C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 65 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The session begins with an unusual assignment: name the things that have made you doubt God is there. The teachers take the doubts seriously, then put the most basic philosophical question on the table, why is there something rather than nothing, and walk every possible answer to its end. Listen for the kalam argument, the claim that an infinite number of moments cannot be traversed; the teachers ask the class to dwell on it all week, because much of what follows hinges on it.
Since no one’s faith in God’s existence is perfect, the class opens by naming the real causes of doubt: we cannot see or hear him; the problem of evil pressed against the goodness of God; the weight of intelligent people who study the questions and conclude he is absent; prayers offered over and over into what feels like silence, the experience the teachers call divine hiddenness; and the apparent meaninglessness of small calamities that seem to serve no larger picture. There is also a darker cause: the desire to sin without accountability, since removing that which is above the arch removes every timeless principle, every universal, and every judgment. The teachers observe that a person’s confession can stay put while the heart drifts, and that a strong, growing belief that God is there is basic not just to conversion but to sanctification.
The class then names its grounds for confidence: the irreducible complexity and structure of living things, which design cannot be explained away; God’s visible work in history, exactly what he told Israel to remember whenever they were tempted toward other gods; the sheer existence of anything at all, since below the arch is inexplicable without above the arch; answered prayers and hallmark experiences that resolidify faith in seasons of doubt; the near universality of belief across mankind; the universal sense of right and wrong and even of beauty; and the Bible itself, above all the historical resurrection of Christ. The teachers add a caution about building everything on subjective experience: the healing celebrated one week can be followed by death the next, and a faith balanced only on such moments will sway. The objective arguments come first; real experience of God then stands on top of them.
Why is there something rather than nothing? Philosophers across history have reduced the possible answers to six: there is nothing, all is an illusion; the universe created itself; the universe was created by chance; the universe was created by nothing; the universe has existed eternally; or a self-existent God created the universe. The method is deduction: if every option but one destroys itself, the last option standing is the truth, with the standing caveat that the conclusion is as strong as the completeness of the list. The rest of the session walks each option to its end.
The claim that all is an illusion defeats itself the moment it is spoken: an illusion is something, and it must have a producer, so the question of origins simply moves back a step and then back another, forever, an argument ad infinitum that never touches the real issue. Descartes wrestled with exactly this, imagining deceiving spirits toying with his mind, and concluded that his own thinking was undeniable: I think, therefore I am. Self-creation fares no better. Whatever the current state of quantum theory, and the teachers decline to hang anything on a theory still in flux, a thing would have to predate itself in order to create itself, which is a straight logical contradiction. Two options down, both analytically false, false by definition.
The universe was created by chance sounds scientific until the word is examined. Chance is a mathematical term describing possibilities; it has no being, no power, no force, and therefore no causal ability whatsoever. It cannot create a single molecule, let alone a universe. R. C. Sproul devoted a book to the confusion, tracing how the word slips into popular science by what he calls the fallacy of ambiguity: a term of description quietly becomes an entity with supreme creative power, a move no one would tolerate in any other area of life. Push the sentence and it collapses; there is no agent in it.
The universe was created by nothing violates the law of causality: every effect has a cause, and a causeless effect is not a rare event but an impossibility. The old philosophical maxim states it: ex nihilo nihil fit, out of nothing, nothing comes. If your house burned down and the investigators concluded that the fire had no cause at all, did not start anywhere, and came from nothing, you would not accept the report, because everything you do in life assumes causes. Attributing creative power to nothing is the same ambiguity fallacy as chance, wearing a different word.
The most serious rival is the eternal universe: the universe is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be, whether as a steady state or an endless oscillation of bangs and collapses. Against it stands the argument the teachers most want the class to carry home: an infinite number of moments cannot be traversed. If the past had no beginning, then arriving at the present moment would require crossing an infinite series of moments, and an infinite, by definition, cannot be completed. Picture a man trying to jump out of an infinitely deep hole: he never gets out, because there is no bottom to jump from. Just so, if the past is infinite, we could never have gotten to now. Since we are undeniably at now, the past is not infinite; time had a beginning. Thomas Aquinas gave the church its classic articulation of the argument, which had been developed earlier in Islamic thought, where the word kalam comes from, and William Lane Craig has written its definitive modern defense.
Five options have destroyed themselves, each one self-defeating, false by its own definition. What remains is the sixth: a self-existent God created the universe. Sproul presses the conclusion all the way: if something exists, there is a God, and the classical apologists claim this chain of reasoning yields certainty. The teachers hold it a shade more modestly: perhaps a possibility no one has listed remains, but that is not how rational people live. When all the evidence points one way, we are morally obligated to act on the evidence, not to wait for a hundred percent that we demand nowhere else in life. On either telling, the arguments against God’s existence examined so far have all canceled themselves out.
The classical arguments come next, briefly, because they are rich in the church’s history even if no one uses all of them. The cosmological argument reasons from effect to cause: every effect has a cause, the universe is an effect, there cannot be an infinite regress of causes, therefore an uncaused cause, an unmoved mover, must exist; the kalam form argues that whatever begins to exist has a cause, and the universe began to exist. The ontological argument, framed by Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century when asked for an argument so simple and self-evident that anyone could grasp it, is the strangest and, the teachers cheerfully admit, the hardest: God must be conceived as the greatest conceivable being, and a greatest conceivable being that did not exist would not be the greatest conceivable, since one could conceive a greater, namely one that exists. Translated into the course’s picture: that which is above the arch must exist, or it is not above the arch. A popular third form, that whatever can be conceived must exist somewhere since imagination only rearranges what already is, three-headed monsters are just one-headed ones multiplied, and a black-and-white world could never imagine color, is weaker and not quite what Anselm argued.
The argument from design, from the Greek telos, end or completion, states that the order of the universe evidences intelligent design rather than chaotic chance, and therefore a designer. Paley’s watchmaker carries the point: a man finding a watch in a barren place would never conclude that its gears, springs, hands, and dials assembled themselves, yet a single living cell is more complex than any watch. The syllogism ends, tellingly, in an undesigned designer, because an infinite regress of designers cannot be traversed, the kalam principle returning again. Scripture speaks this argument’s language: Romans 1 says God’s invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world in the things that have been made, leaving men without excuse, and Psalm 19 says the heavens are telling the glory of God, pouring forth speech without words to the end of the world. All of creation, the teachers say, screams above the arch.
All people have a concept of right and wrong and a conscience, and universal moral law implies a moral lawgiver, an argument the teachers count among the most practical and hardest to overcome. The stock objection cites cultures with inverted values, like the tribe in the missionary account whose prized virtue was betrayal, but anomalies do not defeat the rule: the argument rests on the staggering consistency of moral judgment across most people, most cultures, and most of history, the standing example being that torturing innocent babies for fun is wrong always and everywhere. Without something above the arch there can be no universals at all, only local customs; even survival of the fittest cannot explain where survival got the title good. C. S. Lewis opened his most famous book with this argument, and Romans 2 gives its biblical form: Gentiles who never had the law do by nature what the law requires, showing the work of the law written on their hearts, their conscience bearing witness. The presuppositionalists press it furthest: everyone acts as if there is a God, so there are practical theists who confess atheism, just as there are practical atheists who confess faith.
The sensus divinitatis argues from the innate sense of the divine in every person, the God-shaped void that drives humanity’s universal impulse to worship, an argument held in varying degrees by Augustine, Calvin, and Pascal, and voiced in Augustine’s famous prayer that God made us for himself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in him. Psalm 14 calls the one who says in his heart there is no God a fool, and Romans 1 says men knew God and refused to honor him, which is suppression, not ignorance. Pascal’s wager, finally, is not a proof but an odds table: if you bet on God and are wrong, you lose nothing; if you bet against him and are wrong, you lose everything; therefore bet on God. The teachers rank it a conversation opener rather than a foundation, best deployed after the evidences, perhaps alongside the circle illustration: draw a circle for all knowledge, shade the sliver a person actually knows, and ask what might live in all the rest.
No single argument fits every person: the mathematically minded may be moved by the kalam, others by design, others by the moral law, and hardly anyone, the teachers concede with a smile, by the ontological argument on first meeting. The course’s position is the cumulative case: taken together, the arguments present a case for the existence of God so strong that continued doubt goes against the grain of all the evidence, the very posture that in any other discipline would be called irrational. The homework is single-minded: spend the week dwelling on the kalam principle, that an infinite number of moments cannot be traversed, because a surprising amount of the doctrine of God will hinge on it.
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Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all seventeen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why does the session begin by asking the class to name their own doubts about God’s existence?
2. What caution do the teachers attach to building belief mainly on answered prayers and experiences?
3. What are the six possible answers to why there is something rather than nothing?
4. Why is the claim that all is an illusion self-defeating?
5. Why is self-creation a logical contradiction?
6. Why can chance not have created the universe?
7. What does the maxim ex nihilo nihil fit assert?
8. What is the heart of the kalam argument against an eternal universe?
9. What does the illustration of the infinitely deep hole show?
10. After the five rival options destroy themselves, how do the teachers state the conclusion?
11. What is Anselm’s ontological argument?
12. Why does the teleological argument end in an undesigned designer?
13. How do Romans 1 and Psalm 19 relate to the argument from design?
14. Why do cultural anomalies, like a tribe that prized betrayal, not defeat the moral argument?
15. What does Romans 2 contribute to the moral argument?
16. How do the teachers rank Pascal’s wager among the arguments?
17. What is the cumulative case for the existence of God?
All seventeen correct. Lecture 3 is complete.
The teachers list divine hiddenness, unanswered prayer, and the meaninglessness of small calamities among the real causes of doubt. Which of the causes named in this session have you actually felt, and what in this lecture speaks to it most directly?
Work through the six answers to why there is something rather than nothing with someone this week, and let them try to add a seventh. What happens to the conversation when the options are laid out exhaustively rather than argued one at a time?
The homework is to dwell on the kalam principle, that an infinite number of moments cannot be traversed. Try to state the argument in your own words, with the infinitely deep hole, to someone who has never heard it. Where does it feel strongest, and where do you still have questions?
The witness of creation, from Psalm 19: the heavens are telling the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims the work of his hands; day to day pours forth speech and night to night reveals knowledge, without words, yet their voice goes out through all the earth.
The lecture’s own directions for the week: dwell on the kalam argument, that an infinite number of moments cannot be traversed, until you can state it in your own words, since much of the doctrine of God ahead hinges on it; meet with others over the group discussion questions, since theology is done in community; and the teachers point interested students toward the honors reading on the existence of God and name the modern literature on these arguments, including the definitive philosophical defense of the kalam. The course turns next to the incommunicable attributes of God.