#STRask - Is God Just a Way of Solving a Mystery by Appealing to a Greater Mystery?

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Questions about whether God is just a way of solving a mystery by appealing to a greater mystery, whether subjective experience falls under a category of knowing, why people in the Bible got to hear and see God but we don’t, and an analogy between God and Hitler.   How would you respond to Matt Dillahunty, who says that God is just a way of solving a mystery by appealing to a greater mystery? Does my undeniable, subjective experience of God fall under a category of knowing in epistemology? Why did the people in the Bible get to hear and see God while they were alive, but we have to die first? How would you respond to someone who asked, “If a Jew during the Holocaust was spared the gas chamber in favor of spending the rest of his life with Hitler, would he call that Heaven?”

Welcome to the hashtag STRask podcast. Greg Koukal is here to answer your questions. And I'm Amy Hall. Hi, Amy. And I ask the questions. Actually, I only collect the questions. You ask the questions and then I collect the questions and then I ask Greg the questions. Actually, I only collect the questions. You ask the questions, and then I collect the questions, and then I ask Greg the questions. And then you answer them too with me.

So now that you know how the show works, we're going to start with a question from Erica. Matt Dillahunty says, God is solving a mystery by appealing to a greater mystery. I guess that appealing to God is solving a mystery by appealing to a greater mystery. I guess that appealing to God is solving a mystery by appealing to a greater mystery. And just so listeners know, Matt Dillahunty is an internet atheist and he has a show called The Atheist Experience. I don't know if that's still going on, it probably is.

So what would you say to that, Greg? I'll tell you what the first thing that comes to mind is. So what? I'm not, I sure I understand the significance of that observation. Even if I didn't push back on it in a certain sense like, oh well, we're, God's not a greater mystery in some ways, but if I said, okay, here's a mysterious set of circumstances. Now we have an answer regarding, to make sense of this mysterious set of circumstances. Now it's no longer mysterious. However, there still is mystery with regards to the answer. I get a perfect example of that.

Gravity. Gravity is a mystery. And for a long time, there was no explanation for why, you know, the apple fell to the ground. And then we realize with gravity there's mutual attraction, okay? And this can be quantified and measured and everything, so the concept of Newton's work on gravity is helpful than to explain the phenomena by an appeal to this force. But what's interesting about this force is there was a lot of pushback on Newton on this

one because it was considered, I don't know exactly the language they used, but it was influence at a distance. And in the kind of a mechanistic understanding of the natural realm, you can understand why a cue ball would push a pool ball after you poked it with a cue because there's a mechanical connection between all of those things. But with gravity, there's no mechanical connection.

It's a force. It's an invisible occult force that, and they didn't want anything to do with those kinds of things. So there's a lot of pushback there on that issue. And so what you have is a mystery, falling objects, that is solved by our understanding of gravity, which is mutual attraction even at a distance, but it's, is itself a mysterious

concept. So I don't understand why this is a problem. If we have phenomena that we cannot explain except for an appeal to the kind of being who can explain the phenomena even though there are aspects of that being that we don't understand very well, why is that a liability? The wording, the way he's offered it, makes it sound like you have made no progress. You've just kicked the can down the road a little bit, from one mystery to another mystery. But this second mystery turns out to be, insofar, it's not utterly mysterious. It has a profile, it has characteristics, it has things we can appeal to that help explain

the first mystery so it's no longer mysterious. Okay, but it's not a nothing. Maybe he's thinking, oh, you've got all this mystery here, and so all you do is invoke a mystery. This mystery explains that mystery kind of view. But we're not doing that. We are saying there, we have in a certain sense a concrete characterization. We have a personal being who has no beginning and no end, who is the ground of being, who has unlimited power and full knowledge of everything. Well, that's weird, but it's not like without definition, so to speak.

Well, a being like that is what's going to be necessary to account for the universe. All right, so now we've accounted for the universe by appealing to a being like that because that's what's necessary. There probably is a being like that even though we don't understand everything about that being. So? I just don't get that. This is actually the tactics book, the tenth anniversary edition.

There's a mini tactic, the power of so, S-O, so what basically. I don't see how this helps him at all, although I can see how it might be confusing to some people and they think, oh, I don't know what to say to that. So what? So you solved one mystery by appeal to something else that makes sense of your mystery, even though there are some things mysterious about that too, like gravity. That's a great example. I think a lot of atheists are confused about the reasoning that Christians are using. Take for example, when we make the case for intelligent design, and they'll accuse us

of using like a God of the gaps argument. In other words, they'll say, all you're saying is we don't know how this could have happened on its own, therefore God did it. But that's not actually the argument we're making. The argument we're making is look at the way these things came together. Only minds create this kind of thing. Only minds create information, meaningful information, and specified complexity. And all these things come from minds. It's

not that we're just saying, oh, we don't know how nature did it, so therefore it's God. We're saying we look around us in the world and we see that only minds create this kind of thing by nature. So therefore we know a mind created this and now we're positing a being who would be capable of creating these things. So I think that's where they get a little bit confused. And so then in that case, if we were just saying, well, we don't understand it, so let's just make up a being, then I can see that he might have a point, but that's not what we're doing. We're actually making a case for, you know, with the Kalam cosmological argument. There has to be a self-existent being who created everything.

There has to be a being, like you named all the things that he has to be. We're actually using reason to figure out what kind of a being had to have created everything. So it's not just that we're just throwing a mystery out there. We're actually using reason and evidence. All right, so here's a question from Carrie. When God invades my subjective consciousness and allows me to experience His subjective consciousness and my subjective consciousness, my experience of Him is undeniable. His existence is as undeniable as my existence. My question is, is this a category of knowing and epistemology, and if so, what? Oh, yes. The category is direct awareness. So I just wrote a piece that came out, well,

with regards to our broadcasting just a couple days ago, but it's called The Invisible Man, and I'm making a case for the existence of the soul. And one of the reasons we know there are souls is not because we see them. You can't disqualify the existence of an invisible thing because it can't be seen or detected with scientific instruments. Rather, we know it in part because of our subjective awareness. We are directly in touch, we have direct access to the states of our soul, alright, and so it's not mediated through something else. And so that is a category of epistemology, how we know something, we know it directly

and immediately. And I think that's entirely fair, I've never thought about it this way, but I think it's clever to understand, well, our knowledge of God is not immediate. I mean, a certain aspect of it, what Carrie just described, the subjective person of Christ or God interacting with our subjective selves. We're not reading about that. Now, we could read about it in the Bible, and that would be a secondary way of knowing it, but sometimes there is this direct awareness of God, and that's a direct experience of God. And yes, it is. It's not immediate, it's immediate.

It's direct. And we know quite a number of things like that. We know like the laws of logic, that way just a matter of reflection gets us in touch with the truth of those things, you know. And so yeah, I think that's a totally legitimate way, an immediate awareness that we have of those things. All right, here's a question from Myra Williams. Why did the people in the Bible get to hear and see God

while they were alive, but we have to die first? Well, I mean, just to be fair, that didn't happen to many people in the Bible. Right. Now, if what to many people in the Bible. Right. Now, if what you're saying is the Bible, insofar as it records these unique individuals, well, they're recorded there and featured there because they're unique in that regard. But most of the people in that time and around them and part of the commonwealth of Israel and God's people, even in the book of Acts, did not have this experience.

It was for certain people, for a certain purpose. And most of the time it was through a prophet to somebody. So like, I don't think God ever spoke directly to David. I think he did through prophets. I'm trying to think of any example, but I can't think of— Yeah. Well, let's see, had the Urim and Thummim, he appealed to God, should I go up, and God said—so there's some ambiguity there.

But even if we say he did speak to David, we do have—he spoke with Moses audibly, the people heard God talking to Moses, and it frightened them, you know, so, but the individuals are, I'm trying to think of a parallel, are, they're featured because of their unique thing. This is like saying, why is it when I read sports magazines from a hundred years ago, all of these people are sports stars? That's a crazy. Because what the magazine is all about, about is sports stars, you know? Everybody else wasn't a sports star, but the people they wrote about were sports stars. And the same thing in Scripture, the people that we read about are the subjects of, oftentimes,

subjects of revelation for the rest of the people who aren't hearing from God. So this is just a misunderstanding or a mistake of reading. I remember people would have told me, gee, in the book of Acts, God is showing up everywhere and telling people things and working all these miracles and guiding people and all this. Well, actually when you look at the 30-year record, there's only 13 times or 14 times where that actually happens from the time of Pentecost on. And they're grouped together. So you have two of them associated with Paul's conversion, two with the Ethiopian eunuch's

conversion. You have three that are associated with this thing or whatever. And it just isn't as frequent as people think it is. Compressing 2,000 years into this book that you can pick up. You're not talking about everybody who ever lived. In fact, you'll read about long stretches of time where it will say, God was not speaking to them in those days. But there were specific people that he spoke to.

And I think really the main, the Exodus was the main time when many, many people heard. And then after that, he basically would go through prophets. That's right. And you have the initiation of God's plan to save the world with Abraham. And so obviously there's going to be communication by God with Abraham and some of the others and Sarai and whatever. You see that going on and Jacob wrestling with the angel and there's lots of stuff going on, but it's focused in that original group of people that were foundational for God's salvation plan for the world.

But you don't see this. We'll look at it in 1 Samuel. It says there that the beginning chapters as Samuel is being introduced, that words from the Lord were rare in those days. And of course, from the time of the reconstruction of the temple under Nehemiah and Ezra and Haggai, I mean that period of reconstruction, you don't hear anything from God until John the Baptist, almost half a millennium later. But I do have good news for Myra because we don't have to wait to die in order to hear from God because we do have His Word. We can hear from Him any time we want.

We read the Bible, we read everything that he revealed because this is what we all needed. So regardless of the fact that he spoke to some and not others, the ones he spoke to recorded it so that we could benefit from that. All right, let's go on to a question from Molly Yates. My son heard this question on YouTube and I difficulty answering it. During the Holocaust, if a Jew was spared the gas chambers in favor of spending the rest of their life with Hitler, would they call that heaven? Help me answer this. I don't understand the question. I think the question is they're comparing the Jews in the

Holocaust being spared the gas chambers in favor of spending the rest of their life with Hitler, and calling that heaven, because they're comparing that to God saying, if you don't follow me, then you will go to hell. Therefore, is it heaven to be with someone who would say that? I think that's the point here. Oh, well, I guess there's still some ambiguity there. Let me just put it this way. Heaven is not simply the absence of hell. All right? So this kind of goes back to the carrot stick thing that one of the atheists that I talked with on the year in the past had accused Christians

of. It's all about the carrot and stick. And in this view though, if you don't get the stick, since you're avoiding the stick, that's like, oh, that's the carrot that you're not getting punished. And that, of course, is a complete mischaracterization of what Scripture teaches. God made us to be in communion, in friendship with him. We have rebelled and so we're guilty, all right? And therefore, since God is a good God, he has to be just and punish the sin. Not good. I mean, not good for us or those who get punished, all right? But because he's offered a means of forgiveness through Jesus, we can not just avoid hell. We can be reunited with him in friendship and all that that entails. In thy presence is

fullness of joy, the psalmist writes, and at thy right hand are pleasures forever. And we get glimpses of that in different texts, what we can look forward to. But it was life as God intended life to be without the scourge of of evil and sin. So it's not just avoiding hell. Oh, man, I'm thankful I didn't get that. So I feel better already. This is kind of heaven compared to that. Maybe that's what the question is. No, that isn't the way that works out. They might be also saying, well, how could you enjoy being with a God who would send somebody to hell? I don't know. Maybe that's the sense of it. And the answer is, is because the reason he sends people to hell is the same reason that we can enjoy him,

because he's good. And that's the whole problem with this. It's not remotely analogous because God is not Hitler. This is the biggest problem here. They're trying to reason from the result of hell to reasoning who God is by looking at how this would be in some sort of situation on earth with somebody like Hitler. But the problem is, it's not even analogous there. Because he wasn't justly punishing people for crimes. He was trying to destroy them

because he hated them. That's the whole point. That's not what God's doing. God is justly punishing people for their crimes. So maybe a better analogy would be, let's say there's a prison warden, and he's got a prison full of people who deserve to be there. And he says to one of them, if you will come be with me, I will forgive your debt to society. I will adopt you and you can come live with me in my mansion and enjoy life with me." And he's a good man. He's a good man who has kept this prison and taken care of these prisoners this whole time, even though they're evil and they deserve to be punished. That's way more analogous.

Would he call that heaven? Would he call that a good thing if he left that prison and he went to live in this fancy house with somebody who loved him enough to adopt him and forgive him? Yeah, I think he would. He's not Hitler. And that's the bottom line. God is not Hitler. And here's, this is a problem I see happening over and over with atheists is that they will find an analogy to God that they will claim that a sinful human, they'll put a sinful human, they'll imagine a sinful human in the place of God. And then they'll say, well, that sinful human doesn't have the right to do that. That's so evil that he would do that. But they're missing the core piece

involved here and that God is not sinful. So if somebody just randomly starts to round people up and put them in a prison in his basement, that's an evil person. If the government rounds up criminals and puts them in a prison, that's not wrong, that's a good thing, and that's just. So it all depends on the authority and the character of God. So you can't just imagine what it would be like if a dictator did this, of an evil dictator who didn't deserve to be worshiped, asked to be worshiped. Well, of course, that's awful because he's not God. That's the whole problem. He's not the one that deserves the worship by his very nature. Right.

You have to start, if you want to evaluate what Christianity says, you have to take everything Christianity says and evaluate that. You can't just import your ideas of sinful human beings into the place of God and then evaluate Christianity based on that because that isn't Christianity. That's just something you're making up. So anyway, that's one of my frustrations with people. But anyway, if there's an analogy, look at the character of the person they're putting in place of God and see if it matches. If it doesn't, then it's not an analogy. Anything to add before I close this off, Greg? No, that was excellent. I agree entirely.

All right. Well, it's so sad for me that it almost seems like when I'm talking to atheists about these things, they cannot hear what I'm saying about the character of God. And I think a lot of them, they see the idea of judgment and they fear that. I mean, I'm not saying that they think God is real, but they think that is a very fearful thing to face, which of course it is. Judgment is a fearful thing. If you are still guilty, you haven't been forgiven. And so they assume that if they feel bad about judgment, that means God is bad.

But you have to step outside of yourself for a second and look at judgment and justice as a good thing. It is a very good thing, and it's a good thing we have a good judge. But in order for us not to be afraid, we need to be forgiven. And thankfully, that's available. And then there's no fear. And that's the other thing. I think atheists think Christians live in fear all the time. And we're not. We're just not. I don't, some of them will say, I've been in church and everyone's living

in fear and I don't know what church they're going to. The fear is gone because God has loved us and adopted us. That's it. Perfect love casts out all fear at first job. But for some reason they cannot see past the judgment because it's a scary thing maybe, I don't know. But if I could just help them, one of my big goals is I just want to help atheists understand who I'm describing. That's it. Let's just start there. I just want you to understand who it is I'm describing and see him the way I see him. And then we can talk about whether or not he exists. But I have so much trouble even getting to that

point. Yeah. Well, let's call this straw man. People mischaracterize the Christian view and then they defeat the mischaracterization. And if you want to defeat what you think is a false view, you have to defeat the view itself, not a distortion. And that's what we're facing here. Well, thank you for your questions, Erica, Carrie, Molly, and Myra. We had four questions this time, Greg.

It's a miracle. But we'd love to hear from you, so send us your question on X with the hashtag STRask or go to our website at STR.org. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kochel for Stand to Reason.