Did we learn the concept of God and infer his existence from some other more basic belief, or did we have the concept of God or a belief in his existence ‘already in the mind’? Such is the issue of nativism: whether there is something in the mind prior to experience. Some theologians and philosophers espouse strongly nativist views. For example, Gordon Clark argues for a form of concept nativism. He argues that human beings have “innate ideas and a priori categories” the purpose of which are for “receiving a verbal revelation, of approaching God in prayer, and of conversing with other men about God and spiritual realities.” Clark makes two…
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Scientific Realism and Natural Theology: The Wedding
According to a fairly standard realist view of scientific explanation, a given set of phenomena is explained by postulating some unseen entity or causal process. The entity or process in question is not directly observable, but is explained by an analogy with something with which we are more familiar. Consider our conception of gas molecules. We postulate the activities of gas molecules by an appeal to commonly encountered spherical objects such as billiard balls. In same way billiard balls bounce, gas molecules are said to bounce. The analogy is necessary for the explanation because the gas molecules are not directly observable. A realist concludes from the performance of such an…
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Design?
At school I was taught to anneal copper. This process entailed heating the copper to an exact temperature before working on it. There were no temperature gauges involved – one could tell what temperature the copper had reached by its color – cherry red. The color of the copper changed as the temperature changed. I remember thinking that God was both an artist and an engineer. He designed copper to include its own temperature gauge and made it beautiful at the same time. To a Christian, or any theist for that matter, the world appears to be designed by someone. It is not usually the whole world that appears designed,…
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No Concept, No Belief
You couldn’t believe in something unless you knew something about it. If I said to you that a meroganon lives at the end of my street you might say I am nuts, but you would first want to know something about a meroganon. You couldn’t know if I am nuts unless you knew something about a meroganon. I could describe one to you by listing some of its basic features. After some time you would have in your mind the concept of a meroganon and you could then be justified in thinking that I have lost my mind. Consider the person (there may be more than one) who has not…
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Good Grouping, Bad Shot
What if all the people who have ever existed got together in a massive wiki project and, with unlimited time, were tasked in defining God? There is one rule: they must do it without reference to the Bible. And what if they came to agreement, if they worked until they had an utterly coherent doctrine of God, what would they have achieved? In target shooting there are two kinds of score, one that refers to proximity to a target and one that refers to proximity to other shots. Scoring well by virtue of consistency is called good grouping. If all my shots are close together, but far from the bull’s…