Discussion Grounds

Tom,

You wrote that Christianity really came alive for you when you realized that

…it wasn’t a matter of trying to be a Christian, but having a living relationship with the true God through Jesus Christ.

…The sky was bluer and the grass was greener the next day. Temptations and personal weaknesses that had bothered me for years just disappeared. Now, that was freedom!

I had a similar experience. For years I tried and tried to “be a good Christian,” but I knew I wasn’t measuring up. Then I read The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, which offered a rather simple “curriculum for Christlikeness”: fall head over heals in love with God. Then you’ll obey him because you genuinely want to, and it will be easy.

Falling in love with God that way, wrote Willard, is a matter of spiritual discipline. The discipline that worked best for me was to remind myself every 30 seconds throughout each day of all the wonderful gifts God had given me – green trees, blue lakes, creature comforts, intelligence, a strong family, and so on. Once I started doing that, my Christian life became much easier. And yes, “the sky was bluer and the grass was greener the next day.” So I think I can identify with your experience!

So far we have found a lot of common ground but in your last letter I can see we’ve reached some points on which we disagree:

1. You think Christian belief is properly basic; I do not.
2. I think there is a possible world which contains nothing supernatural; you do not.

And it seems that your belief about the second springs from the first. So that is our point of divergence.

It is a very early point of divergence. In fact, we could hardly have disagreed any earlier in our exploration. If Christian belief is properly basic to you – such that you believe it is warranted without a shred of evidence – then it will be hard to shake you from such a position, and ultimately futile to argue over the evidence itself!

In my fantasies, here is how our dialogue continues: By argument, I persuade you to abandon the idea that Christian belief is properly basic. Then you say you are a Christian because Christianity best explains certain facts about the universe: human reason, consciousness, morality, religious experience, and so on. I then demonstrate to you why “God did it” has such poor explanatory merit. I also offer superior explanations for all the phenomena you cite. You then realize that you have no good reasons to believe in Christianity or even theism, and you become a religious skeptic.

Of course, there’s always a chance you will be able to change my mind – and if Christianity is true, I hope you succeed!

In your last letter, you asked me:

Which of these more accurately states your position?

• There is no reason to believe God exists, or
• There is reason to believe no God exists

My answer is “both.”

I do not think there are any good reasons to believe a god exists. I also think there are dozens or hundreds of reasons to think the Christian God does not exist, depending on how specifically you define that God. And I think there are several reasons to think that no theistic God exists. And since there are some good reasons to think naturalism is true, there are some positive reasons to think that no gods of any kind exist.

At this point, our next step seems to be to argue over our earliest point of divergence: whether or not Christian belief can be properly basic. But I have been leading this discussion too much; feel free to take your share of the reins as well.

Cheers,

Luke

Greetings again, Luke,

Thank you for sharing your story. I have to admit I’m envious of one thing: that you have been able to get so involved in issues like this while still in your 20s. I began reading in philosophy and apologetics in college, but I never knew where to go with it, not having a venue like this to discuss it in. I could have tried to publish on it, but until a few years ago, when I was almost 50 years old already, I didn’t know how to get started.

My growing-up years were nowhere near as intensely Christian as you describe yours to be, Luke. We were a church-going family, we said grace before meals, and we were strongly inculcated with values like honesty and responsibility. But when I was a teenager, church was dreadful: for several years we had a dour, dreary, and somewhat combative pastor. (Sometimes we are our own worst enemies.) My brother and I both got seriously interested in what would later be called “New Age.” At that time it had a lot to do with celebrity psychics like Ruth Montgomery and Jeane Dixon.

Before that I had tried really hard to be a Christian, but I knew I wasn’t measuring up. I wasn’t consistently living even the simplest basics of Christianity. It’s not like I was the worst kid in school, but night after night I would lie in bed and think of at least one thing I had done that I shouldn’t have done, or that I should have done but didn’t. It was all frustration for me: I was living proof that Christianity didn’t work. And when it didn’t work, I figured there must be something more interesting than this to hang my spiritual hat on.

That was all in high school. Going to college opened my eyes to a kind of freedom. I realized very quickly that I had my own life to live and my own choices to make, with no one looking over my shoulder. I also realized that if I rejected God as the source of my morality, there wasn’t much to constrain my choices other than, well, my choices. I couldn’t think of any reason not to do anything I might want to do if I thought I could get away with it.

Meanwhile, though, I was making friends with two men on my dorm floor, fellow Michigan State marching band members who were Christians. What intrigued me about them was that they actually seemed to be enjoying their lives as Christians. They were caring, loving, sharing types, sometimes pretty goofy (I could tell you stories…), and they seemed to have a freedom about them that was more real and more free than I had ever experienced. So I asked them what made the difference. They explained that it wasn’t a matter of trying to be a Christian, but having a living relationship with the true God through Jesus Christ. On January 26, 1975, in their dorm room, I recognized that it was up to God, not me, to make that relationship happen, and I trusted him to begin that relationship.

The next part, for a writer, is very hard, and I don’t know how to pull it off without cliché. (I’ll just have to ask your forgiveness as I press on.) The sky was bluer and the grass was greener the next day. Temptations and personal weaknesses that had bothered me for years just disappeared. Now, that was freedom! There was a light and life in the Christian fellowship there in college, such as I had never experienced before, especially when we did Bible study together. I joked with the others there that my ministry in their lives was to give them practice in forgiveness: in other words, I did plenty of things they didn’t have to accept from me, but they still did accept me.

Josh McDowell’s writing was part of my journey then. I found the historical and biblical arguments in Evidence That Demands a Verdict quite convincing. (Since then I’ve become aware of challenges to those arguments. With further study my view of them has deepened and become more nuanced, but I think they’re generally still valid.)

I have followed Christ since then, obviously not with perfect consistency, but knowing I have freedom in him to grow, to succeed, and sometimes still to fail yet not be rejected, because of his unquenchable love for me. It has been an adventure I would not have missed for the whole world.

More and more along the way, I am seeing Jesus Christ himself as the center of my life and of my hopes. Someone raised a question: “If you showed up in heaven at the end of your life, and it was all streets of gold, mansions, the finest food, no sickness or death, and the greatest personal challenges and satisfactions, but Jesus Christ was not there—would that be heaven for you?” I would have to say no: without him, it would be just another place. Without him, of course, it would be without God, for by Trinitarian understandings, there could be no heaven with God but without Jesus Christ. I look forward to an eternity of worshiping the God who created us, loves us, and designed us for joy.

That’s (part of) my story.

Now to some specifics in your last letter to me, Luke. First, let me acknowledge in passing that you stated some significant disagreements both with Christian doctrine and with Christian evidences or reasons to believe. I think some of what you have said is definitely wrong. I have counter-positions to yours I could state, or more positively I could explain reasons why I believe in Christ, but we have to approach this a step at a time rather than trying to do everything all at once, so I won’t take up those topics right now. We’ll have plenty of opportunity to do that, one issue at a time. I’m sure that’s your intention as well.

So I’ll respond to points you raised in the second half of your letter and leave it at that for now.

My position regarding the Bible is that it is the authoritative and trustworthy word of God, accurate in all that it affirms, and life-giving in the sense that to understand and walk in its truth is to walk in a living relationship with God.

My view on evolution is that science is still working out how life and the various species originated on earth, and various views of Genesis leave room for science to determine much of the facts; but the clear testimony of Scripture is that however life happened, it was God’s creative hand that made it happen. I do not hold to the young earth view of creation, because of the consistent scientific evidence for an old universe. (I believe that God’s other “book” of revelation is nature, and that he would not lie in that one any more than in the Bible. As long as there is reason for confidence in scientific assessments of the age of the universe, I will be confident in them.)

Our agreement on your bullet list is not quite as solid as you concluded in your most recent letter, because I find it hard to “ignore free will and morality for now,” as you thought we might do. They are part of what most persons would call the natural world, and science has not shown itself to be the best and most reliable way of understanding them (or consciousness, reason, identity, etc., either, for that matter).

As for knowing the supernatural a priori, I agree that we can’t know it apart from our experience, but I diverge from what you said in two aspects. First, I think Plantinga is right that knowledge of God can be properly basic: that he can and does make himself known directly, and the knowledge thus gained is not an inferred, it is basic. The fullness of knowledge of God requires knowledge of his revelation through Scripture, nature, and so on, but that is not to deny that there can be some knowledge given by him directly.

Second, I think there is a non sequitur in something you said, which I will re-write here for clarity:

1. We cannot know whether the supernatural exists except through experience.
2. The world we happen to have been born into determines what experience we have.
3. Therefore there is a possible world in which the supernatural does not exist (and perhaps one in which only the supernatural exists).

I agree with (1), except that I take it that this experience could include a direct experience of God himself, which might have nothing to do with the world into which I am born. That’s the first problem I see with this line of thought. The second is that (3) does not follow necessarily from (2), unless by “the supernatural” we are specifying something contingent. If there is the possibility that the supernatural is a necessary existent, then the logical link between (2) and (3) is broken. In order for it to follow logically, you would have to insert (2a):

2a. The supernatural is not a necessary existent.

But the question we’re interested in is whether the God of the Bible—a necessarily existing supernatural—actually exists. If there does exist a necessarily existing supernatural, then there is no possible world in which it does not exist. If the God of the Bible exists, he exists in any possible world.

Nevertheless, strangely enough, I agree with the conclusion you proceed to from there: “To know which kind of world we live in, we have to experience it.” (I must reiterate the caveat that experience need not be confined to what is commonly considered natural.) To know whether there is a God requires experience of God, either directly or through his actions in the world.

Do I think the ontological argument succeeds? Plantinga has an interesting updated possible-worlds version of it, which I think has more strength (more intelligibility, too!) than classical formulations. Still I agree that it does not succeed in the sense that it forces assent.

I think science has a lot to say about what is true about reality, including the reality of God and of Christianity.

Coming toward a close for now, then: When we get to the point of discussing reasons for belief in Christianity, I’m guessing you’ll be surprised at the primary reason I give. In the meantime, I have a quick question for you. Which of these more accurately states your position?

• There is no reason to believe God exists, or
• There is reason to believe no God exists

Tom,

Yes, let’s share our personal stories.

I was raised a preacher’s kid in Minnesota, USA. I grew up believing the same as you: orthodox Protestant theology. I went on missions trips around the world, volunteered to assist with an Alpha course, played on the worship band, attended Bible studies, prayed daily, and attended Christian school.

And I experienced God. I even took the Experiencing God course by Henry Blackaby. At times I was overcome with the presence of the Holy Spirit. Other times I felt God nudging me to say a particular thing to someone – and each time I did, they told me it was very meaningful to them. One time my family was praying for a new vehicle (we lived below the poverty line) and I saw a vision of a burgundy minivan driving down the highway. One month later God provided that exact van I had seen in my vision.

When I read Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy, I was so overwhelmed by its content that I had to slam the book shut every 30 seconds and clench my fists and rock back and forth for a while just to calm down so I could read a bit more. That book taught me how to really fall in love with Jesus – which made obeying him much easier.

My theology evolved over time, of course. I was raised a Creationist but by the time I got to college I had realized there was no denying evolution, and Genesis had to be re-interpreted. Around the same time, I became less interested in the doctrinal accouterments of an ancient religion (were Jesus and Anselm really talking about the same things?) and more concerned with simply living out the mission of Jesus.

But that meant figuring out who Jesus really was. So I started to study what scholars had to say about the real Jesus who ministered to humanity 2,000 years ago.

Reading these scholars introduced me to a new way to look at things – not through the eyes of confirming my own faith, but through the critical, fair, open-minded eyes of someone who wants to know the truth even if it doesn’t confirm his own beliefs. The scholar looks at all the evidence. He looks for ways to disprove his own views, so as to overcome his own cognitive biases. The scholar submits each subject matter to the same criteria. He does not play favorites.

Immediately I could see this was the path to take if I wanted to know the truth. And I wasn’t worried it would destroy my faith. After all, most of the scholars I read had used these methods and still come to think Christianity was true.

Still, what I learned was pretty shocking. The gospels are riddled with contradictions, legends, known lies, and absurdities. Jesus and Paul disagreed on many central issues, and Christian theology had actually sided with Paul against Jesus!

Moreover, Christian scholars had known all this for centuries, and it was taught to seminary graduates like my father, but it had never been taught to me in church or Christian school. Were my pastors and teachers interested in truth, or were they interested in keeping me faithful no matter what? The prediction of Evangelical scholar Daniel Wallace was coming true for me: “The intentional dumbing down of the church for the sake of filling more pews will ultimately lead to defection from Christ.”

I also started to wonder how I could accept the miracle claims about Jesus when I rejected even much-better-evidenced miracle claims from other religions as “superstition.”

I admit my journey was unfair. For every skeptical article I read, I probably read five by Christian apologists. I desperately wanted to keep my faith. I loved being a Christian, and I had been taught that unbelievers cannot have any morality or purpose in life.

My apologetic readings led me to study philosophy of religion, too. I tired of the Lee Strobel and Josh McDowell types quickly, and went straight to the best Christian defenders in the world: top-notch analytic philosophers like William Lane Craig and Richard Swinburne.

But in the end I had to admit I had no good reasons to think Christianity was true. In fact, I had no reasons to think God even existed.

I was lost and miserable. I felt empty. All the joy and purpose in my life had been pulled out from under my feet. I begged for God – whoever he was – to reveal himself to me. I kept hoping I would find truth in some concept of God, but I didn’t. God was dead, and I had killed him. I had killed my best friend. If only I could rewind the clock and never study anything! I wanted my Christian life back.

My life was pretty sad and aimless for a couple months. But eventually I learned what hundreds of millions of atheists had known for centuries – that there is plenty of purpose and joy to be had without God! Perhaps more.

My rediscovery of moral truth came much later. After losing God, I studied every theory of moral realism I could find. They all made a weak case for the existence of objective moral truths. In fact, moral realists usually used the same lame arguments that theists used to argue for the existence of God: “The burden of proof is on the skeptic,” “Most people feel morality is real so it must be,” and so on.

I gave up on morality. It just didn’t seem to exist. In November 2008 I wrote a short essay embracing moral nihilism.

But in January 2009, a guest on my podcast presented a theory of moral realism that did not commit any of the mistakes common to all the other moral theories I had studied. I was floored. I had not expected that. I immediately bought his book. For several months I tried to find where it went wrong, but I couldn’t. So for now I tentatively believe in objective morality. Specifically, I think desirism is true.

So here I am: 24 years old, atheist, metaphysical naturalist, lover of truth and beauty and morality. That’s my story.

Tom, in your last letter you helpfully outlined what you believe. I look forward to hearing your story of how you got there. Two more things I’d like to be clear about before we proceed are your beliefs about the Bible and about evolution.

My own beliefs about those topics will not surprise you. The Bible is a collection of fully human writings filled with many genres but lots of myth and little history. Evolution is an extremely well-proven scientific theory, though of course it does not rule out the intervention of intelligent agents we could detect (via secret messages from alien designers in our DNA, for example) – it’s just that we have no such evidence so far.

Now, back to our quest to find some common ground. You agreed with everything in my list, with some qualifications.

First, you agree with my statement that “Science is thus far our most reliable and successful means for gaining knowledge about the natural world” as long as we understand “natural world” to mean “matter, energy, and their interactions by way of necessity… and chance.” But you noted we probably disagree on what exists in the natural world. You do not think “consciousness, free will, morality, reason, and other phenomena related to human personality” are fully natural.

That’s fine. Let’s back up to where we agree. We agree that science is the best way to gain knowledge about the natural world. And we probably agree that consciousness, reason, and other phenomena of personality are manifested at some level in the natural world – for example, we both believe in physical brain states. It’s just that you also believe there is a supernatural “soul” behind it all. (We can ignore free will and morality for now.) But we agree that science is the best way to truth about the natural world, whatever the natural world happens to contain or not contain.

Second, you weren’t sure what I meant by “The supernatural may exist, but it cannot be known to exist a priori.” The term a priori refers to knowledge gained independent of experience. So what I meant is that the supernatural may exist, but we can’t know whether it exists until we go out and experience this world we happen to have been born into it. That is, there is a possible world in which the supernatural does not exist. Perhaps there is also a possible world in which only the supernatural exists. But to know which kind of world we live in, we have to experience it. I think we probably agree on this.

So it seems we do agree on everything in my original list:

• Truth is not relative.
• Science is our most reliable and successful means for gaining knowledge about the natural world.
• We humans are plagued by many cognitive biases, which corrupt our pursuit of the truth.
• The laws of logic are true.
• Some propositions are more probably true than others.
• You and I and the external world exist.
• The supernatural may exist, but it cannot be known to exist a priori.

Now, let me test the boundaries of our agreement:

I suspect you think Christian belief is not properly basic, as Plantinga does. You sound like an evidentialist to me. If so, you think the truth of Christian belief should be (and can be) inferred from certain evidences – for example religious experience or the complexity of the universe.

I suspect you think the ontological argument does not succeed. The argument itself sounds absurd to most Christians I’ve tried it on, and few philosophers accept it. I also hope you don’t accept it, because it is difficult to discuss in this format.

I suspect you agree with me that science has a lot to say about whether or not Christianity is true. Christianity claims that the supernatural interacts with the natural in certain ways, and so our observations about the natural world imply something about the plausibility of certain theories of the supernatural. For example, you may think that our scientific knowledge about the physical constants of the universe or the complexity of living cells may provide reason to believe in God.

But I can only guess about your beliefs. Please correct me if I’m wrong. And, what else do you think we probably agree about?

Cheers,

Luke

Thank you for your gracious first letter, getting us off to a good start, Luke.

I want to speak to readers here first, to put our discussion here in context. I created this Discussion Grounds website a year or so ago with the intent of inviting one or more atheists or skeptics to a “disciplined discussion on religion and related matters.” I sent one invitation to a prominent naturalist, which he declined. After that I just kept this on the back burner.

A few weeks ago Luke contacted me by email, asking for an exchange of views on our blogs. I let him know about Discussion Grounds, and he agreed to try this experiment with me. I really do see it as an experiment: I don’t know of any other blogs that operate the way this one is set up, and we’re going to find out how well it works.

Anyway, speaking to you now, Luke, I appreciate the initiative you took, and the spirit with which you are approaching this. I look forward to great conversations with you!

We do indeed have much in common. I was “raised Christian” but in fact I did not have a clue what it really meant to follow Christ until I was in college. I’ll tell that story in a future post. I agree emphatically with much of what you have said about your approach to truth, knowledge, and reality. You asked if I could affirm a list of propositions (bulleted, near the end of your post), and the answer is yes, with these qualifications:

“Science is thus far our most reliable and successful means for gaining knowledge about the natural world.“ I agree with that if “the natural world” is defined properly. One such definition is, the natural world is that aspect of reality that is most reliably and successfully investigated through science. That’s not very helpful this time, though, is it? Another way of putting it is that the natural world is that aspect of reality that consists of matter, energy, and their interactions by way of necessity (natural law or lawlike interactions) and chance. There are aspects of the world that you probably consider natural, that I would not view as natural in that sense: consciousness, free will, morality, reason, and other phenomena related to human personality. I don’t think science has been at all successful in explaining these.

“The supernatural may exist, but it cannot be known to exist a priori.” I’m not sure what you mean in this case by a priori. If you mean the supernatural cannot be directly perceived, then I disagree, for God can and often does make himself known directly. If you mean it cannot be reasoned to, then I somewhat disagree. The philosophical proofs for God depend on sense perception of the universe (the ontological argument being perhaps the exception to that) and on a chain of reasoning, but they can be reasoned to and they are persuasive to many. I think we can know that there is a God through perception and through reason, in other words; though there is much we cannot grasp apart from his personal revelation.

“Some propositions are more probably true than others.” I agree with this; I would just state it more emphatically!

My views regarding Christ are summed up in the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, and in historic Protestantism. I believe in the Triune God: the Father; the Son, Jesus Christ as God’s fullest revelation, who lived, died, and rose again for the redemption of our sins; and the Holy Spirit who convicts us of sin, draws us to God through Christ, and guides and empowers believers in following Christ. I believe that God created the world and all of life, and that history is moving toward a consummation at the return of Jesus Christ. I believe that eternal life is a gift of God offered through Christ, and that to reject it is to choose instead eternity apart from God’s goodness and love.

Those are the basics of my belief. I think it might be interesting from here for each of us to describe our spiritual journeys: how we came to the positions we now hold. What do you think?

Warm regards,

Tom

Tom,

You and I have a great deal in common!

You write Thinking Christian, a blog advocating a thoughtful and ethical Christianity. I write Common Sense Atheism, a blog advocating a thoughtful and ethical atheism. We both read some of the philosophical literature concerning theism vs. atheism, but we are not professional philosophers. We both respect science but not so much postmodernism and relativism.

We were both raised Christian, and we have both experienced God in powerful, convincing ways. (At least, we have experienced what we believed to be God.)

We both want to know the truth, and we are both willing to change our minds if we are shown to be wrong.

Most disagreement between Christians and atheists begins over some specific proposition, for example: “God raised Jesus from the dead.” The Christian affirms it, the atheist denies it. Soon they find out their disagreement is more fundamental, for example over historical method or epistemology in general. And later they may discover their disagreement begins at a more fundamental level still. And so they cannot resolve their disagreement over the resurrection of Jesus because their point of divergence actually lies much further back.

Rather than “working back” in this way, I’d like to first find everything we agree on and then work our way forward to find our earliest and most fundamental disagreements. Perhaps then we can not only emphasize what we have in common, but also argue at the true origin of our divergence in beliefs.

But whatever our point of first divergence, we should each be clear about what we believe. I believe:

1. Theism is almost certainly false.
2. Christian theism is definitely false.
3. There are no good reasons to think that any supernatural gods exist.
4. Metaphysical naturalism is probably true.

Being a Christian, I suspect you have a much longer list of propositions to affirm. I don’t need you to list your position on every Christian doctrine, but a brief sketch of your concepts of God and Jesus and their interest in (and interaction with) humanity would be useful.

Next, let’s try to find some common ground. I’ll start conservatively. Can you also affirm the following?

• There is a single, objective truth value for each proposition we might discuss concerning the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. (Truth is not relative.)
• Science is thus far our most reliable and successful means for gaining knowledge about the natural world.
• Humans are plagued by many cognitive biases, which corrupt their pursuit of the truth.
• The laws of logic are true. (That is, we are speaking the same language about the universe. For example, we agree that something can’t both exist and not-exist at the same time in the same way, because that’s part of what we mean by the word “exist.”)
• Some propositions are more probably true than others.
• You and I and the external world exist.
• The supernatural may exist, but it cannot be known to exist a priori.

So there’s a start! In your first letter, I’d like to hear what you believe and whether you agree with the above propositions.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,

Luke

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