I’m an INTP, and if you’re a fellow “NT” Myers-Briggs personality type, I’m especially eager to dialogue with you about the reasons why I believe Christianity is true.

This may sound like a somewhat surprising topic for someone of my Myers-Briggs temperament, because, according to what I have read, INTPs and INTJs, who tend to pride themselves on following the path of reason, have higher rates of atheism or skepticism about religion than most other personality types.  According to the 16 Personalities website, for instance, only 22% of INTPs consider themselves religious, compared to 40% of the general population.  And this is why I want to address the topic.  In our contemporary Western society, a lot of logical NTs think that they have seen the logical flaws in Christianity and all religion, and they reject belief in God – and especially the God of Christianity – as irrational.

I sympathize with this view, because I have similar tendencies myself, and in fact, for a short time a number of years ago I did reject Christianity because I thought in my mind that I had disproved it.  I now believe that I was wrong to reject it.  I believe that a logical analysis of Christianity that is honest about our own presuppositions will reveal why.  So, if you’re a skeptical NT – such as an INTP or INTJ – I want to appeal to your sense of logic and ability to theorize about systems of thought, and I want us to analyze together the presuppositions that lead people to reject Christianity.

 

The presupposition of fairness

To examine our presuppositions and biases as NTs, I’d like to first engage in a thought experiment and imagine the universe that we might desire.  In my experience, most NTs in our contemporary Western culture – including myself – would like to imagine a universe that is highly rational (not random) and they subscribe to a view of “fairness” that assumes that everyone should be treated equally and should be given as much independence as possible as long as their pursuits do not harm other people.  If there were a God in the universe, we would want that God to be a deist God – somewhat along the lines of what the eighteenth-century deists, like the NT Thomas Jefferson, imagined.  This deity would be completely fair and would conform to the expectations of Enlightenment rationality.  Or, if such a personal God does not exist, we might imagine that the universe’s order is maintained by the sort of God that Albert Einstein imagined – a very distant, impersonal force that was vaguely defined and certainly did not interfere with human affairs.  And today, many NTs see no need to invoke the hypothesis of God at all, because they think that science has offered a compelling picture of a materialistic universe.

While many other personality types – especially the NFs – are repelled by a picture of the universe that is completely mechanistic and impersonal, NTs often revel in the idea that there is no personality behind the cosmos, and that in the end, the universe is structured around nothing except physical forces and universal constants.  I think that a lot of NTs would actually still prefer the rationalist God of Thomas Jefferson if they could persuade themselves that such a God exists, but if they can’t bring themselves to that, a world of matter and numbers is far more comfortable than a world controlled by a capricious personal deity.

In all honesty, I will admit that I found the deist God very attractive, and I’m not naturally drawn toward the picture of the biblical God.  But I eventually had to admit that in imagining the deist God, I was doing exactly what I and other INTPs or INTJs have often derided New Age spiritualist NF types for doing when they get excited about shamans or seek spiritual power in neopagan rituals or astrology – I was making a God of my own image that was based not on what is actually true, but on what I would like to be true.

So, if you’re an intellectually honest NT, I would challenge you to ask yourself not whether you think the God of Christianity is fair or whether you would like this God to exist, but ask yourself instead whether instead Christianity is true.

 

Is Christianity true (even if we might not like it)?

How do we determine whether Christianity is true?  There’s far more to this topic than I can cover in this short video, so let me just give you two points.  First, in regard to the existence of God, let me ask you, if you’re an NT atheist, whether a purely materialist, atheist universe gives you the possibility for the sort of rational thinking and rational cosmic order that you imagine.  The Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga has argued that atheistic materialism gives us no reason to believe in the rationality of our own minds, and I think that his arguments are persuasive.  In fact, I would go beyond what Plantinga has said, and also ask how the physical constants in the universe – constants that have existed since the earliest moments of the Big Bang and that have provided a rational, mathematical structure to the universe that allows for the possibility of rational scientific investigation – could arise from purely materialistic forces.  If you pride yourself on your rationality and if you love to analyze systems, I’d like you to consider whether impersonal matter could really produce rationality both in the mathematical structure of the cosmos and in the rationality of our own minds.

But of course, this by itself is not an argument for Christianity, because even if you find it persuasive, a belief in some sort of higher power behind the mathematical structure of the universe would make you no more than a deist at best.  And it’s certainly not the foundation of my Christian faith.

So let me give you one further reason why I have been unable to dismiss Christianity’s claims.  I’ll give you the short version of an argument that would take hours to unpack in detail: I don’t think that Christianity is a religion that people could have made up.  The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament present a cohesive, unified (but very complex) picture of a divinity that is completely unlike any other ancient deity.  The passion that the biblical God has for justice and righteousness, and the love that he extends toward his people, are a far cry from the picture that any of the ancient pagans had of their gods.  The picture of Jesus that the New Testament presents – a picture of meekness and boldness, humility and self-assurance, love and righteous zeal – is also completely different from that of any other individual who has ever lived.  Furthermore, the view of sin and salvation that Christianity presents is far different from any other religion.  Most religions that describe the need of divine forgiveness picture humans as at least partly good and capable of doing good works on their own, and religious teaching is presented as a way to get the knowledge needed to reform ourselves and find God.  Only Christianity depicts humans as completely alienated from the God who made them and in need of God’s intervention to save us.

So, if you’re an NT who is skeptical about Christianity, I would encourage you to ask yourself why Christianity, if it’s merely a human product, is so different from the ancient pagan cultures that allegedly produced it – and, for that matter, different in its essential claims from every other religion that the world has ever produced.  Where did such a countercultural religion come from, and why has it continued to appeal to people from every continent, social class, and racial background?

In other words, to dismiss Christianity, we would have to explain where its countercultural ideas came from.  I’ve read a number of books by skeptical scholars, such as Bart Ehrman, who have tried to explain Christianity away, and I haven’t been persuaded by their claims.  I think that scholars such as N.T. Wright, Larry Hurtado, and a host of others have made a compelling case for the countercultural uniqueness of the early Christian claims about Jesus.  To worship a crucified man was anathema to Jews, Greeks, and Romans in the first century, and yet that’s exactly what the early Christians did when they called Jesus “Lord.”

This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to discussions of Christian evidences, and I haven’t had time to touch on issues such as the resurrection of Jesus, the Bible, and the question of how there could be a good, all-powerful God in a world of suffering and evil.  Like any complex worldview, Christianity can’t be thoroughly examined in only ten or fifteen minutes.

 

An invitation to question and examine

If you’d like to continue the conversation, I would love to talk with you and listen to your questions, feedback, and arguments.  I want to treat your questions fairly and engage in a dialogue that will allow both of us to learn something from each other, even if we disagree.

I would also encourage you to read thoughtful books from people on all sides of this discussion.  If you haven’t read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity or Tim Keller’s Reason for God yet, you should definitely check those out before dismissing Christianity if for no other reason than to make sure that you’re engaging with the best Christian arguments and not merely battling with straw men.

If what the Bible says about the deep sinfulness of our human nature is true, all of us, from every personality type, will be inclined to reject the message until God changes our will and desires.  We all have our own way of rejecting the message, and for many NTs, we’ll probably do so by arguing that it’s irrational and unfair.  If we’re honest with ourselves, I think that we may have admit that the criteria that we’re using to judge God, the Bible, or the Christian message are shaped not necessarily by what is objectively true about reality, but by what we would like to believe about reality because of the biases of our particular personality type.

As an INTP, I would encourage you to look beyond your own presuppositions and consider the possibility that what we might not want to imagine – the possibility that a sovereign God is in control of our lives and that we do not have the autonomy that we would like to think we have – is true.  Ultimately, the Christian message offers much deeper meaning and joy than we could find outside of Christ, but before we get to that, we’ll have to confront the possibility that its message might be deeply uncomfortable for us because of our personality type.  If you’re committed to a quest for knowledge of what is true, discomfort with Christianity should be no reason to dismiss it; it should instead be a reason to investigate it further.

The evidences that we have discussed over the past few weeks for God’s existence and the Bible’s divine origin are important, but in the end, the truth claims of Christianity stand or fall on the basis of Jesus’s own claims and identity.  This week, I want to examine those claims directly.  If Jesus was God incarnate, and if he was really raised from the dead, Christianity is true.  If Jesus was never raised and if he was not the Son of God, the claims of orthodox Christianity are false.  So, in the end, our examination of Christian evidences comes down to this question: Who was Jesus?  This is such an important question that I would encourage you to ask it directly to any skeptic with whom you talk.

 

Lord, Liar, Lunatic, or Legend?

In the 1940s, C.S. Lewis famously posed the “trilemma”: If Jesus claimed to be the Son of God and divinity in the flesh, he was either lying, he was crazy, or he was the Lord he claimed to be.  For decades, Christian apologists have been repeating the “Lord, liar, or lunatic” trilemma, because it has a lot of persuasive power.  The high value of Jesus’s moral teaching, and the exemplary nature of his life, would imply that he was probably not a liar and certainly not a lunatic.  Therefore, he must have been Lord, right?

But in recent decades a number of skeptics have pointed out that Lewis’s trilemma assumes the truth of the gospel narratives, which is an assumption that most critical biblical scholars are not willing to grant.  There is a fourth “L” that can be added to the trilemma, they say: “legend.”  Jesus’s claims were either made up by early Christians or highly exaggerated, they say.  Jesus himself might have been a good moral teacher and perhaps even an itinerant healer or prophet, but later Christians turned him into the Son of God.  How should we deal with the claim that the Jesus in which the church has believed for centuries is mostly a legend?

First, I think that we can quickly dismiss one minority view that has gained a following in some atheist circles: the claim that Jesus never existed.  Jesus’s existence was accepted as fact not only by all four gospel writers, but also by Paul and the other early Christians.  Paul was a skeptic before he was a Christian, and if Jesus had never existed, he surely would have been aware of the claim.  In the late 1^st and early 2^nd centuries, several Jewish and Roman writers (e.g., Josephus, Tacitus, and Suetonius) briefly mentioned Jesus’s life, treating him as a historical figure whose existence was never in doubt.  There is thus a lot of ancient historical evidence for Jesus’s life.  But perhaps the most powerful argument in favor of Jesus’s existence is this: If Jesus had never existed, how did Christianity get started, and why did people claim that they were following a man named Jesus who had been crucified?  This is so hard to explain that very few historians, outside of a small number of atheists, have seriously doubted Jesus’s existence.  Even the agnostic Bart Ehrman, who has written several books casting doubts on the biblical manuscripts and the claims of Christianity, has argued in favor of Jesus’s historical existence; the evidence for it is simply overwhelming.  There is no other nonpolitical or non-military figure from the ancient world about whom we have more historical testimony than Jesus of Nazareth.

But while most critics accept the historical existence of Jesus, they argue that the claims that he was divine were a later invention.  They usually say that the belief in Jesus’s divinity gradually developed over the course of the first century, primarily in a Gentile context.

What are the problems with this idea?

• The earliest epistles present Jesus as Lord, and do not assume that the idea was controversial. See, for example, Romans 1:1-7.
• The Pauline epistles, which were written about 25-35 years after Jesus’s crucifixion, and the earliest gospels (which were written within 40 years of the crucifixion) accept this view. That’s not enough time for a legend to develop.  Many people who heard these letters and gospels read in their churches would have seen Jesus or talked with someone who did, and they would not have been likely to believe a claim that was so shocking as the claim that a teacher they had followed was really God in the flesh – unless, of course, that was what he himself had claimed.
• The idea of Jesus’s full divinity and humanity are deeply embedded in the gospel narratives; they are not external ideas that are overlaid on an existing story. For example, in Mark 2, Jesus forgives a man’s sins, which his audience recognized was a prerogative that belonged to God alone.  In Matthew 7, he claimed to be a cosmic judge, and said that people would be judged for eternity based on how they responded to his teaching.  There are many other examples of this, but these illustrate an important principle: Even in the earliest gospel accounts, and in the sections that people usually cite when they claim that Jesus was a “good moral teacher,” Jesus is behaving as someone more than simply human.

What did Jesus claim about himself?  Among other things, he claimed:

• That he was the promised Messiah (Mt. 16:16-17).
• That he would be the ransom for the world (Mk 10:45).
• That he was the source of divine law (Mt. 5-7).
• That he could forgive sins (Mk. 2:5).
• That God was his Father (Mt. 16:17).
• That he was lord of the Sabbath (Mk. 2:28).
• That he would judge the world as the Son of Man (Mt. 7:21-27).
• That he was the king of the kingdom of God (Lk. 22:69).

Notice that I didn’t list any scriptures from the gospel of John, which contain some of the most direct statements about Jesus’s divinity.  The reason that I restricted this list to the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) is that skeptics often claim that the Synoptics present a picture of Jesus as more human and less divine than John does, and that this represents an earlier Christian view of Jesus.  But in fact, the early gospels are fully Trinitarian (as the accounts of Jesus’s baptism show), and they picture Jesus as fully divine.

If these early testimonies do not reflect Jesus’s actual words, we have to ask the question why there was a uniform Christian belief (even among monotheistic Jewish Christians) that the crucified Jesus was God in the flesh.  This was a deeply countercultural claim.

In fact, I would encourage any skeptic to consider these questions:

• Why did people continue to follow Jesus after he died?
• Why did the early Christians feel the need to consider Jesus God if he had never said that he was? (Consider John the Baptist as an alternative case.  John’s disciples never made this claim about him).
• If someone had made up a story about Jesus being God, would it have been this story? (Consider the apocryphal gospels, which were written in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries, and which depict Jesus using his power to slay his enemies or to reveal secret knowledge to his disciples – which was very different from the picture of Jesus’s humility and service presented in the canonical gospels).
• Why would monotheistic Jews, of all people, have invented a story of Jesus’s divinity?

In my view, the only way to account for the extraordinary claims of Jesus are to acknowledge two facts:

• Jesus really did make these claims.
• His disciples found these extraordinary claims credible because of what they saw in Jesus during his life and especially what they experienced in his resurrection.

 

The Resurrection of Jesus

From the 18^th century to the present, the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus has been a key part of Christian apologetics, and for good reason.  In the early 20^th century, a skeptic writing under the pen name Frank Morrison decided to investigate the resurrection from the viewpoint of a skeptic, and he became so convinced by the evidence in its favor that he wrote the widely popular Christian apologetic book Who Moved the Stone?  More recently, Gary Habermas has built an apologetics career around the evidence for the resurrection.  My favorite book on the resurrection, though, is N. T. Wright’s massive tome The Resurrection of the Son of God, which presents a detailed historical examination of beliefs about resurrection in first-century Jewish and Greek culture in order to show that the story of the resurrection of Jesus was deeply countercultural at the time and not likely to be a fabricated account.

Why is the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus so compelling?

• It was a universal belief among the early Christians and the foundation of their faith. Three of the most prominent eyewitnesses of the resurrection (Peter, James, and Paul) staked their lives on their belief in this claim.  Two of those people were skeptics before the resurrection.  The resurrection is the only explanation that the early disciples gave of why they worshipped a crucified man (which was considered highly embarrassing in the first century).  For this reason, even most skeptics agree that the early disciples of Jesus at least thought they encountered a resurrected Jesus.  In other words, they weren’t lying about it.
• The testimony of the resurrection was written down very soon after the crucifixion, which means there was not enough time for a legend about the resurrection to develop. 1 Corinthians 15 was written in c. AD 55 – about 25 years after the crucifixion.  It is an account written by someone who claimed to have seen the risen Jesus and who also talked with several other eyewitnesses of the resurrection some years before that.  We also have independent resurrection accounts in the four gospels that were written about 40-70 years after the crucifixion.
• The gospels mention that women were the first to see Jesus, which is not a detail that someone in the first-century Roman world would have included in a fabricated account, since women’s testimony was not considered legally valid in that culture.

So, if the resurrection story was not a legend, and if the eyewitnesses were not lying, were they hallucinating or imagining the experience?  This is unlikely, because:

• The resurrection accounts mention multiple eyewitnesses who saw the resurrected Jesus simultaneously. Hallucinations usually involve one person; they don’t involve 500 people.
• The resurrection appearances suddenly stopped almost as quickly as they started. If they had been hallucinations or visions, one would have expected them to continue.
• The disciples claimed that the tomb was empty. Visions or hallucinations alone would not have produced an empty tomb.
• As N. T. Wright demonstrates, the resurrection was counter to what either Jews or Greeks at the time would have expected. In my view, this is the most persuasive reason to believe that the resurrection accounts were not hallucinations or imagined experiences, because when people hallucinate or imagine that they are seeing a ghost, they invariably imagine something from their own experiences or cultural expectations.  Jesus’s resurrection was not like that.  None of the disciples expected Jesus to reappear in a resurrection body.  Most Jews expected a bodily resurrection, but they expected it to be at the end of time.  The idea that the resurrection would begin with the Messiah was a shocking idea.  Greeks did not believe in a resurrection of the body, and they considered the idea foolishness.

Both the resurrection and the claims of Jesus were contrary to the cultural expectations at the time, and they produced something shocking: a movement of people who claimed that their lives had been transformed by a crucified man that they believed was the Lord of all creation.  No other religion has a story remotely like this.  Most new religious movements are founded by prophets who claim to have received a revelation, but Christianity is founded on the identity of a person – a crucified man who claimed to be the Son of God and who proved that claim by rising from the dead.

 

Conclusion

In these eight lessons, we have looked at the most common objections to Christianity, and we have seen that there are a lot of things that an atheistic worldview cannot account for.  The atheist cannot explain the origin of the universe.  The atheist cannot explain the uniqueness of the Bible.  The atheist cannot explain the uniqueness of Jesus or provide a convincing alternative explanation of the resurrection and the beginning of Christianity.

Why, then, do some people find atheism convincing?  Perhaps it is because it seems to match the experience of those who adopt it as a philosophy.

What is that experience?

• They don’t think they’ve heard from God.
• They don’t think they’ve seen a miracle or encountered credible evidence for one.
• They see a world of suffering (and perhaps believe they have experienced a lot of suffering).
• They see a world of competing religious truth claims and believe they can’t all be right – so, most likely, none of them are. They have a human-centered cultural explanation for religious development.
• They see a world where science works. Christianity seems to belong to an unreal (or pre-modern) world.
• They don’t have a positive connection with Christianity that would outweigh the positive connections that they have with secular influences.
• The values that they espouse seem more compatible with a secular worldview than with a Christian one.

How do we counter this worldview?  We need to get people to see beyond themselves and their own experience, and then get them to reinterpret their experiences from the standpoint of the gospel.  We can do that by helping people identify the presuppositions that have prompted them to dismiss Christianity, and then by presenting some facts and ideas that challenge those presuppositions.  If they’re intrigued and willing to consider the evidence, we can then present some evidence in favor of Christianity’s truth claims, and can demonstrate that a gospel-centered worldview offers better explanations for the world around us than any other worldview does.  As I mentioned on the first day of class, apologetics is not a substitute for the gospel, but when the goal of our apologetics is to open the door for the gospel, it can become a very useful tool both in evangelism and in addressing the doubts that might sometimes arise in our own hearts.

 

 

Skeptics often claim that the Bible is comparable to ancient myths or sacred texts from other religions, but a close look at the Bible and its message reveals a uniqueness that cannot be found elsewhere.  As we continue looking at ways to make a positive case for Christianity, I want to survey the uniqueness of the Bible, because I think that if we can show that it is completely unlike any other book ever produced, we can make a compelling case for its supernatural origin.

 

The Unique, Countercultural Message of the Bible

The Bible’s message is very different from the message produced by any other society in the ancient Near East or elsewhere.  Even though the Bible was written over the course of many centuries (approximately 1,500 years, according to the estimate of most conservative scholars, but even according the estimate of liberal skeptics, at least 500 years), and by many different authors (perhaps 40), it presents a message that is not only unified, but countercultural.  That message includes the following points:

• Theology: From start to finish, the Bible depicts one God as the source of everything (including moral law), and who is both transcendent and imminent. No other ancient culture held this view of God.
• The unity of humanity. All humans are created by God and in the image of God.  There is thus a human equality that challenges the feelings of cultural superiority that were common in the ancient world.
• Universal human sinfulness. Other ancient cultures believed in divine judgments, but no other culture produced a view of universal human sinfulness in which all people are in need of God’s grace.  No other ancient work of literature was so critical of the faults of its heroes.  (In fact, this was unheard of in ancient royal chronicles).  But the Bible is consistent in pointing out the sins of even the most righteous people depicted in its pages and showing that Jesus was the only sinless person ever to walk the earth.
• Challenging human hierarchies, yet without privileging any single group: The Bible repeatedly depicts God choosing the outcast – e.g., the younger son, the barren woman, the sinner, the pagan Gentile, et al. The Bible preserves the voices of women, slaves, peasants, and children, along with kings and warriors.  This is highly unusual.
• The inversion of the hero motif: In ancient Near Eastern stories, heroes were people who struggled with the gods. In the Bible, righteous people were those who submitted to God and accepted his grace, and received covenant blessings in spite of their own foolishness and rebellion.
• Affirmation of human diversity, yet also assertion of unity within this diversity. The Bible contains a wide variety of literary genres (e.g., court poetry, love poetry, worship music, laments, proverbs, reflective wisdom literature, historical narrative, apocalyptic prophecy, parables, biography, letters, law codes, eyewitness accounts, covenant documents, and royal chronicles, among others), and it was written in three languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) by people ranging from rustic shepherds and fishermen to educated urbanites.  In calling such people to write his message, God affirmed the full range of human expression, which is what we might expect from a God who created all of humanity.  Yet the final product presented a unified message about God, humanity, and redemption.
• Finally, perhaps the most countercultural aspect of the entire Bible is its declaration that a crucified man was God in the flesh – that is, that the creator of the entire universe entered into the world as a human being and was nailed to a cross for the sins of the world.

No other sacred text or book from the ancient world presents such a countercultural, unified message in such diverse literary form.

When skeptics raise questions about alleged contradictions in the Bible, it’s important to address those questions, but in doing so, we should always make sure that we bring the conversation back to the astonishing unity and countercultural message of the Bible as a whole.  In other words, in dealing with skeptical objections to the Bible, let’s make sure that we don’t miss the forest when looking at the trees.

 

Did the Bible Borrow from Ancient Myths or Religious Practices?

One of the most common contemporary skeptical objections to the Bible is the charge that the Bible incorporated pagan myths and ancient religious practices in its religious system and presented them as the word of God.  For example, they say, New Testament church rituals were borrowed from Greco-Roman mystery cults.  The flood story comes from ancient Near Eastern myth.  The temple worship system was modeled after Bronze Age pagan worship.  Such borrowing, skeptics say, disproves the Bible’s claims to be a unique revelation of God.

How do we deal with this charge?  I think that it’s important to distinguish between the content of the Bible’s message and its form.  The content of the Bible is deeply countercultural, as I demonstrated above.  But the form of the Bible is culturally bound or culturally embedded – that is, it makes use of a lot of the cultural practices and assumptions of the people to whom the message was given.  Thus, for example, the Bible makes use of preexisting literary genres, such as wisdom literature (which was known in Egypt long before it made its way into the Bible in the time of Solomon), ancient biography (which was common among the Greeks and Romans long before the gospels were written), and the conventions of ancient letter-writing.  When Paul wrote letters to other Christians, for instance, he didn’t invent a new literary genre to convey his message; he made use of some of the standard epistolary conventions of his time and place, such as beginning the letter with his name at the top and a standard greeting.  Similarly, God used numerous other literary conventions throughout the Bible, such as the genre of suzerain-vassal treaties to present the message of his covenant with his people, poetry to convey expressions of worship and prayer, and even myth (such as the reference to “Leviathan the serpent” in Is. 27:1, which was a reference to a well known ancient Near Eastern myth).  And in prescribing worship liturgy to his people, God made use of motifs that were common in the ancient Near East, such as priests, animal sacrifices, temples, ritual circumcision, ritual cleansing with water, communal feasts, etc.  The forms were culturally specific, but the message that the forms conveyed was not.

When we see God’s use of culturally specific motifs, we should be reminded that God has entered into our world in order to communicate with us.  The form in which God revealed his message was culturally specific at times because God has reached out to his people where they are.  Just as God communicated with Jacob through a dream about sheep breeding (Gen. 31:10) and with Peter by showing him the power of God over the fish of the sea (Lk. 5:1-11), so God has used culturally specific forms of revelation to communicate to his people throughout biblical history.  Jesus did this in his parables, in fact.

This points to God’s imminence and ultimately, to the incarnation, so we should view it as evidence of God’s desire to communicate with us, not a reason to doubt the Bible’s divine origin.  But if it does cause us to question whether the Bible is really of supernatural origin, we need to remember the countercultural content of the message.  If the form of the message was culturally specific, the message itself transcends the culture in which it was created.

 

What about Alleged Contradictions in the Bible?

The charge that some verses in the Bible contradict other verses has been circulating for centuries.  How should we deal with this allegation?

While there are a few apparent discrepancies that perhaps cannot be easily harmonized or explained, most alleged contradictions in the Bible can be resolved by asking the following questions:

• What was the audience and intended purpose of the passages? For example, the audience for the Old Testament law code was different than the audience for the New Testament, so if we find discrepancies between, say, a command in Deuteronomy and a verse in Colossians, we should not be surprised.
• What was the literary genre of the passage(s) and what were the expectations for that genre? For instance, many alleged contradictions between the different gospel narratives can be resolved by considering the expectations of the genre of historical writing in the ancient world.  No one in the ancient world expected historical writing to report the exact wording of speeches, nor did people necessarily expect a chronologically organized account when a thematic arrangement better suited an author’s purposes.
• Is it possible to harmonize the alleged discrepancies in a way that doesn’t distort the text? Would the original author or audience have seen the contradiction that we allege?  (For instance, some people who allege a contradiction between Genesis 1 and 2 have ignored the rather obvious question of why the author or compiler of Genesis did not see this contradiction himself.  If the author or compiler of Genesis did not consider the first two chapters of Genesis contradictory, why should we?)  If we see an apparent contradiction – but wonder why the original author did not – perhaps we can ask what the author’s original purpose for this material might have been.

In most cases, an honest attempt to answer each of these questions will resolve the contradictions that we might imagine we see.  And in the few cases where the alleged discrepancies cannot easily be resolved, we need to recognize our own limitations in interpreting the biblical text, while also reminding ourselves of the astonishing unity of the Bible and the other evidences of its supernatural origin.  If I were dialoguing with a Christian about these matters, I would encourage the Christian to trust God in those areas where we may not have enough information to resolve an alleged contradiction.  And if I were dialoguing with a skeptic about this subject, I might need to remind the skeptic that even if it could be proven conclusively that there are contradictions in the Bible, that affects only the claim of scriptural inerrancy; it certainly does not negate the claims of Jesus, let alone the existence of God.  And while the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy might be important, it’s not the ultimate foundation for our faith.  The truth claims of Christianity do not depend on our ability to resolve every alleged contradiction in scripture.

 

The Trustworthiness of the Biblical Manuscripts

A skeptic might also ask why we should trust a book that was handwritten nearly two millennia ago and copied numerous times.  We don’t have the original text of the Bible, so how can we be sure that the message has been copied accurately?  Furthermore, how do we know that people remembered the words of Jesus accurately long enough to write them down?  Bart Ehrman is a widely read contemporary skeptic (and New Testament scholar) who has popularized these skeptical questions, so many people may be familiar with these charges against the accuracy of the biblical text.

In answering these objections, we should remember that we shouldn’t view the Bible in the same way that Muslims view the Quran.  The Bible’s words are “God-breathed” and they are a record of what God said, but they are not the mechanically dictated words of God.  The message can be accurately transmitted even when the wording varies.  So, while we should strive for 100% accuracy when translating the Bible and engaging in textual reconstruction of the Hebrew or Greek text, we should never assume that the transmission of God’s word is dependent on achieving 100% accuracy.

Having said that, we can also be grateful that, in fact, the biblical text that we have today is extremely close to the original, as far as can be determined.  We have far more ancient manuscripts of the New Testament than we do for any other ancient book, which means that scholars’ ability to compare these manuscripts and reconstruct the original text is much greater for the Bible than it is for any other ancient work of literature.  We have 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, along with 10,000 manuscript copies of Latin translations of the New Testament, and 9,300 manuscript of other translations (such as Coptic and Syriac translations, for instance).  By comparison, there is no ancient work of literature for which we have even 2,000 manuscript copies.  Some of the New Testament manuscript fragments date back to the 2^nd century, and we have complete manuscripts dating back to the early 4^th century.  These manuscripts come from various geographic regions and scribal traditions.  When the manuscripts agree in their rendering of a passage, it offers strong reason to believe that the original text has been preserved, since it’s highly unlikely that a variation would have replaced the original reading in all of the thousands of manuscripts that we possess.  And in those cases where the text does not agree, scholars can look at the history and origins of the various manuscripts to reconstruct when variations might have entered the manuscript tradition, and they can use that knowledge to figure out which set of manuscripts might have preserved the original reading of a passage.  By using this technique, we can be nearly certain that we have the original reading of almost every verse in the New Testament.  There are only two major passages whose authenticity is in significant doubt: Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11.  The textual questions about those two passages are noted in the margins of most modern English translations.  There are a handful of other verses about which some doubt exists, and those, too, are generally noted.  But most textual variations in the New Testament are extremely minor (e.g., some manuscripts might say “Christ Jesus” in a particular passage, while other manuscripts render the phrase “Jesus Christ”) and do not affect the meaning at all.

There is a lot more that could be said about manuscript transmission, but probably the best thing to do when a skeptic brings up this issue is to challenge them to look at the evidence and then ask if they can give good reasons for doubting that we have a reasonably good idea of what the New Testament books originally said.

Finally, some people (such as Bart Ehrman) have raised the question of how we can know that Jesus’s words, which were delivered in oral form, were preserved in the gospels, which were not written until perhaps forty years after Jesus’s crucifixion.  This is a large and complex topic, and this brief response may not suffice to answer every objection, but here are some points to keep in mind:

• In an oral culture, disciples of a teacher were used to memorizing large amounts of information verbatim. Presumably, Jesus’s disciples would have done this.
• The form of Jesus’s teaching made it easy for people to remember it. For example, much of Jesus’s teaching in the Synoptic gospels consists of short sayings that could easily be remembered (e.g., “A house divided against itself cannot stand”) or parables (the gist of which could also be easily remembered).
• It is also possible that Jesus’s disciples wrote down some of Jesus’s sayings long before the gospels were written. Luke, for example, suggests that several books about Jesus were already circulating long before all of the Synoptics were complete (Lk. 1:1-2).
• A case for the authenticity of Jesus’s sayings can be made by noting the preservation of Aramaic in some of Jesus’s statements (e.g., Mk. 5:41, 7:34, and 15:34). Because Jesus apparently spoke Aramaic most of the time, his disciples would have remembered his statements in Aramaic.  The New Testament books were written in Greek, but when they preserve Aramaic statements of Jesus, we can get a pretty good idea that those sayings were accurately transmitted from the Galilean society of which Jesus was a part to the gospel writers.

But finally, if I were talking to a Christian who had these questions, I would point out the power of the Holy Spirit to accurately preserve God’s word and the power of God to communicate in many different languages and in many different ways.  Many of the New Testament writers, for instance, used the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, which, by most measures, was not a particularly accurate translation of the Old Testament Hebrew text.  It may not have been a very literal translation, but it was sufficient for God’s purposes in the New Testament era.  I think that the English Bible that we have today is a far more accurate translation of the original text than the Septuagint was.  But ultimately, the transmission of the gospel does not depend on getting a perfect rendition of the original text.  We should try to get as accurate a rendition as possible, but in the end, God’s message can be preserved even with a very loose translation or significant discrepancies with the original autographs.

A fair evaluation of the evidence, I think, should lead to the conclusion that the Bible’s text has been transmitted with a high degree of accuracy, which gives us confidence that we are reading something very close to the original text when we read a good modern translation.  With this confidence in the Bible’s text, we can then consider the message of the Bible, which is truly unique.  The Bible not only transcends its own culture but speaks to people of every culture in every time period.  It is unlike any other book ever written.

 

 

 

 

The Bible tells us that we as humans have a knowledge that God exists, even though we suppress that knowledge.  Rom. 1:18-23: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”

In this lesson, we will take a look at the evidence from the universe and ask which worldview – theism (that is, a belief in God) or atheism – best explains the universe in which we live.  In doing this, I’m not suggesting that we can present a definitive proof of God’s existence, but I do think that we can suggest areas in which an atheistic worldview fails to adequately account for the evidence around us – and doing this may lead an open-minded atheist to be sufficiently curious to engage in further conversation and exploration of these questions.

In looking at this evidence, I am going to try to remain within the scientific and philosophical parameters that most atheists accept.  I will not challenge current scientific theories about the history of the universe, but will instead use information that most atheists consider valid in order to show the limitations of the atheistic worldview.

 

The Evidence for a Designed Universe

There are certain key points on which most scientists are now agreed:

• The universe had a beginning. For much of the 20^th century, many scientists (e.g., Fred Hoyle and Carl Sagan) believed in an eternal universe that expanded and contracted, but recent calculations have shown that the expansion will not stop and that the universe will not collapse on itself.  The universe had an origin at a single moment in time, and that origin event will not be repeated.
• The cause of the universe’s beginning has not been discovered by science. We do not know of any physical force that could have caused the initial expansion of space and matter known as the “Big Bang.”
• Fine-tuning of (preexisting?) universal constants. When the Big Bang started, it required the existence of universal constants whose origins are unknown. “For each constant there is an extremely broad range of number values that would result in a cosmic wasteland.  But to generate a universe with life, universal constants must be confined within an extremely narrow range.  Appearing just micromoments after the big bang, there was no time for these constants to have evolved.  They simply appear, already possessing the extraordinary precision that will allow a life-bearing universe to form.” – Philip Rolnick, Origins: God, Evolution, and the Question of the Cosmos, p. 131.  The universal constants include gravity, which had to be present by 10^-43 seconds after the beginning of the Big Bang.  Rolnick: “A change of just one part in 10⁶⁰ in either direction, too much direction or too much outward force, would have prevented the formation of a life-bearing universe. . . . The structures and dynamics of stars, galaxies, and planets could not be produced and maintained without it” (pp. 132-133).  Other universal constants that were present from the beginning include the strong nuclear force (which holds protons and neutrons together), weak nuclear force (which slows the rate at which stars burn hydrogen), and the electromagnetic force.  The Princeton-based theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson said, “The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming.”

For believers, the facts seem to point to a universe designed by God.  But this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the complexity and fine-tuning of the universe.  When we begin to look at biological life, for instance, we find that even at its simplest, one-celled level, organisms are far more complex than anyone a hundred years ago could have imagined.  For instance, in every cell of the human body, there is a strand of DNA that consists of 3 billion letters (using a four-letter code sequence).

How do atheists deal with this?  They usually offer one of three explanations:

• They say that no matter how improbable the conditions for our existence are, they obviously did occur, because we’re here. Richard Dawkins: “Two main explanations have been offered for our planet’s peculiar friendliness to life.  The design theory says that God made the world, placed it in the Goldilocks zone, and deliberately set up all the details for our benefit.  The anthropic approach is very different, and has a faintly Darwinian feel.  The great majority of planets in the universe are not in the Goldilocks zones of their respective stars, and not suitable for life.  None of that majority has life.  However small the minority of planets with just the right conditions for life may be, we necessarily have to be on one of that minority, because here we are thinking about it.” – Dawkins, The God Delusion, pp. 163-164.
• The universal constants and the universe’s beginning do not need to be explained, either because they are an illusion, or because they are part of the eternal structure of matter, or because we don’t yet have the data to answer them, or because our minds are not capable of figuring out the answer.
• This theory is postulated by Richard Dawkins and numerous other modern atheists.  According to this theory, our universe is only one of a perhaps-infinite number of other universes that sprang out of a much larger preexisting universe.  So, no matter how improbable our life-producing universe might seem in isolation, it no longer seems so improbable if it were merely one of a perhaps infinite number of universes.

How should we respond to these arguments?  The first two explanations are essentially a refusal to answer the question, and the third is purely speculative.

Given the paucity of evidence for a naturalistic explanation for the origins of the universe, why are atheists so confident that they have ruled out the possibility of God?  Richard Dawkins says he has done so because he considers a God hypothesis much more complex than whatever phenomenon God’s design purports to explain.  In other words, no matter how complex and improbable multiverses might seem, God is even more complex and improbable.  But this line of reasoning falls into the error of mistaking God for a physical cause within the universe.  When looking for physical causes in the universe, Ockham’s razor (the simplest explanation is the best) is usually a good guide, all other things being equal.  But when the cause for what we are trying to explain lies outside the system, it’s not a good guide.  Creators are often more complex than anything in their creation.  Michelangelo, as a human being, was far more complex than any of the paints or imagery that he used in his painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  When asking whether the universe was designed or whether it was self-creating, we cannot rule out the possibility of a creator on the basis of the creator’s alleged complexity.

What is the use of this discussion of contemporary scientific views of origins?  It’s useful to point out to atheists that the scientific discoveries of the structure of the universe don’t comport particularly well with naturalistic theories of origins – but do seem to suggest that the universe was designed with a structure that would lead to the existence of life (including human life) on earth.

At first glance, the argument that I’m presenting may appear to be simply a “God of the gaps” argument that could be disproved with additional scientific knowledge, but I don’t think that it is.  I’m not simply saying that because we don’t currently know what caused the Big Bang to begin, we therefore have to believe that there must have been a God to start the process.  Instead, I’m saying that the entire structure of the universe’s origins – including the fact that it had a precise origin in time and that its development required some very precisely tuned physical laws and processes that were uniquely suited to the development of life on earth – fit much better with a theory of an intentional creation rather than a purely naturalistic, random process.  To fit this data into a theory of a naturalistic, random process, atheists have to appeal to an idea that is entirely speculative (e.g., multiverses) or simply admit that they cannot account for it.

 

Atheists’ Response to the Argument from Design

Atheists often respond to the argument from design by making two points:

• The natural world has the appearance of design, but this is because natural selection acted as a designer.
• The natural world is badly designed. It has the appearance of randomness, not a thoughtful creation.

In answer to the first point, I don’t think that natural selection can explain all of the design in the universe.  It cannot explain cosmological fine-tuning (the existence of precisely tuned universal constants), for instance.  But in addition, I think that the use of natural selection as God’s mechanism of design does not in any way rule out the existence of a designer.  Just as God uses human agents to accomplish his purposes in history, so he may have used natural selection to accomplish his purposes in nature.  When we examine the entire tapestry of the natural world, we can see evidence of the divine designer’s intentions, even if the mechanism that the designer used might have at times involved natural processes rather than miraculous interventions.

But what about the argument that the universe is badly designed?  To make the charge that the universe is badly designed, someone would have to know the intentions of the designer.  For example, some atheists have noted ways in which the human body could have been designed to last longer and to experience less pain in old age.  But the charge that humans could have been better constructed assumes something about the designer’s intentions that is not necessarily correct.  Actually, when we look at what the Bible says about God’s intentions for his creation, what we see in nature accords pretty well with it.

So, how strong is the design argument?  In my view, the strongest parts of the design argument focus on the complexity and improbability of life, the uniqueness of earth as a planet where life (and especially human life) can exist, and the fine-tuning of the universe.  The appearance of design in the universe does not prove the existence of a creator, but if a convincing naturalistic explanation for the design of the universe has not been presented (which I don’t think it has), it shows that the existence of a divine designer is likely.  This divine designer had to be external to the universe and also uniquely interested in human life.

 

Humans’ God Consciousness

As the psychologist Justin Barrett noted in his book Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, humans seem to be hardwired to believe in a supernatural creator.  Even many atheists concede this point.  Atheists often attribute this to a quirk of evolution (see Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained, for instance), but it is what we would expect from a God-designed universe.  If we have a sense of God’s existence, could that be an indication that a divine creator designed us with the capacity to have a relationship with him?

 

Humans’ Moral Consciousness

One of C. S. Lewis’s apologetic arguments, which he presented in Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man, is that all of us have a consciousness of right and wrong that makes sense only in a theistic universe.  Atheists can explain why altruism and moral consciousness might have evolved (in the sense that they might have been conducive to group survival), but they cannot explain why we ought to give moral weight to these moral claims.  Atheists are confident that they can be moral without God, but their bases for ethics differ.  Most commonly, atheistic ethical systems fall into one of the following categories:

• Utilitarianism – the greatest good for the greatest number. One problem with this ethical system is that it offers little incentive to care for less valued people.
• Human rights. While atheists who believe in a rights-based ideology are confident that humans have inherent rights, they do not agree on where these rights come from or even what these rights are.
• “Tit-for-tat” – Be kind to others until they do something unkind to you, in which case you can then punish them by retaliating.
• Kantian ethics – the “categorical imperative.” This ethical system suggests that we can find out certain absolute, unchanging ethical principles by asking the question, “What if everybody did this?”

Of these ethical systems, utilitarianism and “tit-for-tat” are strictly pragmatic and strategic; they do not offer a basis for respect for human beings.  Human rights ideology and Kantian ethics offer greater promise in that regard, but neither one has a grounding in an atheistic universe.  Both take aspects of Christian ethics and assert that they can still operate in a universe without any purpose or meaning.

The fundamental problem with atheistic ethics is that atheists have not proposed a way to get from an “is” to an “ought” – that is, to get from a statement about what is factually true about the universe to a statement about what ought to happen.  And yet we long for an “ought.”  We want to say, for instance, that certain actions are wrong and should be punished and certain actions are right and should be rewarded.  Atheists can either give us a pragmatic reason for ethics (e.g., utilitarianism or “tit-for-tat”) or they can take a leap of faith and assert their belief in human rights.  But they cannot link absolute moral claims to their materialistic view of the universe.  The fact that they continue to live as though they can make absolute moral claims suggests an inconsistency in their thinking and highlights the inadequacy of an atheistic worldview.

 

Humans’ Desire for Rationality, Purpose, and Beauty

At some level, every person is seeking meaning and purpose for their lives.  The atheist believes that there is no larger purpose in the universe, and that each person gives their own meaning to their own individual life.  The theist, by contrast, asserts the possibility of an external source of meaning.  Similarly, most atheists have a strong respect for rationality and reason, but a universe that originated by chance does not offer any reason to expect such rationality.  Theism does.  Similarly, a materialistic universe does not give any reason for us to believe that our appreciation of beauty is anything more than a trick of the evolutionary process.  Theism, by contrast, suggests that beauty and the aesthetic might be reflective of a divine creator’s intention.

 

Conclusion

The atheist has to assert a great disjuncture between the universe and our own experiences:

• The atheist believes that the universe’s appearance of design is an illusion that can be explained through natural processes.
• The atheist believes that our sense of morality originated through an impersonal evolutionary process, but is mostly trustworthy, even though there is no clear explanation of how we can get an “ought” from an “is.”
• The atheist believes that rationality originated through an impersonal evolutionary process, yet is still trustworthy.
• The atheist believes that the universe doesn’t give us any real purpose or meaning, but through an assertion of our will we can find purpose or meaning for ourselves in spite of the random, purposeless nature of the universe.
• The atheist believes that our aesthetic appreciation is merely a byproduct of evolution – but nevertheless can be a source of joy for us, even though it is not grounded in anything substantive.
• The atheist believes that our sense of God is a trick of the evolutionary process and should be discarded.

By contrast, the theist is free to assert that our perception of the universe matches reality.  The universe appears to be designed for us because it was designed for us.  We have a moral consciousness that reflects objective reality because that moral consciousness was given to us by God.  We can trust our reason (within limits) because it is a divine gift.  We have a longing for purpose and meaning because God created us to have a transcendent purpose.  Our sense of beauty is not merely a trick of evolution, but is instead a gift that enables us to connect with God and see the beauty that he has put into creation.  And the theist believes that our sense of God is not a trick of the evolutionary process, but is instead indicative of God’s existence.  Which of these two worldviews – the theistic worldview that trusts our senses, or the atheist worldview that explains away much of what we think we perceive – offers a better explanation of reality?  It is my conclusion that the theistic worldview does.  On point after point, the atheist has to assert that what we observe or feel is not grounded in reality.  Theism, by contrast, takes our sensory perceptions seriously and offers a coherent worldview that matches the information that we have about ourselves and the universe around us.

 

In this lesson, we’re once again looking at common skeptical objections to Christianity.  As we’ve done in previous lessons, we’ll try to examine not only the objections themselves but also the presuppositions that might lead people to think that a particular objection is persuasive.  We’ll examine, for instance, the presuppositions that might lead someone like Richard Dawkins to think that science has ruled out the existence of God.  But we’ll also spend a lot of time talking about why one particular subset of scientific-related objections is a particular problem for many believers.  In fact, of all the lessons in this series, this one might be especially relevant to parents of believing teens or youth who are trying to prepare them for the questions that they’ll likely encounter in their educational journeys.

 

What attitude should Christians have toward science? 

Psalm 19 shows that God has revealed himself through both the creation and his written word.  For that reason, Christians should view science and investigations of the natural world as a means to understand God more fully.  We also realize that if we fully understood nature and the Bible, there would be no conflict between the two.  Of course, because our understanding of both nature and the Bible is not perfect, there may be conflict between our understanding of nature and our understanding of the Bible.  But this is only an apparent conflict.  To resolve the conflict, we should study both nature and the Bible more deeply to see if we can discover the harmony between these two forms of God’s revelation.

 

Has science ruled out the existence of God? 

Atheists, of course, have a very different view of science.  They often view it as a path to truth that, in some cases, has disproved religious myth.  Some have even claimed that science has ruled out the possibility of God’s existence.  Atheists who make this claim usually believe the following points:

• In the past, people invoked God to explain the mysteries of the universe.
• Science has shown that there are naturalistic explanations for effects that people used to attribute to supernatural causes.
• In fact, science now shows that life and the universe could have begun through purely naturalistic means.
• By contrast, science has not shown us God.

Therefore, God does not exist.

What is the problem with this line of reasoning?  It misunderstands the limits of what science can discover and it misunderstands the nature of God.  Consider an analogy presented by John Polkinghorne, an Anglican priest who for years before his ordination was a professor of physics at the University of Cambridge.  In Polkinghorne’s scenario, someone might ask the question: Why is the water in the kettle boiling on the stove?  Someone might give a scientific explanation, saying that the water is boiling because heat was applied to the lower surface of the kettle, causing the molecules of water to begin moving faster and eventually bringing the water to the boiling point.  Or, Polkinghorne said, someone might answer the question this way: The water is boiling because I wanted to make tea.  What is the difference between these two explanations?  The first explanation focused strictly on the material process of boiling, but did not address the crucial “why” question.  The second explanation addressed the “why” question, but did not deal with the “how.”

Science, Polkinghorne said, is very good at answering “how” questions, but it’s not equipped to give us the “why.”  Religion (or, for the Christian, the Bible) might answer the “why,” but it doesn’t tell us very much about the “how.”

If we reexamine the four skeptical statements above with this distinction between the “how” and “why” questions in mind, we might answer them this way:

• In the past, people invoked God to explain the mysteries of the universe. – Yes, but this was a misuse of religion. The Bible does not picture God as intervening in a creative process only at periodic moments, but instead as controlling the entire process – and yet doing so through natural means, in many cases.  There is both a natural and a spiritual explanation for rain, and one doesn’t rule God out of the picture simply because one has discovered the water cycle – any more than the discovery of how water boils rules out the existence of someone who turned on the stove to make tea.  God is not merely a “God of the gaps” – that is, a force to be invoked as an explanation for natural processes that we cannot explain through science at the moment.  People who believe in a “God of the gaps” tend to lose their faith when science explains a process that they once thought only God could account for.  But a biblical view of God is very different.
• Science has shown that there are naturalistic explanations for effects that people used to attribute to supernatural causes. – Yes, this is the purpose of science. By showing how God has orchestrated the universe, science doesn’t make God smaller; it makes us understand God’s creative process more fully.
• In fact, science now shows that life and the universe could have begun through purely naturalistic means. – This is debatable. There’s actually a lot of question about how the Big Bang started, as we’ll see next week, but even if we could show definitively that life and the universe could have begun through natural means, we still haven’t ruled out God; we have simply shown that it’s likely that God brought the universe into being through indirect natural means rather than through direct intervention.  Again, science can give us a lot of insight into the how, and it might be able to build a convincing case that God brought the universe into existence gradually and without a lot of direct supernatural intervention, but it cannot tell us much about the purpose behind the universe any more than a study of molecular processes could tell us whether or not there was someone who wanted to make tea with the water boiling on the stove.
• By contrast, science has not shown us God. – Because God is not a physical entity in the universe, we would not expect science to discover God per se. But belief in God might offer a way to make the entire universe intelligible in a way that scientific materialism cannot.

So why should a person who believes in a strictly scientific materialistic worldview believe in God?  Consider this: Science is built on the premise that the universe is intelligible – that is, that it operates according to regular, predictable physical constants, and that we can understand these physical constants through investigation and experimentation.  This view accords best with theism.

Consider three worldviews and their possible implications for science:

• Animism / paganism – Natural forces are controlled by gods or spirits who behave in petty, arbitrary ways.
• Atheistic materialism – There is nothing supernatural beyond the universe, and there was no creation. Everything is part of the natural order.  Everything is simply a (possibly random) arrangement of atoms and molecules.
• Christian theism (and deism) – The universe is the creation of a rational God who set up predictable, orderly processes that reflect his purposes and character, and who created humans with the capacity to discover these processes.

Which of these views offers the best philosophical foundation for scientific inquiry?  If you believe in the possibility of rational, scientific investigation, you need to consider whether your worldview is consistent with the possibility of rationality and an ordered universe.

Science thus points us to God, but not necessarily by showing us that only God could account for certain phenomena.  Instead, a proper understanding of science and God should show that the world becomes intelligible only when we have a theistic worldview.

 

The perceived conflict between science and faith

The notion that there is a fundamental conflict between religion and science is a staple of contemporary atheist mythology.  For many contemporary atheists, science is a matter of reason and truth, whereas religion is a matter of dogma, faith, irrationality, and controlled thinking.  Some of their favorite stories about the conflict between scientific truth and irrational, dogmatic religion include the imprisonment of Galileo in the 17^th century and the Scopes trial in the early 20^th century.

But actually, for much of Christianity’s history, educated Christians believed that their faith was perfectly in harmony with science.  Most of the European and North American scientists of the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries (and some from the 20^th century) were either Christians or deists.  A Christian theistic worldview gives a good foundation for science, because Christians should believe in the intelligibility and rationality of God’s general revelation (the natural world).  It was a Christian culture in Europe that produced the scientific revolution of the 17^th century.      Only in the last 150 years has the idea developed that science and faith are fundamentally at odds.

 

Evolution and the Bible

The major area in which contemporary American Christians are likely to encounter a perceived conflict between science and faith is in the area of evolutionary theory.  I want to suggest a few ways in which Christians have tried to resolve this perceived conflict.  Perhaps none of these approaches are fully satisfactory, but they offer some possibilities.  I’d like us to keep a few principles in mind as we go through this survey of ideas:

• It’s important to separate our position on creation and evolution from the gospel or the truth of Christianity. It’s important for Christians (especially younger Christians) to know that evolutionary theory does not rule out God or Christianity.  Christians’ evaluation of the debate between evolution and creationism is important, but we should be careful to distinguish this debate from the central core of our faith.  It’s essential for Christians to assert that God is our creator, but we shouldn’t treat a debate about how God might have created as equivalent to a debate about whether God exists or the Bible is true.
• It’s important to recognize that faithful, orthodox, Bible-believing Christians differ in their views of evolution and creation, and we should treat each of their views with charity, even if we might also critique some of these positions. Clearly, not all of these views are equally correct, but each position deserves respectful consideration.

Before the mid-19^th century, the idea that there was a conflict between science and Protestant Christianity, or between the Bible and science, would have sounded strange to most American Protestant Christians.  And indeed, before the mid-19^th century, it’s difficult to think of any scientific discovery that American Christians found problematic.  Prior to the publication of Charles Darwin’s explication of the theory of evolution in 1859, many scientifically educated Christians had already begun to accept the idea of an old earth because of new geologic evidence, and they adjusted their understanding of the Bible accordingly.  Evolutionary theory presented a more difficult issue for some of them.  Many Christians, especially those who were more theologically liberal, accepted evolution as God’s method of creating the world.  But many others did not.  Those who found evolution theologically problematic usually cited the following objections to it:

• Conflict with the Bible’s presentation of natural history: The picture that evolutionary theory presented of life’s origins did not seem to match Genesis 1 and 2.
• Human origins: Evolutionary theory did not seem to leave room for a direct creation of human beings in God’s image.
• Theodicy: Evolutionary theory pictured a world of death, suffering, and struggle before the fall. Was this compatible with the idea of creation before the fall being “very good”?

 

Christians have had a variety of response to evolution, and I want to survey the most popular of these approaches, beginning with those that are most directly opposed to the theory of evolution and moving to those that are most in harmony with it.

 

Young earth creationism – This view says that God created the universe within the last 10,000 years, and that there has been no macroevolution of species.  The fossil record is the result of the Genesis flood.

This view (minus the explanation of the fossil record) is roughly equivalent to what most Protestants believed from the 16^th century through the mid-19^th.  But in its current incarnation, it is primarily the product of George McCready Price (an early 20^th-century Seventh Day Adventist) and John Whitcomb and Henry Morris (co-authors of The Genesis Flood, published in 1961).  Morris was a hydraulic engineering professor who popularized the idea that the entire fossil record was the product of the Genesis flood, and after the success of his initial book on the subject, he went on to found the Institute for Creation Research.  By the 1980s, young earth creationism had become one of the most popular approach to origins in conservative evangelical churches.

Interpretation of Genesis 1&2: Claims to read these chapters literally.  Believes in literal, 24-hour creation days.

View of contemporary evolutionary theory: Completely opposed to contemporary evolutionary theory.

Strengths and weaknesses: The strength of YEC is clearly its attempt to be faithful to the scriptural record.  It is the only view among those mentioned that offers a fully literal reading of Gen. 1, and it is the only view that avoids death before the fall.  Its reading of Genesis 1 is the one that nearly all Christians adopted between the Protestant Reformation and the mid-19^th century.  Its greatest weakness is probably the limited scientific support for its young earth view, which struggles to account for the geologic record and a number of other evidences of the universe’s great age.  Of all the views discussed, YEC presents the greatest conflict with contemporary scientific understandings of the universe, so someone who believes in YEC will necessarily have to believe that contemporary science is wrong in some of its fundamental assumptions.  For those who believe that the scientific evidence for an old earth is compelling, YEC will probably not be a legitimate interpretive option.  YEC will be most attractive to people who will side with special revelation in any perceived conflict between special revelation and general revelation, or people who take a common-sense realist approach to science (that is, they believe that a person can use common sense to evaluate scientific evidence without special training).  YEC advocates tend to have a very skeptical view of the academic scientific establishment; they believe that the scientific establishment has misread the scientific evidence.

Resources from a YEC perspective: Books by Henry Morris (e.g., Scientific Creationism) and Ken Ham; Institute for Creation Research; Answers in Genesis.

 

Old earth creationism / progressive creationism – This view, which was the leading view of origins among conservative Protestants for the first half of the 20^th century and which is still popular in some circles, accepts the idea of the old earth and death before the fall, but does not accept evolutionary theory.  It insists on a unique, special creation of human beings.  Its leading advocate today is probably Hugh Ross’s organization Reasons to Believe.

Interpretation of Genesis 1&2: May accept a variety of interpretations, but the most common is the day / age view – that is, the view that the “days” of Genesis 1 are creation eras, not literal 24-hour days.  More recently, some adherents of this view may be attracted to the “framework” view of John Walton.  OEC advocates read Genesis 2 fairly literally, and accept a more-or-less literal view of most of the rest of Genesis 3-11 (although some adherents of this view may believe that the flood of Genesis 6-8 was local rather than global).

View of contemporary evolutionary theory: By accepting an old universe, OEC avoids the most obvious scientific weakness of young earth creationism, but because of its skepticism about evolution itself, there is still a lot of conflict between contemporary scientific understandings and old earth creationism.

Strengths and weaknesses: Perhaps the greatest strength of OEC is its success in salvaging the unique creation of human beings and the fall (Gen. 2-3) without running into some of the scientific problems of YEC.  Its weaknesses from a YEC standpoint include its non-literal interpretation of Genesis 1, its belief that there was death before the fall, and, for at least some versions of OEC, its non-literal interpretation of Gen. 6-8.  The day-age theory clearly requires some creative or unconventional readings of the Genesis 1 account, because the days of Genesis 1 do not neatly correspond to the ages required for a 13-billion-year history of the universe.  (Old-earth creationists, for example, do not believe that the sun and stars were created after plants, even though this is the order presented in Genesis 1).  Those who accept evolutionary theory will have other reasons to criticize OEC, because in their view, OEC, despite accommodating contemporary scientific views of the age of the universe, appears to ignore a lot of scientific evidence about the genealogy and evolution of life on earth and is thus suspect on scientific grounds (even if, from the perspective of evolutionists, it is not quite as objectionable as YEC).  As a middle-of-the-road position between young earth creationism and theistic evolution, OEC gets criticized by both camps for both its scientific and biblical interpretations.  But as a middle-of-the-road position, OEC also avoids some of the most obvious pitfalls of either camp.  To many Christians, OEC will seem like an unsatisfactory compromise, but for others, it will seem to offer a happy medium between two untenable extremes.  OEC will probably be most attractive to conservative Christians who find the “young earth” part of YEC difficult to accept on scientific grounds, but who are persuaded by creationist literature that the evidence for evolution is weak, and who believe that OEC generally corresponds with the biblical record.

Resources from an OEC perspective: Books by Hugh Ross (e.g., The Creator and the Cosmos); Reasons to Believe.

 

Intelligent design: The intelligent design movement emerged at the beginning of the 1990s, and quickly replaced young earth creationism as the most popular conservative Christian response to evolution (or “Darwinism,” as many ID proponents prefer to call it).  Because ID doesn’t propose a theory of origins per se, but instead merely criticizes Darwinian evolutionary for gaps that it allegedly cannot explain, ID is a “big tent” that encompasses some people who read Genesis 1 and 2 very literally and others who don’t read it that way at all.  In short, ID is the assertion that although evolution may have happened, naturalism cannot account for every step in the origins of life.  For instance, many ID proponents have cited the cell as an example of “irreducible complexity” that cannot be explained through a naturalistic process of evolution.  A creator, they argue, must have intervened to design the system.

Interpretation of Genesis 1&2: Varies.  Some of the most theologically conservative proponents of ID may essentially be old-earth creationists and will read Genesis 1&2 in the way that other OEC advocates do.  Others who may accept a great deal of evolution will probably be attracted to the “framework” view.  (For more on this view, see the description of theistic evolution below).

View of evolutionary theory: Varies.  ID may be willing to accept some of the theory, but is strongly critical of assertions that, without outside guidance, evolution can account for the origins of life and the diversity of life forms.

Strengths and weaknesses: The strength of ID is its flexibility and its willingness to accommodate a much greater amount of contemporary science than YEC or OEC can.  Because ID doesn’t present a comprehensive theory of origins – but merely has to demonstrate weaknesses in naturalistic evolutionary theory – it’s much easier to win a debate as an ID proponent than as a creationist.  For this reason, ID has become very popular as a “big tent” in which critics of evolution, of whatever theological stripe, can gather.  But this flexibility can also be a weakness, because ID doesn’t really present a firm account of what actually happened at creation.  ID also risks the problem that any “God of the gaps” theory has, which is that, as scientists discover answers to the problems with evolutionary theory that ID raises, the role for God in ID’s theory of creation will become smaller and smaller.

Resources from an ID perspective: Books by Phillip Johnson (e.g., Darwin on Trial); Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box; Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis; Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell.

 

Theistic evolution (conservative version): Since the time of Darwin, many Christians (including some moderately conservative ones) have accepted the theory of evolution but have believed that God guided the process to reflect his purposes.  A consistent theistic evolutionist will say that God did not directly intervene at any stage of the process (though some might leave room for direct intervention at the very end, with the ensoulment of Adam and Eve), and this differentiates them from the ID camp.  However, as Christians, they believe that God’s hand was in the entire process in the same way that God orchestrates human history.

Interpretation of Genesis 1&2: Christian theistic evolutionists usually read Genesis 1&2 in ways that are similar to John Walton’s framework hypothesis – that is, the view that Genesis 1&2 use mythological motifs from the ancient Near East to teach theological concepts but were not designed to be a scientific or historical record.  Many theistic evolutionists would also say the same about all of Genesis 1-11.  At its extreme, this view can eliminate room for a historical fall (which is obviously theologically problematic), but some theistic evolutionists salvage a unique creation of Adam and a historical fall through a “federal headship” view of Adam – that is, the view that God chose Adam out of a larger people group to be a “federal head” of humanity.

View of evolutionary theory: Accepts all of evolutionary theory, but unlike atheists who believe in a naturalistic version of the theory, theistic evolutionists do not believe that evolution was random or purposeless; they believe that God guided the process to accomplish his purposes for creation.

Strengths and weaknesses: The greatest strength of this view is the fact that it eliminates nearly all of the perceived conflict between Christian faith and contemporary scientific understandings of origins.  Those who perceive a conflict between evolution and scripture, though, will see this as a weakness, and will view theistic evolutionists as compromisers with the philosophy of the world.  Theistic evolutionists have various ways of interpreting the early chapters of Genesis, but nearly all of those ways end up heavily deemphasizing the historicity of those chapters and reading them in a metaphorical, poetic, or mythological sense.  Whether a person can accept theistic evolutionists’ readings of Genesis will depend heavily on how that person views the genre of this section of the Bible.  If the genre is poetry or myth, as some theistic evolutionists argue, theistic evolutionists’ non-literal readings won’t seem very problematic, but if the genre is a literal, historically factual account, these readings might be much more questionable.

Resources from a conservative theistic evolutionary perspective: Francis S. Collins’s The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief; John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis 1; Denis Alexander’s Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose?; Biologos website.

 

Theistic evolution (liberal version): Like the conservative version of theistic evolution, the liberal version of this view accepts all of evolutionary theory, but in addition, it also accepts the contingent and unfinished nature of the evolutionary process, which has become an important idea to many contemporary evolutionary theorists.  In other words, liberal theistic evolutionists believe (like their secular counterparts) that evolution is still ongoing and that humans may continue to evolve into another species or become extinct altogether.  They will also frequently accept atheists’ assertion that evolution is random and unplanned; God may have started the process without a full awareness of how it would unfold, they say.  Liberal proponents of theistic evolution tend to be attracted to ideas of open theism (the idea that God does not know the future, because the future has not been determined) or process theology (the idea that the relationship between an evolving creation and God is so close that creation changes God as it progresses and develops).  Liberal theistic evolutionists deny the fall in any historic sense; they say that each of us repeats the fall in our life or that the fallen nature of creation is embedded in the evolutionary process.  Similarly, they tend to downplay traditional understandings of atonement (particularly the substitutionary view) and instead emphasize the incarnation and the cross as manifestations of God’s love entering into creation.

View of Genesis 1&2: Liberal theistic evolutionists usually have a liberal view of scripture as well, since their view of scripture parallels their view of creation – that is, they see scripture as an evolving project of human understandings of God, and they view the church’s understanding of scripture and truth as a progressive, evolving process.

View of evolutionary theory: Except for seeing a spiritual aspect to the universe, liberal theistic evolutionists’ view of evolutionary theory and science is identical to that of secular evolutionary scientists.  For that reason, proponents of a liberal view of theistic evolution almost never encounter much conflict between their faith and contemporary science.

Strengths and weaknesses: Proponents of liberal versions of theistic evolution will no doubt see its central strength as its ability to accommodate all aspects of contemporary secular understandings of the universe, while still remaining open to the existence of God, but the weakness of the theory is that the God that liberal theistic evolutionists believe in does not seem to be the God of scripture.  By denying God’s sovereignty and immutability, the fall, human uniqueness, and substitutionary atonement, liberal theistic evolutionists have created a theology that is incompatible with Reformed (and historic Christian) understandings of scripture.

Resources from a liberal theistic evolutionary perspective: John F. Haught’s Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life; Kenneth R. Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution.  

 

How should we evaluate these views?  In my opinion, Christians should avoid dogmatism when stating their view on the precise way to harmonize the early chapters of Genesis and the scientific record.  I think that it would be wise for Christian parents to explain to their kids that Christians have adopted a range of views on this question, and that our faith is not tied to one particular view.  However, we should not be afraid to critique some of these views and to recognize their weaknesses and limitations.

I think that any view that attempts to remain faithful to scripture and God’s revelation in the natural world needs to include all of the following:

• It needs to offer a compelling and accurate account of all of the relevant scientific evidence, because the natural world is God’s revelation of himself, and a Christian has the responsibility to respect its truth.
• It needs to present a view of the early chapters of Genesis that is faithful to both their original meaning and to the way that those chapters fit into redemptive history. (The themes from Gen. 1-11 occur repeatedly throughout the rest of the Bible, so any legitimate interpretation of Gen. 1-11 will need to take into account not only what those chapters say but also how the themes from those chapters relate to the rest of scripture).
• It needs to preserve and account for the truths that: a) God is sovereign over his creation; b) God had a purpose for creation; c) humans are made in God’s image and are distinct from the rest of creation; and d) there was a historical fall, and that all humanity sinned in Adam and is therefore in need of redemption.

Christians will differ in their evaluation of whether each of these views meets these three criteria.  For example, critics of YEC will charge that it fails to meet criterion #1, whereas most of those who accept YEC believe that it does account for the scientific evidence.  Critics of the framework interpretation of Genesis 1-2 (an interpretation commonly favored by theistic evolutionists) will say that this view does not meet criterion #2, but advocates of the framework view believe that it does.

The only view that unquestionably fails to meet at least one of these criteria is the liberal version of theistic evolution.  Even the proponents of this view will admit that the view does not meet criterion #3, and they may concede that it doesn’t meet criterion #2 as well.  For that reason, this view is not a legitimate option for Bible-believing, evangelical Christians.

But in my view, Christians can consider the other four views as legitimate interpretive options, provided that they are convinced that the views meet all three of these criteria.  If, however, they are not convinced that a view meets these criteria, they need to abandon it.  A Christian who is absolutely convinced that YEC cannot account for the evidence of general revelation needs to reject YEC, and likewise a Christian who does not believe that the biblical interpretations of theistic evolutionists are valid needs to eschew the view of theistic evolution.  But of course, many Christians see no problem with YEC’s interpretation of the scientific record, and others see no problem with theistic evolutionists’ reading of Genesis, and for those Christians, there might be no reason to reject these positions even though some Christians find the views untenable.  Because our interpretations of both the biblical and scientific evidence are prone to error, we need to be charitable toward Christians whose views on these matters differ from ours, and we need to be open to reevaluation of our position when it is warranted.  Above all, we need to separate our view of the science of origins from our defense of Christian truth claims.  Christians who are convinced of the truth of evolutionary theory should not allow their views of science to call their faith into question; they instead need to continue to pray and study in order to find ways to harmonize their understanding of general and special revelation.

 

 

 

For most of the last two centuries, there was a general consensus in the United States among both believers and unbelievers that Christianity and the teachings of Jesus were positive moral influences in society.  Even people who never went to church and who didn’t see much use for religion in their own life often had a respect for the Bible and the ethical teachings of Jesus.  But in the last twenty years, the skeptical charge that Christianity is a negative moral influence and that the Bible is an immoral book depicting a God who engages in evil acts has become widespread.  Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion popularized this argument, and it is now one of the most common skeptical objections against Christianity.

The popularity of this argument is an indication of how far contemporary ethical standards have shifted from biblical morality.  In order to address this objection, therefore, we cannot assume a common standard of morality, but instead, we have to make an effort to understand and engage with the ethical premises from which the skeptics are arguing.

 

What are the differences between biblical morality and contemporary secular morality?

The two ethical principles that undergird secular moral reasoning in the contemporary United States are individual autonomy (personal freedom) and equality.  In fact, these ethical principles are so widespread that both of our nation’s major political parties endorse them, and most American Christians have been influenced by them to a greater degree than they might realize.  But while both principles might be based on a grain of truth, neither one is very biblical.  Thus, when assessing biblical morality, the skeptic will almost certainly be trying to apply his or her own standard of autonomy and equality-based moral reasoning to a biblical ethical system that is based on very different premises.

Biblical morality is based not on the principle of individual autonomy, but on the principle of human dignity, which is derived from the fact that people are made in the image of God.  Because human beings are made in the image of God, they have the right to be treated with the dignity that befits a divine image-bearer, but those rights are not absolute rights – they are subsidiary to God’s right of ownership over each person that he has created.  And because of the fall, humans are also rebels against God, deserving God’s judgment.  That might mean that what is just and fair will look very different from what the skeptic might imagine.

Skeptical objections to biblical morality often arise when skeptics attempt to use their own moral standard (that is, a moral standard that focuses on individual autonomy and equality) to judge the Bible’s moral standard, which is based on different assumptions.  When addressing the skeptic, then, we must first identify the presuppositions that shape their own moral reasoning, and then we can point out some of the reasons why the biblical code of morality differs.

With this principle in mind, we can examine the charges that atheists or skeptics usually make against biblical or Christian morality:

• The Bible portrays God engaging in unjust behavior (e.g., jealousy, Canaanite slaughter, ordering the execution of people or striking them down).
• The Bible sanctioned evil activities (e.g., slavery, forced marriage for women, stoning people), and although most Christians don’t agree with these practices today, the Bible itself condones them.
• Christianity has led to wars, imperialism, intolerance, and human rights abuses.
• The Bible / Christianity encourages behavior and attitudes that make people more intolerant and less fair-minded (e.g., gender, sexuality, intolerance toward other religions).

 

How should we deal with the charge that the God of the Bible is immoral?

As with all of these objections, we should begin by asking the skeptic what makes an action good or evil, and we should use that question to identify the skeptic’s moral presuppositions.  Once the skeptic puts his or her own moral presuppositions on the table, we can explain the reasons why the biblical perspective might differ.

In particular, we probably need to explain the idea that God is a cosmic judge.  Most people would concede that governing authorities have the right to take some actions in the course of judging offenders of the law that would not be right for an individual to take.  Governing authorities, for instance, can levy fines and impose jail sentences, while individual citizens cannot.  As judge, God has the right to act against transgressors.  This explains, for example, why God caused the deaths of a number of people who violated his law; he was acting as a cosmic judge.

Perhaps for many people, one of the most difficult Old Testament narratives to accept, when it comes to descriptions of God’s judgments, is the story of the killing of the Canaanites.  Atheists routinely describe this killing as “genocide,” and deplore the alleged brutality of killing women and children, as well as enemy combatants.  To them, it looks like a blatant land grab and a mass extermination of several people groups.

How should we respond to these charges?  By appealing to the concept of God as the cosmic judge, I think that we can make sense of the conquest narratives of the Old Testament and demonstrate that the actions of God and the Israelites were not equivalent to modern genocide.  Instead, they were a picture in microcosm of God’s judgment of the earth and his creation of a holy land, with a holy people for his own possession.

How do we know that the conquest of the Canaanites was not an act of genocide or a mere land grab?  If we take the biblical narratives seriously, we’ll notice several features of the narrative that don’t fit with any other form of warfare, whether in the ancient Near East or in modern times.  First, God issued a display of his power in Egypt that was known to the Canaanites, and he then gave them more than forty years to consider this display of power and repent (Josh. 2:10).  Second, the Canaanites who did repent and join the Israelites (e.g., Rahab and the Gibeonites) were spared and commended.  Third, the Israelites were instructed not to take any plunder from some of the conquests and were punished when they did (Josh. 7:1).  In the ancient Near East, warfare was usually conducted partly for the purpose of taking slaves and plunder, as well as land.  It was extremely unusual for a group of people to engage in offensive warfare without attempting to enjoy the spoils of war.  Fourth, God did not authorize the Israelites to engage in continued conquests beyond the borders that he had assigned for them.  The conquest of Canaan was a holy war that had a prescribed territorial limit, unlike the wars of imperial conquest that were more common in the ancient world.  God did not authorize the Israelites to continue their conquest across the ancient Near East or to “slay the infidel” everywhere they might have wanted to go.  Fifth, God held the Israelites to the same standard of holiness to which he held their enemies in the land, and he warned them that if they forsook the Lord and refused to turn back, they would be exiled from the land – which they were.

Skeptics are perhaps most often bothered by God’s actions against children – including striking down all the firstborn of Egypt in the tenth plague (Ex. 12:29) or commanding the slaughter of Canaanite children, along with the adults.  How do we make sense of those passages?  I think that if a skeptic brings up these issues, we need to point out that the Bible does not necessarily share our culture’s common presumption that children are entirely innocent.  We don’t know anything definite about what happened to the souls of those children after their death, but we can say that a biblical theology does not assume that children are exempt from God’s judgment against a sinful humanity.  This will be such a foreign idea to most skeptics that they may find it very difficult to accept, but if we focus the discussion on God’s holiness and God’s role as the righteous judge, we’ll probably more accurately communicate a biblical theology than if we attempt to explain these passages on any other grounds.  Of course, we also know that in Christ, God has taken the wrath on himself that rightly should have fallen on us – just as it fell in part on the Canaanites, the Egyptians, and other nations that rebelled against God.

 

Does the Bible sanction evil activities (e.g., slavery)?

Atheists commonly charge that the Bible is at odds with ethical principles that are accepted by nearly all modern Americans, whether Christians or non-Christians.  One of the most commonly cited examples of evils that the Bible allegedly accepts is slavery.  It is true that slavery is mentioned throughout the Old and New Testaments, and that slavery was allowed under the Mosaic law code.  Some of the early Christians owned slaves, and slaves in the New Testament were told to obey their masters.  Furthermore, in the mid 19^th-century South, a number of prominent pastors and theologians used these texts as support for the race-based slavery that existed in the United States.  It would seem at first glance, therefore, that skeptics might be right in saying that the Bible approves of slavery.  How should we deal with this charge?

I think that first, we need to recognize that there were some significant differences between ancient Israelite (and even ancient Roman) slavery and the slavery that was present in the United States during the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries.  Unlike later American slavery, the slavery of the ancient world was not race-based.  Nor, in ancient Israel, was it either permanent or hereditary.  Slaves in ancient Israel were freed at the end of seven years (Ex. 21 and Deut. 15).  Perhaps it should more accurately be termed “indentured servitude” rather than “slavery,” since it functioned as a contractual way to work off a debt rather than as a state of perpetual forced labor.  The Mosaic law also included commands against abuse of slaves.  Slave owners might (temporarily) own a slave’s labor, but they did not own the slaves’ bodies or have a right to do whatever they wanted with their slaves.  If a master gouged out the eye of his slave, for instance, the slave would automatically go free as compensation for the master’s cruelty (Ex. 21:26).

Thus, there were a number of critical distinctions between early American slavery and ancient Israelite slavery.

 

Ancient Israelite Slavery	Early American Slavery
Temporary (7 years)	Permanent and hereditary
Entered into (voluntarily) through debt	Entered into through kidnapping or birth
Master owned only the slave’s labor	Master legally owned slaves’ bodies
Cruelty toward slave not permitted	Cruel punishments permitted
Forced breeding not a part of slavery	Forced breeding a common practice
Not race-based	Based on a racial caste system
Families (not merely slaves) freed in Jubilee	Families could be legally separated

 

So, in dialoguing with the skeptic about this question, I would first want to make it clear that when we are considering ancient Israelite slavery, we are looking at an institution that was vastly different than early American slavery.  But, one might ask, even if ancient Israelite slavery was more humane than early American slavery, why did God allow even this relatively benign form of servitude?  After all, wouldn’t the society be better off if no one were enslaved?

I think that to answer this question, we need to remember the primacy that the Bible places on the value of human dignity, and the relatively low consideration that it gives to individual autonomy.  If individual autonomy is our highest value, any form of forced servitude will seem objectionable, but if human dignity is our prime consideration, the Mosaic laws on slavery seem to do a remarkably good job of respecting the dignity of all people (including slaves) as God’s image-bearers.  Does this mean that the laws on slavery would be a good idea for us to adopt as a civil code today?  No.  The Mosaic law code was a culturally specific application of God’s universal moral law – not the universal moral law itself.  Just as the laws against charging interest on a loan had a culturally specific purpose in an ancient agricultural society and may not be directly applicable to our modern context, so the laws on debt-based slavery had a culturally specific application.  I would not endorse adopting these laws today.  But I do believe that they reflected God’s principles of human dignity for the specific cultural context for which they were given.

 

Another strategy for responding to questions about the Bible’s ethics

Skeptics often argue that the Bible’s ethical codes are outdated and inhumane, and their charges go far beyond the issue of slavery.  In dealing with these charges, I think that the strategy of focusing on the purpose of the biblical mandates and highlighting the differences between modern assumptions about autonomy and biblical concerns about human dignity is generally a good approach.  But in doing this, I would encourage you to avoid falling into the trap of simply defending the biblical commands against a skeptics’ attacks; I would also encourage you to turn the tables on the skeptic by asking what our modern world could profitably learn from some of the allegedly “outdated” biblical ethics.  One of these areas is covenant-keeping.

The importance of honoring our word (and especially covenants) is repeated throughout the Old and New Testaments, because the way in which we treat our word is a reflection of our view of God’s covenants and promises to us.  For much of Christian history, cultures with a Christian framework similarly emphasized the importance of oaths and covenant-keeping.  Only in the last century has this framework broken down.  But imagine what it would look like, we might ask, if we really could trust people to keep their word, honor their vows, and fulfill their commitments in marriage.  We don’t emphasize this value in our society, because it is at odds with our view of personal autonomy.  But at some level, many of us find the idea of an honest, covenant-keeping society appealing.  Having this conversation with  a skeptic who is raising doubts about biblical ethics might be a way to surprise the skeptic with the relevance and attractiveness of biblical teaching, and might be a way to indirectly show the skeptic that we might be far less ethical than we’d like to admit.  It’s easy for a skeptic to feel morally superior when raising questions about biblical ethics, but if the skeptic is shown that perhaps in our own time, with our supposedly superior system of ethics, we’ve behaved less ethically than we’d like to admit, it can be an opening to a more gospel-centered conversation about sin and redemption.

 

Does Christianity make people intolerant?

Skeptics often charge that over the past millennium, Christianity has been responsible for the Crusades, witch-burnings, and numerous wars, and in our own time, it is responsible for producing intolerance and “hate speech.”  How should we deal with this charge?

While one could argue about a lot of the specific details of the historical examples that the skeptic might cite, the best approach to this issue would probably be to point out that when religion is combined with power, it usually offers an excellent motivation for people to exercise domination (and even violence) against others.  This has been a constant temptation for Christians.  Christians are not unique in this, of course.  The same has been true of other religions.  But what the skeptic also needs to realize is that this is true of ideologies in general.  The ideology of nationalism has led to numerous genocides and wars.  The ideology of Marxism has similarly led to revolution, oppression, and war.  Even the ideology of democracy has produced war; it was a principal justification for American actions during the Mexican War of the 1840s and the wars against Indians in the 19^th century, along with America’s actions during World War I – a war, President Woodrow Wilson said, to “make the world safe for democracy.”  Secular ideologies can produce wars and intolerance, just as religion can.

A biblical theology of sin gives us an explanation for this violence and intolerance.  The reason that ideologies (including religious ones) so often breed violence or intolerance is because they give us justification for our feeling of moral superiority.  The less we see of our own sin and the more we see of others’ faults, the more intolerant we’re likely to be.  Secular advocates of “tolerance” can be guilty of this same level of intolerant moral zeal when defending some of their cherished principles.

The solution, of course, is to recognize the deep nature of our sin and our dependence on the grace of Christ.  As Christians, we need to be extremely suspicious of any ideology that tries to connect Christianity to institutions of power – especially political institutions.  We should confess to skeptics that Christians have indeed behaved in evil ways when they took their eyes off of the grace of Christ and tried to impose their moral convictions through the exercise of political power.  But rather than discredit Christianity, this confirms a biblical worldview of sin and highlights our need of God’s grace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I see no evidence of a deity at work trying to ease the sufferings of mankind.  Half a million children, not to mention the adults, were killed in the Holocaust.  If there were a God anywhere, surely He would have stopped that slaughter.”

             – M. Lee Deitz, an atheist who used to be a fundamentalist preacher[1]

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us.  For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.  For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.  For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.”

– Romans 8:18-22

 

The argument that it is impossible to believe in an all-good, all-powerful God in the face of the world’s suffering and evil is one of the most common (maybe even the most common) objection to Christian truth claims today.  But interestingly enough, the existence of suffering and evil in the world was rarely mentioned as an objection to Christian theism before the 18^th century, and this argument did not really begin gaining ground until the mid-19^th century.  This suggests that perhaps this argument is not as intuitive or as obvious as skeptics imagine.  Perhaps it is our cultural view of suffering that is incompatible with Christian theism – not the fact of suffering itself.

So, in order to address this skeptical argument, we need to first look at the presuppositional beliefs about suffering that lead skeptics to think that suffering is incompatible with Christian truth claims, and then we’ll look at what the Bible itself says about suffering in order to see if there is a biblical corrective to the presuppositions that pervade our culture.  In fact, these presuppositional beliefs about suffering are so common that even many (perhaps most?) Christians in contemporary North America and Western Europe probably share them to at least a certain extent – which is one reason why many Christians find their faith shaken when they experience tragedy or prolonged suffering.

If you are interested in exploring this issue in more detail, I would highly recommend Tim Keller’s Walking with God through Pain and Suffering.  Some of the material that I’m presenting here is based on information from Keller’s book.

 

How Ancient Cultures and Other Religions Viewed Evil and Suffering

To get a sense of how we have arrived at our current cultural presuppositions about suffering, let’s take a quick historical tour that will show us how unusual our contemporary assumptions really are.

For several millennia, most of the world’s population was pagan or animist, and they did not have the difficulties reconciling suffering and divinity that contemporary Westerners often have.  No ancient pagan would have been surprised to hear that God is not fair.  To see the gods’ unfairness, one had to look no further than the droughts that regularly brought ancient villages to the brink of starvation or the sudden floods that washed away their crops and threatened to capsize their homes.  The ancients equated their gods with natural forces that were capricious, brutal, and uncaring.  Baal, the Canaanite storm god; Seth, the Egyptian god of chaos; or Zeus, with his unpredictable lightning bolt, were symbols of the terrifying and utterly unfair forces of nature.

If the gods were capricious, they were also cruel.  According to both Sumerian and Greek myths, the gods had created human beings only to be their slaves, and the ancients resented the endless, pointless toil that was now their lot.  “Men never rest from labor and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them,” the Greek poet Hesiod lamented in the 8^th century BCE.  “Bitter sorrows will be left for mortal men, and there will be no help against evil.”

Paganism emerged from a belief that the supernatural realm was tied to natural forces, which is why all forms of paganism viewed the gods as somewhat capricious.  Just as a sea-wind or rain could be a blessing in the right circumstances, so it could also be a curse when it came at the wrong time or in the wrong measure.  And because nature was unreliable – that is, one never knew for sure that the right amount of rain would come at the right time – it was obvious that the gods that controlled natural forces were capricious as well, ready to withdraw their blessings at the slightest provocation or for the most petty of reasons.  That was why ancient pagans took such pains to offer regular sacrifices in the precise manner that the gods demanded.  There was nothing worse than having an angry god plaguing a city.

The gods were also capricious because they were like humans, and as everyone knew, humans were often selfish and petty – especially those in power.  If the greatest potentates of the ancient Near East were tyrannical and cruel, one could expect the gods – who were even more powerful – to be at least as prone to anger and jealousy.  The gods had their throne rooms and attendants, just as earthly kings did.  And like their earthly counterparts, the gods demanded obedience and honor; anything less would be likely to provoke the gods’ wrath.

For most of the ancient pagans, religion was not about love, self-improvement, or a quest for justice and meaning, but was instead a practical matter of survival.  The gods needed to be placated if one were to survive.  The ancients were under no illusion that religious exercises were enjoyable or that the gods were universally beneficent.  They did not expect them to behave justly.  And yet they knew that they needed to serve the gods in order to prevent them from harming their families and communities.  Religion had a terrifyingly practical function in the ancient world.

The pagan myths might have given convincing explanations for the origins of a chaotic, unfair, capricious world, but they failed to explain why humans retained a longing for justice and fairness in spite of that world.  After all, if people were simply the product of an unfair system – the creation of jealous gods who had killed their rivals in order to create people and who had no love for the human race and no qualms about committing murder – why did humans themselves feel that the world was not right?  Why were their own moral sensibilities greater than those of the gods who had created them?  Where did this sense of fairness and justice come from?  Why could they not simply act like their fellow animals and kill their prey with impunity, never stopping to consider whether what they did was right or fair?  Why were they morally disgusted with the thought of having sex with their sisters, raping unsuspecting virgins, or eating their children, as some of the gods had supposedly done without regret?

In the mid-first millennium BCE (c. 600-300 BCE) – the time that historians call the “Axial Age” – several religious teachers in the ancient Near East, beginning with the Persian prophet Zoroaster, offered a new explanation for good and evil that the pagan myths had failed to provide.  The world was a battleground between two rival personal forces – one good and one evil – they said.  For religious thinkers after Zoroaster, ranging from the Gnostics to Mani, the good god was invariably identified with the spiritual realm, and the evil god with the material.  The goal of every human, then, was to achieve enlightenment by escaping from the material realm.

In dividing the world between the evil material realm and the blissful realm of the spirit, the Gnostics and the Manicheans borrowed not only from the dualism of the Zoroastrians, but also from the thinking of Plato and other Greek philosophers, as well as from Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, which taught the possibility of an escape from the body through a long trajectory of reincarnation, followed by nirvana.  In all of these religions, there was a strong emphasis on choosing the good over evil and redeeming oneself through either good works or spiritual knowledge.  Life was not fair, these religions taught, but there was a way for humans to escape life’s unfairness by choosing the good over evil and, in some cases, gaining secret knowledge that would allow one to escape the material realm.

All of these religious and philosophical groups recognized, as the ancient pagans had, that the world was an unfair and evil place, but unlike the pagans, they thought that the problem of evil had a solution.  Like the pagans, many of them believed that the spiritual realm was a world of rival deities, but unlike the pagans, they thought that some of these deities were purely good and others purely evil.  If there was a good power in the universe, they thought, there must be a solution to the problem of evil – that is, there must be a way to escape from the clutches of the evil world and become purely good.  If people could just gain the right knowledge or learn the right behavior, they could escape from the evil material realm, they thought, and become united with what was purely good.  If they could not do it in this life, perhaps they could do it in the next life or the one after that.  In these religious systems, the good powers in the universe are not omnipotent; they may be no more powerful than the evil deities, and thus, they are powerless to stop the evil in the world.  But neither is evil all-pervasive; it is not strong enough to permeate a person’s spirit, even if it corrupts his or her flesh.

Humans therefore are capable of escaping evil through their own efforts.  They can purge themselves of the desires of the body and become a purely good spirit that will escape the evil realm and become united to the good essence of the universe.  In Hinduism and Buddhism, this union with the essence of the universe is called nirvana, and can be reached through a long cycle of reincarnation.  In Manichaeism and Gnosticism, spiritual liberation comes through secret knowledge and asceticism, and death is the great liberator, because it frees the soul from the evil flesh in which it is imprisoned.  In Zoroastrianism, the heavenly reward comes solely through good deeds, which, after death, are weighed in a balance against one’s evil deeds.  Those whose good deeds outweighed their evil deeds will be admitted to paradise.  Just as the universe itself is involved in a cosmic struggle between good and evil deities, so too do the powers of good and evil struggle within each person.  If the good outweighs the bad, the person can enter an eternal paradise.

Despite the many differences between Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Gnosticism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, all were engaged in the quest for liberation from the evil of the world, and all offered a way to do that through individual effort.  Traditional paganism had offered only a way to manipulate the natural forces in the world through propitiation of the gods, but these new religions of the Axial Age offered far more: They promised a way of liberation for the individual who was willing to follow their path.  Because they offered a message of hope and deliverance, these religious ideas, whether in their original form or in a modified version propagated by philosophers and mystery cults, swept the Mediterranean world and gained numerous converts.  Unlike many Westerners of the early twenty-first century, the converts to these new religions did not expect the world to be a good or fair place, and they did not believe that a good, all-powerful deity presided over the universe, but they did believe that through great effort, they could find the secret to escaping an evil world and achieving self-liberation.

 

The Answer That Christianity Provides

The Bible presents a radically different view of suffering and evil that makes sense of both the existence of evil in the world and our longing for justice, while also offering a solution.  The capricious natural forces that we see are a reflection of a fallen world, not ultimate reality.  We cannot merely extrapolate from contemporary nature (as the ancient pagans did) and assume that we can get a true picture of God, because the world that we see today is not God’s ultimate intention; it is instead a fallen creation that will one day be transformed into the new heavens and the new earth.  And unlike either ancient paganism or the new religious movements of the Axial Age, Christianity teaches that the problem of evil is not merely a problem with the world itself or with an external force invading the world; it is a problem with our own hearts.  We need a divine rescue.  This is what Christianity offers.  No other world religion imagined that an all-powerful, all-loving God would enter into his creation and bearing its suffering in order to redeem it and transform it.

Christianity, then, is alone among world religions and philosophies in affirming the following points:

• It acknowledges the full reality of evil in the world today, and in fact, goes beyond all other religions in acknowledging the depth of evil that resides in the human heart. A person with a consistent Christian worldview will never be surprised at the amount of either human or natural evil in a fallen world.  (Gen. 6:5; Rom. 3).
• It says that the evil and suffering that we see in the world today are a temporary aberration, because God created the world as a very good place (Gen. 1:31) and will one day transform it into a perfect place (Rev. 21-22).
• It affirms that God is both all-powerful and all-good. He is not the author of evil, but he is sovereign over creation, which means that the evil that exists is under his (good) control, and he is using it for his (good) purposes (Gen. 50:20; Rom. 8:28).
• It says that God redeemed his creation from evil through entering into the world’s suffering and bearing its evil on the cross (Rom. 8:11-39; 2 Cor. 5:20; Gal. 4:4-7).
• It says that our suffering is temporary and that it has a purpose. God is using our suffering for his glory by allowing us to participate through suffering in the work of Christ (2 Cor. 12:9-10; Col. 1:24; 1 Pet. 2:19-25).

Tim Keller says in his book Walking with God through Pain and Suffering that what makes suffering difficult to bear is not merely the pain of the suffering itself but the belief that the suffering is meaningless.  Christianity gives meaning to our suffering by explaining both its origins and purpose, and also by promising a deliverance.  That is a message of hope that no other religion has produced.

 

The Deist Answer to Suffering

In order to accept Christianity’s message of suffering, we have to believe in two ideas that are difficult for some people to accept: 1) Original sin and human depravity; and 2) The fact that the purpose of our suffering is God’s glory and our ultimate good, not our temporary happiness.  At the end of the 17^th century and beginning of the 18^th century, a new philosophical movement developed in Western Europe that rejected both of those notions, along with the doctrine of the atonement.  That new philosophical movement was deism.  According to the deists, humans were basically good, and God wanted them to be happy by living according to the dictates of reason.

In its full-fledged form, deism rejected the idea of special revelation (that is, any revelation from God apart from the natural creation) and miracles, as well as original sin and the atonement.  These full-fledged deists included 18^th-century American intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, as well as many of the leading French and British philosophers of the Enlightenment.  But alongside these full-fledged deists who rejected organized religion, there were also a larger number of self-professed “Christians” who adopted some deistic ideas even while continuing to affirm their belief in the Bible.  These “rational Christians,” as they called themselves in the 18^th century (or “liberal Christians,” as they were later called), questioned or rejected the idea of original sin and total depravity, and often deemphasized or rejected the idea of substitutionary atonement.  As a result, they eventually found themselves unable to harmonize their idea of God with the reality of evil in the world.

Deists proclaimed the rationality of God and the natural goodness of humanity, so when confronted with evil in the world, they tended to explain it as a product of people’s failure to follow the principles of reason.  Moral education, they believed, would lead to human betterment.  Liberal Christians talked a lot about God’s love, but by deemphasizing or denying human depravity, they, too, found themselves unable to offer any better solution to the problem of human evil than moral education and the promise that God loves everyone.

The lack of a robust Christian theology of evil is why the existence of suffering and evil has been so faith-shattering for people in the Western world 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries.  This was not the case for Christians in earlier centuries.  Before the late 18^th century, for instance, it was very common for Christians to experience infant deaths in their families, and those deaths did not shake their faith.  John Calvin, for instance, lost his only wife after only seven years of marriage, and all of his children died in infancy.  The early 18^th-century Puritan pastor Cotton Mather lost thirteen of his fifteen children in infancy or childhood.  Jonathan Edwards lost his 18-year-old daughter on the eve of her wedding when she contracted tuberculosis from her fiancé.  All of these men and their families continued trusting in the sovereignty and goodness of God in the face of great personal tragedy.  But in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, liberal Christians who had rejected a Christian theology of suffering lacked the theological resources to cope with the suffering and evil in the world, so when they encountered personal tragedy and discovered that the world was not as beneficent a place as they had imagined, their faith was shaken.  Some of them abandoned faith altogether.  Charles Darwin, for instance, became an agnostic after reflecting on the suffering in the natural world and experiencing the death of his 10-year-old daughter.  After the Holocaust, an entire group of Jewish and liberal Christian theologians posited the “death of God” theology, suggesting that belief in God was no longer tenable after the world had experienced such a massive tragedy.

The answer to this objection, then, is to point out that the “Christian” faith that people are often rejecting in the face of suffering is really not true Christianity at all, but rather a deistic distortion of Christianity that naively denies the full extent of human evil.  Deistic-minded “Christians” will have their faith shaken in the face of tragedy; Christians with a biblical worldview and robust Christian theology of suffering should not.

Thus, when someone asks us how we can believe in a good God when there is so much suffering in the world, we can explain that this is a problem only for people who believe in a deistic-like God and innate human goodness.  For most other people in world history, suffering and evil have not been barriers to theistic belief.  Pagans, polytheists, and people in the Axial Age who believed in divinities that were not all-powerful never had a philosophical problem with this idea.  And Christians who believe the Bible’s account of human evil and God’s atoning work in Christ don’t have a problem either.  It is only when people retain the biblical truth of God’s power and goodness, but reject the Bible’s account of human sin and the atonement, that questions about suffering and evil become faith-shattering.

But what about atheist philosophies of suffering and evil?  Why isn’t the atheist answer to suffering a better answer than the Christian one?

 

How Atheists View Suffering and Evil

Because they reject the idea of the supernatural, atheists have to view suffering and evil as intrinsic parts of the natural world order, much as ancient pagans did.  At first glance, that may seem to solve the theodicy problem of suffering and evil – that is, the problem that theists face when they try to harmonize evil with the existence of a good, all-powerful God.  But in reality, atheists face the same philosophical conundrum that the ancient pagans did: they cannot account for our longing for justice and goodness, they cannot produce a universal moral standard that condemns evil, and they cannot promise a deliverance from evil.

In reality, few people are content to simply accept suffering and evil as part of the natural world, even if that’s their philosophical starting point.  Instead, they usually adopt some modernized version of what Axial Age philosophers presented – that is, they try to find a way to transcend evil and suffering in their own lives through a program of self-help.  Sooner or later, though, many people who try this find themselves confronted with evil of a magnitude that they cannot ignore or explain, or they find themselves incapacitated by sickness or injury and thus unable to escape suffering.  They then fall into despair.  As Tim Keller noted, our modern Western culture has adopted autonomy and personal freedom as some of its highest values, and suffering has no function in this value system; it is simply a disruption of a person’s life goals.  Thus, when suffering finally comes, despite people’s best efforts to avoid it, they are often crushed.

 

Presenting the Gospel to People Struggling with Doubts about Suffering and Evil

The gospel provides an answer to the despair that many contemporary people feel in the face of suffering and evil.   But if someone says that they have rejected the idea of God because of the reality of suffering, what should we say?  How should we present a gospel answer to their question?

I think that the best approach might be to find out whether the person is: 1) Struggling to reconcile a deistic / liberal Christian view of God with the reality of suffering; or 2) Resting in an atheistic fatalistic understanding of suffering and evil as simply part of the natural order; or 3) Relying on a self-help, personal therapeutic approach to dealing with suffering and evil in their lives.

If the person’s view of Christian theism is essentially deistic, we need to present a theology of original sin and human evil, and point out that deistic or liberal Christian views of God cannot account for the amount of evil and suffering that we see in the world.  People who adopt these views will therefore constantly struggle with their beliefs whenever they encounter evidence of evil and suffering on a scale that they did not expect.  A biblical worldview is the only worldview that both acknowledges the full extent of the evil that exists in the world and presents a solution to it.

If the person has an atheistic view of suffering as part of the natural order, it might be useful to ask the person how they account for their own longing for justice and goodness.  Why are we uncomfortable with evil if it is simply part of the natural world?  And, what is our hope of making the world a better place if we adopt an atheistic view of suffering?  Many atheists are also advocates of social justice, and if this is the case for the atheist with whom you’re talking, point out this incongruity.  Note the despair that the atheistic worldview should produce, and point out that the gospel offers something better – that is, a genuine hope that does not deny reality.

If the person is relying on a self-help approach to transcending evil and suffering, note that this view is also going to lead to frustration, because it minimizes or denies the extent of evil that resides within us, and it ultimately offers us no assurance of global deliverance from evil.  Self-help programs, of course, can take many different forms, including secular humanism (which focuses on societal transformation), New Age movements (which focus on personal transformation), psychological therapy (again, personal transformation), and a host of other approaches.  But all of these approaches take as their starting point the belief that people can transcend the problems of evil and suffering through their own efforts.  The track record of these various approaches has not been good, because they all ignore the extent of evil within the human heart.  Pointing out the futility of these approaches – and the despair that can result when each approach fails – can be a way to open the door for a presentation of a gospel-centered view of suffering.

 

Why Did God Ordain the Fall?

At this point, the skeptic may have a number of different questions, but in my experience, one of the most common is: Why did God allow the fall?  Perhaps the skeptic will concede that the doctrine of the fall can explain the existence of suffering and evil, but the skeptic might then ask how we can explain why God would allow the fall in the first place.

Traditionally, most Christians who have tried to answer this question have presented some version of the free-will defense, which says that because love is meaningful only when it is freely chosen, God wanted to create free creatures who could choose whether to love him or reject him.  This necessarily required God to create the possibility of a fall.  Though the fall did produce great evil, it allowed for an even greater good – the good of human freedom and a relationship between God and free individuals.

I think that this traditional answer is flawed from both a biblical and philosophical perspective.  I say this cautiously, because it has been the majority view among Western Christian apologists, and it has had a lot of impressive advocates, including C. S. Lewis.  But Reformed Christianity has generally rejected this view, and I think for good reason.

Reformed Christians have said that God ordained the fall for his glory.  But what glory did he receive from the fall?  Here I follow the lead of the 17^th-century Puritan writer John Owen, who wrote that God ordained the fall so that he could show how he would respond to free creatures who rejected him.  In other words, the purpose of ordaining the fall was to reveal God’s justice, mercy, and love in Christ.  While the traditional free will defense suggests that human freedom itself was the good that resulted from allowing the possibility of the fall, the Reformed view says that Christ’s redemption was the good that resulted not just from allowing the possibility of a fall but by creating a world in which the fall would definitely happen.

I think that if someone asks about this, it can be useful to present this explanation.  But it’s also important to note that it’s dangerous to set ourselves up as the judge of God’s purposes.  If someone rejects Christianity on the grounds that God should not have acted in the way that he did, we should ask on what grounds they are judging God.  Are they appealing to a transcendent, absolute moral standard (which should not exist, if the atheistic view of the universe is correct)?  Do they claim to have enough knowledge on which to judge God’s actions (which, if one thinks for a moment, is really a ridiculous claim)?

In the end, if we can show the philosophical shortcomings of each view that challenges the biblical explanation for suffering and evil, and if we can present the gospel message as the only satisfactory answer to these other views, we will not only undermine one of the most common objections to the Christian faith but we will also have the opportunity to win a hearing for the gospel.  Christianity is the only worldview that has ever offered a view of suffering and evil that fully acknowledges the extent of the problem while also offering a divine solution.  Skeptics might consider the existence of suffering and evil a barrier to Christian truth claims, but in reality, the questions that skeptics are asking about this topic provide the perfect moment for a gospel-centered answer.

 

 

[1] M. Lee Deitz, “My Conversion from Fundamentalism,” in Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists, ed. Edward T. Babinski (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 310.

In the Bible, God makes exclusive truth claims (John 14:6), because a central message of the Bible is our need for God alone (Ex. 20:1-6; Deut. 6:4-5, 13-15).  People have always had trouble with this message, because ever since the fall we have been idolaters seeking a “truth” that is different from the one that God has given.  But the ways in which people have rebelled against God’s declaration that there is a single truth have changed over time, so to address a contemporary skeptical objection to exclusive truth claims, we need to use discernment to figure out exactly what the skeptic’s objection is and what particular presuppositions might have led to the objection.

In the ancient Mediterranean world, pagans did not object to the claim that the Lord (Yahweh) existed, but they did object to the claim that the Lord was the only God.  In fact, even many Israelites objected to this claim.  In their view, gods were local rulers and forces of nature, and there were many gods.  Their view of truth was pragmatic; they tended to follow whatever gods seemed to grant them what they wanted.  (See Jer. 44:15-18 for an example of this pragmatic approach to religion among the Israelites).  Much of the Bible’s discussion of God’s exclusive right to be worshiped is directed against this false worldview of pagan religious pragmatism.

Some people whom we meet today might take a similarly pragmatic approach to religious truth claims.  Their view is that truth in religion can be measured by what works for an individual person, so if a particular religious practice has pragmatic value, who can argue against it?  Just as the people of Jeremiah’s day refused to agree to worship the Lord exclusively because they thought that sacrifices to the queen of heaven achieved practical results, so some people today wonder how theologically conservative Christians can assert that Jesus is the only way to God if other non-Christian religious practices produce practical benefits, too.

But the modern objection to exclusive religious truth claims can also take other forms than mere pragmatism.  Two of the major American and European groups that have questioned Christianity’s exclusive truth claims in recent centuries include:

• The 18^th-century deists. The deists believed in an objective, universal truth, but they rejected the idea of special revelation, because this form of revelation was not accessible to everyone.  Instead, they believed that knowledge of God was equally accessible to everyone via reason alone (what the Christian would call the “general revelation” of creation).  Exclusive religious truth claims that were based on special revelation (e.g., the Bible) led to religious wars, they thought, and they were irrational, because they could not be adjudicated via reason.
• Liberal Protestants of the 19^th and 20^th Liberal Protestants believed that the essence of Christianity was morality, along with religious experience.  Because they could find good people, with similar moral beliefs, in non-Christian religions, and because they noted the similarity between Christian religious experiences and the religious experiences of many non-Christians, they eventually decided that all religions offered a path to God.  (One favorite text of this group was William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1903).  In the mid-20^th century, the litmus test for liberal Protestant religious tolerance was a person’s view of Mohandas Gandhi; if a professing Christian thought that Gandhi, as a moral, religious person of great insight, was going to go to heaven, along with good Christians, that person was probably a religiously tolerant liberal Christian.
• The postmodernists of the late 1960s and beyond. In the late 1960s, during a time of widespread skepticism about the American government’s (lack of) truth-telling during the Vietnam War, the idea that truth claims are power claims began gaining ground in some humanities departments, and today that idea is widespread.  For several centuries following the 15^th-century Renaissance (and especially the 18^th-century Enlightenment), the dominant intellectual trend in the West was modernism, which, among other things, argued that reason and the scientific method could produce objective, certain knowledge.  The postmodernists of the late 20^th century voiced skepticism about this idea.  Not only did they question exclusive religious truth claims, they also questioned all absolute truth claims, because they questioned humans’ ability to perceive truth with any degree of absolute certainty.  In other words, for the postmodernist, even if there is truth (which is questionable), we have no way of knowing for sure if we’ve found it.  And if someone does claim to have the truth, that person is probably going to use that claim to exercise power over someone else, which is a good reason to be suspicious of the claim.  Christianity and the concomitant argument that the West had the truth while the rest of the world did not were principal justifications for imperialism and oppression, they argue.

Today skeptics who question religious truth claims are influenced by all of these ideas, but in most cases, the skeptics are likely to fall into one of two very different categories.  Thus, the first task in talking with someone who questions Christianity’s exclusive truth claims is to figure out which category their objections belong to.  I have labeled these two categories of objectors to Christianity’s truth claims:

• Religious skeptics; and
• Religious pluralists.

Religious skeptics – Religious skeptics, in the way that I’m using the term, are usually atheists, agnostics, secularists, or modern deists.  (By “modern deist,” I mean people who are willing to grant the possibility that some sort of creator started the process of creation, but they reject the idea of a personal God who can be known directly).  These people are usually “modernist” in their approach to truth – that is, they believe in objective, absolute truth when it comes to observable phenomenon, but they are highly skeptical of truth claims that cannot be verified scientifically.  They consider themselves children of the Enlightenment, and thus take a view of truth that is very similar to that of 18^th-century deists, except that instead of believing that God can be known through reason, they are often confident that through reason they have ruled out the possibility of God’s existence at all.  In their view, there are two categories of knowledge claims – the “real,” which is the empirical and the scientific – and the religious / mystical, which cannot be verified.  Scientific and empirical knowledge has led to great gains for humanity, whereas religious claims have led to endless controversies and divisions, and they have not produced any concrete evidence in their favor.  If you go to the science section of a typical bookstore, such as Barnes & Noble, you will find numerous books written by religious skeptics that adopt this view of truth.  Richard Dawkins would certainly be in this camp, and so would most other atheist scientists.

Religious pluralists – Religious pluralists are generally much more postmodern in their views.  They don’t restrict the idea of “truth” to empirical or scientific knowledge, and they are perfectly willing to grant the idea that “truth” can be found in religion and in mystical or transcendent experiences.  But they dislike the idea of exclusive, objective truth; truth can never be known definitively or absolutely, they think, and there is some truth (though only partial truth) in all major religions.  One of the most prominent religious pluralists in recent years was the liberal Protestant philosopher John Hick, whose book The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theory of Religions (1987) argued that since all of our claims to knowledge are shaped by historical experience, any claim that we make about God is shaped by historical experience and therefore cannot be an absolute truth claim.  In other words, religious pluralists are not skeptical about the existence of the spiritual realm, but they are skeptical about our ability to know anything about that realm with absolute certainty, so they think that it’s more likely that all religions have a little bit of insight and truth rather than that any single religion has all of the truth.

How should the Christian approach someone in either of these camps?  As with all dialogues with skeptics, I think that the essential starting point is to identify the presuppositions that have led a person to a particular conclusion, and then try to have a dialogue about those presuppositions.

With the religious skeptic, I think that we need to get the person to question the assumption that there is a stark divide between scientific knowledge and religious knowledge, and that all truth can be found in the realm of the scientific and empirical.  One key to doing that is to introduce the concept of “worldview,” and to explain that all people, regardless of whether they are conscious of it or not, have a worldview that explains who they are, where they came from, and what their purpose is.  Christianity offers one worldview, and secularism offers another.  Both worldviews make claims that are not directly empirical.  For example, secularism’s confidence that science and empiricism tell us everything that we need to know about reality is not something that can be verified empirically or scientifically.  Furthermore, most secularists make values claims (e.g., human rights claims) that are not a product of a purely scientific or empirical worldview.  If that is the case, perhaps the skeptic would be wise to be open to the possibility that something outside of the strictly scientific is at work in their lives.  But in addition, the skeptic might have been too quick to assume that Christian truth claims cannot be tested empirically.  Christianity is not a mystical, “upper-story” religion that exists only in the realm of the subjective; it is based on some historical claims that can be investigated to at least a certain extent.  Unlike most other religions, it is based on a claim that a particular historical event happened – in this case, the resurrection – and it claims that that event could be examined objectively and was supported by witnesses.  And Christianity, upon closer examination, also appears very different from other religions; it’s not fair to simply classify it in the general category of “religion” and then dismiss it from further investigation on the ground that the category of “religion” has not produced any verifiable knowledge.

None of these points are sufficient to prove the truth of Christianity, but they do raise enough questions about the religious skeptic’s assumptions to suggest that Christianity merits a closer look.  The Christian can commend the religious skeptic for their commitment to reason and the discovery of truth, but can then raise questions about whether the religious skeptic has really been reasonable in assuming a priori that Christian truth claims can be excluded from further investigation on the presupposition that they belong to a false category of knowledge.

What about the religious pluralist?  How should the Christian approach a conversation with someone who adopts a postmodern, religious pluralist model of looking at truth?  I think that the Christian should commend the person for correctly recognizing the limits of human knowledge.  Modernists have been far too confident that they can arrive at absolute, objective knowledge of the truth through unaided reason, and postmodernists are right to be skeptical of this claim.  But despite their professed tolerance for all points of view, religious pluralists might have inadvertently introduced their own truth claim as an unstated assumption – the assumption that they can be confident that any God that exists has not revealed himself in any sort of definitive way to one particular group of people.  The religious pluralist views all religions as human efforts to ascertain the truth, and because human minds are finite (while God is infinite), no human-created religion can arrive at more than a very partial view of God.  At best, then, each religion has some of the truth, but no religion can insist that its view of God is the only truth.

The religious pluralist’s view would be very plausible if we could be confident that all religions (including Christianity) were merely human constructs – that is, human attempts to figure out what God is like.  But if God has actually spoken directly to at least one group of people and has guided their understanding of who God is, the religious pluralist’s a priori rejection of all absolute religious truth claims no longer makes quite as much sense.  If one grants the possibility of God speaking to people, one has to grant the possibility that one group of people might have access to absolute truths about God that others might lack.

In dialogues with both the religious skeptic and the religious pluralist, I would recommend steering the conversation away from truth claims in the abstract toward a discussion of Jesus’s claims in particular.  Christianity makes exclusive truth claims not because we as Christians believe that we have discovered truths that no one else has, but because God has come to earth in the form of Jesus and has given us a truth that is available only to people who believe in Jesus.  Christianity’s claim to exclusive truth stands or falls on the claim of who Jesus is.  Once we convince a religious skeptic that they can’t rule out Jesus’s claims without investigating them historically and empirically, we can proceed to an examination of those claims.  And once we convince a religious pluralist that if Jesus really was God in the flesh, he might have revealed absolute truths that are available exclusively in Christ, we are likewise ready to proceed with an examination of Jesus.  This centers the discussion where a Christian should want the discussion to be focused – on the question of Jesus himself and the truth of the gospel.