Truth Journal
Theism, Atheism, and Rationality
Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Plantinga has been called "the most important philosopher of religion now writing." After taking his Ph.D. from Yale in 1958, he taught at Wayne State University (1958-63), Calvin College (1963-82), and has filled the John A. O'Brien Chair of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame since 1982. He was president of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association during 1981-82 and president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, which he helped to found, from 1983 to 1986. He frequently directs summer seminars for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has received numerous honors, including an Award for Distinguished Teaching from the Danforth Foundation, a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, separate fellowships from the N.E.H., and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University. He has been invited to deliver more distinguished lectures series at American, Canadian, and British universities than can be listed here, except to note that he was selected to give the eminent Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen University in 1987-88. He was recently honored by a volume of essays bearing his name in D. Reidel's Profiles series. Widely acclaimed for his work on the metaphysics of modality, the ontological argument, the problem of evil, and the epistemology of religious belief, he is the author or editor of seven books, including God and Other Minds, The Nature of Necessity, and Faith and Rationality. Several of his articles, which have appeared in journals such as Theoria, American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Journal of Philosophy, and so forth, have been hailed as masterpieces of the metaphysician's craft.

A theological objections to the belief that there is such a person as God come in many varieties. There are, for example, the familiar objections that theism is somehow incoherent, that it is inconsistent with the existence of evil, that it is a hypothesis ill-confirmed or maybe even disconfirmed by the evidence, that modern science has somehow cast doubt upon it, and the like. Another sort of objector claims, not that theism is incoherent or false or probably false (after all, there is precious little by way of cogent argument for that conclusion) but that it is in some way unreasonable or irrational to believe in God, even if that belief should happen to be true. Here we have, as a centerpiece, the evidentialist objection to theistic belief. The claim is that none of the theistic arguments-deductive, inductive, or abductive-is successful; hence there is at best insufficient evidence for the existence of God. But then the belief that there is such a person as God is in some way intellectually improper-somehow foolish or irrational. A person who believed without evidence that there are an even number of ducks would be believing foolishly or irrationally; the same goes for the person who believes in God without evidence. On this view, one who accepts belief in God but has no evidence for that belief is not, intellectually speaking, up to snuff. Among those who have offered this objection are Antony Flew, Brand Blanshard, and Michael Scriven. Perhaps more important is the enormous oral tradition: one finds this objection to theism bruited about on nearly any major university campus in the land. The objection in question has also been endorsed by Bertrand Russell, who was once asked what he would say if, after dying, he were brought into the presence of God and asked whyhe had not been a believer. Russell's reply: "I'd say, 'Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!'" I'm not sure just how that reply would be received; but my point is only that Russell, like many others, has endorsed this evidentialist objection to theistic belief.
Now what, precisely, is the objector's claim here? He holds that the theist without evidence is irrational or unreasonable; what is the property with which he is crediting such a theist when he thus describes him? What, exactly, or even approximately, does he mean when he says that the theist without evidence is irrational? Just what, as he sees it, is the problem with such a theist? The objection can be seen as taking at least two forms; and there are at least two corresponding senses or conceptions of rationality lurking in the nearby bushes. According to the first, a theist who has no evidence has violated an intellectual or cognitive duty of some sort. He has gone contrary to an obligation laid upon him-perhaps by society, or perhaps by his own nature as a creature capable of grasping propositions and holding beliefs. There is an obligation or something like an obligation to proportion one's beliefs to the strength of the evidence. Thus according to John Locke, a mark of a rational person is "the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proof it is built upon will warrant," and according to David Hume, "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence."
In the nineteenth century we have W.K. Clifford, that "delicious enfant terrible" as William James called him, insisting that it is monstrous, immoral, and perhaps even impolite to accept a belief for which you have insufficient evidence:
Whoso would deserve well of his fellow in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away.[1]
He adds that if a belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a stolen one. Not only does it deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of power which we do not really possess, but it is sinful, stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence, which may shortly master our body and spread to the rest of the town. [2] And finally: To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.[3] (It is not hard to detect, in these quotations, the "tone of robustious pathos" with which James credits Clifford.) On this view theists without evidence-my sainted grandmother, for example-are flouting their epistemic duties and deserve our disapprobation and disapproval. Mother Teresa, for example, if she has not arguments for her belief in God, then stands revealed as a sort of intellectual libertine-someone who has gone contrary to her intellectual obligations and is deserving of reproof and perhaps even disciplinary action.
Now the idea that there are intellectual duties or obligations is difficult but not implausible, and I do not mean to question it here. It is less plausible, however, to suggest that I would or could be going contrary to my intellectual duties in believing, without evidence, that there is such a person as God. For first, my beliefs are not, for the most part, within my control. If, for example, you offer me $1,000,000 to cease believing that Mars is smaller than Venus, there is no way I can collect. But the same holds for my belief in God: even if I wanted to, I couldn't-short of heroic measures like coma inducing drugs-just divest myself of it. (At any rate there is nothing I can do directly; perhaps there is a sort of regimen that if followed religiously would issue, in the long run, in my no longer accepting belief in God.) But secondly, there seems no reason to think that I have such an obligation. Clearly I am not under an obligation to have evidence for everything I believe; that would not be possible. But why, then, suppose that I have an obligation to accept belief in God only if I accept other propositions which serve as evidence for it? This is by no means self-evident or just obvious, and it is extremely hard to see how to find a cogent argument for it.
In any event, I think the evidentialist objector can take a more promising line. He can hold, not that the theist without evidence has violated some epistemic duty-after all, perhaps he can't help himself- but that he is somehow intellectually flawed or disfigured. Consider someone who believes that Venus is smaller than Mercury-not because he has evidence, but because he read it in a comic book and always believes whatever he reads in comic books-or consider someone who holds that belief on the basis of an outrageously bad argument. Perhaps there is no obligation he has failed to meet; nevertheless his intellectual condition is defective in some way. He displays a sort of deficiency, a flaw, an intellectual dysfunction of some sort. Perhaps he is like someone who has an astigmatism, or is unduly clumsy, or suffers from arthritis. And perhaps the evidentialist objection is to be construed, not as the claim that the theist without evidence has violated some intellectual obligations, but that he suffers from a certain sort of intellectual deficiency. The theist without evidence, we might say, is an intellectual gimp.
Alternatively but similarly, the idea might be that the theist without evidence is under a sort of illusion, a kind of pervasive illusion afflicting the great bulk of mankind over the great bulk of the time thus far allotted to it. Thus Freud saw religious belief as "illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most insistent wishes of mankind."[4 ]He sees theistic belief as a matter of wish-fulfillment. Men are paralyzed by and appalled at the spectacle of the overwhelming, impersonal forces that control our destiny, but mindlessly take no notice, no account of us and our needs and desires; they therefore invent a heavenly father of cosmic proportions, who exceeds our earthly fathers in goodness and love as much as in power. Religion, says Freud, is the "universal obsessional neurosis of humanity", and it is destined to disappear when human beings learn to face reality as it is, resisting the tendency to edit it to suit our fancies.
A similar sentiment is offered by Karl Marx:
Religion . . . is the self-consciousness and the self-feeling of the man who has either not yet found himself, or else (having found himself) has lost himself once more. But man is not an abstract being . . . Man is the world of men, the State, society. This State, this society, produce religion, produce a perverted world consciousness, because they are a perverted world . . . Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The people cannot be really happy until it has been deprived of illusory happiness by the abolition of religion. The demand that the people should shake itself free of illusion as to its own condition is the demand that it should abandon a condition which needs illusion.[5]
Note that Marx speaks here of a perverted world consciousness produced by a perverted world. This is a perversion from a correct, or right, or natural condition, brought about somehow by an unhealthy and perverted social order. From the Marx-Freud point of view, the theist is subject to a sort of cognitive dysfunction, a certain lack of cognitive and emotional health. We could put this as follows: the theist believes as he does only because of the power of this illusion, this perverted neurotic condition. He is insane, in the etymological sense of that term; he is unhealthy. His cognitive equipment, we might say, isn't working properly; it isn't functioning as it ought to. If his cognitive equipment were working properly, working the way it ought to work, he wouldn't be under the spell of this illusion. He would instead face the world and our place in it with the clear-eyed apprehension that we are alone in it, and that any comfort and help we get will have to be our own devising. There is no Father in heaven to turn to, and no prospect of anything, after death, but dissolution. ("When we die, we rot," says Michael Scriven, in one of his more memorable lines.)
Now of course the theist is likely to display less than overwhelming enthusiasm about the idea that he is suffering from a cognitive deficiency, is under a sort of widespread illusion endemic to the human condition. It is at most a liberal theologian or two, intent on novelty and eager to concede as much as possible to contemporary secularity, who would embrace such an idea. The theist doesn't see himself as suffering from cognitive deficiency. As a matter of fact, he may be inclined to see the shoe as on the other foot; he may be inclined to think of the atheist as the person who is suffering, in this way, from some illusion, from some noetic defect, from an unhappy, unfortunate, and unnatural condition with deplorable noetic consequences. He will see the atheist as somehow the victim of sin in the world- his own sin or the sin of others. According to the book of Romans, unbelief is a result of sin; it originates in an effort to "suppress the truth in unrighteousness." According to John Calvin, God has created us with a nisus or tendency to see His hand in the world around us; a "sense of deity," he says, "is inscribed in the hearts of all." He goes on:
Indeed, the perversity of the impious, who though they struggle furiously are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of God, is abundant testimony that his conviction, namely, that there is some God, is naturally inborn in all, and is fixed deep within, as it were in the very marrow. . . . From this we conclude that it is not a doctrine that must first be learned in school, but one of which each of us is master from his mother's womb and which nature itself permits no man to forget.[6]
Were it not for the existence of sin in the world, says Calvin, human beings would believe in God to the same degree and with the same natural spontaneity displayed in our belief in the existence of other persons, or an external world, or the past. This is the natural human condition; it is because of our presently unnatural sinful condition that many of us find belief in God difficult or absurd. The fact is, Calvin thinks, one who does not believe in God is in an epistemically defective position-rather like someone who does not believe that his wife exists, or thinks that she is a cleverly constructed robot that has no thoughts, feelings, or consciousness. Thus the believer reverses Freud and Marx, claiming that what they see as sickness is really health and what they see as health is really sickness.
Obviously enough, the dispute here is ultimately ontological, or theological, or metaphysical; here we see the ontological and ultimately religious roots of epistemological discussions of rationality. What you take to be rational, at least in the sense in question, depends upon your metaphysical and religious stance. It depends upon your philosophical anthropology. Your view as to what sort of creature a human being is will determine, in whole or in part, your views as to what is rational or irrational for human beings to believe; this view will determine what you take to be natural, or normal, or healthy, with respect to belief. So the dispute as to who is rational and who is irrational here can't be settled just by attending to epistemological considerations; it is fundamentally not an epistemological dispute, but an ontological or theological dispute. How can we tell what it is healthy for human beings to believe unless we know or have some idea about what sort of creature a human being is? If you think he is created by God in the image of God, and created with a natural tendency to see God's hand in the world about us, a natural tendency to recognize that he has been created and is beholden to his creator, owing his worship and allegiance, then of course you will not think of belief in God as a manifestation of wishful thinking or as any kind of defect at all. It is then much more like sense perception or memory, though in some ways much more important. On the other hand, if you think of a human being as the product of blind evolutionary forces, if you think there is no God and that human beings are part of a godless universe, then you will be inclined to accept a view according to which belief in God is a sort of disease or dysfunction, due perhaps, to a sort of softening of the brain.
So the dispute as to who is healthy and who diseased has ontological or theological roots, and is finally to be settled, if at all at that level. And here I would like to present a consideration that, I think tells in favor of the theistic way of looking at the matter. As I have been representing that matter, theist and atheist alike speak of a sort of dysfunction, of cognitive faculties or cognitive equipment not working properly, of their not working as they ought to. But how are we to understand that? What is it for something to work properly? Isn't there something deeply problematic about the idea of proper functioning? What is it for my cognitive faculties to be working properly? What is it for a natural organism-a tree, for example-to be in good working order, to be functioning properly? Isn't working properly relative to our aims and interests? A cow is functioning properly when she gives milk; a garden patch is as it ought to be when it displays a luxuriant preponderance of the sorts of vegetation we propose to promote. But then it seems patent that what constitutes proper functioning depends upon our aims and interests. So far as nature herself goes, isn't a fish decomposing in a hill of corn functioning just as properly, just as excellently, as one happily swimming about chasing minnows? But then what could be meant by speaking of "proper functioning" with respect to our cognitive faculties? A chunk of reality-an organism, a part of an organism, an ecosystem, a garden patch-"functions properly" only with respect to a sort of grid we impose on nature-a grid that incorporates our aims and desires.
But from a theistic point of view, the idea of proper functioning, as applied to us and our cognitive equipment, is not more problematic than, say, that of a Boeing 747's working properly. Something we have constructed-a heating system, a rope, a linear accelerator-is functioning properly when it is functioning in the way it was designed to function. My car works properly if it works the way it was designed to work. My refrigerator is working properly if it refrigerates, if it does what a refrigerator is designed to do. This, I think, is the root idea of working properly. But according to theism, human beings, like ropes and linear accelerators, have been designed; they have been created and designed by God. Thus, he has an easy answer to the relevant set of questions: What is proper functioning? What is it for my cognitive faculties to be working properly? What is cognitive dysfunction? What is it to function naturally? My cognitive faculties are functioning naturally, when they are functioning in the way God designed them to function.
On the other hand, if the atheological evidentialist objector claims that the theist without evidence is irrational, and if he goes on to construe irrationality in terms of defect or dysfunction, then he owes us an account of this notion. Why does he take it that the theist is somehow dysfunctional, at least in this area of his life? More importantly, how does he conceive dysfunction? How does he see dysfunction and its opposite? How does he explain the idea of an organism's working properly, or of some organic system or part of an organism's thus working? What account does he give of it? Presumably he can't see the proper functioning of my noetic equipment as its functioning in the way it was designed to function; so how can he put it?
Two possibilities leap to mind. First, he may be thinking of proper functioning as functioning in a way that helps us attain our ends. In this way, he may say, we think of our bodies as functioning properly, as being healthy, when they function in the way we want them to, when they function in such a way as to enable us to do the sorts of things we want to do. But of course this will not be a promising line to take in the present context; for while perhaps the atheological objector would prefer to see our cognitive faculties function in such a way as not to produce belief in God in us, the same cannot be said, naturally enough, for the theist. Taken this way the atheological evidentialist's objection comes to little more than the suggestion that the atheologician would prefer it if people did not believe in God without evidence. That would be an autobiographical remark on his part, having the interest such remarks usually have in philosophical contexts.
A second possibility: proper functioning and allied notions are to be explained in terms of aptness for promoting survival, either at an individual or species level. There isn't time to say much about this here; but it is at least and immediately evident that the atheological objector would then owe us an argument for the conclusion that belief in God is indeed less likely to contribute to our individual survival, or the survival of our species than is atheism or agnosticism. But how could such an argument go? Surely the prospects for a non-question begging argument of this sort are bleak indeed. For if theism-Christian theism, for example-is true, then it seems wholly implausible to think that widespread atheism, for example, would be more likely to contribute to the survival of our race than widespread theism.
By way of conclusion: a natural way to understand such notions as rationality and irrationality is in terms of the proper functioning of the relevant cognitive equipment. Seen from this perspective, the question whether it is rational to believe in God without the evidential support of other propositions is really a metaphysical or theological dispute. The theist has an easy time explaining the notion of our cognitive equipment's functioning properly: our cognitive equipment functions properly when it functions in the way God designed it to function. The atheist evidential objector, however, owes us an account of this notion. What does he mean when he complains that the theist without evidence displays a cognitive defect of some sort? How does he understand the notion of cognitive malfunction?

NOTES

[1]W.K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief," in Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 183.
[2]Ibid, p. 184.
[3]Ibid, p. 186.
[4]Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 30.
[5]K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3: Introduction to a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, by Karl Marx (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975).
[6]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.3 (p. 43- 44).

The Search for Non-Being
From The Philosopher, Volume LXXXX No. 1

Lewis Carroll
and the Search for
Non-Being
Pinhas Ben-Zvi

In which Humpty Dumpty, a true Heraclitean, asserts that there must exist an opposite to a birthday which is an un-birthday.



Humpty Dumpty informs Alice that 'there are three hundred and sixty four
days when you might get un-birthday presents'. It is obvious to him that
un-birthdays are real Beings and not mere utterances. His statement is
another augmentation to one of the oldest and rudimentary philosophical
controversies: whether Non-Being, like Being, exists.
Footprints of this controversy, which was initially conceived by Greek
philosophy, can be tracked all over the two books of Alice. Carroll
conveys, through Alice's discourses with the various figures she meets on
her way, his belief that Non-Being does indeed exist. This stand can be
inferred not just from Humpty Dumpty's statement but from other passages
in Alice as well.
The beginning of the 6th Century B.C. was a defining moment in the history
of mankind intellectual thought. From this time on, for a period that
lasted around 150 years, some Greeks, in later years called the
'pre-Socratics', began to ask new questions and propound new answers about
the nature of the universe. (Most of the pre-Socratics flourished not in
Athens, nor even on mainland Greece, but in Asia Minor, Lower Italy and
Sicily. 'Greek', in this context, is a cultural expression rather than a
geographical one.)
The pre-Socratics were the first to formulate tenets that were based on
reasonable arguments rather than on theological doctrines, and they set
the foundation on which the future intellectual revolution in philosophy
would be created by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle
But before we follow Alice into Wonderland, we should recall the roots of
the controversy, in Elea in Lower Italy, in the early 5th Century BC.
There, Parmenides, asserted in a poem that he had composed, that only the
'Is' is, whilst to speak of the 'Is not' is to take a '. . . wholly
incredible course, since you cannot recognise Not Being (for this is
impossible), nor could you speak of it, for thought and Being are the same
thing.'
The grammar used by Parmenides in his poetic assertion gave rise to
different interpretations. Did he mean 'is' as a predicate, as for
instance in a sentence like: 'Parmenides is Greek', or is it the 'is' of
Existence ?
It seems most likely that the 'IS' means Existence since, later on in the
poem, he characterise the 'IS' as a well-rounded ball, namely having
material properties. Accordingly, to Parmenides, Non-Being was analogous
to Non-existence.
Parmenides' concept, embraced by his disciples (the Eleatics) is
considered to be a refutation of the teachings of his predecessor,
Pythagoras, who claimed that a kind of Non-Being does indeed exist. Other
pre-Socratics, such as Democritus of Abdera, the most prominent of the
atomist scholars, and one who wrote and taught some decades after
Parmenides, also insisted, like Pythagoras, that Non-Being must in fact
exist, in spite of Parmenides' rigorous logic.
Certainly, the pre-Socratic philosophers conceived Being as (being) made
of matter. Democritus for instance, and other Atomists, viewed Being as
comprised of an infinite number of small particles- the word 'atoms'
literally meaning 'indivisible'. Atoms combine to form all the objects in
the universe. They are solid, microscopic, move in space and join one
another to form more complex objects. Movement of atoms is possible since
imbetween each one of them there is a void.
The void is not nothing at all - it is Non-Being. A Non-being that,
however, exists. But Greek philosophy had to pass through another thinking
revolution in order to postulate the existence of non material Beings; The
leading figure in this revolution was Plato who conceived the tenet of the
Forms (Ideai). The Forms are the ultimate real Beings, having no spatial
nor material properties.
In the Sophist dialogue, Plato argues that what 'is not' in some sense
also 'is', refuting Parmenides' concept of the impossibility of the
Non-Being to exist. Non-Being is just a being characterised only by its
difference from 'another' being. He asserted that the antinomy between
Being and Non-Being is false. The only real antinomy is that of a single
object of consciousness and all other things from which it is
distinguished.
Carroll was no stranger to Greek philosophy, which was one of the subjects
he studied as part of the Classics curriculum at Christ Church. It seems
that he embraced Platonic Ideational thought by asseverating the existence
of un-birthdays - un-birthdays are non-material beings.
Nor are they the only ones to be found in Carroll's realm of non-material
beings. There also is the dog's temper. The Red Queen urges Alice :
'Try another Subtraction sum.
Take a bone from a dog: what remains?
Alice considered. 'The bone wouldn't remain, of course, if I took it
-and the dog wouldn't remain; it would come to bite me -- and I'm sure I
shouldn't remain!'
'Then you think nothing would remain?' said the Red Queen.
'I think that's the answer.'
'Wrong, as usual,' said the Red Queen: 'the dog's temper would remain.'

'But I don't see how -'
'Why, look here!' the Red Queen cried. 'The dog would lose its temper,
wouldn't it?'
'Perhaps it would,' Alice replied cautiously.
'Then if the dog went away, its temper would remain!' the Queen
exclaimed triumphantly.'
Carroll is over and over again seen to be fascinated by the idea that
Nothingness is more than what meets the eye:
Take some more tea,' the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
'I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, 'so I can't
take more.'
'You mean you can't take LESS,' said the Hatter: 'it's very easy to take
MORE than nothing.'
The Cheshire cat's grin too is a non-material being. The cat appears from
the void and slowly vanishes back into it leaving behind him just a grin.
Can a cat's grin exist without its master? Carroll does not hesitate, he
is certain that it does. For it is clear that to Carroll a grin is just a
Platonic Form - a nonmaterial being which has real existence. He is not at
a loss to see the phenomena of the cat's head without its body, the
possibility of which brings about a heated disputation between the king
and the executioner.
The executioner's argues that: 'You couldn't cut off a head unless there
was a body to cut off from', but the king is not at all convinced. To him,
like to Carroll: ''anything that had a head could be beheaded.' and the
executioner's philosophical observations are just 'talking nonsense'.
However, there is a philosophical hurdle for un-birthdays. Birthdays and
Un- birthdays are of course also expressions of time. Plato did not
consider time as a form. He held that: 'The moving images of eternity we
call time, days and nights, are the parts of time' (Timaeus). One must
therefore question whether Birthdays or Un-birthdays are indeed Platonic
Forms.
Humpty Dumpty is not in the least troubled by this philosophical hurdle.
He remembers well that the Hatter told Alice that he 'knew Time' and that
one cannot 'talk about wasting it' because Time is 'him'. Time, says the
Hatter, is someone that if you only 'knew how to keep on good terms with
him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock', for instance 'you
could keep it to half-past one as long as you liked'.
To Humpty Dumpty, as well as to the Hatter, Time is a real entity. Once we
become aware of this reality, Plato's concept presents no hindrance to the
existence of either birthdays or un-birthdays. As with Time, Numbers too
are portrayed by Carroll as real entities. Upon entering the garden Alice
comes up to three card gardeners presented by Carroll as Two, Five and
Seven. To Carroll, the Christ Church mathematician, Numbers, like Time,
are more than just abstract figures - they are real Beings. Carroll
venerates here Pythagoras' concept about Numbers. Aristotle records that
the Pythagoreans held that Numbers were: the first things in the whole of
nature' and that 'the elements of numbers are the elements of all things'
Numbers also play an important role in Plato's philosophy. It is commonly
construed that he inclined to interpret his theory of the Forms in terms
of mathematics as in the Timaeus dialogue; Mathematical entities have real
existence; they are nonmaterial entities that exist in the realm of the
Forms.
Aristotle however held (in the Metaphysics) that Plato thought of the
Number as an intermediate substance between the Forms and the world of
appearances. The Neo-Platonics, who flourished after Aristotle, believed,
contrariwise, that numbers were identified by Plato with Forms. Whatever
is the right meaning that Plato intended for the numbers, it is widely
agreed that the Pythagorean number theory is the direct ancestor of the
Platonic theory of Forms.
Numbers afford Carroll creative freedom. The gardeners' numbers are
equivalent to their identities, so it is only natural for the Queen,
coming upon the gardeners, to ask: 'And who are these?' Since the
gardeners 'were lying on their faces', 'she could not tell whether they
were gardeners or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her own children'.
Plato, as part of the cave allegory, asserts that the identity of a human
being is not derived from their body but from the character of the their
soul. Carroll, in pure Platonic reasoning, professed that a Number like
the soul, is a nonmaterial entity that harbours the true identity of its
subject. The gardeners' bodies are visible but, alas, their numbers are
out of sight, hence their identity vanished and their very existence is in
doubt.
Another issue that Carroll coped with was the question raised by Greek
philosophy about the true nature of the Being. Ever since the
pre-Socratics, Greek philosophers have disagreed with each other about the
very nature of Being. Is it one or is it many? Can it move or is it
immovable?
This controversy is interwoven in the two Alice books. In order to follow
Carroll's adaptations in this respect, one must go back to the
pre-Socratics' tenets and 'Begin at the beginning'.
At the beginning, Parmenides taught that the IS, namely Being, or sole
existence, is characterised as being one and not many, as neither
generated nor capable of being extinguished, and as complete, not
divisible into parts and immovable. Being is immovable- due to its being
one and as such filling the whole universe with nowhere further to extend.

Alice, it seems, is aware of this concept. After drinking from the 'DRINK
ME' bottle and growing in size to such an extent that her whole Being
fills the room completely leaving no space for anything else, she observes
: 'Oh, you foolish Alice!' she answered herself. 'How can you learn
lessons in here? Why, there's hardly room for YOU, and no room at all for
any lesson-books!'
Parmenides' disciple, Zeno of Elea, formulated a few paradoxes to
demonstrate his masters' teachings that Being is one and motionless. The
most famous of his paradoxes is Achilles and the tortoise. If, in the
race, the tortoise has a start on Achilles, then Achilles can never reach
the tortoise for, while Achilles traverses the distance from his starting
point to that of the tortoise, the tortoise will have gone a certain
distance and, while Achilles traverses this distance, the tortoise goes
still further, ad infinitum. Consequently, Achilles may run indefinitely
without overtaking the tortoise.
The Achilles paradox purported to force upon the listener the truism that
motion is impossible and what we see as motion is an illusion. Pursuant to
Zeno's paradox Carroll wrote a lovely short piece which he called What the
tortoise said to Achilles. Achilles, trying to follow the tortoise's
reasoning, is left by the end mentally near despair failing to understand
Carroll's adaptation of Zeno's paradox which leads to infinity.
Parmenides further portrayed the IS as: 'perfect from every direction,
like the mass of a well-rounded ball, in equipoise every way from the
middle'. This portrayal raised a question - if that is so then the IS
extends only as far as the periphery of the ball. What exists beyond?
Parmenides' pupil, Melissus, was aware of this seeming inconsistency and
added his own refinement. He negated every form of void: to him, Being is
infinite in space as well as in time. Any other possibility will be
inherently contradictory since it will imply a presence of some Non-Being
beyond the edge.
Another pre-Socratic who conceived a tenet about the nature of Being was
Heraclitus of Ephesus, in Asia Minor, a predecessor of Parmenides, who
lived about 500 B.C. Unlike Parmenides' 'oneness' concept, Heraclitus
taught that existence is dualistic - both 'oneness' and plurality. He
further asserted that the nature of all things is governed by one
universal principle- that of the logos, the ultimate reality, which is
manifested by the interdependence of the opposites and by the process of
flux (Panta Rhei) and change. His teaching is defined as the unity of the
opposites.
The opposites may appear different but at the same time they are held
together in unity as, for instance, health and disease, or hot and cold.
They in fact define each other. As Heraclitus put it: 'Justice, which is a
good, would be unknown were it not for injustice, which is an evil'.
The existence of the opposites depends only on the difference of the
motion on 'the way upwards' from that on 'the way downwards'; all things,
therefore, are at once identical and not identical.
Humpty Dumpty, a true Heraclitean, asserts that there must exist an
opposite to a birthday which is an un-birthday. Alice enters the world
where Humpty Dumpty lives through the looking glass, and, as is common in
mirror worlds, every image has its opposite. The mirror images are
different, right appears as left and vice versa, but at same time they are
identical, since after all they are images of the same object.
Lewis Carroll rejects Parmenides' concept of oneness and the impossibility
of movement; Equally Heraclitean he embraces the view that everything is
in an everlasting process of flux, change and transformation, while its
essence remains the same. This is evidenced by Alice's encounter with the
Caterpillar: Who are you', asks the Caterpillar and Alice answers:
'I - I hardly know, Sir, just at present I know - at least I know who I
was when I got up in this morning, but I think I must have been changed
several times since then'. Alice is uncertain: 'I can't understand my
self, to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very
confusing.'
The caterpillar, unlike Alice, is 'not at bit' confused and does not 'feel
queer' at his transformation 'into a chrysalis, some day, and then after
that into a butterfly'. And why should he? As an Heraclitean thinker he
knows that the process of his transformation does not change his essence
and identity.
Carroll submits more evidence that sameness is not lost due to change. In
one instance Alice refers to her previous height changes when she briefly
suffers an identity crisis:
'I wonder if I've changed in the night? Let me think; was I the same
when I got up this morning?'
And the unavoidable question: 'But if I am not the same, who in the world
am I ?' She ponders whether she 'could have been changed for any one' of
the children she knew - Ada or Mabel. For a moment she believes that 'I
must be Mabel and shall have to go and live in that poky little house and
ever so many lessons to learn!' To avoid such a grim prospect, Alice,
still deeply doubtful about her identity, expresses her preference to stay
down in words that immediately call to mind Heraclitus' 'up and down'
language:
'I'll stay down here! It'll be no use their putting their heads down and
saying 'come up again, dear!' I shall only look up and say 'who am I,
then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I'll
come up; if not, I'll stay down here till I'm somebody else.'
After another short cycle of height transformations Alice gains self-
confidence and, with indisputable Heraclitean conviction she is 'very glad
to find herself still in existence'. Alice still experienced another
alarming transformation. After tasting the mushroom she found that 'all
she could see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck'.
Luckily she was delighted to find that her 'neck would bend about easily
in any direction, like a serpent'.And indeed a Pigeon, protecting his
hatched eggs, insists that Alice is a serpent, not just by her snakelike
shape but also in accordance with Aristotelian Categorical syllogism,
which the pigeon applies in an upside down manner:
All Serpents eat eggs
Alice eats eggs
Alice is 'a kind of serpent'
Carroll, the author of several books on logic, is paying here tribute to
Aristotle, the founder of logic as a branch of philosophy, and to
Aristotelian syllogistic propositions of two premises and a conclusion
like :
All Greeks are mortal
Socrates is Greek
Socrates is mortal.
The right Aristotelian syllogism, the Pigeon should have used, is of
course:
Serpents eat eggs
A is a serpent
A eats eggs
One must excuse a Pigeon in distress for such a fallacy when many people,
in more relaxed circumstances, reach similar false conclusions. Carroll
suggests that in spite of all the changes that have transpired, Alice's
existence has not been affected.
After the great Greeks, nearly all eminent philosophers, through the ages,
have taken part in the disputation about the existence and nature of the
Non-Being.
This issue is still debatable and open on the philosophical scene.

Why I Believe in God

By: The Rev. Cornelius Van Til, Ph.D.

You have noticed, haven't you, that in recent times certain scientists like Dr. James Jeans and Sir Arthur Eddington, as well as some outstanding philosophers like Dr. C.E.M. Joad, have had a good deal to say about religion and God? Scientists Jeans and Eddington are ready to admit that there may be something to the claims of men who say they have had an experience of God, while Philosopher Joad says that the "obtrusiveness of evil" has virtually compelled him to look into the argument for God's existence afresh. Much like modernist theologian Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr who talks about original sin, Philosopher Joad speaks about evil as being ineradicable from the human mind.
Then, too, you have on occasion asked yourself whether death ends all. You have recalled, perhaps, how Socrates the great Greek philosopher, struggled with that problem the day before he drank the hemlock cup. Is there anything at all, you ask yourself, to the idea of a judgement after death? Am I quite sure, you say, that there is not? How do I know that there is no God?
In short, as a person of intelligence, having a sense of responsibility, you have from time to time asked yourself some questions about the foundation of your thought and action. You have looked into, or at least been concerned about, what the philosophers call your theory of reality . So when I suggest that you spend a Sunday afternoon with me discussing my reasons for believing in God, I have the feeling that you are basically interested in what I am proposing for discussion.
To make our conversation more interesting, let's start by comparing notes on our past. That will fit in well with our plan, for the debate concerning heredity and environment is prominent in our day. Perhaps you think that the only real reason I have for believing in God is the fact that I was taught to do so in my early days. Of course I don't think that is really so. I don't deny that I was taught to believe in God when I was a child, but I do affirm that since I have grown up I have heard a pretty full statement of the argument against belief in God. And it is after having heard that argument that I am more than ever ready to believe in God. Now, in fact, I feel that the whole of history and civilization would be unintelligible to me if it were not for my belief in God. So true is this, that I propose to argue that unless God is back of everything, you cannot find meaning in anything. I cannot even argue for belief in Him, without already having taken Him for granted. And similarly I contend that you cannot argue against belief in Him unless you also first take Him for granted. Arguing about God's existence, I hold, is like arguing about air. You may affirm that air exists, and I that it does not. But as we debate the point, we are both breathing air all the time. Or to use another illustration, God is like the emplacement on which must stand the very guns that are supposed to shoot Him out of existence. However if, after hearing my story briefly, you still think it is all a matter of heredity and environment, I shall not disagree too violently. My whole point will be that there is perfect harmony between my belief as a child and my belief as a man, simply because God is Himself the environment by which my early life was directed and my later life made intelligible to myself.

The "Accident of Birth"

We are frequently told that much in our life depends on "the accident of birth". In ancient time some men were said to spring full-grown from the foreheads of the gods. That, at any rate, is not true today. Yet I understand the next best thing happened to you. You were born, I am told, in Washington, D.C., under the shadow of the White House. Well, I was born in a little thatched roof house with a cow barn attached, in Holland. You wore "silver slippers" and I wore wooden shoes.
Is this really important for our purpose? Not particularly, but it is important that neither of us was born in Guadalcanal or Timbuktu. Both of us, I mean, were born in the midst and under the influence of "Christian civilization." We shall limit our discussion, then, to the "God of Christianity." I believe, while you do not believe or are not sure that you do believe, in this particular kind of God. That will give point to our discussion. For surely there is no sense in talking about the existence of God, without knowing what kind of God it is who may or may not exist.
So much then we have gained. We at least know in general what sort of God we are going to make the subject for our conversation. If now we can come to a similar preliminary agreement as to the standard or test by which to prove or disprove God's existence, we can proceed. You, of course, do not expect me to bring God into the room here so that you may see Him. If I were able to do that, He would not be the God of Christianity. All that you expect me to do is to make it reasonable for you to believe in God. And I should like to respond quickly by saying that that is just what I am trying to do. But a moment's thought makes me hesitate. If you really do not believe in God, then you naturally do not believe that you are his creature. I, on the other hand, who do believe in God also believe, naturally, that it is reasonable for God's creature to believe in God. So I can only undertake to show that, even if it does not appear reasonable to you, it is reasonable for you, to believe in God.
I see you are getting excited. You feel a little like a man who is about to undergo a major operation. You realize that if you are to change your belief about God, you will also have to change your belief about yourself. And you are not quite ready for that. Well, you may leave if you desire. I certainly do not wish to be impolite. I only thought that as an intelligent person you would be willing to hear the "other side" of the question. And after all I am not asking you to agree with what I say. We have not really agreed on what we mean by God more than in a general and formal way. So also we need not at this point agree on the standard or test in more than a general or formal way. You might follow my argument, just for argument's sake.

Childhood

To go on, then, I can recall playing as a child in a sandbox built into a corner of the hay-barn. From the hay-barn I would go through the cow-barn to the house. Built into the hay- barn too, but with doors opening into the cow-barn, was a bed for the working-man. How badly I wanted permission to sleep in that bed for a night! Permission was finally given. Freud was still utterly unknown to me, but I had heard about ghosts and "forerunners of death." That night I heard the cows jingle their chains. I knew there were cows and that they did a lot of jingling with their chains, but after a while I was not quite certain that it was only the cows that made all the noises I heard. Wasn't there someone walking down the aisle back of the cows, and wasn't he approaching my bed? Already I had been taught to say my evening prayers. Some of the words of that prayer were to this effect: "Lord, convert me, that I may be converted." Unmindful of the paradox, I prayed that prayer that night as I had never prayed before.
I do not recall speaking either to my father or mother about my distress. They would have been unable to provide the modern remedy. Psychology did not come to their library table -- not even The Ladies Home Journal ! Yet I know what they would have said. Of course there were no ghosts, and certainly I should not be afraid anyway, since with body and soul I belonged to my Savior who died for me on the Cross and rose again that His people might be saved from hell and go to heaven! I should pray earnestly and often that the Holy Spirit might give me a new heart so that I might truly love God instead of sin and myself.
How do I know that this is the sort of thing they would have told me? Well, that was the sort of thing they spoke about from time to time. Or rather, that was the sort of thing that constituted the atmosphere of our daily life. Ours was not in any sense a pietistic family. There were not any great emotional outbursts on any occasion that I recall. There was much ado about making hay in the summer and about caring for the cows and sheep in the winter, but round about it all there was a deep conditioning atmosphere. Though there were no tropical showers of revivals, the relative humidity was always very high. At every meal the whole family was present. There was a closing as well as an opening prayer, and a chapter of the Bible was read each time. The Bible was read through from Genesis to Revelation. At breakfast or at dinner, as the case might be, we would hear of the New Testament, or of "the children of Gad after their families, of Zephon and Haggi and Shuni and Ozni, of Eri and Areli." I do not claim that I always fully understood the meaning of it all. Yet of the total effect there can be no doubt. The Bible became for me, in all its parts, in every syllable, the very Word of God. I learned that I must believe the Scripture story, and that "faith" was a gift of God. What had happened in the past, and particularly what had happened in the past in Palestine, was of the greatest moment to me. In short, I was brought up in what Dr. Joad would call "topographical and temporal parochialism." I was "conditioned" in the most thorough fashion. I could not help believing in God -- in the God of Christianity -- in the God of the whole Bible!
Living next to the Library of Congress, you were not so restricted. Your parents were very much enlightened in their religious views. They read to you from some Bible of the World instead of from the Bible of Palestine. No, indeed, you correct me, they did no such thing. They did not want to trouble you about religious matters in your early days. They sought to cultivate the "open mind" in their children.
Shall we say then that in my early life I was conditioned to believe in God, while you were left free to develop your own judgment as you pleased? But that will hardly do. You know as well as I that every child is conditioned by its environment. You were as thoroughly conditioned not to believe in God as I was to believe in God. So let us not call each other names. If you want to say that belief was poured down my throat, I shall retort by saying that unbelief was poured down your throat. That will get us set for our argument.

Early Schooling

To the argument we must now shortly come. Just another word, however, about my schooling. That will bring all the factors into the picture.
I was not quite five when somebody -- fortunately I cannot recall who -- took me to school. On the first day I was vaccinated and it hurt. I can still feel it. I had already been to church. I recall that definitely because I would sometimes wear my nicely polished leather shoes. A formula was read over me at my baptism which solemnly asserted that I had been conceived and born in sin, the idea being that my parents, like all men, had inherited sin from Adam, the first man and the representative of the human race. The formula further asserted that though thus conditioned by inescapable sin I was, as a child of the Covenant, redeemed in Christ. And at the ceremony my parents solemnly promised that as soon as I should be able to understand they would instruct me in all these matters by all the means at their disposal.
It was in pursuance of this vow that they sent me to a Christian grade school. In it I learned that my being saved from sin and my belonging to God made a difference for all that I knew or did. I saw the power of God in nature and His providence in the course of history. That gave the proper setting for my salvation, which I had in Christ. In short, the whole wide world that gradually opened up for me through my schooling was regarded as operating in its every aspect under the direction of the all-powerful and all-wise God whose child I was through Christ. I was to learn to think God's thoughts after him in every field of endeavor.
Naturally there were fights on the "campus" of the school and I was engaged in some -- though not in all -- of them. Wooden shoes were wonderful weapons of war. Yet we were strictly forbidden to use them, even for defensive purposes. There were always lectures both by teachers and by parents on sin and evil in connection with our martial exploits. This was especially the case when a regiment of us went out to do battle with the pupils of the public school. The children of the public school did not like us. They had an extensive vocabulary of vituperation. Who did we think we were anyway? We were goody goodies -- too good to go to the public school! "There! take that and like it!" We replied in kind. Meanwhile our sense of distinction grew by leaps and wounds. We were told in the evening that we must learn to bear with patience the ridicule of the "world." Had not the world hated the church, since Cain's time?
How different your early schooling was! You went to a "neutral" school. As your parents had done at home, so your teachers now did at school. They taught you to be "open-minded." God was not brought into connection with your study of nature or history. You were trained without bias all along the line.
Of course, you know better now. You realize that all that was purely imaginary. To be "without bias" is only to have a particular kind of bias. The idea of "neutrality" is simply a colorless suit that covers a negative attitude toward God. At least it ought to be plain that he who is not for the God of Christianity is against Him. You see, the world belongs to Him, and that you are His creature, and as such are to own up to that fact by honoring Him whether you eat or drink or do anything else. God says that you live, as it were, on His estate. And His estate has large ownership signs placed everywhere, so that he who goes by even at seventy miles an hour cannot but read them. Every fact in this world, the God of the Bible claims, has His stamp indelibly engraved upon it. How then could you be neutral with respect to such a God? Do you walk about leisurely on a Fourth of July in Washington wondering whether the Lincoln Memorial belongs to anyone? Do you look at "Old Glory" waving from a high flagpole and wonder whether she stands for anything? Does she require anything of you, born an American citizen as you are? You would deserve to suffer the fate of the "man without a country" if as an American you were neutral to America. Well, in a much deeper sense you deserve to live forever without God if you do not own and glorify Him as your Creator. You dare not manipulate God's world and least of all yourself as His image-bearer, for you own final purposes. When Eve became neutral as between God and the Devil, weighing the contentions of each as though they were inherently on the face of them of equal value, she was in reality already on the side of the devil!
There you go again getting excited once more. Sit down and calm yourself. You are open-minded and neutral are you not? And you have learned to think that any hypothesis has, as a theory of life, an equal right to be heard with any other, have you not? After all I am only asking you to see what is involved in the Christian conception of God. If the God of Christianity exists, the evidence for His existence is abundant and plain so that it is both unscientific and sinful not to believe in Him. When Dr. Joad, for example says: "The evidence for God is far from plain," on the ground that if it were plain everybody would believe in Him, he is begging the question. If the God of Christianity does exist, the evidence for Him must be plain. And the reason, therefore, why "everybody" does not believe in Him must be that "everybody" is blinded by sin. Everybody wears colored glasses. You have heard the story of the valley of the blind. A young man who was out hunting fell over a precipice into the valley of the blind. There was no escape. The blind men did not understand him when he spoke of seeing the sun and the colors of the rainbow, but a fine young lady did understand him when he spoke the language of love. The father of the girl would not consent to the marriage of his daughter to a lunatic who spoke so often of things that did not exist. But the great psychologists of the blind men's university offered to cure him of his lunacy by sewing up his eyelids. Then, they assured him, he would be normal like "everybody" else. But the simple seer went on protesting that he did see the sun.
So, as we have our tea, I propose not only to operate on your heart so as to change your will, but also on your eyes so as to change your outlook. But wait a minute. No, I do not propose to operate at all. I myself cannot do anything of the sort. I am just mildly suggesting that you are perhaps dead, and perhaps blind, leaving you to think the matter over for yourself. If an operation is to be performed it must be performed by God Himself.

Later Schooling

Meanwhile let us finish our story. At ten I came to this country and after some years decided to study for the ministry. This involved preliminary training at a Christian preparatory school and college. All my teachers were pledged to teach their subjects from the Christian point of view. Imagine teaching not only religion but algebra from the Christian point of view! But it was done. We were told that all facts in all their relations, numerical as well as others, are what they are because of God's all comprehensive plan with respect to them. Thus the very definitions of things would not merely be incomplete but basically wrong if God were left out of the picture. Were we not informed about the views of others? Did we not hear about evolution and about Immanuel Kant, the great modern philosopher who had conclusively shown that all the arguments for the existence of God were invalid? Oh, yes, we heard about all these things, but there were refutations given and these refutations seemed adequate to meet the case.
In the Seminaries I attended, namely Calvin, and Princeton before its reorganization along semi-modernist lines in 1929, the situation was much the same. So for instance Dr. Robert Dick Wilson used to tell us, and, as far as we could understand the languages, show us from the documents, that the "higher critics" had done nothing that should rightfully damage our child-like faith in the Old Testament as the Word of God. Similarly Dr. J. Gresham Machen and others made good their claim that New Testament Christianity is intellectually defensible and that the Bible is right in its claims. You may judge of their arguments by reading them for yourself. In short, I heard the story of historic Christianity and the doctrine of God on which it is built over and over from every angle by those who believed it and were best able to interpret its meaning.
The telling of this story has helped, I trust, to make the basic question simple and plain. You know pretty clearly now what sort of God it is of which I am speaking to you. If my God exists it was He who was back of my parents and teachers. It was He who conditioned all that conditioned me in my early life. But then it was He also who conditioned everything that conditioned you in your early life. God, the God of Christianity, is the All-Conditioner!
As the All-Conditioner, God is the All-Conscious One. A God Who is to control all things must control them "by the counsel of His will." If He did not do this, He would himself be conditioned. So then I hold that my belief in Him and your disbelief in Him are alike meaningless except for Him.

Objections Raised

By this time you are probably wondering whether I have really ever heard the objections which are raised against belief in such a God. Well, I think I have. I heard them from my teachers who sought to answer them. I also heard them from teachers who believed they could not be answered. While a student at Princeton Seminary I attended summer courses in the Chicago Divinity School. Naturally I heard the modern or liberal view of Scripture set forth fully there. And after graduation from the Seminary I spent two years at Princeton University for graduate work in philosophy. There the theories of modern philosophy were both expounded and defended by very able men. In short I was presented with as full a statement of the reasons for disbelief as I had been with the reasons for belief. I heard both sides fully from those who believed what they taught.
You have compelled me to say this by the look on your face. Your very gestures suggest that you cannot understand how any one acquainted with the facts and arguments presented by modern science and philosophy can believe in a God who really created the world, who really directs all things in the world by a plan to the ends He has in view for them. Well, I am only one of many who hold to the old faith in full view of what is said by modern science, modern philosophy, and modern Biblical criticism.
Obviously I cannot enter into a discussion of all the facts and all the reasons urged against belief in God. There are those who have made the Old Testament, as there are those who have made the New Testament, their life-long study. It is their works you must read for a detailed refutation of points of Biblical criticism. Others have specialized in physics and biology. To them I must refer you for a discussion of the many points connected with such matters as evolution. But there is something that underlies all these discussions. And it is with that something that I now wish to deal.
You may think I have exposed myself terribly. Instead of talking about God as something vague and indefinite, after the fashion of the modernist, the Barthians, and the mystic, a god so empty of content and remote from experience as to make no demands upon men, I have loaded down the idea of God with "antiquated" science and "contradictory" logic. It seems as though I have heaped insult upon injury by presenting the most objectionable sort of God I could find. It ought to be very easy for you to prick my bubble. I see you are ready to read over my head bushels of facts taken from the standard college texts on physics, biology, anthropology, and psychology, or to crush me with your sixty-ton tanks taken from Kant's famous book, The Critique of Pure Reason . But I have been under these hot showers now a good many times. Before you take the trouble to open the faucet again there is a preliminary point I want to bring up. I have already referred to it when we were discussing the matter of test or standard.
The point is this. Not believing in God, we have seen , you do not think yourself to be God's creature. And not believing in God you do not think the universe has been created by God. That is to say, you think of yourself and the world as just being there. Now if you actually are God's creature, then your present attitude is very unfair to Him. In that case it is even an insult to Him. And having insulted God, His displeasure rests upon you. God and you are not on "speaking terms." And you have very good reasons for trying to prove that He does not exist. If He does exist, He will punish you for your disregard of Him. You are therefore wearing colored glasses. And this determines everything you say about the facts and reasons for not believing in Him. You have had your picnics and hunting parties there without asking His permission. You have taken the grapes of God's vineyard without paying Him any rent and you have insulted His representatives who asked you for it.
I must make an apology to you at this point. We who believe in God have not always made this position plain. Often enough we have talked with you about facts and sound reasons as though we agreed with you on what these really are. In our arguments for the existence of God we have frequently assumed that you and we together have an area of knowledge on which we agree. But we really do not grant that you see any fact in any dimension of life truly. We really think you have colored glasses on your nose when you talk about chickens and cows, as well as when you talk about the life hereafter. We should have told you this more plainly than we did. But we were really a little ashamed of what would appear to you as a very odd or extreme position. We were so anxious not to offend you that we offended our own God. But we dare no longer present our God to you as smaller or less exacting than He really is. He wants to be presented as the All-Conditioner, as the emplacement on which even those who deny Him must stand.
Now in presenting all your facts and reasons to me, you have assumed that such a God does not exist. You have taken for granted that you need no emplacement of any sort outside of yourself. You have assumed the autonomy of your own experience. Consequently you are unable -- that is, unwilling -- to accept as a fact any fact that would challenge your self-sufficiency. And you are bound to call that contradictory which does not fit into the reach of your intellectual powers. You remember what old Procrustes did. If his visitors were too long, he cut off a few slices at each end; if they were too short, he used the curtain stretcher on them. It is that sort of thing I feel that you have done with every fact of human experience. And I am asking you to be critical of this your own most basic assumption. Will you not go into the basement of your own experience to see what has been gathering there while you were busy here and there with the surface inspection of life? You may be greatly surprised at what you find there.
To make my meaning clearer, I shall illustrate what I have said by pointing out how modern philosophers and scientists handle the facts and doctrines of Christianity.
Basic to all the facts and doctrines of Christianity and therefore involved in the belief in God, is the creation doctrine. Now modern philosophers and scientists as a whole claim that to hold such a doctrine or to believe in such a fact is to deny our own experience. They mean this not merely in the sense that no one was there to see it done, but in the more basic sense that it is logically impossible. They assert that it would break the fundamental laws of logic.
The current argument against the creation doctrine derives from Kant. It may fitly be expressed in the words of a more recent philosopher, James Ward: "If we attempt to conceive of God apart from the world, there is nothing to lead us on to creation" (Realm of Ends , p. 397). That is to say, if God is to be connected to the universe at all, he must be subject to its conditions. Here is the old creation doctrine. It says that God has caused the world to come into existence. But what do we mean by the word "cause"? In our experience, it is that which is logically correlative to the word "effect". If you have an effect you must have a cause and if you have a cause you must have an effect. If God caused the world, it must therefore have been because God couldn't help producing an effect. And so the effect may really be said to be the cause of the cause. Our experience can therefore allow for no God other than one that is dependent upon the world as much as the world is dependent upon Him.
The God of Christianity cannot meet these requirements of the autonomous man. He claims to be all-sufficient. He claims to have created the world, not from necessity but from His free will. He claims not to have changed in Himself when He created the world. His existence must therefore be said to be impossible and the creation doctrine must be said to be an absurdity.
The doctrine of providence is also said to be at variance with experience. This is but natural. One who rejects creation must logically also reject providence. If all things are controlled by God's providence, we are told, there can be nothing new and history is but a puppet dance.
You see then that I might present to you great numbers of facts to prove the existence of God. I might say that every effect needs a cause. I might point to the wonderful structure of the eye as evidence of God's purpose in nature. I might call in the story of mankind through the past to show that it has been directed and controlled by God. All these evidences would leave you unaffected. You would simply say that however else we may explain reality, we cannot bring in God. Cause and purpose, you keep repeating, are words that we human beings use with respect to things around us because they seem to act as we ourselves act, but that is as far as we can go.
And when the evidence for Christianity proper is presented to you the procedure is the same. If I point out to you that the prophecies of Scripture have been fulfilled, you will simply reply that it quite naturally appears that way to me and to others, but that in reality it is not possible for any mind to predict the future from the past. If it were, all would again be fixed and history would be without newness and freedom.
Then if I point to the many miracles, the story is once more the same. To illustrate this point I quote from the late Dr. William Adams Brown, an outstanding modernist theologian. "Take any of the miracles of the past," says Brown, "The virgin birth, the raising of Lazarus, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Suppose that you can prove that these events happened just as they are claimed to have happened. What have you accomplished? You have shown that our previous view of the limits of the possible needs to be enlarged; that our former generalizations were too narrow and need revision; that problems cluster about the origin of life and its renewal of which we had hitherto been unaware. But the one thing which you have not shown, which indeed you cannot show, is that a miracle has happened; for that is to confess that these problems are inherently insoluble, which cannot be determined until all possible tests have been made" (God at Work, New York, 1933, p. 169). You see with what confidence Brown uses this weapon of logical impossibility against the idea of a miracle. Many of the older critics of Scripture challenged the evidence for miracle at this point or at that. They made as it were a slow, piece-meal land invasion of the island of Christianity. Brown, on the other hand, settles the matter at once by a host of stukas from the sky. Any pill boxes that he cannot destroy immediately, he will mop up later. He wants to get rapid control of the whole field first. And this he does by directly applying the law of non-contradiction. Only that is possible, says Brown, in effect, which I can show to be logically related according to my laws of logic. So then if miracles want to have scientific standing, that is be recognized as genuine facts, they must sue for admittance at the port of entry to the mainland of scientific endeavor. And admission will be given as soon as they submit to the little process of generalization which deprives them of their uniqueness. Miracles must take out naturalization papers if they wish to vote in the republic of science and have any influence there.
Take now the four points I have mentioned -- creation, providence, prophecy, and miracle. Together they represent the whole of Christian theism. Together they include what is involved in the idea of God and what He has done round about and for us. Many times over and in many ways the evidence for all these has been presented. But you have an always available and effective answer at hand. It is impossible! It is impossible! You act like a postmaster who has received a great many letters addressed in foreign languages. He says he will deliver them as soon as they are addressed in the King's English by the people who sent them. Till then they must wait in the dead letter department. Basic to all the objections the average philosopher and scientist raises against the evidence for the existence of God is the assertion or the assumption that to accept such evidence would be to break the rules of logic.
I see you are yawning. Let us stop to eat supper now. For there is one more point in this connection that I must make. You have no doubt at some time in your life been to a dentist. A dentist drills a little deeper and then a little deeper and at last comes to the nerve of the matter.
Now before I drill into the nerve of the matter, I must again make apologies. The fact that so many people are placed before a full exposition of the evidence for God's existence and yet do not believe in Him has greatly discouraged us. We have therefore adopted measures of despair. Anxious to win your good will, we have again compromised our God. Noting the fact that men do not see, we have conceded that what they ought to see is hard to see. In our great concern to win men we have allowed that the evidence for God's existence is only probably compelling. And from that fatal confession we have gone one step further down to the point where we have admitted or virtually admitted that it is not really compelling at all. And so we fall back upon testimony instead of argument. After all, we say, God is not found at the end of an argument; He is found in our hearts. So we simply testify to men that once we were dead, and now we are alive, that once we were blind and that now we see, and give up all intellectual argument.
Do you suppose that our God approves of this attitude of His followers? I do not think so. The God who claims to have made all facts and to have placed His stamp upon them will not grant that there is really some excuse for those who refuse to see. Besides, such a procedure is self-defeating. If someone in your home town of Washington denied that there was any such thing as a United States Government would you take him some distance down the Potomac and testify to him that there is? So your experience and testimony of regeneration would be meaningless except for the objective truth of the objective facts that are presupposed by it. A testimony that is not an argument is not a testimony either, just as an argument that is not a testimony is not even an argument.
Waiving all this for the moment, let us see what the modern psychologist of religion, who stands on the same foundation with the philosopher, will do to our testimony. He makes a distinction between the raw datum and its cause, giving me the raw datum and keeping for himself the explanation of the cause. Professor James H. Leuba, a great psychologist of Bryn Mawr, has a procedure that is typical. He says, "The reality of any given datum -- of an immediate experience in the sense in which the term is used here, may not be impugned: When I feel cold or warm, sad or gay, discouraged or confident, I am cold, sad, discouraged, etc., and every argument which might be advanced to prove to me that I am not cold is, in the nature of the case, preposterous; an immediate experience may not be controverted; it cannot be wrong." All this seems on the surface to be very encouraging. The immigrant is hopeful of a ready and speedy admittance. However, Ellis Island must still be passed. "But if the raw data of experience are not subject to criticism, the causes ascribed to them are. If I say that my feeling of cold is due to an open window, or my state of exultation to a drug, or my renewed courage to God, my affirmation goes beyond my immediate experience; I have ascribed a cause to it, and that cause may be the right or the wrong one." (God or Man, New York, 1933, p. 243.) And thus the immigrant must wait at Ellis Island a million years. That is to say, I as a believer in God through Christ, assert that I am born again through the Holy Spirit. The Psychologist says that is a raw datum of experience and as such incontrovertible. We do not, he says, deny it. But it means nothing to us. If you want it to mean something to us you must ascribe a cause to your experience. We shall then examine the cause. Was your experience caused by opium or God? You say by God. Well, that is impossible since as philosophers we have shown that it is logically contradictory to believe in God. You may come back at any time when you have changed your mind about the cause of your regeneration. We shall be glad to have you and welcome you as a citizen of our realm, if only you take out your naturalization papers!
We seem now to have come to a pretty pass. We agreed at the outset to tell each other the whole truth. If I have offended you it has been because I dare not, even in the interest of winning you, offend my God. And if I have not offended you I have not spoken of my God. For what you have really done in your handling of the evidence for belief in God, is to set yourself up as God. You have made the reach of your intellect, the standard of what is possible or not possible. You have thereby virtually determined that you intend never to meet a fact that points to God. Facts, to be facts at all -- facts, that is, with decent scientific and philosophic standing -- must have your stamp instead of that of God upon them as their virtual creator.
Of course I realize full well that you do not pretend to create redwood trees and elephants. But you do virtually assert that redwood trees and elephants cannot be created by God. You have heard of the man who never wanted to see or be a purple cow. Well, you have virtually determined that you never will see or be a created fact. With Sir Arthur Eddington you say as it were, "What my net can't catch isn't fish."
Nor do I pretend, of course, that once you have been brought face to face with this condition, you can change your attitude. No more than the Ethiopian can change his skin or the leopard his spots can you change your attitude. You have cemented your colored glasses to your face so firmly that you cannot even take them off when you sleep. Freud has not even had a glimpse of the sinfulness of sin as it controls the human heart. Only the great Physician through His blood atonement on the Cross and by the gift of His Spirit can take those colored glasses off and make you see facts as they are, facts as evidence, as inherently compelling evidence, for the existence of God.
It ought to be pretty plain now what sort of God I believe in. It is God, the All-Conditioner. It is the God who created all things, Who by His providence conditioned my youth, making me believe in Him, and who in my later life by His grace still makes me want to believe in Him. It is the God who also controlled your youth and so far has apparently not given you His grace that you might believe in Him.
You may reply to this: "Then what's the use of arguing and reasoning with me?" Well, there is a great deal of use in it. You see, if you are really a creature of God, you are always accessible to Him. When Lazarus was in the tomb he was still accessible to Christ who called him back to life. It is this on which true preachers depend. The prodigal [son] thought he had clean escaped from the father's influence. In reality the father controlled the "far country" to which the prodigal had gone. So it is in reasoning. True reasoning about God is such as stands upon God as upon the emplacement that alone gives meaning to any sort of human argument. And such reasoning, we have a right to expect, will be used of God to break down the one-horse chaise of human autonomy.
But now I see you want to go home. And I do not blame you; the last bus leaves at twelve. I should like to talk again another time. I invite you to come to dinner next Sunday. But I have pricked your bubble, so perhaps you will not come back. And yet perhaps you will. That depends upon the Father's pleasure. Deep down in your heart you know very well that what I have said about you is true. You know there is no unity in your life. You want no God who by His counsel provides for the unity you need. Such a God, you say, would allow for nothing new. So you provide your own unity. But this unity must, by your own definition, not kill that which is wholly new. Therefore it must stand over against the wholly new and never touch it at all. Thus by your logic you talk about possibles and impossibles, but all this talk is in the air. By your own standards it can never have anything to do with reality. Your logic claims to deal with eternal and changeless matters; and your facts are wholly changing things; and "never the twain shall meet." So you have made nonsense of your own experience. With the prodigal you are at the swine-trough, but it may be that, unlike the prodigal, you will refuse to return to the father's house.
On the other hand by my belief in God I do have unity in my experience. Not of course the sort of unity that you want. Not a unity that is the result of my own autonomous determination of what is possible. But a unity that is higher than mine and prior to mine. On the basis of God's counsel I can look for facts and find them without destroying them in advance. On the basis of God's counsel I can be a good physicist, a good biologist, a good psychologist, or a good philosopher. In all these fields I use my powers of logical arrangement in order to see as much order in God's universe as it may be given a creature to see. The unities, or systems that I make are true because [they are] genuine pointers toward the basic or original unity that is found in the counsel of God.
Looking about me I see both order and disorder in every dimension of life. But I look at both of them in the light of the Great Orderer Who is back of them. I need not deny either of them in the interest of optimism or in the interest of pessimism. I see the strong men of biology searching diligently through hill and dale to prove that the creation doctrine is not true with respect to the human body, only to return and admit that the missing link is missing still. I see the strong men of psychology search deep and far into the sub-consciousness, child and animal consciousness, in order to prove that the creation and providence doctrines are not true with respect to the human soul, only to return and admit that the gulf between human and animal intelligence is as great as ever. I see the strong men of logic and scientific methodology search deep into the transcendental for a validity that will not be swept away by the ever-changing tide of the wholly new, only to return and say that they can find no bridge from logic to reality, or from reality to logic. And yet I find all these, though standing on their heads, reporting much that is true. I need only to turn their reports right side up, making God instead of man the center of it all, and I have a marvelous display of the facts as God has intended me to see them.
And if my unity is comprehensive enough to include the efforts of those who reject it, it is large enough even to include that which those who have been set upright by regeneration cannot see. My unity is that of a child who walks with its father through the woods. The child is not afraid because its father knows it all and is capable of handling every situation. So I readily grant that there are some "difficulties" with respect to belief in God and His revelation in nature and Scripture that I cannot solve. In fact there is mystery in every relationship with respect to every fact that faces me, for the reason that all facts have their final explanation in God Whose thoughts are higher than my thoughts, and Whose ways are higher than my ways. And it is exactly that sort of God that I need. Without such a God, without the God of the Bible, the God of authority, the God who is self-contained and therefore incomprehensible to men, there would be no reason in anything. No human being can explain in the sense of seeing through all things, but only he who believes in God has the right to hold that there is an explanation at all.
So you see when I was young I was conditioned on every side; I could not help believing in God. Now that I am older I still cannot help believing in God. I believe in God now because unless I have Him as the All-Conditioner, life is Chaos.
I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else. But since I believe in such a God, a God who has conditioned you as well as me, I know that you can to your own satisfaction, by the help of the biologists, the psychologists, the logicians, and the Bible critics reduce everything I have said this afternoon and evening to the circular meanderings of a hopeless authoritarian. Well, my meanderings have, to be sure, been circular; they have made everything turn on God. So now I shall leave you with Him, and with His mercy.

The End

Copyright © 1996 Jonathan BarlowAll Rights ReservedConverted to the electronic domain and into html format by Jonathan Barlow.