Imperishable Inheritance

I will pro­pose an argu­ment for the ratio­nal­ity of Chris­tian­ity through the cause and devel­op­ment of moral­ity uti­liz­ing the Tran­scen­den­tal Argu­ment for the Exis­tence of God.

The argu­ment states (in sum­mary) that objec­tive, absolute real­ity can only come from out­side human expe­ri­ence. In other words for two peo­ple to say “mur­der is wrong,” that truth can­not be based on those two peo­ple, because if all truth was left up to humans than there really could be no such thing as absolute truth. We are left first with deal­ing of the ratio­nal nature of absolute truth/morality. So, we must deal first with that.

We are first left to fig­ure out if such a thing as absolute truth can indeed exist. If you were to say, “no, there is no such thing as absolute truth” you have just com­mit­ted the log­i­cal fal­lacy of non-contradiction. You are say­ing (1) there is no absolute truth and (2) there is absolute truth because you say there is an absolute that no absolutes exist. We are then left to say, if the rel­a­tivis­tic world­view is builty on fault philo­soph­i­cal pre­sup­po­si­tions then we must go and find (cap­i­tal “T”) Truth some­where else. Since this moral rel­a­tivist world­view is built on athe­ism, we must then go to the oppo­site which is the­ism (because agnos­ti­cism is just an athe­ist who can’t make up his mind. there is really no one who is an agnos­tic, but that’s a whole other rab­bit trail).

When left with the­ism, we must then build a foun­da­tion sim­i­lar to that of Rene’ Descartes. After he looked down into the bot­tom of his being and dis­cov­ered that the only thing that he could prove with absolute cer­tainty was his own exis­tence: Cog­ito ergo sum (“I think, there­fore I am.”). Now, what was the very next thing he wrote about in his famous med­i­ta­tion after that famous onto­log­i­cal dis­cov­ery? God. He thereby con­cluded that there was a real essence into which all men from the begin­ning of time have dealt with the doc­trine of God. Some come out believ­ing and some not believ­ing, but the point was that all did indeed dwell upon the thought of God. This was where Rene’ con­cluded that it was God’s “imprint” upon His cre­ation. This is called in Chris­t­ian philo­soph­i­cal cir­cles the “Sen­sus Divini­tatis” or “sense of the divine” (I’ve writ­ten about this pre­vi­ously in length).

Where are we going from here? We have estab­lished that moral rel­a­tivism built upon athe­ism is irra­tional. Remem­ber irra­tional­ity is the fact that an argu­ment does not fol­low a valid line of log­i­cal deduc­tion. We must then go back to our search for cap­i­tal “T” Truth. So, if the­ism is in fact true what about all the religions?

Voltaire and oth­ers stated about the seem­ingly irra­tional nature of reli­gious rev­e­la­tions which is the argu­ment from incon­sis­tent rev­e­la­tions. Basi­cally, it is said that if God is God, and if He wants His name to be known why would He allow other reli­gions? He would smarter to leave only one. So, do we throw up our hands and say “pick a reli­gion?” No, because they are not all ratio­nal. Let me show you just a few of the reli­gions and their essence to deter­mine if in fact they are rational.

A reli­gion such as Bud­dhism (to which I prac­ticed) and Tao­ism (to which I also prac­ticed) is built upon pan­the­ism. Pan­the­ism does not sub­scribe self-sufficiency to a cre­ator, because they state that there really is no cre­ator only god (low­er­case “g”) inside of cre­ation. This makes God thereby reliant upon cre­ation not in charge of it. How can some­thing that is reliant upon cre­ation enact absolute Truth? We are stuck back in your atheism/moral rel­a­tivism dilemma. You’ll find most pan­the­is­tic thought pas­sive to absolute truth, because they are human­is­tic in nature.

What about poly­the­ism? Hin­duism has more gods than cit­i­zens of the U.S., but does it give us the abil­ity to over­come the moral rel­a­tivism dilemma? Well, the cre­ator god in Hin­duism is Brahma. While Brahma is thought of the cre­ator, he is not the giver and upholder of everything–Vishnu another major god in Hin­duism is. Are we able to over­come an incred­i­ble com­plex moral sys­tem from two gods? Well, let’s think of the con­text of Hin­duism. The over 330,000,000 gods in Hin­duism are idol­aters, lovers of greed and power, and some are moral in some sense. Can we build a foun­da­tion upon con­tra­dict­ing moral­ity of gods? Of course not.

That leaves monothe­ism. Judaism is rec­og­nized as Chris­tians, but it found ful­fill­ment in the min­istry of Christ. Christ came down and said, “look at me, the one who was promised is here.”

“Your father Abra­ham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.“
John 8:56

Then begin­ning with Moses and with all the prophets, He [Jesus] explained to them the things con­cern­ing Him­self in all the Scrip­tures.
Luke 24:27 (empha­sis added)

The Jews rejected him because they didn’t accept the mys­tery of God. The ‘mys­tery’ leads the New Tes­ta­ment writ­ers to see that God’s plan was not only for the Jews but for gen­tiles (Col 1:26). Judaism is no more, because the min­istry of Christ ful­filled it. The gospels are rid­dled with ref­er­ences to the Jew­ish Scrip­tures, because Chris­tians accept them. He was show­ing that I am the one that was being talked about.

Islam, to which I study and min­is­ter to, is filled with incon­stan­cies. They say that God deliv­ered three rev­e­la­tions (the Torah, Psalms, and New Tes­ta­ment) but that man “cor­rupted” it all. This is inter­est­ing, because they pick and choose out of the Bible where they think Mohammed is being proph­e­sied about (in par­tic­u­lar Deut 18). I could go on and on about the incon­sis­ten­cies in Islam. Islam really is noth­ing more than a cult of Christianity.

We are left, from the major reli­gions, with Chris­tian­ity. The Bible has over 4,000 man­u­scripts which reveal God’s plan to 99.9% accu­racy (some spelling dif­fer­ences in the Greek). His­tor­i­cally, Jesus is talked about intensely. Jose­phus, an early Jew­ish writer, wrote about the fact that Christ did indeed res­ur­rect from the dead. And I could go on and on about this as well. (And I love to, so just ask!)

We are left with the fact that Chris­tian­ity remains. It allows us to per­ceive moral­ity and ethics which do not vio­late laws of logic and thereby ratio­nal­ity. In fact, it explains where we get such imma­te­r­ial objects as ratio­nal­ity and logic. Why does the athe­ist use “logic” to “dis­prove” God, and they don’t even real­ize that God is the cause of it. Read this about the famous Chris­t­ian apol­o­gist Cor­nelius Van Til:

“Van Til devel­oped his own tran­scen­den­tal argu­ment. He main­tained that Chris­t­ian the­ism is the pre­sup­po­si­tion of all mean­ing, all ratio­nal sig­nif­i­cance, all intel­li­gi­ble dis­course. Even when some­one argues against Chris­t­ian the­ism, Van Til said, he pre­sup­poses it, for he pre­sup­poses that ratio­nal argu­ment is pos­si­ble and that truth can be con­veyed through lan­guage. The non-Christian, then, in Van Til’s famous illus­tra­tion, is like a child sit­ting on her father’s lap, slap­ping his face. She could not slap him unless he sup­ported her. Sim­i­larly, the non-Christian can­not carry out his rebel­lion against God unless God makes that rebel­lion pos­si­ble. Con­tra­dict­ing God assumes an intel­li­gi­ble uni­verse and there­fore a the­is­tic one.“
John Frame, Tran­scen­den­tal Arguments

So, we have seen that Chris­tian­ity, and Jesus Christ, are the only ways that we can, in fact, account for ratio­nal­ity itself. Now, don’t get me wrong, truth does exist out­side of the Bible. Physics tells me that what goes up does come down, and I know this truth in fact sci­en­tific law (repro­ducible every time with­out devi­a­tion), but absolute truth, the core and essence of being comes only from the God of the Chris­t­ian Scrip­tures. So some­one in some­thing anti­thet­i­cal to that is not rational.