The Problem of Evil

The following is the greatly extended version of a paper written for my apologetics and ethics class, with a good deal more detail and long quotations. As you will notice, it is heavily influenced by an amazing little book, The Doors of the Sea by David Bentley Hart, which is one of the most strikingly cogent and sensitive treatments of the problem of evil I have encountered.

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"How can a good, all-powerful God allow suffering and evil to exist?" This simple question, posed innocently and not-so-innocently innumerable times by children and philosophers alike, is undoubtedly the hardest one the Christian apologist has to grapple with, and a major reason for nonbelief among skeptics. If history has taught us anything, it is that this all-too-brief work will certainly not settle the question once and for all. But perhaps I can at least steer the conversation onto a slightly more constructive, edifying track.

Stating the problem

The Greek philosopher Epicurus was one of the first to state the problem: "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"¹ Philosopher John Mackie presents a similar argument in the form of a logical proof: "good is opposed to evil, in such a way that a good being always eliminates evil as far as it can, and...there are no limits to what an omnipotent thing can do. From these it follows that a good omnipotent thing eliminates evil completely, and then the propositions that a good omnipotent thing exists and that evil exists are incompatible."² This is the logical form of the problem of evil, which seeks to argue that the existence of evil is logically incompatible with God's existence.³ The softer evidential form only seeks to demonstrate that evil renders God's existence unlikely or unbelievable, or that "pointless evil" (which probably exists) is incompatible with theism.⁴ "Natural evil" (evil that does not appear to be due to the actions of free, morally responsible beings⁵) is an especially convincing example of "pointless evil", since there is no obvious agent to hold responsible for it except God the creator.

But entirely aside from its philosophical form, the problem of evil exists even more powerfully as an emotional/pastoral problem, the cry of a heart anguished by suffering and demanding to know why God allows tragedy, much of it apparently senseless to befall us.⁶ A father who lost his children in a tsunami, a woman who has just learned her cancer has returned, a man who suddenly loses his job and is unsure how he will provide for his family—these people are probably not making a philosophical argument against God's existence, and they certainly don't want an explanation of why God allows evil. They may even believe in God, but as the one who apparently stood by and allowed terrible tragedy to befall them. We must never so close ourselves off to the plight of others that we allow ourselves to discuss the philosophical form of the problem of evil in isolation; it never exists in such a pure state.

An even stronger form of the problem of evil is stated in Dostoevsky's classic novel The Brothers Karamazov, by the skeptical rationalist Ivan. Ivan's argument is striking for its deeply Christian background: he accepts God's existence and acknowledges that "all suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage ... something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with men—but though all that may come to pass, I don't accept it. I won't accept it."⁷ Though he accepts God, Ivan cannot accept the world he has made or the terms of the salvation that he offers to men. Even though he concedes a future harmony that will justify all evil, in light of the sufferings of children Ivan rejects that harmony because of its monstrous, unjust cost: "It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child...if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price."⁸

Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart comments: "What makes Ivan's argument so novel and disturbing is not that he simply accuses God of failing to save the innocent; in fact, he grants that in some sense God still will 'save' them... Rather, Ivan rejects salvation itself, insofar as he understands it, and on moral grounds. He rejects anything that would involve such a rescue—anything that would make the suffering of children meaningful or necessary."⁹ His objection is thus a powerful rebuke of attempts to logically justify the existence of evil, whether by appealing to a "greater good" or by arguing that the possibility of suffering is inherent to a world that supports life. Dostoevsky’s genius is that he sees not only that the history of suffering and evil is not morally intelligible, but "that it would be far more terrible if it were."¹⁰

If this is the case (as I am convinced it is), then a good deal of Christian theodicies fall on their face, insofar as they try to show that there is some divine plan that justifies the existence of evil, renders it meaningful or purposeful. If we are to learn anything from Ivan Karamazov, it is that suffering and evil are, must be, meaningless, purposeless, that there is no divine reason for their existence and that they are ultimately accidental to God's plan. God does not have the slightest need of evil to accomplish any of his purposes. This is because evil is not simply a tool in God's box of means, "but is only a shadow, a turning of the hearts and minds of rational creatures away from the light of God back toward the nothingness from which all things are called."¹¹ Thus there is no way that evil can supply any deficiency in God's goodness or power.¹² God does not will evil for anyone, nor does he will that anyone should perish. (Ezek 33:11, 2 Pet 3:9) Ivan's mistake, subtle though it may be, is assuming that evil and suffering are somehow necessary to bring about the future reconciliation, or that they contribute to it in any way.

Created freedom

What can be justified, then, is not the actual existence of evil, but the possibility of evil. This is the point of the "free will defense"—free will makes evil possible (though not necessary), but it is also indispensable to God's purposes for us.¹³ God created us from dirt, in his image, to enact his benevolent rule over the creation (Gen 1:26-28). Though we should be wary of peering too deep into the mind of God, we see throughout the Bible that he made us to know him—from Adam to Noah to Abraham to Moses (cf. Exo 33:11). The greatest miracle in the Biblical narrative is God taking on flesh and becoming one of us, to adopt us as his sons and daughters (Gal 4:4-7) and to know and be known by us (Gal 4:9), which is eternal life. (Jhn 17:3) "God has fashioned creatures in his image so that they might be joined in a perfect union with him in the rational freedom of love."¹⁴ I believe that God created us simply to love us and to be loved by us, as a father loves his children.

But the genuinely loving relationship God desires with his creatures requires that there really be someone to love besides himself—that there be not simply passive recipients but active reciprocators of his love, like him and yet other than him. So Isaac of Nineveh: "In his great love God was unwilling to restrict our freedom, even though he had the power to do so. He has left us to come to him by the love of our heart alone."¹⁵ In classical Christian teaching, one major consequence of the image of God in which we are created is that we share in his freedom, as the church father Irenaeus says: "Humanity was free from the beginning. For God is freedom and humanity was made in the image of God."¹⁶ And Gregory of Nyssa: "He who created human beings in order to make them share in his own fullness so disposed their nature that it contains the principle of all that is good, and each of these dispositions draws them to desire the corresponding divine attribute. So God could not have deprived them of the best and most precious of his attributes, self-determination, freedom."¹⁷ This freedom is what makes it possible for us to return God's love and realize the purpose for which we are made, but while we are not yet made perfect in faith and love (cf. 1 Jhn 4:16-19), it also makes it possible for us to separate ourselves from God as well as submit to him.

Yet because of the genuine other-ness of the creation from God, we cannot blame him for this misuse of liberty or hold him responsible for it—we can only blame ourselves. In the patristic and medieval understanding, evil is a privation of the good and a descent into uncreation and nonbeing, movement away from God, rather than something with positive existence. How can God, who calls to all men through the created order and the primordial longing for himself he has placed in our hearts, be blamed when we reject this call and turn away from him? Gregory of Nyssa, responding to this charge, states this in better words:

Thus God cannot be held responsible for evil, for he is the author of what is, and not what is not. It is he who made sight, not blindness ... And that without subjecting us to his good pleasure by any violent constraint. He did not draw us toward what is good against our will, as if we were an inanimate object. If when the light shines very brightly ... someone chooses to hide his eyes by lowering his eyelids, the sun is not responsible for the fact that he cannot see it.¹⁸

Thus evil is not a "cost" of creaturely freedom that is justified by the "greater good" it produces. For it to be a cost would mean that it naturally or necessarily follows from freedom, which it does not. The loving union of free creatures with himself is essentially part of his purpose for us; sin and death are "a contingency and an absurdity"¹⁹ and do not contribute to this purpose in any way. Is this freedom worth the risk? It is presumptuous and beyond our finite minds to set ourselves up as judges of this. So "the rejection of God on these grounds cannot really be a rational decision, but only a moral pathos," such as Ivan expresses.²⁰

Divine freedom

Some may argue that the view of creaturely freedom I have set forth compromises God's sovereignty over his creation. But this is to confuse God's sovereignty with his being the only free agent in the universe. The existence of genuinely free creatures does not in the least threaten God's status as all-powerful creator or providential, sovereign sustainer. In fact, it is ironically arrogant on our part to suggest that we could have such power over against God in the freedom he himself has given us. Is it not limiting of God to deny that he can "at once create freedom and also assure that no consequence of the misuse of that freedom will prevent him from accomplishing the good he intends in all things"?²¹

A discussion of God's absolute sovereignty is incomplete without also keeping in mind his absolute freedom and absolute transcendence. Remembering God's freedom is important first of all because it reminds us that our own freedom is only a finite reflection of the infinite freedom of the one whose image we bear. His transcendence (as most effectively expressed though the apophatic tradition that is unfortunately largely obscure to the west) is just as essential, for it reminds us that his ways are higher than our ways, his thoughts higher than our thoughts (Isa 55:9), and that it is foolish for us to try to confine God to the same web or logic of causality as his creatures.

Divine transcendence is what allows God's freedom and sovereignty to coexist with the limited freedom and sovereignty of his creatures. Such is his absolute, transcendent freedom that "in his omniscience, omnipotence, and transcendence of time, [he] can both allow created freedom its scope and yet so constitute the world that nothing can prevent him from bringing about the beatitude of His kingdom."²²  Simply affirming God's sovereignty without equally affirming his freedom and transcendence means denying both of these things by holding him responsible for absolutely everything that happens, with the catastrophic moral consequences that Ivan (along with numerous church fathers) glimpses. As Hart says:

When any meaningful difference between will and permission has been excluded, and when the transcendent causality of the creator God has been confused with the immanent web of causation that constitutes the world of our experiences, it becomes impossible to imagine that what God wills might not be immediately convertible with what occurs in time; and thus both the authority of Scripture and the justice of God must fall before the inexorable logic of absolute divine sovereignty.²³

If this view of things seems logically impossible, then I ask you to consider whether you have fully submitted your logic to the claims of God, or whether you make your concept of God subject to a system as constraining as that of the Jews who could not accept an upside-down kingdom inaugurated by a crucified Messiah or the Greeks who scorned the resurrection of the body as a pointless absurdity. Why should God's freedom or transcendence (not to mention love) be any less absolute and unconditional than his sovereignty? If your conception of God does not allow all of these things and more to be realized  to their utmost without being conditioned or limited by each other, then it is too small. In fact it is always too small, and the only appropriate way to affirm any proper theology is as the incomplete speculation of a finite image-bearer still being made perfect in faith.

In fact we must affirm the possibility of this view to guarantee the certainty of redemption but avoid making the creation in all its beauty and decay into "the work of one all-determining will",²⁴ and sin and death into instruments of God rather than enemies. It is squarely against this kind of theodicy that Ivan's objection is raised: "the moral rationality of Ivan's rebellion remains entirely unassailable...when it is set against those forms of theological fatalism that, having failed to understand the difference between primary and secondary—or transcendent and immanent—causality, defame the love and goodness of God out of a servile and unhealthy fascination with his 'dread sovereignty'."²⁵ The "solution" of ascribing the force of divine volition to everything that befalls man—even his eternal destiny—flatly contradicts the universal scope of redemption as set forth in verses like 1 John 2:2 and 1 Tim 2:4 and the goodness of God visible throughout Scripture. If the sovereignty of God is so meticulous that double predestination is true as claimed by Calvin, then his freedom, transcendence, and goodness become meaningless:

God would be the author of and so entirely beyond both good and evil, or at once both and neither, or indeed merely evil (which power without justice always is). The curious absurdity of all such doctrines is that, out of a pious anxiety to defend God's transcendence against any scintilla of genuine creaturely freedom, they threaten effectively to collapse that transcendence into absolute identity—with the world, with us, with the devil. For, unless the world is truly set apart from God and possesses a dependent but real liberty of its own analogous to the freedom of God, everything is merely a fragment of divine volition, and God is simply the totality of all that is and all that happens; there is no creation, but only an oddly pantheistic expression of God's unadulterated power. ... such a God, being nothing but will willing itself, would be no more than an infinite tautology—the sovereignty of glory displaying itself in the glory of sovereignty—and so an infinite banality.²⁶

Hidden within Ivan's objection to the world God has made is the prophetic voice of a truer, deeper, more subversive Christianity, a voice that cries out against all the injustice and absurdity manifested in death and evil. God is not worthy of worship simply because of his raw power or terrific glory, but because of his goodness and his divine love that direct his power and make his glory one to be ecstatically adored rather than dreaded. And all of these attributes are always fully expressed to those able to discern them, without impairing or qualifying each other. "For if indeed there were a God whose true nature—whose justice or sovereignty—were revealed in the death of a child or the dereliction of a soul or a predestined hell, then it would be no great transgression to think of him as a kind of malevolent or contemptible demiurge, and to hate him, and to deny him worship, and to seek a better God than he."²⁷

It is also worth mentioning that the traditional Calvinist answer to the problem of evil—that there is no distinction between divine permission and willing, and that God in his sovereign will somehow ordains evil as well as good yet somehow remains free from its moral taint—works only at the most philosophical level. It is no comfort at all (and may in fact do more harm than good) to tell someone reeling from tragedy and loss that their situation is a part of God's inscrutable plan and that they should simply rejoice in his glory rather than question his council. Hart scathingly rebukes such a theodicy:

Words we would not utter to ease someone else's grief we ought not to speak to satisfy our own sense of piety. ... Most of us would have the good sense to be ashamed to speak such words [i.e. that tragedy and suffering are a result of God's eternal, inscrutable, and righteous counsels]; we would recognize that they would offer no more credible comfort than the vaporings of the most idiotically complacent theodicy, and we would detest ourselves for giving voice to odious banalities and blasphemous flippancies. And this should tell us something. For if we would think it shamefully foolish and cruel to say such things in the moment when another's sorrow is most real and irresistibly painful, then we ought never to say them; because what would still our tongues would be the knowledge (which we would possess at the time, though we might forget it later) that such sentiments would amount not only to an indiscretion or words spoken out of season, but to a vile stupidity and a lie told principally for our own comfort, by which we would try to excuse ourselves for believing in an omnipotent and benevolent God. 

In the process, moreover, we would be attempting to deny...a knowledge central to the gospel: the knowledge of the evil of death, its intrinsic falsity, its unjust dominion over the world, its ultimate nullity; the knowledge that God is not pleased or nourished by our deaths, that he is not the secret architect of hell, that he has condemned all these things by the power of the cross; the knowledge that God is life and light and infinite love, and that the path that leads through nature and history to his Kingdom does not simply follow the contours of either nature or history, or obey the logic immanent to them, but is opened to us by way of the natural and historical absurdity—or outrage—of the empty tomb.²⁸

For if a Calvinistic theodicy were true and everything that happens is providentially willed by God for his glory according to the impenetrable mystery of his will, then why should anyone mourn or decry any evil at all? But rather, "blessed are those who mourn" (Matt 5:4), who raise a fist and freely shed tears at the absurdity of evil, suffering, and death, "for they will be comforted." If God himself is the one behind ours sufferings, then to whom can we pray for deliverance?

Other objections

In keeping with Ivan's objection, I have mostly addressed the problem of moral evil—what about natural evil? At this point the Enlightenment view of the universe as a finely-tuned machine, a "closed causal continuum",²⁹ which is the only one known even by a good many Christians, makes understanding difficult. In the New Testament, the word kosmos, "world" or "universe", is often used to refer to the present "order" that enslaves the creation and is opposed to God.³⁰ So the "world" hates Jesus (Jhn 15:18-19) and has been overcome by him (16:33); the devil is described as the "ruler of this world" (Jhn 12:31, 14:30, 16:11) or even the "god of this world" (2 Cor 4:4), which lies "in the power of the evil one" (1 Jhn 5:19). In the biblical imagination (and that of early and medieval Christianity), the world is not governed simply by fixed laws, but by spiritual powers (cf. Col 1:16, Eph 1:21), that is, angels.³¹ Yet some of these heavenly authorities have rebelled against God, and so the creation at large finds itself in a similar situation to humanity, fallen and longing for redemption, to be restored to its creator.

C.S. Lewis was a tentative proponent of this theory:

It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe, or the solar system, or, at least, the planet earth, before ever man came on the scene: and that when man fell, someone had, indeed, tempted him. This hypothesis is not introduced as a general 'explanation of evil': it only gives a wider application to the principle that evil comes from the abuse of free will. If there is such a power, as I myself believe, it may well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared. ... The Satanic corruption of the beasts would therefore be analogous, in one respect, with the Satanic corruption of man. ... If this hypothesis is worth considering, it is also worth considering whether man, at his first coming into the world, had not already a redemptive function to perform.³²

Ronald Osborn echoes Lewis' view and likewise considers it to be the historically orthodox one: "there is a clear sense throughout the New Testament that we are living in a time of temporary dualism in which God has permitted certain parts of his creation—and not humans alone—the autonomy of radical freedom and even defiance, which God himself must in some sense struggle against."³³ Though strange and largely unknown to modern Christians, this perspective is not incompatible with the scientific one any more than rational and theological views on creation are with each other. Thus in the classical Christian understanding, there is arguably no separate category of "natural evil" that occurs apart from the actions of moral agents.

Another possible objection: if free will is essential to God's desire for union with us, and free will entails the possibility for evil, how can God promise a future paradise with no evil unless it is also devoid of free will? At this point an important distinction must be made between two kinds of freedom. We usually associate "freedom" with "free will": the ability to freely choose between alternatives. But a higher understanding of freedom is the freedom to become what we were made to be: "to be able to flourish as the kind of being one is, and so to attain the ontological good toward which one's nature is oriented; freedom is the unhindered realization of a complex nature in its proper end (natural and supernatural), and this is consummate liberty and happiness."³⁴ This is the kind of freedom which God enjoys absolutely, and in which we progressively grow through deification. Compared to this, the freedom to choose is actually a liability, a power that, if misused, hinders our progression toward this higher kind of freedom. It is a reflection of our incompleteness, our nature as "an animal who has received the vocation to become God."³⁵ In heaven, we will have no need to deliberate between possibilities; nothing will hinder us from enjoying God forever, which is true freedom.

This raises the obvious question: why did God not simply create us in this state of eschatological bliss to begin with and eliminate any possibility of evil and suffering? This may be the impetus for Ivan's false assumption: if God could have created a world without any evil but created this one instead, then evil must be necessary for his purposes somehow. This crucial question takes us onto very thin ice indeed. This is partly because there is nothing arbitrary in God's willing as in ours (as though his freedom meant, as it does for us, the obligation to deliberate and choose between an array of mutually exclusive alternatives), so it may not even be justifiable to speak about his actions in hypothetical terms.³⁶

For God is infinite actuality, the source and end of all being, the eternally good, for whom mere arbitrary "choice"—as among possibilities that somehow exceed his 'present' actuality—would be a deficiency, a limitation placed upon his infinite power to be God. His freedom is the impossibility of any force, pathos, or potentiality interrupting the perfection of his nature or hindering him in the realization of his own illimitable goodness, in himself and in his creatures.³⁷

Yet we can attempt to imagine God's reasons for creating as he did, while acknowledging that we are not in a position to pass judgment on what we do not understand, or constrain God's freedom by our rationalizing. Possibly (and very tentatively), if the creation were made in its final perfection, it would not really be other than God, but merely an extension of his will. Irenaeus, responding to the question, explains that by its very nature, the perfection God embodies and intends for us is the fruit of maturity:

It is precisely in this that God differs from humanity: God creates; humanity is created. He who creates is always the same, while they who are created must acknowledge a beginning, an intermediate state and a maturity ... They receive knowledge and progress towards God. For in so far as God is always the same, to that extent human beings founds in God will always be making progress toward God.³⁸

Because of this limitation not of God but of our own nature, "it was possible for God Himself to have made man perfect from the first, but man could not receive this, being as yet an infant."³⁹ He further says of the possibility of Adam and Eve being created perfect: "Their being good would be of no consequence, because they were so by nature rather than by will, and are possessors of good spontaneously, not by choice"⁴⁰ and goes on to ask, "how could you be God when you have not yet become human? How could you be complete when you have only just been created?"⁴¹

The justice of God

Yet till now I have not been answering the question posed by evil in a truly biblical way. The Bible's response to evil is not to explain it (or even the possibility of it), but to exhort us to join God in his ongoing defeat of the powers responsible. A theodicy which does nothing but justify the way things presently are can only succeed in explaining "why paradise is not a logical possibility"⁴²—hardly a praiseworthy end. The problem of evil cannot be resolved by rational explanation; the solution only becomes visible through the eyes of faith, when we learn to stop gainsaying God's works and to trust him (as in Isa 45:5-13), becoming part of the divine answer that is lived as well as believed. "Either one 'sees' that glory [even through horrific suffering and evil] or one does not—and in either case one may be moved by a love of the good. ... To believe in the infinite goodness of being, one must be able to see it, and this no mere argument can bring about."⁴³

So the final answer to the skeptic's question, "Why did God create the world as it is, and us as we are?" is this: to know and love him, with a love that is stronger than death. So Maximus the Confessor: "When God, who is absolute fullness, brought creatures into existence, it was not done to fulfil any need, but so that his creatures should be happy to share his likeness, and so that he himself might rejoice in the joy of his creatures as they draw inexhaustible upon the Inexhaustible."⁴⁴ Seeking rational answers becomes out of line if it keeps us from this divine vocation. It is terribly ironic for us to base our rejection of God on the fact that he made us able to reject him.

This is the challenge of the Christian: not simply to explain the world as it is, but to see and even dwell in the new creation that is emerging from the old by acquiring a merciful heart and learning to see the creation through the eyes of divine, universal love. "The Christian vision of the world...is not some rational deduction from empirical experience but is a moral and spiritual aptitude—or rather, a moral and spiritual labor."⁴⁵ This labor involves adopting a radically different perspective on the creation that overflows with love for all things; in Dostoevsky's novel, this perspective is exemplified by the saintly Father Zossima, who serves as a sort of living answer to Ivan's objection.⁴⁶ A passage from the writings of Isaac the Syrian further describes this otherworldly love:

What is a merciful heart? A heart aflame for all of creation, for men, birds, beasts, demons, and every created thing; the very thought or sight of them causes the merciful man's eyes to overflow with tears. The heart of such a man is humbled by the powerful and fervent mercy that has captured it and by the immense compassion it feels, and it cannot endure to see or hear of any suffering or any grief anywhere within creation. Hence he constantly lifts up tearful prayers for God's care and mercy upon even unreasoning brutes and enemies of truth and all who do him injury.⁴⁷

All this is in obedience to the Lord's command to "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." (Mat 5:44) Hart comments,

To see the world as it should be seen, and so to see the true glory of God reflected in it, requires the cultivation of charity, of an eye rendered limpid by love. Maximus the Confessor taught that it is only when one has learned to look upon the world with selfless charity that one sees the true inner essence—the logos—of any created thing, and sees how that things shines with the light of the one divine Logos that gives it being.⁴⁸

The Christian faith, in its truest form hidden within Ivan's objection, does not try to justify or make sense of suffering and death, but overcomes it. We are to carry within ourselves the paradoxical victory of 2 Cor 4:6-14 that does not only undo death but transforms it into the way to eternal life. In the victory of Christ death, the ultimate subversion of God's creation, has itself been subverted, "in order to change death, in whatever shape it comes, into an approach to life."⁴⁹ The incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ bring about the freedom and redemption described in Romans 8:18-23, which is such that Paul is able to say, "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." Again, this is not to say that evil and suffering in any way contribute to this glory. "The cross of Christ is not, after all, simply an eternal validation of pain and death, but their overthrow."⁵⁰

Thus in the Christian gospel, the meaning of life (and meaninglessness of death) is found ultimately not in a rational explanation, but in the divine Logos (that is, meaning) who for our sake became man and tasted death in order to triumph over it. The comfort it offers in the midst of suffering is that "when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God but the face of his enemy."⁵¹ The gospel itself, as revealed in Jesus Christ, can be considered the most truly biblical answer to the problem of evil. Maximus the Confessor says powerfully: "Therefore the mystery of the Incarnation of the Word contains in itself the whole meaning of the riddles and symbols of Scripture, the whole significance of visible and invisible creatures. Whoever knows the mystery of the cross and the tomb knows the meaning of all things. Whoever is initiated into the hidden meaning of the resurrection knows the purpose for which God created everything in the beginning."⁵²

As one of the most timeless and powerful objections to Christianity in history, the problem of evil is a heart check for Christians, a test of whether their faith is well-balanced or predominantly intellectual. The over-hasty answers of past apologists serve as a humbling reminder of our limited powers of explanation and the need active faith in God. It is a sort of "spiritual hygiene" that points to the subversive theology of the gospel and exposes inadequate visions of it for what they are.⁵³ Though often disguised as a purely philosophical problem, it cannot be resolved simply by thinking and debating; it takes authentic faith to even glimpse the answer God has provided, which is why it will probably continue to be raised until Christ returns to put a final end to evil once and for all. In the face of the most awful evil, the most tragic suffering, and the nihilistic absurdity of death, we as Christians are called not merely to defend the justice of God, but to become it. (2 Cor 5:21)

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1. John Hospers, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (Abingdon, Oxford, United Kingdom: Routledge, 1990), 310.
2. C. Stephen Evans and R. Zachary Manis, Philosophy of Religion: Thinking About Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 159–160.
3. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 158.
4. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 169.
5. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 157.
6. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 156–157.
7. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1995), 217.
8. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 225–226.
9. David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 40–41.
10. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 44.
11. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 73.
12. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 74.
13. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 163.
14. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 82.
15. Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetic Treatises 81 in Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Texts from the Patristic Era with Commentary (New York: New City Press, 2014), 57.
16. Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.37.4 in Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 81.
17. Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Orations 7 in Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 81.
18. Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Orations 5 in Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 86–87.
19. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 68.
20. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 69.
21. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 83.
22. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 83.
23. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 90.
24. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 68.
25. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 89.
26. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 90–91.
27. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 91–92.
28. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 99–101.
29. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 49.
30. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 64.
31. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 48.
32. C.S. Lewis, "The Problem of Pain" in The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 632.
33. Ronald E. Osborn, Death Before the Fall: Biblical Literalism and the Problem of Animal Suffering (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014), 144.
34. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 71.
35. Words of Basil of Caesarea, quoted by Gregory Nazianzen, Eulogy of Basil the Great, Oration 43, 48 in Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 76.
36. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 108.
37. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 71–72.
38. Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.11.2 in Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 87.
39. Irenaeus, "Why man was not made perfect from the beginning", Against Heresies IV.38.1, < http://newadvent.org/fathers/0103438.htm> (31 March 2015).
40. Irenaeus, " Men are possessed of free will", Against Heresies IV.37.6, < http://newadvent.org/fathers/0103437.htm> (31 March 2015).
41. Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.39.2 in Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 87.
42. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 58.
43. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 88–89.
44. Maximus the Confessor, Centuries on Charity III.46 in Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 32.
45. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 58.
46. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 58.
47. Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies 81 in Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 59.
48. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 60.
49. Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 42.
50. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 80.
51. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 103–104.
52. Maximus the Confessor, "Ambigua" in Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 40.
53. Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 43–44.

Why I Am an Evolutionary Creationist

This post is intended as a quick reference and resource in support of my position on the origins of living things, sometimes referred to as theistic evolution but which I (and others) prefer to call evolutionary creation. Evolutionary creation is defined by the Christian organization BioLogos as "the view that all life on earth came about by the God-ordained process of evolution with common descent". In other words, it understands evolution as the means by which God created life on earth.

I will begin by presenting, as clearly (but concisely) as I can, the evidence for creation and evolution, followed by my reasons for combining them.

Creation

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The very first words of the Bible express an unequivocally creationist (not to be confused with young-earth creationist, old-earth creationist, or other particular theories on the when and how of creation) viewpoint. The rest of Genesis 1 (and beginning of chapter 2) expound on this summary statement: in six "days", God separates light from darkness, the heavens/firmament (a solid dome thought to hold up the rain and snow) from the earth, and the land from the sea, then populates the earth with birds, sea creatures, plants, and land animals. This culminates in his creating man "in his own image" (Gen 1:27), male and female, to have dominion over the rest of the creation. So the center of Christian revelation begins with an account of God as creator; literarily, at least, "creator" is the foremost of his many names. By "creationism" I simply mean the fact that God is the creator of everything else. (See also Eph 3:9, Rev 4:11, 10:6)

Historically, the focus of creationism has been on the character of the creator (in the Nicene Creed: "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible) and of the creation (its distinctness from God, Heb 1:10-12; its dependence on God, Psa 65:9-13, Col 1:16-17; its witness to God, Psa 19:1-4, Rom 1:19-20; its essential goodness as God's handiwork, Gen 1:31, 1 Tim 4:4). The Bible consistently depicts God as the author, sustainer, caretaker, and redeemer of the created order. The questions about creation which divide Christians today (the historical/scientific process of creation, the age of the earth, the means by which life arose) were never dogmatically defined by the historical church and are not the primary focus of the doctrine of creation. To lose sight of the essential truths of creationism in the midst of controversies over its peripheral implications is to forsake the historical understanding of the church.

Besides the biblical witness, I believe natural theology offers other reasons for the truth of creationism. There is the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which (in its stronger, nontemporal form) holds that the existence of something (particularly the particular cosmos we live in) must have a reason or explanation of some kind, and this reason can only be a self-existent, personal, eternal, omnipotent creator. There is the teleological argument or "argument from design", which argues that the existence of order and logic in the natural order (or perhaps in the laws governing it) is best explained by a designer. There is the fine-tuning argument, which points to the multitude of conditions, from physical constants to cosmological conditions to the place of the Earth in the universe, which are "just right" for life to exist here. And there is the ontological argument, which argues that an infinite number of Gods must necessarily exist by definition...oh, maybe not. Ignore that last one.

Anyway, I believe that all of these arguments are better answered by theistic creationism than by alternate worldviews like pantheism or naturalism. For the sake of brevity I will refrain from going into more detail on this here. Of course natural theology is just as indicative of the truth of Judaism or Islam as of Christianity, buy hey, it is also possible (I think) to be a Jewish or Muslim evolutionary creationist.

Evolution

Creationism fills in the "who" and "why" of origins; the theory of evolution supplies the "how" and the "when". Evolution is, according to renowned biologist Ernst Mayr in his helpful book What Evolution Is, "the gradual process by which the living world has been developing following the origin of life." The theory of evolution proposes that the diversity of living species today has its origin in common descent from an ancestor, combined with gradual modification by genetic mutation, combined with the preservation of certain advantageous mutations by natural selection. It makes the claim, audacious at first sight, that this seemingly random mechanism is the source of all the kinds of life we see today, even human beings.

Mayr outlines the evidence evolutionary scientists marshal for the theory. Most basically, evolution, like any scientific theory, is based on systematized observation—in this case, observation of the fossil record, the patterns of fossils discovered in various layers of the earth, or "geological strata". Since we can match these strata up with like layers around the world and date them with a variety of reliable methods (e.g. patterns in layers of sediment and radiometric dating of volcanic ash and igneous rock), fossils serve as partial records of organisms that lived in the time corresponding to the fossils' geological age. The most basic evidence for evolution consists in observations of developments in this fossil record—particularly the fact that more recent fossils bear more resemblance to living organisms, while older fossils tend to be more different. Darwinian theory predicts a smooth transition from species to species, but because of the incompleteness of the fossil record (due to the rarity of the conditions for fossilization), there are often gaps, though some lineages (such as the transition from reptiles to mammals, or whales and their land-living ancestors) are "remarkably complete".

In a bit more detail, the study of the degrees of similarity and difference of various fossils is called "homology". These similarities may be structural, physiological, molecular, or behavioral (as best as we can extrapolate it). Evolution supposes that the features of species change gradually due to mutation and natural selection, and the accumulation of such changes gives rise to new species. When a common ancestor is found for two species that demonstrates a point of divergence for their respective features, or when a transition fossil is found between a species and its purported ancestor, it is counted as evidence for the theory of evolution.

Another strong evidence is that, as method of dating fossils become more reliable, each fossil type is found at the time that it is "expected" in the record according to evolution. Evolution is extremely easy to disprove observationally. A single fossil determined to have been found in the wrong geological layer (e.g. a modern mammal fossil in a geological layer dated to 100 million years old) would be sufficient to cast serious doubt on it, or at least necessitate a major rethinking of the "tree of life". Yet no such too-early fossils have been found; the fossil record stubbornly refuses to (seriously) deviate from the patterns predicted by evolution. That constitutes strong evidence for its truth.

Originally, Charles Darwin formulated the theory of evolution not so much from observation of the fossil record as of extant species in the present. He noted the differences between similar species: namely, three species of mockingbird on three of the volcanic Galapagos Islands which got there by a single colonization from South America 1000 km to the east. If a single species of mockingbird was responsible for colonizing the islands, then all three modern species are descended from a single, common ancestor species; the differences between island species (e.g. in beak shape) were most likely adaptations to different conditions, different kinds of food, etc., which were selected for over time since they were advantageous for survival. Eventually, Darwin realized that this mechanism of common descent and mutation with natural selection could apply not just to birds, but to all species on earth. The "origin of species", in Darwin's view, was a single, common ancestor in the distant past.

Darwin's theory of common descent solved the biological mystery of why certain groups of organisms (mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, etc.) share many of the same characteristics: they are descended from a common ancestor. They get their similarities from this common ancestor, and their differences from subsequent changes. The fossil record provides abundant support for common descent, offering common ancestors of dogs and bears, dogs and cats, rodents, ungulates, birds, reptiles, fish, mammals, etc. The hierarchy of animal taxa was known to biologists before Darwin; what he provided for the first time was an explanation for why animal taxa exist in a hierarchy. Some specific kinds of similarity that are well explained by common descent are:

Morphology: "Very suggestive evidence for common descent is provided by comparative anatomy," says Mayr. This is the most immediately obvious way of assessing similarities and differences between species, and it is easily grasped both for living species and fossils. It is the kind of similarity that allowed for the creation of hierarchical animal taxa even before Darwin. Patterns in morphological similarity are some of the strongest and earliest evidence for common descent.

Vestigial Structures: Why do species have morphological structures that have no functionality at all (or much less functionality than their homological equivalents in other species), like the appendix (which appears to help other mammals digest leaves but which we have little use for), human wisdom teeth, teeth in baleen whale embryos, hind legs in whales, or eyes in cave-dwelling animals? Again, vestigial structures are explained by common descent, by a shift in lifestyle resulting in vestigial structures no longer being utilized or promoted by natural selection.

Biogeography: Evolution also helps explain the distribution of plant and animal species. The relative similarity of species in different geographic regions is correlated with the amount of time the regions have been isolated from each other; when they were last connected, a common ancestor would have been present in both regions. In this way, taxonomical similarities can be correlated with geology. For example, North America and Europe were connected by a land bridge 40 million years ago while South America and Africa have been separated for 80 million years, which explains why there is more similarity in North American and European species. Common descent and dispersal from a single point of origin explains why there tend to be no mammals on oceanic islands but plenty of birds and plants; mammals tend to be worse at crossing water gaps.

Molecular Evidence: More recently, it has become possible to study organisms at the molecular level as well as the morphological. Comparisons of molecules indifferent species tends to confirm the evidence of morphology, though occasionally it tells us things we didn't know before. The study and comparisons of genes has allowed us to find deep similarities not just between humans and other mammals, but with plants and insects as well. It is possible to trace the evolution of genes in much the same way as the evolution of species.

One last point of evidence: while it is true that most of the evidence for evolution is simply observational, we also have some experimental evidence of evolution. We have observed and even directed it both in the laboratory and outside it. (e.g. selective breeding and domestication of animals) As point 12 of this Scientific American article describes, we have even observed the creation of new species of fruit flies (using Mayr's definition of a species as a reproductively isolated community) by selective breeding.  We have also experimentally bred entirely new features into e. coli, namely the ability to feed on citrate. I often hear creationists say that they believe in microevolution (the development of differences within a species, like Galapagos Finches or dogs) but not macroevolution (the mechanism explaining the origin of all species from a common ancestor). But microevolution and macroevolution work by the exact same mechanism; they are only quantitatively, not qualitatively different. As the fruit fly experiment shows, the boundary between the two is not precisely definable. Saying you believe in microevolution but not macroevolution is somewhat like saying you believe in early modern, but not ancient history.

Note that in the whole preceding discussion, I have presented my reasons for believing the theory of evolution without trying to disprove the truthfulness of the Bible, bringing in philosophical notions opposed to a Christian worldview, or paying attention to religion at all. Contrary to what many Darwinists and creationists would have you believe, evolution is, first and foremost, a scientific theory (not a doctrine or interpretation of the Bible), supported by scientific evidence like any other theory, and is entirely distinguishable from the philosophical and sociological conclusions people have drawn from it. Consequently, it is not (methodologically) possible to disprove evolution using philosophical or theological argumentation. The way to disprove evolution is to show that it does not, in fact, adequately explain the observable evidence (e.g. by observing contradicting evidence, like a mammal fossil showing up too early in the record or some kind of bird-fungus hybrid) and to present a different scientific theory that explains it better. This is simply the way that any scientific theory is debunked and replaced.

Evolutionary Creation

I do not believe that evolution and creation are in any essential conflict. Further, while they are certainly conversant with each other, they make their points on fundamentally different levels. Creation is, first and foremost, a theological doctrine, while evolution is, first and foremost, a scientific theory. Confusion on this distinction lies behind a good deal of the supposed conflict between faith and science.

For this reason, I cannot support the efforts of creationists who try to reconcile the Bible and science by massaging the scientific consensus to make it fit their interpretation of Scripture. The first problem with this is that it subverts or distorts what we can know from the creation (which is, of course, God's handiwork) in order to preserve a preferred interpretation of Scripture. It thus denies God's general revelation in favor of (one's own understanding of) his special revelation. I do not believe that truth works like this. The Bible does not simply "trump" verified knowledge from other sources; all truth, as they say, is God's truth. I believe rather that the intelligibility of nature and our ability to study and benefit from it are results of God's creativity; to deny these things in favor of a doctrine of creation is simply self-undermining, tantamount to saying that not everything God made is good. The book of God's words does not contradict the book of God's works. And, of course, Scripture says nothing "on its own" without a human act of interpretation on our part. Even if the Bible is infallible, what justifies our confidence in interpreting it in a way that contradicts the scientific consensus, without any prior grounds for disputing this consensus?

The second problem with this approach is that reconciling the Bible with science in this way can't simply stop at evolution, or even the age of the earth (which is even better-supported scientifically, by literally dozens of independent indicators, than evolution). The Bible contains numerous other examples of the ancient science we would expect from its ancient Jewish authors. Denis Lamoureux, a Canadian evolutionary creationist, describes these in his book on the subject, appropriately titled Evolutionary Creation.

• The immobility of the earth (1 Chr 16:30, Psa 93:1, Psa 96:10), in contrast to our modern understanding of the Solar System; this was one of the main points on which Galileo was condemned.
• The earth resting on foundations/pillars, somewhat like a building (1 Sam 2:8, Job 38:4-6, Psa 75:3, Psa 104:5), or on the waters (Psa 24:2, Psa 136:6), again in contrast to our modern conception of a spherical, revolving, orbiting earth.
• A flat (Mat 4:8), circular (Isa 40:22) or square (Isa 11:12, Ezek 7:2, Rev 7:1, 20:8) earth/landmass with a definite center (Dan 4:10) and ends (Isa 41:8-9, Dan 4:12, Matt 12:42); the Hebrew word translated "circle" refers to a flat, two-dimensional surface. No, the Old Testament does not presage the Greek discovery of a spherical earth.
• The existence of a circumferential sea surrounding the earth (Job 26:7-14, Job 8:22-31).
• The underworld, sheol or hades, spatially existing underneath the earth (Num 16:31-33, Pro 5:5, Isa 14:15, Matt 11:23, Luk 10:15). The underworld is also indirectly referred to along with heaven and earth, as being "under the earth" (Phil 2:10, Rev 5:13).
• The movement of the sun across the sky (Josh 10:13, Psa 19:6, 50:1, Ecc 15); as distinct from the Sun appearing to move because the Earth rotates.
• The firmament, a solid dome or "vault" of the sky holding up the (rain)waters above the earth (Gen 1:6-8, Psa 19:1). That the firmament is understood as a solid structure rather than simply the expanse of space is shown by the application of the Hebrew word raqa to it in Job 37:18, which is elsewhere used to describe metalworking (cf. job 22:14, Ezek 1:22).
• Waters above the firmament, in the heavens, thought to be the source of rain (Gen 1:6-8, 7:11, Psa 104:2-3, 148:4, Jer 10:12-13).
• Foundations of the heavens, holding them up above the earth (Job 26:11, 2 Sam 22:8); mention is also made of the "ends of the heavens" (Deu 4:32, Isa 13:5, Psa 19:6, Matt 24:31).
• The location of the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament (Gen 1:14-19).
• The heavens being rolled up and the stars "falling" to earth (Isa 34:4, Matt 24:29, Rev 6:13) or being thrown (Dan 8:10, Rev 12:4). We consider language of "shooting stars" to be merely figurative or poetic today, but only because we know that meteorites are not really stars. The ancient Israelites didn't!
• Ancient taxonomy: bats are birds (Lev 11:13-19), the hyrax and rabbit are ruminants (Lev 11:5-6).
• The mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds (Mat 13:31-32, Mar 4:30-32); seeds germinate by dying (Jhn 12:24-25, 1 Cor 15:35-37).
• An ancient, one-seed model of reproduction in which the woman's womb serves as the "field" in which the man's "seed" (which contains his progeny in tiny form) grows. Hence the biblical language of women as "barren" (Gen 11:30, Jdg 13:2) and the statement that the yet-unconceived Levi was "in the loins of his ancestor", Abraham (Heb 7:9-10).
• Medical conditions like muteness (Luk 11:14), blindness (Mat 12:22), epilepsy (Mat 17:14-18), and skeletomuscular problems (Luke 13:10-13, 16) are caused by demons, alongside other instances of what appears to be actual demon possession (Luk 8:26-39).

I have never seen anyone (even Ken Ham) attempt to consistently subscribe to the ancient science found in Scripture. Such a feat would be absurd, if not impossible for a modern person; it would involve denying modern geology, astronomy, medical science, biology, the eyewitness testimony of everyone who has been to space, and the existence of the orchid (among other facts). We have accepted all of these other discrepancies between biblical and modern science without much fuss (well, maybe with fuss in the case of the Heliocentric cosmos) and don't consider them to be contradictory to a "biblical" worldview. Why is evolution singled out as the one area of science that apparently can't be reconciled with the ancient science of Scripture?

This also rules out the converse approach, known as concordism, of altering our interpretation of the Bible to match our scientific knowledge. (Which, I suspect, is why the above examples don't bother most Christians; they simply don't notice the Bible's ancient worldview and assume it is speaking to their modern one with all these examples being "poetic" or "phenomenological") Aside from the fact that most concordists do not apply this method consistently (denying the scientific consensus on points like evolution that they cannot read into Scripture), I simply do not think that trying to locate a 4.5-billion-year-old earth, Darwinian evolution, a spherical earth revolving around the sun with the other planets, and modern cosmology all in the Bible constitutes a fair, respectful reading of the text. If we force the Bible to speak in the language of our modern cosmology/geology/biology, we silence its original voice.

I prefer to let both Scripture and science speak for themselves, without prematurely bringing them into conflict with each other. The Christian faith confesses God as the creator and sustainer who made all things good and man in his image; through the theory of evolution, science teaches us details of how he created life. Contrary to what Darwin himself and other skeptics have believed, studying God's means of creating through evolution does not marginalize him any more than studying his means of sustaining the creation through physics, chemistry, etc. does. I think this misconception traces at least partially to the shift in peoples' concept of God described in the first chapter of The Unintended Reformation, in which the loss of the apophatic (negative) view of God, Scotus' idea of metaphysical univocity, and Occam's razor combined to allow God to be "explained away" by reason and Enlightenment thinking. But God is far more than simply an explanation for questions of science or philosophy. Between the true God and our study of his works, then can be no final conflict.

The Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God

The following is a paper written for my apologetics and ethics class.

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The cosmological argument for the existence of God is one of the most venerable arguments of classical apologetics. It seeks to infer the existence of God from the existence of the cosmos or of objects within it.¹ It comes in two main forms which I will attempt to treat concurrently: the temporal form, which is based on the existence of a cause or explanation for the beginning of the universe, and the nontemporal form (or argument from contingency), which seeks an explanation for why there is something rather than nothing.

The temporal form of the cosmological argument is best known today as the Kalām cosmological argument, which was originally developed by Muslim philosophers but is widely promoted today by Christian apologists like William Lane Craig.² It has the following structure: 1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause 2) The universe began to exist 3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.³ It is temporal in that is seeks to locate the cause of the beginning of the universe (both temporal and ontological), identifying this "first cause" with God.

The nontemporal form of the cosmological argument, or "argument from contingency" is perhaps stronger since it does not depend on the assumption that the universe began to exist. It is best known as the work of Thomas Aquinas, who assumed (per Aristotle) for the sake of argument that the universe is eternal, since its createdness could only be known by revelation.⁴ It has the following logical form: 1) If any contingent beings exist, a necessary being exists (as the ultimate cause of their contingent existence) 2) Some contingent beings exist 3) Therefore, a necessary being exists.⁵ Unlike the temporal form, the nontemporal form does not seek to locate God as the "first cause" of the universe, but rather as the nontemporal reason for its existence when it could just as easily have not existed (this is what it means to be contingent), as the reason why there is something rather than nothing.

Besides their temporal/nontemporal focus, the premises of these arguments correlate fairly closely. The first premises seem evident from everyday experience and common sense: we expect there to be a reason or explanation for everything, even if we don't know it; we never consider that something might "just exist" for literally no reason at all. We implicitly hold to what Gottfried Leibniz called the "principle of sufficient reason", that nothing is true or exists without there being a sufficient reason for its being so and not otherwise,⁶ for objects in the universe; why should it not also hold for the universe as a whole? This principle is also foundational to the scientific method.

The second premise is supported by philosophy and science, Mathematically, apologists argue, it doesn't make any sense to say that the universe is literally eternal, with no beginning; infinity is just a concept, and it is absurd to propose that (for instance) an actually infinite amount of time has progressed in the universe.⁷ As well, this objection does not answer the nontemporal form of the argument which assumes a beginningless universe; claiming that the universe (or the existence of matter and energy) is necessary as well as eternal simply makes the cosmos itself into Aquinas' necessary being and is actually closer to pantheism (identifying God with the cosmos) than scientific naturalism. So it is fairly uncontroversial to claim that the universe is contingent, that it could have been (or not been) other than it is. Scientifically, twentieth-century cosmology has strongly supported the Big Bang theory, which postulates a clear beginning to the universe;⁸ the second law of thermodynamics also indicates that the universe has a finite age.

If these premises are both accepted, some conclusions can be drawn about the first cause/necessary being. (Granting that it is not simply the universe itself) At the very least, it would have to be outside space and time, eternal, and omnipotent in order to be the first/ultimate cause of everything else. To avoid an infinite regress of causes, it must be uncaused, self-existent, or necessary. If we grant that the universe had a beginning, it also seems that this being must be personal, since if the first cause were merely impersonal or mechanical, then the universe would be coeternal with it.⁹

Unsurprisingly, skeptics have raised a number of objections to the cosmological argument. A common one is to point out that no explanation or cause is given for the first cause/necessary being whose existence is being proven. This is taken to be a form of special pleading, a convenient exemption from the general rule of causality which is argued for everything else; if God does not need a prior cause, why does the universe?¹⁰ As well, it is argued that the first cause whose existence the argument seeks to prove is hardly the God of Christianity, since it provides no evidence for, say, his singularity, goodness, immanence, continuing interaction with the universe, or even continuing existence.¹¹ As its employment by Enlightenment philosophers demonstrates, the cosmological argument works just as well for deism (not to mention Islam) as it does for Christianity.

Other objections take issue with the premises of the argument. A variety of scientific theories have offered alternatives to the Big Bang as the beginning of the universe, such as the steady state model, a cyclic universe with an endless series of collapses and "bounces", vacuum fluctuation models, chaotic inflation theory, and the many-worlds hypothesis.¹² Another approach is to argue that it because time is a property of the universe, it simply makes no sense to speak of anything "before" the Big Bang, or of its having a "cause", since both of these concepts are dependent on time.¹³

Other objections question the first premise, that everything has a cause. This is true on an everyday level, but is causality truly universal? In other words, since we know our concept of causality via inductive reasoning, can we use it deductively as a premise of the cosmological argument? Already, quantum physics seems to present a counterexample, making causality less than universal. If we can't assume that the principle of sufficient reason applies in a truly ultimate sense, then it would seem we can't be sure of the soundness of the cosmological argument. Perhaps the question of why we exist is unanswerable, or simply meaningless.¹⁴

The objection that no cause is sought for the first cause is a misunderstanding of the argument. The first premise only applies to contingent entities, or objects that begin to exist. Since the first cause is understood by definition as beginningless or necessary, no prior cause or explanation is needed to explain it. "It is not arbitrary to deny that God has a cause, because, if God did have a cause, he would not be God."¹⁵ Some forms of this objection are reducible to objections to the second premise; if the universe is caused/had a beginning, then it is reasonable to seek an explanation for it. If what is being objected to is simply the possibility of a necessary/eternal being, that is a whole different, more philosophical argument.

Objections to the second premise are unconvincing. Attempts to get around the Big Bang and show how the universe may have no beginning tend to be highly speculative and nearly as faith-based as theism. Additionally, they apply only to the temporal form of the argument: even if our universe is part of some infinite series or tree of universes, the existence of the whole series is still yet to be explained.¹⁶ The question "why is there something rather than nothing?" is unanswered, since it is dependent only on the contingency (not the finitude) of the universe. As previously mentioned, if naturalists argue that besides being eternal, the universe is not contingent (i.e. it is necessary), the resulting worldview would seem to be closer to pantheism (the universe itself is God), which is not a place I think many skeptics would like to go.¹⁷

The objection that it makes no sense to speak of anything "before" the Big Bang, or its having a cause, is very interesting, since it actually gets at a central mystery of Christian theology proper, the eternality of God, from a scientific angle. It is true that there is no "before" the Big Bang in the temporal sense. But according to what the vast majority of Christians believe about God, he is able to exist and act outside of space and time in ways we cannot even imagine, which does not make it any less possible. It seems more accurate to say that the kind of causality we are talking about when speaking of a "first cause" is more (onto)logical than temporal.

Objections to the first premise are, in my view, the strongest, or at least the most consistent within a position of philosophical naturalism. The idea of the universe being a quantum fluctuation only pushes the question back, since it assumes the preexistence of the quantum vacuum.¹⁸ But objecting to the a priori assumption of universal causality seems at least somewhat promising: perhaps the causality that we consider a universal pattern of reality does not apply on the highest level. Can we be sure? Perhaps the existence of something rather than nothing is absurd, a "brute fact" for which no explanation can be given or should be sought. I know of no refutation of this proposition. But it does seem profoundly at odds with the drive of science to rationally seek explanations for everything. Why give up this quest when it comes to the ultimate reason? At the very least, claiming the universe came from nothing or that its cause is unknowable would seem to be just as much a faith-based claim as claiming that it was created.

Once unacceptable responses have been pared away, debates on the cosmological argument reduce to questions of the principle of sufficient reason: does the existence of the universe have a cause or explanation? This is a question whose answer cannot be "proven" one way or another by logic, science, or anything else. Apologetics can point out this underlying difference between theism and naturalism, but cannot overcome it; this is what is meant when someone points out that "you can't argue someone to Christ." Nonetheless, the cosmological argument is valuable in that it demonstrates the difference between positions and how each is consonant with its respective worldview. It can help to overcome derision and caricatures from each side and promote honest, significant dialogue which has the potential to create real faith.

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1. C. Stephen Evans and R. Zachary Manis, Philosophy of Religion: Thinking About Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 67.
2. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 96.
3. Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence that Points Toward God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 98.
4. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300), vol. 3 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 290–291.
5. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 69–70.
6. Craig, Reasonable Faith, 99.
7. Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 102–104.
8. Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 104–107.
9. Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 111.
10. Austin Cline, “Cosmological Argument: Does the Universe Require a First Cause?”, About Religion, < http://atheism.about.com/od/argumentsforgod/a/cosmological.htm> (17 February 2015).
11. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 70.
12. Craig, Reasonable Faith, 128–134, 144–150.
13. Cline, “The Cosmological Argument.”
14. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 75.
15. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 71.
16. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 74.
17. Evans and Manis, Philosophy of Religion, 73; Craig, Reasonable Faith, 109.
18. Strobel, The Case for a Creator, 117.

Is the Bible the Word of God: The Need for Conversation in Apologetics

My first foray into apologetics (making a defense for my faith, not apologizing for it, I would have been quick to add) was during my junior year of high school, about when I started really caring about the Christian faith I had more or less passively inherited from my family. The fact that my faith largely expressed itself through reason would become significant and probably led to my struggle with doubt as I realized the limits of reason. Anyway, I bought and devoured apologetics books with my lawnmowing money-- I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, The Case for ____, and so on. I reveled in the ability apologetics gave me to establish a firm rational foundation for my faith, impervious to any counterargument or skeptical attack.

If you couldn't tell, I don't look back on those days with much pride. I've since realized that the center of  Christian faith, the "faith" that needs to be firmly founded and vigorously defended, is not in the rational head but in the prerational heart. A faith built on knowledge of Biblical theology and rational arguments alone, which is largely how I started out, is an empty shell of God's desire for us (see James 2:19) But that's a discussion for another time, probably after I've read more of Desiring the Kingdom by James K.A. Smith (which I highly recommend if my previous statement intrigued you).

What I'm concerned with now is not so much the overly rational form apologetics often takes--though Alistair McGrath has plenty to say about this--but its focus on the "argument". If you have read any William Lane Craig or Alvin Plantinga, to name two, you probably have a sense of what I mean by this; if not, I roughly mean "A statement formed by reason and interconnected supporting evidences advanced in apologetics to establish a point being argued." For example, in classical apologetics you have the ontological argument for the existence of God, the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, and so on.

The danger of focusing on "argument" in apologetics is that they tend to be highly self-contained and, ostensibly set up to persuade skeptics, usually tend to be tremendously convincing to the apologist himself, so that apologetics can seem to consist primarily of the learning, memorization, and regurgitation of canned arguments (which often devolves into the other, less benign kind of argument, especially if both parties are doing it). Let me give an exaggerated example: Atheist at twelve o'clock? Quick, throw the cosmological argument at him! That didn't work? Point out the problems with Darwinian evolution! He's still not convinced? Argue that everyone believes in real good and evil, and therefore an absolute reference point for good! It's not working! Call in backup! Refer him to your theologian friend with a blog!

What is missing in the above example (I don't know how familiar it will sound to anyone but me) is simply conversation. Instead of viewing nonbelievers as beloved people made in the image of God and potential partners in real dialogue (or even as people to learn something from), a heavily argument-based approach to apologetics treats them as potential targets for conversion, and arguments as the tools for accomplishing this goal. Notice how no mention was made of anything the atheist is actually saying, just that they aren't buying your arguments so you'd better field more. Something tells me that this isn't a very good way to win people over to seeing things your way.

The other danger is that if all you're doing is reciting or rehashing arguments you've studied beforehand, you will be left flat-footed if a skeptic has some evidence you can't explain or a counterargument you can't answer. I'd like to do a case study of this with a Cru resource a friend showed me presenting arguments for the authority of the Bible/its status as the word of God. It's a pretty good outline of the supporting evidence for the Bible being the "word of God". What concerns me is that it's very one-sided: it presents some basic arguments and substantiation for each of its points, with the assumption that these will be "enough". If this is not the case or if someone has already heard these arguments, then it becomes useless.

What is needed beyond the basic talking points is conversation. This means an openness to allow the person you're talking to to really be heard and help shape the conversation--to actually hear and understand their questions rather than just giving them your answers. Viewing nonbelievers as people rather than simply evangelism targets means humbly entering into the loving give-and-take that should be a part of all of our relationships. For something completely different, let me illustrate with an imagined dialogue between Peter the evangelist and Paul the atheist.

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(Paul is on the campus green, playing frisbee with an iPad. Enter Peter.)

Peter: Hi, I'm doing a survey about peoples' beliefs. Can I ask you a few quick questions?

Paul: Oh, another "survey"? You're here to tell me about Jesus, aren't you?

Peter: Actually yeah, that's right. Would you mind?

Paul: Eh, why not. You can dispense with the survey questions. I'm sure I've answered them before. I get what Penn Jillette said about how you really believe there's a heaven and hell so you want to tell people about it, and I respect that, but I just don't see how the Bible can be true. Between a book with talking snakes, magical fruit, people living in fish, and people coming to life like zombies, or the facts of what we know today about the world, about history, about people, the choice of which one to listen to is obvious, at least for me.

Peter: I certainly see the Bible as more than a story about talking snakes and zombies! 2 Timothy 3:16 says that all scripture is God-breathed, and the more I read it the more I see God, through His Spirit, transforming me through its truth. It's truly a book unlike any other book.

Paul: Well, that's great that you get so much out of it, but I still think it's pretty ridiculous overall. And whatever the Bible says about itself isn't admissible evidence to the contrary.

Peter: Well, I guess that's true. Internal evidence like that is convincing to me, but if you don't trust God in the first place I guess it wouldn't work for you. Have you considered the external evidence? Like archaeology--things like the five cities Abraham defeats in Genesis 14, or the fall of Jericho have been independently confirmed. That's pretty cool.

Paul: Sure, but for every Biblical "fact" archaeology confirms, it disproves another two. There is no evidence whatsoever for the Israelites being slaves in Egypt. Or most of the conquest of Israel. Or the earthquakes when Jesus died.

Peter: Oh...hm. I'd have to look more into those. But a lack of evidence for something still isn't evidence against it.

Paul: But it's still significant, and it gives me no reason to believe any of these things actually happened.

Peter: Point taken. But I guess archaeology isn't what convinced me either. Or what about all the fulfilled prophecies in the Bible? The Bible predicts things like the fall of Tyre, or the Babylonian captivity--not to mention the hundreds of messianic prophecies Jesus fulfills!

Paul: That's assuming you've dated the books correctly. If they were written retrospectively after the events occurred, there's nothing amazing about it. Lots of scholars--even Christian scholars--think most of the Old Testament was compiled, if not written, from oral history during the second temple period. And have you seen some of the messianic prophecies Jesus "fulfilled"? Like prophecies written about someone else, songs that aren't predicting anything, or random parts of the law! I can't help but see your "hundreds" number as greatly inflated. Which of the so-called messianic prophecies can you establish as definitely being about Jesus in the first place?

Peter: Well, for instance, the famous "suffering servant" passage in Isaiah 52 and 53...it's hard to argue that it wasn't written about Jesus. Or Micah 5, which predicts a predicted ruler of Israel would be born in Bethlehem.

Paul: That's two plausible ones. And as my Jewish friends are sure to point out, for every prophecy Jesus fulfilled, you can point to plenty more that he didn't.

Peter: That'll be at His second coming.

Paul: But how do you decide which prophecies predicted Jesus' first time and which ones were about his second? Whichever ones he didn't fulfill now, he'll get to later? Seems awfully ad hoc to me.

Peter: Hm...I'm not sure how to explain it to you, but I still think it's pretty amazing. But I didn't come to believe in the Bible because of a list of prophecies Jesus fulfilled. Hm... Try to keep in mind that it isn't like any other book you might read. It was written by dozens of people over thousands of years, in many different places, circumstances, and genres, but it's all one story! Through all that, the Bible doesn't contradict itself. Isn't that amazing?

Paul: Doesn't contradict itself? Sure it does. Matthew and Luke give two different, incompatible genealogies for Jesus. And all four of the gospels give different accounts of the crucifixion. It's only supposed to be the central, defining event for your whole religion. You'd think they could get their story straight.

Peter: Hm, those are tough ones. I'd have to get back to you on the genealogy thing, but I'm sure there's an explanation.

Paul: Riight.

Peter: But about the crucifixion accounts, I would almost think it would be more suspicious if all four of the gospels agreed perfectly on it--it might indicate the writers collaborated or fabricated their stories.

Paul: So the fact that they contradict each other is supposed to make them more credible?

Peter: Surprisingly, yes! Especially when you consider that Matthew and Luke both drew from a lot of material in Mark, but their crucifixion accounts both differ from it and each other, indicating they were also drawing from their own independent knowledge of the event. And John's take is completely different yet.

Paul: Huh, I guess that makes more sense. But it's still kind of a distraction; it still doesn't explain why the discrepancies are there. Couldn't they differ in a way that doesn't contradict each other?

Peter: Well, when you consider that they were writing these things decades after they happened, it's not too surprising that minor discrepancies like that would occur, while the main theme and message of the crucifixion stays the same through them all.

Paul: Hm, I'll have to think about that. But I could pull up plenty more Biblical contradictions. There are web sites full of the things, after all, and I doubt that you or anyone could address them all.

Peter: I could try, but I'm not sure that's the point. I didn't come to believe in the Bible by having all the contradictions I saw in it resolved one by one, that's for sure.

Paul: Well, how did you come to believe in it, then?

Peter: I was raised in a Christian home, so I guess I've always been taught that the Bible is the true word of God. But I really came to believe it for myself in my senior year of high school. My girlfriend had dumped me, my grades were slipping fast, and I didn't get the part in our spring musical I'd been hoping for. Basically, all the things I'd been relying on for stability or a sense of control in my life had gone out the window, all at once. One day, at home, I didn't know where else to turn, so I reached for my Bible--I hadn't opened it in a few months--and it just fell open to 1 John 4:16: "And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them." And I thought that sounded really nice right about then, to rely on the love that God has for me instead of all these other things that had failed me. So I prayed to receive this love that God has for me and for Him to live in me. And right then I felt this amazing peace like I hadn't in a long time, and I've been following Jesus ever since.

Paul: Huh. Even if God is just your imaginary friend, that's interesting what a difference he made. It's funny you should say that, because my senior year of high school was when I started identifying as an atheist. My parents sent me to a Christian high school and I always saw this big tension between the stuff they taught us in Bible classes with what I was learning in my other classes--science, history, English, everything. I got increasingly annoyed that people believed all these ridiculous claims for no reason, with no evidence. Like the Bible and Christianity were disconnected from the real world, and there was no point to believing them.

Peter: I can assure you, they aren't for me. No, I can't prove that God exists, but I believe it because it sheds light and meaning on everything I know. I can't prove that good and evil are real things that don't just exist in our heads, or that it's better to be well than to suffer, or that the universe began from nothing, but I intuitively know these things have to be true, and Christianity explains them all perfectly. If I only believed things I could prove objectively, I wouldn't be left with much at all. Certainly not enough to live on.

Paul: Well, I'm not about to pray the magic Jesus prayer, but you've given me a lot to think about.

Peter: So have you.

Paul: What you're telling me about sounds different than the Christianity I rejected. Kind of interesting. Anyway, I should get going to class. Thanks for talking. And for listening.

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Feel free to critique how realistic this dialogue is. It's largely me allowing the faithful and skeptical sides of my mind to duke it out for a little while. Notice how the times when Peter really seemed to connect with Paul and get a point across was when he deviated from the preestablished talking points (which he realizes aren't really central to his own faith) and tells the story of why he, personally, believes. A testimony, being so personal, lacks weight as an apologetic argument, but it has the potential to get someone to want to share (or at least understand) your faith instead of trying to draw them to it by forceful argument.

The Limits of Doubt: Higher and Lower Knowledge and Adventures in Epistemology

Epistemology: A branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods,and limits of human knowledge.

A few weeks ago in my post on Dan Barker's book Godless I mentioned a theory that atheism and Christianity (or theism in general) were based on two different epistemologies (perspectives on truth), one human-centric and one God-centric. Through reading, study, and conversations with atheists and skeptics I have refined this theory considerably to the point where it has begun making surprising amounts of sense as an explanation.

I just retook the Strengths Finder test last week for the first time in over two years. My number-one strength is now apparently "Input", new since last time, which means I love collecting and mentally organizing information. In keeping with this, I have been in several online conversations with skeptics, trying to get a fuller, more coherent picture of how they approach epistemology. You have to understand something before you can critique it. (Which is why I feel much more confident critiquing Christianity)

Scientific Inquiry and Materialistic Epistemology

The atheists I talked to espoused the method referred to as "scientific inquiry" or "skeptical inquiry" as our only reliable way of gaining objective knowledge about the universe. (Not ruling out ways of subjectively gaining knowledge, but those can't be shared with others or serve as a sound basis for action) This method entails the systematic gathering of evidence, then building knowledge out of this evidence using the scientific method and valid logical reasoning. As such, scientific tests of truth are applied to all truth, such as:

Occam's Razor: The simplest possible theory that explains the evidence should be chosen over more complex ones.

Falsifiability: A theory is worthless if there is no conceivable way it could be conclusively disproven.

This process is also somewhat analogous to what goes on in a courtroom. One poster in an online discussion wrote (emphasis added):

To put it another way: If someone has a way of explaining something that allows me to understand the universe. Something observable, understandable, repeatable, demonstrable (We call that the scientific method); It would be vastly dishonest and silly of me to then go off of something I cannot confirm, cannot show to be demonstrable, to not be understandable, to not be observable. In other words, I would need to throw away my logical thinking and skeptical way of looking at things to adopt a lot of bullcrap.
In the court of law we have a system that allows us to determine whether or not an eye witness is a credible witness to something. If the person cannot be correctly placed there as a witness (confirmed or as no way to confirm), has personal bias or gain in the matter or knowingly misrepresents data they can be disqualified. Now here's the fun part, in the court of law a witness can be make or bust in a case. They are responsible for an eye witness account for something, something crucial.
Many times people get thrown out as a credible witness if it's found they have a bias, or if they cannot be placed at the scene, or if the witness is strictly hearsay.
So if we will toss people out of the court of law for something as simple as a bias, or personal gain, or even hearsay evidence... WHY would a person base their ENTIRE LIFE on a book that is full of hearsay accounts, anonymous authors, biased accounts and data that cannot be accounted for nor confirmed. In other words, random people, no credibility, hearsay evidence and tons of bias to gain from it.

From this analogy we get some criteria for allowable evidence:

• Empirically observable
• Understandable/meaningful/coherent
• Repeatable/demonstrable (presumably not necessary, as in the case of evolution)

And for a valid witness:

• Correctly placed as a witness
• Unbiased
• Doesn't color or misrepresent the data

If this is the method by which all truth is to be gained and agreed upon, it is obvious that there is no room for anything Christians would call "faith", and no one is more aware of this than atheists and skeptics. In this system, faith is the drawing of unwarranted, arbitrary, unnecessarily complex conclusions from insufficient, highly subjective, and biased evidence.

Arguments Against Faith and God

In fact, atheists seem to see "blind faith" as the antithesis to sound knowledge of actual truth; if you try to use it to know what is true, you have strayed outside the bounds of rationality and can simply believe anything you want with no justification. In his scathing review of Francis Collins' book The Language of God, Sam Harris says, "If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus really is the son of God, then anything can mean anything." Similarly, Dan Barker's refrain when he is arguing for reason instead of faith is, "With faith, anything goes." If you listen to faith instead of evidence and reason, you're believing whatever nonsense you want.

Christians often try to play this game and bring evidence or logical arguments for God's existence to bear, but this evidence either doesn't point to God, is counterbalanced by evidence against God, or ignores simpler, more likely explanations than God. An example of this first argument is the "argument from design", which may have worked hundreds of years ago when we had no idea where the complexity of the universe came from, but now evolution has conclusively shown us how order and apparent design can come from chaos by very simple rules. The best example of the second argument is the existence of pain and suffering in the world: what kind of God, especially one supposedly worthy of "love" and "worship", would create that? The third argument contradicts, for example, the cosmological argument, which makes an enormous leap to God as the explanation of the beginning of the universe as well as logical mistakes like forgetting that, by the same logic, a dynamic being such as God also had to have had a beginning.

Back to falsifiability: atheists accuse Christians of ad hoc arguments or special pleading to explain how evidence like the existence of suffering or God not providing concrete evidence for His existence (a simple "Hi! Here I am, worship Me!" would suffice) doesn't really weigh against their beliefs. Christians' constant qualifications of God ("He works in mysterious ways", "He wants us to have faith") to account for this evidence only add more complexity to the God hypothesis, making it an even less tenable explanation. With all this explaining away of evidence, atheists ask what, if any, evidence would actually cause Christians to stop believing in God. They suspect that nothing would fit the bill; that is, the God hypothesis is nonfalsifiable and therefore meaningless.

Some examples of this are Russell's teapot and, more recently, the parodic Flying Spaghetti Monster, an invisible, undetectable, noodly deity said to have created the universe. Like God, neither of these entites' existences can be falsified, but of course it would be absurd to go around arguing for their existence and teaching others to believe likewise. This demonstrates how the burden of proof rests on people making arbitrary claims that can't be verified or falsified by empirical methods, not on those arguing against them who are making their case from common sense and visible data that we can all agree on.

Similarly, historical claims like "Jesus actually rose from the dead" are unfounded because of the extreme improbability of miracles, according to what we know of the regularity of nature, compared to other, more plausible explanations like Jesus' disciples stealing His body and starting a cult saying He rose from the dead, or the whole Jesus thing simply being a premodern myth.

One last way atheists love to poke holes in theism (especially Christianity) is by challenging the possibility of having a coherent definition of God in the first place. Dan Barker, in his book, goes through God's various "omni-" attributes and explains why they are logically contradictory and impossible. For example, an omniscient being, perfectly knowing all things, would have to perfectly know itself, which would mean having a complete mental image of itself, which would also include a nested copy of this image, and so on to infinity--a contradiction. Or the very definition of God has a "supernatural, spiritual" being has never really been explained or nailed down in a satisfactory sense and until it has, there's no point arguing over it.

Two Levels of Knowledge

That was a distilled, more neutral form of the arguments I have been processing over the last few weeks. It's what I've been wrestling with for the last few weeks, both to understand and to answer. Here is a somewhat parodic summary of how I had been trying to answer it:

You're getting the burden of proof wrong. The starting point is not the nonexistence of God, it's ignorance of the existence or nonexistence of God. From there, the evidence for the existence of God (any god, at least) greatly outweighs the evidence against. Faith that looks arbitrary to you is not arbitrary to us Christians, it's a relationship with a higher being. You're creating a mental image of what you want or expect God to be like, then disbelieving in Him because He doesn't fit that image--that box you've put Him in. How do you know, scientifically, that science is the only source of truth?

If I wrote all of that well enough, you might be worried that I've become an atheist, or am well on my way. This has never been farther from the truth. The more I've made sense of these arguments, the less persuasive they have become. Here is the epistemology I arrived at. (And where it starts getting highly speculative)

The empirical kind of knowledge that is gained by skeptical inquiry and knowledge that comes by faith are of two different kinds. I refer to them as "bottom-up" and "top-down" knowledge, or the terms I will use, "lower" and "higher" knowledge. (These should not be taken as value judgments) Let me explain.

Lower knowledge is basically what I just described as the object of this "materialistic epistemology". It is gained through empirical observation and reasoning, the scientific method being the best modern example of this. Simple, atomic facts are gathered and theories are formed, refined, and tested to explain them. This process is hardly limited to scientific knowledge, though; it is generally the process of starting from oneself and building a body of knowledge outward from what is immediately observable. Descartes' one-liner, "I think, therefore I am" is a pithy statement of the most basic empirically observable truth: the existence of oneself.

Higher knowledge is different. I call it that because it is not built out from ourselves but places itself over and above us, relating what we know and who we are to some external point of reference outside ourselves. Higher knowledge isn't proved by evidence but transforms and determines how we view and interpret the evidence, subordinating it to some higher, teleological (purposeful) value or goal. It isn't uncovered by endlessly dividing and analyzing but unites the facts under something of greater importance to us. It answers the question of "why", not "what" or "how". This method of assigning significance to pieces of lower knowledge by their relation to your system of higher knowledge, I will call "meaning".

I argue that the human need for meaning is universal. No one, no one, is content to live a "purposeless" life. We need to "matter" to someone or something outside ourselves. With our western individualism and existentialism we might find the idea of being the "captain of your own destiny" appealing, but if we are free to decide what is of ultimate importance in life, unstable and fallible creatures that we are, that decision is worthless. In his Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer goes so far as to write, "But, rightly understood, the deification of man is the proclamation of nihilism. With the destruction of the biblical faith in God and of all divine commands and ordinances, man destroys himself." In fact, the universality of "man's search for meaning" would indicate that people are truly incapable of manufacturing meaning for themselves; they must search for it outside themselves. If you deny this fact, it only means you are blind to the specifics of your own system of higher knowledge. There is apparently something lacking in each of us that needs filling; Christians might call it the "God-shaped hole".

A Higher Apologetic

Higher knowledge also answers questions that lower knowledge can', questions that science can't answer--not the facts, but what those facts mean. "What is the meaning of life?", the perennial question goes. I wonder, why does everyone want to know? Why are we such a race of philosophers? Higher knowledge is prepared to answer questions such as:

• The existence of anything: "Why does the universe exist?"
• The ordered nature of nature/correspondence with mathematical thinking: "Why does nature appear to be so regular and predictable by mathematics in a way that aligns with our thinking?"
• All the striking coincidences that led to our existence (cosmic "fine-tuning", abiogenesis): "Were we 'meant' to exist?"
• The existence of external moral law and internal conscience/need for meaning: "Why do I exist?"
• Human consciousness: "Why and how do I (as a "self") exist?"
• The problem of pain: "Why is there suffering? What is the point? Is there a point?"
• Or the meta-question: "Why do humans have this insatiable need for meaning?"

When the above questions are used in the context of apologetics, atheists will often get defensive and deny that these questions reasonably point to God, without answering them for themselves--effectively denying that they need answers. Jumping outside what we can empirically sense and agree on is unjustified, arbitrary, and foolish when materialism has already made sense of these questions for us. But the only answer it can give is the impenetrable randomness and purposelessness of the universe according to science. So our sense of morality, desire for meaning, and "consciousness" are naturally selected, arising by chance, merely chemical phenomena in our brains, and we are free to do with them what we will. In doing so, it elevates science from a system of lower knowledge to a comprehensive system, a task for which science was never meant and at which it performs miserably. Elsewhere in Ethics, Bonhoeffer writes (not from his own position):

All knowledge is now based on self-knowledge. Instead of the original comprehension of God and of men and of things there is now a taking in vain of God and of men and of things. Everything is now drawn into the process of disunion. Knowledge now means the establishment of the relationship to oneself; it means the recognition in all things of oneself and of oneself in all things.

But it gets worse. The claim implicit here is that no system of higher knowledge needs to (or should) be assumed because you can empirically, objectively arrive at the "correct" one by observation and rational thinking, i.e. the generalized scientific method. But in fact, in the scientific method you are already using a system of higher knowledge (assuming that nature really is regular, predictable, and follows mathematical/logical laws) to interpret the data "scientifically". The usefulness of the scientific method as a system for gaining lower knowledge already depends on presumptions in your higher knowledge. The materialistic attempt to arrive at a system of higher knowledge from nothing has failed; it couldn't avoid assuming one first. Everyone has a system of higher knowledge--aware or unaware, simple or complex. Without one, life is meaningless.

Back to my comments on Dan Barker's use of the burden of proof. He asserted that the burden of proof is on anyone making a claim to truth that is not "obvious" or empirically falsifiable. But this is confusing the epistemology of lower knowledge with that of higher knowledge. Everyone assumes some system of higher knowledge without rigorously proving it, even if they may apply the laws of rationality to refine and extend it later. At the very least, in questions of higher knowledge the burden of proof lies on all parties involved to explain why their system makes better sense of questions of meaning and purpose like those above. In fact, considering how "normal" and "obvious" belief in the supernatural has been for most of human history, it could even be argued that the burden of proof lies on the relatively recent thinkers who rule out supernatural explanations in favor of materialistic ones--or, at least, that the definition of "obvious" is not obvious.

So, if higher knowledge can't be empirically derived, ask skeptics, isn't whatever system of higher knowledge we choose just arbitrary, at least as much a product of our origins and wishful thinking as of whether or not it's true? What's to stop people from just believing in whatever they want--God, Buddha, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.? Nothing. But I think people will choose the system of higher knowledge that they feel effectively answers their questions of meaning. C.S. Lewis calls this the "fitness" of a belief system--fitness for making sense of our existence. If the system they grew up in fails at this task, they will look elsewhere. No one sincerely believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster because the Flying Spaghetti Monster, besides being consciously made-up, makes little or no coherent, satisfactory sense of "life, the universe, and everything" and raises far more questions than it answers.

In contrast, through Christian theology I get the sense that I'm exploring something that really is "other" than myself, even "other" than humanity in general, just as much as I did as a math major. The very fact that God doesn't make immediate sense to me and isn't perfectly explainable, yet makes sense in a deeper way that I explore rather than invent in a process that forces me to grow as a person in His image, in love, joy, and wisdom, gives me an unshakable assurance that my faith is well-placed. Skeptics, of course, will demand detailed explanations for things that Christians are happy to accept as mysteries and use their unexplainability prima facie as proof that it's all nonsense. Theoretical physicists truly believe they are exploring a system of truths and rules that objectively exists "out there" and so take mysteries like the bizarreness of quantum mechanics or relativity as invitations to dig deeper, not as excuses to write the whole thing off. I think something similar, but deeper and more fulfilling, is going on between a Christian and his Christ.

Again, higher knowledge is not "proven" in the scientific sense; it makes no sense to apply probability to it and you can't be led to it purely by evidence because your higher knowledge controls how you view and interpret the evidence. This is why the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus is the Son of God to Francis Collins, but not to Sam Harris. This is also why, in rationalistic parlance, Christianity is "nonfalsifiable": no evidence can disprove a Christian's faith (or so we hope) because the Christian's faith makes sense of that evidence in a different way than the skeptic is hoping. In order to move outside your own paradigm and begin to understand a different one, you have to want to understand, to stop writing it off as nonsense and open yourself up to it.

One qualification for Christian readers: I am well aware that I seem to be putting Christianity on the same level as other world religions, even making it seem like nothing more than a more fulfilling way of looking at life, doing nothing that couldn't be done by taking a yoga class or improving your diet. Of course I believe it is far more than this. I believe that Christianity is based on important realities both historical and spiritual--namely the death and resurrection of Christ--and that the point of the higher knowledge it teaches it to shift the focus of our lives outside ourselves to God--the importance of this change can't be overstated. I am only treating Christianity and other faiths as a coherent bloc by what they have in common, namely their claim to offer revelatory answers to metaphysical questions like the ones I voiced above, in contrast to materialism, which asserts that these questions either don't matter, don't have meaningful answers, or can be answered empirically. I am arguing that skeptics really do carry a priori higher-knowledge assumptions just like the religious; we see this every time they make a moral or value judgment. They are just unaware of these assumptions because they categorically deny their validity.

The Dark Room

An analogy is in order. Imagine you are inspecting a room with a fellow detective. There are no windows or light sources, but the room is inexplicably, uniformly lit somehow; nonetheless, it is quite dim. You are walking around looking the whole room over; your partner is crawling on his hands and knees, closely poring over every object and floorboard with a magnifying glass. You comment, "This room is dark". Your partner responds, "No it isn't. I can see everything in it just fine. Every object, every detail, I've come across, I've been able to resolve just fine with my magnifying glass. Do you mean that the ceiling is dark? I may not be able to inspect it yet, but I will be able to once I get a stepladder. Point to your evidence that the room is actually dark." How would you respond, if not by taking away the magnifying glass and imploring him to look at the room as you do? What specific object could you possibly point to as proof that the room is dark on his terms? Would not your partner, dependent on the magnifying glass as he seems to be, respond to your efforts to persuade him to lay it aside as invitations to become blind and despair of any effort to make sense of the room?

I know it's a bit of a contrived example. The magnifying glass is scientific inquiry and the darkness of the room is the existence of God. No specific bit of evidence "proves" that the room is dark, but from your perspective the claim "the room is dark" has great explanatory power for the difficulty in seeing anything clearly. By trying to fit your claim into his system of discovering and evaluating truth, your partner makes it unintelligible and unbelievable to himself. Different belief (or nonbelief) systems change how you view the evidence. Every worldview looks consistent and sensible to itself while the others look unfounded and false; if you refuse to look outside your own, you will never consider or understand others.

Dan Barker asserts that while Christianity, with its claims of higher knowledge not based on any specific evidence, is unfalsifiable, while atheism is exquisitely falsifiable. He says that he would believe in God if, say, someone predicted to him the exact time of impact, trajectory, and composition of a meteorite. Would you, Dan? Or would you believe in radically powerful telescopes and computer simulations, or that time travel will be invented someday? Aren't those more likely than the existence of God? Jesus said that if someone won't listen to the scriptures, even someone rising from the dead wouldn't be enough to convince them (Luke 16:31). And He was right! (Matthew 28:15 and all the present-day atheological explanations for the resurrection)

For fairness' sake, there are also abundant examples today of the opposite error, subjugating the realm of lower knowledge to the higher. Consider the dichotomy often thrown around in more conservative Christian circles along the lines of: "What do you believe: your experience or the Word of God?" As if you had to deny one for the other! As I've argued, the Bible should shape how we interpret our experience, not simply contradict it; the one is constructive and leads to growth, the other is destructive and leads to frustration. This assumption is one of the foundations for the submerged anti-intellectualism that exists in much of popular Christianity. One of the characters in Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash aptly explains the frustration critical thinkers have with this: "Ninety-nine percent of what goes on in most Christian churches has nothing to do with the actual religion. Intelligent people all realize this sooner or later, and they conclude that the entire one hundred percent is bullshit, which is why atheism is connected with being intelligent in peoples' minds."

Applications for Conversation

In light of all this, I have some modest proposals for how conversations between believers and skeptics in the modern, western world can be improved. First, for Christians, because I feel more comfortable critiquing my own faith:

1. Apologists, keep in mind the limitations of logical "proofs" and arguments for the existence of God. As I stated above, your system of higher knowledge--your explanatory "worldview" determines what you make of things like the Big Bang, abiogenesis, "fine-tuning", and other such pieces of evidence. If there really were an airtight, universally understandable proof for God, everyone would believe by now. And seriously, the ontological argument is pretty ridiculous.
2. More generally, realize that apologetics is about more than logic, reason, evidence, and argument. It seems from these emphases like we have largely allowed skeptics to set the terms and format for how the dialogue between us and them plays out. At the core of it, I think apologetics is really about conversation, relationship, and showing nonbelievers the character of Christ--to attract people to Jesus, not to argue them to Him. If I really respect and admire someone's character, I am highly inclined to listen to and consider what they have to say, even if we don't always agree. For people to understand the gospel, they have to first want to understand it. This was true for Jesus and certainly true for us.
3. Don't assume things about nonbelievers' reasons for their views, and don't claim to know "the truth" about what's going on. Dan Barker was rather indignant about this. People would tell him that he just didn't want to believe, needed to have more faith, ask the reason he stopped believing (as if there was just one), said God was testing him, etc. When you know Someone who professes to be "the Truth" and meet someone who doesn't, it's easy to let it go to your head. Paul's speech in Acts 17 is an excellent (albeit culturally contextualized) example of what it looks like to address nonbelievers from "where they're at", not where you're at.
4. Make every effort to understand nonbelievers and build relationships. Realize that atheists aren't God-hating, baby-eating, child-corrupting monsters from out east; by and large, they are intelligent, thoughtful people quite capable of living (by "Christian" standards) upright lives. They aren't amoral, they don't just refuse to believe, and they may not consciously dislike Jesus. Humanism doesn't just mean believing whatever you want, and throwing Romans 1:21 or Colossians 2:8 out there is not a good way to refute it.
5. This is a big one: do not minimize or dismiss honest questions and doubts people are having about God. (Distinguishing honest doubts from theological potshots takes wisdom) Countless ex-Christians became so because their questions about God, the Bible, or the church were met by "You just have to have faith", "Don't question God", or "God works in mysterious ways" instead of by honest answers. We are failing these people and it burdens me. Once you get those relationships and dialogues with skeptics going, you can start actually listening to their questions and doubts and addressing them. God doesn't need us to protect the truth, He wants us to question and investigate it for ourselves, and skeptics can teach us a thing or two about this process if we will listen.

And for skeptics:

1. Realize that your epistemological approach of subjecting everything to rational inquiry and demands for evidence is not the "obvious", "sensible", "logical", or "default" approach that everyone else needs to conform to. Something can be true without being fully explainable or provable empirically. (Consider looking for examples of things you believe without proof)
2. Logical fallacies can be helpful guides to truth, but they can also be tools for short-circuiting debates and "winning" them without convincing anyone but yourself. Their application is subjective: what looks to a Christian like you are arguing against a straw representation of their beliefs might look to you like a "no true Christian" fallacy or ad hoc sophistry on their part. If a belief isn't explainable in your system of truth, could true attempts to explain it look to you like logical fallacies?
3. Realize that there are options in between believing only what can be empirically/rationally proven and making up whatever garbage you want. I've found that perceived dichotomies between my position and the "wrong" one like this can indicate that I'm thinking in too few dimensions. Some Christians hold a similar view, only with basing all knowledge on the Bible.
4. If you must insist that witnesses for truth be rational and unbiased, practice what you preach. Stop caricaturing the beliefs you are arguing against, using dismissive language, and in general acting just as much like you have a monopoly on truth as Christian fundamentalists. Having my intelligence insulted and my faith called a "cult" offhand does not make me more disposed to take you seriously. When you say, "God/Christianity is incoherent and meaningless", I get that you aren't inclined to look into what Christians really believe and how it is coherent to them.
5. Be willing to take seriously the fact that many professing Christians are highly educated, even in the same fields (biology, philosophy, physics, Biblical criticism, history...) you are using to argue against Christianity, and that most Christians don't feel a need to read up on all the evidence on these things because they trust the word of these experts. For example, some atheists I've talked to act like there is no debate at all on the "fact" that the gospels are embellished second-century forgeries, even though I am inclined to side with Biblical scholars like Bruce Metzger who argue convincingly and substantively to the contrary. If the experts don't all agree, why do we need to? If I said that because Einstein, one of the most brilliant physicists ever to live, believed the theory of relativity, it was true, you would rightly point of that I was making an appeal to authority. But most people do believe the theory of relativity is true because of the expert witness of scientists like Einstein rather than by consulting the evidence and reading the papers themselves, and no one really questions it. There is a difference between justified belief and objective truth.

The Limits of Doubt

I used to be afraid to read books or talk to people that were critical of or hostile towards Christianity, as many of you may be. I was afraid they would lead me to doubt or even walk away from my faith--but after I'd already struggled so much with my own doubt, they ended up having the opposite effect. Mainly by presenting me with what appeared to be the logical conclusion of doubting and questioning, and compelling me to figure out why I yet disagreed with it. And, as a counterbalancing force to my doubt, came a deeper satisfaction in what and Who I believe and the admission that He has all the answers, not me. So, on top of everything else, I started questioning my doubts. I realized that sometimes to answer questions, it's myself, not just my understanding, that needs to change. As I hope I've shown in this post, that questioning has led to a richer, more encompassing, more intellectually satisfied faith.