| Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,
It is so good to see summer upon us with its warm, sunny days and folks returning to normal living!
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| May was highlighted by team-teaching a two-week course on the moral argument for God with Prof. David Baggett at Houston Baptist University. Although I have defended the moral argument for God’s existence in debates with secular philosophers like Paul Kurtz, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Louise Antony, and most recently Erik Wielenberg, I had never actually taught a course on this argument, as I have on the kalām cosmological argument and the argument from fine-tuning. But Dr. Baggett, a widely published expert on the moral argument, invited me to join with him in teaching this course, and it was a privilege to do so. I taught virtually via the Internet, while Dave was on location. In addition to the students at HBU attending in person, we had around 50 students joining us online, not only from around the US, but also Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
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| I was pleased at the enthusiastic response of the students to the lectures. I think that the moral argument is widely misunderstood in various ways, and having those misconceptions cleared up, especially in the Q & A times, really made the light come on for many of these students. I think that they began to see the true strengths of an ethics that is grounded in God rather than a secular view. All the lectures were video-recorded and after editing will eventually be available on YouTube. Even more exciting, Dr. Baggett proposes that we combine our lectures, along with a substantial Q & A section, into a joint book on the moral argument! That would be a wonderful ministry tool.
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| During May I recorded a number of “Reasonable Faith” podcasts with Kevin Harris. I also had the unusual opportunity to record an interview for a podcast called “Balkan Apologetics” with Ilija Lazarov, which is podcast into Serbia, Croatia, and other Balkan countries, a very needy area of the world. Jan and I continue to record my weekly Defenders lessons, currently on Doctrine of the Last Things, our final section. I plan to finish out the entire course remotely before we begin to meet again in person on Sunday mornings sometime later this summer.
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Every day I continue to inch ahead on my writing projects, principally my systematic philosophical theology. I have now moved to writing up my study of divine simplicity. There’s a lot to assimilate! I begin by looking at any supposed scriptural basis for the doctrine that God is absolutely simple. Almost no one thinks that the doctrine is based on Scripture rather than on so-called “perfect being theology,” which tries to deduce divine simplicity philosophically from other properties of God that are attested by Scripture, such as God’s aseity and perfection. I did find two authors, Steven Duby and Jordan Barrett, who do boldly claim that divine simplicity is not the product of perfect being theology but of Scriptural exegesis. But what I discovered reading their books is that they arrive scripturally at two utterly different conceptions of divine simplicity! Duby takes the doctrinaire line of Thomistic Reformed theology, which he claims to find in the Bible. His central error is unwittingly importing into Scripture, not just Thomistic Reformed terminology to express biblical ideas, but substantive metaphysical assumptions and arguments. By contrast, Barrett, who sticks closer to the biblical text, actually denies a strong doctrine of divine simplicity in favor of a version which is so modest as to be soporific: “God is rich and multiple without being composite or divisible into parts.” Yawn!
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Now I’m doing a cursory historical overview of some of the principal figures in the history of theology with regard to divine simplicity. One of the cheekiest claims of contemporary disciples of Thomas Aquinas is that Thomism represents “classical theism,” so that if you’re not a Thomist you’re not a classical theist. This is really intolerable, and my study of the Church Fathers bears this out. Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, in his book on the Cappadocian Church Fathers, points out that statements by the Church Fathers on this subject are ambiguous due to the fact that patristic writers use terms like “simple” and “composite” with different meanings and without any acknowledgement of this equivocation. As a result of this ambiguity, F. G. Immink in his book Divine Simplicity doesn’t even bother to treat the Church Fathers because we don’t know what they really believed. The truth of the matter seems to be that the strong doctrine of divine simplicity is a product of Neo-Platonic philosophy as it evolved among medieval Muslim and Jewish philosophers before being transmitted back to the West and adopted by theologians like Thomas Aquinas.
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I’ve also finished the first draft of my final response to Peter van Inwagen for our projected book Are There Numbers? My final draft is due this month. Similarly, I finished my article on the historical Adam which the magazine First Things has commissioned.
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To keep you up to date on the proposed Academic Center, let me say that we’re currently in private conversation with various educational institutions about affiliating our Center with one of them. Let’s pray for a successful outcome!
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| For Christ and His Kingdom,
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Mx wrote to Prof. Tour: “Hello Dr. Tour, I recently watched a debate/discussion that you had with Dr. Swamidass about the origin of life, and heard your offer to share your testimony with anyone who was not a Christian. While I consider myself to be an atheist, I would be interested in hearing your story if that offer is still open. Thank you, Mx.”
Prof. Tour recounts: “Mx and I spoke. He agreed with everything, even regarding the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. He just graduated with degree in Philosophy. And he is applying for grad school in the same. He loves William Lane Craig’s work, and dislikes the work of Sam Harris and the other new atheists. Nonetheless, he could not bring himself to pray the sinner’s prayer and proclaim the resurrection. So odd. Seems to me that this young man thinks that if he accepts Jesus it will be a termination of his philosophical career. There is a cost in following Jesus, and Mx knows that. Though he does not realize that Jesus would make him a better philosopher.”
This week Prof. Tour received the following from Mx:
“Hello Dr. Tour. You were kind enough to speak with me over Zoom several months ago, and I just wanted to tell you that I recently (as of a month or so ago) have returned to Christianity. I came to the conclusion that the resurrection of Christ is historically well evidenced, and that was sufficient for me to believe in Christianity. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me earlier this year.
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