Okay, this is lecture number 16. Philosophy lecture number 16. We're still on chapter number 19 on Does God Exist? We talked about arguments for God's existence. Now we're talking about arguments for atheism. We're trying to refute the argument from evil. Page 292, Geisler and Feinberg say that this is the argument from the fact of evil. So this follows, if God is all good, He will destroy evil. If God is all powerful, He can destroy evil, but evil is not destroyed. What that means is evil is not yet destroyed. It still exists. Conclusion, hence, there is no such God. Reputation of that, the Kṛṣṇa's response is, number one, there's an unnecessary time limit placed on God, because it may be that God is in the process of defeating evil. You see, premise three on their argument should read, this is kind of a hidden premise that's within premise three but evil is not yet destroyed nor will it ever be destroyed then for hence there is no such God. It is an assumption that evil exists and it's always going to exist and that God couldn't use evil for a greater good. Those are all assumptions that they haven't proven. So number one is an unnecessary time limit placed on God because God may be in the process of defeating evil just as the Bible teaches. Number two, God created the possibility for evil. God did not create, you know, this is another dilemma by the way too, some will say, it's called the metaphysical problem of evil. God created everything, evil exists, therefore God created evil. The Christian would not want to say that God Most Christians would not want to say that God created evil. Did he allow it? Yes. So what that amounts to is God didn't create evil, but he created the possibility for evil by giving humans free will. Humans and angels free will. When they abused this free will, that brought evil into existence. All evil is, but we didn't create evil. It just perverts something that already exists. It's like what rust is to a car. That's what evil is to God's perfect creation. Evil is the absence or perversion of the good things that God did create. It's the absence of the good things that God created that should be there. For instance, God created us in fellowship with Him and to be obedient to Him and we turned our backs on Him. Now God did create the possibility for evil. We can only act by giving us free will. But you know, you don't see people, like Walter Martin say, you don't see people carrying signs down with freedom. Having this big protest because they're all against freedom. Nobody protests against freedom. Everybody wants freedom. Everybody wants freedom. Yeah, they do for sure. Everybody wants freedom. At the same time, we've got to understand that freedom means you're free to do some things that might not be the best thing to do. And so evil exists as a privation. Even that, freedom now, I don't even know if I'm about to drag this boy off the topic, but I can't remember where I read this, but the freedom, the human concept of freedom is that you're free to do good and you're also free to not do good. You're free to do good or evil. Whereas the, in its purest sense, the purest form of freedom is freedom from evil. Not the freedom to do evil. Yeah. It's just the world's concept of freedom is freedom to do as you please, freedom to sin. But Jesus said in John chapter 8, 31 and 36, true freedom is not freedom to sin because the freedom to sin is actually bondage. True freedom is freedom from sin. And if the son sets you free, you shall be free indeed. Where I'm trying to go with that is if the freedom that we have today in our free will is the freedom to either sin or to obey, Isn't that freedom on its own a perversion of the freedom that we should have? No. Because God, the thing you see, free will is a good thing. God giving us the freedom to choose Him or to choose ourselves. To do things our, to build our kingdom or to build His kingdom, that is a good thing. Because True love, God wanted us to enter into a love relationship with Him. True love can't be forced. Forced love is rape. So freedom is actually a good thing. But to exercise that freedom not to do what you were created to do is an abuse of that freedom. But the freedom itself is a good thing. Because then we can freely love God and freely enter into a loving relationship with Him. Point number three, God allows evil for the purpose of a greater good. One of the purposes is human free will. Okay? God allows evil for the purpose of a greater good. What would be, I don't think it would be a greater world if God created a world where a bunch of robots programmed to love him. forced to love them. I don't think it would be a greater world than a world where those who love them choose to love them but others still have the freedom we still have the freedom not to love them and some do exercise that freedom to not love them. So God allows evil for the purpose of a greater good, human free will. Number four, God's love cannot be forced on his creatures. We already mentioned that. Forced love is rape. God's love cannot be forced on his creatures. He gives them the freedom to accept or reject his love. Also, point number five, we don't have to argue. Geiser points this up in his philosophy of religion class. We do not have to argue like Leiden has argued that this is the greatest possible world. God is all-powerful and all-good, live in his argument, he must create. He must actualize the greatest possible world. We don't have to argue that way, because more along Thomistic lines, more along Aquinas, all we'd have to argue is that this present world is the greatest possible way to achieve the greatest possible world, i.e. heaven. Okay? Because heaven is going to be made up of people who are going to live in an eternal love relationship with the triune God, but it was their choice to enter into that relationship. Whereas if God just created that from the start, without anything else, it would not have been our choices. In other words, it really wouldn't be a love relationship. Okay? So, with all the evil and human suffering, this could just be seen as the best possible way to achieve the best possible world, rather than the best possible world. Which means that the premise that in all powerful under God we create the best. would create the best world is true, it's just that we're in the process of that creation. I would say would bring about the best possible world. If he did his creation work, he's going to have a new creation as well later, but he did his creation work, but out of that creation work he's going to bring about the best possible world, but it's going to entail, it apparently entails To get people, yes, I'm stumbling along the way. We're going to see there's a few other things I want to mention like, okay, point six. Man's free choice brought evil and human suffering into the world. Man's free choice brought evil and human suffering into the world. It didn't have to be this way. God put us in a paradise. He put us in the garden. He said, don't disobey me. Don't do things your own way. Worship me. It was our free choice that brought evil and human suffering into the world. Don't think you would have done a better job than Adam. He was the perfect man, and you're not. Point number seven, God will use evil for good purposes. Again, this is part of that greater good. Point number seven, God will use evil for good purposes. For instance, you realize that if God did not allow any evil, It would be impossible for us to love our enemies. The best you could do, you wouldn't have any enemies. The best that you could do would be to love your friends. It would be impossible to have courage. Courage is a good thing. But it would be impossible to have courage because there would be nothing to be afraid of. So God uses evil for good purposes. It's just like the guy who allows his son or daughter to go through a horrible, painful surgery for the purpose of a greater good. It's like a parent who spanked a child. We don't understand where the parent's coming from because we don't have access to the information that they have access to. But what we need to recognize is that it's the same with our relationship with God. Isaiah 55, 8 and 9. In fact, I'm going to read that passage if I could find my Bible. Isaiah 55, 8 and 9. And that reads, for my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways declares the Lord, for the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. And so we don't have all the answers. I talked to a guy at work, his son, he had a place where he used to work, and the guy's son had a problem with his private part, his private male part and it took about 8 or 9 surgeries before they got it 8 or 9 surgeries over about a 10 year period from the time the guy was 4 years old until he was about 14 and the kid was in excruciating pain and after one surgery when he was about 10 or 11 years old His father heard him crying in his room. He went into his room and someone was in the corner holding his private area in pain. And he looked at his father and he said, he said, why do you let them do this to me? I hate you. I hate you. Why do you let them do this to me? And there's times when we look up at God and we just gnash our teeth and we clench our fists and we scream up to Him. Why? Why do you allow this to happen? How can you be a just and all good God? And we're going through a tough situation like Job, an innocent guy who's suffering, and we start thinking maybe God keeps bad records. Or maybe he's just cruel. What's the matter with him? And the fact is, God's going to use evil for good purposes, but he knows a lot more than we know. Sometimes we're thinking, God, if you just give me a car that will never break down, that runs beautiful, that would be the best thing for a guy like me who wants to serve you with everything I got. And then we ask why every time our car breaks down, he's doing something there. He's working it for our good. Romans 8.28 says that we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose. And so God will use evil for good purposes. Now the thing is, here's point number eight that I have. On Monday, atheists will deny the existence of evil. Why? Because if you admit the existence of evil, then they can't do some of the things that they want to do. Plus, if you admit the existence of evil, then you also got to admit the existence of some absolute good, some ultimate good that the evil is a perversion of. So atheists usually deny the existence of evil. On Monday they deny the existence of evil. They say that no such thing as right and wrong, I can do whatever I please. But then on Tuesday, they bring up evil to try to disprove God's existence. Now which way is it? Does evil exist or does it not exist? But either way, C.S. Lewis, who was an atheist while he was a scholar in Oxford and Cambridge, he eventually became a Christian. He said that he used the problem of evil to try to disprove God's existence and he didn't realize the problem of evil actually exploded into a good argument for God's existence because just to admit the existence of evil meant that there had to be some ultimately good being some ultimately good existence that this evil was a perversion of and what is the ultimately good existence other than the God of the Bible? It sounds so much like the God of the Bible that C.S. Lewis realized that just to grant the existence of any evil whatsoever Let's say, if we evolve from apes, and if there's no God, the butchering of an innocent little baby isn't any more evil than the death of an animal in the forest or the hugging of a little innocent baby. I mean, there's no such thing as right and wrong. Whatever is, is right. There really is no concept of what is right. If everything is here by chance, and if everything occurs by chance, reshuffling of molecules, then whenever a chemical reaction happens in your brain, if you blow somebody's head off, you shouldn't be held accountable for it, because it was determined by physical causes that are totally out of your control. What? A lot of psychology starts with that premise. Behaviorism starts with that premise. Behaviorism is one of the most inconsistent. They say that everything you do is beyond freedom and dignity. Forget about dignity for human life. Forget about freedom. We need a few intellectuals like myself to rule the world. and make this world the way it should be. Right? And he says this, there's no such thing as right and wrong and everything you do is predetermined by your genetic code, your genes, what you inherited from your mom and dad and the environment you grew up in. So then what he says is what we should do then is we should genetically manipulate with these people, manipulate these people and also make the environment in such a way that we move them in the direction that we intellectuals want them to go. Now Francis Schaeffer points out one of the main problems with that view. Number one, why are you using the word should if there's no such thing as right and wrong? Number two, what gives B.F. Skinner the right? to make that decision that the universe, that the world should move in a certain direction and that what gives him the right to lead it after all, be it skin or is controlled by what? his own genetic makeup and his environment he's going to be a bit there, but we're determined so is he what makes him an intellectual? he's no more intellectual than a guy who's born brain dead you know we're all just a product of what we inherit in our environment, so Behaviorism is just out to lunch. Get it back to the problem of evil. But you know the atheists usually deny the existence of evil. Bring that up to them. The guy brings up the problem of evil. So wait a minute. Weren't you arguing yesterday there's no such thing as right and wrong? And now all of a sudden you admit there is an evil. So you do admit that there is such a thing as the right or the perfect. At point nine, God will, according to the scriptures, defeat evil through Christ's death, resurrection, and return. So people act like I found something that totally proves your Bible wrong. What is it? The problem of evil. Well, guess what? The whole Bible would never have been written if there wasn't a problem of evil. The Bible, fully the sum of the Bible in one word, Jesus. You can sum it up in one event, Calvary. The Old Testament point forward. So every animal sacrifice, every animal that was ever slaughtered in the bloodshed, pointed forward to the day when God would send the perfect sacrifice, the perfect Lamb of God who would die on the cross for the sins of mankind. So the whole Bible, through Christ's death, resurrection and return, Jesus Christ is in the process of defeating evil. So God will defeat evil through Christ's death, resurrection and return. And then point number 10, the God of the Bible is the only guarantee that evil will ultimately be defeated. The God of the Bible is the only guarantee that evil will ultimately be defeated. Now that doesn't sound like much, but remember, the guy who's arguing that God can't exist because of the existence of evil, he is admitting to the existence of evil. So now are we just supposed to put on sackcloth and ashes and just start crying? Is there no hope? What hope does the atheists give us? Look at the hope Bertrand Russell gives us. We all end up in the giant ass heap of the universe. When the universe dies, we die with it, baby. It's all over. Every aspiration, every dream that mankind ever came up with, every poem that was ever written dies in the death of the universe. There's no guarantee that evil will ultimately be defeated by violence. Let me see. The second part of the argument from evil that that Geisler gives, Geisler and Feinberg, is that just the fact that God exists and then that evil exists, they're mutually exclusive. And so they would say that it's impossible for the both to exist. Geisler and Feinberg just argue that unless the atheist is omniscient, he is not in a position to say there could be no good reason known to God in order to allow evil. So it just goes right back to the same stuff. Let's take a look here. Arguments from the nature of God. Jean-Paul Sartre argued that God can't exist because a self-caused being is impossible. Geisler and Feinberg simply answered that God is not defined as a self-caused being. He's defined as an uncaused being. An uncaused being is a being that always exists as a being without a cause, whereas a self-caused being is absurd because it would have to pre-exist its own existence in order to cause its own existence. Another argument on 294 is that necessary existence is impossible. Point number one, God by nature must be defined as a necessary existence. Number two, but necessity cannot apply to existence. Necessity is a characteristic of propositions, not of reality. Therefore, there cannot be a necessary existence. They just say, hey, the theist should just ask, how can one know that necessity cannot apply to existence? See, once you say, look at the second point there. If necessity cannot apply to existence, then the premise itself must be false. In other words... Because they're making a statement about necessity. Yeah, they're saying necessity cannot apply to existence. If that statement is true, it must be necessarily true about existence. So for it to be necessary truths about existence would totally contradict what they're stating. So there's really no strength in that argument against God's existence. The argument from impossible attributes, let's see I've got it in my notes, I'll spell it out here as well. At least I thought I had them in my notes. Okay. Arguments from contradictory attributes. First argument, an all-powerful God can do anything. Number two, even create a rock that he cannot lift. Number three, but if he can't lift this rock, then he's not all-powerful. Conclusion, therefore, no all-powerful God exists. Okay? The cause to this is that yes, God is all-powerful, but there are things that even an all-powerful being cannot do. For instance, God cannot do what is impossible by nature. He can't create square circles. He can't create a God bigger than himself, because there is no such thing as a God bigger than God. He can't create a non-created being. God can't do what's impossible by definition, but he also, there's other things that he can't do that are just contrary to his nature. He cannot fail. As an all-powerful being, an all-powerful being can never fail, an all-powerful being can never sin, can never lie, can never change his mind. So in other words, an all-powerful being is a being that can do anything that is consistent with his good and all-powerful nature. It doesn't contradict his nature and isn't impossible by definition. But an all-powerful being, by definition, cannot fail. So therefore, God will always be able to master his creation. He'll be able to create a rock a tremendous size, but he's always going to be able to lift it. Okay? Any questions on that at all? Okay. Second argument, another argument for contradictory attributes, either something is good because God wills it, you know, murder is, let's say loving your neighbor is good, Either it's good simply because God wills it, but then it's arbitrary. God just said, eenie, meenie, miney, moe. Okay, the eenies and the meenies are good, and the mineys and the moes are evil. So either something is good just because God wills it, but then good is arbitrary, or God wills it because it is good. God says, no, I want you to love your neighbor because loving your neighbor is good. But then the problem there is that good is a standard that is above God. So God's not the ultimate. Good is above God. So therefore, either good is arbitrary, God just ain't eating any money more than really hugging a baby rather than slaughtering an innocent baby. It isn't really good versus evil, it's just God arbitrarily said one's evil and the other's good. Which by the way is what Gordon Clark teaches. That God just arbitrarily decided what's good and what's evil. What? Yeah, yeah, and it's God's decision and He's not responsible to anyone. We're responsible to Him, but there's nobody above Him to be responsible to. But this is the way I respond to it the same way Geisler and Feinberg would respond to it. God wills it because it is consistent with His own good nature. God wills it because it is consistent with His own good nature. In other words, the standard is not arbitrary. He wills it because it's good. He's not saying, he's willing it because it's good. So the standard is not arbitrary, nor is the standard above God. Rightfully understood, God is the standard. Good isn't above God. God is good. God is love. Just like God doesn't have being, he is being. God doesn't have love, he is love. God doesn't have goodness, he is good. And it holds through here. So God wills the good because it is based on his own good nature, consistent with his own good nature. So God is the standard himself. from the nature of freedom Jean-Paul Sartre argues that if God exists then all is determined on page 295 if God exists then all is determined by him but if all is determined then nothing is free however I am free hence God does not exist now you can argue like Jonathan Edwards argued that man really isn't free and that's kind of the way that that's kind of the way that Gordon Clark argues as well that man really isn't free. But I would argue more along these lines, and by the way, the existentialist starts out with that premise, the only thing we know is that I am free. Their free will is elevated above everything. But anyway, what I would argue against Jean-Paul Sartre He says, since man is free, God cannot exist. In response to that I would say, God is sovereign, but in his sovereignty, he sovereignly chose to make man free. There's no contradiction there at all. As long as he makes, he's still sovereign, and we do suffer the consequences for our abuse of freedom that he determines we will suffer, he's still sovereign, he's still in control. There's some other atheistic arguments that they don't cover here, but I'm going to touch on Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, argued that if everything needs a cause, then so does God. However, if God doesn't need a cause, neither does the universe. The response is only that which has a beginning needs a cause, and the universe, both philosophically and scientifically, can be shown to have a beginning. Let me see if I can run through a few more of these arguments on atheists before we get to the agnostic arguments. We cannot, hard agnosticism, we cannot know if God exists. Here's some more atheistic. Remember, atheism is the belief that God definitely does not exist, but agnosticism is the belief that man cannot know if God exists. Now, I'm talking about hard agnosticism. Soft agnosticism, man doesn't know that God exists, but the possibility is still open. There are guys there in Feinberg and myself, we're not dealing with that right now. We're dealing with an art of Gnosticism, the belief that man cannot know God exists. Now they're both self-refuting. Atheism, you must be all-knowing to disprove God's existence. You know, guys think they could be going to outer space and go to the moon and they didn't see God and that disproves God's existence. You could explore the whole physical realm in one all-seeing glance. If you can't see on the spiritual realm, just in case there is a spiritual realm, you have no way to disprove God's existence. Gnosticism though, it also suffers because you must know something about God to know that nothing can be known about God. So that's self-refuting as well. A lot of agnostics will say the finite cannot reach the infinite on its own. So even if an infinite God exists, we can never get any knowledge of him. Still, it doesn't rule out the possibility of the infinite reaching down to the finite. We do what Jesus said, Matthew 19, 25 and 26. The apostles asked him, how can man be saved? He said, it's impossible for man, but all things are possible with God. Here's the atheistic argument of God as a product of man's imagination. Ludwig Feuerbach argued that due to man's fear of death, man created God by his imagination. God is what man wishes to be. Sigmund Freud argued along the same lines. Sigmund Freud argued that due to man's guilt for hating his father, And man's fear of nature, it actually gets sillier than this, but we don't have time to go into it, nor should we, it's not worth our time, but Sigmund Freud said that due to man's guilt for hating his father, because basically he wanted to have sex with his mother, Freud thought that was normal for little boys to want to have sex with their mother and therefore be jealous of their fathers. Due to man's guilt for hating his father, and man's fear of nature, man deifies nature and personalizes it into a father God. See what these guys do. This by the way explains false idols. Which are created by our own imagination. But no one wishes for the God of the Bible. R.C. Sproul points out the God of the Bible says thou shalt not when we want to do something. If I was going to create a God from my own imagination it would be a lot more like the New Age God where I'd be Him and I could do whatever I feel like doing. But these were not actually arguments against God's existence. Rather it was an attempt by atheists to explain why so many people believed in a non-existing God. They assumed that God's non-existence was already proven. Now they had to explain why 95% of the world disagreed with them. Friedrich Nietzsche was the same way. He said, God is dead and traditional values have died with him and therefore we must have a breed of supermen to come up who have the courage to create their own hard values instead of the soft values of Christianity. Adolf Hitler really liked Friedrich Nietzsche's work. But even there, Nietzsche was not disproving God's existence. He was assuming that modern man had already arrived at that and had figured out that God didn't exist. And so he was just saying if God doesn't exist, neither does the Ten Commandments. And so we're going to have to live a more consistent life and throw out those traditional values as well. A.J. Ayer A.J. Ayer, it was from the Logical Positivist School, Logical Positivism. He said that God talk is meaningless. Reason being he held to the Verification Principle which was kind of the main, major premise of the Logical Positivists who are now dinosaurs. They started early in the 1900s and by the halfway through the century they were already refuted. But the Verification Principle said that The only way you can find truth is, truth is either true by definition, but then it says nothing about reality. Or, truth can only be found through the five senses. It's the only two ways of finding truth. So the only way to find truth about reality is through the five senses. Well, the problem with this is that the verification principle itself cannot be proven through the five senses. Okay? and therefore that doesn't stand. So there has to be ways of finding truth beyond the five senses and revelation from God will be one of them. So it is possible to know things that we cannot experience through the five senses. It is possible to have a religious experience. It is possible to talk about God. By the way, also, we'll get into God talk in probably the next lecture after this one. So we'll deal with that a little later. Albert Camus. Albert Camus was a French existentialist, a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre. He wrote the novel The Plague. And in it, it's a novel, but it just real beautifully gets this point, this horrible point across. Where he said that man's dilemma is that if God allowed the plague He didn't even argue that God brought the plague because he wanted to bring the plague. When Christians argue against Camus like that, they don't see the force. All Camus was saying is that God allowed the plague. God could have prevented the plague. God could have prevented human suffering, but he didn't. He allowed it. And if he chose to allow the plague, if God chose to allow the plague, which he did, then to fight the plague is to fight God. Because God allowed it. Therefore, Camus argued that to be religious, one must be anti-humanitarian. To be religious and to be consistent, one must be anti-humanitarian. You don't build hospitals for the sick. Because God allowed those people to get sick. It was his will for them to be sick. So just leave them alone. He's got this atheist doctor who's fighting to save lives. There's a plague being spread by rats. And the atheist doctor is fighting the plague, but the priest can't fight the plague because God allowed it. The Christian response is this. God did allow the plague of sin and its effects, evil and human suffering. God did allow the plague of sin and its effects. However, God is fighting the plague of sin and its effects, and therefore the godly man will fight them also. Part of the reason why God allowed evil and human suffering is so that he can then persuade men to fight evil and human suffering. And that's why Christians have built most of the hospitals and universities and not the atheists. Anthony Flew used a variation of the verification principle. Anthony Flew, the British philosopher, Dr. Gary Habermas, debated him on the resurrection of Christ from the dead. And then Terry Almeithi, another one of my professors, debated him on God's existence, and both of them are now in books. But Anthony Flew, the British philosopher, said there's no way to falsify that two guys walk into a wilderness and they find a garden. So one says, well, there must be a gardener who made it, and the other one says, no, there's no gardener. It just, it just got here that way. And so they try to find this gardener and he doesn't show up. And then the guy says, well, he must be an invisible gardener. They get bloodhounds, but they never alert. They build an electrical fence, but it never shocks anybody. And so the guy says, well, he's an invisible gardener. The believer says he's an invisible gardener and there's no way to sense him. You can't. falsifies existence by the five senses. And so, Blue argues there's no way to falsify the existence of the invisible gardener, therefore it's a meaningless statement. And in response to this, I say that Blue fails to admit the possibility of fulfilled prophecies, eyewitness miracles, and the resurrection. If the prophecies predicted in the Bible didn't come true, then you could falsify them as being claims for God. If the miracles that were supposedly performed can be proven to not have occurred, then you could say, well, Jesus wasn't God. And if Jesus did not rise from the dead, you could produce his rotting corpse, then you could disprove Christianity. In short, the invisible gardener in Christian terms has not been silent he has spoken and then number two the invisible gardener has become visible in the person of Jesus Christ and Flew should look into those things if he would look into them a little bit more maybe he wouldn't have done as poorly as he did against one of my old professors Gary Habermas when they debated the issue let's see doesn't that invisible gardener kind of come back to the theological argument? Yeah, it's all geared towards that, but an attempted reputation of it. But there is strong evidence for the God of the Bible. Also, another good argument against the atheists, too, is the absurdity of life without God. If God does not exist, then there's no real meaning to life. I mean, what does it matter if you live like Mother Teresa and treat people nice, or if you spend your life like Adolf Hitler killing innocent people? A million years from now it'll make no difference whatsoever. Every person you ever exist... you ever... influence will belong out of existence by then. So it's really no meaning to life, no objective morality, no life after death, no rewards or punishments, and no defeat of evil. So life would totally be absurd without God. If God does not exist, then let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Life would really make no sense. But the atheist lives as if there is a better day on the horizon. He protests when he thinks that this particular thing is wrong and that thing is wrong. And so he lives like life makes sense and like there is a God. The absurdity of life without God, you find that in Ecclesiastes. The Book of Solomon wrote that When you consider everything under the sun, everything in the Earth's atmosphere, and you don't put heaven and God in the equation, life is totally futile, life is totally vain, nothing makes sense. But once you put God in the equation, then everything else falls into place and can be accepted as blessings from God. The real problem with atheists is not so much an intellectual problem, it's not a problem of the mind. Even Romans 1, verses 18-22 says all men know that God exists. But the problem is a moral problem, it's a problem of the will, they don't want to bend the knee to Jesus Christ. So they're suppressing this knowledge in their unconscious, if you want to use psychological terms, and lying to themselves and deceiving themselves when in actuality they know that God does exist. John 3, verses 19 and 21 says that some love the darkness rather than the light. They want to stay in the darkness because they love their evil deeds, and so they choose not to come into the light. So the problem is not in the mind as much as it is in the will. Man's two greatest drives is his drive for transcendence, that's his thirst for God, his thirst to transcend the physical life. here on earth, his thirst for God. I even see it coming out in Atheism, Karl Marx's Utopia. Utopian society, he was trying to transcend his earthly experience. In actuality, it's the thirst for God that all men have. Jesus said, man does not live on bread alone, but in every utterance of the mouth of God, we're more than physical beings. Man's two greatest drives is transcendence and thirst for God, but also his drive for autonomy. his desire to be his own God or to be his own king. And that's where the main question in life is, are you going to favor autonomy? Are you going to put yourself first and refuse to come off the throne of your life and then look for excuses why to reject the God of the Bible? Or are you going to accept the fact that you're thirsting for God and then seek to find fellowship with Him? So that's the reputation of atheism there. In the remainder of time we want to look at the arguments for hard agnosticism. Soft agnosticism says that man does not know if God exists. Hard agnosticism says man cannot know if God exists. So we want to deal with hard agnosticism since soft agnosticism does leave open the possibility of God's existence. Immanuel Kant is mentioned from 296 to 299. Immanuel Kant said that we can only know reality as it appears to us, we cannot know reality in itself. That's very very important about Kant. We can only know reality, I can know this chair as it appears to me, but I can't know this chair as it really is. And because of that we couldn't even know God as he really is. He would bring up these antinomies, these contradictions, these paradoxes. He says Even causality, the principle of causality, the principle that everything must have a cause, if everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. Well, that's not the principle of causality. The principle of causality says everything that has a beginning needs a cause, or every contingent or dependent being needs a cause, but eventually you have to arrive at an uncaused cause. But even though he said that, can't say that we must live as if there is a God. We couldn't find God through pure reason because we can't know anything in reality by pure reason with his thought. But by practical reason we need to assume God's existence. Must live as if there's a God in order to make sense of our moral lives. In response to this, We can say that he can't, by saying that, look, if we assume that we know reality, we see all these antinomies, all these contradictions. Well, in order for him to say that, Geisman points out on page 298, He says in the bottom of the first paragraph, Kant assumes that the principle of causality implies that everything must have a cause. But if one assumes that only contingent things need a cause, then contradiction does not follow. So now in the very next paragraph, this is what I was really looking for, Basic categories of the mind must apply to reality. Implicit in Kant's argument for antinomies or contradictions to agnosticism, so he argues from contradictions to the point that we should be agnostics, is the premise, no contradictory premise can be true about reality. This is precisely why Kant says that pure reason cannot apply to reality, because it ends up in contradiction. But if the rational law of non-contradiction applies to reality, then there is at least one principle of the understanding that applies to reality. In fact, since the principles of identity and excluded middle are inseparably related to the principle of non-contradiction, Kant allows that at least these principles of reason apply to reality. In other words, this guy says we can't know reality as it is. We can only know reality as it appears to us. Whenever we assume we can know reality as it is, we always end up with contradictions. And we know contradictions can't be true. But then Kaiser says, yeah, but then what he's saying is the law of non-contradiction applies to reality and we know it. So, in his attempt to disprove it, he actually proves we can know something about reality. The big gap between reality as it appears to us and reality as it is, Kant himself bridged that gap and didn't even realize it. And so, Kant fails in that area. You know, the question comes up, how can one know that he cannot know? You know, pure agnosticism says man cannot know. But he claims to know that man cannot know. And so again, it's self-contradictory. Then also skepticism says that we must suspend judgment about God. But Geiser shows that nobody can be skeptical about everything. the skeptic is dogmatic in his skepticism that we should suspend judgment but he can't live like a skeptic he's not skeptical about his skepticism he's dogmatic about it and then he lives like a non-skeptic in the rest of his life we're running out of time here the conclusion on 302 and 303 is really good and we'll pick that up in the next lecture. In fact, I might even pick up on the response of skepticism and spend a little bit of time on that. And then we'll talk about how we can talk about God in chapter 20, and then I believe after that comes chapter 21, the problem of evil.