three great philosophical questions of life:
ORIGIN
PURPOSE
DESTINY
where did I come from?
why am I here?
where am I going?
“Really? Philosophy is deep.” He seemed intrigued, so I
began to ask him some philosophical questions. How would
you define truth? How would you define knowledge? After
a few minutes talking about the nature of truth and knowl-
edge, I asked him how he would answer the three great
philosophical questions of life.
Scott quickly showed himself to be an agnostic who
believed in naturalistic evolution. He struggled with the
second and third questions and finally gave up. “How would
you answer these questions?” he asked. Rather than going
directly to the Bible, I decided to use the Socratic method to
help him come to his own conclusions that would point him
in the direction of Christianity.
Origins
I asked Scott, “Could something come from nothing?”
He said, “No.”
Then I said, “If something cannot come from nothing,
then if anything now exists, then something must have
always existed. Right?” He agreed.
I asked, “Do you agree with the vast majority of scientists
who say that the universe had a beginning?”
He said, “Yes.”
12
“So if the universe had a beginning and could not have
come from nothing, then something existed beforehand
that was responsible for bringing the universe into exis-
tence, right?”
He responded, “Yes.”
I inquired, “What would this something need to be like to
bring about the universe? Wouldn’t it have to be very power-
ful and intelligent?”
Once he accepted that, I asked, “Wouldn’t you think that
if this eternal, all-powerful being put us here, that he would
want to let us know why? Especially since we have the capac-
ity to think about these questions, and we have the desire to
know the answers?”
This reasoning made sense to Scott, and I proceeded: “If
he did reveal himself to us, then how do you think he did?”
Law of Noncontradiction
We talked about different options out there, like the Koran
or the Bible. I told him that there are many religions with
revelation claims, but they could not all be true because they
contradict each other.
According to the law of noncontradiction, something
cannot both be true and not true at the same time and in