Kant’s moral argument & the Categorical Imperative

20th, Defendingfaith, 2-10-10

Kant’s moral argument & the Categorical Imperative

Early on in this series there was mentioned the revolutionary impact of Immanuel Kant’s critic of the traditional argument for the existence for God. That watershed event was in his book ‘The Critic of Pure Reason.’ He was agnostic in the ability to prove if there is the existence of God through theoretical thought even though he was a theist. ‘The Critic of Practical Reason’ was another book where he discussed more practical ways of proving His existence. Sproul likes say, “one the one hand Kant v was to have ushered God outside the front door of the house, he then runs around to the kitchen and opens up the back door to let Him in.” In his ‘Practical’ book he gave his famous moral argument for the existence of God. Which we are going to look at. But first let us look at some moral arguments from the New Testament.

Paul and Romans meaning


When Paul writes to the Romans from Corinth in the first chapter [which we worked on in a prior lesson], he says the invisible things are known by the things which are made. Now going to a later part of chapter 1 he is making an indictment against the whole human race in their fallen and corrupted state, he says in v28, “even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a debased mind, to do those things which are not fitting. To do those things which are, 1. Unrighteousness, 2.…etc.” It is not an exhaustive list but he catalogues many of the ways in which human beings violate each other with immoral behavior. But the kicker is in v32, “Who [those humans that practice] knowing these things that doing them are deserving of death, do the same and approve of those others who do them also.” God, therefore, has revealed His character to all creatures. Every human knows that God is right and commands from us to know the difference from right and wrong. We know how we ought to behave sexually. We know that we ought not rob from others or murder or be malicious etc. We know that they are wrong. Yet despite our knowing that we don’t want God in our minds eye. We behave this way and yet we approve of this even knowing this is wrong. We enlist the support of other people and encourage participation by others. Name any moral transgression and you will find some group militating for it’s acceptance and tolerance.


Now in chapter 2:12 he says also…{not written]


He says that not only does he give the law to Israel but he also writes his law in the heart of every creature that is born. The proof that He does this is the apparatus that we have called a ’conscientious.’ It is part of the constituent makeup of every human being. Conscience’s can be corrupted and seared and callused and all the rest. At the extreme, If anyone is devoid of a conscience we call them a sociopath. Doing wicked things without feeling of guilt. So to recapture what we are saying is that God bears witness to Himself by planting His moral law in the minds of every human creature. There will be many who say it is not a conscience but either a taboo, or Freud’s notion to freedom and sexual liberty, or puritanical leanings or Victorian constraint, but, the true conscience will not go away. Everywhere in any continent is the construct of an ethical moral structure which is a necessary for social interaction in society and civilization to work.


So in keeping with today’s society some have called it a ‘post-Christian society, some ‘neo-paganism’ but Sproul would call it ‘neo-barbarism’. Meaning that at least 50% act amorally. Including educated barbarians which are apart of the moral revolution in our time. But you cannot extinguish the conscience.

Kant, The Critic of Practical Reason


Now is where Kant’s moral argument comes in. He said it is a universal phenomena that every single person has a sense of ‘oughtness.’ We might call it an internal native sense of right and wrong. He used the phrase the ‘Categorical Imperative’ is a absolute command or duty and requires and obligates them to behave in a certain manner. You can deny it, you can flee from it but you can’t get rid of it. And this leads to the conundrum that you cannot solve for is guilt. When someone says they are an atheist, Sproul will stop and ask them what do you do with your guilt? He has yet to find someone who says they don’t have any. And when each of us knows the other knows that each of us have this, we move onto another plane of speaking about problems and such.


Now Kant says that guilt comes when we fail to do our duty, what we are morally obligated to do. In his reasoning he came to this from a definition of transcendental, which is key to his whole approach of philosophy. This Transcendental approach, even his epistemology, of how do come to knowledge at all, was very innovative. He didn’t say how does knowledge take place. He didn’t start out even saying knowledge is possible. He starts out with a question. If knowledge is possible what would have to be? What are the necessary ingredients to make knowledge possible? He then constructs his philosophy upon this by transcending or getting above the problem and wrestles with the questions of possible knowledge. Saying that if it is possible, what would have to be and proceeds on that premise.


So when he comes to the question for the moral argument for God he comes to this place of a ‘universal sense of oughtness. Now, Kant says, it maybe a glitch in the composition of human beings and as the nihilist would argue, that moral sense is meaningless. And as such, we really should get rid of it because it has no significance. So Kant is saying here that he doesn’t know if it is meaningful but if it is meaningful what would have to be and take place. What would be necessary for true ethics and morality to be, that which imposes obligations on each human for this to be meaningful? He asks another question from the practicality of an objective standard behavior, that in the final analysis, if it is not there really, then culture and society is impossible. Laws, are then, by shear preference and is none other than might makes right or the law of the jungle. Which after some time must destroy civilization. Which is close to where we are today as a society. Dostoevsky said that if there is no God then all things are permissible. If there is no ultimate ground for rightness, then all things have to have permission. Then, after this, it is just a battle over preferences. My preference over your preference. Similar to a time when ‘everybody is doing what is right in their own mind.’ Which brings conflict which eventually brings warfare between states, borders, husbands and wife’s etc. There are no preset rules that have any foundation to the creature.


Kant is acutely aware of this and he knew what was at stake here in his philosophical questioning. No less than Western Civilization was to be defined by this.


So he asked another question; what is necessary for the Categorical Imperative to be meaningful? The first thing for this to be meaningful is justice. For ultimately if crime pays then there is no practical reason to be virtuous. There is no reason but to be selfish. There must be justice involved to reward right behavior and punish bad actions. Then he asked the question as to what would be necessary for justice to take place? Well if this were to be so then you would have to have life after death. Because we know that this world does not dispense justice perfectly. There are innocent people who perish at the hands of the guilty. The OT writes of the wicked prospering and the righteous suffering. That can only happen in an environment where justice is not perfectly carried out. Since in this world there are only approximations of justice then you must have life after death. 1. So we have to survive the grave to find true justice.


But you may have in the next life the same results as you find right now. 2. So along with this you have to also have a judge that is morally perfect and right. If the judge who ultimately judges is not perfectly right then he may render imperfect justice. Because he is bribable, corruptible, selfish and on and on. Above reproach and corruption. But suppose you had a judge who was upright and he was doing the best he had in him but he didn’t have complete knowledge and because of these limitations he makes mistakes. He errs by virtue of working from limitations.


So the third factor is he must be Omniscient and know all of the facts. So now, the judgment that is rendered is without error. So now you have 1. Life after death 2. Final judgment 3. A judge who is perfectly right and knows everything. Will that now ensure justice? Not yet! There is still one more element that has to be present in order to insure that justice prevail. 4. He must have the power to enforce his judgment. If he were restricted in anyway, by some outside agency, to bring true justice bear it would not be possible for justice. So the last feature is he must be omnipotent. Kant his arguing transcendentally that your sense of ‘oughtness’ is going to matter, that means you have to matter. It means you have to survive the grave - you have to be held accountable for everything you do in your life. Every deed, thought, virtue that you left undone is known by one who is not blind in any way and holy and perfectly good, and is strong in power to make this perfect judgment.


So, morality, if it is true, makes the affirmation of God a practical necessity. Kant said, ‘we must live as if there is a God, because if there isn’t, we have no hope for civilization. The dissidents who came after him said that even though this sounds grim, all is still meaningless and there is no hope. But most people who don’t want to believe in this moral God are working off of the moral capital inherent in the God. No, they don’t want God but they want morality. Which will bring them significance and a place for their desire for fairness. But Kant says through this argument that you can’t have both.

The God of the Bible versus the God of the Greek philosophers

19th, Defendingfaith, January 11, 2010

The God of the Bible versus the God of the Greek philosophers

Over this series we have been looking for a sufficient reason to account for reality as it is. In the last for sessions we have looked at four possibilities for one could look at reality. We came to see that it was not illusion and it was not that reality is self-created. Of the last two on deals with a self existent eternal “something” and the other deal with a self existent eternal “transcendent being.” In philosophical terms transcendence means a higher order of being. We left this last session with the question the notion if we come to this understanding it is a long way from the ‘personal being’ we encounter in Judeo-Christian scripture. All we have been able to establish so far is something akin to the ‘God of the philosophers.’ An abstract concept of a ‘seeb.’ That leaves us with two serious problems that we have to look at briefly. 1. The differences of relationship between what we have established so far and what is promoted in the ‘God of the Bible’ and 2. How do we get from a seeb to a personal God. We will start with the first one.


In the early church Tertullian was noted for saying, “I believe because it is absurd.” Tertullian at that point was trying to show the radical difference between the God of the Bible and Greek philosophy. He raised a rhetorical thought of ‘what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens‘? and his rhetorical answer -- Nothing. There is no real point of contact between the God of Israel and the vagueness of principles found in the Greek philosophers. So this objection to dealing with this question was held by early Christians but also in 19th century with the liberal school of theology. And certain of these schools objected and said that early Christians were corrupted by this intrusion of Greek philosophy. You can go back to the council of Nicea where the Trinity was defined. Stating, as they did in Nicea, that God was One in essence and Three in person were using categories to define the Trinity and the two natures of Christ, the term Homo-usesious, was laden with Greek concepts. These 19th century liberal’s said we should break free of the strangle hold of this philosophy that was apart of the theologians of that time period. This view has made enormous inroads into the contemporary evangelical church of today where we have this new sense of the rejection of systematic philosophy because it seeks to have a rational coherent understanding of the whole scope of scripture. Today’s churches fight against the same concepts as they did in general. Because they say the systematician imposes a philosophical thread on the bible to fit into a preconceived system that is borrowed, they say, from the Greeks and their philosophy.


Sproul, with a smile, says that he is a systematic professor and he ‘represents’ that remark. He here’s these criticisms all the time. But Sproul says that his task is never to impose a foreign system on the scripture and then force the scripture to fit its form. But rather what true systematizing try to do is to look at the whole scope of scripture and have a coherent understanding by finding the system of thought that IS in the Bible. That does presuppose that when God speaks He speaks coherently. It presupposes that God has given us minds that can understand coherently what He gives. In rational measures and not absurd ways of thinking which are disjointed and irrational. Yet this very mainline anti-systemic concept today is linked to this antipathy that people have to Greek philosophy.

God the Holy Spirit chose the Greek language


This is a must to understand: that for better or worse, God the Holy Spirit chose the Greek language to have the New Testament written. And as long as that is the language then it will always be with us. In terms of our understanding the gospel. It doesn’t mean that you interpret the scripture, the new testament in the Greek language, in terms of Greek philosophy. No, the concepts developed come from the Hebrew world. They were simply communicated through the Greek language. It is true that the Hebrew language tends to be more ‘imaginative, more pictorial and graphic than abstractions, it would be a mistake and an insult to the Jews to say that the Greeks were coherent but the Hebrew’s were incoherent. The Hebrew mind was rational and sought to be coherent. The mind was of supreme importance to the Jewish understanding of the things of God right along with the Greeks.


A. Having conveyed this we are still left with the problem of concepts in Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, and the ideas put forth in Christianity. Where Aristotle defined God as 1. thought -- word and thinking was his cause. 2. He defined God as the unmoved mover or the first cause of all things. 3. He says that God doesn’t voluntarily create but creates out of necessity but remains completely remote and impersonal and removes Himself from his creation. 4. All human beings, by nature, desire to know. 5. All human beings, by nature, desire to know.
B. While the Bible and Christianity describe God, even in the first sentence of the Bible, 1. as one who acts to create all that is. 2. He acts in a reasonable propulsive manner to bring things to pass. 3. That which is created is sustained and committed to. 4. It is a story of creation and redemption. Is intimately involved with the affairs of history. 5. He is committed to managing the universe.


There are then, sharp differences in these views of God beyond the ‘first mover‘ similarity.


There is also the concept in philosophy of the Logos referred to as the ‘word or logic.’ For Greeks it functions as an abstract idea that is necessary for giving order and harmony to the world. Where as in biblical Christianity the Logos is the incarnate word of God and a person. A great difference in regards to the pre-Socratic’s and their representation.


So when R.C. Sproul hears Christians object to this type of apologetic in that it only gets us to a “first cause.” To the front door of Lyceum School of Aristotle where this eternal self existent being is demonstrated. Which those who object will say that all you have done is find Aristotle’s God. And on this regard of this assumption agreement will reject the process of apologetics that Sproul has been laboring on. So Sproul has to remind people that one of the first principles in the ‘doctrine of God’ in systematic theology is the “incomprehensibility of God.” Which means that none of us, either now or at anytime, will have an exhaustive and comprehensive knowledge of God. Being that God is infinite in His excellence and we are finite we will not be able to have limitless understanding.


The case against the construction of a self existent eternal being is false and the conclusions are false because it is not the compete picture; but it is just a partial picture. The question Sproul asks is do we have to have a comprehensive understanding of God to have ‘true’ understanding of God?
So you go back to our 1st principle and do you have to have total comprehension? For we certainly don’t have or can have full comprehension. Partial knowledge doesn’t mean that our principle is not true. It is true as far as it goes. We grant that what we have achieved so far in our reasoning process is that we have got to a seeb and that is part of what the Bible reveals to us about the character of God. It discloses that He is eternal and self existent and the one responsible for what is made. This position is the same as the biblical notion of who God is.


At this point, where we have come to in stating this claim, a man like Aristotle would say - amen. Detractors, is Aristotle wrong in his reasoning? Of course not. Just because he is a 2,400 year old pagan philosopher and agrees that there has to be a seeb does not vitiate the truth of the Christian claim of the same insistence. The fact is he agrees with the claim. Therefore, the both agree that there has to be a first cause, that first cause has to be self existent, that first cause has to be pure actuality, that first cause is caused by pure being, the first cause has to be eternal. So thank you very much Aristotle we agree with you, you agree with us on the cardinal point - which is only a partial point - of our knowledge of God. But this partial point is crucial to our knowledge of God because, ladies and gentlemen, precisely this aspect of Christian understanding of God that is constantly under attack by atheistic systems of thought. Where atheists attack Christianity is at the point of Creation or at the point of a Self existent eternal Being. So Sproul thinks there is great value in establishing the faith as well as the reason that demonstrates for the logical necessity for having a seeb. So the battle field over which the doctrine of God wages is one where the Christian comes out victorious rather surrendering so much of his truth claims.


We are not playing philosophical games


In summation, Sproul is granting that getting to the conclusion that there must be a seeb does not get us to a full understanding of God or even as much as the God of the Bible supplies. But what this does is under gird the most crucial aspect of the doctrine of God that the bible does reveal. The bible reveals, along with our agreement with Aristotle, that there is a self existent eternal being. We are not doing this for philosophical gamesmanship we are defending crucial aspects of the biblical doctrine of God, to this point.


How do you go from abstraction to personality?


The question then is how do you get from a self existent eternal ‘something’ to a personal God. Well that will take a more complex and difficult investigation. One of the most famous arguments for the existence of God is the ‘teleological’ argument.' From ‘telos’ for end, puporse or goal. The argument from design. We should remember that 2 of the greatest skeptics in history were Immanuel Kant and David Hume and they both thought that the strongest argument from history was found in the Teleologic argument. Kant said that he couldn’t get past 2 things, “the starry skies above and the moral law within.” Kant was not only a philosopher but a scientist. He was overwhelmed by the manifest evidence of design in the world of nature. It is extremely hard to speak of design in nature without begging the question of a ‘designer.’ Saying, “can you have design unintentionally.” A contemporary philosopher Anthony Flew has a story about explorers going through uncharted territory and cutting their way around dense brush and rainforest and came to this opening with a beautifully manicured garden. Rows and rows laid out in perfect order and symmetry. They said there must be a gardener somewhere and when they couldn’t find one they speculated that he was gone or invisible or something. Flew says that what is the difference in a God and no God that can be found. Well, the obvious answer is the garden. The story didn’t account from the garden that it had design. All enlightenment philosophers couldn’t get away from this argument and went from Christian theism to Deism. Because they couldn’t naysay the implications of design. For they say it ran like a perfectly constructed clock. So whether it is the eye or anything else, the designs had intelligence purpose to them and couldn’t find an answer for to cover their thinking. Going back to Aristotle where he said, ‘ the single most important characteristic for personality is ‘intention.’ Something to act with intention needs a mind and a faculty of choosing what the mind plants. The essence of intention is found in mind and will.’ Impersonal forces have no mind or will and cannot design anything. When we try to reduce God to a mere force of unintelligence and unintentional is to escape judgment of the indictment and try to find an escape hatch.


You cannot have purpose accidentally. You cannot have intelligence from unintelligence. Impersonality cannot produce personality. For that would be unintentional intention. Which bears to our possibility of Self Creation which we found to be absurd. So as we look at these things more closely and if we find design in the universe then this self existent eternal something that is responsible for generating the universe must be a self existent eternal ‘intelligent’ being. And if intelligent, then, personal. And if personal, then, we have moved away from abstraction and landed squarely on the pages of Sacred scripture.

Self Existence

18th, Defendingfaith, 12-18-09

Self Existence

The Big Bang theory is not a constant and fully understood theory but some 14-18 billion year ago, give or take a couple of billion years. At that beginning time all that existed, as said by some, is there was a point of ‘Singularity.’ This consisted of a compacted point of all energy and all matter that may be currently found in the universe. All the stuff of reality was in this infinitesimal piece of Singularity. It existed from eternity in a state of organization. In a stable and ordered way. And for ways we can’t know it exploded and from that nanosecond it exploded outward. Everything is moving from that state from organization to disorganization. Which is the process where it moves toward what is called ‘equilibrium.’


So from this explanation, whatever was, was in a state of organization but the laws of thermodynamics are such that it indicates that it is going back to a state of disorganization.


So this raises all sorts of questions. If the state of nature is to move towards disorganization, you have to ask the question, how did it become organized in the first place?
The law of inertia is another thing we have to question. The law being the things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Also, things at rest to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. Golf is a good example. A ball placed on a tee is at rest. The golfer is at rest when he addresses the ball. He sets a club in motion and this outside force strikes it and then the ball goes into the air. Then it is acted upon by air which resists the balls flight because of friction so it hit’s the ground and further friction brings it to a stop. Outside sources acting against the ball traveling indefinitely are why the game can be played at all. So we know what the force was that struck the ball but in like manner we have the Big Bang and we need to ask what caused the Bang?

What caused the Bang?


So we find people saying we don’t have to ask that question for that is out of the scope of science and deals with philosophy and theology. But RC Sproul says that if you are going to pin all your hopes on a concept of an initial Bang why don’t you answer this question of what causes the Bang. Science is innately concerned with causality. And this question is the Big Question of causality. It is an intellectual cop out to not want to go there. If you are going to postulate this thesis for the origin of Everything then you are begging the question of what it is that is the outside force that causes this monumental change in this tiny point of ‘Singularity.’ That causes the movement to begin.


Christianity has the answer to that readily available. This is exactly what is involved in the doctrine of creation. We have a self-existent eternal being who has the power of motion and has the capacity to move that which is not moving. This is what Aristotle understood in antiquity when spoke about the ‘unmoved mover.’ He understood that their had to be an origin to motion. That which has the power of motion must have it within himself. It must have the power of Being within itself. That is why we attribute these attributes to God.


We have the idea that this matter is compacted at the point of Singularity but what about the matter and energy itself being the ‘self existent eternal being’. this is what is assumed in Materialism. The universe is not 15+ billion years old but is just the present incarnation of energy and matter. The stuff of reality is eternal.


Materialism’s description of self existence


What is it in the universe that is eternal? Is it this piece of chalk - in its individuated form or my car keys or Sproul. A materialist will say, no, the sun or the chalk is not eternal. They will say the chief characteristic of matter is it’s mutability, that it changes from one shape to another state. It is not stable eternally. It is in a state of ‘becoming’ and not in a state of pure Being. Anything that we find in the universe that is changing that manifests contingency and is dependent or derived from something else cannot be the ultimate core of being of the universe. That is what we are describing here about ‘Self existent something.’ The materialist will say they grant that this piece of chalk or a key chain is not eternal reality that is self-existent. But that it is made up of elements that are generated by a self existent eternal ‘something.’ But this self existent eternal something, contrary to you religious people, is not transcendent. But rather, it is immanent. You don’t have to appeal to something above and beyond this world to account for this world. For the teaching of the Judeo-Christian worldview is there is something outside the creaturely universe and transcends it. But the materialist says that their must be something that is self existent, not self created for they know that that is absurd, and is apart of the universe. The sum total of the universe is some eternal pulsating force that is the cause of the existence of everything that is in this universe. It is an undiscovered part of the universe where it accounts for all the Bangs and the generating of the power from Singularity. An isolated unknown point within the universe is the pulsating power which generates everything from that beginning.


Immanence view


Notice in describing this view Sproul uses the term, Generated. Yes, and Genesis comes from Genaoho which means to Be or to Become or to happen and cause to be. To make something to come into existence is to generate it. So back to this view that there is a hidden unknown point, within the universe, that is the pulsating core of all reality that generates everything from the beginning. The point being there is no God who lives outside the universe, above and beyond the universe, but within the universe itself. This is called the “Immanistic view.” This is very popular in science and philosophy in some circles today. They say there is a ‘self existent eternal power’ for without this there can be nothing. Their challenge to the Transcendent view is why does it have to come from beyond the universe? Why is it not possible to be a part of the universe?

Sproul’s answer to these questions is that it can be apart of the universe itself. Depending on how you define ‘universe.’ If you mean by universe, all that is, then, if God is - then he would subsumed under the term ‘universe.‘ Because ‘universe’ is then described as ’all that is.’
If, on the other hand, you mean by universe, the created universe, then obviously you can’t subsume God into the meaning of the term universe. You have to be able to distinguish between God and the universe.

Transcendence


The way we distinguish in theology about God and the universe is God transcends the universe. But what we mean, and this is critical that you get this - transcendence is not a description of God’s location. Transcendence is not a geographical location. We are not saying that God is transcendent in that he lives somewhere out there east of the Sun and west of the moon. What is meant by transcendence in philosophy and theology is something is a higher order of Being. That is rather than transcendence being a geographic location it is a ontological description. Therefore He is a higher order than we are. He is a higher order of Being than a piece of chalk or keys or the Sun or pure energy. We don’t care where He lives.


As opposed to the immanent idea, where there is a pulsating unknown point in the universe where a beginning happened. Some core within the universe that is self existent and eternal from where everything else is generated. Ultimately, is there something within the universe, that transcends everything else in the universe, from that point of generation? To answer this you must distinguish between the ‘point where the core-being is’ from all else that is in the universe that is not at the point of generation. What is that core-source-point and how is it different from the whole universe, from all other matter that is derived, dependent and contingent from the place of generation.


Now if this is true, then we are just arguing over ‘it’s’ name. Whether the name of it is X or YHWH. No matter how you slice it your forced back to a self existent eternal being. From whose Being and from whose power all things come into existence. Immanence or Transcendence are to be understood by a self existent eternal power source.


Now Christians will object at this point and say to me that we grant that philosophy and reason argues and demonstrates that you have to have a SEEB but, after this is dealt with, how do we get to the God of the Bible. All we have demonstrated, so far, is Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’ thesis. All we have is an abstract idea, a SEEB, but not a God who is depicted in the biblical account. This is a legitimate objection and it brings one to the question of what is the difference between the God of the Bible and the God of the philosophers. As you know, all that I have been saying in the last few lectures has been based more on philosophy than on biblical exegesis. And Sproul grants that that is true. Sproul’s burden that he has for the Christian community is going to be addressed in our next lecture. About the relationship between the God of the Bible and the God of the philosophers.

A self-existent-eternal-being

17th, defending faith, 11-09

Self existence

A self-existent-eternal-being

Necessary Being

This has and is a course on apologetics and we have been discussing the options or alternatives to give us a sufficient reason to explain reality as we encounter it. Our first one, Illusion has been eliminated. We then looked at self-creation and we found that from a logical and analytical perspective that this is a self defeating idea. That is, it is absurd by definition and therefore rationally impossible.


We have already established that somewhere, somehow, something is self-existent. Because we have eliminated the other two by the impossibility of the contrary.


Is it possible for anything to possibly be self-existent? It is logically impossible for something to be self-created because it would have to exist before it was. It would have to be and not be at the same time and same relationship. But is this question of eternal self-existence possible?


There have been times in the past when people have gone so far in philosophical terms that if it can be thought up in the mind then it can exist in reality. That is not what we are going to demonstrate here now. For example I can conceive right now of a unicorn. We can use abstract thought combine and reassemble thoughts then disassemble them again and construct something. All things can be conceived of with some creativity. But just because its possible does not mean that this animal-type exists. This question we posed goes along with this idea: is it possible for self-existence to be rational?


Can we conceive of an idea of a self existent being without violating rationality?


Sproul mentions that the everyday person will describe both Self Creation and Self existence as so similar, but are they? One may say, ‘they must both be irrational and impossible for there is little difference.‘ At least from the outset, we can say, there is nothing illogical about a self existent eternal being. A being can exist that is not caused by something else. Back when we spoke of cause and effect people tend to misunderstand this by saying that “everything has a cause.” No, the law of causality says that every effect must have a cause. An effect by definition is that which has produced by something outside itself or beyond itself. The idea of an uncaused being is perfectly rational. Now, just because we can conceive of an uncaused being doesn’t make it so. All we are saying up to this point is that we can conceive of this without violating the laws of logic and rationality. Reason allows for the possibility #3 while not allowing for #1 and 2.


It is conceivable but it may not exist. We could say that it is rationally conceivable that nothing would ever exist. But if ‘something’ exists that changes everything. If a self existent being exists it becomes not only possible but necessary. Sproul says it again:

If anything can exist, now the idea of the possibility of something being self existent becomes not merely a rational maybe but a rational necessity.

Let us go into detail about this. We call self-existence the attribute of Aseity. Something exists in and of itself that is uncaused and uncreated. It differs with everything in the universe that has a cause and is dependent and derived. This being, therefore, has the power to Be in and of itself. It doesn’t gain something of itself from something antecedent to itself. It has it inherently. Because it has it inherently, it has it eternally. There was never a time when a self existent being did not exist. If these things aren’t true then if wouldn’t have these descriptions said of it. It would have been created. The definition of a self existent being is one who has always been.


We are now saying that it exists, not only possibly, from the viewpoint of reason, but necessarily. Now when Thomas Aquinas was arguing for the existence of God in his time, one of his arguments from his 5 was from the principle of ‘necessary being.’ In Theology God has been called the ‘Ens Necessario.’


It gets complicated - pay attention closely


The 1st: When theologians and philosophers speak about God as necessary being there are 2 distinct way in which God is described as a necessary being. The first way is: He is necessary by virtue of Rationality. Or to say that the existence of God, that if anything exists, is rationally necessary. If something exists now then reason demands that we come to the conclusion that something has always existed. Then something somewhere has always had the power of Being within itself. Or we could not account for the existence of anything.

Again, I will remind you, if ever there was a time when there nothing - absolutely nothing - what could there possibly be now - except nothing. Because, Sproul says, ‘Ex Nihilo Nihilo Vit’ or out of nothing, nothing can come. (Unless it can comes by itself, creating itself which is a rational impossibility.)

Now Sproul knows that there will be immediate objection to this and will say that science has now within quantum physics and quantum mechanics something coming from nothing. But on the contrary, it shows no such thing. Science shows things that are mysterious, that you can’t fit into your present paradigms but to say that nothing made something is not only bad theology it is bad science.


We know that something exists now. That means that there could never have been a time when there was absolutely nothing. There had to always be something. So far we have not demonstrated that it is God, but we are only arguing at this point that there must be something that has the power of Being within itself and that it has always been there. Therefore it is a Being whose Being is necessary logically. It is a logical necessity, now, that we postulate of such an idea of self existent Being. In review: we began this as a rational possibility, of a self existent being -- and given the thesis that there is something that exists now -- rather than nothing -- takes us to the next level and step which brings us to a self existent being through rational necessity.


When we talk about God being necessary; in the first instance, what we mean by that is it exists by rational postulation. Reason demands the existence of a SEEB. This is very important to the Christian who is trying to defend faith. [Here Sproul has an aside: the guns of criticism against Judeo-Christianity are aimed and focused, almost exclusively, at the idea of creation - and the idea of a creator. If you can get rid of creation and a creator you can get rid of the whole concept God and it collapses. People argue if you are going to be rational and scientific then you have to believe in a universe without God. What we are trying to do is turn the guns around and propose to them that they need to turn the guns around at themselves and realize what they are postulating as an alternative to full bodied theism is manifest irrationality and hence, absurdity. It is reason that demands that there be necessary Being.]
This is the first way of defining and describing necessary Being. That is - rationally necessary.


The 2nd way of defining necessary Being as Aquinas gave is what we call Ontological necessity. Here it gets a little bit more abstract. More difficult if you are not a student of philosophy. Ontology is defined as the study or science of Being. So when we say the God is ontologically necessary, we mean by that, he exists by the necessity of His own Being. He doesn’t exist because reason says he has to. He exists because he has the power of being in himself in such a way that this being - cannot - not - be. The difference between a human being and a supreme Being is…….Being. Our human existence is ‘creaturely’ , that is, dependent, derived and a contingent creature. We cannot sustain myself forever. There is a time when I was not, there will be a time when creaturelyness will transition to something else. That being death. We need things right now to continue to exist; water, air, blood etc. All these things make us dependent. Our life, when we are alive, is a constantly changing existence. This is the supreme attribute of ‘contingent being.’ Creatures change. Constantly. Where as a SEEB is changeless. It never looses any power. It never gains any in the scope of its Being. It is never in a state of becoming as Plato and others understood things. It is what it is - eternally. This is what is meant as a self-existent-eternal-being. It is ontologically necessary because it cannot help but Be. Pure Being is dependent upon nothing.


This is the link we have been discussing, with biblical theism. This how God explains and reveals himself to Moses in the Middianite wilderness. Out of a fire he speaks to him. When Moses asks who he is and how should he say to others who he is. And God says, Yahweh. Which translated means, ‘I Am - who I Am.’ It isn’t I Was or I am in the process, or I am becoming but I Am. Without this Being nothing else could possibly be.


Does this God have a name or is it the universe itself? Is it matter itself? This will be our next session.

Self Creation and Chance

16th, defending faith, October, 2009

Self Creation and the concept of ‘Chance’

Last time we looked at the concept of Self Creation and it’s various varieties; self generation, gradual self generation and multiple universes coming into being and so on. Lastly, we concluded within contemporary language that the counter to theism is brought on by some type of appeal to what we call “chance creation.” This is what we are going to look at in this session. Sproul has written a book on this subject. Where it covers an analysis and the role of ‘chance in modern cosmology and cosmogony'. He wrote it because as he explored different offerings in the field of science which were trying to work out some of the most difficult concepts for the scientist to deal with and how many scientists have assigned worth to this exploration.

Sproul’s beef or dissent was not with their experimentation but with there articulation of the results of their experiments and the inferences they were drawing from the data that they had worked with. Sproul says he doesn’t have to be a physicist to analyze the content -- the significance -- the coherence of statements. Yes, propositions which philosophers major in and can work through very swiftly are not just the scientists own tools of reasoning. Sproul can give a logical analysis of the truth values of propositions that scientists articulate as to why things function. So, when physicists characterize and articulate their theories in ways which, ultimately, are nonsense, then it is time for the philosopher to blow the whistle, step up to the plate, and say, ‘we don’t understand what you are trying to say here’ because what you are saying is absurd and unintelligible. And please go back to the drawing board and try to rephrase and develop your statements; or simply say, ‘you don’t what you are talking about.’ For the way you are talking about it demonstrates that you don’t know how to talk about it. It reveals that you are not communicating intelligible speech as it refers to your conclusions on you reasoning.

In Sproul’s book, in the preface, he refers to Arthur Kessler which said, “as long as chance rules, God is an anachronism.” Sproul picked up on that for it’s insight. And Sproul would like to go farther. It is not that chance has to rule for this to be true, Sproul thinks that all that has to be demonstrated is that “chance exists” in order to make God into an anachronism. That there is really such a thing as chance out there in reality which is involved with the creation of things.

So, if chance has any authority it deposes God altogether. This comes by the merit that this something called chance - exists. The mere existence of chance is enough to rip God from his cosmic throne. Chance doesn’t need to rule - it doesn’t need to be sovereign - but if it, ‘chance‘, exists in any form, even a most humble servant framework, it leaves God not only out of date, but, out of a job.

Sproul and the Harvard Professor

The basic thesis in his book, in the final analysis according to Sproul, that there is no such thing as chance. The greatest myth in modern mythology is the myth of chance. That is what we are going to address here. What provoked this work of the book in the first place was a discussion Sproul had with a professor at the graduate school of Harvard in the Philosophy of Science. They were discussing the origin of the universe. This professor denies a creation moment. So Sproul asks where did it come from then -- this first Singularity event. The Harvard guy said it came to BE as result of chance. He said the universe was created by chance. So Sproul asks him again, so, the universe was created by chance? He said yes. So Sproul took out of his pocket a quarter and flipped it up in the air - caught it and turned it over and it turned up ‘heads.’ He asked the Harvard professor, what happened? He said it is going to come up either heads or tails 100% of the time. This procedure is going to be either 50% heads or 50% tails. Sproul says if he[the Harvard professor] put it to the test and designed a system that would spin and toss the coin the same way each time, within a vacuum and all other parameters and forces on that coin were constant and repeated in such the same manner, what would happen? Sproul asked him if the professor could bring up his variable percentage of it coming up ‘heads’? And the professor said, of course! This would increase the likelihood. Which is true for what Sproul said initially, they both understood this, that the causal agencies that are involved in coming out with this effect of whether this coin comes up either heads or tails has nothing to do with some mythological power called chance. It has to do with, in this causal experiment, of how we tossed the coin. All the factors that one would establish so it was identical each time you tossed the coin. All variables of physical space and motion are consistent and the outcome is always the same. And with all that for the certainty of one result; we can nevertheless say that it is always 50-50.

Serindipity as chance

There is nothing at all wrong with the word chance in a particular setting. It is a perfectly meaningful word when we use it to describe mathematical possibilities. The word becomes a synonym for the odds of such and such. We also use it in a meaningful way when we speak of ‘chance encounters.’
Sproul describes a train trip where he got on a train and went to various cities on his trip. He had a lay over and there was traffic going the opposite direction and he encountered a friend he hadn’t seen in ten years. They conversed and went their ways. Ten hours later when the train came for Sproul the same teeming masses of people were in this Chicago train station and he sees the same friend he saw ten hours ago. What are the odds of that? It is called a serendipitous encounter. A chance happening. But chance doesn’t explain why it happened. Because chance didn’t cause it. The reason that we happened to meet each other was because we happened to be at the same place at the same time; for a host of different reasons. All these things converging in time and space.

Again, chance is a perfectly legitimate word when we use it in the particular popular way to describe these kinds of unintentional meetings or mathematical probabilities we find ourselves in. But what has happened in modern jargon is the word ‘chance’ has subtly been elevated to something far more than just mathematical odds or probabilities. Where actual causal POWER is attributed to chance. So when he talked to his professor friend they agreed on the incapacity of chance to have Being and gave no chance for ‘chance’ to cause the coin to flip a certain way. Based on this simple illustration of this coin toss this Harvard man literally banged his palm into his head and said, ‘I guess I shouldn’t have said that the universe was created by chance.’

The Ontological status of ‘chance’ is “zero.”

When it comes to addressing the Harvard professor one has to take in the science of Ontology, which is the study of Being, of essence, of reality and of ‘isness’. The Ontological status of ‘chance’ is “zero.” Again, ‘chance’ has no Being. Chance is not a thing that operates and works upon other things. It is simply a mental concept that refers to mathematical possibilities. But in and of itself ‘chance’ has no ontology. So Sproul says of this piece of chalk that he has in his hand; It has some being to it. And the being of this chalk can keep the scientist and the philosopher busy for centuries finding it’s essence or the substance that is found in this cylinder of chalk. The one thing that all can agree on is that it is not nothing. It is something.

Earlier in these lectures R.C. said, “that if Something exists, then, God exists. If there is anything out there with ontological status, then you are driven, by necessity of the term, to a self existent eternal being.”

Chalk has ontological status. It is a thing. It has existence. It is real rather that illusion. So too, are we.

But when we come to chance, and when Sproul and the professor spoke they agreed that chance has no ‘being.’ And as a result of it not having any being, it therefore has no power. For, that which is absent of being, must of necessity, be absent of power. Because for power to operate, it must be from the power of something. Alas you can’t have power generated from nothing. Along with the fact that you cannot have objects generated from nothing. Power, that is doing, has to have a doer. Just like Descartes said a thought needed a thinker.

A premise we must know today, that scientists and philosophers have all agreed throughout the ages is ‘chance’ as a word has come to define our ignorance. We throw chance into the equation when we don’t know what’s going on out there. When we can’t do our homework analytically and come away with a cogent understanding we begin to attribute things we don’t know to chance and some magical power it possesses. Now, you’re going to say to me, there are games of chance and card games where you have probabilities of certain things coming up. And you would be right. But the reason for the card hand I was dealt in a Bridge game is because of how they were shuffled and sifted and arranged before you shuffled them and the sequence of handing out the cards and so on. Chance is not some invisible demon who jumps into the cards and has the power to set in motion the way the cards are going to be handled. There is no invisible power called ‘chance‘.

So again, back to this dialogue between the two of them, where Sproul says, Do you agree that chance is not a thing and cannot exercise power? Do you agree? He said yes. Chance is no thing, again, chance is no-thing, again, it is nothing. So when you say that the universe was created by chance you are saying, analytically, that the universe is created by nothing. You are not just giving some small power to chance, you attributing the supreme power to chance in creating everything. Not only to just some thing, no, you are wanting chance to bring everything into being, the whole of reality manifested by what you attribute to ‘chance‘.

The absurdity and myth of chance

This concept, under 5 minutes of analysis yields to it’s own absurdity. It manifests itself as the worst kind of mythology. If you couch it in respectable language and communicate in the language of science it almost sounds plausible. Like thinking that metals could be turned into some other more precious metal. And it was respected as possible for centuries by descriptions in respected scientific language. You can give respectability to mythology if you couch your language in academic parlance. Nonetheless, if you say it is something then, I would ask you, what is it? How much does it weight, is it extended or non-extended. Is it an energy field or electro magnetic pulse, what is the genesis of this power?

you should stop saying that nothing causes something

When you find those that want to prove chance you come to people like Neils Bohr who said “contradictions are complementary.” he was willing to affirm both sides of a contradiction. This thinking drove Einstein nuts! He said as soon as Neils Bohr started talking like this he not only ceases to be logical he ceases being a scientist. With Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle there are certain ways to explain it. When doing experiments on subatomic particles you can say we don’t know why they act in this way. The very experiment may have an influence on the result. For it seems that these particles are acting in a completely irrational manner. It is one thing to say that I do not know why these subatomic particles are behaving in this way, that none of our scientific paradigms account for this inexplicable behavior. And you say, I just don’t know. That is a proper scientific demeanor. When you bump up to the limits of knowledge you say you don’t know. This should be the manner in all fields of study. But it is another thing to say that nothing is producing this event. Unless you know everything attached to an idea - you should stop saying that nothing causes something. It is bad science as well as bad theology to attribute self creation as a power, under any circumstances.