There is Only One God

The next few entries will be more for some than for others. I have my own children and grandchildren in mind as readers of this blog. But I also have in mind the ordinary person in the pews (or not in the pew), who has much better things to do because of work and family than to jump in up to their necks on debates in the Church. I want to be of some help for them, so that it is easier to understand some things.



The little paragraph behind the title page of this blog is taken from the Belgic Confession. It is the very first article, and its heading is There is Only One God. This is the best place to start.



The approach I would take in defending the assertion that there is only one God is to follow Anselm’s arguments. Some say that his argument is, God is He than whom none greater can be conceived. But this is only the premise from which he begins his argument, the starting point. It is a premise which both sides can agree to as a starting point. The one who says there is no God would like nothing better than to deny such a God, a greater than whom cannot be conceived. He knows as well as anyone that a being who is less than that is not God, and therefore not worth denying. But, the one who says that there is a God also means that being than whom none greater can be conceived or he will not be affirming God’s existence.



The argument itself grows from this premise. Anselm’s aim was to show that denying God’s existence was the same as saying that someone can conceive of a greater than he whom none greater can be conceived, which is a contradiction.



In his response to objections raised, Anselm was keen to point out that he was not talking about a conception but about a being. This being had to have certain attributes which were not necessarily attributable to other things, but had to be attributable to God. You could think, for example, of a perfect island without necessarily implying that it existed. This would not be the case when thinking about God: if existence was not part and parcel of the being you were thinking of, then, by definition, it would not be God you were thinking of. This would be so whether you conceived of it or not. So if existence was not a necessary attribute of God, then, first, it would not be God that is being thought about but some other being; and second, you’d be thinking about the conception of it, not about God.



The intent of the argument was not so much to prove that God exists, but rather to show that the person who says in his heart, “There is no God” is indeed a fool in his thinking. My intent here is not to argue out or to defend Anselm’s thesis, just as Anselm was not interested in doing so either. My main concern is the continuity of the argument into the issues of the day.



At present, and indeed for a long time already, one of the main issues has been that of the claims of evolutionary theory which are directly contrary to the Word of God. I don’t think there can be any question about the opposition of these two. Even those who have found common ground between the two have found it on the basis of siding with evolution and departing from the Bible.



They ask, Could the creation have taken many millions of years instead of six days? They do not ask, Could evolution have taken six days instead of billions of years? Or they ask, Does the Bible really say six literal days? The question is never, Does evolution really mean a literal billions of years?



When they go this way then a denial of Adam as the first human is always close behind. And this too is accomplished not by waffling on what evolution says but on what the Bible says. In the end the so-called common ground has cut away anything that can be called ‘ground’ from under the Bible, so that it can say anything at all, so that it agrees with evolution. But we all know that a document which can say anything at all really says nothing at all. And this is where any agreement between the two ends up. So I think we’re pretty safe in saying that the two are opposed to each other.



(An interesting note: Calvin was trained as a lawyer before he became a reformer. Now a document that can say anything at all is, to a lawyer, a very shallow document; and it won’t hold up in court. Yet you never get any hint from Calvin that the Bible is that kind of document. In fact, it’s the opposite to him. The Bible is a document whose depths of knowledge cannot be reached by mere humans. Rather than claim to know anything better than the Word he would rather claim to know nothing at all.)



That is not to say, however, that evolution cannot be made to agree with the Bible. Maybe it can. It’s just that nobody’s thought of that, or at least tried it. Well, that’s not exactly true the way I said it. But what is true is that if evolution is changed in order to make it agree with the Bible then it is no longer seen as evolution. So the idea of conforming evolution to the Bible ends up being a conforming of something other than evolution to the Bible. If it’s conformed to the Bible, then it’s no longer evolution.



Do you see the similarities here with Anselm’s idea? Some of you might say, “Yes, I do. Any form of evolution which is not full-blown evolution is not evolution.” But my response would be that this is not it. In a way I can see where you’d be coming from. If we can defeat in argument any part of full-blown evolution then we’ve defeated all of it. But there are parts of it that are true. There is indeed some evolution. If you grow in body, in experience, or in intellect, then you have evolved. A bird goes from egg to hatchling, to growing feathers, to trying flight for the first time, to gathering its own food, to having its own young; that is an evolving that is taking place. There is not a thing in creation that is not subject to an evolving influence simply on the ground that it is subject to time, and therefore to change. We have to be careful that we’re not denying subjection to time and change when we try to argue against evolutionary theory.



Defeating evolutionary theory is not the point, though. What is at stake is that the Bible is seen as relatively true, not masterfully and eternally true. Evolution, on the other hand, is openly relative, because it is a theory that is universally open to being changed as soon as new ideas are discovered. The idea of relativity involves overriding contingencies, which everyone acknowledges as being the case for evolution: This would be true if that is true first…. This is how we understand things if these are our bases of logic…. We have found a new idea in how to explain something…. Etc. The thing with these is that what has to be true first, or what has to be in place first, are no better established in fact than the thing they try to establish because to evolution all truth is relative by definition.



The truisms or foundation blocks that you have in place before you start determines the way you know things, and how you know that you know them. Everything that you know, therefore, begins with the premise: if such and such is true…, if what I believe to be true is true…, etc. Well, how do we know these preceding ideas and ideals are true? We don’t! They work, that’s all.



That’s about the way relativism works. There is nothing that we know for certain except that something works for now. I asked before if you could see a similarity with Anselm’s idea of contradicting thoughts, and here is where we can see it. Even in relativism there is something that is more basic yet, and it is a contradiction to say that the most basic foundation of knowledge is relative. It can’t be, if we know this to be true. If it’s true, then we are not saying that it is true, but only that it is relatively useful. So it is actually only relatively useful that all knowledge is relative.



They use the word ‘truth’ but they actually mean something else. It’s just the same as when a person says that he than whom none greater can be conceived does not exist. When all knowledge is relative, not true but relative (but we use the word ‘true’ anyways), then isn’t the knowers’ assurance of 'truth’ also relative, not true but relative? Just like the denier of God is talking about something else when he talks about God not being there, so also the evolutionist is talking about something else when he talks about truth not being there.



But have you noticed something else? The denier of God's existence is not just denying God, he’s also denying a worm, because each greatest thing that can be conceived would have to be denied, leaving the next greatest as the greatest, until we get to the worm being the greatest being, which also would have to be denied. One peculiar problem with this is that the one who is denying he than whom none (is) greater has by this time also ceased to exist. It's not different when that which is most useful is the truth. The more you define truth the less is actually true, and so on until the very question becomes meaningless.



Do Christians have a sure knowledge, a solid foundation for saying something is true? I think the first thing to notice is not so much that we can prove anything by some foundation that we claim to have, but that we can say anything at all without contradicting statements. We aren’t talking about relative truth when we talk about truth. Whether or not we can prove that our truth is true is not the point right now. Since it is not a self-contradicting thing to speak about God as being there, it also is not a contradiction to speak of trusting in His words as a sure foundation.



But we do have a sure knowledge, so more about this next time.