The six essential doctrines would be: the Trinity, the deity and humanity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, man’s fallenness and guilt, salvation by grace through faith by the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ, and belief that Jesus is the Messiah. And you have a seventh doctrine that strikes me as a functional necessity, that is the ultimate authority of Scripture without which none of the other truths can be affirmed or asserted with confidence.
By the way, it’s really important that people know these doctrines because many Christians are quite kind-hearted and they end up not being very careful about drawing distinctions between truth and falsity because they don’t want to disagree. I understand that. But if you were really kind-hearted then you would be honest and straight-forward with people about the demands of the gospel on their lives. The demand of the gospel is that you believe particular things to be true. It’s not just a matter of mere belief, as if these are just some incidental details of theology that you might happen to be mistaken about. And if you just happen to be mistaken, why should you go to hell because of that?
You don’t go to hell because you just happen to mistake a doctrine. You go to hell because you have broken God’s law. It is very critical to understand that. God only judges guilty people. People get judged by God not because they mess up on their theology but because they are guilty. People who are guilty get condemned. That’s it. There is a way to get around that but you’ve to know a couple of particular things that are true before you can take advantage of the forgiveness God offers. That’s where the essential doctrines come in.
He’s writing from a Calvinist perspective, which I don’t entirely agree with. But I don’t see anything wrong in that minimal list. Sometimes, it’s a good thing for us to focus on the essentials. There are lots of Christian denominations, and they disagree on many minor things, but on the major things, they are in agreement. And that’s a good thing, too.
Here’s the 66-minute video featuring Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, who holds the Ph.D in philosophy of science from Cambridge University, and other degrees in the hard sciences. (H/T UK Apologetics)
The lecture starts really, really slowly. You can just fast-forward to the 12 minute mark, or you might die of boredom.
Topics:
Up until the the last 100 years or so, everyone agreed that the universe was eternal
This is at odds with the traditional Christian view that God created the universe
Materialism, the view that matter is all there is, requires eternally existing matter
Discovery #1: Hubble discovers that the universe is expanding (redshift observation)
The expanding universe was resisted by proponents of the eternal universe, like Einstein
Some naturalists even proposed speculative static models like the steady-state model
However, not of the speculative models fit with observations and experimental results
Discovery #2: Penzias and Wilson discover the cosmic microwave background radiation
Measurements of this background radiation confirmed a prediction of the Big Bang theory
The steady-state theory was falsified of by the discovery of this background radiation
The oscillating model was proposed to prevent the need for an absolute beginning
But the oscillating model is not eternal, it loses energy on each “bounce”
The beginning of the universe is more at home in a theistic worldview than an atheistic one
The beginning of the universe fits in well with the Bible, e.g. – Genesis 1, Titus 1, etc.
In case you are wondering about what the evidence is for the Big Bang, here are 3 of the evidences that are most commonly offered:
Three main observational results over the past century led astronomers to become certain that the universe began with the big bang. First, they found out that the universe is expanding—meaning that the separations between galaxies are becoming larger and larger. This led them to deduce that everything used to be extremely close together before some kind of explosion. Second, the big bang perfectly explains the abundance of helium and other nuclei like deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) in the universe. A hot, dense, and expanding environment at the beginning could produce these nuclei in the abundance we observe today. Third, astronomers could actually observe the cosmic background radiation—the afterglow of the explosion—from every direction in the universe. This last evidence so conclusively confirmed the theory of the universe’s beginning that Stephen Hawking said, “It is the discovery of the century, if not of all time.”
This is a good article to send to atheists who are not comfortable with what the progress of science has revealed about the beginning of the universe, and of time itself. If you look in agnostic astronomer Robert Jastrow’s book “God and the Astronomers” (2nd edition), you’ll find 6 evidences.
By the way, Dr. Meyer also does a great job of explaining the problem of proteins, DNA and the origin of life in this lecture. And you can hear him defend his views in this debate podcast with Keith Fox and in this debate podcast with Peter Atkins. He does a great job in these debates.
This podcast is a must-listen. Please take the time to download this podcast and listen to it. I guarantee that you will love this podcast. I even recommended it to my Dad and I almost never do that.
Details:
In this podcast, J. Warner examines the evidence for the existence of the mind (and inferentially, the soul) as he looks at six classic philosophical arguments. Jim also briefly discusses Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos and discusses the limitations of physicalism.
Atheist Thomas Nagel’s latest book “Mind and Cosmos” makes the case that materialism cannot account for the evidence of mental phenomena
Nagel writes in this recent New York Times article that materialism cannot account for the reality of consciousness, meaning, intention and purpose
Quote from the Nagel article:
Even though the theistic outlook, in some versions, is consistent with the available scientific evidence, I don’t believe it, and am drawn instead to a naturalistic, though non-materialist, alternative. Mind, I suspect, is not an inexplicable accident or a divine and anomalous gift but a basic aspect of nature that we will not understand until we transcend the built-in limits of contemporary scientific orthodoxy.
When looking at this question, it’s important to not have our conclusions pre-determined by presupposing materialism or atheism
If your mind/soul doesn’t exist and you are a purely physical being then that is a defeater for Christianity, so we need to respond
Traditionally, Christians have been committed to a view of human nature called “dualism” – human beings are souls who have bodies
The best way* to argue for the existence of the soul is using philosophical arguments
The case:
The law of identity says that if A = B’ if A and B have the exact same properties
If A = the mind and B = the brain, then is A identical to B?
Wallace will present 6 arguments to show that A is not identical to B because they have different properties
Not everyone of the arguments below might make sense to you, but you will probably find one or two that strike you as correct. Some of the points are more illustrative than persuasive, like #2. However, I do find #3, #5 and #6 persuasive.
1) First-person access to mental properties
Thought experiment: Imagine your dream car, and picture it clearly in your mind
If we invited an artist to come and sketch out your dream car, then we could see your dream car’s shape on paper
This concept of your dream car is not something that people can see by looking at your brain structure
Physical properties can be physically accessed, but the properties of your dream care and privately accessed
2) Our experience of consciousness implies that we are not our bodies
Common sense notion of personhood is that we own our bodies, but we are not our bodies
3) Persistent self-identity through time
Thought experiment: replacing a new car with an old car one piece at a time
When you change even the smallest part of a physical object, it changes the identity of that object
Similarly, your body is undergoing changes constantly over time
Every cell in your body is different from the body you had 10 years ago
Even your brain cells undergo changes (see this from New Scientist – WK)
If you are the same person you were 10 years ago, then you are not your physical body
4) Mental properties cannot be measured like physical objects
Physical objects can be measured (e.g. – use physical measurements to measure weight, size, etc.)
Mental properties cannot be measured
5) Intentionality or About-ness
Mental entities can refer to realities that are physical, something outside of themselves
A tree is not about anything, it just is a physical object
But you can have thoughts about the tree out there in the garden that needs water
6) Free will and personal responsibility
If humans are purely physical, then all our actions are determined by sensory inputs and genetic programming
Biological determinism is not compatible with free will, and free will is required for personal responsibility
Our experience of moral choices and moral responsibility requires free will, and free will requires minds/souls
He spends the last 10 minutes of the podcast responding to naturalistic objections to the mind/soul hypothesis.
*Now in the podcast, Wallace does say that scientific evidence is not the best kind of evidence to use when discussing this issue of body/soul and mind/brain. But I did blog yesterday about two pieces of evidence that I think are relevant to this discussion: corroborated near-death experiences and mental effort.
You might remember that Dr. Craig brought up the issue of substance dualism, and the argument from intentionality (“aboutness”), in his debate with the naturalist philosopher Alex Rosenberg, so this argument about dualism is battle-ready. You can add it to your list of arguments for Christian theism along with all the other arguments like the Big Bang, the fine-tuning, the origin of life, stellar habitability, galactic habitability, irreducible complexity, molecular machines, the Cambrian explosion, the moral argument, the resurrection, biological convergence, and so on.
WINTERY KNIGHT 