Introspective - Dr. Walter Martin

in the history of Christian thought we have a broad spectrum of intellects that have approached the subject of the existence of God from different ways different angles and for us to try and cover all of those spanning seventeen or eighteen hundred years of the utterly absurd nor can we improve upon some of the great minds which have already stated the things that I'm going to be talking about but there were basically three categories of argumentation which were advanced their big 50-cent words ontological cosmological and teleological what does that break down to ontological is the concept of being or existence to argue for the existence of God on the basis of existence as we see it right now from the man himself the creation all the way back to the celestial galaxies and eventually to energy itself the ontological arguments based of course on the Greek concept of being was stated by many people st. Anselm Archbishop of Canterbury perhaps gave the most conclusive statement of it from two perspectives both deductive and inductive the problem of deductive reasoning of all the forms of the arguments are illogical cosmological and teleological is that your conclusions contained in your premise and so the atheistic and agnostic and sceptical philosopher comes back and says but you're assuming what you want to prove it's circular reasoning and so it doesn't mean anything so I prefer an inductive formulation and some had one and others the basic idea is that you argue from being itself I have an idea let us say all the most perfect beings that and some and since this idea of a most perfect being could not possibly exist in my mind unless there was some indication or evidence of the existence of such a being in other words all ideas can be traced to some concept of reality therefore God must exist of course the philosophers came back at Anne's own one of them being immanuel kant's the great German philosopher and said I have an idea that I have taller in my pocket which is a what we call a dollar and I can have that idea and believe that ideas firmly as I wish but when I put my hand in my pocket there is no taller so there's all kinds of arguments concept that you could raise for the existence of God but this isn't one of them will hold any real philosophical water and so Kant wrote this off and others followed suit however Rene Descartes the great French philosopher came back with a propositional argument inductively that is arguing from a particular instance to a general conclusion which is way science reasons and he could not be accused of circular reasoning and that he argue of course for the innate idea of God and of course then a psychologists and everybody descended upon the cart and tried to explain away what he was saying I think it remained for jail or a Buswell who was the first president of Wheaton College later the Dean of Covenant Theological Seminary author of systematic theology and many many books philosophical theology and so forth to deal with the subject in a condensed manner a logical condensed manner he was a Presbyterian who they're very determined to preserve order at all costs and buswell was my professor and had a tremendous way of condensing all of these great minds together and putting them into a form that was meaningful for the average person after all the layman who's fighting for his life out there on the college campus even in high school now and in the world to try and justify the reasons for his faith the Bible says give to everyone that asks you an answer a reason for the hope that lies within you well I think buswell did that in a very concise way particularly when it got to this subject of being and buswell said and Sam was wrong there are too many explanations the Philosopher's have given they've refuted his deductive arguments however I would like to state it another way and I concur with what he did those well said supposing you were to find a flat island in the Pacific and you landed from your ship and you went in and you began to appreciate the culture the people have never been apparently visited by anybody before and so very much like Captain Cook and the Hawaiian Islands or whatever you would see these particular Island only this is a flat island there's nothing it's just almost level much like the islands which we see out there and then you're talking with the people you learn their language and you notice that they have a word for a snow-capped mountain peak in their vocabulary and you say to yourself wait a moment no let me reason this out here's a flat island in the middle of the Pacific and there's no such thing as snow here when are we talking about well one inductively they must have come from a culture where there was a snow-capped mountain peak which was lost in antiquity or to somebody visited the island and told them about what snow was and there was a snow-capped mountain peak or you say to yourself somehow or other somebody must have conceived of a snow-capped mountain peak well instantly you can discard the last one because if within the idea structure of the culture there is no word for snow and no word for mountain then it would be impossible for a person to sit down and conceive of this idea of a snow-capped mountain peak absolutely impossible in the case of adapting this to Christian theology and the argument for being or the concept of this idea we have the idea of an eternal all-powerful ever-present entity creator and no matter what we do we can't account for that within our vocabulary or within our experience it doesn't exist and so inductively we are forced up against the wall to explain the origin of the idea now of course there are ideas that we have that don't have any real origin all their fantasy or mythology or something like that but we're not talking about this what we're talking about is something of a concrete nature that we can observe something that we could test and when we start testing we find out the card said and buswell sums it all up that the only thing that fits the possibility of our snow capped mountain peak is revelation that God has revealed himself that the information is there and that the idea is within us now it's a modified form at the end sell me an argument but essentially that is an ontological argument for the existence of God I think the cart did a good job of presenting it I think buswell did a good job of summing it up we certainly do have to face the fact that the idea of God exists and we should not be so foolish as to assume that we have conjured up this idea without any relationship to reality because if you talk about the existence of Apollo or Hercules pagan gods and God you can immediately see where they came from because they're in human form and where do you get Hercules the all-powerful man if you don't get it from the idea of a human being blown up into infinity well you can't take any of the ideas of creator from human experience and blow that into infinity and end up with God your snow-capped mountain peak in effect is cannot be accounted for apart from revelation and the existence of God as he exists within our own minds and as he exists in creation itself so the ontological argument inductively I believe has some weight to it and you can say well account for it them as buswell would say god he is that's the data now account for the datum and when you have to try and account for it then you are not a philosophical gas in a hurry I think the argument is essentially sound the second form of the classic arguments is the cosmological argument a big word but it just means from the fact of a cosmos and you get immediately into the concept which everybody understands of cause and effect now it's very foolish when talking to people who are unbelievers and trying to use a cosmological argument to talk about everything must have a cause because the moment you talk about that they'll jump up and down on you with golf shoes and they'll say no everything doesn't have to have a car that's an assumption so the Christian should argue from effect to cause every effect must have a cause sufficient and efficient but you have to have causality and the fact of a cosmos demands that we have an explanation that is if we are following a scientific method of inquiry such as particular instances we observe certain things and we come to a general conclusion science does this philosophy says it does it and I think that we can say it in a very succinctly if anything now exists then something must be eternal or something not eternal must have come from nothing which is a very simple statement of exactly what the cosmological argument is and what we are arguing for as Christians is the universe as an effect and what we see around us as an effect not as the cause in itself a few years ago I was debating different people on a national radio program and I had to debate a gentleman one that who was a scientist and not known who was an atheist and an agnostic and I think the fourth film was a cultist so I had a very friendly audience that night and I was the guest on the program and I was representing quote Orthodox Christianity close quote so they immediately came at me with the idea of well how can you prove the existence of God and I made this statement which upset quite a few Christians I said nobody can prove the existence of God as taking the deity into a laboratory putting a piece of litmus paper into a test tube and if it changes to purple God's here I mean if you're talking about that kind of proof forget it because there are other types of proof and unfortunately scientists forget that sometimes what we have to do is riajuu Kait them and show them that they themselves use other kinds of proof in order to arrive at truth and assumptions and presupposition everybody does anybody that tells you that they don't have any presuppositions you can immediately scratch them off because everybody has some and we have as Christians a presupposition we have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets that right Jesus of Nazareth and because of that we believe we have found the answer as God has given it so anyhow I was going on this program and I had to brush up on my scientific background to get to this gentleman because obviously you're very well informed in his field so I went over and I talked to dr. Lu Bell who was then at the New York Herald Tribune a science editor he's very famous writer now and he was beginning to become famous then and I said I like to bounce off you some ideas on a concept of science and the philosophy of science he said go ahead I said well I'm gonna be debating somebody tonight I have to tell you what my reasons are and I got the bait of scientists and I said I want to approach him in an area where it's going to be logical rational scientifically motivated and then only philosophical incidentally that we eventually end up with a philosophical position he said all right I understand what you're talking about and I said how many possible explanations are there for the existence of the universe and I was going right into causality right into the heart of cosmology and he's a an expert in this field and Yubel said well he said they're different theories I said well let me give you what I think and then you criticize it as a scientist that's the best way to find out he said go ahead I said number one the universe is eternal so we don't really have to worry about it as all we'd have to ask any questions it's always been there so why bother pursuing it any further and he laughed and he said well that's the theory of fred hoyle the steady state theory he said but there's a mountain of evidence accumulating which incidentally since then has buried it that the steady state Theory won't hold that we aren't exchanging matter and energy on an equal basis and therefore the universe is not an eternal existence he said I don't think that that's accurate he said I think also that Einstein would oppose that he said because Einstein affirmed would call the second law of thermodynamics which is heat and it's loss in friction in the universe and the argument of course goes that the universe was at its initial creation very very hot it is now cooling down we know that because in our own solar system we can see that Pluto is solid ice and it's cooling so it's losing heat energy by friction so if it tends toward the loss of energy you arrive eventually at maximum entropy which is supreme cold ultimate cold and you've lost your capacity to regenerate that energy the Yubel said Einstein held that very strongly and he said the second law of thermodynamics he said has not been disproved and it still stands so he said I think that Hoyle has a problem with an eternal universe he said I would not subscribed I don't think best scientific evidence indicates an eternal universe I said well we scratch that one the universe is not eternal I said no I'm supposing we look at it from a standpoint that the universe really isn't there at all but that it exists as a construct or an idea in our minds and we just think it's there and so because we think it's there and we perceive that in our thoughts therefore it exists he says that solipsistic means the only reality that exists as reality within my mind what I perceive is reality he said we know that that's not true of the universe he said because we can predict eclipses we can predict Halley's Comet which we've just seen come back again on schedule every 75 years unless it hit something on the way and he said it'll be back he said you can't predict an illusion I'll never forget that you cannot predict an illusion he said therefore to say that the universe is an illusion and doesn't really exist at all he said is to deny all scientific data in this area well scratch that one the universe is not something which exists only because I think it's there or other people think it's there it has some form of objective reality and then I said well then how about the universe I mean just suddenly appeared spontaneously I mean there was a time when it wasn't and then all of a sudden there was a time when it was it sort of spontaneously arose out of nothing and he said well he said that scientific absurdity he said it's a basic law of physics from nothing nothing comes he said so if you have infinite nothing you're going to have infinite nothing that's it and he said so the idea that the universe just emerged one day at six o'clock in the morning whatever the date was out of nothing he said is nonsense I said well then how about the universe was created by a force infinitely greater than itself and he looked at me for a second and I said it was created by this force I said I'm not saying the God of the Bible I'm just saying that it was create so what you're just pushing it back further and further and further and he said that's I got a sound but he said if you say as the Big Bang Theory does George Gamow is theory George Washington University that the universe was the result of an explosion of hydrogen atoms compacted together tightly to the size a little larger than a softball and that then atomic fusion took place and detonation and it flew forth with an enormous explosion of light and energy and it's been moving outward from that focal point of explosion approximately anywhere from 8 to 16 billion years ago they say at a speed of 186,000 miles per second it's now slowed down to 25,000 miles an hour which is the outer rims of the galaxies which we can clock in speed receding from Earth from where we are so not to you Bell said that's the Big Bang Theory and he said it begins with hydrogen atoms and I said okay then there are eternal hydrogen atoms right he said wrong because the hydrogen atom is not eternal otherwise you have to start explaining the causes of the hydrogen atom he said that you get into the fallacy of what is called infinite regression you keep going back and back and back and back and he said eventually he said you would arrive at God being a theologian he said and then I as a scientist would say well why stop at God why who caused God and who caused God's God and who caused and who caused who cause he said so you have infinite regression going on he said you can't explain the infinite regression he said at least to my satisfaction simply the fact that there is a Big Bang he said I don't think is made out of that there was a big bang and there's no such thing as eternal hydrogen atoms I said okay so we're back - there was an explosion and the probably of hydrogen atoms and the hydrogen atoms one eternal right I said them what is eternal and exactly the what we began with I concluded with in discussing with him I said if anything does now exist then either something must be eternal or something not eternal must have come from nothing and he just looked at me and he said something not eternal must have come from nothing I said right he's impossible I said well then where are you what a Genesis chapter 1 the universe was created by a force outside of itself upon which it must depend and this we call God the God of creation he said but you've got infinite regression you can go back to who caused God and you can go on and on and on forever I said well hey let me ask you a question I said supposing we just agreed with Bertrand Russell that's where you're getting this from British philosopher and yourself that we end up with God after we regress back past the universe and then we say to God when we arrive there well actually we should regress beyond you who made you and then God would respond to us and say that is irrelevant the only thing that matters is I made you and you are answerable to me it is there an irrelevancy to say who made God once one has arrived that God because God made us and the universe itself so stop there when I was concluding my discussion we're back to you Bell on the subject I said to him well as granting your premises that we finally regress in the cosmos past man past creation past the galaxies and we finally end up with eternal hydrogen and we go beyond the hydrogen atoms which we know now know are not eternal and we end up with the creator of the hydrogen atoms and then we say God and then we say to him well now we want to know who made you sir and the response would be that's an irrelevant say because you're answerable to me and I made you so even if you have a finite God when you get there which I don't happen to accept I told him still when you get there granting your own premises you can't answer him nor can you go into any argument defending yourself because you've arrived there and he's there we're gonna do them and of argument of course the Christian doesn't accept this line of reasoning I was using it to show even the scientific arguments carried to their logical conclusion ends up with a finite create or to whom we are answerable you see so the argument of who made God is irrelevant and has no real meaning but from a Christian standpoint when you got back to the creator of the atoms you would not be dealing with an effect you would be dealing with the cause and we must restate this again that the Christian position and the theistic position has always been every effect must have cause there's no possible way out of that and reasoning and when we talk about God we're talking about the eternal cause we're not talking about effect so we can reason back to him but when we get there we're dealing with creator and we're dealing with someone we have to answer to and that doesn't make it easy at all question C is very difficult to deal with people like this because Bertrand Russell came to the United States in the 1950s gave a series of lectures and Russell was asked by a national magazine I clipped the article because it fascinated me and the national magazine said to wrestle Lord Russell what would you consider to be evidence for the existence of God that's a fair question and Russell's well I'm an agnostic I'm not an atheist I don't know if God exists I don't think he does but I don't know but if a voice were to speak to me from heaven and predict without error every event of my life for the next 24 hours even though it was outside the normal range of probability bata principles of mathematics and so forth that I might be willing to concede the possibility of the existence of a supernatural force now I cite this to show the mentality of some of the greatest minds in the world when it comes to religion and to God here's a man that if God talks to him and tells him everything for 24 hours and everything comes to pass exactly as he asked for it then he's still going to doubt that the Creator is there and Jesus Christ had some will not believe even though one rise from a dead he rose from the dead demonstrated himself alive with infallible proofs and you could say as Paul did well there are 500 witnesses that saw him after his resurrection some of them most of them are still alive go talk to them that's evident that's prime of facie evidence but it doesn't make any difference because there are people whose mindset is I'm not an atheist I'm an agnostic and they're closeted atheists they say they don't know but they live as if they did and they're not kidding anybody the least of all God so in making this appearance on the program that night I went to dr. Uwe Bell to try and get a structure inductively for a cosmology for the existence of God now we haven't proven the God of the Bible I'm not suggesting that we have I'm suggesting that we have shown that he is the most probable and reasonable explanation once one goes beyond the creation of hydrogen atoms and you are face-to-face with maximum entropy that the universe is turning cold well it was created then because it's lost energy and that energy cannot be made up so until they disproved the second law of thermodynamics until they disprove the explosion of hydrogen atoms loss of heat till they refute the idea of cause and effect which they can't it's just an argument that they use I think the Christian can very strongly stand upon what the Bible says that God is the creator and that we may go back to him he planted the ear he planted the eye he created the human being which brings us of course to the final argument which is used which I like inductively better than all of them which is the teleological argument for the existence of God the final form of argumentation formerly speaking is the teleological argument I don't include the moral argument not because it doesn't have force but I think it's a deductive argument so I would argue strongly from the teleological argument I favor argument teleology of course simply means purpose and the concept of purpose is very clear within the pages of scripture and in fact Psalm 90 verse 4 talks about he that plans the ear shelling out here he that designed the eye shall he not see it talks about God's creative power in the universe the purpose of creation itself the world around those parties of this argument in Romans chapter 10 is in Romans chapter 1 the invisible things of him from the creation of the universe are clearly seen testified to by the things which have been made even his eternal power and divinity man stands without an excuse so the TV logic argument is a biblical argument a very strong biblical argument and I think it can be stated in an inductive form so that we can grasp it and utilize it as Christians one of the most interesting things about the teleological argument is the concept of the order and design which we are able to perceive around us and I think the best way to deal with it is to go to two very great philosophers David Hume and John Stuart Mill both of whom were skeptics and agnostics so we're not going to them with the expectation of finding an argument specifically designed by theists to argue for the existence of God we go to people who didn't believe but who nevertheless were honest enough to come to grips with evidence when they saw it and they did David Hume and dialogues are natural religion made the observation that if we had nothing else to go by at all except the human eye we would notice some interesting things about it we would notice first of all inductively that is composed of various then we would notice that each one of the parts the lens the iris the optic nerve the various structural parts of the eye itself within each one of them there is no capacity to produce sight yet altogether said Hume obviously do conspire to produce sight put all the parts of the eye together said Hume produce a sight now said Hume it is obvious that since each of the parts cannot in themselves generate sight the thought of sight which is the purpose of the eye is antecedent to the eyes construction exists before it therefore you may postulate a creator for the eye and Hume said that creator would be God now John Stuart Mill was asked and what are the limits of logic in terms of proof when it comes to the existence of God and this is Mill now the Dean of logicians she said I know of only one thing that logic can do for theology he said and that would be the human argument for the eye and then he proceeded to reconstruct it along inductive logical lines to show that no specific part took each part of the eye would generate sight together they did he said Hume is correct the thought of sight exists before the parts so that they are organized to produce it now I updated that in a lecture which I gave on a secular campus and really upset the philosophy department because I said look if you don't like him whom you love when it comes to criticizing miracles and religion and if you don't like mill whom you adore as the Prince of logicians then why not go beyond them to science where you always take refuge the laws of genetics we now know my analysis and the study of genetics heredity that every part of the human body from microscopic structure to the largest form is all the result of a program known as the DNA genetic code we now know what human mil didn't know we now know why each part conspires together to produce site we have now pushed the argument back one more step and the one more step is the program we now have the program that mill and that Hume said existed on they didn't know it we know it we can demonstrate it we can empirically verify the program well do we believe in an eternal program or do we believe in an antecedent thought prior to the program every scientist looking at a design program as complex as DNA would say without hesitation the programmer of this is a genius why is it then when we're dealing with the Creator the ultimate genius they reverse all their reasoning all their logic and all their scientific training and say well we can't say that of course they can't say that because they would confront him then and to confront the Creator is absolutely paralyzing people don't want to do that I was talking one time with the great Christian educator dr. Frank Gable and it was a world-famous mountain climber and we were talking about different illustrations of teleology or purpose in the universe and he said to me well one of the best he said I've ever heard he said is when you're climbing he said and some of the great peaks of the world he said particularly said the Matterhorn he said when your clients very treacherous as you get near the top of the Matterhorn they have quick storms and ice storms you can freeze to death up there or die you know with the minutes I'll be struck by lightning or something like that it's a very hazardous ascent and he climbed it and he said when you get near the top and there's a lot of snow and there's a snowstorm going on he said you notice that there's a pile of rocks on the side of the trail which doesn't register at first and as you keep going a certain distance there's another pile of rocks and a certain distance further and there's another pile of rocks and he said if you follow rock pile to rock pile it marks the trail to the summit he said when you get there you're at the top he said this is an inductive argument if you see evidence cumulative that builds and points you ultimately to a general conclusion he said why can you then not say then God put the piles of rocks there because you certainly know that somebody put the rocks there by the Matterhorn and it was an intelligent person that said if I don't do this the guy behind me is going to die so I put them there and he said we don't have any problem saying that at all inductively we say oh boy that was a thoughtful man that climbed up here before me but we don't do that with God instead we do everything possible to show that the rocks just feller by themselves by chance you see it did occurred up for the story of a little boy who was traveling with his father who was the professor of philosophy an atheist and his mother who was a believer and they came to let us know what Boulder Dam or Hoover Dam in Colorado and when I get out there they saw this magnificent dam and of course the little boy was just you know looking at it just awestruck and as they walked around they saw the mountains and the grandeur of the mountains and the little boy's mother said isn't that wonderful look at these mountains look at the hand and the power and the glory of God the heavens proclaim the glory of God the firmament shows his handiwork look around you can see she said to her husband the hand the power of the creator and he looked at her and said the rocks had to fall someplace that's chance you see there's no purpose it all took place by mechanical chance so the little boy didn't say anything he just kept walking around they finally got to the top of the Hoover Dam and looked around at the rocks and everything like that and his father said isn't that a magnificent dam he's had to look at that structure that construct he said goes in this great and the rapture description of Hoover Dam and the little boy looks at him and says they had a fault someplace didn't they and the father turn around look at him like this it was obvious the child had more perception than the parent did the child know that somebody built the dam but the father was so obtuse that he couldn't go beyond the dam to the universe to the Creator and see that everything is a product of order and design now a chance we must understand does create things if you put a million monkeys on a million typewriters and have them whacking away on the electronic keys eventually somewhere down the line one of them will type out to be or not to be okay but what will follow it is to be or not to be that is the Gazoo Gahagan because because chance creates but it does not sustain organization so you can get chance creation but you can't get chance organization and chance structure that persists that's something that desires for its explanation out of my mind this is what we're talking about here there are so many more illustrations which could be given but the best I think that I like is the one given by Paley who took a watch and said you know here's a watch and if you were to find this in a field and you open it up I mean you'd look at it and you'd study it and you'd come to conclusion that was a mechanism of remarkable design although you probably didn't know what it was but nevertheless it obviously had some function the parts would tell you that and if you wound it and it were running you would know it had some function well the atheist and the agnostic descend on you and they say but you know that the function of the watch is to tell time that's why you can use the argument that Paley used for the watch to deductive so I updated Paley a couple of years ago in a lecture and I said supposing the midst of the UFO crisis on earth here supposing a UFO lands from another planet or intergalactical and this UFO sees a strange object on a strip of hard ground and this object has nobody in it or around it and they examine it and they open appear to be apertures and they lift what appears to be a front aperture and they check around it and go underneath it and they start to look at it carefully they notice that there there are four circular objects upon which it rests and by pushing this object they notice that it moves forward and backwards they also notice tremendous amounts of wires and all types of metals and and other strange things underneath it and they notice that this is a marvelously organized something obviously because it moves it was meant to push or pull or carry something now having observed this particular mechanism they would inductively come to the conclusion that it pushed or pulled something and from the comfortable arrangement of equipment inside that you could sit in it now they don't have to know it's an automobile they don't have to know what its function is they know that it is a design mechanism and they know that it had a designer if you stand at the end of the General Motors assembly line and you see a new Cadillac come out you know perfectly well that the assembly line put it together but nobody in his right mind would say the assembly line designed it the engineering department of General Motors designed and the product of the assembly line obviously is the car we can see around us the product of creation we can see the effect of creative energy power and intellect and we can infer from this the Creator now we must go to revelation to arrive at the God of the Bible and the creator of us all the ontological argument the cosmological argument the teleological argument our only ways of expressing how we reach out with the mind that God has given us to try and reconstruct or construct reasons because we are rational intelligent beings and we are in a quest for knowledge what better ways than to look at effects and to ask questions about cause what better way then to look at the concept of ideas and ask for their origin and trace them the datum and then to try and equate that with some concept of reality that we know or we can imagine or think of or project it's rational and what better way to see intelligence then in designed organization these three forms of argument inductively stated whilst and they are valid they can be used they don't prove the God of creation but they lead us eventually and inexorably to create or and the revelation of that creator in God's power and in God's time as he has chosen to do so gave us the judeo-christian religion as Bertrand Russell once pointed out and I cite him in conclusion he said either all the religions of the world are equally wrong or one of them is right a cannot be none a the law of contradiction I think we have to face the fact that all the religions of the world are mutually exclusive of each other internally and externally contradictory but one the judeo-christian and this we present as the origin of cosmology ontology and teleology the God of the Bible the God and Father of Jesus Christ

Channel: Dr. Craig Johnson

Views: 7,478

Rating: 4.9347825 out of 5

Keywords: teleological physico-theological, ontological, cosmological, teleology, ontology, Cosmology, Craig Johnson, Walter Martin, atheist, atheism, believer, apologetics, Christian apologetics, Dr. Walter Martin, Dr. Craig Johnson

Id: uO0TAHKzPFw

Length: 40min 7sec (2407 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 26 2019