We are still studying the Thomistic cosmological argument. And last time, last week, we had one person here and we talked about the most formidable objection to the argument, which is that the argument commits the fallacy of composition. And I will simply let you guys wrestle with whether, you know, we've answered it adequately when you listen to the, when you listen to the recording, whenever it gets posted. So we are actually going to look at, let's see what page we're on here. Wow, I think we're far further along than I thought. Maybe we're not. This is from chapter five, yeah. Let's see. The last thing we looked at was the fallacy of composition. So bear with me just a moment. OK, on page 229, we go through the fallacy of composition. And the argument there is basically that at one point in the argument, we said that if every contingent thing needs a cause, then if you have a series of contingent things, then the question is, what is the cause of the whole series? You're talking about the vertical chain? Yeah, that vertical chain of causes. So even if you had an infinite number of them, you could still ask the question, well, if every single one has a cause, what is the cause of the whole? In other words, if every single one is contingent, then the whole is contingent. And therefore, even the whole series needs a cause, even though there might be an infinite number of them. And David Hume says, well, you know, this commits the fallacy of composition. This is a bad reasoning because just because every part has a certain characteristic doesn't mean the whole does. If every part of the machine is small, that doesn't make the whole machine small. So if every member of a football team is the best in his position, that doesn't make the team the state champions or the national champions or whatever. So this is the fallacy of composition. You cannot conclude anything about the whole just because of the nature of the parts. On the other hand, some reasoning from parts to holes is adequate. If every tile on the floor is blue, then what is the color of the whole floor? Well, it is blue. So the question is, what is the nature of those parts? And if the nature of the parts are such that the hole must have that characteristic also, then you're not committing the fallacy of composition when you reason from parts to holes. And so that's generally my answer to that objection. And then on page 238, we looked at reasoning from contingency to necessity. There are some people who believe that you can reverse the argument against itself and argue, if a necessary being must exist because contingent things exist, then you could reverse that and say, well, these contingent things must exist because a necessary thing must exist. Do y'all see the problem in that reasoning, how that would destroy theism, if that's true? To go again, in fact, I'll just go ahead and quote Al-Ghazali, because we didn't quote him last time. Goodman is summarizing the reasoning of Al-Ghazali. This is Lynn Goodman. Al-Ghazali's Argument from Creation, which is an article he wrote several years ago. And he says this, he says, if it is possible to reason from a contingent world to a necessary God, it may equally be thought possible to reason from a necessary God to a contingent world. If the world's contingent existence is attributable to a necessary being whose nature is to impart being to all that exists besides him, then it might well be claimed that the world's existence itself is no longer contingent but necessary in relation to its cause. God is the ground of being but nothing more. The world remains dependent on God but hangs only by the most tenuous metaphysical thread vaguely characterized as ontological dependence. Ghazali's suspicion is that the ontological dependence may prove a vacuous relation. By Aristotelian standards, what always exists must exist. If the world is eternal, then it is its own necessary being. Ex-hypothesis. There must be some self-sufficient being. But, as Ghazali puts it, the world is eternal. If the world is eternal, that being has already been reached. There is no need that it be God. The contingency argument then is self-undermining. The world is eternal. It is Ghazali's firm belief. Neither the contingency argument nor any other argument can establish the need for the existence of God. Now, what this comes out of is Thomas Aquinas' belief that you can prove God's existence even if you assume that the universe is eternal. Even on that assumption, you can prove that there is a God. Well, Ghazali's saying, no, you can't. If you assume that the universe is eternal, then God doesn't need to exist. There's no need for God whatsoever if the universe is eternal. In fact, that's the atheist assumption, right? If we have an eternal universe, there's no need for God at all. And then, of course, I give the reasoning of Paul Draper. And what I did there is I basically said two things. One, even if something is eternal, that doesn't mean there isn't a causal relationship going on. So, for example, imagine you have a man or a statue, because men are not eternal, but imagine you have a statue standing on a beach from all eternity. It's just standing there. Well, is there an eternal causal relationship going on there? Well, yeah, the footprints in the sand are just as eternal as the statue is, right? But the footprints wouldn't be there were it not for the statue. So there's an example of how you can conceptually think about something that even if it is eternal, it needs a cause. The eternally existing footprints would still need a cause to explain their existence. Or you could imagine an eternally existing pillow, and an eternally existing ball, and a ball resting on the pillow. Well, the impression from the pillow is an eternal causal relationship between the ball and the pillow. So even if the pillow is eternal, and even if the ball is eternal, and even if the ball is resting on the pillow, you still have an eternal causal relationship. And in the same way, if the universe is eternal, If it's eternally contingent, it still needs a cause, even if it's eternal. Therefore, this reasoning about an eternal universe is not a vacuous relationship at all. And then beyond all that, I pointed out that the argument proves an eternally existing necessary being who is independent of the contingent order, And therefore, even though you can reason from the contingent world to the necessary being, you cannot reason from the necessary being to the contingent world. Precisely because the necessary being is independent, you cannot reason from his existence to the world's existence. By the way, if you could, then that would mean that the necessary being is somehow dependent upon the world, in which case we're now in the world of pantheism or something like that. All right, you have a question? Correct. Correct. The matter that makes me me is contingent. And we actually looked at an early objection trying to argue that that's not true. So the matter that makes me me is contingent, and therefore, that matter must still have a sustaining cause of its existence. So even if there is not a time, even if there was, for the sake of argument, a point in time where matter never existed, is it still the case that matter depends on something? Even if there was once a time where the form of matter Take any for me, please. Didn't exist. Matter may still be eternal. That's what an atheist would argue. And I would say, yes, but even so, the matter is itself contingent. Now, he would say, well, how do you know that? And I would give the arguments that I've given earlier. And he would say, I would hope he would say, oh, OK, uncle. got me, I'll move on to another objection, but that would be the nature of that dialogue. The dialogue would be there, is matter contingent? Any other questions? Yeah, that's really what we're driving towards. So the question is, can we distinguish between supernatural and natural here? Yeah, the supernatural would be the necessary being and the natural would be all this contention. Now, on this distinction, if you do believe in angels, the angels would be in the natural order. If contingent and necessary divide natural and supernatural, angels would be on the contingent side, and they too would be just a natural part of this universe. Because they're created. Because they're created. In more Christian terms, they would be created, they would be creatures. But again, even if an angel is eternal, that angel would have to be contingent, and therefore that angel would still need a sustaining cause of its eternal existence. Anything that's contingent, whether it comes into existence or not is irrelevant. If it's changing, finite, independent, then it depends upon a cause for its existence. Page 240. This is Immanuel Kant's argument that the word necessary can never be applied to reality. I'll have to read this out to explain it. Immanuel Kant takes a different approach than George Smith who basically is the one who said matter is not contingent, and others have said that. George Smith, and asserts that necessity can never be predicated upon reality for only analytical propositions are legitimately referred to as necessary. For example, it is a necessary truth that all men are men, but it's not a necessary truth that all men are fools, for one can coherently say that all men are intelligent, or that there are no men at all. In the same way one cannot coherently state that some triangles do not have three sides, for the very definition of a triangle is that it is a geometric figure containing three sides. Hence, the statement, all triangles have three sides, is analytically true and thus is a necessarily true statement. But the statement triangles exist, which is a synthetic proposition, is an attempt to leave the formal realm of pure ideas and make a statement about reality And since it is equally coherent to state that triangles do not exist, the assertion that triangles exist is not necessary. Kant argues that the assertion God exists is a synthetic proposition, for no contradiction is made when one says that God does not exist. But if God exists as a synthetic proposition, then it is not analytic. And if it is not analytic, then it is not necessarily true. In a word, the term necessary can only be predicated upon analytic propositions. But it cannot be predicated upon either synthetic propositions or things that exist in reality. Therefore, God is not necessary. There are two senses in my response. in which God exists can be considered a necessary statement about reality. First, the conclusion of the contingency argument is a conclusion that, in the words of Bruce Reichenbach, is conditionally necessary. In other words, it is true that the denial of the existence of a necessary being does not entail a contradiction. The statement God exists is synthetic. Now, I say that with this following proviso. If you agree with me that the ontological argument is sound, then the proposition God exists is analytically true. However, my argument does not presuppose the validity or soundness of the ontological argument, and so we're going to go along with this and say, okay, fine. I'll give you the idea that God exists as a synthetic proposition. I'm gonna stop right here and say, do you guys want me to elaborate a little bit more on the difference between a synthetic proposition and an analytic proposition? Yes, okay, very good. What I would like to do is I would like to take you to an area that I know that you guys are familiar with, because we studied the Reformation this past fall, and this is all wrapped up in the gospel, and so those listening can maybe get a sneak peek as to how it answers certain questions about Christianity. We would argue that Roman Catholics uphold an analytical view of justification. whereas we Protestants uphold a synthetic view of justification. Now, some of you are going, well, that doesn't help. That doesn't help me one bit. An analytic truth is one that is true by definition. All trade-offs have three sides. A synthetic truth just is one that is not true by definition, but is true based usually on experience. If you experience something, then you know that it's true. So if I say, all bachelors are unmarried men, I've given you an analytical truth, right? The predicate is basically contained in the subject and vice versa. But if I say Bob is a bachelor, that's not an analytic truth. It still might be true, but how is it true? In what sense is it true? I'm synthesizing two terms. There's nothing about Bob in and of himself that makes him a bachelor. I mean, because he could be married, right? Right. Well, it's a contingent proposition to say that Bob is either married or unmarried. Because one day he's married, and days earlier he was presumably not married. So a synthetic proposition is one that is not true by definition. It can still be true, but it's only true how? Because we experience it. Okay? That's the synthetic proposition. Do y'all understand that? All right, so take the issue of justification. The Roman Catholics will say, at the end of your life, after you've been purged of your sins in purgatory, God will analyze you, and upon that analysis will deem you righteous. And therefore, when he declares you righteous, he declares you righteous because you are righteous. It is just analytically true that at the end of all of the purging of sin, you will no longer be a sinner. How can you be a sinner if you've been purged of sin? You're not a sinner. You are righteous. And why does God call you righteous? Because you are. He's analyzed you. Now, the Protestants say no. Justification is synthetic. God is taking two different ideas or notions or states and bringing them together. In other words, I am a sinner, but God calls me righteous because of the righteousness of Christ imputed to my account. Does that make sense to all of you? All right, so what Immanuel Kant is saying is this. The proposition God exists cannot be analytically true. Now, I will say time out. Yes, it can, the ontological argument. But remember, we're not, depending on the ontological argument here, so let's concede the point. Let's concede the point that God's existence is not analytic. In other words, the truthfulness of God's existence is not analytic. It's not true by definition. And we'll say, okay, God is synthetically true. In other words, the proposition God exists is known from experience of ourselves as contingent realities. And so to go on with this point, the conclusion that such a being exists is conditionally necessary insofar as it is necessitated by the initial premises of the argument. Or to put it another way, the existence of a necessary being is necessitated by the existence of contingent beings. If there are contingent beings, the necessary being is required in order to explain their existence. Hence, there is a sense in which synthetic propositions can rightly be called necessary. Namely, if their necessity is entailed by certain premises. A second sense in which God exists as a necessary statement about reality is metaphysical. The statement is necessary in the metaphysical sense of the term, for when theists say that God is necessary, they are not necessarily tying or trying to analyze the proposition God exists as such, but are attempting to describe the kind of being God is. God is necessary in his very being. He is the kind of being that, if he does not exist, He's the kind of being that, if he does exist, is unable to cease existing. The knowledge of such a being actually says it's acquired from the knowledge of contingent things in the world. But what if the insistence that necessity can only be predicated upon propositions and not reality? We have three responses to contention. First, in a previous paragraph, we saw that there's a sense in which synthetic propositions can rightly be referred to as necessary. That is, conditionally necessary statements. Second, the contention is arbitrary, for there seems to be no good reason to accept the idea that only analytic propositions are necessary. And third, Kant's assertion that necessity cannot be predicated upon reality is self-defeating, for what about Kant's assertion? Is it a necessary statement about reality? In other words, what Kahn is saying is, reality is such that no proposition, no necessarily true proposition can be predicated upon it. Was that a necessary truth about reality? So in other words, his contention is self-defeating. Yes? It's kind of that phrase that gets banned around these days. People say there's no such thing as an absolute truth. Right, exactly. In fact, it may be that that kind of thinking goes back to Kant. Because basically what Kant is saying is all propositions are contentionally true. Why is it that many of Kant's arguments seem to do that? If you remember back to when we were studying worldviews, and I don't remember the name of it, but we were looking at the way in which there was the gap, and then there were things The noumenal and phenomenal world. Yeah, and saying that we can't understand the noumenal world. Right. And wondering, well, then how is he able to make that assertion? How is he able to make that statement that they exist if we can't know it? Right. My short answer to you is to quote Norman Kemp Smith, one of his commentators. I think I quoted him to you when we did the critique of him in Belton Chong. And that would be Kant is the least consistent of the systematic thinkers. That's something close to a quote from Kemp Smith. It's sometimes hard to understand how such a brilliant man can make so many foibles. But remember, if you are locked into a certain way of seeing the world, And you just don't think it's possible to see it any other way. You're just going to articulate your position. And it's going to be very hard for you to be shaken from it, even if some of the contradictions arise. And some of the things that you're talking about were noted by his students. It's not like a couple of fundamentalists came along years later and debunked him. Right, right. The internal critique came from within the Kantian tradition, so that very quickly no one was a pure Kantian. And because Kant himself took over Hume's perspective, there is no pure Humean either. So it's, I don't know, that's an interesting point in the history of philosophy. This next objection on page 242, I'm gonna let you guys knock this one out of the park and then we'll move on. If everything needs a cause, would that not imply that God needs one as well? And if God does not need a cause, what is to keep us from saying that the universe is uncaused? So easy for y'all to defeat this one, so I'll give it to you. What's if God does not need a cause? And it's assuming that, so I'm thinking back to the greatest conceivable being. I'm not sure if that's inside or outside the domestic ontological argument. The greatest conceivable being is, that's kind of the lingo we use when we talk about the ontological argument. Right, okay. But taking that same pattern of thought, thinking about God is defined in that way. God, by definition, would be an unlimited being. Sure. An uncaused being. So this would be, this is, again, assuming that God has to have one, but our definition of God... But what is the objection assuming even more fundamentally? They're assuming something about the nature of our argumentation. They're saying, notice, if everything needs a cause, would that not imply that God needs one as well? By the way, I would agree with that. If everything needs a cause, then God would need one as well, because God is a thing that would need a cause. We do not say that everything needs a cause. We say that contingent things need a cause. Very good. No one is saying that everything needs a cause. We're only saying that contingent things need a cause. Now, in his book, Five Proofs of God, Ed Fazer spends a lot of time going over this, where people went off the rails on this one. And if you want to go back further, there have been several talks. He cites a Thomistic scholar, I think it's Norris Clark, who gave a talk in the 70s, who debunked this. And I could add to that and go back to other works beforehand. Edwin Gurr. wrote a book called The Principle of Sufficient Reason in Some Scholastic Systems. There are two schools of thought. One is that everybody locates the problem in the same area, but they come out with different interpretations. The problem is Leibniz. Norman Geiser said something interesting one time. He said, Leibniz is the one that gave us modern atheism. Because what Leibniz said is that everything needs a sufficient reason. Now, if everything needs a sufficient reason, what is the sufficient reason for God? And you can at least see how that easily translates into the question, if everything needs a cause, what causes God? Now, there are two schools of thought on Leibniz here. The one that I promoted in my chapter on Leibniz is that Leibniz just made a blunder, and we just need to reject Leibniz. We just need to say he was wrong. Because it's true, if everything is a sufficient reason, that would imply that everything needs a cause, and therefore God needs a cause, and now we're in this self-defeating loop. Others have argued that the sufficient reason that Leibniz is talking about is not a causal relation. That said, Faser. And Faser's actually forced me to rethink the argument. Now, if Leibniz did give us a sound argument, that would mean that those who followed him misinterpreted what he was saying. And Faser even blames Leibniz for uncareful wording here. But he points out that you can so construe the argument. that the argument comes out sound. So you really have two options. One option is to just do what I'm doing in this work, reject Leibniz and just be a Thomist. Just do that. Or you could go back into fin line minutes and point out that he's not saying what he seems to be saying. Either way, this quickly devolves within the next couple of decades into a kind of Humean critique. And so ever since David Hume came along, it's almost like atheists have been caught in this rut. And on page 242, this is the 15th objection I'm looking at. For a lot of people, it's the number one objection. It's the objection. But it's not a good objection precisely because it doesn't understand the argument. And yet, we've said this for centuries, that we are not saying that everything needs a cause. We're not saying that everything needs a cause, and yet, you'll see, in fact, Faser makes this prediction, he goes, despite the fact that I'm spending so many pages talking about this, there's going to be a book written defending atheism in the future where they offer this objection. You're still on the second half of that objection, the second sentence. God does not need a cause, what is to keep us from saving the universe? Oh, I haven't gotten to that sentence yet. I'm just saying, I'm just emphasizing just this point that we don't say that everything needs a cause. And Fazer's pointing out that in the future, does it matter that I've written this? It doesn't even matter that people will read me. Yeah, in other words, it's kind of like when I look at my students and I say, OK, this is going to be on the test. You know, I'll have them do memory work, and this is real romper-roomish, I know, but for my regular U.S. history class, I'll say, these presidents, you just have to give their names and their dates. It's easy points. That will be on the test. And they look at me with this dumbfounded look and smile. and go off into the sunset and they come back the next day for the test and they look surprised when the very thing I said was going to be on the test is, it's on the test. And here's phaser saying, we are not saying this. And I'm predicting that even after you read my words, you're going to say that I'm saying this. And they are going to do that. They're gonna read this words and they're gonna go, well, if everything needs a cause, then who caused God? And when I've answered that, they look dumbfounded. I've looked at atheists in the face and said, can you name one important defender of theism with a possible exception of Leibniz? And they usually were like, who in the heck is Leibniz? With the possible exception of Leibniz, can you name one important theistic defender who says such a thing. Well, it seems like you're leaving some context out of that. Oh, yeah. The argument is only contingent things need causes. I said, I obviously don't want to say that everything needs a cause because I actually want to say that God doesn't need a cause. And since God is a thing, he's obviously not reducible to things in the world, but since God is a thing, there's some things that don't need a cause. In fact, Even the people like Platonists who believe in the real existence of numbers, they don't believe that everything needs a cause. Numbers were never caused to exist. Numbers are necessary truths. There are certain abstract objects that might exist, like the laws of logic. Well, the laws of logic never came into existence, the idea that God created the laws of logic. Yeah, we're going to follow Richard Carrier and say, well, we created logic. All right, now the second part. If God does not need a cause, what is to keep us from saying that the universe is uncaused? There's nothing to keep us from saying that the universe is uncaused except for the fact that it's contingent. And how do we know it's contingent? We know it's contingent through experience. We experience everything in the universe as changing, finite, independent. And remember, if you have a series of contingent things that is changing, finite, independent, then you have a series of things that as a whole needs a cause. And we've looked at that from a million different vantage points, and so that's my answer to the second contention. I'm willing to say that the universe is uncaused, right? That's the theoretical possibility at the beginning. But from experience, we experience this as contingent, and that's why we say it needs a cause. The part that's sticking out for me is the scientific part of the universe, where scientists will try to tell us how old the universe is, or how long many billions of years ago it existed, where if it's uncaused, that couldn't be measured. Well, that's true. Now, there is a wrinkle in all of this. We're assuming throughout that the universe is eternal. But I don't believe that the universe is eternal, and I believe that we can actually show that it had a beginning. And most of your scientists living today will say that it began in some form. And those who are atheists will want to say, that's where the mystery is. In what sense are we saying that the universe had a beginning? But that gets us to the Kalam argument, which I'm going to leave to the wayside now. Let's assume the Kalam argument is unsound. You know, we'll say that that argument is unsound, and let's just, let's say, let's assume that all of our eggs are in this basket, and this is the only basket we have to carry theism, you know, rationally. I would say, if this were all I had, I would still say that the universe needs a cause. And yeah, true, science is always trying to measure which, what is, if the universe is eternal, unmeasurable. Right. Oh, of course, that's why that's why your average Atheist is is not going to say that it has a cause. I mean, that's they're gonna they're gonna fight tooth and nail on that one Oh Yeah, yeah I'm resisting going with you there, but yeah, I agree with you. I'm willing to accept that argument. I say, OK. As someone who believes in God, it's quite possible that he started it with the Big Bang. I said, but you're saying the Big Bang just happened. I said, just tell me who lit it. Who lit the firecracker that blew everything into existence? So I accept that it's possibly one of the tools that God uses Oh, of course, of course. One of the things you'll notice about this argument is that it's not, it's wholly non-scientific. And what I mean by that is, and this is what I'd say, this is the point he makes. This is the kind of argument that everybody from Sophie, the wash woman, to Sophia, the philosopher, can use. It doesn't matter how much training you've had, how much science you've read. This is an argument that just sticks. I could have presented the same argument in the year 1200 BC. I could present this argument in 1200 AD. I can present this argument now. That's the beauty of this argument. The weakness of this argument is that we are ignoring all scientific discoveries. I don't know if you've noticed, but I've really resisted all throughout this whole point to even enter into a scientific discussion. Science apologetics begins with the Kalam argument. How do you spell it, Travis? Kalam, K-A-L-A-M. The Kalam argument just is the argument that tries to show the universe had a beginning, and therefore, it needs a cause. I've got a question after this. No, well, you're not behind at all on that one, because we haven't even looked at the argument yet. Now, in Sunday school, I have given a version of that argument. But in any case, in this apologetic series, we haven't even touched the argument. I did say something about Leibniz. The Leibnizian cosmological argument is a version of the contingency argument that says that everything has a sufficient reason. And God is that sufficient reason. And that's the one that I reject. This is the one based on existential causality. Everything that I experience, including myself, is contingent. And since, in the words of Immanuel Kant, it is an analytical truth to say that whatever is contingent needs a cause, that I must say that I am a cause being. What am I caused by? Well, I'm either caused by something contingent or something uncaused, if it's contingent, then that, there can't be an infinite regress of that, and if it is uncausal, then I've arrived at the uncaused cause. I saw that, I also saw that video on that segment. The Thomistic argument, yeah. I'm gonna go back and re-watch that one, so. Yeah. This objection on page 243, no one has ever experienced a necessary being Um, I've never, I've never read this one before, but I was at a, interestingly enough, I actually was at SMU in 1997 watching William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith go at it in a debate. And they were, they were promoting their book, Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology, which is a book they co-wrote where they spent the entire time talking about the origin of the universe and all that stuff. And, um, Quentin Smith, uh, I actually had them both sign that book. Dr. Craig said, you know, I don't think we've ever signed a book together, Quentin. They were like, yeah. Then Quentin Smith and I talked for a while. Then afterwards, I went up to him again and I said, well, what do you think of Thomas Aquinas' argument that because we are contingent, then there must be a necessary purely actual being causing us to exist right now. So forget the issue of whether the universe had a beginning or not just right now. And he just looked at me with a shrug of the shoulders and said, I've never experienced a necessary being. That seems highly subjective. And if you're looking at that, Well, that's an interesting point. And when you were talking just there, it occurred to me, you know, I wrote this years ago, so how would I answer this objection? How would I answer this objection now? One of the things that I've pointed out to all of you, I've pointed out in this series, is that there's no experience that you could really have that proves God's existence if you're talking about an empirical experience. I'm going to broaden out empirical to not just sensation and the sense of sight and touch and so forth, but even heartfelt experience. Okay, so I go to church and I'm worshiping and you have a euphoric experience. I've actually had that. I've taken the Eucharist where I've just really felt the presence of God. Okay, so the cynic is standing next to me after I've had this experience, and he goes, that didn't prove anything. Well, in a sense, he's right. So like if I say, well, I experienced the necessary being at the Eucharist. He said, well, no, you didn't. You had a feeling as a result of the Eucharistic experience, that you felt a certain way, you felt euphoric, you felt at peace or whatever, you had a moment of clarity, as the alcoholics say. But that doesn't mean that you experienced the necessary being. That's your interpretive overlay of your experience. Well, who gets to determine? Well, that's the question. Now, my point would be this. Okay, let's broaden it out then. Let's go from a heartfelt sensation experience to, you know, I walk outside and there's a giant being walking around the earth going, I am the Lord thy God. Worship me. Okay. Now, Keith Parsons has said on several occasions that if there was a King Kong-like creature, or being, I should say, walking around, and he basically just lifted the roof off of Keith Parsons' house and said, go to church, he says, you better believe I'd be in church the next Sunday. Now, my response is, beyond the fact that months later, after that experience, You could argue that it was a delusion or a hallucination. Or that it's an alien. You could argue anything. There you go. Just because you have that experience, that palpable empirical experience, that wouldn't prove that God exists. That might be some creature from another planet pretending. to be God. So you know how memory works. I mean, you experience something that seems so real, but years later, it seems like a dream. I mean, have you ever thought about your high school years? Did they even really exist? You know, that's how memory can play funny tricks with us. But even getting beyond the memory problem, you have the interpretive problem of how do you really know that that was God? This is why miracles do not prove God's existence. That's right. But if a man lifts up his staff and splits the Red Sea, or you go to a tomb and you see a dead man walk out, even if you grant it that they happened, they don't prove God's existence. And that's not just because of worldview issues, like the atheist could be standing by going, boy, this is a freakier universe than I thought it was, right? Not just because of that, it's because of the interpretive problem. If you go into this as some other worldview, say you're a polytheist, then maybe Thor raised Jesus from the dead. And Thor is by definition not a necessary being, okay? I've already been It's very very good. I'm not saying a word. I'm not gonna say a word will not spoil it for any of you But if you've seen Thor Ragnarok, you know, he's not a necessary being he got his eye cut out So, but it was very entertaining Alright, so y'all see the problem here? No experience could give you a necessary being in the way that Quentin Smith seems to be asking for. So, but what, how would I respond to him then? Well, my response to him is, hey, look man, you're experiencing the necessary being every day. When you, when you talk to me the way you're talking to me right now, you're experiencing him. If it weren't for him, you wouldn't be in existence because you would If he took his hands off the universe, as it were, the whole universe would perish into oblivion. He's the necessary being who sustains you in reality. Well, how do I know that? Because I'm experiencing myself right now as a contingent being. And the necessary being is not something I experience in the sense that he walks into the room and I have the experience of him. He's something I experience precisely because he's the necessary precondition for my very existence. And my reasoning in this way, from contingent to necessary being, being a valid and sound form of reasoning, gets me to a knowledge that it is indeed He who sustains me in existence. So what I'm offering here is not a feeling that God just must be real, because He must be real, because He must be real, and I just believe it. It's a knowledge that God really does exist. And that's how I determine. Who determines if it's the necessary being? The contingency argument determines if I could be so bald about it. The fact that I'm contingent and I can infer my existence from my existence to his existence, that is what determines this. I had a professor in seminary that didn't believe he could prove God's existence. Most of my professors did not believe he could prove God's existence. I think they kind of rolled my eyes at me saw me walking down the hall eventually. But one of them in particular would say, he would quote his favorite theologian, Clint Eastwood, who said, a man's got to know his limitations. Well, since mastering this argument, I've come to realize that that very statement proves God's existence via Thomas Aquinas, because When you say a man's got to know his limitations, you're admitting that you're a limited, finite, contingent being. And therefore, if a man has to know his limitations, he has to know he's contingent. And that's all you need to know in order to know that God exists. And so this is the kind of argument I would give to Quentin Smith. Go ahead. But is it not possible to experience something without necessarily perceiving it? For example, you walk around the earth for centuries and millennia before Newton ever actually formalized the law of gravity. People experience the force of gravity, they just don't know what it was. We experience what it's like to be on a pebble hurtling around the sun at who knows how many hundreds or Even thousands of miles an hour, forgive me, I'm not up on my astrophysics. That's happening to us. Right. None of us perceives that we are traveling at that speed. That's right. It's still absolutely happening. We just, and there are hints, you know, you can look at the rotation of the Earth's cyclotron. Obviously we've deduced these things. Right. Over time. Right. But there was a long, long period of time where people did not realize the truth of that they were experiencing. Yes, very good. So again, just because you don't see it doesn't mean you're not experiencing it. Is he saying that God is not necessary or that no one is necessary? Well, Quentin Smith would obviously say God is not necessary. He would probably also say no one is necessary. Well, maybe he had a heart attack and felt differently when he went to the hospital. He might. Who knows? He was one of the most congenial I mean, I've met some really kind, you know, atheists, and he was one of them. I mean, I really enjoyed talking. I mean, it was funny. I went up to him after the debate. I said, you know, sometimes when I hear these issues being bandied about, I feel like a real idiot, and he goes, me too. I really liked the fact that he said that, you know. And a friend of mine said, well, you know, a process theologian, would say the following to you, and he goes, oh yeah, exactly, a process theologian would totally destroy my argument. Now what would be his response to that? He would just give his argument against process theology. That's why he doesn't have to worry about them. I'm not getting into what Quentin Smith argued, but... It's interesting, one of my favorite quotations, and this speaks to the point as well, and this, I guess, speaks to Alex's point. So on page 244, Francis Bacon, and I quoted this in Velton Chong as I began my critique of atheism, but it just, it's worth, it's a great quotation. He is an ill discoverer who thinks there is no land when he can see nothing but sea. It's the weakness of subjectivity. Right. Or I should say it's the limitation of subjectivity. Page 244, the principle of the identity of indiscernibles is false. What's the principle of the identity of indiscernibles? Well, this is one of our arguments for the unity of the uncaused cause. You'll remember that I gave the following illustration. The illustration was, in order for there to be two things, one has to possess one property that the other one lacks, right? So that they would be different. There has to be at least one property distinguishing the two. So even if you have two red circles that are exactly alike in every way, their spatial location opposite each other would distinguish them. So them having the respective properties of occupying two different positions in space would be a distinguishing feature. And the illustration I gave would be, you know, imagine that you ran into a really incredible reporter named Clark Kent, who was the fastest typist at the Daily Planet and in love with Lois Lane, was very well-mannered, etc. etc. And then you ran into another guy named Superman, who also is in love with Lois Lane, is the fastest creature on the planet, etc. etc. etc. And then you begin to observe them for a while and you begin to realize that there's not a single property that distinguishes Clark Kent from Superman. What must you conclude? Obviously, you must conclude that they're the same person, that there is no difference between Clark Kent and Superman. If there were even one thing distinguishing one from the other, they wouldn't be the same. All right, so how can you have two different infinite beings? What would it mean to be that? Well, you'd have to have one property that's possessed by one infinite being that's not possessed by the other. Well, how is that possible? Well, we argue that this being is pure actuality. There are no accidents in this being, meaning there are no properties that this being does not need to have in order to be what it is. I have accidental properties. If you cut off one of my arms, I'm still me. Less happy, but I'm still me. Right. But it's not like God has two arms because he's a non-corporeal being. So the question is, what property could you remove from this uncaused being and give to the other? Well, it turns out there just are no properties. In other words, you cannot have an uncaused being that lacks any of the properties we predicated upon this being. So for example, you could not speak of an uncaused being who is not eternal. Well, that's exactly right. In other words, the very fact that you have differences between humans, for example, that itself is proof of our contingency. The diversity between us is a proof of our finitude. and our contingency, therefore. You're talking about a non-contingent being, a necessary being. A being can't have, there cannot be more than one of those beings because you can't have properties between them distinguishing them. In other words, any property a necessary being has, it must have to be the thing it is. And therefore, if you found two uncaused beings, one lacking a property that the other had, then it turns out that one of those guys ain't an uncaused being. Yes, the off-brand. Very good. All right. Now, J.P. Moreland gives the following. He says, many philosophers take this principle to be false because, among other things, they believe that there is more to a particular than its properties. For example, we should have two red and round disks that had the very same color, shape, size, and so forth. They could share all and only the same properties, but still be two disks and not one because an individual thing like a disk is not exhausted by its properties. Now here's my response. First, even if it were valid, we would still be left with three more arguments for God's unity that to our knowledge have never been answered. Remember, this is not the only argument for God's unity. I gave four. So this is just one. Second, even if this objection were valid, it would at most apply to finite or contingent beings, not the necessary being. As Geisler and Korduan state, a finite and infinite being may be conceived of non-unifically because they differ in being, but two infinite beings, which are said to be the same in every respect, cannot be so conceived. Whatever univocally conceived beings have, no real difference, must be really identical. And two infinite beings with all perfections are surely not to be conceived of equivocally, for then they would be totally different. And if one had being, then the other would be non-being, since that is what is totally different from being. Nor will an analogous conception be permitted where they are only similar for it has already been agreed that they are identical in attributes and being. If they are not identical, then it follows easily that there cannot be two infinitely perfect beings. For if they are not identical, one has what the other does not have. And if one is absolutely perfect with that characteristic and the other lacks it, then the one lacking it is not absolutely perfect. Thus, we would be left with only one absolutely perfect being, which is what we set out to show. This argument is distinguishable from our earlier use of the identity of indiscernible in at least three ways. First, it concerns the actual identity of what is, in fact, indiscernible. not the logical identity of indistinguishable concepts. Two, it applies only to infinite being and leaves open the possibility that two finite beings with exactly the same properties could still be different. And three, it applies only to beings that are univocal, not those which are analogous. And thirdly, we simply disagree with Moreland's contention. Even in the realm of contingent reality, indiscernible things must be identical. Indeed, two red disks will have at least one difference between them, spatial location. Now, there's some people that don't want to say spatial location is a property, but see, I would say spatial location will be something that's accidentally true of you, therefore a property of sorts. So, for example, I possess the property of wearing a blue and white shirt, okay? That's a property that I have. And you would say, well, that can't be a property because you can lose that. Well, most of my properties I can lose. In fact, that's proof. As we pointed out when we were defending simplicity, God doesn't have his properties, he is them. He doesn't have power, he is power. If he had them, if he possessed them, he could lose them. Proof, everything I possess, I can lose. including my life, I possess life, and that's precisely proof that I can lose it. So really the question is, what isn't accidental to human beings? Everything about you is contingent. So is there such a thing as an essential property that makes you you? And that'll be something y'all can dwell on on your own. I'll say yes, but the question is what is that, right? But most of the things that you can point out that you possess, you don't need to be you. And that includes, you know, huge chunks of your bodily material, your arms, your legs, so on. All right, omnipresence does not entail incorporeality. Y'all remember this argument? I argued that if something is, everywhere that it is not extended in space and therefore non-material. This is how we argued for the non-materiality of the uncaused cause. Do y'all remember this, or at least do y'all understand what I just said? Now, it turns out that there are Mormons out there. Mormons exist in our world. And Mormons do not believe that God is non-corporeal. However, you have to ask the question, well, if a Mormon says that, then how do Mormons rationally believe that God is omnipresent? If God is omnipresent, then God cannot be corporeal. They believe that God has a physical body, lives on a physical planet near the center of our galaxy. Kolob. Maybe it's the star Kolob. Anyways, there's a planet near the center of our galaxy that Mormons believe God resides in. But he's also omnipresent. You have to believe that God is omnipresent if you're a Mormon because scripture says so. And so what I'm, what I'm suggesting to you is that incorporeality is a necessary, uh, inference from the omnipresence of whatever it is you're talking about. So if you are omnipresent, you cannot be, um, incorporeal. Excuse me. If you are omnipresent, you cannot be corporeal. Right. Oh, by the way, uh, you could be corporeal and, um, Or excuse me, you could be finite or you could be non-omnipresent and incorporeal as well. I mean, again, the number one, if it does exist, is not a corporeal thing. But if it is corporeal, it cannot be omnipresent. It would be, it may not be subject to the same limitations, but it would definitely be subject to limitations. You know, you couldn't be everywhere if you're spatially located. That just, that's an impossibility. Sure. Sure. And those of us who believe in an incarnation would say that the human nature of Christ is still limited in its location. God the Son as a man is not on earth. He's not here. He can't, the human nature of Christ can only be at one place at one time. He can only be at one place at a time. The divine nature of Christ can be everywhere, but that's precisely because the divine nature of Christ is not corporeal. You have a question or a thought? I'm just trying to think through what they might say in response to that. So you could say corporeal, but you couldn't say that the corporeal part is all enveloping. Could you say that, so that the corporeal part is, in other words, in all things, where you kind of get into this more pantheistic view? That's exactly the direction where they're actually, they're heading more towards a pantheistic model of God. Their model is panentheism. So that Elohim is a divine manifestation of the divine. So even though Elohim is corporeal, the divine nature is incorporeal. But the divine nature itself evolves, and so they have to be panentheous. But in any case, on page 246, we have David Paulson. He's inspired by the work of Grace M. Dick, who was married, and she's now Grace Jansen. Paulson argues that God's omnipresence does not entail His incorporeality. Indeed, the statement, God's body is not everywhere, is not necessarily equated with God is not everywhere. By the way, it is, but we'll see that in a minute. The implicit question being asked is, in what relevant sense can one be said to be present at a particular place? In answer to this question, Paulson answers that And this is the first point he wants to make. First, it is not the case that I am present only in the volume of space occupied by my body. And two, to be present at X means most essentially to be aware of what is going on at X and perhaps to be able to some extent to influence it. In support of the first point that it is not the case that I'm present only in the volume of space occupied by my body, we would surely say that a speaker addressing the Senate that he is present in the Senate chambers, even though it is not the case that the spatial coordinates of his body are coextensive with those of the chambers. What he's getting at is imagine you're addressing the Senate via television. So you could say, well, the senator's in the chamber of, you know, in the Senate chambers addressing the Senate now. Well, is he really? Well, he's on TV, but he's in there addressing them. All right, OK. And as to the second point, what it means to be present, how would a senator who slowly falls asleep as a bill is read and remains so throughout the ensuing debate correctly answer the question, were you present when the measure was considered? In other words, his body is there, but he is not there. So in other words, just because you're spatially coordinated someplace doesn't mean you're at that place. And just because you're not spatially coordinated in some place doesn't mean you're not at that place. Or suppose a hearing on a bill eliminating veterans' benefits is held in a hospital ward of comatose veterans. Could they correctly be said to be present for the hearing? On her analysis, Jansen concludes that if God has a body which is spatially locatable somewhere in the universe, and if from that position, he knows and is able to influence everything that is going on, then he would properly be said to be omnipresent. If this is correct, then the argument for omnipresence fails. Now, my point is that this is just a bad line of reasoning. And I basically look at the two definitions or the definitions he gives of being present. I say, look at the definition again. To be present in X means, most essentially, to be aware of what is going on in X and perhaps to be able to some extent to influence it. Notice that on this definition, causal influence is optional. That is, it is only perhaps the case that being present at X is being able to influence it. So what is most essential to the Paulson-Janson definition of presence is knowledge. That is, being aware of what is going on at X. And we strengthen the definition, as I think we should, and remove the word perhaps. The heart of the Paulson-Janson definition of being present at some place is one is present at X if one is aware of X and is able to exert some kind of influence over it. But we're still not satisfied with the definition. Allow us to use one of their illustrations to explain our dissatisfaction. Ought we to say that a speaker addressing the Senate via television was present in the Senate chambers? If we answer the question in the affirmative, it is indubitable that we would do so, or we should do so, with at least some qualification. To be sure the speaker, in a sense, was present in the Senate chambers. He was aware of at least some of the things that were going on there. His speech has at least some influence over the thinking of the Senators present. And certainly, at least if his speech was delivered via television, his image was present in the Senate chambers. But could we still honestly say that the speaker himself was in the Senate chambers? The answer seems obvious. In order to say in an unqualified manner that a speaker is present in the chambers as he gives his speech, one must say that all of what the speaker is, mind and body, is present as he delivers his speech. And this really gets to the problem with this whole exercise. We actually inferred the omnipresence of the uncaused cause from the uncaused cause's infinitude, and we argued the following. We said that one of the properties that the uncaused cause has is infinitude, and we also said that the uncaused cause is clearly present somewhere because existence entails location. But since presence is an attribute of the uncaused cause, and you can't place limits on the uncaused cause's attributes, then that means that the uncaused cause must not only exist somewhere, it must exist everywhere. That was how we reasoned. This argument doesn't take into account the infinitude of God. Yeah, the one that they're giving. If God really is infinite, then that means that he exists even in my little, Pinky, here, I was about to say thumb, but I went with pinky, all right? But there's not a molecule in my body where God isn't present. The simplicity of God entails that all of what God is exists in, with, and through everything that is. Some people say, well, that sounds like pantheism. Well, it's not because we're saying that God is everywhere, but not everything. But saying that God is everywhere means just that. It doesn't mean that God is just here in this room causally influencing it or aware of it. Know that everything that God is exists in, with, and through everything that is. And so that's another problem I have with this argument. It just doesn't take into account the infinitude of this God. On page 248, here's my definition of what it means to be present somewhere. S is present at X if and only if, first, S is aware of at least some of the events going on at X. Two, S is able to exercise at least some influence over what is going on at X. And three, the whole of what S is can truly, in an unqualified manner, be said to be located at X. And on that definition of presence, Given the omnipresence of the uncaused cause, the uncaused cause must be incorporeal. Yeah, go ahead. Right, and this is a univocal definition of presence so that it applies to contingent beings as well as God. Right, so God is present in the same way that I am except in an infinite manner. So the way I predicate the word presence upon God is analogical, but the definition of the word present is the same. And so I wanted to give a definition of presence that doesn't beg any questions and could apply to anything. And this applies to God very well. I mean, God exists in, God is aware of what's going on in me, for example. He's not only able to exercise influence, but he does cause me to exist. And then finally, the whole of what God is without qualification can be said to reside in me. And I can just extend that to everything. And therefore God just is, he must be incorporeal. We don't have to give this qualified sense. So that song, Bette Midler, God is watching us from a distance, is a pagan song because God is not watching us from a distance. He is eminent within all of us at all times. This is the truth that the pantheist distorts, where he shifts from God is in me to God is me. Right, and that's where he goes wrong. Sure. Right, right, exactly. Very good. The principle of determinism on page 249 is not valid. This is the principle of determinism in a nutshell. The principle of determinism went like this. If I have two options, A and not A, and one obtains rather than the other, The obtaining of one rather than the other is explainable by the actions of a personal agent. Well, I have two options. A contingent universe exists and it need not exist. And therefore, there's an equal possibility that a contingent universe does not exist. So the explanation of one over the other is to be explained by personal choice or free choice. And since impersonal things don't have freedom, God must be a personal being. The uncaused cause must be personal. This is actually one of our arguments for the free will of the uncaused cause. The uncaused cause freely makes this world, or excuse me, the uncaused cause freely causes or sustains this world in being. And so that's, that was the nature of that argument. And here's what Michael Martin says. He says on the bottom of page 249, In ordinary life and in science, one would be ill-advised to appeal always to the choice of a personal agent to explain what happens when two events are equally likely and one occurs. For example, if heads come up in a flip of our unbiased coin, one would try to explain this event by causal factors operating on the coin, none of which might be the result of the choice of a personal agent or agents. It is unclear why the situation would be different in cosmology. It is unclear also why a mechanical, non-personal cause could not have brought about or sustained the universe. Perhaps some non-personal causes are non-temporal and yet create or sustain events in time." I'm just not impressed with this kind of response. He actually gives an illustration here that proves our point. What is an unbiased flipping of a coin? What does that even mean? How can you be biased flipping a coin? Well, what I mean by that is, what he wants to do is he wants to analyze the coin that has already been flipped. And if you want to look at that, you can have all kinds of non-personal explanations as to why the coin lands one way rather than another. The rotation speed, the wind. the speed at which you flipped it, that would be rotation speed, but the force that was exerted on it when it was initially flipped, the height at which it reached its crescendo as it was going upwards. I mean, all those things would play into why the coin lands heads rather than tails. But here's a question. Why was the coin flipped in the first place? So yeah, it was a personal choice of the coin flipper. So in other words, his illustration actually proves our point. The illustration illustrates our point very well, because I can speak of all kinds of factors as to why, you know, mechanical, non-personal factors as to why one contingent events happens rather than another. But we're asking the question that's more deep than that. Why do contingent things exist in the first place? And so while I could maybe agree with him, take the theory of evolution. I mean, we're not talking about evolution. We might not talk about it in natural theology at all. Well, let's grant the entire Darwinian story from start to finish. I mean, after all, the universe is eternal. Then there's an eternal, infinite chance that life spontaneously generated in a perennial soup somehow, somewhere, someway. Why not our planet, right? So fine. So we had the whole Darwinian story going on. Non-personal mechanical forces explain life from start to finish. And I want to say, so what, as far as God's existence is concerned? Now, in Sunday School, we're actually talking about this, so the listeners can go and hear what I have to say about that. But fine, grant the whole thing. It doesn't change the fact that you still don't have an explanation for why contingent things exist in the first place. Unless, of course, there was someone to flip the coin. Yeah, yeah. Right, exactly. The contingency argument rests upon the invalid ontological argument. I'm not going to read all of this to you. I'm simply going to say this. His argument presupposes, or excuse me, his argument, this is Immanuel Kant I'm talking about, page 251. This argument comes from Immanuel Kant, and he's thinking about Leibniz's argument. And I have actually argued that Leibniz's argument presupposes the ontological argument. Can you elaborate a little bit for me on the ontological argument? Sure, the ontological argument is an attempt to show that God is logically necessary. Yeah, if I can conceive of God, that proves that God must exist. Thomas' argument is not trying to show that God is logically necessary in that sense. In other words, Thomas actually rejected the ontological argument. So he would say, I can conceive of God's non-existence. Anselm, the great medieval monk who preceded Aquinas by a couple centuries, he argued that God's existence is, excuse me, God's non-existence is inconceivable. And so he argued that since God is the greatest conceivable being, and since that which exists is greater then that which does not exist. If I say that God does not exist, that automatically entails that I can conceive of a greater than God. But that's a contradiction in terms. To conceive of a greater than God, why? Because God is the greatest conceivable being. And therefore, once you understand that God is the greatest conceivable being, you must say that God is real. Because to say that God is non-real entails a contradiction. There's nothing that can come before Him. But it's not just that, it's that I know that God exists because I cannot not conceive of God's non-existence. Excuse me, I cannot not conceive of God's existence. Right, right. A lot of people think a dancing girl is brought in here somewhere. This is not a valid line of reasoning. And again, my argument here, Thomas' argument, does not presuppose the ontological argument. Thomas himself rejected the argument. So the question is, where did Kant get the idea that the cosmological argument is resting upon the non-firm foundation of the ontological? He did it through Leibniz, because here's what Leibniz said. Imagine you're playing tennis with an atheist, and you're hitting the ball in his court, and he's having to hit it back. Your first serve is the argument, and you say, everything needs a sufficient reason. The universe needs a sufficient reason, and that sufficient reason is God. Atheist hits back and says, well, what is the sufficient reason for God? And you hit back and you say, God is his own sufficient reason. And then the atheist hits back and says, well, why can't the universe be its own sufficient reason? And here's what the Leibnizian is going to say. He's going to say, because I can conceive of the universe's non-existence, but I cannot conceive of God's non-existence. And at that point, Leibniz has incorporated the ontological argument into his own argument, which is fine if the ontological argument is sound. But if the ontological argument is not a good argument, then the whole thing falls like a house of cards. Now, I've argued that the ontological argument is sound, mind you. But I don't want my proofs to rest on just one argument. I like diversity. And so the Thomistic argument is an attempt to give an independent line of reasoning. Well, Thomas Aquinas is not assuming that everything needs a sufficient reason. He's assuming that only contingent things need causes. And so he's open to the possibility that the universe need not have a cause. It just turns out that through experience, I learned that the universe is contingent. And so we're right back to the old point that I was making just a few points ago. that this argument is in no way contingent upon the ontological argument part of the pun. Page 254, and now we're at my favorite part, or one of my favorite parts. The thought experiment upon which this natural theology is based is wholly hypothetical and therefore totally bogus. In chapter one, we were introduced to Thomas, a man who has lived in a pitch black cave all of his life, blindfolded, gagged, and in chains. The question we asked was, could Thomas ever know God's existence under these circumstances? The argument of the last couple chapters has been that he could come to such a knowledge for, as we pointed out in chapter two, he could conceive of that then which nothing greater can be conceived, realize that such a conception cannot be the greatest conceivable unless it exists, and so conclude that such a conception is no mere conception, but corresponds to an actually existing being. But the greatest conceivable being is what we mean by God. Therefore, even in the cave, alone with his thoughts, Thomas knows that God is real. In this and the previous chapter, it has been argued that Thomas can know that he is a limited, dependent, and mutable being. That is, he is contingent. As such, he needs a cause. Now that which is causing him to exist is either a caused or uncaused. If the latter, then he has discovered God, for God is the uncaused cause. And if the former, then the chain of causes must ultimately end in an uncaused being. Hence, either way, Thomas has come to know God. The problem with all this is that no one has ever been born under these circumstances. No one has ever lived in a cave, blind, deaf, and dumb, only to come to a knowledge of God. People come to know about God because they have been taught that God is real. After being socialized under these circumstances, God-believers conjure up proofs for the existence of God, of such a being, because they don't want their faith to lack a rational component. So first comes faith, then comes reason, or better still, dogma is imposed upon us as children. Some of us have the temerity to throw off such ignorance, others fearful of the unknown, not so much reason as rationalize less than convincing arguments to excuse themselves for believing in invisible sky gods who watch us from the heavens. Here's the reconstruction of the argument. If our proverbial man in the cave is a purely hypothetical construct, then our natural theology is bogus. But our proverbial man in the cave is a purely hypothetical construct, and therefore, our natural theology is bogus. But the problem here is that premise A is clearly false, for it does not follow from the purely hypothetical nature of Thomas' existence that our natural theology is bogus, for we may be absolutely incorrect when we insist that even in the cave, Thomas can know God. The question is whether our arguments are sound, not whether a hypothetical person could, in principle, become aware of them. For even if he could never become aware of them, we are aware of them, and that should be sufficient for any seeker after the truth." At this point in the discussion, the atheist ought to be more concerned with refuting the premises of our argument than seeking a refutation of our thought experiment. Also, we are not sure how anyone could prove that our Thomas, under such circumstances, couldn't infer God's existence from one, his idea of God as the greatest conceivable being, or two, his contingent existence. Even if we were to come across an entire culture consisting of millions upon millions of people living under the same conditions as our Thomas who, it turns out, never once even began to think along the same lines as our ontological and cosmological arguments, such would not refute our basic contention. Indeed, the question is not, has anyone ever come to a knowledge of God under such circumstances? Nor is the question, would anyone come to such a knowledge of God under such circumstances? No, the question before us is, could someone come to a knowledge of God under the same conditions as Thomas? And we see absolutely no reason to think not. Finally, we find it curious that so many unbelievers criticize theists for coming to believe there is a God first through, say, their parents or religious institutions or friends, only to later come up with proofs for God's existence. When atheists say things like, oh, so you theists who are now natural theologians have only found what you're already looking for, or this is just a self-fulfilled prophecy. You wanted God to exist, and so you conjured up an excuse to think there's a God in the guise of your so-called proofs. They're actually committing a genetic fallacy. The genetic fallacy is a formal fallacy in logic. It is committed when a person's beliefs are attacked on the basis of where they come from. There are many illustrations of this fallacy. For example, it is fallacious to think that because I learned the golden rule from a bad person, the rule itself was morally suspect. Also, it is fallacious to think that because Hitler believed in evolution, evolution is thereby disproven. By the way, there are fundamentals to do that. They'll link the theory of evolution to Hitler in order to prove that it's a bad theory. But that doesn't prove that evolution is a bad theory just because a bad person believed it or promoted it. In the same way, it is fallacious to think that because I learned about God from my parents, my proofs for God are invalid. Indeed, as John Gerstner once put it, this criticism confuses one's motive for giving an argument with the argument itself. My motive for giving an argument for God's existence may be as sinister or saintly as you please. I may be giving the cosmological argument, in other words, I may be giving the cosmological argument to make people feel bad, or make myself feel smarter than others, or even help persons become more rational than they currently are. Right? My motives may be multifaceted. I might have all of the above as motives. I like feeling smarter than others, and I like imposing my beliefs on others, and I want people to be more rational than they already are. But that has nothing to do with whether the arguments are valid or invalid. I hope, by the way, you all don't believe that about me. Well, no, but I get it, because I used to just like to win the argument. Sure, sure. I just wanted to destroy the other person's argument. It occurred to me to try to win the person. Win the person, yeah. Now, of course, we have analyzed all the known objections to the various ontological and or a priori arguments, as well as the Thomistic cosmological argument, and we have found them wanting. Hence, it is safe to say that if the genetic value is the best the atheist can do at this point, then theism, along with our natural theology, is in very good shape. Premise B of this objection states that Thomas' purely hypothetical construct excuse me, it states that Thomas is a purely hypothetical construct. Our response is that while he is, bless his heart, hypothetical, he is not purely hypothetical. Indeed, he is hypothetical in the sense that we have never witnessed or even heard about someone being born and raised in a cave or living out his life in the same manner as Thomas. But he is not purely hypothetical, for our parable of Thomas has actually been inspired by one person who really did live out her existence blind, deaf, and dumb, and yet came to a knowledge of God under just these circumstances, and that is Helen Keller. No, no, no, this is the first time I brought this point up. So for those of you who know about Helen Keller, and for those of you who don't know about Helen Keller, this is an interesting story. Helen Keller was born in Alabama in 1880 to Arthur H. Keller and Kate Adams Keller. The first year and a half of her life was like that of any normal, quote unquote, child. Her early months were accompanied by normal brain development along with good sight and hearing. However, in February of 1882, she fell ill. Keller writes the following. In the dreary month of February came the illness which closed my eyes and ears and plunged me into the unconsciousness of a newborn baby. They called it acute congestion of the stomach and brain. The doctor thought I could not live. Early one morning, however, the fever left me as suddenly and mysteriously as it had come. It was great rejoicing in the family that morning, but no one, not even the doctor, knew that I should never see or hear again. Just before she turned seven, Ann Mansfield Sullivan was hired by the Kellers to teach Helen Keller whatever she could. The first thing she learned to do was spell out letters in her hand and or discern the letters being spelled out in her palm. Perhaps the most famous episode in her life was the water well incident, when Miss Sullivan taught her how to spell the word water. Keller writes, we walked down the path to the well house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher, Miss Sullivan, placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water. First slowly, then rapidly, I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as a something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then what W-A-T-E-R meant, that it meant the wonderful, cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away. Did Ann Sullivan introduce Helen to the idea of God? Not at all. Sullivan herself explains, no creed or dogma has been taught to Helen. nor has any effort been made to force religious beliefs upon her attention. Being fully aware of my own incompetence to give her any adequate explanations of the mysteries which underlie the names of God, soul, and immortality, I have always felt obliged by a sense of duty to my people to say as little as possible about spiritual matters." Roger Shaddock tells us that Michael and Nagnos, director of the Perkins Institute, the school for the blind, which sent Ann Sullivan to the Keller home, had asked Ann to restrict her use of spiritual or religious terms out of a scientific interest in natural theology. This is interesting. He wanted to basically keep her from learning about God just to see how much she already knew about God before being taught. And Annie, by the way, I don't agree with this. I wouldn't have done this, but having said this, I think this is a very interesting study. It's the redemptive value of a very broken scripture. Exactly. I think we can draw redemption from this. And Annie went along, not out of scientific interest in natural religion, but out of indifference to all religion or spiritual matters. So he said, I want to do an experiment. I want to know what she knows. And she went along with it because she didn't care. It's perfect. So in other words, done. I'll do whatever you're asking. Did Helen evince a natural, untaught awareness of the divinity? Yes, she did. And here's Sullivan, the apathetic agnostic who doesn't really care about teaching these things. This is what she reports. It must have been evident to those who watched the rapid unfolding of Helen's faculties that it would not be possible to keep her inquisitive spirit for any length of time from reaching out toward the unfathomable mysteries of life. But great care had been taken not to lead her thoughts prematurely to the consideration of subjects which perplex and confuse all minds. Children ask profound questions, but they often receive shallow answers or, to speak more correctly, they are quieted by such answers. Where did I come from? And where shall I go when I die? Were questions Helen asked when she was eight years old. The explanations which she was able to understand at that time did not satisfy, although they forced her to remain silent until her mind should begin to put forth its higher powers and generalize from innumerable impressions and ideas which streamed in upon it from books and from her daily experiences. Her mind sought for the cause of things. That is so interesting. It is a natural bent of the human mind to seek for the causes of things. This is exactly what Thomas Aquinas argued. It is just a natural function of our mind to seek after causes. So notice that atheism has to be learned. Y'all need to get that in your head very firmly. It is not theism that has to be learned. Atheism has to be learned. Because you have to go to a university and have a professor tell you that questions of ultimate importance are not important. You have to have a professor tell you that searching for the ultimate cause of things is just not a rational exercise of the mind. It takes outside forces to bring you to that conclusion, yes. It's a form of anti-intellectualism, I'd submit, to say that you shouldn't be looking for the ultimate cause of things. You're cutting off a question that rational people have asked for centuries. As her observation of phenomena became more extensive and her vocabulary richer and more subtle, enabling her to express her own conceptions and ideas clearly, and also to comprehend the thoughts and experiences of others, she became acquainted with the limit of human creative power and perceived that some power, not human, must have created the earth, the sun, and the thousand natural objects with which she was perfectly familiar. She concluded this. Finally, she one day demanded a name for the power, the existence of which she had already conceived in her own mind. Through Charles Kingsley's Greek Heroes, she had become familiar with the beautiful stories of the Greek gods and goddesses, and she must have met with the words God, Heaven, and Soul, and a great many other similar expressions in books. She never asked the meaning of such words, nor made any comment when they occurred. Sullivan tells us that it was not until February, 1889, when someone introduced Helen to the idea of God, giving her concepts she simply could not understand. For a while, Helen attributed many natural phenomena to the workings of Mother Nature, after reading that expression in a book. Finally, in May of 1890, Sullivan felt it was evident that she had reached a point where it was impossible to keep from her the religious beliefs held by those with whom she was in daily contact. She almost overwhelmed me with inquiries which were the natural growth of her quickened intelligence. The conclusion we draw from all of this is that Helen Keller's testimony is one of the clearest examples of how the knowledge of God gets through to everyone, even those who are cut off from the world of sounds and colors. Helen never showed any confusion or made any inquiries whenever confronting words like God or soul, a fact which to us vindicates at least some of the a priori proofs offered in chapter 2. And she very naturally sought after the name of the Power, or we should say Power with a capital P, that caused everything in this world to exist, a fact which to us vindicates our Thomistic argument for God. Sullivan herself assumed, at the outset of her work with Helen, that had she not been endowed with a certain capacity to learn whatever she desired, it would be impossible for her to become educated. And without that degree of mental development and activity which perceives the necessity of superhuman creative power, no explanation of natural phenomena is possible. Which by the way, I should have added, that seems to me to vindicate our transcendental argument for God's existence, that God is the precondition for knowing anything whatsoever. Oh yeah, very good, very good, yes. So yeah, there was a heightening of this inquiry given the lack of the senses. Sullivan did explain to Helen that while no one knows for sure how the world came to be, many wise men have come to believe that all forces of nature are manifestations of one power, and to that power they give the name God. Helen immediately asked, who made God? Sullivan evaded the question, fearing that she would not be able to explain the mystery of a self-existent being. Interestingly, Sullivan implies that that she was a pantheist or at least panentheistic when she says, I told her that God was everywhere and that she must not think of him as a person but as the life, the mind, the soul of everything. So notice pantheism was taught to her. She had an innate knowledge of God and an educator distorted her knowledge. Because notice the question that Helen, some of you might say, well, no, you're reading into that. No, notice her question. Who made God? Not what made God, but who made God? That means she's looking for a spiritual, personal power that makes everything, not an impersonal force that is everything. And so she was taught to believe that pantheism is true. And this is just everything that we're getting from this testimony. Helen interrupted Sullivan, insisting, everything does not have life. The rocks have not life, and they cannot think. In other words, pantheism is false. In other words, the God who is life itself cannot be confused with this world, for there is much that is lifeless and lacking all thought. For the sake of those who are listening, My statement that begins with, in other words, those are not quoted by the author, so this is me inferring this. But that's exactly what she's saying. The rocks don't have life, so therefore, not all is life, and therefore, not all is God. That's the only conclusion you can come to. It is pantheism and not theism that must be taught. Sullivan also pointed out that at this point in her life, she did not allow Helen to read the Bible. thinking that had she done so, she would have developed a very erroneous conception of the attributes of God. So what I'm inferring from this is the very natural knowledge of God that she was born with was suppressed by her educator, because what the Bible does is it enhances the knowledge that's already there. But Sullivan said, no, no, no, she'd get an erroneous conception of God with that, so we're going to suppress that. So Sullivan was not quite as agnostic and apathetic Very good. We're not as agnostic and apathetic as we sometimes make ourselves out to be. However, and I'm going back to what I'm writing here, however, she was introduced to the life of Jesus and the story of his heroic death greatly disturbed her. Helen Keller was disturbed by the death of Jesus. Helen was also troubled by the problem of evil and the perplexing question as to how evil can be real in a world created by an all-powerful and all-good deity. which is the question of all questions. At this point, I do want to tell all of you something that's disturbed me. And I point this out in footnote 109. If you surf the internet, you'll find many versions of a story often told about Ann Sullivan and Helen Keller. The story is that after some time, Sullivan introduced Helen to the idea of God and then shared the Christian gospel with her. We already know that that story can't be true because Sullivan is not a Christian. At that point, Helen responded by saying, I have always known there is a higher power, but it was not until now that I learned his name. And you'll have different versions of that quotation. I have searched and searched and searched for a source for that story. And it's one of those maddening trails that I spent days on, where you go and you find the quote and he gives you a website. And that website takes you to another website, that takes you to another website, that takes you to another website, and no one ever gives you a source. And so I've actually heard preachers use this as an illustration. So I'm telling you this because unless you know something I don't, I can't find a legitimization of that story anyway. I'm gonna call that fake news. And you know what's really disturbing about it? Is that the real story is so much more interesting. That's probably just grabbed onto and widely accepted. Yeah, yeah. But this story is so interesting to me. Sullivan did seek out the counsel of Dr. Phillips Brooks, perhaps the most popular pastor in Boston at the time, to answer some of Helen's questions about religion. What he gave her was a rather liberal form of Christianity. So she seeks out the help of a liberal, a theological liberal, which can be summarized in the following words he gave to her. He says, there is one universal religion, Helen, the religion of love. Love your heavenly father with your whole heart and soul. Love every child of God as much as you ever can. And remember that the possibilities of good are greater than the possibilities of evil, and you have the key to heaven. So a works-based gospel, which is no gospel, was handed to her. So notice, she comes to a natural knowledge of one God who is personal and is the cause of all things around her. And then she asks really good questions. Well, who made God, and then why is there evil in a world made by a good and powerful deity? And she's given a workspace gospel as a solution to this. A few lines later, Helen tells us that Bishop Brooks taught me no special creed or dogma, but he impressed upon my mind two great ideas, the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. By the way, that was liberalism in the 19th century. Now that's too patriarchal, the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man. So now God is conceived of as totally impersonal in modern liberalism. And he made me feel that these truths, she says, underlie all creeds and forms of worship. God is love, God is our father, we are his children, therefore the darkest clouds will break, and though right be worsted, wrong shall not triumph. This view of God, which stressed God's love almost at the expense of his moral perfection, seems to influence Helen to seek even more liberal expressions of Christianity, and she even embraced Swedenborgianism. And this was a form of liberalism that was developed in the 19th century, and basically it was a form of Unitarianism. And then Helen will spend the rest of her life fighting against Orthodox Christianity. To my knowledge, I don't know if she ever became a Christian. Of course, we're not suggesting that Swedenborgianism was a natural or logical outcome of her natural theology. Indeed, Brooks's Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man along with Swedenborg's reinterpretation of Christianity were doctrines she learned from men, whether they be true or not is a different issue. Our point is that before she learned anything from a theologian or a pastor or a spiritualist, Helen Keller, in the recesses of her soul and in her reflections on her circumstances as a contingent being, manifested a profound, albeit truncated, knowledge of God. We are certain that her initial musings on the divine nature, due to her own metaphysical and moral limitations, needed to be developed, enhanced, and even corrected by another source. Nevertheless, Helen Keller's testimony reveals to us that a knowledge of God is manifest to everyone, even a blind and deaf child surrounded by those who refuse to discuss such things to her. Thus, if everything we have said so far is true, then this final objection fails. To be sure, Helen Keller, unlike Thomas, had access to the outside world. She could interact with people, read books, and thereby reflect on the world in which she lives. And yet we wonder, if God can get through to her, why not someone like our hypothetical Thomas? I've got a question here. Go ahead. take you back to an earlier objection, because I want to give you a quotation that I absolutely adore. And let's see. Page 254. And this is a good way for us to close out our discussion of Thomas's argument. We are done with Thomas's argument as of now, basically. And I'm just going to give you a conclusion, and then we'll start with the Klum argument next week or whenever we can meet. So we will get into science apologetics starting next week. But I love this quotation by Jonathan Edwards. And this is in the response to the idea that the ontological argument is the background is the background to the Thomistic argument. I point out that a defender of the contingency argument can concede that, let me back up and say, Kant's critique of the argument is unpersuasive, for it seems to me that all he's telling us is the attributes predicated upon the existing uncaused cause derive from the a priori realm of ideas. A defender of the contingency argument can't concede this point without abandoning the argument itself. For one could legitimately say that while our conception of the supreme being is derived from a priori categories, his existence is established by our knowledge of the world around us. This is exactly what Jonathan Edwards said. when he said that humans can come to a knowledge of God through this means. He says, we first ascend and prove a posteriori, or from effects, that there must be an eternal cause. And then secondly, prove by argumentation, not intuition, that this being must be necessarily existent. And then thirdly, from the proved necessity of his existence, we may descend and prove many of his perfections a priori. By a priori, we simply mean that having established the uncaused being's existence through an a posteriori method, our experience with the contingent world, we actually arrive at an uncaused cause. And from the prior knowledge of that uncaused cause existence, we infer his attributes as rationally necessarily belonging to him. And I think that that's exactly what everybody can do. Everybody can do this. Helen Keller did this. And if Heller can do this, then anybody can. What I do in the conclusion is I just raise concerns about whether we've overstated our case and that sort of thing. And then what I'd like to do is point you out that there is an appendix where I diagram the argument, and like the first, linear series. Let's imagine there's a linear series and there's an infinite number of contingent beings on page 267. God still must exist to explain that. Well, what if the contingent series is in a circle? Well, then you would have a series of concentric circles that end in God. What if the contingent realm is disconnected? What if no contingent thing causes another? Or many contingent things are not caused by other contingent things. Then God must still be the ultimate cause of all those contingent things. And then I point out that maybe the universe is eternal on page 270. And the eternality is illustrated by the circle. And the universe would be illustrated by the line. And maybe that line just goes on forever. On this illustration, there is really no beginning or end to the space-time continuum of existence. The cosmos has always been and perhaps will always be. Nevertheless, it is currently being sustained by God. The question before us is whether or not this view of the universe is correct. Did the universe begin to exist? Or has it always existed? And that's the question we're gonna try to answer next week. So do you have a question or a thought? As I conclude this, yeah. Right. Right. but she was limited by what others gave her to learn that. She couldn't go out and just do it on her own. So she's led off into a wrong view of Christianity. How does God judge that? How does God look at that? Oh, very good. In other words, how is Helen Keller going to be judged if her limitations are so profound? Right. And the argument is, we get this a lot. Is God going to send someone to hell just because of what someone failed to give them? Or what they never heard. Right. I know we know there's cultures. I think Latin America is a big interest to you. There's cultures that have never heard of God. Right. Well, I will back up and say there's no culture that's never heard of God. There are cultures that have never heard the gospel. And my short answer, and this is going to sound trite and I'm very sorry that I'm giving it, is that I will say two things. The first thing is I know that the God of heaven will do what is right. I just know that. And then second of all, I do believe that God judges people on the basis of the light that's given them. I am absolutely certain that there's a whole lot more light given to certain humans than we give them credit for. And I also think that they're capable of learning a whole lot more than we give them credit for. I think that our own educational system limits the potential of humans. And yeah, I think Helen Keller illustrates the fact that she was capable of a whole lot more than people were giving her credit for. You could bring up the same situation as regards a child that was murdered or killed at a young age, or even just dies of sickness Yeah. Um, you know, in the Pope, I have, uh, and we have a few minutes. I don't know if y'all saw my post on Facebook when I wrote, uh, there was a, somebody asked this question to us. I think it was you, Alex, you, you raised the questions that how would we handle the Pope issue? I don't know if you, I don't know if you agreed with what I said, but, um, But I'll go ahead and just say for the sake of everyone, a little boy came up to the Pope and asked him if his father's gonna go to hell because his father was an atheist. And I agree that that is an extremely sensitive situation and you gotta be very careful in the way you handle it and all of that. But in the most pastorally sensitive way possible, I would never lie to a child. And I would never say something to a child that is anti-biblical. And so for the Pope to look at his, this child and say, your father is definitely in heaven because he had you baptized. And that's basically what he said. And that proves that he was a good man. That to me is the height of arrogance and anti-gospel thinking. The gospel says we're all bad people. That's the presupposition of the gospel. Can God save anybody, even the recalcitrant atheist who's heard the gospel and rejects it anyway? Of course God can. Of course God can. I mean, I'm not going to put limits on what God can do. And I would love it if God did save everybody. So that's what I want. Charles Spurgeon said, God save the elect and elect some more. You know, that's the attitude we should have. We want you to save everybody. And we should have that attitude. But I'm not on that committee. And Jeremiah Pitts tells the story of a guy in seminary class who was railing against Billy Graham, because Billy Graham, near the end of his life, y'all might not know this, said some things that were borderline just heresies. I mean, he even indicated that maybe Jesus is maybe not the only way to heaven. And that, you know, a lot of evangelicals just went nuts over this. A lot of reform people went nuts over this, and they were just like, well, Billy Graham was not saved. I went to a conference where the title of a paper was, Is C.S. Lewis in Heaven? I kid you not. A theological conference that said, is C.S.? And the answer was no, not if he believed what he wrote. And here's, this is another gospel of works, by the way. Because the idea is that unless you're consistent, then that means that you're going to hell. So we're now saved by theological consistency. Do I have the right to look at Billy Graham and say, dude, you're being inconsistent, I think you're wrong, all that? Yeah, of course. Do I have the right to look at Billy Graham and say, dude, you're going to hell? Or say about him, I'm not on that committee. And that's what the professor in Jeremiah's class said. He goes, you know what? I'm very happy that I'm not on that committee. And he said, look, I'm not going to look at a man who lived a life of faithfulness. and was sort of the beacon of the evangelical movement for all those years. I'm not going to look at him and say, near the end of his life, where we don't know what's going on in his soul, we don't know what he's been going through, he may be experiencing a little bit of dementia and he says something off the cuff that just isn't really so. I'm not going to look at that and say, oh, well, you're not a Christian because of that incident. I don't know what's going on with you. I have the right to say you're wrong and that I disagree with it, but I don't have the right to say, oh, well, that means you're not saved. We need to be very careful about who we say is a part of our fold and who isn't. Am I convinced that God saves people who've never heard the gospel? Yes. Am I convinced that I have the right Well, let me ask this, do I have the right to affirm a person as a Christian who doesn't profess Christ as Lord? Absolutely not. So what is my attitude towards all kinds of people? Are there people in the Mormon church right now that are saved, even though that's a cult? I hope there are. I don't have the right to affirm them as my brothers and sisters in Christ because they have a false, the church that they're associated with is just, it's a cult. And I can't affirm them as my brothers and sisters, but I certainly hope that God is saving them, despite a lot of the things that they're learning instead of because of it. Obviously, the Pope is the man who believes in salvation by works. Well, I hope that there are Catholics being saved right now, despite what the Pope is saying. They certainly can't be saved because of what the Pope is saying. And I hope the Pope is really saved and just extremely, extremely confused. I hope that the opposite is not true. But I'm really disturbed by this sort of bland, it's kind of like we think that God's job is to love everybody. I think God does love everybody. But I don't think it's his job, I don't think he's required to love everybody. I think that his love of everybody is a pure choice. And so none of us should be very complacent about that. D.A. Carson tells the story of a guy that he met in Paris and they were talking. They were at a theological conference, and he basically was open about the fact that he was about to go to the red light district after they had their dinner. And Danny Carson says, are you serious? He says, oh yeah. He goes, but you're a theologian. He goes, well, God will forgive me. That's his job. Well, I'm not saying that God won't forgive him, but you can't be presumptuous about the grace of God like that. That is just the height. of ingratitude and arrogance. But even there, am I going to say that I know that that guy is going to hell in a handbasket? I'm not going to say that. I'm going to say he's wrong, and he's engaged in sin. I may even get to the point where I say, I just can't affirm you as a brother because of what you're doing. But I'm not going to say I know for a fact where your soul is. I'm just not in a position to know that. That's right. Well, I think that's the same line. Yeah. Well, we'll end right there and we'll see y'all next week.