Polemics

William Lane Craig answers questions from an arrogant atheist

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Mary sent me this question and answer from William Lane Craig’s Question of the Week.

Here are the questions:

Hi there, I’m writting in regards to your “Q&A 170: So many athiests, so little time” answer. First of all, your two simple questions have very simple answers, and an athiest who can’t answer them isn’t a true athiest.

1)
Q. What do you mean by (you don’t believe in God)
A. I mean that I have a lack of belief the the existance of a deity, your christian God or any other.

2)
Q. What reasons do you have to think that (there is no God)
A. The Earth shows no proof of creation, every single thing on this Earth has a natural explanation, simply becasue modern science has not yet solved every problem, does not mean it never will. I’d go in to detail, but no need to bore you with the science of it all.
So, I’ve given my proof and will give far more if you ask it of me, and any wel linformed athiest will be able to answer those questions in a flash and have the burden of proof back in your hands.
In regards to scholarly work, may I point out Charles Darwin’s “The Origins of Species”, the works of Gregor Mendel, father of Genetics, William “Strata” Smith, father of Geology, Alfred Wegener “The Origin of Continents and Oceans”, Issac Newton, Galileo, On and on I go, where I stop, nobody knows!
Now, if I may turn to the real point of this e-mail besides to point out that you havent really told anyone how to argue christianity other than asking easy questions and throwing names at them. Your God is Omnicient so you say, operating on this assumption, here is how morality plays out in the bible…
1) God creates heaven and Earth and then he creates Humans.
2) God KNOWS that humans will sin
3) God puts the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden KNOWING it will drive Adam to sin.
4) God Determines that Adams sin is transmutable down to every single person that will ever exist. (Moral objection 1: The sins of the father are logically not related to the son in any way shape or form)
5) God decides that to punish people for this one sin they had nothing to do with or anything else he deams bad, they shall be sentenced to an eternity of burning hellfire. Infinite punishment for a finite crime? That sounds like Moral objection #2 to me!
6) When God sees that his creations have really gone bad, he drowns the world, killing millions of innocent people.
7) only 1600 years after the mass murder of his creations(following biblical chronology) they’ve already fallen back in to sin. So God, in his infinite wisdom, determines the best course of action, is to sacrafice his Son, who is part of himself, TO HIMSELF, to make up for the sins of the creations he made knowing they would sin!

How in the world do you rectify this!?

Cheers,

Luke

I think that Bill is doing a great thing to come down to the level of village atheist once in a while and reply, and if you read his answer, he’s actually pretty mean. And it’s a good thing, in this case, because the worldview of village atheists is a lot like the worldview of Islamic terrorists. They are so insulated from outside criticism that you really have to thrash them around a little bit in order to get them to see that they have been involved with a cult their whole lives. That’s not going to be the case with some of the better atheists like Austin Dacey and Paul Draper, but it is going to be the case with many rank and file atheists, and we need to know how to answer them, too.

News

Is global warming the secular leftist equivalent of flat-earthism?

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Either you say that this is global warming, or you get no research money and no Ph.D.
Either you say that this is global warming, or you get no research money and no Ph.D.

Here’s the latest on the 20 inches of global warming being dumped on the global warming alarmists on the secular leftist East coast.

Excerpt:

The U.S. East Coast faces a second day of travel disruption after snowstorms blanketed cities from New York to Boston, closing airports and halting trains with waist-high drifts and blinding winds.

New York City’s Central Park had 20 inches (51 centimeters) of snow by 8 a.m., the most for the month since 1948, as the storm’s center shifted north and east, the National Weather Service said. Snowfall in the city eased by daybreak while the agency issued blizzard warnings for Boston and into Maine.

More than 5,000 flights were canceled in the region since yesterday as airports closed. John F. Kennedy International will reopen at 6 p.m., while resumption times for LaGuardia Airport in New York and New Jersey’s Newark Liberty are undetermined, according to the Federal Aviation Administration’s website.

“It is horrendous in the New York City area,” Tom Kines, a meteorologist at State College, Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather Inc., said by telephone. “This is about as bad as it gets. There may have been storms that equaled this, but it doesn’t get much worse than this. To get this much snow with the amount of wind that is accompanying it, that is devastating.”

And it’s happening in Moscow, too.

This isn’t a one-off thing, the same thing happened last year.

What is annoying to me is that people are making entire academic careers based on studying Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny using expensive scientific equipment paid for by taxpayers (who don’t share their beliefs in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny).

I understand that global warming advocates are concerned about implementing communism and and coerced abortions, but why don’t they just come out and advocate for communism and coerced abortions, and stop inventing fairy tales to deceive the public at taxpayer expense. You can have your delusions and your deluded research programs where you hide the decline, but please pay for it with your own money, and keep your hands off of my children’s worldviews.

The problem with the left in academia is that there is no room for critical thinking. If you oppose the idea that people in academia and government should be able to extract wealth from the productive proivate sector to fund their research into self-serving delusions, then you get bad grades, no research money, and no Ph.D. That’s called “critical thinking” by the way. By which they mean coerced uncritical credulity.

Commentary

Are Christians too involved in politics?

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Here’s a thought-provoking post I missed at the Life Training Institute blog, about the new Wayne Grudem book on politics and the Bible.

Intro:

I’m thoroughly enjoying Wayne Grudem’s Politics According to the Bible. Finally, here’s a Christian theologian who connects the dots: Christian belief is not just about John 3: 16, but transformed living which includeds the transformation of government. True, political success can’t save souls eternally (only the gospel does that), but it can promote a more just society for the weak and oppressed. To that end, Christians should exert significant influence on government.

Grudem begins by challenging five wrong views regarding Christians and government: 1) Government should compel religion. 2) Government should exclude religion. 3) All government is evil and demonic. 4) Do evangelism, not politics. 5) Do politics, not evangelism.

[…]Most helpful to the pro-life cause is Grudem’s refutation of #4—namely, the faulty view that Christians should do evangelism not politics. Sadly, well-intentioned leaders like John MacArthur and Cal Thomas have discouraged pro-life Christians from engaging the culture through politics.

I am not a big fan of John MacArthur and Cal Thomas for the reasons stated, and I don’t think that either is really much of an evangelist in any case, since I never see them referenced as authorities on apologetics, which is really the means by which evangelism occurs in the real world.

In his book, Grudem refutes MacArthur and Thomas:

I agree that one significant way that God restrains evil in the world is through changing people’s hearts when they trust in Christ as their Savior (see 2 Cor. 5:17). But we should not turn this one way into the only way that God restrains evil in this age. God also uses civil government to restrain evil, and there is much evil that can only be restrained by the power of civil government, for there will always be many who do not trust in Christ as their Savior and many who do not fully obey him.

Klusendorf also referenced this post by evangelical Joe Carter.

Excerpt:

Consider that for more than two decades the number one issue on the agenda of the evangelical wing of the religious right has been abortion.

The bitter irony is that this is perceived as the “number one” political issue for evangelicals when it really isn’t one of our top priorities. If evangelicals–and Christians in general–truly cared about this issue, abortion on demand would not be the law of the land.

Imagine if every Christian in America vowed not to cast a vote for any candidate of any party for any office if they supported or condoned the killing of the unborn. Imagine if every pastor in America had the courage to stand in the pulpit and deliver the Gospel-centric message that God abhors this slaughtering of the innocent and that for the church to tolerate this sin is a fecal-colored stain on the garment of Christ’s bride.

But it will never happen because the evangelical church isn’t committed as the church to rectifying this grave injustice. We never have been.

I was having a talk with someone recently who was telling me that sometimes the religious left pushes policies that are inconsistent with the Bible, like wealth redistribution or encouraging Christians to condone sexual immorality instead of setting up boundaries on sexuality by making clear statements of what the Bible says and explaining why what the Bible says is true using real objective evidence. Yes, I support policies that are consistent with what the Bible says – but I don’t look to politics to push non-Biblical policies.

Grudem’s book is must reading for Christians looking for a comprehensive Biblical view of politics, including social AND economic issues.