§ In a recent lecture, popular science and philosophy communicator Curt Jaimungal presented an argument against the simulation hypothesis.

The Simulation Hypothesis: The idea that we are in a realistic computer-simulation like The Matrix.

Advocates argue that surprising features of reality, like false collective memories (“The Mandela Effect”), are what you would expect if the simulation hypothesis were true. Therefore, it probably is true.

But Jaimungal demonstrates that this argument rests on a logical fallacy. (Relevant clip: 16:42)

Consider its structure:

* If the simulation hypothesis were true, you would expect false collective memories.

* There are false collective memories.

* Therefore, the simulation hypothesis is probably true.

In other words,

* On hypothesis H, you would expect evidence E.

* There is evidence E.

* Therefore, E indicates the probability of H.

But this reasoning is precisely backwards.

In order to demonstrate the probability of H given E, we cannot use the probability of E given H. We want the probability of the hypothesis given the evidence, not the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis.

Logicians call this a “transposed conditional” or “the prosecutor’s fallacy.”

And several common Christian apologetic arguments commit the same logical fallacy.

§ Seven years ago, William Lane Craig met atheist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein in debate.

But this was not any ordinary atheist-theist debate, because also on stage was psychologist Jordan B. Peterson.

In his remarks, Craig argued that, given the hypothesis of atheism, we would not expect life to be meaningful or morality to be objectivity, and that given the hypothesis of theism, we would.

Yet both his interlocutors argued for moral realism (the objectivity of moral truth), independently of the God hypothesis. As a result, Craig was left trying to argue his opponents out of their moral realism, because it is not what you would expect on an atheistic worldview.

I recently listened to and reacted to the whole of debate and discussion. I’ll be posting my (very long) reaction to YouTube soon. Here’s the first clip from the video:

Why did Craig end up in this unenviable position? Because his argument, the “No meaning without God” argument, is—like the above simulation argument—backwards.

Consider its structure:

* On the God hypothesis, you would expect to find meaning (or morality or mind).

* Life is meaningful. We all want life to be meaningful.

* Therefore, if we want life to be meaningful, we need to adopt the God hypothesis.

It’s paired with the opposite argument about atheism (or naturalism):

* On naturalism, you would not expect to find meaning (or morality or mind).

* We do find meaning. It would be nice if life were meaningful.

* But, if you believe in naturalism, you should conclude—in order to be consistent—that life is not meaningful.

Like the argument for the simulation hypothesis, the reasoning proceeds by considering the probability of the evidence given the two hypotheses on offer.

If God exists, it is probable intuitively that he would create meaningful rather than meaningless forms of existence. But that’s not what needs demonstrating.

What needs demonstrating is that it is probable that God exists, given the evidence of meaning and morality.

We need to prove the probability of God given meaning/morality, not the probability of meaning/morality given God.

Therefore, we need first to demonstrate the existence of meaning, morality, or mind independently of either hypothesis.

And of course, that’s where we encounter another wrinkle.

§ Rather than admitting the independently-evident existence of meaning or morality, Christians often object to it.

As you may have noticed, I had to strike through the middle premise of each argument. Unlike in the simulation case, the evidence is not even granted.

Instead, when Christians encounter a non-believer who believes in morality or meaning, we pressure them to call this into question, given its improbability on an atheistic view.

But if there is no meaning or morality, then there is no reason to postulate God as the explanation of meaning and morality.

How do you explain morality on an atheistic worldview? Well, if there’s no morality or meaning, then there’s no explaining to do. Unless we grant that morality and meaning are demonstrable independently of one’s worldview, the argument cannot get started.

§ The proper order of natural theology is not to begin from a hypothesis and postulate what we would expect to find if it were true.

Rather, the first step of a natural-theological argument is to demonstrate the phenomenon that will serve as evidence, whether meaning, morality, or mind.

That means that, in this debate, Goldstein and Peterson are engaging in the appropriate first step of natural theology, demonstrating the relevant phenomenon independently of metaphysical hypotheses.

The second step is to demonstrate that the explanation of that phenomenon requires the existence of something else as its minimal, sufficient explanation.

But notice what Popular Christian Apologetics does instead. It fallaciously reverses step two, by considering the probability of the evidence on the hypothesis, instead of the hypothesis on the evidence. And it undermines nonbelievers’ confidence in the phenomenon of step one.

In effect, this is worse than the problem with the simulation argument. There, the evidence is granted. Here, the evidence is not even granted.

It’s as if the simulation people tried to argue everyone else into thinking that hallucinations and false collective memories don’t exist. But those phenomena were supposed to be your evidence for the simulation hypothesis!

Popular Christian Apologetics argues in just about the opposite direction it should argue.

§ What are the steps to demonstrate that meaning or morality—let’s pivot to morality—indicates the existence of God?

1. First, you must demonstrate the truth of moral realism, that moral statements express truths about reality. This is no easy feat. But let’s imagine you were able to do so.

(I think that page one of Mere Christianity, Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment,” and Jonathan Haidt’s moral psychology all do this work, in a certain way. By demonstrating that we all engage in moral thinking and can’t help but doing so, I think we are forced to recognize that we all are moral realists, whether we like it or not. See my video on natural law.)

2. Second, you must argue that moral realism cannot be explained naturalistically. My late professor Helen De Cruz carefully considers these arguments in her chapter on the moral argument for God’s existence. When it comes to moral psychology, there are many available evolutionary explanations of moral psychology, even if I would raise questions about them.

But for moral realism, evolutionary explanations tend to be “debunking.” We believe these things, not because they are true, but because they contribute to group survival. As a result, many thinkers—both religious and secular—think it is difficult to see how naturalism can account for the truth of moral statements. From scientific ‘is’ statements, you don’t arrive at any moral ‘ought’ statements. Hence, a moral argument against naturalism has good odds of success.

But what follows? Many folks who adopt moral realism “from below” adopt either a kind of Platonism or a kind of social constructivism (a non-reductionist one). For example, in analytic philosophy, Iris Murdoch proposed a kind of Platonism to explain the reality of the good and the truth of moral statements in contradiction to the ethical emotivism of the logical positivists. On the other hand, John Rawls resurrected moral philosophy by introducing a kind of constructivism, which many take to have realist implications. As a result, most secular analytic philosophers today are moral realists.

(Even Peter Singer recently came out as a moral realist.)

3. Step three is to argue for the minimal, sufficient non-naturalistic explanation of moral realism. This could be the Platonism or constructivism mentioned above, or true Kantianism, where moral statements express not truths of theoretical reason but of the form of practical reasoning.

Most Christians are not so chastened in their reasoning. Rather, we propose God as explanation and jump to the conclusion that we’ve hit the jackpot.

But given the Euthyphro dilemma, it is not at all clear that this is so. Trying to explain morality (or logic) by God rather than Platonism is suggestive of voluntarism.

In fact, I think that moral realism indicates either something like Platonism or something like Kantianism. Natural reality is an inadequate explanation of morality, so either a non-natural moral reality (vaguely akin to Platonic forms) is suggested, or something endemic to practical reasoning, a kind of logic of action introduces moral categoricity.

4. Step four is the one you’ve been waiting for. We ask what metaphysically explains the existence of this non-natural moral reality or what follows from Kantian practical reasoning. Only at this stage will we be led to appeal to God.

If we think moral realism requires a kind of Platonic moral reality in addition to nature, then we ask a causal question about what could explain and give rise to it. A naturalistic causal explanation is not even an option, since this reality is non-natural. A supernatural source of moral reality must, arguably, be postulated.

If moral realism leads to Kantianism, then, at least according to Kant, God arises not as a causal explanation of the world, of human beings, or of moral reality. No God himself is another postulate of practical reason, the being that must exist in order to bring about cosmic justice in accord with the categorical imperative.

But either way, there are more steps until we arrive at anything like God, and those steps are not obvious.

The Four (4) Steps of a Non-Fallacious Moral Argument for God’s Existence:

* Argue for moral realism.

* Rebut naturalistic explanations of moral realism.

* Determine the minimal, sufficient non-natural explanation of moral realism.

* Seek a metaphysical explanation of the non-natural explanation of moral realism.

§ My caution to Christians is that we stop making arguments that short-cut these steps.

The process of reasoning from a phenomenon to God is not something that can be done on the cheap.

Some of our arguments are fallacious, like the argument from the probability of the evidence on the hypothesis—a favorite of both presuppositional and evidential apologists.

Others are not fallacious but are far too quick. In the process, we jump to conclusions. And we are pressuring our interlocutors to jump to those conclusions with us.

This is not classical apologetics. It is a kind of fideistic metaphysics.

“Leap into my belief because it can quickly solve some of your philosophical and spiritual puzzlement!”

Now atheistic naturalists engage in this kind of reasoning as well. I fully admit that. But that doesn’t excuse the error on our part.

I’d like to see more Christian philosophers and apologists making careers out of steps one through three, rather than jumping to step four (and reversing its logical order).

But I don’t think you have to be a career philosopher or apologist to start putting these ideas into practice.

§ Instead of demolishing nonbelieving worldviews and jumping to conclusions, practice apologetics that are 1) constructive and 2) patient.

To be constructive, don’t undermine nonbelievers’ intuitions of things that are more than material. As human beings inhabiting God’s world, they are entitled to perceive the irreducible character of mind, meaning, and morality. Use this perception as common ground from which to reason in a Godward direction.

And take things slowly. You may, like William Lane Craig, want to push Jordan Peterson or a secular philosopher to metaphysically explain their moral realism. The answer is probably that they can’t.

But, as I suggested to someone this weekend, give these philosophers another forty years to think about it. Maybe they’ll go the way of Thomas Nagel or Antony Flew.

The equivalent for non-philosophers is a solid ten years, minimum. That’s how long an adult, intellectual conversion takes. (I wrote about this pattern in conversion stories here.)

Patient apologetics has time for people to consider these arguments, to follow steps one through four of the moral argument, rather than leaping all the way to the end, short-cutting and cheapening the conclusion.

For if our moral experience and awareness is an indication of the divine, then patient reflection, not suffering through an anxious sales-pitch, will reveal it to be so.

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§ Recently, one of the world’s most downloaded podcasts hosted a debate between a Christian, an atheist, and a psychologist.

Their topic?

The meaning of life.

Christian apologist Greg Koukl argued that, without belief in God, a materialist worldview holds no hope to provide meaning.

The atheist—young and dapper Alex O’Connor—countered that, even if there is a God, who’s to say he hasn’t given our lives a meaning that we find meaningless? Say, designing us so that our purpose in life was to produce paperclips?

However, at other points the Christian and the atheist seemed to be in complete agreement:

Koukl: “There either is meaning objectively, or not.”

O’Connor: “I think so too, to be clear.”

Meanwhile, a third participant, “Dr. K,” trained psychologist with a background in Eastern spirituality, had this to say:

Countering both sides of the metaphysical debate, Dr. K continued, “For me, finding meaning and purpose…is a very practical thing.”

Rather than answering the perennial questions of metaphysics and religion, Dr. K is concerned to intervene in a recent, acute crisis of loss of subjective meaning—the very crisis with which Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary, framed the discussion.

As Dr. K puts it, “If someone asks me, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I don’t know. But if someone says, ‘I have no meaning. Can you help me with that?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”

And in saying this, Dr. K exposed the deep failure of several decades of both Christian and atheist apologetics, a failure that comes down, in this case, to a single preposition.

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1. The Setup

§ The Diary of a CEO is one of today’s top podcasts. Host Steven Bartlett is a young, successful entrepreneur who interviews the best minds in a wide variety of areas, from psychology, to politics, to—more rarely—religion.

That is why it was exciting to see him host this discussion on meaning and religion with a Christian apologist among the participants.

Even secular audiences have become interested in religious questions as a result of what many term “the meaning crisis,” a combination of psychological down-turns that have prompted a resurgence of religious belief and participation.

And that is the setup with which Bartlett frames the podcast discussion:

The reason I wanted to speak to all three of you today is to discuss meaning and purpose. And there’s some stats that I wanted to share that kind of frame the discussion:

Three in five young Americans believe that their life lacks purpose. Nine in ten young people in the UK believe that their life is lacking purpose.

And to give some further stats, which I found really interesting around the rise of religiosity in the UK, a belief in God amongst 18-24 year-olds has risen from 18% in 2021, to 37% in 2025. According to YouGov and in the UK, monthly church attendance has risen from 4% up to 15% in 2025.

There is something going on, and that’s what I want to talk about today.

Bartlett identifies two trends.

First, there is an increase in the number of people in Western countries who report lacking purpose in their lives.

Second, in only the last couple years, there has been an increase both in religious belief and attendance.

What is interesting about this is that, for a long time, there have been intellectuals—from Friedrich Nietzsche to Francis Schaeffer—arguing that the decline of religious belief is the cause of contemporary purposelessness. This argument has ramped up in intellectual spaces in the last nine years, chiefly through the influence of Jordan Peterson.

However, until the last two years, there was little evidence that this had had an impact on the religious beliefs and practices of the population at large. This recent turn of events lends empirical, sociological credence to what was previously only a philosophical postulate.

But the connection between religious belief and felt purpose remains opaque. Does one need to resolve questions of religion in order to gain a sense of purpose in life? Or is religious conviction merely a psychological remedy that happens, sometimes, to be effective?

2. Team Metaphysics, Unite!

§ Over the course of the discussion, it is revealed that the Christian apologist and the atheist are strongly aligned in their answer to that question.

For both Greg Koukl and Alex O’Connor,

the questions of metaphysics are prior to those of psychology.

So Greg Koukl:

“I have no reason to believe that any naturalistic explanation can explain the consciousness’s hunger for meaning and significance.”

In other words, you need to decide between metaphysical naturalism and theism before you can satisfy the hunger for meaning and significance.

And Alex O’Connor:

“You asked, ‘Do I know my own purpose?’ That assumes that there is a purpose to know.”

On the other hand, they both throw bones to psychology, acknowledging its significance in measure.

Koukl rightly points out that, because God made the world with objective purpose:

“People can participate in that meaning and purpose even if they don’t know God.”

Effectively, Koukl acknowledges the doctrine of the natural law in a way I applaud.

For O’Connor, the New Atheists neglected the psychological dimension, and he acknowledges that religion serves an important role in strengthening us against the existential threat of death:

“The New Atheist movement was quite philosophically shallow. It didn’t seriously engage with the existential component of religious belief and why it exists in the first place.”

However, in spite of these concessions, when pushed, both Koukl and O’Connor express their view of meaning as 1) turning on questions of metaphysics, and 2) being all or nothing.

At one point, Greg Koukl bluntly says, “There either is meaning or there isn’t,” to which O’Connor responds, “I completely agree.”

In short, the atheist and the Christian have teamed up on team metaphysics.

Their program is this:

“Want meaning in life? First determine the meaning of life.”

But the psychologist is having none of it.

3. Psychologist: “I hard disagree.”

§ Several years ago, Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig, who has long been YouTube-famous for rattling sabres with atheists in heated philosophical debates, was caught off-guard by the introduction of a third participant: Psychologist Jordan Peterson.

In debate with Peterson and atheist Rebecca Goldstein, Craig’s directly metaphysical approach to defending Christianity seemed preachy, dated, and out-of-touch.

Something similar occurs in this discussion.

While Koukl and O’Connor are clearly poised to engage in some classic atheist-theist exchanges, Dr. K presses a different question:

“If someone asks me, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I don’t know.

But if someone says, ‘I have no meaning. Can you help me with that?’ the answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.’”

At one point, Dr. K brings the discussion back to the statistics with which Bartlett framed the podcast:

Steven started this out with some really scary statistics that we’re seeing, right? There’s a mental health crisis. I think a lot of what we’re seeing is, while it may be perennial, I think it’s like seems more acute right now.

Dr. K also challenges Alex on an important point. Alex argues that the discussion they are having is a perennial one. People for all history have had existential questions, questions of meaning and metaphysics, and so these are the perennial questions which will not be answered in one conversation.

But Dr. K points out that their discussion is not framed by a perennial problem, but an acute one.

That acute problem is not the perennial problem of metaphysics: What is the meaning of life?

Instead, it is the personal problem: How can I find meaning in life?

The difference is but a preposition.

Because he thinks the problem of meaning is perennial, Alex emphasizes more than once that it will be impossible, in the course of one conversation, to settle the matter.

But Dr. K disagrees. He does think their conversation can provide an answer.

4. Incremental Improvement

§ Moments later, Dr. K reveals why he thinks the meaning crisis is manageable.

While, for the atheist and the theist, the problem of meaning is all-or-nothing, for Dr. K, meaning is measurable along a sliding scale. He describes how psychologists measure a sense of meaning or purpose in life. They give people a series of surveys that get responses to questions related to meaning, control, and purpose (all of which clump together psychometrically, suggesting that they measure the same psychological variable).

He surveys the debate participants on the spot, asking how they would rate their subjective sense of purpose on a scale of 1 to 10: Koukl offers 10, Bartlett 5, and Dr. K presses Alex to admit that he would score greater than five on such a scale.

But what is Dr. K’s goal in the conversation? Not to get people from zero to ten in a single conversation, but to help people move “some vague percentage points, I’m shooting for about 20%.”

Yes.

This is it.

Dr. K wants people to move some small percentage along a vague scale that he doesn’t understand, but that we kind of all know is there: More meaning and purpose, less meaning and purpose.

That’s what he’s going for. It’s incremental improvement.

Meaning in life is not a grand, metaphysical sense of the purpose of all existence.

Meaning can be as simple as moving from doing less well to doing a little bit better.

5. A New Apologetic

§ In much of popular Christian apologetics, a certain kind of argument predominates.

While I have previously made much of the presuppositionalist-classical distinction, this argument predominates on both sides, whatever the apologist’s professed methodology.

The argument:

* If there is no God, there can be no meaning.

* The atheistic worldview has no God.

* Therefore, people with an atheistic worldview have no meaning.

But the conclusion doesn’t follow.

My freshman year at Wheaton College, I remember being struck by the title of a book: The God Who Is There.

And that is the relevant point.

An improper inference is made from “The atheistic worldview has no God,” to atheists have no God.

But they do. People with an atheistic worldview live in a world where God is there—even though they don’t believe he is.

And what that means is that there is no one whose life does not have meaning.

Dr. K and Jordan Peterson are right, therefore, to help people find meaning in life well before they’ve figured out the meaning of life.

Team metaphysics—the atheist and the theist—say:

the questions of metaphysics are prior to those of psychology.

But the actual result of Christian realism—the belief that God is there whether we believe it or not—and if psychological pragmatism, like that of Dr. K and Jordan Peterson, is the opposite:

the questions of psychology—including that of meaning in life—are prior to those of metaphysics.

And so, I envision a new kind of Christian apologetics, one that moves in the following order:

* Help people find meaning in life. And only then,

* Help people discover the meaning of life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once lamented the collective influence of both atheists and theists on ethical and philosophical development:

Russell and the parsons between them have done infinite harm, infinite harm.

To which his friend responded:

I was puzzled by his coupling Russell and the parsons in the one condemnation.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, M. O’C. Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” 117.

I think Wittgenstein’s condemnation applies not only to Russell and the parsons, in his day, but also to Dawkins and the apologists in our own.

In a rush to solve the question of the meaning of life, we neglected the question of meaning in life.

Fortunately, there’s still time to reverse course.

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In A Natural History of Natural Theology, my late professor Helen De Cruz (1978-2025) and husband Johan De Smedt write that “most modern versions of the design argument do not take natural selection and its principle of cumulative selective retention into account as a viable explanation” (75).

Advocates of the design argument have not proven that the argument remains valid after Darwin; they—we—have simply ignored natural selection.

Dr. De Cruz, who served on the committee for my dissertation prospectus, died this June at the age of 46 of an aggressive illness. She left behind two children and a husband. Her work in philosophy was truly remarkable, not to mention her prior Ph.D. in art history, her fiction-writing, and lute-playing(!). While this article engages in criticism, it arises from deep respect for her amazing, cross-disciplinary scholarship.

However, while De Cruz and De Smedt argue that contemporary natural theologians ignore natural selection, their own description of natural selection is simplistic.

They illustrate the process with an example of Richard Dawkins’. And they begin with an important admission:

The likelihood that a computer program that generates random combinations of letters will produce by pure chance a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, such as METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL, is vanishingly small.

(I did the math; that’s less than 1 in 1032!)

But here’s how natural selection can overcome this probability threshold:

However, allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt will produce the sentence in no more than 23 × 26 = 598 runs.

Allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt?

That’s not natural selection. That’s cheating.

What I greatly respect about Dr. De Cruz’s work is its careful integration of science with philosophy and theology. For example:

But on this point, I find myself disappointed.

I had hoped for a robust analysis of wherein modern evolutionary science conflicts with the design argument. Instead, I find an inaccurate overestimate of the power of natural selection, with the assumption that natural selection is the sole causal source of biological evolution.

De Cruz and De Smedt are also dismissive toward Bill Dembski and the theory of Intelligent Design. (At least they are willing to cite Dembski!) As a result, I find myself craving more accurate analysis of the power and limits of modern evolutionary theory and the remaining viability of teleological thinking in science and philosophy.

In this article, I’ll argue that De Cruz and De Smedt’s analysis of natural selection assumes the presence of design and, citing Bill Dembski’s recent article on “the conservation of information,” argue that natural selection explains only a fraction of biological diversity.

While structural biologists, admitting the problem, propose additional mechanisms of evolution, I conclude that no naturalistic explanation of the origin of biological diversity yet exists. The design argument, therefore, remains as viable as ever.

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1. Natural Selection…Plus Additional Programming

In his analysis of the origin of biological forms, Aristotle discussed three kinds of cause: Chance, Necessity, and Purpose.

(This is distinct from his “four causes” idea.)

In his contemporary defense of the design inference, Dembski discusses the same three, calling them “chance, regularity, and design.”

But De Cruz and De Smedt argue that this is to ignore a fourth causal option that modern science has turned up: Natural selection.

Admittedly, natural selection is not independent of the other three causes. It is a combination of chance and regularity, and purportedly, it mimics or creates the appearance of design.

On this analysis, Aristotle’s trichotomy has been superseded by Darwin’s tetrachotomy. Hence, contemporary teleologists, including intelligent design theorists, are working with an outdated palette of options.

For pre-Darwinians like Aristotle and Cicero, and even William Paley, “natural selection was not in the pool of possible explanations,” De Cruz and De Smedt admit. But for modern advocates “of the design argument,” De Cruz and De Smedt allege that they “do not take natural selection and its principle of cumulative selective retention into account as a viable explanation” (75). Modern advocates of design are simply ignoring the advance made by Darwin’s discovery of natural selection.

But as revealed in the above example, De Cruz and De Smedt confuse natural selection’s combination of chance and regularity with the workings of a pre-programmed filter.

While the chance of producing METHINKSITISLIKEAWEASEL by chance is prohibitively low, they argue that, by the “principle of cumulative selective retention,” a computer could reduce the odds from <1 in 1032 to something that could be produced in less than 600 attempts:

Allowing the computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt will produce the sentence in no more than 23 × 26 = 598 runs.

But a computer program that “retained the correct letters at each attempt” would not be a combination only of chance and regularity, but of chance, regularity, and design.

Chance is involved in the mechanism of random-letter-generation.

Regularity governs the mechanical working of the computer’s selection mechanism.

But allowing, i.e., programming, a “computer to retain the correct letters at each attempt” would require design.

While De Cruz and De Smedt are confident that “Darwin…came up with natural selection as a naturalistic explanation of design,” their own description of its workings—even as highly-educated, scientifically-informed philosophers over a century and a half after the publication of On the Origin of Species—tacitly invokes design.

2. Information In, Information Out

This week, mathematician and philosopher Bill Dembski shared on his Substack an academic article he published earlier this month: “The Law of Conservation of Information: Search Processes Only Redistribute Existing Information.”

In that article, Dembski argues the following:

Conservation of information sparked scientific interest once a recurring pattern was noticed in the evolutionary computing literature. In grappling with the creation of information through evolutionary algorithms, this literature consistently revealed that the information outputted by such algorithms always needed first to be programmed into them.

Thus, the primary goal of this literature—to uncover how information could be created from scratch or de novo—was shown to be misconceived: the information was not created but instead shuffled around or smuggled in, implying that it already existed in some form or other.

Information output in these situations therefore always presupposed a counterbalancing input of prior information.

In other words, mechanistic processes are incapable of producing new information. The most a mechanistic process can do is shuffle it around or destroy it.

Accordingly, while natural selection was an important scientific discovery, it does not have the power to produce new biological information (or lines of Shakespeare). It can only reshuffle or destroy existing information.

Consider an example of biological evolution for which the mechanism of natural selection is adequate: The evolution of the polar bear.

Scientists believe that the polar bear shares a common ancestor with the brown bear and the North American black bear. The evidence of this is their shared genetic material, less two notable mutations.

One mutation is to a gene

involved in fat metabolism, which allows the polar bear to have a diet that ‘contains a very large proportion of fat (much higher than in the diet of brown bears)’ (Behe, Darwin Devolves, 16). The second gene “is associated with pigmentation, and changes in it are probably responsible for the blanching of the [polar bear] ancestors’ brown fur” (17).

(I wrote about this here.)

Yet both mutations, when they occur in other mammals, are damaging.

“When the same gene is mutated in humans or mice, studies show it frequently leads to high levels of cholesterol and heart disease” (Behe, 17).

Likewise, the loss of pigmentation in the fur was a loss of functional genetic material, not the creation of a new gene for white fur.

As I once summarized it,

“Scientists have reason to believe that both variations that occurred in polar bears [involved] a loss of genetic information that, as we saw, is shared by mammals, up to and including humans.”

In other words, in a scientifically demonstrable instance where biological evolution was caused by natural selection, no new information was created. Biological information was lost. And this loss of biological information was, by accident, beneficial. It was selectively retained without any pre-programming—without any design.

Importantly, however, while natural selection can explain how the polar bear evolved from the biological kind of bear that was the common ancestral population of the brown bear and the North American black bear, it cannot explain the origin of the biological information that gave rise to that ancestral kind of bear in the first place.

Natural selection explains the survival, but not the arrival of the fittest.

Natural selection explains the speciation of an off-shoot, whose differentiating mutations are damaging to existing functional genes.

But what natural selection cannot explain is the origin of biological kinds.

3. Evolutionists, Don’t Give Up!

In What Darwin Got Wrong, philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini report that, among structural biologists, no one believes that natural selection is sufficient to explain biological diversity: “None of them is ‘that kind’ of Darwinist any more” (xiv).

However, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini report that this admission from structural biologists has yet to influence “informed opinion in [other] fields,” including those they have worked in, like philosophy and cognitive science (xiv). “In all of these, neo-Darwinism is taken as axiomatic; it goes literally unquestioned.”

Neo-Darwinism: Random genetic mutation and chance-based natural selection suffice to explain the origin of biological diversity.

They include an entire appendix of scholars outside of “‘wet’ biology” assuming neo-Darwinism axiomatically to demonstrate this.

They could add to their list De Cruz and De Smedt’s axiomatic assumption of neo-Darwinism (or adaptationism).

While I am disappointed by De Cruz and De Smedt’s analysis of how modern evolutionary science affects the viability of the design argument, this does not mean that evolutionary science has not affected the design argument.

In the first place, natural selection has been shown to have the power to explain variations in the color of moths, the separate, convergent evolution of sub-varieties of Cichlids (a kind of African fish) in merely thousands of years, and the evolution of the polar bear from an ancestral kind of bear.

In the second place, as Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini describe—as well as Andreas Wagner in Arrival of the Fittest—contemporary structural and computational biologists are considering many other causal mechanisms that (may) contribute to biological evolution. Especially, they are considering non-random sources of variation from the internal structure of the organism and the possibility-space of biological forms.

Now, I don’t want to advocate a “God of the gaps” argument any more than the next guy. So bring on new mechanisms of evolution, evolutionists.

But let’s not pretend that anyone has yet demonstrated that there is a naturalistic mechanism that can produce the panoply of biological diversity and apparent design.

Because so far, the best of evolutionary science has explained only a fraction of biological adaptation.

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This afternoon, I hosted a livestream about the following note:

My contention that a theistic worldview is shared by the major monotheistic faiths provoked debate and discussion. I decided to go to the airwaves to dig into the matter more deeply.

If you missed the stream, watch the video here.

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In response to my recent post on J. Gresham Machen, readers offered thoughtful pushback on several fronts.

Some questioned whether Machen’s later turn away from “objective” methods wasn’t the right move after all.

Others raised concerns about the dangers of free inquiry, especially when it risks undermining Christian convictions.

Still others debated the wisdom of staying and reforming corrupt institutions rather than leaving them to act authentically.

Here are a few reflections in response to those critiques.

1. Should Christians Strive for Objectivity?

A common objection was:

“The theological modernists claimed objectivity, but they were, in fact, biased. Doesn’t that vindicate Machen’s later turn toward Christian perspectivalism?”

This strikes me as a category confusion.

The problem with theological modernists wasn’t that they tried to be objective. The problem was that they weren’t. They imported philosophical and theological assumptions while presenting their conclusions as neutral scholarship. Their failure wasn’t in aspiring to objectivity, but in failing to live up to it.

The right response isn’t to embrace perspectivalism as if all truth is merely a projection of our ideological priors. It’s to strive for greater objectivity, not less.

I’ve described this elsewhere as civilized empiricism—a pursuit of truth grounded in a recognition of one’s biases, tested through dialogue with dissenting voices and institutions designed to expose blind spots. This is distinct from a kind of naïve or “brute empiricism,” where a lone thinker imagines they can arrive at truth without community, history, or correction.

If our institutions are prone to dogma, the answer isn’t to surrender to subjectivity. It’s to lean more fully into practices that counterbalance our partiality.

That means that students of faith should study with secular professors and peers, and secular scholars should welcome religious students into their classrooms.

We need shared spaces of inquiry across disagreement, not echo chambers of our own convictions.

2. Should We Pursue Truth Before Christ?

Another objection was more spiritual in nature:

Is there not danger in pursuing truth wherever it leads, especially if that pursuit might lead us away from Christ?

I take this concern seriously. The fear isn’t just about what we might find out if we looked deeper. It’s about our own susceptibility to pride, to the allure of intellectual respectability, or to temptation masquerading as insight.

There is wisdom in spiritual caution. Not everyone is ready for every branch of philosophy or science.

But while maturity matters, I don’t believe the answer is to foreclose hard questions for fear of where they might lead. Christians often speak of the need for moral commitment to Christ prior to intellectual inquiry. But the New Testament seems to assume the reverse: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Our faith depends on something being true, and that truth is, in principle, open to examination.

Faith seeks understanding, yes, but it also rests on good reasons. We are not asked to believe blindly, but to weigh, inquire, and discern.

To do that well requires what I might call a “philosophic temper”—a posture of non-anxious, open-minded interest in truth. Some secular scholars model this better than many Christians.

(This is very different from the kind of student who learns a bit of textual criticism and suddenly becomes pro-abortion. That’s not inquiry; that’s reaction.)

One helpful way to cultivate a philosophic temper: Ask yourself what kind of worldview you’d hold if you lost your faith. Don’t just assume you’d become a Nietzschean or a nihilist. Perhaps you would continue to “act as though God exists,” like Jordan Peterson, or maintain the best insights of “religion for atheists,” like Alain de Botton. Thinking through those scenarios helps clarify what’s at stake, and what’s not, in our beliefs.

3. Should We Stay or Leave Broken Institutions?

Finally, some readers defended Machen’s own institutional departures, asking:

Wasn’t Machen right to leave the mainline Presbyterian church and Princeton Seminary? Aren’t some institutions working at cross-purposes with their founding principles?

In my earlier post, I only revealed my views on Machen’s decision to paid subscribers, but I will say this here: Burnett’s biography has me reconsider my Protestant impulse to take doctrinal purity as the deciding factor in favor of leaving corrupt institutions.

The question applies far beyond Machen’s choice to leave his denomination and academic home. Many of us wrestle with similar choices in our relationship to academia, to the church, or to legacy institutions in general. Should we remain, or break away and start afresh?

Often our conclusions reflect our own sociological positioning. Those outside academia often see only its ideological flaws and institutional failures. Those within it, especially those embedded in its better corners, see the benefits it still offers: peer review and intellectual collaboration and camaraderie.

I’m part of academia, though not at its center. I see both its value and its limitations. (See my “Don’t Let Academia Stop You Being an Intellectual.”) I envy the acknowledgements pages in academic books, in which top scholars credit tens, if not hundreds of other academics for conversations, criticisms, and challenges that shaped the final work. That kind of collaborative refinement can’t easily be replicated on Substack. Substack has its strengths, but it doesn’t yet foster the same kind of rigorous back-and-forth.

The same dynamic plays out in the church. Many evangelicals ask, “Why stay in a theologically liberal denomination?” But consider what was lost when evangelicals abandoned the mainline: beautiful buildings, central properties in every city, and a visible presence in the cultural square. By leaving, we may have preserved our theology, but at the cost of place, heritage, and public witness. There’s a kind of escapism in that.

Doctrinal purity matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. Institutions do more than just preserve doctrine: they order life, preserve memory, and embody truth in social form. When they lose their way, leaving is tempting, but rebuilding outside the institution is costly. You lose the infrastructure, financial, intellectual, and even architectural, that once supported your mission.

Those supports aren’t ultimate, but they’re not irrelevant either. There’s a kind of radical Protestant, or Donatist, impulse in assuming we can do without them.

“Donatism was a schism from the Catholic Church from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Donatists argued that Christian clergy must be faultless for their ministry to be effective and their prayers and sacraments to be valid.”

from “Donatism,” Wikipedia

What Comes Next?

As I continue reflecting on Machen’s biography, I find myself drawn to an earlier generation of Christian leaders—those turn-of-the-century college presidents who pursued academic excellence while holding firm to the faith. There was a window of time when Christian intellectuals helped shape the modern university—before ideological conformity closed that door.

In one sense, you could see what I’m doing as reconsidering the idea that the seminary theologian is the ideal of the Christian intellectual. Perhaps the ideal of the Christian intellectual is somewhere closer to the interface of the modern research university, the Christian faced with the objective pursuit of truth in a whole variety of areas, with empirical research, with philosophy, and so on. It’s for such an individual that the conflicts between faith and reason are raised in an institutional calling.

I’ll be drawing attention to some of these figures in the near future.

This post was written with the editing help of ChatGPT.

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My theological education took place at Westminster Seminary, the bastion of presuppositionalism.

Presuppositionalism: Christian thinking must begin from all and only Christian presuppositions.

And this thesis had a noticeable effect on our studies.

95% of the time we would read people who already agreed with us in order to believe what they said.

5% of the time, we would go find somebody we disagreed with and be assigned to go figure out what was wrong with them.

But after Westminster, I did a program in philosophy at the University of Chicago. In this beautiful, gothic reading room, etched in stone over one of the doorways was this quotation:

“Read, neither to believe nor to contradict, but to understand.”

And those words summed up what had been wrong with my experience at a presuppositional seminary, and what was so right about my experience at the University of Chicago.

Now, my Christian perspective is not just based on Christian presuppositions.

Now, my Christian perspective suggests that even if I’m not looking at the Bible, I see indications of the Divine.

Readers, last week, I argued that the theology nerd mindset is that of a closed system, a self-reinforcing circle of Bible and theology, with no outside inputs.

While much evangelical theology makes this error implicitly, presuppositionalism endorses and radicalizes this error explicitly.

The presuppositionalist avows that theology should utilize circular arguments, beginning all and only from Christian presuppositions.

And even if you haven’t encountered presuppositionalism, I think you’ll recognize the tendency to ideological thinking that refuses to be challenged and protects its ideas from outside interference.

Not so the Christian humanist. Outside interference, from reality, is what the humanist desires.

That’s why the story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist is also the story of how I became a Christian humanist.

In the rest of this post (originally a YouTube video I made in February), I tell the story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist. Thank you for reading.

If you want to learn more about transcending the theology nerd mindset, sign up for my upcoming (July-August) course, From Theology Nerd to Christian Humanist.

I. What Is a Presuppositionalist?

The story of how I stopped being a presuppositionalist begins back when I was one.

A presuppositionalist is someone who believes that, to have a consistently Christian worldview, you need to start from all and only Christian presuppositions.

The underlying theory is that people of different worldviews all start from their own presuppositions. If you’re a materialist atheist, you start from those presuppositions. If you’re a Christian, you start from a Christian set of presuppositions, and never the twain shall meet.

Nobody really bases their beliefs on just an objective look at the evidence. We all bring a set of lenses, interpretive schemes to the world, and a Christian ought to make the Bible their interpretive scheme.

Now for me, this was compelling as I was first taking my faith seriously. I’d had a lot of time where I just was a Christian on Sunday, and I didn’t know how to apply my faith to the other days of the week. That’s a lot of people.

But as I was trying to take that faith more seriously, reading the Bible more, studying theology—the idea of having Christian presuppositions for all that you do sounds really compelling.

I was also getting into the Reformed theology space where there’s an argument put forward that presuppositionalism is the consistent Calvinist or Reformed approach to apologetics, instead of classical or evidential apologetics, where you start from common ground and evidence to argue to a Christian worldview.

Now I remember going off to college, at a Christian college. I thought, “Hey, I can get a Christian perspective on things!”

And my now wife showed me her homework from a philosophy class, and it was about Thomas Aquinas, who is the opposite of a presuppositionalist. He’s a natural theologian. And he was arguing that there’s a distinction between the preambles of faith, the things you can know apart from faith or revelation, and the articles of faith, the things that are taught by faith.

Aquinas would say that the Trinity, the Incarnation, and redemption you can only get from the Bible. But that God exists, that there is a moral law, and that we’ve sinned, these things can be known apart from Scripture. They might be even what gets you interested in Scripture. If you start to think, “I think there’s a God out there. Maybe I should read this Bible people keep talking about.” That’s the preambles versus the articles.

But I denied that. I remember at the time thinking: “No, everything’s got to start from the Bible. That’s how you’re going to have a consistently Christian perspective on things in the world.”

II. The Turning Point: Moral Attitudes in P. F. Strawson

But there was a time in a final philosophy class I took at that college, we were reading about free will and moral responsibility.

And there’s an important essay by Peter Strawson, British philosopher from the mid-20th century—“Freedom and Resentment.”

In it, Strawson was arguing against the hard determinists. These are philosophers who think that free will and determinism are incompatible, that determinism is true and that therefore free will is false.

And the hard determinists thought that therefore, we should rid ourselves of all emotions that assume that other people are moral response morally responsible. Think, e.g., resentment, from the title, that assumes that the other person has free will and purposefully did something to you. Or gratitude on the positive side: to be grateful towards somebody assumes that they were free, deserving of praise for what they did, and not just, “Well, they were pre-programmed to do it.”

And Strawson’s argument took an interesting form, because Strawson was not a Christian. He was not somebody who argued that we have a soul or a metaphysical basis for free will, that we're not physically determined by our psychology or something.

No, he just said, “There’s no way that we’re going to rid ourselves of these emotions of resentment and gratitude, blame and praise. These are part of being human, that we are equipped with the ability to make these evaluations.”

And so from there, he said, no metaphysical thesis that pointy-headed philosophers or physicists come up with in the lab is going to affect this practice and its validity. If you bump into me, what decides whether I should be mad or forgiving is whether you intended to do so, not whether physicists have figured out whether quantum mechanics is true.

So that idea, I didn’t realize it, but that was already incompatible with presuppositionalism.

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How? you say. How was Strawson’s idea incompatible with presuppositionalism?

Well, let’s take an example of a presuppositionalist argument. A prominent one was the way Doug Wilson debated Christopher Hitchens in their recorded debates.

Wilson is officially a presuppositionalist. (He’s got some other C. S. Lewis, natural law influences that we’ll leave aside for the moment.)

But Wilson kept pressing Hitchens on Hitchens’ morally fervent critiques of the God of the Old Testament and the New. He would say, “Where do you get this morality by which you can judge—by what standard can you judge that God is evil, for having the Israelites go and kill the Canaanites? By what standard can you judge that penal substitutionary atonement is morally repugnant? You must be assuming a moral standard that has no place in an atheistic, materialist universe.”

Now there are two ways you can go with an argument like that. The presuppositionalist essentially says:

“You, atheist, have no basis for morality. Stop it. You need to be consistent. Go become a nihilist and go kill other people or yourself.”

That’s the extreme version, but that’s essentially, “Go take your presuppositions to their logical conclusion.”

But that’s not the direction that Strawson goes.

Strawson is not a Christian, but he’s saying there’s something else beyond metaphysical inklings (i.e., do you believe in God or materialism).

There’s our ingrained human ability to evaluate things on a moral level and to feel the emotions that are part and parcel of that.

And that’s not going away.

To read and understand Peter Strawson’s article, sign up for From Theology Nerd to Christian Humanist. I’m adding it to the syllabus for “philosophy week.” Grab a copy of the syllabus by clicking this link.

III. C. S. Lewis and my Agnostic Professor

And that’s actually where C. S. Lewis starts his argument for Christianity, in the very opening pages of Mere Christianity.

C. S. Lewis says people are doing this all the time. They’re saying, “That’s mine!” “Don’t take that.” “You pushed me.” “I didn’t mean to!” They’re arguing in these moral terms based on these practices of praise and blame that we all already participate in.

And C. S. Lewis says, “We all already know about that, but that thing is a clue to the meaning of the universe.”

So both the presuppositionalist and the natural theologian hold that you can’t make sense of morality without God, but they do different things with this claim.

The presuppositionalist says, “You need to be consistent and give up on morality.”

The natural theologian says, “You need to be consistent with what you already know—that morality exists—and adopt a worldview that explains why the world is more than just material.”

The presuppositionalist says, “There’s no common ground between believer and unbeliever; there’s nothing we have in common. All that morality you’ve got is, at best, stolen capital. You don’t have a right to it.

The natural theologian says, “Of course, you have a right to that. That is your birthright as a human being.”

And now we’ve got common ground together, and we can look at the world, given our shared morality and say: “Well, what makes the best sense of this? Does evolution explain morality, or does it just explain why it's advantageous for weaker people to obey morality? Would it make better sense to believe that God is at the foundation of morality, or would that make morality arbitrary, as if God could command something different?”

These are the philosophical questions that morality and theology raise, but the natural theologian acknowledges that there is common ground between believers and non-believers on that basis.

Now, if we fast-forward, I’m in a position with my dissertation advisor, in a philosophy program, where he’s an atheist, or an agnostic rather. But he’s also a moral realist. He really does believe in morality.

Do I want him to be consistent with his atheism and be more amoral and nihilistic?

No, I’d like him to be consistent with that morality. I think he’s absolutely correct about what he’s seen in the world that gives him this sense of morality. I just think his evolutionary explanations of it fall short.

There’s more to this world than that in order to explain morality. The normative cannot be reduced to or explained by the natural.

IV. Westminster: Presuppositionalist Seminary

Now, from Wheaton College, I went on to Westminster Seminary, the bastion of presuppositionalism, where Cornelius Van Til taught of old, the chief presuppositionalist thinker.

And there I learned a lot. There was a robust curriculum, so much to be thankful for. But there was also presuppositionalism in almost every class.

And presuppositionalism, starting only from your own presuppositions, had an interesting effect on our studies.

It meant that if you wanted to learn something about any topic, you wanted to read something from someone who shared your worldview. So if you want to learn about mathematics, you need to go read a book like Redeeming Mathematics by one of our professors. You need to read a book from your worldview. If you want to think about laundry, you need to read a Reformed theology of laundry, and so on, to reach the absurd.

But leaving that aside, there was a tendency to just read our own perspectives.

95% of the time, we would read people who already agreed with us in order to believe what they said.

5% of the time, we would go find somebody we disagreed with and be assigned to go figure out what was wrong with them.

And I got dissatisfied with this at a certain point. I thought, “I already know that the people who agree with me agree with me. I’d like to learn from people who disagree with me. In fact, I’d really like to know whether anybody out there who isn’t a Christian thinks that some of the things we’re saying are true, or do they think we’re just totally crazy. They don’t have to agree with us on every point, but do they see some of what we’re saying about moral reality, about right and wrong, about the importance of faith and religion, the limits of science and so on?”

And in my own studies, I began to find that there were such people. The philosopher Roger Scruton was one I discovered. Jordan Peterson was coming on the scene. I saw him doing the same thing.

V. The University of Chicago: Humane Academy

And so, from Westminster, I decided to go get a master’s in philosophy.

I did a program at the University of Chicago, which was a 180 from Westminster. It was people of all different beliefs studying together in a much different way. There was no assumption that people shared their points of view. There were good ideas, bad ideas, but it was an open environment to think things through and come to your own conclusions.

In this beautiful, Gothic reading room at the University of Chicago, etched in stone over one of the doorways was this quotation:

“Read, neither to believe nor to contradict, but to understand.”

—words of Francis Bacon, the great Christian scientist-philosopher.

And those words summed up what had been wrong with my experience at a presuppositionalist seminary, and what was so right about my experience at the University of Chicago.

At the University of Chicago, no one told me what to think. At the University of Chicago, I was reading people who didn’t share my presuppositions, and yet finding them making cogent and coherent arguments, and not in an exclusively atheistic or materialist direction, but carefully navigating the terrain of human thought, the merits of a more moral view of the world, the limits of a scientistic view of the world.

And I thought this experience was beautiful, and the real result of it was that now my worldview was not just based on the Word of people who agreed with me. In fact, now it was confirmed by people from outside the fold, if you will.

But more than that, I now had things that I could say to people outside my faith that built common ground, but that pointed in the direction of belief. I had arguments that didn’t just sound like an apologetics argument, that there’s a truth to morality that take the philosopher John McDowell, that there’s limits to the purely scientific worldview, that you start to lose our grip on ourselves as beings with minds and moral knowledge.

And all of those things could be said without asking somebody first to adopt an entire biblical worldview.

VI. Conclusion: Christian Humanism and Empiricism

And so what was the result of this change of heart and change of mind?

Well, it led to me taking a perspective that I now call either empiricist or humanist.

Humanism is often the bad thing in a kind of Christian worldview discourse. “Watch out for secular humanism!”

But there’s a long tradition of Christian humanism, of which C. S. Lewis was a part, Thomas Aquinas, many of the Protestant Reformers who were humanists, following Erasmus (like Zwingli!), and they believe that there’s a lot in secular learning that we can take. We can plunder the Egyptians, as Augustine says. Philosophy can be a preparation for the gospel, as Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr among the Church Fathers said.

And empiricist, in that now, I believed that the human faculties of our senses and our reason could get things from the world and learn new things. We didn’t just need to download biblical presuppositions, put on our Christian goggles and see the world through that.

We could see the world. Unmediated information from the outside gets in, because God made us to know this world. (See my “Toward a Sophisticated Realism.”

What that’s done is it’s strengthened my Christian perspective. Now my Christian perspective is not just based on Christian presuppositions. Now my Christian perspective suggests that, even if I’m not looking at the Bible, I see indications of the Divine. I see reason to believe that there’s a moral reality to life.

I learned that from Christian thinkers who are natural theologians; and I learned it from contemporary thinkers like Jordan Peterson and Louise Perry, who see truth to moral to the moral claims of Christianity. I am not just stuck in my self-enclosed Christian circle of circular arguments.

I think this shift in perspective can really develop our ability to talk with people outside the faith. We need, in this day and age, to be able to talk to people we don’t agree with on the basis of the things we do have in common.

There’s a kind of parallel between presuppositionalism and radical forms of ideology, where, if you don’t agree with everything, I say, we’re in total disagreement.

No, your neighbor, whatever they think, you and they should be able to find some common ground. And from that you can build towards truth together through common truth seeking and a common good that you share.

(I wrote and recorded a pop-punk song about it:)

I’d like to see Christians be more an example of that and and that is part of the reason why I stopped being a presuppositionalist.

Feel free to add a comment if you disagree. I’d love to hear why people still find presuppositionalism compelling, or why you’ve left it behind perhaps, or never held it.

But for now, I’m Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian. Until next time.

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In this video, Nathan Shaver cohosts a discussion with me about the Zwingli option. We discussed the tension between depravity and dignity, the distinction between humanism and scholasticism, and much more!

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I used to think that Calvinism was simply a system of soteriology.

But I’ve come to see that there’s something more, a Calvinist vibe: to exaggerate human sinfulness in order to exaggerate the role of the grace of God.

Before Calvin’s time, Zwingli articulated a Reformed theology that was deeply humane, sympathetic to the foibles and weakness of sinful human nature.

If we take “the Zwingli option,” the fact that our nature is already predetermined in various ways does not make us the more evil and wicked and guilty. Rather, it provides a reason to sympathize with our condition, to treat others with greater mercy, not greater condemnation.

Welcome, reader. In this post, I’ll explain why it’s time to forget Calvinism and become a Zwinglian.

By the way, I’m Joel Carini, “The Natural Theologian.” I write essays on Substack to help Christians learn from secular sources.

And I make videos on YouTube about God for people whether you believe what I believe, something different, or nothing at all. (This post was originally a video. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel as well.)

The Calvinist Vibe

Calvinism.

I came to these set of views when I was a young man, as many do.

When I first arrived at Calvinism, it was out of a sense that my own conversion to Christ and the moral renovation that began to occur in my heart weren’t really down to me making a decision, i.e., finally deciding to get my life together, but that the initiative had come from God.

When you start from that point, you get the idea that we can’t just decide for Christ on our own, sin holds us back: total depravity and unconditional election, from which follow limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints. (TULIP!)

While I thought that Calvinism was simply this system of soteriology, since then, over the course of 15 years as a Calvinist and three years intensively studying at a premier Calvinist seminary, I’ve come to see that there’s something more. If you will, a Calvinist vibe.

This vibe is to exaggerate human sinfulness in order to then expound upon and exaggerate the role of the grace of God. By increasing the severity of our description of human sinfulness, we make theology and Reformed theology all that more important. (“Let us describe things as sin that grace may abound!”)

In the process, I fear we’ve begun to denigrate human nature. We say that human beings can’t know anything apart from scripture or apart from the Holy Spirit intervening in our minds. We say that nothing people do outside of Christ has any value apart from maybe God’s intervention as common grace. We say that everything we do, even as Christians, is wicked and evil and is ultimately filthy rags, even when the Holy Spirit is working in us.

All this we say, purporting to glorify the grace of God, forgetting that God is also the creator of our nature.

We should not exaggerate the effect of the fall upon that creation as if it obliterated the image of God in man.

For a while I’ve sought to argue that this isn’t real Calvinism. These are some extra add-ons, this exaggeration of sinfulness. And if we could get back to true Calvinism, we could avoid these problems. I’ve thought that the extra errors came from going the radical side of the Reformation, the Anabaptist tradition, which denigrated the world and focused on staying pure from it within the church.

But once an error is made a certain number of times, you have to question whether there isn’t something wrong towards the root. And then you start to wonder whether Reformed theology couldn’t have gone a different direction. Was there some fork in the road and we took the wrong route?

That is indeed possible. Martin Luther nailed his theses to the Wittenberg church door in 1517. And John Calvin, who we know as the first reformed pastor and theologian, did not experience his conversion until 1533. What was going on in the intervening years?

The ministry of Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli’s entire career ended in 1531 with his death in a battle — before Calvin’s conversion even occurred.

Before Calvin’s time, Zwingli articulated a Reformed theology that was deeply humane, sympathetic to the foibles and weakness of sinful human nature, and appreciative of the work of God in creation and beyond the bounds of the Church.

The Zwingli Option is the one we never took.

In this post, I’m going to describe five points of Zwinglianism and articulate why I think this is the direction Reformed theology ought to go.

For further reading on Zwingli, I recommend Bruce Gordon’s biography of Zwingli, Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet, which I am currently reading. Also, Zwingli’s On Providence and Other Essays, which includes his discourse on original sin. I recommend this interview of Dr. Gordon by Austin Suggs for an intro to Zwingli’s life.

1. Original Sin Is Not Sin, But Defect

Zwingli held that original sin — our innate disposition away from God and towards sin — is not something for which we are to blame, but rather a defect in human nature that is a punishment of the fall.

In contrast to the later Reformed tradition, Zwingli did not think we were guilty on account of original sin. He did not think we were guilty on account of sinful desires and temptations, but only for sinful action.

This position came out of a whole debate about whether babies were damned to destruction, and Zwingli thought that that was a horrible position to hold. Before they have done any good or evil, simply because they were born with original sin as a result of Adam’s fall, infants were to be condemned to destruction. Zwingli held that, no, these children have done no wrong, even though as a reformed theologian he held that they were subject to original sin.

But original sin, Zwingli wrote, even though we call it “original sin,” is not a sin on our part, but a condition into which we are born where our motivations are not aligned with God’s purposes. And we can sympathize with human beings who are born this way, subject to this defect and to any particular form of sinful defect. (Contra Stephen G. Adubato: video.)

Zwingli himself put it this way:

Original sin is like a defect and a lasting one, as when stammering, blindness, or gout is hereditary in a family. On account of such a thing, no one is thought the worse or the more vicious, for things which come from nature cannot be put down as crimes or guilt.

This point of Zwinglianism became prominent as I left seminary. I’d already studied Calvinism, and I saw theologians trying to wrestle with the idea of same-sex attraction, that some Christians possess a homosexual orientation.

They struggled to deal with it theologically. They said, isn’t this concupiscence? Isn’t this original sin within them? Isn’t it something for which they are to blame, that they must repent of? And all of a sudden Reformed theologians, who I thought had never really discussed this matter, were completely aligned that 17th-century theology had already determined that same-sex attraction was sin.

But if we take the Zwingli option, we have quite a different result. The fact that our nature is already predetermined in various ways, different of us in different ways, does not make us the more evil and wicked and guilty. Rather, it provides a reason to sympathize with our condition, that we have to fight against our nature, that our nature is already determined against the will of God, and that in order to follow Jesus Christ, we must take on the yoke of fighting against that nature.

Original sin is like a congenital blindness (“Did this man sin or his parents that he was born blind?”) toward the good and toward the will of God with which we ought to sympathize and understand people’s struggles. (See “The Man Born Blind,” by Grant Hartley for this connection.)

As I’ve found, if we appreciate the doctrine of original sin in this way, it gives us reason to treat others with greater mercy and not greater condemnation.

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2. Righteousness and Salvation Beyond the Church

Now, Zwingli, as a Protestant reformer, rejected the idea that salvation could be had only through the Catholic Church. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus — “No salvation outside the Church,” the Catholics had proclaimed.

Instead, Zwingli thought that by knowledge of the Word of God and the proclamation of the Gospel, salvation could be had wherever that word was heard, even apart from the operation of the Roman Church.

But Zwingli also went further. When he spoke about the great heroes of the classical Greek and Roman West, he hoped for their salvation. He wrote that we would see Hercules and Socrates at the pearly gates, that those who had lived in pursuit of the unknown God even before the time of Christ would join us and all the saints hereafter.

Zwingli had hope for the salvation of babies, whether baptized or unbaptized. And by implication, he had hope for those who attempted to live righteous lives and forsake wickedness, even beyond the bounds of the proclamation of the gospel.

This theological position is often called “inclusivism,” and it’s the opposite direction of where the Calvinist vibe goes. You get the vibe that salvation is for the elect few and that that’s what Calvinism is all about.

But it’s possible to take the opposite implication. If God’s grace is sovereign in salvation, then it can be found working above and beyond the ordinary means of grace, the word, the sacraments and prayer. It can be found where people, even knowing God through nature, are seeking after forgiveness of their sins, even if they know not how, if they form the altar to the unknown God, if they seek to abandon the unrighteousness and wickedness around them, as Noah or other ancient patriarchs (who had not a page of Scripture) also did.

If we take this approach, whether we follow Zwingli to the inclusivism or not, we can have a much better appreciation of the possibility of goodness and righteousness beyond the bounds of the church.

Too often we Christians are asked by our neighbors and friends, “But can’t people be good without God? And sometimes we really want to argue with them that, “No, no one is good in any way. It's all just filthy rags.”

While original sin is a true doctrine — that there is corruption and bad motivation affecting every human act of this side of eternity — it doesn’t mean that there’s no distinction between better and worse, between righteousness and unrighteousness. We often even extend this to the Christian life, as if the good works done by the Holy Spirit within us are just filthy rags as well, that we simply cast ourselves on Christ and his act of obedience.

But this is to deny the real distinction between virtue and vice, both in the regenerate and the unregenerate.

Non-Christians can choose to live well or poorly. Some choose the life of a criminal. Others choose the life of an upstanding citizen. And while the danger of hypocrisy is always present, there is a real distinction between righteousness and unrighteousness.

Here is something we can take from Zwingli. We should appreciate the civic righteousness of the people around us and seek to emulate that virtue, whether it’s performed by a Christian or not.

We should also believe that being a Christian is not enough in our own lives. We must actually exemplify virtue. As St. Peter said, “Add to your faith virtue, and self-control, and righteousness” (paraphrase).

So with Zwingli, we can come to a greater appreciation of the good deeds of those outside the church. And if these play a role in salvation (which I do not assert), it is not that they would be saved by their works, but that the evidence of the Holy Spirit’s working can be found even beyond the bounds of the Church.

3. The Fall Was God’s Plan.

Zwingli was a supralapsarian, one of those big fancy words that when you first study theology you think, “This has to be a joke — this can’t be a real distinction.”

But supralapsarianism is a real theological distinction, and not an unimportant one. It’s the idea that the fall was God's plan all along. Sometimes this shows up as the idea of the Felix culpa, the happy fall, that the fall plays a role in human growth and maturity.

We can learn much from Zwingli on this point. Many online atheists, many philosophers, and many college students take it that the problem of evil is a deep objection to the Christian faith. How could God allow evil and suffering and bad to exist in this world?

But there’s another group I’ve often seen reject this, and it’s been art students — students of art who believe that the wickedness and evil of the world is essential to the motivation to find and create beauty within this world. Some even object to the doctrine of heaven and the perfection of the eternal state that without suffering there could be no good. (That was actually my friend Matthew Stanley in his wonderings about suffering in heaven.) They sound a bit like Nietzsche there.

Since Irenaeus, this has been an idea that the fall is a necessary step towards human maturity. That Adam was not in a state of righteousness, but mere innocence. When he encountered the first trial of his life, the temptation of the snake, he fell. But through this path of suffering, we like Christ can be brought to perfection or maturity and that that will be our eternal state.

If we adopt Zwingli's supralapsarianism, we can see the evil of the world as a necessary step in God's plan and one to which we can reconcile ourselves.

This dovetails perfectly with Zwingli’s doctrine of original sin. Original sin is something which God has imposed upon us as a punishment for Adam's fall. It’s a defect in us. It’s not our fault, but it’s also a happy and good part of God’s plan that we should endure this veil of tears and come to the other side.

4. The Sacraments Aren’t Magic

Now, the Catholic Church had held that the sacraments work ex opere operato (“by the work worked”). If you baptize someone, the grace of God is upon them. Initial justification has occurred.

The Protestant Reformers rejected this, arguing that faith was necessary to the working of the sacraments. But they differed on whether to insist upon the real presence of Christ. While all rejected transubstantiation, the idea that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ entirely physically, some like Luther retained some part of the physical presence of Christ with consubstantiation. And then Calvin and the other reformers insisted upon the spiritual presence of Christ in the supper.

To which I say, with Zwingli, “Yeah, the spiritual presence of Christ is present wherever two or three are gathered in his name. But the sacraments themselves operate only by our understanding and remembering what they mean.” This gets denigrated as the “memorialist” view.

In contemporary Catholic and Protestant apologetics and debates, the Catholics are accusing evangelicals of not caring about the sacraments. And some Protestants are tempted to really emphasize that no, no, the initial Reformers, they held to the real presence of Christ, a spiritual presence, but real nonetheless. (Redeemed Zoomer and some of my fellow Davenant Institute-adjacent folks.)

We can happily go with Zwingli on this one. The sacraments work only if we remember what they’re talking about, what they mean. They’re symbols. There’s nothing wrong with symbols.

We do not need to adopt an enchanted view of the world, become Eastern Orthodox, or anything like that in order to receive the saving grace of Christ. We need to know God and follow him, whether through nature, the Word of God in revelation, or the sacraments showing it visibly to our eyes. It all operates through our mind and our heart and our understanding. There is no reception of the grace of Christ bypassing our mind.

On this point about enchantment, we Protestants should simply embrace that, yes, we led the way to the Enlightenment. We focused on the Word and on human intelligence and rationality. And that is because all human beings are rational and can receive the grace of Christ through understanding who God is and who Christ is. You don’t need the sacraments. They are not physically or metaphysically essential in this way. They are part of the human practice of remembering and obeying Jesus Christ.

This frees us to be Protestant and to accustom ourselves to the secular world. We live in a world that doesn’t believe in magic and the enchanted and the supernatural. And we ourselves follow that in a lot of ways, apart from the existence of God and the miracles of the Bible.

We do not need to adopt an enchanted view of the world to believe that God is at work. God is at work through even symbols. Symbols can show us the way, mythology.

Rather than adopt an enchanted and magical view of the world, why not adopt the view that myth and symbol and memorial have their validity and not just secular, scientific understanding?

(Wanting to re-enchant the world reflects a literalist mindset; dissatisfied with the symbolic, mythological, and literary dimension, we insist on reifying the symbolic and taking literally the figurative.)

So with Zwingli, let us adopt a memorialist, even “secular” Protestantism.

5. Christian Humanism

This fifth point of Zwinglianism is a summary point. With Zwingli, we see a different strain of Reformed theology, a Christian humanist one, that emphasizes the goodness of human nature, and sin and the fall as human brokenness and defect, rather than guilt and something that is our fault.

In Zwingli, we see a recognition of the goodness of human beings even beyond the bounds of the church and the real distinction between righteousness and unrighteousness. Not all is filthy rags before the grace of Christ.

Christian humanism represents a different strain than what you could call fundamentalism and puritanism with their kind of “Christ against culture” and “Christ against nature” approach.

Rather than viewing the world as irredeemably evil, or “nothing good should be happening in it apart from the common grace of God,” we see the operation of the way God made things still going, imperfectly and in a fallen way, but still in operation. The image of God was not destroyed in man, and man knows of God through the natural law and natural theology and can seek after him.

In Zwingli, we encounter a Christian humanism, which was among the original motivations for the Reformation. Originally, the Reformation was not just a movement about reading the Bible. It was part of a Renaissance humanist movement focused on going back to all the sources, the classical sources and the Old and New Testaments, to learn them all in the original languages.

Therefore, in Zwingli, we see an appreciation of those outside the church like a Socrates or a Hercules (whether Hercules existed or not) who, they really pursued righteousness. We cannot simply ignore their natural, human virtue.

As Christians our goal isn’t simply to be some weird religious people, that are completely different from the ordinary human — but for grace to restore nature, for us to become more human, not to adopt views that make us less human, that make us denigrate humanity everywhere.

A friend and reader mentioned the other day that when he was younger, he heard a number of Calvinists discussing with an older woman the doctrine of predestination and arguing that the children of non-Christian families, infants, would go to hell. And this woman objected from a deep place within her.

I don’t know that she had Bible verses for it or knowledge of the theology of Ulrich Zwingli.

But she had a human impulse that this would be against the goodness of God and the innocence that can be seen in a child’s eyes.

And so, with Zwingli, we can adopt a more humane approach, sympathizing with the weakness and frailty of human nature.

So in closing, take a listen to this recent song of Mumford and Sons, “Carry On,” where they express their own objection to original sin, saying that “There’s no evil in a child’s eyes.”

Well, I’ve been Joel Carini, the Natural Theologian. This has been “Forget Calvinism. Become a Zwinglian.”

If you agree or disagree, drop a comment below.

Until next time.

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In their latest album, Mumford and Sons take aim at the doctrine of original sin.

I will take this darknessOver any light you castYou and all your original sin

The motivation for this denial is heartfelt:

Cause there’s no evil in a child’s eyes

In saying this, lead singer and songwriter Marcus Mumford fears he may be engaged in “heresy”:

I will take this heresyOver your hypocrisy

But Mumford and Sons are not the only ones moved by a child’s innocence to modify the doctrine of original sin.

Ulrich Zwingli, the first Reformed theologian, despised the medieval Catholic doctrine that unbaptized children were damned. (Zwingli became Protestant independently of Luther and died in 1531, two years before Calvin’s conversion!)

Now Zwingli acknowledged the doctrine of original sin, that all children were born subject to the disposition and propensity to sin.

But he denied that original sin was actually sin. In other words, to call the propensity to sin “sin” was not to speak properly, but to engage in metonymy.

metonymy (noun): the substitution of the name of an attribute…for that of the thing meant, for example “suit” for business executive, or “the track” for horse racing. (Oxford Languages)

Instead, original sin was a defect of human nature. As a result of the fall, we no longer possess an Adamic nature with no disposition to sin. We are, instead, born into the world with disordered loves. But this is no fault of ours. And being subject to original sin and desires to sin does not of itself give rise to guilt.

Zwingli’s doctrine of original sin came to be overshadowed in Reformed theology by the doctrine that even the motions of our nature toward sin give rise to guilt. So the Westminster Confession of Faith:

Every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the righteous law of God, and contrary thereunto, doth, in its own nature, bring guilt upon the sinner. WCF 6.6

But contrary to the later tradition, I believe that Zwingli was correct, and that we are in deep need of recovering Zwingli’s merciful doctrine of original sin.

Damned Babies: The Late Medieval Mess

The late Medieval Catholic Church taught that baptism was so necessary to salvation that all unbaptized children would be damned.

The funny thing is that the Catholic Church did not itself think that babies were sinful.

The Catholic view of original sin was that it was not sin, nor even defect.

Original sin was nothing but the loss of extra gifts to Adam’s nature.

Let’s pause there. To get a sense of the weirdness of this view, take a listen to this contemporary restatement, and reflect on the fact that this is still the position of the Catholic church:

LINK: Trent Horn Explains Original Sin

Original sin is nothing but the loss of the superadded gift. It does not include any defect in human nature or newly sinful disposition or desires. It means being returned to a state of pure human nature.

But then, unbaptized babies are also damned!?

Well, yes, because human nature is naturally in a state where the passions, including concupiscence, are in conflict with reason. Without the “golden bridle” of original righteousness and the superadded gift, humans will devolve into sin.

Accordingly, babies by nature are subject to wrath, not because they’ve sinned but because they lack the “extra” of superadded grace.

This complex of Catholic doctrine is a mess. And all the Reformers departed from it. They denied that there was, by nature, a conflict in man between the passions and reason. They held, instead, that man was “righteous by design.”

Therefore, original sin was not merely the loss of something extra to human nature. It was a corruption of human nature. Zwingli held this Reformed view as firmly as any other.

(This is very important, because any advocacy of the Zwinglian view or departure from the current doctrine of concupiscence is immediately accused of and confused with Catholicism.)

Now you might expect the Reformers to think children even more worthy of damnation. But Zwingli thought the Reformed and Augustinian doctrine of original sin had the opposite implication.

Zwingli argued that, while children were subject to original sin, original sin is not sin, but only a defect in, or disease of, human nature.

He summarizes:

For what could be said more briefly and plainly than that original sin is not sin but disease, and that the children of Christians are not condemned to eternal punishment on account of that disease? (Declaration Regarding Original Sin, 3)

Just like being born blind is no fault of the blind man, being born subject to original sin is no fault of any child.

Zwingli spells out the implications of understanding original sin as disease:

“I use it as combined with a defect and that a lasting one, as when stammering blindness, or gout is hereditary in a family.” (D, 4.) “On account of such a thing no one is thought the worse or the more vicious. For things which come from nature cannot be put down as crimes or guilt.” (D, 4-5.)

If original sin is like a disease, then it cannot make us guilty. It is no crime of ours that we were born in a condition of sin and misery.

The difficulty comes in understanding how original sin can give rise to sin without giving any reason to think us “worse or the more vicious.”

After all, other Reformed theologians argue that all the motions of the soul, especially desires, that are part and parcel of original sin produce guilt. They come out of the heart, so they produce uncleanness (Mark 7:20-23).

But Zwingli is concerned sharply to distinguish original from actual sin. As Oliver Crisp further describes the position:

Because of this all subsequent humans (barring Christ) are born with a propensity or disposition to sin, though this disposition is itself not properly a sin so-called, but more of a source of sin (D, 9). Sin is an act; it is for actions of sin that we are culpable, not for possession of the condition of original sin which gives rise to acts of sin (he cites various New Testament passages in support of this claim, especially Rom. 7). … There is a clear bifurcation here between sin as inherited disease or condition, and sin as immoral action—that is, between original and actual sin, respectively.

Reformed theologians generally, and the Westminster Confession particularly, distinguish actual and original sin. However, they treat original sin as bearing some of the properties of actual sin, chiefly, inducing guilt in us. Some Reformed theologians went so far as to extend the operation of the will back into the workings of desire, effectively arguing that all desire for sinful objects is actual sin. (I would argue that that denies the distinction between original and actual sin.)

But Zwingli is concerned to take seriously the distinction between original and actual sin. Actual sin has the character of a crime which induces guilt. Anything which lacks the character of a crime, like the inner propensity that tempts us to evil, does not of itself induce guilt.

Zwingli reasons:

“The original contamination of man is a disease, not a sin, because sin implies guilt, and guilt comes from a transgression or trespass on the part of one who designedly perpetrates a deed.” (D, 5.) Later in the same passage he says original sin is “a condition and penalty, the disaster and misery of corrupted human nature, not a crime of guilt on the part of those who are born in the condition of sin and death.”

That which precedes and even precipitates sinful action is not itself sin.

Not Actually Sin

Zwingli, I argue, is correct. Original sin is not actually sin.

In the first place, this follows from the meaning of the word “actual.” Over in analytic philosophy, I find myself having to combat the idea that “actual things” are a subset of things.

But this is erroneous. Decoy ducks and actual ducks are not two kinds of ducks. Since a decoy duck is not an actual duck, it is not a duck. Or, it is not actually a duck. It is a “duck” only by an extension of our use of language.

In other words, sentence 2 is epexegetical of sentence 1:

* A decoy duck is not an actual duck.

* A decoy duck is not actually a duck.

If a sentence of type 1 is true, a sentence of type 2 is true.

In the same way, since original sin is not actual sin, it is not sin. Because it is not actually sin.

Sentence 2 below is epexegetical of Sentence 1:

* Original sin is not actual sin.

* Original sin is not actually sin.

Q.E.D.

Born This Way

If that feels like wordplay, consider Zwingli’s own primary argument.

(By the way, the above is not wordplay. It is wordplay to acknowledge that something is not actual x, but then argue that it really is x.)

Zwingli’s primary argument for his position rests on this principle: “For things which come from nature cannot be put down as crimes or guilt.” From that principle, it follows that original sin is not sin, but defect.

Now many object to this principle as a humanistic and philosophic rejection of original sin. After all, our contemporaries plead that they were “born this way,” and on that basis, reject Christian beliefs about sin.

The trouble is that the principle is obviously correct, even though it is humanistic. What comes from nature does not come from our will.

Conservatives, Christian or not, recognize this in the modern voluntaristic and social constructionist view of the self and the body. Masculinity and femininity are not mere social constructions, and the male and female body are certainly not mere social constructions. Nature is not the product of the human will, even if the human will is capable of interfering with and destroying nature.

The rejection of the humanistic principle cannot be the solution.

What’s a Christian to do, then? The Christian should recognize that original sin “cannot be put down as [crime] or guilt,” since it comes from nature.

But the Christian can retain the doctrine of original sin, since he can hold that original sin is not sin, but defect.

Our Unnatural Nature

Another objection remains: That original sin does not come from nature but is, instead, contrary to nature. Original sin does not come from human nature, in the sense of our original design and makeup. It is a change to human nature introduced as punishment for Adam’s fall.

But so are all diseases. The man born blind possesses a condition that is “contrary to nature,” in the sense of original design. That is the misery of our condition. But it is no less true that the man’s blindness comes from nature, rather than from human will or sin. In this sense, “nature” refers not to our original design but to our nature as it now is, and as we are born with it.

After the fall, ours is an unnatural nature. Human nature has been broken, become defective, been corrupted as a punishment for Adam’s fall. Things do not work as they should. Our nature now operates contrary to nature.

But our unnatural nature is the hand of cards we are dealt. It is no more our fault than that.

The Zwingli Option

In the recent theological tome, Ruined Sinners to Reclaim: Sin and Depravity in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, David and Jonny Gibson write:

“Being attracted to sin and sinning are distinct but inseparable parts of the sin-guilt complex. The Reformed tradition has always held that the corruption of nature is itself sin.”

Well, apparently, not always.

Given that Calvin did not become a Calvinist until 1533, and that Zwingli’s entire career ended with his death in 1531, the Reformed tradition for that period held that the corruption of nature was not itself sin.

Contributor Raymond Blacketer acknowledges as much on page 143 of the volume, though he calls Zwingli’s “an unusual position”:

“Like the medieval theologian Peter Abelard (c. 1079-1142), Zwingli claimed that original sin is a tendency to sin, but not sin itself; original sin is a disease, but it is not guilt.”

In context, the Gibsons present their volume as coalescing the whole field of Reformed scholars to present a unified doctrine of sin not so subtly directed at a small subset of congregants: the same-sex attracted.

The effect is to tell those beset by a particular challenge to Christian obedience that they are extra sinful.

These Calvinists would no doubt reply that they think everyone is subject to concupiscence and original sin, and that therefore everyone is guilty for having propensities to desire sinful objects.

But in the midst of this Calvinist barrage, one option has been overlooked: The Zwingli Option.

The Zwingli Option is to view the doctrine of original sin as not something that further incriminates those beset by temptation. Rather, original sin is a doctrine that enables us to acknowledge our own weakness and to sympathize with our fellow sinner.

At least one atheist already knows this. Alain de Botton argues that, in sacrificing the doctrine of original sin, modern people become less understanding of human weakness and more perfectionistic.

“The Christian concept of ‘original sin’ has many dark undertones and associations. But, really, what it’s trying to get you to take on board is that, from the very beginning, there’s something a bit wrong with you.” (Laughter)

Zwingli would be proud.

In closing, let me repeat: Original sin is not sin, but defect.

And as a result, there is, indeed, something a bit wrong with each of us.

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Do people’s different beliefs about God mean they worship different gods?

Many Christians speak as though they do.

Wheaton College fired a professor for claiming that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.

In a recent video, YouTuber Redeemed Zoomer said that, because Mormons and orthodox Christians have different conceptions of God – as an ‘Eternal Trinity’ or as a ‘Godhead of many changing divine beings’ – they “believe in different gods” and Mormonism and Christianity “can’t be said to be the same religion.”

My freshman year at college, I wrote that Catholics and Protestants worship different gods, in an op-ed for the college newspaper.

But the idea that different beliefs imply different gods presupposes a controversial philosophical view: descriptivism about reference.

Descriptivism about reference is an object of critique in my Ph.D. dissertation, following many significant challenges to it in the philosophical literature of the last half-century.

But the chief objection to descriptivism about reference to God is this:

If having heretical beliefs means that one does not refer to God, then those beliefs are not even about God, much less false of Him. But then it is impossible to have heretical beliefs about God.

Hm, that’s not the result we wanted!

To get straight on what went wrong here, let’s dig in to what descriptivism is, the challenges to it, and why it is a poor way to understand theological disagreement.

What Is Descriptivism?

According to descriptivism, when you or I attempt to refer to something, we refer via a description in our minds which an object satisfies.

So, when I attempt to refer to my wife, I refer successfully if an object in the world matches the description of her in my head: “An attractive woman, with a degree in music, and an occupation as a Christian counselor, etc.”

But there are several problems with this theory:

* Descriptivism implies that it is a purely conceptual truth that my wife got a degree in music, but my wife could have gotten a degree in business or history.

An example of a conceptual truth is “All bachelors are unmarried.” It is true in virtue of the meanings of the terms. “Analytic,” “tautological,” “logical,” and “necessary” are other terms for this kind of truth.

BUT it is a contingent, empirical truth that my wife got a degree in music, not a conceptual truth. Therefore, I and others must be able to refer to my wife without the mediation of a description of her.

* While I may possess a detailed description of my wife, people often refer to individuals and objects they cannot adequately describe.

For example, I can refer to Cicero, even if all I know about him is that he was a famous Roman orator. Given that there were other famous Roman orators, this description is insufficient to distinguish him from others. Yet we successfully refer to historical figures all the time without possessing individuating descriptions of them. (An “individuating description” is one that only one individual matches.)

In fact, that is the normal condition to be in at the beginning of a research project: “I can refer to Cicero, but I can’t describe him. Now, let me find out some information about him.”

* We often successfully refer to things of which we have false beliefs or have received misinformation.

For example: I direct you to “the man in the corner drinking whiskey.” But it turns out that he is drinking vodka, if in a whiskey glass. I still successfully referred to him.

It’s like my description comes with a proviso: “Fix it up, if I’ve got the description wrong!”

Likewise, if I falsely believe that Aristotle was the teacher of Plato, as an introductory philosophy student might easily do, the inadequacy of my description of Aristotle does not change the fact that my use of “Aristotle” refers to Aristotle, and my use of “Plato” to Plato.

“Who are you studying?”

“Aristotle, the teacher of Plato — or was it the other way around?”

In fact, that is precisely why my statement is false. Aristotle did not teach Plato. If the inadequacy of my description of Aristotle interfered with my ability to refer to him, then my belief that “Aristotle taught Plato” would not even be false, which it is.

Descriptivism misdescribes the phenomena of reference and description.

Descriptivism about Divine Reference?

Let’s apply these lessons over to theology:

Consider what we could call descriptivism about divine reference.

On this theory, we successfully refer to God only if we possess an accurate description of him. If our description is inaccurate, we refer to a different god ( … or “god,” or something).

But let’s consider the three objections to descriptivism in a theological context:

* Descriptivism about divine reference implies it is a purely conceptual truth that God is a Trinity, became Incarnate, etc.

In other words, if you’ve got the right concept of God, you’ll just know that God is a Trinity.

Now, some theologians have defended this, like Anselm, Hegel, Van Til, Frame, and Poythress.

But most people think that you can’t know just by attending to the concept of “God” that He is a Trinity. After all, you might have started with the wrong concept of God.

At least on the mainstream view, that God is a Trinity is not a conceptual truth; rather, it had to be revealed. Likewise, on the mainstream view, the Incarnation of the Son of God arises from the will of God and so was contingent, rather than necessary and conceptual.

Furthermore, these truths about God do not enable us to refer to God, as if you couldn’t refer to God unless you already knew them. Rather, the ability to refer to God enables us to learn truths about God.

We can refer to God before we can describe God.

* If descriptivism about divine reference is true, then I can only refer to God if I have an individuating description of God.

Depending on what you’re after, this is either way too easy or way too challenging.

After all, “the Creator of the universe” seems to be sufficient to pick out God only.

But then, a bunch of heretics and people from other religions are able to refer to God because they also think he is the Creator of the universe.

So we can make it more challenging. We’ll say that you can only refer to God if your description of him is specific enough that only orthodox Christians hold it.

But then, the bar seems to be too high. Kids will, presumably, be unable to refer to God, much less pray to him. Moreover, when adults attempt to teach them things about God, the kids will be unable to believe them about God — at least until they learn enough truths that their use of the word “God” starts to refer to Him.

Whether descriptivism sets the bar too high or too low, it seems that we are able to refer to God even if our description of him is insufficient.

* In order for us to have false beliefs about God, our uses of “God” must already refer to Him.

If we want to say that heretics and non-Christians have false theology, their sentences have to at least refer to God.

Take the sentence, “God did not become incarnate.” If “God” does not, in that sentence, refer to God, then on what grounds can we say it is false?

Perhaps “God” in that sentence refers to something else, god1. But then the truth of “God did not become incarnate” does not turn on whether God became incarnate, but on whether god1 became incarnate.

But then, these beliefs are not false. After all, the Mormon god (godLDS) did not become incarnate. (He started as a man and became God — or godLDS.) It may be false of God that he did not become incarnate, but the Mormon belief isn’t about God; it’s about godLDS.

If false theological beliefs do not even refer to God, then false belief is impossible. Heck, heresy is impossible.

But we can refer to the man in the corner drinking vodka even if we misdescribe him. So it follows that we can refer to God without describing him sufficiently, or even accurately.

In fact, my descriptions would not even count as inaccurate unless they were descriptions of God.

Even false beliefs about God are about God.

Even people with false beliefs about God refer to God.

Descriptivism about divine reference misdescribes the phenomena of reference to and description of God.

The Alternative: Direct Divine Reference Theory

What should we think if we abandon descriptivism about divine reference?

In philosophy, the alternative to descriptive reference is direct reference.

According to direct reference theory, the meaning of a term is the thing it refers to, without the mediation of a description.

Effectively, a term tags something in the world, rather than catching it in the net of a description.

For more on tags v. nets, read this:

If we adopt a “direct divine reference theory,” then our word “God” refers to God, independently of any particular description we may believe concerning God.

It follows that the true things we say of God are not merely conceptual; they must be learned and received through natural and special revelation.

We can also refer to God even while our conception of God is rather inadequate. This enables us to learn new things about the God to whom we already refer.

Also, children can refer to God and pray to Him, despite limited knowledge about Him.

In the same way, people in religious traditions that differ from Orthodox Christianity, or none at all, may refer to God despite their inadequate conceptions about God.

Most importantly, the only reason their, and our, beliefs about God can be said to be false of God, is that we all successfully refer to Him. Even our false beliefs about God are only false because they refer to God, of whom they are false.

The very possibility of false belief, and even heresy, presupposes that it is possible to refer to God despite the inadequacy of our descriptions or conceptions of God.

So let’s drop the talk about people believing in different gods.

Instead, let’s discuss what is true and false of the God to whom we all successfully refer.

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