Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions (16 page)

No, the professor was going after the conviction in "modernist" circles that human beings can actually know something like absolute truth — knowledge they can count on. Instead, she is saying that we mortals inhabit a kind of knowledge twilight where the outlines of reality are vague and indistinct, robbing us of all confidence that anything we think we know is actually so.

The professor seemed blind to her point's suicidal tendencies. The following questions make this failure obvious:

Professor, I'm confused about your comments. Is this insight you've offered true or false? I don't think you'd knowingly teach us something false, so you must think it true. And that's what confuses me. What kind of "truth" would that be? It couldn't be
TRUTH,
because you're not God. So it must be
truth.
But if this is just your personal perception of reality, why should any of us take you seriously? We have our own perceptions. Since none of us has
TRUTH,
who's to say who is right and who is wrong? Can you clear this up for me?

Paul warned us not to be taken "captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ" (Colossians 2:8). Yet captivity abounds, even in places God intended to be a refuge from such error.

CAN GOD MAKE A ROCK SO BIG HE CAN’T LIFT IT?

This kind of challenge is called a "pseudo-question." It's like asking, "Can God win an arm wrestling match against himself?" or "If God beat himself up, who would win?" or "Can God's power defeat his own power?"

The question is nonsense because it treats God as if he were two instead of one. The comparative phrase "stronger than" can only be used when two subjects are in view, like when we say Bill is stronger than Bob, or my left arm is stronger than my right arm. Since God is only one, it makes no sense to ask if he is stronger than himself. The question proves nothing about any deficiency in God because the question itself — Can God's omnipotence defeat his omnipotence?
— is incoherent.

“GOD DOESN’T TAKE SIDES.”

This reprimand comes up every election cycle. In fact, I once saw a full-page ad in the
Los Angeles Times
lecturing one side of the political spectrum on this very point. The assertion is self-defeating, though, as illustrated in the following conversation:

"You think God is on your side, but you're wrong. God doesn't take sides."

"Let me ask you a question. In this disagreement we're having on whether or not God takes sides, what do you think God's opinion is?"

"I just told you. God isn't against taking sides."

"Right.
So in our dispute, God would agree with you, not me."

"That's right."

"He would
side
with you in this issue, then. I guess God does take sides after all."

Note the contradiction: God does take sides. God doesn't take sides. The assertion was self-defeating. Not surprisingly, the ad went on to campaign for its own political view as the moral high ground, compounding the error.

TO ERR IS HUMAN

A common attack on the Bible goes like this: Men wrote the Bible. People are imperfect. Therefore, the Bible is flawed and not inspired by God.

Remember our rule for discovering suicidal statements:
If exactly the same reasons in favor of another's view (or against your own) defeat the reasons themselves, then the view is self-defeating.
The presumption that if man is
capable
of error, he
will
err also applies to this very argument against inspiration.

Consider this exchange:

"You think the Bible must be flawed because people make mistakes."

"Yes, that's the way it seems to me."

SUICIDE: VIEWS THAT SELF-DESTRUCT

"I'm curious — why do you think you are an exception to that rule?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you don't seem to think you've made a mistake in your own judgment about the Bible. But you're a flawed human being, too."

"Of course I am. But I didn't mean that people always make mistakes."

"If people don't always make mistakes, though, you can't rule out the Bible just because people wrote it, can you?"

It’s not enough to dismiss the Bible simply by noting that “men wrote it.” This, in itself, proves nothing. It doesn’t follow that if people are capable of error, they always will err. Taken at face value, this objection is self-refuting.

C. S. Lewis cites a related example. In response to the Freudian and Marxist claim that all thoughts are tainted (either psychologically or ideologically) at their source, he writes:

If they say that all thoughts are thus tainted, then, of course, we must remind them that Freudianism and Marxism are as much systems of thought as Christian theology. . . . The Freudian and the Marxian are in the same boat with all the rest of us and cannot criticize us from the outside. They have sawn off the branch they are sitting on. If, on the other hand, they say that the taint need not invalidate their thinking, then neither need it invalidate ours.

In which case they have saved their own branch, but also saved ours along with it.
⁸

Statements like "Everyone's view is a product of his own prejudices" or "All your so-called 'facts' are only beliefs dictated by your cultural biases" falter for the same reason. Are these views

themselves
merely a product of prejudice or cultural bias? If so, why take them seriously?

“ATMAN IS BRAHMAN AND BRAHMAN IS ATMAN”

Hinduism as a religious view also seems compromised by contradictory notions. The pantheistic monism at the heart of this Eastern religion teaches that "reality" as we know it is an illusion —
maya
— of which each of us is part.

If I am an illusion, how could I know it? How could I possess true knowledge that I do not exist? (I think, therefore I
ain’t
?) Do people in a dream know they are imaginary? Does Charlie Brown know he is a cartoon character?

This Hindu concept that the world is an illusion contradicts the idea that I can know that I am a player in the illusion. Implicitly, it claims that I am not a real self and that I am a real self at the same time. Thus, this central doctrine of Hinduism self-destructs.

The most common escape route from this problem is the claim that the law of contradiction is a Western notion that doesn't apply in Eastern thought like Hinduism. Eastern thinkers are comfortable with contradiction, so they say.

This problem, though, has nothing to do with what people are "comfortable" with. It has to do with how reality is structured. People may be comfortable with all sorts of unusual things. This may tell you something about
psychology,
but not about
reality.

Computers work on a binary system of 0s and 1s. The law of
noncontradiction
functions to keep these two distinct. It doesn't matter if the computer is in the Eastern Hemisphere or the Western Hemisphere or if the person at the keyboard is Christian, Hindu, Taoist, animist, or atheist. The computer works regardless because reality is still structured according to the law of non-contradiction,

even
if people from other cultures are psychologically confused about this point.

THEISTIC EVOLUTION: DESIGNED BY CHANCE?

Some people suggest that God used evolution to design the world. They are motivated, I think, by two impulses. The first is a desire to affirm the Bible. The second is a suspicion Darwinism might have merit. Thus, they declare both true.

These two notions, however, seem incompatible to me. It may sound reasonable for God to "use" evolution, but if you look closer I think you will see the problem.

Suppose I wanted a straight flush for a hand of poker. I could
either pull the cards out of the deck individually and
"design" the hand, or I could shuffle the cards randomly and see if the flush is dealt to me. It would not make any sense, though, to "design" the hand by shuffling the deck and dealing. There's no way to ensure the results. (I guess if I were really clever I could make it
look
like I was shuffling the deck when in reality I was stacking it, but that would be a deceitful kind of design called "cheating.")

In the same way, either God designs the details of the biological world, or nature shuffles the deck and natural selection chooses the winning hand. The mechanism is
either conscious and
intentional (design), or unconscious and unintentional (natural selection). Creation has a purpose, a goal. Evolution is accidental, like a straight flush dealt to a poker rookie.

The idea that something is designed by chance is contradictory. Like trying to put a square peg in a round hole, this just doesn't fit.

“ONLY SCIENCE GIVES RELIABLE TRUTH”

This modern slogan seems reasonable at first glance. Many people think knowledge begins and ends with the scientific method. Anything else is mere opinion and unsubstantiated belief, a view that is sometimes called "scientism." However, those who hold this view will be surprised to know that it commits suicide. Consider this dialog:

"I don't believe in religion."

"Why not?"

"There is no scientific evidence for it."

"Then you shouldn't believe in science either."

"Why not?"

"Because there is no scientific evidence for it."

This was a terse exchange, so let me expand a bit. I noticed first that the slogan "Only science gives reliable truth" is a statement
about
truth that also purports to
be
true, so it includes itself in what it refers to (in the same way that the statement "All English sentences are false" includes itself). Next, I simply applied our basic test for Suicide by asking, "Can the statement satisfy its own requirement?"

I quickly realized it could not. Since there is no scientific evidence proving that science is the only way to know truth, the view self-destructs. I then used
Columbo
to point out the flaw.
⁹

The next time someone dismisses you with the "Only science gives reliable truth" canard, ask if he wants you to take his statement as fact or simply as unsubstantiated opinion. If fact, ask what testable scientific evidence led him to his conclusion. As it turns out, this claim is not a fact
of
science. It is a philosophical assertion
about
science that itself cannot be proven by the scientific method and would therefore be unreliable, according to this approach.

RELIGIOUS “SUICIDE”

The notion of religious pluralism, that all religions are equally true or valid, is also self-refuting. There are two different ways to demonstrate this.

First, if all religions are true, then Christianity is true. Yet a central claim of classical Christianity is that other religions are false when taken as a whole. Clearly, Jesus was not a pluralist. Either Christianity is correct that Jesus is God's Messiah for the world and other religions are deceptions, as Scripture teaches, or Christianity is false and some other view is true. In no case, though, can all religions be true and valid.

Second, when you think about it, religions have very diverse pictures of what the spiritual realm is like. Most forms of Hinduism teach that God is an impersonal force. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity teach that God is a personal being. In Buddhism, the question of God is irrelevant.

In classical theism, death is final, followed by either eternal reward or eternal punishment. In Eastern religions, death is a door the soul passes through many times as it works out its karma in reincarnation. Some religions teach that reprobates are destroyed while the righteous live on.

Can you see the problem? When someone dies, they
might
go to Heaven or Hell, or they
might
be reincarnated, or they
might
simply turn to dust, but
they can't do them all at the same time.

Some religions are clearly mistaken on details central to their worldview. In fact, every one of them could be wrong on every single point, in principle, but they cannot all be right. Taken at face value, religious pluralism commits suicide.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT?

I once saw a sign in a restaurant that read, "You are what you eat." I pointed out to the waitress that if we are what we eat, then we couldn't be something until we have eaten something. But we can't eat something unless we are something. Therefore, it's not true that we are what we eat.

The waitress, unschooled in the finer points of self-refuting arguments, looked at me and said, "You'll have to talk to the manager."