Comment on A big reason why so many people are leaving the church by Sean Pitman.

Shane,

You wrote:

The origins debate is a worldview conflict. Creationists and evolutionists have been throwing evidence at each other for a long time now. The answer is not necessarily more evidence, but which worldview (way of interpreting) is the correct way to understand the evidence. I suggest is the biblical worldview alone that makes science and reasoning possible.

The answer is more evidence when you’re talking about people who are honest seekers for truth. Simply telling someone, who is an honest seeker, that they have the wrong world view “by definition” is not a rational argument.

I think a bit presumptuous to think the critics of the Bible just need more evidence. According to Romans 1:18-20, everyone has an innate knowledge of the God of creation.

This passage is not talking about an “innate” knowledge of God at all. It is talking about knowledge that is based on empirical evidence – “being understood from what has been made.”

The problem is not the lack of evidence, but that some people “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”

There is no “unrighteousness” or “sin” is honest error. If one is not deliberately suppressing known truth, there is no unrighteousness. There is simply error without sin.

If one is deliberately suppressing known truth, the evidence itself isn’t the problem. The evidence may be plentiful and its meaning clear, but if the individual doesn’t like what the evidence is saying, God can’t remedy that situation with more evidence…

Evidence can be used to help them understand this, but it should not be relied on as the sole source of knowledge. Otherwise this is rationalism, which is clearly anti-biblical. Not to be confused with using reason.

Using one’s God-given reasoning abilties to discover God is not anti-biblical. It is about as biblical as you can get. Nowhere does the Bible even suggest that God expects belief without a basis in the weight of empirical evidence that is first understood by the God-given mind.

Appealing to someone’s reason is not the same as relying on empirical evidence to prove something.

Yes, it is. Because, without an appeal to empirical evidence, what you have left is circular reasoning which is not reasonable by definition.

Assuming your reasoning is reliable is a presupposition, one which only can be explained through the biblical worldview. Thus you would use the Bible to show how their worldview is self-refuting and ultimately not consistent.

Come on now. What did people do before there was a Bible? Or, what do people do who don’t have the Bible now? Is it impossible for such people to rationally consider the natural world, detect the Signature of a God or God-like intelligence, and come to a rational appreciation of God in this manner? – and then use the same rational God-given mind to determine that the Bible is also raationally credible in its claims to be The Word of God?

You can rationally come to false interpretations of the evidence.

That’s right. That’s why there is always a risk of being wrong from a rational perspective. The only way you can avoid all risk of being wrong is to define your position as “true by definition”. That’s the attraction of empirically-blind faith. There is no risk to being wrong and no possibility of change.

This is the very reason why my LDS friends, who use the very same arguments you use, will not change their minds regarding the Book of Mormon – since their faith in the Book of Mormon is “true by definition”.

There are many examples of creationists and evolutionists looking at the same bit of evidence but drawing different conclusions based on their worldview (their collection of presuppositions).

Right – and there are many examples of Christians looking at the same passage of Scripture and coming to different conclusions on what it’s saying. Honest errors cannot be avoided when you’re a subjective human being. It doesn’t help to simply declare your position true by definition.

There is no such thing as neutrality for anyone. To suggest there is, is unbiblical.

There is such a thing as shared reality and a common origin and basis for rational thought – which is very biblical.

Keep in mind I’m not boo-pooing the use of empirical evidence. Use empirical evidence to confirm the Bible, but not to prove it. When you use it to prove it, you’ve elevated empiricism above God’s Word.

There is no such thing as absolute “proof” in science or in any form of a rational defense of any view of the empirical world that exists outside of the mind. One can use rational thought and tests of theories regarding the meaning of the empirical evidence to approach truth, but never to fully realize truth.

If our God given powers of reason are not submitted to His Word, then there is no way for us to properly interpret the natural world.

Not true. The Bible is simply not needed to properly interpret the natural world to a very useful degree. Again, what do people do who do not have access to the Bible? According to your argument, it would be impossible for them to recognize anything about God from the study of the empirical evidence available to them. This is not a biblical concept.

Any appeal to an ultimate standard is circular reasoning.

Not if that standard is a shared standard between all parties involved in a discussion. If certain of the parties involved have not grown up automatically appreciating authority of the Bible, the Bible cannot be used as your default source of authority to prove itself. That’s circular reasoning that doesn’t appeal to anyone but those who already subscribe to this position. In order to attract honest seekers for truth toward a new position, you must appeal to a common sourse of authority – i.e., the generally-available empirical evidence and reasoning capabilities of rational intelligent God-given minds.

You make an appeal to empirical evidence, but has that been shown to be empirically true?

With a very useful degree of predictive value, yes, it has.

Without any appeal to empirical evidence, your form of reasoning has no predictive value that will appeal to any mind other than those who have already accepted your same point of reference.

What’s the empirical evidence that it works and is even applicable to all truth claims? I would agree that there are some truth claims that can be verified through empirical methods, but not all, and is limited when it comes to the Bible.

Empirical evidence and rational thought is always limited. It is never perfect short of access to all information and all knowledge. Yet, just because the empirical evidence is incomplete and our reasoning ablities subject to the potential for error, doesn’t mean that they are not useful or that we have access to any better means of identifying truth from error…

It should also be noted that there are certain special cases where circular reasoning is unavoidable and not necessarily fallacious. Remember that begging the question is not invalid; it is considered fallacious because it is arbitrary. But what if it were not arbitrary? There are some situations where the conclusion of an argument must be assumed at the outset, but is not arbitrary. Here is an example:

1. Without laws of logic, we could not make an argument.
2. We can make an argument.
3. Therefore, there must be laws of logic.

Most of the examples of circular reasoning used by evolutionists are of the fallacious begging-the-question variety—they are arbitrary. Consider the evolutionist who argues:

The Bible cannot be correct because it says that stars were created in a single day; but we now know that it takes millions of years for stars to form.

By assuming that stars form over millions of years, the critic has taken for granted that they were not supernaturally created. He has assumed the Bible is wrong in his attempt to argue that the Bible is wrong; he has begged the question.

By this argument one would be unable to detect if any particular biblical interpretation were right or wrong. What if the Bible said that the American Indians were decendants of the lost tribes of Isreal? – while DNA evidence showed them to be from an Asian background? You’d argue, in a ciruclar manner, that the DNA evidence must be wrong since the Bible, and your interpretation of it, is true by definition.

While we must assume, without absolute proof, that we are rational before we can have a rational discussion, this assumption is based on a shared reality within which this assumption produces a useful level of predictive value when applied to empirical evidence within that shared reality…

If your views about that shared reality are “true by definition” you are making a non-testable non-falsifiable claim about that shared reality which is irrational from that particular perspective. In other words, there is no predictive power to your argument because your argument is not subject to testing or the outcome of any test…

The Bible does and can appeal to a persons reason and that many scientific findings confirm the Bible; however, approaching the validity of the Bible solely human terms elevates man to a position he is not meant to be or capable of handling.

We cannot approach the Bible as more than we are – i.e., human. We must investigate and interpret the claims of the Bible from the human perspective using our God-given human abilities. Again, we cannot be more than we have been given.

Faith is not created by man, it is a gift of God and grows as a result of it being exercised.

Intelligence is not created by man either. None of our inherent abilities were created by us. This does not mean, therefore, that we can be more than what we are and what we have been given. Faith is not some magical method by which we can obtain useful information about the world in which we live beyond what our God-given abilities to think and reason from the empirical evidence are telling us. Faith is simply a process of accepting as true what are minds tell us is most likely true without obtaining absolute proof.

I’m not against the use of science to confirm the Bible. It’s just not what the authority of the Bible rests on.

If one uses science to “confirm” the Bible, one is indeed affecting one’s faith via such confirmation. If there is no such support or “confirmation”, what then is left as a rational basis to support the authority of the Bible? Faith that is entirely devoid of empirical support is not useful to even the honest seeker for truth. God does not expect us to blindly believe in anything about the world in which we live for which there is no real empirical support.

Sean Pitman
www.DetectingDesign.com

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