Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,
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May was a pleasurable and profitable month for us, both in terms of social media engagements and my research and writing. I’m especially pleased to report that Lawrence Livermore Laboratory has now posted on their public site the video of my recent lecture at the lab “Three Arguments for God’s Existence.” I’m so grateful to have had this extraordinary opportunity!
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Without a doubt, the highlight this past month was my appearance on the Bryan Callen Show, a widely viewed podcast, to discuss “Why Believe in God?” with the agnostic philosopher of science Michael Ruse. It turned out to be one of the best events I’ve ever done! Ruse is the epitome of the eccentric philosopher with his disheveled white hair and long beard and his strong British accent. He did the interview lying in bed, popping corn chips into his mouth! I had debated Ruse decades ago in Canada, in the early years of our ministry, but to my dismay the recording of the event was defective, so that the event was lost to posterity. So I was eager to engage with him again.
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Bryan Callen, for his part, showed himself to be remarkably open and even moving in the direction of Christian faith. He confessed that he has come to believe in God, if not yet in Jesus Christ. As things turned out, we never really got around to discussing the question “Why Believe in God?” but spent all our time talking about specifically Christian faith, which was just fine with me!
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Ruse’s Quaker background still strongly shapes his attitudes toward religious belief. For example, he wanted to say that the resurrection of Jesus shouldn’t be interpreted literally but could be taken as just a symbol of new life or new beginnings or what have you. Bryan asked me why that wasn’t sufficient. I responded, “Because that’s not what our historical sources indicate.” I explained how the Gospels present Jesus’ resurrection as a historical event, leaving an empty tomb in its wake and followed by post-mortem appearances to various individuals and groups. When Bryan pressed me on why we need to read such sources literally, that gave me the chance to contrast the literary genre of the Gospels, which is closest to ancient biography, a historical genre, with myths, which are not intended to be read literally. When he asked me why it’s important that the resurrection of Jesus be a real event, I explained that it was God’s public vindication of Jesus’ radical personal claims, for he was crucified as a blasphemer. “If God has raised this man from the dead, then the God whom he had allegedly blasphemed has publicly and unequivocally vindicated those allegedly blasphemous claims, revealing that Jesus was who he claimed to be.” We also talked about questions like the problem of the unevangelized and even a bit about Molinism!
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Ruse was an entirely congenial interlocutor, so we had a great time! In fact, near the end of the interview I pointed out that we had never really gotten around to talking about why believe in God, and that I had six arguments for God’s existence that I was prepared to defend. As I anticipated, Bryan then asked me to list them, which gave me a chance to run through the retinue of theistic arguments that I have formulated. Thereupon Bryan exclaimed, “Well, let’s schedule a second round!” Ruse and I were both agreeable, and so we shall be on the show for round two on June 13.
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Another really substantive interview I did this past month was with students of the Oxford Socratic Society at Oxford University in England on “The Kalām Cosmological Argument.” The students had really done their homework and came with a battery of questions and objections focused on the philosophical (rather than scientific) defense of the argument’s premises. So this event, which was video recorded, was definitely not for your average layman, but for philosophy students and professors. It is so vitally important that we commend our faith ably to the intellectually elite like these Oxford students, who will be Britain’s future leaders. We had a really great discussion, including a Q&A time with the students there, and at the end I complimented them on the depth of their preparation. The moderator responded, “There are a lot of us here interested in the argument, and we’ve already had a couple of sessions on it!”
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Another fun event I participated in was an interview conducted by our own Kevin Harris of J.P. Moreland and me on the twentieth anniversary of our book Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. Our Reasonable Faith chapter directors, especially in Latin America, where the book is available in Spanish and Portuguese, were especially interested in hearing about the origin of our friendship and our collaboration on this book. The interview turned out to be a walk down memory lane with some good laughs over personal stories. May the Lord continue to use this book!
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Another poignant podcast I did was with our Ukrainian Reasonable Faith chapter. When I think how terribly these people have suffered at the hands of Russian aggression, I am just amazed at their commitment to continuing in Christian ministry. The occasion for the podcast was a Q&A session following their viewing of a video of my new talk entitled “Must God Choose the Best?,” which is now available on YouTube. As one might expect, one of the questions that came up had to do with the problem of evil and suffering, and why God would allow such things. It was a privilege for me to have input into the lives of these intelligent and committed young believers!
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Finally at the end of May I did an interview for a Catholic podcast called “Reason and Theology.” I want to do what I can to try to reach out to Catholics, as well as Coptics and Orthodox, all of whom are enthusiastically using Reasonable Faith material. The subject of our interview was Molinism, of all things. This is the reconciliation of divine sovereignty and human freedom proposed by the 16th century Jesuit theologian Luis Molina and rediscovered in our day by Alvin Plantinga. So it serves as a nice bridge to Catholics on matters of Christian doctrine.
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I’m pleased to report that the Zangmeister is making good progress with the new series of animated videos on the attributes of God. I’ve watched the prototype for the video on “God is Spirit,” and it is excellent in helping people to understand God’s incorporeality and to respond to objections to that doctrine. I’ve also been working with him on finalizing the script for “God is All-Knowing,” which includes a discussion of the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. Once the scripts are finalized, we’ll schedule another film shoot to record them.
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I’m currently writing on the Doctrine of Creation, trying to articulate a theological perspective on biological evolution to complement my section on the origin of life. The bulk of evolutionary change is supposed to have happened since the rise of multicellular eukaryotes (organisms having a nucleus in their cells) sometime around 600 million years ago. Leaving aside the various kinds of bacteria and archaea, the millions of animals, plants, fungi, and other multicellular eukaryotes are supposed to have gradually evolved, leaving no significant trace of transitional forms, from some primordial ancestor in somewhat more than a half billion years. This is prima facie difficult to believe.
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Richard Dawkins has styled this argument “the Argument from Personal Incredulity” and rejects it as “extremely weak” and, indeed, “pathetic.” To the contrary, I think, the Principle of Personal Incredulity
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PPI. We should believe something that we find incredible only if we are aware of overwhelming evidence in its favor.
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expresses a fundamental scientific principle, one that evolutionary biologists themselves often employ in theory assessment. According to (PPI) we should be incredulous of anything that strikes us as unbelievable unless we have sufficient evidence in its favor to overcome our incredulity. The more incredible a proposition is, the greater the evidence required to compel belief. We should require very powerful evidence, for example, in order for each us to be obliged to believe that he is a Boltzmann Brain!
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Not only is (PPI) plausible, but it is implicit in the responses of many evolutionary theorists to creationist claims. Alan Rogers, for instance, rejects as “a desperate hypothesis” Philip Gosse’s infamous proposal in his Omphalos (1857) that God created the world about six thousand years ago with the appearance of age. Claiming that Adam must have had a navel, Gosse argued that the world God created would also bear appearances of age, the trees in the Garden of Eden replete with tree rings and the earth with geological strata, despite their being, in fact, at most a few days old. The evolutionary history of Earth is an illusion!
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Rogers observes that Gosse’s argument left his contemporaries, including Christians, with mouths agape. According to the Westminster Review, it was “too monstrous” for belief. Now just what is wrong with the Omphalos theory? It is just as irrefutable--and as preposterous-- as the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis. In line with (PPI), Rogers rightly rejects the theory in the absence of overwhelming evidence in its favor. Arguments from Personal Incredulity are rife in anti-creationist and anti-theistic evolutionary literature, where incredulity is often expressed by secularists regarding theistic alternatives. The theistic alternatives would explain the evidence just as well as the evolutionary accounts but are deemed incredible, so that, failing to have overriding evidence in their support, they should be rejected in favor of evolutionary accounts.
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Dawkins actually furnishes a good example of (PPI) at work. He writes, “Something like the transition from Amoeba to man . . . goes on in every mother’s womb in a mere nine months. Development is admittedly a very different process from evolution but, nevertheless, anyone sceptical of the very possibility of a transition from single cell to man has only to contemplate his own fetal beginnings to have his doubts allayed.” Dawkins’ analogy is, however, inept: assuming that we initially find it incredible that a single cell in utero could develop into a man, our incredulity is overwhelmed by the evidence of developmental biology that this is precisely what happens. Similarly, we rightly demand comparable evidence that this is what happened during the history of life on Earth, especially in the absence of the regulatory genetic mechanisms that guide fetal development. The Argument from Personal Incredulity is not a show stopper, but simply a demand for sufficient evidence.
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So I am exploring the evidence for universal common ancestry and the adequacy of the mechanisms offered to explain it. It’s a huge undertaking!
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For Christ and His Kingdom,
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I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you how God used your ministry in my life. I grew up in a Christian home and I easily accepted Christianity as a child. When I became a teenager, however, the challenges proffered against my faith were very convincing. [. . .] Nobody in my life could answer the challenges offered by my teachers and peers. I began to think that I had to turn my brain off in order to be a Christian. And so, I stopped going to church at around 15 years old. [. . .]
When I was about 30 years old, on a whim, I decided to search YouTube for a debate about the existence of God. I told myself, that if the Christian was trounced then I should just face the music and abandon the belief in God altogether. I wasn’t hopeful for the Christian position. [. . .] I randomly watched one of your debates (though I don’t remember which one). At the conclusion of the debate, I was astonished. Thinking that, maybe you just got lucky against a particularly weak opponent, I searched out debates that you had with others. I watched so many of your debates and it became apparent to me that Christianity wasn’t a religion for those who wanted to shut their brains off, but instead had good answers to the philosophical, historical, and moral objections offered against it. That experience put me on a path that eventually led to rededicating my life to Christ. God used your ministry to bring me back to Him, and I am so grateful for His mercy and your ministry.
I don’t want others to needlessly walk away from Christianity like I did. I want to help show others that the intellectual barriers to Christianity can be overcome directly, and that despite the intellectual noise from the culture that God is here with us, and they can truly get to know Him personally. So, I applied and was accepted into the M.A. – Philosophy program at Biola. [. . .] I just wanted to write to you and let you know how God used you in my life and to say, “Thank you.”
Your Brother in Christ,
Joe
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