Transcription
All right, welcome to my Monday Q&A slash Ask Me Anything session.
I know this is the second one in a row that I'm doing, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm making this into a regular thing. However, it also doesn't mean I'm not making this into a regular thing. Basically, I'm just working off the feedback that you guys have given me and the responses I've been getting from reposting some of the videos.
Other than that, I think we're going to get into this because I've already started to get some questions popping up in my inbox.
Here's one: "Hey Wes, what is the moral argument for the existence of God, and how do you explain that?"
Let me start by saying that there are multiple iterations of what we refer to as the moral argument. The one that I think I would subscribe to consists of getting to a necessary rational source.
Basically, what I'm going to do is articulate something that comes from an individual named Linda Zagzebski in a work called "Does Ethics Need God?" I'm just going to be parroting a lot of that.
The breakdown of it is that if objective moral facts exist, they need to find an origination for their existence. If they do exist, the question then follows: where do they come from?
So, we try to break this down in a way that is hopefully more understandable. If it is still too convoluted by the time I get to the end of this, feel free to basically ignore this section and tune out for a little bit until I get to your question.
First, morality is a rational enterprise, and it's explored within the confines of rational thought. What I mean by that is that moral facts can be discovered through basic rationality and reasoning.
Now, this goes equally for things like mathematics or philosophical reasoning as well.
For example, if you see... you know what? Don't worry about that. Let me just keep going.
Secondly, moral realism is true in that moral facts exist.
Third, the moral problems and disagreements among humans are too many, depending on where you are and what center it is, and where you find yourself. That sort of thing—people disagree on all sorts of ethical conclusions, and those disparities are too much to conclude that morality can be granted simply in human rationality.
To parse that out, what's meant by that is that humans cannot be the source of moral knowledge because we are not perfect and cannot have perfect knowledge of all the facts in question. In other words, humans are flawed, and therefore grounding moral knowledge in ourselves as the foundation will always lead to issues.
I mean, history is full of examples of humans constantly failing to grasp moral facts and incorrectly and inappropriately performing moral duties. I think we can all agree on that.
We're also contingent beings, and much like how the laws of logic or mathematics aren't grounded in a human source, the reality of morality cannot be grounded in a human source.
Now, these are things we discover, not create.
So, with morality as a rational enterprise and moral realism being true, it logically follows that moral problems and disagreements among humans are too much for us to assume moral facts and duties are grounded in a human source of rationality.
In other words, if moral facts and duties are grounded in a necessary rational source, following from the reality of the truth of moral realism, then there needs to be a necessary source for those things to be grounded in.
What logically follows from that is that the source is what we call God. In order for that source to be rational, it must be sentient in nature. Non-sentient objects cannot be rational, and therefore the moral lawgiver is God.
To slow it down and back up: if moral realism is true, morality exists, and it exists whether I'm here or not. When I die, murder doesn't stop being morally wrong for me; it still goes on being morally wrong outside of my personal experience and existence.
If that's true, then there are moral prescriptions and obligations that are rational, discussed, understood, and obeyed by rational, sentient agents—i.e., you and me.
Then, it is logically impossible for them to be grounded in a natural source.
So, when a Christian says that morals find their foundation in the character of God, we're not just arbitrarily stating that fact. That conclusion comes from what would necessarily follow from the actuality of moral realism. God is the necessary rational source.
So, the Christian understanding of philosophy for what we call the moral argument is both a grounding for the objective good and bad, as well as making an argument that there needs to be a necessary rational source for said standards to begin with. It is therefore a coherent argument for the existence of God itself.
Let me just pull up a couple of quotes here. This is one taken from my presentation on the problem of evil.
This quote is from a guy named Michael Ruse, who is actually a fellow Canadian but is currently the professor of philosophy at Florida State University. In an article he wrote in 2010, he said this:
"Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothaches and marking students' papers. But it is, and has to be, a funny kind of emotion. It has to pretend that it is not that at all. If we thought that morality was no more than liking or not liking spinach, then pretty quickly it would break down."
So, morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though in reality it is subjective.
In other words, Ruse is acknowledging that moral realism sure looks like it's true, but even though it looks like it's true, even though all the evidence points to it being true, the implications of acting like it's not true are too problematic.
So, despite all the rationality and sensibility of moral realism, we need to pretend like it's true, even though we think it's not.
It's kind of like Richard Dawkins. He was talking with Stephen Weinberg at an event in Texas, and he said that the universe appears to be fine-tuned, but because we know that it's not fine-tuned, we can dismiss that as just the appearance of such.
Michael Ruse is doing a similar thing with morality.
Also, it's probably important for me to point out that what I'm not saying is that, sometimes when we talk about morality only being able to be grounded in God, atheists get mad because they think we're saying that non-theists can't be good people. That's not what we're saying.
Of course, atheists can do good things and lead good lives. The question is one of foundation and logical grounding.
Glenn Scribner, who works for a ministry organization called Speak Life, has this great example where he says that if someone is asking where they got their morality from, it's like asking where they got their pants from. They're not saying they don't have any pants; they just want to know the root location of where those pants came from.
So, the moral argument is addressing the question of the foundational moral duties and the foundation of those moral duties and facts.
In fact, if moral realism is true, then you would expect there to be moral atheists because moral realities exist outside of ourselves. They are objective; they exist outside of us; they're not subjective.
Even the objection that you can account for moral facts evolutionarily doesn't even remotely answer the grounding question.
At that point, all that would explain is how we, as a human species, understand and know moral facts or came to understand moral facts. But that's not a rational explanation as to where they're coming from or how they're accounted for.
That is the difference between those referred to as epistemology, which is the study of how we come to know what we know, and ontology, which is the study of the nature of something.
In other words, an explanation for how we, as a species, learned moral facts and duties doesn't explain the foundation for them.
I would contend that the only logically consistent ontology of morality is the fact that:
A. Morality is a rational enterprise.
B. Moral realism is true.
C. The moral problems and disagreements among humans are too much for us to assume moral facts and duties are grounded in a human source of rationality.
D. Moral facts and duties are grounded in a necessary rational source.
E. The source is what we call God.
So, what the moral argument for Christians points out is that moral subjectivity, in any way, starts to break down really quickly without a necessary, excuse me, a rational source outside of the natural world.
I know that may have been a little complicated, and I definitely got into the weeds there, but I think it's important that we understand not only that morality is grounded in the essence and character of God, but why that is.
Okay, let's look at another question.
Here's one: "Mark and John appear to be giving different times of crucifixion for Jesus. How is that not a contradiction?"
This is a really good question. First, I think it's important to define what we mean when we use the word contradiction because a lot of people, even very smart people, use this word incorrectly.
So, first, a contradiction is something that implies both the truth and falsity of something. In other words, it breaks the rule of logic called the law of non-contradiction.
The law of non-contradiction states that A cannot be non-A at the exact same time.
So, in other words, I can't be a married bachelor. Those two words mean the two words that the meanings of those words are mutually exclusive.
When we're looking at examples in the Bible that are often labeled as contradictions, we need to make sure that they are indeed contradictions and not just differentiations in detail or polarity and particulars.
God loves those differentiations in detail, polarity, and particulars.
So, the person asking this question is right in one sense. The synoptic Gospels—that's the term we use to describe Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—specifically all agree on the time of Jesus' death, but John is different at least at face value.
According to Mark 15, Jesus died at the third hour, which would be approximately 9:00 a.m., and darkness covered the land at the sixth hour, which computes to 12:00 p.m. Jesus died at the ninth hour, or 3:00 p.m.
But John 19:14 said that Jesus was still before Pilate at the sixth hour.
So, how do we square those facts?
There are two explanations for this. The first is that the synoptic Gospels are using the Jewish system of timekeeping, where the day starts at 6:00 a.m., and John is using the Roman system of timekeeping, where the day starts at 12:00 a.m. If you compare and compensate for that, they match up.
I'm sympathetic to this explanation, and I think it accounts for a number of details, although I know some who raise questions as to how it fits in with the chronology of the Synoptics as a whole.
In general, though, there's a scholar named Craig Blomberg, and in his work "The Historical Reliability of the Gospels," he proposes that this type of critique is actually imposing a modern, precise timekeeping assumption onto an ancient culture.
Both Mark and John are estimating and speaking of time in quarters. When we take into account the ancient understanding of time, both would be understood in their culture to be claiming a rough estimate of about midday.
I think this is totally reasonable. I mean, we have an incredible ability to measure time, and we have accessibility to those things. Sorry about that.
I mean, right now I have two computers, an iPhone, and my watch here, but that's a modern luxury.
In ancient cultures, they weren't necessarily concerned with that kind of timing.
So, a number of scholars have pointed out that when the Bible describes the sixth hour, you really have about a three-hour window of that event possibly taking place.
A better description of that time of day is like the equivalent of us saying morning, afternoon, and evening.
This has to be pointed to when we see in the Gospels and Acts how it uses descriptions like the third, sixth, or ninth hour to describe stuff.
This is what Blomberg mentioned before when he points out that Mark's third hour could realistically mean anywhere between 9 a.m. and noon, and John's use of the sixth hour, in the mind of the ancient reader, could have been understood as something before midday.
I think this also makes sense. I mean, I've used both the disparity between Jewish timekeeping and Roman timekeeping, along with the pointing out that exact times are a modern thing.
I've used both of those as explanations in the past, and I think either are entirely plausible and totally reasonable.
So, here's the wrap-up to that particular question:
A. This is not a contradiction.
B. Mark is not saying things like the crucifixion took place at 9:00 a.m., and John is saying it did not happen at 9:00 a.m. That would be an outright contradiction.
Instead, we need to make sure we're not anachronistically reading our modern understanding of things like time into the ancient document.
When we understand that the synoptic Gospels and John had a particular audience—Mark, for example, having a Jewish audience, and so he uses Jewish understandings of time, and John having a more Gentile audience, and therefore he uses the more Gentile timekeeping practice—I think that makes sense.
Or if we compare it to other classical literature and see that the impreciseness of time measurement was the norm, what we see could easily be seen as Mark rounding down to the third hour and John rounding up to the sixth hour.
Then we start to read the Gospels in the way that they were meant to be understood.
So, the question is about Mark and John appearing to give different times, and at face value, it does appear that way. But when we start to dig into the plausible explanations as to why that is, I think not only would they not be contradictions, but the differentiation in detail is easily understood when we read an ancient document not through the lens of modern thinking, but through the lens of ancient understanding.
Okay, question three: "I've heard your personal testimony in the past, and I know you believe in and experienced miraculous healing. How do you understand miracles, and how can anyone believe them in light of how Hume deemed them to be irrational?"
I won't go into my personal testimony right now; that's a video for another day, and you can find the description of that story elsewhere. Actually, what I'll do is I'll just drop a video of a short section of that here in the comments.
But let me address this second part that asserts that Hume has shown miracles to be irrational.
For those of you who don't know, David Hume was a Scottish philosopher in the Enlightenment period, so we're talking about the 18th century. Hume came up with this argument against miracles, and here's my basic beef with him: his arguments against the probability of miracles have a fundamental flaw in the fact that I don't think Hume understood probability very well.
Basically, Hume believed that there is essentially consistent evidence of completely universal laws in the universe that are never broken. In order to make that case, he had to ignore the fact that there are claims all the time of miracles taking place.
So, he was essentially making an assumption about human experience that rendered miracles highly improbable.
Now, there were other components to his argument, but that was basically the foundation of it.
The other problem I find is that Hume defined miracles as violations of universal laws, and since he believed that universal laws were universal, he was effectively defining miracles as something that couldn't happen and then concluding that on that basis they couldn't happen, which I think is begging the question.
So, what are miracles then?
Well, basically, a miracle is an extraordinary act of God. "Extraordinary" literally means what it is; the components define themselves as "extra," meaning out of in Latin, and "ordo," meaning arrangement.
So, etymologically, that is the breakdown of the meaning of the components of the words themselves. This literally means outside of the normal course of events.
That's what we mean when we use the word miracle.
The word that we translate as miracle in the Bible, among others, is "dunamis," which means power, might, strength, or mighty works, or "semeion," which you can see almost sounds like the word signs.
As a Christian, I believe that God sustains the universe by His power.
So, we could describe it by saying that the laws of nature and the way that God normally upholds the world are done in an incredibly consistent and natural way. That's what we discover when we do things like scientific inquiry and study within the natural sciences.
But God, being God, is by no means limited by His ability to sustain the world in an extraordinary way for His own purposes if He so wishes to do so.
We can see through things like the fine-tuning of the universe that it almost always obeys the laws of science. I don't think that scientists prove that absolutely 100% of the time, but those laws are followed and have to be followed usually.
I don't think we can establish that on the basis of science because, for no other reason, science depends on reproducibility, and miracles, by definition, are unreproducible.
So, hopefully, from that, you can see why I think Hume is incorrect. I'm not alone here. In fact, there's an explanation of all of this in a book by Ian Hutchinson called "Can Scientists Believe in Miracles?" It's a great resource, and Hutchinson is a legitimate scientist; he teaches nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
So, here's a good one to follow up on the details:
"Where did the chapters and verses in our Bible come from?"
The answer to this question is that both chapters and verses are relatively modern.
The original books of the Bible had no chapter and verse divisions. We created those to help us do things like read, reference, and memorize the text of the Bible itself.
Chapter divisions started to appear in manuscripts between the 10th and the 13th centuries. In Christian manuscripts, the more established chapter divisions pop up at the beginning of the 13th century in the Latin Vulgate, and then they're transcribed into later translations in the 16th century.
Verses, on the other hand, come later, and their origin is in a guy named Robert Estienne. The story goes that he came up with a lot of the verse divisions in a carriage ride from Paris to Lyon to meet his printer deadlines.
The reason some verse divisions don't quite make sense is that the ride was bumpy. I had a professor who actually said that even if that story isn't true, it's a good story, so it's worth telling, even if it doesn't account for all the facts of what was going on.
Now, I should also mention that the Jewish divisions in the Hebrew Bible differ at various points. I may or may not be right about this, but I'm pretty sure the Psalms in Hebrew translations, or sorry, in Jewish translations, are one or two verses off.
In the Middle Ages, you start to see chapter divisions in Hebrew manuscripts accounted for in the Hebrew alphabet.
So, there's evidence of these; I believe they're called "parashot" in the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can go earlier for other types of verse divisions.
So, I hope that answers your question.
I did see there was a question in the Facebook Live announcement from last week about dating in the Gospels. Let me see if I can trace that down.
Excuse me.
Okay, here it is: "Is it true that the New Testament manuscripts were written before 70 AD? If so, what's the best evidence that proves this?"
I'm going to assume that what the questioner is asking is about the original manuscripts that were written down by the New Testament authors, and the question, therefore, is about the date of authorship.
So, there are a couple of things to break apart here.
First, the question mentioned 70 AD, and for those who don't know, that's the date when Jerusalem was sacked by the Roman army. They captured Jerusalem after an uprising from a group of Judean rebels, and in the process of capturing the city of Jerusalem, the temple was destroyed.
The reason we come to the date of 70 AD, among other things, is that the Judeo-Roman historian Josephus places the siege of Jerusalem in the second year of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, which corresponds with the year 70 AD.
So, that's where we get that number from.
Some point to the lack of anyone mentioning this whole event taking place in the New Testament as evidence that all the 27 books that we call the New Testament were written before that.
I'm not totally convinced by that argument, if I'm honest. Total transparency: I give some of the books in the New Testament an early pre-70 date, but I don't necessarily think all of them are.
Here's the deal: very few, if any, ancient writings coming from the ancient world have dates on them.
There is a category that papyrologists call "documents," meaning things like receipts, deeds, and tax returns—official government documents. In other words, non-literary texts, and those often preserve the dates on which they were copied, just as we do that today with official documents.
We do have a few examples to point to as manuscripts that do have dates. In Roman Egypt, for example, it was common to practice putting dates on documents combined with the regional years of emperors with the traditional system of Egyptian months.
For example, there's a famous manuscript called P.Amh. 2.78, which is a petition to a centurion detailing complaints against a character named Hexus. In the actual document, it says it was written in the 20th year of Marcus Aurelius, with the Egyptian date of Thoth 30 at the bottom.
So, right there, you have the regional emperor Marcus Aurelius and specifically Marcus Aurelius Commodus Antonius Augustus, which is his full title, plus the stipulation of being the 30th of the Egyptian month of Thoth, which, in terms of the Gregorian calendar that we use today, would compute out to September 26th of the year 184 AD.
We can often know the dates of documents like these down to the very day that they were copied.
But when we're talking about Christian literature, like Christian manuscripts, they have no inclusion of such specific dates of composition.
It's only around the 9th century where we start to see some copies of Greek biblical manuscripts including dates in the form of what are called "kalavons," which are short notes to the reader from the scribe who copied the manuscript.
But the original documents themselves, what are sometimes called the autographs, have no formal date on them.
So, let me zero down on this question by just outlining why I do think particular New Testament documents are relatively early.
I think there are some pretty reasonable evidences for the synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—having a pre-70 early date.
So, I actually think we can work backwards from this argument and start with the book of Acts.
The argument basically goes like this: the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts have the same author. Acts, as we can read in its preface, precedes the Gospel, so it's part one and part two.
A big part of the narrative of Acts is the relationship between Peter and Paul as apostle brothers in Christ.
Now, Luke mentions a number of individuals' deaths in Acts, but he doesn't say anything about Peter or Paul's death.
We know from extra-biblical writings that are relatively reliable and can be corroborated that Paul was martyred in the city of Rome somewhere between 64 and 67 AD, and Peter's death is recorded as sometime just prior to or around the time of the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD.
So, both Peter and Paul are martyred in the same city around the same time, and I think given the concentration of these two individuals by Luke within Acts, it doesn't make sense for him to have been writing after the events took place and just not mention them.
For that reason, I think it makes sense that, given these facts, Acts had to have been written at least as early as 63 or 64.
If Luke precedes Acts, because Acts is the follow-up volume to Luke's Gospel, then we obviously have to date Luke before 63 or 64.
In fact, some have pointed out that when Paul uses the description of the Lord's Supper in 1 Corinthians 11, he appears to be quoting the words of Jesus, and those specific words of Jesus said in that specific way correspond with Luke's recounting of the Lord's Supper event.
In 1 Corinthians, even by some of the latest dating, it has been placed between 53 and 57 AD.
So, I think if Paul is quoting Luke's Gospel, then Luke could be as early as 53.
Now, Luke is generally considered to be after Matthew and Mark—he's a minimum after Mark—and there is debate about whether Luke knew Matthew's Gospel or not.
But that aside, the general consensus is that Luke comes after Matthew and Mark, and therefore I don't think it's crazy to put Matthew in the late 40s and Mark in the late 30s.
Now, why do I put Mark so early?
Well, if you saw my answer to the question of the longer ending of Mark from my last Facebook Live, I mentioned the theory that Mark's Gospel could have been a prequel to the creed Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15, that he was passing on of first importance those—the words he uses.
Now, regarding the creed in 1 Corinthians 15, there's a German scholar named Ulrich Wikkens who has stated that the material found in this creed statement in 1 Corinthians 15 goes back to the earliest phase of primitive Christianity.
If UK scholar Gerald O'Collins is right, which I think he is, he says that this creed should be placed in the mid-30s at the latest. Scholars place it at 40 AD.
So, if Gerald O'Collins is correct and the creed is mid-30s, and Mark is writing a prequel to the creed, then it isn't crazy to hypothesize it being written in the late 30s.
That's how I get that.
So, minimally, that places all three synoptic Gospels well within the boundaries of between 35 and 64 AD. That's how I would reason that out.
Now, that being said, I think John was written in the 90s, so it's not like I have this completely biased view of dating everything early just because I'm an evangelical Christian and I want it to be early.
I think some of the New Testament does post-date the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and John is in that specific group.
But let me finish by just saying that this is all a guess.
Now, it's an educated guess, don't get me wrong, but any dating theory is going to be exactly that—a theory based on the highest preponderance of the evidence at hand.
I think we need to make sure that we're holding some of these things in a relatively loose grip.
The reason these books don't come with timestamps, as I said before, is that here's what we can say definitively: the 27 books that we call the New Testament are our earliest source material for the life of Jesus and the earliest followers of Jesus.
No one truly argues against that fact.
The New Testament is a collection of documents that comes from the century of the first eyewitnesses. Whether they were written a year after Jesus died or 70 years after Jesus died, they were being written, compiled, and circulated in the time of the living memory of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection.
I think that, if anything, is clear.
So, if you want to know who Jesus was, you go to the New Testament. That's just good history.