Atheistic Amens

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now and then, and sometimes atheists say things that make you want to shout, "Amen!!!"

"I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian." (Atheist Christopher Hitchens responding to Unitarian "Christian" minister Maryiln Sewell's denial of Christ's atonement)

"prosperity gospel" preachers..teach that God will reward those who give as much cash as they possibly can to his self-appointed representatives on Earth. These televangelists are obsessed with money and shamelessly exploit the faith and gullibility of their flocks to enrich themselves." (From Daylight Atheism: Probing the Prosperity Gospel)

“How can you know if you’ve saved someone if there’s never follow-up, never counseling, never a progress report? How can you be sure the person hasn’t instantly reverted to his old ways? In other words, aren’t you simply counting the people who prayed the prayer in that instant rather than counting new Christians?… If you’re a sincere Christian you believe all it takes is that instant, as long as you’re sincere. Once you’ve prayed the sinner’s prayer, you’re good to go. God is supposed to abide in you and guide you, but really your ‘ways’ don’t matter. Your name is written forever in the Lamb’s book of life.’ It seemed evident that evangelicals were padding their rosters.” (Atheist Gina Welsh: In the Land of Believers: An Outsider’s Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church, Metropolitan, 2010, p. 254)

It's a shame when atheists have a better grasp of Christian truth than nominal Christians.

The Knowledge Of God Part II

The God of Knowledge

"...in [Christ] are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." (Colossians 2:3)

“If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. . . .” .(C.S. Lewis, They Asked for a Paper - London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962, 164–165.)

Pontius Pilate asked "What is Truth?" (John 18:38). Jesus Christ proclaimed Himself to be the truth (John 14:6). This clash of worldviews provides a glimpse into the folly of unbelieving epistemology (theory of knowledge). By rejecting the Christ who is the foundation of all knowledge, the unbeliever has no objective defense of his own ability to know anything. The result of consistent unbelief is utter skepticism, and even then, unbelievers must know something about their lack of knowledge in order to be skeptics.

Man the Measure?

So what is truth, and how do we justify what we know to be truth? The naturalist is hard pressed to justify any sort of human knowledge, since he holds that knowledge is the product of the human brain, and the brain a product of a cosmic accident. By rejecting the need for divine revelation concerning knowledge, the unbeliever must either become intellectually autonomous, or else deny that knowledge itself is possible or meaningful (skepticism). In relativism, the idea of absolute truth is rejected. The father of modern relativism is (apparently) Protagoras, who was famous for stating that "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not". Truth and falsehood are dependent on individual impressions, and truth is relegated to mere belief. Modern religious pluralists have invented a "subjective truth" that does just that. Socrates countered Protagoras with the classic "recoil argument", along the lines of this declarative:

A Everyone believes what is the case.

A--->B If everyone believes what is the case, than those who deny that everyone believes what is the case also believe what is the case.

B=~A The belief that everyone believes what is the case and belief that everyone does not believe what is the case cannot both be the case. (Law of non-contradiction).

~A It is not the case that everyone believes what is the case.

As one can easily see, relativism's need to reduce true knowledge to personal belief is self defeating when applied to its most basic premise. Shooting an arrow into a barn door and painting the bull's eye around it doesn't make one a skilled archer, but rather makes the shot meaningless.  The end result of relativism is sheer skepticism. The statement "there are no objective truths" cannot possibly be true, thus there has to be an objective form of truth independent of man, and relativism fails to account for or justify true knowledge.

Another option for the autonomous man is empiricism, the belief that true knowledge arises from sense experience. Aristotle tells us that “we prefer sight to almost everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.” (Metaphysics, Book I Section 980a21). This produces a dilemma for the father of logic, for we must inquire how he knows this to be true. If he uses sense experience to arrive at his conclusion, he has committed an argumentum ad circulum? On the other hand, if he uses any other justification for this belief, how can we know that it is the most authoritative knowledge of particulars? The empiricist’s dilemma can be illustrated as follows:

P1: All true knowledge must come from empirical evidence.

P2: There is no empirical evidence to support the idea that all true knowledge must come from empirical evidence.

Conclusion: The idea that all true knowledge must come from empirical evidence is not true knowledge.

William Clifford, in his essay "The Ethics of Belief", takes empiricism to another level, holding that man has a moral duty to forsake belief that runs contrary to empiricism. Clifford assures us that holding to a conviction without questioning it is "one long sin against mankind", and that skepticism is a moral duty until sufficient evidence becomes available to support a conviction. But a multitude of problems arise from Clifford's work. What amounts to "sufficient evidence"? How can one determine if evidence is sufficient without first having some sort of knowledge? As it turns out, evidence itself is a subjective matter. What a person accepts as evidence is determined by his own metaphysical presuppositions. Hinduism holds that the entire physical universe is maya, or illusion, and thus sense experience cannot be trusted. What type of sufficient evidence could free one of such skepticism? Furthermore, how does an empiricist find any truth outside of personal sense experience? Clifford examines the "limits of inference", and tells us that "we may add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity of nature". We'll look more into this area when we examine the knowledge of God through science, but on what ethical ground does Clifford allow for such an assumption?  Clifford writes,

"What this uniformity precisely is, how we grow in the knowledge of it from generation to generation, these are questions which for the present we lay aside..."

To my knowledge, Clifford never takes these questions up again. Clifford's skepticism is thus arbitrary, requiring some presuppositional knowledge in order to establish what he considers to be "sufficient evidence".

A third problem with Clifford's viewpoint is that it requires an a priori knowledge of morality, certainly something that mere empiricism cannot account for. Empiricism is a useful tool, but alone cannot account for true knowledge, since it not only cannot justify induction, but is also self-defeating, and requires some degree of knowledge before it can be used.

Closely related to the relativists are the sophists, who hold that the pragmatic view that truth is whatever works satisfactorily.  William James suggests that belief at any moment can be passional, without any moral consequences, as long as there are no claims of absolute truth. Belief, according to James, can be shown by empirical evidence to be either more or less true, as the risk of error is small in comparison to the blessings of obtaining real knowledge. However, such a view of truth required some a priori knowledge of "whatever works", and suffers from the same recoil problem inherent in relativism. James, in response to Clifford, asks,

"Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?"

It's a fair question to ask of both the relativist and the empiricist, since neither can provide any foundation for epistemology. As it turns out, not only does the materialist worldview fail to account for human knowledge, but it also makes any appeal to reason and logic an exercise of futility. This can be seen in the last possibility for the autonomous man, realism. Secular realism seeks to establish consciousness as part of some (undefined) reality, but fails to establish how this can be known or how it can be the foundation of true knowledge. If the physical laws that govern the material world are all that exist, then they, of necessity, govern our thought processes as well. In that case, ideas such as free thought, rationality, or meaningful inquiry are but a pipe dream. Knowledge has no meaning apart from God, and thus the logical conclusions of an atheistic worldview are genetic and epistemological determinism. (We are what our genes say we are, and we believe what our neurons tell us to believe.)

As we can see, when a man becomes autonomous in his epistemology, he has no ground on which he can claim to know anything. The fact that man both obtains and acts upon knowledge as an objective truth is proof that he knows God. He lives in God's universe, and cannot even function apart from acknowledging him in some way. Knowledge is possible because God has enabled the mind of man to connect with reality, and gives him an understanding of the tools by which knowledge may be increased. Thus we can prove the existence of God by way of the following syllogism:

P1: If man can obtain meaningful knowledge, then God exists, since God is the precondition of human knowledge.

P2: Man can obtain knowledge.

Conclusion: God exists.

The common denominator of unbelievers of any stripe is the idea that God has not revealed Himself in the Holy Scriptures. The problem that the unbeliever has isn't a lack of proof, such as I have just offered up, nor is it a lack of evidence. The problem that the unbeliever has is metaphysical. He has precommitted himself to a materialistic worldview, and this precommitment alone will determine what the unbeliever will accept as "sufficient evidence". Yet we can see the groundless epistemology that results from the presupposition that man is the measure of all things.  Truly, God has "made foolish the wisdom of the world". (1 Corinthians 1:20).

The Futility of Worldly Knowledge

The world seeks after wisdom. At no time has this held more truth, as worldly wisdom has been offered as the potential solution to every imaginable issue of our day. Just ask any politician what the answers are to the problems of AIDS, Terrorism, Racism, Poverty, Hunger, etc. The answer most often presented is "education". If we just become more "educated", or more "aware", then it is believed that we can fix these all of our problems and create a Utopia. Yet this has been tried before. 

"And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind. For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow." (Ecclesiastes 1:17-18)

As it turns out, the more men know the more that we realize that we don't know. Rather than being the solution to all of our problems, knowledge "under the sun", i.e. in a godless world, is "but a striving after wind". In fact, such knowledge tends to increase sorrow.

Now clearly there is a benefit to obtaining knowledge, even "under the sun". "Then I saw that there is more gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than in darkness." (Ecclesiastes 2:13) There is no doubt that education has a purpose, and knowledge has practical benefits during life on earth. But when all is said and done, all knowledge "under the sun" is of no benefit. "For of the wise as of the fool there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten. How the wise dies just like the fool!" (Ecclesiastes 2:16). May we instead be seekers of the wisdom that comes from above, for "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom..." (Psalms 111:10).