| See related article Why Isn’t The Evidence Clearer? Serving as an instructor of philosophy at a community college for the past eight years has given me an unique opportunity to gauge the "intellectual pulse" of freshmen and sophomore college students. I have sought to keep track of the common questions, and especially objections students raise against belief in God and in the Christian Gospel. While questions about evil, miracles, and the reliability of the Bible come up often, another challenge is even more common, and it has direct philosophical and scientific implications. The objection is usually expressed as follows: "If God exists, why can't I see him? If he made an appearance and people could see him, then I would believe in him. But since he hasn't, I don't believe in God. I only believe what I see." Such statements about seeing and believing reflect a severely limited approach to the nature of reality: crass materialism. Essentially, it means that if something is real, it must be visible, hence, physical. All reality can be reduced to, or is explainable in terms of, physical matter. The viewpoint also expresses a severely limited approach to how reality can be known, what may be called a "crude empiricism." Empiricism is the epistemological theory (view of knowledge) that knowledge comes exclusively through the five senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Ironically, "I only believe what I see" is a self-contradictory statement. As Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland points out, "The proposition 'I can believe in only what I can see' cannot itself be seen."(1) The underlying metaphysical and epistemological idea that "what is real is visible" is, itself, invisible. As a conceptual principle, it cannot be visible to the eye or detectable by any of the rest of the senses. Thus, to accept the statement "I only believe what I see" demands acceptance of a principle that cannot be seen. To put it another way, if I did believe that "I can only believe what I see," I would be contradicting myself because this principle is abstract and cannot be seen. The statement "I only believe what I see" reduces to absurdity. A second major problem with the "seeing is believing" viewpoint is that the reality of many unseen things can be verified. In fact, our existence depends upon them. Consider the many physics realities that cannot be seen: magnetism, gravity, and electricity, to name just a few. Moral values such as justice and goodness exist, but they cannot be seen. Truth is an invisible reality. So is love. Feelings and emotions surely exist, but they cannot be observed directly. A central weakness of all forms of materialism, including the simplistic form adopted by many young students, is its inability to account for the transcendent components of life, including the cognitive or conceptual elements. We cannot see our thoughts. And though we can see the human brain, the mind is unobservable.(2) If we were to doubt the existence of thought and reason, we would be declared, and rightly so, irrational, disconnected from reality. The formal laws of logic (the law of non-contradiction, for one) stand as universal, invariant, immaterial principles. Yet these are indeed the very anchors that make human rationality, and the world's intelligibility, possible. At first glance it may seem reasonable to believe in only those things that can actually be detected by the senses. However, a moment's reflection tells us that this position lacks the explanatory power to account for even the most fundamental realities of life, including "life" itself. This viewpoint instead represents the height of irrationality. While my students' lack of philosophical sophistication may seem understandable in light of their youth and academic experience (or inexperience), secularist scientists who espouse a strikingly similar form of reasoning cannot be so easily excused. I frequently hear scientists say, or imply, "I only believe in what can be observed and tested and in what can be inferred from what is observed and tested." Philosopher Greg L. Bahnsen echoes Moreland's comment: Such a belief "cannot itself be derived from empirical observation!"(3) His words bring to mind Carl Sagan's opening declaration in the enormously popular television miniseries Cosmos: "The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be." Sagan never acknowledged that this bold naturalistic (and atheistic) assertion cannot be derived without a wholesale departure from the inductive scientific method he clearly idolized.(4) The Historic Christian Claim: Direct Contact With God I must confess, however, that a smile begins to form inside me when students declare that they would believe in God if he were to make an appearance in the world. I love to tell them that's exactly what He did. Christianity alone makes the historically verifiable claim that our transcendent God physically entered the realm of time and space, matter and energy, as we know them. The central claim of Christianity is that God made direct, historical contact with mankind through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. Our doctrine of the Incarnation teaches that Jesus of Nazareth, none other than God the Son, came into the world clothed in human flesh (Jn 1:1, 14). Jesus is the one and only theanthropos (God-man). New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg notes, "Biblical faith is fundamentally commitment to a God who has intervened in the history of humanity in a way that exposes his activity to historical study."(5) See Did Jesus Claim To Be God Of course, while the apostles could not actually see Jesus' divine nature (for God is, in His essence, an infinite Tri-personal, spiritual Being), they nevertheless inferred His deity from His flawless personal character, fulfillment of messianic prophecy, and supernatural works (especially His own resurrection). They did, however, claim to encounter-with their physical senses-the resurrected Christ. The Apostle John specifically writes that he saw, heard, and touched the risen Lord (1 Jn 1:1-3), and the other apostles had similar encounters (Lk 24:36-43; Jn 20:24-31; Acts 9:1-9). Jesus' response to Philip is therefore directly relevant: "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9). The great Christian thinker and author C. S. Lewis encourages us to reflect upon the reality of God's appearance in the world: "The Second Person in God, the Son, became human Himself: was born into the world as an actual man-a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular color, speaking a particular language, weighing so many stones. The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus inside a Woman's body."(6) And what was the purpose of His appearance? In these few words, Lewis explains the meaning of Christmas: "The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God."(7) See Meaning Of The Cross Jesus..Political Martyr or Atoning God Why Did Jesus Die? References: 1. J. P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1987), pp. 226-8. Dr. Moreland presents six different arguments for rejecting this visibility criticism of God. I use two of his arguments in this article. 2. Attempts to reduce the mind to mere brain states results in a form of physical determinism, itself a self-referentially absurd theory (see Moreland, Scaling the Secular City, pp. 77-103). 3. The late Dr. Bahnsen made this point in his debate with atheist Edward Tabash (see Covenant Media Foundation, 4425 Jefferson Ave., Texarkana, Arkansas 71854). 4. For a summary of the problems associated with the naturalistic worldview, see Ronald H. Nash, worldviews In Conflict (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, pp. 116-129) 5. Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downer's Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1989), p. 11. 6. C. S. Lewis, The Joyful Christian (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1977), p. 51. 7. C. S. Lewis, p. 50. This page, and all contents, are Copyright © 1998 by Reasons To Believe. |
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