IS CHRISTIANITY RATIONAL
“What is faith?” asked the Sunday School teacher. A young boy answered in a flash, “Believing something you know isn’t true.” That many non-Christians feel this way is not surprising. That many believers overtly or secretly feel this way is tragic. Frequently I have the opportunity to present the Gospel in a bull session format. After a presentation, we have questions from the floor. Following these discussions I am often gratified and often dismayed.
Unbelievers say the session has been helpful because it’s the first time they’ve heard something that makes sense. I’m also gratified, but more deeply dismayed, when Christians tell me the same thing! They’re relieved to discover that the Gospel can be successfully defended in the open marketplace of ideas and to discover that they haven’t kissed their brains good-bye in becoming Christians! We live in an increasingly sophisticated and educated world. It is no longer enough to know what we believe. It is essential to know why we believe it. Believing something doesn’t make it true. A thing is true or not regardless of whether anyone believes it. This is as true of Christianity as it is of everything else.
Erroneous Viewpoints
There are two equally erroneous viewpoints among Christians today on the important question of whether Christianity is rational. The first is, in essence, an anti-intellectual approach to Christianity. Many misunderstand verse like Colossians 2:8: “Beware lest anyone spoil you through philosophy or vain deceit, after the traditions of men, after the rudiments of the world and not after Christ.” Some use this verse in a way that gives the impression that Christianity is at least non rational it not irrational.
They fail to realise that a clearly reasoned presentation of the Gospel “is important-not as a rational substitute for faith, but as a ground for faith; not as a replacement for the Spirit’s working but as a means by which the objective truth of God’s Word can be made clear so that men will heed it as the vehicle of the Spirit, who convicts the world through its message.” 2 There are challengers to our faith on every hand. Modern communications have made the world a neighbourhood. We are likely to be challenged by Muslims. Hindus, and Buddhists, all of them claiming valid religious experience that may approximate ours. From within Christendom we are now being told God is dead. In-creasingly, in our scientific age, ethical humanism is having stronger appeal.
The analytical philosopher, Antony Flew, in developing a parable from a tale told by John Wisdom, illustrates how meaningless to the non-Christian are religious assertions incapable of being tested objectively. “ Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, “Some gardener must tend this plot.’ The other disagrees, ‘There is no gardener.’ So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. ‘But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.’ So they set up a barbed wire fence.
They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry.
Yet still the believer is not convinced. ‘But there is a gardener, invisible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.’ At last skeptic despairs, ‘But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary or even from no gardener at all? 2
“This parable is damming judgement on all religious truth claims save that of the Christian faith. For in Christianity we do not have merely an allegation that the garden of this world is tended by a loving Gardener; we have the actual, empirical entrance of the Gardener into the human scene in the person of Christ (John 20:14-15), and this entrance is verifiable by way of His resurrection.” 3
On the other hand, there are those who naively trust a set of answers and try to argue people into the kingdom. This is an impossibility and is as doomed to failure as attempting to put a hole in a brick wall by shooting it with a water pistol! There is an intellectual factor in the Gospel, but there are also moral considerations. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). Apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, no man will believe. But one of the instruments the Holy Spirit uses to bring enlightenment is a reasonable explanation of the Gospel and of God’s dealings with men.
Know the Gospel
Beyond these pragmatic considerations, however, are the biblical assertions of the reasonableness of the Gospel. Along with this there are clear biblical commands to Christians to be intelligent in their faith: “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (Peter 3:15). If we are unable to give reasons for our faith, and if we allow the same questions to defeat us in conversation time after time, we are being disobedient. By our own ignorance, we are confirming unbelievers in their unbelief.
There are sound practical reasons why this command has been given us. In the first place, it is necessary for the strengthening of our faith as Christians. If we know Jesus lives only because, as the hymn says, “He lives within my heart,” we’re going to be in trouble the first time we don’t feel He’s there. And when someone from a non-Christian position claims to have experienced the same thing from his god, our mouths will be stopped. We may choose to ignore doubts, but eventually they will “get to us.” One cannot drive himself indefinitely to do by willpower something of which he is not intellectually convinced. Witnessing is an example. He eventually suffers emotional collapse. When someone tells us the only reason we believe is because of our parents and our religious background, we must be able to show ourselves and others that what we believe is objectively true, regardless of who told us.
A Rational Body of Truth
Many non-Christians fail to consider the Gospel seriously because no one has ever presented the facts to them cogently. They associate faith with superstition based primarily on emotional considerations, and therefore they reject it. Further biblical indication of the rational basis of the Gospel appears in our Lord’s command to “love the Lord they God with all they heart, . . . and with all they mind” (Matt. 22:37). The whole man is involved in conversion-the mind, the emotions, and the will. Paul says that he is “set for the defence of the Gospel” (Phil. 1:17). All of this implies a clearly understandable Gospel which can be rationally understood and defended.
It is quite true that an unenlightened mind cannot come to the truth of God unaided, but enlightenment brings comprehension of a rational body of truth.
The Gospel is always equated with truth. Truth is always the opposite of error (2 Thes. 2:11-12). Non-Christians are defined by Paul as those who “do not obey the truth” (Rom. 2:8). These statements would be meaningless unless there were a way to establish objectively what the truth is. If there were no such possibility, truth and error would, for all practical purposes, be the same because we would have no way to tell one from the other. In writing to the Romans, Paul makes it clear that men have enough knowledge from creation itself to know there is a God (Rom. 1:20). He goes on to show that the basic reason men do not know God is not because He cannot be know or understood but because men have rebelled against Him, their Creator, “When they know God, they glorified Him not as God” (1:21), “changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man” (1:23), “changed the truth of God into a lie” (1:25), and, finally, “did not like to retain God in their knowledge” (1:28).
A Matter of the Will
The moral issue always overshadows the intellectual issue in Christianity. It is not that man cannot believe-it is that he “will not believe.” Jesus pointed the Pharisees to this as the root of the problem. “You will not come to me,” He told them, “that you might have life” (John 5:40). He makes it abundantly clear that moral commitment leads to a solution of the intellectual problem. “If any man will (wants to) do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be God or whether I speak of Myself” (John 7:17). Alleged intellectual problems are often a smoke screen covering moral rebellion. A student once told me I had satisfactorily answered all his questions. “Are you going to become a Christian” I asked. “No,” he replied. Puzzled, I asked, “Why not?” He admitted, “Frankly, because it would mess up the way I’m living.” He realised that the real issue for him was not intellectual but moral.
The question is often asked, “If Christianity is rational and true, why is it that most educated people don’t believe it?” The answer is simple. They don’t believe it for the same reason that most uneducated people don’t believe it. They don’t want to believe it. It’s not a matter of brain power, for there are outstanding Christians in every field of the arts and sciences. It is primarily a matter of the will. John Stott struck a balance when he said, “We cannot pander to a man’s intellectual arrogance, but we must cater to his intellectual integrity.”
Is Doubt Healthy?
Many Christians become troubled when they think about their faith and sometimes even wonder if it’s true. Doubt is a word that strikes terror to the soul and often it is suppressed in a way that is very unhealthy. This is a particularly acute problem for whose who have been reared in Christian homes and in the Christian church. From their earliest years they have accepted the facts of Christianity solely on the basis of confidence and trust in parents, friends, and minister. As the educational process develops, a re-examination of their position takes place. This is a healthy and necessary experience to bring virile faith into being.
It’s nothing to fear or to be shocked about. Occasionally I asked myself, as I walk down the street, “Little, how do you know you haven’t been taken in by a colossal propaganda program? After all, you can’t see God, touch Him, taste Him or feel Him.” And then I go on to ask myself how I know the Gospel is true. I always come back to two basic factors: the objective, external, historical facts of the Resurrection, and the subjective, internal, personal experience of Christ that I have known.
When young people begin to think and seem to have doubts, they should be welcomed into a climate where they are free to “unload” and express their doubts. Many such young people have been driven underground and lost to the cause of Christ because the adults with whom they first talked had a high shock index. They implied that a good Christian would never doubt and that the questioner’s spiritual life must be slipping because he was thinking. Young people aren’t stupid. When they meet this response they quickly shift gears and mouth the party line, even though it doesn’t come from the heart. They quietly wait until they are out from under pressure to conform, and then they shed a faith that had never become their very own.
Doubt and questioning are normal to any thinking person. Rather than express shock, it is better for us to hear the questioner out and, if possible, even sharpen the question a little more. Then an answer can be suggested. Because Christianity is about the One who is Truth, close examination can do it no harm.
Don’t Hit the Panic Button
If we don’t have the answer at the moment, we needn’t hit the panic button. We can always suggest we’ll be glad to get the answer. It is improbable that anyone thought up, last week, the question that will bring Christianity crashing down. Brilliant minds have thought through the profound questions of every age and have ably answered them.
We don’t have full answers to every question because the Lord hasn’t fully revealed His mind to us on everything. “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children forever” (Deut.29:29). We possess enough information, however, to have a solid foundation under our faith. Faith in Christianity is based on evidence. It is reasonable faith. Faith in the Christian sense goes beyond reason, but not against it. Despite these facts, many Christians are over-whelmed by a mountain of material which they erroneously think they must master if they are ever to answer the questions of thinking Christians and non-Christians. A little exposure to non-Christians, however, will help to dispel those fears. It will soon become apparent that the same few questions are being asked repeatedly. Further, these questions fall within a remarkably limited range. I frequently talk to audiences that are composed of 98 percent non-Christians. I can predict with a high degree of accuracy the questions that will be asked me in the course of a half-hour question period. The questions may vary in wording, but the underlying issues are the same. This consistency is a great help in knowing what to study to answer such questions.
A Doubter’s Response
A doubter needs to see that he must come to a decision after having been given an answer. To make no decision is to decide against the Christian position. Continued doubt in the face of adequate information may be a cloak for unwillingness to believe, in which case the problem is the questioner’s will has been set against God. Recently a friend told of a time, after he had finished college, when he felt God was calling him to the mission field. He fought against the call by feigning intellectual problems concerning his faith, rather than by praying clearly about his unwillingness to go overseas. This book is intended to spotlight commonly asked questions and to suggest at least preliminary answers.
For the strengthening of our own faith and for the help of others, we must be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks us a reason for the hope that is within us, for Christianity is rational!
TWO
IS THERE A GOD?
There is a human existence no more profound question demanding an answer. “Is there a God?” is the question that must be answered by every human being, and the answer is far-reaching in its implications. Mortimer Adler in his essay on God, in the monumental Great Ideas Syntopicon says: “With the exception of certain mathematicians and physicists, all the authors of the ‘Great Books’ are represented in this chapter. In sheer quantity of references, as well as in variety, it is the largest chapter.
The reason is obvious. More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question.” Adler spells out the practical implications: “The whole tenor of human life is affected by whether men regard themselves as supreme beings in the universe or acknowledge a superhuman being whom they conceive of as an object of fear or love, a force to be defied or a Lord to be obeyed. Among those who acknowledge a divinity, it matters greatly whether the divine is represented merely by the concept of God -the object of philosophical speculation-or by the living God whom men worship in all the acts of piety which comprise the rituals of religion.”
Scientific Proof?
We must be clear from the outset that it is not possible to prove God in the scientific method sense of the word. But it can be said with equal emphasis that you can’t prove Napoleon by the scientific method. The reason lies in the nature of history itself, and in the limitations of the scientific method. In order for something to be proved by the scientific method, it must be repeatable. One cannot announce a new finding to the world on the basis of a single experiment. But history in its very nature is non repeatable. No one can rerun the beginning of the universe or bring Napoleon back or repeat the assassination of Lincoln or the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. But the fact that these events can’t be proved by repetition does not disprove their reality as events.
There are many real things outside the scope of verification by the scientific method. The scientific method is useful only with measurable things. No one has ever seen three feet of love or two pounds of justice, but one would be foolish indeed to deny their reality. To insist that God be proved by the scientific method is like insisting that a telephone be used to measure radioactivity. What evidence is there for God? It is very significant that recent anthropological research has indicated that among the farthest and most remote primitive peoples, today there is a universal belief in God. And in the earliest histories and legends of peoples all around the world the original concept was of one God, who was the Creator.
An original high God seems once to have been in their consciousness even in those societies which are today polytheistic. This research, in the last 50 years, has challenged the evolutionary concept of the development of religion, which had suggested that monotheism-the concept of one God-was the apex of a gradual development that began with polytheistic concepts. It is increasingly clear that the oldest traditions everywhere were of one supreme God. For our present purposes, however, it is enough to observe that the vast majority of humanity, at all times and in all places, has believed in some kind of god or gods. Though this fact is not conclusive proof, by any means, we should keep it in mind as we attempt to answer the big question.
Law of Cause and Effect
Then there is the law of cause and effect to consider. No effect can be produced without a cause. We as human beings, and the universe itself, are effects which must have had a cause. We come eventually to an uncaused cause, who is God. Well, who is God?” God by definition is eternal and uncreated. Were God a created being, He would not and could not be God.
Universe’s Order and Design
A further development of this line of thought has to do with the clearly observable order and design of the universe. No one would think a wrist watch could come into being without an intelligent designer. How much more incredible is it to believe that the universe, in its infinite complexity, could have happened by chance? The human body, for instance, is an admittedly astounding and complex organism-a continual marvel of organisation, design, and efficiency. So impressed was he with this that Albert Einstein, generally considered to be one of the great scientists of all time, said, “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior Spirit who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.
That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.”
Evidences of this design are abundant. It is unlikely that a monkey in a print shop could set Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in type. If we found a copy of it, we would conclude that an intelligent mind was the only possible explanation for the printing. It is like wise incredible that water, for instance, with all its qualities, could have just happened. Water has a high specific heat. This means that chemical reactions within the (human) body will be kept rather stable. If water had a low specific heat we would ‘boil over’ with the least activity. If we raise the temperature of a solution by 10 degrees Celsius we speed up the reaction by two. Without this particular property of water, life would hardly be possible. The ocean is the world’s thermostat. It takes a large loss of heat for water to pass from liquid to ice, and for water to become steam quite an intake of energy is required.
Hence the ocean is a cushion against the heat of the sun and the freezing blast of the water. Unless the temperatures of the earth’s surface were modulated by the ocean and kept within certain limits, life would either be cooked to death or frozen to death. Water is the universal solvent. It dissolves acids, bases, and salts. Chemically, it is relatively inert, providing a medium for reactions without partaking in them. In the bloodstream it holds in solution the minimum of 64 substances. Perhaps if we knew the actual number it would be a staggering figure. Any other solvent would be a pure sludge! Without the peculiar properties of water, life as we know it would be impossible. A. Renlde Short makes this observation about water: It form more than half the body weight of most animals and plants. It is not readily decomposed; it dissolves many substances; it makes dry substances cohere and become flexible; with salts in solution, it conducts electricity. This is a very important property in the animal body. Then alone, or almost alone, amongst fluids known to us, it reaches its greatest density when cold, not at freezing point but at 4 degrees Celsius.
This has two important consequences. One is that lakes and ponds freeze at the top, and from the bottom upwards. Fish life thus has a chance of surviving a very hard winter. Another consequence is that by its expansion freezing water disrupts the rocks (also, alas, our household water pipes), and thus breaks them down to form soil, carves out cliffs and valleys, and makes vegetation possible. Water has the highest heat of evaporation of any known substance. This, with other special properties, reduces the rise in temperature when a water surface is heated by the sun’s rays.
The earth itself is evidence of design.
If it were much smaller an atmosphere would be impossible
(e.g., Mercury and the moon); if much larger the atmosphere would contain free hydrogen (e.g., Jupiter and Saturn). Its distance from the sum is correct-even a small change would make it too hot or to cold. Our moon, probably responsible for the continents and ocean basins, is unique in our solar system and seems to have originated in a way quite different from the other relatively much smaller moons. The tilt of the [earth’s] axis insures the seasons, and so on. DuNoiiy says that “the chance formulations of a typical protein molecule made up of 3,000 atoms is of the order of one 2.02 x 10231, or practically nil. Even if the elements are shaken up at the speed of the vibration of light, it would take 10234 billions of light years to get the protein molecule [needed] for life, and life on the earth is limited to about two billion years.”
Law of Thermodynamics
In addition to design in the universe, there is the implication of the second law of thermodynamics, which is also called the law of entropy. Ramm explains it: What the law asserts can be illustrated from a plastic oleomargarine bag which contains white margarine and small capsule filled with yellow colouring. When the capsule is broken, as the bag is massaged, the colouring is eventually spread throughout the mass of white margarine.
If the bag is squeezed indefinitely the distribution of the colouring will proceed till the colouring is perfectly spread throughout the entire mass.
No matter how much more we squeeze, we cannot reverse the process and get the colouring back into the capsule. There are some parts of the universe that are much hotter than other parts of the universe. The distribution of the heat is always ‘down’ from hotter regions to cooler regions. As the heat ‘flows’ from the hot regions to cooler regions, it becomes more and more evenly distributed throughout the universe. If the universe is infinitely old, the energy would have been evenly distributed by now. The fact that there are still hot bodies in the universe means that the furnace was stoked, so to speak, at some measurable time in the past. This would be the moment of creation, or of some creative activity.
In the light of all these things we can conclude with Ramm’s statement:
Genesis 1 now stands in higher repute than it could ever have stood in the history of science up to this point. We now have means whereby we can point to a moment of time, or to an event or cluster of events in time, which dates our present known universe. According to the best available data, that is of the order of four to five billion years ago. A series of calculations converge on about the same order of time. We cannot with our present information force a verdict for creation from the scientists, though that is not to be considered an impossibility. Perhaps the day will come when we have enough evidence from physics, astronomy, and astrophysics to get such a verdict from the scientists. In the meantime we can maintain that Genesis 1 is not out of harmony with the trend of scientific information.
This is what the Apostle Paul had in mind when he wrote, “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Rom. 1:19-20). The psalmist says the same thing: “The heaven declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork” (Ps.19:1).
Prejudice Prevents Obvious Conclusions
A most remarkable admission of unscientific bias, which precludes an admission that God is the only plausible explanation of the origin of the universe, is made by J.W.N.Sullivan. At his death, Time magazing called him “one of the world’s four or five most brilliant interpreters of physics to the world of common man.” He said: The beginning of the evolutionary process raises a question which is as yet unanswerable. What was the origin of life on this planet? Until fairly recent times there was a pretty general belief in the occurrence of “spontaneous generation.” It was supposed that lowly forms of life developed spontaneously from, for example, putrefying meat. But careful experiments, notably those of Pasteur, showed that this conclusion was due to improper observation, and it became an accepted doctrine that life never arises except from life.
So far as actual evidence goes, this is still the only possible conclusion. But since it is a conclusion that seems to lead back to some supernatural creative act, it is a conclusion that scientific men find very difficult to accept. It carries with it what are felt to be, in the present mental climate, undesirable philosophic implications, and it is opposed to the scientific desire for continuity. It introduces an unaccountable break in the chain of causation, and therefore cannot be admitted as part of science unless it is quite impossible to reject it. For that reason most scientific men prefer to believe that life arose, in some way not yet understood, from inorganic matter in accordance with the laws of physics and chemistry.
Here we have an example of how believing there is no God is also an act of faith. It is pure presupposition, as much as faith in God is a presupposition for belief. Unbelief is even more remarkable when it is admitted that the evidence, by which one is guided in science, points in the opposite direction! And science rejects the conclusion because it is an unpalatable one.
What Is God Like?
It is important to observe here that though there are many indications of God in nature, we could never know conclusively from nature that He is or what He is Like. Thequestion asked centuries ago, “Canst thou by searching find out God” (Job 11:7). The answer is NO! Unless God reveals Himself, we are doomed to confusion and conjecture. It is obvious that among those who believe in God there are many ideas abroad today as to what God is like. Some, for instance, believe God to be a celestial killjoy. They view Him as peering over the balcony of heaven looking for anyone who seems to be enjoying life. On finding such a person, He shouts down, “Cut it out!” Others think of God as a sentimental grandfather of the sky, rocking benignly and stroking His beard as He says, “Boys will be boys!” That everything will work out in the end, no matter what you have done, is conceded to be His general attitude toward man.
Others think of Him as a big ball of fire and of us as little sparks who will eventually come back to the big ball. Still others, like Einstein, think God as an impersonal force or mind. Herbert Spencer, one of the popularises of agnosticism of a century ago, observed accurately that a bird has never been known to fly out of space. Therefore he concluded by analogy that it is impossible for the finite to penetrate the infinite. His observation was correct, but his conclusion was wrong. He missed one other possibility: that the infinite could penetrate the finite. This, of course, is what God did.