Arguing the Affirmative: JOHN THE ATHEIST
Arguing the Negative: RANDAL THE CHRISTIAN
John’s Opening Statement
The Bible speaks often as if God doesn’t know the future (Gen. 22:12; Deut. 13:3; Jer. 3:7, 19–20; 26:3; 32:35; Ezek. 12:3; and Jon. 3:10). Why then should we think there is any reason he can predict the future with certainty, especially for creatures with free will?
There are a few easily seen failed prophecies. Isaiah predicted the river Nile would dry up (Isa. 19:5–7). Isaiah predicted Damascus would cease to be a city (Isa. 17:1–2). Ezekiel predicted Nebuchadnezzar would destroy the city of Tyre (Ezek. 26:7–14) but later admitted this didn’t happen (Ezek. 29:17–20). Revising his original prediction, Ezekiel predicted instead that Egypt would become desolate and that Nebuchadnezzar would conquer it (Ezek. 29:8–12, 19–20). But that too never happened. Jeremiah predicted Jehoiakim, the king of Judah, would have no successor (Jer. 36:30) even though he was succeeded by Jehoiachin, his son (2 Kings 24:6). The prophets Haggai and Zechariah both predicted in their day that Zerubbabel was the long-awaited messiah (Hag. 2:20–23; Zech. 4:6:9–13; compare Zech. 6:9–15), but this turned out to be false as well.[64]
Elsewhere I have analyzed some of the most important claims of Old Testament prophetic fulfillment in the New Testament. My challenge is this: I defy anyone to come up with one statement in the Old Testament that is specifically fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that can legitimately be understood as a prophecy and singularly points to Jesus as the Messiah using today’s historical-grammatical hermeneutical method. It cannot be done.[65]
Many of the claimed prophecies came from the so-called messianic psalms. But in their original contexts there is nothing about them, when reading them devotionally, that indicates they are predicting anything at all. For there to be a prediction, there must be a prophecy, and there are none in the psalms. With no prediction comes no fulfillment. When it comes to the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, the servant was not a redeemer messianic king at all. In Isaiah the Suffering Servant is identified with the people of Israel themselves (see Isa. 41:8–9; 42:18–24; 43:10; 44:1–2, 21; 45:4; 48:20; and especially 49:3). One must interpret this in its context. It is Israel who has suffered so much, and from out of her sufferings Israel hoped to become a light to the nations, restored by God to her former glory. When it comes to the infancy prophecies in Matthew’s Gospel, Robert Miller sums up what we find.
No wonder Professor C. F. D. Moule argues that Matthew’s use of the Old Testament “to our critical eyes, [is] manifestly forced and artificial and unconvincing.”[67] And if this is the case, then why not be skeptical of his whole Gospel since he takes these kinds of liberties with his sources?
The most serious failed prophecy is the one Jesus himself made concerning the consummation of the ages, also known as the eschaton, from which we get the word eschatology. Jesus was a failed apocalyptic prophet because the “Son of Man” did not come in his generation as he predicted—something I’ve already argued elsewhere in some detail.[68] In Mark 9:1 Jesus says: “Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power” (see also Matt. 16:28; Luke 9:27). No amount of theological gerrymandering can escape the conclusion that Jesus was wrong. Just like every other failed end-time movement in history, his followers successively revised this original prediction by adding additional signs of that cosmological, earth-shattering event as the earlier signs were proved wrong.
But what I consider the worst ignorance of them all is what I’ve called the Problem of Divine Miscommunication.[69] If there is a loving God who knew the future of how his sincere followers would inflict so much pain, oppression, and death on others, then he should have been very clear from the beginning about how they should act. He should have unequivocally condemned slavery, the oppression of women, and the abuse of animals. But he didn’t.
God also should have specified more completely what Christians should believe doctrinally. But because he didn’t, eight million Christians killed each other in the wars following the Protestant Reformation over issues most Christians today think are silly.
Randal’s Opening Statement
Once you have reason to believe a man named Dave is a police officer, you automatically have reason to believe Dave can operate a firearm, even if you have never seen him handle one. The reason is simple: being a police officer requires the ability to operate a firearm. Therefore, if you have reason to believe Dave is a police officer, you have reason to believe he can operate a firearm.
By the same token, if you have reason to believe that Yahweh is God, then you have reason to believe Yahweh is omniscient (that is, Yahweh knows all true propositions and believes no false ones, including propositions about the future). The reason is simple: to be divine is to be omniscient. (The property of being God entails the property of being divine.) Thus, if Yahweh is God, then he is omniscient.
One may take issue with this argument by claiming either that the concept of divinity does not necessarily include omniscience or that it is not reasonable to believe Yahweh is God. I’ll respond briefly to each of these claims.
Let’s begin with the definition of divinity. It is true that many people have attributed the property of divinity to beings that were very far from perfect. The Greek pantheon perched atop Mount Olympus was full of such “deities” who demonstrated character faults so glaring that they make the cast of your favorite soap opera look like paragons of virtue by comparison. But the fact that the concept of divinity has been predicated of such individuals begs the question of whether it is proper to apply the concept to those individuals.
In fact, Greek philosophy was borne out of the recognition that this is not an adequate concept of the divine. Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle concluded that the concept of divinity should not be applied to agents merely because they are immortal or very powerful. It should be reserved for a truly exalted entity, one who was variously defined as the Form of the Good, Pure Act, or a Logos who guides all things in their logical course.
The same process of conceptual clarification is evident in the Hebrew Scriptures, which witness the move from polytheism to monolatrism (worship of one god among many, a position that begins with Abraham) to henotheism (recognition of one God supreme over other gods, a position that begins with the exodus) to monotheism (a doctrine that is affirmed in Deutero-Isaiah, see especially Isa. 44:6).
With divinity having been identified in monotheistic terms (there is one God), the process of conceptual clarification then turned to unpacking the qualitative nature of this one divine being. The apogee of this process came with Anselm’s formulation of the ontological argument, which is as much a definition of God as a proof for God. God, by Anselm’s reckoning, is that being whom none greater can be conceived. In other words, God necessarily contains all perfections, and since omniscience is a perfection, God is necessarily omniscient. Thus a Christian who accepts the end results of this long and rigorous process of conceptual clarification can say unapologetically that the concept of divinity includes the property of being omniscient as surely as the concept of being a bachelor includes the property of being male.
This brings us to our next question. What reason has a Christian to believe that Yahweh is God? Let’s ask another question: What reason may we have to believe Dave is a police officer? One obvious way is through testimony—somebody you know and trust told you that he’s a police officer. Is it possible that we can likewise come to know Yahweh is God through the written or spoken testimony of another? There is no principled objection to this possibility, and so it is indeed possible to know Yahweh is God through testimony. But there are other ways as well. For example, if you prayed to Yahweh and that prayer was answered (see chapter 17), that would provide prima facie support that Yahweh is God. After all, according to Ockham’s razor (do not multiply entities beyond necessity), it is simpler to posit Yahweh as the deity answering prayer rather than posit him as a subordinate agent to a deity. The same reasoning applies to those who become persuaded that Yahweh raised Jesus from the dead (see chapter 19).
In these and many other ways Christians can come to believe that Yahweh is God just as they may come to believe Dave is a police officer. And in the same way that Dave’s identity as a police officer supports the conclusion that Dave can operate a firearm, so the identity of Yahweh as God supports the conclusion that Yahweh is omniscient.
John’s Rebuttal
This is one of the best things Randal has written in this book. Bravo!
My claim is that as religious people became aware of a bigger world, then their conceptions of God became bigger too, which is adequately described by Randal as moving from polytheism to monolatrism to henotheism to monotheism. Later, as the Western world began interacting with the Eastern world, Anselm defined God as the “greatest conceivable being,” which went beyond a mere localized kind of monotheism. So just like morality, God concepts have evolved too.
One problem though is that Anselm’s God is emphatically not reflected in the Bible, as I’m explaining in this book. On this topic the biblical data shows that God does not know the future. Period. That should be the end of the story. Another problem is that contrary to Anselm, an adherent of eastern religion believes the One (i.e., the greatest being possible) cannot be conceived, and as such is beyond comprehending. At that point Anslem’s ontological argument cannot even get off the ground.
And once again Randal points out another mere possibility, that we can know his God exists because of human testimony, even though it is unreliable. Sure, this is a possibility. But probability is all that matters.
Randal’s Rebuttal
John doesn’t dispute the notion that deity essentially includes omniscience, but he does claim that Yahweh is not a credible candidate for being divine because Yahweh fails to demonstrate knowledge of the future.
Is the evidence John provides sufficient to overturn one’s belief that Yahweh is God? That depends on the evidence one has for thinking that Yahweh is God and the evidence John provides for thinking Yahweh is not omniscient. I cannot survey the evidence for the first claim here, but we can consider John’s evidence for the second.
To begin with, John points to passages that speak of God’s ignorance of certain future events. But Christian theologians interpret these as anthropomorphisms. Next, John points to alleged failed prophecies. But even if I granted every one of these, they would only point to the failure of a human prophet. Third, John alleges that Jesus wrongly predicted the arrival of the eschaton. Again, even if I granted the point, it would only mean that Jesus, in his incarnate kenosis, made a mistaken prediction about the future. Finally, John alleges sweeping divine miscommunication. But God could have all sorts of reasons for communicating with creation in the way he does apart from being ignorant of the future. To sum up, John provides poor evidence to think Yahweh is not omniscient, particularly if one already has independent grounds to believe Yahweh is God.
John’s Closing Statement
Theologians reinterpreted the biblical descriptions of God anthropomorphically as their God got bigger. To admit there are false prophecies in the inspired Bible grants way too much. There isn’t a way to make coherent someone who is 100 percent God and 100 percent man anyway. And once again Randal punts to a mere possibility.
Randal’s Closing Statement
John admits that a Christian could know that Yahweh is God through testimony. He just doesn’t think this is probable. Yet he has never presented a formal probability calculation to support his claims. Thus all John really offers are subjective intuitions cloaked in the rhetoric of probabilities.