Brian did another interview, this time with Sean McDowell. He’s pretty fun to listen to.
Topics:
- with respect to faith, do young people care about more about truth or emotional happiness?
- what projects is Sean working on lately?
- what was it like being the son of famous apologist Josh McDowell?
- how did Sean become a Christian?
- what did Sean’s father say when Sean expressed doubts in Christianity?
- how did Sean build up his convictions about the truth of Christianity?
- what effect does the father’s relationship to the child have on the child’s Christian faith?
- how did Sean get interested in apologetics?
- what resources had the biggest effect on Sean’s apologetics training?
- should you be concerned when someone you care about starts to doubt?
- what should you say to someone who has doubts?
- how should you respond to tough questions from young people?
- how can a person encourage their church to adopt apologetics?
- what’s a good book on intelligent design theory for young people?
This is fun because I spend a lot of time thinking about how to pass my faith along to my children in a way that will still allow them to question and rebel. It’s a really challenging problem, but Sean seems to know how to do it.
Don’t miss the MP3 from Sean’s first debate on whether morality is possible without God.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I was wondering if you are at all familiar with Presuppositional apologetics (as opposed to Evidential Apologetics)? Greg Bahnson was a great debator in this area of apologetics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdfkxSAPHCQ Kerrigan Skelly’s presentation on the topic.
Also, Jason Lisle has a whole DVD series on Presuppositional apologetics http://www.answersingenesis.org/PublicStore/product/Nuclear-Strength-Apologetics-Part-1,6187,229.aspx
Just interested to know if you are familiar with this line of debate. I am new to your blog, Churchmouse introduced me. I’m glad to have found another thinking Christian with great content on his blog. :)
God bless!
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Yes, I am familiar with it, but I find that evidential arguments based on the progress of science are superior in the university and in the workplace, where non-Christian roam about.
I understand that you are a young-earth creationist, but you may be surprised to know that generally agreed upon science furnishes many wonderful arguments for a Creator and Designer.
For example, there’s the cosmological argument, supported by the discovery of the beginning of the universe, the fine-tuning argument, the habitability argument, the argument from biological information in DNA, the argument from the sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian era, the argument from irreducible complexity, and the argument for limits of mutation/selection to produce new functional information in the cell.
And then there is the minimal facts argument for the resurrection, which does not assume that the Bible is inerrant or even generally reliable. Instead, it makes use of minimal facts from the earliest New Testament sources that pass a boatload of strict historical tests from the mainstream study of ancient history.
So yes, evidentialism all the way with me. BUT.
I do use pre-suppositional arguments from morality and rationality, both of which are supported only if some form of theism is true.
One problem with pre-sup is that people today trust scientific arguments more than logical ones, for better or worse. Science is king today in the public square, and a good Christian apologist has to master mainstream scientific arguments, even if they are young-earth themselves, e.g. – Paul Nelson and Marcus Ross. (Young-earth arguments have limited effectiveness outside the church, for now – that could always change)
But pre-suppositionalism also doesn’t get you to Christianity – you need the resurrection for that – that’s an evidential argument. Evidentialism is also more Biblical, since Jesus, Paul and Peter all appeal to the historical evidence of the resurrection. Jesus even talks about the sign of Jonah, which is the resurrection, as a way to authenticate his claims to be the sole means of salvation from sin for mankind. Paul appeals to the creation in Romans 1, as does the author of Hebrews 11:3. Etc. I am not sure if pre-sup is ever used in the Bible, and I like to do what people do in the Bible.
Sorry to be so disagreeable. One of my Hindu-raised atheist co-workers IM’d me last night to tell me that he was busy watching a presentation of the DNA argument, like what Stephen C. Meyer makes. (I didn’t ask him too, but that’s what my co-workers do since we talk about science all the time at work). The non-Christians like the science, for better or worse.
And at the very least you need to make a good argument for the resurrection, and that’s easier to do after you make a scientific argument for a Creator/Designer. If you want a really conservative scholar who is at Liberty University and makes a dynamite case for the resurrection, try Gary Habermas. He’s very conservative, but he knows how to debate in the university. I also like Mike Licona a ton, and I think he’s also at Liberty University. Liberty’s a young-earth school, so I’m guessing these guys are young-earth, but I know that they are not afraid to use the mainstream science to prove God.
Just FYI, I think that Darwinian evolution is about as well-supported as a flat-Earth. I do not exaggerate. Old-earth doesn’t mean you believe in Darwinian evolution.
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There were so many wholes in Corbett’s argument that I don’t know where to begin. Black people were liberated from slavery on the basis that we are all created in God’s image and it was the CHURCHES that heavily mobilized rights during the Civil Rights movement and the period prior to that. Corbett also mentions that theology is what prompted the most atrocities in the world. Ah, excuse me but he seems to forget out Mao Zedong, Stalin, and Lil Kim’s atheist regimes and how they killed more people in a fifty year period then all the religious wars combined. I guess he does not mind if people kill out of other ideologies but only if they are religious should people believing in God be condemn.
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I could not agree with you more. Wasn’t that a great debate to really show how poorly atheism fares when trying to rationally ground the minimal requirements for morality?
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One Atheist does this = Atheism means this
Really?
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It really does. He approached the whole debate on authority but seems to only condemn authority if the person does it out of religious conviction but fails to say anything on atheist regimes which just replace themselves as gods.
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