A Soldier's Honour

An essay defining true Honour

        Honour unguided, like a dream, is easily broken. Shattered among the ground, the shards of honour have created the most vile of mankind, the individuals deceived by the satisfaction of mere authority. By replacing virtue as the guide to honour, destruction and evil fills the empty void and throws mankind into the oblivion of a single, deceptive belief: that an individual acts as the possessor of honour, when instead, one has forsaken her long ago. However, men are not only the devices of tyranny, but also the shining hope of freedom. Over the years, honour has been entrusted to the knights, the watchmen, and the soldiers who have paid the greatest price to protect the ones they love. G.K. Chesterton understood the soldier's honour as a commitment to the virtues of love, hope, and obedience, when he stated, “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”¹ Though unguided honour has ravaged the history of civilization, honour that is guided by the virtues of love, hope, and obedience, has defined the true concept of honour that all have come to respect.
        History has testified to the horrors committed in the name of honour. Perhaps the most infamous acts performed under the guise of honour were the ones described by General Eisenhower at Ohdruf's Concentration camp in Normandy; “... [It was] beyond the American mind to comprehend.... I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world.”² Eisenhower ordered every high ranking official in the local area to immediately witness the grotesque mutilations that America was fighting to end. The execrable events that marked Hitler's ending were not the events that marked his beginning. Hitler did not rise to power upon fear and atrocity, but he rose upon the love and loyalty of the German people.
      The Führer did not merely promise wealth, power, and dignity, but he also fulfilled his promises faithfully. Six years after Hitler assumed office, the bankrupt, ill, and indecisive Weihmer Republic became the rich, flourishing, and commanding Third Reich. But what Germany neither saw nor took heed to understand was what Hitler's promises were guided by; as described in the Mein Kampf³, Adolf's passions were guided by the lust for domination and the desire for revenge. Germany's transformation was surely delivered, but not by the honour the German people believed in. The German people believed in an honour that was defined by virtue, but desired national honour so passionately that an entire nation was willing to risk life, liberty, and country for anything that resembled true honour.   
        Few have endured and have been guided by the virtues of true honour. A knight's accomplishments are not recognized by actions, promises, or fulfillment alone but by the guidance of love, hope, and obedience. The first and greatest virtue is love. Love is the all-encompassing virtue that withstands all the troubles of life: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things - true love never fails”⁴. The second is hope. “Hope is faith holding out its hand in the dark”⁵: it is the light of God being seen when all lights go out. Through the darkest of times and through the perilous of moments, the virtue of hope continually assures the watchman of what is true when nothing is to be seen. And the last quality of honour is obedience. Obedience is the act of walking down the path less traveled not because one wishes, but because one must. The collection of virtues defining honour is demonstrated by the choices an individual makes; one chooses either to uphold the virtues of honour through all the toils of life or to abandon honour when she is most needed. Unlike the sunshine patriot, the bearer of honour is not defined by what he wishes, but by what he is given, and by what he accomplishes.
      Though historically the knight in shining armour has been the epiphany of the nobility of honour, the definition of honour has also been described by the ancient philosophers and completed by the Christian belief. Aristotle believed, “Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit, is considered to aim at some good. Hence the Good has been rightly defined as 'that at which all things aim'.”⁶ Aristotle described that all of mankind travels down the road of life to find happiness and, in so doing, directs all actions towards objects of goodness. And from the path of goodness mankind immortalizes the men and woman who reach the pinnacle of goodness – which is honour. The German people believed in Hitler not because of the concentration camps, but because he was able to renew Germany.        
        The Nazi regime rebuilt destroyed cities, fed the famished citizens, and carried the burden of the people. With so much good, how did Hitler's honour end with such atrocities? Honour ended with evil because the ancient philosophers could not define the standard of goodness, therefore the path to honour was the path that each person believed to be right – all paths lead to honour. Without a standard to guide honour, honour became as morally good as described by the people who benefited by her riches and as morally evil as described by the people who were destroyed by her deception. Honour was a dead end, a poor collection of good thoughts, until Christianity asserted a standard to goodness that the ancient philosophers could not conjecture.

      The virtues of honour are completed by the doctrines of the Christian faith by defining the virtues of love, hope, and obedience with the standard and purity of God's goodness. The prophet Micah stated, “ He hath shewed thee, O man, what [is] good; and what doth the LORD require of thee. But to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”⁷ Through the Ten Commandments and the prophets, mankind was shown God's expectancy, provided the standard of goodness, and shown why honour was treasured above all other virtues. Honour stands alone unlike any virtue because honour is defined by something beyond mankind – defined by God – because honour is the virtue that saved mankind. The strife for true honour has been the story of every civilization and the glory of every belief.     
        In Paradise Lost, Milton portrays the acts of honour in the elegance of poems and valiance of legends. The Biblical story of creation and the fall of mankind depicts the struggles and the importance between the bonds of male and female; between a man and a wife; between a knight and his love; and between life and death. As Adam held the forbidden fruit in his hand, he chose the ultimate sacrifice for the one he loved. Looking at Eve, Adam proclaimed, “If death consort with thee, death is to me as life.... Our state cannot be severed. We are one, One Flesh. To lose thee were to lose myself.”⁸ Adam ate the fruit, his body died, and his soul separated from his creator. In the love for his wife, in the hope for the things to come, and in the obedience to one bond, Adam perished with Eve. Adam's choice was the only choice for Eve to be saved from death.    
        For thousands of years after the death of Adam, the race of man fell; but love, hope, and obedience endured. The sacrifice committed by Adam was a great sacrifice, and the cost was dear, for again, “darkness fell upon the face of the deep”^9. And in darkness, mankind awaited another sacrifice. Ten Thousand years later, God, in all His glory, came to fulfill that honourable sacrifice. As the Bible speaks about the church being the Bride of Christ, so did Christ endure the sacrifice for the sin of His wife. Upon the cross, Christ bore the shame that Adam carried before his Creator long ago in the garden. Christ tasted the fruit of his creation, His body died, and His spirit was separated from His Father. In the love for His Bride, in the hope for the few to be saved, and in the obedience to God, Christ died and rose from the grave. Virtue prevailed so that two may be together again. Honour is defined by sacrificial love, impelling hope, and determined obedience.        
        Unguided honour has been the demise to every good intention, but the fulfillment of every good deed is the pleasures of true honour. The love of every knight, the keeper of every watchman, and the duty of every soldier is to understand true honour.“To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risk must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.”¹⁰ To risk everything is to gain honour – the greatest of virtues.

1. G.K. Chesterton, Chesterton Society, www.chesterton.org (accessed 04/13/2011), ILN, 1/14/11

2. General Dwight Eisenhower, Eisenhower Memorial, http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/stories/death-camps.htm (accessed 04/13/2011)

3. Mein Kampf ( My Struggle) by Adolf Hitler, Published by Eher Verlag (accessed 04/13/2011)

4. Holy Bible, King James Version, 1 Cor. 13:4-8 [Paraphrased]

5. George Iles, Think Exist, http://thinkexist.com/quotation/hope_is_faith_holding_out_its_hand_in_the_dark/206715.html (accessed 04/13/2011)

6. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, Chapter 1, The Object of Life, pg. 1

7. Holy Bible,King James Version, Micah 6:8

8. Paradise Lost by John Milton , Book IX, pg. 285, Lines 953 – 959 (accessed 04/13/2011)

9. Holy Bible, King James Version, Genesis 1:2

10. Bill Bixy, Think Exist, http://thinkexist.com/quotation/to_love_is_to_risk_not_being_loved_in_return-to/9949.html (accessed 04/13/2011)

Evolution vs. Naturalism

Why they are like oil and water

by Alvin Plantinga

As everyone knows, there has been a recent spate of books attacking Christian belief and religion in general. Some of these books are little more than screeds, long on vituperation but short on reasoning, long on name-calling but short on competence, long on righteous indignation but short on good sense; for the most part they are driven by hatred rather than logic. Of course there are others that are intellectually more respectable—for example Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's contribution to God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist[1] and Michael Tooley's contribution to Knowledge of God.[2] Nearly all of these books have been written by philosophical naturalists. I believe it's extremely important to see that naturalism itself, despite the smug and arrogant tone of the so-called New Atheists, is in very serious philosophical hot water: one can't sensibly believe it.

Naturalism is the idea that there is no such person as God or anything like God; we might think of it as high-octane atheism or perhaps atheism-plus. It is possible to be an atheist without rising to the lofty heights (or descending to the murky depths) of naturalism. Aristotle, the ancient Stoics, and Hegel (in at least certain stages) could properly claim to be atheists, but they couldn't properly claim to be naturalists: each endorses something (Aristotle's Prime Mover, the Stoics' Nous, Hegel's Absolute) no self-respecting naturalist could tolerate.

These days naturalism is extremely fashionable in the academy; some say it is contemporary academic orthodoxy. Given the vogue for various forms of postmodern anti-realism and relativism, that may be a bit strong. Still, naturalism is certainly widespread, and it is set forth in such recent popular books as Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and many others. Naturalists like to wrap themselves in the mantle of science, as if science in some way supports, endorses, underwrites, implies, or anyway is unusually friendly to naturalism. In particular, they often appeal to the modern theory of evolution as a reason for embracing naturalism; indeed, the subtitle of Dawkins' Watchmaker is Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. Many seem to think that evolution is one of the pillars in the temple of naturalism (and "temple" is the right word: contemporary naturalism has certainly taken on a religious cast, with a secular priesthood as zealous to stamp out opposing views as any mullah). I propose to argue that naturalism and evolution are in conflict with each other.

I said naturalism is in philosophical hot water; this is true on several counts, but here I want to concentrate on just one—one connected with the thought that evolution supports or endorses or is in some way evidence for naturalism. As I see it, this is a whopping error: evolution and naturalism are not merely uneasy bedfellows; they are more like belligerent combatants. One can't rationally accept both evolution and naturalism; one can't rationally be an evolutionary naturalist. The problem, as several thinkers (C. S. Lewis, for example) have seen, is that naturalism, or evolutionary naturalism, seems to lead to a deep and pervasive skepticism. It leads to the conclusion that our cognitive or belief-producing faculties—memory, perception, logical insight, etc.—are unreliable and cannot be trusted to produce a preponderance of true beliefs over false. Darwin himself had worries along these lines: "With me," says Darwin, "the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"[3]

Clearly this doubt arises for naturalists or atheists, but not for those who believe in God. That is because if God has created us in his image, then even if he fashioned us by some evolutionary means, he would presumably want us to resemble him in being able to know; but then most of what we believe might be true even if our minds have developed from those of the lower animals. On the other hand, there is a real problem here for the evolutionary naturalist. Richard Dawkins once claimed that evolution made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. I believe he is dead wrong: I don't think it's possible at all to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist; but in any event you can't rationally accept both evolution and naturalism.

Why not? How does the argument go?[4] The first thing to see is that naturalists are also always or almost always materialists: they think human beings are material objects, with no immaterial or spiritual soul, or self. We just are our bodies, or perhaps some part of our bodies, such as our nervous systems, or brains, or perhaps part of our brains (the right or left hemisphere, for example), or perhaps some still smaller part. So let's think of naturalism as including materialism.[5] And now let's think about beliefs from a materialist perspective. According to materialists, beliefs, along with the rest of mental life, are caused or determined by neurophysiology, by what goes on in the brain and nervous system. Neurophysiology, furthermore, also causes behavior. According to the usual story, electrical signals proceed via afferent nerves from the sense organs to the brain; there some processing goes on; then electrical impulses go via efferent nerves from the brain to other organs including muscles; in response to these signals, certain muscles contract, thus causing movement and behavior.

Now what evolution tells us (supposing it tells us the truth) is that our behavior, (perhaps more exactly the behavior of our ancestors) is adaptive; since the members of our species have survived and reproduced, the behavior of our ancestors was conducive, in their environment, to survival and reproduction. Therefore the neurophysiology that caused that behavior was also adaptive; we can sensibly suppose that it is still adaptive. What evolution tells us, therefore, is that our kind of neurophysiology promotes or causes adaptive behavior, the kind of behavior that issues in survival and reproduction.

Now this same neurophysiology, according to the materialist, also causes belief. But while evolution, natural selection, rewards adaptive behavior (rewards it with survival and reproduction) and penalizes maladaptive behavior, it doesn't, as such, care a fig about true belief. As Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the genetic code, writes in The Astonishing Hypothesis, "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents." Taking up this theme, naturalist philosopher Patricia Churchland declares that the most important thing about the human brain is that it has evolved; hence, she says, its principal function is to enable the organism to move appropriately:

"Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principal chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive...Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism's way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival [Churchland's emphasis]. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost."[6]

What she means is that natural selection doesn't care about the truth or falsehood of your beliefs; it cares only about adaptive behavior. Your beliefs may all be false, ridiculously false; if your behavior is adaptive, you will survive and reproduce. Consider a frog sitting on a lily pad. A fly passes by; the frog flicks out its tongue to capture it. Perhaps the neurophysiology that causes it to do so, also causes beliefs. As far as survival and reproduction is concerned, it won't matter at all what these beliefs are: if that adaptive neurophysiology causes true belief (e.g., those little black things are good to eat), fine. But if it causes false belief (e.g., if I catch the right one, I'll turn into a prince), that's fine too. Indeed, the neurophysiology in question might cause beliefs that have nothing to do with the creature's current circumstances (as in the case of our dreams); that's also fine, as long as the neurophysiology causes adaptive behavior. All that really matters, as far as survival and reproduction is concerned, is that the neurophysiology cause the right kind of behavior; whether it also causes true belief (rather than false belief) is irrelevant.

Next, to avoid interspecies chauvinism, let's not think about ourselves, but instead about a hypothetical population of creatures a lot like us, perhaps living on a distant planet. Like us, these creatures enjoy perception, memory, and reason; they form beliefs on many topics, they reason and change belief, and so on. Let's suppose, furthermore, that naturalistic evolution holds for them; that is, suppose they live in a naturalistic universe and have come to be by way of the processes postulated by contemporary evolutionary theory. What we know about these creatures, then, is that they have survived; their neurophysiology has produced adaptive behavior. But what about the truth of their beliefs? What about the reliability of their belief-producing or cognitive faculties?

What we learn from Crick and Churchland (and what is in any event obvious) is this: the fact that our hypothetical creatures have survived doesn't tell us anything at all about the truth of their beliefs or the reliability of their cognitive faculties. What it tells us is that the neurophysiology that produces those beliefs is adaptive, as is the behavior caused by that neurophysiology. But it simply doesn't matter whether the beliefs also caused by that neurophysiology are true. If they are true, excellent; but if they are false, that's fine too, provided the neurophysiology produces adaptive behavior.

So consider any particular belief on the part of one of those creatures: what is the probability that it is true? Well, what we know is that the belief in question was produced by adaptive neurophysiology, neurophysiology that produces adaptive behavior. But as we've seen, that gives us no reason to think the belief true (and none to think it false). We must suppose, therefore, that the belief in question is about as likely to be false as to be true; the probability of any particular belief's being true is in the neighborhood of 1/2. But then it is massively unlikely that the cognitive faculties of these creatures produce the preponderance of true beliefs over false required by reliability. If I have 1,000 independent beliefs, for example, and the probability of any particular belief's being true is 1/2, then the probability that 3/4 or more of these beliefs are true (certainly a modest enough requirement for reliability) will be less than 10(to the power -58). And even if I am running a modest epistemic establishment of only 100 beliefs, the probability that 3/4 of them are true, given that the probability of any one's being true is 1/2, is very low, something like .000001.[7] So the chances that these creatures' true beliefs substantially outnumber their false beliefs (even in a particular area) are small. The conclusion to be drawn is that it is exceedingly unlikely that their cognitive faculties are reliable.

But of course this same argument will also hold for us. If evolutionary naturalism is true, then the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable is also very low. And that means that one who accepts evolutionary naturalism has a defeater for the belief that her cognitive faculties are reliable: a reason for giving up that belief, for rejecting it, for no longer holding it. If there isn't a defeater for that defeater—a defeater-defeater, we could say—she can't rationally believe that her cognitive faculties are reliable. No doubt she can't help believing that they are; no doubt she will in fact continue to believe it; but that belief will be irrational. And if she has a defeater for the reliability of her cognitive faculties, she also has a defeater for any belief she takes to be produced by those faculties—which, of course, is all of her beliefs. If she can't trust her cognitive faculties, she has a reason, with respect to each of her beliefs, to give it up. She is therefore enmeshed in a deep and bottomless skepticism. One of her beliefs, however, is her belief in evolutionary naturalism itself; so then she also has a defeater for that belief. Evolutionary naturalism, therefore—the belief in the combination of naturalism and evolution—is self-refuting, self-destructive, shoots itself in the foot. Therefore you can't rationally accept it. For all this argument shows, it may be true; but it is irrational to hold it. So the argument isn't an argument for the falsehood of evolutionary naturalism; it is instead for the conclusion that one cannot rationally believe that proposition. Evolution, therefore, far from supporting naturalism, is incompatible with it, in the sense that you can't rationally believe them both.

What sort of reception has this argument had? As you might expect, naturalists tend to be less than wholly enthusiastic about it, and many objections have been brought against it. In my opinion (which of course some people might claim is biased), none of these objections is successful.[8] Perhaps the most natural and intuitive objection goes as follows. Return to that hypothetical population of a few paragraphs back. Granted, it could be that their behavior is adaptive even though their beliefs are false; but wouldn't it be much more likely that their behavior is adaptive if their beliefs are true? And doesn't that mean that, since their behavior is in fact adaptive, their beliefs are probably true and their cognitive faculties probably reliable?

This is indeed a natural objection, in particular given the way we think about our own mental life. Of course you are more likely to achieve your goals, and of course you are more likely to survive and reproduce if your beliefs are mostly true. You are a prehistoric hominid living on the plains of Serengeti; clearly you won't last long if you believe lions are lovable overgrown pussycats who like nothing better than to be petted. So, if we assume that these hypothetical creatures are in the same kind of cognitive situation we ordinarily think we are, then certainly they would have been much more likely to survive if their cognitive faculties were reliable than if they were not.

But of course we can't just assume that they are in the same cognitive situation we think we are in. For example, we assume that our cognitive faculties are reliable. We can't sensibly assume that about this population; after all, the whole point of the argument is to show that if evolutionary naturalism is true, then very likely we and our cognitive faculties are not reliable. So reflect once more on what we know about these creatures. They live in a world in which evolutionary naturalism is true. Therefore, since they have survived and reproduced, their behavior has been adaptive. This means that the neurophysiology that caused or produced that behavior has also been adaptive: it has enabled them to survive and reproduce. But what about their beliefs? These beliefs have been produced or caused by that adaptive neurophysiology; fair enough. But that gives us no reason for supposing those beliefs true. So far as adaptiveness of their behavior goes, it doesn't matter whether those beliefs are true or false.

Suppose the adaptive neurophysiology produces true beliefs: fine; it also produces adaptive behavior, and that's what counts for survival and reproduction. Suppose on the other hand that neurophysiology produces false beliefs: again fine: it produces false beliefs but adaptive behavior. It really doesn't matter what kind of beliefs the neurophysiology produces; what matters is that it cause adaptive behavior; and this it clearly does, no matter what sort of beliefs it also produces. Therefore there is no reason to think that if their behavior is adaptive, then it is likely that their cognitive faculties are reliable.

The obvious conclusion, so it seems to me, is that evolutionary naturalism can't sensibly be accepted. The high priests of evolutionary naturalism loudly proclaim that Christian and even theistic belief is bankrupt and foolish. The fact, however, is that the shoe is on the other foot. It is evolutionary naturalism, not Christian belief, that can't rationally be accepted.

Alvin Plantinga is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

1. Reviewed elsewhere in this issue by Douglas Groothuis, in a piece covering four books dealing with atheism in one fashion or another.

2. Coauthored with Alvin Plantinga in Blackwell's Great Debates in Philosophy series (Blackwell, 2008).

3. Letter to William Graham (Down, July 3, 1881), in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), Volume 1, pp. 315-16.

4. Here I'll just give the bare essentials of the argument; for fuller statements, see my Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), chap. 7; or my contribution to Knowledge of God (Blackwell, 2008); or Natural Selection and the Problem of Evil (The Great Debate), edited by Paul Draper, www.infidels.org/library/modern/paul_draper/evil.html.

5. If you don't think naturalism does include materialism, then take my argument as for the conclusion that you can't sensibly accept the tripartite conjunction of naturalism, evolution, and materialism.

6. "Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 84 (October 1987), pp. 548-49.

7. My thanks to Paul Zwier, who performed the calculations.

8. See, e.g., Naturalism Defeated?, ed. James Beilby (Cornell Univ. Press, 2002), which contains some ten essays by critics of the argument, together with my replies to their objections.

[Books and Culture magazine July/August 2008]

The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism ad absurdum

By Alvin Plantinga
[A Book Review by Dr. Alvin Plantinga of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins]

Richard Dawkins is not pleased with God:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal….

Well, no need to finish the quotation; you get the idea. Dawkins seems to have chosen God as his sworn enemy. (Let's hope for Dawkins' sake God doesn't return the compliment.)

The God Delusion is an extended diatribe against religion in general and belief in God in particular; Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (whose recent Breaking the Spell is his contribution to this genre) are the touchdown twins of current academic atheism.1 Dawkins has written his book, he says, partly to encourage timorous atheists to come out of the closet. He and Dennett both appear to think it requires considerable courage to attack religion these days; says Dennett, "I risk a fist to the face or worse. Yet I persist." Apparently atheism has its own heroes of the faith—at any rate its own self-styled heroes. Here it's not easy to take them seriously; religion-bashing in the current Western academy is about as dangerous as endorsing the party's candidate at a Republican rally.

Dawkins is perhaps the world's most popular science writer; he is also an extremely gifted science writer. (For example, his account of bats and their ways in his earlier book The Blind Watchmaker is a brilliant and fascinating tour de force.) The God Delusion, however, contains little science; it is mainly philosophy and theology (perhaps "atheology" would be a better term) and evolutionary psychology, along with a substantial dash of social commentary decrying religion and its allegedly baneful effects. As the above quotation suggests, one shouldn't look to this book for evenhanded and thoughtful commentary. In fact the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery, spleen, and vitriol is astounding. (Could it be that his mother, while carrying him, was frightened by an Anglican clergyman on the rampage?) If Dawkins ever gets tired of his day job, a promising future awaits him as a writer of political attack ads.

Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of the book, can be annoying. I shall put irritation aside, however and do my best to take Dawkins' main argument seriously.

Chapter 3, "Why There Almost Certainly is No God," is the heart of the book. Well, why does Dawkins think there almost certainly isn't any such person as God? It's because, he says, the existence of God is monumentally improbable. How improbable? The astronomer Fred Hoyle famously claimed that the probability of life arising on earth (by purely natural means, without special divine aid) is less than the probability that a flight-worthy Boeing 747 should be assembled by a hurricane roaring through a junkyard. Dawkins appears to think the probability of the existence of God is in that same neighborhood—so small as to be negligible for all practical (and most impractical) purposes. Why does he think so?

Here Dawkins doesn't appeal to the usual anti-theistic arguments—the argument from evil, for example, or the claim that it's impossible that there be a being with the attributes believers ascribe to God.2 So why does he think theism is enormously improbable? The answer: if there were such a person as God, he would have to be enormously complex, and the more complex something is, the less probable it is: "However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747." The basic idea is that anything that knows and can do what God knows and can do would have to be incredibly complex. In particular, anything that can create or design something must be at least as complex as the thing it can design or create. Putting it another way, Dawkins says a designer must contain at least as much information as what it creates or designs, and information is inversely related to probability. Therefore, he thinks, God would have to be monumentally complex, hence astronomically improbable; thus it is almost certain that God does not exist.

But why does Dawkins think God is complex? And why does he think that the more complex something is, the less probable it is? Before looking more closely into his reasoning, I'd like to digress for a moment; this claim of improbability can help us understand something otherwise very perplexing about Dawkins' argument in his earlier and influential book, The Blind Watchmaker. There he argues that the scientific theory of evolution shows that our world has not been designed—by God or anyone else. This thought is trumpeted by the subtitle of the book: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design.

How so? Suppose the evidence of evolution suggests that all living creatures have evolved from some elementary form of life: how does that show that the universe is without design? Well, if the universe has not been designed, then the process of evolution is unguided, unorchestrated, by any intelligent being; it is, as Dawkins suggests, blind. So his claim is that the evidence of evolution reveals that evolution is unplanned, unguided, unorchestrated by any intelligent being.

But how could the evidence of evolution reveal a thing like that? After all, couldn't it be that God has directed and overseen the process of evolution? What makes Dawkins think evolution is unguided? What he does in The Blind Watchmaker, fundamentally, is three things. First, he recounts in vivid and arresting detail some of the fascinating anatomical details of certain living creatures and their incredibly complex and ingenious ways of making a living; this is the sort of thing Dawkins does best. Second, he tries to refute arguments for the conclusion that blind, unguided evolution could not have produced certain of these wonders of the living world—the mammalian eye, for example, or the wing. Third, he makes suggestions as to how these and other organic systems could have developed by unguided evolution.

Suppose he's successful with these three things: how would that show that the universe is without design? How does the main argument go from there? His detailed arguments are all for the conclusion that it is biologically possible that these various organs and systems should have come to be by unguided Darwinian mechanisms (and some of what he says here is of considerable interest). What is truly remarkable, however, is the form of what seems to be the main argument. The premise he argues for is something like this:

1. We know of no irrefutable objections to its being biologically possible that all of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes;

and Dawkins supports that premise by trying to refute objections to its being biologically possible that life has come to be that way. His conclusion, however, is

2. All of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes.

It's worth meditating, if only for a moment, on the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion. The premise tells us, substantially, that there are no irrefutable objections to its being possible that unguided evolution has produced all of the wonders of the living world; the conclusion is that it is true that unguided evolution has indeed produced all of those wonders. The argument form seems to be something like

We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p;Therefore p is true.

Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I've propounded a few myself); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one. I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he'd gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.

Here is where that alleged massive improbability of theism is relevant. If theism is false, then (apart from certain weird suggestions we can safely ignore) evolution is unguided. But it is extremely likely, Dawkins thinks, that theism is false. Hence it is extremely likely that evolution is unguided—in which case to establish it as true, he seems to think, all that is needed is to refute those claims that it is impossible. So perhaps we can think about his Blind Watchmaker argument as follows: he is really employing as an additional if unexpressed premise his idea that the existence of God is enormously unlikely. If so, then the argument doesn't seem quite so magnificently invalid. (It is still invalid, however, even if not quite so magnificently—you can't establish something as a fact by showing that objections to its possibility fail, and adding that it is very probable.)

Now suppose we return to Dawkins' argument for the claim that theism is monumentally improbable. As you recall, the reason Dawkins gives is that God would have to be enormously complex, and hence enormously improbable ("God, or any intelligent, decision-making calculating agent, is complex, which is another way of saying improbable"). What can be said for this argument?

Not much. First, is God complex? According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense, so that in him there is no distinction of thing and property, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like. Some of the discussions of divine simplicity get pretty complicated, not to say arcane.3 (It isn't only Catholic theology that declares God simple; according to the Belgic Confession, a splendid expression of Reformed Christianity, God is "a single and simple spiritual being.") So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex.4 More remarkable, perhaps, is that according to Dawkins' own definition of complexity, God is not complex. According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts.5 A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn't have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex.

So first, it is far from obvious that God is complex. But second, suppose we concede, at least for purposes of argument, that God is complex. Perhaps we think the more a being knows, the more complex it is; God, being omniscient, would then be highly complex. Perhaps so; still, why does Dawkins think it follows that God would be improbable? Given materialism and the idea that the ultimate objects in our universe are the elementary particles of physics, perhaps a being that knew a great deal would be improbable—how could those particles get arranged in such a way as to constitute a being with all that knowledge? Of course we aren't given materialism. Dawkins is arguing that theism is improbable; it would be dialectically deficient in excelsis to argue this by appealing to materialism as a premise. Of course it is unlikely that there is such a person as God if materialism is true; in fact materialism logically entails that there is no such person as God; but it would be obviously question-begging to argue that theism is improbable because materialism is true.

So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God's existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God—an argument that doesn't just start from the premise that materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn't even seem to be aware that he needs an argument of that sort.

A second example of Dawkinsian-style argument. Recently a number of thinkers have proposed a new version of the argument from design, the so-called "Fine-Tuning Argument." Starting in the late Sixties and early Seventies, astrophysicists and others noted that several of the basic physical constants must fall within very narrow limits if there is to be the development of intelligent life—at any rate in a way anything like the way in which we think it actually happened. For example, if the force of gravity were even slightly stronger, all stars would be blue giants; if even slightly weaker, all would be red dwarfs; in neither case could life have developed. The same goes for the weak and strong nuclear forces; if either had been even slightly different, life, at any rate life of the sort we have, could probably not have developed. Equally interesting in this connection is the so-called flatness problem: the existence of life also seems to depend very delicately upon the rate at which the universe is expanding. Thus Stephen Hawking:

reduction of the rate of expansion by one part in 1012 at the time when the temperature of the Universe was 1010 K would have resulted in the Universe's starting to recollapse when its radius was only 1/3000 of the present value and the temperature was still 10,000 K.6

That would be much too warm for comfort. Hawking concludes that life is possible only because the universe is expanding at just the rate required to avoid recollapse. At an earlier time, he observes, the fine-tuning had to be even more remarkable:

we know that there has to have been a very close balance between the competing effect of explosive expansion and gravitational contraction which, at the very earliest epoch about which we can even pretend to speak (called the Planck time, 10-43 sec. after the big bang), would have corresponded to the incredible degree of accuracy represented by a deviation in their ratio from unity by only one part in 10 to the sixtieth.7

One reaction to these apparent enormous coincidences is to see them as substantiating the theistic claim that the universe has been created by a personal God and as offering the material for a properly restrained theistic argument—hence the fine-tuning argument.8 It's as if there are a large number of dials that have to be tuned to within extremely narrow limits for life to be possible in our universe. It is extremely unlikely that this should happen by chance, but much more likely that this should happen if there is such a person as God.

Now in response to this kind of theistic argument, Dawkins, along with others, proposes that possibly there are very many (perhaps even infinitely many) universes, with very many different distributions of values over the physical constants. Given that there are so many, it is likely that some of them would display values that are life-friendly. So if there are an enormous number of universes displaying different sets of values of the fundamental constants, it's not at all improbable that some of them should be "fine-tuned." We might wonder how likely it is that there are all these other universes, and whether there is any real reason (apart from wanting to blunt the fine-tuning arguments) for supposing there are any such things.9 But concede for the moment that indeed there are many universes and that it is likely that some are fine-tuned and life-friendly. That still leaves Dawkins with the following problem: even if it's likely that some universes should be fine-tuned, it is still improbable that this universe should be fine-tuned. Name our universe alpha: the odds that alpha should be fine-tuned are exceedingly, astronomically low, even if it's likely that some universe or other is fine-tuned.

What is Dawkins' reply? He appeals to "the anthropic principle," the thought that the only sort of universe in which we could be discussing this question is one which is fine-tuned for life:

the anthropic answer, in its most general form, is that we could only be discussing the question in the kind of universe that was capable of producing us. Our existence therefore determines that the fundamental constants of physics had to be in their respective Goldilocks [life-friendly] zones.

Well, of course our universe would have to be fine-tuned, given that we live in it. But how does that so much as begin to explain why it is that alpha is fine-tuned? One can't explain this by pointing out that we are indeed here—anymore than I can "explain" the fact that God decided to create me (instead of passing me over in favor of someone else) by pointing out that if God had not thus decided, I wouldn't be here to raise that question. It still seems striking that these constants should have just the values they do have; it is still monumentally improbable, given chance, that they should have just those values; and it is still much less improbable that they should have those values, if there is a God who wanted a life-friendly universe.

One more example of Dawkinsian thought. In The Blind Watchmaker, he considers the claim that since the self-replicating machinery of life is required for natural selection to work, God must have jumpstarted the whole evolutionary process by specially creating life in the first place—by specially creating the original replicating machinery of DNA and protein that makes natural selection possible. Dawkins retorts as follows:

This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously self-defeating. Organized complexity is the thing that we are having difficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating machine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity… . But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself… . To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer.

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett approvingly quotes this passage from Dawkins and declares it an "unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier." Now here in The God Delusion Dawkins approvingly quotes Dennett approvingly quoting Dawkins, and adds that Dennett (i.e., Dawkins) is entirely correct.

Here there is much to say, but I'll say only a bit of it. First, suppose we land on an alien planet orbiting a distant star and discover machine-like objects that look and work just like tractors; our leader says "there must be intelligent beings on this planet who built those tractors." A first-year philosophy student on our expedition objects: "Hey, hold on a minute! You have explained nothing at all! Any intelligent life that designed those tractors would have to be at least as complex as they are." No doubt we'd tell him that a little learning is a dangerous thing and advise him to take the next rocket ship home and enroll in another philosophy course or two. For of course it is perfectly sensible, in that context, to explain the existence of those tractors in terms of intelligent life, even though (as we can concede for the moment) that intelligent life would have to be at least as complex as the tractors. The point is we aren't trying to give an ultimate explanation of organized complexity, and we aren't trying to explain organized complexity in general; we are only trying to explain one particular manifestation of it (those tractors). And (unless you are trying to give an ultimate explanation of organized complexity) it is perfectly proper to explain one manifestation of organized complexity in terms of another. Similarly, in invoking God as the original creator of life, we aren't trying to explain organized complexity in general, but only a particular kind of it, i.e., terrestrial life. So even if (contrary to fact, as I see it) God himself displays organized complexity, we would be perfectly sensible in explaining the existence of terrestrial life in terms of divine activity.

A second point: Dawkins (and again Dennett echoes him) argues that "the main thing we want to explain" is "organized complexity." He goes on to say that "The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity," and he faults theism for being unable to explain organized complexity. Now mind would be an outstanding example of organized complexity, according to Dawkins, and of course (unlike with organized complexity) it is uncontroversial that God is a being who thinks and knows; so suppose we take Dawkins to be complaining that theism doesn't offer an explanation of mind. It is obvious that theists won't be able to give an ultimate explanation of mind, because, naturally enough, there isn't any explanation of the existence of God. Still, how is that a point against theism? Explanations come to an end; for theism they come to an end in God. Of course the same goes for any other view; on any view explanations come to an end. The materialist or physicalist, for example, doesn't have an explanation for the existence of elementary particles: they just are. So to claim that what we want or what we need is an ultimate explanation of mind is, once more, just to beg the question against theism; the theist neither wants nor needs an ultimate explanation of personhood, or thinking, or mind.

Toward the end of the book, Dawkins endorses a certain limited skepticism. Since we have been cobbled together by (unguided) evolution, it is unlikely, he thinks, that our view of the world is overall accurate; natural selection is interested in adaptive behavior, not in true belief. But Dawkins fails to plumb the real depths of the skeptical implications of the view that we have come to be by way of unguided evolution. We can see this as follows. Like most naturalists, Dawkins is a materialist about human beings: human persons are material objects; they are not immaterial selves or souls or substances joined to a body, and they don't contain any immaterial substance as a part. From this point of view, our beliefs would be dependent on neurophysiology, and (no doubt) a belief would just be a neurological structure of some complex kind. Now the neurophysiology on which our beliefs depend will doubtless be adaptive; but why think for a moment that the beliefs dependent on or caused by that neurophysiology will be mostly true? Why think our cognitive faculties are reliable?

From a theistic point of view, we'd expect that our cognitive faculties would be (for the most part, and given certain qualifications and caveats) reliable. God has created us in his image, and an important part of our image bearing is our resembling him in being able to form true beliefs and achieve knowledge. But from a naturalist point of view the thought that our cognitive faculties are reliable (produce a preponderance of true beliefs) would be at best a naïve hope. The naturalist can be reasonably sure that the neurophysiology underlying belief formation is adaptive, but nothing follows about the truth of the beliefs depending on that neurophysiology. In fact he'd have to hold that it is unlikely, given unguided evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It's as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.

If this is so, the naturalist has a defeater for the natural assumption that his cognitive faculties are reliable—a reason for rejecting that belief, for no longer holding it. (Example of a defeater: suppose someone once told me that you were born in Michigan and I believed her; but now I ask you, and you tell me you were born in Brazil. That gives me a defeater for my belief that you were born in Michigan.) And if he has a defeater for that belief, he also has a defeater for any belief that is a product of his cognitive faculties. But of course that would be all of his beliefs—including naturalism itself. So the naturalist has a defeater for naturalism; natural- ism, therefore, is self-defeating and cannot be rationally believed.

The real problem here, obviously, is Dawkins' naturalism, his belief that there is no such person as God or anyone like God. That is because naturalism implies that evolution is unguided. So a broader conclusion is that one can't rationally accept both naturalism and evolution; naturalism, therefore, is in conflict with a premier doctrine of contemporary science. People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and religion because they think there is a conflict between evolution and theism; the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God.

The God Delusion is full of bluster and bombast, but it really doesn't give even the slightest reason for thinking belief in God mistaken, let alone a "delusion."

The naturalism that Dawkins embraces, furthermore, in addition to its intrinsic unloveliness and its dispiriting conclusions about human beings and their place in the universe, is in deep self-referential trouble. There is no reason to believe it; and there is excellent reason to reject it.

Alvin Plantinga is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

1. A third book along these lines, The End of Faith, has recently been written by Sam Harris, and more recently still a sequel, Letter to a Christian Nation, so perhaps we should speak of the touchdown triplets—or, given that Harris is very much the junior partner in this enterprise (he's a grad student) maybe the "Three Bears of Atheism"?

2. Although Dawkins does bring up (p. 54), apparently approvingly, the argument that God can't be both omniscient and omnipotent: if he is omniscient, then he can't change his mind, in which case there is something he can't do, so that he isn't omnipotent(!).

3. See my Does God Have a Nature? Aquinas Lecture 44 (Marquette Univ. Press, 1980).

4. The distinguished Oxford philosopher (Dawkins calls him a theologian) Richard Swinburne has proposed some sophisticated arguments for the claim that God is simple. Dawkins mentions Swinburne's argument, but doesn't deign to come to grips with it; instead he resorts to ridicule (pp. 110-111).

5. What about the Trinity? Just how we are to think of the Trinity is of course not wholly clear; it is clear, however, that it is false that in addition to each of the three persons of the Trinity, there is also another being of which each of those persons is a part.

6. "The Anisotropy of the Universe at Large Times," in M. S. Longair, ed., Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data (Springer, 2002), p. 285.

7. John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding (Random House, 1989), p. 22.

8. One of the best versions of the fine-tuning argument is proposed by Robin Collins in "A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God: The Fine-Tuning Design Argument," in Michael J. Murray, ed., Reason for the Hope Within (Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 47-75.

9. See my review of Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea in Books & Culture, May/June 1996.

The Inerrancy of Scripture

I found it needful to write this essay on the inerrancy of scripture as many individuals who identify themselves as Christians are being taken captive by “empty deception” (Colossians 2:8). Clearly one of the most important things these individuals don’t believe is the inerrancy of the Bible, or they are truly ignorant to the Bible’s teachings.
First and foremost, if you take away the doctrine of inerrancy from the Bible all you get are some fantastic stories and some morals that give you good ethics in a world that doesn’t practice good ethics.
If you just want to learn good ethics, you can read the teaching of Confucius. If you want to read a good story, read some classic work of fiction. In other words, if you take away the inerrancy of the Bible, there really is no point in reading it, to believe in it, or to teach it to anyone else. Without the doctrine of inerrancy, the Bible just becomes a museum piece. The doctrine of inerrancy may be the most important doctrine to keep within the Christian faith; without it how can we believe anything else that the Bible says?
If we can’t trust anything the Bible says, we don’t need to take the commands within the Bible seriously. When our society doesn’t have morals to adhere to, evil runs rampant. Here are just three examples of what happens in a society without morals:
1. What is considered as truth is now relative to the situation we find ourselves in, there is no absolute truth to guide our decisions by.
2. The devaluing of human life resulting in the murder of millions of unborn children in America alone.
3. And the proliferation of sex in our society, causing family break ups, addictions, and has made millions of American to be afflicted with sexually transmitted diseases.
These three major problems in our society, and many more, can be linked directly and indirectly to not taking the Bible as the holy, inspired, word of God. I think it is high time to make a case for believing in the inerrancy of the Bible.

First things first, in order for there to be holy, inspired, words of God there first has to be a God. Genesis 1:1 says that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God thus proves his existence by creating our existence. John further substances this in his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” (John 1:1-3) The “Word” described by John is Jesus, who is the word of God incarnate. Paul also makes this argument in Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” God reveals his existence through his creation, so much so that Paul says that no one is without excuse for not accepting God’s existence.
The Bible firmly shows that God exists, but how can we take what the Bible says as fact? That is an excellent question and one that must be answered, for the foundation of the Bible’s inerrancy rests upon the holiness of God.

Before we go to substantiate God’s holiness in the Bible, we must first know what the word means in the original Hebrew.
The Hebrew word for holiness comes from a root meaning “to separate or cut off.” (1) This separation means separation from all sin and evil. Noah Webster defines holiness “Applied to the Supreme Being” as denoting “perfect purity or integrity of moral character, one of his essential attributes.” (2)
The King James Study Bible from Thomas Nelson Publishers further adds, “The Primary meaning of holiness implies God’s positive quality of self-affirming purity; the secondary meaning implies separation, particularly separation from sin. The holiness of God means He is absolutely pure and absolutely separate from (and above) all His creatures, and also separate from sin and evil.” (3) God also states His holiness within the Bible (Leviticus 11:44-45, 19:2, 20:26, 1 Peter 1:16).
Since God is holy and absolutely pure, for Him to lie is completely and utterly incompatible with His nature; thus we can trust what God says in His holy word.
Now the argument that the scripture verses quoted two paragraphs ago applies only to God the Father and not to the other two members of the Trinity could come up. This argument must be answered in order to build a case for the inerrancy of the words of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit-inspired writings of the prophets, disciples, Apostle Paul, etc…

The best way to prove the infallibility of Jesus Christ’s words is to show that He is, and is equal to, God the Father.
Jesus states rather plainly that He and God the Father are one several times within the Bible (John 10:38, 14:11, 20). The most blunt and straightforward declaration Jesus makes is in John 10:30: “I and the Father are one.”
Also by calling God the Father as His father, Jesus is claiming equality with God the Father. Jesus calls God the Father His father twenty times alone in Matthew: 7:21, 10:32-33, 11:25-27, 12:50, 15:13, 16:17, 27, 18:10, 19, 35, 20:23, 24:36, 25:34, 26:29, 39, 42, 53. Jesus seems fairly confident that God the Father is His father (of course if you are God and perfect then I think you can be completely confident in anything you say).
Now if you think that no one got Jesus’ not so subtle hints, you are wrong. Jesus is called “Son of God” (a title that confirms Jesus’ deity) by: the people in the ship when Jesus walks on water to (Matthew 14:33), demons (Matthew 8:29, Mark 3:11, Luke 4:41, 8:28), the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:35), Nathaniel the disciple (John 1:49), and Martha (John 11:27). Peter confessed that Jesus was the messiah (Mark 8:29). The Pharisees and scribes also recognized that Jesus claimed equality with God the Father, otherwise they wouldn’t have had such a strong desire to stone (John 5:18) and crucify (John 19:17) Jesus.
The Jews at the Temple in Jerusalem understood Jesus’ claim well enough to desire to stone him, to which Jesus asks for what good work is He going to get stoned for. The Jews respond in John 10:33: “For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God.”
However anyone can call themselves anything, ranging from the ‘son of god’ to ‘mashed potatoes’, so it must be established that God the Father calls Jesus His son.
God the Father does call Jesus His son on two occasions, during Jesus’ baptism and during Jesus’ transfiguration.
Matthew 3:16-17 speaks of God the Father’s affirmation of Jesus’ divine sonship: “After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him, and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, ‘This is My Beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased’”
The Greek for ‘voice’ (phone) in that passage denotes that an audible voice, noise, or sound could be heard. In Strong Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible it says that the word ‘voice’ we are looking at is “probably akin to” a Greek word (phaino) that means to “to lighten (shine), i.e. show (transitive or intransitive, literally or figuratively):- appear, seem, be seen, shine, think.” Strong’s Concordance also says that phaino has a base in it (phos) which means “to shine or make manifest.” (4)
So clearly God the Father’s voice was audible enough for everyone present at Jesus’ baptism could hear Him. There were also things that were visible at Jesus’ baptism, e.g. the sky opening up and the dove descending upon Jesus. These events made manifest that Jesus was the Son of God.
Likewise during Jesus’ Transfiguration (Luke 9:28-36), God the Father calls Jesus His son in the presence of three of Jesus’ disciple, Peter, John, and James. “While he (Peter) was saying this, a cloud formed and began to overshadow them (Peter, John, and James); and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. Then a voice came out of the cloud, saying, ‘This is My Son, My Chosen One; listen to Him!’” (Luke 9:34-35, notes added)
Again the same Greek word, phone, is used to describe God the Father’s voice when He speaks to Peter, John, and James during the Transfiguration of Jesus.
God the Father thus calls Jesus His son on two occasions, and during both occasions there were witnesses to the Father’s voice. By calling Jesus His son, God the Father is saying that Jesus is equal to Him; thus the attributes of holiness and complete perfection are inherent in Jesus, and we can trust His word just as completely as God the Father’s words.

We are now left with the last member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Jesus shows the equality, and thus perfection, of the Holy Spirit to God the Father and God the Son in chapters 15 and 16 of the Gospel of John.
Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit in John 15:26 “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me:” (KJV).
The King James Study Bible by Thomas Nelson Publishers explains this verse excellently. “The action of the word translated ‘proceedeth’ is ‘in the process’ — ‘continually proceeds.’ The eternal procession of the Spirit means that He continually proceeds from beside, not out of, the Father. If the Holy Spirit came out of God, He would be less than God. To be more specific, the Holy Spirit not only proceeds from the Father, but also from the Son. This means the Father and the Son continually send the Holy Spirit. This in no way suggests the [Holy] Spirit is less in deity than are the Father or Son. Instead it explains the relationship among the three eternal persons of the Trinity.” (Note added) (5) Since the Holy Spirit proceeds beside God, this also proves that the Holy Spirit is equal to God the Father and Jesus.
Jesus further clarifies the equality of the Holy Spirit in John 16:13-15. “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak on his own authority; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak and he will show you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive what is mine, and shall show it unto you. All things that the Father has are mine: therefore said I, that he (the Holy Spirit) shall take of mine, and shall show it unto you.” (KJV, note added)
Jesus says that “All things that the Father has are Mine.” (John 16:15a) The verse further establishes the equality of Jesus Christ and God the Father as well as builds the foundation for the equality of the Holy Spirit.
In verse 14 Jesus says that the Holy Spirit, “shall receive what is mine,” thus implying that everything of God the Father’s and Jesus Christ’s is also the Holy Spirit’s. If the Holy Spirit has everything that God the Father and Jesus Christ have, then that includes their perfection and holiness.

It is of the utmost importance that we established the Holy Spirit’s equality and holiness as the Holy Spirit is responsible for the formation of the Bible. As Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary says of the classical (read: Biblical/Orthodox) interpretation of the inspiration of the Bible, “The Bible is divinely inspired because God concurrently worked with human authors to produce the very written message He desired. This classical view teaches the Holy Spirit superintended more than 40 authors from widely divergent backgrounds (shepherds, kings, prophets, fishermen, etc.), spanning a period of approximately a millennium and a half, to produce with supernatural congruity not just the thoughts but the very words of God to mankind.” (6)
Now you may not completely understand the importance of the previous statement, so let me clarify it for you. You see the Holy Spirit is directly responsible for every word within the Bible. Even in the cases when God the Father and Jesus Christ were speaking directly to people, the Holy Spirit is responsible for the writers of the Bible being able to remember, and thus enabling them to write, the words spoken to them.
It was import to show that all the members of the Triune Godhead are holy and to show that for any member of the Trinity to lie is completely against their nature. Restating what has already been mentioned, we can completely trust what is said within the Bible as true and infallible.

However another issue needs to be addressed: Since the original writings of both the New and Old Testament are now either lost or destroyed, can we trust that the scribes who copied the originals copied them correctly, without any alteration to the original meaning of the text?
Most of the heat in this question has been directed towards the New, rather than the Old, Testament; however we shall look at both of the Testaments to see if the integrity of the original writings have been preserved. For simplicities sake we shall start with the New Testament.

While the question on the integrity of the New Testament is something that needs to be answered, it must be realized that most who raise this question are seeking to debunk Biblical Christianity and not to see if the meaning of the original writings have been preserved in the copies we presently possess.
Bart Ehrman, a textual critic, says in his book Misquoting Jesus, “We could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which the texts of the New Testament came to be changed, either accidentally or intentionally…The examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands.” (7)
That is a very intriguing statement and one that carries significant implications with it; however let’s look at what the evidence indicates.
If one looks at the copies of the New Testament, it can be rather easily discerned that there are thousands of different textual variations in the copies because there are thousands of copies. (8) The real question then is if the changes in the copies have implications on Christian doctrine?
Bart Ehrman asserts so. “It would be wrong…to say—as people sometimes do—that the changes in our text have no real bearing on what the texts mean or on the theological conclusions that one draws form them…In some instances, the very meaning of the text is at stake, depending on how one resolves a textual problem.” (9) However, the truth is quite the opposite of what Mr. Ehrman says.
Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace show in their excellent book, Misquoting Jesus, that most textual variations in the copies are due to spelling differences, synonyms, and meaningful but not viable differences. They show that less than one percent of all textual variations fall under the category of “meaningful and viable differences.” (10) Mr. Bock and Mr. Wallace further show that no core/central/Salvational doctrine in Christianity is questioned or negated by such passages. (11) It is therefore established that the copied manuscripts of the New Testament do indeed retain the original writings’ meaning. (If you wish to find out more about the subject, read “claim one” [e.g. chapter one] of Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ.)

With the textual correctness of the New Testament established, it is easy to determine if the integrity of the Old Testament has been preserved.
Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary says of Scripture, “Historic Judeo-Christian name for the specific literature that the church receives as divine instruction. Scripture means ‘a writing,’ rendering the Latin scriptura and the Greek graphe. The term is used some 50 times in the NT for some or all of the OT.” (Italics in original) (12)
The New Testament writers use approximately 250 complete verses from the Old Testament, and if you include indirect and partial quotations, the number is raised to over 1,000. (13)
Jesus also calls the Old Testament ‘scripture’ (Mark 12:10, Luke 4:21, John 7:38, 42, 10:35, 13:18, 17:12).
Since the New Testament has been established to still possess the meaning of the original writings, and if Jesus and the writers of the New Testament call the Old Testament ‘scripture’, we can be certain that the original meaning of the Old Testament has been preserved in the copies we posses.
In summary, if one studies the evidence with a mind willing to accept the possibility of the Trinity creating everything, it is almost assured that they will be convinced of the accuracy of the Bible. One needs to look no further than the cases of C.S. Lewis and Lee Strobel to see that the above statement is true. When given a fair chance God’s truth, the ONLY truth, will always win out.

Be not conformed,
OutcastWriter.

Citations and Notes


1. The King James Study Bible, pg. 203, published by Thomas Nelson Publishers.
2. Noah Webster, American Dictionary of the English Language.
3. The King James Study Bible, pg. 203, published by Thomas Nelson Publishers.
4. To find these Greek words look up G5456 (phone), G5316 (phaino), and G5457 (phos), in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible.
5. The King James Study Bible, pg. 1643, published by Thomas Nelson Publishers.
6. Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, pg. 825.
7. Bart Ehrman, pg. 98, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.
8. Darrel L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace, pgs. 49-52, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ. To further impress on how rock solid a foundation the NT has on its copies here are some numbers: there are about 5700 Greek copies of the NT, the oldest of which are only 50-100 years away from the originals. Including the Greek copies, there are more than 10,000 Latin copies. Including the Latin and Greek copies there are over a million quotations from the NT by the church fathers, so impressive is it that even Bart Ehrman said in The Text of the New Testament: “Besides textual evidence derived from New Testament Greek manuscripts and from early versions, the textual critic compares numerous scriptural quotations used in commentaries, sermons, and other treatises written by early church fathers. Indeed, so extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.” (pg. 126) One final note is that Homer's works come in second with only 2500 hundred copies, and that for other works of ancient literature there is often hundreds of years between the original and the nearest copy.
9. Bart Ehrman, pg. 208, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.
10. Darrel L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace, pgs. 55-58, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ.
11. Ibid, pgs. 57-58 & 60-76.
12. Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, pgs. 1452-53.
13. Ibid, pg. 1216.

The Return of the King: Book Review

The Return of the King
A Book Review of the Third Book of Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

"There never was much hope...just a fool's hope.” - Gandalf The White

And so came the closing of the Third Age. The Great Tower of Minas Tirith, a fortress besieged, stands as a small island with storms raging on all sides. There the fading hopes of Middle Earth holds its breath before the bitter darkness of their end.

The clouds are lifted and the jaws of his forces draw forth. From the land of the Shadow, the Dark Lord Sauron brings all to him; from the southern kingdoms, men march into his lands, and from the sea, Corsairs sail to break the final defenses of Osgiliath; all have been brought together to strike the final knell upon Gondor and cover the land, at last, in darkness. Under a desperate alliance of Men, they will fight upon the plains of Pelennor and from the walls of Minas Tirith, fortress of the Kings, the future of Middle Earth will be decided.

In the last of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, we are given a great treasure. They say that man is willing to change only at its precipice - just before all is destroyed -, it his here, the unfolding of the troubles of Middle Earth, that J.R.R. Tolkien writes with a passion I believe was withheld.

This story has been long told and ever praised - the great and final clash between Good and Evil. A time where all force is amassed to the crushing destruction of each other. It has been told and been blunted time and time again, but this is not our case. Our story shimmers in the sun and under the shadow of darkness not a virtue is lost.

J.R.R. Tolkien's Characters, by far and wide, brought into this last chapter their hopes and dreams, their struggles and fears, and most importantly, their desires. From the Witch King of Angmar to King Theoden, the unquenchable malice of Sauron to the unrelenting hope of Gladriel, every character's story was brought forth unbound by any secret. All characters in a story can only be weighed by what you feel about them in the in end, and when you find yourself among the peoples of weightless pages, among the sounds of a silent night, you have crossed a great chasm and walked into the land of wonder; always to be remembered.

When we speak of the bones of a story, we can only knock against their moral foundations. To this, I cannot speak about them without joy and excitement - especially in this tale, without attachment. From the least of peoples came the greatest of triumphs. Each man is born into a world of unknowns, of difficulties, and sorrows, but it is to him to choose what he shall do in the time he has been given. We were not asked for our choice to life or death, but we are demanded to choose what we shall live for and what we will be remembered by.

Our story does not end bitterly, but beautifully; completed to the last sentence in justice, virtue, and wonder. As a trilogy of books leaves a trilogy of reviews, everything will rest upon my final memories:

From the Fires of Mount Doom the helm of Sauron, enemy of Middle Earth, fell to its ashes. All the glory and splendor of years forgotten began to blossom under the coming of spring and welcomed, with a bright morning, “The Return of the King”.

And so came the beginning of the Fourth Age.... And my enjoyment of The Lord of the Rings.

First Cause Argument: Finite Universe

A Finite Universe: A Premise for a First Cause 

There are two main schools of thought regarding the origins of the universe: Either the universe has always existed with an infinite past, or the universe was at one point created and thus finite. I will contain my response as another essay to support the premise of a finite universe in linear form and why the universe could not have always existed in a state of actual infinity. This essay will not address causal loops - that is addressed here.

Before we even dive into the why's and why not's of an infinite universe, we need to understand a basic idea of Mathematical Set Theory. Below are two mathematical sets, labeled "A" and "A1", and we will use them to explain the basic ideas of what we will be discussing later:

A - {0,1,2,3,4 ...}

A1 - {0,2,4,6,8 ...}

As you can see set "A" contains all numbers up to infinity, while set "A1", a sub set of "A", contains all the even numbers up to infinity. What has been presented is one Mathematical Set and one Mathematical Subset. For anything to be a subset every member in that subset must be contained in the parent set. So if subset "A1" has the letter "a", then "A1" could not be a subset of "A" because set "A", the parent set, does not have the letter "a" as a member.

Now here is a question. If set "A" and subset "A1" are actual infinity, which is larger? The answer is that they are equal. This conclusion is derived from the fact that each member of both sets can be evenly paired.

A -   { 0 , 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ...}

A1 - { 0 , 2 , 4 , 6 , 8 ...}

Since these two sets continue on for infinity they would continue to be paired equally.

On the other hand, outside of actual Infinity, there is potential infinity. A potential infinity designates a set of numbers which can be continually added, but is unlike actual infinity in that the subsets are not equal to the parent set. The latter is seen in every day life, the prior, I will contend, does not exist.

The first argument is that actual infinity cannot exist in our universe. In actual Infinity, the old saying, "The whole is greater than its parts", is false because the parts are equal to the whole. I am going to give a couple of examples to show the nature of actual infinity:

Imagine a library that contains an infinite amount of red books and an infinite amount of black books. Each book contains an infinite amount of pages. There are two specific assertions that we will be taking note of. First, the total combined amount of infinite red and black books would equal the amount of infinite red books. Secondly, if we read every page in the library, consisting of an infinite amount of pages, it would be equal to reading only one book with the infinite amount of pages. As you can see, actual infinite decimates addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

Another example of a part being equal to its whole is in the affirmation that one-billionth of an inch would have an equal amount of points as the universe does in its totality. Again, every part, in actual infinity, is equal to the whole. This again is not possible because in our universe we have accumulation (ie. added parts equals a whole, not every part equaling a whole).

The second argument against an actual infinite universe is noting that infinity is Non-Transversal. What this means is that if our universe always existed, the universe should have an infinite past. With the premise established, we can say that, if the past could not be transversed, then we do not have the present; for the present equals the past transversed.

When we see a plane flying over head we can assume a chain of past causes had to be tansversed to the point of the present state. For the plane to be flying we could assume that the pilot got into the plane. Perhaps we could also assume that the plane needed fuel before departing the airport. In any assumption we make, we can assume that there has been a series of past events which were transversed and lead up to the present plane flying over head.

The next thing we must consider is the idea of counting to infinity. You may have pulled this one out during a game of hide-and-seek where you tell the counter to count up to infinity so you have enough time to find the awesome hiding spot everyone knows about. The problem is if you count for the duration of your life you will never reach infinity. Why? This is what we call potential infinity. The mathematical set we deal with in this equation is concerning the possibility of continual addition. Meaning the numbers are finite, but can always be continually added by 'x' number. An easy rule is if you can state the number it is finite because you can always add 1 to it; which you cannot add 1 to infinity and change its nature. You cannot count up to infinity and likewise you cannot count down from it.

With these two premises, that you have chained events and that you cannot count up or down from infinity, tells us one thing. If the past was infinite, an infinite chain, you cannot transverse the infinite as you similarly could not do so in counting. The conclusion is that the past could not have been transversed and thus we could not have the present. The past would still be continuing and we would not have a present state (Remembering that the present is equal to the past transversed). Of course this is not so and another reason why the universe is not infinite.

As Blaise Pascal stated, "The finite are annihilated in the presence of the infinite." Whenever the actual infinite are applied to the finite application of our day-to-day universe, we find not only no ability to tend the actual infinite, but if it were applicable, time itself would cease to exist. The most classic example is Zeno's puzzle. If actual infinity did exist, we could not even declare motion as being real because we would have to transverse infinity in each step we took - again 1) we know motion does exist and 2) it isn't possible for actual infinity to exist.

Hope this helps.

Dracula: A Book Review

A Midnight Terror
(A Book review of Dracula by Bram Stoker)

"No man knows till he experiences it, what it is like to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the woman he loves." – Dr. Seward’s Diary

What would you do? What do you hope? When darkness grimaces above and the endless sea crashes below. From the silent halls you answer with speed. From the desolate you run to stop the coming tide. Beneath the bowing walls and rushing swords you find your friend, your greatest companion, your lovely wife, holding open wide your soul - death is within and not without.

From deep within Transylvania, Bram Stoker reveals the horrors of a nameless evil, an evil that shadows every dream and steals from every soul. Fused with superstition, religion and sacrifice, these collections of diary entries would become known as Dracula and has survived the destruction of time for one reason: This is not about a vampire, but the vampire.

We all know his name, but few know why this book has survived as a timeless classic; beyond the blood filled movies lays a moving story – a Perl deep in the ocean. It may be true for Dracula, however, this book has not continued to survive by blood alone, but by the seeming unerring loyalty of friendship.

From start to finish, all are Personal Diary entries, newspaper clippings and sparse Journal fragments. This may allude as incompetent in horror and suspense, but in all writing styles, I have never found a more passionate way to write such a tale as this. In ever touching fashion, Bram Stoker depicts the horrifying nightmares and grotesque visages from the people who saw it themselves. But more importantly, the shimmering Perl, is the revealing of the characters’ personal journal entries as they struggle to stand against such an evil; for better or worse, for happiness or sorrow, for death or life, they stood by the friends they knew, the wives they loved, to fight an enemy they feared.

We all understand that honourable sacrifice: to perish for the ones you love. But would one knowingly sacrifice himself to a war one could not believe – ever to be forgotten? Are you willing to sacrifice yourself for the things you believe in, or for the things that will be written down? As the sea of a passing storm may begin to crumble our stronghold, when evil takes the form of the ones we love, Hope is only lost when the lost stop hoping. This Perl is as bright as the morning ere after the passing night and a responsibility that cannot be ignored.

This is true: there is a price that must be paid in the end for the things we want most. The moral of this story, as afraid as I am to say, is perhaps one that comes at too high a cost. I could never recommend this book except for one who already wishes to read it. The mountains are high in the sun, but so the valley plunges deep into the dark.

If all is lost in Stokers' journals, there is one thing to grasp. When death is within and not without, what are we to do but smile back? Act upon what we have already chosen, for to choose our path when it comes, is to be destined to fail before we start.