Faith and Reason: Is Christianity Rational? | Dr. Don Deal
Download MP3Welcome to Paratus, the broadcast ministry of Veritas International University. Paratus seeks to help Christians develop a biblical worldview, preparing believers to think scripturally and soundly about the Christian faith and our culture. To learn more about Veritas International University, visit our website at ves.edu. That's ves.edu.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to Paratus, where we defend and discuss unchanging truth and changing times. I'm your host, Betzner. Joining me today on the podcast is Doctor. Don Deal, Christian apologist, scholar, and director of classical apologetics at Norm Geisler International Ministries. Welcome, Don.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you for having me, Luke. I'm I'm excited to be here. I've listened to the podcast many times and learned a lot through it.
Speaker 2:Well, we're glad to have you. And just so that our audience and you know, we're continuing our season on Paratus, turning our attention to science and the Christian faith. We'll be using doctors Holden, Demski, and Luskin's book, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, as our text. Last week with Drs. Casey Luskin and Jonathan McClatchy, we explored the relationship between faith and science.
Speaker 2:Today, however, we're going to explore the questions surrounding the idea of how we understand the relationship between faith and reason. However, before we begin our discussion, Don, let me have you say a bit about yourself and your work for the benefit of our audience.
Speaker 3:Okay. Well, Luke, just to give you a brief background, I was raised in what was basically an atheistic home. My father died when I was three, and my mother gave up on any thoughts of going to a church. So I was raised with science and science fiction books around the house. That's all I read growing up.
Speaker 3:Lead you into kind of a materialist worldview, but, I still got managed to meet a man who led me to the Lord, got saved when I was 16, went to college, decided that going to church was boring, and left. I applied for and became a naval aviator, a navy pilot. I did that for twelve years. And then after that, was a commercial airline pilot for another twenty five years. I spent my formative years and my flying career focused on science because aircraft fly very well because of the science and engineering.
Speaker 3:And that was my interest and my focus. But beyond that, I wanted to understand how the world worked. That's why I studied science so much. I had become a Christian when I was 16, but I didn't really get serious about going to church till God called me back to the church when I was about 35. And I began to want to know more about him and how to serve him.
Speaker 3:During my time flying for the airline, I earned two master's degrees, one in biblical theological studies and one in Christian apologetics. And then I took early retirement and got a PhD. And for the last thirteen years, I've been working with Doctor. David Geisler and the Norm Geisler International Ministries. And most importantly, I've taught scientific apologetics at Veritas International University for the last five years.
Speaker 2:Well, Don, that is definitely a really interesting path to where we're at now. And that's clearly provided you with a lot of expertise to be able to speak to this subject. I really appreciate you introducing that, sharing a little bit about yourself and how the Lord brought you to this place before we jump in and start talking about some stuff that your expertise uniquely contributes to. So the first way that we want to sort of bridge into this is talking about faith and reason working together. It's the classic enlightenment, post enlightenment kind of thing here where faith and reason are allegedly opposed to one another.
Speaker 2:But let's talk about the actual relationship, not just the stereotype. How do faith and reason work together?
Speaker 3:Okay. So we got two hours to discuss this, Luke. This is a fascinating topic, and we could go on forever, but I'll try to keep it somewhat brief. First I think we need to know of first important point is that faith and reason are not the same thing but neither are they entirely separate. Reasons helps us understand what's true and whether a belief is intellectually justified.
Speaker 3:Faith involves trusting and committing ourselves to what God has revealed is true. In other words, reason can lead us to the threshold of faith, but faith is what leads us through the door and beyond what reason alone can discover. And so reason, number one reason can help us know that faith is reasonable. We're not simply believing because we believe. So as a Christian, we can reason from effects in the world to the necessity of a God beyond the world, a creator beyond.
Speaker 3:So we'd say, the universe has a cause. We'd say the universe is not self explanatory. It doesn't explain itself. We could say we could reason from objective moral values existing to how can they exist. We can look at the order and design of the universe, which you'll be exploring further in the next several weeks and say what best explains the reason and design.
Speaker 3:And we could also, this is a popular one among many Christians is that we could say that rationality, our ability to reason is better explained if there's a rational cause than an immaterial, non rational cause. And all these arguments we can use to establish a belief in God is reasonable. And the second point about reason and faith is that reason prepares the way for revelation. Believe that God became incarnate in Jesus Christ and that Christ rose from the dead. Well, the first one, God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, if we just sat and reasoned about it from now till doomsday, we could come to different conclusions.
Speaker 3:That's a matter of divine revelation. But the Christ rose from the dead, that's a matter of historical investigation. And so we could look at it this way. There's reasons, reasons leap to believe that God exists. If God exists, revelation is possible.
Speaker 3:When someone claims to reveal something from God, it can be authenticated such as if somebody says God's giving me this message to give to you and here's a miracle that only God could do to go with it then you're justified to believe that that person's message is from God if the miracle occurs and therefore we get this is a very condensed version of the 12 steps that show Christianity is true. But from those we can justifiably believe that Christianity is true. And the other end of the spectrum started from the other direction, faith accepts and trust what God has revealed. God's revealed himself through scripture and through revelation, general revelation in nature and through scripture. So that's a special revelation.
Speaker 3:And Hebrews eleven:one says, God faith is confidence. What is hope for and conviction concerning things not seen? Doesn't mean believing something without reason. Our our faith is trust based upon God's character and his revealed truth. I cannot personally observe the resurrection of Jesus, but when I look at the changed lives of the disciples, the empty tomb, the origins of the resurrection proclamation, reason is what gives me the ability to evaluate that evidence.
Speaker 3:Faith then involves trusting the truth that God has revealed through Christ. And I think it's an important logical point here. Even the act of believing involves reason. And this is where that whole canard from the you just mentioned is shown to be wrong. Before I can believe that something is true, I must have some understanding of what that proposition means.
Speaker 3:I can't believe something. Well, Thomas Aquinas said, and I'm paraphrasing here that the cannot accept or the heart cannot accept what the mind has rejected. If you think something's complete nonsense, then you're not going to put your heart and faith into it. So I'll brief it up, summarize it real quickly here. The Christian faith is not, I believe, even though there's no reason to believe.
Speaker 3:I think about Mark Twain and his, believe what I know ain't so. It's rather I have sufficient reason to believe and therefore I trust myself to what I believe is true. And I just want to make sure we get really deeply into this. Neither faith nor reason are isolated. They're not you know, if you look at a Venn diagram that you get the two circles, there's actually an overlap between the two circles.
Speaker 3:They're not coextensive. They don't cover each other, but there was an overlap there. And if they were separate, then the rationalism side would say, I believe only what human reason can independently establish. Well, there's very little that we can establish as certain in the world. And we'll discuss that I'm sure more in a few minutes.
Speaker 3:And the Fideism, that's the Latin term for just believing, says I don't need reasons. I simply believe. But if if and many Christians do approach it that way. But that makes to unbelievers, that makes Christianity appear arbitrary and leaves Christians poorly equipped to answer questions from them. So reason establishes what it can.
Speaker 3:Revelation tells us what reason could not discover and faith trusts what God has revealed.
Speaker 2:I love those breakdowns, Don. I think those are really, really accessible, and it really puts the spotlight on this intersection, which is faith and reason are not mutually exclusive. By definition, you can't have faith without thinking about what it is in which you're placing your faith. And if you have reason, there ought to be enough reason there in order to teach you that there are some things that you must vicariously accept that you do not have the ability to empirically prove. And that's not necessarily a lack of understanding.
Speaker 2:It just means that there are certain propositions that you're never going to be able to observe that you must trust based on the evidence that you can observe.
Speaker 3:You know, Luke, I believe that my wife loves me. If you ask me to prove that to you with deductive certainty, I could not. I could give you reasons, the evidences that lead me to that, but faith is kinda like when you get married. You may believe the woman you're dating or the man you're dating, depending on your sex, is the the right person that God's called to be your partner for life. You may believe that, but until you actually take that step into matrimony, that's a commitment of faith that says I'm acting on what I believe to be true.
Speaker 3:It's a step of faith to get married.
Speaker 2:Completely understood. And I think that's a great analogy. That's also a really good segue into our next question here. Looking at the relationship itself, we've established, I believe sufficiently that faith and reason do work together, that they are not mutually exclusive in their purposes, but they do have individual roles that cooperate together. So before we can delve deeper into that actual relationship between reason and faith, let's talk a little bit about what exactly is reason in particular and how should we think about it?
Speaker 2:I know that's sort of a recursive question, but is there a way to properly think about how we think?
Speaker 3:Well, I would say yes. Unsurprisingly, perhaps I would say yes. I've given a great deal of thought about the use of reason, because I've been dealing with apologetics for the last twenty five year no. Thirty years now. Ever since I became called, ever since God called me back to church almost immediately he called me into apologetics and it helped me to understand.
Speaker 3:But we need to understand that reason is not an autonomous human faculty that stands above God and judges whether God is acceptable. We're not saying in that way. Reason is a God given capacity. It's by which reason human beings, because God has given us capacity, we can apprehend truth. We can evaluate evidence, make logical connections and draw conclusions about reality.
Speaker 3:So first I'd like to say reason is a gift from God. There's no good reason to trust our reason if you believe that we're nothing but matter and motion. If you believe in the unguided story of evolution, that is it's time plus chance plus necessity equals us, there's no reason to trust our reasoning faculties. If that's the only thing that's going on, and I'm not trying to make a point about evolution today, but if that's all that's going on, then our brains evolve to survive, not to find truth. If I believe that a apple is a evil excuse me.
Speaker 3:If I believe an apple is a gift from a fairy and I eat it and survive, it doesn't matter if it's truth or not. It only matters that I survive from it. Or if I believe a tiger is a demon. Well, it doesn't matter whether that's true or not if it helps me survive. So truth and survival don't necessarily go hand in hand.
Speaker 3:So first reason is a gift from God. And we say in Genesis one twenty six, 27, it tells us us that we're created in the image and likeness of God. Interestingly, in John one:one, it lets us know that the Logos, the mind, the rationality, the reason of God has been revealed to us in a person of Jesus Christ. I find that interesting because the word logic, it comes from that same root. That is the logic of God is revealed to us through Christ more than that, but at the minimum that.
Speaker 3:And if you think about all the great Christian thinkers of the past, Augustine and some Aquinas, all the great thinkers of the past, they didn't see rational thought as opposed to faith. Rather reason's a means of discovering truth. It's the means by which we apprehend truth. I'll give you an example. All things that begin to exist have a cause.
Speaker 3:The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. Now that's people might recommend that might recognize that as the Kalam cosmological argument. And it gets further as you go along that the cause is not matter, energy, space and time, because as science reveals in the Big Bang Theory that approximately according to science, about thirteen point eight billion years ago the universe began to exist. That was the birth of matter, energy, space and time.
Speaker 3:Well, then that means that whatever caused that is not composed of matter, energy, space or time. Immaterial, timeless. You get my point is that reason allows us to recognize the truth of the conclusion, and we can use reason in the pursuit of truth. At the same time, a Christian must begin with reality. Christian understanding of reason should be realist.
Speaker 3:And I say this because I have friends who are they espouse Zen Buddhism, and they say things like, to really gain enlightenment, you have to accept both ends of a contradiction. And I I tried to explain to my friend, well, makes all language null and void because if you say this is an apple, then I say, then I have to believe it's also not an apple. And so all words become meaningless at that point. It's an anti realist, anti rationalist. People from the Eastern tradition typically don't start by reasoning from the world.
Speaker 3:They start from reasoning from internal experience. So I and I assume you, believe in a correspondence view of truth. That truth is what corresponds to reality. If I say something and it ain't so, it ain't true. But at the same time, we gotta recognize as humans that we are finite, that we don't know everything, we can know truly without knowing comprehensively, and that we're fallen and we can make mistakes.
Speaker 3:People ask me sometimes about the different denominations and why they disagree on, various topics like baptism or the gifts of the Holy Spirit or whatever. And I say because we're finite and fallen. But reason can tell us that God exists. Revelation tells us what God has revealed about himself and faith trust in what's been revealed. And just to be very clear, reason cannot be placed above revelation.
Speaker 3:That's a very important thing to say. You cannot make reason the final authority rather than God. There's a big difference between saying Christianity must be reasonable and saying I will accept only what I completely understand. There's very few things in life and you could make an argument for almost nothing that you completely understand. And that's because, as I mentioned, we're finite.
Speaker 3:We don't know everything. We can't know everything. Our brains have a physical limitation on how much we can learn. So when we hear some doctrine about God or doctrine about the Bible of the world, it should not be irrational, but it doesn't mean we should expect everything God reveals of us to be something that we could reason to. And and I mentioned before the difference between fittyism and rationalism.
Speaker 3:What fittyism is just believe because you believe in rationalism is if I don't believe it if I can't demonstrate it to be true, I won't believe it. Well, that's the origin of the Unitarian church in America. They could not rationally reach the point where God is triune or had a son, that sort of thing. And therefore they rejected that and got rid of the trinity and became Unitarian because they focused on their rationality, their reasoning to be superior to revelation. So, I'll give you an example.
Speaker 3:Reason can be used to expose contradictions. God doesn't exist because miracles are impossible, someone says. And then the question the Christian should ask is, how do you know miracles are impossible? And they say, well, because nature's all there is. Well, you see what they've done there is they've assumed naturalism, that everything is nature in order to argue against supernaturalism.
Speaker 3:That's not an argument. That's circular reasoning. And, somebody what if someone says there's no such thing as objective truth? That's one of my favorites. I say, is that true that statement objectively true, or is it only true for you?
Speaker 3:It's it's one of those things that so reason can function negatively by exposing contradiction to false assumptions and positively by helping us construct a rational case for what's true. And it serves in the pursuit of God. I know that for me, my greatest moments of joy in worshiping God comes when I learn a new truth through study and reasoning. When I try to follow the thought of some of the great thinkers in the past and when I understand what they're saying, the joy I get from truly understanding through reasoning is something much beyond what I got simply by believing. And so reason's not the enemy of faith.
Speaker 3:It's not the master of faith. It's a God given instrument for knowing truth and evaluating what we believe. Revelation provides truths that reason couldn't discover on their own. So we discussed the natural, excuse me, the special revelation and general revelation. Special revelation is God's word in the Bible and general revelation is what we learn about God through looking at the world.
Speaker 3:So God Yes, go ahead, Luke.
Speaker 2:So this is really great information. And I want to come back to two things that you said. Okay. Because in laying this out and sort of telling us, okay, this is what it is, you also purposefully helped insulate us from a couple of pitfalls and you illustrated those, both of them. One was, it doesn't really matter if I believe that what I received from a fairy or what I perceived about a tiger was true.
Speaker 2:This sort of feeds directly into pragmatism, which is sort of what you just landed on, which is, well, this is true for you, which, you know, that's the Scientology thing. It's not true unless it's true for you. And that's what they say. But then the other side of this was the Buddhist approach or the Unitarian approach, which is I'm not going to try to resolve the tensions. I'm going to try to accept them all as a process of resolution.
Speaker 2:And this causes all kinds of not very difficult to imagine chaos. And it's interesting because all these religions are predicated on the idea that something is clearly not right with the world. That's the whole purpose of the formation of a religious or an ideological solution. And then landing on the idea that there really are no solutions that are solid enough for us to be able to differentiate between, we must simply accept them all and resolve tension by, you know, Buddha's idea, the erasure of self, which is what causes all the distress within the human being. Well, now you're just disconnecting yourself from good reason as a part of that to try to alleviate the tension that the exposure of different viewpoints creates.
Speaker 2:And how you brought those together, thought was very interesting. And I do want to move into our next question, because it really talks about the tools that we can use to help differentiate in a balanced manner to where we're not necessarily trying to resolve things that can't be, but we're trying to identify the things that can be and what's actually there. So there are, in the book that we're using for our guide, there's three types of logic listed. Now, clearly those are not the only types of quote logic or ways of thinking, but there's deductive, inductive, and abductive. And so these three areas, I'll let you break them down, give us some just very pithy definitions of what those would look like if you're writing it on a whiteboard for one of your classes.
Speaker 2:This is deductive. This is inductive. This is abductive. Something that our audience can get ahold of. And then let's talk a little bit after those definitions about how do these function in the process of the reasoning that we were just describing.
Speaker 3:Okay. Well, that's that's an excellent question. And I do teach a class on, logic. So I've done a good deal of study in this area. Deductive reasoning is big it's where you begin with premises and move to a conclusion.
Speaker 3:You start from something that's universal true and then you move to a particular truth. Inductive reasoning is where you start from individual examples and move to a general idea. So I'll give some examples of that in a moment. So inductive reasoning works the opposite way of deductive reasoning. And as I said, I'll give induct examples of that.
Speaker 3:And abductive reasoning is usually defined as inference to the best explanation. The first two types of reasoning aren't applicable in every situation. And so abductive reasoning says, well, what actually makes sense? What actually explains this best? And so there's different levels of confidence with each one.
Speaker 3:In deductive reasoning, if you deny, if the form is valid and the premises are true in deductive reasoning, then the conclusion is necessary. In deductive reasoning, if you deny a sound deductive argument which means the premises are true and the form is valid. If you deny the conclusion you are by definition irrational. Inductive reasoning, because it goes from individual examples to a general principle has levels of confidence. And so in physics they like to say sigma, standard deviations.
Speaker 3:How confident are we? And so, for example, when they said they discovered the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that gives mass to particles in the universe, they said we've crossed the five sigma threshold, which is when because you can't actually observe or touch these particles, that means that they're 99.99% certain that they found it. So inductive reasoning can give you very high levels of confidence but not certainty. There's certain and you can always deny it. Whereas inference is the best explanation abductive reasoning, there are plenty of reasons you can, depending on your background, how you're training, your mind works, etcetera.
Speaker 3:There are reasons to deny the conclusion of abductive reasoning, but you should at least give a formal reason and not simply deny it. And say these things because several years ago, I gave a gentleman a deductive argument that I thought this is really good stuff, and his response was no. I just I was just stunned. I I honestly, at the time, I didn't know how to respond. I'd never heard anyone respond to a deductive argument with no.
Speaker 2:Well, it sounds like he created yet another logical fallacy called the position through negation, did he not?
Speaker 3:Something of that sort. Absolutely. But I was, I had not been trained to handle that one. The one where they simply deny with no reason.
Speaker 2:That's an excellent one. And I love how you pointed this out because there's a lot of things that become sort of, for lack of a better term and not for a pejorative reason, tropes within the Christian apologetic circle. There's many people who know the deductions that have been brought to bear by people who did the reasoning to bring them to bear, but are bereft of all of supporting infrastructure necessary to really be flexible on how they apply. And as a result of that, when we're challenged in the church or in our faith or in our family, and we don't fully, not necessarily comprehensively, but fully grasp how those things were arrived at so that we have hold of the reasoning ourselves, Sometimes the outcomes of that, where we sort of trot that out in front of the world or in front of those who are struggling for answers, it doesn't necessarily land well. As we look at this, just to sort of peel back the layer a little farther, outside the obvious, or maybe even including the obvious, what is the best way for a person who's interested in trying to get a little bit more skilled at navigating the reasoning behind the things that we assert with these three types of reasoning?
Speaker 2:How did you gather that skill and what do you do to pass it on to your students?
Speaker 3:An interesting question. Yeah. When I was a sophomore in college, I took a I had needed a couple of credits so I could transfer to a four year college from a junior college, and I saw they offered a short class called logic. And based on my love of Star Trek in the nineteen sixties with mister Spock, I thought, well, cool. I wanna be like mister Spock.
Speaker 3:Didn't work out. But anyway, I was my that was my introduction to logic was just a a class I took. And then later on at the master's level, I took logic, and I learned a lot. There's a lot more going on with logic than people think on the surface. They use the word logic in a generic sense, but the technical meaning can be much more refined and difficult to achieve.
Speaker 3:So the book I use when I teach the class is Come Let Us Reason by Norm Geisler, of course, since I'm Norm Geisler International Ministries. But his book is an excellent introduction. There are harder ones and I'm sure there are some where there are more approachable ones, but that's the one we use that goes through how all these different kinds of reasoning works. And it has questions at the end of the chapter and an answer guide at the end so people can go through that themselves and learn how to reason, more correctly.
Speaker 2:So one more question on that. If you could, in just a paragraph or so, how would you describe the reason that Christians need to care about being able to do this? Outside of the scriptural clear, give a reason to everyone who asks, but on a personal benefit level, what have you seen in that in your own life as you develop that skill set that you can say, Hey, I can speak to this from personal experience?
Speaker 3:I can tell you for me, the big part of the motivation was Jesus' own words. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, your mind, and your soul. And heart and soul, we get really well in church, but the mind part, how to do that correctly, how to not simply accept things people say because there's some famous speaker and examine them and hold them up to logic and to evidence and to scripture to see, does it make sense? If you wanna prevent Christians from getting caught up in cults or getting caught up in a cultish environment within a controlling church, the ability to reason and evaluate evidence properly is a huge gain there. And also I believe it gives great advantage when we're doing evangelism because at some point during evangelism somebody's gonna bring up objections.
Speaker 3:And if you haven't thought about those objections and how you would handle them or you haven't encountered them, then you're gonna struggle. And so part of loving God and loving the neighbor involves using your mind properly.
Speaker 2:I love that because that's such a great way to look at it as a tool. It's personal benefit, but it's also missional benefit. There's so many different parts of this that just make everything about it bring a lot of robust behavior into the believer's life. And not just to the believer, even as a human property, it's a very valuable thing. So as we look at this, and we've been unpacking faith and reason, we come back to that old stereotype, you know, the faith and reason are enemies for one another.
Speaker 2:But I think we've sort of settled that that's really not the case. So why is that assertion something that just keeps popping up? What's the real controversy if it isn't actually between faith and reason?
Speaker 3:I I think part of it's just a matter of the human condition. We we're looking for certainty, and there are finite. We're limited. We're sinful. There are some things we reject unreasonably and some things we reject because they need to be rejected.
Speaker 3:But the question we need to ask is, will we use not what the question isn't will we use faith or will we use reason, but whether what will we believe and what reasons support that belief. You gotta bring them those two faith and reason into the proper relationship. Faith should have reasons and reason should be directed towards truth. And that's the key there. It's not faith versus reason, but truth versus error is the real problem and whether our what our faith is grounded, whether that is actually true.
Speaker 2:I love that. It's it's so practical. And and here's where I wanna take this, because as we've already talked about, this can affect matters of faith. But in the the hard sciences, of course, error can often have very physically catastrophic mistakes. And we don't often hear scientists speaking of this as well.
Speaker 2:This was true, and we fell short of that threshold, and therefore we added twice as much of this particular ingredient to this particular experiment and the outcome was X. And that was a terrible result. It blew up the lab. We don't often hear them speaking of that in terms of truth, almost as if there's a unnecessary disconnect. And I don't want to assume any motives, but
Speaker 3:If I can, I'd like to address that because number one, science proceeds primarily through inductive reasoning. That is inductive reasoning works this way. I go outside, I see a swan, it's white. I go, oh, I think maybe swans are white. Later on I encounter 30 of them and upon they're all white.
Speaker 3:I go, my confidence that swans are white has increased. Over the next ten years, every swan I see across The US is white. Now I have a very high level degree of confidence that swans are white. Never certainty because we can't see and know everything everywhere at all times. And then I go to Australia and I see a black swan and I say, ah.
Speaker 3:And so what a particularly in quantum physics, what they're looking for is not truth, but verisimilitude that is within the limits of how the reasoning works. How close to truth can I get? They don't aspire to truth because truth is something that they think is beyond them. And there's different philosophies of science. And one of the ones that, many physicists, hold to is that if the theory makes predictions that come true, then it doesn't matter if it's literally true.
Speaker 3:It matters that it works. And that's the pragmatic approach you were talking about. That's why that keyed in that thought when you mentioned it.
Speaker 2:Well, love that you spoke to that because I think that can help a lot of times, again, in the apologetic bubbles that sometimes develop within the evangelical community in particular, we can try to assign motive to the way that someone is thinking about something, not necessarily realizing everything in their training has sort of cut them off from even thinking about how they might think otherwise. And that it's always been sort of the path to whatever it is that they were able to discover and verify. And that this shouldn't necessarily require a change of modality, but perhaps a change of application. So if we were to speak from a place of faith to some of our friends who are in the scientific disciplines, and find them to be stuck in this fashion without it seeming like it's an attack or a judgment. What's the best way to sort of grab a hold of the end of that thread and pull them toward, well, I'll just say it, perhaps a more open way of thinking about thinking.
Speaker 3:One of the lectures that's interesting you asked that. One of the lectures in my class on scientific and advanced scientific apologetics is called What Science Can't See. And among the things are truth, beauty, logic. These are things that are assumed to be part of the process, but you can't go through, you can't do an experiment and demonstrate what truth is. You can't go through an experiment and say, this is what beauty is.
Speaker 3:You can't. But for instance, the human love, they've identified various chemical reactions that take place, various hormones that are released. And so, the last time I checked, they were explaining love in terms of three different hormones that are released, one causing bonding, one causing sexual attraction, one causing something else. But they were saying that's what love is. Well, when that scientist goes home and sees their wife and kids or husband and kids, they don't say, oh, I'm experiencing a chemical reaction right now.
Speaker 3:They experience love. It's called cognitive dissonance. I'm sure you're familiar with that term where you believe two things that are contradictory and you believe they're both true. So you keep them separated in your head and you just don't wanna think about it. So when they're with their family, love is a real thing and I really love them.
Speaker 3:And when they're at work, this is a chemical process going on and they keep them separated. And so, what I try to do is tease out the things that science can't see and particularly the example of love, because that's very personal and help them to see that there must be something beyond the chemical going on or else love becomes meaningless and all of life becomes meaningless.
Speaker 2:And I think that really puts a finger on something really important. And I know this is not necessarily directly slated toward philosophical things, but I do want to touch on this as a philosophical outcome when it comes to observation. And that is the willingness of an individual to take and compartmentalize their own human experience is sort of a necessary thing when they're working in an inductive area to try to control for bleed over of bias and confirmation of things. And then when that happens, just as you described, when they come home, their actual life may embrace any number of given things that they would never find to be appropriate in the lab. And perhaps in this way of thinking, is there a possibility that sort of open their eyes to that, that there's already things that they know to be true that are guiding their life, that's part of their experience, that aren't verifiable necessarily in the lab, but are nonetheless concrete, naive realities of their personal experience.
Speaker 2:And why wouldn't God and all that he's done and all that he has said to reveal be a part of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I've I've had discussions with scientists who are atheists, and we we I wasn't gonna tell him his science was wrong because he knows much more about his science than I did. He was a by evolutionary biologist. I think that there's big picture problems wrong with it, but I'm not going to argue details with him. And I think this is going to get a little technical again.
Speaker 3:But within science, there are realist theories and there are anti realist theories. A realist theory says this is what really is and you can test it. So in astronomy or in optics or physics, you design experiments and you test them. That's a realist theory. The theory of evolution is an anti realist theory.
Speaker 3:That is it's a meta narrative, a big story that explains data without having to get every detail right. And so if you say these details are off or wrong, all they're thinking is, okay, we'll work on that later. But the story is still right to them because that explains more information in their minds. And so the key is, you can't simply show a convinced evolutionist data and expect them to change their mind. That's the wrong approach because they're not looking at data in the way a physicist does.
Speaker 3:They're looking at it in terms of does it fit my story, not can I test it? So the key is you're not gonna get them to give up that theory until you have another theory to replace it that has better evidence. And I think when you talk to Casey and and William Timski, you're gonna talk about, I'm sure at some point intelligent design. And I think that better explains the data. And the key is not to simply beat them with information.
Speaker 3:Whenever you got a hardcore case, never ever try to beat them with information. Because even if you're correct, even if you're a 100% correct, and I think we are, they can still mentally put up a block and say to themselves, okay, I can't answer that, but somebody can. And they'll just hold on to what they believe. The key is to ask questions that tease out the ideas. If you ask them questions in a way that allows them to surface the truth for themselves, then they can change their mind.
Speaker 3:They have to come to the conclusion themselves. They can't accept your conclusions. And so to do it in a proper way, is to ask them questions in a non threatening, I wanna understand your viewpoint better. So I understand that the theory of evolution teaches that sex is simply something that allows the species to propagate. Under the theory, is there something that makes rape wrong?
Speaker 3:Can you help me to understand why rape is wrong? Because I really do believe rape is wrong, but I'm trying to understand it from the theory. Why is rape wrong? And so you get them, you ask them questions, not in a challenging aggressive way, but in a way where you wanna understand that causes them to think about it. And even if they don't respond immediately and they usually won't, that same biologist atheist I was talking about, we were just having discussions at a party.
Speaker 3:And when he left, he said to me, you've given me a lot to think about, and and that's all you can all you can hope for. We're planting seeds. We're removing obstacles. We're not there. Only the holy spirit's gonna change somebody.
Speaker 3:Not not us. Not our words. Not how smart we think we are. Not not what whatever magic formula we think. And and I do have a lot of people who want, what's the phrase I'm supposed to use that's gonna make a Muslim become a Christian?
Speaker 3:Or what's the phrase I'm supposed to use that's making a scientist, a materialist scientist become a Christian? And there's no magic bullet, nothing we do. It's a matter of relationships, and it's a matter of helping them to surface the truth for themselves so that they can't deny what they've decided is true for themselves. So focusing on moral issues, justice, you know, scientists are very interested in justice and righteousness and and behavior. You know, this president or that president or that congressman's evil and bad.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm not really clear. Could you help me understand from your perspective what makes that evil? Not not what particular acts are evil, but what makes them evil? Because, on a purely materialist view, evil is an illusion of sorts.
Speaker 2:I think that's a really balanced way to look at it, Don. I really appreciate you sharing that. We're gonna actually move into the next question because what we get to see in the New Testament is an employment of this very kind of method to a limited degree, because it's not exactly, you know, the Bible wasn't written to necessarily be the end all be all of how to for apologetics, but it definitely contains some very important examples of the deployment of reason that's very powerful. So one of our, some of our best examples of this are with Christ himself. Are there any, as we've talked about this, are there any examples that sort of came to mind about how Jesus used reasoning in presenting and defending the truth?
Speaker 3:Absolutely. It's the New Testament is full of them. I find this interesting because the atheist philosopher Peter Bergozi and I was watching a discussion between he and Alex O'Connor, the the cosmic skeptic and two unbelievers discussing. And Alex O'Connor said to Peter Bergosian that there's no examples of logic or reasoning in the New Testament. It's just about love.
Speaker 3:And I think that's it is about love. He's not wrong about that. God's expressing the ultimate love and and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for us is the ultimate, love for us. But Jesus himself, he he asked questions. He exposed contradictions.
Speaker 3:He drew logical conclusions. He appealed to evidence, used analogies, and risen from accepted premises to conclusions. And I'll give you an example of each of those if we have time. He reasoned from scripture, Mark twelve twenty four. Jesus says, is this not the reason you were wrong?
Speaker 3:Because you know neither the scripture nor the power of God. And then he's he reasoned from God's statement to Moses. God said to Moses, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. And Jesus said, God is the God of the not the dead, but of the living. And therefore God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Speaker 3:God is God of the living. Therefore, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob continue to exist supporting which helps support the reality of the resurrection. That is he was reasoning from a premise that his opponents already accepted the authority of scripture to a conclusion they didn't care for. He he used the reductio argument, the reductio ad absurdum. That is I'll give you an example of that where he shows the contradiction within their thinking, not the reductio ad but he breaks it down.
Speaker 3:He said Matthew twelve twenty six, If Satan cast out Satan, he's divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand? So the if you wanna make that into a formal logic, Satan's kingdom's a unified kingdom. K. Satan has a purpose and he has a reason and he rules it.
Speaker 3:Two, Jesus is supposed to be casting out Satan's demons by Satan's powers. Three, that would mean Satan is fighting against himself. Four, a kingdom divided itself against itself cannot stand. Therefore, what they're saying is unreasonable. And he and he further, just like I was suggesting, he asked questions that exposed faulty assumptions.
Speaker 3:He was he was asking them to examine their own assumptions. When a lawyer asked, this is in Luke chapter 10, who is my neighbor? Jesus told the story of the parable of the good Samaritan. At the end of that, he asked, which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor? That is he was leading the man step by step through a reasoning process towards a proper conclusion.
Speaker 3:He used the logic of cause to effect. Matthew seven, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. Matthew seven, also in Matthew, you will recognize them by their fruits. He he reasoned from observable effects to their underlying cause. And that resembles what we call inductive or abductive reasoning.
Speaker 3:And he argued from the lesser to the greater, we call it the afortiore argument. He said, if you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father give good things to those who ask him? So three step reasoning right there. Human parents, despite their imperfections, give good things to their children. God is infinitely greater and more good than human parents.
Speaker 3:Therefore we have even greater reason to test God's willingness to give what is good. And if we care for ourselves and our children this much, how much more will God care for us? And he he didn't say simply believe me. He said he didn't say believe me because I say so. Matthew 11, he said, go and tell John what you see in here that is, and then he pointed to his works, the blind receiving sight, the lame walking dead.
Speaker 3:He's looking at evidence. He said, I'm not doing the works of my father, then do not believe me. If I'm not doing the works of my father, don't believe me. But if I do them, believe the works. Any reason from, accepted principles.
Speaker 3:So he used these arguments for his own identity using a cumulative case for reasoning. And there's a fancy term for this we're not gonna get into because you say we're gonna discuss three kinds of logic. But he said the evidence from John the Baptist testimony, the evidence of his miraculous works, the evidence from the testimony of his father, the scriptures and Moses, these are multiple lines of evidence converging on the same conclusion. And so Jesus did not separate faith from reason. Reason was a means of revealing truth and exposing error but the reason is not an end to itself.
Speaker 3:He expected people to think. He asked questions. He exposed contradictions. He appealed to evidence. He reasoned from scripture, and he also demonstrated the inadequacy of their false explanations.
Speaker 3:What he's showing is not a departure from Christian faith. It's one of the ways we can faithfully pursue defend the truth.
Speaker 2:Completely agreed. And, of course, using those kinds of methods, one might expect those similar kinds of effects where people are gonna experience cognitive dissonance, etcetera. One of the things that we've talked about is sort of people who are already living in cognitive dissonance and sort of what might produce cognitive dissonance. But sometimes people shy away from the idea that Christians themselves are certainly no exceptions to the rule on this.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And Casey and Jonathan and I were talking about this a little bit last week, where sometimes those become silos, where don't do anything to destabilize my faith. And the scientists says, well, don't do anything to mess up my understanding of science. But we're going to focus particularly, since we're looking just at faith and reason as opposed to faith and science, but how should Christians weigh evidence while holding faith and reason together? And after that, we'll wrap it up because we've got time for just maybe one more question after that, but I definitely wanna make sure that we get to that one. How should we be weighing evidence while holding faith and reason together?
Speaker 3:But we got so much more to talk about, Luke.
Speaker 2:I know. We'll have to have you back on.
Speaker 3:I'd be happy to. I would say that Christians should weigh evidence with intellectual honesty and theological confidence. That is faith doesn't mean believing something regardless of the evidence, and reason means and reason doesn't mean refusing to believe anything we can't prove. We discussed that. The question we should ask is what does the evidence actually show and what conclusion best accounts for it?
Speaker 3:And we've talked about the different kinds of logic and how they work and faith and reason can work together by recognizing different kinds of evidence, provide different levels and kinds of certainty. Every doctrine taught at the church I attend or the what I believe, I believe with varying levels of confidence. Some things I'm absolutely certain are taught in the Bible. That is Jesus is the son of God and that he has eternally existed and that we are saved through faith in him. Those I'm certain on.
Speaker 3:Some of the things on the taught in the that are mentioned in the Bible, I'm not a 100% clear on. I'm not clear what Paul meant when he talked about you who baptized for the dead. Was he referring to something that Christians should follow? Mormons would think so since they like to call themselves Christians, but I don't don't think so. So how does baptism work?
Speaker 3:How does the baptism of the Holy Spirit work? I'm less certain about those sorts of things. I know that happens, but exactly how it manifests, I'm less certain. So the different kinds of evidence provide different levels of certainty. Where the Bible very clearly says things, I have great confidence in it.
Speaker 3:And so, I mean, life, we make rational adjustments based on the best available evidence. And I think most importantly, Christians should allow truth, not fear to determine where the evidence leads. I think this will help keep us from ending up at staying in our silos as Jonathan said. Reason can provide grounds for faith, but faith is ultimately trust in the God who is known through his revelation. The Christian a mature Christian faith, and I I harp on this to people in my classes constantly, mature Christian faith is neither blind faith nor skeptical paralysis.
Speaker 3:It's reasonable trust grounded in truth.
Speaker 2:And that's such a great way to think about this because, again, we were talking at the very beginning about how to think about how we think and to do so in a way that is informed by our faith and not think, again, use the word, that those things are fundamentally separate. They cooperate together. And so even though we could talk about this and so many more things that I would love to get to you with, I just want to wrap this up by saying we've covered a lot of ground, not nearly as much as we wanted to, but we've covered a lot between the first question and now, where we started out talking about the relationship between faith and reason. What are your final thoughts on or your best summary of how Christians should understand the relationship that we've been talking about this entire time, the relationship between faith and reason?
Speaker 3:Another great question, and I, I'll sum it up this way. Christians should reject the idea that we must choose between faith and reason. The Christian faith is not a retreat from rational thought. It's a commitment to truth. God created us with minds capable of knowing truth, and he's given us revelation so we can know truth about him that we can never discover through logical or looking through physical evidence.
Speaker 3:Reason can investigate the world, evaluate evidence, expose contradiction, provide rational grounds for belief. But faith is when we follow what we realize is reasonable to its ultimate source. Reason has limits, but those limits don't make reason useless. We can't know everything because we're not infinite in knowledge and wisdom. Faith understands and reason seeks truth.
Speaker 3:That's what we're looking for. We should pursue a faith that understands and reason that seeks truth. We don't use reason to replace faith. We use reason to show that faith is reasonable. And so we're not trying to when I do apologetics, I'm not trying to win arguments.
Speaker 3:That's an ego thing that I try to avoid. I'm trying to leave them away from the errors in their thinking and to the truth of God and from knowing about God to knowing God through Jesus Christ. That's what I do.
Speaker 2:Excellent, Don. Thank you for sharing that with us. Now as with all of our episodes, we encourage our listeners to dig deeper into the topics we've been discussing. So, Don, what books would you recommend for someone who wants to explore deeper the relationship between faith and reason?
Speaker 3:I have two books in two categories. First category is for more of the beginner, more of the popular level, Reasons for Belief by Norm Geisler and Patty Tunnicliffe. That's written on a high school level. And 12 Points that Show Christianity is True by Norman Geisler. I'm the director of classical apologetics.
Speaker 3:That takes you generally through the classical apologetics methodology to establishing the truth of Christianity. And for people who want to go deeper, Norm Geisel wrote a book called Christian Apologetics, which is quite deep. And he edited a volume which had many different writers and 400 something pages called Reasons for Faith in which many different scholars discuss reasoning and faith.
Speaker 2:Thank you for those recommendations, Don. Now did you have anything that we could put out there to the guests of where you're currently working? I know you're at the Norm Geischeren Institute. Is there a website, anything like that we could sort of direct traffic toward to find out a little bit more about your work and what you're doing there?
Speaker 3:Sure. The website's ngim.org. That's normgeislerinternationalministries.org. I have a profile there and we have many things going on there. We have a norm geisler institute where they can take classes and learn more about this.
Speaker 3:But I would like to say, I would really appreciate it if they would go ahead and enroll at Veritas International University. And if they want to know more about science and faith and how reason works and these sorts of things we've discussed, many of those are taught in my scientific apologetics class at Veritas. So sign up for Veritas.
Speaker 2:Excellent. Well, folks, this has been a great episode with again, Doctor. Don Deal, a Christian scholar and apologist, and we want to know that if you're enjoying what you're hearing on Paratus, we encourage you to help support our outreach endeavors. Simply go to ves.edu and click the donation button on the top right side of the page. All the donations are tax deductible, and they will help you help us think deeply, stand firmly, and live purposefully.
Speaker 2:Join us next episode as we address Has Science Refuted Miracles? With guest Doctor. Jonathan McClatchy. Until then, may the Lord richly bless you.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Paratus, the broadcast ministry of Veritas International University. To learn more about Veritas International visit our website at VES dot edu. That's ves.edu. Or call (505) 407-4307. That's (505) 407-4307.
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