Bits and Pieces 10

March 10, 2010

Bits and Pieces 10

*Note: I wrote this up yesterday, and it was a really nice, long post – including almost everything from the class.   But, somehow when I posted it, only the first paragraph showed up (and not even all of that)!  I was not able to retrieve any of it, and I didn’t want to spend that much time typing it all out again, so I’m only doing part of what I had before.  But it’s still good material.

The last class for Winter Term was Apologetics.  This was a kind of crazy week, since it was the last week of school and we finished Thursday morning, with a test at noon on Thursday.  Plus, I had my usual outreach on Tuesday morning (helping with a Good News Club), we had our once a term banquet Tuesday evening with a Film Festival directly following, and a time of Communion and Prayer on Wednesday afternoon.  In addition to all that, we had to get our homework (a 2-3 page essay critiquing the statement: That may well be true for you, but it is not true for me) done by Wednesday morning.  And, we didn’t find out about that till our first class Monday evening!  So basically, I had two chunks of time to work on the homework: after dorm meetings (which end around 9:30 PM) on Monday till whenever I decided to call it quits for the night, and after the Film Festival Tuesday night (which ended around 9 or 9:30 PM).  Well, the paper got done, but it wasn’t one of my best.  Anyways, this was a pretty intense class; the teacher was Dr. Robert W. Evans.  He is a very intelligent man (which also added to the pressure of the paper) and has two Ph.D.s!!  This page lists all his many accomplishments.  Now on to some of the main topics of the class:

• Principles of Reality.  (This is pretty deep…get your thinking caps on!)  There are twelve basic first principles:
  1. Being is: The principle of existence.
     • To deny this establishes my own existence.
  2. Being is Being: The principle of identity.
     • A thing must be identical to itself.  If not, it’s something else.
  3. Being is not Nonbeing: The principle of noncontradiction
     • Because those are opposites – it either is or it isn’t – it can’t be both.
     • Opposite statements cannot both be true.  If you say they can, you can’t say that the statement you just made is true.  You can’t have two mutually exclusive things both be true.
  4. Either Being or Non Being: The principle of the excluded middle.
     • If opposites can’t both be true, only one can be true.
  5. Nonbeing cannot cause Being: The principle of causality
     • If something doesn’t exist, it can’t make something else.
     • If the universe always was, we wouldn’t be here (infinite regression), so at one point there was nothing (this means the universe is a contingent being), which means at some point there had to be an eternal being to create us.
  6. Contingent Being cannot cause Contingent Being: The principle of contingency or dependence
     • Something that could not be anything can not create something else that could not have been.  (A contingent being is something that doesn’t need to exist.)
  7. Only Necessary Being can cause a Contingent Being: The positive principle of modality
     • Only something that must necessarily be can create everything that could not have been.
  8. Necessary Being cannot cause a Necessary Being: The negative principle of modality
     • A necessary being must be, so it can’t be caused, or it would have not been needed, so it would be a contingent being.
     • (Thus God is the only necessary being and you can’t have more than one God.)
  9. Every Contingent Being is caused by a Necessary Being: The principle of existential causality
     • All contingent beings need a reason for existing.
  10. Necessary Being Exists: The principle of existential necessity
      • Because of (9), a necessary being must exist.  Because contingent being exist, thus a necessary being (God) must exist to create all the contingent beings.
      • “I think, therefore God is.”
  11. Contingent Being Exists: The principle of existential contingency
      • If there wasn’t a God, we wouldn’t be here.
  12. Necessary Being is similar to similar Contingent Being(s) it causes: The principle of analogy
      • A necessary being must itself possess what it creates. (E.g. It must have the capacity for love in order to create love.)
      • So does God have sin?  No.  We share the freedom to choose.  God chooses not to sin; we have freedom to choose to love Him (coerced love is not love).
      • Argument for the Trinity: God would have to have the capacity for relationship in order to make humans with that capacity, but it has to be contained in Himself or else He would be dependent on something else and thus not God.
• Reliability of the New Testament:
  • Julius Caesar’s Gallic War has 9-10 copies; the most documented piece of ancient literature (other than the Bible) is the Iliad which has 643 manuscripts.  No one calls their fidelity into question.  The New Testament (Greek copies alone) has 5,686 partial and complete manuscripts copied by hand.  If you include manuscripts from other languages, there are more than 14,000 copies.  And if you include all quotations of the New Testament there are 36,000 in the first 200 years.  You could reconstruct the entire New Testament (except for eleven verses) from these quotes.
  • Older manuscripts are better because they are closer to the original.  A distance of 1000 years is considered good in ancient literature.  It’s rare that there would be a copy within 500 year (for example, Homer’s Odyssey).  Most of the New Testament (NT) manuscripts were within 200 years – some within the first 100 years, and some within 40 years!  The entire NT in book form is found within 100 years of the original!
  • The NT is also the most accurate of ancient literature.  Homer’s Iliad is 95% accurate, while the NT is 99.9% accurate.  Most of the errors are variants in readings that get perpetuated by copies (each copy is counted as an error instead of one error faithfully and accurately copied).  Nearly all these mistakes are grammatical errors.  According to Philip Schaff, of about 150,000 variants, only 400 actually changed the meaning of the passage.  Only 50 of those were significant, and of those, not even one has any doctrinal importance.
• Miscellaneous Items for Your Consideration:
  • “Far more people are going to be loved into the kingdom of God than will be argued in.”
  • When you get into a debate with someone, first restate their argument to ensure you correctly understand their position.
  • The statement: “There’s no such thing as truth” is a self-defeating statement.  You have to exclude that statement from your claim.
  • The naturalistic explanation for the universe is that given enough time it could happen.  But the problems with that: where did the original elements come from?  Where did matter, space and energy come from?  Even granted those, with more time (unless there’s design), there’s just more chaos.  It gives more time for things to go wrong.
  • We have to give science a break.  It is trying to get the most plausible, naturalistic explanations to explain observable events.  They can’t do naturalistic investigations and end up with a supernatural explanation.  They are trying to explain how the universe began without being allowed to say that God created it.  It’s kind of like asking someone to tell you what 2+2 is if there is no such number as 4.
  • There are two central tenants of the gospel (1 Cor. 15:3-5): Christ died (Scriptural evidence: the Bible; scientific evidence: he was buried); and Christ was raised (Scriptural evidence: the Bible; scientific evidence: he was seen by many people).
  • In the last class, he referred to the multiple choice exam as a “multiple guess” exam.

Well even this turned out pretty long, so you can imagine how much I left out!  Now that I’m finally caught up, I get to finish up my taxes and enjoy the last few days of spring break, while looking forward to learning more from God’s Word starting Monday!

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