Is a Changed Life a Valid Proof for God?

In arguing for God's existence, apologists will offer various points of evidence, such as the existence of something rather than nothing, the design of the universe, the existence of real moral values and duties, and so on. One point that philosophers such as William Lane Craig and others has offered seems strikingly different from these more objective facts: the fact that people who become Christians experience a changed life. Is such a subjective point valid when arguing for God's existence? I believe it is, but I want toreview a few reasons why.

One of the promises of Christianity is the believer will become "a new creation" (II Cor 5:17) and will be "born again" (John 3:16). The concept the Scripture is communicating is that people will experience real change in who they are and in their very nature. This is why people who share Christ with others will use their testimony as a point of evidence to the reality of Jesus.

Is The Experience Real?

Just because a change happening to an individual is subjective (that is we must rely on the testimony of the indivisual to tell us what they are experiencing), it does not diminish the reality of that experience. Scientists study the effects of mood-altering drugs on patients, which are similarly subjective, but they can with various degrees of certainty claim that it is the drug that is causing the patient's mood to be changed, and not other conditions.

The strength of the argument then lies in finding whether the changes are a real result of something happening outside the individual, or is it merely the belief of the individual himself that is causing the change. Dr. J.P. Moreland states the problem in this way, "It is possible to argue that all such experiences are merely psychological or perhaps the result of sociological factors like peer pressure. One could hold that some sort of placebo effect is going on."1

If such a placebo effect is occurring, then it is not God changing people's lives, but it is the people believing their lives are changed that are responsible for the said change. If this is true, then we don't prove God at all.

So, how can we determine whether a placebo effect is happening? Or how can we tell if some other factor is causing such a change? Moreland lays out three main points as to why we can claim the Christian experience as valid:

1. The claim of personal religious experience of God doesn't deny psychological factors, it merely claims that they are not enough in themselves to explain a transformed life. This means that people will of course be subject to both social and psychological influences. However, these influences do not by themselves have adequate power to explain religious transformation. In fact, religious experiences exhibit properties that are unique to themselves.
2. Attempts to reduce religious transformation to psychological factors must assume there are some common factors that would cause the similar experiences. However, as we see more diversity in the causes of people's lives being changed, that explanation becomes less likely to be true. In other words, as the sample size grows, and the backgrounds and other variables are eliminated as a common cause, the more difficult it is to ascribe such a change to a psychological cause.
3. Finally, religious transformation in Christianity is tied to objective events (the resurrection) and an objective interpretive grid (the Bible) which render transformation probable. This point is perhaps the most important. These experiences are not based on only the belief of the subject, but they are linked directly to an event that is historically verifiable. The Bible also predicts that this type of experience would happen to the believer (as shown in the second paragraph above).2

Now, I am not arguing that we should accept all claims of religious experience as actual. We must approach these as we would any other truth claims: in a discerning manner using the points I've outlined above.

How We Should Approach Subjective Truth Claims

Josh McDowell demonstrates how he approaches subjective claims. "There are two questions or tests I apply to a subjective experience. First what is the objective reality for the subjective experience, and second, how many other people have had the same subjective experience from being related to the objective reality?"

McDowell then goes on to use an example of a man who claims a fried egg over his ear gave him joy and peace, and shows how this flunks his test. However, when judging claims of changed lives from believing in the objective reality of Jesus Christ and His resurrection he says "the evidence is overwhelming... that truly millions from all backgrounds, nationalities and professions have seen their lives elevated to new levels of peace and joy by turning their lives over to Christ."3

Because there exists a vast number of people from all cultures over nearly two thousand years who made similar claims of transformation bolster our position that their experiences come from outside of themselves. And by understanding these three points, we can make a viable claim that God is really working in the lives of those who believe in Him and therefore He exists.

References

1. Moreland, J.P.Scaling the Secular City.
Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Books, 1987 233

2. Ibid. 233-234. 3.McDowell, Josh. Evidence That Demands A Verdict.
San Bernardino, Ca: Here's Life Pub., 1989l 327-328

Challenging the New Atheists

In the November 2006 issue of Wired magazine, Gary Wolf coined the term "New Atheist". In his article, "The Church of the New Believer" he defined the New Atheist as someone who will "not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God."¹, In other words, there is a movement today where atheists are engaged in an ideological war with people of faith, and they feel they are on the side of virtue.

Three primary proponents of this "war against faith" (Wolf's term) are highlighted in the article - zoologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins, End of Faith author Sam Harris, and philosophy professor Daniel Dennett. Although each seems to take a different tact in their approach to unseating the entrenched religious viewpoints of the masses, they all seem to argue that they advance their cause as a moral obligation.

Eroding the Moral Argument

The fact that Dawkins, Dennett and Harris all appeal to a moral framework in their belief system fascinates me, for by its nature, atheism has no objective standard by which to claim moral values. The article restates Dawkins position that bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. But talking about things like moral rights and wrongs bring the question of good and evil into play and that requires a moral framework from which to judge things as being either "good" or "evil".²  One must have a basis to compare one's actions or ideas to classify them as falling into one category or the other .

This is one area where an atheistic worldview fails. Moral frameworks require a moral lawgiver who transcends humanity. In other words, moral laws require an all-good God who can tell us what's good and what isn't. Without God, then man is the ultimate arbitrator of what's good and what's not, which simply means that it's my opinion against yours. In fact, if evolution is true, if we really are here only due to a random series of natural processes, then saying we "shouldn't" do this or that is tantamount to saying a comet shouldn't have struck the earth and killed all the dinosaurs. So the primary premise of the New Atheists really rests on an assumption of God's existence while they try to deny that very existence! Every time they claim a moral reason for advancing their cause, they are trying to smuggle in a condition that could only exist if God does.

Self-Refuting Assumptions

The contradictory nature of Dawkins and company doesn't stop with morality, though. Dawkins admits in the article that the main point of contention is a clash of worldviews - those who hold to naturalism versus supernaturalism. Naturalism is the belief that the only things that can be believed are those things that can be measured by science. We see this in the article as it says how some scientists who hold to a supernatural world view have "implicitly accepted science as the arbiter of what is real. This leaves the atheist with the upper hand… There's barely a field of modern research - cosmology, biology, archaeology, anthropology, psychology - in which competing religious explanations have survived unscathed."

First of all, the second statement is really question-begging. Only if one assumes that we must nullify supernatural explanations for natural ones does one arrive at these "corrosive arguments". But, beyond that, the concept of scientific naturalism collapses upon itself. You see, one must first start with the assumption that the only things we can really know are those things that can be verified scientifically. But that particular premise - that we can only know something if it is scientific -cannot itself be discovered by any type of science. It is a statement of fact that cannot be justified by its own criteria. Imagine if I said to you "Only statements in Latin are true facts." Since that statement is in English, it doesn't meet its own criteria - it refutes its very premise and must therefore be false. The same is true for the scientific naturalist.

Dennett believes that "neutral, scientifically informed education about every religion in the world should be mandatory in school." But again, science cannot test for God any more than it can test for love. They start with an assumption that supernaturalism cannot be true and then build a set of rules that by definition exclude supernatural causes from being considered evidence. However, the rules that they build do not themselves stem from scientific discovery, so they must be false.

Having Faith in Non-Faith

The fact that Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett hold to these rules is one example of how these "freethinkers" really are nothing of the sort, merely adherents to another form of faith. The article points to research by anthropologists that we humans are naturally wired for faith and atheism, when examined carefully, is simply one type of belief system with its dogmas and orthodoxy. The language throughout the article cannot escape this. We see Harris talking about a kind of "religion of reason" with a Sabbath and prayer. Dennett says that no rational creature would be able to do without unexamined, sacred things. Dawkins invokes morality in his position. But to build a religion on non-religion is also contradictory. And by the end of the article, the author begins to note this himself.

Wolf writes that "Dawkins' tense rhetoric of moral choice, Harris' vision of the apocalypse, their contempt for liberals, the invocation of slavery - this is not the language of intellectual debate but of prophecy." He then goes on to conclude that, while he is an agnostic, he couldn't be one of the New Atheists. "The irony of the New Atheism, this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism - is too much for me." Wolf claims that his desire to not be dogmatic about his nonbelief is reasonable. "It simply reflects our deepest democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there's always a chance we could be wrong."

My question to Wolf would be from where do the values of democracy come? This is certainly not the way evolution works, claiming survival of the fittest and let all the others go extinct. Indeed, as the New Atheists become more and more vocal in their opposition to faith in general and Christian faith in particular, they cannot help but draw upon the tenets of faith in order to make their points. And that, as rational beings should see, is telling evidence that they are wrong.

Recently, I've contributed to a book that focuses on the New Atheism movement and the problems inherent there. Entitled True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheists, it holds contributions from prominent apologists including William Lane Craig, Sean McDowell, and Tim McGrew on why the New Atheism fails. Now, you may receive your copy as free thank you gift for supporting our efforts at Come Reason. Just click here for details.

References

1. "Church of the Non-Believers"  Wired Magazine, November 2006.  See http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html for the full article.

2. There is, of course a third option, that the thing in question is neither good nor bad but morally neutral. Given the purposes of our discussion, though, the categories above will suffice to make my point.

Contempt Prior to Examination is an Intellectual Vice

William Paley on how intellectuals can be biased against evidence:

Contempt prior to examination is an intellectual vice from which the greatest faculties of mind are not free. I know not indeed whether men of the greatest faculties of mind are not the subject to it. Such men feel themselves seated upon an eminence. Looking down from their height upon the follies of mankind, they behold contending tenets wasting their idle strength upon one another, with the common disdain of the absurdity of them all. This habit of thought, however comfortable to the mind which entertains it, or however natural to great parts, is extremely dangerous; and more apt, than almost any other disposition, to produce hasty and contemptuous, and, by consequence, erroneous judgments both of persons and opinions.

Paley, William. The Works of William Paley: With a Life of the Author, Volume 4
(London: G. and J. Robinson, etc. 1825.) 395.

Modern Heresies: Christian Science (video)

What is Christian Science? How does it relate to historic Christianity? In this video, Lenny reviews a bit of the history and beliefs of Mary Baker Eddy and the Church of Christ, Scientist. Drawing parallels to the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, Lenny show why Christian Science is really a wolf in sheep's clothing.

 

Why the Law of Gravity Cannot Create the Universe

Stephen Hawking is a very smart man. I think that statement is uncontroversial. Hawking is recognized as a brilliant mathematician and theoretical physicist, and the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position he held for thirty years. That was the same position Isaac Newton held when his writings were changing the face of science and mathematics simultaneously. Some have even called Hawking one of the smartest men alive. So when in his recent book The Grand Design, Hawking and co-writer Leonard Mlodinow seek to answer what they term "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" people take notice.

But because someone is brilliant, especially in their field of study, it doesn't always make them right. One of those ultimate questions (they really list three) is "Why is there something rather than nothing?"1 Hawking and Mlodinow's answer is simply, "Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing"2. They rely on the simple actions of gravity at a quantum level to balance the positive and negative energy of the universe and to create matter, time, and space.

I've written on some of the issues with quantum vacuums before, but there's a fundamental problem with this scenario, that may be easy to grasp. One cannot rely on a law to do anything by itself. The law of gravity cannot be the starting point because laws don't exist if there is nothing upon which the law governs. For a familiar comparison, let's look at traffic laws such as the speed limit.

Everyone who drives is familiar with a speed limit. The speed limit is a law set by a governing body in order to control the flow of traffic and keep the drivers safe in their vehicles. Some areas such as Germany's autobahn have no speed limit. But for a speed limit to mean anything, you have to have at least two other things: a vehicle and a road. If no road exists and there are no vehicles yet invented, limiting someone's driving to 65 miles per hour is not only foolish, it doesn't mean anything. How can you limit driving when no vehicles exist? And if there's no road to drive on, then there's no way to begin forward motion.

Imagine if you will creating laws as to how high and how fast the winged horse Pegasus can fly and you might see the problem. While your laws can be very specific and detailed, it doesn't matter because there is no wined horse for those laws to govern.

In The Grand Design, the authors use John Conway's Game of Life as their example of how a simple set of laws can lead to new patterns that weren't originally anticipated3. Hawking and Mlodinow extrapolates this into how all matter interacts and says we are the result of the same kind of new, surprising patterns. But the same problem applies. Conway's rules are just fine, but if there is no grid of squares and there are no lights to "live" or "die" as his rules define, then the game never gets off the ground. There's nothing to blink, so no new shapes appear. Of course, beyond even these problems, there's still one additional question that hasn't been answered. We know that Conway wrote the rules to his Game of Life, but who wrote the Law of Gravity?

It is unfortunate for the authors of The Grand Design that in their zeal to dismiss God from the creative process they assume that the Law of Gravity can answer all their problems. The question "why is there something rather than nothing" cannot be answered with gravity because gravity is a something. It's actually part of the question. Gravity and those objects that gravity affects are part of the something that needs explaining.  Postulating gravity before the creation of anything else is simply trying to place a speed limit on a flying horse. The outcome produces no effect at all.

References

1 Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The Grand Design. New York: Random House Pub., 2010. 10.
2 Ibid. 180.
3 Ibid. 172-179.