Dear Dan Barker – I

    In his book godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists, Dan Barker has a chapter entitled "Dear Theologian." It is written as though it were a letter from God addressed to theologians, and in it Mr. Barker raises questions about what he evidently considers to be the major conundrums of theology. It is a clever literary device, but as a piece of argumentation it leaves much to be desired.
    We will not presume to speak on behalf of God – Mr. Barker's attempt to do so is frankly sacrilegious. But since we do have an acquaintance with the Bible and Christian theology, we will venture to reply on behalf of the theologians. As Mr. Barker's chapter is divided into three main sections, each revolving around a principle question, we will attempt to address each question in a separate blog post. Today we begin with:

 
Where did I come from?

Dear Mr. Barker,
    We read your letter addressed to us, and it goes without saying that we were hardly amused. You are ever the Sophist – witty, urbane and cultured, but skilled at dancing around a question. The issues you raise, however, are important, and merit consideration more serious than you gave them.
    In the first section of your chapter you challenged the argument from design. You insisted that if the appearance of design in nature calls for a designer, then the Designer Himself must also have been designed, since He would be a rational being Himself, and therefore would also have the appearance of design. At one point you imagine God telling theologians "If you say that everything needs a designer and then say that not everything (Me) needs a designer, aren't you contradicting yourself?" (p. 146).

Caspar David Friedrich, The Stages of Life

    That is a clever way of putting it, but it misses the point. First of all, it is a caricature of what we are actually saying. No one ever intended to say "everything" (including God Himself) "needs a designer." Our point is that nature evinces design, and therefore must have been created by an intelligent Being. But more to the point, as you well know, the Christian position has always been that God is the eternal, self-existing First Cause – the unmoved Mover of the universe. He is the ultimate reality, and therefore not dependent upon anything else.
    The problem with your argument is that it is based on a false analogy between the temporal and eternal, between the human and divine. As human beings we are conscious of the limitations and variability of temporal existence. ". . . from dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." We are each aware of having had a specific beginning, and we know that we shall each have a definite end. In between all is change and flux. And if everything in nature has a beginning, it must have had a cause which brought it into existence. Order does not spontaneously arise out of chaos, and life is not spontaneously generated in inanimate objects. What, then, is the source of it all? Nature points to something outside of itself, some superior Being from which it derives its structure and energy.
    How did life begin? Why does anything exist at all? If you think about it for a few minutes, it becomes apparent that there are only a few possible answers. One possibility is that matter and energy have always existed – that there is an infinite regression of natural causes. But that still doesn't account for the rational order in the universe, nor does it explain the origin of life or of intelligence. Moreover, many scientists now believe that the universe started with a "Big Bang." In other words, the universe had a definite beginning. But what caused the "Bang"?
    Another suggestion that has been made is that reality is self-creating. But this is palpable nonsense. If something does not exist, it lacks the power to do anything, let alone bring itself into existence. This hypothesis is a plunge into the bath of irrationality.
    That leaves us with one other possibility: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." This hypothesis satisfactorily explains what we can actually observe in the universe: rational order, life, and human intelligence. When one sees a garden, one naturally assumes the existence of a gardener.
    You then objected that you don't know what it meant to be "eternally existent," that you did not understand why something eternal is greater than something temporal, and you said "I don't see how being eternal solves the problem" (p. 147). Admittedly the concept of eternity is a difficult one for us to wrap our minds around, but that does not make the concept itself invalid. May we point out to you that if God is eternal He has no beginning? Nothing was required to bring Him into existence, and He is not dependent upon anything outside of Himself. So you ask the question, why does nature require a designer but not God? The answer is that it is the difference between having a finite, temporal existence and being eternal, uncreated and self-existent. It is the difference between being a part of nature and being the Creator of nature. God is Lord of heaven and earth.
    

Theistic Evolution: the Philosophical Problem

    So far in our review of Francis Collins' book The Language of God we have considered some of the theological problems involved in his version of theistic evolution. But there are philosophical problems as well.. The central question in the debate is whether or not there is such a thing as design in nature, and this, in turn, lies at the heart of the much broader question of whether or not life itself has meaning and purpose.
    Like Darwin, Dr. Collins conceives of evolution as a naturalistic process, but he also asserts the "Anthropic Principle." At the moment of the "Big Bang" 14 billion years ago the universe was precisely tuned to sustain life and ultimately produce man. But this seems to imply a kind of mechanistic determinism of the type once advocated by Laplace: by a very long chain of cause and effect the outcome of the process is determined by the beginning. But that would leave no room for the kind of moral responsibility Dr. Collins says is the distinctive feature of humankind. Moreover, as Dr. Collins points out, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle undermines any notion of mechanistic determinism. That would mean that "God plays dice," as Einstein complained, and it would also mean that the evolution of Homo sapiens is would have been far from certain. Dr. Collins tries to tell us "evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God's perspective the outcome would be entirely specified. Thus God could be completely and intimately involved in the creation of all species, while from our perspective, limited as it is by the tyranny of linear time, this would appear a random and undirected process" (p. 205).
    But Dr. Collins still has not answered the question, is there design in nature? There would appear to be three possibilities: 1) God controls each step of the process to ensure the desired outcome; 2) Evolution proceeds in a deterministic fashion, so that God can foresee the outcome without directly controlling the process; or 3)Evolution really is a random and undirected process. Dr. Collins tells us how it appears, but he is not at all clear about how it actually is. Is the design real, or is it merely apparent?

Francis Collins and Theistic Evolution

Review:
    The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
    Francis S. Collins
    Free Press, 2006
    280 pp., pb.

 
    Dr. Francis S. Collins is one of the most distinguished scientists of our time. He is the head of the Human Genome Project as well as the director of the National Institutes of Health here in the U.S. He also happens to be a devout Christian, and it is this combination of circumstances that helped make his book a New York Times bestseller.
    Dr. Collins gives us a fascinating account of his own personal journey from atheism to Christ, and then discusses, in the middle of the narrative, the current controversy between science and religion. In Dr. Collins' view the two are quite compatible, and what he offers as a solution is his version of theistic evolution. Unfortunately, his proposed solution has some serious difficulties.
    The first of these difficulties is a theological problem. In discussing evolution Dr. Collins sounds very much like his secular counterparts such as Prof. Jerry A. Coyne. He believes that all living creatures, including human beings, share a common ancestry, with single cell organisms appearing some 550 million years ago and anatomically modern humans appearing 195,000 years ago. And yet Dr. Collins wants to say that humans are somehow different – that we have a "spiritual nature" that distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom, a spiritual nature that defies evolutionary explanation.
    There are, however, several difficulties with this scenario. For one thing, in order to accommodate evolution Dr. Collins has to adopt an allegorical interpretation of Genesis chapters 1 and 2. He argues that a "day" is not necessarily a literal 24 hour day. But the problem here is that the word "day" is defined within the text itself: "God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day:" (Gen. 1:5; NKJV). It is hard to see how the human author could have intended anything other than something close to a literal 24 hour day, and virtually no one else would have interpreted it any other way prior to the 19^th Century. (Dr. Collins does note that St. Augustine raised some questions about how literally to take the six "days" of creation).
    By the same token Dr. Collins denies that there was a literal Adam and Eve. Yet the whole theology of original sin rests on the assumption of a common ancestor whose actions affected the entire race. Thus it is hard to see how the biblical narrative can be reconciled with Darwinian evolution.
    It should be noted that Dr. Collins arrived at his Christian faith largely through the philosophical arguments of C.S. Lewis. Lewis argued for the philosophical necessity of a Moral Law, which, in turn, implies both the existence of God as its author and a special capacity in human beings to discern this Law. To support the idea of evolution Dr. Collins relies heavily on comparative genetics and the presence of "junk DNA," both updated versions of the older arguments drawn from comparative anatomy and vestigial organs. Thus Dr. Collins begins with a philosophical presupposition, combines that with the standard scientific understanding of evolution, and then makes his interpretation of Scripture conform to the resulting conclusion. The result is that his theology is biblically weak, and this is a problem for the Christian believer who takes seriously the authority of Scripture as a divine revelation.

 
Next: the philosophical problem.

Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?

We have already stated in a previous blog post that our knowledge about God and reality rests upon the concurrence of three independent lines of evidence: nature, Scripture and conscience. Skeptics, however, have challenged all three. We have already devoted attention to the first, nature, involving science and evolution. What about the second, Scripture? In a recent comment on this blog Tildeb stated the objection this way: "All we really have is testimonials – often contradictory and out of sequence – in the form 'I know a guy who knew a guy who said he once knew of this guy who performed miracles.'" Making allowance for a certain amount of exaggeration on Tildeb's part, the statement does more or less reflect the thinking of modern critical scholarship on the issue. But is it true?

    Almost all of the information we have about the historical Jesus is contained in the four gospels of the New Testament. The "Gnostic gospels" of which we have heard so much about lately have little historical connection with First Century Palestine and are obvious attempts to recast Christianity in the mold of Greek philosophy.

    But how historically reliable are the four biblical gospels? Who wrote them, and how much did they know? The traditional view was stated by the Second Century church father Irenaeus, who tells us this: Matthew originally wrote his gospel in the language of the Hebrews (evidently either Hebrew or Aramaic). Mark wrote down what the apostle Peter had preached. Luke did the same with the Apostle Paul, and then finally John, a member of Jesus' inner circle, wrote his gospel. Thus while John gives us a firsthand eyewitness account, and Mark relates for us Peter's firsthand account, Luke is the careful third person historian, diligently gathering information and scrupulously weighing his sources, to give us a comprehensive biography of Jesus. Thus if the traditional accounting is correct, we are hardly dealing with hearsay evidence.

    All of this has been called into question in modern times, however. The chief stumbling block appears to be that all of the gospels record Jesus as performing miracles. Again, Tildeb states the objection. In order to believe the gospel accounts we have to suspend what we know about nature. Miracle do not happen; therefore the stories are implausible. The historical Jesus could not possible have done some of the things that He is reported to have done.

    How, then, did these stories get into the Bible? The modern critical answer is pretty much "I know a guy who knew a guy . . ." According to the modern critical reconstruction of events, the four gospels were written at a relatively late date by persons who were not eyewitnesses. Stories were handed down by word of mouth, and changed over time to meet the apologetic needs of the church.

    However, the methodology of the modern critics is questionable. They begin by subjecting the available evidence to intense scrutiny, and then conclude that it is either ambiguous or unreliable. One might suppose that this would leave us in a position of skepticism about the origins of the gospels, but surprisingly it does not. The critics go on to reconstruct the history of the gospels, relying very heavily on a subjective reading of the texts. But the reconstruction is mostly conjectural. What the critics have done, in effect, is to get rid of the evidence and replace it with speculation. O the marvels of modern scholarship!

    Ironically, confirmation of the traditional view comes from an unlikely source. One of the leading liberal theologians, Dr. John A. T. Robinson, published Redating the New Testament in 1976. Dr. Robinson was struck by the fact that not one of the New Testament writers mentions the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70 as a past event, which they almost certainly would have otherwise. Dr. Robinson went through and reexamined all of the evidence, and concluded that conservative scholars had largely been right all along. Most, at least, of the books of the New Testament had to have been written prior to A.D. 70.

    What the "I know a guy who knew a guy . . ." scenario overlooks is the role of the apostles in the transmission of information about Jesus. Jesus did not leave Himself without witnesses. He worked closely throughout His earthly ministry with a group of handpicked disciples. They saw Him alive after His crucifixion. The books that make up the New Testament are in the New Testament precisely because they were either written by apostles or by people who were closely associated with the apostles. The witnesses are so many, and they are so close in time to Jesus Himself, that they cannot possible all be wrong. Thus when we weight the evidence carefully and objectively, we are face to face with a crucified and risen Savior!