Athenagoras. Apologia pro Christianis.
--, De resurrectione.
F. L. Cross, "Athenagoras.”
N. L. Geisler, The Battle for the Resurrection, chap. 4.
B. P. Pratten, "Introductory Note to the Writings of Athenagoras.”
Atonement, Substitutionary. See Christ, Death of; Christ’s Death, Substitution Legend; Resurrection, Evidence for; Resurrection, Physical Nature of.
Augustine. Augustine, bishop of Hippo (354-430), made his spiritual pilgrimage from Greek paganism through Manichaean dualism to Neoplatonism (see Plotinus) and finally to Christian theism His great mind and immense literary output have made him one of Christianity’s most influential theologians.
Faith and Reason. Like all great Christian thinkers, Augustine struggled to understand the relationship between faith and reason. Many apologists tend to stress Augustine’s emphasis on faith and underplay his affirmation of reason in the proclamation and defense of the gospel (see Fideism; Presuppositional Apologetics). They stress passages in which the Bishop of Hippo placed faith before reason, such as “I believe in order that I may understand.” Indeed, Augustine said, “First believe, then understand” (On the Creed, 4). For “if we wished to know and then believe, we should not be able to either know or believe” {On the Gospel of John, 27.9).
However, these passages taken alone leave the wrong impression of Augustine’s teaching on the role of reason in the Christian Faith. Augustine also held that there is a sense in which reason comes before faith. He declared that “no one indeed believes anything unless he has first thought that it is to be believed.” Hence, “it is necessary that everything which is believed should be believed after thought has led the way” (On Free Will, 5).
He proclaimed the superiority of reason when he wrote, “God forbid that He should hate in us that faculty by which He made us superior to all other beings. Therefore, we must refuse so to believe as not to receive or seek reason for our belief, since we could not believe at all if we did not have rational souls” (Letters, 120.1).
Augustine even used reason to elaborate a “proof for the existence of God.” In On Free Will, he argued that “there exists something above human reason” (2.6). Not only can reason prove God exists, but it is also helpful in understanding the content of the Christian message. For “how can anyone believe him who preaches the faith if he (to say nothing of the other points) does not understand the very tongue which he speaks. . . . Our understanding therefore contributes to the belief of that which it comprehends” (cited in Przywara, 59).
Augustine also used reason to remove objections to Christian faith. Speaking of someone who had questions prior to becoming a believer, he wrote, “It is reasonable that he inquire as to the resurrection of the dead before he is admitted to the Christian sacraments.” What is more, “perhaps he ought also to be allowed to insist on preliminary discussion on the question proposed concerning Christ—why he came so late in the world’s history, and of a few great questions besides, to which all others are subordinate” (Letters, 120.1, 102.38). In short, Augustine believed that human reason is used before, during, and after one exercises faith in the gospel.
God. For Augustine, God is the self-existing I AM WHO I AM. He is uncreated substance, immutable, eternal, indivisible, and absolutely perfect (see God, Nature of). God is not an impersonal Force (see Pantheism) but a personal Father. In fact, he is the tripersonal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (see Trinity). In this one eternal substance, there is neither confusion of persons nor division in essence.
God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. He is eternal, existing before time and beyond time. He is absolutely transcendent over the universe and yet immanently present in every part of it as its sustaining cause. Although the world had a beginning (see Kalam Cosmological Argument), there was never a time when God was not. He is a Necessary Being who depends on nothing, but on whom everything else depends for its existence. “Since God is supreme being, that is, since he supremely is and, therefore, is immutable, it follows that he gave being to all that he created out of nothing” (City of God, 12.2).
Origin and Nature of the Universe. According to Augustine, the world was created ex nihilo (see Creation, Views of), out of nothing. Creation comes from God but is not out of God. “Out of nothing didst Thou create heaven and earth—a great thing and a small—because Thou are Almighty and Good, to make all things good, even the great heaven and the small earth. Thou wast, and there was nought else from which Thou didst create heaven and earth” (Confessions, 12:7). Hence, the world is not eternal. It had a beginning, yet not in time but with time. For time began with the world. There was no time before time. When asked what God did before he created the world out of nothing, Augustine retorted that since God was the author of all time, there was no time before he created the world. It was not creation in time but the creation of time that God executed in his initial acts (ibid., 1.13). So God was not doing (acting, creating) anything before he created the world. He was simply being God.
Miracles. Since God made the world, he can intervene in it (see Miracle). In fact, what we call nature is simply the way God regularly works in his creation. “When such things happen in a continuous kind of river of ever-flowing succession, passing from the hidden to the visible, and from the visible to the hidden, by a regular and beaten track, then they are called natural.” But “when, for the admonition of men, they are thrust in by an unusual changeableness, then they are called miracles” {On the Trinity, 3.6). But even nature’s regular activities are the works of God.
Who draws up the sap through the root of the vine to the bunch of grapes, and makes the wine, except God; who, while man plants and waters, himself giveth the increase? But when, at the command of the Lord, the water was turned into wine with an extraordinary quickness, the divine power was made manifest, by the confession even of the foolish, (ibid., 3.5)
Evil. Evil is real, but it is not a substance (see Evil, Problem of). The origin of evil is the rebellion of free creatures against God (see Evil, Problem of). “In fact, sin is so much a voluntary evil that it is not sin at all unless it is voluntary” {Of True Religion, 14). Of course, God created all things good and gave to his moral creatures the good power of free choice. However, sin arose when “the will which turns from the unchangeable and common good and turns to its own private good or to anything exterior or inferior, sins” {On Free Will, 2.53).
By choosing the lesser good, moral creatures brought about the corruption of good substances.
Evil, then, by nature is a lack or privation of the good. Evil does not exist in itself. Like a parasite, evil exists only as a corruption of good things. “For who can doubt that the whole of that which is called evil is nothing else than corruption? Different evils may, indeed, be called by different names; but that which is the evil of all things in which any evil is perceptible is corruption” {Against the Epistle of the Manichaeans, 38).
Evil is a lack in good things. It is like rot to a tree or rust to iron. It corrupts good things while having no nature of its own. In this way, Augustine answered the dualism of the Manichaean religion, which pronounced evil to be a coeternal, but opposed, reality to the good.
Evaluation. Augustine has been criticized for many things, but perhaps more than anything else he is guilty of an uncritical acceptance of Platonic and Neoplatonic {see Plotinus) thought. Even he rejected some of his own earlier Platonic views in his Retractions, written near the end of his life.
For example, he once accepted Plato’s doctrine of the preexistence of the soul and the recollection of ideas from a previous existence.
Unfortunately, there were other Platonic ideas that Augustine never repudiated. These include a Platonic dualism of body and soul wherein human beings are a soul and only have a body. Along with this, Augustine held a very ascetic view of physical desires and sex, even within the context of marriage.
Further, Augustine’s epistemology of innate ideas has been contested by modern empiricists {see Hume, David), as has been his view of illuminationism And even some theists question whether or not his proof for God from truth really works, asking why one needs an absolute Mind as the source of an absolute truth.
Augustine, Against the Epistle of the Manichaeans.
--, The City of God.
--, Confessions.
--, Letters.
--, Of True Religion.
--, On Christian Doctrine.
--, On Free Will.
--, On Predestination.
--, On the Creed.
--, On the Gospel of John.
--, On the Morals of the Catholic Church.
--, On the Trinity.
N. L. Geisler, What Augustine Says.
E. Pr/ywara. An Angus line Synthesis.
Averroes. Averroes (1126-98) was a Spanish Muslim jurist and physician born in Cordoba. His name is a Latinization of the Arabic form of Ibn-Rushd. Averroes wrote treatises on law, astronomy, grammar, medicine, and philosophy, his most significant being a commentary on Aristotle. He was known by scholastics as “the commentator” (of Aristotle).
Philosophy and Religion. Averroes had a strong influence on the Christian Middle Ages. Because he was the most widely read commentator on Aristotle, his Platonic interpretation was thought to be correct and was adopted by Christians. Actually, like many in his time, Averroes mistakenly believed Aristotle was author of a book called Theology, which was really a compendium of Plotinus’s writings (Edwards, 221). As a result, PIotinian ideas were read into Aristotle. The commentaries of Averroes on Aristotle were integral to the education curriculum at early Western European Universities (ibid., 223).
Emanational Pantheism. While it seems strange for an adherent of monotheistic Islam to be a pantheist (see Pantheism), this is not uncommon among Sufi Muslims. Averroes’s God was entirely separated from the world, exercising no providence. Similar to the theology of *Avicenna, the universe was created by emanations from God. There was a series of celestial spheres (intelligences) that descended from God until they reached humanity at the bottom Matter and intellect are both eternal. God was a remote, impersonal Prime Mover. God’s is the only actual Mind in the universe.
The individual under this schema has only a passive intellect. God does the thinking through the human mind. Averroes denied human free will and the soul’s immortality.
Double-truths. Averroes has been falsely charged with teaching a “double-truth” theory. In a double-truth, one simultaneously believes two mutually exclusive propositions to be true if one is in philosophy and the other in religion. Actually, Averroes composed the treatise On the Harmony between Religion and Philosophy to refute this very view. Averroes did believe in alternative modes of access to truth, but he apparently did not hold that there could be incompatible truths in different domains (see Edwards, 223). *Thomas Aquinas reacted strongly. Aquinas is credited with destroying the popularity of Averroeism in the West, particularly through his Unity of the Intellect against the Averroeists (1269). By 1270, Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris, had condemned several of Averroes’s teachings, including the eternality of the world, the denial of the universal providence of
God, the unity of the human intellect, and the denial of free will. In 1277, he issued more condemnations of similar errors. In the preamble to the latter denunciation, he accused Siger of Brabant and his followers of saying that “things are true according to philosophy but not according to the Catholic faith, as though there were two contradictory truths” (Cross and Livingstone, 116).
T. Aquinas, The Unity of the Intellect against the Averroeists.
Averroes, Averroes on Plato 's Republic.
--, Averroes on the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy.
F. L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church.
P. Edwards, "Averroes.”
N. L. Geisler and A. Saleeb, Answering Islam.
E. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages.
A. Maurer, A History of Medieval Philosophy.
S. Munk, Melanges de philosophie duive etarabe.
E. Renan, Averroes et I'civerroisme.
Avicenna. Avicenna (980-1037) was a physician and philosopher from near Bokhara in the west Asian region of Uzbekistan. His name is a Latinized pronunciation of the Arabic form of Ibn Sina. Avicenna wrote about one hundred books on logic, mathematics, metaphysics, and theology, and his greatest work, The Canon, is a system of medicine. He combined Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism (see Plotinus) in his philosophy of pantheism.
Avicenna’s Cosmological Argument. Followingthe Muslim philosopher Alfarabi, Avicenna formulated a similar cosmological argument that was emulated by later scholastics, including *Thomas Aquinas. To find Avicenna’s context in the history of the cosmological argument, see Cosmological Argument. Avicenna’s proof goes like this:
1. There are possible beings (i.e., things that come into existence because they are caused to exist but would not otherwise exist on their own).
2. Whatever possible beings there are have a cause for being (since they do not explain their own existence).
3. But there cannot be an infinite series of causes of being, (a) There can be an infinite series of causes of becoming (father begets son, who begets son), (b) There cannot be an infinite series of causes of being, since the cause of being must be simultaneous with its effect. Unless there was a causal basis for the series, there would be no beings there to be caused.
4. Therefore, there must be a First Cause for all possible beings (i.e., for all beings that come into existence).
5. This First Cause must be a Necessary Being, for the cause of all possible beings cannot itself be a possible being.
Neoplatonic Influence on Avicenna. By borrowing some Neoplatonic premises and a ten-sphere cosmology, Avicenna furthered his argument to prove that this necessary First Cause created a series of “intelligences” (demiurges or angels) and ten cosmic spheres they controlled:
6. Whatever is essentially One can create immediately only one effect (called an intelligence).
7. Thinking is creating, and God necessarily thinks, since he is a Necessary Being.
8. Therefore, there is a necessary emanation from God of ten intelligences that control the various spheres of the universe. The last of these (agent intellect) forms the four elements of the cosmos. By agent intellect, the human mind (possible intellect) is formed of all truth.
Evaluation. Many criticisms of the cosmological argument have been offered by atheists, agnostics, and skeptics, most emanating from David *Hume and Immanuel *Kant (see God, Objections to Proofs for).
Avicenna’s form of the argument is also subject to many of the criticisms of pantheism and neoplotinian thought. Emanational cosmology has been outdated by modern astronomy. In common with theism, Avicenna’s God was a Necessary Being. But in contrast to theism, a serial creative force of ten gods emanated from God with absolute necessity. Also, unlike theism, in which God freely created ex nihilo and is directly responsible for the existence of everything else, in Avicenna’s cosmology the universe emanated from a chain of gods (see Creation, Views of).
F. C. Copleston, The History of Philosophy.
N. L. GeislerandW. Corduan, Philosophy of Religion.
E. Gilson, "Avicenna,” in History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages.
Ayer, A. J. Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-89) was a British humanist, a graduate of Oxford (1932), and a member of the Vienna Circle of logical positivism. This group, formed in 1932, was influenced by Ernst Mach (d. 1901). Their work was strongly antimetaphysical (see Metaphysics) and anti-Christian.
In Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), Ayer tried to eliminate metaphysics via the verifiability principle. Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940) dealt with problems of private language and other minds. Philosophical Essays (1954) contained articles treating problems raised by his first two books. In 1956, Ayer wrote The Problem of Knowledge, which reflects moderate antiskeptical realism. He accepts that some statements may be true even if they cannot be justified in principle. A near-death experience in the 1980s convinced Ayer of the possibility of immortality, though he continued to reject the existence of God (see Acognosticism).
Following David *Hume, Ayer taught that there are three types of propositions: (1) Analytic propositions are truisms, tautologies, or true by definition. These are explicative, meaning the predicate merely states what the subject says. (2) Synthetic propositions are true by experience and/or in relation to experience. These are ampliative, since the predicate amplifies or affirms more than the subject. All other propositions are (3) nonsensical. They are meaningless, have no literal significance, and are emotive at best.
Metaphysics Is Meaningless. Ayer followed Immanuel *Kant in rejecting metaphysical or theological statements, but for different reasons. Kant used the argument that the mind cannot go beyond phenomena of the physical world. But Ayer recognized that the mind must go beyond the physical. How else would it know it cannot go beyond? Further, whereas Kant had a metaphysics, Ayer did not, reasoning that we cannot speak meaningfully of what may be beyond the empirical. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “That whereof you cannot speak, speak not thereof.” The impossibility of metaphysics rests not in the psychology of man but in the meaning of language.
Logical positivism is diametrically opposed to evangelical Christianity. If true, Ayer’s logical positivism would hold disastrous consequences for orthodox Christianity. No statement about the existence or the nature of God could even be meaningful, to say nothing of whether it could be true. The Bible could not contain propositional revelation about God, nor could it be the inspired Word of God. There could be no meaningful ethical prescriptions, let alone absolute moral principles.
The Self-defeating Nature of Empirical Verifiability. The deathblow to Ayer’s principle of verifiability is the self-destructive fact that it is not empirically verifiable, for according to the criterion of verifiability, all meaningful statements must be either true by definition or empirically testable. But the principle of verifiability is neither. By its own standard the principle of verifiability is meaningless.
The revised verification principles died the death of a thousand qualifications. Every attempt to push metaphysics out the front door and let verification by qualification in the back door found that metaphysics followed it in the back door (see First Principles).
Sources
A. J. Ayer, Foundations of Empirical Knowledge.
--,Language, Truth, and Logic.
--, Philosophical Essays.
--, The Problem of Knowledge.
H. Feigl, “Logical Positivism after Thirty-Five Years.”
F. Ferre, Language, Logic, and God.
A. Flew, New Essays in Philosophical Theology.
N. L. Geisler and W. Corduan, Philosophy of Religion, chap. 12.