Renewed Vision for our Campus

As the Creative Events Coordinator for our humble planning team I was pleased to see the first promotional event go smoothly on Friday. Naturally, I plan to conduct more of these throughout next week to advertise for the largest event on Thursday night.
But something interesting happened in handing out fliers, running the silent debate and talking with my fellow students. I got a huge reality check. I saw first-hand how many different worldviews are represented here at Tech, but not only that; I saw how unhappy so many students are. I guess I had forgotten that on this lively campus at this highly regarded Institute of Technology there still exist people who not only have questions, but the majority of these people seem silently desperate for the answers.
A couple of interesting examples for you: In response to our silent debate question of "Is God a delusion?" one student emphatically scrawled "LIFE is a delusion." Other responses varied in their opinions and level of rationality, but none stood out to me as being so depressing or fatalistic as that one. What a terribly sad life that must be!
A female student saw our computer screen playing excerpts of the God Delusion debate and exclaimed, "Is that Richard Dawkins?! I LOVE HIM!!" Yet another student came by and asked if we were Christians and then laughed as he declared "...yall are gonna get HOSED!!" (citing, I presume, the mounting "preparations" being made by the Campus Atheists).

Things like this shock me in some ways, sadden me in others, but they serve to remind me of why it is the Veritas Forum is needed here. We must provide an atmosphere on this campus where discussion of these topics is comfortable, inviting and thought provoking. In a setting like that Christians should take on the role of befriending these students that don't have Truth and showing them that the real answers are found in Jesus Christ.

I pray that's exactly what happens. We'll create the events to raise these discussions; God will provide His children to show the love of Christ to these students. And somewhere between having their questions answered one by one and seeing the love of the true God someone may come to know and trust in Him.

Faith, and the Line of Despair

What is Faith?

Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion defines it as:

"Blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence"

The funny thing is, however, as Alister McGrath points out in his response The Dawkins Delusion is that, if a poll was taken of all the Christian Theologians throughout the ages, I don't think even a single one would agree with that definition. Alister cites W. H. Griffith - Thomas, an Anglican Theologian, who defined it this way:

"[Faith] affects the whole of Man's nature, It commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence; it continues in the confidence of the heart, or emotions based on conviction, and it is crowned in the consent of the will, by means of which the conviction and confidence are expressed in conduct."

But a question I've begun to ask is, how has the word "Faith" picked up such an irrational connotation? How did faith lose its connection to rationality?

For this answer, I think the answer might be found in the works of a man named Francis Schaeffer. In his book The God Who Is There, he introduces a concept he calls "The Line of Despair." In order to really get a good feel for the entirety of the idea, I would recommend Ch. 2 of The God Who Was There(Available online at Google Books), where it is explained in more detail, but long story short, he traces the development of Western Philosophical Thought through Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Sarte, Heidegger, and on and on and on. In this process, primarily existential philosophers began to come to the conclusion that the things that we can know, like, that my laptop is black, that a day is 24 hours long, etc. are necessarily without meaning. However, things that do have meaning like love, family, purpose, etc. cannot be known, and can only be experienced or known by taking a "leap of faith," and it is in this direct quote from Kierkegaard that we can see the rationality and reason of faith were declared dead.

Religion, as a traditional source of all meaning in life, was viewed as inherently irrational, not because there was no evidence behind it, or good logical reasons for Faith in God didn't exist, but as a natural consequence of the fact that it falls in the category of "things with meaning"

This whole line of thinking in some sense leads to a form of "Secularized Mysticism," which is why my ENG 1102 Professor commented that one of the characteristic features of Postmodernism (where this line of thinking led) was an "openness to meaning from unexpected places"....This strikes me as a remarkably new-age idea, but something that I think permeates the Atheistic community. They are faced with a substantial problem.

If God is dead, and I will die, and the universe will end, what purpose is there in life? for what reason do I draw my next breath?

Dawkins, in an interview with Fox News, claimed that religion poisoned people's lives, and if they liberated themselves of it, they could take hold of their lives, and learn to love freely, to seek after things that really matter, etc, etc. (see also Christopher Hitchen's God is Not Great) What both Hitchens and Dawkins fail to realize, is what they, themselves are doing, is taking a Kierkegaardian "leap of faith" into "love," "family", and so on, in without regard to the fact that none of these things, in their world view can be known.

The question I will leave you on is this: Why should we kill God, for which there is an abundance of Apologetic material in support of, and replace it with ideas of "love", "family," etc. for which Atheiests themselves admit they cannot know?

A Common Sense Defense of Original Sin

If you went up to a random person on the street and asked them "Is man naturally inclined to good, or to evil?" you would probably get some very interesting responses. Some would say "evil," and you would instantly be able to explain the Christian idea of Depravity very easily, it would then be a mere question of "why is that" or, "what is the solution"

More interestingly, and probably more common, would be the response that "man is naturally inclined to good." This response naturally begs the question "Then why is there so much evil in the world?" I would imagine (and I am sorta guessing at this point) that you would get one of two responses, either A. "We get corrupted by society" or B. "Just some turds in the gene pool"

Answer B, of course, leads to another interesting line of thinking. Perhaps when you asked about "Evil," thoughts of Hitler, and Musollini, and Mogadishu flashed in their mind, but they think those people and places were largely isolated instances, but that the majority of the world is largely evil-free. But what if the standard of "Evil" is much lower? What if a simple lie is "Evil"? What if we define pride as "Evil"?

A person may object to this notion, saying that those things largely don't matter, but then the question is begged "Why do naturally good people have these tiny flaws?" Hopefully no one but the most staunch relativists would make the arguments that theft, and lies, and other such things are not morally wrong, but that still leaves us with the question of why we do these things.

This, of course, leads to the original Answer A. "We get corrupted by society." To which I would have this to say: "Isn't society composed of individuals who are, according to your theory "naturally good"? so, if individually they are good shouldn't society be also "naturally good"?"
or go even further and say, "If we are corrupted by society, and society simply consists of individuals who were on earth a few years more than us, would it be fair to say that we inherited this corruption from the previous generation?" and, if this is so, "Would it then be fair to say that at some point in the past, some naturally good human would have had to "invent" or "stumble" upon evil, and pass it on generation to generation to us?" to which I would answer in the affirmative.

We call this man Adam

Syllogisms

So, I was reading through Dr. Craig's book "Reasonable Faith" and in the first chapter, Dr. Craig has a brief discussion on the Syllogism. For those who don't know what a syllogism is, its a logical argument with this form

Major premise: All humans are mortal
Minor premise: Socrates is human
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal

Its a wonderful way of proving things, because the validity of a syllogism is so easy to check.
The first way to look for problems is to check the validity of the premises. For instance, if all men are not, in fact, mortal, then the Major premise is false, and therefore the conclusion is invalid (it may be true for other reasons, but that syllogism wouldn't prove it).

The second way to look for problems is to check that the Conclusion follows from the premises. For instance, a classic example of a flawed syllogism is:

Major premise: All cats are mortal
Minor premise: Socrates was mortal
Conclusion: Socrates was a cat

In this case, the linking term (i.e. mortality) is non-exclusive. There are things that are mortal that are not cats, so from the fact that Socrates was mortal the conclusion he was a cat does not follow.

The beauty of the syllogism is in the power and simplicity of the well-written syllogism, and its explanatory power. For instance, one of Dr. Craig's favorite syllogisms is one called the "Kalam Cosmological Argument" for the existence of God. It goes as follows:

Major premise: All things that have a beginning have a cause
Minor premise: The universe had a beginning
Conclusion: The universe had a cause

In fact, a syllogism does not need to stay in isolation, the conclusion of one may be a minor premise of another, for instance, the above syllogism only proves a "cause," not "God," but we can safely write this:

Major premise: Before the universe began, Time, matter, and space did not exist
Minor premise: The universe had a cause
Conclusion: The "Cause" exists outside of time, space, and matter.

At this point, we now have a "Transcendent" cause that exists outside the material world, we still have a long way to go to get to the God of the bible, but for many people, this is a huge step, and confirms a dualistic view of things (a material realm and a spiritual "transcendant" realm).

I was thinking recently about these ideas, and I've been able to start phrasing other things as syllogisms, and its been extremely helpful in seeing how things fit together. For instance, St. Augustine, in trying to figure out the Trinity, how One God can be Three persons, he came up with an argument based on the idea that "God is Love". He reasoned that if god is an eternal being, and he has always been love (i.e. He didnt start being "love" when he created the unvierse), he MUST have an equally eternal being to be the object of his love, His Son. In other words, the existence of a Loving God necessitates a co-eternal God to be loved, just as the existence of physics necessitates the existence of mathematics. I recently noticed that this line of thinking can be "syllogized" this way:

Major premise: Love Requires an Object to be Loved
Minor premise:God Is Love (1 John 4:16)
Conclusion: God must have an object of his Love

Major premise: God exists outside of space, time, and matter (See above Syllogism)
Minor premise: God must have an object of his love
Conclusion: God must have an object of his love outside of space, time, and matter

(The above syllogism works when you understand God Is Love is an eternal statement, i.e. God Is Love, not God Became Love)

We call this object of his love "Jesus," or the "Son of God". The existence of God the Father necessitates the existence of God the Son.

Ideas, Christianity, and the University

I headed over to Dr. Craig's website for (I'm ashamed to say) the first time this afternoon and picked through a few articles. Here's an excerpt from one that I'd like to share:

"In order to shape the thought structures of society so as to foster a cultural milieu that allows a place for the Christian worldview as an intellectually viable option, we must influence the university. I say this because the single most important institution shaping Western culture is the university. It is at the university that our future political leaders, our journalists, our lawyers, our teachers, our business executives, our artists, will be trained. It is at the university that they will formulate or, more likely, simply absorb the worldview that will shape their lives. And since these are the opinion-makers and leaders who shape our culture, the worldview that they imbibe at the university will be the one that shapes our culture. If we change the university, we change our culture through those who shape culture. If the Christian worldview can be restored to a place of prominence and respect at the university, it will have a leavening effect throughout society.

But that implies that popular-level apologetics aimed at the masses will not do the job. Only scholarly level apologetics aimed at specialists in the various academic disciplines will be capable of changing the university and so ensuring lasting cultural change. Machen observed that many people in his day "would have the seminaries combat error as it is taught by its popular exponents" instead of confusing students "with a lot of German names unknown outside the walls of the university." But, Machen insisted, the scholarly method of procedure

'. . . is based simply upon a profound belief in the pervasiveness of ideas. What is to-day matter of academic speculation begins to-morrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combated; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. So as Christians we should try to mould the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity.'"

I think this is a deep, resounding call to America and to the modern Christian church. The immense volumes of scholarly progress over the past two millennia centering around the relation of man and God are all for naught if the current trends in culture continue. How is scholarship on Christianity viewed publicly? The answer to that question, at least for most people, would probably be "what scholarship?"

What happens when the power of ideas intersects with the power of the living God? Think about it...

Big Questions Week at Georgia Tech Video

Sneering Is Not an Argument

Much of atheistic rhetoric these days comes off as a collective sneer at the idea of theism or intelligent design. From my experience, atheists often forgo cogent arguments in favor of mocking, rather than arguing against, the existence and revelation of a God. Such proved to be the case in the debate last night between Christopher Hitchens and Jay Wesley Richards at Stanford University. Hitchens is the author of God Is Not Great, and Richards is co-author of The Privileged Planet and a senior fellow of the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.

Read the story from the Stanford Daily, or read his book, and you will see that Hitchens is one of those argument-less atheists. He presents no coherent arguments of his own, and in fact addresses very few of Richards's points. In fact, in response to Richards's arguments from cause-and-effect and irreducible complexity, Hitchens simply asks if he believes in the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ. When Richards answers "yes," he is dismissed out-of-hand.

Melinda over at Stand to Reason makes some very good points about Hitchens's debate:

This is, of course, a dodge of the arguments Richards had offered. He apparently made no attempt to answer them and stay on topic. And what does belief in the virgin birth have to do with the rationality of Richards' evidence for ID? Rational people often have some irrational beliefs. Citing the latter doesn't defeat the former.

Let me say it again: a sneer is not an argument. While it may get you by in the arena of public opinion, it says very little (in fact, less than nothing) of the truth of your claims. This new generation of atheists is going to have to do a little better if they are to engage theists on an intellectual level.

A Vision for Veritas

A lot of people have begun to ask, "What do you want to accomplish?", "Why are you doing this?", and so on. The first time I was asked this question was when I was new to Veritas. I was taken back--not because I didn't know the answers, but because I realized the great need to be able to answer these questions very well. I can't ever give a half-hearted answer to these types of questions.

Our team sat down and had a bit of a vision session two weeks ago. We asked ourselves some big questions: "Where do we want to be in two years? What will Veritas have become? What will the culture of campus be like? What impact do we want to make as The Veritas Forum?"

Then, even more challenging, were the short-term questions: "How will we get there? What are we doing now that will help us accomplish this?" The challenge of answering these questions proved healthy to keep our goals in the forefront of our minds. After several such sessions, I believe we really know what it is that we can accomplish and desire to accomplish as an organization.

Now, I know you're asking, "So what did you come up with, specifically?" So I'm going to share.
Our long term goal is to establish a culture of investigation and open dialogue among Christians and non-Christians on campus about the most challenging questions. We will put on events and provide resources that will allow people to interact with Truth. We want to be an organization that people look toward for hope (that they would see/feel the Truth of Jesus), and to be an organization that unites Christian ministries on campus behind a common initiative of spreading the Truth and brilliance of Jesus. We hope to be a pre-evangelistic ministry that would bring non-Christians to the point of realizing the plausibility of God's existence and the Bible's inspiration. Then we hope to hook these people in with a campus ministry where they can be ministered to and eventually have a personal and relational encounter with Jesus Christ.

Looking forward, our "Big Questions Week" in February will challenge our campus on a deeper philosophical level. We hope to coin the event "Big Questions Week" as an annual big event associated with Veritas. Alternatively, we hope to also engage students on a cultural level - a level where the truth of Christianity can interact with their emotions. We believe the truth of Christianity is not just intellectual, so, with that, we've planned an event in the fall about marriage. We are also trying to bring a drama to campus in the fall. It's really exciting to see where God is leading our planning.

Now when people ask us questions about our vision, it really becomes an opportunity to share our conviction, excitement, and love for truth. The results of expressing this well have already been remarkable.

In His Grace and Truth,

Stephen Kump
2008 Campus Director
Veritas Forum at Georgia Tech