Why do you believe what you believe? Because what you believe determines how you live. And so it's a very important question to ask yourself, particularly as a Christian, because Paul tells us to be babes in evil, but in our understanding to be adults, which means we have to use the minds that God has given us to see the basis for truth. If you're a Christian, why do you believe what you believe? Is it because your parents told you that the Christian faith is true?
Is it because you grew up in the church and you never questioned or investigated it? Thankfully, because it is true, the Scriptures do stand up to scrutiny, and we don't need to shrink back from thorough inquiry. This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. We're spending this week thinking about thinking, as RC Sproul is helping us think like Christians, introducing us to some of the philosophical debates at the root of the question, how do we know what we know? This week's series, Think Like a Christian, is actually 12 messages, more than you'll hear this week on Renewing Your Mind, so I encourage you to request lifetime digital access to the series, plus RC Sproul's book, The Consequences of Ideas, when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. So how do you know what you know?
Here's Dr. Sproul. Recently I saw a bumper sticker that I got a little bit of a kick out of. It said, I am a golfer, therefore I lie.
Could have said, I'm a fisherman, therefore I lie. And obviously, this humorous bumper sticker was a takeoff on a very famous phrase that finds its origin in the teaching of Rene Descartes, whom we have been looking at briefly. And if you remember from your college days, or even your high school days, that famous formula that was first set forth by Descartes was what? Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Now, we might be somewhat amused or bemused by this, that somebody would be famous for setting forth a formula about something that we would take for granted. You might ask the question, why would any philosopher spend any time or effort trying to prove or to demonstrate his own existence?
Why would a man like Descartes labor to establish this particular proposition? We all know, or maybe we don't all know, but many of us know that there is a somewhat esoteric school of philosophy that rears its head periodically throughout Western history called solipsism. And solipsism has never really taken a hold of a culture in any significant way, but solipsism is the idea that all of reality is an illusion or a projection of our own imagination. It raises the philosophical question, how do I know, for example, that you are real or not simply a fig newton of my imagination or a character in one of my dreams? And then it gets even more bizarre when we ask the question, how do I know I'm not a character in one of your dreams?
We've seen in the past how sometimes our dreams can be so intense and acute and graphic in their imagery that after we awaken, we're not quite sure whether what we have dreamed was real or imagined. And so some philosophers have, from a somewhat skeptical perspective, offered a philosophy that says you can't be sure of your own personal existence, even something that you take for granted as you do that you indeed are. Now, if we could transpose Descartes over into the 20th century, we may begin to see a little bit of why this is not just a philosopher's game for him to be laboring the point of his own existence. We hear frequently the idea that we are living in the age of relativism and that there is no such thing as objective truth or absolute truth. We are told by existential philosophy, by relativism, that truth is subjectivity or that truth is simply a matter of one's personal preference and that there is no such thing as fact or objective reality.
And I might just add in passing that such an assertion is devastating to historic Christianity because Christianity is based upon certain propositions that we believe to be absolutely true, not to mention the existence of God, for example, and His Word, the truth claims of the New Testament, that we're not saying that the resurrection of Christ was a subjective experience that you can take or leave according to your own personal preferences, but we see it as an objective reality in the midst of history that imposes a crisis on every human being who is called to respond to it. And so when you're living in a culture when people are saying there is no such thing as truth or there is no such thing as objectivity, and nothing can be known with any degree of certitude, it's into that environment that somebody like Descartes steps to try to demonstrate at least one premise that is indubitable, that can be objectively and demonstrably proven. Now again, Descartes did not live in the twentieth century. He lived in the seventeenth century and is generally conceded to be the chief spokesman of a school of philosophy that arose in the seventeenth century and dominated Western thought in that time, which is called the school of rationalism. And we'll come back to this idea of rationalism a little bit later on, but for now let's look at Descartes and his role in the history of Christian thought and of Western philosophy. It's interesting to note that he lived in the seventeenth century, the century that followed immediately on the heels of the sixteenth century.
That's an absolute fact. That's one you can take to the bank, that the seventeenth century followed right after the sixteenth century. But the great news, the big news of the sixteenth century, the grand upheaval in the world of thought in the sixteenth century was clearly the Protestant Reformation, which some historians have considered to be either the most or the second most pivotal event that shapes culture today in the entire history of Western thought.
Because what happened in the sixteenth century Reformation, apart from all of the theological disputes about justification and about the authority of the Bible and so on, was the collapse of Christian unity and the monolithic authority of the church. Now, from early centuries and on through the Middle Ages, a particular axiom developed within the life of the church that was captured in a little Latin phrase. I've already gone five or ten minutes since the last Latin phrase, so we haven't strung them together too rapidly. But we have the Latin phrase, fides in plicitum. Now, that may sound strange to your ears, but you've heard the term fide, in terms of justification by faith alone, or adestes fidelis, or semper fidelis, always faithful, the Marine Corps motto, and so on. And so we know that the word fides has something to do with faith. And the word implicitum is the word from which we get the English term implicit. Fides implicitum was declared by the church as to have an implicit faith, and not in the sense of a vaguely implied faith, but you've heard the expression in our culture, I want you to trust me implicitly.
What does that mean? Without question, without rancor, without rebellious spirit, but you're called to acquiesce to my authority as a teacher, and I just want you to believe it because I said so. This is the kind of thing that parents do to their children all the time after you get a little bit weary of answering their why questions, and you patiently try to explain the reason for your decision to them after the sixth or seventh why you finally resort to because I said so. And at that point, you're asking for a surrender or an acquiescence of the child that they would take your word for something. Now, this may seem like an extremely arrogant thing for a church to be propagating to its people, that they should acquiesce through an implicit faith to whatever is taught by the church, but the idea, even though it was not defined yet and was not defined until 1870, the idea of the infallibility of the church was already in place. Now, if indeed the church is infallible when it teaches things de fide in its pastoral role here, if the church has the grace of God that renders its teachings infallible, then would it not be entirely appropriate for a person to acquiesce implicitly?
Let's take it away from the realm of the church, which we see is so marred with the corruption of humanness and so on, and let's go to God. Would a thinking person, a rational person blindly, or maybe that's too strong a word, but would he simply render an implicit faith to anything uttered by Almighty God? Or would we say, I don't care who you are, O Creator, I want to see your credentials, and I've… Well, alright, so God shows the credentials, and you know that it is God, and you know something about this God that He's omniscient, that He's eternal, and if you encountered a being that you were convinced was eternal and knew everything and was all righteous, and He made a proposition to you, would you believe it? When you've seen the bumper sticker, I've talked about this before, I've seen it many times, God said it, I believe it, that settles it, and I've objected to that bumper sticker, saying that's not a very good bumper sticker for Christians to be using. There's something seriously wrong with that bumper sticker, and what is it? God says it, I believe it, that settles it, as if what settles the matter is my acceptance of what God has said.
No, no, no, no, no. If God says it, that settles it. If it is the God of heaven and earth who is eternal, omniscient, and righteous, you get the point. To give anything less than a fides implicitum to God would be arrogant. If we knew that it was God who was speaking, what creature would have any right to challenge the truthfulness of what comes from the mouth of God? So it is not a matter of really blind faith for the Christian to place his trust in the living God when God speaks about things that we don't fathom by our own naked intellect, as that's why sometimes people get the idea that faith, as it manifests itself in the Christian life, is something gratuitous, that is something irrational, something that reflects some psychological weakness in us, and that the only way we can affirm the existence of anything is by having an immediate demonstrative proof of it.
Oh no, wait a minute. What Descartes was getting at was this. If we can establish the objective existence of God, then His very existence puts a major spin on how we interpret everything in the universe, because if you see a plant growing or a process taking place before your scrutiny in a laboratory, and you know that there is no God, how you understand the significance of the growth of that plant or the progress of that particular activity will be radically conditioned by that axiom, that there is no God. On the other hand, if you know that there is a God who is transcendent and eternal and the Creator of all things, and He governs all things that come to pass and so on, your understanding of the flower, your understanding of life itself is radically changed. That is the most important controlling premise to all thought. That's why every person's worldview is either, in the final analysis, theocentric, that is God-centered, or anthropocentric, man-centered.
So there's no more important premise than the premise of the existence of God. Now again, I can't answer every question that comes up about the truth claims of Christianity. But if a person understands that God exists and that He is eternal and omniscient and so on, and if we can come to the conviction that the Scripture is His Word, then would it be irrational to acquiesce to the teaching of Scripture? If it is true that this is His Word, and as Jesus proclaimed, His Word is truth, wouldn't we be insane not to acquiesce to every word that proceedeth forth from His mouth? Now, of course, the great controversy is, is it His Word? And I understand that, and I understand the burden of Christian apologetics to give evidence that it is the Word of God. But what I'm saying again is, if you are convinced on objective grounds that it is the Word of God, how foolish would it be to carp and attack the truthfulness of what it says?
If it's the Word of God, then it must be true, and if it's true, you are to acquiesce to it. But you see, in the life of the church in the sixteenth century, with the collapse of the unity of the church and the authority of the pope, and with the authority of the pope, the authority of church councils, people were left staggered with this concept of an implicit faith in the teaching of the church. People still believed in putting their faith implicitly in God, but now we had a dispute about not is there a God, but the question now is, because what does God say? And what does what God says, what does it mean? Because you have the best minds of the church in the sixteenth century coming into mortal conflict over crucial theological affirmations.
And so the person in the street was confused. Is Luther right? Is this Protestant movement that is sweeping across Europe, is it the truth of Christianity? Or are guys like Knox and Calvin and Zwingli and Luther heretics and the church in Rome, are they telling us the truth? Is Luther right when he says that the sole authority that binds the conscience is the Scripture? Or does the church have equal authority along with the Scripture?
Is the church also infallible? You see, these questions now were having a devastating impact upon everybody, not just on scholars, but on the people in the street. Sometimes they would say, well, I'll be a Lutheran because the governor of my territory is Luther, or I'll be Catholic because the prince over here is Catholic, and people started making decisions like that, whereas the thinking people began to say, wait a minute, I want to know who's telling the truth here. These sides can't both be right. Somebody here is wrong.
Maybe they're both wrong, but they certainly both cannot be right. And so in a very real sense, as we make the transition into the 17th century, the basic question was the question, how do I know what is true? How can I know what is true? And all of a sudden, philosophy now takes a hard look afresh at the question of epistemology. And the study of epistemology, which dominated philosophical thought in the 17th and 18th century, is the study of that simple question, how do you know what you know? How do we come to beliefs that we hold?
Are they gratuitous? Are they grounded in nothing? Or is there some kind of objective basis for the truths that we affirm? It's almost like everything flipped back to ground zero, and the church had to start all over again, and Western philosophy had to start all over again, asking the question at Pontius Pilate, ask Jesus at His trial, what is truth? And the only what is truth, how can I know it? And beyond that, even worse, where the voices of skepticism were saying, well, if Luther can't get it together, and the church can't get it together, and Luther and Calvin can't agree, and Roman Catholic Church and Protestants can't agree, people became cynical and saying, truth is unknowable, we can't know anything with certainty.
It's into that situation that Descartes came. We can call from ancient times that the unexamined life is not worth living, and I agree with that. And yet I must find myself in a small minority because I find it difficult to find many people who put their own philosophies and their religious convictions under a microscope and ask themselves, why do I believe what I believe? Do I believe it simply because it's been passed on to me by my parents or the subcultural community that I've been in? Am I a Republican just simply because I live in the midst of Republicans?
Or have I really thought through the issues that divide people on political theory? Why do you believe what you believe? Because what you believe determines how you live. And so it's a very important question to ask yourself, particularly as a Christian, because there is a real sense in which we are called upon to justify our belief systems, not just to our neighbor, but to ourselves, because we are called to be mature in our faith. Paul tells us to be babes in evil, but in our understanding to be adults, which means we have to use the minds that God has given us to see the basis for our truth.
This should not threaten us. It should encourage us. As the more carefully I believe we examine the data of Scripture, the more amazed we will be at the internal harmony and profundity of it.
That was R.C. Sproul on this Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, a daily outreach of Ligonier Ministries. In a world which elevates feelings, it's important that as we seek to reach, serve, and disciple the next generation, that we remind them and demonstrate that our faith is true and that it can stand up to the criticisms and critics of our day. And when you support Renewing Your Mind and Ligonier Ministries, you're helping do that through Ligonier's Always Ready Youth Apologetics events, as we teach the teenagers in attendance why they can trust the Bible, why it's not arrogant or unloving to say that Jesus is the only way and to respond to other objections. So if you'd like to support the global and generational outreach of Ligonier Ministries by giving a donation at renewingyourmind.org, to say thank you, we'll send you R.C. Sproul's book, The Consequences of Ideas, which is his overview of Western philosophy. Plus, we'll grant you lifetime digital access to this week's 12-part series, Think Like a Christian. You can give your gift when you call us at 800 435 4343 at renewingyourmind.org or by clicking the link in the podcast show notes. Rene Descartes formally declared, I think, therefore I am. How did he get to that conclusion and what did he mean? Be sure to join us tomorrow to find out, here on Renewing Your Mind. .
