August 15, 2025 • 28 mins
On today’s Bible Answer Man broadcast (08/15/25), we pick up where we ended on our previous broadcast and present more of an episode of the Hank Unplugged podcast. Hank is talking with Dr. Paul Gould, associate professor of philosophy at Palm Beach Atlantic University and author of A Good and True Story: Eleven Clues to Understanding Our Universe and Your Place in It. Hank and Paul discuss the evidential problem of evil, the significance of suffering in our lives, how the existence of love points to the existence of God, the relationship between truth and beauty, the chief value of art, and the idea that all religions can be false but they can’t all be true.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
From the Christian Research Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina. This
is the Bible answer Man Broadcast with Hank Hannigraph. We're
on the air because truth matters, Life matters. More on
today's special edition of The Bible answer Man, we pick
up where we ended on our previous broadcast and present
more of an episode of the Hank Unplugged podcast. Hank
(00:30):
is talking with doctor Paul Gould, Associate Professor of Philosophy
at Palm Beach Atlantic University and author of a Good
and True Story Eleven Clues to Understanding our Universe and
your place in it. Let's now join Hank Cantigraph and
Paul Gould in their conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
You make another bold claim, and that is the claim
that there's no such thing as pointless evil.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I think this is a really important point, right.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
So if the logical problem of evil has been solved,
let's say almost everybody agrees. There's at least two atheistic
philosophers I know that think that Planaga and others didn't
solve the logical problem. But most, including William Row Paul Draper,
who I interact with in the chapter others say no, no,
we solve the logical problem. Let's move on to what's
called the evidential problem. The evidential problem just says, given
(01:18):
all this evil, probably God doesn't exist because, for all
we can tell, much of the evil and suffering we
see in the world is completely pointless. Now, there are
some theists like Peter van Nwagen that will agree, and so, yeah,
there's some pointless evil in the world, but most theists
are not willing to go there, and I don't want
to go there either. Your listeners might not want all
this detail. But I agree with Eleanor Stump, who's a
wonderful philosopher who she has a high bar for theodices
(01:41):
theodysses are giving God justifying reasons for evil. She has
what's called a person centric bar, such that the evil
and suffering that happens to you must be for your benefit,
not for humanity in general, not for some other creature,
but for the person undergoing the suffering. That's a very
high bar for giving a reason for God allowing evil.
(02:01):
And Stump's answer, then, given that high bar, which is
one that I'm super attracted to, is that the only
reasons why God allows evil and suffering in any person's
life is for one of two reasons and Marwani, they're
to prevent that person from further distancing themselves from God,
their highest good, or number two, to draw them closer
(02:22):
to their highest good, which is God. And those are
the only two, basically two reasons for allowing evil. And
I'm I'm really attracted to that view. And one of
the reasons why this view works and only works is
because you have to extend the god justifying reasons into
the afterlife, right. I think that Tolkien's insight at the
end of The Lord of the Rings when Sam, you know,
(02:45):
and Frodor are back at the Shire and Sam's like,
why are you leaving? He's going off to the Gray Havens,
and Frodo says, you know, hey, there's some wounds a
time cannot heal.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Right.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
The intuition is that some of our wounds in this
world I don't think will totally heal, but in the afterlife, right,
all of those things will be made right again. And
I'm pretty attracted to that view. I don't know how
I got here from your question, but.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
No, it's a good answer. I was thinking as you're speaking.
I just quoted this at wedding of one of my
daughter's last weekend. It's called the Weaver. I was in
a restaurant in southern California and I saw this place
Matt and a cocos actually, and it had this little poem,
and I decided to memorize it, and I've used it
(03:27):
many times, but I think it sort of explains what
we're talking about. It goes something like this, My life
is but a weaving between my Lord and me. I
do not choose the colors he weaves steadily. Oftentimes he
weaves sorrow, and I am foolish pride forget he sees
the upper and the underside. Not till the loom is
silent and the shuttles ceased to fly, will God unfurl
(03:47):
the canvas and explain the reason why the dark threads
are as needful in the weaver skillful hand as the
threads of gold and silver. And the pattern he has
planned really has significant impact in our lives. I mean suffering,
(04:08):
we can say, credibly, God uses suffering for good.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Yeah, right, And part of the thing this is one
of the there's a number of places in the book
where I'm a little sharing a little bit more personal
about my story, but I share a time when I
actually experienced a great loss in my own life. And
I actually was reading Eleanor Stump. This person. I just
mentioned her book Wandering in Darkness, and she named it
(04:34):
and it was heartbreak. And so here I was a
philosophy professors taught for decades on the problem of evil,
but I didn't know what heartbreak was. And suddenly I'm
at this place where I have this feeling at the
level of my gut that this is what it means
to be broken and stripped of a deep longing to
the heart. Actually, and then I had like different eyes
at sea. You're right, Like, suddenly I'm in the grocery store,
(04:56):
I'm at the restaurant, and I'm looking around at the faces.
I'm like, oh, there's heartbreak over there, and there it
is there, and so it's actually helped me.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
You're right.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
So going through this suffering in my own life, you know, embarrassing,
not embarrassed to say, but my life has been pretty easy.
But going through that period of suffering gave me eyes
to see and to really appreciate the importance of wrestling
with this and that God is good even there.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah, you have a chapter. I love this chapter, Chapter nine.
It's simply titled love. What is Love?
Speaker 4 (05:29):
This is one of my favorite chapters, actually, the Love
and Beauty one. We're finally getting to be that. I
just really love loved writing. Okay, so what is love
and why include it? Well, it seems to be something
that we think is of great value, and I love
what I was really struck by. I've been reading on
the Virtues for years and I was reading Joseph Peeper,
who's a Catholic theologian philosopher who writes on the Virtues,
(05:50):
and I was reading his chapter on love and he
has this wonderful little sentence where he says, the fundamental
affirmation of love is I'm glad that you exist. I'm
glad that you are. And I can remember reading that
for the first time thinking that's right, that's profound, and
that's right. That's what love's fundamental affirmation is. And so
(06:11):
I wanted to explore this. This is like, you know,
in a work on apologetics or cultural apologetics, we don't
usually think about the argument from love to God, but
there is one. And so what I did is spend
some time looking at the nature of love, and then
I asked, what is the best explanation for this deep
love that we do see in the world.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
What is love?
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Well, it has at least five features that we notice.
It's multidirected, right, we can love things and food and people.
It's complex, it's deep and enduring, it's active and passive,
and of course it's some deep value. And so then
the question was what best explains those features of love?
And I was had a chance to look at the
contemporary literature, and there's actually a rich tradition of philosophy
(06:53):
of love, and I canvass those only to discover that
a Quinas, the thirteenth century monk sell Monk, probably got
it right. And for a Quinnas, I'm convinced that this
is the best account of love that I've found. Love
is the desire for two things. Love is the desire
for the well being of the beloved and union with
(07:14):
the blood. And that seems to capture the phenomenology the
futures of love that I experience in my own life
and that I think others experience in theirs as well.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
You point out that if you take the non religious story,
love comes into the picture very late in the game.
I mean, I suppose that's true of Islam, as well,
for Islam, you have a unitarian God. A unitarian god
doesn't have an object apart from the universe to love,
and therefore is morally deficient, doesn't have the attribute of love.
(07:45):
But in either case, if we just go to the
naturalistic worldview, love comes into the pictures late.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
Yeah, right, it's not fundamental to reality. It's late, and
it's local for all we know. You know, it's in
one place. And so then what's interesting is you can
run an argument from the kind of deep love that
I articulate there. That's basically Aquinas's view to theism, and
it goes something like this. It's very simple in the book.
You know, hey, given naturalism, this kind of love is
(08:16):
really surprising, right because it's late and local and it's
like an evolutionary byproduct of survival. But on Theism it's
not surprising. Therefore, according to a rule of inference called
the likelihood principle, the existence of love provides strong evidence
for the existence of theism. So why is love not
surprising on theism? Well, on the Christian story, love is
at the center of reality itself, right, Like, I love
(08:38):
your point. I hadn't actually thought about that. With the
Unitarian God of Islam versus the Trinitarian God of Christianity.
At the heart of the Trinitarian God is love. Right,
This is the most fundamental fact of reality. It's a
relational fact, and it's a fact about love, and so
it wouldn't be surprising, given that fundamental reality is love itself,
that this loving being would create a universe with creatures
(09:03):
that can love. And that's actually a piece of evidence
that can figure into a pretty cool argument from love
to the God of theism.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Yeah, maybe this is regressing a little bit in terms
of the book, but I think it's important to the
overall structure of the book.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Explain your use of conceptual landscapes.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
Well, I think that it goes back to something that
JP Morland, my first philosophy professor, drilled into my mind
and my students who I teach now will recognize this comment.
But JP said, if you want to be good thinkers,
you need to learn to make distinctions, and if you
want to be good teachers, you need to learn to
teach distinctions. And that has been something that I have
(09:42):
followed for years. I think that it's important to ask
the right preliminary questions and get clear on the concepts
that we're talking about, because by the light of reason,
we shine our light on reality and we discover truth.
And if we're after discovering the true story of the world,
we have to think as carefully and as clearly and
as methodically as we can. And this is a skill
(10:03):
that we've lost. So that's why I try to do
a bunch of you know, conceptual landscape kind of work
all throughout the book. And I try to do it,
I will say, with some humor and with some stories
along the way, but it's super important that we think
clearly about these important matters.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Your chapter on beauty loved it. Why do you think
that beauty is ultimately objective? Some people would say that's ridiculous.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You say, no,
that's not true.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
Yeah, Well, because we need to look at the phenomena
and ask what best explains the phenomena and for at
least well two reasons that are coming to mind, there's many.
Number One, we disagree about beautiful things, and that the
fact that we have disagreements and that we think people
are wrong is best explained by their being objective. Aesthetic
facts in the world so that's one reason, and I
(10:54):
could give an argument for that.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Don't go away. In just a few moments, we will
rejoin Hank Kanigh conversation with Professor Paul Gould in his
book A Good and True Story. Philosopher Paul Gould guide
you on a rewarding journey to discover the true story
of the world and our place in it, showing that
Christianity holds the most satisfying answers to life's biggest questions.
(11:20):
A Good and True Story is a wonderful book to
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(12:05):
the most often asked questions Hank Hannigraph has received throughout
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This newly revised and expanded Collector's Edition helped seekers and
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(12:29):
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Speaker 5 (14:01):
Hank Hanigraph has dedicated his life to defending truth. Because
Truth Matters Yet. An encounter with Christians in the underground
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were experiencing something beyond truth. They were experiencing life. Truth Matters.
Life Matters More by Hank Hanigraph is two books in one.
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(14:24):
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Speaker 1 (15:07):
Let's rejoin Bible Answerman host Hank Hanagraph and as guest
philosopher Paul Gould in their conversation.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Why do you think that beauty is ultimately objective?
Speaker 4 (15:18):
Two reasons that are coming to mind, There's many. Number One,
we disagree about beautiful things, and that the fact that
we have disagreements and that we think people are wrong
is best explained by their being objective aesthetic facts in
the world. So that's one reason. And I could give
an argument for that. One thing that I found really
interesting though, because I've been working a little bit on
(15:39):
philosophy of science and thinking about theory, construction and metaphysics,
which is the area I work in in philosophy, And
what's so interesting. When you're doing your mature theories, like
in metaphysics or in science, you appeal to theoretical virtues
because theoretical virtues are supposed to be truth indicative, right,
So if your theory has more virtues than some competing theory,
(15:59):
well then you go with the one with the most virtues,
because those virtues are truth indicative. What's so interesting is
the theoretical virtues are all esthetic simplicity, elegance, uniformity, right, scope,
these are all aesthetic things. And many thinkers have noticed
throughout history that truth and beauty are tightly aligned. In fact,
(16:22):
in our theory assessment, truth and beauty are tightly aligned.
There's an argument from the indispensability of aesthetic properties to
the objective existence of aesthetic facts. So those are just
two reasons. I think. It's like looking at the sunset.
Wouldn't that be foolish to say, oh, that's just beautiful
to you, right looking at you. I live in Jupiter, Florida.
(16:43):
It's it's like paradise looking at the palm try outside
my window.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
Right.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
We would think that they are wrong if they look
at these things and think they're not actually objectively beautiful.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
So one of the quotes you use, I love this,
Peter Forrest. I just laughed out loud when I read this.
He presses the plausible consequence of esthetic relativism, or saying, well,
beauty is just in the eye of the beholder. And
this is the quote it's worth reading how ugly the
stars are tonight, how trivial the pounding of the waves
(17:15):
on the beach, and is it not crass to be
thrilled by mountains? The rainforest and the wild flowers are
quite repulsive? And as for sunsets. You read that quote
and you say, yeah, beauty is not just in the
eyes of the beholder.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
There is objective beauty. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
So then the question becomes what do we do with
that fact?
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Right?
Speaker 4 (17:40):
So, now, notice what's happening to our universe. We began
with physical facts, looking at the universe, Lady nature. Then
we started looking at like moral facts and meaning facts,
and now we're looking at the sthetic facts. Suddenly our
universe is quite interesting. Right, There's all these features of
the world that are way more rich than the scientistic
view of the world sometimes tells us. On the non
(18:02):
religious story, so again we ask what best explains it?
And you can run the very same kind of argument
that I ran in the argument from Love. I look
at two specific features of objective beauty in the world
and argue on theism they're best explained and naturalism they're
utterly surprising. And those two features are number one that
the world is saturated with beauty, from the heavens above
(18:26):
to the microscopic below. Everywhere we turn our mind's eye,
including the laws of nature itself, we find beauty. Right,
it's saturated. Now, think of the analogy with an artist,
a human artist. A human artist can create beautiful things.
I'm because of my research on beauty. I'm trying to
learn how to draw because I want to learn to
(18:46):
see the world, and I think that that will help
me to learn to see the world better. Maybe if
I can develop some art. And I know, because I'm
really bad at it, that it's hard to create beautiful
portraits landscapes, right, But an artist can do that. If
nature and natural processes are all that there is in
the universe, you wouldn't expect the universe to be saturated
(19:07):
with beauty because it's hard to create beauty. You'd expect
it and maybe, you know, get lucky in different pockets
of the world maybe or something like that. But it's saturated.
That's one piece of evidence. The second piece of evidence
is what philosopher's, theologians and sociologists have noted throughout history,
including atheists, is that beauty has a kind of transcendent
quality to it. It's evocative of the eternal, as one
(19:28):
would put it from Plato on. They've noticed this, and
even the atheist says, given this evocative nature, the universe
is kind of a sham, right. So you want to
take these two facts, the fact that the world is
saturated with beauty and the fact that it's suggestive of
like a kind of personal communication, a transcendent nature to it.
What best explains that well? On naturalism, again, that would
(19:48):
be surprising. On theism, given God himself is the source
of beauty or beauty itself, it's not surprising. So beauty,
as it turns out, is another powerful reason to think
that God exis.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
You've already touched on this, but maybe to elaborate on
this a little more, even when you talk about how
you've started to draw because it gives you a concept,
an understanding of the world, the beauty of the world,
and that leads you to the religious story or the
Christian worldview. What is the chief value of art and
(20:25):
why is it so important that art remains art and
doesn't become random and distorted?
Speaker 4 (20:31):
I love this. I taught a class here at PBA
on philosophy and literature, but it was really our philosophy
of art class and for part of that, and we
read Gordon Graham's book Philosophy, Introduction to Philosophy of the
Arts in there, and I talk about this in the
book we're talking about good and true story. I talk
about these different theories. I'm convinced the view that it's
(20:52):
called esthetic cognitivism, but it's just the view that the
chief value of art is cognitive. And what he means
the chief value of art is it helps us understand
the world around us, or the human experience of the world.
That's what art does. It's kind of like and this
is what I love about artists, and I think philosophers
(21:12):
can play this role too. Artists are men and women
who basically pull that curtain back on reality and help
us get a glimpse. I think of prime reality, the
way that it really is right. That's the benefit of art.
You can even give like an eschatological function or t
loss to art. That good art, I think helps us
see what reality one day and the transformed, renewed heavens
(21:37):
and earth will be like. That's what art does. It's
evocative of the divine, but it helps us to see, understand,
and appreciate reality. And ultimately, I think, done well, it
can lead us to worship.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Yeah, and as you just alluded to, it points us
to the divine artist.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Religion.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Your last chapter, fantastic chapter. I mean, the book just
keeps getting better as you go through it. And I
hope we've done justice to the book because when you
read it, it's just intoxicating. You can't stop reading it
because you tell wonderful stories and you just.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Have a gift for doing this. But how do you
define religion? Good?
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Yeah, good. I thought in any book seeking to discover
the true story of the world, we should talk about
the thing that the majority of humans in the history
of our species have engaged in, which is religious activities.
Religire is the Latin word to bind, and so religion
is seeking to unite heaven and earth, God and man.
(22:36):
And that's, you know, in generic terms, what religion is.
And this chapter actually, you know, I have guides in
the book along the way. I'm inviting guides to kind
of help point us in the right direction. In this
last chapter, this is the most personal where I share
some of my own journey coming to faith in Christ.
And just kind of share a little bit about that.
But yes, so it begins with all the religions can't
(22:57):
be true because they contradict each other. Right, I feel
like I thought that it would be important to state
that because that moves away from this sort of false
idea that's out there sometimes that all religions are equal
paths to God. Right, I think we need to move
beyond that to discover the true story of the world,
the true religion, the true religion that God founded, and
that moves us off of that purely logical blunder that
(23:20):
they're all religions are the same. To the question of evidence,
and so I just share briefly the evidence that was
persuasive to me as a freshman in college, was, among
other things, the evidence for the resurrection, and I just
briefly go into it there and more sharing my biography
than the actual evidence. But I'm pointing the reader to
it and helping them see that all the clues that
(23:40):
we've been exploring, all of them converge on this good, well,
this true story, and it turns out to be a
good story. And if you go all the way back
to the book I wrote cultural apologetics, my definition of
cultural apologetics was that we want to help others see
that Christianity is not just true to the way the
world is, but it's true to the way the world
to be that is both good and beautiful and true. Right,
(24:04):
And that's what I wanted to end with, was not
only did we discover the true story, but it satisfies
all the lungings of the heart in a way that's
we discover our true name. And as it turns out,
that true name. And this is where I end is
beloved on the Christian story.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Expand on something that you just touched on very briefly.
I think it's worth expanding on the idea that all
religions can be false, but they can all be true.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Good.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
Yeah, this is just a point of logic, given the
love of non contradiction to mutually exclusive statements cannot be
true at the same time in the same sense.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Right.
Speaker 4 (24:40):
So if we just take two religions and boil it
down to a set of propositions that they claim. Within
the Christian faith, you would find a proposition affirmed that
Jesus is God or divine, and within like the Islamic faith,
you would have a proposition that's the negation of that
Jesus is not divine. Right, So, just on a pure
logical point, one of those statements is true and the
other is false. Either Jesus is or isn't divine. And
(25:04):
so if that's a central claim that is like at
the foundation of these religions, well it just follows that
either Christianity is true or Islam is true, but not both.
And you're right, all of the religions could be false.
It could be some other thing out there that we
haven't determined, but they can't all be true because they
contradict each other on these central features about the nature
of reality, the nature of God, and it's fundamental problem
(25:28):
in God's solution.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Thank you for listening to this special edition of the
Bible answer Man Broadcast with Hank Catagraph and its guest
philosopher Paul Gould. To hear this Hank Unplugged podcast interview
in its entirety, go to equip dot org, iTunes, or
wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. Our firm commitment
here at the Christian Research Institute is to defend the
(25:53):
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(26:13):
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You can also write CRII at Post Office box eighty
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(27:00):
The Complete Bible answer Book Collector's Edition is the comprehensive
collection of the most often asked questions Hank Hannigraph has
received throughout his four decades as host of the Bible
answer Man Broadcast. With more than half a million copies
already in print, this newly revised and expanded Collector's Edition
helped seekers and skeptics alike sort through the truth on
(27:23):
topics such as reliability of the Bible, religions and cults,
the resurrection and afterlife, and many more issues vital to
a better understanding of God in Christ and our relationship
to Him. To receive your copy of the Complete Bible
answer Book Collector's Edition, Revised and expanded, call eight eight
(27:43):
eight seven thousand CRII and make a gift to support
the Christian Research Institute's life changing outreaches eight eight eight
seven thousand CRII or visit us at EQUIP dot org.
From the Christian Research Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina. This
is the Bible answer Man Broadcast with Hank Hannigraph. We're
on the air because truth matters, Life matters. More on
today's special edition of The Bible answer Man, we pick
up where we ended on our previous broadcast and present
more of an episode of the Hank Unplugged podcast. Hank
(00:30):
is talking with doctor Paul Gould, Associate Professor of Philosophy
at Palm Beach Atlantic University and author of a Good
and True Story Eleven Clues to Understanding our Universe and
your place in it. Let's now join Hank Cantigraph and
Paul Gould in their conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
You make another bold claim, and that is the claim
that there's no such thing as pointless evil.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I think this is a really important point, right.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
So if the logical problem of evil has been solved,
let's say almost everybody agrees. There's at least two atheistic
philosophers I know that think that Planaga and others didn't
solve the logical problem. But most, including William Row Paul Draper,
who I interact with in the chapter others say no, no,
we solve the logical problem. Let's move on to what's
called the evidential problem. The evidential problem just says, given
(01:18):
all this evil, probably God doesn't exist because, for all
we can tell, much of the evil and suffering we
see in the world is completely pointless. Now, there are
some theists like Peter van Nwagen that will agree, and so, yeah,
there's some pointless evil in the world, but most theists
are not willing to go there, and I don't want
to go there either. Your listeners might not want all
this detail. But I agree with Eleanor Stump, who's a
wonderful philosopher who she has a high bar for theodices
(01:41):
theodysses are giving God justifying reasons for evil. She has
what's called a person centric bar, such that the evil
and suffering that happens to you must be for your benefit,
not for humanity in general, not for some other creature,
but for the person undergoing the suffering. That's a very
high bar for giving a reason for God allowing evil.
(02:01):
And Stump's answer, then, given that high bar, which is
one that I'm super attracted to, is that the only
reasons why God allows evil and suffering in any person's
life is for one of two reasons and Marwani, they're
to prevent that person from further distancing themselves from God,
their highest good, or number two, to draw them closer
(02:22):
to their highest good, which is God. And those are
the only two, basically two reasons for allowing evil. And
I'm I'm really attracted to that view. And one of
the reasons why this view works and only works is
because you have to extend the god justifying reasons into
the afterlife, right. I think that Tolkien's insight at the
end of The Lord of the Rings when Sam, you know,
(02:45):
and Frodor are back at the Shire and Sam's like,
why are you leaving? He's going off to the Gray Havens,
and Frodo says, you know, hey, there's some wounds a
time cannot heal.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Right.
Speaker 4 (02:53):
The intuition is that some of our wounds in this
world I don't think will totally heal, but in the afterlife, right,
all of those things will be made right again. And
I'm pretty attracted to that view. I don't know how
I got here from your question, but.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
No, it's a good answer. I was thinking as you're speaking.
I just quoted this at wedding of one of my
daughter's last weekend. It's called the Weaver. I was in
a restaurant in southern California and I saw this place
Matt and a cocos actually, and it had this little poem,
and I decided to memorize it, and I've used it
(03:27):
many times, but I think it sort of explains what
we're talking about. It goes something like this, My life
is but a weaving between my Lord and me. I
do not choose the colors he weaves steadily. Oftentimes he
weaves sorrow, and I am foolish pride forget he sees
the upper and the underside. Not till the loom is
silent and the shuttles ceased to fly, will God unfurl
(03:47):
the canvas and explain the reason why the dark threads
are as needful in the weaver skillful hand as the
threads of gold and silver. And the pattern he has
planned really has significant impact in our lives. I mean suffering,
(04:08):
we can say, credibly, God uses suffering for good.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Yeah, right, And part of the thing this is one
of the there's a number of places in the book
where I'm a little sharing a little bit more personal
about my story, but I share a time when I
actually experienced a great loss in my own life. And
I actually was reading Eleanor Stump. This person. I just
mentioned her book Wandering in Darkness, and she named it
(04:34):
and it was heartbreak. And so here I was a
philosophy professors taught for decades on the problem of evil,
but I didn't know what heartbreak was. And suddenly I'm
at this place where I have this feeling at the
level of my gut that this is what it means
to be broken and stripped of a deep longing to
the heart. Actually, and then I had like different eyes
at sea. You're right, Like, suddenly I'm in the grocery store,
(04:56):
I'm at the restaurant, and I'm looking around at the faces.
I'm like, oh, there's heartbreak over there, and there it
is there, and so it's actually helped me.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
You're right.
Speaker 4 (05:04):
So going through this suffering in my own life, you know, embarrassing,
not embarrassed to say, but my life has been pretty easy.
But going through that period of suffering gave me eyes
to see and to really appreciate the importance of wrestling
with this and that God is good even there.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah, you have a chapter. I love this chapter, Chapter nine.
It's simply titled love. What is Love?
Speaker 4 (05:29):
This is one of my favorite chapters, actually, the Love
and Beauty one. We're finally getting to be that. I
just really love loved writing. Okay, so what is love
and why include it? Well, it seems to be something
that we think is of great value, and I love
what I was really struck by. I've been reading on
the Virtues for years and I was reading Joseph Peeper,
who's a Catholic theologian philosopher who writes on the Virtues,
(05:50):
and I was reading his chapter on love and he
has this wonderful little sentence where he says, the fundamental
affirmation of love is I'm glad that you exist. I'm
glad that you are. And I can remember reading that
for the first time thinking that's right, that's profound, and
that's right. That's what love's fundamental affirmation is. And so
(06:11):
I wanted to explore this. This is like, you know,
in a work on apologetics or cultural apologetics, we don't
usually think about the argument from love to God, but
there is one. And so what I did is spend
some time looking at the nature of love, and then
I asked, what is the best explanation for this deep
love that we do see in the world.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
What is love?
Speaker 4 (06:30):
Well, it has at least five features that we notice.
It's multidirected, right, we can love things and food and people.
It's complex, it's deep and enduring, it's active and passive,
and of course it's some deep value. And so then
the question was what best explains those features of love?
And I was had a chance to look at the
contemporary literature, and there's actually a rich tradition of philosophy
(06:53):
of love, and I canvass those only to discover that
a Quinas, the thirteenth century monk sell Monk, probably got
it right. And for a Quinnas, I'm convinced that this
is the best account of love that I've found. Love
is the desire for two things. Love is the desire
for the well being of the beloved and union with
(07:14):
the blood. And that seems to capture the phenomenology the
futures of love that I experience in my own life
and that I think others experience in theirs as well.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
You point out that if you take the non religious story,
love comes into the picture very late in the game.
I mean, I suppose that's true of Islam, as well,
for Islam, you have a unitarian God. A unitarian god
doesn't have an object apart from the universe to love,
and therefore is morally deficient, doesn't have the attribute of love.
(07:45):
But in either case, if we just go to the
naturalistic worldview, love comes into the pictures late.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
Yeah, right, it's not fundamental to reality. It's late, and
it's local for all we know. You know, it's in
one place. And so then what's interesting is you can
run an argument from the kind of deep love that
I articulate there. That's basically Aquinas's view to theism, and
it goes something like this. It's very simple in the book.
You know, hey, given naturalism, this kind of love is
(08:16):
really surprising, right because it's late and local and it's
like an evolutionary byproduct of survival. But on Theism it's
not surprising. Therefore, according to a rule of inference called
the likelihood principle, the existence of love provides strong evidence
for the existence of theism. So why is love not
surprising on theism? Well, on the Christian story, love is
at the center of reality itself, right, Like, I love
(08:38):
your point. I hadn't actually thought about that. With the
Unitarian God of Islam versus the Trinitarian God of Christianity.
At the heart of the Trinitarian God is love. Right,
This is the most fundamental fact of reality. It's a
relational fact, and it's a fact about love, and so
it wouldn't be surprising, given that fundamental reality is love itself,
that this loving being would create a universe with creatures
(09:03):
that can love. And that's actually a piece of evidence
that can figure into a pretty cool argument from love
to the God of theism.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Yeah, maybe this is regressing a little bit in terms
of the book, but I think it's important to the
overall structure of the book.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Explain your use of conceptual landscapes.
Speaker 4 (09:22):
Well, I think that it goes back to something that
JP Morland, my first philosophy professor, drilled into my mind
and my students who I teach now will recognize this comment.
But JP said, if you want to be good thinkers,
you need to learn to make distinctions, and if you
want to be good teachers, you need to learn to
teach distinctions. And that has been something that I have
(09:42):
followed for years. I think that it's important to ask
the right preliminary questions and get clear on the concepts
that we're talking about, because by the light of reason,
we shine our light on reality and we discover truth.
And if we're after discovering the true story of the world,
we have to think as carefully and as clearly and
as methodically as we can. And this is a skill
(10:03):
that we've lost. So that's why I try to do
a bunch of you know, conceptual landscape kind of work
all throughout the book. And I try to do it,
I will say, with some humor and with some stories
along the way, but it's super important that we think
clearly about these important matters.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Your chapter on beauty loved it. Why do you think
that beauty is ultimately objective? Some people would say that's ridiculous.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You say, no,
that's not true.
Speaker 4 (10:31):
Yeah, Well, because we need to look at the phenomena
and ask what best explains the phenomena and for at
least well two reasons that are coming to mind, there's many.
Number One, we disagree about beautiful things, and that the
fact that we have disagreements and that we think people
are wrong is best explained by their being objective. Aesthetic
facts in the world so that's one reason, and I
(10:54):
could give an argument for that.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Don't go away. In just a few moments, we will
rejoin Hank Kanigh conversation with Professor Paul Gould in his
book A Good and True Story. Philosopher Paul Gould guide
you on a rewarding journey to discover the true story
of the world and our place in it, showing that
Christianity holds the most satisfying answers to life's biggest questions.
(11:20):
A Good and True Story is a wonderful book to
give to an unbelieving friend or family member. To receive
your copy of A Good and True Story eleven clues
to understanding our universe and your place in it, call
eight eight eight seven thousand CRII and make a gift
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to equip dot org. That's equip dot org. The Complete
Bible answer Book Collector's Edition is the comprehensive collection of
(12:05):
the most often asked questions Hank Hannigraph has received throughout
his four decades as host of the Bible answer Man
broadcast with more than half a million copies already in print.
This newly revised and expanded Collector's Edition helped seekers and
skeptics alike sort through the truth on topics such as
reliability of the Bible, religions and cults, the resurrection and afterlife,
(12:29):
and many more issues vital to a better understanding of
God in Christ and our relationship to Him. To receive
your copy of the Complete Bible answer Book Collector's Edition,
Revised and Expanded, call eight eight eight seven thousand CRII
and make a gift to support the Christian Research Institute's
life changing outreaches eight eight eight seven thousand CRII or
(12:54):
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(13:15):
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(13:35):
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Once again, that's equip dot org.
Speaker 5 (14:01):
Hank Hanigraph has dedicated his life to defending truth. Because
Truth Matters Yet. An encounter with Christians in the underground
Church of China left Hanograph contemplating his Christian experience. They
were experiencing something beyond truth. They were experiencing life. Truth Matters.
Life Matters More by Hank Hanigraph is two books in one.
Because Truth Matters. Part one equips Christians to defend the
(14:24):
essential truths of the historic Christian faith. In Part two,
Hank explains why life matters more and how we can
experience the height of human existence union with God. Prepare
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Life Matters More. The unexpected beauty of an authentic Christian
(14:46):
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Speaker 1 (15:07):
Let's rejoin Bible Answerman host Hank Hanagraph and as guest
philosopher Paul Gould in their conversation.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Why do you think that beauty is ultimately objective?
Speaker 4 (15:18):
Two reasons that are coming to mind, There's many. Number One,
we disagree about beautiful things, and that the fact that
we have disagreements and that we think people are wrong
is best explained by their being objective aesthetic facts in
the world. So that's one reason. And I could give
an argument for that. One thing that I found really
interesting though, because I've been working a little bit on
(15:39):
philosophy of science and thinking about theory, construction and metaphysics,
which is the area I work in in philosophy, And
what's so interesting. When you're doing your mature theories, like
in metaphysics or in science, you appeal to theoretical virtues
because theoretical virtues are supposed to be truth indicative, right,
So if your theory has more virtues than some competing theory,
(15:59):
well then you go with the one with the most virtues,
because those virtues are truth indicative. What's so interesting is
the theoretical virtues are all esthetic simplicity, elegance, uniformity, right, scope,
these are all aesthetic things. And many thinkers have noticed
throughout history that truth and beauty are tightly aligned. In fact,
(16:22):
in our theory assessment, truth and beauty are tightly aligned.
There's an argument from the indispensability of aesthetic properties to
the objective existence of aesthetic facts. So those are just
two reasons. I think. It's like looking at the sunset.
Wouldn't that be foolish to say, oh, that's just beautiful
to you, right looking at you. I live in Jupiter, Florida.
(16:43):
It's it's like paradise looking at the palm try outside
my window.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
Right.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
We would think that they are wrong if they look
at these things and think they're not actually objectively beautiful.
Speaker 3 (16:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
So one of the quotes you use, I love this,
Peter Forrest. I just laughed out loud when I read this.
He presses the plausible consequence of esthetic relativism, or saying, well,
beauty is just in the eye of the beholder. And
this is the quote it's worth reading how ugly the
stars are tonight, how trivial the pounding of the waves
(17:15):
on the beach, and is it not crass to be
thrilled by mountains? The rainforest and the wild flowers are
quite repulsive? And as for sunsets. You read that quote
and you say, yeah, beauty is not just in the
eyes of the beholder.
Speaker 3 (17:33):
There is objective beauty. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:36):
So then the question becomes what do we do with
that fact?
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Right?
Speaker 4 (17:40):
So, now, notice what's happening to our universe. We began
with physical facts, looking at the universe, Lady nature. Then
we started looking at like moral facts and meaning facts,
and now we're looking at the sthetic facts. Suddenly our
universe is quite interesting. Right, There's all these features of
the world that are way more rich than the scientistic
view of the world sometimes tells us. On the non
(18:02):
religious story, so again we ask what best explains it?
And you can run the very same kind of argument
that I ran in the argument from Love. I look
at two specific features of objective beauty in the world
and argue on theism they're best explained and naturalism they're
utterly surprising. And those two features are number one that
the world is saturated with beauty, from the heavens above
(18:26):
to the microscopic below. Everywhere we turn our mind's eye,
including the laws of nature itself, we find beauty. Right,
it's saturated. Now, think of the analogy with an artist,
a human artist. A human artist can create beautiful things.
I'm because of my research on beauty. I'm trying to
learn how to draw because I want to learn to
(18:46):
see the world, and I think that that will help
me to learn to see the world better. Maybe if
I can develop some art. And I know, because I'm
really bad at it, that it's hard to create beautiful
portraits landscapes, right, But an artist can do that. If
nature and natural processes are all that there is in
the universe, you wouldn't expect the universe to be saturated
(19:07):
with beauty because it's hard to create beauty. You'd expect
it and maybe, you know, get lucky in different pockets
of the world maybe or something like that. But it's saturated.
That's one piece of evidence. The second piece of evidence
is what philosopher's, theologians and sociologists have noted throughout history,
including atheists, is that beauty has a kind of transcendent
quality to it. It's evocative of the eternal, as one
(19:28):
would put it from Plato on. They've noticed this, and
even the atheist says, given this evocative nature, the universe
is kind of a sham, right. So you want to
take these two facts, the fact that the world is
saturated with beauty and the fact that it's suggestive of
like a kind of personal communication, a transcendent nature to it.
What best explains that well? On naturalism, again, that would
(19:48):
be surprising. On theism, given God himself is the source
of beauty or beauty itself, it's not surprising. So beauty,
as it turns out, is another powerful reason to think
that God exis.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
You've already touched on this, but maybe to elaborate on
this a little more, even when you talk about how
you've started to draw because it gives you a concept,
an understanding of the world, the beauty of the world,
and that leads you to the religious story or the
Christian worldview. What is the chief value of art and
(20:25):
why is it so important that art remains art and
doesn't become random and distorted?
Speaker 4 (20:31):
I love this. I taught a class here at PBA
on philosophy and literature, but it was really our philosophy
of art class and for part of that, and we
read Gordon Graham's book Philosophy, Introduction to Philosophy of the
Arts in there, and I talk about this in the
book we're talking about good and true story. I talk
about these different theories. I'm convinced the view that it's
(20:52):
called esthetic cognitivism, but it's just the view that the
chief value of art is cognitive. And what he means
the chief value of art is it helps us understand
the world around us, or the human experience of the world.
That's what art does. It's kind of like and this
is what I love about artists, and I think philosophers
(21:12):
can play this role too. Artists are men and women
who basically pull that curtain back on reality and help
us get a glimpse. I think of prime reality, the
way that it really is right. That's the benefit of art.
You can even give like an eschatological function or t
loss to art. That good art, I think helps us
see what reality one day and the transformed, renewed heavens
(21:37):
and earth will be like. That's what art does. It's
evocative of the divine, but it helps us to see, understand,
and appreciate reality. And ultimately, I think, done well, it
can lead us to worship.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
Yeah, and as you just alluded to, it points us
to the divine artist.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Religion.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Your last chapter, fantastic chapter. I mean, the book just
keeps getting better as you go through it. And I
hope we've done justice to the book because when you
read it, it's just intoxicating. You can't stop reading it
because you tell wonderful stories and you just.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Have a gift for doing this. But how do you
define religion? Good?
Speaker 4 (22:15):
Yeah, good. I thought in any book seeking to discover
the true story of the world, we should talk about
the thing that the majority of humans in the history
of our species have engaged in, which is religious activities.
Religire is the Latin word to bind, and so religion
is seeking to unite heaven and earth, God and man.
(22:36):
And that's, you know, in generic terms, what religion is.
And this chapter actually, you know, I have guides in
the book along the way. I'm inviting guides to kind
of help point us in the right direction. In this
last chapter, this is the most personal where I share
some of my own journey coming to faith in Christ.
And just kind of share a little bit about that.
But yes, so it begins with all the religions can't
(22:57):
be true because they contradict each other. Right, I feel
like I thought that it would be important to state
that because that moves away from this sort of false
idea that's out there sometimes that all religions are equal
paths to God. Right, I think we need to move
beyond that to discover the true story of the world,
the true religion, the true religion that God founded, and
that moves us off of that purely logical blunder that
(23:20):
they're all religions are the same. To the question of evidence,
and so I just share briefly the evidence that was
persuasive to me as a freshman in college, was, among
other things, the evidence for the resurrection, and I just
briefly go into it there and more sharing my biography
than the actual evidence. But I'm pointing the reader to
it and helping them see that all the clues that
(23:40):
we've been exploring, all of them converge on this good, well,
this true story, and it turns out to be a
good story. And if you go all the way back
to the book I wrote cultural apologetics, my definition of
cultural apologetics was that we want to help others see
that Christianity is not just true to the way the
world is, but it's true to the way the world
to be that is both good and beautiful and true. Right,
(24:04):
And that's what I wanted to end with, was not
only did we discover the true story, but it satisfies
all the lungings of the heart in a way that's
we discover our true name. And as it turns out,
that true name. And this is where I end is
beloved on the Christian story.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Expand on something that you just touched on very briefly.
I think it's worth expanding on the idea that all
religions can be false, but they can all be true.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Good.
Speaker 4 (24:32):
Yeah, this is just a point of logic, given the
love of non contradiction to mutually exclusive statements cannot be
true at the same time in the same sense.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Right.
Speaker 4 (24:40):
So if we just take two religions and boil it
down to a set of propositions that they claim. Within
the Christian faith, you would find a proposition affirmed that
Jesus is God or divine, and within like the Islamic faith,
you would have a proposition that's the negation of that
Jesus is not divine. Right, So, just on a pure
logical point, one of those statements is true and the
other is false. Either Jesus is or isn't divine. And
(25:04):
so if that's a central claim that is like at
the foundation of these religions, well it just follows that
either Christianity is true or Islam is true, but not both.
And you're right, all of the religions could be false.
It could be some other thing out there that we
haven't determined, but they can't all be true because they
contradict each other on these central features about the nature
of reality, the nature of God, and it's fundamental problem
(25:28):
in God's solution.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Thank you for listening to this special edition of the
Bible answer Man Broadcast with Hank Catagraph and its guest
philosopher Paul Gould. To hear this Hank Unplugged podcast interview
in its entirety, go to equip dot org, iTunes, or
wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. Our firm commitment
here at the Christian Research Institute is to defend the
(25:53):
faith once for all delivered to the Saints, and equip
believers to become true disciples of Jesus Cris in appreciation
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you a copy of a good and true story Eleven
(26:13):
Clues to Understanding Our Universe and Your Place in It
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(26:35):
You can also write CRII at Post Office box eighty
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(27:00):
The Complete Bible answer Book Collector's Edition is the comprehensive
collection of the most often asked questions Hank Hannigraph has
received throughout his four decades as host of the Bible
answer Man Broadcast. With more than half a million copies
already in print, this newly revised and expanded Collector's Edition
helped seekers and skeptics alike sort through the truth on
(27:23):
topics such as reliability of the Bible, religions and cults,
the resurrection and afterlife, and many more issues vital to
a better understanding of God in Christ and our relationship
to Him. To receive your copy of the Complete Bible
answer Book Collector's Edition, Revised and expanded, call eight eight
(27:43):
eight seven thousand CRII and make a gift to support
the Christian Research Institute's life changing outreaches eight eight eight
seven thousand CRII or visit us at EQUIP dot org.
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