Terror From the Skies and the Existence of God (2001)
by Peter S. Williams
On Tuesday 11th September 2001, terrorists flew two hijacked jumbo jets into the World Trade Centre (and one into the Pentagon) causing death and destruction on an incomprehensible scale, on live TV. To consider the philosophical implications of these tragic events is not to trivialize them, but to take them seriously. There are of course occasions when an active expression of loving comfort is far more appropriate than a philosophical discussion; but since we cannot help asking questions about such events in relation to the really deep issues of life, we should recognize the value of taking the task seriously.
Christianity has much to say about the problem of evil or suffering. Many have thought evil a particular source of embarrassment for Christianity; which is odd when one remembers that Christians worship a crucified saviour! The fact of the matter is that evil is, at the very least, a far greater source of embarrassment for the worldview held by the minority of secular people who don’t believe in God, namely ‘naturalism’. As Corliss Lamont explains: “a naturalistic metaphysics or attitude towards the universe. . . considers all forms of the supernatural as myth [because it] regards Nature as the totality of being and as a. . . system of matter and energy which exists independently of any mind or consciousness.”[1] If we ask which understanding of things makes the most sense of such events as those we witnessed in New York, I believe that the answer is overwhelmingly in favour of the Christian view. According to Pascal:
“The Christian religion consists of two points; it is of equal concern to men that they should know both, it is equally dangerous to be ignorant of them, and it is equally due to His mercy that God has given indications of both. . . The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two truths: that there is a God whom men are capable of knowing, and that there is an element of corruption in themselves which renders them unworthy of Him. It is important to man that he should understand both these two points; it is dangerous for him to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing the redeemer who can free him from it. Knowledge of only one of these truths gives rise to the pride of philosophers, who have come to know God but not their own wretchedness, or to the despair of atheists, who know their own wretchedness but not the Redeemer [who is Jesus Christ], the end of all, the centre to which everything tends. . .”[2]
The events of Tuesday 11th remind us that the human heart is wretched and corrupt. The temptation, when faced with such a graphic example of this corruption, is to find too much comfort in the thought that ‘we’ are, by comparison with the hijackers, relatively good people. However, the only valid standard of comparison is that standard by which any and all corruption (including that of the terrorist) is recognized as such in the first place; that is, by the standard of absolute goodness that theists understand as being part and parcel of the very nature of God. Judged against this standard, must not we agree that: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23)? Watching NewsNight I found former American Secretary of State, James Rubins, asserting that by attacking the World Trade Center the terrorists had struck “at the heart of western civilization.” I hope this is not true; but the mere fact that no one found this assertion at all peculiar, let alone laughable, surely raises some very uncomfortable questions. The Christian agrees with G.K.Chesterton, who, in reply to a request from The Times for letters on the theme of ‘what’s wrong with the world’ wrote: “Dear Sir, I am.”
So much for the human heart; but what do Tuesday’s events have to say about God? Thomas V. Morris phrases the central question of existence thus: “Is the most basic truth about ultimate reality a personal truth [God], or is it an impersonal truth? Are human persons small anomalies blindly thrown up by natural processes for a temporary, transient existence in an otherwise hostile universe, or could it be that we may have both eternal value and everlasting existence?”[3] What should one think in the face of such widespread evil and suffering? Doesn’t the mere existence of evil disprove God? In fact, it is now widely accepted that: “there isn’t any inconsistency between the existence of an omnipotent, omniscience and wholly good God and the existence of the evil the world contains.”[4] There is, as Michael Bergmann of Purdue University writes, a “nearly unanimous agreement among both theistic and nontheistic philosophers of religion that the logical version of the argument from evil doesn’t work.”[5] William Lane Craig explains:
“it is widely recognized. . . that the. . . coexistence of God and evil is logically possible. . . the atheist presupposes that God cannot have morally sufficient reasons for permitting the evil in the world. But this assumption is not necessarily true. So long as it is even possible that God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil, it follows that God and evil are logically consistent.”[6]
Craig doesn’t speak from an ‘ivory tower’ on this issue: “I guess I don’t discuss this much publicly, but I have a congenital neuromuscular disease that causes progressive atrophy in the extremities.”[7] As Peter Kreeft observes: “it’s significant that most objections to the existence of God from the problem of suffering come from outside observers who are quite comfortable, whereas those who actually suffer are, as often as not, made into stronger believers by their suffering.”[8]
The ‘free will’ defence has played a crucial role here, for as Alvin Platinga argues: “A world containing creatures who are significantly free. . . is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. . . To create creatures capable of moral good. . . [God] must create creatures capable of moral evil; and he can’t give these creatures this freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so.”[9] Adding the admittedly implausible suggestion that all ‘natural evil’ is caused by fallen angels is nonetheless sufficient to prove the logical compatibility of God and evil. The atheists alleged that it was self-contradictory to believe both in God and in evil; the theists have successfully rebutted this accusation.[10]
This is all very well in so far as it goes, but one must admit that it doesn’t go very far. Doesn’t evil (or the amount of evil that exists) at least count against the existence of God? Supposing it does; one would still have to take into account all the evidence for the existence of God before deciding if evil counted decisively against God’s existence.[11] However, I do not think that evil even ‘counts against’ God, let alone decisively. Once it is granted that the co-existence of God and evil is not impossible, it becomes very hard to see how any particular amount of evil can disprove God’s existence: “That’s like saying it’s reasonable to believe in God if six Jews die in a Holocaust, but not seven. Or sixty thousand but not sixty thousand and one, or 5,999,999, but not six million. . . When you translate the general statement ‘so much’ into particular examples like that, it shows how absurd it is. There can’t be a dividing line.”[12] Moreover, I think that the existence of evil actually counts decisively for the existence of God, that it is actually the atheist who engages in a self-contradiction if they believe in evil, and that the more horrifying the evil the more obvious and inescapable a fact this is.
Flying a hijacked plane into a skyscraper full of people is self-evidently wrong; to cause such pain and heartache is palpably evil. Consider, for a moment, what it means to make the claim that something is morally ‘good’ or ‘evil’:
“a moral claim. . . is not a descriptive claim, for it does not tell us. . . how a majority of people in fact behave and think. Nor is it a preference claim, for it does not tell us what anyone’s subjective preference may be or how one prefers to behave and think. Rather, it is a claim about what persons ought to do, which may be contrary to how persons in fact behave and how they prefer to behave.”[13]
If humans are, as naturalists believe, nothing but “small anomalies blindly thrown up by natural processes for a temporary, transient existence in an otherwise hostile universe”, then it is surely impossible to justify such claims. As J.P. Moreland says: “If one sees the entire cosmos as coming from a blind explosion called the Big Bang and life arising through a blind, natural process of mutation and struggle for reproductive advantage, it is hard to see what could give man moral worth.”[14] Since the claim that terrorism is evil is more certain than the claim that humans are ‘nothing but’ an unintended and temporary cosmic anomaly, and since the two claims are incompatible, we must repudiate at least one of them. This is the heart of the atheist’s dilemma; not that they cannot recognize evil when they see it, but that they cannot do so without embracing a contradiction between their conscience and their worldview. In this way the problem of evil backfires on the atheist, for as Norman L. Geisler writes: “to disprove God via evil one must assume the equivalent of God by way of an ultimate standard of justice beyond this world. . .”[15]
Terry L. Miethe calls attention to the atheist’s use of ‘evil’: “The atheist is constantly raising the problem of evil but never gives a solution. It is high time the theist called: “Foul!” I defy the atheist to give an answer to the problem of evil.”[16] As Steve Kumar notes, “The reality of evil confronts every philosophy of life, and the burden of explaining its origin and existence lies equally upon all.”[17] For example, naturalism implies the absence of free will; but how can I be morally culpable for doing something that I had no choice about doing? In the words of C.E.M.Joad: “the conviction that some things. . . are positively evil carries with it the consciousness that the things ought not to be done. . . and the consciousness of ought carries with it in its turn. . . the consciousness of freedom. Is it not, indeed, meaningless to say that something ought not to happen. . . if, in fact, it could not have happened or could not have been otherwise?”[18] Thus naturalism denies objective ethics and free will, and objective ethics proves free will and disproves naturalism: “if moral norms exist, then materialism as a worldview is false, because moral norms are nonmaterial things.”[19]
Then again, naturalism implies that our thoughts just are certain material facts about our brains; but how can one piece of matter have the property of being true about another piece of matter? This is extremely counter-intuitive to say the least; a fact that poses huge problems for the naturalist who wants to say that their judgement as to the moral status of terrorism (or its implications for the existence of God) is true!
Thomas V. Morris writes: “An atheist can believe that there are objective moral principles that should be obeyed, but it is awfully hard to give a convincing account of exactly what such principles consist in, where they come from, or exactly what their status could be in a thoroughly physical system such as our universe is thought to be from an atheistic point of view.”[20] The atheist’s problem, as Winfried Corduan explains it, “is committing the fallacy of trying to get an “ought” from an “is.” He or she is trying to justify prescriptive moral laws on the basis of descriptive data. The atheist is after an obligatory moral code without anything that makes it obligatory. To have commandments, they must be commanded in some way, but the atheist’s system does not allow for such a possibility.”[21] Only a theistic worldview allows for such a possibility. As W.R. Sorely argued:
“persons are conscious of values and of an ideal of goodness, which they recognise as having undoubted authority for the direction of their activity; the validity of these values or laws and of this ideal, however, does not depend upon their recognition: it is objective and eternal; and how could this eternal validity stand alone, not embodied in matter and neither seen nor realized by finite minds, unless there were an eternal mind whose thought and will were therein expressed? God must therefore exist and his nature be goodness.”[22]
The theist can say that those who carry out evil in the name of God are being inconsistent; can the atheist really say that the inquisition or the crusades are incompatible with their world-view of a purposeless, amoral universe? Obviously not, because no action can fail to cohere with an amoral metaphysical framework!
The recognition of a moral law thus leads to the recognition of a good moral law-giver, while denying the moral law leads not only to the collapse of the atheist’s flagship argument against God, but to the soul destroying embrace of nihilism, the view that nothing has any objective value. As R.C. Sproul puts it: “To deny [God] is to set one’s sails for the island of nihilism. . . the darkest continent of the darkened mind. . .”[23] Pascal’s “despair of atheists” is the wretchedness of life without God, of a life that is missing out on its true goal, “the centre to which everything tends,” and which therefore finds itself at a dead end. Atheist Will Provine knows this dead end well: “No God. No life after death. No free will. No ultimate meaning in life and no ultimate foundation for ethics.”[24]
We can, then, show that neither the existence of evil, nor the amount of evil in the world, even counts against the existence of God, but that it actually argues for His existence. We can show that the ‘problem of evil’ either backfires on the atheist by proving God’s existence (if one accepts the existence of objective moral norms), or leads into the dead-end of nihilism if such norms are rejected. We can see that naturalism, and the nihilism to which it logically leads, denies human freedom and value, while theism supports both. And we can see that the existence and abuse of human (and angelic) freedom provides a partial explanation for the existence of evil. But can we gain any further insight into evil? We can; but our first answer is to recognize with Job both that it is unreasonable of us to expect to have all the answers, and that it is nonetheless reasonable to trust God in our perplexity.
The story of Job is the story of a good man to whom bad things happen. His friends produce the then orthodox theological perspective on Job’s suffering: that it must be a punishment for his sin. This perspective, as Job knows, has the singular failing of being completely incorrect. In the end, Job demands that God explain Himself. Then Job meets God in the midst of his undeserved suffering. God’s explicit reply to Job is that he does not understand what’s going on, and that he can’t expect to understand what’s going on. God’s implicit reply to Job is to give him, not a philosophical argument, but an experience of the divine presence. It is in the very act of railing against God that Job finds the ultimate answer to his suffering: God Himself: “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:5-6.) Thereafter, Job still does not know how God and evil can co-exist, but he knows that God and evil can co-exist, because both are undeniable elements of his personal experience. As James Kelly Clark writes:
“The desires to blame or accuse God, to feel bitter or that one has lost out on something are silenced because one knows new things and sees things differently. One comes to know and admire God in a way that one believes that God’s allowing the suffering is acceptable and good. One’s sufferings become part of a whole without becoming [merely] a means to an end. What one values has changed. . . Although one cannot know how God’s goodness works in any detail, the Christian believes that fellowship with God is sufficiently good to silence any evils suffered in this life.”[25]
The Christian can never forget that God is a God who suffers with us and for us. Alban McCoy, Catholic chaplain at Cambridge University, reminds us that however we view the philosophical problem of evil, “none of us can escape the second form of the problem: that is the experience of evil.”[26] This is the practical question of how we are to cope with the experience of suffering. McCoy suggests that: “Only the conviction that evil can never be the final word. . . can ease the sense of futility that so easily arises in the face of evil. Without this, life would surely be, as Macbeth says, no more than ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ (Macbeth V.v.16). Even if we cannot make sense of the experience of evil, we need some ground for hope. Without hope, we cannot live.”[27] With McCoy, I believe that only God can provide an adequate ground for hope in the face of evil and suffering. Knowing God’s personal involvement in solving the practical problem of evil (especially in my own heart) encourages my confidence in the face of the philosophical problem of evil. As McCoy says:
“The Cross is at once the greatest evil and the greatest good and it is here that we are given grounds for believing that the mystery of sin and evil is within the providence of God, however little we may understand how this might be so. . . it is in the Cross that the problem of evil is most clearly manifest, for here, contrary to the view that God must be indifferent to our suffering, he becomes the victim of evil in order to overcome, on our behalf, the evil we have inflicted on him.”[28]
In the end, the Bible teaches that God will heal the whole of creation when he recreates it to produce the new heavens and earth where there will be no more pain, no more mourning, and no more tears (Revelation 21:1-7). In the meantime, whether or not God heals us here and now, He is there with us in our suffering, sharing our pain. Alvin Plantinga writes:
“God. . . enters into and shares our suffering. He endures the anguish of seeing his Son, the second person of the Trinity, consigned to the bitterly cruel and shameful death of the cross. . . God’s capacity for suffering, I believe, is proportional to his greatness; it exceeds our capacity for suffering in the same measure as his capacity for knowledge exceeds ours. . . God. . . was prepared to accept this suffering in order to overcome sin and death and the evils that afflict our world, and to confer on us a life more glorious than we can imagine. So [even if we don’t know] why God permits evil; we do know. . . that he was prepared to suffer on our behalf, to accept suffering of which we can form no conception.”[29]
Such mass murder as we witnessed on September 11th forces upon us the question of death. On the Christian view of things, death is a gateway through which all who choose it can enter the heaven of eternal life with God. Earthly existence is not an end in itself, but a means to an unimaginably glorious end: “our life here is, then, to be looked upon as a period of training and discipline designed to teach us, if we are willing to learn, how to become better, and, since it is mainly through suffering that men learn, suffering is to be expected.”[30] Thus Paul says: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” (Romans 8:18.)
What does naturalism have to say about death? A little while back I reviewed a collection of papers on ‘death and philosophy’.[31] I found it a profoundly unsatisfying experience. No systematic attempt was made to understand the nature of death, or its import for understanding the nature and destiny of human existence. No attempt was made to situate death in the context of philosophical understandings of human nature or wider world-view questions.[32] For example, while the editors said that their collection was concerned with death “as it figures in human life and in contributing to, or perhaps even detracting from, the meaningfulness of such life” [33], no attempt was made to define meaningfulness! For human existence to be objectively meaningful is for it to have an objectively valuable purpose; and this is something only a supreme agent can provide. As G.K. Chesterton said, “If there is a purpose, there is a person.” How can we recognise meaningless or senseless acts of terror as such if the human story has no meaning or sense? And how can the human story have any meaning or sense if it lacks any authorial intent? Ignoring such questions, editors Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon insist that the pallet of naturalism provides “the only colours available to us – colours that derive from a thoughroughly human set of concerns, values and commitments.”[34] This narrow range of philosophical ‘colours’ leads to a monotone outlook, heavy with its worldliness; for if naturalism is true “Death seems to entail. . . the annihilation of oneself.”[35] Hence: “The disappearance of [belief in the] afterlife has increased human freedom; but, at the same time, it has decreased human meaning.”[36] It’s hardly surprising that: “Having disposed of the traditional notion of life after death and of one’s immortal soul [how exactly has this supposed disposal been achieved?], we are still, in our thinking about death, haunted by its ghost. . .”[37] What can naturalism offer to fill this ghostly void? It is suggested that we adopt “the idea of a human life as constituted in terms of a narrative or story”, an (authorless) story that, “like all good stories, at some point comes to an end.”[38] This narrative approach is employed with the intention of showing how death as extinction can contribute to the meaningfulness of life; but no one thinks to mention how fairy stories traditionally end: “and they all lived happily ever after”! Besides, why savour the little we have simply because it is little? What’s to be savoured if neither the little we have nor our savouring of it has any meaning or value? When Betty S. Flowers suggests that: “We need some good communal storytelling about the kinds of fiction we can hold as if they were beliefs”[39], the emptiness of secularism is resounding. Flowers ultimately gives up on truth, hoping that “we can live in the as if stories of meaning we have created and test their results in our own lives and in the lives of our communities.”[40] This is nothing but a self-conscious whistling in the wind. The Christian, on the other hand, can affirm with Saint Teresa that: “in the light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures on earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.” As Jesus taught: “A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no-one will take away your joy.” (John 16:21-22.) Evangeline Paterson’s poem, ‘Deathbed’, encapsulates this hope and its justification:
Now, when the frail and fine-spun
Web of mortality
Gapes, and lets slip
What we have loved so long
From out our lighted present
Into the trackless dark
We turn, blinded,
Not to the Christ in Glory,
Stars about his feet,
But to the Son of Man,
Back from the tomb,
Who built fires, ate fish,
Spoke with friends, and walked
A dusty road at evening.
Here, in this room, in
This stark and timeless moment,
We hear those footsteps
And
With suddenly lifted hearts
Acknowledge
The irrelevance of death.
In the end: “The way we approach and view our mortality depends upon our views of what are the ultimate ends of our actions and desires, what offers us true satisfaction, and what is the source of the positive or negative value that anything may possess.”[41] For the Christian, our ultimate end and true satisfaction is eternal life with God, the source and summit of all value. For the naturalist, our ultimate end is extinction, true satisfaction is a temporary and fragile distraction from that end, and all thought of values is, as Michael Ruse says: “just an aid to survival and reproduction. . . and any other meaning is illusory.” Our choice is between some kind of theism, or the no meaning, no purpose, no future and no value worldview of nihilism: “Make no mistake; there is a collision of world views. . . One view says there is no ultimate reality, there is no meaning, there is no purpose, everything is relative, there are no absolutes. The other says God is, He is not silent, He is in heaven, there is ultimate meaning, and it is in God.”[42] To say that it is objectively good to accept nihilism, or that it is rationally bad to accept theism, would be self-contradictory, because nihilism is the utter denial of such normative concepts. Therefore, our choice is between God on the one hand and self-contradiction on the other. To choose self-contradiction is absurd. While the nihilists may shrug their shoulders and demand, “So what? That’s the point of nihilism”, those of us who remain on the sunny side of the metaphysical street, where it is metaphysically reasonable to “Rejoice with those who rejoice [and] mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15), can find no rational, moral or existential motive for crossing over. For once, the grass isn’t greener on the other side.
Recommended Resources
Kelly James Clark, ‘I Believe in God, the Father, Almighty’ @
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/writings/ibig.htm
Norman L. Geisler, ‘Any Absolutes? Absolutely!’ @
http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~lin/files/absolute.html
William Lane Craig, ‘The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality’ @ http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/meta-eth.html
Peter Kreeft, ‘The Problem of Evil’ @
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0019.html
Peter Kreeft, ‘Life After Death’ @
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0022.html
Peter Kreeft & Ronald Tacelli, ‘Evidence for the Resurrection of Christ’ @
http://hometown.aol.com/philvaz/articles/num9.htm
Josh McDowell, ‘Evidence for the Resurrection’ @
http://www.leaderu.com/everystudent/easter/articles/josh2.html
Barry R. Leventhal, ‘Holocaust Apologetics: Toward a Case for the Existence of God’ @ http://ses.edu/journal/issue1_1/leventhal.rtf
Peter S. Williams, ‘A Conversation about the Existence of God’ @ http://www.ht-leicester.org.uk/
- Stephen Evans, Why Believe? Reason and Mystery as Pointers to God, (IVP, 1996).
Peter Kreeft, Heaven – the heart’s deepest longing, (Ignatius).
Peter Kreeft & Ronald Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, (IVP/Monarch).
C.S.Lewis, Mere Christianity, (Fount).
C.S.Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (Fount).
Alister McGrath, Suffering, (Hodder & Stoughton, 1992).
Thomas V. Morris, Philosophy for Dummies, (IDG Books, 1999).
Ronald H. Nash, Worldviews in Conflict, (Zondervan, 1992).
Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith – A Journalist investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity, (Harper Collins/Zondervan, 2000).
Peter S. Williams, The Case for God, (Monarch, 1999).
Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God?, (Word, 1994).
[1] Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism, (Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1977), p. 12-13.
[2] Blasé Pascal, Pensees, (Everyman’s Library, 1960).
[3] Thomas V. Morris, Making Sense of it All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life, (Eerdmans, 1992), p. 21.
[4] Alvin Plantinga, ‘Tooley and Evil: A reply’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 60 (1981): 74.
[5] Michael Bergmann, Philosophia Christi, Series 2, Volume 1, Number 2, 1999, p. 140.
[6] William Lane Craig, in debate with Kai Nielson.
[7] William Lane Craig in Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith, (Zondervan, 2000), p. 72.
[8] Peter Kreeft, in Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith, (Zondervan, 2000), p. 72.
[9] Alvin Plantinga, ‘The Free Will Defence’ in Basil Mitchell ed., The Philosophy of Religion, (Oxford, 1971).
[10] cf. John Perry, Dialogue on Good, Evil, and the Existence of God, (Hackett, 1999).
[11] cf. Peter S. Williams, The Case for God, (Monarch, 1999); ‘A Conversation about the Existence of God’ @ www.ht-leicester.org.uk/; & ‘Aesthetic Arguments for the Existence of God’ @
www.quodlibet.net/williams-aesthetic.shtml
[12] Peter Kreeft in Lee Strobel, The Case for Faith, (Zondervan, 2000), p. 43.
[13] Francis J. Beckwith, ‘Why I Am Not A Moral Relativist’, in Norman L. Geisler & Paul K. Hofmann ed.’s, Why I Am A Christian, (Baker, 2001), p. 17.
[14] J.P. Moreland, Christianity and the Nature of Science, (Baker, 1998), p. 55.
[15] Norman L. Geisler, Christian Apologetics, (Baker, 1995), p. 233.
[16] Terry Miethe, Does God Exist?, p. 192.
[17] Steve Kumar, Christianity for Sceptics, (John Hunt, 2000), p. 41.
[18] C.E.M. Joad, The Recovery of Belief, p. 77.
[19] Francis J. Beckwith, op cit, p. 16.
[20] Thomas V. Morris, Making Sense of it All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life, (Eerdmans, 1992), p. 119.
[21] Winfried Corduan, No Doubt about It, p. 87.
[22] W.R. Sorely, Moral Values and the Idea of God, (Cambridge, 1919).
[23] R.C. Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas, (Crossway Books, 2000), p. 171.
[24] Will Provine, in Russell Stannard, Science and Wonders.
[25] Kelly James Clark, ‘I Believe in God the Father’@
www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/writings/ibig.htm.
[26] Alban McCoy, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Catholicism, (Continuum, 20001), p. 17.
[27] ibid, p. 18.
[28] ibid, p. 16-17 & 27.
[29] Alvin Plantinga, ‘A Christian Life Partly Lived’, Philosophers Who Believe, (IVP, 1993), p. 71-72.
[30] C.E.M.Joad, op cit, p. 80.
[31] Death and Philosophy, ed. Jeff Malpas & Robert C. Solomon, (Routledge, 1998).
[32] cf. Gary R. Habermas & J.P.Moreland, Beyond Death, (Crossway Books, 1998).
[33] op cit.
[34] ibid, p. 4.
[35] ibid, p. 33.
[36] ibid, p. 53.
[37] Ivan Soll, ibid, p. 38.
[38] ibid, p. 3.
[39] Betty S. Flowers, ibid, p. 55.
[40] ibid, p. 56.
[41] Ivon Soll, op cit, p. 23.
[42] Chuck Colson, Chuck Colson Speaks, (Promise Press, 2000), p. 40.