Logic, it seems to me, can only be explained by the existence of God.

By far, most people in the history of the world have believed in the existence of God. But some of course come to believe that God does not exist. Now I think it is painfully clear that people who reject God never do so only on the basis of arguments and evidence. I can say this confidently because we humans never come to our core worldview beliefs without emotions, desires and past experiences figuring in in significant ways. It is certainly true of people who come to Christian belief and it is equally true of those who come to deny those beliefs.

Though we may be, in some ways, driven by emotions or desires, there is still always a logic to our beliefs. That is, there are always reasons why we believe what we do. These reasons may be good or bad and they may or may not be formed in a very reflective way. But there is logic there whenever we form a belief.

What is logic?

But what is logic? If you think about it logic is a bit odd. We believe things on the basis of reasons. The reasons we have provide logical support for our beliefs (again, good or bad). We will even base our very lives on the logic of our core beliefs.

Suppose you have a big decision to make. You need to decide whether you will go to college. You take out a piece of paper and list out all of the reasons for and against going to college right now in your life. Let’s say there are clearly more and much stronger reasons for going to college than reasons against it. So you now believe, quite rationally, college is a good idea for you right now in your life.

What happened in that process?

Well it seems you (knowingly or unknowingly) used the principles of logic to come to a decision. In other words, you went with the reasons that accorded with the principles of logic.

An example of a principle of logic is the principle of non-contradiction (PNC). According to Aristotle:

…opposite assertions cannot be true at the same time (Metaphics IV 6 1011b13–20)

Put somewhat differently, this principle says…

for any statement A, it can’t be the case that A and not A at the same time.

This is necessarily true for any statement you want to plug in for A.

It can’t be the case that the Boston Red Sox won the World Series and did not win the World Series at the same time.

The Red Sox could win and not win the World Series in different years (and this true for this year and last year). But they could not, at the same time, both win and not win. To assert something like this is to assert something necessarily false and not even sensible.

Logic is necessary and universal

The truth of the principle of non-contradiction isn’t a matter of mere opinion (try denying the principle of noncontradiction without using it!).[1]

It is widely held that the PNC and all logical principles are objectively and universally true. Many philosophers will say they are true in all possible worlds! This means that logic is not tied to the way our world is. Whatever it is, it exists as a feature of reality that couldn’t not be the case and it is used every time we make and support a claim.

If logic is this real thing that exists outside time and space, then this entails that the natural world is not all there is. In other words, the supernatural (as in supra-natural) must exist.

Explaining logic

Now how do we explain this? It seems to me one has to say either that logical facts exist as brute facts or they are explained by God. If one says they are brute facts, then this just means they are unexplained. So this means that for logic to be explained, one is lead back to God as its explanation.

I’ll leave the technical issues aside here, but my own view is that the eternal truths of logic are grounded in the mind of God. Being aware of the principles of logic is us literally being aware of features of God’s mind. Help me out Chris Pratt?

Okay, so here then is the irony. People use logic to argue against the one thing that grounds their ability to make that very argument. And this is God.

I’m convinced that without God we are left without an adequate explanation of life’s most important aspects.

Check out my book Logic and the Way of Jesus: Thinking Critically and Christianly

[1] To deny the truth of the PNC, you’d have to say the principle is not true and we are only able to say this by the PNC. This makes the denial self-refuting.

Authority Issues

Christians have always been extremely wary of holding anything, such as philosophy or “reason” or evidence, as an authority over Scripture. It is sometimes argued that if one appeals to something as a reason to believe Scripture, then that thing becomes one’s authority. But, for the Christian, nothing can stand in authority over Scripture. Thus, we cannot use reason and evidence as our basis for believing the claims of Scripture.

The very prominent theologian, Wayne Grudem, has said:

Since the words of Scripture are “self-attesting,” they cannot be “proved” to be God’s words by appeal to any higher authority. If we make our ultimate appeal, for example, to human logic or to scientific truth to prove that the Bible is God’s Word, then we assume the thing to which we appeal to be a higher authority than God’s words and one that is more true or more reliable. Therefore, the ultimate authority by which Scripture is shown to be God’s words must be Scripture itself.[1]

Is Scripture Self-Attesting?

Though it is a common phrase in the history of theology, it seems difficult to know exactly what is meant by saying Scripture is “self-attesting.” Grudem himself goes on to explain this as the persuasiveness of Scripture in the actual experience of the world. But if this is right, then Scripture doesn’t seem truly self-attesting. It is seems to be the experiences of the world that attest to its truth in persuading us. Grudem goes on to even more explicitly contradict his initial claim (so it seems to me) by saying we can have evidence for the authority of scripture without that evidence becoming a higher authority. He says:

This is not to say that our knowledge of the world around us serves as a higher authority than Scripture, but rather that such knowledge, if it is correct knowledge, continues to give greater and greater assurance and deeper conviction that the Bible is the only truly ultimate authority.[2]

I would agree. It looks like he is suggesting here we can make appeal to what we know about the world and see that it (the evidence) points to Scripture’s authority. This seems to concede (despite what Grudem said above) that something can play an epistemological role in believing and recognizing a thing’s authority without itself becoming the ultimate authority.

Question: “Is the Bible God’s Word?”

The real epistemological issue we face in believing that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God is what we do when the question is “is the Bible the Word of God?” This question, it seems, can’t be answered merely by looking to the claims of Scripture attesting to this fact, at least not without vicious circularity. To avoid circularity, we’ll need to use reasons and evidence to come to the belief that Scripture is authoritative. But our coming to know that Scripture is God’s revealed word doesn’t take away from its authority in our lives. Once we come to know that it is God’s word, then we recognize and submit to its authority (the authority, by the way, it possessed all along). How do we recognize it is God’s Word? I am extremely broadminded as to what counts as evidence for this claim.

Evidence Broadly Construed

Consider the following example. Suppose Al is standing before a complete library of the world’s great religious texts. The Bible is there alongside the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, Book of Mormon, the Upanishads, etc. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that each of these claim, in effect, to be divine revelation. Standing there before all of these options, how could Al decide which one is correct? It can’t be the mere fact that the Bible claims to be God’s word. This is because, again, they all make this claim. How is Al going to decide?

Let’s suppose someone, whom Al has reason to think is trustworthy, tells him that the Bible is God’s divine word. Al now has one (i.e., a preacher) testifying to the Word of God (Rom. 10:14). Let’s also suppose the Holy Spirit stirs in Al’s spirit confirming that the Bible is God’s divine word. In this, Al hears and recognizes the voice of God (See Jn. 10:27). Al now, it seems, has epistemological reason to think the Bible is God’s authoritative word. Though Al now has reasons to believe, he can and should improve the epistemic status of his belief. He can engage in an intentional study of the text itself and begin to see how Scripture accords with the world. He will also no doubt notice the consistency and harmony of the message throughout the biblical text. Let’s also suppose he begins to read Scripture as a guide and, as he internalizes its claims, it begins to change his heart and life. Al now possess an even stronger epistemological basis for his belief in Scripture’s authority.

Many don’t think of the preacher or the Holy Spirit as providing evidence. But it is not clear why we shouldn’t. Much of what we believe is on the basis of testimonial evidence. This is where a person, whom we have reason to trust (this is important!), reports something as a fact. It seems we thereby have some reason to believe the account. It is defeasible evidence, but it is evidential in nature. This may include testimony of our parents, our teachers, books we read, etc.  But again, a trusted person telling you something has some evidential value. Again, I am employing a notion of reason in an extremely broad sense.

No one will be surprised that I think Al should also turn to topics in apologetics related to the authenticity and authority of Scripture. One should come away with the distinct impression from this study that this is no ordinary book. None of this, as I’ve argued, should take away from the authority of Scripture. Indeed one has reason upon reason (I would argue) to yield one’s life to its authority.

(This is comes from a journal length article that will be published in the Southwestern Journal of Theology).

[1] Wayne Grudem, Bible Doctrine: Essential Teachings of the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), 37.

[2] Ibid., 39.

In one of the best books on Christian apologetics in the last 50 years, Reasonable Faith, William Lane Craig says something rather provocative. He thinks that the proper basis for knowing that Christianity is true is not the evidence for Christianity. This might strike one as more than a bit odd given that Craig is the one of the world’s foremost Christian apologists. Craig certainly has a high view of the evidence for Christianity’s truth given the fact that he routinely takes on Christianity’s most difficult critics in formal debates on the evidence for Christianity.

So what’s going on?

Knowing and Showing

In the book, Craig makes a distinction between knowing and showing. He says:

…the way we know Christianity to be true is by the self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit. Now what do I mean by that? I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for him who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God; that such experience does not function in this case as a premise in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself; that in certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion, such as “God exists,” “I am condemned by God,” “I am reconciled to God,” “Christ lives in me,” and so forth.[1]

Craig’s idea is the inner experience of the Spirit of God Himself—where He testifies to His existence and the truths of the gospel—is the primary way in which people come to the knowledge of Christianity. His idea seems to be that the best way to know something is to have direct experience of that thing. Though we can know in this way, we cannot share things known by inner experience. This is simply a fact about our inner experiences. We might say to another, “I feel your pain,” but we don’t mean it literally. What we mean by this empathetic claim is that we understand that one is feeling pain, and we have had what we take to be a similar feeling of pain. But mere testimony of an inner experience is not a good way to convey (i.e., provide evidence of) what the pain is like.

We can, likewise, tell people about inner religious experiences, but unless one has a similar experience, then this testimony seems too weak, in terms of evidence, to constitute knowledge.

So, for Craig, the best way (perhaps the only way) for us to convince another person of the truth of Christianity is to show that Christianity is true with arguments and evidence, which is what Craig offers in his debates, his books, and his interactions with students across the globe. Craig seems to think that this evidence, though it can move one along in their journey towards Christ, it never results in genuine knowledge unless and until God makes himself known to that individual. And it is not necessary for knowledge. The person completely uneducated in the arguments of Christian apologetics can be perfectly rational on the basis of his or her direct experience of God. Thus arguments and evidence play, at most, a ministerial or subsidiary role on the way to knowledge.

I think Craig’s distinction is problematic for two reasons.

Inner experience as evidence

First, though I certainly agree that religious inner experience is important for coming to a genuine and full knowledge of Christianity’s truth, it seems to me that it should be understood as part of one’s overall evidence set. That is, I deny that there is a substantive distinction between evidence, on one hand, and the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit, on the other. The direct experience of God just is evidence—indeed, great evidence—for the truth of Christianity. This is described as testimony and experiences, after all, and we typically think of testimony and experience as evidence.[2]

This is best seen within the broader discussion of evidentialism in epistemology. In this discussion, it seems to me that inner experiences such as this would just count as evidence. Again, direct experience of some fact is typically thought to be the best sort of evidence (such as one’s acquaintance with what’s immediately before them). The debate in epistemology is whether we can be rationally justified by facts without our being aware of these facts (e.g., Plantinga thinks that we can have, what he calls, warrant for our beliefs in virtue of their being produced by properly functioning faculties even if we are not aware that our faculties’ proper function[3]). The evidentialist thinks there must there be something of which we are aware that points to the truth of our belief (call this evidence) in order for one to be rational. The point is that what Craig identifies as the proper basis of religious knowledge seems to fall within this category of evidence since these are facts of which we are aware that point to the truth of our beliefs.

 Experience needs interpretation

But this is mostly a terminological issue. The more pressing issue with this distinction is that inner experience, all by itself, doesn’t seem to provide a good basis for knowing Christianity is true. The inner experiences that we have seem crucially to need interpretation. The typical religious experience does not seem to have enough content to serve as the primary basis of our knowledge.

For example, let’s say one is in an evangelistic service and experiences an overwhelming sense of awe. Is this sufficient all by itself to rationally believe that the claims being made in the service are true? It seems not. Many Christians would agree that this is inadequate if it was, say, a Mormon evangelistic service. But why should this experience justify the belief in the Christian gospel?

Craig is quite aware of this objection and says that the counterfeit experience of, say, the Mormon does nothing to take away from his veridical experience.[4] But one seems to need reason for thinking that the experience is in fact veridical. If merely being veridical was sufficient, then all skeptical concerns could similarly be dismissed. When the skeptic asks how one knows that one is not in the Matrix given it would be qualitatively indistinguishable experience, it simply doesn’t address her concern to assert that one’s experience is veridical. She’s likely to ask again, “but how do you know it’s veridical?”

Now Craig might not think that the Christian and Mormon experiences are qualitatively indistinguishable, but this seems impossible to verify. If they are qualitatively indistinguishable, then the rest of one’s evidences will need to play more than a subsidiary role. It will have to be this inner experience of God along with the Christian evidences that rationally justifies one’s belief.

Do Christians have evidence?

One motivation for Craig’s view is the fact that many Christians have never considered the apologetic evidence for Christianity, and yet they certainly seem to believe Christianity in a rational way. Craig thinks that one need not have familiarity with apologetics to know that Christianity is true. And I agree! But, I’ll end with a provocative statement: I think that the typical Christian has evidence for the truth of Christianity (including the inner and outer experiences of God, but also the natural signs seen in the world,[5] etc.) even if he or she does not know any formal apologetic arguments. There’s no doubt most Christians can greatly improve their evidence and rational basis by considering the rich tradition of Christian apologetics. But to think that most Christians do not have any evidence is just to have an unnecessarily narrowed concept of ‘evidence.’

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[1] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith:  Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3d ed. (Wheaton, Il: Crossway, 2008), 43.

[2] There are some approaches to Christian apologetics that understand “evidence” as only formal arguments and “evidentialism” as the view that formal apologetic arguments are necessary for faith. This is a much derided view. The only problem is that I know of no one who actually holds this view. The discussion of evidentialism in epistemology is far more precise (than the one in Christian apologetics).

[3] See Alvin Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief (Eerdmans, 2015).

[4] Craig, Reasonable Faith, 49.

[5] See C. Stephen Evans, Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (New York: OUP, 2010).

More than one way to doubt

There are a variety of ways to doubt. The two most talk about forms of doubt are emotional doubt and intellectual doubt.

We can sometimes have every intellectual reason in the world to believe something is true, and yet we doubt. This form of doubt, and we’ve all faced it to greater or lesser degree, is emotional doubt (or sometimes called psychological doubt). An extreme example of this form of doubting is one who has a phobia of flying. The person may know everything there is to know about flight safety, and know (intellectually) that flying on an airplane is, by almost every metric, safer than, say, driving in a car, and yet the person will dramatically doubt the reasonableness of getting on the plane.

When it comes to Christian faith, we can sometimes be in a very good position intellectually in believing the truths of Christianity, and yet there is a kind of emotional inability to take the plunge.

This is a real battle. It’s a battle that, as a philosopher, I’m frankly not well equipped to engage (I wouldn’t suggest me for marriage counseling either!). I would however recommend that you read Gary Habermas on this issue. He has two books on emotional doubt and he’s graciously published these on his website here and here.

Making this distinction is not to say that there are no intellectual considerations when it comes to emotional doubt. It is also not to say that there are no emotions involved when we doubt intellectually. Like most things, it gets messy. But I’m primarily focused on (and much better equipped to think about) intellectual doubt.

It is also very common to wrestle with some objection to one of our beliefs. When the objection has to do with whether a new season of Dancing with the Stars begins tonight, this is not too big of a deal (Okay, for some it might be a pretty big deal!). However, when we wrestle intellectually with objections at the worldview level (informing issues religious commitment, politics, morality, etc.), this can be quite difficult. At times, it forces us to call into question our most cherished beliefs.

But what is intellectual doubt?

I characterize intellectual doubt as when we experience the intellectual pull or the force of some objection to a belief we have.

What’s interesting about doubt is that when we doubt, we have not yet conceded the objection. We just feel the force of it. We find it, to some degree, plausible. The objection has a kind of pull on us and yet, if we are still in a place of doubt, we still believe.

Suppose that I believe that a new season of Dancing with the Stars begins tonight and someone tells me it does not begin until next week. I now have an objection to my belief. But I’m not sure who is right. So I may still believe that it begins tonight and yet I’m now doubting it.

The nature of intellectual doubt

With this, we can give something of an analysis of doubt.

A person, S, doubts that p if and only if…

1. S believes that p is true.
2. For some objection to p, S does not yet concede the objection, but finds it plausible to some degree.

Let’s illustrate. Suppose Smith believes that God exists. But let’s say someone challenges Smith with the problem of evil. Smith is asked how a good and all powerful God could create a world with so much and so much horrendous pain and suffering. Smith doesn’t have a good answer for this and it is claimed that the belief in God is incompatible with the evil we see in the world. Smith feels the force or the pull of this objection. Smith maintains his belief in God (we can assume he has reasons for this that make him rational) but is feeling the force of this objection. Smith doubts his belief since…

1. Smith believes that God exists.
2. Smith does not yet concede that the problem of evil defeats the belief in God, but she is finding the objection plausible.

What to do about doubt

Now I think a more detailed analysis can be given here and I have given that elsewhere.[1] However, this account suffices to make the following point. Our doubts should drive us to look deeper. They should drive us to investigate the evidence both for and against. We should investigate whether the objection indeed defeats our belief. If we are believe that Dancing with the Stars begins tonight and yet we have an objection to this fact, then it seems the only thing we can do to alleviate this tension is to investigate further. Somebody grab the TV Guide!

If we believe that God exists, but we just ran into a thoughtful expression of the problem of evil, then I don’t know what to do other than look further into it. It’s not like the problem of evil recently fell from the sky. This has been debated for millennia. Millennia! In fact, a great statement of the problem of evil can be found in Epicurus from about 24 centuries ago! Christians and other theists have responded. In fact, one could easily spend a decade reading the problem of evil literature and probably not exhaust it. I don’t actually think that the theistic response is a complete slam dunk. The problem of evil is a difficult problem, but there are certainly important and really helpful theistic responses to the problem. Though none of them are slam dunks, I am very satisfied by the Christian answer to the problem of evil. But this is because I’ve looked into it.

Christians very often tend to either shun objections. They just seem to be able to ignore them insulated against potential problem. Or some allow objections to simply have their way with them.

There’s nothing I know to do with an objection other than to push in and investigate the rationality of the objection

One last point. You may need to change your mind. You may find that something you believe is not well supported. On a personal note, I’ve yet to find the smoking gun objection when it comes to my Christian faith. That is, there is no salient objection to Christianity that I don’t find an extensive literature of thoughtful Christians offering thoughtful answers some of which I find very satisfying intellectually.

Given this, we shouldn’t, as Christians, be afraid to encourage folks to explore the answers to deep and difficult questions. Again, what’s the alternative?

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[1] “Doubt as Virtue: How to Doubt and Have Faith without Exploding” in The Christian Research Journal (Issue 39 Volume #4, 2016).

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