Tag Archives: Apologetics

Polemics

Common atheist objections to Christianity and questions for pro-choice friends

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This post on Well Spent Journey got 73 likes from bloggers.

Here’s the first one:

I’m writing this post primarily for my own convenience. During my online journeys to r/atheism, “freethought” blogs, and beyond, I encounter the following arguments so frequently that it seems sensible to fact-check them all at once.

The Claim: “Religion has been the primary cause of war and oppression throughout the history of mankind.”

The Truth: In their comprehensive Encyclopedia of Wars, Phillips and Axelrod document the recorded history of warfare. Of the 1,763 wars presented, a mere 7% involved a religious cause. When Islam is subtracted from the equation, that number drops to 3.2%.

In terms of casualties, religious wars account for only 2% of all people killed by warfare. This pales in comparison to the number of people who have been killed by secular dictators in the 20th century alone.

I’m surprised that these Internet atheists have never heard of The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press, either. 100 million deaths were caused by atheistic regimes in the last century. One Hundred Million Deaths.

Anyway, here are the other challenges in post:

  • The Claim: “Thanks to modern science, the days of religion are numbered. Humanity’s superstitious belief in miracles and sky gods will soon be replaced by an era of atheism and rationalism.”
  • The Claim: “The dark ages were a time of ignorance and superstition, thanks to religion’s negative influence on scientific progress.”
  • The Claim: “Jesus was a mythical figure. The New Testament stole most of its stories from other ancient sources.”

All are dealt with in the post on Well Spent Journey. When I look at these arguments, and compare them to our good, deductive, science-based arguments for theism, it does make me feel sorry for atheism.

Questions for pro-abortion people

This post was too short, so I thought I would link to Well Spent Journey’s “Twelve Questions to Ask Your Pro-Choice Friends“.

He’s got a list of twelve in the post, but I like these ones because they really put the pro-abortion person on the defensive:

3. Pro-choice philosophers typically define the value of a human life in terms ofutility (development of brainwaves, consciousness, etc.). If this is true, then why is it morally acceptable to sacrifice pigs and dogs for the purpose of medical/scientific research, but not human infants? Neurologically speaking, it’s not at all controversial to say that pigs and dogs are in many ways “more advanced” than human infants. Yet society only accepts sacrificing the former for experimental purposes. Do you? If so, why?

4. Do you support paternal child support laws? (Consider this quote from Dr. Michael Pakaluk: “[Suppose] that the reason the woman has sole right to decide to have an abortion is that the status of the fetus somehow depends upon how she chooses to regard it: thus, the fetus is not a child until the mother decides that it is, say, at some point later in pregnancy. But then a consequence of this is that the man, through having intercourse with the woman, does not conceive a child. Rather, he conceives only a fetus, and the fetus at some later point becomes a child, only because of the woman’s deciding that it is. But then the man’s role in intercourse is not a cause of a child. He brought into existence only a fetus, and it was the woman’s decision to ‘continue the pregnancy through term’ that made it a child. But if so, it is not clear why the man should have any responsibility for the child. How could the woman bring a claim for paternity support against him? After all, he could rightly reply: ‘You decided to regard the fetus as a child; so the child is your responsibility.’”)

7. What is your position on “two-minus-one” abortions? Are they ethical? Should they be legal?

8. Many of those who identify as “pro-choice” are particularly concerned with issues of inequality and discrimination. Are discriminatory abortions (such as sex-selective abortions) legally or morally defensible? Suppose that scientists developed a prenatal test to determine whether or not one’s child will be homosexual. Would you support a woman’s legal right to abort her fetus solely because of his homosexuality?

By the way, I added Well Spent Journey to my blogroll. For some reason, it was not already there!

Mentoring

Book review of the book “Contending with Christianity’s Critics”

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Apologetics 315 posted a review of the book “Contending with Christianity’s Critics“, which I discussed in posts earlier today. I wanted to excerpt a few chapter summaries for chapters that you may not find in any other apologetics book.

Here they are:

Part 3, The Coherence of Christian Doctrine, begins with chapter thirteen: “The Coherence of Theism” by Charles Taliaferro and Elsa J. Marty. Here the authors seek to defend the coherence of the concept of God. They address six attributes: “necessary existence, incorporeality, essential goodness, omnipotence, omniscience, and eternity.”(26) They point out: “The attributes of God are therefore not a patchwork of arbitrary characteristics. Each one is, rather, interconnected, and together they form a coherent whole. Appreciating this helps one avoid the more crude depiction of God one finds in Dawkins’s work.”(27)

Chapter fourteen: “Is the Trinity a Logical Blunder? God as Three and One” by Paul Copan covers the concept and difficulties of the Trinity. Copan discusses some common problems to avoid in our understanding of the trinity: overemphasizing threeness, overemphasizing oneness, rejecting equality.(28) He then lays out six considerations that will make the understanding the trinity clearer. Finally, Copan shows the philosophical and practical relevance of the Trinity.

Chapter fifteen: “Did God Become a Jew? A Defense of the Incarnation” by Paul Copan aims “to show that the incarnation, though a mystery, is a coherent one.” Copan’s task: “(1) briefly review the scriptural affirmations of Jesus’ humanity and divinity, (2) highlight three important distinctions to help us understand the incarnation, and (3) examine the question of Jesus’ temptation in light of His divinity.”(29)

Chapter sixteen is entitled: “Dostoyevsky, Woody Allen, and the Doctrine of Penal Substitution” by Steve L. Porter. The title refers to the two contrasting characters in the works of these men, as Porter explains:

The difference between these two stories [Crime and Punishment and Crimes and Misdemeanors] is extremely relevant when it comes to the doctrine of penal substitution, for it seems that most of the contemporary objections to the view that Christ suffered the punitive consequences of human sin on behalf of sinners are fueled by the fact that we in the West find ourselves more in the world of Dr. Rosenthal than Raskolnikov. The doctrine of penal substitution does not make sense to many of us because, unlike Raskolnikov, punishment in general no longer makes sense to us.(30)

Porter describes the goal of his essay “the first goal … is to clarify and defend the plausibility of the moral framework required to ground penal substitution.” … “the second goal … is to offer an argument that penal substitution is the best explanation of why Christ voluntarily went to His death.”(31) Porter sheds light on the misconceptions of our understanding of punishment, while pointing out the coherence of the doctrine as it relates to the Biblical narrative as a whole.

Chapter seventeen: “Hell: Getting What’s Good My Own Way” by Stewart Goetz was the most challenging for this reviewer. Not because of the difficulty of the concept so much as the angle the author takes in exploring it. Goetz discusses the doctrine of hell and the particular philosophical issues that it raises He asks questions about how hell relates to the good, free will, and choices. For Goetz, “heaven and hell must ultimately be understood in terms of how a person chooses to live his life in pursuit of what is good.”(32)The author raises and explores important questions – but his responses could have been presented with more clarity.

The book ends with chapter eighteen: “What Does God Know? The Problems of Open Theism” by David P. Hunt. While not addressed to atheists or non-Christians, this chapter does deal with the significant issue of the Open Theism view. This is the view that God does not have complete knowledge of the future. Hunt provides an overview of what Openists teach, followed by a critical response and survey of the scriptural data.

I think these chapters are a little off the beaten path of apologetics books, which is why you should get this book. Philosophical theology is an important part of your apologetics toolkit.

If you’re looking for an even more scholarly take on some of these doctrinal and theological issues, then look no further than the recently published Oxford University Press book “Debating Christian Theism“. The book features two scholarly points of view for about twenty or so issues related to Christianity. The topics range from science to philosophy to history to theology.

This is a great book to put on your desk at work for three reasons. First, it is published by Oxford University Press, and that right there has a prestige factor that will defuse the arrogant attitude that so many non-theists have from their vast experience of reading Dan Brown novels and watching the Discovery channel. Second, it features world-class scholars for each of the twenty or so topics under debate, so you can show that these issues are debated by people at the highest levels. Third, the book doesn’t mark you out as being a Christian, so you can just feign neutrality when the tolerance and diversity police come by to tell you that they have to fire you for having different views than they do. This is the book that you need to put on your desk to get the debate started (or not) depending on who happens to ask about it.

Now, if these books look to be a bit too complicated, then I recommend this easy-to-understand introduction to Christian apologetics entitled “Is God Just a Human Invention?“. That book is suitable for anyone who finished high school. It’s my favorite book to buy for beginners to apologetics. Even simpler than the Lee Strobel books, if you can believe that.

Mentoring

William Lane Craig talks about the book “Contending With Christianity’s Critics”

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A series of three interviews from the “Reasonable Faith” podcast about the essay collection “Contending with Christianity’s Critics: Answering New Atheists and Other Objectors”.

Here is the first MP3 file.

Topics:

  • About the editor Paul Copan, (the nicest Christian apologist)
  • 1: Responding to Dawkins’ argument “Who designed the designer?”
  • 2: Responding to the multiverse counter to the fine-tuning argument
  • 3: The argument that rationality and consciouness require theism
  • 4: The evidence for humans being hard-wired for belief in God
  • 5: Responding to naturalism’s claim to rationally ground morality
  • 6: Responding to Dawkins’ idea that the universe looks undesigned

Here is the second MP3 file.

Topics:

  • 7: The criteria that historians use to establish historical reliability
  • 8: Did Jesus think that he was the Son of Man in Daniel
  • 9: A time line for the resurrection of Jesus from the early sources
  • 10: Responding to scholarly distortions of the historical Jesus
  • 11: Responding to Bart Ehrman’s claim that the NT text is corrupted
  • 12: The evidence for Jesus divine self-understanding

Here is the third MP3 file.

Topics:

  • 13: The logical coherence of the concept of God
  • 14: The logical coherence of the doctrine of the Trinity
  • 15: The logical coherence of the doctrine of the Incarnation
  • 16: The logical coherence of the doctrine of the Atonement
  • 17: The logical coherence of the doctrine of the Hell
  • 18: Responding to objections to God’s knowledge of the future

I have this book, and I highly recommend this book and “Passionate Conviction: Contemporary Discourses on Christian Apologetics”, along with Lee Strobel’s “Case for…” books, as the basic building blocks of an amateur apologists’s arsenal.

You may also be interested in a new book offering a detailed response to the New Atheists, called “God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable & Responsible”.