- Introductions:
- Restatement of theme:
- “If this issue was the reason a non-believer gave as their obstacle to Christianity, what would we say to them?”
- Theme verse: “When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart.” (Matthew 13:19)
- Topic for Today: Philosophy and the Christian
- Or, Who Cares About Metaphysics, Part II?
- (This is all borrowing heavily from Francis Schaeffer’s book He Is There and He Is Not Silent.)
- Review from last week:
- Philosophy (at least the practical and not purely academic kind) and religion deal with the same kind of questions. Francis Schaeffer would claim that we have the best answers out there to make sense out of reality—so why are we scared of philosophy?
- Metaphysics: Why the heck is anything here? Jean-Paul Sartre said, according to Schaeffer, that “the basic philosophic question is that something is there rather than nothing being there.” What did it start like? How does it all fit together?
- Francis Schaeffer pointed out that for all the stories there are about how and why stuff got here, they basically boil down to three choices:
- Nothing. It all started from nothing.
- No one really gets very far explaining this point of view, but I suppose you could try.
- “Impersonal” beginning. God isn’t distinct from creation, isn’t his own person. This is both the pantheistic ideas and the atheistic ideas, where the idea of “the Cosmos” replaces the idea of “god.” Easy to explain our desire for community, hard to explain why we see ourselves as individuals with purpose and meaning. We want to “be who we are created to be.” How did time and chance create this drive?
- What are some of the examples that we came up with last week?
- “Personal” beginning. This is what we are talking about today.
- The final possible answer is to have a personal beginning—a Creator or Creators.
- Within this answer, there are several discussions: Is there God or Gods? Do we know other characteristics that may be necessary for God?
- What different beliefs are out there that fit in this category?
- God or Gods?
- Having multiple gods does not give one absolutes. Schaeffer uses the example of the Greek gods and the Fates. Sometimes it seems as if the gods controlled the Fates, sometimes it seemed as if the Fates controlled the gods. Why? They really wanted ideals and absolutes—but it was really hard to define absolutes when the gods didn’t agree. So they tried the Fates—but that didn’t work because they weren’t gods. If there is something above your god(s), don’t you need to follow that?
- Bertrand Russell’s famous critique of Christianity is asking if “the difference [between right and wrong] is due to God’s fiat [decision] or is it not?” If there is some idea of good above God, than why do we worship Him? If God just arbitrarily chose what is “good”—then why do we call it “good”? Of course, this overlooks the possibility that God and goodness go together and are inseparable.
- For morality to make sense, it seems that there must be one infinite God in absolute power. Nothing else would suffice to really serve as what Schaeffer calls an “integration point”—something that we can really judge ourselves against, something to be able to determine our goodness by, something to see if we are living purposeful lives.
- This idea of “infinite” God makes the distinction between God and ourselves—He is infinite, no-one and nothing else is.
- What about the Trinity?
- Trinity is mostly unique to Christianity—I’ve heard that some Jews did believe in some Trinity-like ideas, if not well-defined. There does seem to be plenty of evidence for a God with a Spirit and a Son in the OT, especially the Psalms.
- If we did not have the Trinity, we would have had a God who needed to create in order to love and communicate—a God that needed us just as much as we needed Him.
- Conclusions
- Can you prove without a shadow of a doubt that Christianity is true? No. I don’t think you can. I think you can make a very good case to either be agnostic or a Christian, however. I think you can certainly make a very good case for Christianity being a very plausible answer. In the end, though, it comes down to faith. You can reject God pretty easily in your pride.
- Why are we looking at this, then? Two reasons, I guess. One, Christianity has some truly great answers, and we should not be afraid of the darkness but rather light the darkness with Truth. Second, I’ve found it very encouraging in my faith. I want to believe the Truth—not just follow something that I take for granted. And it is immensely encouraging to see that Christianity really does make sense. I think that’s very helpful as we encounter our world.
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