The Ontological Argument and the S5 Objection

The Ontological Argument for the Triune God is the most popular video I have released so far. Generally the feedback has been positive. And even many skeptics have admitted that they cannot find a flaw, but simply choose to be unconvinced. And that is their right. You can get out of the conclusion of any argument in philosophy if you just bite the bullet and deny one of the premises. The job of the proponent of the argument is to make that intellectual price as high as possible. What do you have to give up in order to rationally deny the conclusion?

One skeptic has decided to avoid the conclusion of this argument by attacking the entire system of modal logic (called the S5 system) upon which this argument is based. This is so incredible that at first I thought it was a joke. S5 is well-accepted as a fully coherent logical system by logicians, and an accurate representation of certain kinds of modality in the philosophy journals. I mentioned to potential detractors that it is just about impossible to avoid the conclusion of this argument unless you are willing to deny the laws of logic themselves. This guy apparently took me up on the offer!

So let's go through a recap of modal logic. This is a formal logic which adds two additional truth qualifiers. Something can be true (T), something can be possibly true (◊T), and something can be necessarily true (□T). The diamond denotes possibility and the box denotes necessity. Modal logics use a semantic called "possible worlds." A possible world is a description of the way reality might be, kind of like a hypothetical situation. The actual world is a possible world where the entire description is true. In other words, it is a description of the way reality is.

There are different systems of modal logic, where the axioms are different. There are also different modal logics, where the application is different. The term possible and the term necessary have different meanings in different modal logics. So the first question is, what modal logic are we using for the Ontological Argument, and which of the available systems should we use?

Modal logics include deontic logic (logic of obligation), temporal logic (logic of time), epistemic logic (logic of knowing things) and alethic logic (logic of truth). Since the argument is an ontological or metaphysical argument, we are going to use an alethic logic, and deal with metaphysical modalities. Alethic modalities and epistemic modalities are often expressed in English using the same words. "It is possible that bigfoot exists" can mean either "Bigfoot could exist (it is metaphysically possible), whether or not bigfoot does in fact exist" (alethic), or more likely, "For all I know, bigfoot exists" (epistemic).

In alethic modal logic something "necessary" is true in all possible worlds, something "possible" is true in at least one possible world. To say a statement (we'll call this statement X) is possibly necessary (◊□X) is to say that in at least one possible world it is true that X is true in all possible worlds. This is the same as saying that X is true in all possible worlds. And this means that saying possibly necessarily X is equivalent to saying necessarily X (◊□X → □X). This means that when we pick a system of modal logic, it must account for this. It must be able to derive this formula in order to accurately represent metaphysical possibility and necessity.

To think of it another way: when we are dealing with metaphysical possibility and necessity, we are dealing with ultimate (absolute) possibility and necessity. By ultimate, I mean possibilty and necessity that does not vary over different possible worlds, for there has to be at least one truth that holds for absolutely all possible worlds without exception (if it didn't, then the statement "there is no truth that holds for all possible worlds" would hold for all possible worlds). So we know that there is at least one of these truths that has this ultimate necessity. Hence, the proposition "necessarily T" (□T) and the proposition "necessarily necessarily T" (□□T)have to mean the same thing (□T is equivalent to □□T). If it didn't, then the term "necessarily" isn't talking about ultimate necessity.

Same goes for possibility. If we say that something is metaphysically possible, we are talking about ultimate possibility, and therefore "possibly possibly T" is equivalent to "possibly T" (◊◊T is equivalent to ◊T). Otherwise, we are not talking about ultimate possibility. And not only is this true, but is must be necessarily true in order for us to be talking about ultimate possibility. If "possibly T" did not entail "necessarily possibly T" in all worlds (◊T → □◊T), then we would not be talking about ultimate possibility. In short, only systems of modal logic that have what is called a universal accessibility relation can represent ultimate metaphysical truths.

Another way of saying it is that in order for our system to reflect metaphysical truth, it must define necessity and possibility in the following way:
□P holds if and only if ∀w(P is true at w)
(Necessarily P holds if and only if for every world, P is true in that world)
◊P holds if and only if ∃w(P is true at w)
(Possibly P holds if and only if there is a world where P is true in that world)

S5 is the only system that can do this. Now S5 is not appropriate for all modal logics. It would not represent temporal modal logic, for example. But regarding the ultimate possibility and ultimate necessity needed to address metaphysical statements, only S5 will do. It is the only system that can address ultimate modality.

It states that under S5, you can stack modal operators (diamonds and boxes) as much as you want and they collapse into the last operator.
◊◊□◊□◊□◊□◊◊□□□□□□◊P → ◊P
But it is essential that this does happen if we are really talking about the fundamental laws of metaphysics.

To quote Alexander Pruss:
Broad logical possibility cannot have been different, since it is a matter of what propositions follow from what propositions, and what follows from what could not have been different. . .
. . .the collection C0 of all the fundamental laws of metaphysics could not have been different from what it is – that is central to its being the collection of the fundamental laws of metaphysics – and the ‘could not’ here surely is metaphysical. Moreover, what C0 allows cannot have been different. If it were different, that would presumably be because a collection of laws might permit different things in different circumstances. Suppose that C is some collection of fundamental laws that permits different things in different circumstances. But then there would need to be further metaphysical laws as to what the laws in C collectively permit under what circumstances, and barring a vicious regress of more and more basic laws, there would have to be fundamental laws specifying what laws in C permit. And these laws couldn’t be in C, since then the laws in C would not permit different things in different circumstances. Therefore, if C permits different things in different circumstances, then C does not contain all the fundamental laws, in the way that C0 does. Thus, what C0 permits could not be different, and hence modality could not have been different, and this is what S5 says.
-Actuality, Possibility, and Worlds: (pp. 16-17)

There has to be at least one fundamental truth that does not vary over possible worlds. Because if there are none of these truths, then that truth is the fundamental truth that does not vary over possible worlds.

This backwards E (∃) represents the existential quantifier. Whatever comes after this symbol is said to exist. When the modal operator is placed before the quantifier, we are talking about existence de dicto. So with the diamond before the quantifier (◊∃xAx), we can say it is possible that an alien exists. When the modal operator is placed after the quantifier, we are talking about existence de re. An example would be "A possible alien exists." (∃(x)◊Ax) De dicto modality states that the proposition is necessarily true or possibly true. De re modality states that a certain state of affiars possibly holds or necesarily holds. De re is about the thing itself.

Quine objected to de re modality, because he believed it that it could not be expressed without resulting in absurdities. Quine believed in what's called the substitutivity of identity, meaning that given a statement of identity (x = y), the two terms (x and y) are interchangeable. Susan Haack cites his objection in her book: The Philosophy of Logics. Quine objects to de re modality with the following argument which I will call Quine's Argument:

1. Necessarily, 50 is greater than 7
2. 50 = the number of states in the US
3. Necessarily, the number of states in the US is greater than 7

Quine states that 1 and 2 are true, while 3 is false. Yet if 50 is equal to the number of states, then we should be able to substitute one term for the other with no change in the resulting statement's truth value.

Quine says that the only way to get these equal terms to substitute for one another is to accept a premise which I will call Quine's Solution.

Quine's Solution: necessarily, terms are identical if and only if all conditions specifying them are equivalent:
(∀y (Fy ≡ y = x) & ∀y (Gy ≡ y = x)) → □∀y (Fy ≡ Gy)

I would like to point out here that there are no independent reasons for accepting Quine's Soltuion as a valid principle. It is a formula contrived specifically to address Quine's Argument. It would be an ad hoc solution even if it worked without any negative repercussions. The problem is, even if we were to accept Quine's solution, it would lead to modal collapse.

Let p be any true sentence, and let F be ' p & y = x' and G be 'y = x'; then from Quine's Solution it follows that:
□∀y (p & y = x ≡ y = x), whence, in particular
□(p & x = x ≡ x = x) and so p → □p and all truths become necessary truths!

When people talk about de re modality leading to modal collapse, this is what they are talking about. The collapse only occurs if we accept Quine's Solution. So obviously we can't accept Quine's Solution!

The problem with Quine's Argument, as Saul Kripke pointed out, is that there is a difference between rigid and non-rigid designators. A rigid designator picks out the same thing in all worlds. "The square root of 16" picks out the number 4 in all possible worlds. "The number of states in the US" picks out different values in different possible worlds (if it is indeed a proposition about states, and not about a specific number; more about this later). When we are doing modal logic, two equal terms can only be substituted for one another only if either one is a rigid designator for the other, or if they are both rigid designators for a third term. Once we recognize the distinction, the problem disappears.

This is why Genoveva Marti concludes:
Quine's argument does not succeed in proving that modal distinctions collapse. A crucial step in Quine's reasoning relies on the assumption that whenever two expressions determine the same object, those two expressions should be intersubstitutable [exchange one for the other] salva veritate [with no change in truth value] even when they occur under the scope of a modal operator.
-Quine and Modal Distinctions, p. 289

*Also note that Plantinga in The Nature of Necessity writes that Quine's case is based on a flawed view of identity.
Quine believed that: "Two terms are the same (eadem) if one can be substituted for the other without altering the truth of any statement (salva veritate)."
Plantinga noted that principle does not hold for such excellent examples of language such as English. Instead, identity should be defined as: For any property P and any objects x and y, if x is identical with y, then x has P if and only if y has P.
x=y → ∀P(Px ↔ Py)

Once we correct Quine's definition of identity, Quine's entire objection crumbles.

What's even worse for Quine is that even under his own criteria, his argument commits a fallacy of ambiguity (technically, a fallacy of amphiboly). It is like the joke: "I once met a man with a wooden leg named Smith and asked him 'what is the name of the other leg?'"

It appears the statement "50 = the number of states" is a statement about a number while the statement "the number of states in the US is greater than 7" is about states. If we interpret the third statement so that it is about numbers, then the third statement is equivalent to "Necessarily, the number that numbers the states (as things in fact stand) is greater than 7." And this is a true statement, as it is a statement about numbers. If we instead leave the third statement as it is and reinterpret the second statement so that "50 = the number of states" is about states, then the second statement is equivalent to "however many states in the US there happen to be, that's what 50 is" and this is clearly false. Either way, Quine's objection fails.

Furthermore, Quine's most significant blunder in his argument is that he tries to draw metaphysical conclusions out of an argument that only addresses semantics. This is one reason that Quine's argument against de re modality has been almost universally rejected in the philosophy journals, even by philosophers who themselves reject de re modality.

For further reading on this subject, Alvin Plantinga also shot down the Quine's objection in chapters 2 and 3 of The Nature of Necessity.

For a very thorough and technical critique of Quine's argument, please see Genoveva Marti's article.

So there is no problem with de re modality. It is fully consistent with the S5 system, and does not lead to any sort of modal collapse. Objections surrounding it have been answered half a century ago, which is why Richard Swinburne could say confidently:

If a state of affairs is necessary, then the proposition which states that the state of affairs holds will be necessary; and conversely, if a proposition is necessary, then the state of affairs which it states to be the case is necessary. Necessity de re entails necessity de dicto, and conversely.
-Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, p. 235

It's sort of a backhanded compliment, that someone would go to such extraordinary lengths to avoid believing in the Triune God. It's not every day that someone decides to jettison an entire system of logic just to avoid the conclusion of one argument. I wonder what the New Atheists would say if we resorted to such extreme measures to avoid a conclusion of one of their arguments. I am sure it would not be nice.


Bonus Section
A simpler argument for divine necessity is this. The term being means: something that exists. If abstract objects like numbers and universals really do exist, then these beings have to exist in every possible world. If this is the case, then God, defined by the philosopher as the metaphysical ultimate or the ultimate being or the greatest (metaphysically) possible being would have to exist in every possible world. After all, it would be really strange to think that some beings exist in every possible world but the ultimate being does not.

This also answers the objection that the Ontological Argument mixes de dicto and de re modality. It does not. God is defined as the metaphysical ultimate. If you could coherently describe something that is greater than God then that something would be God. If a being had omnipotence, but only existed in some possible worlds, then we could describe a greater being: one that has omnipotence in all possible world, which entails that such a being exists in all possible worlds. Only a being that exists necessarily can have maximal greatness.

Notice the definition of God here. We are using the philosopher's definition. I do not mean a tribal deity that I am specifying. I do not even mean Yahweh, the deity of Israel. People often get this confused when discussing the moral argument. They ask, Why would the existence of a deity make the difference as to whether objective moral values exist or not? Zeus was not morally perfect. This is, of course, an equivocation fallacy. I am not using the word God as a proper name, but as a term meaning the metaphysical ultimate.

The inquirer may then ask: why believe that Yahweh is this God? And I would answer that given God's moral perfection, he would want to intervene in human history and reaveal himself to someone. Of all the deities in the ancient world, only Yahweh's description is compatible with him being the metaphysical ultimate. Hence, Yahweh is the only candidate for such at title.

Creation as Science

A lecture by Dr. Hugh Ross. As an Old Earth Creationist, I appreciate and endorse the work of Ross and his organization: Reasons to Believe.
http://www.reasons.org
for more info.

Genesis 1 vs. Rashi

Those of you who are interested enough to watch my videos (or read this blog) know that Genesis 1:1 reads: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth." in Hebrew: בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃ What you might not know is that Jewish translations treat this verse differently. Artscroll translates the first three verses as "In the beginning of God's creating the heavens and the earth – when the earth was astonishingly empty, with darkness upon the surface of the deep, and the divine presence hovered upon the surface of the waters – God said, "Let there be light, and there was light."

Artscroll translates this passage so that the first two verses describe the situation and nothing happens until verse three. Artscroll's justification is that "in the beginning God created" would indicate that the Torah is giving the sequence of Creation – that God created the heaven, the earth, darkness, water, light, and so on. However, Rashi and Ibn Ezra maintain that this verse cannot be chronological.

Rashi argues that we cannot translate רֵאשִׁית as a beginning simpliciter, since it always means "beginning of." He cites Genesis 10:10 "beginning of his kingdom" Jeremiah 26:1 "beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim" and Deuteronomy 18:4 "first of your grain." Hence, the Hebrew word בָּרָא which is a verb, has to become a gerund in order for the verse to make sense. He justifies this with Hosea 1:2 "When the LORD first spoke to Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea..." which uses תְּחִלַּ֥ת as a sort of "in the beginning of" and the verb דִּבֶּר as a gerund as well.

Rashi admits that "In the beginning God created" is not a forced interpretation of the Hebrew. He just rejects it because he believes that such an interpretation would suggest that God created the earth before he created the water. And to Rashi, this is unacceptable. Hagigah 12a of the Talmud says that the water preceded the earth because the heavens were created from fire and water.

I think you can see already, Rashi is letting rabbinic tradition mess with his interpretation of this verse. This is one problem with the rabbis. They know the verses in their original Hebrew, and what the Hebrew means, but they sometimes derive their interpretations independently of what the words are actually saying.

Like some of the modern scholars, Rashi denies the prima facie reading and places verse 1 as a subordinate clause modifying verse 2. Claus Westermann, one of the leading Old Testament scholars of the 20th century, who specialized in Genesis, disagreed with Rashi. Westermann notes that there is no evidence that בְּרֵאשִׁית cannot be used in the absolute sense as רֵאשִׁית is used to denote an absolute beginning in Isaiah 46:10. So it can mean "in the beginning" or "in the beginning of" depending on the context. While Hosea 1:2 does use the same structure as a subordinate clause, this verse is atypical. The normal construct for circumstantial ideas is the infinite construct, as is used in Genesis 5:1. Hence, Hosea is the exception, not the rule. Also, our oldest textual witnesses of Genesis 1:1: the Masoretic punctuation, the oldest translations, and the New Testament all took 1:1 as designating an absolute beginning.

As Franz Delitzsch pointed out, not only does "the heavens and the earth" serve as an idiom to mean "the whole universe" as the ancient Hebrew language has no word for universe, but the grammatical relation of verse 1 to verse 2 entails that 1 cannot be a mere heading, because the vav connects the two verses, indicating a relation of connection between God's primary and subsequent acts of creation. Computer analysis has also shown what scholars like Delitzsch noted—that whenever there is a vav plus a non-predicate plus a predicate, then the preceding clause furnishes either background or circumstantial information. Whenever this construction precedes a main verb, as it does in verse 2, then it is always background information that is given.

Finally, the real nail in the coffin the fact that the next verse וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהֹום וְרוּחַ אֱלֹהִים מְרַחֶפֶת עַל־פְּנֵי הַמָּיִם׃ begins with a vav, which always means "and" and is used extensively in Genesis to signal the beginning of a new sentence. As Artscroll notes, Rashi's interpretation forces the interpreter to translate the vav as "when" even though it is not translated as such anywhere else. If translating רֵאשִׁית as "the beginning" simpliciter is problematic, then translating וְהָאָרֶץ as "when the earth" is a thousand times more problematic. When the text is allowed to speak for itself, it testifies strongly against Rashi's rabbinic eisegesis and in favor of the standard translation: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth."

What Christians Can Learn From Judaism: The Sabbath

Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism celebrates the Sabbath in a very different way than the different flavors of Christianity as well as Reform and Conservative Judaism. The Sabbath for most Christians as well as for non-Orthodox Jews usually means attending a religious service for an hour or two, meeting, greeting, and eating with the community afterward, driving home, and then usually proceeding as though it was any other day of the week.

The Orthodox community treats the Sabbath differently, however. Since the Rabbis enforced a highly legalistic system with a gazillion and one laws regarding the Sabbath, any conceivable form of productive work becomes impossible for anyone in the community. Since driving is forbidden on the Sabbath, the entire Orthodox community must live within walking distance of the Synagogue. This has the added benefit of making all the members of a synagogue live within walking distance of each other, making it much easier for them to get to know one another. Imagine if everyone at your church lived within walking distance of each other.

The Sabbath is a 25 or so hour experience, from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. As a single adult, let me tell you about my Sabbath experience with the Orthodox community. It begins with the Friday evening service. Technically, it is supposed to begin with lighting candles, but as a single guy who at this time lived outside the community, it began at the synagogue. Anyway, after a relatively short evening service, I was walking outside the synagogue and one of the Orthodox people, I think his name was Ben, asked me "do you have a place to eat and a place to stay" at this point, not knowing exactly what he meant by it, I shrugged my shoulders and he said to me "Ok, you're coming with me." Already, I knew that this experience was different than the other denominations of Judaism, where you simply leave after the service.

Ben led me to his house, where he was having several other guests for his obligatory Sabbath meal. I got to meet his guests and made several friends even in that evening. After the extended meal was over, he let me spend the night in an extra bedroom, as Jews are not allowed to drive on the Sabbath, and I got to better meet his wife and several children.

The next morning I was awakened fairly early, and walked with his family to the synagogue. After making it through the three hour Shacharit morning service, I visited another man named Ari and his family for the midday Sabbath lunch. He pointed me in the general location of his house beforehand, but because I did not walk with him to his house, I had to sort of guess which one it was. During lunch, I made the joke that I knocked on the door and hoped that it was the right house. He told me that almost anybody on his street would have been happy to have me over for the meal. It was at this point that I realized being part of an Orthodox community is like being part of a large extended family.

He, too was having several guests, including Josh, a young college student who became Orthodox a few years prior. During the afternoon, we walked around the neighborhood and dropped in on many of the other families in the community. Since everyone was under the restrictive Orthodox Sabbath laws, no one had the excuse of being too busy to meet with us. So I got to meet a lot more people in a very short period of time.

In our cold and somewhat paranoid modern society, we have forgotten the art of hospitality toward strangers. Have you ever been to a church where people you don't know invite you over to their house for a meal with their family? No church that I have ever attended has extended that type of hospitality. Can you imagine what would happen if a group of volunteer families at a church actually did that? It would make single men like myself, who are a very non-churchgoing demographic more likely to attend church in the first place, because it would make it so much easier to get to know everyone. Introverts like myself have a much easier time when meeting in these settings rather than in large crowds.

There is also something to be said about being unplugged from our connected world for a full day. It helps to reduce the stress a great deal. Because the Orthodox view of the Sabbath is to cease from any sort of productive activity, including the use of electronics, it helps people take their minds off of their concerns and helps them enjoy the moment. And that is the point of the Sabbath, to be an island in time, where for one day we can take our focus off our constant planning for the future and simply enjoy the moment.

Separate But "Equal" Weights And Measures

The antimissionary Moshe Shulman of Judaism's answer has been kind enough to respond to Michael L Brown's article called "Unequal Weights and Measures." In this article, Dr. Brown explains the gross double standard by which anti-Missionaries operate. Dr. Brown's article is here. My video summary of it is here.

In short, Jewish antimissionaries are willing to grant leniency when evaluating issues in the Tanakh which they are not willing to grant when evaluating the New Testament. They are quick to harmonize Exodus 20:8 which states "Remember the Sabbath" and Deuteronomy 6:4 which states "Guard the Sabbath" and harmonize them by saying "God said both at the same time."

However, these same anti-missionaries complain about the baptism of Jesus. Matthew 3:17 reads "This is my beloved son" while Mark 1:11 reads "You are my beloved son." They will shout: "holy crap. This is a major contradiction. How could you possibly think this is the word of God?" This reeks of a fallacy called special pleading, when you are willing to hold other views in extreme skepticism without applying it to your own.

Shulman has responded here, on his website. It's a short article, one that will only take a few minutes to read through. But let me give you a quick summary of his article in my own fake New York accent (which is apparently a really bad Joe Pesci impersonation):

Dr. Michael Brown has written an article stating that anti-missionaries criticize the New Testament in ways that they would never criticize their own Tanakh or Rabbinic literature. Brown argues that we should hold one standard for criticizing both the Tanakh and the New Testament. But that's no fun! Rabbinic Judaism came first. Therefore, we should begin with the assumption that Rabbinic Judaism is innocent until proven guilty, and that Christianity is guilty until proven innocent. There is nothing unfair about this method.

Secondly, Rabbinic Judaism and Evangelical Christianity interpret the Bible through different means. Because Rabbinic Judaism has a set of authoritative interpreters, they can address Biblical problems, such as harmonization, alledged misquation, and hyper-literality issues, and come up with solutions which can be accepted without question. However, because Christianity holds to a doctrine called "sola scriptura" which means that only the Bible is written by God, we can be as skeptical as we want to be regarding any Christian solution. After all, we, the Rabbis, get to decide how you Christians are allowed to interpret Scripture.

I'm then going to go through several sections of Michael Brown's article with this methodology.

For example, Judaism has an interpretation to reconcile "an eye for an eye" Evangelical Christianity has no authoritative teaching magesterium, and therefore is not allowed to give a non-literal interpretation. Judaism has a harmonization in its teaching magesterium for reconciling Geneis 1 and 2. Christianity does not. So Judaism wins again! Who killed Goliath? Judaism has an answer in Rabbinic Tradition. Christianity has no Rabbinic Tradition, so Christianity has no answer!

That's right, Christianity is bound to a literal interpretation because it doesn't have Rabbinic Tradition. Christianity is not allowed to harmonize. Christianity is not allowed to engage in non-literal interpretation. Christianity is not allowed to engage in textual criticism. Why? BECAUSE I SAID SO!!

I am not kidding when I say that this is basically how the article goes. Shulman is admitting that he is indeed holding a double standard, but then saying that it's okay for him to do that, because Rabbinic Tradition says it is. And since we all know for a fact Rabbinic Tradition is the absolute word of God, it is not even possible to argue that Rabbinic Tradition is incoherent or that any part of it is false. Shulman's case against Dr. Brown is circular. It assumes that the Tanakh and Rabbinic Tradition are from God, while the New Testament is not from God, in order to establish that the Tanakh and Rabbinic Tradition are from God, while the New Testament is not.

In the interest of charity, I am going to assume that Shulman is engaging in a type of presuppositional apologetics, specifically, a system where you hold up your worldview as a whole and then hold up your opponent's worldview as a whole. You then compare the two for internal consistency and correspondence with reality. I think that Shulman is taking the Rabbinic interpretive system as a whole, including its presupposition of an authoritative Rabbinic Tradition, and testing it against Biblical problems. Because this interpretive system begins with the assumption that the Tanakh and Rabbinic tradition are from God and are therefore infallible, it cannot be falsified from within the system. Shulman is then attempting to hold up Evangelical Christianity, testing it as well for internal consistency and correspondence with reality. Problem is, he is engaging in a straw man fallacy by misrepresenting the Evangelical position.

To those who read books on Evangelical Bible interpretation, such as in Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, you'll notice that we bring several presuppositions to the text itself, which are considered authenticated by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit.

1 All 66 books of the Bible are Scripture
2 All Scripture is infallible and inerrant (incapable of being wrong)
3 Textual criticism, harmonization, and non-literal are perfectly valid as long as there is some justification for using them

And when you include these assumptions when evaluating the Christian system, all the Biblical problems posed by the anti-missionaries just disappear in a poof of logic. However, we soon realize that this system, too, is unfalsifiable when evaluated from within the system. So that when we compare the to systems, granting each its own internal assumptions, we quickly realize that there is no way of falsifying either.

But the two systems are irreconcilable. They cannot both be true, yet neither can be falsified from within. So how do we break the deadlock? By abandoning the assumptions of both systems, and holding both to some third standard. Problem is, when we do that, when we stop assuming divine authorship of our own texts, all of Dr. Browns arguments come right back on the table. It really is hypocritical to use liberal criticism of your opponent's worldview without letting your opponent use it of your view. It really is deceptive to say that the Tanakh gets a free pass for all its Bible difficulties, but the New Testament does not. There is no getting around it. If you want to compare the Rabbinic and Christian systems, the only way to do so fairly is to hold both systems to the same standard.

In short, Shulman's case is that Rabbinic tradition has an authoritative answer to every conceivable objection, while the New Testament does not. This response collapses the entire anti-missionary case into a single accusation: "You need a divinely inspired authoritative oral tradition in order to make sense of Scripture."

If this really is the anti-missionary case, is seems strange that they concentrate all their attacks on the New Testament. If the only problem is that Christianity lacks the authoritative Rabbinic tradition, as these Rabbis claim, then why not spread out your accusations over the entire Bible? There is plenty to attack in the Tanakh, and pointing out its difficulties as well will help the audience understand that the Rabbinic objection to the New Testament is not that there is anything inherently wrong in the text itself, but that the book does not have authoritative Rabbinic answers to its difficulties.

We know why the Rabbis do not do this. They avoid mentioning the Tanakh difficulties because they want to make it look like it is the text of the New Testament, not the lack of Rabbinic tradition that is the problem.

The Ontological Argument for the Triune God

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The Ontological Argument is a purely a priori logical argument that operates like a mathematical proof. It derives the existence of a perfect being from the laws of modal logic themselves. It's a technical argument for the existence and properties of God. That's why this is my favorite argument for the existence of God, because it goes beyond fallible evidence and when understood correctly, is virtually impossible to argue against.

In the field of philosophical theology, there are two competing definitions of God. In creator theology, God is defined as "the creator of all that is not God." In perfect being theology, God is defined as "A Maximally Great Being" which means that God possesses all great-making, properties such as love, knowledge, and power, and possesses each in a maximal way. He also possesses no flaws, such as immorality. He would be all-powerful, all-loving, and all-knowing. I intend to show you three things about this Maximally Great Being:

This video will present and defend three points:
1. A Maximally Great Being Exists (hence, perfect being theology is correct)
2. Only one Maximally Great Being can possibly exist (hence monotheism is true)
3. A Maximally Great Being must be multipersonal (the being must exist in two or more persons)

Let's start defining things before we get into the argument. First up: possible world. A possible world is basically a hypothetical situation. Calling it a possible world is not to say that such a world actually exists. It's just a description of what reality might be; a way for philosophers to see what ideas are coherent and what ideas are not. If something is possible, then we say that it exists in some possible world.

In metaphysics, the term "possible" has a different meaning than in epistemology. In epistemology, you could look at a difficult math problem and say "it's possible that there is a solution for it" which is like saying "for all I know, there is a solution to this problem." In metaphysics, something is possible if it is logically coherent. For example, my wearing a red shirt is possible, but the existence of square circles is not metaphysically possible.

If something is possible, it exists in a possible world. Rolling a six on a die is one example. If something is necessary, it exists in all possible worlds. The laws of mathematics are examples of this. If something is contingent, it exists in some possible worlds but not in others. If something is impossible, then it exists in no possible worlds. A square circle would be an example of this.

Next up entailment. Entail means "to imply necessarily." For example, shape entails size. If something has a shape, it necessarily has a size. After that: Great-making properties. A great-making property is a property that it is better to have than to lack. A lesser-making property is a property that it is better to lack than to have. A neutral property is one that is neither. Maximal greatness is the state of having all great-making propertries, and to their maximal extent. It also means having no lesser-making properties. One of these properties is necessity. Nothing that exists contingently can be maximally great. This is not to say that something has to exist to be maximally great. Instead, if something maximally great exists, then its existence is either necessary or impossible.

Now one Immanuel Kant's objections to an obsolete version of this argument is that existence is not a property. This is true. And this argument does not assume that it is. It is immune to the classic criticisms of Anselm's ontological argument.

Necessity is a property. Existence is not. Necessity does not entail existence. Necessity just means that if something exists, it exists in all possible worlds. Numbers have this property.

Now on to the Ontological Argument itself. This argument has five premises, which if true, entail the conclusion.

Premise 1: It is possible that a Maximally Great Being (MGB) exists
Premise 2: If it is possible that a MGB exists, then a MGB exists in some possible world
Premise 3: If a MGB exists in some possible world, then a MGB exists in all possible worlds
Premise 4: If a MGB exists in all possible worlds, then a MGB exists in the actual world
Premise 5: If a MGB exists in the actual world, then a MGB exists
Conclusion: A MGB exists.

Premises 2 through 5 are pretty uncontroversial in academia. They are just restatements of the laws of modal logic, accepted by theist and atheist philosophers alike. The controversy is in Premise 1. Is it possible (metaphysically) that a Maximally Great Being exists. I think that on the face of it, we have good reason to believe that it is true. As long as the concept of a Maximally Great Being is coherent, and does not violate any known necessary truths, then Premise 1 is true. A school of philosophy called "natural atheology" has attempted to build arguments against the coherence of a Maximally Great Being, but this project has been all but abandoned. Richard Swinburne explains why in his book: The Coherence of Theism.

But I think we can advance an argument in favor of Premise 1, that will make it airtight. It was developed by Robert Maydole and is called the Modal Perfection Argument. For the sake of this argument, we can go with the following definitions:

Great-making property: A property that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and metaphysically necessary being must have.
Lesser-making property: A property that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and metaphysically necessary being cannot have.

Here is how it works:

1. If a property is a great-making property, its negation is a lesser-making property
2. Great-making properties do not entail lesser-making properties
3. Maximal Greatness is a great-making property
Hence, Maximal Greatness cannot entail its negation of non-Maximal Greatness.

It is perfectly within the laws of modal logic for a property (which is not a perfection) to entail its negation. If a property is an incoherent (or impossible) property (square-circleness is an example, so we'll call this S), then it's necessary that everything has the negation of S (we'll call this ~S) as a property. That's what it means for a property to be impossible. But if everything has ~S, that means that every property entails ~S. If it didn't, then something could have some other property and not have ~S, which means it would have S, which means S would be a possible property. But if every property entails ~S, then S also entails ~S. This is consistent with the Principle of Explosion, which states that if you assert a contradiction, you can logically infer anything from it.

Hence, if it is impossible that a Maximally Great Being exists, then necessarily, nothing has Maximal Greatness. Hence, all things have non-Maximal Greatness. Hence, all properties entail non-Maximal Greatness, including Maximal Greatness. But we just established that Maximal Greatness cannot entail non-Maximal Greatness.

For the minority of philosophers who deny the principle of explosion, here is another way to view the argument. If Maximal Greatness is an impossible property, then all properties entail non-Maximal Greatness. Hence, no property can be a great-making property. But this is absurd. It would mean that some properties such as goodness, intelligence, and wisdom are not better to have than to lack. So again, there is no way that Maximal Greatness is an impossible property.

But that would mean that its is possible that a Maximally Great Being exists. And therefore such a being exists in some possible world, and therefore in every world, and therefore in this world. And since some of these properties such as omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection entail personality, then it follows that this Maximally Great Being must be personal. But that's the definition of a personal God. Hence, perfect being theology is correct.

Let's go through a few of the common objections. The first is Dawkins' own delusional objection. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins attempts to use this argument to disprove the existence of God. He says that if God is the greatest possible being, then wouldn't it be greater for God to not exist and still bring the universe into being? But far from undermining the Ontological Argument, it shows its coherence.

To answer Dawkins: Greater? Maybe. Possible? No. For in what possible world does a non-existent being exist?

What about a Maximally Great Pizza or a Maximally Great Bird? The problem with positing anything physical, is that physical things are dependent on space for their existence. And we know from modern cosmology that space once existed as a singularity, and no bird or pizza in such a state would even be a bird or a pizza. So the idea of a necessarily existing physical thing is undercut.

But how do we know that only one Maximally Great Being exists? Some of the properties possessed by a Maximally Great Being cannot exist in more than one being in any possible world. Omnipotence is one example. If multiple beings are omnipotent, then a logical contradiction follows if their wills come into conflict. If one omnipotent being chooses to bring about a state of affairs where a green elephant exists, then such a state of affairs will be actualized. But if another omnipotent being in the same world wants to bring about a state of affairs where a green elephant does not exist, then that state of affairs will be actualized. So in this world, a green elephant would both exist and not exist, but no possible world can contain such a contradictory state of affairs. So no possible world can have multiple omnipotent beings. Hence, there can only be one God.

Alexander Pruss presents the same idea worded differently: "Omnipotence requires perfect freedom and an e fficacious will. But there cannot be two beings with perfect freedom and an e fficacious will. For if they are perfectly free, they will be able to will incompatible propositions to be true, and then one of their wills shall have to fail to be e fficacious. (This argument assumes that we are individuating beings in such a way that distinct beings with will have their own will. If God is a Trinity, the persons of the Trinity do not have distinct wills, and hence will not count as distinct beings in our sense.)"

Robert Maydole's solution is to add the premise:
4. Being Supreme is a great-making property
Since being supreme entails that all other beings are inferior, only one MGB can exist! Again, there can only be one God.

Finally, what about a unitarian or uni-personal God? I'm afraid such a being, too would not be Maximally Great. For at least one of the properties of such a being, love, is problematic. In order to be necessarily loving, God must be loving in all possible worlds. Since all that is not God is subject to the creative and destructive power of the omnipotent one, God can be the only necessarily existing being. This means that there are possible worlds where God alone exists. But is God loving in those worlds? It would make no sense to say that God is loving in a state of affairs where only he exists. Does he love himself? Self-love doesn't sound like love. Love has to be expressed between one person and another in order to be true love. But that means that God must exist in at least two persons, if not more. Hence, unitarianism is false.

I want to remind all my viewers that both of these arguments are logically valid deductive arguments. You cannot avoid the conclusion of this argument without denying at least one of the premises. And in order to justify that denial, you have to show that the negation is more plausible than the premise itself. But I think to any fair-minded individual, all premises presented are pretty obviously true. And with this sequence, we have a logical proof of the existence of God. The Triune God of Scripture lives, and atheism is toast.

Part 2 (The S5 Objection and de re modality) is here!
Part 3: The Greatness Objection

What Christians Can Learn From Judaism: The Language

Children raised in Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism generally do not depend on translation for reading the Bible. They are able to read it in the original tongue.

From the time Orthodox Jews are very young, they learn the Hebrew alphabet and Hebrew phonics alongside their education in English subjects. As a result, they learn Hebrew as a second language, and reading it becomes more natural for them than for a seminary student who picks up the language in his twenties. One Modern Orthodox Rabbi I spoke to told me that his Rabbinic contemporaries have vastly superior command of the ancient Hebrew language than do the Old Testament professors at divinity schools such as Yale. This does not surprise me. The Rabbis read all their ancient and medieval literature in Hebrew and use it in the prayers every day.

In the Middle Ages, Clergy from the church could not read Hebrew. They were dependent on Jerome's Latin Vulgate. It was sufficient for most cases. But for difficult hermeneutics, the clergy had to ask nearby Jewish Rabbis to interpret the Hebrew. However, it was not just the Rabbis who knew Hebrew. All Jews in that era were required to learn the language and engage in at least some level of Biblical and Talmudic scholarship. They didn't divide their people into classes the way Christianity has historically done, between the educated clergy and the uneducated lay people. Instead, they put the knowledge and power in the hands of the average Jew.

The New Testament was written in Greek and when it quotes the Tanakh, the authors usually quote the Greek translation called the Septuagint. Hence, it is Greek, rather than Hebrew that is the most important Biblical language for a Christian to learn It makes me wonder: why is it that Evangelicals can go through twelve years of Christian school without learning any Biblical Greek?

Getting the average Christian, and not just the clergy literate in Greek will open tremendous opportunity. It will give Evangelicals more confidence in reading their Bibles for themselves. It will make the task of misrepresenting the Bible very difficult for the cults to accomplish. And it would give us a deeper and richer understanding of the text in its original language.

How can this be accomplished? I believe a Christian elementary school would be able to pull this off. Children are especially skilled at learning new languages, and what they learn tends to stay with them longer. If they start learning Greek in Kindergarten and continue through the sixth grade, they should be able to at least translate some short, basic passages, which will provide a tremendous foundation for later learning. It will help future generations better understand the New Testament, and make it easier for future pastors to transition into seminary. And while it is true that kids who enter these Greek-teaching schools in the fourth or fifth grade will have to play catch-up, Orthodox day schools have coped with a similar situation thanks to families that become newly observant. The kids adapt much faster you expect. So let's get on board and expand our children's horizons.

What Christians Can Learn From Judaism: The Kollel

The Kollel is a place where married adult Jewish men gather to study Talmudic law full-time. The kollel is supported by donations from the community and fundraising programs such as selling raffle tickets. The kollel functions as a power pant for Rabbinic culture, generating the proverbial electricity to keep a community Orthodox and unassimilated.

During the day, the kollel learners study full-time. In the evenings, the rest of the Orthodox community comes in to the kollel to learn from the full-time learners. In this way, everyone gets some level of personalized instruction from men highly learned in Jewish law. Children in the day schools get extra help in the religious portion of their homework, and adults get to continue learning even into their old age.

The kollel functions as a social hub for the community, helping members network and find a place in it. Celebrations such as the 8th day circumcision, the greeting of holidays, and even bar mitzvahs can take place in a kollel. On summer mornings, schoolchildren will often come to the kollel for morning prayers, have a donut or two, and then learn with their friends and their rabbi for a few hours before playing the rest of the day.

The kollel functions as another home away from home, making sure that no one feels too isolated. Like the Sabbath, dependency on the kollel for learning Talmud is another way that Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism finds strength in weakness.

The Evangelical community can take a hint from this. Many Evangelicals, especially nerdy intellectuals like myself, experience strong isolation and loneliness even within the community. While there are apologetics groups and bible study groups that perhaps meet one per week or once per month, we still feel a great deal of isolation.

I would challenge an Evangelical community to borrow from the concept of the kollel and experiement with it. Perhaps a seminary school or even a local church could renovate a large room, fill the middle with chairs and tables, and cover the wall with bookshelves packed with Bibles and reference material. Then, the room could open a few nights per week for Bible study groups to meet. That way, groups that study on the same night could meet and network and interact with each other. They can form the same close-knit relationship with each other, and with pastors and seminary professors that Orthodox Jews have with their Rabbis.

It would help Evangelicalism become more closely knit and more intellectually vibrant, and would also solve two problems at once. To paraphrase the apologist James White: two of the biggest problems in apologetics are that the people socially involved in the Churches tend to be not well trained in apologetics. Yet the apologists tend to be loners, not connected to a Christian community. Many of the biggest apologetics disasters could have been avoided if the apologists had been a part of a Christian community. The kollel idea would take care of both problems with a single solution.

What Christians Can Learn From Judaism: The Shtiebel

This is the first video in a series of short videos called: What Christians Can Learn From Judaism. It goes into some of Judaism's best practices, and tells you what Evangelicals can learn from them.

When the Hasidic sects came to America, they noticed how most Jewish communities were liberal, superficial, and in a state of decay. They went into the synagogues and noticed that these synagogues were large and expensive. When they asked about the day schools, the American Jewish leaders responded that the communities that even had a day school in the first place usually had small ones. Most Jews went to public schools.

The Hasidim decided to do the opposite. They invented the Shtiebel, which is a very small and basic synagogue, and invested the rest of their money in the day schools, making sure that everyone in the community could send their kids to the day schools. Their justification is that kids learn their worldview in their schools which they attend every day, much more so than the synagogues, which they visited once a week. The Synagogues might be great places for Jews to connect and network, but it is in the day schools that the next generation learns its worldview.

As a result of this action, the Hasidim experienced growth while the rest of American Jewry experienced decay. This effect is still going on to this day. Most sects of Judaism are shrinking, while Orthodox Judaism is growing.

It makes me think: is the Christian community guilty of the same thing? Are we spending too much money on our churches and not enough on Christian schools? Can we in one day a week compensate for the politically correct, secularizing influence being pushed on our children five days per week? Is it worth having more sports programs for our children, if it means we have to send our kids to secular college, whose professors are experiencing a 70% or so success rate at deconverting Evangelical students? Is this the right investment of our money? Perhaps it is time that we took a page out of the Hasidic playbook, and focused on small churches, large schools.

Jesus as God: a Closer Look

This is a video in the Jesus as God series, if you have not already, please view the first video in this series which clears the ground of objections before watching this video.

In the previous video, I went through a great deal of Biblical prooftexts at warp speed to establish that the New Testament clearly teaches that Jesus is God. This video will take slower pace, looking at only a handful of texts and investigating them in greater detail.

This video will go through the following texts: John 1:1, John 20:28, Titus 2:13, and 2 Peter 1:1.

Before we get into the texts, let me give you a quick background of the Greek words for deity. The first is θεός and is usually translated "God" in English. The second is κύριος and is generally translated "Lord."

In Hebrew, the generic word for god is אֱלהים which can describe the God of Israel, or can be a generic term for gods or even for spirits. The proper noun for the God of Israel is יהוה

When the Jews returned from exile in Babylon, not all of them spoke Hebrew. The Jewish scholars realized that in order to make the Torah of God available to everyone, they needed to translate it into the common language. Since the trade language in the eastern part of the Roman Empire was Greek, that's what they used.

When the translators came across the word אֱלהים they usually translated it into the Greek as θεός, and when they came across יהוה they generally translated it as κύριος. Now you might be thinking "Didn't the New Testament authors constantly use the word Lord or κύριος as a title for Jesus?" That's correct. They used κύριος as a title for Jesus and ὁ θεός to describe the Father. If the New Testament authors were trying to avoid the implication that Jesus was God, why did they use κύριος as his title?

Nevertheless, the New Testament authors do use the term θεός and sometimes even ὁ θεός to describe Jesus, so let's begin looking at those passages.

John 1:1 states:Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος . In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. The term Ἐν ἀρχῇ means "before the world was created" here, as it does in John 17:5, John 17:24, and Proverbs 8:23. Now Ἐν ἀρχῇ is used at the beginning of Genesis, but it refers to an act at the beginning of time. Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν, refers to a state of existence that does not come into being at any point, not even at the beginning of time. If John wanted to write that Jesus came into being at the beginning of time, he would have used Ἐν ἀρχῇ εγενετο instead of Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν.

καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, and the Word was with the God. That word ἦν still indicates eternal pre-existence, making the Word co-eternal with ὁ θεός, which John generally uses to refer to God the Father.

καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος, and the Word was God. This is the tricky part of the verse. The Greek word order is different, and one might on first glance think that it says “God was the Word” or “the Word was a God” as seen in the New World Translation. Both these versions have problems. In Greek, word order does not matter as much as it does in English. In Koine Greek, the word with the article is the subject, in this case ὁ λόγος , the Word; and θεὸς, God or Deity, is the object.

What about the New World Translation of this verse, which said that the Word was “a god”? After all, Koine Greek does not have indefinite articles. However, this would contradict the monotheism found elsewhere in John. Remember that monotheism is not unitarianism. While the New Testament authors use the term “gods” to refer to the beliefs of polytheists, a monotheist would not, when referencing his own beliefs, use the term θεοί (gods) at all, or use θεὸς to refer to anything other than the God of monotheism. Now one might ask “If John wanted to say that the Word was God, why didn't he just use the definite article and make the phrase ὁ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος? The Word was The God. The problem with this is it would contradict the previous verse. If The Word was The God, then it would indicate that the Word and The God were interchangeable, that Jesus was The Father, and John wanted to avoid this.

You might insist that it's “a god” because without the definite article, the indefinite article goes on by default. Let's see what would happen if we did that. Luke 2:14 would read: “Glory to a god in the highest” or Matthew 14:33 would read: “Those who were in the boat worshiped him saying “truly you are the son of a god” or we would have to translate John 1:6 as: “there came a man, sent from a god, a name to him was a John.”

Finally, what about the objection that the λόγος is just an abstract concept, the will of God, as was used by Philo and in the Aramaic Targums? The problem with this is that John treats the λόγος as a personal entity, even before the incarnation in verse 14. In verses 10-12, the preincarnate Word is referred to as αὐτὸν (him, which is personal and possessive).

So let's recap. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with the God, and the Word was God. The Word in this verse is a personal entity distinct from the Father that existed with the Father before creation.

In John 20:28, after the resurrection of Jesus, Thomas, a doubter, encounters Jesus and Thomas says to him “My Lord and my God” that's ἀπεκρίθη Θωμᾶς καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ· ὁ κύριός μου καὶ ὁ θεός μου. This occurs at the end of John's narrative, reflecting what he said in John 1:1, and taking the story full circle.

There are three ways in which scholars have tried to wiggle out of the theistic implications of this passage. They will say that:

1. Thomas is referring to Jesus as his lord and the Father as his God or
2. The passage should be translated: The Lord is also my God or
3. This is an exclamation of surprise, like saying: “Holy fudgesicle cream pops!”

The idea that this phrase can be split between two parties is pretty much killed by the phrase εἶπεν αὐτῷ (to him, singular), to one party. The immediate context gives several references to Jesus, but none to the Father, so randomly intoducing the Father with a pronoun in this verse is highly unlikely. The repeated use of the word μου (of me) does not split the address between two parties, but personalizes Thomas' remark.

The second interpretation argues that if Thomas meant to say “my God” the text would have read ὁ κύριε μου. The first problem is that μου literally means “of me” and κύριε sometimes translates as “sir” robbing this passage of its full implication.

The last one is in my opinion the most ridiculous of these interpretations. Not only does it clash horribly with the context (this passage is the climax of John's narrative) but these words would be a real chillul hashem (a desecration of God's name), horribly inappropriate and blasphemous for a first century Jew. For Jesus to respond with “blessed are you...” instead of rebuking Thomas makes even less sense.

Instead, Thomas is addressing the risen Jesus as his Lord and his God.

In Paul's letter to Titus, he writes προσδεχόμενοι τὴν μακαρίαν ἐλπίδα καὶ ἐπιφάνειαν τῆς δόξης τοῦ μεγάλου θεοῦ καὶ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. Looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of the great God and Savior of us, Jesus the Messiah.

Now groups that deny the deity of Jesus find this intolerable, and look desperately for some way to escape. First, they try to interpret it as the appearing of our great God and also the appearing of our Savior Jesus. However, in the entire Bible, the Father has never appeared to anyone. However, Jesus appeared to lots of people. This would also destroy the parallel with verse 11, where the first coming of the Messiah displayed God's grace and the second coming will display God's glory.

Ok, so maybe it is talking about the appearing of the glory of our great God and the appearing of our Savior Jesus the Messiah. This would be a strange shift in subject, to include the impersonal glory of God with the personal appearing of Jesus in a double epiphany. Also if that were the case, it should have read τοῦ μεγάλου θεοῦ καὶ τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν The Great God of us and the Savior of us. Also, the terminology of theos soter, god/savior was in common usage by both Jews and pagans, where theos and soter always were applied to the same subject.

Fine. What about the glory of our great God and the glory of our Savior Jesus? In support of this view, exegetes will cite that the word θεὸς is generally reserved for the Father, so why isn't it in this verse? The reason is that if the New Testament writers had used θεὸς as often for Jesus as the Father, they would have been accused of polytheism, or it may have led to the view the the Son is the Father. And this too would destroy the parallel with verse 11, and would equate the glory of Jesus with the glory of the Father, making Jesus equal with the Father and therefore make him God.

Finally, the exegete will try to say that this verse is saying that Jesus is in a sense the glory of our great God and Savior. This is a pretty inventive interpretation. It is at least consistent with the Greek bracketing of God and Savior to apply to only one subject. However, the beginning of the next verse reads “who gave himself to redeem us...” which is clearly talking about Jesus, is describing him as Savior. And since this Greek construction joins God and Savior it means that Jesus is both the God and the Savior in this passage.

Finally, we come to 2 Peter 1:1. It reads, Σίμων Πέτρος δοῦλος καὶ ἀπόστολος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ τοῖς ἰσότιμον ἡμῖν λαχοῦσιν πίστιν ἐν δικαιοσύνῃ τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, Simon Peter, a bondservant and apostle of Jesus the Messiah. To those with us who have received the same precious faith through the righteousness of the God of us and Savior Jesus the Messiah. The first question of this passage is: Is this talking about one person or two? Is it about Jesus who is our God and Savior, or is it about our God and also of our Savior Jesus?

At first, you might think that ἡμῶν, of us, which binds God and Savior together in Titus 2:13, separates the terms as it does in 2 Thessalonians 1:12. However, this is bad grammatical reasoning, because the definite article binds the two words together here as it binds Lord and Savior to the same subject in 1:11, 2:20, and 3:18. τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν καὶ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. The Lord of us and Savior Jesus the Messiah. Again, if this passage was meant to apply to two separate persons, it would have read: τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν καὶ τοῦ σωτῆρος Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. the God of us and the Savior Jesus the Messiah.

Then they will shoot back, “but it has to be about two subject, just look at the next verse.” And that verse ends with τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ Ἰησοῦ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν. The God and Jesus the Lord of us. This verse clearly distinguishes Jesus from the Father, so why wouldn't the previous verse? The reason is that the term God/Savior was often used by Jews to refer to God. And the term “God and Jesus” used in the second verse simply cannot be applied to one person.

Also, the Greek word for Savior, σωτῆρ, is used over and over again in 2 Peter. It refers always to Jesus, and it never stands alone, but it accompanied by another word, usually κυρίου or Lord.

Finally, doxologies are regularly addressed to God, and sometimes through Jesus, such as in Romans 16:7, Jude 25, and 1 Peter 4:11. But on some occasions, a doxology, which is a short hymn of praise is addressed to Jesus. In 2 Peter 3:18, the praise is clearly and unambiguously addressed to Jesus. A writer who would address a doxology to Jesus would not likely have difficulty addressing him as θεὸς, as it would be blasphemous to give a doxology to a mere creature.

Jesus as God: A Biblical Case

This is a video in the Jesus as God series, if you have not already, please watch the first video, which clears the ground of objections before watching any other videos in the series. And if you have watched it, but not recently, then you might want to watch it again. Then you can come back to this one. Ok moving right along.

Here is what's at stake in this video series. If Jesus is anything less than Yahweh, the God of Israel, then any worship of him on any level is absolutely inappropriate and is avodah zara, or idolatry: a crime that in Biblical times carried the death penalty. Yet if he is God in the flesh, then any denial of his deity is blasphemy against the God of Israel and a rejection of Jesus. And as Jesus clearly said in Luke, anyone who rejects Jesus rejects the Father. John corroborates this in his first epistle: anyone who does not have the Son, Jesus, also does not have the Father. If Jesus truly is God incarnate, then no one who denies his deity can ever truly worship the God of Israel.

In this video, I present to you a Biblical case that Jesus of Nazareth is Yahweh, the God of Israel. There are several ways in which Scripture portrays Jesus as God:

1. Jesus is called God
2. Jesus is described as only God can be described
3. Jesus freely receives worship

As we examine many texts from the New Testament, always ask yourself the following question: could these words be applied to a mere creature? If Jesus of Nazareth is not the God of the universe incarnate, then he would have to be a mere creature, highly exalted perhaps, but a mere creature nonetheless, as Ebionites, Arians, and some Orthodox Jews such as Pinchas Lapide believe.

The first category of passages are those that specifically describe Jesus as God, or θεός in the Greek. We think of Thomas when he sees the resurrected Jesus in John 20:28, who says his confession of faith: My Lord and my God. If Jesus was not God, then Thomas' words were inappropriate and Jesus should have rebuked Thomas instead of accepting his confession as a confession of faith.

In Titus 2:13, Paul refers to the blessed hope we have of the appearance of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, the Greek bracketing the phrase God and Savior so that both God and Savior can only apply to one subject: Jesus. And Peter used the same language in 2 Peter 1:1, so it isn't just Paul who is using this title.

In Romans chapter 9 verse 5, Paul called Jesus who is over all, the eternally blessed God, amen. In Hebrews Chapter 1, the writer to the Hebrews in verse 6 talks about how all the angels of God worship Christ, and then refers to Christ as God. In this chapter it is God the Father who refers to Jesus as God, and if God the Father is willing to do so, I think we should as well.

Isaiah was given a vision of God high and lifted up and in chapter 9 refers to the one who is born (Biblical Hebrew does not have a past, present, or future tense). Isaiah refers to him as the Mighty God, that's El Gibbor in the Hebrew, a term that Isaiah uses in the next chapter to refer to God himself, and cannot be used of a mere creature, not even King Hezekiah.

In Paul's letter to the Colossians, Paul says that in Jesus, all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. The Greek term θεότητος, deity, means "that which makes God God" and it dwells in the resurrected Jesus in bodily form.

In Hebrews chapter 1 verse 8, "But of the Son he says, 'your throne, O God, is forever and ever, the scepter of uprightness is the scepter of your kingdom. You have loved righteouseness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness beyond your companions'"

But this is only one way in which the writers of Scripture teach that Jesus is God. In Philippians chapter 2 verses 5 through 7. Paul presents his theology of Jesus before he came to Earth. Before he voluntarily made himself of no repute. He did not regard the equality he had with the Father, something to be exploited or held on to but emptied himself of his glory. He existed long before his birth in Bethlehem, and had equality with the Father. What creature has equality with the Father?

In Revelation 22:13, Jesus is described as the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. These are terms that frequently describe Yahweh in the Tanakh. And they also describe the Almighty God in chapter 1 verses 7 through 8. How could one writer describe Jesus as the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end when he had already described the almighty God in those terms? Because for that writer, Jesus is the almighty God.

Another way that Jesus is described as God is when he is called the creator of all things. This means that Jesus the Messiah is your creator. In Colossians chapter 1, Jesus is described in words where Paul literally exhausts the Greek language to communicate his point. He said for by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things and in him all things hold together. This was written in response to people who would say that Jesus was a great person, even a great prophet, even the highest angel, but is not God. Paul corrected this.

In Hebrews chapter 1, Jesus is called the creator of all things who laid the foundation of the earth from the beginning. And in John chapter 1, the fact that Jesus was both God and the creator of all things is made plain. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things were made through him and without him was not any thing made that was made. The word was indicates eternal pre-existence. And if Jesus was a mere creature, then apart from him many things were made.

Jesus also used the I am statements, that's ἐγώ εἰμι, in Greek. Jesus uses this phrase repeatedly to describe himself. In John 8:58 it says "before Abraham was, I am" in John 13:19, he specifically cites from the Septuagint Isaiah 43:10. Jesus takes a statement about Yahweh and applies it to himself. In John 18, the soldiers look to arrest Jesus. He asks them who they are looking for and they say "Jesus of Nazareth" Jesus responds "I am he" and the soldiers fall to the ground. Why did that happen? This is important because in John 8:24 Jesus says that "unless you believe that I am (that's ἐγώ εἰμι) you will die in your sins" Those are Jesus' words.

In Hebrews chapter 1 verses 10 through 12 quotes from the Tanakh, specifically Psalm 102:25-27. This is a passage about how God is uniquely the unchangeable creator of all things. All of creation will pass away, but God will remain. The writer to the Hebrews takes that passage which is uniquely about the God of Israel, and applies it to Jesus.

In John chapter 12, when Jesus is about to hide himself from the people. John is commenting that while the people has seen so many miracles from Jesus, yet they were not believing. He explains why and quotes two passages, one from Isaiah 53 and one from Isaiah 6:10. Then the author of John makes a comment that many of us miss. He says that Isaiah saw the glory of Jesus. When we look back at Isaiah chapter 6, Isaiah says he sees Yahweh sitting upon a throne. He saw his glory. If you ask Isaiah "whose glory did you see?" Isaiah would say "the God of Israel" If you ask John "whose glory did Isaiah see" he would say "Jesus" You don't make that kind of application to a mere creature. It would be blasphemous.

Finally, Jesus is worshipped in a way that only God can be worshipped. Those who deny that the New Testament teaches the deity of Jesus are quick to point out that the word used for worship προσκυνώ can sometimes mean homage. If that were the extent of the argument then this would be enough to shoot it down. The question is: can it refer to full religious worship and is it used this way of Jesus. The answer is most definitely yes.

We know that Peter refused to accept προσκυνώ in Acts 10. And we know that the angel who showed John many wonders in Revelation twice refused προσκυνώ in Revelation 19 and 22. Instead, the angel instructed John to προσκυνώ God alone. When Satan tempted Jesus and showed him all these wonderful kingdoms if Jesus would only προσκυνώ him. Instead, Jesus told Satan that we are to προσκυνώ God alone. In each situation, we see that προσκυνώ in the New Testament refers to a form of worship that is only to be given to God, and is absolutely inappropriate to give to any mere creature, even the most exhalted angel. That is what makes this form of προσκυνώ different from the secular, non-religious usage.

Not only is Jesus declared worthy to receive such worship, but he also freely receives it. In Matthew 14, after Jesus fed the 5000, Jesus withdrew to a mountain, while the disciples went to the Sea of Galilee on a boat. And a storm came, and Jesus went to his disciples, walking on the water, and got into the boat. When the storm ceased, the disciples worshipped Jesus, saying "truly you are the Son of God." If the term THE Son of God, meant anything less than full deity, why did the disciples worship Jesus and why did Jesus allow them to do so? In Matthew 28, after Jesus' resurrection, he freely received worship twice: once just after his resurrection by a group of his disciples, and again on the mountain in Galilee.

In John 9, a blind man came to the pool of Siloam, and Jesus healed the man of his blindness. After the newly sighted man conversed with the Pharisees, he was kicked out of the synagogue for denying that Jesus was a sinner. Jesus then found the man and then Jesus called himself the Son of Man. The formerly blind man said "I believe" and worshipped Jesus. If the term Son of Man was a denial of deity, why did this man worship Jesus?

In Hebrews chapter 1 verse 6, the author says Let all God's angels worship him.

In Revelation chapter 4:9-11 we see a vision of the highest form of worship as it exists in heaven. God is seated upon the throne and all the holy inhabitants of heaven are involved in constant worship before that throne. "And whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who is seated on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who is seated on the throne and whorship him who lives forever and ever. They cast their crowns before the throne saying: Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created" Not only does John use προσκυνώ in its highest sense, but we read of worthiness, glory, power, and honor. These are terms that are commonly used of worship alone. If it is not absolutely inappropriate to give this kind of worship to any creature no matter how exalted, then we have no possible way of defining true worship from the biblical texts.

In Revelation 5 we see the same level of worship being given to Jesus. Starting verse 8 we read regarding the lamb that looked as though it had been slain: "And when the lamb had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the lamb, each holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song saying, Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its eals, for you were slain and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God and they shall reign on the earth. Then I looked, and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands saying with a loud voice:

Worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing. And I heard every creature in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them saying "To him who sits on the throne AND TO THE LAMB be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever" And the four living creatures said Amen. And the elders fell down and worshipped.

This is the continuation of the scene we have seen in chapter 4. But now it includes the lamb that was slain. It has the same complex of words including worthiness and power and glory and honor and blessing with their direct object being that of the lamb. Among those that worship the lamb are all creatures, including the highest and most exalted heavenly beings. If Jesus was in any sense a created being, then it would have been his absolute duty to refuse this kind of worship, and join all of creation in worshiping the one who sits on the throne. But such is not what we see because the lamb is indeed Jesus who is Yahweh.

So the next time you hear such a radical claim as "the New Testament does not teach that Jesus is God" you will know that whoever is making this claim is either ignorant of what the New Testament so plainly and repeatedly teaches about the subject, or that person is a deceiver, a con artist trying to swindle you out of your faith. Do not believe that person's lies.

Jesus as God: Clearing the Ground

This video is the first in a series of videos explaining and defending the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth. Before going on to other videos in this series, I strongly recommend watching this one in its entirety, as it clears the ground of Biblical objections that Jesus of Nazareth is the God of monotheism incarnate.

Like James White, I think there is truly no question as to what the New Testament teaches on this subject. When one lays aside traditions, prejudices, and other outside influences, the answer to the question is plain and unambiguous. Think for a moment of some of the titles and descriptions used of Jesus.

He is the Lamb of God, the Son of God, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. He is the Word of God, he is the Risen Lord. He is the Creator of All Things, Sustainer of All Things, the One for whom all things were made. He is worshipped by angels and men, and in fact all of creation itself. He is the object of prayer and the author and finisher of our faith. He is given the name which is above every name, so at the name of Jesus every knee bows and every tongue swears allegiance. All the fullness of deity dwells in him in bodily form, all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in him, and every thought is to be taken captive in obedience to him. Paul describes him as our great God and Savior, the Eternally Blessed God. John records Jesus' own words, calling himself the I Am, and John speaks of Jesus as the Word who existed eternally and is as to his being absolute deity. Thomas confesses him as his Lord and his God. Peter calls him God and Lord, and the early church prays to him and suffers in his name. Lord, God, Creator, Savior, Lamb of God, Risen and Coming King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. Truly there is no question of the New Testament's teaching on the deity of Christ.

So why is it that Jehovah's Witnesses, Muslims, and Jewish antimissionaries say that the New Testament teaches otherwise?

I think it is because they allow their own beliefs and prejudices to overthrow the plain testimony of Scripture. To an antimissionary, the idea that God could enter into his own creation in physical form is so scandalous that the New Testament writers could not have believed it.. Only by assuming the falsity of Christianity, ignoring the context of the New Testament, and inserting what you seek to prove could you make statements as absurd as those made by these antimissionaries.

When I say that Jesus is God, I am not saying that Jesus is The Father. Such is not the belief of historic Christianity, nor is it the testimony of the New Testament. Therefore, all the passages that distinguish Jesus from the Father are not denials of the deity of Jesus. The apostle Paul plainly distinguished between the Father and the Son, and yet plainly said that in Jesus, all the fullness of deity (theotetos, a word meaning that which makes God God) dwells in bodily form in Colossians 2:9.

Christianity is a monotheistic religion, always has been, always will be. We believe in one and only one God. We affirm that Yahweh is denying from the category of god anyone but himself in Isaiah 45, when he says "I am Yahweh and there is no other. Besides me there is no god." The word god in this passage means that there are no other gods, and is not just referring to idols. Interpreting it as "besides me there is no idol" makes no sense. There were lots of idols. But there is only one God.

Likewise in Isaiah 44: "I am Yahweh who made all things, who alone streched out the heavens, who speard out the earth by myself" God acted alone in creation, without the aid of any other gods, and God does not share His glory with anyone. There is no true god with a small g.

Therefore, any arguments that there is one major God, the Father, and that Jesus is a lesser deity fail, because they contradict the plain testimony of Isaiah. The option that Jesus is a god with a lowercase g is simply not open to anyone who believes in the inerrancy and infallability of the Bible. He is not the great archangel Michael or anyone else.

When Paul teaches the deity of Christ, he is not proclaiming Jesus to be a second god, but was a trinitarian monotheist like the rest of us. A confusion arises when the antimissionary confuses monotheism with unitarianism. Monotheism is the belief that there is one being that is God, unitarianism is the belief that God is one person. Being and person do not mean the same thing. We make the distinction every day. Being is what you are. Person is who you are. Trinitarian monotheism teaches that in the one being that is God, there are three distinct persons. This is made clearest in Matthew's baptismal formula where Jesus instructs his disciples to baptize in the name (singular) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). The word for name "nouma" appears once in the verse. You do not baptize in the name of God, a prophet, and a force. Instead, the three persons share the one, divine, trinitarian name of Yahweh.

The statement "there is one true God" is not the same as saying "the Father alone is God" These are two separate statements with two different meanings. Therefore, such passages as Isaiah 43, which states that "Before me was no god formed nor will there be any after me" or 1 kings 8:60 which says Yahweh is God and there is no other, or Deuteronomy 6 "Hear O Israel, Yahweh your God, Yahweh is one" establish monotheism but do not establish unitarianism. We believe that the Triune God is the one and only, and that no God came before Him and none will come after Him. Such statements that there is one God are not denials of the Trinity.

But what about 1 Corinthians 8:6 when Paul says that there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist? Is this saying that only the Father is God and that the Son is not? Such erroneous reasoning would mean that the Father is not Lord. Yet in Luke chapter 2, Jesus was presented in the Temple to the Lord, and in Revelation 4, the Father is called Lord. It would also mean that God did not create all things by himself, contradicting Isaiah. And for those who object and say that "through him" means that Jesus is only a passive agent in creation, may I remind you that in Romans 11:36, Paul speaks of Yahweh when he says "From him and to him and through him are all things." Also, the Greek word for Lord, kurios, is the term that the Greek Septuagint uses in place of the Hebrew name Yahweh. In this passage, Paul is taking the Shema and applying it to both the Father and the Son.

Numerous other errors made by those who attempt to deny the deity of Christ are based on their failure or refusal to allow for the Biblical teaching that Jesus was both God and Man. The eternal and divine word became flesh as in John 1:14. They cite passages such as Mark 13:32 where Jesus denies that he knows the day or the hour of his return. This is divine knowledge, and not within his self-limited knowledge. They also cite passages such as Numbers 23:19, 1 Samuel 15:29 and Hosea 11:9 which all say that God is not a man.

Not only do they fail to point out that the incarnation had not yet taken place, the Word had not yet taken on flesh, but the whole point of all of these verses was to point out that God is superior to any mere human. And Jesus was no mere human.

In John 14:28, Jesus said that the disciples should have rejoiced that he was returning to the Father, because the Father was greater, meaning in a greater position in heaven than the Son was while on Earth. The Son voluntarily took the position where he set aside the independent use of his divine perogatives, which include divine knowledge. To say that Jesus cannot be God because he set aside the independent use of his divine knowledge makes about as much sense as saying that the Father is not God because he does not know what it is like to be a human or to eat food. The Father and the Son took about different roles in bringing about the redemption of God's people. They distinguish the difference between the Father and the Son but do not tell us that the Son is any less deity.

In John 5, Jesus said the Son can do nothing of Himself unless it is something he sees the Father doing. Whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does. Does this mean that the Son who is elsewhere described as having all power and authority has no power or authority? Of course not. Jesus is not denying his power or deity, but is describing the absolute and perfect unity that exists between the Father and the Son. The Father, too, can do nothing apart from the Son. This is why in that same chapter, the Son claims the same divine right to be active on the Sabbath day as the Father. This is also why he says that he and the Father are one, meaning unified in their mission and purpose, just as he wants the disciples to be unified in their own mission and purpose.

In 1 Corinthians 11:3 The head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. Does that mean Christ is not God? Of course not. This is like arguing that I am a nobody and nobody's perfect so I'm perfect. The word God in the New Testament can have more than one meeting. It can mean deity. It can mean the Triune God as a whole, or it can mean The Father. In this case it means the Father. Of all the New Testament writers, Paul has been the most explicit in calling Jesus God, which we will get into in a later video. Does this mean that Jesus is inferior in some way to the Father? By that logic, it would also mean that the woman is an inferior being to the man. But man and woman both bear the image and likeness of God. We are equal in our worth. Instead, this passage just explains that men and women play different roles, just as the Father and the Son took on different roles. It does not mean they are anything less than equal in their being.

In John 20:17, Jesus speaks after his resurrection from the dead of the Father as his God. Such words make perfect sense in the context of Scripture. What else do we expect the resurrected Christ to say? Is the holy one an atheist? Jesus was resurrected from the dead, and is still the God Man. Hence, he speaks of his Father and his God. And within only a few verses, Thomas will express the faith of all true believers, when he bows in adoration to the risen Jesus and calls the Risen One "Ha kurios mu kai ha theos mu" which means "The Lord of me and the God of me"

In John 17:3, Jesus prays to the Father, calling Him "the only true God" Those that deny the deity of Christ pass over the fact that according to the passage, eternal life means knowing both the Father and the Son. And they also ignore the testimony to the deity of Christ found two verses later. To those who think that Jesus is a mere creature, how is it that eternal life is merited through knowing God and a mere creature, joined on equal footing with his creator? And why is it two verses later, when Christ asks the Father to "restore to me the glory that we shared together before the world was"? What creature shares the glory of the Father before creation? Saying that there is only one true God is not the same as saying the Father alone is deity. This again confuses monotheism with unitarianism.

In Mark 10:17-18, a man calls Jesus a good teacher, and Jesus responds "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone?" If this was a denial of his deity, Jesus should have said "Do not call me good." Instead, Jesus points out that the young man does not know with whom he is dealing. Remember that Jesus already claimed to be able to forgive sins in Mark chapter 2 verses 5 through 7, which is a divine priviledge.

In John 10, Jesus almost gets himself stoned to death when he claims in front of his fellow Jews, "I and the Father are one." They responded "You, being a man, make yourself God" and were about to stone Jesus when he responded quoting Psalm 82: "Is it not written in your Law, 'I said, you are gods'" If he called them gods to whom the word of God came, and Scripture cannot be broken, you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming' because I said 'I am the Son of God'? If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me; but if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father"

Is Jesus denying his divinity here, or worse, claiming that we are all divine? That's quite an interpretive stretch. Jesus was being charged with blasphemy, and wanted to avoid getting on the Sanhedrin's hit list prematurely. He had two ways of doing this: 1. By denying that he claimed to be God, or 2. By showing that it is not necessarily blasphemy to claim to be God. Jesus chose option 2. He said that it is not blasphemy to call someone god if they deserve the title, and Jesus deserves the title, and then said "the Father is in me and I in the Father." If Jesus was denying his deity in this passage, why is it they tried to arrest him for blasphemy anyway in verse 39? Why didn't they just say "ok, as long as you are not claiming to be God. Just a misunderstanding"? Instead, they tried to seize him. They did not believe Jesus was denying his deity, so why should we?

Nor does Psalm 82 teach that men are gods. This psalm is a song of lament over unjust and oppressive rulers. It is these wicked tyrants that the Psalmist sarcastically calls gods, who will nevertheless die like men.

Finally, in Philippians 2, Jesus, who was in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be held on to, but made himself nothing, taking on the form of a servant. Does this emptying "kineo" mean that Jesus gave up his divinity? Not at all. He made himself nothing by taking the form of a servant and giving up the independent use of his divine perogatives. It describes how the glorious one seen in Isaiah chapter 6 can be seen walking among us.

In any case, most of these misunderstandings come from either reading short phrases from the Bible in total isolation, ignoring what is written around it, or from assuming that God cannot take on corporeal form, in other words, that an omnipotent God who can do anything cannot do something.

The Kuzari Principle

The Kuzari Principle argument is the primary outreach argument of Orthodox Jews to establish that Orthodox Talmudic Judaism is the one true religion. The Kuzari principle is as follows: Suppose that at least one hundred thousand people claim to witness a certain event. Then almost certainly, this event must have occurred. Since only Judaism claims that its origins are in national revelation rather than merely personal revelation, it must be the true religion. There are two versions of this argument of which I am aware. Here is the first.

Judaism makes these four claims:

1. At least 600,000 Israelites gathered at the bottom of Mount Sinai over 3,300 years ago.
2. All of the Israelites heard God speak to them at Mount Sinai, and they then asked Moses to be His prophet.
3. Moses received the entire Torah from God and taught the Torah to all of the Israelites standing at Mount Sinai.
4. The Israelites transmitted the Torah and also the history of the transmission process of the Torah from generation to generation in an unbroken chain of generations for over 3,300 years until today, with at least one hundred thousand Israelites in each generation of the chain.

Here is how the proof is supposed to work: Suppose that 100,000 people all claim to see a flaming unicorn appear in their midst. Is their testimony likely to be true? I think so. Suppose these 100,000 people form a community and all tell their children about the flaming unicorn incident. Is the witness of that entire second generation enough to establish that the first generation believed they saw a flaming unicorn? I think so too. When a third generation is produced, it attests the validity of the second generation's beliefs, which attests to the validity of the first generation's beliefs, which attests to the validity of the original event.

No matter how many generations away from the event you go, as long as you have that unbroken chain with at least 100,000 in each generation, you have proof of the original event. In this way, the modern Jewish people are in a sense direct witnesses to the events on Sinai.

So what's the catch? Why is this argument so thoroughly rejected by liberal Jews, many Modern Orthodox Rabbis, and even some Haredim?

The fatal flaw with this entire argument is in the central claim itself. Remember what it states: Suppose that at least one hundred thousand people claim to witness a certain event. Then almost certainly, this event must have occurred. Do you see the flaw? This version of the Kuzari Principle argument is really nothing more than a Sorites paradox.

What is a Sorites paradox? A Sorites paradox is a paradox that arises from vague predicates. The paradox of the heap is an example of this paradox which arises when one considers a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Is it still a heap when only one grain remains? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?

Just because a sand heap can remain a heap when you remove one grain of sand, it does not follow that you can remove any number of grains of sand and expect that it will remain a heap. Likewise, if you hear the testimony of 100,000 people that they witnessed an event, is that the same as witnessing the event yourself? Is there absolutely no difference? I think there is. Hearing the testimony of the second generation attesting to the first generation is not as reliable as hearing the testimony of the first generation directly. You lose credibility with each generation.

In order for the argument to actually work, the Kuzari Principle would have to be reformulated as: Suppose that at least one hundred thousand people claim to witness a certain event. Then 100% certainly (or 100% minus some infinitestmal amount certainly), this event must have occurred. But that's obviously false. Hearing the testimony of 100,000 witnesses just isn't the same as being an eyewitness to the event.

If we think about this proof in mathematical terms, suppose we attached a percentage of certainty to the 100,000 witnesses. Let's say that the witness of 100,000 people gives you a 97% certainty that the event was true. The 97% figure is only for illustration purposes. It was chosen just as arbitrarily as the 100,000 figure. So speaking to the eyewitnesses of the event, you're 97% certain it happened. Speaking to the children of the eyewitnesses, you're 97% certain that the parents believed it, which if true would give you a 97% chance that the event happened. So 97% of 97% is about 94%. Not too bad, but at the 20 generation mark that brings you to about 54%. Twenty more generations takes you to about 30% certainty. Twenty more generations which would get you to around the time of the Macabees, and you're at 16%. Today, we are somewhere around 150 generations from the time of the event, which even under these generous probabilities, would you about 1% certainty based on oral tradition alone.

Here is the second version of this argument:

1. Suppose that a group of 100,000 people claim they have an unbroken line of tradition that a certain number of generations ago at least 100,000 people saw a single, spectacular, memorable event which we will call a national experiential tradition or NET for short.
2. If that claim is false, it would have to be introduced at some point without the event taking place
3. But such a claim of that type cannot be introduced without the event taking place
Conclusion: The claim must be true.

This is a better argument, at least this version is not fallacious. However, premise 3 seems weak. Why can't such a claim be fabricated? Proponents of the argument will usually give two reasons to support this premise.

First, all proposed scenarios where the claim slips into a national culture are implausible. How do you convince a nation of 100,000 people that such an event took place? Do you do it all at once?

My answer is: No, you can bring it in gradually through legendary development. Legendary development is a process by which oral traditions change as they are passed from generation to generation. The details change, and the stories often take on larger than life characteristics. Once you get past two generations from the original event, legendary development begins to wipe out the historical core. An example would be the legend of King Arthur.

Worse, the argument assumes a society in which texts and information are widely distributed, so that the people, when receiving a new text or story, will know that it is new. However, this is often not the case in ancient societies. People often had only the vaguest knowledge of their own family or national pasts, and were aware that information might well be in slow circulation about which they knew nothing. If an individual learned of what appeared to be that information, it would be welcomed and not questioned.

The second reason to believe premise 3 supported by Dovid Gottlieb, is that there are no counterexamples. Specifically, there are no stories that fit these five criteria:

1. The story must describe an event witnessed by a nation of at least 100,000.
2. The event must be one that would have created a national tradition.
3. The story was in fact believed to be true.
4. The believers included the nation composed of the descendants of those to whom the event was supposed to have occurred.
5. The story is in fact false.

These criteria seem both conveniently vague and enormously ad hoc i.e. contrived. It's almost as if in formulating the argument, Gottlieb did a survey of religions, observed which characteristics make Talmudic Judaism different, and made those characteristics his criteria for what constitutes true religion. Even if documents of a previously unknown ancient religion founded on national revelation were unearthed, Gottlieb could use the ambiguity in terms such as "national tradition" and redefine it to include Judaism and exclude the other ancient religion. And since such a religion would be long dead, one could not prove that all the descendants were were believers.

Also, why the figure of 100,000. Is 5,000 somehow not enough to verify an event? Gottlieb's methodology is like shooting an arrow into a tree and then painting the target around it.

Since Gottlieb has a degree in philosophy and mathematical logic, I hope he also realizes that there is no such thing as proof by lack of counterexample. Not in mathematics, not in philosophy, not even in history. A theorem is not proved by failing to find a counterexample. Otherwise, theorems like Goldbach's conjecture or the continuum hypothesis should be considered proven. This goes for science as well. If I claimed that there can be no gold spheres larger than 20 feet in diameter, and claimed as my proof the fact that there are no counterexamples, I do not think anyone would accept that.

Similarly, a historical hypothesis is not verified by a failure to find evidence against it. Instead, you have to show that if the hypothesis is false, there would be evidence against it. In this case, the proponent of the Kuzari Principle argument has the full burden of the proof. Good luck with that.

Besides, if we drop the arbitrary 100,000 requirement from the argument, then there is a plethora of counterexamples. The Kurukshetra War in India, the founding of Thebes, and the fouding of the Aztec nation to name just a few.

But speaking of counterexamples. Why are there no ancient Egyptian records of such an event taking place? The Kuzari proponent will reply: "The Egyptians did not record their defeats." Well hold on there, sparky. Does not that suggest that the Egyptians published a history and the millions of Egyptians that read it accepted it as true even though they knew it was untrue? So can you cause multitudes to accept a false history or not? Which is it? You cannot suck and blow from the same explanatory pipe at the same time.

It also may be the case that premise 1 of the argument is false. The Torah might not claim that there were at least 600,000 at Sinai after all. I think the problem is in assuming that the Hebrew word elef in the context of the Pentatuch only meant thousand. It could just as well have meant clan. If we are talking about 2,500 clans, we can get a number somewhere around 70,000 to 140,000. This figure is more consistent with ancient population statistics, as well as ancient archaeological evidence. Alexander the Great only had about 50,000 soldiers with him when he conquered Persia. Hannibal had about 20,000 soldiers with him. There were only about 20,000 soldiers in Egypt's army, so why would an Israelite army of 600,000 be afraid of them?

Also, if the larger figure is true, a mass exodus of 3 million people leaving Egypt, wandering through an uninhabited wasteland for 40 years, and then invading the Canaanite area would leave a massive trail of archaeological evidence. However, the much smaller figure would be able to make this type of journey without leaving such a massive trail. But if the smaller number is true, then the number at Sinai could be as low as 10,000, and we would not have the necessary 100,000 for the Kuzari argument to work.

To repeat, I am not arguing that the story of the Exodus is false. I believe that it is true. I am only arguing that it is not provable in the way that the Rabbis want it to be. By extension, the Rabbinic claim of an unbroken and uncorrupted line of Rabbinic Tradition and Oral Torah that dates back to Moses and Sinai is also not provable.