The Existence of Shoes

Coming up next on Renewing Your Mind... As we continue our study now with the most common objections raised against Christian truth claims, we recall that in our last program we looked at the crisis brought to the church by this massive critique of the traditional arguments for the existence of God, which critique was made by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. And if I may review it for you or if you've missed that particular program, you will notice that Kant argued that reason cannot move through the use of cause and effect from the physical universe that we perceive to the conclusion that above and beyond this physical universe there is a non-physical reality named God. And we see a collision course here between the teaching of the Apostle Paul and the teaching of Immanuel Kant. And we see this at the outset, that if Kant is correct that you cannot know the invisible God from visible objects in this world. If Kant is correct, then manifestly Paul is wrong when he says that the invisible things of God are known through the things that are made. On the other hand, if the Apostle Paul is correct, then Kant must be wrong. The great scandal of modern Christianity is that the church today seems to want to have its cake and eat it too. They want to affirm the truth of what Paul is teaching and yet roll over and play dead before the feet of Immanuel Kant. And so we've seen in the last 200 years or so a vast decline in the church's attempts to prove the existence of God, surrendering to the skepticism that says it can't be done.

And there are different kinds of skepticism at this point. One argues that even if we could prove the existence of God, the only God that we could prove would be a nameless, faceless, uncaused cause, some ultimate being who has the power of creation within himself. And that wouldn't necessarily correspond to the Christian God whose name is Yahweh who reveals himself in history and who redeems us in Jesus Christ and so on.

And so that all we could get to through our rational argumentation would be this sterile, empty, vapid concept of an Aristotelian unmoved mover. And certainly God is much more than a first cause. He's the Father. He's the Redeemer. He's all these things that we're concerned about in biblical revelation. Well, I'm sensitive to that concern, and yet I want to caution my friends who come to that conclusion and say, just keep this in mind, that one of the primary tasks of apologetics as we saw in our first session is to give an answer to the hope that is within us. And it has always been the church's responsibility to give a reasonable reply to the skeptic. And the guns of skepticism have been aimed for the last 200 years at one basic concept that is absolutely essential to Christianity, and that is the idea of creation. Whatever else God is, He is the Creator.

And the guns of skepticism have been so vigorously trained upon the idea of creation because the skeptic understands this, that if he can do away with the rational concept of divine creation, then the whole structure of Christian faith collapses because Christianity is married to the assertion in the beginning God, and that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Now, I don't go to church to worship Aristotle's unmoved mover. I go to church to worship the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. I don't go to church to worship an abstract philosophical principle. But I do go to church to worship a God who, among everything else that He does, also happens to be Creator. And it's very important for us to show the necessity of a Creator, because even though that doesn't prove the full nature of God, what it does answer is the objection that is leveled at this most critical point.

Now, how do we then endeavor to do this? I once had a discussion with a philosopher, a professional philosopher. He made his living teaching philosophy, and he said, How can you suppose to argue cogently for the existence of God?

Give me some proof, some real proof that God exists. And I said, OK. And I had a pair of loafers on my feet, and I took off one loafer and one shoe, and I held up the shoe, and I showed him my shoe, and I said, Look here. This shoe proves conclusively that God exists.

And he laughed. He said, All that proves to me is that you have a shoe in your hand, and it suggests, it doesn't necessarily prove it, R.C., but it's suggesting that the one who's holding the shoe is not all there. How in the world can you say that that shoe proves the existence of God? And I said, Well, I'll back off for a second, and I'll take a retreat.

You've laughed me to scorn. I said, OK. Let me just ask you first of all, do you agree with me that I was holding a shoe? He said, Yeah, I'll give you that. And would you agree that the shoe is something? And he said, Yes, it's not nothing. I said, Because if that shoe exists, if my shoe exists, then I can only think of four possible explanations for this shoe. One is that it's an illusion, a fig newton of my imagination and of yours. But we had already gotten past that because he suggested that he agreed with me that there really was something there, that I wasn't in the tender grasp of nothing.

He said, This is something, a shoe. I said, We agree that the shoe is not an illusion. And even if it were an illusion, we're not stopped there because if my friend would have said, I don't even believe in your shoe, not to mention your God, I don't believe that you're holding a shoe in your hand, I think that's an illusion. I'd say, Okay, it's an illusion. Now what's having the illusion? Is the illusion real? And he said, Well, I guess we have to say that if there's an illusion, something's having an illusion because you can't have an illusion of illusion without having something having the illusion. He agreed with that. I said, Okay, that really boils it down now to three possible explanations for this shoe.

And they are these. This shoe that he agreed exists is not an illusion, is either self-existent and eternal. That is that this shoe that I have on my foot is an eternal shoe. It wasn't made. It wasn't manufactured.

It didn't grow. It wasn't born. But as long as there's been anything or time, even before time, this shoe exists. When I take it to the shoemaker, he says, How long have you had these shoes? Or he says, You should have been in here a long time ago.

They're so damaged. He may think that my shoe's been on my foot forever, but I have never found a shoemaker yet who believes in eternal shoes. But I said, Let's allow that as a possibility that the shoe is self-existent and eternal. The other possibility is that the shoe created itself out of nothing. One day I was walking down the street barefooted and suddenly, magically, mysteriously, a shoe popped out of thin air and went on my foot. That's possibility number two, that that object created itself.

And the third possibility is that the shoe has been made by someone or something other than that shoe itself. So we really have three options now, an eternal shoe, a shoe that creates itself, or a shoe that is created by something else. And I've talked about this before philosophers, before scientists, and I keep asking for other alternatives.

And every alternative that's ever been suggested to their agreement has always been able to be subsumed under one of these three categories. So now we're down to three categories, a self-existent eternal shoe, a self-created shoe, or a created shoe. Now, what we can do by logic alone, without any microscopes, without any telescopes, without any empirical investigation, but by the sheer power of logic and rationality, is eliminate one of those three options.

And I have to say in parentheses that it is the option most frequently presented by those who deny a creator. And that is the idea of self-creation. This shoe cannot create itself because, ladies and gentlemen, nothing can create itself. It is a logical, rational impossibility.

Why? Because the idea of self-creation violates the most basic law, not only of philosophy, but the most basic law of science, which is the law of non-contradiction. And the law of non-contradiction teaches that something cannot be a and non-a at the same time and in the same relationship. A thing cannot be what it is and not be what it is at the same time and in the same way. Now, how does that relate to my self-created shoe?

Well, you see, it's simple. For a shoe to create itself, what would it have to do? It would have to be before what?

Before it was. For the shoe to do the job of creating the shoe, it would first have to be a shoe, before it was even a shoe. It would have to be a shoe and not be a shoe at the same time and the same relationship. If I'm giving you a headache, that's good.

Consider yourself fortunate that you're still within sanity. You understand that something cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same relationship. Now, most people who argue against the idea of a creation do not do so in such crass, silly categories as saying the shoe creates itself by itself. Rather, it becomes more sophisticated. We'll say that the universe, for example, was created by chance.

How many times have you heard that? I talked to a professor at Harvard University who looked me straight in the eye and said he believed that the universe was created by chance. And he wasn't talking here about the collision of present molecules in some kind of pattern that was undiscernible but followed somewhat vague mathematical possibilities. What he was talking about was that once there was nothing, and then, boom, there's something, and the agent that brings something out of nothing is chance. And I reminded this professor that chance is not a thing. Chance is a word.

We use a perfectly good word, a valid word, to describe mathematical possibilities. Poker players are very familiar with it, and people with the racetrack understand odds and probabilities and chances. They understand all of that. And when they say that the horse runs an eight to one, they don't mean that the odds makes the horse run. They're just talking about not knowing who's going to be running the fastest on day to day. They make bets on the basis of the odds. I talked about the flipping of a coin. I said, I'll flip a coin here. What are the odds, if it doesn't stand on its edge, that this coin comes up heads or tails? And everybody says 50-50.

I said, I tricked you. The odds are that it'll come up heads or tails 100 percent. What are the odds that it comes up heads? 50 percent. Now, do the odds make the coin come up heads or tails?

No. Chance has no influence on the actual event because chance has no power to influence anything. The reason it has no power to influence anything, beloved, is because chance has no being. For something to do something, it must first be something. For something to exercise power or force or energy, it must first be. And chance is not a thing.

Chance is not an entity. It has no matter. It has no energy. It has no being.

It is nothing. So, when someone says to you the universe was created by chance in this sense, what they are saying fundamentally is what Stephen Hawking finally said, that the universe comes from nothing, by itself. Now, we have the second fundamental law of science violated with a vengeance, and that law is stated in Latin, ex nihilo, nihil fit. Out of nothing, nothing comes. Nothing cannot produce something because, again, to weary you, nothing is not any thing. And nothing can't do something. It can't produce anything because it is nothing. And I want you to think about this. I don't have time in these short lectures to go into a complex discussion of all of the salient points here, but the fundamental point I want you to understand is this. Try to imagine, if you will, that there once was a time when nothing was, absolute nothingness, not just no trees, no planets, no gas, no energy, nothing, no God, no point of singularity, absolute nothing.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to answer this question. If there ever was a time when there was nothing, what could there possibly be now? Absolutely nothing. And so that's why I said to my friend, if you grant the reality of my shoe, then you must admit there has never been a time where there was nothing. There has always had to be something, or nothing could be now. Some people call this the cosmological argument rather than the ontological argument, but it's basically an argument from being. If something is now, something somehow, somewhere must have the power to make whatever is here be here. In shorthand terms, again something must have the power of being, and that which does not have the power of being is nothing. Nothing has no power to be itself, let alone to make anything else be. So what I'm saying is that reason doesn't just suggest or hint or bear witness of. What I'm saying is that reason absolutely demonstratively demands that it is impossible that if something exists now that there ever could have been a time when there was absolutely nothing. And self-creation of the universe presupposes that the universe came into being out of nothing by nothing through the power of nothing. And that is manifest nonsense, unworthy not only of theology, it's unworthy of philosophy, and most emphatically it's unworthy of any serious science. But still, we haven't proven the existence of God. All we've shown so far is that with respect to my shoe, if it's not an illusion, the one thing we know for absolute sure is that that shoe did not create itself. Nothing can create itself. But we're still left with two options. One is that it was made by something other than itself or that it is eternal. And we'll look at those options in our next program.

And we will look forward to that. Using a shoe and simple logic, R.C. Sproul has proven the existence of God. Today's message here on Renewing Your Mind is classic R.C.

Sproul. He had such a winsome way about him. And you know, even when he was disagreeing with someone, they knew that he enjoyed being with them and talking about these things. Those of us who had the privilege of working with R.C. really sensed that gentleness when we hear messages like this one. Thanks for listening to Renewing Your Mind on this Wednesday.

I'm Lee Webb. And all week, we have been pleased to feature R.C. 's series, Objections Answered. He's given us helpful answers to some of the more challenging questions about the Christian faith. We won't be airing all of the messages this week, but we'd like for you to have the entire series for your personal library. We'll provide you a digital download, eight lectures in all, when you contact us today with your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. We also want to equip you even further, so we're including Dr. Sproul's comprehensive series on Christian apologetics titled, Defending Your Faith. In 32 messages, he helps us see that there are many levels on which to defend the faith and shows how apologetics brings comfort and confidence to Christians of all ages. So request a digital download of both series today when you contact us with your donation of any amount.

Our offices are closed for the holiday, but you can give your gift and make your request online at renewingyourmind.org. And before we go today, here's Dr. Sproul with a final thought for us. In our Coram Deo thought for today, let me say to you that many of you may not ever think about these things and may even think that such discussions are a waste of time. And why don't we just take the matter of God by faith and not worry about people who are trying to argue against the existence of God.

Beloved, again, what is the difference between nothing and the eternal God of the universe? There is nothing more important to the Christian than the bold affirmation and assurance of the eternal being of God Himself. There's nothing more basic, more foundational to our faith than that. There is one school of apologetics called presuppositionalism that does assert this primary truth, namely that the existence of God is so important that it is the supreme article that defines every bit of truth we ever seek to understand.

And they're right about that. It's absolutely foundational to everything that we believe. And that foundational assertion, the first assertion of sacred Scripture, is not something that we want to take lightly. So, I hope you'll bear with me and look carefully at these questions as we continue in our next session. And since God is the central supreme article that defines all truth, everything that we see and experience must come from Him. Tomorrow, we'll continue Dr. Sproul's series with a message titled, Something is Eternal. I hope you'll make plans to join us for Renewing Your Mind. Thank you.