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| The Easter Bunny lacks the ontic capacity to account for the cosmos |
By Mike Robinson author of Killing Christ: Contesting the Trendy Critics Regarding the Death & Resurrection of Jesus on Amazon
It was always going to be difficult to defend atheism (in fact,
impossible; only God could prove a universal negative), but even zealous
devotees of the new atheism concede things are going worse than hoped. This newfangled anti-theism got off to a
rough start because the majority of their leaders and their internet cliques
were philosophically and theologically naïve—especially Christopher Hitchens,
Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. On Dawkins, non-theist Michael Ruse opined, “The God Delusion makes me ashamed to be
an atheist.… Richard Dawkins in The God
Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly
he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing.” Nonetheless, the surly e-atheists
have been working hard but are evidently overwhelmed, trying to defend the
indefensible. The growing legions of Christian apologists have made things much
more difficult by refusing to concede any ground as they unleash a myriad of
arguments in favor of theism.
By now, the militant neo-atheists involved in missionary work seem
to be in a state of boredom. Their aggressive verbal abuse just doesn’t seem to
pack the same kick it had when it was novel to be ill-mannered and insolent in
arguing against Christianity. The new atheists are angry because their
pugnacity is so stale that no one cares anymore when they call good people
horrific names.
Name-calling may get one’s endorphins lit-up, but it doesn’t make
for good argumentation. The issue is God. God not only exists; He must exist
and anti-theists loathe this truth. God is infinite, all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere-present,
independent, lofty, and impeccably transcendent. Yet, His majestic loftiness
extended within His omnipresence allows Him to be immanent everywhere. The God
of the Bible is the eternal fount of all that is and will be—He is the infinite
basis of all truth and actuality, the Complete Absolute flowing in aseity upon
which all contingent things are wholly reliant. The true God is the unity
grounding and sustaining all the innumerable particulars. Yahweh is the
ultimate bridge and netting of the one and the many—the unifier of all the
diversity. So God is not only one; not merely a monad or a lone oneness, but
the three distinct infinite and eternal persons in one being (Matthew
28:19).
Thus, it
is this holy and transcendent God in whom the new atheists bleakly attack. But
wait. When one attends an atheist worship service led by Reverend Dawkins or
another atheist priest, the preacher will almost always profess: “I do not
believe in God, Santa, the Easter Bunny, elves, pixies, or leprechauns.
Moreover I reject the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), Apollo, Thor, and Allah,
so I am merely a man who believes in one less god than the Christians.” But
this will not offer any real assistance to the ingenuous atheist. Opinions
concerning pixies and FSMs are tied to a particular type of being. Such notions
are in the same category as ideas about whether snow is on the mountain or
whether Big Foot exists. Beliefs regarding God concern the transcendent—the
source who provides the preconditions for knowledge—the cause and foundation
for all human experience. The eternal unchanging God is the basis for
everything in heaven and earth because He is the foundation for all reality.
Elves and material mutable gods have the same limits as material items,
biological things, and molecules—all of which are submissive to the force of
light, motion, and energy. Not so with the transcendent God, the high and lofty
one. Not only is God not submissive to the forces of nature, but He also sustains
them. The Lord God is in a completely different ontological category than the
FSM, elves, Thor, and Santa.
Yahweh
is the omnipotent One who makes it possible for anyone and anything to exist.
Moreover, He is the One who supplies the universal operation features required
to even use logic in discussing such things. Elves, the Easter Bunny, and
Apollo do not have an ontology (nature) powerful enough to provide the
universal necessities required for intelligibility. The FSM, Thor, and Santa,
analyzed through modal logic and theology, lack the capacity to account for the
universal features needed for intelligibly. Whether a Dodo bird or Thor exists
does not affect the conditions required for intelligibly. They are limited by
their ever-changing and finite nature. The necessity of Yahweh is revealed in
the language of independence, absolute, immutable, omnipotence, omnipresence,
and transcendence. Proof regarding the existence of the FSM, Apollo, or my pet
turtle would involve limited changing beings, not universal unchanging laws of
logic. Proof for the truth of Yahweh permeates every aspect of human
experience, the existence of all things, every engagement of logic, every moral
deed as well as every known and background aspect of intelligibility. And this
helps explain why the new atheists are so belligerent and irrational. They are
not only attacking that which they know exists, they are attacking that which
must exist—and He alone is in charge.
God is the Necessary Foundation
God …
knows all things (1 John 3:20).
All things are properly said to be … supernaturally through infinite power (as from the terminus a quo and by the way of
creation).[1]
The argument for Christianity must therefore be that
of presupposition. With Augustine it must be maintained that God’s revelation
is the sun from which all other light derives. The best, the only, the
absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christianity is that unless its truth
be presupposed there is no proof of anything. Christianity is proved as being
the very foundation of the idea of proof itself.[2]
There is no neutral
starting point in the knowledge quest. Either one is open to uphold the truth
of the non-reductive immaterialist conception of the world or one is not. If
one is a Christian, one sees evidence everywhere of God’s handiwork. But the
rigid materialist is holding his eyes tightly shut to avoid the all-persuasive
evidence of God’s work. The atheistic reductive impulse leads to maddening
ideas: the brain is the mind—all the properties of the mind are physical, the
laws of logic are conventions, men are mere animals, and other rubbish. T.F.
Torrance observed that “the utterly contingent nature of the universe and its
inherent intelligibility raises with us the question … as to its transcendent
ground which the universe … rests. By its very nature as contingent and
intelligible, the universe embodies … a reference beyond itself …. God … as the
Creator … is the ground.” As God is the foundation for the Christian worldview,
He supplies the fixed ontic platform as the sufficient truth condition, which
can justify induction, immutable universals, and the uniformity of the physical
world. But materialistic atheism lacks such a fixed ontic platform.
Consequently, it fails to provide the sufficient ground required to justify
science and the investigation of the natural world. The true and living God
subsists and accounts for the intricate and distinct interconnection of the
particulars in the united cosmos. That is the reason many theologians have
mused, “I believe in order that I may understand.” Van Til uses this
illustration to argue via presupposition:
We cannot prove the existence of the beams underneath
the floor if by proof you mean that they must be ascertainable in a way that we
can see the chairs and the tables of the room. But the very idea of the floor
as a support for the tables and chairs requires the idea of beams underneath.
But there would be no floor if no beams were underneath. Thus there is absolute
certain proof for the existence of God... Even non-Christians presuppose its
truth while they verbally reject it. They need to presuppose the truth of
Christianity to account for their own accomplishments.[3]
Atheism reposes upon a mutable ontology, thus it cannot
underwrite immutable truths—including the allege immutable truth God doesn’t
exist.
I.
How can an atheist know
something is immutable (he lacks revelation from an all-knowing source)? As
atheists have finite knowledge and lack knowledge of the future they cannot, in
principle, maintain that it is immutably true that God does not exist.
Thus, under atheism God can exist in the future; and because
God is necessary, omnipresent, and immutable—successively God exists in the
future, God must exist always.
This is the case modally. God’s ontology necessitates that if
[since] He exists anywhere (the future) He exists everywhere as the omnipresent
Lord.
II.
If [p] is not immutably true then it is possible that in the
future God does exist [q].
Since [q] is possible in discussing the omnipresent God, God
must exist.
One
can envisage God existing in at least one possible world. The biblical God is
an immutable being that exists of necessity. Consequently, one can think of a
being that exists of necessity existing in at least one possible world. Since
there is a being who exemplifies the property of existing in all possible worlds (He’s omnipresent),
it follows that He exists in all possible worlds. As one can think God could
possibly exist then God necessarily exists; which means He exists in all
possible worlds including our actual world. God is inescapable.
A possible world is a complete account
of a maximal state of affairs. The notion of possible worlds also exhibits a
distinction between material necessity and logical necessity. It may be a
material necessity that light has specific properties of wave and particle. But
that does not mean light must have those exact properties transversely in all
possible worlds. The properties of light in our universe are of material
necessity, but not logical necessity.
For light to have the same properties
in all possible worlds would mean it is necessary, hence light would require no
explanation outside itself. For light to require no explanation outside itself,
it would have to exist across all possible worlds as it is in our actual world. In other words, there is no possible
way things could have been that doesn't include the present properties of light
in the actual world. It’s worth noting that the laws of nature, including the
properties of light, are not the determinants of necessity as are the laws of
logic. This truth of logical necessity is entrenched in the universality of the
laws of logic which the laws of nature are devoid.
Atheism
is impossible. When anyone attempts to escape the truth that God exists, he falls
in a trap he cannot escape. This point is well made in the illustration of a
man made of smoke, who is trying to ascend out of the gaseous void by means of
stairs made of steam. He cannot get out of the void, for he has nothing to
stand on. Likewise, without God, one cannot make sense of anything. The atheist
has nothing to stand on (an ontic Archimedean locus of reference) and he lacks
a rational apparatus to scale—an epistemic ladder that would allow him to view
reality with clarity.
For more see my innovative Apologetics eBook Risen: Proof for the Resurrection of Jesus HERE
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NOTES
1. Francis Turretin, Institutes
of Elenctic Theology, P & R.
2. Cornelius Van Til: The
Defense of the Faith, P & R.
3.
4. James Anderson: Paradox
in Christian Theology. Paternoster.
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