Eyewitness Experiences and the Existence of God

Do eyewitness encounters with God “count” as an apologetic for the existence of God? If so, how in the world can one man’s experience with God, for example, at a burning bush (or the Apostles' claim to have seen the Resurrected Christ for that matter) be a proof for God’s existence if the skeptics themselves have not seen these events with their own eyes? Can such experiences be validated?

The White Stag Illustration

Let me try an illustration. Suppose that a large group of persons went together on a camping trip into the woods, some three hundred people. And let’s suppose that ten men are sent out to fetch water from the stream while the others stay back. And let us further suppose that those ten men witness with their own eyes the most beautiful, pure white stag, drinking from the stream.  They cannot believe our eyes! An albino buck! These men immediately return to the camp to tell everyone what they’ve seen. Most are skeptical. Some are not interested. A few are curious. Eventually the first ten men lead another ten people back to the stream, right to the same place they saw it, and sure enough--it is gone!

Logically (remember: we are interested in reasoning clearly) does the fact that the second envoy failed to see the white stag prove that the first group’s experience didn’t happen?

One man says “I didn’t see anything!”

Another man says, “I didn’t either!”

A third says “I’ve never even heard of a white stag!”

A fourth says “That’s patently impossible!”

The ‘Logic’ of Unbelief

Quite often, the logical thinking of the skeptic goes something like this…

a. I’ve never seen a white stag.

b. I can not believe what I have not seen. 

c. Conclusion: Therefore there are no white stags.

Obviously there is a fallacy between points ‘b’ and ‘c.’ The fact that one observer has not personally beheld any given object or phenomenon does not make it impossible a priori.

Nevertheless, the question remains, How do we validate other people’s claims of religious experience? If a skeptic has not experienced a given phenomenon (such as grace), how can he weigh the claims of those who have? Is there any objective way that he can weigh the evidence? I think there is.

Weighing the Claims of Witnesses

1. Agreement in Testimony: First, in the White Stag Illustration, the witnesses have the benefit of not being alone. If only one man had seen it, we might have reason to suspect that he’d been smoking something on the walk to the brook. But the fact is that nine others saw the same thing, and their testimony agrees. In Christianity of course, we have the benefit of 2.2 billion other people making the same claim of having experienced the grace of Jesus Christ! It’s hard to dismiss 2.2 billion people! And that is only counting those alive on the planet today, not to mention the billions that have lived in prior centuries.

2. What Do They Stand to Gain? Secondly, we can ask whether the witnesses stand to gain anything by making such a claim. Are they planning to write a book about it? Are they selling the rights of the interview to Katie Couric? Are they going on a speaking tour to make millions? Will there be a Pixar animated “White Stag” movie forthcoming? If there is clearly something to gain personally, we might weigh their claims with some degree of dubiousness. 

3. What Do They Stand to Lose? On the other hand, we might also ask if their experience puts them in such a position that they are now going to suffer because of their experience. I can tell you that Moses’ claim to have seen God at the bush did not exactly make life easy for him. It made his life infinitely more complex. It brought him into the cross-hairs of Pharaoh. It brought great suffering to the Egyptians in the ten plagues. It would eventually cause Aaron and Miriam to rebel against him. And ultimately, it placed upon his shoulders the additional burden of leading the people of Israel who, throughout much of the Pentateuch, amount to a bunch of whiners and complainers, and grumblers, and faultfinders!

As for the Apostles, we can say without any hesitation that their having seen the Resurrected Christ was a decidedly “inconvenient truth.” Their claim to have seen Jesus Christ raised from the dead cost ten of the remaining Apostles their lives. James was beheaded. Peter was crucified upside down. The only apostle who lived was John, who was exiled.

In fact, I can go even further and state that being a Christian believer is the hardest life any mortal could possibly choose. Our people, from day one, AD33, have been chased, mocked, beaten, burned at stakes, tossed to lions, systematically persecuted, hated, lied about, slandered and falsely accused. 

Add to that the fact that we as a people willingly choose to love our enemies, turn the other cheek, tithe on our income, volunteer or time, deny the cheap pleasures of this world, retain our sexual purity within marriage, and many other marks of sacrifice—one wonders why anyone would willing choose Christianity if God had not first chosen us.

Conclusion

So if there are multiple witnesses whose testimonies agree, and those witnesses stand to gain nothing by their claim (at least in regards to this fading world) and in fact have everything to loose for their confession, eyewitness testimony turns out to be a very powerful apologetic for God’s existence. 

Matthew Everhard is the Senior Pastor of Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Brooksville, Florida. Please consider following on Twitter @matt_everhard

The Moral Argument for the Existence of God

At Faith Church, we have recently been considering some philosophical arguments for the existence of God. (Listen to our sermon series here).

One such argument for the existence of God is called the Moral Argument. It is an argument for the existence of God based on the undeniable existence of Good and Evil in this world. 

Consider Exodus 3:7,  "Then the Lord said, 'I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings'" (Exodus 3:7, ESV). Historically, we know from Scripture that the Egyptians treated the Israelites wickedly. They held them as slaves. They beat them viciously, even slaughtering their children. Slavery and genocide were both inflicted upon God's people Israel (cf. Exodus 1:13-16).

Slavery

Slavery is an interesting and timely example today because even the most secular, left-leaning, veggie-burger eating liberal must acknowledge slavery to be a monstrous Evil. Ethics professors at secular, state-funded universities will get on their soapbox  to declare slavery to be Evil. And I agree! I doubt that many ethics professors today would label slavery today as “morally relative.” It is interesting, isn't it, which actions relativists choose to label as "relative."

But the more important question here is this: “Where did human beings (even atheists) even get the idea that some actions are Evil and others are Good?”

Good and Evil 

The Moral Argument for God works on the premise that everyone (universally!) acknowledges the existence of morals—right and wrong. You say, ‘What about criminals and the people that fill our overcrowded jails and prisons?’  Well, one may be the most notorious, cold-blooded mobster in 1940’s Chicago, but if you shoot up his hideout, he calls it Evil. The Moral Argument doesn’t assume people are good, but it states that everyone certainly knows when they’ve been wronged!

Here are the premises on which the Moral Argument rests...

a. All men know intuitively that there is a distinction between Good and Evil, especially when evil is done unto them. 

b. The fact that there is a distinction between Good and Evil requires the existence of a universal Moral Law to differentiate between them. 

c. The existence of a universal Moral Law differentiating between Good and Evil requires there to be a universal Moral Law-Giver.  

Conclusion: This Moral Law Giver must be God.

As an interesting historical anecdote, it was the Moral Argument that convinced CS Lewis—one of the world’s all-time greatest thinkers—to lay down his atheism and to worship at the feet of Jesus. He found it to be irresistibly compelling, and writes about it eloquently in his Mere Christianity.

Notice that we don’t have to agree on which acts are inherently Good and which are Evil to make the case. Some societies in the Middle East argue that a woman must cover her entire body. In other societies in the south pacific islands women wear virtually no clothing at all. Here in America, we can argue all day about birth control for instance. Divergences in moral theory do not undercut the moral argument; the fact remains that everyone believes some actions are good and others wrong. If someone doesn’t agree with that, just kick them in the shins and they soon will!

The main point is this: If you say there is really such thing as “right” and “wrong” you must acknowledge the existence of One who created and defined such categories in the first place!

Alvin Plantinga, recognized to be one of the most astute philosophers alive today, sums the argument well, 

“Could there really be any such thing as horrifying wickedness [if there were no God and we just evolved]? I don’t see how. There can be such a thing only if there is a way rational creatures are supposed to live, obliged to live…a [secular] way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort…and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness (and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful argument [for the reality of God].”[i] 

--Matthew Everhard is the Senior Pastor of Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Brooksville, Florida. 

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[i] Quoted in Timothy Keller. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. P. 26-27.

The Cosmological Argument: The Existence of God Demonstrated by the Existence of the Universe

Have you ever wondered why there is something rather than nothing?

All things being considered fairly, it’s probably more likely that nothing would have existed than something. If nothing ever existed, we wouldn’t have to ask where any of it comes from. There wouldn’t even be an “us” to ponder the question.

But that fact that something exists  rather than nothing is a primary clue to approach the God Question. The fact that something exists--anything--begs the question: where did it come from?

The Cosmological Argument
One of the classical "proofs" for the existence of God is called the Cosmological Argument. It is called the cosmological argument because the word “cosmos” means universe. It is an argument for the existence of God based on the existence of a universe. The cosmological argument is centuries old. It goes something like this:

    A. Some things exist. Would anyone really dispute this point? If you do, raise your hand. If you raised your hand you just raised a thing and confirmed Premise A.
    B.  All things that exist are either caused (contingent) or uncaused (necessary). Really there are no other categories. I doubt many would deny Premise B either.   
    C. If caused (contingent) things exist, there must be an uncaused (necessary) thing as their ultimate source.
   
    Conclusion: This uncaused (necessary) thing is God.

All contingent things are caused or made by something else. When we take any one object (a desk, tree, a shoe, a man) and consider its origin, we can trace it to other contingent things. In a long series of successive "causes" we trace caused (or contingent) things back to other caused (contingent) things, to still other caused (contingent) things until eventually we have to say—there must have been an uncaused cause that started the entire series in the first place.

Unmoved Mover
Aristotle (384-322 BC) in Book 12 of his “Metaphysics” called this necessary logical starting point the “Unmoved Mover.” Aristotle himself was not a Christian. He wasn’t a Jew either. His “Unmoved Mover” was a far cry from the God of the Bible that we know and love. But at least this pagan philosopher recognized that at the starting point of history there must have been a necessary being that himself is not caused, created, or made, or initiated by anything else. There must have been an Unmoved Mover!

Some will say, “We science people call that the ‘Big Bang,’” i.e. when the universe spontaneously erupted into existence. But naked science has some real philosophical problems. The Big Bang cannot qualify as the Unmoved Mover because it does not explain what caused it to go “bang” in the first place. As a theory, it doesn’t explain how “matter” got there or what caused it to explode two seconds before it did. Eventually, Aristotle (and Thomas Aquinas after him) would say: we must ultimately come to a being that does the causing, without Himself being caused.

In other words, underlying all contingent things, is a necessary being--God.

Matthew Everhard is the Senior Pastor of Faith Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Brooksville, Florida. He is currently doing a sermon series entitled He is There and He is Not Silent in which he is considering the cumulative case for the existence of God.