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Preface
There is a scene in a novel by Peter De Vries in which the parish priest and the village atheist get into an argument about religion—an argument that lasts all night and is so intense and evenly matched that, by the time the sun comes up, the priest has become an atheist and the atheist believes in God. In the real world, debates about religion tend to end less dramatically. Many of the debates that I have had about the existence of God have ended in a deadlock. Sometimes this is due to paradigm pressures; sometimes it is because the arguments are not presented or evaluated with sufficient care. But there have been other times when my opponent is open and rational and recognises the force of my argument but rejects it because it depends for its tenability on an unspoken assumption which has not been defended and which, it turns out, he does not accept.
What I mean is easily illustrated.
Suppose I claim there is good historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus. You will never accept that claim, however compellingly I make it, if you believe that the doctrinal content of Christianity is incoherent. “If Jesus rose from the dead,” you might reason to yourself, “then Christianity is true; but Christianity can’t be true because no loving God would send people to hell.” For our debate to make forward progress, I will therefore need to argue that the doctrinal content of Christianity is coherent. But you will still not accept an argument for the Resurrection if you believe on other grounds that there is no good evidence for the existence of God. “Even if the doctrinal content of Christianity is not incoherent,” you may think to yourself, “there is no evidence for the existence of a God to raise Jesus from the dead.” I will therefore need to argue that there is good evidence for the existence of God. But again you will not give serious attention to those arguments if you believe that the very concept of God is incoherent. “If these arguments are sound, then God exists; but God can’t exist because the very idea of an omnipotent being is paradoxical.” And that brings us to the proper starting point of the debate—arguments that show that, whether or not God exists, the idea of God under discussion is at least meaningful and coherent.
All this can be represented with the following pyramid. Note that the position that God exists, without any commitment to particular religious claims, is known as, “Bare Theism.”
This pyramid lays out the basic structure of what follows. To make sure that all the key arguments and objections are accounted for, I have assumed that my reader is an atheist of the most skeptical sort possible—not only does he claim that there is no evidence for the existence of God, he claims that the very concept of God is illogical. And so we must enter the debate on the ground floor with the coherence of theism. Only when that matter is settled can we ascend to the existence of God and, finally, the Resurrection of Jesus.
Rational Permission and Rational Obligation
To clarify my basic methodology, a philosophical distinction between “rational permission" and “rational obligation” will be helpful—a distinction that is nicely illustrated by J. P. Moreland in his book Scaling the Secular City.
Suppose you are expecting a visit from a friend at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and at 2:58 PM your wife tells you that a man is walking down the driveway towards the house. You are rationally permitted, says Moreland, to believe that the man is your friend. It might not be your friend, but it would not be irrational for you to believe that it is. But now suppose that your wife tells you that the man walking down the drive has a ginger beard and is wearing a police uniform and your friend, too, is a ginger-bearded policeman. You are now rationally obligated, says Moreland, to believe it is your friend. It might not be your friend but it would be irrational not to believe that it is.
With the help of these concepts, my task can now be stated in a few sentences: I must first demonstrate that God is a logically coherent concept in order to gain rational permission to present the evidence for the existence of God. And having made the case for His existence, I must then demonstrate that Christianity is logically coherent in order to gain rational permission to discuss the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus.
The following pages represent, in short, the best arguments for Christianity in their most logical and persuasive sequence. I have taken pains to present them as clearly and succinctly as I can and I hope that my reader will find them helpful.
Rational Permission and Rational Obligation
To clarify my basic methodology, a philosophical distinction between “rational permission" and “rational obligation” will be helpful—a distinction that is nicely illustrated by J. P. Moreland in his book Scaling the Secular City.
Suppose you are expecting a visit from a friend at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and at 2:58 PM your wife tells you that a man is walking down the driveway towards the house. You are rationally permitted, says Moreland, to believe that the man is your friend. It might not be your friend, but it would not be irrational for you to believe that it is. But now suppose that your wife tells you that the man walking down the drive has a ginger beard and is wearing a police uniform and your friend, too, is a ginger-bearded policeman. You are now rationally obligated, says Moreland, to believe it is your friend. It might not be your friend but it would be irrational not to believe that it is.
With the help of these concepts, my task can now be stated in a few sentences: I must first demonstrate that God is a logically coherent concept in order to gain rational permission to present the evidence for the existence of God. And having made the case for His existence, I must then demonstrate that Christianity is logically coherent in order to gain rational permission to discuss the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus.
The following pages represent, in short, the best arguments for Christianity in their most logical and persuasive sequence. I have taken pains to present them as clearly and succinctly as I can and I hope that my reader will find them helpful.