Lux Lucet

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1771.

My earlier post In Praise of Karl Marx makes the point that Christians can take one positive lesson from Marx’ work: the power of systematic thought. Marx was a thoroughgoing atheist, and both he and his followers consistently applied atheism to all fields of study, creating a well-developed all-around view of the world. Systematic thought is powerful and impressive. One idea is related to and supports another, in much the same way the flying buttresses support a majestic gothic cathedral. This is true, even if the system itself is badly flawed.

Of all people, Christians should be the most systematic thinkers, for we have the systematic, non contradictory truth of God’s Word revealed to us in the 66 books of the Bible. From the express statements and necessary implications of Scripture, we are able to develop a coherent, complete, systematic worldview. The apostle Paul tells us that the Scriptures make the man of God complete, thoroughly equipping him for every good work. This includes the good work of developing a systematic, Christian view of the world.

As mentioned in last week’s post Christian Philosophy: Epistemology, Epistemology is logically the first discipline in any systematic philosophy. For unless one can answer the question, how do you know?, in a coherent fashion, there is no reason to listen to anything a man has to say. But after epistemology, what comes next? Once we have laid the foundation for knowledge, what do we build upon it? The next step in philosophy after epistemology is called metaphysics. Metaphysics attempts to answer questions about the nature of existence. What is reality? Where did the world come from? Does God exist? Metaphysics, at least in the popular mind, is thought of as one and the same thing with philosophy.

Contemporary secular metaphysics denies God and attempts to explain all the world in terms of natural forces. The big bang theory seeks to explain the creation of the universe in terms of natural forces. Darwinism makes the same case in biology, trying to explain the existence of the variety of life we observe as the results of time and chance. Contemporary secular scientists, of course, are not in agreement on all things metaphysical. But they do seem certain of one thing: God can never be invoked to explain anything. Writing in his Systematic Theology, Robert Reymond gives an account of the almost comical lengths to which various scientists will go in their attempt to explain the existence of the universe apart from God.

Alan Guth, a brilliant MIT cosmologist, declares that the universe is a “free lunch,” that is, it came from nothing-that there was nothing, not God, not energy, not matter, simply nothing (bu wait, he say; there was “possibility”!) – and then suddenly and spontaneously the void of nothing gave rise to, no, “decayed” into all the matter and energy the universe now has. He contends that the universe, “not with a bang so much as with a pfft, … ballooned accidentally out of the endless void of eternity, from a stillness so deep that there was no ‘there’ or ‘then,’ only possibility.” Guth, of course, is fudging here; there could not even be possibility, a mathematical concept, if there was nothing. More technically, he has proposed (with refinements from others) that an infinitely dense, infinitely (note the use of a term traditionally reserved as a description of the infinite, personal God) hot point called a “singularity” (he does not explain why or how this infinite singularity got “there”; apparently is spontaneously “decayed” from nothing) spontaneously exploded, that within a ten-millionth of a quadrillionth of a sextillionth (a 1 preceded by point 42 zeros of a second later the universe was about the size of a grain of dust, that one-hundred thousandth of a quadrillionth of a quadrillionth (a 1 preceded by point 34 zeros) of a second later it had doubled in size, that – well, the reader get the point…

Edward P. Tryon, a professor of physics at the City University of New York, proposes that the universe created itself “spontaneously from nothing (ex nihilo) as a result of established principles of physics.” Alex Vilenkin, a Tufts University cosmologist, explains all this this way: ” ‘The universe as a young bubble had tunneled like a metaphysical mole from somewhere else to arrive in space and time. That someplace else was ‘nothing.’ ” Edward Kolb of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, explains this by informing us that “even when you have nothing, there’s something going on”! (Reymond, Systematic Theology, Second Edition, 120, 121)

From this, Reymond wryly concludes, “These descriptive explanations of the universe’s origin, I think one must agree, sound like something written, if not by college freshmen who flunked their introductory course in logic, at best by romantic poets, rather than deliverances issued by serious scientists.”

Over against this, we have Biblical metaphysics. The scriptures declare to us what God is. “God, revealed in the Bible,” John Robbins writes, “is spirit and truth. Since truth always comes in propositions [a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence; we speak of the meaning of a declarative sentence as distinct from the sentence itself, because different sentences can have the same meaning; “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” conveys the same idea as “The heavens and the earth were created by God in the beginning”] the mind of God, that is God himself, is propositional” (Robbins, An Introduction to Gordon Clark).

The Scriptures also declare to us the origin of the universe. In the Bible, the universe is not something sprung from nothing, it is not a bubble, neither did it create itself. The universe and everything in it, much to the consternation of Alan Guth and others of his ilk, was spoken into existence by God. The Westminster Short Catechism brilliantly summarizes the creation of the universe this way, “The work of creation is God’s making all things of nothing, by the word of his power, in the space of six days, and all very good.”

As the apostle Paul declared to the Athenians on Mars Hill, “In him we live and move and have our being.” Science, with its foundation of empirical epistemology that holds man can discover truth on his own, builds upon its secular epistemology a secular metaphysical explanation of the origin and nature of the universe. And as we have seen above, these explanations come off as almost farcical. It is remarkable to this author that this sort of thing even gets a hearing, let alone is taken seriously in educated circles. Yet such is the case today. The reason for this state of affairs is that sinful man would rather suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness, even if that means talking obvious nonsense, than admit his own attempts to explain the universe are failures.

Christian metaphysics, on the other hand, is simple, coherent, and takes no special training to understand. That a child who believes the Bible has a sounder understanding of metaphysics than a brilliant MIT cosmologist, is a remarkable fulfillment of Jesus saying, “I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes” (Matthew 11:25).