Just wanting to be happy

Image by atomicity via Flickr

It’s odd, isn’t it, that despite the massive philosophical differences between Christians and everyone else we all agree on this fact: happiness is a good thing.

I think it’s a God-inspired desire, and look at the wonderful promise in Psalm 16:11:

in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Fullness of joy; maximum happiness, forever! For the Christian, the best is always yet to come.

I’m going on a blog Christmas holiday for a bit. Merry Christmas everyone.

The ontological argument

Image via Wikipedia

Always good to start the day with a five-syllable word.

I’m currently working my way through a series of degree lectures on the history of apologetics. Pretty interesting stuff. One of the arguments to prove the existence of God, ‘the ontological argument’, goes something like this:

• If God exists, He must be perfect in every single way.
• In order for us to measure that perfection, some standard of perfection must exist.
• Therefore God must exist.

A bit over-simplistic, but it works. Here’s another version:

• If God exists, He must be perfect in every single way.
• Therefore in concept He must be the greatest thing anyone can imagine.
• Imagining an ultimately perfect Being only gives you an imaginary Being.
• Existence is more perfect than non-existence, therefore God must exist.

Now, people have tried to complain that this doesn’t work. For example, Gaunilo of Marmoutiers said that he could imagine ‘a perfect island’, but that doesn’t prove its existence. Fair enough, said the ontological argument’s supporters, but an island is simply an item; some Being, a Person, is more perfect, therefore God is ‘more perfect’ than the perfect island, and therefore your imagination of a perfect island only goes to further prove God’s existence.

But something about it just seems a bit odd, doesn’t it? Bertrand Russell, when he was shown this argument, said:

…the argument does not, to a modern mind, seem very convincing, but it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies.

Exactly. ‘I can’t find a fault in the argument, but I sort of think there is one.’ That’s like Richard Dawkins’ response:

[it's] dialectical prestidigitation

Great. Use a longer word to dismiss someone and hope people will just go with that.

Bertrand Russell ultimately came to a wonderful conclusion, however:

Great God in Boots! — the ontological argument is sound!

So…that’s a new line for the next dinner party you hold. Anyone fancy helping me out here? Anyone fancy pointing out where the fallacy lies?

The problem of evil if God’s good

Common issue posed by atheists:

1. If God is all-good and all-powerful, evil can’t exist
2. Evil exists
3. Therefore, God either isn’t all-good, or isn’t all-powerful

Statement (1) isn’t logical, so the argument doesn’t work. Here’s why. God is Creator, but the object of this argument is creation. You might as well claim:

1. If the carpenter is alive and is in the shape of a human, the table he creates must also be alive and in the shape of a human
2. The table isn’t alive, and it’s in the shape of a table
3. Therefore the carpenter’s dead

How ridiculous. But it also turns out the issue of evil itself is a non-issue. Dr. Greg Bahnsen puts it better than I could:

My answer to the problem of evil is this: there is no problem of evil in an atheist’s universe because there is no evil in an atheist’s universe. Since there is no God, there is no absolute moral standard, and nothing is wrong. The torture of little children is not wrong in an atheist’s universe. It may be painful, but it is not wrong.

It is morally wrong in a theistic universe, and therefore, there is a problem of evil of perhaps the psychological or emotional sort, but philosophically the answer to the problem of evil is you don’t have an absolute standard of good by which to measure evil in an atheist’s universe. You can only have that in a theistic universe, and therefore, the very posing of the problem presupposes [the Christian] world view, rather than [the atheist's].

The atheist’s response in this debate was:

Yes, indeed there can be evil in an atheist’s universe. Evil is, by definition, in an atheist’s universe, that which decreases the happiness of people, the most unhappiness in people.

Well, that’s just silly isn’t it? If it makes you happy, do it? Let’s take the Holocaust as a shocking example of this attitude played out horrifically. Hitler’s policies stated clearly that Jews and others were not persons. Therefore, cleansing the population was not decreasing any people’s happiness; by this logic, the Holocaust was not morally wrong.

I disagree.

Circular reasoning

I hope you’re feeling in the mood to question existence.

I was reading an interesting debate the other day, which is available to watch (sort of) on YouTube. Anyway, it didn’t take too long for the idea of circular reasoning to come up – here’s a quick summary:

The Christian worldview starts with the assumption that the Bible is the highest authority. If something disagrees with the Bible it must be discounted as an anomalous result. The conclusion, of course, will be that the Bible is true because all the valid evidence agrees with it.

Clearly circular reasoning.

The atheist worldview starts with the assumption that human reason is the highest authority. If something disagrees with human reason it must be discounted as an anomalous result. The conclusion, of course, will be that human reason is the best approach because all the valid evidence agrees with it.

NOTE. The two summary paragraphs above are almost identical, just replacing ‘the Bible’ with ‘human reason’, yet somehow taking the Bible as ultimate authority is seen as a step of faith, yet taking human reason as the highest authority is seen as just sensible.

The real issue here is that human reason is clearly and demonstrably full of flaws. Using human reason I am very aware that my mind is not perfect, so how can I ever trust any conclusions that are drawn using human reason?! It is an ultimate authority which undermines itself.

Democracy: conscience and cops

Let’s start today by acknowledging there’s such a thing as good and bad. I recently saw something that’s been called Colson’s Law, which calls these Community and Chaos, but I don’t mind what you call them.

Anyway, it’s the role of national leaders to continuously move society away from Chaos and towards Community, right? Move away from bad, and towards good. All agree so far.

There are effectively two ways to do this, and Colson’s Law is sponsored by the letter C, so calls these Conscience and Cops. Cops prevent you from doing bad and punish you when you do bad, and Conscience is its complimentary opposite; it makes being good attractive.

This is where it gets interesting. Democracy ultimately relies on Conscience. If Conscience fails, the population will vote for bad leaders, and society will descend into Chaos. Democracy sells itself on its freedom from Cops, yet that freedom has a natural tendency to free us from Conscience as well.

Do I need to even mention the August riots? The response was: put more police on the streets! Introduce a curfew! Give people a life sentence for stealing a bottle of water! Introduce the death penalty!

So what conclusion can we draw? Simply this: the human race intrinsically knows good and bad, and knows it should choose good, yet more consistently chooses bad. This doesn’t make logical sense unless you introduce the idea of an ultimate, all-good, all-powerful force or person.

Train a child in the way he should go

So I found out last week that my first child is a boy. Pretty exciting. And because I’m me, I thought I should read lots about it.

I started with The Baby Whisperer – I figured anyone claiming to be able to make every single baby perfect with minimum effort had to get their confidence from somewhere…turns out it comes from thinking you’re wonderful, eating lots of chocolate, and swearing every so often. I’m sure there are some good lessons in there – anyway, if my son’s perfect after a couple of months you’ll know where to go to find out how you can do it too!

I then discovered an interesting little article in which some guy talks about this thing he made up with his wife. They celebrate their sons becoming men in a Bar Yeshua. The article’s here.

I potentially like the idea, and I like the way his kids clearly take on responsibility when they ‘become a man’. All good so far. Then comes the curriculum for passing the ‘man test’:

1. Knowledge of the contents of the Bible.
   • Know the names of books of the Bible in order.
   • Know Bible history.
   • Read the Bible all the way through.
   • Know main themes of biblical books.
   • Understand how Biblical teaching centers on Christ.
   • Know Greek and Hebrew (amount of knowledge tailored to the child’s ability)
2. Memorization of selected verses and passages of the Bible.
3. Knowledge of the major teachings of the Bible (doctrine).
   • Memorize a children’s catechism as a summary of doctrine.
   • Be able to explain doctrines and respond to questions using one’s own words.
4. Personal piety.
   • Using devotional materials
   • Prayer diary
   • Day-long personal retreat for prayer and fasting with Daddy
   • Growth in understanding of means for overcoming sin
5. Projects of service and mercy.
   • Serving the church; serving the needy.
6. Wisdom in dealing with various spheres of life.
   • Finances: tithing, drawing up a year-long budget; checkbook balancing; investing.
   • Etiquette: table etiquette, greeting etiquette, letter etiquette, conversational etiquette, sexual etiquette.
   • Apologetics: answering questions and objections about Christian faith; understanding the Christian world view and the main competing worldviews and ideas in the United States.
   • Sexuality: knowing Christian teaching and standards for thoughts and actions. Understanding how God designed male and female bodies.

Um…wow? I can’t do half of that now! The age for this test is his son’s 13th Birthday, and assessment starts at 11. Drawing up a year-long budget at age 11? Learning biblical Hebrew and Greek? Memorising a catechism and the full order of Bible books?

Perhaps I’m shooting too low with expectations for my son, but does this strike anyone else as making a kid grow up a tad too quickly? Part of me thinks that a boy who’s memorised Scripture, serves faithfully in the local church and has training in apologetics has got to have a good headstart for moving out into the big wide world, but part of me can’t get away from the fact that at 12 I’d probably want him to say ‘do you want to go outside and play football’ rather than ‘have you ever wondered about John’s use of logos?’

Any thoughts, anyone? Particularly from parents of boys? Any tips would be very welcome!

The biggest driver for anything: sex

Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but it’s probably at least close to true: the biggest driver for achieving anything is sex.

Damon Brown, a writer for Playboy, once said:

It seems so obvious. If we invent a machine, the first thing we are going to do—after making a profit—is use it to watch porn. You name it, pornography planted its big flag there first, or at least shortly thereafter.

Think about it. He’s probably right. And Damon Brown would obviously therefore say porn’s a good thing. I’m sure we can agree that without sex the human race statistically would die out in approximately one generation.

But porn is objectively bad. A study by Drs. Zolf Zillman and Jennings Bryant showed that only 25% men who watched 4 hours and 48 minutes of porn over 6 weeks supported women’s rights, in comparison to 71% of men who hadn’t – that’s a 46% drop. Shockingly, women in the study showed a 30% drop in support for women’s rights.

So, to say sex (and its mutated ugly sister porn) is so significant it’s been a while since my last post on it. And because I think it’s important, I’m just going to post to some good other posts on it.

• Overcoming pornography temptations
• A parent’s guide to protecting kids on YouTube
• Accountability partner guide

Do you want to be happy or angry?

I clicked a link on a blog I follow yesterday and found this post. A couple of thoughts.

First, this post is from a set of blogs entitled Freethought Blogs. But it looks like all the blogs are atheist. So it doesn’t look like the team encourages genuine free thought. Happy to be proved wrong, didn’t really look around that much, just seemed at first glance to be a bit like false advertising.

Secondly, how angry is this guy? His conclusion about death is literally: I hate death, and I hate life. There is no hope, and I hate anyone who says there is. Hate hate hate.

Now, perhaps I’m being silly, but looking at Christianity and atheism it doesn’t strike me that there’s any contest:

Christianity gives you a certainty that God’s good and in complete control over life, death and everything else. Christianity, at an over-simplistic level, makes you permanently happy.

Atheism gives you a certainty that you’re worthless and your actions are insignificant. Atheism means that bad things aren’t actually bad because there’s no such thing as objective ‘good’, so it brings depression, hopelessness, and hatred (as our friend demonstrates so well and so willingly).

Logically speaking, if atheism is true, then nothing we do, say or believe matters. So atheists: stop being so angry! Enjoy the limited life you have – at least on that point I agree with the words Richard Dawkins sponsored (although let’s be honest he’s not the best advocate for a happy person)!

And, logically speaking, if Christianity is true then not only does it make you happy, it will make you happy for the rest of eternity!

C.S. Lewis was logically correct when he said that if Christianity’s true it’s of utmost importance, and if it’s not, it’s of no importance whatsoever. It strikes me as hypocritical, therefore, when atheists like the guy I linked to get so worked up about something they think is a fairy story. It’s like losing your temper at a child because they’re trying to work out where Father Christmas lives - you personally might not think Santa exists (unbeliever!) but it doesn’t matter because it’s making them happy. And if this life is all there is, let’s get as happy as possible, right?

But thank goodness I get to be happy for eternity!

Half of what I believe is probably a plain lie

Check this out. The following stories I was taught in History class are actually lies, made up by various people to make the heroes out to be more important than they were:

Christopher Columbus never ‘proved that the world was round’. At the time he sailed west it had already been mathematically proven. In fact, everyone educated knew that the world was larger than Columbus thought it was, but he was so stubborn he just called the people he met Indians anyway. Good work, great historical figure.

Sir Walter Raleigh wasn’t nearly as chivalrous as the books tell us – he pretty much definitely didn’t cover a puddle with his coat, and introducing the potato to Europe had happened ages before he went off on his merry journies.

There are more (a bit more relevant to American readers) over here, but there’s something oh-so-slightly concerning that I was taught these as fact, and have just blindly believed them ever since. Surely the best way we could know that what we believe about history is true would be if:

1. we had direct access to texts actually written at the time
2. the copies we had access to were as close to the originals as possible
3. other texts from the same period in history don’t disagree with them

Agreed? Sounds logical to me.

Turns out that using the above criteria, the New Testament is the best record of historical facts we have, by about 25,000%.

Another thought on worship

Every so often I’m drawn back to the word ‘worship’, and why we use it the way we do.

Contemporary Christianity has taken to using ‘worship’ to describe the act of singing. We call it ‘the worship’ during a Sunday meeting and we listen to ‘worship CDs’…but at the same time we somehow want to cling to the biblical idea that all of life is worship.

Here’s a thought for a Monday – compare the Old Testament and New Testament ideas of the temple. In the Old Testament the presence of God was encountered once a year when the high priest entered the Holy of Holies, but in the New Testament we’re told that our bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit; God dwells within every Christian!

But in our use of the word ‘worship’ are we falling back into the Old Testament attitude that the gathered body of believers is somehow the only way that we can truly connect to God?

I’m re-reading a book right now called Unceasing Worship by Harold M. Best – it’s wonderful. And he suggests that the best way of understanding the biblical idea of worship is in the phrase ‘continuous outpouring’. We are continuously outpouring worship to some god or other in our words, ideas and actions; whether that god is Jesus, or ourselves, or something or someone else ultimately comes down to us.

That idea makes sense of Jesus’ words in John 4 after the Samaritan woman asks him where the right place to worship God is. He doesn’t give a place name, he instead gives her an attitude: ‘in spirit and in truth’. If that lady had asked a typical contemporary Christian ‘where is the best place to worship?’ I’m not sure the Christian wouldn’t default to something along the lines of: ‘Well, that depends on what sort of music you like.’

Is it a worry that we’d so blatantly answer such an important question differently to Jesus?

I’ve written about this already (at least here and here) so if you feel like I’m flogging a dead horse you may have a point…but I suppose you clicked the link to get here so it’s actually your fault. Haven’t quite worked that thought through yet.