Further discussion

Explore some of the issues raised in The Possibility of Belief in more detail, through a series of supplementary discussions by Duncan Bayliss

This section includes some discussion of the issues in the book in more formal and structured terms. Everything here assumes that you have read the book or relevant chapters first. The additional material will then make most sense.

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What fundamental issues does the book address?

Here is a list of some of the questions and issues the book discusses or touches on.

The existence of God

The basis of knowing

The existence of the realm of the mind

The origin of evil

The ethical/ moral dimension of reality

The nature and limitations of scientific knowledge

The knowability of God

The truth about human nature

The basis of revelation and prophecy

The identity of Jesus and the basis for his identification as Messiah, Son of God and Saviour

Clearly each of these and other topics discussed in the book are the subject of extensive literatures and debate. As a supplement to the book, what follows is a series of short essays or discussions that look at these and other issues from a range of angles and include some more structured and formal language and formulation. None of these discussions is intended to be the final answer. Each of them is just another contribution that I hope readers will find helpful. But first it is worth a short detour into the approach that was taken in writing the book.

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The approach taken to writing

The Possibility of Belief

The book was written with the following principles in mind.

If you can’t explain something simply, you probably don’t understand it. Academic language often gets in the way of a clear understanding (for the authors as well as the readers!).

Many people in Europe and North America can’t hear a lot of what Christians are saying because they simply lack the background. Too much background knowledge and context is assumed. That background needs exploring and discussing.

It is valuable to be clear about where a Christian and a secular worldview differ, not least because it surprises most non-Christians how much of a Christian worldview they do actually agree with.

Christianity in the West has in recent decades offered too much emotion and not enough content. Heads and hearts both need satisfying.

Any deeply thoughtful Christian, if they are completely honest with themselves, will be aware that there is much they don’t understand. Christianity cannot offer neat, tidy, pre-packaged answers for everything and still be credible. But what we can offer is to join with us wrestling with truth. Belief becomes a journey, built on solid evidence, but an often painful and difficult yet infinitely rewarding journey. If we look afresh at the characters in the Bible, that is what they experienced too, which ought to tell us something important.

Christians have in the past taken the time to explain their thinking and beliefs across many cultural barriers in the face of great resistance, and as a consequence those Christian ideas have come to structure the very foundations of western thought and society. They are now once more under challenge, but they can be examined and explained and explored again because it has been done before and because what we stand to lose is too great not to try. This book is my contribution to that process.

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Some more comment on Design vs Random Chance

Chapter 10 Back to first principles Design vs Random Chance

Many readers have found this chapter a bit difficult to follow, so it is worth breaking the discussion down into some of its core elements.

In this chapter we get to the heart of a crucial question – Did an infinite intelligence plan and make all that exists? Or, did everything make itself or just always exist? If the evidence and argument lead us to accept that there is a God who made everything, then that immediately leads us into many other important questions.

Accepting the present scientific consensus that the universe had a beginning then we have basically two competing claims as to the origin of ‘life the universe and everything’: Random Chance and Design. 

This section continues an exploration of the adequacy of those competing explanations.  It is important to be clear on what each explanation requires to be valid.  It is also important to be clear on their limitations.

A Design based explanation requires a designer, a plan, intentional outcomes and the means to achieve them. (An Agent, thus a mind, a plan and the agency to implement it).

A Random Chance based explanation has to have none of those things.  If they have to be smuggled into the explanation somehow, it has become a design based argument.

Random Chance can be easily shown to have important limits to what it can achieve in two ways.

1. There are severe practical limits to what is possible within the finite amount of time and space available within the history of the universe. These set very severe limits on the maximum that Random Chance can ever lead to as outcomes.

2. There are absolute philosophical limits to what Random Chance can do because it cannot have a plan, any intention or exercise any choice. If any of those elements are needed to make Random Chance succeed as an explanation it completely fails because you have introduced concepts that require an intelligent agent which random chance is not.  Random Chance is a process leading to an outcome, not a designer or agent.

Thus evolution is a severely constrained explanation.

Random Chance has other significant problems as an explanation of the origin of anything.

1. It assumes there is something there in the first place for it to operate on and it assumes a structure to that something within which it can operate.

In other words, the universe is full of stuff and runs according to rules we can describe in mathematics.  So, where did the stuff come from and where did the maths come from?  An explanation of origins can’t just assume they are there and have nothing to say on the matter if at the same time it assumes the universe had a beginning.  As noted in an earlier chapter, either the universe or God has always existed; one or the other.

Thus it is an incomplete explanation.

2. It assumes that there are right or good outcomes which can be fixed and kept during an immensely long process of evolution rather than being constantly undone by the continued operation of random chance.  That is, it assumes rules within which it operates that lead to a particular and successful outcome. That can only be described as a plan of some sort, working towards a goal (technically described as an end-directed outcome or teleology) whether the evolutionist likes it or not.

That is inconsistent with seeking a purely naturalistic explanation.

3. It is a naturalistic or strictly materialistic explanation that by definition excludes all non-material reality including the realm of concepts and the mind.  Thus the thoughts of the evolutionist who claims to have found in evolution an explanation of origins are also excluded.

That is incoherent and unliveable.

Attempts to blend the two explanations, Random Chance and Design end up in a mess.

If there was a designer who intended things to be as they are now, why would he use a mechanism (Random Chance) that doesn’t work on its own and needs intervention at literally every millisecond to keep it on track to create and make anything so as to direct it to the goal of life as we now have it?

This cannot be a distant, occasional intervention since because Random Chance can’t create anything his involvement must be totally comprehensive, immanent, and constant through all time.  Otherwise Random Chance would always be thwarted by the limitations we outlined earlier.

In which case it makes God self contradictory to make everything as it is now by directing it to this outcome and to then declare it sinful and broken and to say we need saving from it.  Trying to keep God as the Designer with a plan but also random chance as the means by which he achieved it is an inherent contradiction. 

That is simply muddle headed and incoherent. 

Random Chance has no plan.  Yet Random Chance is the only mechanism evolution has. God has a mind, plans and intentions.  If he used Random Chance to try to achieve those plans and design it would always go wrong and need correcting.  Why would an infinitely intelligent being who can make matter out of nothing and can see the end from the beginning, use a mechanism that can’t work?  It would be much simpler to create what he intended in the first place, which is what he says he has done!

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. Genesis chapter 1

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The nature of prophecy. Did God really predict the future?

Chapter 24 Didn’t anybody see it coming? Isaiah and the Messiah

If we see good reason to believe that there is a God, a question that immediately follows is, is he remote or does he act into what he has made?

Jesus is identified by Christians as the Messiah predicted by multiple prophets in the Old Testament. Is it reasonable to do so?

Were the gospels made up to fit to Isaiah?

Were there accurate prophecies of the Messiah that Jesus fulfilled?

Multiple Old Testament authors made predictions of the Messiah that Jesus fulfilled.  Some are discussed in chapter 24.  So, did Christians modify the Old Testament books to fit to Jesus?  The fact that the Great Isaiah scroll predates Jesus life means that it was not modified to fit to him.

Therefore were the gospels, the biographies of Jesus, modified to fit to the prophetic template?  It’s unlikely because Jesus was proclaimed as the Messiah right from the start, and if the facts about his life, ministry, death and resurrection that people at the time knew to be the case were deliberately changed to make it look like he was the Messiah those people would have been able to contradict those claims. 

Also, Jesus was not the Messiah they were expecting.  It was not that people started with the prophecies and wrote up a life of Jesus to fit them.  They recorded the life of Jesus and then went back to the Old Testament prophecies to try to understand why he wasn’t the Messiah they had expected and rapidly they found that he was the one who was predicted all along.  They had been wrong, not the prophecies.  They started with the facts about Jesus and checked them against the prophecies and, as the Apostle Paul did immediately after his conversion, found convincing corroboration that Jesus was the Messiah.

So, early Christians had several lines of evidence that convinced them that Jesus is the Messiah.

1. Jesus teaching and healing ministry

2. The resurrection

3. The fact that what they knew to be true about Jesus was predicted in the Old Testament by multiple prophets when they just looked without preconceived ideas.  Jesus himself encouraged them to do just that, as witness his post resurrection discussion with some believers on the road to Emmaus (see Matthew 24) where he specifically expounds the prophecies and his fulfilment of them.

4. The unstoppable witness of those who had followed him, seen him crucified, met him after his resurrection and couldn’t stop telling everyone about it.

Each of these might be convincing in their own right, but together they are more compelling.

So, it is extremely helpful that the Jewish nation had a false expectation of the Messiah because it is harder to argue that an individual could read the prophecies and then try to live them out to make a claim to be the Messiah.

But even more so, when the Messiah is predicted to suffer, die and come to life again, then it sets a test that is impossible to fake.  The real Messiah, predicted by the one true God through his prophets had to fit multiple criteria and then pass that supreme test.

Any individual who passed that test could legitimately claim to be sent from God.  In addition, since Jesus had made claims that were meaningless unless he did rise again, such as “I lay down my life only to take it up again”, and to “have life in himself”, (see John’s gospel) he claimed and then demonstrated the very attributes of God. 

Early Christians reflecting on this came to the conclusion that he was indeed God embodying himself in human form, and that was a claim so radical that no one had seen that coming.  In fact at that time, anyone who publicly admitted that was what they thought rapidly found themselves persecuted.

This was a claim so far off the scale of imagination that no one would have tweaked the Torah to predict it, and it was testified to be true so convincingly by Jesus resurrection that the early Christians were blown away to discover it was in the Torah (Old Testament) all along.

So we are left with the incredible conclusion that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus were prophesied in advance and that he genuinely fulfilled those prophecies, because neither the conservative Jews who accurately preserved the Torah, nor the early Christians who simply recorded what they knew to be true were expecting what the scriptures revealed. 

Jesus was predicted to live, teach, die and rise again to life and he did.  And that is the foundation of Christianity.

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How does it all come together?

Christian belief presents a complete system of thought starting with our origins, moving to God’s interactions in history and life as we experience it, then to the future and the end of history.