S10 E9 - The Case For God: The Case for Theism

[Music] Hello everyone and welcome to episode 9 of this season on the Case for God. Jim it's been a challenging series in some ways because we've engaged with really difficult concepts. Certainly at times I haven't really been following what you've been saying Jim I have to be honest but it's been really helpful I think despite the fact that it's not always been an easy lesson. Yeah it's hard to get the right level with these arguments. Some people will think they've been too heavy. Others who are on the bleeding edge of the debates will know that sometimes I haven't dotted every eye or crossed every tea. But the good news is that we have completed all the main arguments for Theism. So if you've made a disfiring this season the hard work is over. Yeah because when we were sort of thinking about this season planning at the outset we thought of non-Christians as well perhaps thoughtful non-Christians who might be interested in engaging with these discussions and debates. But the arguments aren't just for non-Christians they're helpful for Christians too aren't they? I'm sure you know the old story about the two men who were being chased by a tiger. There's no point gasp the first man we will never outrun this tiger. I don't have to reply to his friend I just need to outrun you. So in our context it's sometimes the case that the Christian doesn't need absolute certainty. At this stage it can be enough to see that competitive world views like atheism or pantheism are in a much weaker position than the Christian position. So even if you aren't completely sold on every argument we've made this episode is going to show that Christianity isn't a much better person. It's a much better position than any of our competitors but it comes to outrunning the tiger of doubt. It's been a while since I'm not sure we'd be able to outrun a tiger. They are fast actually they're massive and fast and I know from your algorithm feeds you a lot of and all themed videos do you get much tiger content? Very much so. I follow Zion the tiger. OK. Zion the tiger has, he's very interesting. He lives in some adventure park. His handler is this American girl called Brittany and all Americans Brittany is relentlessly enthusiastic and optimistic. But Zion the tiger has a personality which is the polar opposite of his handler. So every morning you see these on these little reels. Every morning the guy approaches his Dan and in cherry tones tells Zion to come out and play and she promises them all sorts of fun and splash pull. But Zion is incredibly lazy. I mean he yons and groans and in response to every happy remark and eventually he lurches out of the Dan giving these legubrious mooring noises. I mean I find them hilarious. In fact I think he is my spur of animal. Yeah you told me about including animals in your social media feed some time ago but I remember you you mentioned it was basically penguins and baby elephants. So you're getting a whole diversity of animals. Well I have upgraded my feeds to include singing donkeys and clumsy pandas. I mean I know this sounds a little bit mad but it really helps dilute the negativity and the anger of political discourse on Twitter. But I know that I reveal my own spur of animal. What would yours be Ollie? Yeah I do love dolphins. I have this obsession with dolphins and red squirrels to my favorite animals. I don't know if you heard me talk about red squirrels before. No I think we'll remember that. But red squirrels I am. Can I go with red squirrel? I just think that I love the way they said it. That's not horse. I mean a horse is a noble and impressive animal but they're easily spooked. There's some deep psychology. There's some deep psychology there Jim. Wow okay I get off to go away and sort of ask chat GPT for some insight there. But I'll take it to be honest. The sources are you know. I like redpandas. There's a fantastic series of films on red pandas eating grips. And if you're ever sad just watch a redpand eating grip. Redpandas whereabouts within the world would you find a red panda where? I have no idea. Somewhere in the forest. I think I have seen them but they're lovely we think. Yeah they're sweet. Oh wow that's I feel like I've learned a lot about myself. A lot to process. Who needs controlling? A lot to process. Over the past five episodes Jim we've built this case for theism and we've discussed a whole variety of arguments including these from reason and consciousness. The calam argument about the origin of the universe the design argument the moral argument and then in our last episode we thought about the ontological argument first proposed by and some of canterbury in the 11th century. And all his arguments when taken together they sort of combined to give us a really compelling argument really compelling reasons for believing that God is an unembodied person who is perfect in power perfect in knowledge and goodness he's transcendent and self-sufficient and he exists necessarily he cannot not exist. So that is the case for theism but all the way back in episode two we discussed other belief systems that are available to us and you made the argument Jim that theism is only one of seven different world views that anyone on the planet can believe. Yeah there are only seven basic things that you can believe. No given the diversity of human thought over thousands of years that is a surprisingly small number but as we said in episode two lying underneath all that complexity we find only seven basic world views. And the seven a theism a theism a theism a theism finite God is in penentism pantheism and polytheism. Four of the seven a well man and three are a little bit more remade and if you think back to episode two this framework of seven world views is fair to everyone we aren't arbitrarily dismissing any particular belief system out of hand. Yeah so in one sense this framework acts a bit like an intellectual trap because no one gets to sit on the sidelines with an ironic smile here. Everyone has a word of you so if you reject theism even in the face of the strong evidence that we've presented in the last five episodes then you must choose one of the other six word views. Everybody has to believe one of the seven so I mean as we are argued in episode two agnosticism is not a viable option I'm not going to rehearse those arguments again so if you're tempted to take refuge in agnosticism go back and listen to episode two. Let's compare theism then with the other six possible world views so starting with polytheism polytheists believe in many different gods they propose a universe governed by multiple divine entities and that suggests that ultimate reality is diverse or even fragmented and the best known systems are Greek and Raymond gods and the gods found in popular forms of Hinduism. How does theism compare with polytheism? Okay I'm going to give four reasons why polytheism is inferior to theism but before I do that there is a really important difference between monotheism and polytheism that I need to highlight and the difference isn't just over the number of gods between one and many. In theistic thought God is transcendent he is a necessary being who is in a different category from the creation he made and that creation unlike God is a contingent thing. It doesn't exist necessarily but in polytheism the gods are part of the system of creation. Now Jim my listeners will be anticipating your favorite analogy at this point that of minister any seed which I'm still a little vague on I've never seen it on a menu at any restaurant I'm not sure it's a thing but I'm sure you're excited to crack it out. No no I am trying to avoid repeating that analogy even though it is brilliant if I say so many times. I'll just say that in theism God isn't another ingredient in the soup God is the chef. Okay. Now that distinction helps me make my first criticism of polytheism. I cannot explain the origin of the universe just about every polytheistic system explains the world by telling is a elaborate story about conflict between primordial gods so the Babylonian creation myth for example begins with two gods called Absu and time at who are fresh water and saltwater and they bear a number of child gods. One of them kills his father Absu which so enrages time at that she creates this set of monsters to fight the other gods. One of them the famous Marduk I think mentioned in scripture is chosen to battle against his mother and he wins the war and cuts Tiamat's body into using one half to create the sky and the other half to create the earth. Now the point of it that story is that there is stuff around from the very beginning that material stuff gets manipulated and organized through all these battles going on between the gods but the basic idea is more like chemical chemicals reacting to create new chemicals rather than a creation from nothing. So here's my point. Polytheism only tries to explain how the stuff of the universe gets arranged. It cannot explain the origin of the universe. In complete contrast, theism has a coherent origin story for the universe, a single eternal necessary being a rational mind perfect and power knowledge and goodness creates time, space and matter from nothing. My second criticism of polytheism is that it is wildly speculative. I mean let me quickly outline the creation myth of Greek pathology as told by Hesseod. In the beginning we are told there There was a god called Chaos, and Chaos lived in a sort of formless dark goo to use a theological term. And he used this darkness to form a giant bird called Nix. In some accounts, Nix is there from the beginning and she lays an egg that hatches to become Chaos. I guess that's the ultimate chicken and egg dilemma. But anyway, Chaos and Nix mate together and produce a son called Aribus. And Aribus then meets with Nix to produce Gaia. And we've heard a guy named New Ageers call her Mother Earth. Gaia then meets with one of her sons, a god called Uranus, to produce a set of beings known as the Titans. Now Uranus was a very bad father, so Gaia creates this gigantic stone sickle and persuades her son, Kronos, to kill his father. Now excuse my directness here, but Kronos uses this stone sickle to castrate his father and he hurls his genitals into the sea. And that action led to the birth of Aphrodite. Some listeners may have seen that, you know, it's a really famous painting with Aphrodite standing on a sea shell. It's called the birth of Venus. Anyway, Kronos then meets with his sister, but he is so threatened by the children who emerge from that relationship that he eats them all apart from the god we know who is called Zeus. Now, my intention here is not to mock those beliefs, because in the minds of intelligent people, those stories represented philosophical ideas. And here's my question. How could anyone ever know if they were true? How might we know if Nix gave birth to Chaos or Chaos created Nix from darkness? Now I contrast all that, elaborate speculation, with the parsimonious explanation of Theism, a single creator who has left his evidence of his rationality and goodness. Now you think back to the design argument, the arguments from reason and consciousness of the moral argument. Theism has evidence and good arguments to back up its claims. Theism has done. Wow. Yeah, there's a lot of log going on there. I love your ability to be understood, Covert. That was quite tail. The third reason why polytheism fails is that it leads to moral conflict, which gods morality should we follow, the god of war or the god of love? Each god represents a different moral perspective, so there can be no single objective moral standard from which all our moral GTs can then be derived. That was actually a practical problem in the ancient world. Worshippers had to be very careful how they balanced conflicting loyalties to their various gods. Anyway, the final criticism of polytheism is that it cannot give a coherent kind of meaning. Theists say that a maximally great being created this universe for a purpose. Consequently, he has undied the physical universe with patterns of meaning so we can come to understand life's purpose and significance and value. But the fragmented metaphysics of polytheism can offer nothing but a never-ending stream of cosmic squabbles between these petulant, finite gods. So, any for all these reasons, I think polytheism fails as a word of view and it isn't just Christian philosophers who dismiss it. Plato did. So did Aristotle. And Islam, of course, is scaring about polytheism with good reason, I believe. It's not compared with another of its six competing worldviews, the belief system called pantheism. We came across pantheism in our last season when we talked about Hinduism and Buddhism. Both those religions are complicated mixtures of ideas. Back to Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism are really more like polytheism. But the Advaita Vedanta School of Hinduism and Theravada Buddhism are genuinely pantheistic. Pantheism teaches that there is only one thing. So all the distinctions we make between things, those are just delusions. In the ultimate sense, there is only one thing. And that's the thing called Brahman, which is the impersonal essence of the cosmos. It's sometimes called the absolute impersonal. You might remember us using that term back in our series on world religions and cults. So the pantheists see no distinction between God and creation. Everything is God and God is everything. I just want to reinforce a point you just made. When pantheists talk of God, they don't mean a person. The absolute is impersonal. It isn't even conscious. The relationship between the absolute impersonal and the physical world does need a bit of explanation. Pantheism sees the physical world, the stuff we can see and touch as an emanation from the one absolute. Just like the way the rays of the sun emanate from the sun itself. What is that I'd to mean for us as individual extension? Some Hindu philosophers explain pantheism by giving the illustration of a "rain drop falling into the ocean". And as it falls, the rain drop is an individual thing with a specific shape and density and speed. But when it is absorbed into the ocean, it loses its individuality. So does the rain drop still exist? Well, yes, no, says Hinduism. The molecules that made up the rain drop are in the ocean, but the individual drop does not. So if you apply that to you and me, in pantheist thought, it means that our sense of personal identity is an illusion. In reality, there are no "I die" relations. There is no "you and me". There's just the one ocean of impersonal bliss. And the big problem humans have, we are told, is that we confuse this finite world with all its messy distinctions with the ultimately real world of the one. What is this stack up against theism? Pantheism versus theism as a world you had of a stack up against each other? Okay, I'm going to make four criticisms of pantheism. First, it requires, as I just said, it requires us to believe that everything we value is an illusion. Even our own sense of ourselves as distinct persons, the instinct that we all share that we are enduring selves, that we are told is an illusion. The love we have for others is an illusion. Suffering is an illusion. One for the pantheist is the dissolving away of everything that we think is real. The second big criticism is that evil flows necessarily from God. Remember that pantheism equates God with everything. Everything that is emanates from the one. So that clearly implicates God in evil and suffering. In fact, evil becomes a part of the divine. At the very least, the concepts of good and evil dissolve away with everything else as we encounter the one. The third problem I have is that the God of pantheism is actually an incoherent idea. Because the pantheist identifies God with the universe, it's not possible to attribute coherent properties to God, like we've talked about omnipotence or amnesians, for example. In fact, the pantheist God is changeable and contingent. I can't trust that with the theist's claim that God is this maximally great and necessary being perfect and power, knowledge and goodness. The final criticism is that it ends up dissolving logic itself away. Remember, I don't remember in our episode on Hinduism. I quoted a Hindu scholar who's too claimed logic itself melts in the full blaze of divine incandescence. Now, the problem with that idea, this marvelous rhetoric, but the problem with it is that the whole thing refutes itself because the pantheist claims that his conception of God cannot be conceived. And that's what I'm saying. A drawing cannot be drawn. So if compared theism with polytheism and pantheism, our third competing worldview is this thing called pantheism. What actually is that and how does it compare with theism? If pantheism means all is God, then pantheism means all is in God. Okay? Pantheism says that creation is within God. God contains it, but it is not limited to it. So pantheist worldviews teach that God and the universe are identical. We just thought about that. There's just the one. But the pantheist worldview is more like saying that God is a soul and the universe is his body. So pantheism might be considered to be like a sort of halfway house between pantheism and theism. But there's one important feature of pantheism that I want to talk about. It proposes that both creation and God himself evolve over time. So think of the theory of evolution. And then apply that to God himself to the concept of God. In some pantheist models, God has two poles, you know, a bit like a North Pole and a South Pole. And at one pole, God is actual. And at the other pole, he is potential. And as time progresses, we are told God moves himself from potential to actual. And how then does pantheism compare with theism as a worldview? Okay, I think it has most of the flaws of pantheism and in some unique problems of its own. Some shares this idea with pantheism that the physical world emanates from God, like the rays of light from the sun in one it's external in the other it's internal. So the distinction in both cases between creator and creation gets blurred and that has disastrous consequences. First, that evil flows from God. Pantheism usually treats God in a more personal sense, but that means makes things worse. Because now we must believe that evil resides within the personal being called God. I said earlier that pantheism leads to an incoherent view of God because of its blurring of the creator creation divide. It means we can't attribute coherent properties to God like omnipotence or omniscience. But pantheism gets into eating greater trouble here because God himself is evolving so we can't attach any timeless properties to him. But in my mind, the biggest problem with pantheism is that the whole notion of God evolving from potential to actual makes no sense. I mean, that's imagine as true for us. moment, okay? So at the moment let's imagine God is 50% of what he could be at this point in time. That means in some time earlier he was only 25% of what he could be and before that 1%. In fact, if this evolutionary idea is true, God must have started off as nothing but potential, in other words in the beginning he wasn't actually real. Now compare that concept of God with theism, the eternal, necessary, maximally great being, perfect and power, knowledge and goodness, self-sufficient transcendental. It's interesting that all three of the competing world views that we've talked about so far get into trouble because they blur the distinction between creator and creation. In a few moments we'll discuss the main rival to theism and that's atheism but there are a couple of other world views that compete with theism and a kind of like a truncated version of theism. We can deal with them, hopefully fairly quickly. Let's talk about deism and then let's follow that with discussing finite godism. Deism is basically the idea that the universe was created by a divine agent who then went off on holiday and has never been seen since. He is the absentee landlord of the universe. Deism is very similar to theism in terms of its explanation of the origin of the universe and how does it compare in overall terms with theism? Three fairly obvious criticisms can be aimed at deism. The first is that it reduces god to an aloof, disinterested intelligence. But a maximally great being should be perfect in his relational qualities, like loves, for example. Deism's god is a cold fish who winds the mechanism of nature up and then abounds it. Now that leads to the second criticism. In theism god creates the word for a purpose. He invests his creative energies into the world. He intervenes in history. He reveals himself to us because he has a purpose for us. The deist god makes no sense to me. I mean why go to all the trouble of making this world if he is no purpose for it? That's irrational. And remember rationality is all the deist god is supposed to have. The final problem is that deism cannot grind objective morals because the deist god never reveals anything about himself other than his intelligence. So how can we explain good in evil? How do we know our moral duties and obligations? The truth about deism is that it was invented by philosophers who wanted to ditch objective morals but who needed an explanation for the universe's origin. So once it completed this work of creation we're told the deist god was carried off stage so that we humans could get on with our own lives. The other truncated form of theism is this world we called finite godism. Can you tell us about what that is and how it stacks up against theism? Finite godism is also close to theism. I like your term. These two ideas are truncated forms of theism. And finite godism usually affirms god as an eternal, necessary and all good being. He's transcendent and self-sufficient. But finite godists deny that god is all powerful and all knowing. Now the best known form of this world view is a thing called open theism. And open theists say that god can't know the future because there are no facts to be known at a stage. And they say that god can't be blamed therefore for the evil in the world because he is not all powerful. So the holocaust happened because god could not have stopped it even if he wanted to. Now we need to be really really careful here. Let me say clearly I reject open theism completely. But on the other hand, I disagree with Luther's view that god's power is not limited even by reason or logic. I think that god can do all things that are logically possible. So god even though he's all powerful cannot create a square circle or a married bachelor. And the point I'm making here is going to become crucial when we discuss the single greatest objection to Christianity and that is the problem of evil. I'm going to discuss that on Episode 11. So I think it's entirely orthodox to define omnipotence as god's ability to do anything that is logically possible. But finite godism goes much farther than that. It says that god cannot do things like stop the holocaust even though those things are logically possible. So finite godism, while it may have been invented to, you know, in an attempt to protect god from being blamed for evil, it ends up with this impudent god who sits on the sidelines ringing his hands together, unable to do anything to stop bad things from happening. And that doesn't sound like a maximally great being to me. It actually makes very little sense, I think. If god is powerful enough to create the world and powerful enough to bring it to an end, why isn't he powerful enough to intervene when he wants to? So that brings us to atheism and we've discussed five alternatives to theism so far, polytheism, pantheism, pantheism, and then these two truncated versions of theism called "theism and finite godism". But for most of our listeners, the only real alternative to theism is probably atheism. Let's imagine that an atheist has listened to the previous eight episodes of this season. How might you convince them that theism is a more rational belief than atheism? Well, if an atheist has listened to all previous episodes, I want to thank them for the resilience and courtesy. But in a sense, we've been leading up to this precise moment ever since episode 1, only. So what I want to do is just walk through the arguments very quickly against atheism that have emerged so far in this series. In episode 3, we talked about the origin of reason. Why can we be confident that our rational faculties are able to discern truth? My fears say that the rational god who designed and made the universe is the same god who designed and made our minds, our minds and reality fit together like a spanner in a bolt. But if there is no god, why on earth should we think that our cognitive faculties are able to discern the deep intellectual structures of reality? For the naturalist, our brain is no different from our pancreas. They just both exist to help us survive, and that's it. So as we saw in that episode, Alvin Planting argued that if naturalism and evolution are both true, then no one has the right to believe that they are true, because those two theories undercut our confidence in our own cognitive faculties as truth-determined instruments. Then we discussed the origin of the universe, and we saw there are compelling scientific reasons for believing that the universe had a beginning. If you're an atheist, you must believe in the widely speculative idea called the multiverse. But even multiverse models require a finite point in the past for a beginning. Then we dived into the depths of philosophy in that episode, and we discovered there are really powerful philosophical arguments that demand that the universe had a beginning. You can't have an infinite regressive events in space-time. It's logically impossible. So we're forced to conclude that the universe had a beginning. But now the Kalam argument really kicks in. If the universe had a beginning, then it must have a cause. That caused by definition must be outside of space and time, in other words, it must be eternal and unembodied. And that leaves us with only two options. Either the universe was caused by an abstract object like the number 7, or by an unembodied personal mind. The abstract objects are causally inert, so the universe must have been caused by an eternal, immensely powerful, personal mind. Then in episode 5, we went on further and we discussed the argument from design. The fine tuning of the universe is regarded by atheist scientists as the strongest of all the arguments for theism. We saw that the multiverse theory provides no escape for the atheist here. In fact, the multiverse theory makes the fine tuning argument even stronger. And the specified complexity that we see in nature is a hallmark of true design, not just a parent design. We talked a lot about the digital code in DNA that cannot be explained by physics and chemistry. Information in all of our experience has only ever been produced by minds. In episode 6, we discussed consciousness. And consciousness is unlike anything else in the universe. Our thoughts have intentionality. There is always about something. We have private access to our mental states. Every thought or sensation has a different texture, a unique, what is it like, quality? How does atheism explain consciousness? Well, consciousness cannot be explained by the brain alone. My brain never gets happier sad. The mind is not the same thing as the brain, but the mind cannot be produced from material stuff. Matter cannot produce mind. So as you say, how do we explain the existence of this immaterial substance called the mind or the soul? Nathiasim provides the best explanation for the mind. Atheists have proposed two solutions, but neither works. Reductive materialism is falling out of favour even among atheist scholars. And the other proposal, the thing called property dualism, explains nothing. It's just a name. In episode 7, we discussed the moral arguments. Most of us are moral realists, so we think killing a child for fun is morally wrong in any possible world. We consider that action to be morally wrong, but if we are moral realists, then we must either be fierce or Platonism. But Platonism will never get us from is to ought. It can describe moral values, but only fearsome can explain the ideas of moral obligations and duties. That logic is so compelling all either that atheists have spent centuries trying to deny moral realism. The two most popular attempts we thought about were cultural relativism and sociobiology. And we saw in that episode that neither of those attempts works. Cultural relativism can be dismissed with two words, Nazi Germany. And the evolutionary argument forces us to believe that raping a child is not objectively wrong. We have just been fooled by our genes into believing that. If the evolutionary Your process was run again. then RIP might well be regarded as a good thing. Because in the end, everything reduces to a survival mechanism. So the moral argument provides a compelling reason for believing that God is the source of objective moral values. Last week we discussed Anselms, Ontological Argument. There is a possible world in which a maximally great being exists. By maximally great, we mean perfect in power, knowledge and goodness. A transcendent and self-sufficient being. But this maximally great being cannot be limited to just one possible world. If he is in fact maximally great, then he must be maximally great in all possible worlds. This actual world is one of our possible worlds. Therefore, there must be a maximally great being in this actual world. For a long time whenever I heard that argument, I dismissed it as a sort of card trick. But neither God older, I think it does have real power and it makes life very difficult for the atheist. The real power of the ontological argument is that there is only one escape from it. And that's to deny the first step, because the second and third steps are really uncontroversial. And the first step is that it is possible that a maximally great being exists. Now that puts the atheist in a terrible bind. He now not only needs to deny that God exists, he has to say that it is impossible for God to exist. He has to say that the concept of God is in the same category as a Rhine Square or a Mary Bachelor. So anyway, that is the cumulative kiss for theism. I want to go back to our earlier conversation about the two men being chased by the tiger. But let's say now that there are seven men being chased. We'll call them Theism, Polytheism, Pantheism, Penetism, Deism, Finite Goddism and Atheism. All seven are being chased by the tiger of doubt. Which band would you rather be? Which argument if you like has the best legs? My point is that you might not be 100% convinced that Theism is true at a stage. But it runs stronger and faster than any of the others. And you remember you cannot opt out of the rest. There are only seven things you can believe. So I suggest you that Theism is the best of the bunch. It feels like the strongest, the most rational, contender. Now as we shall see next week, if you accept Theism, then you only have three choices. Become a Jew, become a Muslim or become a Christian. So next week at long last we get to make the case for Christian Theism. And once we've done that, we are going to examine the two biggest objections to Christianity, the problem of evil and the hiddenness of God. But for now, we are done. Fantastic, Jim. That was a really excellent summary of a lot of what we've been discussing in this series so far. And with all this talk of Tigers, Jim, I assume the clasic piece of music will have an animal theme. I did toy with I of the tiger, probably. That would be excellent. But it's just too awful to inflict in anyone. I've gone with a lovely piece by Sasson. It's called the Swan. That'll work. That'll work. It's written for piano and cello. And anyone who has made it through this episode deserves a moment of relaxation. So make yourself a cup of tea, cut a slice of butter cake, and put your feet up the next three minutes. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]