1C India or China or Japan or Russia or Sub-Saharan Africa or North America or South America or Australia would have exercised his libertarian freedom to believe the gospel?
ii) Moreover, Craig’s position is incoherent. For he appears to say that there are some sinners who would respond favorably to natural revelation, but respond unfavorably to the gospel.
On the one hand, he says that no one who never had a chance to hear the gospel would have believed the gospel had he been given the opportunity.
On the other hand, he says that there are sinners who never heard the gospel, but they will be saved anyway because they lived up to the light they had (natural revelation).
Moving along:
“I think that it helps to put the proper perspective on Christian missions: it is our duty to proclaim the gospel to the whole world, trusting that God has so providentially ordered things that through us the good news will be brought to persons who God knew would respond if they heard it.”
Why is it our duty to proclaim the gospel to people who could be saved apart from the gospel?
Craig is trying to screw one half of one soteriology into the bolt of an alternative soteriology. The two halves don’t make a whole, because the screw belongs to one kit, and the bolt to another kit.
Monday, August 21, 2006
Where is God?
George Frodsham from http://helpwithgod.blogspot.com/ has some questions about the Christian worldview. While many of his questions are built upon misunderstandings, I believe his questions to be genuine and will respond accordingly:
1. I'm not very certain where Mr. Frodsham is receiving his information, but the assertion that "less than half of the words" in the present Bible are found in the original autographs simply betrays an ignorance of the manuscript tradition and the tenacity of the copyists. For the sake of space, I won't here present an apologetic for the reliability of the Scriptural documents, but will refer Mr. Frodsham to free online works where the issue has been extensively handled.
2. No, God is not changing the Bible to "fit the times." He has preserved his Word from the time it was first spoken.
3. Saying there are "hundreds of different versions of the bible" confuses transmission with translation.
2. Scripture tells us that no one is good (Romans 3:9-23), and the basis for our salvation is Christ's work, not ours. We are justified by a righteousness that is extra nos--outside of us, imputed to us. If any Christian obeys God's word expecting that his own works can merit him salvation, he lacks a fundamental understanding of the gospel.
3. Consequently, our doing good is a response to the gospel. Thus, we do not do good in order to merit salvation, but we walk in sanctification as an appropriate response to what Christ has already done.
2. Often, the issue isn't one of interpreting Scripture, but a lack thereof. Often, people don't want to let the text itself inform them of their doctrine, but rather allow their own traditions to be read into the text.
3. Again, "goodness" is not the criteria for going to heaven. Before Mr. Frodsham can proceed with his questions, he needs to acquire a basic understanding of the gospel.
4. The "big deal" about the Da Vinci Code isn't so much a doctrinal issue, but a factual issue. The Da Vinci Code involves a twisting of history and a deceptive approach to basic facts, resulting from Biblical and historical illiteracy.
2. Why does a disease being cured not count? That simply begs the question regarding rules of evidence.
3. In any case the Church has, and even my local church has, experienced the miraculous on the level that Mr. Frodsham is alluding to. Does an eye-less girl instantaneously growing eyes count?
2. In believers, in addition, there is the inner working of the Spirit. We wouldn't expect to find this in unbelievers, however, who do not have the Spirit (Romans 8).
3. Saying that God "talks to us," on the other hand, is ultimately subjective. I'm not saying that such a thing isn't real, but that it is non-revelatory (in the technical sense), fallible, and subject to the objective revelation of Scripture.
4. The assumption that God is "supposed to love all humans equally" is an unbiblical assumption.
2. Justification is in Christ alone, so the basis of our justification is his work, not ours.
3. Regeneration is a monergistic work of the Spirit, and because salvation is a result of God's elective purpose, it is able to transcend all cultures and backgrounds.
Evan May.
Where is God?
Let me preface this by saying that I am neither an atheist nor a Christian, and the questions and comments are not all originally mine.
I am somewhat confused about religion. I fully admit that I do not know much about it (indeed this is an attempt to find out), but what I do know makes it difficult for me to understand how people can be believers. So I ask one big question – how do you know that you’re right? Here are some questions/problems I have about Christianity:
1. The Bible: many take the bible to be the word of God – most of the religious beliefs and practises are based on it. However, changes (accidental and deliberate) to the bible over the last 2000 years mean that less than half of the words now there are the original ones. So is God changing the bible to fit the times? That’s the only explanation I see, but we have stumbled across a problem. Not only do we have hundreds of different versions of the bible, but we have also become so good at copying it that we don’t make ‘mistakes’ anymore. So how will God modify it?
1. I'm not very certain where Mr. Frodsham is receiving his information, but the assertion that "less than half of the words" in the present Bible are found in the original autographs simply betrays an ignorance of the manuscript tradition and the tenacity of the copyists. For the sake of space, I won't here present an apologetic for the reliability of the Scriptural documents, but will refer Mr. Frodsham to free online works where the issue has been extensively handled.
2. No, God is not changing the Bible to "fit the times." He has preserved his Word from the time it was first spoken.
3. Saying there are "hundreds of different versions of the bible" confuses transmission with translation.
2. Selflessness: from what I understand, one of the most important things about living a Christian life is being ‘good’, and that often means being selfless. So doing things only because you benefit from them is a sin. But why are people ‘good’? To go to heaven. Ask any Christian why they follow God’s word and the answer is so that they can go to heaven. Isn’t this the same thing as saying ‘I’m only good because I get a reward’? Sounds a little bit selfish to me… Those of you thinking that you are not ‘good’ for selfish reasons answer me this: would you still be ‘good’ if doing so sent you to hell?1. Goodness is to be defined by God's revelation of goodness. We should do good in obedience to God's command and with a desire to bring him glory. It is not necessarily wrong to desire to receive benefit from doing good, as long as the desire is framed by the greater desire to bring glory to God. So it is a simplistic understanding of the issue to say that "doing things only because you benefit from them is a sin."
2. Scripture tells us that no one is good (Romans 3:9-23), and the basis for our salvation is Christ's work, not ours. We are justified by a righteousness that is extra nos--outside of us, imputed to us. If any Christian obeys God's word expecting that his own works can merit him salvation, he lacks a fundamental understanding of the gospel.
3. Consequently, our doing good is a response to the gospel. Thus, we do not do good in order to merit salvation, but we walk in sanctification as an appropriate response to what Christ has already done.
3. Different interpretations: everybody interprets the bible differently. Is this ok? Christians with the same fundamental beliefs live their lives in very different ways. Not all believe that premarital sex is wrong, not all believe that being homosexual is wrong, some think that you should go to church every day etc… So where is the line? Are there some basic beliefs that if you hold, you will go to heaven, as long as you’re ‘good’? Come to that, is it enough to just be ‘good’? Are these the basic beliefs:1. Church history tells us that orthodox Christianity has interpreted Scripture fundamentally the same way for centuries.
a. God exists
b. Jesus was the son of God
c. He saved us
d. We should be nice people
If they are, what was the big deal about the Da Vinci Code? Surely it’s anyone’s right to believe that as much as the bible – the evidence for both is about the same anyway. And they are upholding the basic beliefs.
2. Often, the issue isn't one of interpreting Scripture, but a lack thereof. Often, people don't want to let the text itself inform them of their doctrine, but rather allow their own traditions to be read into the text.
3. Again, "goodness" is not the criteria for going to heaven. Before Mr. Frodsham can proceed with his questions, he needs to acquire a basic understanding of the gospel.
4. The "big deal" about the Da Vinci Code isn't so much a doctrinal issue, but a factual issue. The Da Vinci Code involves a twisting of history and a deceptive approach to basic facts, resulting from Biblical and historical illiteracy.
4. Lack of miracles: miracles were the evidence that Jesus provided to show he was the son of God. A miracle, by definition, is something occurring that should be impossible (not unlikely). So when was the last miracle? Has one ever happened to you? Was it what made you a believer? A disease being cured doesn’t count – that is merely unlikely, and just as many people have died even though people were praying for them. However, something like an amputee’s leg growing back – that works.1. A miracle, as Biblically defined, is not "something occurring that should be impossible." That simply begs the question against supernaturalism in favor of naturalism. Rather, a miracle is an extra-ordinary working of the providence of God as a unique means of revelation. Miracles shake us up and blow our minds because they are contrary to what we are used to. What is different about a miracle is not who is acting (God is equally active in both ordinary and extraordinary providence), but how ordinarily the action occurs. There's also the revelatory and redemptive purpose of the miraculous: something about the character and redemption of God is made known.
2. Why does a disease being cured not count? That simply begs the question regarding rules of evidence.
3. In any case the Church has, and even my local church has, experienced the miraculous on the level that Mr. Frodsham is alluding to. Does an eye-less girl instantaneously growing eyes count?
5. Talking to God: many believers say that they believe in God because he talks to them. If someone says that they hear voices telling them what to do, we usually send them to an asylum. How do you know you are different to them? Secondly, why is it that God hasn’t spoken to billions of people, including me? This seems a little unfair considering he is supposed to love all humans equally.1. God communicates with his people primarily, objectively, and infallibly through Scripture.
2. In believers, in addition, there is the inner working of the Spirit. We wouldn't expect to find this in unbelievers, however, who do not have the Spirit (Romans 8).
3. Saying that God "talks to us," on the other hand, is ultimately subjective. I'm not saying that such a thing isn't real, but that it is non-revelatory (in the technical sense), fallible, and subject to the objective revelation of Scripture.
4. The assumption that God is "supposed to love all humans equally" is an unbiblical assumption.
6. Other religions: if Christianity is the one true religion (and believers of other religions are going to hell), God is again being unfair to the billions of people who are never educated about Christianity, and never have a chance to believe in it. And it works the same the other way around. How many of you have been educated about every different religion and still choose Christianity? If you are brought up as a Muslim, you will be a Muslim. If you are brought up as a Hindu, you will be a Hindu. Or is it that it doesn’t matter which religion you believe in, just that you believe in a higher power? If that is the case, why do we have a bible?1. "Fairness" is all being justly condemned to hell, and none being saved.
2. Justification is in Christ alone, so the basis of our justification is his work, not ours.
3. Regeneration is a monergistic work of the Spirit, and because salvation is a result of God's elective purpose, it is able to transcend all cultures and backgrounds.
Evan May.
The Thief and the Robber
Billy Graham’s recent comments about the availability of salvation outside of Christ have come under fire.
Graham’s position is especially incongruous considering the fact that he has consecrated his entire adult life, at great personal sacrifice, from his dynamic prime to doddering old age, to mass evangelism.
But the irony of Graham’s position merely highlights a tug-of-war in any generically Arminian theology.
For if you believe that God loves everyone equally, that God desires the salvation of everyone, that Christ died for everyone, and also that the Holy Spirit is working to engender conviction in every heart, then that logically implies the availability of salvation apart from faith in Christ.
You end up with a scheme of potential universalism. Everyone may not be saved, but everyone has an equal chance to be saved.
And if not in this life, then in the next. (Postmortem evangelism.)
Calvinism is the only theological tradition that lays a logical foundation to consistently honor faith alone through grace alone in Christ alone for salvation.
Otherwise, Christ gradually fades from view as the object of saving faith.
Ironically, many evangelicals in the SBC and beyond regard unlimited atonement as a precondition of effective evangelism.
To the contrary, unlimited atonement cuts the root of sola fide, sola gratia, and solus Christus.
The Lord Jesus Christ is both a road and a roadblock. A road to heaven for believers, but a roadblock for unbelievers. There is a way through him, but no way around him.
Graham’s position is especially incongruous considering the fact that he has consecrated his entire adult life, at great personal sacrifice, from his dynamic prime to doddering old age, to mass evangelism.
But the irony of Graham’s position merely highlights a tug-of-war in any generically Arminian theology.
For if you believe that God loves everyone equally, that God desires the salvation of everyone, that Christ died for everyone, and also that the Holy Spirit is working to engender conviction in every heart, then that logically implies the availability of salvation apart from faith in Christ.
You end up with a scheme of potential universalism. Everyone may not be saved, but everyone has an equal chance to be saved.
And if not in this life, then in the next. (Postmortem evangelism.)
Calvinism is the only theological tradition that lays a logical foundation to consistently honor faith alone through grace alone in Christ alone for salvation.
Otherwise, Christ gradually fades from view as the object of saving faith.
Ironically, many evangelicals in the SBC and beyond regard unlimited atonement as a precondition of effective evangelism.
To the contrary, unlimited atonement cuts the root of sola fide, sola gratia, and solus Christus.
The Lord Jesus Christ is both a road and a roadblock. A road to heaven for believers, but a roadblock for unbelievers. There is a way through him, but no way around him.
Sunday, August 20, 2006
The Weapons of Our Warfare
Introduction: The Weapons of Our Warfare is an online apologetics "book." Its scope is very broad, not focusing on any one particular apologetic methodology. Its aim is to present the online Christian faith defender with a broad array of arguments for the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. Its goal is two-fold: (1)that the online Christian faith defender will be better equipped to defend his faith as well as go on the offensive, and, (2) it will function as an easy one-stop-shop apologetic resource. Its hope is that Christian laymen will be better prepared to offer reasons for the hope that is within them.
Though the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ (II Cor. 10:4-5), we should also note that "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, if one rise from the dead" (Luke 16:31). We must remember that "No man can come to [Jesus], except the Father that sent me draw him" (John 6:44). Therefore apologetic arguments can never, by themselves, convert anyone. God may use them as a means to bring someone to repentance, but to convert a sinner needs a new heart, not more arguments. Unbelief is not intellectual, it is moral. Unregenerate man does not believe not because of a lack of "evidence" or "arguments" but because he hates God, because he is God's enemy (Rom. 8:7). So, it's personal. Unless the Holy Spirit changes a man's heart, he'll always cut off his nose to spite his face. Greg Bahnsen expresses the above nicely when he writes,
And so we note that we can present arguments and evidence, but we should also note that there is a standard of argument and evidence. Thus Greg Bahnsen notes,
This "book" will present many arguments for the Christian faith. The "book" will run the gambit, apologetically. I do not agree with everything contained in the articles below, but overall I think they each have very useful and helpful material. May God bless your studies.
Chapter 1: Metaphysical Arguments
A. Theism And Mathematical Realism. -Dr. John Byl
B. The Teleological Argument And The Anthropic Principal. -Dr. William Lane Craig
C. The Ontological Argument -Dr. Alvin Plantinga
i. The Ontological Argument Redux. -Steve Hays, Auquscum et alia
Chapter 2: Epistemological Arguments
A. If Knowledge Then God: The Epistemological Theistic Arguments of Plantinga And Van Til. -Dr. James Anderson
B. Naturalism Defeated. -Dr. Alvin Plantinga
C. Secular Responses to The Problem of Induction. -Dr. James Anderson
D. Knowledge And Naturalism. -Dr. Dallas Willard
Chapter 3: Arguments From Mind or Reason
A. Argument From Reason. -Dr. Victor Reppert
i. The Argument From Reason: Reppert Replies To Carrier. -Dr. Victor Reppert and Dr. William Vallicella
B. Converting Matter Into Mind: Alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone in Cognitive Science. -Dr. William Dembski
C. Does the Argument From Mind Provide Evidence for God? -Dr. J.P. Moreland
D. The Origin of the Brain and Mind [Part I]. -Drs. Brady Harrub and Bert Thompson
i. The Origin of the Brain and Mind [Part II]. -Drs. Brady Harrub and Bert Thompson
Chapter 4: Moral Arguments
A. The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality. -Dr. William Lane Craig
B. How Reason Can Survive The Modern University: The Moral Foundations Of Rationality. -Dr. Dallas Willard
C. Evil As Evidence For God. -Grek Koukl
D. Do We Need God To Be Moral. -John Frame vs. Paul Kurtz
E. The Problem of Evil. -Greg Welty
F. The Problem of Evil. -Dr. Greg Bahnsen
Chapter 5: Modal/Transcendental Arguments
A. The Actual and the Possible. -Dr. Alexander Pruss
B. Possible Worlds: What They Are Good For and What They Are. -Dr. Alexander Pruss
C. An Examination of Theistic Conceptual Realism as an Alternative to Theistic Activism -Greg Welty
Chapter 6: Cumulative Arguments
A. Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments. -Dr. Alvin Plantinga
B. Theism vs. Atheism Phil Fernandes/Michael Martin Debate Opening Statement: Phil Fernandes The Cumulative Case for God. -Dr. Phil Fernandes
Chapter 7: The Inerrancy, Authority, and Reliability of The Bible
A. Is The Bible Inerrant? -John Frame
B. The Inerrancy of The Autographa. -Dr. Greg Bahnsen
C. Scripture Speaks For Itself. -John Frame
D. Why I Believe The New testament Is Historically Reliable. -Dr. Gary Habermas
E. Is The Bible Reliable. -Bob and Gretchen Passantino
F. The Textual Reliability of the New Testament. -JP Holding
Chapter 8: The Resurrection of The Lord of Glory, Jesus Christ
A. This Joyful Eastertide: A Critical Review of 'The Empty Tomb'. -Steve Hays et alia
B. The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus. -Dr. William Lane Craig
C. Explaining Away Jesus' Resurrection: The Recent Revival of Hallucination Theories. -Dr. Gary Habermas
i. A Summary Critique: Questioning the Existence of Jesus. -Dr. Gary Habermas
Chapter 9: Theism -vs- Atheism
A. The Great Debate: Bahnsen vs. Stein.
B. Tag vs. Tang: Frame vs. Martin.
C. William Lane Craig vs. Douglas Jesseph.
Though the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ (II Cor. 10:4-5), we should also note that "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, if one rise from the dead" (Luke 16:31). We must remember that "No man can come to [Jesus], except the Father that sent me draw him" (John 6:44). Therefore apologetic arguments can never, by themselves, convert anyone. God may use them as a means to bring someone to repentance, but to convert a sinner needs a new heart, not more arguments. Unbelief is not intellectual, it is moral. Unregenerate man does not believe not because of a lack of "evidence" or "arguments" but because he hates God, because he is God's enemy (Rom. 8:7). So, it's personal. Unless the Holy Spirit changes a man's heart, he'll always cut off his nose to spite his face. Greg Bahnsen expresses the above nicely when he writes,
"To make God's word your presupposition, your standard, your instructor and guide, however, calls for renouncing intellectual self-sufficiency - the attitude that you are autonomous, able to attain unto genuine knowledge independent of God's direction and standards. The man who claims (or pursues) neutrality in his thought does not recognize his complete dependence upon the God of all knowledge for whatever he has come to understand about the world. Such men give the impression (often) that they are Christians only because they, as superior intellects, have figured out ore verified (to a large or significant degree) the teachings of Scripture. Instead of beginning with God's sure word as foundational to their studies, they would have us to think that they begin with intellectual self-sufficiency and (using this as their starting-point) work up to a "rational" acceptance of Scripture. While Christians may fall into an autonomous spirit while following their scholarly endeavors, still this attitude is not consistent with Christian profession and character. "The beginning of knowledge is the fear of Jehovah" (Prov. 1:7). All knowledge begins with God, and thus we who wish to have knowledge must presuppose God's word and renounce intellectual autonomy. "Talk no more proudly: let not arrogance come from your mouth, for Jehovah is a God of knowledge" (1 Sam. 2:3).
Jehovah is the one who teaches man knowledge (Ps. 94:10). So whatever we have, even the knowledge which we have about the world, has been given to us from God. "What do you have that you have not received?" (1 Cor. 4:7). Why then would men pride themselves in intellectual self-sufficiency? "According as it stands written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord" (1 Cor. 1:31). Humble submission to God's word must precede man's every intellectual pursuit" (Bahnsen, Evangelism and Apologetics, Synapse III (Fall, 1974).
And so we note that we can present arguments and evidence, but we should also note that there is a standard of argument and evidence. Thus Greg Bahnsen notes,
"The Christian's final standard, the inspired word of God, teaches us that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge" (Proverbs 1:7). If the apologist treats the starting point of knowledge as something other than reverence for God, then unconditional submission to the unsurpassed greatness of God's wisdom at the end of his argumentation does not really make sense. There would always be something greater than God's wisdom - namely, the supposed wisdom of one's own chosen, intellectual starting point. The word of God would necessarily (logically, if not personally) remain subordinate to that autonomous, final standard.
Ludwig Wittgenstein confessed that a devastating incongruity lay at the heart of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. If he was correct in his eventual conclusion, then the premises used to reach that conclusion were actually meaningless: "anyone who understands me eventually recognizes [my propositions] as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps - to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up by it)" (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961 [1921], section 6.54, p. 151)" (Greg Bahnsen, Autonomy Is No Ladder To Christ's Supreme Authority, Penpoint I:1 (October, 1990)).
This "book" will present many arguments for the Christian faith. The "book" will run the gambit, apologetically. I do not agree with everything contained in the articles below, but overall I think they each have very useful and helpful material. May God bless your studies.
Chapter 1: Metaphysical Arguments
A. Theism And Mathematical Realism. -Dr. John Byl
B. The Teleological Argument And The Anthropic Principal. -Dr. William Lane Craig
C. The Ontological Argument -Dr. Alvin Plantinga
i. The Ontological Argument Redux. -Steve Hays, Auquscum et alia
Chapter 2: Epistemological Arguments
A. If Knowledge Then God: The Epistemological Theistic Arguments of Plantinga And Van Til. -Dr. James Anderson
B. Naturalism Defeated. -Dr. Alvin Plantinga
C. Secular Responses to The Problem of Induction. -Dr. James Anderson
D. Knowledge And Naturalism. -Dr. Dallas Willard
Chapter 3: Arguments From Mind or Reason
A. Argument From Reason. -Dr. Victor Reppert
i. The Argument From Reason: Reppert Replies To Carrier. -Dr. Victor Reppert and Dr. William Vallicella
B. Converting Matter Into Mind: Alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone in Cognitive Science. -Dr. William Dembski
C. Does the Argument From Mind Provide Evidence for God? -Dr. J.P. Moreland
D. The Origin of the Brain and Mind [Part I]. -Drs. Brady Harrub and Bert Thompson
i. The Origin of the Brain and Mind [Part II]. -Drs. Brady Harrub and Bert Thompson
Chapter 4: Moral Arguments
A. The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality. -Dr. William Lane Craig
B. How Reason Can Survive The Modern University: The Moral Foundations Of Rationality. -Dr. Dallas Willard
C. Evil As Evidence For God. -Grek Koukl
D. Do We Need God To Be Moral. -John Frame vs. Paul Kurtz
E. The Problem of Evil. -Greg Welty
F. The Problem of Evil. -Dr. Greg Bahnsen
Chapter 5: Modal/Transcendental Arguments
A. The Actual and the Possible. -Dr. Alexander Pruss
B. Possible Worlds: What They Are Good For and What They Are. -Dr. Alexander Pruss
C. An Examination of Theistic Conceptual Realism as an Alternative to Theistic Activism -Greg Welty
Chapter 6: Cumulative Arguments
A. Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments. -Dr. Alvin Plantinga
B. Theism vs. Atheism Phil Fernandes/Michael Martin Debate Opening Statement: Phil Fernandes The Cumulative Case for God. -Dr. Phil Fernandes
Chapter 7: The Inerrancy, Authority, and Reliability of The Bible
A. Is The Bible Inerrant? -John Frame
B. The Inerrancy of The Autographa. -Dr. Greg Bahnsen
C. Scripture Speaks For Itself. -John Frame
D. Why I Believe The New testament Is Historically Reliable. -Dr. Gary Habermas
E. Is The Bible Reliable. -Bob and Gretchen Passantino
F. The Textual Reliability of the New Testament. -JP Holding
Chapter 8: The Resurrection of The Lord of Glory, Jesus Christ
A. This Joyful Eastertide: A Critical Review of 'The Empty Tomb'. -Steve Hays et alia
B. The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus. -Dr. William Lane Craig
C. Explaining Away Jesus' Resurrection: The Recent Revival of Hallucination Theories. -Dr. Gary Habermas
i. A Summary Critique: Questioning the Existence of Jesus. -Dr. Gary Habermas
Chapter 9: Theism -vs- Atheism
A. The Great Debate: Bahnsen vs. Stein.
B. Tag vs. Tang: Frame vs. Martin.
C. William Lane Craig vs. Douglas Jesseph.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
Do unto others...
Daniel Morgan responded to something I posted here:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/08/care-and-feeding-of-village-atheist.html
Let me say at the outset that compared with some of critical feedback, Danny’s reply was a measured and levelheaded response.
I’ll confine myself to two of his criticisms:
DM: This is another difficult thing for me to respond to. I can cite OT verses that certainly differentiate between the Jew and Gentile, Pauline verses that basically say to consider the conscience of the other in your outward activities [1 Cor 10:29, etc], and verses by Jesus pointing out that how one treats another person who doesn't love them is the measure of goodness, since it is easy/natural to love those who love us back.
Again, it really depends on which verses you want to emphasize. Certainly, the Confuscian/Epicurean/Jesus ethical precept of reciprocity [do unto others] is certainly an agreeable enough ethos. Conversely, killing an apostate to prevent them from leading you away from God, as commanded in the OT, is not a value system I want my treatment based upon.
SH: Both Bridges and Hiraeth have responded to this with some very sensible comments.
I’ll just make a few observations of my own. Let’s take a step back and recall the broader context of this debate.
There are unbelievers who quote the Sermon on the Mount against a hard-hitting Christian apologetic. But this is to take the words of Christ completely out of context.
An outspoken apostate or militant atheist is not my personal enemy. He has done me no personal wrong. Loftus isn’t persecuting me. Dagood isn’t smiting my cheek.
Hence, when I critique the Debunkers or other suchlike, I’m not exacting private vengeance on my enemies. That has nothing to do with it.
It’s not as if I’m getting even with Loftus for slashing my tires by slashing his tires.
Likewise, to take an analogous example, the parable of the Good Samaritan is irrelevant to blogging. The Debunkers are not my neighbors. Danny and I didn’t attend the same high school. Loftus doesn’t live across the street from me.
The do-unto-others ethic of the Sermon on the Mount has something far more immediate in mind than the impersonal, mass medium of blogging.
If Danny were living next door, and his car broke down, and he needed to hitch a ride, then, according to the ethics of Christ, I should give him a ride.
That’s the sort of application that the Sermon on the Mount or the parable of the Good Samaritan envisions.
It has nothing do with offensive apologetics. Loftus isn’t persecuting me, and I’m not retaliating in kind. This is not a personal vendetta.
Modern readers are apt to allegorize or trivialize biblical injunctions. But the Biblical prohibition against taking revenge has reference to a literal blood feud. It isn’t a metaphor for observing the social amenities at the soiree.
DM: Picking these examples is a bit disingenuous though. It's like me basing my appraisal of your behavior towards atheists on Mather, Calvin, or some fun fellow from the Spanish Inquisition.
SH: I disagree. It seems to me that unbelievers like Dawkins, Dennett, Russell, Ingersoll, and Harris are quite representative of atheism, both in tone and content.
I’m not picking examples of the village atheist: of men and women who are uncouth or stupid or embarrassing to the cause of unbelief.
If I wanted to be unfair, I could have gone down the list at www.positiveatheism.org and picked out such luminaries of free thought as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Clarence Darrow, H. L. Mencken, Madalyn Murray-O’Hair, Thomas Paine, Eddie Vedder, Jesse Ventura, Gore Vidal, or H. G. Wells, to name a few.
Instead I chose my examples from the cream of free thought. The men I mentioned are highly regarded in secular circles as articulate and generally well-educated spokesmen for infidelity. These are heroes of humanism.
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/08/care-and-feeding-of-village-atheist.html
Let me say at the outset that compared with some of critical feedback, Danny’s reply was a measured and levelheaded response.
I’ll confine myself to two of his criticisms:
DM: This is another difficult thing for me to respond to. I can cite OT verses that certainly differentiate between the Jew and Gentile, Pauline verses that basically say to consider the conscience of the other in your outward activities [1 Cor 10:29, etc], and verses by Jesus pointing out that how one treats another person who doesn't love them is the measure of goodness, since it is easy/natural to love those who love us back.
Again, it really depends on which verses you want to emphasize. Certainly, the Confuscian/Epicurean/Jesus ethical precept of reciprocity [do unto others] is certainly an agreeable enough ethos. Conversely, killing an apostate to prevent them from leading you away from God, as commanded in the OT, is not a value system I want my treatment based upon.
SH: Both Bridges and Hiraeth have responded to this with some very sensible comments.
I’ll just make a few observations of my own. Let’s take a step back and recall the broader context of this debate.
There are unbelievers who quote the Sermon on the Mount against a hard-hitting Christian apologetic. But this is to take the words of Christ completely out of context.
An outspoken apostate or militant atheist is not my personal enemy. He has done me no personal wrong. Loftus isn’t persecuting me. Dagood isn’t smiting my cheek.
Hence, when I critique the Debunkers or other suchlike, I’m not exacting private vengeance on my enemies. That has nothing to do with it.
It’s not as if I’m getting even with Loftus for slashing my tires by slashing his tires.
Likewise, to take an analogous example, the parable of the Good Samaritan is irrelevant to blogging. The Debunkers are not my neighbors. Danny and I didn’t attend the same high school. Loftus doesn’t live across the street from me.
The do-unto-others ethic of the Sermon on the Mount has something far more immediate in mind than the impersonal, mass medium of blogging.
If Danny were living next door, and his car broke down, and he needed to hitch a ride, then, according to the ethics of Christ, I should give him a ride.
That’s the sort of application that the Sermon on the Mount or the parable of the Good Samaritan envisions.
It has nothing do with offensive apologetics. Loftus isn’t persecuting me, and I’m not retaliating in kind. This is not a personal vendetta.
Modern readers are apt to allegorize or trivialize biblical injunctions. But the Biblical prohibition against taking revenge has reference to a literal blood feud. It isn’t a metaphor for observing the social amenities at the soiree.
DM: Picking these examples is a bit disingenuous though. It's like me basing my appraisal of your behavior towards atheists on Mather, Calvin, or some fun fellow from the Spanish Inquisition.
SH: I disagree. It seems to me that unbelievers like Dawkins, Dennett, Russell, Ingersoll, and Harris are quite representative of atheism, both in tone and content.
I’m not picking examples of the village atheist: of men and women who are uncouth or stupid or embarrassing to the cause of unbelief.
If I wanted to be unfair, I could have gone down the list at www.positiveatheism.org and picked out such luminaries of free thought as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Clarence Darrow, H. L. Mencken, Madalyn Murray-O’Hair, Thomas Paine, Eddie Vedder, Jesse Ventura, Gore Vidal, or H. G. Wells, to name a few.
Instead I chose my examples from the cream of free thought. The men I mentioned are highly regarded in secular circles as articulate and generally well-educated spokesmen for infidelity. These are heroes of humanism.
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