0 WHY I BELIEVE

By: Steve Hays

PART 1: A POSITIVE APOLOGETIC

 

The natural mind sees God in nothing,

Not even spiritual things;

The spiritual mind sees God in everything,

Even natural things.

—Robert Leighton

 

PART 2: I’m Glad You Asked!

I. Insight & Hindsight

Why am I writing this?  Over the years, I’ve had a number of college and seminary students approach me to ask me how I’d field this or that objection to the faith. In responding, my answer was naturally shaped by the form of the question. And this is fine as far as it goes.  But that doesn't really represent how I’d frame the questions and prioritize the issues if I were offering a positive defense of my own faith.  And so I’d like, for once, to take the initiative in setting the terms of the debate from my own point of departure.

Secondly, I’m at a point in life where it is worthwhile to take stock of my reasoning.  I became a Christian as a teenager, and I’m now a middle-aged man.  So I’ve passed through the most of the major phases of life, in consequence of which my outlook is pretty settled.

In addition, I’ve read widely and deeply in the fields of philosophy, theology, apologetics, philosophy of religion, science, philosophy of science, Bible criticism, comparative religion, comparative mythology, and atheism. I doubt that there are any major arguments pro or con that I’m not acquainted with, so I don't anticipate any intellectual revolutions in my thinking.  Having sifted through all this material, it’s time to distill it down to a few core questions and answers if not for the benefit of the reader, certainly for my own.

In that regard I need to say in advance what I do and do not intend to cover in this essay.  On the one hand, I don’t plan to rehearse all the traditional arguments for the Christian faith.  This omission doesn’t necessarily imply a rejection of such reasons.  Many of the arguments I’m leaving out of consideration enjoy considerable merit.[1]  But I don't want to swamp the reader in a sea of technicalities.  I'd like to keep this essay at the level of popular reading and personal reflection.  So I’m confining myself to arguments that I myself find especially appealing and compelling. The treatment is admittedly idiosyncratic.

0 An Apologetics Handbook

By: Steve Hays

I'm Glad You Asked!

Contents

1. Epistemology:

            (i) God-Talk

            (ii) Divine Silence

            (iii) Coherence of Theism:

                        (a) Divine Attributes

                        (b) Trinity

                        (c) Incarnation

            (iv) Freudian faith

2. Bible Criticism:

            (i) Miracles

            (ii) Mythology

            (iii) Contradictions

3. Science:

            (i) Creation

            (ii) Flood

            (iii) Physicalism

4. Ethics:

            (i) Problem of Evil

            (ii) Hell

            (iii) Holy War

            (iv) Original Sin

            (v) Predestination

            (vi) Euthyphro Dilemma

            (vii) Crimes of Christianity

            (viii) Christian Chauvinism

Preface

In Why I Believe, I presented a personal and positive case for my Christian faith. This essay is a sequel to that one, for here I field the major objections to Christian faith—some traditional, others of more modern vintage. But as before, I'm confining myself to the answers I favor, even though that does not exhaust all the good answers.  Interested readers are still encouraged to check out the bibliographies in the complementary essay.

I. Epistemology

1. God-Talk

Both inside and outside the Church there is often felt to be a peculiar difficulty with religious language.  This apparent problem has both an epistemic and ontological dimension. At the epistemic level, it is felt that if our knowledge derives from experience in general, and sensory perception in particular, and if God is not a sensible object, then whatever we may say or think or believe about God is a figurative extension of mundane concepts. 

At the ontological level, it is felt that if God is in a class by himself and apart from the creative order, then all our statements about God are vitiated by a systematic equivocation inasmuch as there is no longer any common ground between the human subject and divine object of knowledge.

What are we to say to these considerations? Regarding the epistemic issue, the first thing to be said is that this assumes a particular theory of knowledge.  So if this is a problem, it is not a problem peculiar to religious epistemology, but goes back to the ancient debates between empiricism and rationalism, nominalism and realism. If you are a Thomist, then this is a problem generated by your chosen theory of knowledge.  But if, say, you are an Augustinian, then you don't believe that all knowledge derives from the senses. Abstract objects are objects of knowledge without being perceived by the senses—at least on an Augustinian theory of knowledge.