(Text: “Debating an Atheist“, Soli Deo Gloria, July 2, 2012)
Pastor Stephen Feinstein is taking us on a whirlwind tour of presuppositional Christian apologetics, and as we saw last week, he’s already made the mistake of presuming that a Creator God can be non-contingent, meaning His existence is not preconditioned on anything else. That’s not the case, because the existence of a Creator God can only be true if it occurs in the context of a reality that is greater than Himself, that is perfectly self-consistent and that includes both everything that is God, and also everything (including material properties like time) that is not God. We could propose a pantheistic God like Alethea as the ultimate Necessary Being, but a true Creator God, in the Christian sense, is contingent on the existence of a greater, self-consistent reality that contains Him.
Today, Pastor Feinstein is going to build on his mistaken assumptions and give us what he calls “the Christian metaphysical understanding” concerning God. I’m not sure why he specifically calls it a metaphysical understanding, since what he actually delivers is essentially dogma. Perhaps he means that, being “metaphysical,” it’s not subject to scientific investigation, and is therefore presumably immune to critique? But that’s not right, because we have plenty of valid criticisms that can be made, and I’m sure Pastor Feinstein knows that. So let’s just raise a few of them, and take it from there.
Evangelical Realism 