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Mentoring

Tactics: the worst mistake a Christian can make when doing apologetics

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I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

So, this is just an advice post for doing apologetics.

Here are three situations I’ve run into while doing apologetics in the last month.

First situation. I was talking with a lady who is an atheist. I had a copy of “God’s Crime Scene” in my hand, and she asked me about it. I told her that it was a book written by the guy who solved the homicide case that I asked her to watch on Dateline. She remembered – it was the two-hour special on the woman who was killed with a garrotte. She pointed at the book and said “what’s in it?” I said, it has 8 pieces of evidence that fit better with a theistic worldview than with an atheistic one, and some of them scientific. Her reply to me was – literally – “which denomination do you want me to join?”

Second situation. I was talking with a friend of mine who teaches in a Catholic school. She was telling that she got the opportunity to talk to her students about God, and found out that some of them were not even theists, and many of them had questions. So she asked them for questions and got a list. The list included many hard cases, like “what about the Bible and slavery” and “why do Christians oppose gay marriage?” and so on.

Third situation. Talking to a grad student about God’s existence. I’m laying out my scientific arguments for her, holding up the peer-reviewed papers for each discovery. I get to the Doug Axe paper on protein folding probabilities, and she holds up her hand. One question: “Am I going to Hell?”

So think about those three situations. In each case, the opponent is trying to reject Christianity by jumping way, way ahead to the very end of the process. When you do Christian apologetics, you do not take the bait and jump to the end of the process dealing with nitty gritty details until you have made your case for the core of the Christian worldview using your strongest evidence. Let me explain.

So, your strongest evidence as a Christian are the scientific arguments, along with the moral argument. Those would include (for starters) the following:

  1. kalam cosmological argument
  2. cosmic fine-tuning
  3. galactic and stellar habitability
  4. origin of life / DNA
  5. molecular machines / irreducible complexity
  6. the moral argument

The problem I am seeing today is that atheists are rejecting discussions about evidence because they think that all we are interested in is getting them to become Christians. Well, yes. I want you to become a Christian. But I know perfectly well what that entails – it entails a change of life priorities. Both of the women I spoke to are living with their boyfriends, and the kids in the Catholic school just want to have fun. None of them wants to believe in a God who will require self-denial, self-control, and self-sacrifice. Nobody wants God to be in that leader position in their lives. Christianity is 100% reversed from today’s me-first, fun-seeking, thrill-seeking, fear-of-missing-out travel spirit of the age.

So, how to answer all these late-game questions? The answer is simple. You don’t answer any late-game questions until the person you are talking with accounts for the widely-accepted data in your list. These are things that have got to be accepted before any discussion about minor issues like one angel vs two angels at the empty tomb can occur. When we discuss all the basic issues where the evidence is the strongest, then we can go on to discuss issues where the evidence is debatable, then finally, in the last bits before the end, we can discuss these other kinds of questions.

How to explain why this process must be followed to the person who asks specific questions about minor issues? Simple. You explain that your goal is not to get them to become a Christian right now. That you want to let them believe anything thing they want. That’s right. They can believe anything they want to believe. As long as what they believe is consistent with the evidence. And what I am going to do is give them the evidence, and then they can believe whatever they want – so long as it’s consistent with the evidence.

So, for example, I’m going to tell them 3 pieces of evidence for a cosmic beginning of the universe: the expanding universe (redshift), the cosmic microwave background radiation, and the light element abundances. That’s mainstream science that shows that the universe came into being out of nothing, a finite time in the past. And I will charge them not to believe in any religion that assumes that the universe has always been here. For example, Mormonism is ruled out, they believe in eternally existing matter. See how that works? Hey, Ms. Atheist. You can believe anything you want. As long as what you believe is consistent with the evidence. 

I think this approach of not letting them rush you to the end at the beginning is important for two reasons. First, we can get our foot in the door to talk about things that are interesting to everyone, in a non-stressed environment. Everyone can talk about evidence comfortably. Second, we show that we hold our beliefs because we are simply letting evidence set boundaries for us on what we are allowed to believe. We can’t believe not-Christianity, because not-Christianity is not consistent with the evidence. And you start with the most well-supported evidence, and eliminate worldviews that are falsified by the most well-supported evidence. Atheism actually gets falsified pretty quickly, because of the scientific evidence.

So, that’s my advice. Had a friend of mine named William try this out about a week ago. It went down like this:

William to me:

This guy I know messaged me and bragged for a while about how easy he can dismantle Christianity. He said: “present the gospel to me as you understand it. I’ll simply ask questions to demonstrate it is not worth your belief.”

WK to William:

First of all, he isn’t allowed to just sit there and poke holes in your case, he has to present a positive case for atheism. Second, don’t discuss Christianity with him at all until you first discuss the evidence for theism – start with the good scientific evidence.

And William wrote this to his friend:

The way I’m wired is that I process all competing theories and go with the best one. By doing a comparative analysis of worldviews I find that Christian theology easily explains the most about the world I find myself living in.

I’m pretty sure that a God of some sort exists because of the scientific evidence for the origin of the universe and the fine tuning in physics. From there I find it quite intuitive that if a God went through the trouble of creating and tuning a universe for life that this God likely has some sort of interest in it and has revealed Himself to humanity in some way.

From there I can look at the major world religions and compare them to see which one explains the past and the present the best. Christianity easily comes out on top.

And then a few days later, I got this from William:

I finally got the agnostic to tell me what he thinks about origin and fine tuning. When I started pointing out that his views were unscientific, he blew a gasket, called me dishonest and told me he didn’t want to discuss anything further.

And that’s where you want to be. Cut off all discussions where the challenger tries to jump to the end and get you to debate the very last steps of your case. Present the strongest evidence for your core claims, and get him to account for this evidence within his own worldview. Lead the discussion with public, testable evidence. All warfare depends on picking the terrain, weapons and tactics that allow you to match your strength against your opponent’s weakness.

News

Fascist Twitter permanently bans conservative, no warnings, no explanations, no appeals

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Twitter bans another conservative with no previous violations
Far-left fascist monopoly Twitter bans a conservative with no warnings, no previous violations, and no indication of which tweet violated their rules

Although Twitter allows tweets from radical leftist anti-Semites like Louis Farrakhan, they permanently ban moderate conservatives with no explanation of which specific rules those conservatives violated. There are no warnings. There is no appeal. It’s time for the government to step in and break up the big social media monopolies.

Here’s the story from The Federalist:

Federalist Contributor Jesse Kelly was permanently suspended from Twitter on Sunday for “repeat violations of the Twitter rules,” according to a message from Twitter Support. Kelly is a combat Veteran Marine, conservative radio host, and former Republican candidate for U.S. Congress.

Twitter did not explain what rules Kelly violated, or if there was a specific tweet in question.

[…]Kelly is a frequent guest on Fox News, and ironically, his last appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show was to discuss online censorship.

All we have is a copy of Twitter’s message (screenshot above), about the permanent ban. No other reasons were given.

Requests for more information from conservative journalists were ignored, and no specific reasons for the permanent ban were given.

Note that a permanent Twitter ban isn’t a ban where they just ask you to delete specific Tweets that violate their rules. In the past, Twitter asked a Canadian feminist to delete a tweet where she said that a transgender woman was a biological man. You can’t say that a woman has to have a vagina on Twitter – that’s hate speech, and you’ll be banned if you say that.  She was allowed to delete the offending tweets to get her account back. Kelly was not told which of his tweets was offensive, he was just permanently banned.

But do you know what isn’t banned on Twitter? Saying that all Jews are termites. That tweet is fine with them, because it comes from a leftist. The account that tweeted that is still active.

The Times of Israel reports:

The Anti-Defamation League on Thursday called on Twitter to remove tweets by Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader, from the social network after he posted a video in which he appeared to compare Jews to termites.

But when the Buzzfeed news site asked Twitter whether Farrakhan’s latest post violated its newly announced  policy against “dehumanizing language,” it was told the religious leader was not in violation of any rules.

It’s time for the government to step in and break up this corporate monopoly. And maybe we need to have some civil suits with some billion dollar decisions against these left-wing fascists, for violating first amendment rights of conservatives.

Polemics

Jay Richards answers the objection “Who Designed the Designer?”

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

So I have presented the evidence for a cosmic beginning and for cosmic fine-tuning many times to atheists, going slowly over the history of cosmology and astrobiology, pointing out the discoveries that led all the science-accepting grown-ups to accept the Big Bang cosmology and the cosmic fine-tuning.

A couple of examples of evidence for the cosmic beginning: cosmic microwave background radiation and nuclesosynthesis.

And some examples of cosmic fine-tuning would be the gravitational force and the strong force.

The response from atheists who listen to this evidence is usually something along the lines of “Am I going to Hell?” and “Who made God?” or “Who Designed the Designer?”

Well, I’ve answered the Am I Going To Hell response to scientific evidence for a Creator and Designer in another place. The response to the who made God question is simple: 1) scientists acknowledge the Big Bang as the beginning of all space, matter and time itself. 2) the cause of the beginning of time must exist outside of time, and the cause is therefore eternal, and CANNOT therefore come into being itself.

For an answer to the last question about the Designer, let’s turn to Jay Richards, probably my favorite Christian thinker, (tied with Stephen C. Meyer).

Watch this for two minutes:

I just want to make sure that everyone gets the two points there.

First point is obvious. When it comes to objects that have the appearance of design, we have to look at the features of the object itself. If the object exhibits hallmarks of design, e.g. – specified complexity, irreducible complexity, etc., then we have to compare the design and non-design explanations for the object and choose which is the most reasonable. We do not need to know anything about who the designer(s) are, and you can see this in other areas like SETI, where nothing at all may be known about the originator of a coded message from space, yet still naturalists can accept that a coded message was sent (e.g. – first 100 prime numbers in beats and pauses).

The second point is that atheists have to account for the fine-tuning within their worldview as well, and give an explanation that is more probable than a Designer.

Questions like “Who made God?” and “Who Designed the Designer?” are asked in order to avoid having to provide an explanation for the scientific evidence we have today. It’s not that atheists have the answer to the evidence, it’s that they want to ask silly questions in order to avoid having to comply (rationally speaking) with the scientific evidence they see with their own eyes. Today, we have the scientific evidence for a beginning of the universe, and for fine-tuning of the universe to support complex, embodied intelligent agents. So that’s why you need to focus them on the important question: what is the explanation for the scientific evidence within an atheistic framework – how do they fit the scientific evidence we have today into their worldview? 

You have to watch out for their response of forced ignorance in the face of scientific evidence and demand that they deal with the scientific evidence that we have today. The more progress we have made in science in the last 50 years, the stronger the evidence for a cosmic beginning and for cosmic fine-tuning have become. This isn’t going away. Denial of today’s evidence and hoping for reversals of what we know today is not a rational response to the scientific evidence of today.

Let me give you a case in point. There was a recent debate where a prominent atheist said he was not even sure that the universe began to exist, despite the fact that this is guaranteed under the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem. The BGV theorem says that any universe that is on balance expanding must have a cosmic beginning. (And our universe will be expanding outward, eternally) Atheists like to clump together on atheist podcasts, atheist blogs and atheist chat rooms where they can all agree amongst themselves that the universe didn’t have a beginning and wasn’t designed – so that they can keep living as if no one designed them for a purpose that might interfere with their desires. But this is just willful ignorance in the face of solid scientific evidence, and we need to demand that they account for the scientific evidence we have today within their worldview. We can’t allow them to continue in their Flat-Earth worldview because they just plug their ears and shut their eyes to the progress of science. Self-inflicted ignorance is not a rational response to the progress of science.