Discussion Grounds

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