00:00 [MUSIC]

00:20 Hi, I'm Adam Francisco, a scholar in residence at 1517 and also a co-host of the Thinking Fellows podcast.

00:27 This is a course on faith and reason.

00:30 the relationship that philosophy has to theology, what role reason might have in thinking theologically?

00:38 It also looks at questions where reason comes into play and deep theological questions concerning

00:44 whether there's good reason to believe God exists, if the Christian faith is reasonable in and of

00:50 itself. In many ways, the course is prompted by a concern that I have myself and others have that

01:00 to be a trend towards what we might call \"fidism,\" a belief that says faith can be justified or

01:09 defended by simply appealing to faith. Now, we know from Scripture that faith is one of the

01:15 theological virtues right next to hope and love. We also know as St. Paul described it in several

01:21 places that Christians walk by faith and not by sight. And we certainly confess Christians

01:30 us, that our faith has been given to us by God through the Holy Spirit.

01:37 Martin Luther says, maybe even famously, that we cannot believe in our Lord Jesus Christ

01:43 by our own reason or our strength, but it is a gift of God through the Holy Spirit.

01:49 One of our dear friends at 1517, Dr. Jim Nestigan, St. Dr. Jim Nestigan, wrote that

02:00 long before we were even around.

02:03 He didn't look to see what our lives would be like.

02:06 He certainly didn't look to see how reasonable we were

02:09 before he decided whether we were his own.

02:12 But rather he chose us from all eternity.

02:16 And in choosing us, he sent us the gift of faith

02:19 through the Holy Spirit.

02:22 But is that all there is to faith?

02:25 There is another side of faith, the cognitive

02:30 Christian faith, as the articles of the creed, the historical content of the gospels, the

02:38 way we fashion our response to those who ask us questions for the hope that's within

02:44 us. And that's what this course is really about, or what role does reason play as we

02:50 think about how we might answer the challenge that non-Christians pose to us when they ask

03:00 and philosophy has played in the development of the theological task through the ages.

03:06 In fact, the course is split into essentially two components.

03:10 The first half is mostly a very brief, almost 30,000-foot overview of church history.

03:17 It looks at the question that Christians have posed over the centuries that was first posed

03:22 by a church father named Tertullian, who asked, \"What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?\"

03:30 What does the Academy, in our day and age, the university and all of its disciplines have to do

03:36 with Christianity? What does philosophy have to do with theology? That question was asked very

03:43 early on in the late second, early third century AD. And it's been alive and well ever since,

03:51 as medieval theologians wrestled with the question, what it meant that the fool says in his heart,

04:00 Firstly, what that also meant, that those who believe in God must therefore be wise in

04:04 some way.

04:05 Medieval theologians, though they wrote on any number of topics, were concentrated in

04:11 many ways and many times on the question, \"How do we know using our reason?\"

04:18 Maybe the tools and methods of philosophy, that it's reasonable to believe God exists

04:23 in the first place.

04:26 Now there are a lot of Christians out there.

04:30 Fairly famous, though it's a bit dated now, been around for a couple of decades, entitled

04:35 \"The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,\" where the author, Mark Knoll concluded that the real

04:41 scandal of the, we'll just say, Christian mind is that there is no mind.

04:46 And what he was observed in that book is a deep-seated, not in all corners, but pretty

04:53 profound anti-intellectualism and Christianity.

05:00 quoting passages like \"We live by faith, not by sight.\"

05:04 But as we said earlier, there is another side to the story.

05:08 Christianity from its early days when Saint Paul went to Athens,

05:13 and as Luke tells us as he accounts for his travels there,

05:18 Paul reasoned with the Jews and the synagogue as was his custom.

05:23 He conversed with the pagans in the marketplace.

05:30 proponent of a new religion, a novel, and perhaps a dangerous religion by stoic and

05:36 epicuring philosophers and then was asked to go to their formal meeting place, a high

05:42 point in the city called Mars Hill or the Ariapagos.

05:47 And there, although we only have a few passages from it, Paul gives a stellar defense of

05:55 the Christian faith from a philosophical perspective.

06:00 really remarkable about Acts 17 when Paul's at Mars Hill is that in the pages of Holy Scripture,

06:08 Paul quotes in two locations, pagan philosophers, as if to say that philosophy does have something,

06:16 certainly by no means everything, and certainly one has to be discerning in their use of philosophy,

06:22 but philosophy does have something to say about theology. Fast forward a couple decades,

06:30 early church father named Justin Martyr, who spent his youth and into his 20s pursuing

06:38 the different philosophies on offer in the ancient world. He says in one of his accounts

06:43 that he started with stoicism and found that seriously wanting when it came to an ethical

06:49 and a metaphysical or we might say a religious system of belief, he moved over to Platonism,

07:00 wanting. It wasn't until he met a Christian. He says, he doesn't even give us the name of the

07:07 Christian, just a Syrian who opened up the pages of the Old Testament to him and showed him the

07:12 wisdom of the prophets. And presumably, we don't have the full account, but presumably,

07:19 talk to him about Jesus and how Jesus fulfilled all those prophecies in the Old Testament.

07:30 the preaching of a Christian attended by the Holy Spirit that Justin Martyrs eyes were opened and

07:36 he received Jesus trusting in him as a Savior. And from or afterwards the rest is so to speak

07:44 history. We don't know all that Justin Martyr wrote. He left, we think, three works behind but presumably

07:51 wrote many more. But these are extremely important works when thinking about the role reason and

08:00 of theologians in the past, in that Justin Martyr, two of those works, were what are

08:06 called apologies.

08:07 \"Defenses of Christianity\" addressed to the Roman Emperor himself.

08:12 And another work called \"Dialogue with Trifo the Jew\" is an attempt by a Christian author

08:18 to persuade a Jewish audience that Christianity was indeed a reasonable religion because it

08:25 fulfilled those Old Testament Messianic prophecies.

08:30 story. There's 1800 years of church history filled with example after example of Christian

08:36 theologians wrestling with the issue of the relationship between faith and reason and all the

08:40 other connected issues. And we'll look at many of those over the next two sessions. But I want to

08:46 go back to a point I made earlier about this anti-intellectualism that is found across denominations

09:00 for the way others perceive Christianity.

09:03 Years ago, a movement emerged in America

09:06 in the wake of September 11th, 2001.

09:09 The movement was called the New Atheism.

09:12 It wasn't all that new.

09:13 It was just simply a continuing atheism

09:16 that began to emerge over the course of the Enlightenment,

09:19 but it was an atheism that was much more militant

09:22 and much more intentional in trying to persuade Christians

09:26 and other religious people away from believing

09:30 defined as their myths. You probably recognize some of the names of the authors. It's people

09:35 like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins or the now deceased Christopher Hitchens. Go to any

09:43 of their works, many of which were New York Times bestsellers, and have had a profound influence

09:51 on the way the American public views religion. And what you'll find in book after book is a

10:00 tack against religion in general, but more often than not Christianity in particular for

10:06 its irrationality, as they claim. You have Christopher Hitchens, who will describe faith

10:14 as being poisonous. As he put it in his book, \"God is not great, how religion poisons everything,\"

10:22 he'll say that if you can convince people to believe something apart from any evidence,

10:30 If you can convince them to believe in these objective things, these historical claims

10:35 and their religion apart from any consideration of the evidence, you can convince those people

10:40 to do anything.

10:42 Sam Harris makes the same claim in his book, The End of Faith.

10:45 Now those are just a few authors and that's just a particular movement that's still with

10:49 us today.

10:50 It's still, but at the same time seems to be losing the momentum it once had.

10:56 Having taught at universities for about 20 years.

11:00 universities, it's interesting to me that the arguments of the new atheism have softened a bit

11:06 but have proliferated much more. And you find the skepticism of atheistic thinkers and agnostic

11:14 thinkers as well, oftentimes parroting the work and the attacks of the new atheists. But it's not just

11:30 There are people working in the natural sciences who might not be attacking Christianity specifically,

11:36 but who will make claims or at least

11:40 assume that if one follows

11:43 natural science and is really invested in being scientific in their thinking, they will

11:50 automatically be committed to a non-theistic worldview.

11:56 At best committed to an agnostic worldview.

12:00 Your friends have brought up questions like,

12:02 what does science have to say about theology?

12:07 Or maybe your Muslim coworker has asked you,

12:12 why you believe Christianity,

12:15 if it's in many ways based on a book

12:17 that is filled with all sorts of logical fallacies?

12:21 It's those sorts of questions and those concerns

12:24 that we look at this issue of faith and reason.

12:27 So over the next few sessions,

12:30 at the history of Christianity and how prominent thinkers dealt with the issue of faith and

12:38 reason. Beginning when Tertullian asked that question, what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?

12:43 And we'll move forward through the Middle Ages, up to the time of the Reformation, where thinkers

12:50 from St. Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther began to, in a way, at least implicitly address the question,

13:00 faith begin. And then we'll move into the modern age, especially looking at the enlightenment.

13:07 When we see as a culture, Western civilization, slowly but surely lose its faith in God's

13:16 existence, or at least lose its faith that God's existence is eminently reasonable. Then

13:22 after we paint our historical survey, we'll begin looking at particular questions concerning

13:30 can a rational person believe that God exists in the first place? And then perhaps the great

13:38 question of our age, are science and religion compatible? Does science have anything to say

13:44 about theology, or must reasonable people separate the two? And our final session, we'll look at

13:52 what is probably the most important question for Christians in the public arena as they encounter

14:00 people who have very different worldviews, people who might in fact be hostile to the

14:05 Christian faith.

14:06 We'll look at the question, \"Is Christianity reasonable?\"

14:10 So that you might be prepared to give an account or to give a reason for those who

14:15 ask you for the hope within you.

00:00 [MUSIC]

00:20 Welcome back to Faith and Reason.

00:23 In this session, we're going to look at the question first posed by Tertullian in

00:30 What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?\" he wrote.

00:33 Before we get there though, I want to retrace some steps we took in the first session.

00:38 I want to go back to Paul at Mars Hill.

00:41 I think the point is worth emphasizing that even in the earliest days of Christianity,

00:47 when Paul was faced with people who did not share the same assumptions he had,

00:53 when his faith was stoic and Epicurean philosophers in the city of Athens,

01:00 He did not hesitate to look for and use some of their own material, some of their own sources

01:07 to continue the conversation so that he might have an opportunity to present Christianity to them.

01:14 We find this same desire and the same use of philosophy over the course of Christian history.

01:20 In the first session, we mentioned in the man Justin Martyr, who lived in the late first century

01:30 Just, apologist, outside the apostles, wrote a number of works addressing the emperor and

01:38 Jewish audiences trying to persuade them of the truth of Christianity.

01:45 But by the time Justin Martyr died, because it had been so commonplace for philosophy

01:52 and theology to be intermingled, some theologians began to be a bit uncomfortable with it.

02:00 So when Tertullian began writing, in the late 2nd century,

02:06 in a work called \"Prescription Against the Herrotics,\"

02:10 he recounts the number of heresies

02:12 that had popped up in the early Christian church,

02:16 from Marcianism to Gnosticism and a whole bunch more.

02:20 He found, as he writes,

02:21 that many of those heresies began

02:24 when philosophy intruded too much into theology.

02:30 Aristotle and any number of ancient and also very popular philosophies were to account for

02:35 many of these heresies, Tertullian wrote.

02:39 And then he asked the rhetorical question, \"What does philosophy have to do with theology

02:44 in the first place?

02:45 Or what does, more famously, Athens have to do with Jerusalem?

02:50 What does the academy, that is, what does education and all the disciplines of education,

02:56 have to do with Christianity?\"

03:00 questions by saying nothing. Philosophy had nothing to do with theology. Philosophy started

03:07 from different assumptions than theology. Theology started from the scriptures. Philosophy

03:12 started from speculation. The Academy, the academies in the ancient world, were mostly

03:19 schools of philosophy, though they did dabble in other disciplines. But they were very different,

03:30 which focused on reading the biblical text and understanding doctrine.

03:36 Athens and the culture of Athens, the whole culture of the Greco-Roman world

03:41 was radically different than the Christian church.

03:44 And so, Tertullian encouraged Christians to stay away from the world

03:49 and its philosophy and its speculation as much as possible.

03:52 Tertullian had a contemporary in Egypt named Clement of Alexandria.

04:00 miscellaneous writings. He addressed the same question Tertullian asked, but his

04:07 answer was a completely different to Tertullian. Clement argued that while

04:12 philosophy certainly could be arrogant and it could influence theology in ways

04:18 that were inappropriate, in ways that would lead Christians away from biblical

04:23 doctrine, at the same time Clement said philosophy could be quite helpful to

04:30 or could certainly help Christians in thinking about how to approach methodologically the

04:35 reading and understanding of the Scriptures.

04:38 It could help Christians order their theology in ways that were rational.

04:44 Seemingly, most important for Clement, he believed that theology was important to study

04:50 for Christians because non-Christians thought in some way some were sophisticated than others

04:56 philosophically.

05:00 could, like Saint Paul at Athens, use ideas from those philosophies as a way to articulate

05:06 the gospel.

05:08 Tertullian may not have completely disagreed with these points about that Clement of Alexander

05:14 brought up about philosophy, but he certainly would have disagreed with Clement's later

05:19 point where Clement suggests that some philosophies, and in his mind, he most likely had the philosophy

05:27 of Plato.

05:30 bore the marks of being connected in some way to God's natural or general revelation.

05:37 That is to say, as later Christian authors would put it, that Plato and his philosophy is the

05:42 closest to Christian theology. Clement, in fact, went a little further and said that

05:49 people living before the incarnation of God and Christ, who were exposed to the philosophy of Plato

06:00 that living before the incarnation,

06:02 and that particular special revelation and time and space,

06:07 all they really needed for salvation was Platonism.

06:11 Now that's a step that Tertullian absolutely detested.

06:14 In many ways, Tertullian's negative response

06:17 to philosophy is driven by Clement's

06:21 wholehearted acceptance of philosophy.

06:24 It wasn't until the fourth and fifth centuries, though,

06:26 that the debate was essentially settled

06:30 Quo was achieved concerning the question between faith and reason.

06:34 And you find it most explicitly in the writings of probably the greatest of the Church Fathers,

06:39 a man named St. Augustine from North Africa.

06:42 St. Augustine was born around 354 AD, lives up until 430 AD, wrote a tremendous amount.

06:53 In fact, Augustine's writings and influence cannot be underestimated.

07:00 One church father that both the Western Church, Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity,

07:06 and the Eastern Church, Orthodox Christianity, recognized collectively as a church father.

07:12 Moreover, Augustine's writings and his ideas will exert a tremendous influence, second

07:18 only to the biblical text, over the course of the thousand years of the Middle Ages.

07:23 Some historians would say Augustine's influence was more prominent than any other Christian

07:30 until 1900. So you cannot underestimate the influence of Saint Augustine, especially when

07:37 it comes to the issue of faith and reason. Now there's a tremendous amount to talk about

07:43 with Saint Augustine. The best phrase though that captures Augustine's response or approach

07:51 to the relationship of faith and reason is captured in his phrase, \"Fideis quarrens

08:00 That is, for Augustine, he took for granted that you could not separate yourself from the

08:07 world such that the flosses of the world wouldn't influence you in some way shape or form as you

08:14 think theologically, or you're reading the biblical text. The ideas in the culture you live in are

08:21 going to, in some way, shape your understanding and your approach to Christianity. And so for

08:30 And being aware of that, and also Augustine was quite fond of some philosophies like Clement

08:36 of Alexandria, like Justin Martyr before him, believe that Plato's philosophy wasn't

08:42 as hostile to Christianity as other forms of Greek philosophy.

08:46 So Augustine says that in order to interact with philosophy, in order to use reason appropriately

09:00 So a person of faith, a Christian, as they seek to understand the world they live in,

09:07 as they try to think about the universe and the history of the world from a biblical

09:12 vantage point, and yet don't have all the data, if you will, that they need from the

09:17 biblical text, could then use philosophy, could then use the best of human wisdom to

09:22 fill in that gray area to help them understand things from a worldview perspective.

09:30 The idea of face-seeking understanding is in St. Augustine's great and one of his last

09:35 works that he wrote called \"The City of God,\" sometimes entitled \"The City of God Against

09:40 the Pagans.\"

09:42 It's a book that took him almost 20 years to write, and in fact, it's not just one book,

09:46 but it's 22 books.

09:49 It makes for light reading in the evening.

09:52 Twenty-two books long, about a thousand pages total in a modern edition.

10:00 Christian analysis and critique of Greco-Roman philosophy, especially Greco-Roman philosophy

10:09 and theology.

10:12 It's essentially books one through ten of the city of God is Augustine's Christian

10:16 takedown and exposure or deconstruction of the inadequacies of Greco-Roman philosophy.

10:24 Where face-seeking understanding though is really on display though in the city of

10:30 12 books, where in 12 books, St. Augustine paints essentially a picture of what the Christian worldview

10:38 looks like in a very detailed manner. From first and foremost, the pages of Scripture,

10:45 but when Scripture doesn't speak to certain issues, Augustine is more than happy to apply a,

10:50 we might say, a philosophical or platonic analysis to fill in those blanks. For example,

11:00 human beings, and what a human being is comprised of. He sides with Plato on the

11:07 issue and argues that it's not the whole person, but rather the soul that

11:13 takes prominence. The soul is what directs the body, and while that is not

11:18 anti-Christian or opposed to Christian ideas about the soul and the body, it's

11:24 very much a central concern of Platonic philosophy, and Augustine certainly learned

11:30 of it from his reading, a deep reading of Plato and neoplatonic writings.

11:36 But by the time we get to Augustine and for centuries thereafter, and we'll see it in

11:41 our next session when we begin looking at medieval views of faith and reason, this idea

11:46 that faith should be primary when it comes to thinking about the world and our place

11:52 in it or the place of the church in the world, but philosophy and reason can play

12:00 a ministerial role in helping us address the questions of the age.

12:05 So in summary, in the ancient church,

12:09 the two towering figures on the question of the relationship between faith and reason,

12:14 and the guys who get the debates started,

12:17 and really are the impetus between the thousand-plus-years discussion in the church

12:23 over the relationship between philosophy and theology

12:30 Andrea. But Augustine is the guy who brings the debate effectively to a close for a long

12:37 time thereafter when he suggests and teaches that Christians did not need to fear philosophy.

12:45 Christians in fact should pursue being reasonable people. And they could use the tools of philosophy

12:52 and reason as they sought to understand the world, as they sought to address the questions

13:00 Faith took priority, but reason and philosophy provided the tools and the methods and also

13:07 filled in some of the ambiguous area that the scriptures left behind.

13:14 Our next session, we're going to look at the Middle Ages, and we'll address a question

13:19 that wasn't asked specifically but is implicit in much of the discourse in the High Middle

13:24 Ages, and that's the question of where does reason end?

13:30 about God and the universe before they came to their end or their limit and then had to start believing.

13:38 Where does reason and faith begin as it was put in a number of texts?

00:00 [MUSIC]

00:20 Welcome to session three, where does reason end and faith begin?

00:25 In the last session, we took a quick tour of the ancient church.

00:30 Athens, and worked away through the ages to St. Augustine in the 4th and 5th century,

00:35 who made it the standard within Christianity that faith seeks understanding, that Christian

00:42 people can be comfortable, albeit they should be discerning in using philosophy and reflecting

00:48 or thinking rationally about the Christian faith and Christianity's place in the world.

00:54 That standard persisted throughout the Middle Ages.

01:00 in the writings of a early scholastic theologian named St. Anselm. St. Anselm was born in the

01:08 middle of the 11th century, dies around 1109, wrote a number of works, three popular ones

01:15 are still available in English today. One of those is called Curdeos Homo, \"Why the

01:30 that God was reconciling the world unto himself in the person work of Christ was a reasonable thing

01:37 to believe, a rational belief, if you will. And in fact, was a true belief over and against

01:44 the claims of other religions. And in the introduction of why the God, man, Anselm, tells us why he

01:50 wrote the work in the first place, what people he hoped would read his book. He explained how in

02:00 had been growing by leaps and bounds,

02:02 and there were also Jewish communities,

02:04 both of which had views on Jesus,

02:06 but very different views on Jesus than Christian orthodoxy.

02:12 So Anselm writes this book and hopes that his readers,

02:17 reading his arguments, digesting his arguments,

02:20 would be if the opportunity presented itself

02:24 would be able to explain the Christian doctrine

02:30 But the curious thing about why the God-man is it doesn't work like a modern evidential

02:37 apologetic that uses historical evidence and works from particular things to a larger

02:42 conclusion.

02:44 Why the God-man really captures or symbolizes the spirit of face-seeking understanding.

02:51 For what Anselm does in there is provides a coherent account of the Christian doctrines

02:57 that he takes on in the book.

03:00 try to prove it evidentially.

03:02 So faith is the priority.

03:05 And then he begins to explain

03:07 so that other people might understand

03:09 the rationality of that belief.

03:12 Another example of faith-seeking understanding

03:14 in Anselm's work comes in two books.

03:17 One is called \"Monlogion\" and the other is \"Proslogion.\"

03:21 And there effectively, we might call them

03:23 devotional writings today.

03:25 It's almost like St. Anselm is having

03:27 a conversation with God.

03:30 places in those works, he begins to rhetorically, in a way, ask God if the fool says in his heart

03:39 there is no God. That must therefore mean Christianity is wise. And so how could one

03:46 understand the existence of God in a rational way? And the way Anselm describes this is quite

04:00 as that than which none greater can be conceived.

04:05 And if it's implied that it's greater to exist than not to exist, which was a common

04:12 assumption in the Middle Ages and going back to the early church, going back to the

04:16 writings of Plato, that therefore means that God exists.

04:20 Now, that argument is sometimes called the ontological argument for God's existence.

04:30 scientific, evidential, inductive age.

04:34 For medieval people, it made perfect sense.

04:37 The commitment of faith to God's existence took priority, but then through a elaborate

04:45 philosophy or maybe not so elaborate.

04:48 But if you read the works, you'll find out that it is quite profound.

04:53 He's able to show that it's coherent, internally consistent, if you will, to believe God exists.

05:00 according to the standards of the 11th and the 12th century.

05:04 Now, around the same time that St. Anselm's living

05:09 and will eventually die in the early 12th century,

05:12 Europeans are becoming increasingly aware of

05:17 not just the Muslims and the Jews

05:19 who live in the Spanish peninsula,

05:21 but they're also increasingly aware of a civilization

05:23 that's been around for some time

05:25 and growing for some time to the east of them,

05:27 the civilization of Islam.

05:30 And they're also beginning to learn that Islamic civilization has its own scholars

05:35 and its own philosophers.

05:37 In fact, around the 12th and certainly the 13th century, the works of Aristotle are going

05:42 to make their way from Arabic translation into a Latin translation into Europe and begin

05:49 to be read in these new and very early universities that are starting to take shape in the Middle

05:55 Ages.

06:00 merchants like Marco Polo will travel along the Silk Road in the northern part of Islamic

06:07 civilization encountering different people all along the way.

06:11 Franciscan and Dominican monks who become missionaries will travel to the Holy Land to

06:16 Egypt.

06:17 One in the late 13th Central will even spend about 10 years in the city of Baghdad.

06:23 And so as they're having these encounters with people who don't share their assumptions,

06:30 in the, what are called the High Middle Ages.

06:33 And the need was in a way captured by this question,

06:35 where does reason end in faith begin?

06:38 And it's driven by this desire that those Christians

06:41 who might spend time among non-Christians

06:44 would be able to use reason as common ground

06:47 to converse with them and to persuade them

06:50 of some of the truths of Christianity

06:52 that could be known apart from revelation,

06:55 apart from the scriptures, but nevertheless

07:00 true just on the grounds of logic and philosophy and reason.

07:05 Now, the great thinker in the Middle Ages who's going to address this question, where does

07:10 reason end?

07:11 Whether it's the reason of a Christian or a Muslim or perhaps a Buddhist or a Hindu

07:17 further east, was in the writing of St. Thomas Aquinas.

07:23 Thomas Aquinas is probably the most important theologian in the Catholic tradition.

07:30 role that Martin Luther does to Lutherans or John Calvin to the Reformed. You cannot underestimate

07:36 the influence of Thomas Aquinas. Even more broadly, Thomas Aquinas continues to exert an

07:41 influence on Westerners generally to this very day. Martin Luther King Jr. for example,

07:47 in his famous letter from a Birmingham jail, cites Thomas Aquinas and Thomas' reasoning about how law

08:00 us law is no law at all. So you can't underestimate the influence of this man in the way he thinks

08:06 about the world and it's his influence on Christianity but Western civilization more broadly.

08:12 What's important for our topic here though is in Thomas' work, especially his two great sumas,

08:20 the suma controgentili's, which could be translated as summation against non-Christians or summation

08:30 A summation of theology, Aquinas does his best, especially in the former book, to prove

08:39 what he can through reason, the truths of the Christian faith.

08:44 But he acknowledges throughout the work, you can only prove so much.

08:49 You can prove God exists through reason.

08:52 And you can be confident, reasonable people everywhere, whether they're in medieval Iraq

09:00 same conclusions as you if you followed the right method and you remain consistently logical.

09:06 The suma contour genteel is even though it's quite large and if you just spend a little bit of time

09:11 of it in it, you rise it's it is no practical work of theology. Thomas actually intended it for

09:18 it to be practical. It was used and originally designed for especially Dominican missionaries

09:30 rational arguments for certain doctrines of the Christian faith.

09:35 And once those were demonstrated to be proven and

09:37 agreeable to human or universal human reason,

09:41 then you could begin to preach Christ and reason from the scriptures and

09:46 move into the particular doctrines of the Christian faith.

09:51 In the other great summation of theology,

09:53 Aquinas begins to ask the question and give answer to the question,

10:00 know that God exists. And though he doesn't put it this way, he attempts in five different ways

10:07 to argue from neutral grounds independent of any faith commitments that any rational person

10:15 will conclude that there must be a creator from which the universe came. We call those the five

10:22 ways for proving God's existence. The five ways are still influential today in the realm of the

10:30 Even Richard Dawkins in his work, The God Delusion, spends time attempting to, and I would say

10:35 inadequately so, refuting the five ways of Thomas Aquinas.

10:42 Now we're going to get into the arguments for God's existence in a later session.

10:46 I want to quickly move beyond Saint Thomas Aquinas to a thinker from the next century,

10:52 the 14th century, who also exerted a tremendous amount of influence on how Christians think

10:58 about faith and reason.

11:00 He's, for most Christians, an obscure figure.

11:04 But if you spend any time reading medieval history or perhaps reformation history, you'll

11:08 probably at least encounter his name.

11:10 His name was William of Ockham.

11:12 He lives until about 1347 AD.

11:15 He's from the British Isles, a Franciscan monk, part of a school that's sometimes called

11:22 nominalism, that in many ways did not reject the principle of face-seeking understanding.

11:30 what he would have described as the hubris of Thomas Aquinas

11:36 or even St. Anselm before him.

11:39 For William of Occam, reason certainly was powerful.

11:45 It could tell you about the world you live in.

11:49 But reason could only tell you

11:50 about the particulars of the world you live in.

11:54 To abstract higher,

11:56 to think that you found a particular example

12:00 in the created order.

12:03 And then abstracting higher to suggest

12:05 that there might be a designer behind all of that

12:08 was a step too far according to William of Occam.

12:11 For William of Occam, you could simply use reason

12:14 to describe the world that was apparent to your senses.

12:19 And that's as far as reason could go.

12:21 In fact, in a particular discussion on Thomas Aquinas,

12:25 William of Occam says,

12:27 \"You might be able to suggest

12:30 But that's as far as you can't go, you can go.

12:34 You can't prove God exists and you certainly can't prove that there's just one God.

12:40 All of that, that stuff that Thomas Aquinas was so confident you could prove, William

12:45 of Occam says, \"All belongs to the realm of faith.

12:48 It can only be believed, and in believing you could then know it.\"

12:53 While William of Occam is kind of a controversial figure in the history of philosophy and intellectual

13:00 generally, in many ways, starts a new tradition that resembles maybe a bit of

13:06 Tertullian's approach to things but has its own particular nuances. Again, for

13:11 William, reason was powerful and it could tell you about the world you lived in,

13:16 but its end was very limited. It could only be used to describe our world. For

13:24 William of Occam, the scriptures and he would add very quickly the teachings of

13:30 play a priority in any thinking about what's higher,

13:34 whether it's God, the angels,

13:36 how theology should be ordered, and so on and so forth.

13:39 I bring up William of Occam

13:40 because in many ways he's a hinge

13:42 between medieval philosophy and thinking about faith

13:45 and reason and what will unfold

13:47 in the early modern period,

13:49 starting around the time of the Reformation.

13:52 More importantly, I bring him up

13:53 because many people claim that Martin Luther

13:56 borrowed almost directly

14:00 And indeed, you can find a lot of influence from William Vaucom and what's called the

14:06 Nominalist Philosophical School on Martin Luther.

14:10 When Martin Luther went to the University of Erfurt, his teachers were almost exclusively

14:14 nomulists.

14:15 In fact, if you read anything on Martin Luther and reason, you're bound to encounter historians

14:21 and theologians making the claim that Luther called reason a number of nasty things.

14:30 Frau Houda, even an enemy of the church.

14:35 And those are all true and legitimate.

14:37 When Luther, like William Vacum critiques reason, he's doing so in a very particular

14:43 way.

14:44 He's critiquing those folks, those thinkers in the past, that he believed had equated

14:50 reason with faith, who in many ways taught that one could reason themself into saving

14:57 faith.

15:00 was suspicious of using reason and philosophy to construct a comprehensive or a totalizing

15:06 worldview. He knew things were much messier than that. Luther, like most Christian theologians

15:12 through the centuries, believed that the Word of God that scriptures took priority.

15:18 Luther did not believe that the church and doctrines that were invented over the age

15:23 should be added to the church's teachings. In fact, you believe they should be stripped away.

15:30 But at the same time, Luther did not discount reason entirely, in fact, in his small catechism,

15:38 the basic instruction book for any Lutheran.

15:41 After quoting the first article of the Apostles' Creed, I believe in God the Father, Almighty,

15:46 Maker of Heaven, and Earth, Luther asked the question, \"What does this mean?\"

15:50 And response, \"I believe God has made me in all creatures, that He's given me my reason

15:55 and my sense experience and still preserves them.\"

16:00 still, God still preserves our reason and our ability to interact in the empirical world.

16:08 Elsewhere, he will describe reason as the master in the temporal arena. For Luther,

16:13 he will in a number of places call reason God's greatest gift to humankind in figuring out how

16:19 one should live, how one should construct a political order, how one should conduct civil matters,

16:30 later on in life, as Luther, like earlier medieval theologians, became increasingly aware of cultures,

16:36 in particular, Ottoman Islamic culture, cultures that didn't share the same assumptions as Christianity.

16:43 He also begins to express a favorable opinion about what we might describe as natural theology.

16:50 He says in one place that the universe cries out and bears evidence all around us, that every

17:00 made that they are designed to live in such a way, to move in such a way, all of those

17:08 evidences pointed to the fact, a reasonable fact that there's a creator or a designer

17:13 behind things.

17:15 Probably the most helpful way of understanding Luther's view of faith and reason is a distinction

17:20 that's made by not just Luther, but also a number of other Protestant theologians that

17:30 tradition. Reason is indeed acknowledged as a gift from God and the primary actor in figuring

17:38 out life in this world, in time and space. But reason when applied to matters of the

17:44 faith could be applied but had to be applied only in a ministerial way. They call this

17:49 the ministerial use of reason. When approaching the biblical texts, for example, especially

17:55 like the gospels where the four different gospel accounts don't always describe things

18:00 exact way and cause some difficulty for interpreters. And some would even go so far as to say

18:06 our obvious contradictions for the reformers, for a guy like Martin Luther, or for someone

18:12 approaching faith and reason the way Luther did, they would say reason helps us sort out those

18:17 things. Reason doesn't presume to know what is the case in the first place, and then force all the

18:30 But it is used from below.

18:32 It is used to help understand things in a serving way.

18:37 Faith, the gift that God has given you to trust in His Son for your salvation, and by extension,

18:45 to trust the Scriptures that have been given to us and inspired by God through the various authors

18:51 about the Old and the New Testament.

18:53 That faith is magisterial.

18:55 That's the master.

19:00 universe when it comes to understanding the things that are otherwise hidden of God,

19:06 scriptures and God's revelation gives us that information. Reason can help us sort it out.

19:12 But one reason in faith or the faith contradict for Luther and conservative

19:18 Protestant theologians across the world. Reason, philosophy, later on science has to play a serving

19:30 In this session, we've looked at over a thousand years of church history in just

19:36 about 20, 25 minutes.

19:39 There's a lot more to be said.

19:41 In fact, I'd encourage you to read any text you can get your hand on, on the Medieval

19:47 and Early Modern or Reformation Church.

19:49 It's a fascinating history.

19:52 The thing we should remember from all this though, is that the question about reason and

20:00 What will continue to play out in subsequent centuries is that there's not a consensus

20:06 that's uniform, but by and large, most Christians agree that reason does operate in the temporal

20:14 arena.

20:15 In fact, I can't think of a theologian who would deny that from this era we've been

20:19 looking at.

20:21 Where they did disagree was how much reason could say or what role it played when looking

20:30 the providence of God and so on and so forth.

20:34 And there's a number of different answers to the question

20:36 where reason ends and faith begins in light of all that.

20:40 But by and large, Martin Luther's position

20:44 and other theologians like him,

20:46 whether they were Lutheran or Reformed,

20:48 became the predominant position for Christians

20:51 in those subsequent centuries.

20:52 That reason was powerful,

20:54 but it was limited to some extent or another.

20:58 Now in our next session,

21:00 quickly describe another several hundred years of church history in just a few minutes,

21:06 but get to the particular question concerning faith and reason.

21:10 And that is the question of whether it really is reasonable to believe God exists or not.

21:15 We'll start with the work of Tom's Aquinas, as we said earlier, but move very quickly

21:20 into contemporary Christian philosophy about that question.

00:00 [MUSIC]

00:20 Welcome to session four. In this session, we're going to look a little bit more at church history,

00:30 reason can show or prove that God exists,

00:34 especially as the Western world,

00:36 as the Christian church moved into the modern age

00:39 and a new movement began to take shape,

00:43 starting around the 17th or maybe the 18th century

00:45 called the Enlightenment.

00:48 It was during the Enlightenment

00:50 where science began to increase.

00:53 It's during the Enlightenment

00:54 where Europeans began to question their traditions

01:00 being on the chopping block first. The story is complicated. It's a 300 year

01:06 history at this point. We're going to spend just a few minutes talking about

01:11 it. In particular what happened after the Protestant Reformation? There's the

01:17 obviously the long answer, the 15-week long history course at university answer,

01:22 and then there's the five-minute answer we're going to look at here. So

01:30 that follows in the 17th century, a huge war breaks out that wreaks havoc across Europe,

01:37 called the Thirty Years War, from 1618 to 1648. It pits Catholics against Reformed,

01:44 and Lutherans against Reformed, Lutherans against Catholics, sometimes Catholics working with

01:48 Lutherans against the Reformed, very complicated war over the course of those 30 years. But the

01:54 veterans coming out of the war, people like René Descartes, to ask the question after they surveyed

02:00 whole the war took on European cities, and especially the toll it took on life in the

02:06 17th century. They began to ask the question on whether or not there was a common ground.

02:13 People of a different Christian and maybe by extension religion, religious confession

02:19 could work from to solve their political and ethical and social problems.

02:30 What we might call epistemology or a theory of knowledge became the primary starting point.

02:38 All of a sudden, and it took a long time, but the church and faith and religion more

02:44 generally began to be marginalized in what was once called Christendom.

02:49 And you get people by the 1800s suggesting that God's existence certainly wasn't necessarily

03:00 But more importantly, for the subsequent history was not even important for answering

03:06 the big questions in life.

03:09 A case in point would be a Frenchman who lived in the late 18th and into the 19th century

03:15 named Pierre Simone Laplac.

03:18 He wrote a work attempting to describe how our solar system worked.

03:24 And after he wrote it, it somehow reached the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte.

03:30 said, interested in the intellectual life, but he especially reveled in asking intellectuals

03:37 and authors complicated and embarrassing questions.

03:41 So after he wrote this work of pure Simone Laplac on the solar system, he invited him

03:47 in for an audience with Napoleon.

03:50 And as pure Simone Laplac sat there and answered his questions, Napoleon says, \"I have one more

03:55 question for you, Bonseir Laplac.\"

04:00 which does a great job in explaining how the solar system might work.

04:04 I notice there's a glaring omission in the text.

04:07 You don't in anywhere mention God.

04:11 You don't mention God as the entity that put the universe and our solar system into existence.

04:18 You don't mention God as the one who providentially cares for the universe and the solar system.

04:23 Where is God in this text?

04:30 I have no need for that hypothesis.

04:34 In many ways, that's a symbol for what goes on in the Enlightenment and the subsequent

04:41 modern era.

04:42 European thinkers, even before Pieris Simone Laplac and certainly afterwards, were increasingly

04:48 trying to find ways to think about their world, the political order in the world.

05:00 and answering those questions without any input or drawing from any sort of traditional

05:06 sources.

05:07 And at that point, traditional sources referred to almost exclusively the church and its

05:12 theology.

05:14 We start to see Europe and across the Atlantic in a slower way, America slowly but surely

05:23 secularize.

05:30 role in European and American life,

05:33 plays a lesser role in public matters

05:36 and is relegated to the private realm

05:39 in what's sometimes called the fact-versed value split.

05:43 And the attitude is something like in the public arena

05:48 and all those things we negotiate over

05:51 that affect all of us in any given nation state.

05:55 Those matters, because people in any given nation state

06:00 philosophically and theologically, we've got to somehow push those to the side and figure out how to work from common ground to build our values as a people.

06:11 But those values in the public arena had to be informed by rationality and fact.

06:17 If you wanted to retain your religious belief, your theology, or what the cynics in the age would call your mythology, you can do that, but do that on your own time.

06:30 or so, or at the dinner table as you pray, but don't bring those private values that you have.

06:37 That can't be proven as coherent or evidentially supported. Don't bring those into the public arena.

06:44 Last, the sentiment was something like the religious wars of the 16th and certainly the 30 years

06:51 war in the 17th century happened again. And it's in this mix that we start to see alongside the

07:00 also the shift away from Christianity being the most popular religion to another religion

07:05 starting to take shape that's not organized in any way, but is more like a worldview,

07:11 a worldview called deism that held on to the belief that God exists in some way, but

07:18 only as the entity that put the universe into existence and then sort of left it to

07:25 run on its own.

07:30 to a worldview called materialism that's largely synonymous with atheism that begins to dominate

07:36 in the 19th century.

07:38 But in the midst of all this intellectual history or the history of ideas over the course

07:44 of the Enlightenment into the scientific revolution over the course of the modern era

08:00 best a matter of faith, including the sheer existence of God. And so the question begins to be

08:07 raised in a number of places by a number of authors and influential public, what we would call

08:13 today public intellectuals. Can God's existence be proven by reason or is it a matter of faith alone?

08:23 Now that question had been raised theoretically in the Middle Ages by Thomas Quinas. In the earlier

08:30 He develops five ways or five proofs for God's existence.

08:35 When later Christians and later thinkers are addressing the question of the modern era,

08:41 whether God's existence was a matter of faith or a matter of reason,

08:45 they'll draw on Thomas Aquinas's five ways.

08:48 They might make some amendments or interpret them in nuanced ways in light of their

08:54 particular context, but they're still very much informed heavily by Thomas Aquinas's.

09:00 work. For the sake of time, we're going to quickly run through those five ways of knowing God's existence as not just historical artifact, but as the foundation upon which new ways for thinking about the question have emerged in our own day and age.

09:16 So we'll look at the five ways as they were fashioned by Thomas Aquinas, and then we're going to move into the 20 and 21st century in the way Christian thinkers or philosophers have addressed the same question.

09:30 So Thomas Aquinas, again to refresh your memory, was working in the 13th century.

09:36 There by all our accounts, by all the evidence available to us, are no atheists in Europe,

09:44 in the Middle Ages.

09:46 There weren't really any serious skeptics that were loud and proud about it.

09:53 There may have been some monks who had who were experiencing what Martin Luther will later

10:00 about God and His care for you and so on.

10:04 But by and large, the criticisms of atheism were very much a theoretical thing,

10:12 which is interesting in and of itself.

10:15 It tells us a bit about how wide-ranging and how forward-looking, if you will,

10:23 these Christian thinkers were in the Middle Ages, people like Thomas Aquinas.

10:30 You can find his five ways for arguing God's existence,

10:33 or maybe we might say proving God's existence

10:36 in his summation of theology.

10:40 He argues as the first way that if you look at the universe,

10:45 one thing that you'll be struck by

10:47 is that there's constant movement in it.

10:49 Well, the planets move,

10:50 seem to be moving around the earth

10:52 as they thought in the Middle Ages.

10:54 On the earth, there's constant movement,

10:56 the tides rise and the tides fall.

11:00 A person who's thinking rationally or philosophically about that and how that all happens has to

11:05 ask the question much like Aristotle did well before Thomas Aquinas.

11:10 In many ways, Thomas develops these five ways for arguing God's existence from the

11:14 writings of Aristotle.

11:16 You have to ask, where does this movement come from?

11:20 And for Thomas, the short answer, though he's never short in how he answers questions,

11:25 is that clearly there must be some sort of first mover.

11:30 something, some entity behind the scenes getting everything in motion at some point in time.

11:39 Some people call this argument the argument for the prime mover.

11:44 The second argument or the second way Aquinas argues is an argument from the efficient cause.

11:51 That is to say though it's a very complex Aristotelian argument. In short says that if you look at

12:00 that there's all sorts of effects, which is similar to saying that the universe is filled

12:06 with all sorts of movement.

12:08 And so for Thomas, he says, because there's effects, you've got to account for it by a

12:12 cause.

12:13 And there might be secondary causes behind these effects.

12:16 You might be able to trace causes behind those secondary effects.

12:20 But ultimately Thomas says, you have to stop somewhere because an infinite regress is impossible.

12:30 Christian couldn't.

12:32 So there has to be a time when things began to happen

12:36 or when effects began to be caused.

12:39 And so he calls God the first cause

12:42 and argues that anybody looking at the universe

12:44 will see this.

12:46 Thomas' third argument is much like the other two.

12:49 It's based on an observation

12:50 about the character of the universe

12:53 and actually more of a defining of the universe.

13:00 We call this the argument from contingency.

13:03 That is, the universe does not describe its own existence.

13:08 The universe could not be the cause of itself.

13:12 There has to be some sort of not contingent being but rather a necessary being that exists

13:19 before or outside of the spatial temporal world.

13:30 efficient causes and the argument from contingency are all, in many ways, what we

13:36 would call generally cosmological arguments. They work from, unlike St. Anne's films,

13:42 ontological proof based on a philosophical reasoning about the definition of who God

13:48 is or what he is, they work from evidence and presumably neutral evidence to a larger conclusion.

14:00 will shift in the thinking about the question of God's existence that takes place in the

14:04 13th century and will continue even up until our own day and age.

14:10 The fourth argument in Thomas' five ways is the argument from the gradation of perfection.

14:19 And it's actually more of a, you might say, a platonic type of argument.

14:30 in our world, we notice there are some things

14:32 that are better than other things.

14:34 And we have this notion that there is the perfect

14:38 and then there are things that are good.

14:41 There are some things that are worse than good

14:43 and then there's the worst.

14:44 So there's this gradation of the being of perfection,

14:47 if you will.

14:49 So that should cause one to ask the question,

14:52 where do we get this notion of the perfect from?

15:00 then really do these categories of good and better and best and worse and the worst make any sense.

15:09 If there is no perfection, everything is relative.

15:13 And unlike William Vakim after Thomas Aquinas, Thomas is not comfortable with a relativistic world.

15:21 So Thomas says, again, following platonic reasoning, that we can envision the perfect that we have a constant

15:30 concept that there is something that is perfect suggests that it really does exist. Everything in

15:39 our, the world we encounter with our senses, we know isn't perfect. Yet we think that there is

15:44 something perfect. It's something higher. And for Thomas, that thing that is, or that entity that

15:49 is perfect is synonymous with God. The last argument that Thomas makes is sometimes called

15:54 the teleological argument, which means the thing, the end for which things have been made or the

16:00 or what they're destined for.

16:03 And for Aquinas, like his cosmological arguments,

16:06 he says, if you look at the universe,

16:07 things are designed for certain purposes.

16:12 If you look at the acorn,

16:15 its purpose is not just to be an acorn

16:17 to lay in the ground, but rather has a greater purpose.

16:20 It grows into something much larger than itself.

16:23 Its total purpose is to become an oak tree.

16:30 for Thomas, he thinks that all things have a telos in time and space. He can make that

16:37 assumption because that's the assumption of the age. It's a very much a platonic assumption,

16:42 but also prominent in the thinking of Aristotle. And in Thomas' day and age,

16:47 Aristotle was the philosopher or the ideas that were replacing old platonic ideas.

17:00 called today various cosmological arguments

17:03 that is based on the observation of the universe

17:06 as a whole and the argument from the gradation

17:11 of perfection, which we might call a morgue argument,

17:14 that we're already fashioned in the 13th century.

17:17 You can find their roots way back in the 4th century BC

17:21 in the thinking of Aristotle,

17:22 though from a very different vantage point,

17:25 a vantage point of Greek paganism.

17:30 going to take shape and be refashioned for a modern context, both in the enlightenment

17:35 but even into our own day and age.

17:38 The question of God's existence and whether it can be demonstrated by reason or not is

17:44 alive and well even into our own day and age.

17:46 And thinkers who have taken on that question in what's oftentimes called the philosopher

17:51 religion, where this question has become one of the primary questions have been around

18:00 As we work towards closing this session, I wanted to mention two very modern thinkers,

18:05 one from the 20th century and one of 21st century thinker who have addressed the same

18:09 question that Thomas Aquinas proposed theoretically in his own day and age.

18:15 The first is the famous C.S. Lewis.

18:19 And if you've read mere Christianity, you've encountered this argument already.

18:24 It's the argument for morality.

18:30 And probably two hours talking about this argument, in short, the way it works is C.S. Lewis argues,

18:38 if you observe the ways human beings behave, you'll notice that even though someone might

18:46 describe themselves as a moral relativist, as if morality is absolutely and everywhere

18:51 relative, when push comes to shove, they will object when you treat them poorly, when

19:00 university courses when you punch somebody in the throat.

19:03 They're going to object as if that was objectively wrong.

19:08 They might think that everything else is relative,

19:10 but when it comes to the rubber hitting the road,

19:13 everybody ultimately objects to some things on some presumed objective moral basis.

19:20 And so for C.S. Lewis and other thinkers who argue from the moral argument,

19:25 that begs the question,

19:30 or are the principles that inform our morality

19:33 in some way extent?

19:35 Do they really exist in an immaterial way

19:38 in an objective way?

19:40 And if they don't, you do fall prey

19:43 to the problem of relativism,

19:45 where it's basically might makes right,

19:47 and we define morality, how we want for our time

19:51 in our place, but that might be replaced at another time.

19:54 And it certainly means we're hampered

20:00 For example, the overused example of national socialism or Nazism in the 1930s and 40s,

20:09 who believed that they were in the moral right because they had decided as a collective

20:13 majority to exterminate a whole population in their nation.

20:18 So C.S. Lewis argued that even though cultures across the world disagree on the particulars

20:30 work from the premise that there's a basis for morality, an objective basis.

20:36 So C.S. Lewis would reason that while it's true that if you take account of all the cultures

20:42 around the world, there'll be vast disagreements about particulars at what constitutes the

20:49 moral good.

20:50 At the same time, those cultures and civilizations that disagree on particulars all operate

21:00 foundation from which we reason about moral things. And that begs the question, where does this immaterial

21:12 objective basis for morality come? Why is it that even though somebody might be a

21:18 relativist in all things, they know in their heart, as if it's been put on their heart,

21:24 that some things are just wrong. So for C.S. Lewis, the problem is if there is an objective basis

21:30 moral law or if there is a moral law in the universe that's immaterial that cannot be

21:36 accounted for from atheistic reasoning which is materialistic reasoning. There has to be some

21:42 sort of moral law giver. It's that moral law giver we call God. Now as a brief aside in his work

21:50 mere Christianity, Lewis will say just because you've persuaded somebody that there must be a

22:00 doesn't mean you've gotten anywhere close or to Christianity proper yet.

22:04 That's a topic for a later session. Now, one more very contemporary thinker,

22:09 a man named William Lane Craig, has put forward a new version of the cosmological argument that

22:16 Thomas Aquinas fashioned in three different ways back in the 13th century. Only, he's added

22:21 an additional insight into it, and he calls it the Calam cosmological argument.

22:30 It consists of two premises and then a conclusion that follows deductively from those premises.

22:38 The first premise is whatever begins to exist.

22:41 That is not what exists, but whatever begins to exist has a cause, which is a premise that

22:47 is the basic assumption behind probably the majority of natural science.

23:00 David Hume said, \"I never suggested something so absurd that effects can arise without a cause.\"

23:09 And that assumption is still underpinning science. In fact, as we look about our universe and as we

23:15 seek to understand our universe in even more discrete and particular ways, it's underpinned

23:23 by this assumption that we can explain that by finding the causes behind things. So it's a,

23:30 first premise and it's a good solid,

23:33 almost universally agreed to premise.

23:36 The second premise or minor premise is

23:39 the universe began to exist.

23:41 This is also, it's not as universally accepted,

23:43 but by and large in the Western world,

23:46 especially in light of the discoveries of the 20th century

23:49 of the Big Bang Theory that says

23:52 that the universe had a beginning effectively,

23:56 even though there's lots of disagreements

24:00 The universe did at a certain time and certain place pop into existence.

24:06 So the universe had an existence, is a good minor premise, a premise that's ascended to

24:13 by modern science.

24:15 The conclusion that follows, both by way of deduction and in terms of its logical validity,

24:23 as well as its truthfulness is that the universe has a cause.

24:30 that there are two options here, in accordance with modern scientific thinking.

24:36 The first option is that cause is something immaterial, something that proceeds that is

24:42 before the universe itself, which most would call God.

24:47 Another scientific hypothesis that's put forward only recently is the multiverse theory,

24:51 that we've got to rule out an immaterial cause, a cause like God, because science has to abide

25:00 This assumption that everything has to be accounted for by appealing to material causes.

25:05 And so they'll say the best option is to posit that we might live in the universe that

25:12 sits or resides along an ensemble of universes.

25:15 And maybe one of those universes gave birth to our universe.

25:18 But effectively that just sort of pushes the answer or the problem further down the line

25:24 because then you have to explain those other universes.

25:30 valid. It's also true as a matter of the force of deductive logic. The problem, the reason why people

25:38 don't ascend to it is not because of evidence or any sort of fallacy in his reasoning, but because

25:46 of the dogma of not science, but scientism, which says that all questions, material, physical,

26:00 and can be ultimately, though they might not be yet.

26:04 They will ultimately and should be resolved

26:06 by the scientific method.

26:09 We're going to get into in our next session

26:12 that particular issue, the issue of,

26:15 or the question does science rule out

26:17 or has science buried as some have put it, buried God

26:21 and made religion, and certainly in our case,

26:24 Christianity irrelevant.

26:27 We'll see you next time.

26:30 [MUSIC PLAYING]