Audio only:
In this episode Trent reveals the results of a survey involving 50 Catholic apologists who each answered the question: What is the best argument for the existence of God?
REBUTTAL of Rationality Rules’s “Debunking” of Aquinas
REBUTTING Rationality Rules on Ben Shapiro, Ed Feser, and Aquinas
Alex O’Connor deconstructs Ben Shapiro and Ed Feser (REBUTTED)
How the Essentia Argument for God’s Existence Works (Aquinas 101)
Why Did Christian Apologists Stop Using the Classical Arguments for God’s Existence?
Transcription:
Trent:
I asked 50 Catholic apologists, philosophers, theologians, and influencers. One question, what is the best argument for the existence of God? In today’s episode, I’m going to break down their answers and what this means for how we as Christians should answer atheism and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ to a thoroughly secular world. But first, a little background. Back in June, Protestant scholar Sean McDowell asked 100 Christian Apologists, including myself, what is the best argument for God? By the way, Sean has written the best treatment on the martyrdom of the apostles, so I highly recommend it if you want to ramp up your who would die for a lie argument for the resurrection of Jesus. Now, I had a tough time deciding on my answer to the question for Sean’s survey, but I eventually settled on the contingency argument for God’s existence. I was shocked, however, to find out that no other Christian apologist in Sean’s survey mentioned this argument. I was the only one.
CLIP:
Trent Horn, a Catholic apologist was the only one who said contingency. Now, this is a kind of caus logical argument, but it moves from the existence of contingent things like the universe that didn’t have to exist as saying the best explanation for its existence is a necessary being.
Trent:
Afterwards, I went back through Sean’s list of apologists and notice that the vast majority of them, probably over 95% were Protestant. Many of them were associated with the Talbot School of Theology, which is part of the Evangelical Biola University. So that got me thinking. What would Catholic scholars say about this same question and how might their results mirror or diverge from these Protestant scholars? So I sent out a bunch of emails and I ended up getting 50 responses. I wanted to make it to the full 100, but things have been a tad busy having to work and manage a lot of household duties while my wife Laura recovers from brain cancer treatment. I think our favorite gift we received during this time is this t-shirt, which says Brain surgery one star did not enjoy, would not recommend. Still, I think 50 responses provides a wide enough sample to get reliable results among Catholics who engage to some degree in the public defense of the faith.
So first I’m going to summarize the results of Sean’s survey of 100 Christian apologists and then I’ll compare it to the results from my survey. Sean divided up the arguments for God’s existence into five categories, and here’s how his respondents fell into those categories. Number one were existential arguments about 5.5% of respondents. Number two were unique arguments, a kind of grab bag if you will, at about 12%. Number three were arguments related to the evidence for Jesus at about 14%. Number four was the moral argument at about 21% of respondents and finally was creation. At about 47% of respondents picked one of these arguments as the best for showing God exists. Now here’s how the Catholic apologists came out using Sean’s categories. Number one existential arguments, 0%. Sean used the example of John Lennox saying, A transformed life is the best evidence for God. None of the respondents in my survey said anything like that, but what I grouped under unique arguments might also be called existential.
So let’s take a look at those unique arguments came out to about 12%. This included Keith Nestor choosing the argument from common consent, which says Universal belief in God is good evidence. God exists Catholic apologist Gary Chuda who said the argument from the existence of abstract objects like numbers shows God exists, and Peter Crave said, the best argument for God is the argument from beauty. I love how Crave puts it in his handbook. For Christian apologetics, there is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Therefore there must be a God. You either see this one or you don’t. Next we have evidence for Jesus and in my survey this also came out to about 12%. We have Stephanie Gray, Connors reprising her answer from Sean’s survey with Christ resurrection biblical bookworm who mentions the teachings of Christ and also things like Eucharistic miracles, which as a Catholic I will say counts as Jesus.
When it comes to the moral argument, this one came in lower among Catholic apologists at 12%. Eric salmons from Crisis magazine and philosophy Professor Logan G were among those who voted for this argument. And finally, creation, which you can probably tell ate up a way bigger piece of the pie chart among Catholic apologists coming in at a whopping 64%. But things get even more interesting. In Sean’s video, he notes that creation is somewhat of a broad category and it included people who voted for the Kal cosmological argument, fine tuning and even intelligent design or evidence from design seen in things like the structure of the cell as the best arguments for the existence of God. However, in my survey, only one respondent, Adrian from Sips with Sarah picked the KALM cosmological argument and only two respondents, Cameron Bertuzzi and Luis Dizon picked the fine tuning argument as the best argument for the existence of God.
And no respondent picked intelligent design or evidence from the biological structure of living organisms. What’s interesting is that one of the most famous defenders of intelligent design, Michael Behe is Catholic. However, the intelligent design movement tends to be overwhelmingly Protestant and Catholic philosophers are usually quite critical of it. So what part of creation did the Catholic apologists in my survey pick as being the best reason to believe that God exists? Remember, I was the only apologist in Sean’s survey to mention the contingency argument by name. However, that was certainly not the case with my survey. In my survey, 26% of all the Catholic respondents one out of four picked the contingency argument by name as the best argument for God. This included Catholic apologists like Pat Madrid, Joe Meyer, Matt Fra, and Jimmy Aiken, as well as Catholic philosophers like Tyler McNabb and Alex Press. Logan G also said the contingency argument was a very close second for him.
Thank you guys. I knew I was not alone out there and 24% of respondents pick something that in many cases is very close to the contingency argument and that would be one of St. Thomas Aquinas’s arguments for the existence of God. This included Tim Staples Catholic answers Christian Wagner of Scholastic answers who chose the argument for motion, which is Aquinas’s first way as well as Catholic philosopher Ed Faser who chose the Arisal argument, which expands on what is commonly known as the argument from motion to see some of my episodes defending the argument from motion that St. Thomas Aquinas makes. Check out the links below. Catholic philosopher Frank Beckwith said The contingency argument is the best, and in particular he mentions St. Thomas Aquinas’s argument in his work Deante at Essentia. Dr. Faser also added as a runner up Thomas’s argument from the distinction between essence and existence.
In fact, 12% of the respondents brought up not just St Thomas Aquinas, but the Dete at Essentia argument by name as being the best argument for God’s existence. This includes Catholic philosophers like Carla Broussard, Rob Koons and Gavin Kerr, who’s written an entire book Just on this argument, this argument notes that there is essence what something is and existence that something is. The argument shows that the only way things exist with different kinds of essences is that there must be something whose essence just is existence and that reality is most fittingly called God. Now, there’s a lot more that can be said about the argument and I’ll save a defense of it for a future episode, though I’ll link to some defenses of it in the description below. Instead, what I want to explore is why the Catholic and Protestant apologetic responses to this question are so different.
I emailed Sean and asked him if anyone in his survey mentioned St. Thomas Aquinas by name as having the best arguments for God, and he said he didn’t recall anyone mentioning Aquinas. So why is that? Why are contingency arguments and mistic arguments, especially mistic contingency arguments, which was essentially my answer to the question, so popular among Catholics and not Protestants. When it comes to Aquinas, the answer might seem pretty obvious. He’s one of the most famous doctors of the church, and Pope Leo XIII said his philosophy has a pride of place in the life of the church. The Pope encouraged the church at the end of the 19th century to return to the scholastic method in order to combat modern secularism. In contrast, while the early Protestant reformers like the Lutheran Johan Gerhard or the Reform Francis Turtin preserved much of the scholastic method, later, Protestants gradually moved away from this mode of thinking Instead of viewing the universe through the lens of God’s continual conservation of material, formal, essential, and finally ordered causal series that actively sustain everything in existence, these newer Protestants saw the universe as being more like a great machine that God made in the past and now lovingly watches over in the present proving God made the universe relied more on inferences from the presence of design.
As can be seen in the 18th century Protestant scholar, William Paley’s famous watchmaker argument for God, this gave way to modern intelligent design arguments I mentioned earlier. Under this view, God ended up becoming one. All being among other beings who like them is subject to time and laws of existence, arguments to prove God exists. Ended up focusing on showing that God started this universal machine like the Kal cosmological argument, one that Aquinas did not agree with by the way, which is another reason it’s not popular among Catholics or that God designed this big universe machine. This stands in contrast to classical theisms view that God simply is being itself. For example, when I spoke at a Protestant apologetic conference on God’s existence years ago, only one other speaker along with me agreed that God has no parts and that God is timeless. The rest of the Protestant speakers of this conference held to what Father Brian Davies calls theistic personalism God is a being, but not the infinite act of being that sustains all beings.
Unlike the Kalm or design arguments, classical theist defenses of God show not just that a powerful being created the universe in the past who itself may no longer exist, but that the infinite act of being itself created and sustains the universe. And so it still exists because it just is existence itself. Finally, I think many Protestants don’t use St. Thomas Aquinas’s arguments because they either simply aren’t familiar with them or because there’s a fear that Aquinas is a kind of gateway drug to Catholicism. Catholic author Doug Beaumont’s book Evangelical Exodus describes several students at Southern Evangelical Seminary who became Catholic due to the school’s heavy emphasis on studying Aquinas in spite of its Protestant mission. One review in the Protestant Journal, Emilio says this, for all intents and purposes, St. Thomas Aquinas was the seminary’s patron saint. Another author admits that the first thing that brought me to Catholicism was the Tomism at SES.
Frank Beckwith was once the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, but he stepped down in May of 2007 after his decision to revert to the Catholic faith of his childhood. I remember discussing this bombshell with a Protestant friend at the time who himself became Catholic. A few years later, Beckwith credits part of his reversion to studying Aquinas, and in 2019 he published the book, never Doubt Thomas the Catholic Aquinas as Evangelical and Protestant to show how Aquinas can benefit Protestant readers. And as you might expect, not every Protestant is enthused at that invitation. Here’s James White from two years ago complaining about then Baptist author Matthew Barrett being too much of a Thomas Aquinas fanboy.
CLIP:
When I point out Barrett’s wildly imbalanced fascination with Thomas Aquinas, I don’t know if he’ll ever become Roman Catholic. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t, I don’t know, but it’s wildly imbalanced. If you are at a Southern Baptist seminary and your students are drawing pictures of Thomas Aquinas for you, you might want to go, huh, something strange. There’s an imbalance, a massive imbalance. Just look at his timeline. I mean, if I as a Calvinist talked about Calvin half as much as Matthew Barrett talks about Thomas Aquinas, and all you got to do is go back to 2016 when he wrote a book on solo scriptura that’s not the same guy
Trent:
White reared this clip a few weeks ago to run a victory lap. Now that Barrett has announced he’s become Anglican, which White thinks is a gateway denomination to Catholicism.
CLIP:
All this scholasticism that has been coming into reform Baptist circles was coming into Midwestern. This is inconsistent with what defines Baptist theology practice and quality as well. And so if your students are drawing pictures of Aquinas, pretty soon they’ll be drawing pictures of Pope Leo the 14th. It’s inevitable. That’s the progress. So what I did warn about is that once you collapse on certain foundational issues regarding scriptural sufficiency over against any kind of whatever terminology of tradition you want to use, those are the people who if they continue to seek consistency, will end up not only leaving our churches but moving toward a different expression of Christian faith. And that might be certain highly liturgical churches,
Trent:
White’s perspective is fairly common among particular American evangelicals who were skeptical of anything being an infallible rule of faith beyond scripture even reason itself. Mark Knoll warned about this all the way back in 1994 with his book, the Scandal of The Evangelical Mind, but not all evangelicals are like that. I ask Gavin Orland, who holds to classical theism and agrees with me that God is absolutely simple and timeless to share with me some of his thoughts on the differences between these two surveys.
CLIP:
Hey everyone, as a long time appreciative viewer of the Council of Trent podcast, it’s fun to be able to share some thoughts here, and I kind of want to acknowledge some of the weaknesses of my tribe of Christendom, which is evangelicalism, at least where I see things in the United States and I think elsewhere as well. The nice way to say it may be that we have an underdeveloped appreciation of the contingency argument and many arguments like it. I would say probably all of Thomas Aquinas’s five ways these are well-known, but I think evangelicals neglect them a lot. There are exceptions to that, so there’s plenty of great evangelical philosophers, but I think they’re probably more the exception now, personally, I love the contingency argument. The moral argument is the one that moves me the most existentially and emotionally I think because conscience is such a lively place where we experience God.
But the contingency argument to me is maybe the simplest and best and just most forceful argument for God at least philosophically. And over the last year and a half as I’m working on a book on Christianity, it’s the argument I’m leading off with. So my appreciation for it has deepened. I wonder if there’s two reasons why evangelicals have been a bit weaker when it comes to the contingency argument. One is that we tend to not focus on philosophy as much in general, and to the extent that we do focus upon cosmological arguments, we tend to focus on the Kal version of this argument. And part of that is probably due to the influence of William Lane Craig, who has popularized that argument and done a lot of great work rehabilitating it, but so much of the focus has gone there and that argument has some weaknesses that the contingency argument doesn’t.
Another reason though, I think, and this is a huge area where I think there can be mutual benefit from Evangelicals and Catholics and other Christians talking more, and that is the weakness in my tribe with respect to classical theism and the doctrine of divine simplicity, especially, this is an area where many evangelicals are a bit weak from my vantage point, and we’ve sort of fallen away from what standard views have been throughout church history, and it’s just amazing how much the doctrine of divine simplicity comes up in the context of arguments for God and just in general sort of apologetics and philosophy when you’re looking for the unexplained explainer, the stopping point for explanation that which makes sense of everything else, the idea of a God who is perfectly simple ends up being exactly what you need. And so I hope that evangelicals will do more to rehabilitate our use of the contingency argument and Thomas’s other arguments. And I think this is an area where there can be a lot of fruitful conversation between evangelicals, Catholics, and other Christians.
Trent:
I also ask the Lutheran scholar, Jordan Cooper to share his thoughts on mainline Protestantisms move away from contingency and scholastic arguments for God’s existence since his doctoral dissertation covers this phenomenon among the radical Lutherans. Check out Jordan’s full explanation of the history of this shift in theology in the link in the description below. So if you’re a Protestant, I would encourage you to learn about these powerful evidences for the existence of God even though they have some Catholic accouts. And if you’re Catholic, well, it doesn’t hurt to study up on these resources. If you want to get started, I highly recommend Ed ER’s book five Proofs Through the Existence of God. If you want the abridged version of that book, just read the first chapter on the Aristotelian argument for God, and then chapter seven, easily the best chapter of the book that answers lots of common objections to natural theology. I also recommend Pat Flynn’s book The Best Argument for God, Gavin Kerr’s book on Aquinas’s Deante argument, and John de Rosa’s classical theism podcast. If you like a nice evangelical start to your arguments for God, check out Gavin Orland’s book Why God Makes Sense. Thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.