dogmatics 41 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> Earlier you said that nature, reason and experience can only tell us about God but they can't tell us who He is. God's identity is known only through Jesus Christ. How then can we talk about the true God with nonChristians? Can we prove that He exists? >> We now move in the field of apologetics, if you want to say so. That is, we ask how can we in a rational way defend the Christian faith or destroy arguments that are brought against the Christian faith? Apologetics cannot prove the truth of Christianity, but it can do two things. It can, first, show that concepts and ideas that NonChristians have are not as rock solid as they think they are. And it can also show that Christianity is not simply some irrational babble. So what does it mean when we talk to unbelievers? What can we say? How should we talk about that, about the existence of God? You mention in your question that we had talked about general revelation, about the fact that God has revealed himself through nature to all of mankind so that they have a certain knowledge about God, that He exists and that He is all powerful or eternally powerful. And we have also talked about the fact that this natural revelation has been perverted. But what about those people who don't believe in God at all? I mean, at least with people who believe in some God, you can say well, that's right. I mean, you have at least something right. Now let's show you who the true God is. That leads us to the question of the proofs of the existence of God. Now, in Holy scripture we don't find much about proofs of the existence of God, because the existence of God is always presupposed. Rarely we find any reference to people who deny the existence of God. One famous reference is in Psalm 14. The fool says in his heart there is no God. But holy scripture does not try to prove the existence of God, but it rather proclaims who God is. It witnesses to Him. The proofs of the existence of God were nevertheless used later in Christian theology and we come here in a field where theology and philosophy kind of overlap. It's not specifically Christian to talk about the rational justification of the belief in God. For example, the Roman orator/philosopher/politician Cicero, in his book on the nature of the Gods, gives quite a few proofs or points that speak in favor of the existence of God. He talks about the order of the universe. He talks about the uniform motion of and the revolutions of the heavens that lead us to believe that there must be an organizing higher being. He puts it like that. When a man goes into a house, a wrestling school or a public assembly and observes in all that goes on arrangement, regularity and system, he cannot possibly suppose that these things come about without a cause. He realizes that there is someone who presides and controls. Far more, therefore, with the vast movements and phases of the heavenly bodies and these ordered processes of a multitude of enormous masses of matter which throughout the countless ages of the infinite past have never in the smallest degree played false is he compelled to infer that these mighty world motions are regulated by some mind. So here you have one classical argument from the order of the universe. Cicero also talks about prophecies and premonitions of future events. That proves that there must be a God. He says that since all people always believed in a God, or in Gods, therefore there must be a reality in this belief. He also thinks that exceptional occurrences in nature point to the existence of God: From the awe inspired by lightning, storms, hail, floods, pestilence, also unnatural monstrosities, human and animal, and also the appearance of meteoric lights. And he talks about the sympathies pervading the parts of the world, proving the operation of the divine spirit. So you have a whole assembly of different proofs, you want to say, in the discussion of the existence of the Gods in Cicero. Part of this reflection on the rational justification of the existence of God was adopted by Christian theologians, and so they came up with several proofs for the existence of God. There is first the cosmological, that since everything in this world has a cause, there must be a first cause. And that's what we call God. There was the tellulogical *** proof. That means that everything has a Tellus, that is essentially the argument of order in the universe. That since we observe order and design in the universe, there must be an entity that actually created that order, an entity that designed the universe. This argument is used nowadays, for example, in the debate about creation and evolution with the design argument, that the design of biological creatures is so complex that it points to a designer. There is another proof, which is very famous and probably the hardest to understand, that is the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God. It was first brought forth by Ansom *** of Canterbury in his book "Proslogium." *** His argumentation goes like that: God exists in the understanding. That is, I have a concept of God in my mind. Now debated is: Does He exist in reality or does He only exist in my mind? We cannot rule out that God exists in reality. God might exist in reality. That is, God is a possible being. Now, if something exists only in the understanding and might have existed in reality, then it might have been greater than it is. For that, we have to understand that Ansom *** defines God as the being to which nothing greater can be thought. So, if God is only -- has only existence in my mind, but not in reality, then I can think of a being which is greater than this God, that is this being has existence. That leads us into a difficulty that God might have been greater than He is. So, when we think God, God as the being than which a greater is not possible, we have to think that He exists. Because otherwise we get into a self contradiction in our thinking. Therefore, when we have the thought of God in our mind, it is necessary to think that He exists. I don't know if you think that's a compelling proof, but it stirred up philosophers for almost a thousand years. Is that true or is there a problem with that? And Ansom *** was debated in his time by a man called Gonelu *** who said: Well, if I think of a perfect island, that doesn't mean that that island exists. But that misses the point of Ansom's *** argument. An island is not the perfect -- a being which greater cannot be thought. An island is always limited. In that sense, the concept of God is unique. The problem of the argument, as a current philosopher has formulated, is Ansom's *** concept of God may be coherent and his principle that existence is a great making quality may be true, but all that follows from this is that no nonexisting thing can be Ansom's *** God. If we add to all of this the premise that God is a possible thing, it will follow that God actually exists. But the additional premise claims more than that Ansom's *** concept of God isn't incoherent or contradictory, it amounts to the assertion that something existing being is supremely great. And since this in part is the point of the argument that the argument endeavors to prove, the argument begs the question. It assumes the point that it's supposed to prove. Most philosophers today and also many theologians reject the ontological argument. What about the other arguments from causality and the theological argument? Also, these arguments of proofs with the existence of God have suffered from philosophers since the enlightenment. David Jume *** argued that you cannot prove the existence of God through causality, because causality is nothing that exists out there in the world, but is rather a way how we perceive things and bring things together. Causality exists in our mind solely. The theological argument was also rejected because all it can prove is that there might be some designer, but you cannot prove that there is an absolute God. Other arguments were brought up, and that is that the universality of morals or ethics proves the existence of a lawgiver. The German philosopher Emmanual Khunt *** used the moral argument in a different way. He said the idea of the highest good cannot be realized by man himself. Yet he discovers within himself the duty to work for this int ***. Hence he finds himself impelled to believe in the cooperation or management of a moral ruler of the world by means of which alone this goal can be reached. Since we find in ourself that happiness and virtue are a priority together, it is necessary that God exists, because in this life we see that virtue and happiness not always go together, but somewhere this idea must come from. Now, if you look at all these arguments, you might think that's a lot of philosophy and I'm not really interested in philosophy, so should I skip that simply? I think it's helpful to look at these arguments, again, because they show us the intellectual effort that was done in thinking how can we see God. And I -- although I do not think that they can prove the existence of God, I think that the cosmological argument, the cause of the argument from design, can do one thing. They can shatter a shallow and smug atheism. They can show that a dogmatic assertion of the nonexistence of God is exactly that. It's a faith. It's not simply science or the facts. And it can also show us that it's not meaningless to speak about God. So the arguments for the existence of God show us that it is possible to think God. The classical proofs in a certain way do not try to prove the existence of God, but rather showed that it is meaningful to talk about God. And as such we can use them, too, in conversations when we challenge people in their atheism. We can use these arguments, the cosmological argument, the Tellulogical argement, even the onotological argument to show that we have to think God as existent, and also the moral argument, that if we believe in some kind of absolute values, it at least makes it very likely --