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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 basket, 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

Marco Rubio co-sponsored a bill to remove due process for accused college students

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Marco Rubio with his allies: Democrat Churck Schumer and RINO John McCain
Marco Rubio with his allies: Democrat Churck Schumer and RINO John McCain

This is just shocking – it turns out that Marco Rubio supports a bill to presume that college students who are accused of rape are treated as guilty before any police involvement or any criminal trial.

National Review explains:

When it comes to due process on campus, Republicans in Congress, who campaigned on vows to rein in the Obama administration’s abuses of executive power, have largely acquiesced in its bureaucratic imposition of quasi-judicial tyranny. For more than four years, the White House and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have used an implausible reinterpretation of a 1972 civil-rights law to impose mandates unimagined by the law’s sponsors. It has forced almost all of the nation’s universities and colleges to disregard due process in disciplinary proceedings when they involve allegations of sexual assault. Enforced by officials far outside the mainstream, these mandates are having a devastating impact on the nation’s universities and on the lives of dozens — almost certainly soon to be hundreds or thousands — of falsely accused students.

One might have expected an aggressive response by House Republicans to such gross abuses of power — including subpoenas, tough oversight hearings, and corrective legislation. Instead, most of them have been mute. In the Senate, meanwhile, presidential candidate Marco Rubio of Florida, Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa, and rising star Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire have teamed with Democratic demagogues Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Claire McCaskill of Missouri in co-sponsoring a bill that would make matters even worse.

[…]These Republicans are keeping bad company. Gillibrand, for example, published two statements branding a Columbia University student a “rapist” even though he had been cleared by the university and the police had found no basis for charging him. McCaskill, ignoring two generations of progress in the way police and prosecutors approach rape allegations, oddly asserted that “the criminal-justice system has been very bad, in fact much worse than the military and much worse than college campuses, in terms of addressing victims and supporting victims and pursuing prosecutions.”

Does this remind you of anything? It reminds me of the time that Marco Rubio sided with Democrats to give (at least) 20 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. It also reminds me of the time that Marco Rubio sided with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to intervene militarily in Libya. Libya is now a failed state, there is a civil war, Christians are being crucified and Islamic State has started another caliphate there.

So, think about that false rape accusation at UVA, where the accused was slimed and judged guilty, until we found out that the whole thing was a hoax. Apparently, Rubio is all in favor of enabling this sort of situation – enough that he would co-sponsor a bill to remove due process rights from accused college men.

Here’s more from the libertarians at Reason.com:

[…]Rubio is a co-sponsor of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, which would codify into federal law several of Title IX’s most oppressive dictates. As The Washington Post’s George Will put it:

By co-sponsoring S.  590, Rubio is helping the administration sacrifice a core constitutional value, due process, in order to advance progressives’ cultural aggression. The next Republican president should be someone committed to promptly stopping this disgrace, not someone who would sign S.  590’s affirmation of it.

The Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow attempted to get to the bottom of Rubio’s support for CASA and discovered that the simplest answer was the right one: he just doesn’t care very much about due process on campus. Schow writes:

Rubio is the only GOP candidate that has seemingly taken a stance on this issue – and it is a bad one. He has co-sponsored a bill that codifies into law the overreach of the Education Department and ensures that accused students will not have a fair hearing.

In the past, I blogged about Marco Rubio’s support for amnesty, his support for Hillary Clinton’s disastrous Libya intervention, and his deliberate skipping of votes to defund Planned Parenthood to do campaign events instead. Marco Rubio also pushed for cap-and-trade legislation as Speaker of the House in Florida. This would burden the energy sector with taxes and regulations, and raise the electricity bills of American consumers (who are already hard-pressed). Rubio has a billionaire donor who is strongly in support of gay rights, gay marriage and amnesty – does anyone believe that he does not expect to get his money’s worth if Rubio is elected President?

I hope everyone understands that he has many, many problems. I like Marco Rubio. If he is the nominee, I will back him completely, as he is much better than our nominee in 2012. But right now, my vote goes to the most conservative candidate who can win. And that’s Ted Cruz.

News

As Speaker of the House in Florida, Marco Rubio pushed for cap and trade

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Marco Rubio with his allies: Democrat Churck Schumer and RINO John McCain
Marco Rubio with his allies: Democrat Churck Schumer and RINO John McCain

Somehow, I missed this story about Rubio’s support for a radical anti-business policy that is pushed by global warming alarmists. (It came up in the Fox News debate last night)

Read this from Breitbart News:

As the Speaker of the Florida state House of Representatives, now U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)  was aggressively pushing for Florida to adapt to what he viewed as an inevitable “federal cap and trade program.”

In a politically damning video, Rubio backs cap and trade and argues that Florida—his state—should get in line to comply with the federal government rather than fight back.

“Florida should do two things,” Rubio said in 2008 on Florida television, in video discovered by Breitbart News.

First, Florida should position itself for what I believe is inevitable and that is a federal cap and trade program. Florida should do everything it can to be an early complier so it can access early compliance funds and so that it can help influence what that cap and trade looks like at the federal level. So I’m in favor of giving the Department of Environmental Protection a mandate that they go out and design a cap and trade or a carbon tax program and bring it back to the legislature for ratification some time in the next two years.

Cap and trade is an environmental system that hardcore liberals including former Vice President Al Gore support. A federal cap and trade program would be centered around a carbon tax.

“It will be difficult for sure but we can back away from the fiscal cliff and the climate cliff at the same time,” Gore said in 2012. “One way is with a carbon tax.”

Support for cap and trade is basically about as politically toxic a position as a Republican can take when it comes to the party’s voters, and ranks up there among GOP base voters as about as unacceptable a position as support for amnesty for illegal aliens, government-run healthcare, restrictions against the Second Amendment or support for open borders style international trade policies.

That Rubio has now racked up questionable behavior not just on immigration and international trade—which have been known quantities heading into this election cycle—but now questions about his Second Amendment stance, his actions on Obamacare, and even his work for cap and trade have conservatives questioning if there’s anything Rubio agrees with them on.

Here’s the video:

It looks like Rubio agrees with Barack Obama on this:

Yes – Rubio and Obama agree that your electricity prices should skyrocket, because we have to stop “global warming”. So pay up, suckers. You have lots of money for global warming schemes, don’t you?

In the past, I blogged about Marco Rubio’s support for amnesty, his support for Hillary Clinton’s disastrous Libya intervention, and his deliberate skipping of votes to defund Planned Parenthood to do campaign events instead. Rubio has a billionaire donor who is strongly in support of gay rights, gay marriage and amnesty – does anyone believe that he does not expect to get his money’s worth if Rubio is elected President?

And in my afternoon post, I’ll be blogging about ANOTHER time where Rubio sided with Democrats on their priorities – this time on removing the rights of people accused of rape and sexual assault on university campuses. Rubio just seems to always want to side with Democrats on their issues, and never with conservatives on our issues.

The good news about this is that we don’t have to pick a pro-amnesty, pro-cap-and-trade, pro-Libya-debacle liberal in the GOP primary. We can vote for Ted Cruz, who has made none of these mistakes.