What do you have? Robot juice and watermelons. Okay. I'm really worried about that. No, I don't. I don't even know what that is. I probably just need a coffee. And I'm not even going to try to take one. I'm going to try to go without it. But if the need comes up, I don't have a 20-minute coffee fit. Thank you so much. All right, let's talk a little bit about Blaise Pascal. We've gone through the arguments for God's existence, and Pascal's wager be one of their popular arguments for God's existence. But I've got news for them, it's not an argument for God's existence. So I purposely save it for after the arguments for God's existence that we've already discussed. And so, a little background on Blaise Pascal's Pascal died in the early 1600s, I believe, or at least in the 1600s. And his ponses, I don't even know if that's two E's or one E's, one E, but it's just French for thoughts. He was one of the most brilliant guys who ever lived. He was only 39 years old when he died. He was writing his own apologetics textbook. He was writing his own defense of the faith. And all he had was hundreds of notes all over the place. And then he died. So they figured, well, let's publish his apologetic work. So let's put it together and publish it. Problem is, we don't know what Now, I've got a chapter in Pascal on contenderism and faith, but I think I got his thought a little bit out of order. And in my Seventh Grade Apologist, I edited that, the psychological apologetics of Blaise Pascal, to where I think I have the proper order now. But basically, in Pascal's thought, his pensées fellow Frenchman, fellow mathematician, Rene Descartes. So you'll see him mentioning Descartes a few times in the work and he's always responding to him. And his problem with Descartes, Descartes was an ultra-rationalist. He believed you could prove everything through reason alone. Descartes thought actually led to modernism. He believed that we could find all truth and solve all our problems through human reason alone. which end, eventually we fell so in love with reason, the gift, that we forgot all about God, the gift giver, and we used reason to argue against God. And then the modernist project failed so miserably that the backlash of that, because with modernism we start out with the rational, we talk about The last stage of modernism is existentialism, where you still have the individual, but the reason's gone. We don't even believe in absolute truth anymore, absolute morality. Now we don't even trust reason, so you just have the individual and the act of the will. They actualize themselves by their will. Well, eventually you lose even the individual, and that's postmodernism. community's narrative, you know, like the Liberation theologians, they're kind of post-modern Marxist theologians, and so they read Karl Marx, they read, you know, there's no objective true history, so they turn Jesus into the greatest by trying to prove everything through reason alone. Now, you remember, I'm going to use skepticism as a method to find truth. So he's not a skeptic, but he said, I'm going to doubt everything until I can find something that is impossible for me to doubt. And so the more he doubted, he doubted the world of the senses and all, the more he doubted, So he said, look, doubting is a form of thinking. I think, therefore I am. And from that he started to build his defense of Christianity. Blaise Pascal is often... people will often treat him as if he's an irrationalist. because he's slamming Descartes. Well, this is not true. Pascal, you know, wrote papers on geometry. He was an expert mathematician. He wrote the laws of probability. He was a scientist. He had a very high view of human reason. who believes by faith alone. Look, hey, no Phineas is going to come up with about a hundred pages of historical not an irrational being, period. Man's a rational being, comma. Blaise Pascal says that we make a lot of our decisions and we don't even refer, reference reason. And then Pascal, he says, so Pascal, I would argue that Pascal had a high view of reason No trust in fallen man's ability to use his reason in an unbiased manner. That's kind of an overstatement there, The reason works. The problem is us. We're flawed. So most of us make our decisions based on something other than reason. Okay? Maybe it's our will. Maybe it's our emotions. Okay? Our desires, whatever. Intuition. But then we sneak reason in through the back door to defend what we already believe. Okay? It's kind of like, you know, deep down inside I really, if I took a lie detector test, I would probably pass, arguing that Kenny Stabler is the greatest quarterback in NFL history. Now, I'm a Raider fan. something else, something other than rational grounds, but I can still bring my reason in through the back door and then start building a case. And so Pascal wants us, he says, look, when we use our reason, we never use it in an unbiased way. So, when it comes to God's existence, we're either going to be biased, in favor of God, biased towards God, or biased against God. There's no such thing as Rene Descartes' unbiased, rational individual. The guy doesn't exist. The gal doesn't exist. If you're human, you're biased. But he says there's good, non-rational, what I would call psychological reasons for being biased towards God, and not against God. So his wager argument is not an argument that God exists, it's an argument that we ought to hope that God exists and we ought to be willing to wager our lives on God's existence. In other words, it's an argument we ought to seek God with all our hearts. So Pascal, he talks about Descartes, You know, you're standing in a long line and each person is getting executed one after another and you know your number is coming up. You're going to be slaughtered. And they said this is the human condition. So man's greatest enemy is death. Until we find victory over death, okay, even worth living if we don't find victory over death. Now, we could despair. We could go dancing. Pascal said that because they didn't have television, radio, video games yet. So he said, so what do we do? We know we're going to die. He also talks about the human dilemma, that man is great, but man is also wretched. But it's not like evolutionarily we evolved from wretchedness and now we're great. It's more of the wretchedness of a dispossessed king. We're supposed to be a king, but we're walking around like paupers. But we know this isn't working really. In other words, it's the acknowledgement that we were created in God's image, but now we have fallen. Okay? And so we can despair about death and man's dilemma, or we can divert our attention, but... I mean, you want to despair and kill yourself, Pascal can't help you. Okay? You want to divert your attention, though? That's foolish. see a theme here, it all started with D. That was my idea. But just by learning these D's you can really understand Pascal's plot. So this kind of gives us the faces from which we can now intelligently look at Pascal's Wager. They said, look, you're going to be biased for God or against God when you look at the evidence. Now, he talked about arguments for God's existence, and he doesn't necessarily rule them out. He says, OK, let's say you use sophisticated philosophical arguments for God's existence, rational arguments for God's existence. Most times your arguments are going to be over people's heads, says Pascal. So he says, most times you're going to be wasting your time, that people aren't going to understand you. The people who do understand you, assuming your arguments are valid, you're going to convince them for the moment, but the next day they're going to forget the force of your argument, and they're not going to believe in God anymore. Or, best case scenario, your arguments are valid, the person understood them, you convinced them, now they believe that God exists, and now you've got a hell-bound theist, because he's not trusting in Jesus yet for salvation. So Pascal says, look, there's so little success with the philosophical arguments, let's just bypass them. That's a pretty big thing to say when you've got, like, 1,500 years of these arguments floating. In fact, even longer than that, you go all the way back to Plato and some traditional arguments for the god of theism, at least. But he says, why don't we just and get right down to dealing with man psychologically, with man's biases, make a case that we ought to be biased towards God before looking at the evidence, and then we'll look at the historical evidence for Jesus. So Pascal's wager, you know, he was not a betting man, but he wrote the Laws of Probability, So he's probably the foremost expert in what a good bet is. So either God exists... Now, you can wager your life against God, or you can wager your life for God. Let's put He claims to be a wise man. Paul says, professing to be wise, they become fools. But he claims to be a wise man. He's a brilliant guy, and he knows a lot of stuff. He's got a lot of knowledge, but is he wise? Pascal would say no, because Dawkins is wagering against God. In the Expelled movie, he acknowledges there's a possibility that God exists. He doesn't know how great or how small that possibility is. He thinks it's a small possibility, but I think it's too small a possibility, we should just assume that God doesn't exist and move on. Blaise Pascal at age 39 was a lot smarter than Richard Dawkins will ever be. They came up with this thing, I think they rated Blaise Pascal, probably had the 8th highest IQ and human history, and I don't know how they figured out the data, but because he's not in the top two or three, I think they got it wrong, okay? I don't think he would have just been eighth, but by the way, Clayton Dawkins isn't on the list, okay? And I don't want to sound too mean to Dawkins, he's probably smarter than me, but I read guys a lot smarter than him, okay? It shows. You know, he's trying to refute Thomas Aquinas, and then you read Thomas Aquinas, and you've got to re-read Thomas Aquinas six, seven times to figure out what he's saying. Dawkins, you realize Dawkins did a superficial reading of two or three pages in Aquinas' huge works in the Theologica, and thinks he's refuting it. But if you wager against God, is that a good wager? Richard Dawkins is wagering against God. Is that a good wager? If you wager against God and God exists, you lose. Okay? But your loss is infinite loss. If you wager against God and you win, you win nothing. It'd be like me and Richard Dawkins are driving down the road and we're arguing about God's existence. We get in a car accident and we both die. If God doesn't exist, he can't even tell me. I won. I was right, man. I was right. So he's got nothing to gain by it. Now, if you wait so Richard Dawkins against God, living like God doesn't exist, refusing to seek God, Richard Dawkins faces the possibility of infinite loss and no possibility of any gain. Now, if you wager your life on God, you wager for God, and God exists, you win. But what do you win? Well, it's infinite gain. Okay, you gain eternal life, infinite gain. But if you wager your life on God and God does not exist, you lose. But what do you lose? You lose nothing. So, by wagering on God, you have the possibility of infinite gain and no possibility of loss. by wagering against God, you've got the possibility of infinite loss and no possibility to win anything. Pascal is saying only a fool would wager his life against God. And, you know, Douglas Guyver, God bless him, love him, Christian philosopher, Biola and Taoist School of Theology, comes up once a year in Belgium to speak. One year he came up and he said, Pascal's wager only works if the evidence for and against God is even. Well, God bless him, but that just shows that he didn't understand. Maybe he understands now, but he didn't understand Pascal at that point. See, Pascal talks like in terms of 50-50. What he's talking about there is you've got geniuses who can provide what looks like good evidence against God, So in other words, if you're going to just look to thinkers, it looks like it's 50-50. But Pascalism is an argument it's 50-50. I believe it was Richard Creel, a philosopher, said, look, your little child gets lost in the woods. And the sheriff gets a bunch of volunteers and the police department, and they search And then he comes up to you and he says, look, there's only a 1% chance that your child is still alive. Is it OK if we call off the search? What are you going to tell him? You're going to say, no. If there's any chance at all that my kid is still alive, there's so much to gain by searching and nothing to lose by searching, let's keep searching. So if there's any possibility whatsoever that God exists, The wise man is going to keep searching. And the only wise reason to stop searching is because you found him. And so that's why Blaise Pascal, and this is key to understanding Pascal's wager, that's why Pascal stated that there's only two kinds of people who can call themselves wise. And by the way, Richard Dawkins falls in neither category. There's only two kinds of people who call themselves wise. because they do know. Anything else? You're either wallowing in despair or you're going dancing. Richard Dawkins is doing a lot of dancing and you ought to be looking for deliverance. So Pascal's Wager, just keep in mind, it's not an argument. and if there's any possibility of Him existing, you ought to seek Him with all your heart. And he believes that if you seek God with all your heart, and then look at the evidence for Jesus' life, he even has the evidence of the Jews. He was shocked that the Jews still had retained a national identity, even though they had been kicked out of their land in 70 AD. Yet they retain their nationality without a nation. And he also, by the way, he also argued, like a premillennialist, he argued that there would be an Antichrist. And he gave good reasons why we should not be deceived by the Antichrist. But whatever the case, he used evidence from the divine miraculous preservation of the Jewish people, But also, the evidences for Jesus' resurrection from the death of the apostles were not deceived, they were telling the truth, that there's no way they could have fabricated this and fooled the powers that be, and then why would they die, men don't die, getting you to be biased towards God, to then looking at the evidence for Jesus. It's amazing this guy died at age 39. So that's Pascal's wager. Now, we talked about the ontological argument, or did we? Well, I mention it like every time I'm in this room. Because I love it so much. Yeah, did we cover that in the notes? Did we go into any great depth on Anselm's oncological argument. Basically, this is a little oversimplification of it, but it's basically arguing that God, once we understand Okay? And this is something that Aquinas would reject this, because Aquinas is existential... Aquinas is not an ultra-rationalist. He's a... Aquinas is arguing for God's existence from existential causality, which means that undeniable that God exists. He starts in the realm of being, the realm of actuality. But Anselm, as well as Descartes, they're looking for logical, that it's logically impossible for God to not exist. Big, big difference between actual undeniability and logical impossibility. spell out what the concept of God is, and you find it's impossible for Him to not exist. Therefore, you must exist. There's different ways that you can come at it. Anselm had two different ways to argue for it. One way, Anselm conceivable, or possible, greatest conceivable being. It can't be a being greater than God, okay? You can't conceive of a being greater than Him. And then, you say that God must have Every perfection is every attribute that is a good attribute to have. God must have every possible perfection. If He lacks one, He's got to have every possible perfection to an infinite degree, by the way. But if he lacks one, then he's not the greatest conceivable being. Because we can conceive of a being that has all those perfections, and then also has the one that God would lack. So God is the greatest conceivable being, so God must have every possible perfection. Existence is a perfection. must have existence. Now, if you say, well, God doesn't have existence, I don't think God has existence. What if God doesn't have existence? Well, then we can conceive of a being who's just like God in every other way, but also has existence, and then that would be the greatest conceivable being, and God wouldn't be. But we've already defined God as the greatest conceivable being, so he must have it. This form of the oncological argument is not held in high regard in philosophical circles today. Immanuel Kant argued that existence is not a predicate or a perfection. Basically what he's saying is, look, The perfections or the attributes that a being has is a total separate issue from the question of whether that being exists or not. Okay? The problem with that is though, I mean, Kant should have actually read that in Aquinas, because you have potential and actual. So, for God as the greatest conceivable being, that every possible perfection can be infinite actuality, or pure essence. We say God is His actuality, God is existence, He has existence to the infinite degree. That is a perfection. There's no way that you can say that it's not. Yeah, well, the thing though there is, with Aquinas though, you're putting actuality into the picture, and Aquinas starts with actuality. And I understand Aquinas didn't like the ontological argument. Aquinas, you have to start in the realm of the senses. Everything in the mind is first the senses. The sense of mind itself. Potential actual scale. Whether something has a potential to be or is actual. Yeah, not as much as like modal logicians like Melina. And we're going to bring that into the second form. So with Aquinas, you know, it's like when I debated Jeffrey J. Louder at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1999, Kai Nielsen, a leading atheist, was arguing there's no difference between existential causality and logical necessity. And it's just like, well then why did Aquinas reject Anselm? I mean, there's a big difference between the two. But whatever the case, This is still open to debate, most have sided with Kant that it's not a perfection, but the fact of the matter is Anselm, without realizing it, also presented his argument in another form. By the way, Gonolo, a monk that argued, okay, well then I can conceive of the greatest possible island. And then the Greatest Possible Island is like, dude, that is so far from what Anselm is saying. Anselm is treating God as the greatest conceivable being. There are no other... The way Anselm is defining God here, there are no analogies that work. This is something that can be said of God and God alone. Because he's not talking about the greatest conceivable island, the greatest conceivable dog, the greatest conceivable monkey. No, he's talking about the greatest conceivable being. So, it takes itself out of the realm of the finite. But if this argument is refuted, it would be the Kantian reputation. But here's the other way that the argument of Anselm... Anselm himself... Most scholars believe Anselm didn't realize he had two different... How did they define being? Being is just that which exists. Something that exists. You're a being, but the type of being you are is a human being. So then we're just looking at what type God is? and some would say, to be the greatest conceivable being, it would also have to have the property of existing. Otherwise, we can conceive of a being greater than it. But the other way he spelled it out is, he didn't spell it out quite like this, but this is the way modal logicians, they see different modes of existence, and there's existence or impossible beings, that's like square circles, they cannot exist. Then there's possible beings, contingent beings, the beings that it's possible for them Another type would be necessary, to be a necessary being, being with no possibility of non-existence. Okay? Well, the only way to refute this form of Anselm's argument, you would have to prove that God's existence is impossible. In this way, it's really weird, because this is the ultra-rational argument, Pascal's is the ultra-non-rational argument, yet both of them stand or fall based on whether or not it's possible that God exists. If you can't prove that God's existence is impossible, And by the way, guys have been trying to do that for at least 2,500 years, and no one has ever succeeded. Sometimes they think they succeed, finally found the argument that this proves God's existence. And then 50 years later, that argument gets proven false. Sometimes the next day it gets proven false. But unless you can prove that God is like a square circle, that He has contradictory attributes, remember we went over that earlier? They say that God has contradictory attributes, that He's all-powerful, He can do anything, even create a rock too big for Him to lift. We went through all that and showed that that just doesn't work. But if you can't prove that God's impossible, it's impossible for Him to exist, then the only things that are left are either He's a possible being, which it would have the possibility of non-existence, or it would have to be a necessary being with no possibility of non-existence. The thing is, is that God is defined... I'll talk a little bit about essence. Essence is what you are. OK? You're a human being. Being is an existence. It's that you are. OK? What are you? You're a human, and you do exist, so you're a human being. Okay? So what comes first, existence or essence? With humans, your traditional theologians are essentialists. So, they would say that we come into existence already defined. So you can't jump off a building and fly because you're not a bird. You're a human being. You have your own potentialities, your own potential to do this and do that. So I would agree with traditional theologians. I'm an essentialist. If you're an existentialist, you say existence precedes essence. So we come into existence totally free to define ourselves. We don't have a nature. And almost all the existentialists, that are existentialists in this sense, they're not believers. They don't believe in God, so we're not created by God, so we come into existence. God's essence is His existence. By the way, both Aquinas and Axiom are going to agree on that. But Aquinas views it as an argument from being. In other words, God is defined, in Anselm's Law, God is defined as a necessary being. To say that a being that cannot not exist, does not exist, or has the possibility for non-existence, is a contradiction. A necessary being must exist. Now, Alvin planning of He used motor logic, he talked about all possible worlds. It's not impossible that my car would have broken down and I would not have made it here tonight. So that would be, that one difference would make it a different possible world than the world in which we live. Now the actual world in which we live Because if it were an impossible world, it would be impossible for it to have been actualized. But the actual world in which we live can only be a possible world. Otherwise there would be no possibility it would be actualized. Is that also with God? Well, that's what planning is arguing too. exist in every possible world as the greatest being in each of those actually has a lot of. Whenever he formulates it in like an article or a speech, it really is a 5 or 6 step. It is God, what is it, God, evil, I can't remember the title of the book, it's a small book, but I think he's got I would say for me it is. For playing it, it is. It's such a wide issue. But anyway, so the actual world, the real world, is one of these possible worlds. Why? Because it can't be an impossible world. You've got possible worlds, In possible worlds, is the actual world, is it one of the possible worlds? It has to be, because it can't be one of the impossible worlds. So the actual world is one of the possible worlds. Therefore, God must exist in the actual world, because He exists in every possible world. the actual world is one of those plausible worlds. Now, Norman Geisler is a Thomist, and as a follower of Thomas Aquinas, you have to start in the realm of being, not in the realm of ideas. Descartes and You've got to start in the realm of being. Norman Geisler, a good friend of mine, an old professor, said, if you start in the world of ideas, you'll end in the world of ideas. You're never going to bridge the gap from the realm of ideas to the realm of being unless you start in being. So, Geisler says that Alvin planning up is assuming, without realizing it, the existence of the actual world that exists outside of our minds, outside of the world of ideas. Well, guess what? The actual world is the realm of being. So, Norman Geisler says Alvin Plantinga's argument works, and it's a valid argument, but it's not really an ontological argument, it's just a very sophisticated cosmological argument, because he assumes the realm of being, okay? Now here's the clincher though, and Geyser says because it's always logically possible that nothing According to Geyser, the only way to make this work, you have to assume, in actual world, you have to assume that something exists. If something exists, then God must exist. But it's always logically possible that nothing exists. However, I'll just throw this in, because I'm not sure I'm a Thomist. I have great respect for Norman Geyser and Richard Howe. And, um, we have Protestant Thomists, uh, R.C. Sproul, he's not really a Strict, he's more of a Neo-Thomist, because he likes the ontological argument, True Thomists wouldn't. Um, I respect the Roman Catholic Thomists that are out there as well. Um, but, think about it, nothing exists. Another way of writing that would be nothing It's non-being. When you say something exists, you're saying it is being. Non-being is being. So, there is a way to write this in the classical way to write a contradiction. In other words, I think Descartes and Anselm would say, no, it's impossible that nothing exists, because then non-being would equal being. And that's a contradiction. Therefore something must exist. And the Thomists could say, well, no, you're starting in the realm of being. These guys say, no, we're starting in the realm of ideas. But we built it. It's not as difficult as you think or impossible to build a bridge from the realm of ideas to the realm of being. How do they figure there are ideas without being? Yeah, I think that puts the ball back in the Thomas camp. He said, wait a minute, there can't be ideas without a being. But whatever the case, it's more dealing with the start of the argument. Are you starting in the realm of being? Starting in the realm of ideas? What I like about this is whether planning this argument is really an ontological argument, that doesn't presuppose the existence of the actual world, or if it's a Thomistic cosmological argument that does presuppose the existence of the actual world, either way, it's a valid argument, it's a strong argument for God's existence. Now, you know, A lot of things that I'm saying, that I'm talking about here with the oncological argument, and going back and forth between Aquinas and him, okay? The average person isn't as weird as a philosopher. The average person is going to give you the existence of the real world, okay? So there's a lot of things that, just because If we cannot prove God's existence with logical necessity, let's say Anselm and Descartes are wrong, if we cannot prove God's existence with logical necessity, who cares? Because so few of what we believe can be proved by logical necessity. I mean, mathematical truths and things of that sort, Most of what we believe is just based on good, solid evidence. Maybe you believe it beyond reasonable doubt. Maybe it's just more reasonable than the alternative. But whatever the case, in the realm of philosophy, they want to be real precise. What I will often ask myself, when I deal with arguments for God's existence, and then even historical arguments for Jesus of Nazareth and his resurrection as deity. Whenever I have doubts, I always ask myself, what is the alternative? Okay? Like, what if God doesn't exist? Okay, what's the alternative? The alternative, really, would be Consistent with that, there is no absolute truth. That's absurd. Because then it would be true that God doesn't exist. There is no morality. There's no absolute morality. That's just a game we play. No. Killing innocent children really isn't. There's no real meaning in life. We have eternity in our hearts, because we think about it, but God didn't put it there. Somehow it just got there. I mean, even Walter Kaufman, the atheist and Nietzschean scholar, defines man as the God-intoxicated ape. Well, why? If man is greater than ape, why are we intoxicated with the God-concept and not the apes? But whatever the case, you can probably see why I say Because it's a very abstract argument and most westerners today do not think in abstract terms. You'll get a few mathematicians that'll say 2 plus 2 equals 4 and that's good enough for them. Most people, they gotta see four apples, you know. They gotta have it in the concrete realm outside of mine. Alright, take a ten minute break and then I think we'll look into the problem of evil and then after that we'll go into creation versus evolution.