Readers of my material will have gathered that I do a bit of programming.[1] Not very sophisticated programming, perhaps (Pascal, Turbo Pascal), but at least it’s with a compiler and not with a mere interpreter, and it’s not “object-oriented” (OOP) like the Micro:bit or Meccanoid kits. Owing to the rigorous syntax of Pascal, the programmer is forced to respect strict, logical reasoning.
In this brief introduction to the present issue, I shall offer an illustration of the potential benefits of programming to the apologetic task. We shall begin with an important point for program verification and then show its application to fundamental arguments in defense of biblical faith.
Program Verification
Two specialists write concerning the weakness inherent in the usual technique of verifying one’s computer programs:
Testing can only detect the presence of errors; it can never prove their absence. All we can say about the program is that for a wide range of carefully chosen data cases it has worked properly and, from this experience, we extrapolate to the statement that the program will work correctly under all circumstances, even for those test cases that were not explicitly tested. This extrapolation is really a “leap of faith” that is not based on either mathematical formalities or physical laws but on empirical observation and human judgment.[2]
An example of such limited testing is provided by oft-recurring advice to programmers to engage in “boundary testing.” Since it is impossible or impractical to test all possible values, one tests values at just before or just after the limits of the propositions in one’s program. “By a ‘boundary’ we mean a point at which the rule for determining the answer changes.”[3] To be sure, this kind of testing does nothing to show that values other than those on the boundaries will provide valid results.
For this reason, a more sophisticated kind of verification has been suggested. It is characterized as “informal,” in that it does not necessarily reach the level of deductive certainty, but it is a substantial improvement as compared with the testing of individual values in a program. “The important thing . . . is not to make an assertion about the behavior of a single statement, but to study the behavior of entire programs.”[4] A simple example of the applicability of this more rationally satisfying approach follows.
Assume that we were writing the following fragment to sum up the first N elements in a list:
i := 1;
sum := 0;
while i ? N do {not sure what is the correct relational operator}
begin
sum := sum + X[i];
i := i + 1
end
We are not completely sure right now whether the test condition in the loop should be i < N or i <= N. A lazy way would be simply to write out whichever one you think is correct, knowing that boundary testing will detect an error if we are wrong. . . . The [more logical] reasoning that could be done about the previous code fragment might go something like the following:
When we enter the loop the value of i is 1. We add X[1] to sum, set i to 2, and end the iteration. After one pass, we have added one item from X and i is 2. After two passes, I see that we have added in two items from X and i is 3. Therefore, it must be the case that after k passes through the loop, we will have added X[1] . . . . . X[k] to sum and i will have the value k + 1. Thus, if I want to stop when I have correctly computed X[1] + . . . + X[N], then I will want to end the loop when i has the value N + 1 at the end of the loop. The correct condition to write in the while loop must be while i <= N.[5]
Application to Apologetics
Two of the most central issues in the defense of biblical faith are God’s existence and the resurrection of Jesus Christ as proof of his deity and of the truth of his saving message.
Therefore, apologists go to great lengths to refute arguments such as:
G1: The multiverse makes God’s existence unnecessary
G2: Life can be accounted for, not by divine creation but by the seeding of basic cells or life forms from outer space
R1: Jesus survived the crucifixion by natural means
R2: Someone else was crucified in Jesus’ place
Let us suppose that, by analogy with the discussion of the pseudo-code fragment in the previous section, we are faced with the proposition
If ((G1 or G2) and/or (R1 or R2)) were true, then biblical faith is false
and that we wish to test the stated condition. Should we endeavor to counter each of the sub-arguments, much as one would test boundary conditions in a computer program?
Such an approach would be grossly inefficient, since G– and R-type arguments create potentially infinite series. (G and R are by no means limited to two similar sub-arguments each. In a contingent universe, Gn and Rn are entirely realistic sub-arguments.) The four assertions G1, G2, R1, R2 in fact represent a single, common fallacy:
If ((G1 or G2 or Gn) and/or (R1 or R2 or Rn)) were true, then any and all “natural” (non-supernatural) arguments totally lacking in evidential support would also be plausible, and it would then be impossible in religious argument to distinguish provable fact from improvable speculation.
Were that the case, religious explanation in general would fall under the epistemological axe of physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who wrote in the margin of a colleague’s paper: “This isn’t right. It isn’t even wrong.”
Therefore, instead of pursuing the refutation of individual arguments of the G and R variety, the apologist would do far better to see the total picture in the fashion of programmatic “informal verification” and decimate the underlying logic of all such arguments:
If X is in principle empirically unable to be substantiated then X can be rejected out of hand.
No empirical evidence whatever of a multiverse or of the seeding of life on earth from outer space exists. No empirical evidence at all supports the notion that Jesus physically survived the cross or that someone else died in his place.
It follows inexorably from the inherent irrationality of such arguments that the universe requires a transcendent explanation and that Jesus’ claims to deity must be taken with all seriousness.
Transcendent, divine creation is empirically confirmed by the application of contingency argumentation via the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as well as by strong empirical evidences of intelligent design in nature and in human life.[6]
Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is empirically established by eyewitness accounts of his physical appearances from Easter morning to his public ascension into heaven, and is collaterally supported by the miracles he performed throughout his public ministry and by the many detailed prophecies of the Old Testament fulfilled during that ministry.[7]
A serious consideration of the approach to verification here outlined would make unnecessary the infinite pursuit of boundary discussions limited to non-empirical religious and philosophical speculation. Such a methodology might even contribute to raising the discipline of apologetics to the more respectable intellectual level it surely deserves.
[1] See, for example, “Regeneration, Biological, Computational, Theological,” in Montgomery, Defending the Gospel in Legal Style (Bonn, Germany: Verlag fuer Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2017), pp. 373-82; and, in the present volume, infra, “A Short and Easie Method with Postmodernists” and “On Innovative Theologians.”
[2] G. Michael Schneider and Steven C. Bruell, Advanced Programming and Problem Solving with Pascal (2d ed.; New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1987), pp. 499-500.
[3] J. Winston Crawley,William G. McArthur, and Norman M. Jacobson, Structured Programming Using THINK Pascal on the Macintosh (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), pp. 77-79.
[4] Schneider and Bruell, op. cit, p. 501.
[5] Ibid., p. 508.
[6] See Montgomery, Tractatus Logico-Theologicus (6th ed.; Bonn, Germany: Verlag fuer Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2019), sec. 3.85-3.87.
[7] In the present volume, infra, see the articles, “Resurrection and Legal Evidence” and “Did Jesus Physically Rise from the Dead?”
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The Global Journal has greatly benefitted in the past from articles by the Australian apologist Philip Johnson. The current issue provides not only his two-part analysis of the legal defense of the faith offered by 19th-century Harvard law professor Simon Greenleaf but also Johnson’s catalogue of legal apologists and unique bio-bibliography of American legal apologetics. These scholarly contributions especially warm the heart of the Global Journal’s editor, since the Christian law school he founded in California was named for Simon Greenleaf, and much of the editor’s apologetic activity has centered on the legal defense of the faith (cf. William P. Broughton, The Historical Development of Legal Apologetics, with an Emphasis on the Resurrection [Maitland, FL: Xulon Press, 2009]).
John Warwick Montgomery
