I have tried very hard to avoid writing about Peter Boghossian because I kept hoping that someone would speak to him and set him straight before he went too far.

Basically, when you listen to the debate below, you’ll find that Boghossian redefines the word faith so that it basically means “stupidity”, and then he tries to get people of faith to accept that they are stupid according to his new definition of faith. The new definition is not found in any dictionary, and it’s not used commonly, either.

Anyway, here are the details:

This Week on Unbelievable : Peter Boghossian vs Tim McGrew – debate on ‘A Manual For Creating Atheists”

Peter Boghossian teaches philosophy and is the author of ‘A Manual for Creating Atheists’. He believes that faith is a ‘false epistemology’ (way of knowing things) and even describes it as a ‘virus of the mind’. Tim McGrew is a Christian philosophy professor specialising in epistemology. He contests Boghossian’s definition of faith and debates the merits of his recent book. To cast your vote on the definition of faith visit www.facebook.com/unbelievablejb.

The MP3 file is here.

Topics: (I reserve the right to satirize Boghossian in this. Listen to the audio if you want his exact words)

• PB: My book tries to avoid the “obfuscations” of reputable, credentialed Christian scholars and discusses faith at my intellectual level
• PB: The goal of the book is to help people abandon the dictionary definition of the word “faith” and accept the definition I invented
• TM: Defining the word “faith” in the wrong way is not the right way to start an authentic, respectful conversation
• TM: Faith does not mean “pretending to know things you don’t know” – that is not a standard definition
• TM: the only people who accept your definition of faith are you and the people who follow you online
• TM: your whole book is predicated on on a wrong definition of faith
• PB: that is my definition of faith based on my experience of talking to lots of people
• TM: He says this is how billions of people define faith – but not in my experience, maybe satirists like Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain do
• TM: Your definition of faith is not in the Oxford English Dictionary and that definition is based on common usage of the word faith
• TM: The New Testament definition of faith “pistis” means trust
• PB: There are 50-100 people who use the term that way, and only in academia
• TM: How about “The Good Atheist” who interviewed you? He is not an academic or a theist, but he didn’t accept your definition
• PB: You are “extraordinarily isolated” from the real definition of faith
• TM: Faith is not belief without evidence, it is trust based on at least some evidence
• PB: Christian leaders use the word according my definition, I won’t name any or quote any, though
• JB: So you are basically saying that Christians are lying when they express their faith, since they know what they are saying isn’t true but they say it anyway
• PB: What percentage of Christians use the word faith to mean “belief without evidence”
• TM: Well below 1%. It may be the case that their evidence is not very good, but they do rest their beliefs on evidence
• TM: Faith is trusting, holding to, and acting on what one has good reasons to believe is true in the face of difficulties
• PB: That’s not what people mean by faith, they mean my definition
• JB: What do you mean when you say that faith is a “virus of the mind”, and a “mental illness”? School programs to remove faith?
• PB: Think about how atheists feel when they are told they will go Hell
• PB: Christians are hurting people, so that means they have a mental disorder that needs to be cured in a systematic way
• PB: Faith is an epistemic virus that hijacks the reasoning process

At that point I quit summarizing, because I didn’t think he was worth listening to any more.

He is clearly not aware of how even basic Christian apologetics books that are bestsellers cover evidences like the Big Bang, the cosmic fine-tuning, the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, galactic habitability, stellar habitability, New Testament reliability, historical Jesus, philosophical arguments for theism, and so on. This is the bottom-shelf of Christian apologetics, widely read by rank-and-file Christians, but Boghossian seems to be completely unaware of it. He needs to get out more and talk to people outside of radical atheist circles. Maybe he needs to pick up a serious book like “Debating Christian Theism” and read it before he opens his mouth on topics he knows nothing about.

But that’s not all. As, I explained before, the concept of faith presented in the Bible agrees with what Dr. McGrew said – faith is trust based on evidence. That is the Biblical view.

And finally, this:

John 10:37-38: [NASB]

37 If I do not do the works of My Father, do not believe Me;

38 but if I do them, though you do not believe Me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father.”

The words of Jesus – he is saying: believe me because of the evidence I provide from miracles that you can see with your own eyes. Period. End of discussion.

So Boghossian’s view of faith is nowhere except in his own mind. Not in the apologetics literature. Not in the writings of any reputable Christian scholar. Not in the Bible. Not in the words of Jesus. It’s enough to make me think that this talk about “mental disorders” and “viruses of the mind” is just projection.

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Thank goodness we have debates like this so that we can find out where Christians really come down on faith.