Every now and again, some atheist will claim that Christianity is falsified by Occam’s Razor. Occam’s Razor is the principle of parsimony, which states that entities should not be multiplied needlessly. Basically, the Razor claims that the simplest explanation is the best. The argument forwarded by atheists is generally along the lines either that (i) God is unnecessary to explain the world as we know it, and therefore is unlikely to exist; or, more strongly, that (ii) since God is infinitely complex, the Christian explanation of reality is thus infinitely more complex than a non-theistic one, and so should be rejected by default. (This second argument I find more interesting—it’s what got me thinking about Occam’s Razor to begin with, after Steve Zarbi posited it following our debate.)

It intrigues me that atheists use this as a foundation for “disproving” Christianity. Several obvious problems suggest themselves:

Question-begging

Firstly, how does (i) not beg the question against the Christian? If, in fact, the Christian is correct in asserting that God is not just necessary to explain reality, but is a necessary precondition for reality, then (i) is obviously false and doesn’t constitute an argument at all. Since the Christian has plenty of good arguments of his own which seek to prove his position, these should be evaluated on their own merits rather than dismissed on the dubious basis of parsimony.

Less obviously, (ii) also begs the question. Even if the Christian explanation is infinitely more complex by merit of entertaining an infinitely complex being, perhaps it is the case that, in this particular instance, such a being is a requirement of any rigorous and adequate explanation of reality. The atheist needs to make an argument which shows this is not the case, rather than merely asserting it.

Furthermore, what does the atheist mean by “infinitely complex being”, in reference to God? The term “infinite” is used very freely with relation to God, but is generally a qualitative term rather than a quantitative one. That is, when we say that God is “infinite”, we tend to be referring to some superlative characteristic of his, rather than to any actual number of things which inhere in him. So the atheist needs to clarify and argue for his view that God is infinitely complex.

On top of this, even if that argument is successful, he has still not shown that an infinitely complex God entails an infinitely complex explanation. In what sense is the quantitative infinity of God being imputed to the Christian’s explanation of reality? Again, clarification and argument, rather than mere assertion, are required to prove the point.

Complexity is better than simplicity

Secondly, and along similar lines to the question-begging problem, it is self-evidently the case that we can have such a thing as an explanation which is too simple, but not necessarily an explanation which is too complex. Imagine, for example, a detective trying to find an explanation for the death of a man who died from blunt trauma in a factory. It’s obvious to us that an explanation which includes a murderer is more complex than an explanation which doesn’t. According to Occam’s Razor, the detective should favor any explanation which does not needlessly multiply entities. If the death can be explained by an unfortunate mechanical accident, then there isn’t any reason to postulate a murderer. A murderer becomes a needless entity, and so the detective assumes that it was indeed an accident. That’s fair.

However, two obvious things need to be noted: firstly, an explanation which fails to include a necessary entity is too simple, and therefore is necessarily false. Imagine the dead man was 90 years old and had a heart condition. Ordinarily, natural causes would be the simplest and most likely cause of death. But there is evidence of blunt trauma; so if the detective posits a natural heart attack as the explanation for the man’s death, his explanation is obviously too simple—and thus must be wrong. A blunt object is a necessary entity in the explanation.

Secondly, and on the other hand, a murderer could have killed the man in such a way as to make the death appear accidental. So the fact that the explanation without a murderer is more simple does not guarantee its truth; and the fact that the explanation with a murderer is more complex does not guarantee its falsehood. In fact, we can imagine a fantastic and highly unlikely explanation for the man’s death, involving any number of entities that the detective would never think of, which was nonetheless true.

So an over-simple theory must be wrong, but an “over”-complex theory might be right. There are plenty of good arguments to show that a non-theistic explanation of reality is over-simple in such a way that it must be false. I hope to discuss more of these in the Philosophy section of Thinking Matters Talk as time goes on.

Occam’s Razor has no grounds in a non-theistic worldview

The last and most convincingly troublesome problem for the atheist is that Occam’s Razor itself, on which his objection is based, really has no grounds whatsoever in a non-theistic worldview. The atheist wants to say that we should not multiply entities needlessly. A Christian may well agree with him, because he knows from revelation (both special and general) that God typically does not act in a needlessly complicated way. He has designed the universe to act consistently, and in a way which is fairly straightforward, even in its complexity. He has also designed our senses and intellects in such a way that we can apprehend the way the world works, and discover things about it. Most importantly, he has built into us certain expectations about the world, such that our intuitions generally match up to reality. Thus we have grounds for affirming Occam’s Razor.

But an atheist has no such grounds. In a non-rational universe, whether mechanistic or probabilistic, what possible reason could he have for asserting that simpler explanations are better? Why should they be? As a rule of thumb, at least fifty percent of the time we should expect the more complex explanations to true. There isn’t any physical law of parsimony such that the universe must operate in such a way that simpler explanations are better, is there? So on what basis does the atheist assert Occam’s Razor at all?

He could say that, historically, the simpler explanations have been true. And maybe this is so. But then why does he think that this will continue to be the case? After all, we know very little of the universe, and we haven’t been around very long in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps our history is an aberration, and in fact it is a general rule that the likelihood of an explanation being true tends to rise with its complexity. How can he know this isn’t the case?

In truth, he affirms Occam’s Razor because his God-given intuitions suggest very strongly to him that it’s true. Unfortunately, because his intuitions are indeed God-given, he is most certainly misapplying them in using them as a basis for objecting to God’s existence.

I recently wrote on the question ‘Is intelligent design scientific?’ responding to some comments by Dale Campbell, attached to kiwi atheist Ken Perrott’s article ‘A new science bashing campaign?’ This generated a lot of feedback, and Ken has now posted a follow-up article titled, ‘Redefining science by inference’. I’d encourage you to read this before reading my response below. I’ll structure this response according to the headings Ken has used.

The arrogance of science-bashers

Firstly, I think it needs to be pointed out how Ken is framing this issue. He’s couching the question in terms of “science-bashing”, so that anyone who promotes ID is not only mistaken, but actually an anti-science zealot with an agenda to proselytize. Now, to a certain extent his defensive attitude is understandable. In my own opinion, many ID advocates have made a poor name for themselves in the public square precisely because of this sort of tactic. I tend to agree with Ken’s criticism that this is hypocritical, and with his concern that ID tends to be about tearing down evolution rather than building up any useful positive arguments of its own.

However, the push-back from the scientific community is no less prejudicial and no less ideologically-motivated. Since Ken is responding specifically to my own comments, I find his couching the matter in terms of “science-bashing” to be disappointing. I am not anti-science. True, my philosophical views about science hold it in a lower regard than most scientists would like. I hold the propositional revelation of God above the procedural revelation of his creation, and as the lens through which to interpret it. Science is not a means toward discovering ultimate truths. It is a tool for interacting with and manipulating the world. But by merit of this fact, I obviously do not deny its usefulness (on the contrary, I affirm it), and I am not shrilly paranoid about its ability to advance our understanding of the world in many ways. I am realistic about its shortcomings and limitations (such as its philosophical commitment to naturalism), and about how these will color and affect its conclusions and theories. But I am not anti-science.

It also needs to be said that Ken’s analogy is really poor. He likens ID advocates to people who criticize the methodology or philosophy of their plumbers and motor mechanics. But plumbers and motor mechanics fix relatively simple systems which have been designed. This is markedly different from scientists, who try to develop systematic explanations for highly complex systems which supposedly have not been designed. (Dentists, the third example, can at least be said to fix relatively simple systems, even if the origin of these is a matter of dispute.) The analogy might seem superficially persuasive, but in Ken’s own words there is an “abrupt discontinuity” between it and the reality it’s supposed to represent. It’s just not an equitable comparison.

Playing with words

Getting into the meat of the objections Ken raises, the accusation that proponents of ID “play with words” or try to “redefine science” is pretty common. In my view, the accusation says more about the ignorance or misunderstandings which scientists have of the philosophy behind their own discipline than about the intentions of those arguing for intelligent design. If ID proponents are arrogant, scientists have a certain superciliousness of their own as regards the relationship between science and philosophy. This is pretty well indicated in Ken’s post, when he talks about “the honest scientific process” as compared to the “word play” of ID supporters; one which has clear facts behind it, and one which clouds and confuses those facts.

The truth of the matter is that the process of science is not detached from the philosophy of science; yet the scientists themselves are detached from not only the philosophy of their field, but also its history. Perhaps this is understandable, but it’s still unfortunate, because it leads to a great deal of prejudice against any questions which can’t be tested in the lab (so to speak). ID is pretty much exclusively a philosophical issue—but it’s a philosophical issue regardless of which side you stand on. Scientists seem blind to this fact, however, because they hold to the side which asserts a naturalistic explanation. Since naturalistic explanations are scientific, they fail to notice that this one is still philosophically grounded. When you try to point this out, they treat it as “word play”.

Here’s what I mean. Consider the following inference which most scientists make:

1. The commonly-recognized appearance of design in the universe is best explained by naturalistic, non-intelligent phenomena.

Making inference respectable

According to people like Ken, this is a perfectly acceptable scientific inference. Most scientists would probably take it for granted; they’d assume it implicitly—but an unstated inference is still an inference. Why is it so intrinsically acceptable that most scientists would take it for granted? Because science is concerned with natural causes, effects, and explanations. A natural explanation is a scientific explanation; and so the thesis that the appearance of design can be naturally explained seems, to the philosophically untrained, like a valid scientific conclusion. But then, consider its antithesis:

2. The commonly-recognized appearance of design in the universe is best explained by the universe being designed by an intelligent agent.

Notice how this is exactly the same question—only with a different answer. Indeed, prima facie this is the better abductive inference, as opposed to (1). This doesn’t mean that it’s correct, necessarily, but it does seem intuitively better.

Is the question scientific at all?

Now, perhaps the question “What is the best explanation for the appearance of design in the universe?” is itself unscientific. Perhaps it’s something which scientists cannot answer, and so one for which any answer will be unscientific. I don’t think most scientists would agree with this, but if they did, then why are so many of them insisting on a naturalistic answer? Is it perhaps because they assume that naturalistic explanations should be accepted by default? Why? The fact that science, as a method of investigating reality, is naturalistic does not in any way imply that every explanation must be naturalistic. Scientists are conditioned to look for natural explanations—and that’s fair enough, because that is what science is all about. But that doesn’t mean that:

• when we’re presented with the appearance of design, we should automatically exclude non-naturalistic explanations;
• a naturalistic explanation is “scientific” by definition, while a non-naturalistic one isn’t. If the question itself is unscientific, then any answer to it will be unscientific as well;
• if a non-naturalistic explanation is not scientific, it is therefore false. Being unable to investigate something scientifically does not imply its falsehood.

However, if the question is scientific, then—

Poverty of inference

If answer (1) is scientific, then answer (2) is as well

Notice how (1) and (2) above are addressing the exact same question. Yet (1) is dismissed as unscientific and even anti-scientific; while (2) is not. Why? Is it harder to falsify the thesis that the universe was designed than its antithesis, that it was not? I don’t see that it is. How might a scientist go about testing the assumption that the universe wasn’t designed? Probably in a similar way that he’d go about testing the assumption that it was. Yet the very complaint which scientists level at ID advocates is that we have not provided any falsifiable predictions to test. Okay, maybe that’s so—but why is the onus purely on us to falsify ID? Why is it not equally on secular scientists to falsify the antithesis? Isn’t that how honest scientists work? Once a question is raised, like, “Is the universe designed?” honest scientists don’t try to enforce a particular answer. They try to find one.

Conversely, if answer (2) is unscientific, then so is (1)

Most importantly, if intelligent design, as an explanation, is disqualified as unscientific, then its antithesis is disqualified as well, because they would both be falsified in the same way. The same test which could falsify intelligent design could (one would expect) falsify its denial. If we can make some prediction about some phenomenon which would occur if the universe is designed, and if we then test for that phenomenon, finding it would suggest that ID is right, while not finding it would suggest that ID is wrong. Similarly, if we can make some prediction about what we’d find if the universe is not designed, finding it would tend to prove ID wrong, while not finding it would tend to prove ID right.

In conclusion

Scientists don’t have to regard the question of intelligent design as important. They may not care one way or the other. Or they might be agnostic about it because they think it can’t be falsified one way or the other. That would be appropriately scientific. But if secular scientists want to say that the question of whether the universe was designed or not is nonsense; if they want to say that intelligent design, as a thesis for explaining the appearance of design, is unscientific; if they want to say that we should reject non-naturalistic explanations by default, then I must ask them to explain themselves:

Do they think that the thesis that the universe was not designed is falsifiable? If so, how so? But if not, then why are they championing it as scientific, over and against the thesis of intelligent design?

Is it on the basis of philosophical naturalism—the view that the natural world is all that exists? If so, can philosophical naturalism be falsified? No? But then it is unscientific—so why do they use it as a basis for decrying ID so loudly? Are they hypocrites?

Or is it on the basis of some other evidence? If so, what is it, and why should we find it compelling?

In the comment stream of a recent post by Ken Perrott, ‘A new science-bashing campaign?’, some discussion has been taking place about whether intelligent design (ID) can be considered scientific. Typically, secular scientists are vocal in their assertion that ID is a philosophical idea, and not a scientific one. It’s inappropriate to treat ID as if it were a scientific theory, or as if there is real evidence to support it, they say. And there is the vocal minority of ID supporters who push back and say the opposite.

In the comments on Ken’s article, the editor of Christian News New Zealand cited an article on Opposing Views by Jay W Richards, titled ‘Is Intelligent Design Science?’. I encourage you to read this article; it argues simply, yet I think persuasively, that it is not unreasonable to consider ID science—and that wherever you stand on the issue, you’d be naive to dismiss ID as unscientific by trying to define science in such a way as to preclude it.

In response to this article, Christian blogger Dale Campbell, who is an evolutionist, said:

What Jay Richards and others need to realise is that ‘ID’ is a philosophical inference which attempts to be scientifically informed. It starts with an inference, and then tries to find/match it with science – or (re)interpret science to try and match it up with the inference. The inference is not scientific, but philosophical.

Now, I don’t think Dale is opposing ID per se; rather, he is expressing his view that it’s a philosophical, rather than scientific position. As a Christian, I’m sure he does believe in ID; and as a Christian, certainly ID is a philosophical position. But does this preclude it from being scientific as well?

I don’t believe it does. Firstly, ID does not necessarily start with the inference of design, and then look for data in support of it. In fact, I think manifestly the fact that ID is not a specifically religious view demonstrates that it is quite possible and reasonable for it to be an a postiori rather than an a priori inference. Certainly for the Christian it must be treated as a priori: we come to the study of science with the presupposition that the universe was designed and created by God. But ID is not confined to Christianity, nor to religion at all. ID is simply the thesis that the universe, or some part thereof, was designed. A non-religious scientist could come to this conclusion quite reasonably by studying empirical data, and deciding that the facts at his disposal are best explained by a designer.

Is this an unscientific conclusion? Is it merely philosophical? This question raises another in turn: What is the difference between a “philosophical” as opposed to a “scientific” inference? For my own part, I’m not sure I see a clear distinction between them. Scientific inferences have two defining characteristics that I can see: (i) they start from empirical data; (ii) they are by nature abductive (and/or inductive; but abduction really is what defines them). Abduction, however, is itself a philosophical process; so I don’t see how we can deny that scientific inference itself is intrinsically philosophical. It is simply a kind of philosophical inference. All inference is philosophical in one way or another; and abduction is arguably more influenced by philosophical concerns than straightforward deduction.

But if scientific inference is characterized by these two principal factors, then how is ID not a scientific inference? Empiricism and abduction seem to describe the inference of ID just as well as any uncontroversial scientific inference which comes to mind.

Typically, I’d expect a scientist to say that I’ve omitted a third factor: scientific inferences need to be falsifiable. But there are two obvious objections to this: (a) falsifiability is a relatively modern notion in the history of science, and as such can’t be used to define science qua science. But more importantly, (b) it’s transparently evident that not all scientific inferences—indeed, perhaps not even most scientific inferences—are falsifiable. It’s not inferences which scientists generally require to be falsifiable, but theories. But even then, a theory is just the conclusion of a number of inferences (ie, it is itself an inference), many of which might not be themselves falsifiable; so the demand of falsifiability seems rather arbitrary.

Whether or not ID is true, and whether or not anyone can or has come up with falsifiable hypotheses about it, it does seem to me that Jay Richards is correct in his evaluation that it is not intrinsically unscientific. As he explains, we can’t validly keyhole science to fit certain preconceived philosophical notions about the world. In fact, the attempt to define ID out of science is openly prejudiced and hypocritical, being the attempt to exclude philosophical views of the world from science, on the basis of a philosophical view of the world. The definition of science really is not as fixed, narrow, or agreed upon as anti-ID scientists and philosophers would like to say it is.

It is time to affirm the truth of God’s word. Your opponent’s intellectual stronghold has crumbled to dust. His foundational assumptions have been exposed as subjective opinions; his reasoning as irrational; his arguments as speculation; his worldview as fantasy. He has been disarmed, and evicted from his castle of sand; he has nothing with which to attack the truth, nor anything with which to replace it.

How you proceed from here is largely a matter of discernment. But, although at this stage you have recourse to affirm most any biblical truth, and direct the debate wherever you please (particularly toward anthropology and soteriology, so as to affirm the biblical command to repent and believe), the obvious question that your opponent will raise is: what is the biblical view on science?

Particularly, a non-Christian confronted with a refutation of science’s claims to knowledge will commonly jump to the faulty conclusion that Christians think there is no physical world and that all science is useless. This, as usual, is because his thinking ability is so impaired, so steeped in illegitimate reasoning, that he has simply done what is most familiar to him and made an invalid leap of inference without realizing it. What actual reasoning process could lead from the premise that secular, empirical science cannot yield any knowledge, to the conclusion that Christians do not believe in a physical world? What reasoning process can lead from the premise that induction cannot yield any certainty, to the conclusion that Christians don’t believe it is ever useful?

Only by trying to impose upon the Christian that same broken worldview to which he still clings is your opponent able to come to such fanciful conclusions. He desires to show that, whatever your reasoning, you do not act as if science is generally unreliable. By doing so, he hopes to perhaps salvage the situation by exposing that you yourself don’t even believe what you’re saying.

Of course, even if you don’t believe what you’re saying, or even if you believe it but act inconsistently with it, this has absolutely no bearing on its truth. It is simply a non-sequitur to think that the actions of anyone in regard to some logical propositions are able to alter the truth of those propositions. I may act as if truth and fiction are entirely interchangeable depending on point of view, as most non-Christians intermittently do, but that doesn’t make it so. So again, your man is muddied in his thinking, and his inference is embarrassingly incompetent.

But the Christian is not inconsistent in using sense experience, or in inductively reasoning about it. Unlike the secular scientist, the Christian is completely warranted in believing that the future will be like the past; that one event which scientists call “cause” and another event which they call “effect” will always be correlated (though we know better than to think that they are truly causal); that these events occur in a physical universe which actually exists; and that we are able to achieve some knowledge of this physical universe. This is because the Christian view of science is founded in biblical metaphysics, which affirms all these things.

That is, by adopting an understanding of the nature of reality as it is revealed in the Bible, Christians know that the future will resemble the past because both are providentially organized by God, who is not of confusion and disorder (1 Corinthians 14:33), but is consistent and orderly (as evidenced by Scripture itself, which is his consistent and orderly word). Similarly, we know that actions do not truly cause other reactions, but that God, who causes them both, ensures that when one happens the other will always follow. As Elihu says in Job 37:10-13:

By the breath of God ice is given,
and the broad waters are frozen fast.
He loads the thick cloud with moisture;
the clouds scatter his lightning.
They turn around and around by his guidance,
to accomplish all that he commands them
on the face of the habitable world.
Whether for correction or for his land
or for love, he causes it to happen.

Thus, Christians know that there could be no uniformity in nature, no effects proceeding from causes, and indeed no actions to cause reactions, without God bringing them about and tying them together by his continual providence. As John Calvin once so aptly summarized, “not even would abundance of bread be of the least avail were it not divinely converted into nourishment”.1

In short, the Christian metaphysic affirms a world which is entirely contingent upon God’s absolute sovereignty. Everything about our understanding of reality is predicated upon God himself, through his word—not upon the physical universe, through our observation of it. In a real sense it would make no difference to us whether there was a physical universe at all, because that universe is not absolute or necessary in any particular way, but holds together entirely in God himself. The physical and the mental are only correlated by merit of God’s action—the latter certainly does not rely upon the former! The only necessary aspect of the Christian worldview is God and his word—how he reveals it, and what necessarily follows from there, is merely incidental.

Nonetheless, we know that the physical world exists because it is explicitly affirmed by Scripture. Genesis 1:1 tells us that, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. It proceeds with a systematic account of this process in chapters 1 and 2, describing also how man was created to interact with this physical world, so as to be its steward and have dominion over it. Hebrews 11:3 ratifies that the world exists and can be known in a functional sense through our experience, saying that, “by faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” In saying this, it simultaneously affirms that, in coming to knowledge of reality, observation is subservient to faith—that is, to knowledge of Christ.

The whole of Scripture testifies to the ability of man to functionally know, through his senses, about the world in which he lives; and to communicate with other men (see, for example, 1 John 1:1-4). And since we know that all the particular occurrences of empirical knowledge-acquisition revealed in the Bible are part of God’s larger creation, and since we know that this creation is consistent and uniform, we need not infer invalidly via induction that empirical knowledge-acquisition can be considered generally reliable, because we can instead infer this validly—via deduction.

However, notice I said just before that scientific observation gives us knowledge in a functional sense. It would be insane to affirm that what we perceive perfectly correlates with what is—for really, when we describe something, we are not stating the objective nature of that thing (in fact we are quite detached from it); nor even are we stating some of its objective properties. Rather, we are describing the result of operations we have performed to interact with it. For example, length is just the conclusion of some operation of measurement which we find useful. In the most precise sense, it does not describe literal physical reality (though we often imprecisely think of it as doing so), but rather one way in which we interact with that reality.

So, when I say that we have knowledge of the world in a functional sense, what I mean is that, through our senses, we come to hold certain mental propositions which inform us about how to interact with the world in a way we find useful. We do not come to hold any propositions regarding the actual nature of the world. We gain a small amount of this knowledge through Scripture—particularly the knowledge of God who is the only and ultimate reality, and without which we could not affirm even the usefulness of our senses at all. But Scripture only shows that we are able to come to functional or operational knowledge of creation, which really is to say that we come to knowledge of how to interact with it. We should not suppose that our senses give us more power than this, as if by them we can come to knowledge of the objective nature of creation itself.

This may seem a little confusing or convoluted. Let me repeat for the sake of clarity. Again: our senses allow us to interact with the world, and we gain knowledge through them of how to do this. Through observation, we can say that a ruler is a foot long. But length itself is only a meaningful concept inasmuch as it is defined by certain operations we have performed. We find it useful to know that cars are so many feet or metres long—but what this really means is that we have performed a certain operation on them, like holding a measuring tape alongside, by which we have formulated (not found, if you recall) a certain property which is helpful in our attempts to manipulate the world. But when we want to find the length of the spot on Jupiter, a measuring tape is not of much avail, and so we perform a different operation. Thus, the length of Jupiter’s spot is really the conclusion of a different set of operations than the length of a 1968 Shelby GT500E—so, logically speaking, although we suspect that “length” means the same thing for both and is a description of the same objective property, the operations performed are different, and so the meaning of “length” (being defined by those operations) is different also.

A good and well-known example of this idea of operationalism is found in scientific descriptions of light. Once upon a time it was imagined that light must either consist of particles, or of waves. Newton proposed that light was corpuscular and would accelerate in a denser medium because of the effect of gravity. Other scientists believed that light was a wave and would thus decelerate in a denser medium. At the time, verifying this was beyond the capabilities of experimental equipment, and other experiments on light could be explained either way. So there was much debate over this until the 1800s. At that time, it was shown that light propagates more slowly in a denser medium, and so Newton’s particle theory was disproved and everybody accepted that light was a wave.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, though, certain other experiments had revealed that it simply could not be a wave. For example, measurements of light emitted from thermal radiators only made sense if it were actually a particle. The particle theory was revived because of these anomalies, but of course this caused strife given the other experiments which showed clearly that light was a wave. Eventually, physicists decided that light was a “wavicle” and started to talk about “particle-wave duality”. In other words, for scientists light is both a particle and a wave, depending on how they are interacting with it.

Obviously light cannot be both a particle and a wave in a real sense, since a particle is not a wave, and a wave is not a particle, and P cannot be not-P at the same time and in the same sense. So, in fact, light is neither a particle nor a wave. Both theories are wrong, and Einstein said as much. But it is useful to us to think of light as a particle sometimes, and as a wave at other times. Physics, correctly applied, does not concern itself with truth in the ultimate sense, but rather with usefully manipulating reality. It is only when physicists get above themselves and start to think that science is about discovering truth, rather than about fulfilling God’s command to have dominion over the world, that problems arise and quibbling starts over the obvious contradictions between theories. It is only when a model is considered to be the truth, rather than to be a wrong but useful description of the truth, that we start to have trouble.

So, we never come to knowledge of actual reality, but rather we discover specific ways of interacting with and describing it, as we find useful—and we then generalize from these descriptions. It seems strange that a false description can nonetheless be useful, but science is replete with examples of this, from Ptolemaic astronomy versus Copernican to particle-wave duality. Science is, in fact, always false. And this is exactly what we should expect. Our senses are not intended to be means of acquiring objective knowledge (that is what revelation is for), but rather tools by which we can interact with and manipulate the world.

Of course, they are pretty reliable for this purpose. But Scripture also warns us that they are not always reliable—particularly because our interpretation of them is often faulty. This ought to be obvious from the example of optical illusions of various sorts: our senses may deceive us; or, really, we may expect them to be more reliable than they actually are, and thus deceive ourselves. When we see a mirage, although we see it accurately, it is not really there. But because we suppose that accuracy of perception is all we need in order to know functionally about reality, we might interpret the mirage as something real. And, when we see the same shade of grey in disparate parts of a drawing with tricky lighting, we interpret one instance as being lighter than the other. Although they are the same color, our suppositions about the nature of reality lead us to believe that they are two different colors.

In fact, the unbeliever’s interpretation of his sense experience is so highly fallible that, although “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1), he denies God’s existence altogether. This despite the fact that what can be known about God is plain to any person, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse (Romans 1:19-20).

It should not surprise us, then, when in John 12:28-30 we find the event of a voice from heaven interpreted differently by various people present. Some “said that it had thundered. Others said, ‘An angel has spoken to him.’” This merely reiterates and confirms the biblical view of sense experience.

This is why Scripture says that we walk by faith, and not by sight. For if we were to give sense experience primacy over revelation, we could have no confidence, and no knowledge. But we have the mind of Christ, and by our reliance on his word we have a foundation for justifying our knowledge of the world, and for rightly interpreting our experiences.

We therefore—despite what your opponent may misconstrue—do not affirm that empirical investigation, in and of itself, is hopeless. Rather, we affirm that it is a tool which God has provided us so that we may fulfill his command to be fruitful and multiply, and to subdue the earth and have dominion over it (Genesis 1:28). But it is a tool with a place and with limitations, and that place is in subservience to revelation, by which its limitations are defined, recognized, and acknowledged. Revelation is the foundation for knowledge; without it, science is useless.

This doesn’t mean that secular science will never yield useful results (by certain standards of usefulness). The discussion above should make this quite clear, since science is really all about having dominion over the world. The fact that unbelievers foolishly take dominion too far by thinking it is a means of discovering objective knowledge has no bearing on this. It is entirely possible and likely that, because of the general reliability of our senses, scientists will be able to learn to manipulate the physical world even despite their God-denying, knowledge-destroying worldviews. They won’t, of course, be able to explain why any of what they learn works, nor justify calling it knowledge—but they will not fail completely to interact successfully with the world. The important thing to note is that their success comes in spite of their philosophical failures, and because of God’s sovereign action, rather than vice versa. While they believe that science is reliable, the truth is that it is not: it is the God-directed universe itself, and the tools they are given to interact with it, which are reliable. Science, being their own understanding of things, is fatally and terminally flawed.

So we have no reason to expect reliability or accuracy from secular science. Scientists may muddle their way through learning about reality to the point that they’re able to describe with reasonable accuracy how it works in certain situations. They may, despite their intellectual incompetence, eventually produce things like computers and cars, which work relatively well and are useful to us in everyday life. But their success in one area gives us no reason to suppose that they will be successful in another: and wherever their conclusions contradict the truth of Scripture, we can be certain that they are wrong. Thus, we need not even bother to learn about the foolishness of evolutionary theory, let alone feel anxious or uneasy when confronted with it, let alone feel obliged to refute it. We should simply continue to use science correctly by comparing it always with Scripture, so as to develop our own understanding of the place of biology, geology, cosmology, and so on.

Indeed, this is my advice to Christian scientists—there is no need to waste time fighting secular scientists on their own ground by trying to disprove evolution. Evolution will fall apart all by itself sooner or later. Let us rather devote our resources to furthering Christian science, and leave the unbelievers in their foolishness. Science is not the place to engage them in apologetics anyway: philosophy is. Once we allow unbelievers to engage us using their own faulty presuppositions, we have already abandoned biblical apologetics and evangelism. We will still prevail, because their scientific theories are still wrong, but our victory is hollow. We do not demonstrate the necessary truth of Scripture by taking this approach; we merely demonstrate the falsehood of their existing ideas, leaving the door open for them to retreat into yet another invented fantasy-world. Therefore, let Christian scientists perform Christian science, and let Christian apologists perform Christian apologetics.

This, then, is the biblical view of science. It is a view founded upon what revelation tells us about reality: about its cause, in both the initial and continual sense. The universe was created by God (Genesis 1:1), and is upheld by him (Hebrews 1:3). Everything which occurs within it occurs by his agency (Colossians 1:17). By his providence and provision we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) and are given the ability to subdue the earth and have dominion over it (Genesis 1:28). It is through this lens that we interpret and apply our experiences and observations, and it is by this truth that we have justification for doing so.

1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.pdf); p 558.

Of course, having established that empiricism is incapable of producing the knowledge which science claims to have, there is technically no need to continue the critique any further. But most pro-science non-Christians (and even some pro-science Christians) will be unpersuaded by the failures of empiricism, and will continue to pretend as if logical positivism is alive and well. They will, in spite of everything, continue to assert that their position is the rational one, and that Christianity (and particularly Christian science) is irrational and false.

They will tend to do this on the basis of the fact that “science works”. It will not matter to them that they don’t actually know that science works, because they trust their perceptions anyway without feeling a need to justify this trust. And, since you as a Christian trust your perceptions to a large degree, because you have metaphysical warrant to do so, your opponent can appeal to your own knowledge of reality to demonstrate that science produces reliable and consistent results. This, he will argue, proves its worth as a system for acquiring knowledge about reality; and, therefore, you ought to at least re-evaluate your interpretation of Scripture so as to conform to modern scientific ideas.

Again, there are a great many problems with such a statement. To start with, science does not produce reliable and consistent results a great deal of the time—it’s just that the successes, which yield pragmatically useful results, are well-known, while the failures are not. Indeed, scientists themselves claim that one of the great “advantages” of science is its flexibility: that it can adapt to new data, leaving old theories behind as new experiments disprove them. It is a prerequisite for a theory to be considered scientific that there must be some way to test it, so that if it is wrong, it can be disproved. And, in the history of science, just about every theory has been disproved sooner or later. In other words, the entire history of science is actually a very long list of wrong ideas about reality; a veritable sequence of failures and errors and mistakes leading to more failures and errors and mistakes; and even scientists will admit that modern scientific theories are equally assumed to be wrong. It is therefore no stretch to say that science, at best, is about being wrong. Any scientist worth his salt will acknowledge that no scientific theory is true, inasmuch as no theory is a decently accurate reflection of reality: it is merely the best model that scientists have been able to develop with the limited data they have.

Scripture, on the other hand, has needed no updating, no correction, no amendments, ever, because it is God’s objective revelation about the reality which he created. All it needed was to be revealed. Why would anyone, then, place science over Scripture?

But we’ve already seen that this cannot be done in the previous part of this series (and, more pertinently, in chapter 2 of The Wisdom Of God): Scripture is the basis for knowledge, and it attests that its primary interpretative schema is itself; not science, or anything else for that matter. So to interpret the Hebrew word yom in Genesis, for example, as meaning anything other than a literal day is already to abandon Scripture (as very adequately proved by Jonathan Sarfati in his book Refuting Compromise (ISBN-10 0890514119)), and thereby to abandon knowledge—including any supposed scientific knowledge—altogether.

Moreover, modern scientific ideas are themselves the product of anti-biblical presuppositions. For example, Genesis is at odds with the modern scientific theory of evolution, but that theory itself would never have been developed if scientists had presupposed the truth of Scripture instead of the non-existence of God. Your opponent may argue from the evidence for evolution—but the term “evidence” itself implies a presupposed interpretative schema. A fossil is not evidence of anything without a framework within which to interpret it. It is simply data. Any time your opponent speaks of evidence, you ought to immediately demand that he give account for it. Since data is impotent to interpret itself, he must be able to justify the entire set of presuppositions within which he presumes to call any piece of data “evidence”. A Christian scientist will interpret the data of a fossil completely differently than a secular scientist, and so each will reach totally different conclusions about its significance. And it does no good to pretend that the Christian scientist is not objective or unbiased, and that he is working backwards from a presupposed answer to the evidence, while the secular scientist is objective and unbiased, working from the evidence to the answer—because I’ve already exposed the stupidity and falsehood of such an idea.

Therefore, when your opponent starts to talk about the evidence for evolution, you should immediately correct him. What he actually means is the data which he has interpreted according to demonstrably faulty presuppositions, and which he has then concluded supports his presupposed theory. The scientific claim of objectivity and neutrality is so easily exposed as a sham that it is difficult to think that any scientist truly believes it; yet, the inability of unbelievers (particularly university-educated unbelievers) to think clearly and rationally should not be underestimated. We should not ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Lastly, however, the actual reasoning behind the idea that Scripture should be reinterpreted in the light of scientific inquiry is formally fallacious: that is, it does not follow a process which leads to a necessarily true conclusion. It assumes firstly that the practical success of science in various fields of technology proves its truth; but even granting this (which is a stretch beyond reality!), the unstated inference is that because it works in these particular instances then it must therefore work in all instances—which is invalid. The conclusion might be true—but it equally might not be, and we have no way to be sure. But this invalid reasoning is the way in which all scientific inquiry is conducted: the scientific method itself is based on generalizing from the particular to the universal.

At the beginning of this series, I established that the scientific method involves “the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.” That is, a scientist will take a problem, such as “why do ships appear to sink into the sea as they get further away?” and he will collect as much data about the problem as possible so as to test various hypotheses he might have. For instance, he might imagine two different possible explanations: firstly, that the earth is spherical, and that the ships are moving beyond the visible horizon for the observer; secondly, that it is an optical illusion caused by the fact that light is made up of particles, and that particles travel in a trajectory when influenced by gravity, and thus “sink”.

He may then devise an experiment to determine if either hypothesis is correct. For example, he may note after careful observation that the stars rotate about an axis in the night sky. He may also note that one particular star might be just visible on the horizon at one location, but be invisible at locations further north. From this, he may reason that, if the stars are actually stationary, then the earth is a sphere which rotates about an axis. And, from this, he may further reason that, like the stars, the sun is stationary, and that the earth rotates from west to east, explaining the phenomena of sunrise and sunset.

There are a number of things to notice about this example. Firstly, although the scientist came to the correct conclusion about the shape of the earth, his reasoning was based on a premise which is not actually true: the stars are not, in fact, stationary: they move, but very little relative to the solar system. However, now that he has assumed that the stars are stationary, and he believes this assumption has yielded useful results, he may draw false conclusions about other things because of his mistake.

Secondly, even if we imagine that his premises are all sound, his conclusion does not necessarily follow from them. That is to say, it’s possible to imagine a different explanation for all the phenomena he observed; an explanation which contradicts his existing solution, and which cannot be disproved by his experiments. He is therefore unjustified in believing that the earth is spherical, even if it is.

Thirdly, he has not actually disproved his other hypothesis. In fact, according to one model of physics, light is carried by particles, and these particles do sink into gravity wells. But, because of their velocity and lack of mass, this effect is negligible on earth, and is unrelated to the phenomenon of ships disappearing over the horizon. However, again, having set these two hypotheses against each other, concluding that one is correct, the scientist’s tendency will be to discard the other hypothesis as wrong. This, again, could cause him to draw false conclusions about other phenomena in the future.

Now, a scientifically-minded person might object to this fabricated example on the basis that it is invented to demonstrate a point, rather than to reflect reality. But I don’t need to cite an actual experiment to adequately demonstrate the scientific method. The objection is merely based on the fact that I have simplified the method enough to demonstrate its basic nature, and thus its absurdity:

1. If P is true, then Q will be true.
2. Q is true.
3. Therefore, P is true.

This is a logical fallacy known as affirming the consequent. To take a well-known example, I might say that if it is raining, the road will be wet. Since the road is wet, I then infer that it is raining. But perhaps a fire hydrant burst, or perhaps a river flooded. Or, I may say that, if knowledge is gained by sense experience, then I will have knowledge. Since I believe I have knowledge, I therefore infer that it came through sense experience. But perhaps I do not have knowledge despite appearances, or perhaps I came by it another way without realizing.

One of the ways in which scientists attempt to mitigate the obvious fallaciousness of this method is by falsifiability. That is, they devise many different experiments to test the reliability of an hypothesis from as many angles as possible, so as to try to exclude as many potential alternatives as they can. Similarly, they run the same experiment many times, so as to ensure that the results are consistent. Where the results are similar, they average the differences between them so as to increase the likelihood of accuracy, discarding those results which seem too dissimilar.

But this method is utterly futile: it attempts to minimize the probability of error by increasing the number of instances of confirmation. But probability is measured by dividing the number of actual situations of something by the number of possible situations. Since the number of possible situations would require universal knowledge to discover, the idea of increasing probability in this manner is plainly stupid. The probability is unknowable, and always will be. That is, if the numerator is unknown, the probability of accuracy (and thus of error) is unknown, since the equation cannot be completed.

In other words, the accuracy of any scientific experiment is completely unknowable, and thus will never increase even if scientists were to run experiments until the proverbial cows returned. And if we don’t know, we don’t know, and so the theory is no better than speculation. Therefore, performing repeated experiments is self-evidently pointless, since scientists can have no idea whether this is helpful or not. Yet, they still act as if they can know. Even though they should be well aware that this is just an irrational pandering to their intuitive sense of what makes something likely, they do it anyway. It has nothing at all to do with actual probability, or with reality, or with rationality.

There is more to this foolishness, however. For example, if an experiment yields a certain result, but then whenever it is conducted in the future it yields a different result, the initial result is discarded as an error. Indeed, any outlying results (ones which seem too different to the others) are ignored, and only “consistent” results are collected and averaged. This is supposed to increase certainty and accuracy, as discussed above. But consider:

How does the scientist determine when a result is aberrant and when it is not? Since any repetition of the same experiment will yield different results each time, if only because our own observation is limited to a certain margin of error, the scientist can never obtain a perfect result. That is, all his results are in error to some degree. How he determines the degree of error which is acceptable is really quite arbitrary. He may think that it’s reasonable to discard results which show a discrepancy larger than the margin of error he has calculated for his equipment, but then he is still accepting that there is error present, so any theory he derives from his results does not reflect reality as it actually is.

In fact, his theory is a result of a mathematical set of averages. For example, if he is determining the speed of sound at sea level, he may measure four times (I will say four for the sake of simplicity, but really it would be more than this), and get the results 340.33, 340.28, 340.28 again, and 340.27. However, he will not take any of these measurements to be the speed of sound—instead, he will average them by determining their mean, and get 340.29 meters per second. Notice that this result never appeared in his observations at all, and yet he claims that it is the speed of sound instead of one of the results he did obtain! Furthermore, if he is going to average his results, why not choose the mode, 340.28, instead of the mean—at least that way he would be using an actual experimentally observed number! So we can see, using a very simple example, that scientific “facts” are not actually data imposed upon the scientist by reality, but rather mathematical models imposed upon reality by the scientist. His decision to average his results was not arrived at empirically. It was not dictated or even suggested by the empirical measurements he took. On the contrary, rather than being a finding at all, it is a formulation, ultimately determined by aesthetic philosophical notions, rather than empirical observation.

Another good example which may help to clarify this issue is the equation used to describe the motion of a pendulum, which says that the period of its swing is proportional to the square root of its length. This particular equation irritated me greatly in high school because, quite simply, what it predicted was never more than vaguely approximate to any experiment I performed, no matter how careful or accurate I was. But this should hardly have surprised me, since the equation assumes that the pendulum’s weight is a point (ie, infinitely small); that its string is tensionless; and that there is no friction on its axis. Such a pendulum never existed, and never could exist! Therefore, this law is not empirical, for it does not describe actual things—rather, it describes some imaginary “perfect” pendulum which the scientist has invented. Physical pendulums, as Gordon Clark put it in Science and Truth, do not obey the laws of physics.

But when the scientist performs his experiments so as to get results which he will average into a non-empirical, mathematical model which he calls a “law”, which the universe nonetheless doesn’t actually follow, he faces an even bigger problem. Consider that, on top of averaging the results, he also chooses which ones he will average at all. How does he decide? Well, he assumes that consistent results are to be expected! After all, it’s not reasonable for him to ignore results which are outside his arbitrary margin of error if he doesn’t presuppose that his results will be consistent in the first place.

But what justification does he have to assume that it is the aberrant results which are in error? What if all the other experiments were in error instead? Certainly it seems unlikely; his assumption seems reasonable; but I have just shown that intuition is totally useless for determining things like what is probable and rational, given an empirical worldview. Indeed, how would probability even be determined in this instance without making a whole host of other unjustified, non-empirical assumptions? For example, why does he assume that only one of the results can be correct? Why does he not instead assume that, at that one particular point in time, the experiment yielded a different result, making the whole question of probability moot?

This gets down to perhaps the most fundamental principle in science: that of the uniformity of nature. Scientists assume that the future will resemble the past, and that an experiment conducted in one location will yield the same result when conducted in another. Again, to prove the irrationality of the scientific method, one need only ask: why? Indeed, although I have taken the long route in getting to the topic of uniformity, it is the prime example to pick when refuting any scientific argument, because it avoids getting side-tracked with specific theories and instead cuts directly to the heart of all scientific inquiry. It must be true if any scientific theory is to be even considered plausible, because it is implicitly assumed by the scientific method itself; and yet it commits the same logical fallacy as every other instance of scientific reasoning. There is simply no reason, no justification, for the assumption of the uniformity of nature (when we look at the vastness of the universe, and its supposed age, really it doesn’t even make any kind of necessary intuitive sense). It is also obviously a non-empirical assumption, and this is why I said before that the point at which science begins and philosophy ends is really not clear at all—certainly it is not where the scientist would smugly like to believe it is, and this just goes to show his ignorance and stupidity once again.

Recognizing the importance of uniformity, your opponent will try to justify it despite that it is both non-empirical and formally fallacious. He may say that we can expect the future to resemble the past because that is what we have always observed to date. Certainly it’s possible that the future could suddenly be different, he might concede: as far as he knows the laws of nature might radically alter at any instant, since there is no consistent and orderly God causing them from one moment to the next. But, he will continue, it’s very unlikely, because it’s never happened before.

But this is just the same fallacy all over again: probability isn’t measured in the way he would like to think it is. In fact, in total opposition to what he thinks, it is again unknowable as to whether the future will resemble the past! If the only way for him to justify his assumption is to argue for it on the strength of its historically always having been so, then he is sunk, because this reasoning is openly fallacious by merit of its circularity—after all, his inference is only justified if he’s already assuming that the future must be like the past. But to even posit this much, he must first assume that his memory of the past is accurate, which again is an assumption justified, in the lack of a valid metaphysic, only by his presupposition of the fact, and so constitutes (at best) question-begging. So not only can he not know that the future will be like the past; he cannot even know that the past has been like the past! His beliefs, then, are not only irrational, but obviously irrational; such that even the simplest person could expose his error.

I mention the obviousness of the error for two reasons. Firstly, because those who disbelieve the Bible on the strength of science tend to have an extremely high opinion both of their own intellectual abilities, and of the rational standing of scientific inquiry. Secondly, because they conversely tend to have a very low opinion of the intelligence of Christians, and of the credibility of the Bible. They pride themselves on being more intelligent and more rational than we are. Yet, despite their estimation, we have seen that what they believe is obviously stupid and irrational—and that they are so mentally incompetent that they didn’t even notice until we, irrational Christians, explained it to them. Ridicule may be a powerful ally as we seek to fulfill the biblical command to destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, by proving that unbelievers are fools, and their thinking futile.

Proving this is as important as proving any other scriptural truth, and it is entirely appropriate to use it as a means for forcing your opponent to consider the Christian worldview more seriously. By destroying his own way of thinking, showing him that it’s utterly useless and incompetent just as the Bible says, you open the door to set up biblical thinking in its place, proving its rationality and invincibility. In this series, I have so far shown how to approach the first half of this process: how, ultimately, scientific beliefs are derived from a form of reasoning which can be essentially represented as follows:

1. This object is spherical.
2. Billiard balls are spherical.
3. Therefore, this object is a billiard ball.

Once you have shown this, putting the supposed rationality of the unbeliever to shame, you’re in a position to move on to replace their useless opinions with the objective truth of Scripture. To conclude this series, then, we should briefly address the correct relationship between science and knowledge-acquisition, as defined by biblical metaphysics and epistemology.

Continued in part 4 »

Scientific knowledge-acquisition is empirical. That is, its method takes the form of observing physical events so as to draw conclusions about them. Now, it seems to us intuitively obvious that we have knowledge of physical events; and we certainly talk about them as if they actually occur as we suppose. Thus, it seems natural to consider science’s empirical method of knowledge-acquisition reliable and justified.

But if this is the case, then it should be easy to rationally, logically confirm this assumption. Yet how might we go about doing this? For what reason do we believe firstly that there is a physical world at all, and secondly that it in any way actually resembles what we perceive? That is, how do we bridge the gulf between the physical world, and our minds?

Let me expand on these points. I have said that secular science assumes an empirical epistemology (which must then presuppose an empirical metaphysic). To refresh your memory, a metaphysic is simply a theory of reality; a set of propositions which explain the nature of the universe. An epistemology, in turn, is a theory built upon the metaphysic, which explains the nature of knowledge; a set of propositions which explain how we know, and how we know that we know. So the orthodox scientific approach is to assume that knowledge can be obtained through empirical means: through sense experience.

Now, so many valid objections can be raised to this system of thought that entire volumes could be devoted to them—and indeed, many already have been, by better thinkers than myself. A comprehensive discussion of the philosophy of science for the lay Christian would be a worthy project, but for now I can only give an overview of a couple of its more obvious and easily understood problems.

Firstly, it ought to be evident after some rudimentary consideration that the proposition knowledge can be acquired through sense experience cannot actually be proved using sense experience without begging the question. This might not be an issue if room is allowed for knowledge to be acquired in other ways; but the problem is that secular science does not. The only method which it will entertain by which knowledge can be acquired is by empirical means: any other method is regarded as unscientific and therefore invalid. So, from the very outset, science invalidates itself by working from a self-refuting belief about how knowledge is acquired.

Obviously, not all scientists have the exact same beliefs about the nature of the universe. Many, for example, claim belief in God in one form or another, which by definition would entail a belief in the immaterial, and in the subordinate, contingent nature of the physical universe. But what is important is not the precise metaphysic to which any scientist may hold, but the epistemology upon which scientific endeavor itself is built. What I mean is, a scientist may hold to any theory of reality he pleases, but unless he assumes that, in scientific inquiry, knowledge can only be gained through empirical means, his work will be considered unscientific by his peers. Witness, as an obvious example, the complete ridicule which Christian science receives in the world of scientific orthodoxy, where it is denied any credibility at all because it is founded upon “unscientific” assumptions. Thus, science precludes and rejects non-empirical means of knowledge-acquisition (such as revelation), and therefore we can critique its epistemology as purely empirical.

Secondly, then, not only is the empirical theory of knowledge self-refuting, but any conclusion derived from it is entirely fallacious in the same way. Clearly, there is no empirical method by which we can prove that there is a physical world at all; or to verify that it is actually the way we perceive it to be. After all, there may be no physical reality: it might be entirely illusory, existing only within our immaterial minds (or, more pertinently, within the immaterial mind of the person considering the problem). The only thing that a non-Christian can really claim to know is that he exists; but even in this case he can only justify this knowledge to himself, and not to others—because just as he cannot know that an external world exists, he similarly cannot know that other people, being parts of that external world, exist either.

Unless he can validly infer from the premise, I perceive an external world, to the conclusion, there is an external world, he is stuck in a hopeless position in which any belief he has about reality is actually nothing more than speculation. He cannot deduce the existence of the external world from his perception; and if it does exist he nonetheless can still not deduce that his perception of it is accurate. However, worse than this—just as he can’t deduce the existence of an external reality, neither can he deduce its non-existence. So, whatever he believes, he is simply speculating. His subjective experience can never yield objective knowledge.

To put it simply, empiricism cannot be used to prove empiricism, because this would be to beg the question. One cannot assume that empiricism is true, so as to prove that empiricism is true, since it is not self-affirming. In order to justify a belief in a physical, empirical reality, a sound metaphysic and epistemology is required, upon which an understanding of reality can be based. But what metaphysic and epistemology does science claim? Orthodox science doesn’t even claim a metaphysic at all, since scientists may believe all sorts of things about reality. (In fact, in recent times many scientists have started to say that metaphysics is an invalid concept altogether, and that questions about the nature of reality cannot be answered because they don’t actually mean anything.) Yet science nonetheless relies upon an empirical epistemology by assuming that we can know things about the universe through observation. Since epistemology, by definition, presupposes some kind of metaphysic, it must be acknowledged that science’s empirical theory of knowledge militates against any non-empirical theory of reality, regardless of the beliefs of individual scientists (which should give such scientists pause for thought!) Certainly, it outright rejects the only sound metaphysic available: that of the Bible. As I said before, many scientists have done everything in their power to ridicule and suppress Christian science, to oppose the teaching of Christian philosophy in schools, and to affirm that any science not based on pure agnosticism is “pseudo-science”—that is, not really science at all.

Thus, in your apologetic encounters with those who are pro-science, you will almost certainly find that they consider the presupposition of Christian truth to be completely inappropriate in scientific endeavor. Indeed, they will claim that one of science’s great strengths is that it does not rely on any particular worldview—and they will be appalled at the idea of presupposing the truth of Scripture and correcting scientific inquiry according to it. They will argue that this is to twist science beyond any usefulness by completely reversing the order of knowledge-acquisition. And of course they think this, because they are under the mistaken impression that science, in and of itself, is a valid method of learning the truth about reality. In fact, in line with the empirical epistemology of science, they will probably think that it is the only method. They therefore naturally suppose that it ought to be used as the benchmark for determining any other claim to truth; say, the accuracy of Genesis. But this simply betrays their total ignorance of what knowledge is, and what is needed to acquire it. They assume the validity of empiricism without justification—in fact, without even realizing that justification is required.

To presuppose the truth of Christianity is not to twist science, but to put it in its correct place. Since Scripture is the only foundation for rational thought, and thus the only way to justify the basic assumptions of scientific inquiry at all, it is totally self-defeating and false to claim that agnosticism in science is a strength. On the contrary, agnosticism renders science utterly impotent, and makes it incapable of guaranteeing any accuracy in its conclusions. It is totally impossible to use science to judge Christianity; quite the opposite is in fact true.

Further, though, any claim of agnosticism (also called “objectivity”) in science is simply absurd. The scientist merely betrays his ignorance and unconscious prejudice when he claims that science does not rely on any philosophical or religious beliefs; or, if it does, that they are nonetheless not important. Scientists like to claim that science doesn’t presuppose either the truth or falsehood of Christianity (or any other religion or philosophy). In other words, they claim that science is not dependent upon, or influenced by, subjective beliefs; rather, it is entirely objective. But again, the scientist merely demonstrates that he not only has no idea what objectivity actually is; but indeed that he is so completely prejudiced that he thinks objectivity is defined by the particular set of subjective beliefs which science presupposes.

But by not assuming that the Bible is true, science necessarily adopts a position of practical atheism: scientific agnosticism itself is a positive position of belief which assumes a default state in which God does not exist; and further supposes that if he does exist it makes no difference anyway. But this is clearly idiotic, for if God exists it makes every difference, because Scripture is his objectively true revelation which not only defines a different context for scientific inquiry than the scientist assumes, but also contradicts scientific beliefs on major, irreconcilable points. So unless atheism is objectively true (which is impossible), science is in no way objective, whatever the scientist thinks. It relies completely upon subjectively-held beliefs.

From the get-go, then, science assumes without rational justification that there is a physical world about which we have accurate perceptions. It assumes without justification that other people exist, that there is a similarity between their perceptions of the same physical phenomena, and that they can communicate reliably. It assumes without justification that metaphysics is not important and that God does not exist. So, from the get-go, whatever science claims about knowledge is false, since in the most fundamental way it relies upon unsubstantiated assumptions about the nature of reality, instead of justified, true beliefs. Whether these assumptions, and the assumptions based on them, are true or not is irrelevant to the problem, since there is no way to know if they are true. Science cannot justify any of them without a metaphysic and epistemology on which to base them—but it explicitly rejects even a pretense at a useful metaphysic and epistemology by claiming to be agnostic to these things, as if they don’t matter.

Thus we can see that empiricism is completely unable to make even a pretense at being a foundation for knowledge-acquisition. But one might say (and a scientist probably will) that this is all mere mind-games; for obviously we perceive a reality, and obviously it correlates in some way to what we perceive. I will grant that this is a mind-game—but only in the sense that I challenge the empiricist to show that there is anything except the mind! Contrary to his beliefs, logic is the only thing of which he can be certain, and logic is not physical. If it is, let him tell me its mass or its energy. Let him tell me the characteristics of the logitron, the logic carrier particle!

No, the only thing he can prove, even to himself, is the existence of his own immaterial mind—and so the only thing of which he can actually be certain is the immaterial, and not the physical at all. The physical world he perceives may simply be an immaterial illusion. Perhaps he is the only mind in existence, and after an eternity of loneliness he has fabricated the illusion of the physical world to save himself from total dementia! His certainty of the existence of the material universe—in opposition to the logic which shows such certainty to be impossible without Scripture—is utterly irrational, and simply testifies to his stupidity.

But we may generously grant the scientist some leeway, so as to further examine his method; we may permit him to take his knowledge of his own perceptions, and posit whatever consistencies and relationships he thinks he discovers within them. He cannot, of course, justify his belief that when he tells us about his conclusions we will hear and understand, for he cannot know that we exist as anything more than perceptions of his own mind—but we, being Christians with a valid metaphysic and epistemology, can grant him whatever fantasy he desires, since we do know that we hear him and understand him. So, we may grant him that the world exists as he supposes, and therefore ask him to present to us his method for learning about the way in which it works.

Continued in part 3 »

A great deal is made of science in the world today—much emphasis and trust is invested in scientific inquiry when it comes to discovering things about reality. The success of technology has resulted in a world where science is the first field to which people look in the search for answers about a great many questions, whether scientific or not.

Any Christian ought to be ready to fully refute any scientific argument raised against his faith. There is no need to be a scientist to do this; refuting scientific arguments does not require any intimate knowledge of scientific theories, or experiments. As with any apologetic you make, you need only look to the presuppositions upon which any scientific argument is built, and expose them as irrational and unjustified. Without a sound foundation to science itself, any scientific argument is incapable of even getting off the ground. To take the obvious example, you have no obligation to address the theory of evolution, when you have already refuted the basic assumptions upon which it relies. If the assumptions are unjustified, then the theory is unjustified.

It should be immediately obvious to any Christian that whatever status science has in the process of acquiring knowledge about reality must be defined by the foundation for all knowledge: Scripture. It cannot be superior to Scripture, nor equal with it: it must be entirely subordinate. So, in the positive sense, we can say that Scripture has supremacy over science, and science must work within whichever constraints revelation imposes. Whatever we know about reality starts with Scripture, and so whatever utility science may have must be determined from there also. We can therefore discover the proper place of science in the Christian worldview, and evaluate its place in secular worldviews.

In the negative sense, though, we can also critique science’s rational standing without explicitly involving the Bible at all. Since so many people look to science for knowledge, and judge religious questions in light of it (including many professing Christians, who judge revelation’s accuracy by science!), we can examine the presuppositions which underly scientific inquiry, and determine whether they are rational and justified. If they are not, we can then proceed to demonstrate how science is incapable of justifying any conclusion it may reach, any theory it may originate, and any belief it may claim: and thus how it is utterly impotent to produce knowledge of any kind.

It is worthwhile to do this because a majority of people, both Christian and non, are completely unaware not only that science is not necessarily reliable, but that it is in fact necessarily unreliable: completely incapable of providing us with knowledge about anything. The most unaware are often those who ought to be the most cognizant of science’s hopeless position: the scientists themselves. These people tend to have a certain attitude of surety verging on smugness, and look down on philosophical fields as involving vacuous guesswork and stuck-up mind-games, detached from the practical reality of the universe.

Now, it’s true that philosophy, as a study, is worthless without Christian presuppositions; but this should give no cause for smugness on the part of scientists, since their presuppositions and methods are built upon this worthless philosophical framework. Anyone who thinks that science is removed from philosophy is an ignorant fool, since science is founded upon philosophy and reason. In fact, where philosophy ends and science begins (or vice versa) is often extremely difficult to say. And anyone who thinks that reason is detached from reality is also ignorant and foolish, since reason is all about the essential nature of reality. Even a nonbeliever, entirely unconvinced of biblical truth, cannot refute or deny the essential necessity, validity, and reality of logic; whereas refuting scientific theories tends to be trivial.

But many scientists, from graduates to professors, are quite oblivious to the importance of philosophy to their own study: because instead of having received an actual education, learning from the ground up, starting with the philosophy of science, they have learned only theories and beliefs. Each theory and belief reinforces the existing faulty suppositions of which the scientist is either unaware, or in which he is naively confident. Richard Dawkins is an obvious and high-profile exemplar of this problem. Of course, the same holds true in most any area of study, and any university degree is merely a long and expensive program for conditioning the mind in irrational thinking and unquestioning belief—albeit disguised as the development of critical thinking and skeptical inquiry. A Christian university student who is not already trained in biblical thought may be crippled by the intellectual indoctrination he receives; his “education” is literally worthless except as an exercise in trivia. The notion that university-educated folk are better thinkers than average is only true inasmuch as they are better at thinking wrongly, having spent a great deal of time learning how.

That said, then, there is a single basic, foundational error intrinsic to any field of scientific endeavor—that is, a reliance on induction. It is no exaggeration to say that the forms in which this error manifests are legion; but, for the purposes of this discussion, I will demarcate them into two essential layers which can be evaluated separately. The first layer is comprised in the reliance on an empirical epistemology. The second is in the form of reasoning which constitutes the scientific method itself. I demarcate them thus because the first error is, at least in principle, correctable. Although empiricism is the epistemology adopted by secular scientists, it should not be intrinsic to science at all. Like any other field of inquiry, the biblical epistemology is the only valid basis for knowledge-acquisition. The second error, on the other hand—scientific reasoning—is entirely necessary to scientific endeavor by definition, and is thus not correctable.

Although I will examine the empirical epistemology first, I will do so through the lens of the scientific method itself. This will better explicate the secular approach to knowledge-acquisition, and more coherently demonstrate the common error which relates empiricism with the form of scientific reasoning itself. Since the scientific method is central to scientific endeavor, and thus reveals most aptly the problems with scientific presuppositions, it is the sensible locus for this discussion.

The scientific method, then, is defined by Wikipedia as “a body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge, as well as for correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical, measurable evidence, subject to the principles of reasoning.” Merriam-Webster elaborates that these “principles of reasoning” entail “the recognition and formulation of a problem, the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.”

Notice that the scientific method is indeed purported as a method of acquiring knowledge. Knowledge, as I’ve extensively covered, is defined as justified, true belief. Therefore, the scientific method must be able to not only produce beliefs about things, but produce true beliefs, and also justify them. In other words, scientists must be able to know that their beliefs are true.

This scientific knowledge-acquisition occurs through “the collection of data through observation and experiment, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.” This being the case, we can break the knowledge-acquisition process into two basic parts: observation; and the reasoning which scientists do about that observation, in order to come to the conclusions which they claim as knowledge. These two parts coincide with the demarcation I mentioned before between the empirical metaphysic, and the form of reasoning in the scientific method.

It is easy to prove that neither of these things is able to yield any knowledge at all; and, further, we can also show that the knowledge which science claims, and has claimed, is in fact necessarily false. In other words, science does not even produce true beliefs which it simply cannot justify, but rather false beliefs which it nonetheless passes off as both true and justified anyway. To demonstrate this, we must examine first empiricism, and then inductive logic: that is, observation, and scientific reasoning. After we have done this, I’ll conclude with the correct, biblical view of science.

Continued in part 2 »

Click here for Angels Depart’s final statement; below is my response—

As I see it, Angels, there are three main areas which I must cover in this final response so as to show convincingly that God must exist, and that the Bible is his revelation. The first area regards the issue of the textual criticism of Scripture. I will dwell on this as briefly as possible, since although it is important, it is also incidental to the main thrust of my argument. The second deals with science and probability. Again, I will treat this with as cursory a consideration as possible before leading into the third area, which is the question of epistemic authority and security. I will spend the most time on this question, in order to fully demonstrate why God must exist.

So firstly, regarding the contradictions you have asserted to exist in Scripture. You discuss angels being bound versus the devil being free; God’s omnipotence versus his inability to lie; and his alleged inability against iron chariots. Your responses to the first two of these three questions seem to be disconnected from the arguments I forwarded in my previous statement. You accuse me of failing to address the issue of devils appropriately, and of “completely ignoring” the “blatant contradiction” of God’s omnipotence and inability to lie. But in my previous statement, I said—

Since God is truth (John 14:6; 1 John 5:6), and he cannot contravene his own nature (otherwise he could not be God), it is absurd to suppose that he can lie. If he could lie, he would not be God. It does not make him less than omnipotent, unless you misunderstand what omnipotence means.

As you can see, I have clearly answered your objection. If you believe that my answer is inadequate then I would ask that you explain why, rather than alleging that I ignored the “contradiction” altogether. Similarly, as regards the issue of demons, I stated clearly that the Bible does not say in 2 Peter 2:4 or Jude 1:6 which angels were imprisoned; nor how many. It is true that fallen angels are demons, and that Satan, the devil, is a fallen angel. But these passages do not say that all angels were imprisoned, nor when. There is ample provision within them to be referring to a specific group of angels; and there is ample provision also for the passages to be speaking metaphorically rather than merely spiritually. If the latter is true, then it is likely that they are referring to the same event as Revelation 20:2. I would interpret this through a preterist eschatology and argue that the binding is not in a literal pit for a literal thousand years (that is, it is not a total incapacitation), but rather is an apocalyptic illustration of how God has revoked the ability of Satan and his angels to prevent the spread of the gospel in the “millennium”, which is the current age. However, it seems needless to continue any complex exegesis when I can simply point out that to establish a contradiction here would require far more information than the passages themselves provide. It is only by assuming from them a great deal more than is warranted that any kind of incongruity can be suggested. I made this quite clear in my previous statement, and it strikes me as strange that you would have mistaken my clear refutation of your objection for my conceding the point.

As regards Judges 1, you have conceded my defense here, and although you raise ancillary objections, they are not arguments per se, but rather your own personal disagreement with God’s methods. No doubt you would do things differently to God, but since the Bible itself tells us to expect such a thing, this is by no means a problem.

What would be really impressive in situations like these is if god made himself/herself known directly to the enemies of his/her people. A direct revelation from god could not be refused. There are many examples of god making people’s hearts hardened and making them disobey his/her command, but he/she never coerces someone to follow them.

Of course, this is simply not true. If by a “direct” revelation you mean simply a revelation in which God himself appears to people, then such a thing can and may be refused, as evidenced by all those who gathered around Jesus and yet disbelieved him. But if by a “direct” revelation you mean a personal imparting, by God, of the truth of his word, then such revelation is never refused. This is the basis of Christian faith: the indwelling Spirit and the implanted word (Jer 31:31-35; John 3:3-8; James 1:21).

The second thing is, if god normally works through average everyday means then how do we know that it is god working? If we assume that it is god working but he/she is working through everyday means then how is that any different than there being no god?

As I will show, the difference is that reality is unintelligible and impossible if there is no God. Nonetheless, I find your question rather bizarre. I’m not really sure with what purpose you framed it, so it is difficult to answer directly.

Moving on, you ask why God would issue a covenant knowing full well that it would be broken. This question is loaded with implicit assumptions, not least of which is the supposition that God issues covenants for similar reasons that people do; and that people always wish covenants they issue to be fulfilled. However, since God’s purpose in creation is to glorify himself, and one of the ways in which he can do this is to show the results of disobedience to his commands, many reasonable explanations can be formulated to the contrary. That said, it is not necessarily appropriate for a Christian to do this, and I will not be seen to be questioning or testing God’s motives—neither is it necessary for the sake of argument, since your inability to discern these motives does not imply that they do not exist, nor that they are not superlatively good.

Nonetheless, lest your accusation of God being deceitful seem unanswered, let it be noted that Scripture does in fact explicitly state at least one purpose of the law in general (which includes the covenant conditions in question): to demonstrate man’s inability to justify himself before God, and thus the necessity of faith (Gal 3). It “was our guardian until Christ, so that we could be justified by faith” (v 24). There was no deceit on God’s part; only inability and incomprehension on man’s part.

As for your allegation that “there is a countless amount [sic] of absurdities and direct contradictions in the Bible that are impossible to reconcile”, I have already shown that this is a ridiculous claim. You cannot give examples of supposed contradictions, have them refuted, and then immediately say, “well there are countless others that can’t be reconciled!” Since I have proved that those contradictions which you have alleged were apparent only on the basis of an ignorance or naiveté of one sort or another, it is simply absurd to give you, rather than the text, the benefit of the doubt as regards other supposed contradictions. To do so would be to commit the twofold error of violating a major principle of textual criticism, and ignoring the precedent of your previous errors—errors which you now compound by citing a supposed incongruity between Genesis 1 and 2, thus demonstrating that you are ignorant of a fundamental aspect of Hebrew thought: block logic. Since you are evidently unaware that in Hebrew culture it was common to arrange stories conceptually, rather than chronologically, how can I possibly take your criticism of the Bible any more seriously than you would take criticism of evolutionary theory from someone who did not understand the concept of a common ancestor? Your textual objection is as well-founded as the scientific objection that if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys around? (I should also note that it isn’t really cricket to allege another contradiction after I have already considered and refuted more than I originally offered to—at best it suggests a certain degree of desperation on your part.)

Now, to briefly address your objections to the canon of Scripture: since these seem to be based entirely on your own speculation rather than any hard evidence; and since, if Scripture is true, then God sovereignly ensured its accurate transmission regardless of potential pitfalls and possibilities of error, I see no counter-argument that needs to be made. Scripture is inerrant because it was authored by God, and not because of any particular historical arguments. That said, the only historical arguments against its accuracy are those propounded by heavily biased, fringe theorists who have an insufficient grounding in genuine historical scholarship.

Lastly, the argument from atrocity. You cite various New Testament passages which supposedly contradict the Bible’s own commands in the Old Testament. However, since I have already stated that these Old Testament commands were situational and specific, and cannot be generalized; and since I have similarly acknowledged the general commands given in both the Old and New Testament to love one’s enemy, you appear to be arguing against a nonexistent position. Your objection does not engage with my point regarding specific versus general commands at all, let alone demonstrate why it is in error. You would therefore seem to concede this point by default.

The second area I must cover is science and probability. More specifically, I should say science and uniformity. You have given some impressive-looking calculations and arguments for the accuracy of scientific prediction, but you have done so on the basis of the very assumptions which I have called into question. In other words, you are continuing to assume the validity of presuppositions such as the uniformity of nature, so as to make your argument. But since it is not any specific experiment which I am questioning, but rather the underlying philosophy of them all—the very presuppositions you are assuming—your argument is both irrelevant and unable to engage with the points I am making. Allow me to elaborate:

For example we do have a way of knowing exactly the potential outcome given consistent variables. If you are coming up with slightly different outcomes it is likely that your variables have not been consistent. For instance, in your example regarding a measurement taken on the speed of sound, I would question whether or not the scientist was controlling for variables, such as wind speed, air density and elevation.

The latter part of this statement is not in question. I was careful to mention, when giving this example, that I was simplifying for the sake of brevity. Furthermore, the example (along with its companion the pendulum) was demonstrating that “empirical” laws are actually not empirical at all—a point with which you have not engaged. It was not trying to show that consistent results are impossible.

Nor have I claimed that consistent results are impossible. On the contrary! I affirm the law of uniformity, and the usefulness of science, and the benefits of medicine, and all those other things you represented me (for what reason I do not know) as being against. My point was that you, and not I, are in the situation of having no justified, rational reason to suppose that consistent results are to be expected at all. Since you have no rational reason to suppose this, you also have no basis for calculating even the most tentative probabilities—for, as I said, this requires knowledge of the number of actual and possible instances of something happening. If you have no justification for supposing that something will happen the same way twice (given sufficient control of the variables of course), then you have no basis for calculating a probability based on hypothetical occurrences; you must restrict yourself to actual ones. My comments regarding probability were merely introductory to the main thrust of my argument, which was regarding uniformity. This argument you have not engaged with in the slightest. You have not even attempted to refute the fact that your (not my!) worldview cannot justify its assumption of uniformity, which of course includes such assumptions as the accuracy of memory and so on.

Now, for some reason it is entirely common for people to think that I am myself arguing against science, uniformity, and so on, when in fact I am arguing against the secular scientific worldview. Obviously, it is absurd and ridiculous to think that if I hold up a glass of water and let it go, it will not fall to the ground and break, sending water all over the place. We all agree on that. What seems to be somehow missed in my presentation is that this is my point. If it is so absurd and ridiculous to disbelieve uniformity, then conversely its truth must be obvious and entirely sensible. But if it is so obvious and true, then it ought easily to be demonstrated. Such an obvious truth, being so fundamental to all science, should be able to easily be proved. There should be a rational basis for it. To put it more technically, the philosophy of science should entail a metaphysic, or theory of reality, which can rationally justify its belief in the principle of uniformity.

But it can’t. The Christian worldview, of course, can—it accounts perfectly for uniformity, because our orderly and consistent God “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb 1:3). We can rightly ridicule a worldview which cannot even account for the basic principle of uniformity, because such a worldview is genuinely ridiculous.

Now, this leads me into my third and final area of discussion, which is epistemology and metaphysics. You said that we “have a way of knowing exactly the potential outcome given consistent variables.” I am glad you used that word, knowing, because that is the precise question at hand. If I can show that you have no way of knowing anything of the sort—that you have no justification for any scientific or religious proposition which you may assert—then the foundation of your entire worldview crumbles, and any argument you may bring to bear will collapse from the ground up. Conversely, if I can show that I do have justification for the scientific and religious propositions I assert, I automatically exclude any contrary propositions by merit of that justification.

What I am saying is that knowledge (I am sure you will agree) entails a belief which is both true, and justified. One may coincidentally believe something true, but if one believes for no good reason, or for false reasons, then one does not have knowledge. Therefore, if you are to make any claim to knowledge (such as that God does not exist, or that it is unknowable whether or not he exists), you must be able to justify your claim. You must be able to show that it is true. If your assertion is without rational basis—that is, if it cannot be shown to be genuinely, objectively true, but rather is ultimately a result of your own subjective ideas—then obviously you have no argument whatsoever. You have only opinion; and opinion is of no use in a debate.

So far, you have offered numerous reasons for doubting the truth of Christianity. These reasons have basically been empirical in nature, one way or the other. You have assumed that one can come to at least some knowledge through empirical means, and that this knowledge can contradict other knowledge-claims, such as those made by the Bible. But what if you can come to no knowledge whatsoever using empirical methods?

In order to use empirical evidences, you must make assumptions. One of the assumptions I have already mentioned is that of uniformity. Since you are unable to justify this assumption, any belief built on top of it is necessarily unjustified as well. That is to say, if you claim to know that the Flood did not occur (and here is why I concede no point at all regarding it), then you must also claim to know all the other things, including philosophical ones, upon which this alleged knowledge is based. If a prerequisite to your claim is that nature is uniform, then you must be able to know that nature is uniform. It is no good to merely believe it, no matter how apparently obvious or necessary that belief is. Indeed, the more obvious or necessary it seems, the easier it ought to be to show that it is rationally justified.

More fundamentally, though, empirical knowledge-claims rely on more basic assumptions, like, an external world exists, and, we can come to knowledge of the external world through our senses. Again, how do you know this? You may subjectively believe it, and it may appear absurd to question it, but what rational justification do you have for this belief? If no rational justification can be given, then regardless of how sensible it may seem, it cannot be called knowledge. And, as I have said, a worldview which cannot justify even its most basic beliefs can rightly be called ridiculous. Since it clearly fails to engage with even the most fundamental aspects of reality, which we all take for granted, there is certainly no reason to suppose that it correctly interprets reality in more complex ways.

It should be obvious from what I have said so far that no worldview which is based purely on subjective experience can make any meaningful claim to knowledge (by “meaningful” I am referring to claims of the sort currently under debate: religious assertions and the like). Since knowledge deals with rational justification and true beliefs, it is by definition dealing with principles and facts which are not specific to any one person, but rather are universal to all people, having an origin outside of them. In other words, knowledge must be objective. But a particular and subjective person such as you or I is simply unable to assert universal and objective principles on the basis of our own experience. We have no way of knowing that we are not mistaken. The rather tired example of the brain in the vat suffices to show this. It is only in the case of necessarily true objective facts, such as the law of noncontradiction, that we can make any claim to knowledge at all. Nothing can simply be asserted as true on the basis of subjective belief, regardless of what it is.

This leaves the empiricist, who relies wholly on subjective interpretation of the world and the belief that what he perceives actually correlates to what is, in a position of total skepticism. Unless he can logically infer from the proposition, I perceive an external and physical world, to the conclusion, there is such a world, he simply cannot know if he is right about any given knowledge-claim or not. He would have to stop making knowledge-claims altogether. But such skepticism itself is a self-refuting position: that is, its assumption that we can know nothing about the world is itself rationally unjustified. How do we know we can know nothing about the world? What if, for example, there is an objective, universal deity who is both immanent (exists within reality and can communicate with us) and transcendent (exists outside of reality as we know it, and causes it to exist)? What if that deity has given us a true revelation of the world, so that we can know about it and make justified claims about it?

Certainly, such a revelation would be a valid basis for making knowledge-claims. If that revelation was from a truthful God, and if it declared that this was so, and if it told us enough about the world to build a workable framework for interpreting reality—that is, a metaphysic—then that metaphysic would be completely true, and any claims to knowledge we made based on it, whether directly or through valid inference, would be indeed genuine. So, since any worldview which is based on subjective experience or beliefs cannot make knowledge-claims and must reduce to skepticism; and, since skepticism refutes itself and cannot be true; therefore a worldview based on an objective revelation is the only possible alternative. Without it, you cannot claim to know, and you cannot claim not to know. A revelatory worldview is therefore not merely the only theoretically viable one—it is the only actually viable one. No other worldview can be true. To say otherwise is a knowledge-claim, which I have just shown cannot be made except on the basis of objective revelation. Therefore, any knowledge-claim—even one which asserts the falsehood of a revelatory worldview—must presuppose objective revelation. It borrows from this revelation even as it seeks to deny it.

Now, you might object that, even so, there are many worldviews which claim to be based on objective revelation, so the point I am making is at best moot. It certainly does not help me in establishing the truth of Christianity, since although I seem to have narrowed the possible contenders for a true worldview to a handful, I have no justification for claiming the Bible as the one genuine revelation, rather than (say) the Qur’an. But of course, even your saying this requires some kind of basis for doing so. What basis will you claim? I have already shown that you are wrong to say that no proof exists for God, since whichever alleged revelation is genuine does indeed constitute such a proof, as does the argument I have given above. It is in fact impossible for God to not exist, since that would mean we can know nothing. The only possible knowledge-claim which can be made in this regard is that God does exist. The assertion that he does not is by definition false; therefore, once properly reduced and analyzed, it is actually unintelligible. It is an incoherent statement; it means nothing. It is not a knowledge-claim, and worse, since it claims to be knowledge-claim, it is not even a sensible statement at all. Thus your position—whether it be that God does not exist, or merely that we cannot know if he exists—is shown to be absurd and false.

So even if it is the case that revelationism does not establish the truth of Christianity automatically, you should still recant your previous agnosticism and earnestly try to determine which revelation is true. (I say this only to remind you that your agnosticism has been soundly refuted and you have therefore lost the debate; we should still consider the objection, because that way we can show not only that “god”, in a general sense, exists; but that this god is YHVH, the Christian deity.)

Obviously there is a great deal which can be said at this point; and a lot that should be said also. For example, to most fully expound and prove my case, I should not merely disprove all other non-Christian worldviews, but also explicate the biblical metaphysic and epistemology to show that they do indeed make reality intelligible. Obviously, the Christian worldview must actually be able to justify the knowledge-claims it makes. However, I unfortunately cannot do this here for reasons of brevity and etiquette. For now, I can only direct you to The Wisdom Of God by way of proof that I can do this; and to Vincent Cheung’s Systematic Theology (PDF).

That said, I assert on the basis of the above precedent that the biblical worldview does make reality intelligible, while also acknowledging the open nature of this assertion, and inviting you to interact with it more fully in the future. In order to briefly demonstrate it, and to prove its exclusivity (that is, that only the Bible is sufficient as a basis for metaphysics and epistemology), I cite the philosophical concern known as the problem of the one and many.

This problem, briefly stated, asks: is the universe one? How then is it diverse? Or, is it diverse? How then is it one? This question can be expressed in many ways, but its basic gist is that either unity, or plurality, must be ultimate. If unity is ultimate, then diversity is impossible; if plurality is ultimate, then unity is impossible. However, neither of these situations is sensible, since they lead to logical absurdities. Obviously diverse things exist, and therefore unity cannot be ultimate, for no diversity can come from something totally unified. But if unity is not ultimate, then diversity must be—but then the same problem applies in reverse: no unity is possible. And if unity is impossible, relationships between things could never exist, for a relationship by definition is a unifying principle between two different things. Since logic entails relationships, and logic is self-affirming, it is irrational and self-refuting to think that diversity could be ultimate. Thus, neither is possible.

The only resolution to this dilemma is the equal ultimacy of unity and plurality represented in the trinitarian God of the Bible. Unless another worldview alleges a revelation from such a God, it cannot be true, because it would necessitate the impossible situation of an unintelligible reality. This simple philosophical issue therefore refutes any monotheistic or polytheistic religion which claims objective revelation. Any worldview which fails to answer the question of unity and plurality fails to make reality itself intelligible, and is thus incoherent and false.

Therefore, by merit of the impossibility of the contrary, Christianity must be true. Now again, to be fair, I have not presented my argument in great detail; nor have I explicated many points which might be misunderstood; nor have I dealt with many objections which commonly arise. If you would like, I would be quite willing to schedule a second debate to examine these sorts of questions in a mutually convenient way. Alternatively, I could recommend you read The Wisdom Of God, which is available online either in free PDF or a cheap paperback, and is linked at the top of the sidebar.

However, the salient points I wished to affirm have now been made. I have demonstrated that empiricism cannot make any knowledge-claims at all, and that you are therefore wrong to consider it either rational, or capable of proving anything. It is, in fact, irrational and unsupportable—and therefore false. I have demonstrated equally that skepticism is a position which must be necessarily false. Thereby, I have proved that what one might call revelationism—a system of thought founded upon objective revelation—must be true. This constitutes a proof for God in the broadest sense, and thus refutes the negative position of the moot of this debate. I have then further demonstrated that only the biblical worldview can genuinely claim divine revelation, because the gods of no other religions have natures which answer one of the basic questions which must be answered if reality is to be intelligible and coherent.

I have also addressed and refuted your objections against the Bible itself, from several angles, thus defending its internal consistency and truth. It therefore remains as the sole basis for any claim to knowledge, whatsoever.

Continued in the conclusion »

Related posts:

1. “No one is righteous”…metaphorically speaking

Click here for Angels Depart’s third statement; below is my response—

Erratum; August 2, 2007: thank you Jim for pointing out that I incorrectly cited the covenant conditions relating to Judges 1. These are not from Leviticus 7, but Deuteronomy 7.

As with my previous statement, Angels, I am going to respond only to some of the items you address. Again, this is not with the intent to avoid other important issues, but rather to focus on those which seem most central to the moot of the debate.

Firstly, thank you for clarifying your position regarding the burden of proof, and the claims of your own worldview. Your posts as I have read them seem to evidence a decidedly atheistic bent—and, given that the moot itself places you in the negative position regarding Does God exist? I inferred you to be taking a genuinely atheistic, rather than agnostic stance. If you are affirming agnosticism, at least in principle, a better moot would seem to be Can we know God exists? Nonetheless, since by answering that question in the affirmative I will also affirm this debate’s moot, I am happy to continue.

Secondly, I will briefly engage with the alleged contradictions you cite. Now, I said I would engage with just two, for the sake of brevity, and you have cited four (the negative positions of which are alleged to be Judges 1:19, Mark 6:5, Hebrews 6:18, and 1 Peter 5:8). I will engage with the first, and the third, so as to demonstrate the manner in which a lack of understanding severely cripples one’s ability to say anything about Scripture. This should provide adequate precedent to allow the second example of Mark 6:5 to be given the benefit of the doubt and thus suspended. Your fourth example (1 Pet 5:8) indicates no apparent contradiction at all, since 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6, which you list in contradiction to it, do not state which angels were imprisoned; Satan’s particular status could easily set him apart from them by mere implication anyway; and certainly we see Jesus casting out many unclean spirits during his ministry, so obviously they were not all imprisoned. There is good reason to think that the verses you cite are referring to an extra-biblical tradition about the Nephilim of Genesis 6, but even if not, no contradiction exists. So—

1. Is God all powerful?

Yes he is—but we must clarify what this means. For God to be all-powerful does not imply that he can do the logically impossible. For example, a popular question posed to Christians is, can God create a rock so heavy that he could not lift it? Or some iteration on that theme. Of course, the question is a contradiction in terms. It presupposes a being who can lift anything, and then asks about something he cannot lift. But if he can lift anything then obviously the question is incoherent. Though grammatically we can parse it, and semantically it seems to make sense, when broken into its logical components it is actually meaningless. It cannot be answered any more than the question can God create an uncreated being? By definition, an uncreated being cannot be created.

So omnipotence does not imply the ability to do logically absurd things, like creating uncreated beings, or imagining square circles. These things are meaningless in the most literal sense. Reason and logic are intrinsic elements of God’s nature—and he cannot be who he is not. It is not an imperfection on his part that he cannot be imperfect.

Similarly, to say that God cannot be all-powerful because it is impossible for him to lie (Heb 6:18) is to make an absurd statement. Since God is truth (John 14:6; 1 John 5:6), and he cannot contravene his own nature (otherwise he could not be God), it is absurd to suppose that he can lie. If he could lie, he would not be God. It does not make him less than omnipotent, unless you misunderstand what omnipotence means. This is why I said that contradictions appear to arise when one has insufficient knowledge to be evaluating Scripture.

The same is true of Judges 1:19. All emphases in the passages below are mine.

And the LORD was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country, but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain because they had chariots of iron.

Notice that it does not say that God could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain; it says Judah could not. The sentence is comprised of two parts: first, “the LORD was with Judah, and he [Judah] took possession of the hill country”; second, “but he [Judah] could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain because they had chariots of iron.” Is the LORD with Judah in the second part of the sentence? Obviously not; certainly Scripture details any number of other occasions where God causes his people to prevail in battle against apparently insurmountable odds—including the previous half of this very sentence—so it is hardly sensible to suppose that he could not do the same here. Rather, God was not with Judah in the battle against the inhabitants of the plain. If, instead of reading a single verse and taking it at a dubious “face value”, you continued on so as to understand the context of the passage, you could discover that an explanation is forthcoming at the very beginning of the very next chapter—

Now the angel of the LORD went up from Gilgal to Bochim. And he said, “I brought you up from Egypt and brought you into the land that I swore to give to your fathers. I said, ‘I will never break my covenant with you, and you shall make no covenant with the inhabitants of this land; you shall break down their altars.’ But you have not obeyed my voice. What is this you have done? So now I say, I will not drive them out before you, but they shall become thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare to you.” (Judges 2:1-3).

Here, the angel of the LORD is referring back to the covenant conditions of Leviticus Deuteronomy 7:1-2,12,16:

When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than yourselves, and when the LORD your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them.

And because you listen to these rules and keep and do them, the LORD your God will keep with you the covenant and the steadfast love that he swore to your fathers [...] And you shall consume all the peoples that the LORD your God will give over to you. Your eye shall not pity them, neither shall you serve their gods, for that would be a snare to you.

But what do the Israelites, and specifically the people of Judah, do in Judges 1?

And the descendants of the Kenite, Moses’ father-in-law, went up with the people of Judah from the city of palms into the wilderness of Judah, which lies in the Negeb near Arad, and they went and settled with the people [...] Judah also captured Gaza with its territory, and Ashkelon with its territory, and Ekron with its territory (Judges 1:16,18).

Do the people of Judah devote their enemies to complete destruction? No! Judges 1 makes a point of mentioning this. They settle with them, and capture them, keeping them alive and even mingling among them, in total contravention to God’s command. God’s previous promise that they would have success was conditional upon them obeying his commandments; and so when they start to disobey, he revokes the promise. And, in order to make this as obvious as possible, the failure of the people of Judah to take the plains is directly preceded by their disobedience—in the very verse before!

Your assumption of a contradiction here is caused by a failure to understand the overall context of the story, which results in a failure to correctly identify the causality of the people’s defeat. God generally uses normal means to accomplish his purposes—in this case, he prevented the people of Judah from taking the plains by means of the iron chariots of its inhabitants. Would they have prevailed against the chariots if they had obeyed God? Of course they would have. God, being all-powerful, was in absolute control of the situation and could direct it as he pleased.

Rather than give the text the benefit of the doubt, as an impartial scholar would; and rather than investigate the story further for explanations, as an impartial scholar would; and rather than ensure that you understand the covenantal context within which the story is placed, as an impartial scholar would—you instead assume that you know more about what is going on than the author, read a few verses, focus on a single one which appears to you (in your complete ignorance of what is going on, and without even a critical consideration of the structure of the sentence), to be contradictory to the attributes of God, and then declare that the Bible contains contradictions. I hope I have made it evident how ridiculous this is.

Now, thirdly, some cites on the accuracy of oral tradition, and the dating of the original New Testament documents (even Wikipedia agrees, with the possible exception of James). However, as I mentioned before, I am making most of my comments regarding canon based on the highly regarded book, The Canon of Scripture, written by F F Bruce. Bruce is a noted and respected historian; which, I would caution you, cannot be said of people like Acharya S and Elaine Pagels, whose works, though publicly prejudiced, speculative, and well-refuted, you nonetheless seem to be referencing.

Fourthly, I would like to briefly dispense with the argument from atrocities. For the record, I am assuming the definition of atrocity as an atrocious act; one which is “extremely [...] brutal or cruel; appalling, horrifying; utterly revolting” (Merriam-Webster Online, atrocious). This definition appeals to the visceral response which most people would have. I use this definition so as to avoid the difficulties inherent to ethical judgments, so as to ensure that we have a common ground from which to work. From an ethical standpoint it should go without saying that I deny that the Bible approves atrocities whatsoever.

Now, I have already stated that the Bible contains no examples, out of the above-defined sorts of atrocities, which can be extrapolated from specific, historical events into general principles for all time; but rather that it mandates, in the absence of such general commands, the principle: “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:44).

You cite Numbers 31:16-18 in support of your case that the Bible approves atrocities in general—but the events therein are in fact an example of specific, historical commands. They, like all other examples in Scripture, give us no leave to treat them as if they contain a general principle to be applied outside of the direct circumstances in which they occurred. Furthermore, even if they did give us such leave, and even if other scriptural teaching such as Matthew 5 did not militate against, you would still need to demonstrate that the generalization does not commit the fallacy of induction.

That said, your argument from atrocity does not rest upon the soundness of these generalizations. Rather, it seems to be agnostic to the general application of biblical teaching by Christians, and is directed instead toward the examples in Scripture itself. You succinctly state that, “if the god of the Bible is real and did allow these atrocities then he is not worthy of being served”—which, you say, would be in direct contradiction to the biblical teaching that he is worthy, and thus prove the falsehood of Scripture. Let me agree with you that a single contradiction in Scripture is sufficient to prove Christianity false; and let me also do you the service of justifying your assertion that the Bible teaches that God is worthy of our service. This is a fact upon which the entire law, and thus the entire gospel, rests—see Exodus 20, and also Revelation 4:11.

I interpret your argument, in referring to “these atrocities”, as referring not only or necessarily to events such as the Crusades, but also to those described in your selected passage of Numbers 31, and others. Obviously, these events were not merely allowed by God, but commanded by him. Therefore, we can certainly say that the condition upon which your premise rests is amply met: God has allowed, and even at times commanded atrocities.

However, the consequent assertion of your argument is that God is therefore not worthy of being served. This seems to be a confused statement. It is asserted in order to establish a contradiction within Scripture, but is not itself justified from Scripture. That is to say, your argument is couched as an internal critique of the biblical worldview; something like this—

1. The Bible states that God is worthy of being served (from Ex 20, etc).
2. If God commands atrocities, then he is not worthy of being served.
3. God commands atrocities (from Num 31, etc).
4. Therefore, he is not worthy of being served (from #2).
5. Therefore, the Bible is false (from #1 and #4).

There is an obvious omission in the logic above: that is, the justification for premise #2. You have not cited any, and there is no scriptural basis for it. After all, these atrocities were commanded by God either to preclude the possibility of the Israelites turning aside and violating the commandment to serve him (in the case of their destroying other peoples), or to punish them when they did (such as in the case of your Numbers 31 passage). We may reasonably infer that a physical destruction is a foreshadowing of the eternal destruction for which all those who do not serve God are devoted, as described frequently throughout the Bible—for example, in the first half of Revelation 21. Since the Bible approves that those who do not serve God be punished with eternal torment, destruction, and death; we can argue a fortiori that it must equally approve a lesser, temporal torment, destruction, and death visited upon the same people.

This is certainly confirmed repeatedly by Scripture. Consider, for example, that God himself, in Exodus 7-12, strikes Egypt with plagues culminating in the death of all its first-born males, as a judgment upon the nation, through Pharaoh (who was hardened by God so that this would happen). Or consider his judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. Or how, in 2 Samuel 24, he incites David to number the people, so as to punish him for doing this—and then how this punishment involves the deaths of 70,000 men. Or simply glance through Deuteronomy to see all the sins which warranted death, so as to purge the evil from Israel.

So it is quite evident that premise #2 of your argument is not a biblical one: God is definitely not unworthy of service though he commands what we have defined as atrocities. Therefore, this premise cannot be used to internally critique the biblical worldview. You have imported it from your own worldview, which has no bearing on Christianity. Now, if your worldview is true, then Christianity is false in any case, so your argument from atrocity is superfluous. But if your worldview is false, then premise #2 is fallacious and your argument fails. Therefore, we should really move directly now to examine your own worldview. So—

If we can prove that something happens again and again over multiple trials then we can make strong assumptions about the possibility that it will continue to happen under those same circumstances.

This is where we will start. I would like to challenge your supposition that proving something again and again over multiple trials gives us any greater ability to make assumptions about the possibility of it happening in future, given the same circumstances. Later on, I would also like to challenge your supposition that you can prove anything at all. I will cover the former item now.

What you seem to be saying, as regards repeated experimentation, is that you are trying ensure that the results are consistent. Where results are similar, I assume you would also average them so as to increase the likelihood of accuracy. Those results which seem too dissimilar, of course, are discarded. This is effectively attempting to minimize the probability of error by increasing the number of instances of confirmation. I presume I am correct in stating your position this way.

The problem you have is that probability is measured by dividing the number of actual situations of something by the number of possible situations. Since it would require universal knowledge to discover the number of possible situations of any given event, the idea of increasing probability in this manner is plainly absurd. The probability is simply unknowable, and always will be. That is, if the numerator is unknown, the probability of accuracy (and thus of error) is unknown, since the equation cannot be completed. (If you assume an infinite number of possible situations, then the probability is a finite number divided by infinity, which is zero—even worse!)

In other words, the accuracy of any scientific experiment is completely unknowable, and thus will never increase even if you were to run experiments until the proverbial cows returned. And if you don’t know, you don’t know, and so whatever theory you may formulate based on your experiment is no better than speculation. Therefore, performing repeated experiments is self-evidently pointless from a logical point of view, since you can have no idea whether this is helpful or not. Yet, you still act as if you can know. Even though this is just an irrational pandering to your intuitive sense of what makes something likely, you do it anyway, don’t you? It has nothing at all to do with actual probability, or with reality as you understand it (it has a lot to do with reality as I understand it), or with rationality. So why do it?

Moreover, if your experiment yields a certain result, but then whenever it is conducted in the future it yields a different result, you discard the initial result as an error. Indeed, any outlying results are ignored, and only “consistent” ones are collected and averaged. This is supposed to increase certainty and accuracy, as discussed above. But how do you determine when a result is aberrant and when it is not? Since any repetition of the same experiment will yield different results each time, if only because your own observation is limited to a certain margin of error, you can never obtain a perfect result. In fact, you don’t even know that there is such thing as a “perfect” result. All results are in error to some degree. How you determine the degree of error which is acceptable is really quite arbitrary. You may think that it’s reasonable to discard results which show a discrepancy larger than the margin of error you have calculated for your equipment; but then you are still accepting that there is error present, so any theory you derive from the results does not reflect reality as it actually is.

In fact, your theory is a result of a mathematical set of averages. For example, if you are determining the speed of sound at sea level, you may measure four times (I will say four for the sake of simplicity, but really it would be more than that), and get the results 340.33, 340.28, 340.27, and 340.28 again. However, you will not take any of these measurements to be the speed of sound—instead, you will average them by determining their mean, and get 340.29 meters per second. Now, this result never appeared in your observations at all, and yet you would claim that it is the speed of sound instead of one of the results you did obtain? Furthermore, if you are going to average your results, why not choose the mode, 340.28, instead of the mean—at least that way you would be using an actual experimentally observed number!

Using this very simple example, we can see that scientific “facts” are not actually data imposed upon the scientist by reality, but rather mathematical models imposed upon reality by the scientist. The decision to average the results was not arrived at empirically. It was not dictated or even suggested by the empirical measurements taken. On the contrary, rather than being a finding at all, it is a formulation, ultimately determined by aesthetic philosophical notions, rather than empirical observation. In this sense, science is actually not empirical at all, and never could be.

A good example which may help to clarify this issue is the equation used to describe the motion of a pendulum, which says that the period of its swing is proportional to the square root of its length. Now, this equation assumes that the pendulum’s weight is a point (ie, infinitely small); that its string is tensionless; and that there is no friction on its axis. Such a pendulum never existed, and never could exist. Therefore, this law is not empirical, for it does not describe actual things—rather, it describes some imaginary “perfect” pendulum which has been invented as a non-empirical, non-physical philosophical idea. Physical pendulums, bizarre as it may seem, do not actually obey the laws of physics.

There is more to be said, though. When you perform your experiments so as to get results which you will average into a non-empirical, mathematical model which you call a “law” (which the universe nonetheless doesn’t actually follow), you face an even bigger problem. Consider that, on top of averaging the results, you also choose which ones you will average at all. How do you decide? Well, you assume that consistent results are to be expected! After all, it’s not reasonable for you to ignore results which are outside your arbitrary margin of error if you don’t presuppose that your results will be consistent in the first place. That is, you assume that if you had perfect observational abilities, you would always get precisely the same result.

But what justification do you have to assume that it is the aberrant results which are in error? What if all the other experiments were in error instead? Certainly it seems unlikely; your assumption seems reasonable; but I have already shown that intuition is totally useless for determining things like what is probable and rational, given a (so-called) empirical worldview. Indeed, how would probability even be determined in this instance without making a whole host of other unjustified, non-empirical assumptions? For example, why do you assume that only one of the results can be correct? Why do you not instead assume that, at that one particular point in time, the experiment yielded a different result, making the whole question of probability moot?

This gets down to probably the most fundamental principle in science: that of the uniformity of nature. You assume that the future will resemble the past, and that an experiment conducted in one location will yield the same result when conducted in another. Again, to prove the irrationality of science which you hold in such high regard, I need only ask: why? Uniformity must be true if any scientific theory is to be even considered plausible, because it is implicitly assumed by the scientific method upon which all theories are based; and yet it commits a basic logical fallacy. There is simply no reason, no justification, for the assumption of the uniformity of nature within your own worldview (when we look at the vastness of the universe, and its supposed age, really it doesn’t even make any kind of necessary intuitive sense). It is also obviously another non-empirical assumption.

Now, you may say that we can expect the future to resemble the past because that is what we have always observed to date. You may agree that it’s hypothetically possible that the future could suddenly be different—realistically, as far as you know, the laws of nature might radically alter at any instant, since there is no consistent and orderly God upholding them from one moment to the next. But, I imagine you would argue that this is very unlikely, because it has never happened before. You seem to have implied as much in your last statement.

But this is just the same fallacy again: probability isn’t measured this way. In fact, it is again unknowable as to whether the future will resemble the past! If the only way for you to justify the assumption of uniformity is to argue for it on the strength of its historically always having been so, then you are sunk, because this reasoning is openly fallacious by merit of its circularity—after all, the inference is only justified if you are already assuming that the future must be like the past!

But to even posit this much, you must first assume that your memory of the past is accurate, which again is an assumption justified only by your presupposition of the fact, and so constitutes (at best) question-begging. So not only can you not know that the future will be like the past; you cannot even know that the past has been like the past! Thus, the presuppositions which you hold as most fundamental to much of your knowledge-acquisition process are not only irrational, but obviously irrational. If you were to pursue the truly rational course, your worldview would immediately devolve into skepticism.

I am going to draw my statement to a close here. I have established a sufficient foundation now to present my final, complete refutation to your worldview in my next statement. I believe that statement 4 will be the last before our conclusions? Please correct me if you would like a different format. I am happy to accommodate you within reason, but I don’t want this debate to become too protracted.

To conclude then, I have so far shown firstly that the contradictions you allege to exist in Scripture are not what you claim, but appear that way only given ignorance of the text and prejudice against the normal method of textual criticism. In showing this, I have also established a precedent wherein to evaluate other supposed contradictions—that is, that any apparent incongruity is more likely to be caused by similar defects in your own analysis than by genuine errors in the text.

Secondly, I have shown that scientific theories do not describe reality as it actually is, and never can; that they are not actually empirical at all; and that they are founded upon assumptions which are rationally unjustified. Attempts to justify them result only in circular reasoning and other logical fallacies. The form of reasoning in the scientific method itself can be essentially represented as follows:

1. This object is spherical.
2. Billiard balls are spherical.
3. Therefore, this object is a billiard ball.

Thus, since the assumptions underlying all scientific reasoning are logically fallacious, it follows that all scientific theories are logically fallacious also.

In my final statement before the conclusion, I will draw out the implications of this as regards your ability to make knowledge-claims of any kind, showing why your worldview is necessarily false. In so doing, I will simultaneously demonstrate why the Christian worldview must be true.

Continued in part 4 »

Related posts:

1. “No one is righteous”…metaphorically speaking
2. A response to Glenn Peoples’s ‘No, I am not an inerrantist’