Turning the Incarnation and Trinity from "Defense" into "Offense"

This post is meant to re-enforce (re-explain) and add-on to the arguments I began to develop in the post about using the Trinity as an argument against Judaism and Islam.  Some of the following material is a re-hashing of those points with additional rigor.  Some is meant to simplify that post.  The truly new material comes near the bottom of the post where I go into the Incarnation as an argument against other monotheistic faiths based on a double-bind present in God's approach to evil.

Frequently, in discussing the faith with members of other monotheistic religions (Judaism and Islam, in particular) the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation are treated as embarassments for the Christian.  These two teachings - the two most distinct teachings of Orthodox Christianity - are viewed as compromising both the singularity of God (God's one-ness) and God's transcendence (God's un-changing-ness).

This need not be the case, though.  Far from being something on which Christians should play "defense," we should critique other theists for denying them.  How?  Take a look after the jump.

Theism Part Three: Teleological Arguments

This will be a brief post, mostly to present a framework for a series of small posts I intend to do defending and applying the argument from design.  Despite the broad dismissal of this argument in pop-culture, it is alive and well.  When people say that "science has disproven God" (it hasn't - how could it?) what they most often mean is "science can explain the order of the universe, so we don't need God."  Indeed, gods have long been used as cop-out explanations for hard-to-explain phenomena (like lightning, earthquakes, or the rise and fall of empires).

Yet there are two critical things to observe at the outset when analyzing arguments from design.  The first: what sort of question are we asking here?  The second: Is it proper to think that science could answer it?

Theism Part Two: The Kalam Argument and the Argument for a Finite Past

This continues the arguments in favor of theism.  If you're interested in how these arguments proceed or why I'm providing them, take a look at the first post in this series (Theism Part One) where I explain that, or post in the comments and I can seek to justify why, in an Orthodox context that generally dislikes syllogistic argumentation, I'm providing a syllogistic argument.

The following two arguments work together as a sort of super-charged version of the argument for God as "first cause."  The first, the Kalam argument, is most likely the one people are familiar with.  Typically, people know it in its rhetorical (rather than philosophical) form: How do we know there's a God?  Well, who else could have created the universe?

In other words, there is an implied rhetorical question (called the question of "cosmology").  It goes like this: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?"  Ultimately, people fall into one of two camps on this question.  They either say "There just is" (sometimes called the "brute-force" or "materialist" viewpoint) or they say "Something willed that there be something rather than nothing."

Of course, if we answer the second way, people are rather proud to ask what they THINK is the nail in the coffin against belief in God: "Well, who made God then?  Who willed that GOD should exist?"  Put more philosophically, the theistic answer can appear to delay the question rather than answer it.  The statement "Something willed that there be something rather than nothing" pre-supposes a "something" doing the creating.  That just pushes the debate back one, doesn't it?

Not so.  And I'll use the Kalam and Finite-Past arguments to present the reasons why after the jump:

Theism Part One: The Argument from Change

Just as I'm doing a series on the papacy, examining a complex and multifaceted issue in "smaller" chunks, so I'd like to compose a cumulative case for the existence of God.  Note that, for the Orthodox, none of these are THE reason we believe in God.  We believe (both in the sense of "believing in existence of" and "trusting") in God because of the revelation of Jesus Christ and our direct experience of God's presence in prayer and sacrament.

However, there ARE some DECENT arguments pointing towards God's existence, and in a world like ours where secularism is assumed (and religion viewed as mere personal choice), an apologetic argument or series of arguments in favor of God's existence can be helpful.  In particular, it shows that belief in God is not mere mythology nor mere psychology, but ALSO intellectually probable and reasonible.  This will matter more for some than for others, but its good to have these arguments in your toolbox if the right situation happens to arise.

This post assumes basic familiarity with syllogistic argumentation (two or more premises leading to a logically necessary conclusion).  If someone doubts one of the two premises, then it becomes necessary to defend that premise with an additional syllogism or as an axiomatic necessity.

The argument from change comes after the jump: