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It Is Written Canada

Philosophy's Achilles Heel

Chris Holland

The Question

God's book, the Bible, still relevant in today's complex world.

It is written sharing messages of hope around the world.

¶¶ The North American moose, the largest species of the deer family.

Strong, majestic, yet mysterious animals.

Growing up, I didn't live in an area where there are moose.

I went camping with my parents and often camped in areas where moose should have been.

Later in life, when I married my wife, she shared stories of seeing moose.

It only increased my desire to see this animal all the more.

So I set out on a quest to see a moose in the wild.

I camped in 1 area that they said had moose.

I went to places where there should have been moose, but all to no avail.

I traveled another place with the guarantee that I would see a moose, but nothing.

Along the way, I saw statues, pictures, and even videos, but never a moose in the wild.

I even saw a statue of a moose with wings, but never a moose in the wild.

As I considered this situation, I began to doubt whether or not moose even existed.

I said in my mind, this is a fabricated story.

The pictures have been photoshopped and the videos edited.

Now, I know it sounds absurd, but that is really what I thought.

I wasn't able to see it, so it must not be real.

People are even distorting the picture with a flying moose.

Well, the course of all of that changed in 2013 when I traveled to Algonquin Provincial Park, where I was virtually guaranteed a sighting.

We came into the park on the west entrance and drove east.

But would I see this animal that was continually escaping me?

Well, as we traveled, we had almost arrived at the east entrance and hadn't seen anything.

I turned the car around and there it was.

I shot some pictures and even posted it on Twitter.

Even though I had settled the question of this moose's existence in my mind, I had a friend that said it was a tiny moose and therefore barely even a moose.

But just 1 year later, in Newfoundland, I saw 2 bull moose that left no doubt that moose are real.

My own experience with Moose reminds me of the struggle that some people have in knowing whether or not God exists.

And maybe it is a good question for us to ask.

It is perhaps a strange question for it is written to ask, yet a recent Canadian census reveals that the percentage of those who claim no religious affiliation grew from just 4% of the population in 1971 to almost 25% in 2011.

Yet at the same time, the percentages of those who represent the largest religious groups in Canada, namely Roman Catholics and Protestants, experienced significant decline.

The Roman Catholic Church decreased from 47% of the population to 39%.

The most significant and greatest decline occurred among Protestants, who were at 41% in 1971, but fell to only 27% of the population in 2011.

And while there may be a variety of causes for these statistics, we cannot rule out the possibility that for many Canadians, the question of God's existence constitutes the underlying reason for these trends that are revealed by the census.

The fact is that science, since the time of Charles Darwin, has led many to believe that this world is not the result of a special creation by a divine being, but rather is the result of a chance mixture of the right amino acids and atmosphere that eventually evolved through natural processes over millions, if not billions, of years.

Now Because of this, many scientists believe that random chance processes completely rule out creation and design by a divine being as an explanation for the origin of our world and the universe.

Thus, this approach has created an unbridgeable chasm between science on 1 hand and religion on the other.

And this has led many to question the very existence of God.

It is interesting to note that many of the pioneers of modern science, such as Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Pascal, Linné, and Newton, all included the concept of God in their scientific outlook.

Author Ariel Roth points this out in his book, Science Discovers God.

They often spoke of him and they considered their scientific investigations as the continuing discovery of the laws that He had created.

Those intellectual giants demonstrated how science and an awareness of God can work together as we study nature.

And so, for those pioneers of science, the existence of God and scientific methods were not mutually exclusive of 1 another, but rather complementary.

And in light of the chasm that has been created between modern science and religion, it is even more interesting to note the percentage of scientists who believe in God, not only as a supreme being that creates and sustains nature, but also as a personal God to whom 1 may pray.

In the prestigious journal Nature, a survey was conducted and they picked 1, 000 individuals from the listing of scientists in the American Men and Women of Science.

The results revealed that about 40% of these scientists said they believed in the type of God that answers their prayers.

Interestingly enough, this survey, which was conducted in 1996, was principally the same survey as 1 done 80 years earlier with essentially the same results.

Yet for many Canadians, and for many people around the world, for that matter, they are still asking that question.

So for the next weeks and months, I would like to explore with you what some say is the ultimate question of life.

How can we be sure that God does in fact exist?

Do many who believe just operate under the assumption of God's existence?

Furthermore, does the evidence only lend itself to those who belong to some religion, or is there some criteria that 1 can apply regardless of whether 1 ascribes to religion or not?

In order to try to find an answer to these questions, and the big question of God's existence, we need to construct a test.

It must be a test that anyone can administer regardless of whether or not 1 is religious.

Now before we begin, we need to establish 1 important ground rule, and that is the importance of maintaining a proper attitude in answering this question.

Sabud Pandit, a scholar and researcher of world religions, each of us has a blend of 3 attitudes in us that we can switch to at any given moment.

Each of us are inherently either believers, skeptics, or inquirers.

And here is the major difference between them.

A skeptic decides against a claim prior to thorough investigation.

A believer, on the other hand, decides to accept a claim prior to thorough investigation, and an inquirer holds verdict until the investigation is done.

In addition, a skeptic focuses on the question to the exclusion of the evidence, whereas a believer focuses on the evidence to the exclusion of the question, while an inquirer focuses on the weight of the evidence.

All the while, a skeptic disbelieves in the face of reasonable evidence.

However, a believer believes while big questions remain.

An inquirer accepts reasonable evidence, even if some questions still remain.

So I must ask, which of these attitudes is the most critical to demonstrate in any given investigation?

Now of course, the answer is that of an inquirer.

Beginning with the attitude of the skeptic will lead to skewed results and understandings.

Yet in the same way, if I start with the premise of a believer, I will undoubtedly make flawed decisions of naivety.

By founding my attitude as an inquirer, it will lead to the best possible results of a decision based on the evidence establishing a well-balanced and grounded belief system.

So With that understanding of how important it is of having the attitude of an inquirer, we now need to describe the method we are going to use in order to analyze the question of God's existence.

In other words, we need to construct a test that only God Himself could pass.

The method we are going to construct must be able to examine 2 things.

And second, how can we determine whether our knowledge is certain?

From these 2 questions, we will construct the test and then apply it to the question of God's existence.

So then let's begin by asking that question.

It is 1 that philosophers have analyzed and scientists have assumed in their hypotheses.

And so let's first evaluate several sources of knowledge in order to determine whether or not we can use any of these sources in order to construct our method.

The first source of knowledge is that which is derived from our senses.

Not By Chance

♪♪ Did you know the chance of a pregnant woman having twins is 1 in 250?

Or how about the chance of being hit by lightning in your lifetime?

Or the chance of being struck and killed by an asteroid?

These random chance facts are really frivolous, to be honest.

But they lead me to ask an important question, maybe the most important question to be answered in life.

What is the probability that God really exists?

Fundamentally and essentially, does God exist?

It is a question that we began to answer last week.

In fact, in order to answer that question, we began to set up a framework to answer the question.

In order to answer this question in an unbiased fashion, our framework needs to be able to work for anyone, whether that person is a Christian, an atheist, or someone who practices any religion at all.

First and most importantly to the framework is the issue of attitude.

Now in a review of last week, and if you happen to miss last week's show, you can go to our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com forward slash IIW Canada, and there you can watch any of our previous programs, but most especially last week's.

But in a brief review, each of us has opportunity to investigate with 3 basic attitudes, That of a skeptic, believer, or inquirer.

And the attitude that we take will often dictate the results of any given investigation.

Remember the important distinctions that we emphasized in that last show.

A skeptic decides against a claim prior to thorough investigation, while a believer, on the other hand, decides to accept a claim prior to thorough investigation, but an inquirer holds verdict until the investigation is done.

In addition, a skeptic focuses on the question to the exclusion of the evidence, whereas a believer focuses on the evidence to the exclusion of the question, but an inquirer focuses on the weight of evidence.

However, a believer believes while big questions remain, but an inquirer accepts reasonable evidence, even if some questions remain.

And so as we investigate this question of God's existence, the only fair and balanced attitude to start with is that of an inquirer.

So once we have established the proper attitude, it allows for a framework to be formed that will lead to honest conclusions.

So the next issue becomes, well what kind of knowledge must we obtain to answer the question of God's existence?

1 must assume that somewhere in the vast expanse of knowledge that exists, the reality of the knowledge of God must be there.

So where might we obtain that knowledge to build the right questions to answer the question of God's existence.

Last week, as we investigated the possible sources of knowledge, we discovered that knowledge comes through 7 basic sources.

Reason, sensory perception, intuition, feeling, experience, history, and the experts.

Yet with each 1 of these sources, we saw clearly that they are vastly insufficient to build a framework that will reveal the answer to 1 of life's greatest questions.

There is another source of knowledge that may help us.

Probability theory deals with the occurrence of events.

It looks at the possibility or probability that something is completely random or if it is statistically probable.

That we would use probability theory in order to tackle the question of God's existence.

Because it is an unbiased factual way of dealing with this great question of life.

Now before we jump into the statistical analysis, let's further explain and describe some aspects of probability theory.

Pondit, In day-to-day life, we can say that any given event that has only 1 chance of occurrence in 10 to the 8th power, which is a 1 with 8 zeros after it, or 100 million, it is considered an impossibility.

Now, in the same way, the converse is true.

If something occurs 10 to the 8th power times, yet has 1 of non-occurrence, it is considered a fact.

Now when we move into the world of science, scientific calculations require that the number actually goes up.

So the number is 10 to the 15th power for any scientific calculation.

But when it comes to establishing a scientific law, we are told that the number must be 10 to the 50th power.

If there is a mathematical probability of something occurring 10 to the 50th power times with only 1 chance of failure, that event is then considered scientific law.

Now just to give you an idea of how huge these numbers are, Suppose we wanted to test the certainty of gravity by dropping a ball every second as we look for that 1 time when the ball will just float in the air.

To test it, 10 to the 18th power times, which is less than half of what is considered to make a scientific law, dropping that ball every second will take us 15 billion years to accomplish.

A time that long is almost unfathomable, especially in light of the fact that some scientists believe that 15 billion years is the age of the universe, at least according to the Big Bang Theory.

These are huge numbers that go a long way toward eliminating error and chance on 1 hand, yet establishing certainty on the other.

Therefore, as a result, we can clearly affirm that an extremely low probability is virtually synonymous with certainty.

And so it is with that framework That we can Put to the test 1 of the greatest claims of Christians That God is the creator of all things This claim is not just the claim of people speaking, but it is the actual claim of the Bible, the very book that forms the foundation for 2 of the world's largest religions.

Listen to these bold claims of both the Old and New Testaments in the Bible.

The very first words of the Bible say that God is the Creator of all things.

In Genesis chapter 1 and verse 1, the Bible says this, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

And then the remainder of the Genesis account says things like this, Let there be light, and there was light.

Then God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the water.

Then God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in 1 place, and let the dry land appear.

Then God said, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, and the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself on the earth.

And finally, then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

The Bible is clear in its assertion that God is Creator.

In fact, many scholars say that Moses wrote these chapters in the book of Genesis as a defense of God's Creatorship, if we call it that.

Now, another passage that declares the creative power of God is Psalm chapter 33, Psalm 33.

And it states this, the Lord, the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.

He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap.

Let All the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him, for he spoke and it was done.

He commanded and it stood fast." A bold statement that God Himself spoke everything into existence.

The New Testament also makes such declarations.

Hebrews chapter 11 and in verse 3 boldly claims these things.

By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.

Then really, 1 of the capstone passages on creation is Revelation chapter 4 and verse 11.

You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they exist and were created.

The very worship of God is founded on His being the creator of all things.

The Bible though invites us to test these claims that He is the Creator.

To do that, we will apply the test of probability to creation.

If the test reveals a high probability that random chance processes are able to explain what we see in nature, then it will rule out the existence of God.

If, however, on the other hand, the test reveals probabilities that are incredibly small, then it becomes reasonable indeed to affirm that God is the creator and that these very small probabilities point to his existence.

Let's now apply the test of probability to see what we find.

First, let's look at the relation between gravity and electromagnetic forces.

1 of the delicate balances that science has noted is the precise relationship that exists between gravity and electromagnetism.

Physicist Paul Davies comments, So, just the ever slightest change would doom the planetary functions.

This balance cannot be explained by some random chance holding it all together, but by precise design.

This is such an incredibly small value that a hypothetical illustration is needed.

Suppose that you had a pile of wooden matchsticks and that that pile was actually much larger than the entire volume of the earth.

An Invitation to Inquire

The purpose of our last 2 shows was to make a determination on whether God exists.

If God does not exist, then a whole range of questions related to His existence can simply disappear.

We might as well eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die without any judgment or accountability.

Yet, Knowing that God does indeed exist, how then are we to re-reconcile His existence with the seemingly contradictory opinions about Him provided by philosophers and the world's major religions?

For instance, we have already made at least 2 assumptions through how we phrased the question.

The first is, should we refer to God in masculine terms, such as Father?

Or should we refer to God through something a little more ambiguous, such as our heavenly parent?

Second, is it possible that what may seem to us as contradictory expressions about God by the major philosophies and religions of the world are only apparently contradictory?

On the other hand, perhaps they are contradictory expressions that are ultimately reconciled into the 1 God.

In other words, perhaps these are just different paths to the same place.

Is God a personal being or is he an impersonal force?

Does God exist in some timeless and spaceless realm as some early Christian church fathers taught, thereby making it impossible for him to be acted upon or to enter into a relationship with us?

Or is God freely able about to providentially step into our world and enter into a relationship with us without at the same time compromising his divinity.

Is God essentially distinct from the stuff that makes up the universe or is he through the process of evolution coming to an awareness of himself as was taught by the 19th century philosopher Hegel and popularized by films such as Matrix and Lucy?

Furthermore, in our search for answers, are we doomed to subjective explanations that arise from our own particular faith communities?

Or can we apply an objective standard to these questions regardless of whether we belong to any faith community at all?

Our purpose in this presentation is much broader than providing an answer to all of the specific questions that we just recently raised.

Instead, our purpose is, first of all, to seek for an objective standard that we can apply to the major philosophies and religions of the world so that we can evaluate whether there are claims to Authoritatively reveal God are in fact true Before we begin to tackle this daunting task.

However, let's take a few moments to review the methods we used to analyze that question in our previous shows on the existence of God.

Now if you missed any of those shows you can go to our YouTube channel www.youtube.com forward slash IIW Canada And there you can watch any of our archived programs.

Now as we studied over the past 2 weeks, we discovered that although the founders of modern science, such as Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Pascal, Linné, and Newton, they all believed in God.

However, many scientists after Charles Darwin abandoned the notion that the Creator God is the cause of the universe.

We also learned that knowledge that is derived from the senses, reason, intuition, feeling, experience, history, and from the experts, they all constitute an interpretation of truth and nature.

So we can then draw 2 conclusions from this.

First, since knowledge from these sources constitutes an interpretation of the facts, that it's obvious that these sources of knowledge have a high probability of error regarding the question of God's existence.

Since that is the case, then they are unreliable in making a solid determination regarding the existence of God.

The second conclusion that we can draw from the reality that knowledge is interpretation is that we must look for a method whose probability of error is so incredibly minute that it will decidedly place the problem of God's existence beyond question.

We discovered that when we analyze the wonders of nature in the universe, the incredibly small probabilities of random chance cry out for an explanation of which there are only 2, chance and blind natural processes on the 1 hand and design that points to God on the other.

However, what seems like an unavoidable conclusion is that both sides believe in miracles.

In light of probabilities such as 10 to the 40th power, 10 to the 60th power, 10 to the 120th power, 10 to the 123rd power, 10 to the 190th power, and the huge number of 10 to the 40, 000th power, and even greater, 10 to the 5 billionth power, they all demonstrate that anyone who still believes in random chance as an explanation for the universe still believes in miracles.

The difference between the 2 sides resides in the fact that 1 believes that God is responsible for the miracle, and the other believes that nature is responsible.

But either way, a miracle has indeed taken place.

I happen to agree with scientist Fred Hoyle, who, by the way, rejects the idea of God.

Now that I don't agree with with him, but I agree with his statement when he states that a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with the laws of nature and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about.

This is why I believe that it is reasonable to say that God exists and that He is the Creator of all things.

Now it is important to note that there is a source of knowledge that we did not discuss in our previous 2 shows.

And that is knowledge that comes to us from sources that claim to be authoritative and inspired.

Furthermore, do we believe our particular religion or philosophy because it is true or is it true because we believe it?

Series

Philosophy's Achilles Heel

Troubling News of Hope

Transcript

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