RookieApologises

Do you remember, back when you were a kid, and you used to play those playground games, like “it”. Someone would be “it”, and everyone else would have to run away and try not to get touched? Anyone playing the game had to obey the rules and act like they were actually genuine, and if you didn’t, the game simply didn’t work.

Now, let’s think bigger.

Is life governed by some set of rules, that we’re all pretending are true? Is it all just a big playground game, and we’re all pretending that the rules are there?

The title of this post is a pretty simple, but it’s actually a fair question so I’m going to try to convince you that a God with the characteristics of the Christian God is necessary from a moral standpoint.

1. Reduction ad Absurdum

I’m going to start off with some pretty morbid, but true statements.

You’re going to die one day.

In a godless universe, nothing is owed to you by the universe, not even life.

Though some may find comfort in nothingness after death, I think most would agree that there being an objective meaning to the universe would be a much more satisfiable option than the alternative, though, obviously, this desire doesn’t create it’s necessity.
Without God, I think there’s no broader framework within which man’s life can be seen to subjectively or objectively matter. Further, without immortality, your only destination is extinction in death, and there was no purpose for which you, or I, or anyone else came into this world. I think that it’s for this reason that many of the great philosophers of the past, like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer were so invested in nihilism, and I think, that if I wasn’t a Christian, I’d probably be a nihilist myself.

I’ll push even further and propose that true Atheism is practically impossible to live out, when its naturalistic presuppositions are carried to their logical conclusion.

Francis Schaeffer proposed a model in which man lives in a two-story universe. The upper story is a story with God, meaning, value, and purpose, and the lower story is a finite, physical world. In the lower story, everything is physical and objectively purposeless. Life here is absurd, both probabilistically and semantically, and given that man cannot live here consistently and happily, he repeatedly makes jumps to the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, although he has no right to, because otherwise, they’d simply be an illusion. But is there objective meaning at all? I think C.S Lewis puts forward a pretty strong argument for it in this statement:

“Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should have never found out it has no meaning, just as if there were no light in the universe, and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known that it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.”

In a world without immortality or a “convictor”, there is no objective reason to do good or evil, as there is no ultimate accountability for your actions. Anyone who punishes you for doing wrong has no true or authoritative basis upon which they do so.
In fact, I would argue that the infinite reference point, and therefore the judge between distinguishing good and evil can only be found in God, for only he can exhaust the definition of “absolutely good”. Without God, moral values are just delusions ingrained into us by evolution and social conditioning. After all, it was Darwin that said:

“But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy”.

2. A ‘Moral Argument’

Now, based on what I’ve just said, I’ll propose a ‘moral argument’ for the existence of God, who is the infinite reference point that is absolutely good, and therefore the moral absolute by which we can judge good and evil.

Before I get into the actual argument though, I’d like to further explain the need for an objective moral foundation for values and duties.

It would be “speciesist” to consider our social “objective” morality to be inherently “correct” just because we are human (presupposing naturalism). Different animals act differently, and I’d rather not talk about the things Hive bees get up to, but if you’d like, go and have a look.

I’d also like to assert the necessity the existence of a creator, not just a belief in one, because belief without true existence would also create delusion.

Back to the argument. It has three premises.

*Argument tweaked from Craig’s standard version on Jan 14th ’24.

1. Without using God as the foundation, objective moral absolutes and duties cannot be plausibly grounded.¹
2. Objective moral values really exist, and can be plausibly grounded.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Some critics may object and propose a humanist or relativist mindset, but these are extremely fragile.

Humanism: generally, says that whatever contributes to human flourishing is good.

• Seems good, but it’s pretty arbitrary, and it has no foundation.
• Further, on what grounds can you say that human beings have any intrinsic moral value? Mankind has many times proven itself to be a harbinger of destruction to nature and to us under the guise that we are doing some sort of ‘greater good’ for the flourishing of mankind but have proven to be false in due course. Need I mention Nazi Germany?

Relativism: knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture, society, or historical context, and are not absolute.

• This is a self-refuting position, because you can’t even found your own beliefs. I mean, what happens when someone has contradicting beliefs to you? Funnily enough, the only model in which it works is one in which all follow and maintain the same ethical standard.
• There are many sociobiological objections to this standard – some of which are moral dispositions and genetic influences, and the “evolutionary” origins of morality. You could say that morality is derived through pure naturalistic evolution, but the issue with this is that moral choices are exactly that. Choices, and choices are made by free creatures. If there is no soul capable of exerting will upon the human body frame (and therefore no free will) then morality doesn’t, and can’t, exist. Humans would therefore not at all be free creatures, as all our actions are, in a sense, predetermined by the randomness of molecules swimming in our bodies and electrical impulses firing in our brains. I could go deeper into the philosophy of free will, but I think I’ll save that for another time.
• This is guilty of the genetic fallacy.

An emotional objection to this might be that “If religious people need God to be moral, then what does that say about them?”

Well, yeah, that’s exactly our point. This statement doesn’t actually refute anything, but it actually bolsters the Christian viewpoint of our need of a saviour because of our fallen nature. Also, I think that it’s been made clear throughout this post that anyone who makes this statement doesn’t actually have any authoritative source upon which they can actually call something “moral” at all.

I hope you now see how vapid and confusing a truly naturalistic world is.

3. Abraham and Isaac

In reading up on this argument, I came up against a dilemma. It’s called Euthyphro’s dilemma. It states:

“Is something good because God wills it, or does God will something because it is good?”

Take some time to think about it.

If something is good just because God wills it, then theoretically, if God willed murder, then that would make it good. An example of this could be Abraham and Isaac.

For those who don’t know, in Genesis 22, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, for no reason. So, judging from this. That would make murder or child sacrifice good.

However, if God wills something because it is good, then how do you even judge good. It’s like a separate entity altogether. If this is the case, it doesn’t result in any moral obligations for me, and it’s thoroughly improbable given naturalistic evolution.

What even would ‘good’ be?

God.

God wills something because He is good. God himself is an entity of complete good and therefore it is He who decides what is good and what is evil. His will necessarily expresses his nature.

This also allows us to answer the Abraham “contradiction”. We can all agree that child sacrifice is inherently immoral, but according to Christianity, God is good. If God is omnipotent then he has complete ability to let his active or permissive will come to pass, so surely Isaac should have died?

Since God is inherently good and cannot desire evil, then it would make sense that, although God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, it was not his intention for Isaac to actually be sacrificed, and he should either have: all power to prevent it since it is a command he gave (since forcing it to be done would be a breach of free will), or he shouldn’t have asked it to be done in the first place.

The next logical question to be asked is, couldn’t that make God a liar, since he wanted Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but he apparently doesn’t? How can God be good but be a liar?

Another dilemma has arrived!

Slow down a bit.

If you read Genesis 22, you realise that nowhere does it state that God wanted Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
God just told Abraham to do it.

So, we have a dilemma, God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but he didn’t actually want him to do it, but God commanded child sacrifice, but God is good, so he didn’t actually want Isaac to be sacrificed?

Confusing, huh.

There’s a solution to this, and it’s quite simple.

God’s desire wasn’t for Abraham to kill Isaac, but for Abraham to be tested so that all of us may see the kind of faith he desires from us.
Think about it. If God is truly omniscient, he knew the outcome from the beginning, and therefore there would be no reason for him to test Abraham for his own reasons. The only other logical conclusion was that Abraham was being tested for us. God already knew that Abraham would do it. We didn’t, it was a display.

This solution ticks all the boxes. God didn’t want Abraham to sacrifice his child, and so he prevented it, but the whole fiasco was a display of what God wants from us. There’s a little foreshadowing in there too, but I think you guys are smart enough to figure out how, yourselves.

So, in conclusion, what do you think?

Are we all just faking it?

Pretending?

Sources:

• On Guard, William Lane Craig

And btw Abraham was compensated for his troubles.

1 – Jan 14th 2024 – Craig asserts way too much in his first premise that these objective absolutes cannot exist outside of theism. Whether it was true or not, he would need to systematically refute each and every proposition to the contrary and even then it might not necessarily be proven true. That’s why I tweaked the argument to be more modest. Poetically, the effectiveness of the argument is now dependent on subjective criteria (plausibility), but I welcome attempts to ground moral absolutes outside of the being of God since, even with the reformed argument, I’d still need to show that rebuttals are implausible. To better defend this point, I might appeal to something like a Rob Koons-esque contingency argument (i.e., divine simplicity) and argue that non theistic arguments are arbitary/scientifically non-justified/lead to morally absurd conclusions but these are just thoughts swimming around in my head. I think i’ll narrow in on sharpening this argument in a later post 🙂

I’ll first approach this by providing what I think are good reasons to reject some common arguments that I’ve encountered that support atheistic viewpoints.

The “Multiversal” Argument

This argument states that our universe is a collection of infinite universes, that life may or may not exist in multiple others, and that our universe is just one of those rare cases where parameters just happen to be perfectly fine tuned for the Earth to accommodate life.

Let’s suppose that this is the case.

I would propose some questions then. Scientific findings indicate that the universe is growing.

• If we suppose that this is the case for all universes in the Multiverse, then we realise very quickly that all these universes, at one point, must have, either:
  • not existed (what they were before their “Big Bang”, which would necessitate a creator anyway to create this multitude, as we know things don’t just spawn into existence),
  • or were all simply a practically infinitely dense point “IDP” where all their matter was condensed. In this second case, we reach a similar conclusion. If all universes were, at one point in the past, all IDPs, then what caused the first one to begin its expansion? How does an effect (it’s growing) not have a cause?
• If we instead suppose that these universes are instead growing and shrinking over time (sort of like a sine wave) rather than only growing, then I would ask some questions. You can see the graph here forming, of the size our universe over time, where the “upward” periods signify growth . how often does this happen, i.e., what is the period of this occurrence? Is it equal among all universes, if so, doesn’t this suggest a law maker who insisted that this is the case? If the periods are not equal then Occam’s law of parsimony suggests that “other things equal, explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more.”

The “Primordial Soup” Argument

Unguided Evolution suggests that we originated from a pool of biological fluid some billion years ago, and this is an extremely poor argument for our being.

Let’s start from the ground up.

Skipping forward some billion years from the big bang, due to an asteroid or something transporting- or, there just were- atoms on the Earth that formed amino acids. The most likely method for these amino acids forming would have been passing electricity through methane gas (the probability of an amino acid forming this way would have been ≈1/1020). From these, amino acids randomly formed enzymes (of which there are ≈2000, ≈1300 in a human body), and the probability of even the least complex one forming would have been 1/1,040,000. Somehow, along with the Earths destructive tendencies, all of these things randomly came together to form complex systems such as skeletal structures and more (which I will go through in the next argument). I could even use the fine-tuning argument to add more insult to injury.

I’m a theistic evolutionist, but my point remains that if we, and all species, did stem from a common ancestor, that common ancestor definitely did not randomly come to be, and randomly evolve to the millions of different types of species we have today.

The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

To put it simply, there are ten steps listed in this book that needed to happen in the course of evolution. Three of these are: the development of aerobic respiration, the development of an inner skeleton, the development of an eye. It should also be noted that each of these is already incredibly unlikely, and it makes sense that complex systems cannot evolve piecemeal (i.e., one part at a time).

I asked ChatGPT for an evolutional explanation for the generation of the blood clotting system. It said that this complex process likely evolved through the “modification” of simpler, pre-existing mechanisms. For example, it is hypothesized that the initial steps in blood clotting (a complicated system of many constituent processes) may have evolved from a primordial pathway that was used for wound healing. Over time, this pathway may have become more complex through the duplication and modification of genes that code for the proteins involved in blood clotting, and that, along with the destructive properties of the Earth, all of these processes randomly became complex and good enough without any sort of intervention.

Now…

Similarly, I will approach arguments for God. The first two aren’t necessarily arguments for a God, but arguments for an ultimate beginning, regardless of the big bang. I won’t go into horrible detail on these, since I didn’t in the original video that corresponded to this post.

The 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics

This is a known law that indicates that the amount of usable energy (note that this is usable energy, which doesn’t include all energy) in the known universe is slowly decreasing over time. As the universe expands, the available energy becomes more dispersed and less concentrated, and the entropy (degree of randomness) of the universe as a whole increases. This means that the amount of usable energy in the universe is gradually decreasing over time, and there will come a point in the far future where there will be no more usable energy left to do useful work. However, it’s important to note that the usable energy available for doing useful work depends on the context and the specific process being considered. For example, there may be sources of usable energy that we have not yet discovered, but unlike God, there is nothing to imply that this is the case, unlike the other arguments I will put forward in my argument. The point still stands that we are running out of energy, and this naturally implies that there is not an infinite supply of energy in the universe, that there was a beginning, and that there will be an end. This also further rejects the multiverse theory.

The Impossibility of an Infinite Time Span within our Universe

This basically states that given we have memory, cannot recall future events, and know that in this universe things happen as a logical sequence of events – one after the other – that time cannot be eternal because if it were, we would constantly stay an equal distance (in time) away from the beginning as we do to the end of it (that is, an infinite distance as nothing would happen). In summary, this impossibility arises because time is measurable, countable and sequential.

The Teleological Argument

This argument asks you to look at your surroundings and reason to yourself about how complexity and order can arise from simplicity and disorder with no form of intelligent motivation.

Tough, right?

Another way to put this is: “How can a cause have a greater effect than itself?”. How can randomness and chaos have intelligence enough to create stability in its own being?

The Fine-Tuning Argument

Stephen Hawking admitted himself that:

1. ‘The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.’
2. “If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in 100 thousand million million, the universe would have collapsed before it ever reached its present size.”

A scientist called Charles Darwin said:

“[reason tells me of the] extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking backwards and far into futurity, as the result of a blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind, in some degree analogous to a man; and I deserve to be called a Theist”

[note that Darwin did not remain a theist and later became agnostic, but the fact that he uttered these words is something]

I’ll just let that sink in for a bit. I will further talk about mental complexity later and how this further implies a creator.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

To be clear, this one doesn’t prove the existence of God, but, it certainly implies it.

1. Whatever begins to exist has to have a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the Universe was caused by God¹.

The Constancy of the Laws of Nature

Since ancient history, there have never been any records of the rules of the universe changing (e.g. Gravity and the behaviour of Forces and Matter). If the universe spontaneously generated, then how come I know with certainty that, ceteris paribus, should I drop a cup, it will fall and not levitate? Does this not imply some sort of sovereign rule maintainer, or giver that governs over creation, given that should there not be one, there would not be any reason for the rules of reality to stay fixed? I cannot supply a naturalistic reason for why they would change, but equally, I cannot supply a reason for them to stay fixed.

The Mental Argument

Here, you need to confront the reality of non-physical entities such as numbers, values and propositions.

You need to explain our capacity for moral awareness, conceptual thought, our power to articulate and understand meaningful symbols, our rational powers, pursuit of beauty, use of language, fear of extinction
You also need to explain the non-identity of the brain, mental phenomena, the fact of private access (the ability to know our own thoughts with directness and certainty) which eludes any brain surgeon. Further, our domination over other animals, we have just the perfect combination of strength, intelligence and structure to do so.

Fin,

I personally believe that the case for God is stronger than the case for not, but what do you think?

If you’re more interested, I encourage you to have a look at the sources I have listed below.

Sources/Good Reads:

• “Who Made God? And Answers to Over 100 Other Tough Questions of Faith” – Ravi Zacharias, Norman Geisler
• “Know the Truth: A Handbook of Christian Belief” – Bruce Milne

1 – Yeah, I know the obvious question. “What caused God?”. It makes sense that all of time, matter and space came into coexistence at the same time. If there was a creator, then whoever created the Universe (i.e., space, time and matter) is not restricted by any of these. If that is the case, then the creator must be spaceless, timeless and immaterial, and therefore had no beginning, and no creator.
The reason I claim that the argument doesn’t prove the existence of God, is because there needs to be some more fleshing out of the inference between the second premise and the conclusion. It seems to me that you could posit quite a few more explanations of entities that might satisfy this criteria – but the God of classical theism is one such entity that satisfies the argument.

I decided to ‘convert’ my channel into a blog!
Managing a YouTube channel takes a lot more management, time, and effort than I can currently allocate for, so I decided it would be more prudent to convert it to a blog. Much less effort, but I can still convey the same ideas.

In terms of frequency, possibly a post every three weeks, don’t really plan to stick to a perfect schedule. I’ve got a lot going on (nothing bad!) so I don’t really want to go ahead with putting too many deadlines/demands on myself.

The content of the blog will more or less remain the same. Apologetics/Theology/Philosophy.

If you’re interested, have a wander, but if not, again, no one’s forcing you to be here, and thanks for visiting.

-Rookie