Philosophy vs. Theology

Quite often, during philosophy class, my instructor was eager to point out the differences he perceived between philosophy and theology. He would turn to the board without fail each time the word theology was mentioned. He would then draw two columns entitled with said subjects and tell us all that philosophy is based on evidence but theology is based on authority. The purpose of this essay is to challenge that this is a clear fact that should be stated as such in a classroom setting.

Christianity is a theology that is not based upon a blind devotion to authority, without evidence to back it up, as our philosophy instructor would have us believe. The Bible says that we are to “prove all things and hold fast to that which is good” 1 Thessalonians 5:21. This hardly sounds like a call for ignorance on the part of the believer. In fact it sounds pretty close to common sense ethics if you ask me. The big difference is, that a follower of the God of the Bible also believes a human being, with his limited understanding of this world, can never count on his common sense alone for all things.

Just because at times God has called on man to act in a way that opposes our sensibilities of right and wrong, and man has obeyed, does not mean that he has done so out of blind obedience. If a child is running out into the street to catch a ball and unquestioningly stops in his tracks as his mother asks, his obedience is based on prior knowledge that his mother loves him and wants what is best for him. He may not see the car and have no other reason to stop than his trust in his mother but that does not make his obedience absent of evidence.

The people who converted to Christianity in that first century after Christ was resurrected, were not without evidence to convince them either. For one, they had first hand accounts. The Disciples of Christ were there and saw with their own eyes the miracles that accompanied the Son of God. They knew that no mere mortal could have done these things. Peter said, “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” 2 Peter 1:16 But a Jew or Gentile of these times would not have had to rely solely on the word of the apostles. Christ was seen resurrected by many others, even 500 at once. Paul writes, “After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.” 1 Corinthians 15:6. He doesn’t say, you better believe what I say or else you’ll go to hell. He says, if you don’t believe me then go ask around. Most of the people who witnessed these things are still alive. Many of these men went on to die for their beliefs. Men do not die for what they know to be a lie. You might answer so what, Muslims die for their faith all the time. The difference is, while they may sincerely believe in the ideals of Islam to the point of being willing to die for it, they are dying because they believe an ideal. These men died because they literally saw Christ perform miracles. They literally saw His resurrected body, and they literally saw Him ascend into heaven. There is a big difference. We know from secular sources that by 64 AD, only a few decades after the resurrection of Christ, Nero was already executing Christians. The Bible is not our only evidence that these men sacrificed their lives.

The second evidence that these early converts had was the Word of God. Luke records in Acts 17:11 that there were men, “more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” This also is not an example of blind faith. When Paul told them that Jesus was the messiah spoken of in their ancient text hundreds of years prior, they checked it out. They read verses in Isaiah 53. “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” They must have marveled at how these words written 700 years prior sounded so close to events that had just taken place. They remembered the story of how their father Abraham had once been willing to sacrifice his son on Mount Moriah and how God had stayed his had and offered a sacrifice in his place. They must have then finally seen the prophetic meaning behind those sacred scriptures. It was by this evidence they were convinced. Many of them had cried, “Crucify him!” Do you think it was easy to come to the knowledge that they were wrong? I believe it pained them deeply, but the evidence was so clear that they could not deny it no matter how much they would have liked to.

Many today deny the reliability of the Bible but if you are going to deny the historical facts presented in its text, you are going to have to throw out all secular historical documents as well. Textual criticism depends upon two factors, how many copies exist, and how close they are to the originals. Of the Bible we have 5,300 copies and fragments in the original Greek text. 230 manuscript portions predate 600AD. Nearly all of the New Testament can be reconstructed using writings of the early church fathers of the second and third centuries AD. Only 40 lines of text have been disputed when compared to the Bibles we hold today. None of the secular historical documents we have today even come close. Of Tacitus’ “Annals of Imperial Rome” for example, one of our primary sources for Roman history, we have only two partial surviving manuscripts. These manuscripts have a gap of nearly a millennium from the original.

Not only do we have manuscript evidence of the reliability of scripture but prophetic evidence as well. There are said to be nearly 2,000 prophecies in the Bible, many of which have already been fulfilled. There are prophecies we can see being fulfilled today, like the return of the Jewish people to Israel after 2,000 years of exile (Zechariah 8, Ezekiel 34). Some of these prophecies must have been unimaginable to the people who penned them. Such as an eastern army of 200 million (Rev. 9:16), or that the whole world could look upon the same image like we can today through TV and the internet (Rev 11:9-10).

Though the Bible is not a scientific book, there are scientific statements in the Bible that were far ahead of their time when written. Job 28:25 says that there is a weight to the wind. The fact that the air has an actual weight was not discovered until 1640 by Galileo. It describes hydrothermal vents (Job 38:16) not discovered until the 1970’s, and says that hands should be washed in running water (Lev 15:13) long before microbes were known to cause disease. While doctors were leeching men to rid them of bad blood, the Bible says that the life of the flesh is in the blood (17:11). Contrary to popular belief, the Bible has always said, “It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth.” Isaiah 40:22. People have always scoffed at Adam being created from the dust of the earth, but as we have discovered the table of elements, we find that earth and flesh do in fact share many of them.

Archeology as well has confirmed the Bible time and time again. They laughed at the Bibles description of Sargon, until they found his temple. They swore Belshazzar had to be a made up character, until they found an inscription naming him as the son of a known Babylonian king. Hittites were once considered a fabled people, now there is abundant evidence of their existence. It was once taught that Acts 14:6 was in error because it has Paul and Barnabas fleeing to Lycaonia from Iconium. They said the writers must have been ignorant to the fact that Iconium is in Lycaonia. Unfortuanly for the nay sayers, archeology proved them wrong again with their finding that during the few decades between 37AD and 72AD Iconium was a part of Phrygia not Lycaonia. The city of Ur was just a story as well until about 150 years ago.

Romans 1:20 says that “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made (us), even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” Here is another verse that says we come to knowledge of God through evidence. All through history, every tribe and nation has looked at the world and seen a creator. Reading on to verse 22 of this chapter we see a clear description of mans state today, “ professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” Scientists today are riding the backs of giants. It is the height of arrogance to assume that we have a better understanding of the world today than the great minds of the past. The more we learn about our distant ancestors, the more we realize how very industrious they really were.

Today we have more evidence of creation than those of the past could have ever imagined, but we chose to ignore it, so we are very much without excuse. They had no idea of the delicate balance of forces sustaining our planet or the amazing complexity of a single cell. For more than 40 years SETI has search the universe in vain for a nonrandom repeating sequence. Once they find this signal they say they will know they have evidence of intelligent life out there. If they would only turn and look inside the universe of the human body they would find the very message they have been looking for all these years encoded into our DNA.

This verse in Romans not only speaks of the knowledge that a creator exists but of the nature of His Godhead as well. I have heard many people claim that the concept of one God in three persons makes no sense. In the past I have been content to reply that I am glad my God is not small enough to fit into the box of my own imaginations. Lately though, I have been seeing that the idea of a trinity should be quite familiar to us all. This three in one concept can be seen over and over again in creation. The universe is made up of time, space, and matter. Matter comes in three forms, solid, liquid, and gas; time in past, present, future; space in height, width, and depth. We distinguish what we see in hue, saturation, and brightness. Our ears do the same with pitch, loudness, and timbre. A year is composed of days, weeks, and months. A day is made up of seconds, minutes, and hours. All colors stem from blue, yellow, and red. Even the atom has protons, neutrons, and electrons. These are only just a few examples.

God has not only given us evidence in creation and evidence in His word. He has also given us evidence within ourselves. We aren’t living survival of the fittest, as an animal should. We deplete our time, money, and energy caring for our old and sick. When we hurt someone to benefit ourselves we feel guilt. We don’t look up to those who stomp on others to rise to the top. We don’t revere people who abandon their parents in institutions, never to regard their needs again. We say these people are defective in some way, heartless. We are not animals. We are morally responsible beings who have all at many points in our lives, failed to live up to those responsibilities.

I don’t know what better moral philosophy throughout time could ever better deal with issues of right and wrong than the one laid out by He who created all things. You may conclude that this is not enough evidence for you, but to exclude theology as a viable moral philosophy on the grounds that it is entirely absent of evidence is clearly a view born out of deep seated bias, not free thought.

We have been trying to find good in ourselves apart from God for some time now, but many are learning the lesson He meant for us and coming with our sin to the cross, walking away with a piece of the only good that will last.