Atheism 4 - The Nature of God?

Note: If you haven't already, you should read over all previous posts before proceeding.  These posts build upon previous information; they do not stand alone.  Starting at the end is like criticizing the selection of a hip v. gable roof without knowing anything about the walls and foundation.  Also, you should skip up to "Words, Words, Words" and then return before proceeding with this post.

A few years after I had made the discoveries described in this blog, I noticed a paperback book at the drugstore entitled "More Than a Carpenter" by Josh McDowell.  Intrigued, I bought it and read it.  McDowell, a law student at the time of writing, made a very good legal argument for the case of Christ, using many of the same arguments I had already been toying with, but putting it much more succinctly than I could as a liberal arts major.  From this point on, I will be relying heavily on this book, but I feel compelled to throw in a caveat should any readers choose to look it up for themselves.  The following paragraphs represent my own opinions upon reading the texts in question.  They do not in any way represent a professional critique of the published work.

The book was almost like two books.  In the first half is a compelling legal argument with very few fallacies in the logic.  A great read, especially for doubters. The second half of the book seemed to me like so much proselytizing and, to my mid-20s mind, unworthy of the logician who had written the first half.  

Well, either way, I lost the book many years ago.  A couple of years back, I ordered a new copy through Amazon.  Upon receipt, I found that the book had not stood still during my multi-decade absence.  I discovered that I had purchased a fourth- or fifth-edition copy and the text had been completely re-worked since that first edition I had previously cherished.  Josh McDowell had, by this time, aged along with the rest of us and was sharing co-author credit with his son Sean.  Most of the chapters written by Josh stay rather true to the contents of my memory with a bit of updating as to archeological records and the like.  It is my impression that Sean is more the theologian than his father is (or at least as his father was in 1977), but much less the logician.  Sean makes a number of excellent points, backed properly by all the footnotes and references needed to make Turabian proud.  Unfortunately, I find them peppered with some rather large leaps of logic that the average agnostic is unlikely to follow.  I highly recommend the book, but I recommend it with a critical eye.  I doubt that either author would mind such a recommendation as this is indeed their own invitation to the reader.  It is also the invitation extended by this blogger.

Okay, with those disclaimers behind us, where were we?  I believe I had left off with having proven the existence of god as a valid conclusion, but with nothing at all regarding the nature of god, pointing out that, semantically at least, we had made no distinction between "god" and "a cosmic bowl of Jell-O salad."  So now we're left to ask the obvious follow-up question; "what is god like?"

As happened so often through this process, I became stuck before I could even start.  I had just finished reading two books on world religions, so the diversity of opinion concerning this very question was fresh on my mind.  I was fully aware that to thoroughly explore even one possible answer to the question would require the dedication of an entire lifetime.  While I supposed that explained most people's devotion to a given belief, even in the face of contrary evidence, it wasn't a lot of help to a guy who was simply looking for a valid answer to a valid question.  I only had one lifetime to dedicate to the pursuit.  What if I happened to plunge down a wrong path?  I desperately needed a shortcut.

It took quite a bit of pondering (a few more years worth, in fact) but I did finally realize that a shortcut had presented itself long before I had thought to ask the question, back during my Jesus Freak days.  I knew that virtually all Christian doctrine centered on the belief of Jesus of Nazareth - the historical man - as being the human incarnation of God.  It followed, then, that if Jesus was the human incarnation of God, then I could learn about the nature of God by studying the nature of Jesus.

Let us pause for a second, because I can hear the outcry from here.  Actually, I don't have to hear it; I made it when this idea occurred to me some four and a half decades ago.  At first glance, the above statement seems like a magnificent leap of logic, but read it again.  It is actually a fairly straightforward conditional statement, like any other that might appear in a fourth-grader's math book.  If A is true, then B is true.  And it is a valid statement, because the conclusion is a simple grammatical extension of the condition.  Like any conditional statement, the validity hinges entirely on the strength of the condition.  In other words, it's all about the if.

 So, can we prove (or disprove) that Jesus of Nazareth - the historical man - was the human incarnation of God?  I reasoned that, if I can prove or disprove that statement (remember that, at the time, I was rather hoping for the latter), then I would be in a position to settle an argument that had been raging for 2 millennia.  Amazing, the pride of youth, huh?

So, where to start?  It seemed that I had two issues to resolve before I could even begin to consider the question at hand:

(1) How exactly did I intend to define the word "proof?"  What "proof" would I consider sufficient to render a conclusion valid (this is logic, remember; we're not looking for "truth")?

(2) Since there are precious few historical records regarding the life and teachings of Jesus outside of Scripture, how far could I trust the historical accuracy of the Holy Writ?  Good stories, to be sure, but true history?  That's going to take more research!

At this point I'm being called to dinner, so I'll have to take this up in my next post.  We'll start with the question of valid proof and move on from there.

Pax