Craig Sinnott Armstrong God A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist

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perience is no delusion, regardless of what the atheist or Taoist
tells him. In a recent discussion,41 philosopher William Alston
points out that in such a situation neither party knows how to
demonstrate to the other that he alone has a veridical, rather than
delusory, experience. But this stand-off does not undermine the
rationality of belief in God, for even if the believer s process of
forming his belief were as reliable as can be, he d still have no way
of giving a non-circular proof of this fact. Thus, the believer s in-
ability to provide such a proof does not nullify the rationality of his
belief. Still, it remains the case that in such a situation, although
the believer may know that his belief is true, both parties are at a
complete loss to show the truth of their respective beliefs to the
other party. How is one to break this deadlock? Alston answers
that the believer should do whatever is feasible to find common
ground, using logic and empirical facts, by means of which he can
show in a non-circular way whose view is correct. That is exactly
the procedure that I have sought to follow in this chapter. I know
28 God?
that God exists in a properly basic way, and I ve tried to show that
God exists by appeal to the common facts of science, ethics, his-
tory, and philosophy.
Now if, through experiencing God, we can know in a properly ba-
sic way that God exists, then there s a real danger that proofs for
God could actually distract one s attention from God Himself. If
you re sincerely seeking God, God will make His existence evident
to you. The Bible promises, Draw near to God and He will draw
near to you (James 4.8). We mustn t so concentrate on the proofs
for God that we fail to hear the inner voice of God speaking to our
own heart. For those who listen, God becomes an immediate real-
ity in their lives.
In summary, we ve seen five good reasons to think that God
exists:
1. God makes sense of the origin of the universe.
2. God makes sense of the fine-tuning of the universe for intel-
ligent life.
3. God makes sense of objective moral values in the world.
4. God makes sense of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
5. God can be immediately known and experienced.
These are only a part of the evidence for God s existence. Alvin
Plantinga, one of America s leading philosophers, has laid out two
dozen or so arguments for God s existence.42 Together these con-
stitute a powerful cumulative case for the existence of God. Unless
and until we re given better arguments for atheism, I think that the-
ism is the more plausible world view.
Notes
1. David Hilbert, On the Infinite, in Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. with
an Introduction by Paul Benacerraf and Hillary Putnam (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1964), 139, 141.
2. Fred Hoyle, Astronomy and Cosmology (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman,
1975), 658.
3. Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways: St. Thomas Aquinas Proofs of God s
Existence (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 66.
4. David Hume to John Stewart, February 1754, in The Letters of David
Hume, 2 vols., ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 187.
5. Kai Nielsen, Reason and Practice (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 48.
Five Reasons God Exists 29
6. Arthur Eddington, The Expanding Universe (New York: Macmillan,
1933), 124.
7. See James T. Cushing, Arthur Fine, and Sheldon Goldstein, Bohmian
Mechanics and Quantum Theory: An Appraisal in Boston Studies in the Phi-
losophy of Science 184 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996).
8. See John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Prin-
ciple (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 441.
9. See Bernulf Kanitscheider, Does Physical Cosmology Transcend the
Limits of Naturalistic Reasoning? in Studies on Mario Bunge s Treatise, ed.
P. Weingartner and G. J. W. Dorn (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 346 347.
10. Robert Deltete, Critical notice of Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cos-
mology, by William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Zygon 30 (1995): 656. (N.B.
the review was attributed to J. Leslie due to an editorial mistake at Zygon.)
11. See, for example, Abraham Robinson, Metamathematical Problems,
Journal of Symbolic Logic 38 (1973): 500 516.
12. See Alexander Abian, The Theory of Sets and Transfinite Arithmetic
(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1965), 68; B. Rotman and G. T. Kneebone, The
Theory of Sets and Transfinite Numbers (London: Oldbourne, 1966), 61.
13. See I. D. Novikov and Ya. B. Zeldovich, Physical Processes near Cos-
mological Singularities, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 11
(1973): 401 402; A. Borde and A. Vilenkin, Eternal Inflation and the Initial
Singularity, Physical Review Letters 72 (1994): 3305, 3307.
14. Christopher Isham, Creation of the Universe as a Quantum Process,
in Physics, Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding, ed.
R. J. Russell, W. R. Stoeger, and G. V. Coyne (Vatican City: Vatican Observa-
tory, 1988), 385 387.
15. See John D. Barrow, Theories of Everything (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991), 67 68.
16. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time,
The Isaac Newton Institute Series of Lectures (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1996), 20. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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