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Scientism

• Hard – Science is the ONLY way we can know reality.

• Weak – Science is the BEST way we can know reality.

If we rely ONLY on scientific answers to knowledge, we lose meaning, purpose and personal

explanations of reality.

Science•Conclusions•Evidence•Facts•Knowledge•Proofs•Laws

Religion•Belief•Personal Convictions•Dogma•Faith (as understood as

blindly accepting things)•Values

postmodernismPost-Modernism

postmodernism

Post-Modernism- The rejection of objective truth.- The belief that all truth claims are simply social/linguistic constructs.- The rejection of a meta-narrative (bigger story) that unites people.- You choose truth based on your preferences.

postmodernismProblemsTo say there is no objective truth is to make a statement that is assumed to be objective, which is self-defeating

postmodernismProblemsTo say all truth claims are social/linguistic constructs attempts to make a truth claim that is outside of social/linguistic constructs

postmodernism

ProblemsTo say truth is based on your preference violates its own standards.

postmodernism

ProblemsLoss of critical elements such as truth, logic, ethics, meaning, purpose, etc.

Worldview Impacts Christianity• Tentativeness about expressing truths

• Powerless gospel

• Our spiritual/religious activity will never rise above custom and convention

• Scripture becomes how I interpret it

• The Loss of expectation for God’s activity

• Purely physical understandings of thoroughly spiritual ideas (soul, spirit world).

In what ways has this thinking impacted the American Church?

In what ways might have these effected your thinking/living?

Right Way of Knowing

Knowledge is the ability to represent things as they are on an appropriate basis of thought and experience.

J.P. Moreland

THREE TYPES of KNOWLEDGE:

•Knowledge by Acquaintance

•Knowledge by Skill (know how)

•Knowledge by Proposition (K=JTB)

KNOWLEDGEKnowledge = Justified, True Belief

Epistemology:

1.What do we know?

2.How do we know what we know?

Problem of the Criterion

• Skepticism – can’t answer either question.

• Methodism – answer “How do we know what we know” first.

• Particularism – answer “What do we know” first.

Knowledge = justified, true BELIEF

“I believe in order that I might know”

Anselm and Augustine

“All of them (items of knowledge) rest on fundamental assumptions which can be questioned. But the questioning, if it is to be rational, has to rely on other fundamental assumptions which can in turn be questioned. It follows that there can be no knowing without personal commitment. We must believe in order to know.” Lesslie Newbigin

TEX

TRUTH/REALITY

IDEAS ABOUTTRUTH/REALITY

Knowledge=justified, TRUE belief

TWO TASKS as KNOWERS

•believe as many truths as possible

• Avoid as many falsehoods

Knowledge=JUSTIFIED, true belief

TWO TYPES OF JUSTIFICATION

•Indefeasible (things you cannot doubt)

•Defeasible (can be doubted, but are likely true though possibly wrong)

Knowledge=JUSTIFIED, true belief

TWO TYPES OF JUSTIFICATION

•Indefeasible (things you cannot doubt)– Self-Evident – can’t be doubted (I exist)– Incorrigible – can’t be corrected (I am doubting)– Evident to the Senses (I am having a sense)– Logic, Math proofs, Reason (only if obvious)

Knowledge=JUSTIFIED, true belief

TWO TYPES OF JUSTIFICATION

•Defeasible (can be doubted, but are likely true though possibly wrong)

– Perception– Memory– Testimony– Sensus Divina– Revelation?

Questions

• Does it bother you that belief is part of knowledge?

• If there is no certainty, can we really say we have knowledge?

• What implications might there be in approaching knowledge this way?

Implications for Knowing• Christianity counts as knowledge

• Knowledge and faith actually work quite well together

• Certainty is not required for knowledge

• Our certainty is in God, not in evidence

• Humans need to know more than the Bible

• Non-Christians can discover important truths

• The Bible has limits, but is still ultimate

Questions

• Does it give you confidence that you can claim to know Christianity is true every bit as much as you can claim that George Washington was the first president or that H20 is Water?

• How should we approach apologetics in light of how knowledge works?

• Where is the Spirit of God in all of this?

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knowledge for your faith

Knowledge of God

“For His (God’s) unseen, but His eternal abilities and ‘God-ness’ are clearly understood/perceived from the creation of the universe (world) in the things He made (earth, wisdom, humans, etc.) so that the created are without excuse (literally – without a proof or defense).”

Romans 1:20

Natural,Material:

World,People,

Universe

Supernatural,Spiritual:

God,Being,Spirit

Ethics

science

Religion

Logic,Math Spiritual

Truth/ Reality

Arguments for the Existence of God

Necessary Being Argument(the one who started the ‘mommy’

and ‘daddy’ system into place)

• If things exist, then something has always existed.

• LOGIC: From nothing, comes nothing.

• There cannot be a time when nothing existed (contradiction – what created it?).

• That something necessarily had to have ultimate existence in itself (not created).

• So, who created God?

Unmoved Mover Argument (who hit the cue ball?)

• If things are in motion, who started them?

• Physics: Newton’s First Law (Inertia) states that every body remains in a state of rest or uniform motion unless it is acted upon by an external unbalanced force.

• There had to be an ‘unmoved mover’.

• Can God create a rock so big that He cannot move it?

The Artist/Watchmaker Argument(who is the sculptor of the art?)

• If there are effects, there must be a cause.

• Science: Every effect has a cause.

• There is too much order/beauty and meaning to say there is not a cause.

• Effects must have a cause, God is the first cause.

Degrees of Perfection(how do we know what is ‘good’?)

• Everyone, in general agrees on what is good – for example, it is never good to torture babies.

• In order for there to be ‘good’, there had to be someone who gave the standard of good.

• If it is human preference, we have some serious implications:– We cannot say anything is wrong (child

molestation)– What the Nazis did was fine, who are we to

judge?– Anyone who tries to exert their preference on

others is wrong (Jesus, MLK Jr., etc.)

Moral Argument

Moral Law implies a law giver

There is a moral law

Therefore, there is a law giver

Religious Experience–If S experiences X, then it is likely

that X exists and is very much like what S experienced.

–At least some people are experiencing God. It does not make sense to discount all people as having invalid experiences.

BONUS POINTS!!!• I have ideas/thoughts (even if they

are wrong or fictional – dragons, fairytales)

• I know my ideas/thoughts are incomplete (my knowledge/thoughts are always lacking – I am not all-knowing).

• We could not create thoughts on our own – an all-knowing, always existing thinker had to create us with the ability to think (same thing can be applied to personality).

(And the right kinds of reasons are reliable indicators of truth)

• Poor reasons to believe:– Popular opinion– Wishes, hopes, desires– Sincerity– Feelings

We Believe Things for Reasons

(And the right kinds of reasons are reliable indicators of truth)

• Good reasons to believe:– Logic– Perception– Evidence– Sound argument– Reliable testimony

We Believe Things for Reasons

“Cumulative Case” Argument:The Conclusion

God is the necessarily existing, uncaused, intelligent, morally good agent who is the creator and sustainer of all and God can be known.

From Theism to Christianity

The Problem: How may we know that God is the God of any specific religion?

The Approach: Three questions:– What is our human condition? – What would we expect such a God to

do about our condition?– Is there evidence that God has done

what we expect?

The Human Condition

Moments of Glory

I was made for this!

The Human Condition

Scarred by Tragedy

This is not the way it’s supposed to be!

“. . . the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts.”

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag

Archipelago II

The Human Condition

The Human Condition

“If I find within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The Human Condition

What Would We Expect God To Do About The Human Condition?

Given that we have good evidence that a God of a certain kind exists, what would we expect from that God?– Communicate with Us about it– Offer a Remedy– Leave Significant Evidence– Maintain Personal Responsibility

The Christian “Story”

• Creation:– We were made for something better

• Fall– Tragedy is the result of sin

• Redemption– There is a remedy for sin

• Glorification– Our destiny is the world for which we were

made!

The Christian “Story”

• God took human nature and gave us His Spirit(The Incarnation - communication)

• Jesus died for sins(The Crucifixion - a Remedy)

• Jesus rose from the dead(The Resurrection - Significant Evidence)

• Salvation must be received by faith.(Individual Decision - Personal Responsibility)

LORD, LIAR, LUNATICLORD, LIAR, LUNATIC“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus saidWould not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – On a level with with a man who says he is a poached egg – or else heWould be the Devil of Hell (a liar). You must make your choice. EitherThis man was, and is, the Son of God (Lord): or else a mad man or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool (lunatic), you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon (liar); or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsenseAbout His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open To us. He did not intend to.” C. S. Lewis

The option of calling Jesus a moral teacher, or a prophet is not an option because He said He is God.

The Truth of the ResurrectionThrough His resurrection, Jesus demonstrated that He does not stand

in a line of peers with Buddha, Muhammed or any other founderOf a world religion. If the resurrection is true, He is the one true God.

Dr. Simon Greenleaf (professor of law at Harvard), the greatest authority on legal evidences In the 19th century, came to the conclusion (after examination of the historical record) that any unbiased jury openly examining the evidence would inevitably come to the conclusion That Christ had risen from the dead.

“Did you know that in His life, Christ fulfilled 332 distinct prophecies in the Old Testament? What are the mathematical possibilities of all these prophesies being fulfilled in the life of one man? The mathematical possibilities of all these prophesies being fulfilled in the life of one man:

1

_____________________________________________________

840,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

(that’s ninety-seven zeroes!)

The Truth of the BibleProphecy

The Truth of the BibleHasn’t the Bible been historically and scientifically discredited?

The manuscripts from which we get the Bible are divine ratherThan of human origin. We don’t have the original manuscripts (or the first original draft). So, the question is, how good are the Copies we have? “The answer is that the manuscript copies supporting Scripture are far better than those supporting suchClassical literature as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, and Tacitus”

Hank HannegraffOf the works listed, not one is argued to be unreliable or evendisputable. But, Because of the claims of Jesus in the Bible, it is argued ad nausium.

The Truth of the BibleArchaeology

“Archaeology testifies to the reliability of the Bible as well. It is Telling that an archaeologist as noteworthy as Sir William RamseyWas converted to Christ as a direct result of his digs. And he is notAlone. Many skeptics have bowed before the majesty of ScriptureAfter an examination of archaeological evidence” Hank

God’s Testimony“We accept human testimony, but God’s testimony is

greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son. 

11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 

13 I write these things… so that you may know that you have eternal life. 14 This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” 1 John 5

Your Testimony

13 I write these things… so that you may know that you have eternal life. 14 This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” 1 John 5

 1 In the beginning was the LOGOS, and the LOGOS was with God, and the LOGOS was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning… 14 The LOGOS became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

 

John 1

1 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the LOGOS of life.2 The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 3 We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 

1 John 1

knowledge for your faith