Discussion Grounds

Luke, I woke up this morning thinking I had moved too quickly toward the suggestion that I present some of my reasons for belief. We have more points of agreement we should talk about first. One of them is this that you wrote last time:

“One tendency is to spend little time understanding the other’s position, and lots of time attacking it. This leads to straw-man arguments and mutual frustration. I hope we continue to invest heavily in understanding each other….”

The question of properly basic beliefs still seems moot for this conversation, but I don’t mind your asking me for clarification:

I’m still a bit confused. It sounds like you want to say your direct perception of God is incorrigible, but your example is misleading. If you perceive green, it is still an inferential leap to say that “there is green there [outside the window].” All that is incorrigible is to say “I perceive green.”

There is a difference in the case of God: he can impress a person with a perception that is knowledge, an awareness that is not just of the numinous, the transcendent, the other, but an awareness that is of God himself. I think we have to regard God as having that ability, if he exists, or else he would have less capacity to make himself known to his creation than his creation has. Green can incorrigibly impress itself on our awareness;¹ why would we suppose that God could not do at least as much?

As to what propositions about God are available to me in a properly basic way, I really don’t know. I am quite certain that God could make any number of propositions available to any person in a basic way. There are numerous very well attested reports of Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East having visions of Jesus Christ. These are fairly content-rich. So I must amend what I wrote earlier: “I think that theism, not Christianity, can be a properly basic belief.” I wasn’t thinking broadly enough then.

I know that when I first entered into a relationship with Christ, God gave me a strong inner knowledge that his Word was trustworthy. Since that time, I have had other occasional experiences of God giving me knowledge not based on evidence. The most striking, I think, was when I had signed up for college classes on the basis of a plan that made perfectly good sense at the time. After registering, I had a strong impression from God that I must change my schedule. I found out about two years later that if I had not changed it, the sequence would have been messed up and my graduation would have been considerably delayed.

But how much of my knowledge of God now is properly basic? As I said, I don’t know, because my knowledge of God is wrapped up in so many different things now: knowledge of Scripture, my own experiences as well as others’, and a whole lot of reading and reflection. Plantinga’s argument in 2000 was not (as I recall) that knowledge of God must be properly basic, but that knowledge of God may be warranted or justified if it is acquired in a properly basic way, that is, if one comes to knowledge of God apart from evidences. (I’ve only read through half of the 1967 book, so I won’t speak to that one.) I certainly agree with that.

You asked,

Concerning the “default view,” I’m really asking whether you think theism or atheism carries the burden of proof. You seem to think atheism carries the burden of proof because it is the less popular view. Is that correct?

I’m not sure we ought to consider either theism or atheism a “default view.” I had said before that religious belief is a default position, and that this is just a matter of empirical observation. Religious belief is not the same as theism. But we must put this in context. A while ago I wrote,

“I believe because of the convergence of a whole constellation of reasons, ranging from my experience of God, to my experience of myself and other humans, to philosophical arguments and to historical evidences.” Each one of those reasons could be individually challenged, but as these challenges multiply in number, their strength weakens rather than grows; for they comprise a set of beliefs, all of which are necessary in order to sustain an atheistic viewpoint, and many of which are implausible. The result: it takes more “faith” to be an atheist than a Christian.

And this is what you assessed as my taking the position that Christianity should be regarded as the default view, and you went on to say, “Christianity makes a long list of highly contentions claims, and it should offer support for them.” I’m certainly willing to go there with you, to offer support for these claims (contentious or otherwise).

Now to some other probable points of agreement. I think you and I probably both hold that:

1. Moral duties and values are real; that is, some things are really right and some things are really wrong.²
2. You and I have a genuine awareness or sense of responsibility relating to (at least some) moral duties and values.
3. Human consciousness is real, not illusory.
4. Humans have a persistent, one might say incorrigible, belief that we have free will.
5. Humans have a similarly incorrigible belief that we are each (in at least some sense) the same person from day to day and from beginning to end of life; there is continuity of identity.
6. Humans have a similarly persistent belief that our lives and our actions have meaning and purpose that transcends our individual selves.
7. Humans all consider there to be something wrong in our experience: that we do not experience the world in the way it “ought to be,” that we ourselves do not live up to our own expectations of ourselves, that there is something not right in the way people treat each other, that there is something awful or wrong about natural disasters, and so on.
8. Humans are unique in believing that; that although prey will try to escape predators and deer will run from fire, still no animal has anything even distantly approximating a human-like cognitive experience that it is “wrong” that predators eat prey, or that forest fires sometimes kill fawns.
9. Humans have a sense of what is or could be better about themselves and the world, and a (faulty but nonetheless real) drive to improve themselves and the world; and again, this is unique among humans.
10. Yet we have made very little if any progress in this over the past several millennia, with the perhaps dubious exception of increased technology³

Are we in agreement on this list?

I do think we’re moving at a fast clip, as you said last time. So far I’m okay with that, just because it’s an interesting conversation. I appreciate your taking part in it with me. It helps that right now I’m between major projects at work, for I won’t always have time to respond so quickly.

Regards,

Tom

1. That doesn’t mean I have to know what Green is in itself. I just have to take it that there is something there that is impressing itself on my awareness as Green, and that impression is to my mind quite incorrigible [↩]
2. Many atheists would disagree with that, but I think as a desire utilitarian you would affirm it. [↩]
3. I say “perhaps dubious” because it brings both wins and losses with it. Yes, medical advances have been marvelous. But someone recently noted that medieval poetry and song hardly ever complained of deep existential loneliness. Many other examples on both the plus and minus side could be brought forth. [↩]

Tom,

Six letters already? We really raced out of the gates, didn’t we? I suspect we won’t be able to keep up this pace much longer.

I like how this discussion has developed, so let me reinforce it a bit. I want to counteract some destructive tendencies of theist-atheist debates.

One tendency is to spend little time understanding the other’s position, and lots of time attacking it. This leads to straw-man arguments and mutual frustration. I hope we continue to invest heavily in understanding each other.

These debates also tend to attract the Theist Tribe and the Atheist Tribe, each of which jeers at the other and encourages their representatives to go after “gotcha” moments or make snarky jabs. I hope you and I can avoid such temptations.

I also hope we can each pursue the truth rather than trying to “win one for the team” (or for ourselves).

I hope we can each be honest about our own ignorance. In these debates it can be tempting to imply that one’s knowledge is greater than it really is so as to win “authority points,” and so as to make a slightly larger portion of the audience think one is “winning.”

With that in mind, and before we get to a defense of your beliefs, I still need your help to clear up some ideas you presented.

You wrote that:

…as the challenges to faith multiply, they weaken rather than grow. [Let's say] we have arguments for Christian theism A, B, C, … and the corresponding objections ~A, ~B, ~C, …

…If ~A, ~B, ~C, … are independent of each other, then their cumulative probability is equal to the product of their individual probabilities. Since I think their probabilities are all less than 1, then their combined [probability] must be less than their lowest individual probability…

Granted, the probabilities of A, B, C, … are also less than 1.

I’m confused. By ~A do you mean “not-A” or do you mean “Luke’s objection to A”? For example, let’s say A is “Jesus is God,” not-A is obviously “It is not the case that Jesus is God,” and Luke’s objection to A is “a human cannot also be a god.”

In any case, I think we agree that we can assess the probability of Christianity vs. not-Christianity by comparing the multiplied probability of A, B, and C… with the multiplied probability of not-A, not-B, and not-C…

Concerning the “default view,” I’m really asking whether you think theism or atheism carries the burden of proof. You seem to think atheism carries the burden of proof because it is the less popular view. Is that correct?

Regarding the proper basicality of theistic belief, you write:

I believe I have a direct inner perception of God, and that there is knowledge just in that experience. It is not like inferring there is a laptop in front of me based on [a] mixture of perceptions consistent with the presence of said laptop. It is more like looking out the window and seeing green, and knowing there is green there. I infer the presence of trees from that perception, but I do not infer the presence of green from that perception. I just see it. I believe the perception of God is of that order.

I’m still a bit confused. It sounds like you want to say your direct perception of God is incorrigible, but your example is misleading. If you perceive green, it is still an inferential leap to say that “there is green there [outside the window].” All that is incorrigible is to say “I perceive green.” It could be the case that the green is just a sensation in your brain being generated by an alien scientist from another dimension, and that green does not exist “in the real world” anywhere around you, but you would still be correct to say “I perceive green,” and that’s why the statement “I perceive green” is incorrigible.

Are you saying your experience of God is like that? Or are you saying something else? Also, how many propositions about God do you think are available to you in a properly basic way? At what point in listing the propositions you believe about God do you switch to saying they are inferences, and not known in a properly basic way? It would probably help if you could point me to another author who has defended your view on this in depth. For example, are you defending the type of properly basic theistic belief that Plantinga defended in 1967, or the different version he defended in 2000, or something else?

In any case, it sounds like neither of us wants to make proper basicality a focus of our discussion, though I would like to at least understand what your position is. So after that perhaps we can set it aside and instead consider whether the evidence favors Christianity or atheism.

Cheers,

Luke

Luke,

The first order of business here ought to be clearing up confusion from last time. You wondered what I meant by saying that as the challenges to faith multiply, they weaken rather than grow. That’s a fair question. I believe that for the most part, where we have arguments for Christian theism A, B, C, … and the corresponding objections ~A, ~B, ~C, …, that ~A, ~B, and ~C are individually less plausible than A, B, and C respectively. (This is especially true if we consider arguments for theism generally, as opposed to the specific case of Christian theism.) The more implausibilities you have to accumulate in order to make your case, the less plausible is your overall case.

The reason is based in probability. If ~A, ~B, ~C, … are independent of each other, then their cumulative probability is equal to the product of their individual probabilities. Since I think their probabilities are all less than 1, then their combined probabilities must be less than their lowest individual probability. (If ~A, ~B, ~C, … are not independent of each other the math gets a whole lot messier, but I think we could find enough generally independent examples that the point is valid overall.)

Granted, the probabilities of A, B, C, … are also less than 1. We can’t prove either theism or atheism for certain. We have to resort instead to asking, what are A, B, and C … , and which are more plausible (or probable), those statements or their contraries? We’ll get to that soon, I’m sure.

You disagree with my making it sound like Christianity is the default position. I would argue that religious belief is certainly the default position, based on evidence from child development studies and from world culture, and from observation of what atheism requires (which I think we can take as the contrary to religious belief for our purposes here). Atheism requires that we re-order and re-conceptualize dozens of natural attitudes toward the world: that the appearance of design actually signifies design, for example. You say that Christianity offers a long list of highly contentious claims; I would say that atheism does too. (I am intentionally alternating between discussion of “religious belief” and the narrower topic of Christianity here.) What should the default view be? I don’t think you can use “should” with respect to a default view. You have to ask what is the default view, and it is neither atheism nor agnosticism. It is some form of spiritual or religious belief at least.

You say,

Christianity carries a heavy burden of proof, and a “challenge” to Christianity may be only the realization that it cannot carry this burden with regard to a particular claim.

That’s what is going to make the rest of this discussion so interesting!

With respect to properly basic beliefs, your approach is one that has a following and is reasonable; and I have been using a different one which also has a following. Mine is closest to that of Reformed epistemology on the Wikipedia page you linked to:

beliefs are held to be properly basic if they are reasonable and consistent with a sensible world view. This rather broad criterion can include faith in our senses, faith in our memory, and faith in God.

But to this,

It sounds like you may just mean that you have a direct inner perception of God, and that you think the best explanation for this subjective phenomenon is the real existence of God.

I say no, not quite. I believe I have a direct inner perception of God, and that there is knowledge just in that experience. It is not like inferring there is a laptop in front of me based on mixture of perceptions consistent with the presence of said laptop. It is more like looking out the window and seeing green, and knowing there is green there. I infer the presence of trees from that perception, but I do not infer the presence of green from that perception. I just see it. I believe the perception of God is of that order. Now, there are also inferences I can draw from that starting point, but they are in addition to a non-inferential starting point.

But I also doubt we’ll get very far in conversation about my perceptions and whether I infer knowledge from them or simply have knowledge from them; because you don’t have my perceptions, and I don’t expect my perceptions to be very useful in discussions with anyone except possibly another individual who seems to have the same kind of perception. I won’t build my public arguments here on my own private perceptions. Thus it seems to me that basicality of belief is moot for us.

You said,

I have not defended my beliefs thus far. I am happy to do so, but I won’t just start rambling. I’ll wait for your questions of me.

With your permission, I would like to take the first shot by offering one defense of my beliefs, and letting that be the first move into the next stage of our discussion. Would that be okay with you?

Tom,

Why do you believe? You write:

I believe because of the convergence of a whole constellation of reasons, ranging from my experience of God, to my experience of myself and other humans, to philosophical arguments and to historical evidences.

This is probably true for most Christians, though you probably have an unusual number of philosophical arguments and historical evidences in your own constellation. I certainly had a constellation of reasons supporting my belief in God when I was a Christian. I believed because of personal experience, the witness of loving and trustworthy people in my life, the authority of the Bible, and some vague philosophical and historical arguments (I think I had read a Lee Strobel book in my youth).

But one by one, my introduction to critical thinking yanked out each of these tent pegs until the whole thing collapsed. In my case, the first to go was my assurance about the Historical Jesus. The next to go was my confidence in theological reasoning. In particular, I was disturbed by the gap between what liberal theologians called the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus. The next to go were my confidence in the divine inspiration of Scripture and my willingness to defend its barbaric moral values. After that I studied philosophy of religion quite a bit and one by one the common arguments for the existence of God fell apart. Finally, I was left only with my experiences of God and the witness of the good Christians around me. But I knew that if I was going to be fair and honest in my pursuit of truth, I had to admit there were millions of people of other religions who had equally convincing experiences of their own gods, and were likewise surrounded by convinced and moral believers. To say my experiences were genuine while their’s were not would just be special pleading.

Speaking of your constellation of beliefs that support your Christian worldview, you write:

Each one of those reasons could be individually challenged, but as these challenges multiply in number, their strength weakens rather than grows; for they comprise a set of beliefs, all of which are necessary in order to sustain an atheistic viewpoint, and many of which are implausible. The result: it takes more “faith” to be an atheist than a Christian.

Now this confuses me. You say that as the challenges to your faith multiply, their strength weakens rather than grows, because all these challenges are positive beliefs that must be sustained to justify atheism. First, I don’t understand why it should be the case that as challenges to Christian beliefs multiply they actually become weaker. Challenges to Christian belief need not be seen as supporting atheism. They merely undermine Christianity. And the more challenges there are to Christian beliefs, the stronger the challenge to Christianity itself.

Second, let us consider the possibility that the challenges to your Christian beliefs are not implausible.

Third, you make it sound as if Christianity is the default position. In my experience, most challenges to Christianity are not “positive” arguments against Christianity or theism, but merely a realization of how very weak the positive case for Christianity and theism are. Christianity makes a long list of highly contentions claims, and it should offer support for them. I’m not sure what the default view should be – agnosticism, maybe? – but it is most certainly not Christianity. Christianity carries a heavy burden of proof, and a “challenge” to Christianity may be only the realization that it cannot carry this burden with regard to a particular claim.

Now, about theism as a properly basic belief, you write:

The sense in which theism can be properly basic is that of a direct awareness of God… Yet there is also a related, specifically Christian experience of God through the Holy Spirit…

So then what of evidences? They are not out of the picture at all. There are appeals to history and other evidences throughout the Bible. Look at it this way: God is pure and holy, and one of the things he is incapable of is lying. The Bible purports to be his Word, so it certainly ought not to affirm what is false. It makes claims about events in history. Historical events can be studied by methods of historical inquiry. If such study showed that the events recorded in the Bible did not happen or were significantly unlikely to have happened, then I would have to conclude that what I thought was a properly basic belief was an improperly basic error. [emphasis added]

Now this is a bit different than the notion of proper basicality with which I am familiar. It sounds like you may just mean that you have a direct inner perception of God, and that you think the best explanation for this subjective phenomenon is the real existence of God. In the same way, I now have a direct visual perception of a Vostro laptop, and I think the best explanation for this subjective phenomenon is the real existence of a Vostro laptop. But your belief in the real existence of God and my belief in the real existence of the Vostro laptop are not properly basic, for they are neither axiomatic nor incorrigible.

If so, then one approach I could take would be to argue that the best explanation of my direct visual perception of a Vostro laptop is the real existence of a Vostro laptop, while the best explanation of your direct visual perception of God is not the real existence of God.

I would then argue the same thing concerning your inner perception of the Holy Spirit and his witness to you about the truth of Christian doctrines. And I would continue with other claimed evidences – the historicity of the Bible, philosophical arguments, and so on.

But you probably resist my attempt to recast your “properly basic” theistic beliefs as resulting from arguments to the best explanation. In any case, would you care to defend your notion of the proper basicality of theism, whatever it is?

I have not defended my beliefs thus far. I am happy to do so, but I won’t just start rambling. I’ll wait for your questions of me.

Cheers,

Luke

Luke,

Thanks for answering my question in the spirit in which it was intended. No, my theology does not require me to believe there was a moral issue involved in your loss of faith, except in the universal sense that we all have an issue called sin to deal with. I don’t really think we need to get into that right now, because the main question I asked you has been answered.

I lived in Southern California for thirteen years, in Riverside, Pasadena, Tustin, and even 2 1/2 years in Big Bear Lake (beautiful country, but a very hard place to connect with people for friendships). It’s all changed a lot since I left there in 1993. I loved it there, except during and after the Landers and Big Bear earthquakes of 1992. What I miss most about Southern California is the diversity of people and environments there. It’s just a really interesting place to live.

In your third letter you identified this as a fundamental point at which our ways separate:

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.

And you are concerned that

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!

That’s not quite the position I would state. First, I think that theism, not Christianity, can be a properly basic belief. I don’t know of anyone who would claim that knowledge of Christ can be had apart from the record of the Bible. The sense in which theism can be properly basic is that of a direct awareness of God, leading directly to belief in him. Yet there is also a related, specifically Christian experience of God through the Holy Spirit in which God confirms the truth of his Word to the believer.

So then what of evidences? They are not out of the picture at all. There are appeals to history and other evidences throughout the Bible. Look at it this way: God is pure and holy, and one of the things he is incapable of is lying. The Bible purports to be his Word, so it certainly ought not to affirm what is false. It makes claims about events in history. Historical events can be studied by methods of historical inquiry. If such study showed that the events recorded in the Bible did not happen or were significantly unlikely to have happened, then I would have to conclude that what I thought was a properly basic belief was an improperly basic error.

I could also have illustrated that point by referring to evidences relating to philosophical, existential, or even scientific considerations, not just historical. So if you’re worried that a discussion on evidences is moot, it’s not. I will admit that I do not expect or require evidences to produce certain proof with respect to God and Christ. I follow a best explanation approach instead: recognizing that any phenomenon could have multiple explanations, which one is the most satisfactory? And I also follow a cumulative evidence approach: no one set of evidences by itself can bear the whole weight of belief, but in concert with another they are very convincing.

So if the next question were, “Why do you believe, Tom?” I would begin my answer, “I believe because of the convergence of a whole constellation of reasons, ranging from my experience of God, to my experience of myself and other humans, to philosophical arguments and to historical evidences.” Each one of those reasons could be individually challenged, but as these challenges multiply in number, their strength weakens rather than grows; for they comprise a set of beliefs, all of which are necessary in order to sustain an atheistic viewpoint, and many of which are implausible. The result: it takes more “faith” to be an atheist than a Christian.

So that is my position in its most general, introductory form. I think a good direction to go from here would be to take some reasons for belief and work through them one at a time. What do you think?

Tom,

You’re not alone; most Christians who read my deconversion story have (tentatively) concluded that my loss of faith was a moral issue, not an intellectual one – despite my pains to emphasize the opposite. Perhaps your theology requires such a conclusion about infidels.

I am sure that many unconscious motives played a role in my deconversion. And personality certainly matters. If I was a less independent person, perhaps I would not have had the guts to sever such a central connection to my friends and family, even after learning what I learned. But as I tried to emphasize in my deconversion story, my deconversion was a thoroughly intellectual one. At least, that was my conscious experience of it.

I did experience a lot of needless guilty during my Christian years, though that was mostly before reading Dallas Willard. You seem to advocate a different path to spiritual health than Willard does, but trust me – a different theology or Christian practice would not have kept me in the fold. In fact I tried many different theologies because I did not want to leave. The problem was not that Christianity was difficult or guilt-inducing, or that one particular theology didn’t make sense. The problem was that I had no good reasons to think even Mere Christianity or theism were true, and lots of reasons to think they were false.

You’re concerned that the Christianity I reject is not the same as the Christianity you’re defending. But no, it’s the same. Earlier, you wrote that:

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.

…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 think Plantinga is right that knowledge of God can be properly basic…

Yes, that is precisely the Christianity I reject.

So I think we’re back where we were before. Our next step seems to be to argue over our earliest point of divergence: whether or not Christian belief can be properly basic.

Oh, and I live in Los Angeles now. Minnesota is too cold! But I do miss the lakes, and the color green.

Cheers,

Luke

Good morning, Luke!

We have an extra hour given to us this morning (in the United States, that is) by the switch back to standard time, so it’s a good opportunity for me to check in here. Do you still live in MInnesota, by the way? I have family living about 35-40 miles south of your original home town of Cambridge—they’re in Circle Pines. (My home is in Yorktown, Virginia, which you probably already know from looking through my blog.)

Looking at your story here and on your blog, I wonder how accurate it is when you say you had a similar experience to mine. On your blog you summarize your growing-up years,

In many ways I regret my Christian upbringing. So much time and energy wasted on an invisible friend. So many bad lessons about morality, thinking, and sex. So much needless guilt.

And here you say,

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!

To me that sounds an awful lot like my experience before I entered into a personal relationship with Christ. The change that I experienced was not from doing anything at all, except trusting Jesus Christ. It was most undoubtedly an inward transformation accomplished by God doing something in me. It wasn’t about resolving to change my ways, or even about resolving to be more aware of God and his goodness. It was a gift, not a discipline.

I won’t try to guess what “bad lessons” you were taught about morality, thinking, and sex, but “needless guilt” sounds very familiar, in the sense that earlier in my life I had a moral sense, which often led to awareness of moral failure, and I didn’t know what to do with that guilt. This is inevitable for anyone who has a moral sense at all, regardless of the content of that moral sense. You and I, neither of us being psychopaths lacking in all moral sense, were both bound to feel failure and guilt.

So what’s the solution to guilt? I can think of four or five potential options:

1. Adjusting moral beliefs to match behavior. If you paint the target around the arrow after you’ve shot it at the wall, you can never miss! This is a version of moral relativism (there are New Age variants that approach this too), and since neither of us is a relativist I don’t need to spend time on what’s wrong with that approach.
2. Nihilism or some version thereof, which gives up and says none of this matters. Neither of us are nihilists, either.
3. Trying a lot harder to do right until one finally succeeds. The severe problem with that is that no one ever finally succeeds in consistently doing what they really think is right.
4. Accepting moral realism without responsibility to a transcendent God, which I think might give one freedom to say, “Okay, I’m not perfect, but I’m doing the best I can, trying to grow, and what more can you expect?”
5. Forgiveness from God, living by his grace, and growing in character by the power of his inward working.

Based on the clues and hints in what you wrote, it sounds to me like possibly you grew up with a list of “Christian” do’s and don’ts, so thus you experienced a lot of what you now describe as needless guilt. Based on Willard’s book, you resolved to remind yourself every half-minute or so of God’s goodness, an approach with corresponds more or less with number 3: trying harder to do right. I think Divine Conspiracy is a truly great book, but there is a “map vs. fuel” distinction to be made.¹ The disciplines are not the way out of guilt; they are for those who know that God has already provided that solution through his grace.

In other words, it sounds to me like the Christianity you say you tried and rejected is a lot like the “Christianity” I previously tried and rejected, too.

I have things to say about the rest of your most recent letter, but in this one I have taking a dangerous risk of running with some hints and clues, and I might have gone the right direction or the wrong one. It sounds to me like now you are living with solution number 4 to your previous and/or current potential guilt. My inferences might be all wrong, though, so before bumbling on ahead with possibly wrong assumptions, I’d like to get your response to this much.

I trust you can see why this matters. If you think the Christianity you have rejected is the same as the Christianity I’m defending, when in fact it has much in common with a “Christianity” that I have also rejected, it would be important to bring that to light as early as possible.

1. The map/fuel problem applies to anyone who is trying harder to be or do better as a Christian, whether they have encountered Christ in a relational way already or not. [↩]

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