No Neutral Ground

Dr Craig Ireland on Borrowed Light and Haddon's new Apologetics course

In October, Haddon Institute opens its Apologetics course at undergraduate and graduate level, with Borrowed Light by Academic Dean Dr Craig Ireland as its principal textbook. The course arrives in a Queensland markedly different from the one many churches remember. In 1971, 87.3 per cent of Queenslanders identified as Christian; by 2021, that figure was 45.7 per cent. Over the same period, those reporting no religion rose from 5.9 per cent to 41.2 per cent, including a jump from 29.7 per cent in 2016.

For the church, that is no reason to fall silent. Nathanael Duffy, a graduate student at Haddon, asks Dr Ireland how the new course will equip Christians to defend their faith and take the argument back to its critics.

Nathanael Duffy: Apologetics is already taught all over the world. Why build a course for Queensland, and why now?

Dr Craig Ireland: Because the objection is local, even when the arguments themselves are old. At the barbecue or on the building site, the challenge may arrive with a shrug: 'Religion's fine, mate. Just keep it to yourself.' A Christian can prepare for a debate and find himself facing indifference instead.

You can't answer a shrug with a syllogism. First, you have to uncover the convictions inside it. 'Nobody can know for sure' is a claim about knowledge. 'Keep it to yourself' is a claim about what belongs in public. 'I don't need God' is a claim about the human condition. None of those becomes neutral because it is said casually.

The sceptic who thinks he has no worldview is a metaphysician who has never been introduced to himself. The course makes the introduction.

ND: The course text is your book, Borrowed Light. What does the title mean?

CI: It means the light is already there. The unbeliever's mathematics works. His moral outrage is often right. When he exposes a church that protected an abuser, his accusation may be entirely true. He is seeing by the same light that I see by.

Borrowed Light asks where that light comes from. Every argument about God already relies on truth, meaning, and the laws of logic. The sceptic uses them before breakfast. He did not create them, and denying their source does not make them his property.

The book's claim is categorical: the Triune God of Scripture is the necessary ground of rationality itself. His existence is the precondition of evidence, hypotheses, and the people arguing over them. Every attempted denial still has to draw on His account to pay for its reasoning.

The Christian borrows the light too. Psalm 36:9 says, 'In Your light we see light.' Common ground exists. Neutral ground does not. The ground is common because it belongs to God.

Romans 1 puts the offence precisely: although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or give thanks. Knowing and acknowledging are different acts. The question reaches beyond intellectual equipment to worship. Man can see. Will he thank the One who gives the light?

ND: You hold a law degree as well as your theological doctorates. Must Christianity always be the defendant in the public square?

CI: The usual picture is the Christian on the witness stand, defending, explaining, apologising for whichever part of Scripture the culture finds embarrassing this year. I want students to learn to cross-examine.

A good cross-examination can be quiet. You take the witness back through what he has actually said and let his own testimony do the work. If he tells you moral judgments are merely personal preferences, ask why his outrage obliges anybody else to change. If he declares that no truth is objective, ask whether that declaration is supposed to be true for you as well.

You listen carefully because you intend to take the answer seriously enough to test it. A quiet question can do a great deal of damage to a confident error. The course trains students to hear those moments and name them without flinching.

ND: The book, drawing from Greg Bahnsen’s classic work, calls this 'the impossibility of the contrary'. What does that mean?

CI: Take the claim, 'There is no truth.' Is that true? Or offer me an argument that no inference is valid. Why should its conclusion follow? The denial has used the very thing it set out to abolish. It has certified the reality it was trying to dismiss.

That is retorsion: the argument turns back upon its author. Some objections collapse in the act of being stated. They cannot be repaired by saying them more confidently.

From there, the book investigates what these unavoidable realities are and what grounds them. It argues through their content and necessity to their ultimate source. Revelation discloses the Triune God, and reason recognises that His revealed nature answers the requirements it has uncovered.

That progression matters. We must establish each conclusion with the kind of argument that can actually carry it. I expect students to follow the whole case. It is no use memorising the last sentence while skipping the reasoning that makes it unavoidable.

ND: Why spend so much time on mathematics and the laws of logic?

CI: Because the sceptic is standing on them while he argues. When he demands evidence, he is already using logic to demand it. When he drives over the Story Bridge, he trusts that the mathematics describes something real about the steel. The reliability of that knowledge deserves an explanation.

Start with a simple question. Was seven odd before there was anyone to count? Of course. The mathematician discovers that truth; he does not legislate it. A valid inference remains valid when everybody overlooks it. Logic judges our thinking, including the thinking that gets it wrong.

Then ask what we are dealing with. The same mathematical claim can be spoken, printed, or remembered. Its physical expressions change while its meaning remains. Shredding the page does not shred the truth printed on it. The book argues that intelligible content requires an intellectual ground. Describing ink or brain activity does not discharge that obligation.

Our contingent minds cannot legislate necessary truth. An evolutionary history of a brain cannot, merely by recounting its development, establish what must hold in every possible world. Put eternal truths in a realm independent of every mind, and you still owe an account of their intelligible content and our reliable knowledge of them. Call mathematics a useful fiction, and you still owe us an explanation of why this fiction describes the world so successfully. Renaming the debt does not pay it.

Borrowed Light examines those alternatives and argues that the necessary ground is God's eternal understanding. Logical truth is necessary because His nature is necessary. He does not manufacture it by an arbitrary choice. We know truly because He made minds capable of understanding His world. The sceptic spends that inheritance every day, even while disputing the existence of its Giver.

ND: How do you get from that to the Christian God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?

CI: We investigate both the truth by which we know and the existence of the things we know. The book argues that a world of dependent beings requires a ground that depends on nothing. In God, existence is intrinsic. He receives it from no one. Everything else stands on received existence.

The doctrine of the Trinity does not fall out of the statement that seven is odd. God reveals Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Reason examines that disclosure and finds the requirements it has uncovered fulfilled in Him. The book calls this ratification: recognising the revealed answer and understanding why it answers the question.

Consider personal life and love. God does not acquire them by making creatures. The Father, Son, and Spirit are eternally God. Creation depends on that eternal fullness; the fullness never depended on having a creation.

The argument is that this answer is exclusive. The revealed Trinity supplies what the rival accounts cannot. That is why revelation, redemption, human dignity, and our final destiny belong to the same case. We are following the light all the way to its source.

ND: Does that still leave room for historical evidence and the resurrection?

CI: Of course. Jesus Christ did not rise in the abstract. He died, was buried, and rose again in history. Paul makes the stakes explicit: if Christ is not risen, our faith is empty. Christian apologetics has no business treating the resurrection as an optional illustration.

The book examines how we know the past and then gives sustained attention to the resurrection. We examine the testimony and the explanations offered for it. We also examine the assumptions brought into the courtroom. If a critic excludes every miracle before hearing any witness, he has announced a philosophical ban and called it history. That ban must answer questions too.

A historical event can be contingent and still be known with certainty. The resurrection belongs to God's freely purposed work of redemption, and His testimony is infallible. An event's contingency does not make the God who testifies to it uncertain or unreliable.

My certainty rests on the God who speaks truthfully in Scripture. The historical examination is real, the testimony is real, and the event is real. We are proclaiming the risen Christ, and we should speak as though that is what we believe.

ND: What about the Royal Commission, abuse, and churches that protected their own?

CI: The first thing a Christian owes that objection is agreement. It was evil. Christ spoke of millstones. There is no Christian defence of covering up abuse. We owe those harmed the truth, justice, and care. If a student learns nothing from this course except to stop being defensive at that moment, the fee was worth paying.

But the honest question must run the other way as well, when the conversation reaches it. The outrage is right. What is it standing on? If morality amounts only to preference, social convention, or the advantage of the stronger party, what makes the condemnation binding on the person who prefers the abuse? An objective wrong remains wrong even when its perpetrators approve of it. Their approval is part of the indictment.

The critic may have his facts absolutely right. He does not need a complete philosophy of morality before a church must answer for its conduct. Yet the wider argument still demands an account of the moral authority his accusation invokes. Borrowed Light argues that only God's goodness supplies that ultimate ground, and that people possess dignity because they bear His image.

That light falls on the church too. The God who condemns abuse also condemns the Christian who conceals it.

ND: It sounds demanding. Who should take this course?

CI: This course is for the church. I want Christians equipped to hold their ground at a barbecue, on a building site at smoko, in a first-year tutorial at UQ, and in the pulpit. These questions already reach people who have never opened a philosophy textbook.

The theology is not watered down for anyone. We explain the vocabulary and work through the arguments with concrete objections beside them. Borrowed Light builds one cumulative case. Its chapter introductions and glossary help students learn the language; its Field Manual takes the case into familiar conversations.

I want you to understand an objection well enough to state it fairly and answer it decisively. That takes work. The objections will not disappear because Christians decline to think.

ND: What would you say to the Christian who feels outnumbered by objections?

CI: Stop apologising for being a Christian. There are sins we must repent of. Christianity is not one of them. We have no reason to behave as though our faith has been caught out and is waiting for the culture to decide how much of it may survive.

The Apostle Peter joins readiness to answer with meekness and fear. Both belong. Australians can smell a salesman at fifty metres and contempt at a hundred. The apologist this culture needs is unafraid and unimpressed with himself at the same time.

Your certainty does not hang on winning tonight's exchange. It rests on the truthful God who has spoken, and your hope rests in Christ. That gives you room to listen, courage to answer, and reason to pray for the person across the table.

I want our students to be the calmest people in the room when the objections start. The sceptic is already reasoning in God's world. We intend to show him whose world it is, and to call him to its risen Lord.

Census figures: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Snapshot of Queensland, 28 June 2022.