Does God exist?

The following is taken from Dr. Greg Bahnsen's opening argument in his debate with Dr. Gordon Stein at UC Irvine. The entire debate, entitled, The Great Debate: Does God Exist? may be purchased from Covenant Media Foundation at www.cmfnow.com or 1-800-553-3938.

It is necessary at the beginning of a debate to define one's terms and in particular we should make clear what is meant by the term "God." I want to specify that I am arguing for Christian theism and for it as a unit or system of thought, not just theism in general. The reasons for this are (a) the various conceptions of deity in the world religions are logically incompatible leaving no unambiguous sense to general theism; (b) I have not found the non-Christians religions to be philosophically defense able, each of them being internally incoherent or undermining human reason and experience; (c) since I am by the grace of God a Christian I cannot from the heart adequately defend those religions faith which I disagree. My commitment is to the triune God and Christian worldview based on God's revelation in the Old and New Testaments.

Secondly, we should indicate what is and what is not at issue in this debate and on what basis we would hope that you would consider it. It must be clear that we are debating about philosophical systems, not the people who adhere to or profess them. Our concern is with the objective merits of the case that can be made for atheism or Christian theism, and not related, subjective or personal matters. The reasons for this are (a) the personalities of those individuals who adhere to different systems of thought are not relevant to the truth or falsity of the claims made by those systems. Atheists and Christians can equally be emotional, unlearned, intolerant, rude; (b) subjective claims made about the experience of inner satisfaction or peace and promotional claims made about the superiority of Christianity or atheist are always subject to conflicting interpretations and explanations being autobiographical rather than telling us anything for sure about the truth of the system; (c) the issue is not whether atheists or professing Christians have ever done anything undesirable or morally unacceptable (respectively the French Revolution's Reign of Terror and the Spanish Inquisition), but whether atheism or Christian theism as philosophical systems are objectively true.

(1) The nature of evidence

How should the difference of opinion between the theist and the atheist be rationally resolved? What Dr. Stein has written indicates, like many atheists that he has not reflected adequately on this question. He writes:

The question of the existence of God is a factual question and should be answered in the same way as any other factual questions.

The assumption that all existent claims or questions of fact are answered in the very same way is not merely oversimplified and misleading, it is simply mistaken. The existence, factuality or reality of different kinds of things is not established or disconfirmed the same way in every case. We might ask Is there a box of crackers in the pantry? We know how we would go about answering that question. But that is a far, far, cry from the way we would determine the reality of barometric pressure or quasars, or elasticity, or gravitational attraction or radioactivity, or names or grammar or past events or future contingencies, or categories, or laws of thought or political obligations, or individual identity over time, or causation or memories, or dreams or beauty or love. All these things are real and none of them do you confirm the existence or reality in the same way you do the box of crackers in the pantry. When Stein says that we settle all factual questions in the same way, that is just unlearned. There are thousands of existence or factual questions and they are not at all answered in the same way. Just think of the differences in argumentation and types of evidence used by biologists, grammarians, physicists, mathematicians, lawyers, logisticians, merchants and artists. Each of those fields has a way of arguing, but they do not use the same kinds of arguments or appeal to the same kinds of consideration.

It should be obvious that the type of evidence one looks for in existence or factual claims will be determined by the field of discussion and especially by the metaphysical nature of the entity mentioned in the claim under question. We may debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but the way we determine the existence of an angel is different from the way we determine the reality of a pin. Dr. Stein's remark that the question of God's existence is answered in the same way as any other factual question mistakenly reduces the theistic question to the same level as a box of crackers in the pantry, which we will hereafter call the cracker in the pantry fallacy.

What Dr. Stein has written about the nature of evidence in the theistic debate points to a second philosophical error of significant proportions. In passing we would note how unclear he is when speaking of the evidence that must be used, describing it variously as logic, facts, or reason. Each of these terms is susceptible to a whole host of differing senses depending upon who is using the terms.

I take it he wishes to judge hypotheses by the test of logical coherence and empirical observation. The problem arises when Dr. Stein elsewhere insists that every claim which someone makes must be treated as a hypothesis which must be tested by such evidence before accepting it.

Don't miss this. He says that every claim made by someone must be first treated as a hypothesis. What Dr. Bahnsen is going to attack is the fact that not every claim can be of a hypothetical nature. Because then you would never have anything on the basis of which to judge any hypothesis.

There is to be nothing of begging the question or of circular reasoning, he says. This is oversimplified thinking and misleading, what we might call the pretended neutrality fallacy. One can see this by considering the following quotation from Dr. Stein:

The use of logic or reason is the only valid way to examine the truth or falsity of a statement that claims to be factual.

One must eventually ask Dr. Stein then how he proves that statement itself.

How does he prove the statement that logic or reason is the only valid way to prove factual statements. He is now on the horns of a dilemma. If he says that the statement is proved by logic or reason then what has he done? He has reasoned in a circle which he says we cannot do. If he says that they statement is proven by something other than logic or reason, then he has refuted the statement that all statements are proven by logic or reason.

So he either violates his own rule by reasoning in a circle or he refutes his principle. My point is not to fault Dr. Stein's commitment to logic or reason. My point is to observe that it actually has the nature of a pre-commitment. What he is talking about here is not something that he has proven but something that he has taken into the debate and his research. It is something that he has assumed in advance. It is a presupposition. It is not something he has proven by empirical experience or logic but it is rather that by which he proceeds to prove everything else.

He is not presuppositionally neutral. [this is to show that everyone has their ultimate authority, everyone has that which they do not question. On the basis of which they prove everything else. They are not neutral.]

He does not avoid begging crucial questions, rather than proving them in the ordinary way. This tendency to beg crucial questions is openly exposed by Dr. Stein when the issue becomes the existence of God.

Having shown that he is not neutral, and that Dr. Stein has his presuppositions, which are vicious, such that he assumes that there can be no evidence for God's existence. Dr. Stein actually writes that you can never use the supernatural explanation in science. Whether one can or not, the fact is that when someone tells you that you cannot, he is stipulating a rule showing that he rules out God before he even goes to look at the evidence.

Dr. Stein is committed to disallowing any theistic interpretation of nature, history or experience and he is committed in advance. He is just as much begging the question then as is the Christian who is approaching the question with his theistic presuppositions. The theist does the same thing when certain empirical evidences are put forth as allegedly disproving the existence of God. The naturalist would insist that Christ could not have risen from the dead or that there is a natural explanation, yet to be found as to how it happened. So the supernaturalist insists that the alleged discrepancies which happen in the Bible have explanations even if they have not been found yet, and that the evil in the world has a sufficient reason behind it which is known to God. Each of us have our governing presuppositions, even as all philosophical or worldviews do. At the most fundamental level of everyone's thinking and beliefs there are primary convictions about reality, man, the world, knowledge, truth and behavior. Convictions by which all other experience is organized, interpreted, and applied.

Dr. Stein has such presuppositions and so do I, and so do all of us. It is these presuppositions which determine what we accept by ordinary reason and evidence for they are assumed in all of our reasoning, even about reasoning itself. Even the way that we reason about reasoning assumes our basic presuppositions.

How then should the difference of opinion between the theist and the atheist be rationally resolved? [We are not going to give up reason here. We are going to say "how can we intellectually deal with each other and resolve this?] We have seen two of Dr. Stein's errors regarding it: the crackers in the pantry fallacy and his pretended neutrality fallacy. In the process of discussing them, we have observed that belief in the existence of God is not tested in any ordinary way, like other factual claims.

The reason for this is because of the non-natural character of God. Metaphysically, God is not a natural object. Secondly, epistemologically because of the presuppositional character of commitment for or against his existence. Because we reason presuppositionally and we are dealing with a non-natural entity, the kind of reasoning is not going to be ordinary.

Arguments over conflicting presuppositions between different worldviews must be resolved somewhat differently, yet still rationally, than conflicts over factual existence claims within a worldview or system of thought. We must compare the worldviews themselves and ask whether they provide the preconditions of intelligibility and rationality for man's experience and thinking. We must engage in transcendental argumentation, the only kind that ultimately deals with skepticism, the foundations of science and logic, and the question of epistemological certainty.

When we do that we see why one must rationally be committed to the existence of God. We would prove God's existence from the impossibility of the contrary. The transcendental proof for the existence of God is that without Him, it is impossible to prove anything. The atheist worldview is irrational and cannot consistently provide the preconditions of intelligible experience, of science, of logic, of morality.

That is the end of Dr. Bahnsen's opening remarks in his debate with Dr. Stein.

In Dr. Bahnsen's closing speech, basically what he said to Dr. Stein was that the fact that he came to the debate proves his point. Because debate presupposes the laws of logic. If you do not have to observe laws of logic then why debate with someone. But the laws of logic make no sense in an atheist worldview. In an atheist worldview where there are no immaterial things, much less things that have the characteristic of universality or obligation, logic makes no sense. You cannot find universality in rocks. You cannot find obligation in atoms or molecules. Since we are saying that we are obligated to follow the universal, absolute laws of logic, and the atheist worldview rules out there being any thing like that, then the fact that Dr. Stein came to the debate shows that he is assuming a Christian worldview in order to argue against God's existence!

This is what is called the transcendental proof. You show that the other person must be standing on your ground, your worldview, in order to be arguing with you. You prove the impossibility of the contrary.