TRANSCRIPT 🔗
Heith Terry: Does the universe require God as an explanation for its existence? Can't we explain morality and consciousness outside of a God? And isn't believing in a God really just another way to fill in the gaps of the unknown? Well, these are some questions and claims by skeptics and atheists. But classical apologetics points to something different. The real question is which worldview best explains the world in which we live. Welcome to Bear Apologetics. Here we're talking about classical apologetics today. And just as a brief overview, quickly as we go through, that the classical apologetics is simply a reasonable and philosophical argument that establishes that there is the need for a God, that a God exists in theism outside of the universe and all that exists. And then from that, the classical approach How explaining the Christian God is the best example for everything that we know and that we see. So, with that two step in mind, let's jump right into it today. Today we're only going to talk about step one, natural theology, but we're going to get from the point of a logical argument or discussion for reasons that the world and the universe exists into theism. Now, I know what some people are already thinking. We're thinking we're going to leave the Bible out of this, we're going to leave God out of this. No. this approach to apologetics is for the the thinker, the philosopher, the atheist, the skeptic who's out there who you kind of just get their their appetite wet. And I know we're not taking anything away from the Holy Spirit. We're not even pretending that we can explain things better without God. That's not what classical apologetics does. This is simply a tool that can be used to to argue logically. And philosophically for the existence of God. And so, even to give you better examples of what I'm talking about here, you can go and look at some of these books that I'll be sharing throughout the time. you can look these up. They're great reads. They kind of give a better explanation of what classical apologetics is. Now, I will say also up front that I don't necessarily agree with every person I'm gonna share a book that I've read by or I've studied, then you may not either. And so I'm not pointing to their theological discussions, we're pointing to their understanding of evidential apologetics through classical approach. So as we get going through that, let's begin here with some very important qualifications. And I I did lay mention to this, but make sure that we understand that it's simply we are trying to get people to understand. That God exists. This is not replaced, nor can it ever, nor has there ever been a claim that a reasonable defense, an argument, or a conversation can convert someone. The regeneration of someone's heart is a calling of the Holy Spirit upon their lives. and what apologetics chooses to do is have those debates, those discussions with people that have no idea about the Bible. have no idea about anything going on, but we can reason with them and say, hey, this is why I believe what I believe. is it always effective? Absolutely not. And we're not claiming that it is. It's something you can look at and see it that it's something you like. Maybe you want to put it in your toolbox of witnessing or testifying Maybe it's just something you want to use or something that can more importantly maybe strengthen your faith in areas that you had never thought of or questions that have been posed to you that you never really looked into. So I hope if nothing else, you can take that away from this conversation today. So, why does the universe need God? This is an argument from the skeptics. We'll cover five arguments today. Number one, maybe the universe just simply exists the way it is. You know, maybe the universe is capable of creating and supporting life all on its own. Similar questions there you can see at the bottom, or similar objections that come into this style of reasoning, as the people would bring it up. Well, one of the great ways to tackle this argument, philosophically and logically, Is what we call the Kalam cosmological argument. And it has two premises. First and foremost, whatever begins to exist has a cause. Now, notice that first premise is whatever begins to exist. So one of the questions on that first slide was, you know, does God exist? Is there a God who created God? Well, the claim is not that God was created, the claim is simply that he's been eternal. So in the Kalam cosmological argument, We're saying whatever begins to exist, We're talking about the universe and everything in it. Premise two, the universe began to exist. that is highly and widely agreed upon. there was still some debate up until, you know, Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity, but that kind of nailed it down completely that there was a beginning of some degree. The measurements that we see out there, we know it had to begin at some point. So the universe had a beginning, and the conclusion is therefore the universe has a cause. There has to be something. That was the reason for all of this happening. Now, there are a lot of objections that can be brought up. why couldn't the universe have existed forever? Well, research points to beginning. Then now we're going into an area called quantum mechanics, and it's really popularized in science fiction movies and superhero action movies recently, But quantum mechanics shows something can come into existence without causes. that's not necessarily true. it just it shows that there's sometimes an not an understanding of exactly why things happen, but it doesn't explain the cause of why those things happen. There are things we don't quite understand yet, how things are are related, even even across vast differences, how they can be connected in quantum mechanics, but that still doesn't prove causation. And then, of course, the argument with this is, you know. If everything has to have a reason to begin, God needs a
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cause also. No, God doesn't need a cause. The God that of the Bible, the God of Christianity, is an eternal, timeless God outside of creation. So that simple argument that, they believe that it came from nothing universe, or their their explanation of how things came into existence, and the Christians' explanation of how things came into existence. All start with an unknown, unreachable, unseeable entity of some sort. but the materialists or the scientists, they determine that it has to be naturalistic causes. Well, we have some problems with that in this. Now I'm not saying Christianity doesn't have a problem with God creating. It's still faith-based. It's still reason-based. It's still understanding something that we truly can't understand. But let's make sure we understand also and see that scientifically, I'm gonna I'm gonna read this out from Grand Design from Stephen Hawking and something from Richard Dawkins from his book A Universe from Nothing. Scientifically, standard physical laws state that matter and energy cannot create themselves. Very simple. They can neither create themselves nor destroy themselves. Now, the modern quantum mechanics and cosmology suggests that space and energy can spontaneously change and emerge without an ex maybe an external trigger that we don't see. But the provision is, and this is from the grand design by Stephen Hawking, that pre-existing quantum fields or physical laws have to have already existed for us to see something spontaneously emerge without a trigger. So therefore, the universe did not come out of nothing. Something had to exist to be the external trigger, if you will. Well, that doesn't mean nothing then. So in physics, nothingness is not absolute nothingness. So to understand that is very important in this debate and in this conversation. Now, when scientists talk about the vacuum of space or the state of the universe before anything was made, when there was it was devoid of matter and energy. But it was still governed by mathematical and quantum rules, that's why that "nothing," quote unquote, something can arrive out because there already existed these laws and rules. Now, for the Christian, for the believer that God created everything, the argument simply is back to them. Well, what caused that to exist in the first place? Where did that come from? And we get back to square one from both sides. So classical apologetics it covers some of these topics that are just we can't really come to a conclusion or a consensus on either way. it's by faith that you take either the universe pre-existed at some source, or that God eternally existed and then created that. Okay. So the cosmological argument proposes that God is not contingent within the universe. God has to be a necessary being outside. He has to be an uncaused agent. That is not contingent on any reality whatsoever. So if space and time, the space-time continuum, science agrees they cannot exist without each other. They are a continuum, Now,
matter and energy come later on, but they agree that it began with the universe. But for the universe to transcend those things. Is impossible. For the universe itself to create matter and energy is completely unscientific That something outside of anything that we know of has to be the cause for the existence of anything. So it reasons, and this is that logical philosophical debate part from the Christian standpoint that. The universe had to come from a being, a necessary, contingent, existing something, someone, some intelligent mind out there that is timeless outside of time, that is spaceless outside of space, immaterial, extremely powerful. Now, this doesn't prove Christianity. It begins to establish the idea that in every law of physics, every law of reality that we know of, any scientific measurement we can make. That the universe requires something for this beginning and it cannot be self-creating. So therefore, we have to look outside of the regular scientific method and and things that we do to understand where it came from. Unfortunately, science has ruled out God as an example because they want to measure things And then there's the problem, you can't find an answer to a physical universe by measuring things that are already existing. You can never get back to that and what existed prior to that. Some examples of great books, just to point you to that to kind of understand this argument more. but there's just some logic and philosophical terms that are very, very well explained by these men here that have written these books that can really help us understand more and more why something can't come from nothing. It's a great argument and a great conversation to have. Well, the second debate, argument, skeptic question they may have is why do we think the universe is designed? It just could have happened. It just became the way it is by chance. It's like the roll of the dice, and it came up sevens for our universe. And then off of that, you can see some other common examples of their questions. So, why do we think the universe was designed? Is it not just luck? Well, the Christian would argue no. The argument would therefore come to what is the best explanation? You really only have three choices. And science for the most part agrees with this. And so one of the Stephen Hawkins said this in his book specifically that the universe created itself because it needed to create itself. I'm paraphrasing. So is it physical necessity? The universe exists because it needed to exist. It brought itself into existence. the Big Bang Theory, after the Big Bang the chance, just the randomness of everything coming together, exploding, gravitational fields forming, all this stuff happened, and we just came to the perfect way to support the life that we understand in the universe, or its design. the classical apologist. Would argue that the intelligent designer is obviously the best explanation. Blind chance or necessity don't make any sense in anything that is as finely tuned as the universe. Now, this argument, the teleological argument. one of the things that skeptics come back with is this. Well, you're just throwing a God in there because you don't understand it. They claim they don't understand it, so they're looking for evidence. They're looking for reasoning. But but Christians and theists, they just throw a God out there because they can't understand all the conditions, and that's just an easy way to say, okay, you know, I don't understand it, so therefore, God. Well, the response is very simple. We admit and we know what we don't know. And in a lot of cases, we don't really know what we don't know. There's so much more out there than we could ever imagine. But the conditions of the universe are so perfect, so perfectly fine-tuned, brought together, existing, allowing life to come to be that a logical approach to this, a simplistic look at everything going on, is that it had to be designed. And there are some examples of of analogies used by a past apologist It's not a ex a perfect parallel, but When we see something that exists anywhere, in my studio, in my home, in my church, wherever it may be, I can see that someone designed that. And there's nothing I can see anywhere that doesn't show design. So for us, we see the atomic level structures and say that it's so perfectly fine-tuned that even God designed that down to things we don't even understand about science yet. Well, then there's the second claim, the multiverse claim. this was not popularized, by the way, by recent superhero movies. This has been in theory for a very, very long time. But there are just these multiple universes, either in the effect that the universe has kind of existed and come back on itself and recreated itself over and over again from infinity past, and now we're living in the universe that does sustain life as we know it, or at this moment there are multi-universes out there. And we just happening to live in the the one or one of the few that actually has some kind of design that has a life as we know it. But the problem with that view is simply this. Doesn't that just push the question of where the universe came from in the first place back to the start? So even if it is a multi-universe, and if you you give them that argument, still, where did the multi-universe come from? Some some great questions, not easy to answer all the time, but they're things that we need to think about philosophically, logically, within our own minds, because these are questions that people ask. I've had people ask some of these questions to me, and th there's not really a a Bible scripture to go to in some of these types of questions that points to that existence, except for in the beginning, God created, obviously. But they don't take that as fact, but we can logically kind of nudge them into the idea that, hey, there must be something outside of all this. And here are a couple of authors and apologists that really dig into
this idea, the teleological argument. And so I encourage you to pick up some of these books, read them, get them online, and just see what they have to say if this interests you at all. Well, our third argument is what we call the moral argument. this seems to be the most common argument that I see anywhere. Any debates, any question and answer session. And questions that that I've gotten more so relate to the moral argument. You may have a different example, but why does God have to exist for someone to be good? And then the secondary claim off that really is: are you claiming atheists can't have a moral compass whatsoever? Well, the answer is no. Nobody's claiming that atheists can't act morally. The question here really concerns. Where does morality come from? And then why is there a sense of morality that almost universally every society that has ever existed agrees upon? And then why are there things in the past and even currently that people can universally agree that something is being done incorrectly? Now, can there be societies who do things that are morally objectionable? In our minds and our ideas, maybe just one country specifically does something that the rest of the world didn't agree with? Absolutely. But the idea is that there is some kind of sense of morality within us, despite those people out there that we can all point to and say, obviously that's wrong. And that's what we call objective morality. So the question is not can someone who doesn't believe in God have morality? The question is where does that morality come from? Why is there any kind of agreement whatsoever? And then is morality, is it subjective, meaning that it's subjective to the people's ideas and thoughts and society's ideas, what's wrong or right? Or is it objective, meaning that no matter where you are, there's a one standard that is measurable by all. And so to put it into a premise form, the moral argument states this if God does not exist, then objective morals and duties do not exist. So we're arguing that God is the sustainer, the creator of all of the objective moral values and duties that we have as humans. The idea to want to help ourselves, to propitiate the species, to take care of the earth, to love one another, even people we don't know. That all comes from God, according to this view. Premise two is objective morals and duties, these values exist. And we we touched on that a little bit. There are things we know do not murder. That is a universal understanding. Now, the debate is on death penalty. There's the debate on that. Abortion, there's a debate on that. War, there's a debate on that. But the intentional murdering of somebody is universally accepted as incorrect. And because there are things like do not murder, therefore, God must exist. There has to be a standard above ourselves that tells us what it comes to. Just there just has to be. There's no other way to look at it. There's no other way to think about it. it has to come from some area. Now, the the or the atheist can say, Well, it's not God. There's other ways we can explain it. And we'll talk about that. We're gonna talk about four specific arguments in the moral argument that skeptics can come back with and say it's apart from God. But we know that there are certain things that I can't mention. For a lot of reasons on the platform, and I just don't want to talk about certain things that we can clearly say this is absolutely wrong. And so when you point to a skeptic, someone who believes there is no moral objectivity, we can say, okay, well, in this case, let's just use murder for this one. Is it wrong because your culture dislikes it? Or is it wrong even if the culture approved of it? And the very, very obvious and very most thrown out there, and I'm gonna use it here because it's a great example, the extreme. Is the Holocaust. If the people of the Nazi Party believed it was correct, does that make it correct for their culture, their people group? Or was it wrong no matter what? And an honest person has to answer that question. An honest person has to say either no, it was wrong no matter what, or the other side that there's no such thing no matter what as morality. Well, let's before we hit dive into the deepest part of that, let's look at this example. So, what grounds are morality? Evolution. That's the simplest, easiest one that we have been involved over time. We've known what kept us alive. that evolution over the time of the last you know millions of years, whatever they believe that we've evolved from, from primates to humans, that we've understood what's right and wrong because it helps us to adapt. It helps us to understand survival. Well That may basically say that we know we ought to do it because it helps us survive. But the Christian response to that is that the "ought" in that understanding, the why we should do it, the authority has to come from another standard. Something that's unchanging because right now, if you're talking about primates that fight each other for their land to destroy each other, kill each other, would eat each other. just kill because there was a threat, not peaceably talk it out, then it was okay back then. But that's not acceptable now. So then morality is relative, but really that just comes down to again a survival tactic, not a where does that moral value come from? The only answer to evolution's moral is because it helped us to survive. So it's not a great example when you can just say, this is why we do it. And it because it helped us survive, not an understanding of why that is if in fact moral and not just a behavior we learn to survive. The second argument comes from the Euthyphro dilemma. Euthyphro dilemma is simply is is something good because God commands it? Or does God command it because it's good? They kind of try to put God into a box and say, well, where does that goodness actually come from? But there is a fallacy in the reasoning. When you have these, they call
these the two horns of the dil dilemma, like one's gonna get you either way. So it's like watch out for the left hand and right hand. You know, if you only watch this one, this one will get you. Well The false dilemma is this, it's a false framework. Because you're trying to say there's only two reasons why this can happen. So if good is good just because God commands it, then they'll argue that morality is random. God could have made hate and murder good. It was arbitrary. So therefore, morality has no standard. Now, horn two, the second part, is if God wills something because it's already good, then there's a standard outside of God. And he's subject to that standard rather than being the supreme source of morality. So it appears like a catch 22, stuck between a rock and a hard place. So what is goodness? Well, our simple answer is this: God wills the things that he does because he is good. That is his nature. Goodness is grounded in God's own unchanging nature. It's not something he demands, decides, commands outside of himself or receives from something else. His commands are expression of his goodness. God doesn't choose what is good, he is good. Now, what about the argument of society? Let's let society determine. And the argument is that there are different, especially throughout history, people who believe different things, had different morality levels. There were societies who ch sacrificed our children. There are societies who were cannibals. There are societies that had, you know, many other things that we would pretty much agree with most, even atheists and agnostics, that those things were morally wrong. But if society determines morality, we have a bigger problem. Because that means that whatever they were doing or today that we're doing in societies, even though the society approves of it, no matter if any other country in the world agrees, who's right, who's wrong, who can judge? If society determines morality, then noah society can ever be held accountable for any crimes, and they can never be morally mistaken. Now that seems like an extreme position. And I'll admit that is a extreme position. It's very strong to say that. But I fully believe that the position of the atheist with no God, with no outside understanding, when you appeal to this standard, this is where we end up. And here are three examples out of many that we could quote. But Friedrich Nietzsche said, "A good man and an evil man are not opposites. Rather they both express the same impulses. The evil man merely expresses them in a more direct manner." That's from his book, Beyond Good and Evil. His conclusion of all this was that when people are sorry, that evil was a tool developed by specific historical groups to constrain human excellence. Human excellence is constrained by what people called evil to control them. J.L. Mackey. he's probably the least known of these three that I chose from 1917 to 1981. he kind of popularized what's called the error theory or the
moral error theory. So from his book, Ethics Inventing Right and Wrong, he explicitly argues that all moral statements, such as murder is evil, okay, all moral statements are fundamentally false. And I quote "According to error theory, when people say that an action is wrong or right, they are mistaken. As there are no moral facts that endow such terms with truth value." Everything's acceptable. Nothing's right, nothing's wrong. And lastly, more common, more recent, Richard Dawkins, still living today, in his book River Out of Eden, he summarized the natural world's complete lack of inherent good or evil by saying this: quote: "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design. No purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference." Now, what I am not saying, I am not claiming that these people lived out their ultimate conclusion. But the ultimate conclusion they came to is evil does not exist. It's something we've codified, it's something that we have decided exists. And each society or the people in charge at that time decided what was right or wrong. And we are using that to hold people down, to constrain people. And it could be for the greater good. But again, who makes that determination if it's ourselves, that will change over time. It'll change very quickly and be very be very scary as it goes on. Well, then they can argue this. And and this is a the third argument of the four that we're going talk about here. If that's the case, there is no evil, no good, we logically flow into this: that morality is situational. So this is the moral dilemma or the situational ethics. Right or wrong changes depending on the circumstances. What was wrong at one time could be right now, and vice versa. And even so much that each circumstance could dictate what is right or wrong in that. Okay, so is it always. Right to protect the innocent life? Is it okay to lie, cheat, steal, or kill someone to protect an innocent life? That's the question. And there are people on both sides of the argument. So the classical apologetics response is actually more Christian than anything. But here's what it comes down to: even though there are circumstances that can affect how we determine how we act. Or how we apply moral principles, they don't create the morality itself. So because I know it's wrong to steal, but if we came to a situation where my family is starving, just like the old dilemmas written out, would you steal bread to feed your starving family? So would you steal bread or let your family starve? Well, I think the simpler answer obviously is steal some bread. But that doesn't make stealing bread justified. It's still wrong. So, this moral dilemma, while it will show what humans may do or may not do, and show which moral duties they hold more highly, it doesn't mean that good and evil are simply whatever seems most loving or useful at the moment. There is still an outside source that is God that
says stealing is wrong, murder is wrong, and so on and so forth. So, for more on this specific example, the moral argument, here's some books on the screen here. And if you are listening on the podcast, you can go to our YouTube page and and watch this more specifically in video and see what these books are. But moving on to our next argument, our next skeptical question they would pose. Reason and consciousness. So the human mind, it it's just the brain. We are just some neurological firing neurons and impulses and electricity going through our body that just gives us this understanding of what we call consciousness. Right. So why do we have to have a soul? Why does there just have to be something outside of materialism that accounts for why we think that we believe? That that's a a good question. And then I would argue simply with this: well, we can't know anything if they're just impulses. How do we know we're firing correctly? How do we know that things are are in reality what we see, what someone else sees? We we can't really know that outside of that. science can only measure physical things. Okay. we can measure the mass, motion, so on and so forth. You cannot physically or materially handle, measure, or test things that are not material. They're not like consciousness. the reason that we have a first-person experience, we have our ideas, our thoughts. That we have awareness that we exist at all. How we can think about things, sometimes the same, sometimes it's different than other people. Our intentions, what how we rationally infer anything from the data, the evidence that we see, and then experiences. We see things differently, even from each other. So that seems to be unique from each person. So that takes it away from the material and makes it an immaterial object. So, why do we have all these things? That's the question that's raised up by this dilemma. Now, brain scans can show what's happening, and we we can see the neurons firing, we can see electricity, and we can measure how fast things go from pain receptors back up through your nervous system. But that doesn't explain the experience, what you feel, what happens. So consciousness only makes sense if there's some. Reality outside of ourself that we measure it by, a standard by which there is. And the only way to have that reality is to have a higher level of reality in mind that's out there instead of mindless matter, instead of just protons, neutrons, electrons, and everything that goes with that. So logically, it makes sense that there has to be something outside of ourselves that helps us understand reality as a species, as a group. The classical argument with this, when they say, well, eventually, eventually science will be able to explain consciousness. No, science will not ever be able to explain it because, by definition, the scientific approach, the method that we analyze everything, measures physical reality. They they can't quantify anything that's not physical. Emotions, love, Those things are not testable by the scientific method. And scientists understand that. They they agree with that. There's it's not an argument to be made from that side of the aisle. Science can only say whether it exists or not materially. But the conscious, all the things that are going on within ourselves, they require philosophical understanding, something outside of ourselves that cannot be measured and tested by science. So perhaps, perhaps one day. Neuroscience will explain more about correlations, but correlation is not an explanation as to why these things happen. A couple more to read on this JP Moreland, C.S. Lewis, Victor Repert, some great authors there to read a little bit more about our reasoning and consciousness and how we we get to that. So with these arguments that we've talked about, Science can explain a lot of things, but when we rely on science to answer questions that are not answerable by science, it still comes back to logic. It still comes back to this idea of philosophy coming in to explain best evidence. And that's where we get to theism. Remember, the whole argument, part one, in a classical approach, when they won't take any biblical scripture, any other things to that, that they're outside of that. That we can reason from the world around us, from the experiences that we have, to get to the point where there needs to be a creator outside of ourselves that's governing everything. So classical apologetics covers why things exist, why the universe is intelligible, why there's design, why nature appears to be so fine tuned and perfectly put into existence where we can exist as we do, why some things are objectively right and wrong, why there's objective morality. And why rational minds and consciousness exists. So through that conversation, logically, philosophically, and debating these ideas, which worldview best describes that? Well, that's a theistic worldview. And apologetics, remember, can never regenerate or replace the Holy Spirit. Classical apologetics simply shows there's good reasons for believing that God exists. next week we're going to hit part two, which in classical apologetics you jump from just there being a God to the God of the Bible being the best example. So thanks for listening to Bear Apologetics today. And if this episode helped reinforce your faith, or maybe helped you understand the role of classical apologetics just a little bit more, like, subscribe. And share it with someone who wants these questions answered with conviction and grace. So until next time, keep seeking truth with biblical evidence and reasoning.