I sort of wonder if I’m boring my current audience when I comment on religion. I think I gained most through political commentary. In any case, this is what interests me, so this is what I’m writing about. Besides, I didn’t start this blog to entertain anyone but myself.

I said I’d review the late Greg Bahnsen’s Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith, so here’s the first part. I’m not going to critique the first half of the book, as it’s essentially an argument on how to approach apologetics. What the hell do I care?

Actually, I’m going to make one comment. Bahnsen argues for a “presuppositional” approach. This essentially means that, in contrast to most apologists, a neutral approach is not taken. For example, consider the First Cause argument. This is reasoned without assuming God or the Bible. Bahnsen sees this approach is immoral. Now, you may be thinking that this would render apologetics pretty boring, but it actually does not. Bahnsen’s approach is to argue that the Christian worldview is the only coherent worldview and the worldviews of “unbelievers” are internally inconsistent. Immediately, some problems come to mind. Showing something to be internally consistent doesn’t mean it’s correct. It may be a powerful tool (obviously a worldview has to be internally consistent to be correct), but it can’t ultimately establish the truth of something. Bahnsen intends to discredit every other worldview except Christianity, leaving it as the only, and presumably true, option. That still doesn’t quite work out logically, but it’s certainly a powerful argument.

The review will consist of five, maybe six parts. Their subjects are Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian, the argument from evil, faith, religious language, and miracles. Possibly, I’ll look at some of the claims he makes about unbelievers a couple chapters before the Russell chapter in addition to those five subjects.

The first part of this review will consider Bahnsen’s chapter Apologetics In Practice, which discusses Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian lecture. Russell’s lecture is a refutation of some specific arguments for being a Christian. These include arguments for the existence of God (first cause, natural law, design) and moral arguments (remedying injustice, character of Christ). Russell finds none of these arguments convincing, needless to say. Bahnsen summarizes the lecture thusly:

(1) the Roman Catholic church is mistaken to say that the existence of God can be proved by unaided reason;
(2) serious defects in the character and teaching of Jesus show that he was not the best and wisest of men, but actually morally inferior to Buddha and Socrates;
(3) people accept religion on emotional grounds, particularly on the foundation of fear, which is “not worthy of self-respecting human beings”; and
(4) the Christian religion “has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”

I don’t quite agree with that summary, but it suffices. I don’t read the lecture as holding that (3) and (4) are arguments against Christianity per se, but it’s a reasonable interpretation, I suppose.

Bahnsen first takes issue with Russell’s moral standards, as is expected from his general approach to apologetics. It’s hard to disagree with him here. The fact that something in the Bible is morally objectionable by someone else’s standards is not an argument against it being true. However, Russell is generally arguing against the idea that Christ is the most moral of men. His point can be taken as simply that Christ is not necessarily the most moral by some standards. This casts doubt on the claim, forcing the promoter to consider an actual definition of what is or isn’t moral. Bahnsen, however, gets ahead of himself and misses a salient point Russell makes:

I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come.” Then he says, “There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom”; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of His earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, “Take no thought for the morrow,” and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought that the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians did really believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In that respect, clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and He was certainly not superlatively wise.

Here Russell is doing exactly what Bahnsen thought he should be doing (“Now, if Russell had been reasoning and speaking in terms of the Christian worldview, his attempt to assess moral wisdom, human worthiness, and moral progress — as well as to adversely judge shortcomings in these matters — would be understandable and expected.”). Christ said something, according to the Christian worldview, that plainly didn’t happen. Or did he? Bahnsen might claim that there is no inconsistency because God’s Word is by definition consistent (the appearance of being inconsistent being the result of the Fall or something). It seems to me that this requires a standard of truth that is not only incompatible with everyday understanding but in fact turns it upside down. The only way to interpret the statement to be true is to believe the second coming has passed, which is obviously not true. As Bahnsen would note, your argument has the unintended result of destroying logic as a whole. Actually, Bahnsen would probably try to re-interpret the passage into meaning something else, but that’s ridiculous enough not to contemplate.

The nagging problem which Russell simply did not face is that, on the basis of autonomous reasoning, man cannot give an adequate and rational account of the knowledge we gain through science and logic. Scientific procedure assumes that the natural world operates in a uniform fashion, in which case our observational knowledge of past cases provides a basis for predicting what will happen in future cases. However, autonomous reason has no basis whatsoever for believing that the natural world will operate in a uniform fashion. Russell himself (at times) asserted that this is a chance universe. He could never reconcile this view of nature being random with his view that nature is uniform (so that “science” can teach us).

This is Bahnsen’s central critique in the book. First off, let’s note the problems with the last part, Russell’s assertion of chance. Chance is not contradicted by uniformity in the slightest. I think Russell meant it in the sense that Daniel Dennett uses when he explains chance in a deterministic Universe:

Have you ever wondered about the apparent contradiction involved in using a coin flip as a generator of a random event? Surely the result of a coin flip is the deterministic outcome of the total sum of forces acting on the coin…?Yes, but this total sum has no predictive patterns in it. That is the point of a randomizing device like a coin flip, to make the result uncontrollable by making it sensitive to so many variables that no feasible, finite list of conditions can be singled out as the cause. (Freedom Evolves, pg. 85)

Just to point out, I don’t think uniformity means determinism, but the principle is the same.

Bahnsen’s argument that science, logic, and ethics are impossible without presupposing God is known as the Transcendental Argument for God (TAG). What strikes one immediately about TAG is its boldness. Bahnsen’s argument for its use concedes almost every other apologetic argument in favor of itself. It attacks unbelief at the core, unifying a few other apologetic arguments (you can’t be moral without God; faith in reason). He alludes to the conclusion constantly in the book, but does not elaborate much. The above quote gives one argument: materialism implies material chaos, not uniformity. That immediately sounds fishy, but it’s not that easy to refute. I found an impressive argument at IIDB against TAG and I will refer to it often in discussing Bahnsen’s conclusions. I’ll give a quick sketch of it:

Christianity presupposes that God exists and has a nature. This in turn presupposes that things exist and have natures. Specifically, the entities have Presence, Form, and Context. Science, logic, and ethics can be grounded in this basic assumption and therefore do not presuppose God or Christianity.

For example, this argument explains the uniformity in the context of materialism as such:

In a universe in which everything has a nature and ‘obeys’ that nature completely, and in which a system of objects has a nature completely defined by the Form and Context of its components, nature is necessarily uniform. If an entity with a given nature does X, then anything else (anywhere and at any time) with an ‘essentially similar’ nature (see Essay 2 on Universals) will do X as well. If an entity suddenly changes its behavior, that is because something about its nature required that change — if we know the nature of a thing, then we can always know what it will do, and what it has already done. If a universe is not MetaNatural, then uniformity is impossible. Therefore, Metaphysical Naturalism is the true presuppositional foundation for the uniformity of nature, and of the rationally grounded practice of induction and science.

I think this dispatches with Bahnsen’s objection. Moving on:

One stands in amazement, for instance, that the same Russell who could lavish ridicule upon past Christians for their ignorance and lack of scholarship, could come out and say something as uneducated and inaccurate as this: “Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him.” Even forgetting secular references to Christ in the ancient world, Russell’s remark simply ignores the documents of the New Testament as early and authentic witnesses to the historical person of Jesus. Given the relatively early dates of these documents and the relatively large number of them, if Russell “doubted” the existence of Jesus Christ, he must have either applied a conspicuous double standard in his historical reasoning, or been an agnostic about virtually the whole of ancient history. Either way, we are given an insight into the prejudicial nature of Russell’s thinking when it came to consideration of the Christian religion.

Now we’re into standard apologetics territory. Of course, the entire paragraph is nonsense. Bahnsen simply assumes that the Gospels are authentic witnesses to Jesus’ time. I guess that’s because his standard critique (whatever the unbeliever is doing presupposes Christianity) is hard to apply here. The Gospels clearly contain legendary material, rendering it very difficult to evaluate their truthfulness. Secular references are no help, because they are either too late to be interesting or a solid case can be made that they are late forgeries. Russell’s comment is very reasonable and Bahnsen’s remarks amount to nothing more than a temper tantrum against a conclusion he dislikes intensely.

Perhaps the most obvious logical fallacy evident in Russell’s lecture comes out in the way he readily shifts from an evaluation of Christian beliefs to a criticism of Christian believers. And he should have known better. At the very beginning of his lecture, Russell said, “I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently and according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian.” That is, the object of Russell’s criticism should be, by his own testimony, not the lifestyle of individuals but the doctrinal claims which are essential to Christianity as a system of thought. The opening of his lecture focuses upon his dissatisfaction with those beliefs (God’s existence, immortality, Christ as the best of men).

This is true, but I’m still skeptical that Russell meant those points to be arguments against Christianity, rather than comments related to the subject.

Similarly, Russell tried to take Christians to task for their “wickedness” (as though there could be any such thing within Russell’s worldview) — for their cruelty, wars, inquisitions, etc. Russell did not pause for even a moment, however, to reflect on the far-surpassing cruelty and violence of non-Christians throughout history. Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, Marquis de Sade and a whole cast of other butchers were not known in history for their Christian professions, after all! This is all conveniently swept under the carpet in Russell’s hypocritical disdain for the moral errors of the Christian church.

This is a mindblowing paragraph. Bahnsen pounds the idea of relativism constantly in the book, yet he can’t help himself here. Russell didn’t say Christianity has caused most of the evil in the world, he said it has caused evil. Whether non-Christians have caused evil in the world is entirely irrelevant to the statement. This sort of thing is endemic on the Right these days (Abu Ghraib wasn’t as bad as Saddam!) and it drives me up the wall.

So, we see that Bahnsen’s critique of Russell leaves much to be desired. I skipped a lot of it because I’m going to critique his arguments about logic (using the IIDB argument) in another part of my review (faith).