Ultimate Authority

It is an unfortunate symptom of the sickness of the church that Christians cannot defend themselves.  One of the most often cited objections to Christianity is prophesy and faith.  You have "faith" that you'll enter Heaven?  How can you be sure?  And prophesies?  Some crazy Arab wrote down that thus and such will happen, and you actually believe that primitive nutzoid?

So it comes down to this: Christians believe certain things will happen about which they do not have absolute certainty.  But humans are not supposed to have absolute certainty of anything.  That was the lie of the snake in the garden.  (Are you sure God told you you would die?)  But they believe it anyway.  Why?  Christians don't know what the future holds but they do know who holds the future.  Christians put their faith in something (ahem, someONE) who knows everything.  And so astrophysicists and evolutionists ridicule them by saying they believe something they can't or don't know.

But here's the rub: scientism does the same thing.  Science, as anyone who is as acquainted with it as they should be knows, has not explained every last phenomenon in the universe.  If it had, we would no longer have need to publish papers in quantum mechanics and magnetohydrodynamics.  But we do.  It's quite similar to math.  We begin with assumptions (or axioms) and run with them.  Science has made a lot of progress, but it's still going somewhere.  There are also specific phenomenon that not only science has yet to explain, but current scientific theories won't be able to explain.  Pendulums swing faster during eclipses; probes in space are not where they should be according to Einstein's relativity theory.  This means a new theory of celestial mechanics will eventually be needed.  The list goes on.

But whenever anyone cites this, scientists seems to have this supreme confidence.  "We will get there though, we just haven't gotten there yet.  Science will prevail eventually!"  Sounds a bit like faith.  They don't know what the future holds, but they do know that science holds the future.  Scientists somehow know certain things will happen (such as the above phenomenon being explained eventually) and you just need to believe that it will.  Russell and Whitehead wanted to ground all of mathematics in airtight logic and prove all the theorems that could be proven.  Then Godel came by and blasted the whole thing to pieces.  Godel showed there are things that mathematics can't know, even within their own systems.  Guess what that means for science?  

If scientists were to be fair, they would have to at least concede they don't know if science will ever explain everything (which it won't, anyway).  But they don't seem to know that that is what they are doing.

Faith vs. Reason

I hate the title of this blog post.  Why?  "vs." is a word used when two entities are in conflict with one another.  But that is entirely the point of this blog post.  Faith and Reason are not in conflict.  How do you reconcile the two?  As Spurgeon once said, "I don't reconcile friends."

Discussions like this, however, get very muddled unless we first discuss definitions.  This, I think, is primarily when Christians run into trouble.  I've actually heard Christians define faith as "belief in something in spite of the evidence".  This is semantic suicide.  If you define faith as contradictory to reason, you've lost the battle before you've even begun.  If you surrender before the battle even starts, you're going to lose.

Christians need to define faith using (what else?) the Bible.  Hebrews 11:1 says "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen".  This definition is not at odds with reason at all; in fact, faith and reason are inextricably linked.  I found a good definition of faith on Davis Wilson's blog.  "Reason is the process by which one infers from acknowledged truths other propositions that are likely or necessarily true."  This covers both inductive and deductive reasoning.

Atheists (and some Christians) have a very incorrect idea of what reason does.  They seem to think that reason and logic will lead you to absolute truth, or that you can prove the existence of God through logic and reason.  This is, in fact, what Descartes tried to do.  In Discourse on the Method, he attempted to find truth by doubting everything that had any shade of uncertainty to it.  He says that he cannot doubt that that which does the doubting (his mind) does not exist, i. e. I think therefore I am.  He then proceeds to "prove" the existence of the soul and God.

This is the cardinal sin of much of modern Christian thinking, the idea that we start with our own reasoning and this leads us to God.  Let me emphasize this: God is the starting point of our worldview, not the conclusion.  "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge." (Proverbs 1:7 NASB)  Once Christians begin realizing this they will stop bowing their knees to the false idols of rationalism and scientism and learn real apologetics.

What is proper apologetics, you ask?  Again, the answer is in Proverbs.  "Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him.  Answer a fool as his folly deserves, that he not be wise in his own eyes."  (Proverbs 26:4-5 NASB)  My problem isn't that Christians use reason or science or what have you to provide evidence that God exists, but when Christians try to prove the Bible using reason along, or science alone, we run into trouble.  When Christians argue, "We should believe in God because of the scientific evidence." I want to ask, "Who's the God here?"  We should believe God exists because science tells us so?  What if science didn't tell us us so?  Should we still believe in Him?  We being with the assumption that God exists and the Bible is true.  This then explains all the scientific evidence.  If God exists then all the scientific, logical, moral, archaeological evidence (properly examined) and what else have you would comport it.  If God, then evidence.  C. S. Lewis once said, "I believe in Christianity as I believe the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but by it I see everything else."  Most people seem to have this backwards.

So we don't answer a fool according to his folly.  We don't bow to his god and claim it proves our God.  We are to answer the fool's folly, however, but by exposing his self-contradictory, untruthful nature.  Neo-Darwinism claims we are all results of natural laws, of mechanistic processes.  We are bags of chemicals doing what chemicals do.  As a metaphor, we are programmed, like computers.  How, then, can we know what we know is true?  If we are "programmed" to believe what we believe, fated to do what we do simply because our actions are the sum total of billions of chemical reactions, how are we to know that our perceptions are reliable?  I can program a computer to claim that black is white, that the year is 3008, or that human existence is a cosmic accident; i. e. I can "program" any falsehood into a computer I want, and there is already evidence that mankind is "hard-wired" to believe in some kind of god or supreme being.  So it would appear, according to the naturalist, that we have in fact been programmed to believe falsehoods.  How, then, can we trust any of our scientific theories?  They claim at least that the scientific theories are to be consistent, but could they not then be consistently wrong?

If we assume the truth of the Bible is true, it will answer every question put to it.  If we assume any number of worldviews that are false (naturalism, rationalism, etc.) it will be self-contradictory, and we can prove it to be so.  Why then is the Bible true?  Because every other assumption leads to nonsense.

Here's an example.  I take on "faith" (the axioms) that two points determine a line, or three determine a plane.  What reason and logic tell me are the kinds of statements about points, lines, and planes that we can infer from our initial assumptions.  Further, reason can falsify the assumptions by showing they are self-contradictory, but it cannot show our assumptions are true.  The truth of our assumptions is the very assumption we are making.  If we make bad assumptions in geometry, reason will show that out eventually, and show further some contradiction results, thus showing our assumptions need some adjustment.  Faith and reason work together.  Faith is where we start, and reason, true reason, submitted to God's authority, helps us get there.

I realize this post was a bit meandering.  I went from faith and reason to apologetics back to faith and reason again.  But hopefully my readers will find their way through. =)