The Huntington Apologetics Team

the HAT: Protect Your Head

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Should We Defend Doctrines?

Is there any reason for Christians to defend specific doctrines? We live in an age bent on unity, and there is good reason for unity. Christ spoke of it, St. John does as well. It is supposed to mark us. But, say some, doctrine divides, so why should we defend doctrines? There is good reason, though you can go overboard.

Good Reason

"I don't want to know about God, I want to know God." Most of us have heard this phrase, or perhaps one like it, in discussions on the importance of doctrine. I understand the motivation behind this phrase. It doesn't take most Christians very long to think of someone they know who, while he/she loves to know facts about God and the Bible, has no real love for God Himself. Often such people are argumentative and spiritually dry, and they end up being a detriment to evangelism. Avoiding this pitfall is a good goal indeed.

Conversely, we must ask ourselves if the catch phrase mentioned above gets us where we need to go spiritually. Is jettisoning doctrinal discussion the right approach to take? I fear there is an inherent problem in refusing to learn the doctrines that have been handed down to us. You see, our minds, like nature, abhor a vaccuum. There is a compartment for God in our minds which cannot stay empty. We cannot prevent concepts and indeed doctrines from rushing in, filling the God-comparment with ideas about God's nature, whether they be true or false. These ideas are subtle, subconscious assumptions about what God should be like. You can see it in the surrounding culture.

People in America often like to think of God as only a loving God with no reference to justice. Consequently, if a Christian makes a statement about God's justice he is met with blank stares, or worse, outright anger. "A loving God doesn't condemn people!" someone might say. It is easy to see that, Biblically speaking, their perspective is skewed.

We must recognize that doctrines have consequences, whether we self-consciously adopt them or not. When we ignore doctrine we ignore the truth that God has revealed about Himself We should not believe that our concept of God will herefore remain a vaccuum. Rather, true concepts will be replaced with concepts of our own making. In other words, we will remake God in our own image. This is a violation of the 1st and 2nd Commandments!

Going Overboard

One thing that has turned a lot of people off of doctrine in general is when we go overboard in defending it. As I mentioned above, many who enjoy doctrine have little to speak of in the way of a spiritual life. What does this 'going overboard' look like? If I refuse to associate with a fellow Christian because I am a Calvinist and he is Arminian, I am going overboard. There are doctrines over which principled, civil disagreement should reign.

How do we avoid going overboard? The first thing is to take a look at one's self and determine how much we enjoy arguing. Do you take pleasure in really nailing your opponents? Do you enjoy watching your 'combatant' squirm? Watch yourself in debate, then. Ungodliness can rear its ugly head if we are not careful to behave in a gentle, Christlike fashion. This is not to say that we should soften the truth. Rather, we should be truthful in a gentle, winsome fashion.

The second step in avoiding going overboard is to understand the relative importance of each doctrine. Some doctrines are more vital to the Christian faith than others, and should therefore be defended more vigorously. The deity of Christ, for instance, is absolutely essential to the Christian faith. If you do not believe this, you are not a Christian. This must be defended to the end, though without losing one's temper.

Third, in avoiding going overboard we must become very familiar with the doctrines we defend. The reason for this is that we often lose our tempers when all of our arguments are exhausted. Like an animal backed into a corner, when we are trapped we lash out. This is an unhelpful behavior.

Finally, we must maintain a vibrant spiritual life if we are to avoid going overboard in defending doctrines. Knowledge of God and intimacy with Him must go hand in hand. We drift off the path if we abandon either wing of our spiritual lives. So can we know God without knowing about Him? No. We will get to know something or someone (perhaps ourselves), but it will not be God.

Friday, June 17, 2005

Dr. Washington's Argument From Harm

A couple of weeks ago I posted some analysis of Dr. Corey Washington's argument that the Christian conception of God is contradictory. In that spirit, I decided to post analysis of his "Argument from Harm," which is a sort of argument from evil. And here it is:

One of the most important areas of philosophy is the philosophy of religion. This area is vital because it has such a bearing on how we should structure our lives. For instance, it would make sense, if God exists, to live differently than we would if He didn’t exist. This paper deals with that very question: Does God exist?

The Argument from Harm
Dr. Washington’s salvo is what he refers to as the Argument from Harm (AFH). AFH is more commonly called the Argument from Evil. The first thing Dr. Washington does is lay the groundwork for AFH by providing a definition for God:

“…God is all-knowing, or as I’ll say sometimes omniscient. God is all-powerful, or as I’ll say omnipotent. God is morally perfect or all-good, or as I’ll say omnibenevolent. We’re also assuming that God is personal. And we believe this God can causally interact with the world.”

According to Dr. Washington an argument for a God that does not have all of these characteristics will not help the theist in this situation. He states that the theist must argue specifically for the Christian conception of God. This will come into play below, but AFH is our current problem. Let’s examine:

Dr. Washington lays out the argument itself in this fashion:

1. Given God’s omnibenevolence, He should desire to have a world in which there is as little suffering as possible, perhaps none.
2. God is omniscient, so God is supposed to figure out how to design a world that has basically no harm at all.
3. God is omnipotent so, so any design that God brings into being, God can actually implement.
4. Given these premises, there should be very little or no harm in the world.
5. There is a great deal of harm.
6. Therefore, the Christian conception of God does not exist.

Dr. Washington has made his argument a deductive argument. Therefore, all the theist has to do is demonstrate that it does not follow that the existence of evil necessitates the non-existence of God. AFH as it is presented is susceptible to what has been called the Free-Will Defense (FWD). Dr. Alvin Plantinga raised this line of argument in a paper called, appropriately enough, “The Free Will Defense”. How can this be done? We must first see if the argument is valid. Does the conclusion follow from the premises? Even if we grant that it does the argument still will not stand because not all of the premises are true.

Premise 3 in particular is problematic for Dr. Washington. At first blush, one would think that it is true that God should be able to create any world He desires. After all, He is omnipotent! Surely God could conceive of some possible world in which we all do rightly of our own free will! As Dr. Plantinga shows, this is not the case.

Say that two friends, Thomas and Bill, are standing in a field. Perhaps neither are particularly bright, or they’ve had a few too many, so they decide to go ‘cow tipping’. They come upon a particularly large cow and both hesitate. Neither Thomas nor Bill want to tip the cow because of its size. It just so happens that Thomas has $100, which he offers to Bill to tip the cow. It also happens that Bill would have never tipped the cow for less than $100, but since he has been offered $100 he tips the cow.

Under no circumstance would Bill have, of his own free will, tipped the cow for less than $100. Could God make Bill tip the cow for less than $100? Certainly, but then God would have been determining Bill’s action, which is not a free act by definition. Bear in mind that in both cases (tipping for less than $100 and not tipping for less than $100) each and every aspect of history of the world is the same up until the monetary offer. That is to say God did not alter some aspect of history to make Bill more favorable to the idea of tipping the cow.
This silly story generalizes to all of humanity. It could be that God chose to actualize the world with the amount of harm it has because He values free will in His creatures. This ‘could be’ is all that we need to show that there is no logical contradiction with the existence of harm and the existence of God. Therefore the AFH fails.

Friday, June 03, 2005

God the Contradictory?

There have been many ways in which atheists and skeptics have tried to disprove the existence of God. Some are more compelling than others, of course, but none that I have found ultimately succeed. Many don't even get off the ground for me, like the evidential argument from evil. Some who like this argument use specific incidences of evil and argue that the existence of such evils is strong evidence that a good God doesn't exist. I think there are good explanations for the evils they mention, but that is not the topic of today's entry. I wrote the above paragraph to ask this question:

If I don't believe that the argument from evil gets off the ground, what sort of argument could potentially convince me that God doesn't exist? I think that if it could be shown that the very concept of God was a self-contradiction then I would be forced to reject His existence.

First, I'll answer one question that some readers may be asking: What is a "self-contradiction?" A self-contradiction occurs when something is said to have two attributes or qualities that cannot coexist. For instance, if you went looking for a triangle with four angles you would be out of luck. By its definition a triangle has three angles. There cannot be a thing that has three angles and four angles at the same time. This is a self-contradiction.

I will now give you Dr. Corey Washington's attempt to show that the concept of God is self-contradictory. This was given in his debate with Dr. William Lane Craig. The argument goes like this: (warning, this gets a little philosophical!)

1. God is an abstract object.
2. God is causally efficacious.
3. Abstract objects have no causal properties.
4. Therefore, the definition of God is contradictory.
5. Contradictory objects don’t exist.
6. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

Now, my analysis. Premises 2 and 5 are non-controversial, in my opinion. Premise 4 follows if premises 1, 2, and 3 are true and premise 6 follows if 4 and 5 are true. However, this argument, with all due respect to Dr. Washington, fails. How so? The argument is certainly valid, so we cannot attack on that front. No, we must attack one or more of the premises. What premise(s) shall we choose? Let’s take a look at some of them.

Premise 1: “It’s common to think of God as an abstract object…”

This seems innocuous at first, but that depends on your definition of “abstract object”. In fact, it appears that this argument, specifically in a debate context, relies on an equivocation on this term. Dr. Washington begins by saying that it is common to think of God as an abstract object. Bear in mind that most people in a debate audience have their own definition of ‘abstract object’ and it is most likely not the philosophical one. He is probably right that most people think of God as abstract, but what do ‘common’ people think of as an ‘abstract object?’ If we took a poll of the people in the audience of the debate most would agree that God is not a material object. Why? Most likely because we can’t perceive Him with our five senses. Then Dr. Washington provides a definition of a “material object” from the Harper Collins Dictionary of Philosophy. The definition is as follows: “an object that casually interacts or inter-relates with other independently existing things.” He goes on to state that the same dictionary states that an abstract object is “and object that is not a material object.”

When most people think of abstract objects they think of it in terms of intangibility, not causal efficacy, and it is in the first sense that people think of God as abstract.

These considerations lead to this question: Why should we think of God as abstract in the philosophical sense at all? Dr. Washington suggests that “God is said to be timeless, and the only timeless things around are abstract objects.” Never mind that there is a strain of theology that asserts that God entered the time stream at the creation event. Let’s say that God is timeless. Why then must He be abstract? Because all other timeless objects are abstract? This doesn’t seem to follow logically does it? This is supposed to be a deductive argument isn’t it? What does this tell us about God? Not much.

If it is the case that it is not logically necessary for God to be abstract in Dr. Washington’s sense we can deny the first premise. The argument will fall apart from here.

Premise 2: “At the same time, it’s believed that God is causally efficacious, that is that God can affect material objects.”
There is certainly no problem with this from the Christian perspective.

Premise 3: “…abstract objects, as standardly understood, have no causal properties.”

Philosophically this is true, but as we saw above there is no reason to call God ‘abstract’ in this sense.

Premise 4: Therefore the definition of God is contradictory

This follows if premise 1 is true but we have seen that it need not be the case.

Premise 5: Contradictory objects do not exist

Agreed.

Premise 6: Therefore God does not exist.

Only if premise 4 is true, which it is not.

Conclusion

So much for the contradictory definition of God. There have been other attempts to show that the concept of God is contradictory, and perhaps better ones that I have not seen. None that I have seen come close to succeeding, but they must taken individually. It is my hope that showing a refutation of one such argument strengthens the faith of Christians out there. We can be confident that our God is real and that what the Bible says of Him is true. Worship Him confidently!