Truth Unites - 5 Questions That Point to God

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Sometimes questions are helpful in conversations about God. Here are 5  questions that draw from various classical arguments for God and may be  useful to utilize in our dialogue others.  Here is the video I referenced on the Euthyphro Dilemma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erYct5Hevmo Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Many of us who are Christians, who are followers of Christ, find it hard to talk about that with people who aren't Christians, whether you call it evangelism or apologetics or whatever particular conversation it is. It can be kind of intimidating. Sometimes we're not sure what to say. We're afraid of having the wrong answer. Two of the things that I found helpful are on this. Our number one is having some kind of appeal that you can make, that you condense down into very clear and succinct expression. so that it's not a complicated, but you're just ready to draw it out in a few words,

and I'll go through five of those in this video. But then secondly, posing them as questions. I think questions can be so powerful. It kind of evens the playing field a little bit, you know, because sometimes people think that the believer has to defend all of the aspects of their faith, but the skeptic doesn't have to defend their faith at all. But the fact is, we all have some level of faith. This is one of the things Tim Keller talks about and the reason for God is all forms of alternative,

all forms of doubt have some kind of alternative faith. And I think it's helpful. You know, Greg Koukull has written a fantastic book called Tactics. In there, he talks about the Colombo tactic. We talked about this as a church. I did an apologetics class here. And the Colombo tactic, if you remember, the Detective Colombo is asking questions to draw the other person out, especially simple questions.

Questions can be so powerful. and, you know, these five questions that I'm going to recommend are not defeaters or anything. They're not even arguments. They're just one thread of an argument in each case. But I've just found that the Holy Spirit can sometimes use even simple little questions. Sometimes it's just one little thing, but it gets in someone's mind or it's like a pebble in their shoe. You know, it kind of bothers them and they keep thinking about it. And so these are tools to engage in conversation. So let me go run through five that I have found useful.

Number one is, where did the world come from? This question is a way of getting into what's called the cosmological argument or the argument for God is the first cause. So if you get into this argument and it's more technical expression, it can get really technical, really fast. Okay, because you're, especially like William Lane Craig has done so much work on the Kalam cosmological argument, which argues for God as the first cause of the universe because it looks like our universe began to exist. and he's done so much that is wonderful to help rehabilitate this argument. But if you get into that at a really technical level, it gets really dense. You know, you're talking about like Lawrence Krause has three different definitions of the word nothing.

It sounds kind of funny if you've never engaged this, but, you know, it's like you'd think defining nothing, actually that's tricky. How you define the word nothing. It gets into one of those points where cosmology and philosophy, bump into each other. And you get into quantum physics and you get into these non-standard cosmologies where the universe somehow, you know, like Stephen Hawking's no boundary proposal for the way you understand time. And if you don't know any of that, don't worry about it. But it gets complicated.

It's the point. You can bypass a lot of the technicalities with this basic question because what happens is if people propose a multiverse or a prior universe or a quantum field or something like that, this that produced our world, or they say our world has always been here. No matter what they say, you can always show the need for a first cause, because you can always say, okay, where did that come from? Right. Contingent things, we all have this intuition, and this is the intuition and play in this argument, contingent things, i.e. things that are not necessary that didn't have to exist, just beg for some kind of explanation. And one contingent thing doesn't really explain another

a contingent thing because you can just ask, well, why is that? Why is that here? Why is there a quantum field? Why is there a multiverse? Now, what I find is at a certain point in conversation, the discussion usually gets to this where people say, well, why is God not contingent? Why is God a necessary thing? Or why is God simple? So that's another one of the points is a lot of times we're trying to find the simplest explanation possible. And if nothing else, this question can help you clarify what we mean when we use the word God. oftentimes people, you know, the most common response, you see it over and over, and Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russell, everybody is always saying,

well, if everything needs a cause, what caused God? And you realize what they're thinking is, they're thinking of it as though God is like the first domino, and he sort of gets a pass. He's an exception to the rules of causation somehow, but that's not what the claim is here. The claim is that God is an ontologically distinct, uncaused first. cause. He's not the first domino. He's more like Shakespeare is to Hamlet. He's a completely different kind of being, completely different kind of reality. Now, somebody can easily say, well, I just don't believe in that. And that's fine. But if you ask what caused God, if everything needs a cause, what caused God, what that shows is that the idea that's on the

table here has not been understood because God is by definition unconsted. That's what it means. When we say God, the reason we say God is a really good candidate for the first cause, the reason we say that if you just think about contingent reality enough, you inexorably are led back to something like God. And the reason why God has been such a kind of fertile, useful concept historically to explain the nature of reality is because he's personal, simple, and necessary by definition. Now you can deny there is such a thing, but that's the proposal on the table. He's personal so he can act spontaneously to bring into being a new state of affairs. Philosophers call this agent causation as opposed to event causation. He's necessary. So he's the one thing that is self-existent.

He exists from himself. And he's simple. And that's another point of confusion where you can get into this. people say, well, why is God, this is how Dawkins will think. I'll say, why is God simpler than a multiverse, right? And they misunderstand what we mean by simple. Simple doesn't mean not big and mysterious. It doesn't mean not complicated.

The opposite of simple is not complicated. It's composite. Simple means God's not made up of constitutive parts. He's ontologically simple, not intellectually simple. And again, if nothing else, if you start to get into this and you start to get into this and you start to kind of think it through like, oh yeah, no matter what you have, you kind of need an explanation for it. It starts, you may get to a point where you realize this is why we need something like God. There's no way to understand reality unless there's something, some infinite

ocean in which we are all swimming. And actually, I think a lot of modern people will find the idea of theism enchanting and amazing and beautiful as it is. Second question, did it all happen just by accident. Again, I'm trying to put these in very colloquial, simple, plain language, and this is a way to get at what's sometimes called the teleological argument or the argument from design. And I like to put the focus with this argument on the physical constants of our universe, things like the gravitational constant, the speed of light, things like that, because it just allows you to bypass the whole question of evolution. I think you can make a good argument from design from the biological world as well. But the thing is, you don't even need to.

Because the very fact that we have a universe in which evolution is even possible, a universe that is life permitting, is already miraculous. I mean, so many of the physical constants have to be set just right to this exact, precise degree. And so the question comes up, well, why are they like that? And philosophers have pointed out there's basically three possible explanations for that. Law, chance, or design. Well, they don't seem to be a law. It doesn't seem to be necessary. We can easily imagine the physical constants being different and thus our universe not being life permitting. So then you're down to chance or design. And it's kind of the question of, you know, it's helpful to see the biggest alternative rival sort of idea on the market is the multiverse theory,

which is the idea that there's a huge number of universes, and ours is one of them, and they all are different, and so we happen to live in the right one. And, you know, at a certain point getting into this, you start to realize, no matter what you opt for, we live in a pretty mysterious world, if that's the main alternative theory

to fine-tuning of the physical constant, you realize there's no worldview on the market that's entirely rationally explicable and explainable in terms of science and so forth and what we can observe because the multiverse is beyond what we can observe. And so I find this question to be a powerful one. And even if you don't get into all that, that gets kind of technical as well. But even just making what is sometimes called a naive tealological argument of just basic appeals. You know, we had ants in our house recently. ants are amazing. Some of the ants got in there like scouts, you know,

and then they form these incredibly intricate, complicated, like, assembly lines. And if you mess it up, they can reform it. And it's like, how do they know to do that? How do they communicate? It's actually kind of amazing. Or think about the symbiotic relationship that trees get with each other when their roots intertwine in a forest. And the way, if you ever study that, that is absolutely amazing.

Or look up at the stars at night. or look at the colors on the tail of a peacock, or look at a double rainbow. I mean, it's hard to evade the powerful impression that I don't think all this happened just by accident. And even that kind of naive appeal, I think, would be very powerful. Now, one of the responses will often get on this one, just like the last one, is, okay, if everything that seems designed,

needs to be explained, who designed the designer. And I think William Lane Craig has given a very good response to this and others have as well. I don't think that's actually a powerful objection. You don't need to know everything about the designer to posit it as an explanation for the design we do see. And he gives the examples of if astronauts discovered machinery on the other side of the moon, they wouldn't need to know who put it there to infer intelligent design. If archaeologist discovered products, you know, arrowheads and tomahawks and other things, they wouldn't need to know who precisely put them there in order to recognize this evidence as some kind of civilization and so forth.

You don't need to have exhaustive information about that to see it's something. It's something. All right. Number three, why is murder different from a shark eating a seal? Again, what I'm trying to do here is get at one aspect of one of these classical arguments and putting it in sort of everyday language. And you can substitute a different human evil, like a historical event. though just be careful not to be insensitive. But you can, or you can substitute a different animal phenomenon.

Like another one I like to use is a Venus fly trap liquidating a bug. Because if you've ever studied Venus fly traps, they're pretty brutal. A lot of the insect world is kind of like, ugh. So you point to this and you say, and what you're basically getting into, because we all know deep in our hearts, murder is wrong. Rape is wrong. H hurting a child is wrong. We all know that.

If someone won't grant that, then it's hard to argue with them. You know, at that point, William Lane Craig says they don't need an argument. They need a therapist. You know, if you can't see that harming a child is wrong. Harming a child deliberately or for fun. But the question that comes up when you make, I just find it helpful when you're talking about the realm of morality to make a comparison between the. animal kingdom and the human realm. Because what you get into is we all intuit that there's a

qualitative distinction. Like we don't think that, well, when a shark eats a seal, that's a little bit wrong. But then when a human being exploits someone, a stronger human being exploits and preys upon a weaker human being to get what they want from them, that's really wrong. No, we don't think. We know that there's nothing wrong about a shark eating a seal or, you know, in the animal kingdom when we see the strong exploit the weak. We know that that's a different realm altogether. So the question is, where does this qualitative distinction between the human realm and the animal realm come from? And if you can get people to recognize there's just something unique about human beings, that raises the question of, well, why? And where did that come from?

Now, one of the most common responses to this argument is the youth of row dilemma. I've addressed that in another video. I'll put that in the video description. If you're interested in that, maybe that could be helpful. Here's the fourth one. These last two will be quick. A billion years from now, will it matter how we lived? Now, this kind of question is getting into questions of significance and meaning. It doesn't necessarily get into something from which you can make an airtight argument. But I find questions like this are often helpful to draw attention to the implications of an atheistic worldview. Because they highlight something that we can tend to forget that on an atheistic worldview,

if there's nothing beyond nature, then not only will all biological life expire at one point, but all memory of biological life will expire, every consequence of our lives, every consequence, every attainment of human civilization, every product of art, every musical thing that's ever been composed, any good moral victory that ever happened in human history, ultimately, if you just wait long enough, it will cease to matter. They only have finite value. So, you know, the question I ask in my apologetics book, why God makes sense in a word that doesn't, is will there be a consequence ultimately to the difference of the lives of Mother Teresa and

Adolf Hitler? And I think on a naturalistic worldview, we'd have to say not ultimately. there will for a time, but ultimately no. And it's one thing to make an argument from that. It's another thing just to help people to see the implications, because if nothing else, I think one of our greatest enemies these days is simply apathy. A lot of people are just not thinking about these questions. You know, we're distracted, our lives are consumed with other details.

So just getting people to feel the weight of it. And I often find referencing movies, is a helpful way. I love to talk about the movie Gladiator, which I'm filming this in February 2022. Can you believe it's already been 22 years since that movie came out? Unbelievable. I love the movie Gladiator. One of the things about it that's so interesting is how philosophical it is. I mean, maybe unintentionally, it's a, you know, it's more just a historical sort of war movie, but it raises this profound question about the afterlife over and over. It comes up. General Maximus, played by Russell Crowe, early on, says, what we do in life echoes in

eternity, and that's a theme or a motif throughout the whole movie. When his son and wife are murdered, his friend promises him, you will see them again, but not yet. Toward the end of the film, as he's dying, you know, there's this famous scene where he's walking through the field in his hand is drifting over the wheat, and he's like being reunited. Throughout the movie, it recurs. Sorry for the spoilers. And it's been 22 years, so hopefully I can talk about it now. but he's reunited with his family finally at the end there and you're wondering what and there's this sense of this think of the emotions of that and then his friend says to him i will see you again but not yet it's all about the afterlife the whole shining theme is there's something after this life you know

and if you think about the emotions of that it's profoundly contrary to a naturalistic worldview but people sometimes we don't think about that we don't think about the philosophical implications or something like that. It helps people to feel the stakes, and questions of meaning and significance can do that. All right. Last question is, who do you think Jesus was? Honestly, sometimes just that question alone can get so much leverage because the person of Christ is so powerful. But if you want to get into it a little more than that, you can just point out for people that there are a limited number of options. And C.S. Lewis's famous argument now, a lot of times we want to add on a fourth category, not just Lord liar or lunatic, but Lord liar, lunatic, or legend to not assume that he did claim to be God.

But the fact is, I think you can make a good case from the Gospels. I mean, in my book, I go through all this, but basically, even if you take the most radically skeptical proposals, the material in the Gospels that does go back to the historical Jesus by pretty much everyone's estimation, he's still claiming this divine authority to forgive sins, to judge everyone at the end of history with divine authority. Think of Mark 2 and Mark 16. I cover all that in the book. But what I try to leverage us to say is,

look, there's a limited number of options and none of them are easy. It's not like, oh, believing in a naturalistic account of Jesus is really, really easy. And it takes this wild leap of imagination to consider a divine interpretation of Jesus. It's like, no, you've got to find some way to explain this person, because if he's actually making those claims, and he isn't a legend, it's hard to see another option besides Lord, liar, or lunatic. And he doesn't seem like a liar or a lunatic.

And just getting people to see, even if all it does is get someone to see like, okay, yeah, it's not a crazy idea. You know, that's a gain. And I think, you know, if nothing else, these questions are ones that hopefully can get people thinking because I think one of the biggest challenges that we face is people, sometimes are so distracted and they're so focused on other things that we're not thinking about ultimate questions. And that's what my book is all about. It's all about using Pascal, using these other kind of using these classical arguments, but trying to frame them in a way, both narratively

and emotionally, so that it hits us at multiple levels of our being. So that we feel the stakes. We feel the plausibility of the Christian claim, but we also feel the infinite stakes of whether it's true or not and what that entails. So hopefully those five questions will be helpful for you. Maybe there'll be a conversation that you have where one of these will pop into your mind. And God can bring those things to mind in the moment. And he guides us to say the right thing at the right time. And it's a comfort to know that it's not us speaking in that moment, but it's God speaking through us. So hopefully those questions will be helpful for out there, for people out there. If you're watching this and you're a skeptic, you're an atheist, I love engaging with people

and having my videos engaged with by people outside of Christianity. So sometimes the dialogue between non-believers and believers on the internet is very nasty. I really try to keep it cordial and positive. So what I'll do is on this video, I'll be extra careful to respond to comments. So if you, especially from skeptics, if you're not a believer and you have a comment that's stated respectfully and not just an insult, I'll be sure to try to look and engage and see what your perspective is on these things. Hey, thanks for watching everybody. Hope this is helpful. God bless you.