Tag Archives: Apologetics

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”.

Mentoring

Brian Auten begins a series on lifelong learning for Christian apologists

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Part one has been posted here at Apologetics 315.

Excerpt:

The Problem: Good books are imperative for learning and growing. However, many people read their good books at random. Sporadic or scattered reading may have the small benefit of keeping you interested as you jump from topic to topic — but one problem can be that often the information hasn’t saturated your mind long enough for you to think deeply on that particular subject over an extended period of time. You haven’t let it simmer in your mind. You haven’t developed your own thoughts on the topic. You quickly moved on to another topic when you could have gone deeper.

Click through to read Brian’s advice for developing a deep understanding of an issue.

On the one hand, you can’t deny that Brian is doing a fine job on his current topic, which is the psychology of atheism. On the other hand, from a purely practical point of view, I think that you need to have non-Christian friends to spar with otherwise your motivation for reading deeply will be unsustainable. I find it very discouraging to read about things at an advanced level and to find no one to talk to about it.

Having people to talk to about these things is very important!

Videos

Video of the Stanford debate between Jay Richards and Christopher Hitchens

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Remember this debate?

Atheism vs. Theism and The Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design
Sunday, January 27, 2008 at 4pm PST, Stanford University

Christopher Hitchens — Contributing editor to Vanity Fair; visiting professor, New School in New York; author of God is Not Great.
VS.
Jay W. Richards — Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute; co-author, with astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery.

I just found the 10 videos in a youtube playlist. Each video is about 10 minutes.

Part 1 is just introductory, so I skipped it.

Here’s part 2, which is the start Hitchens’ opening speech:

Part 3 is the rest of Hitchens and the start of Richards’ opening speech:

And part 4, which is the rest of Richards’ opening speech:

You can click through to the playlist for the rest. Or you can listen to the full MP3 audio provided by Brian Auten of Apologetics 315.

This is the one where Richards gives his famous line “A sneer is not an argument and insults do not constitute evidence”. Richards has his Ph.D in philosophy from Princeton University, and he is extremely careful with logic and arguments.

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