Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 25, No. 3. 1962.
God Fact or Fancy ?
God Fact or Fancy ?
"Can I know that there is a God?" was the problem posed by Mathematics Lecturer Wilf Malcolm in a Wednesday lecture to the Evangelical Union. "If I can merely say that I believe in God I could be wrong even though I am sincere. I could sincerely believe it was two o'clock when it was in fact one-fifteen."
Mr Malcolm laid down three conditions which must be satisfied if a man is to be able to say "I know there is a God."
(1) | It must be a true statement i.e. correspond with reality. |
(2) | The individual making it must be aware that it is so. |
(3) | There must be evidence of the sort available also to others. |
Mr Malcolm then went on to survey the validity of some of the traditional arguments put forward to prove God's existence.
(1) | The Ontological argument rested on the assertion that if I can conceive of a perfect being, then this implies existence, as otherwise the conception would not be perfect. This argument he rejected as inadequate, since it was entirely contained within the realm of ideas. |
(2) | The Cosmological argument was that since everything had some cause, then going back ad infinitum one would reach God, the "first mover." This also he felt to be inadequate, since as a Mathematician Mr Malcolm saw no necessary reason why an infinite series should have a first member. |
(3) | The Teleological argument rested on the grounds that, just as the existence of a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker, then the existence of an orderly universe implies an original planner whom we call God. Again Mr Malcolm did not feel this to be completely adequate to actually prove God's existence. |
(4) | Another argument based its-self on the awareness of the supernatural (even in primitive peoples) and of Moral obligation in man. From this had been postulated the existence of the original Moral Being, God. This too Mr Malcolm felt to be not adequate. |
In general Mr Malcolm felt that while all these arguments shared the character of scientific arguments they fell short in that they could not be tested under control conditions. They were adequate only if one first assumed the existence of God.
Well then, asked Mr Malcolm, what was left that would satisfy our original conditions? This he felt depended on the method one wished to use to gain truth by. It was a fallacy to assume that truth could come only by scientific method. For instance, one could gain knowledge that could validly be regarded as truth from a study of History, even though this was not a scientific method. Taking it further, even scientific proof necessarily involved (as in Mathematics) an initial faith in the validity of the axioms used. Thus a Mathematician used faith as a means towards knowledge. Given the Mathematician's initial faith, the three conditions could be met when, he said, he knew the triangle theorem was true.
Similarly revelation could be a means towards knowledge, e.g. if I had a penfriend in South Africa who told me in repeated letters that he wished to be an artist, one could conclude that this revelation was true assuming it was open to anyone else also to write and enquire about it. (This assumed faith in the honesty of the Penfriend).
Hence Mr Malcolm asserted that revelation and faith were legitimate means towards gaining knowledge. The Agnostic Spencer had once objected against Christianity on the grounds that finite man could not know infinite God, and Mr Malcolm felt this was a valid objection unless God Himself revealed something of His nature to infinite man. This was the Christian message, and a means of knowledge towards God in Christ was open to those who would take the step of faith.
Faith itself was not knowledge, but a means towards it, and the way was open for those who wished to discover whether God could be known.