Tag Archives: Defence

News

MUST-HEAR: Brian Auten explains why Christians ought to learn apologetics

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A super 20-minute podcast from Apologetics 315.

The MP3 file is here. (20 minutes)

PDF Transcript here.

Topics:

  • what is the definition of apologetics?
  • what do you mean by defense? a testimony?
  • what is the goal of apologetics?
  • does apologetics create belief? should it?
  • what are offensive and defensive apologetics?
  • should Christians fear intellectual opposition to Christianity?
  • is apologetics good for believers?
  • does apologetics help you to be more confident when witnessing?
  • what was the role of apologetics in the Bible?
  • what was the role of apologetics in the early church?
  • was apologetics central or peripheral to Paul’s ministry?
  • does the Bible present Christianity as personal preference or public truth?
  • did Jesus appeal to objective evidence to get people to believe him?
  • is there a requirement for all Christians to make a defense of their faith?
  • should Christians care if non-believers have false beliefs about God?
  • does the Bible need to be defended? What does the Bible say about it?
  • Is an intellectual approach to evangelism antithetical to faith?

My posts on apologetics advocacy are here:

    These were all quite popular when they were originally posted, so it’s good to re-post them.

    Actual arguments and counter-arguments are here, if you want to know the basics. Debates and lectures are here to see how this gets used. Most Christians never even dream that their faith can be debated at Harvard or Columbia or Oxford!

    Christianity is a knowledge tradition. It’s not a feelings tradition.

    UPDATE: If you’re really good at apologetics, you can debate the top atheists in public, and say things like this:

    (The full debate is here)

    Mentoring

    What can you learn by reading apologetics books?

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    For beginning apologists, I wanted to recommend a series of 3 books designed to give you coverage of most of the issues. Each book is a collection of short chapters designed to introduce you to the various areas that are likely to come up in disputes.

    Here they are:

    1. “The Case for a Creator” by Lee Strobel
    2. “Passionate Conviction” edited by William Lane Craig and Paul Copan
    3. “Contending with Christianity’s Critics” edited by William Lane Craig and Paul Copan

    I just wanted to show you the table of contents so that you could get an idea about what you might learn by reading through these books.

    The Case for a Creator

    Here is the table of contents. (Watch the book’s DVD on YouTube)

    1. White-Coated Scientists Versus Black-Robed Preachers
    2. The Images of Evolution
    3. Doubts About Darwinism: An Interview with Jonathan Wells
    4. Where Science Meets Faith: An interview with Stephen C. Meyer
    5. The Evidence of Cosmology: Beginning with a Bang; An interview with William Lane Craig
    6. The Evidence of Physics: the Cosmos on a Razor’s Edge; An interview with Robin Collins
    7. The Evidence of Astronomy: The Privileged Planet; An interview with Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards
    8. The Evidence of Biochemistry: The Complexity of Molecular Machines; An Interview with Michael J. Behe
    9. The Evidence of Biological Information: The Challenge of DNA and the Origin of Life; An Interview with Stephen C. Meyer
    10. The Evidence of Consciousness: The Enigma of the Mind; An Interview with J.P. Moreland
    11. The Cumulative Case for a Creator

    Passionate Conviction

    Here is the table of contents. (Sample chapter in a PDF)

    PART 1 WHY APOLOGETICS?

    • In Intellectual Neutral by William Lane Craig
    • Living Smart by J. P. Moreland

    PART 2 GOD

    • Why Doesn’t God Make His Existence More Obvious to Us? by Michael J. Murray
    • Two Versions of the Cosmological Argument by R. Douglas Geivett
    • The Contemporary Argument for Design: An Overview by Jay W. Richards
    • A Moral Argument by Paul Copan

    PART 3 JESUS

    • Revisionist Views about Jesus by Charles L. Quarks
    • What Do We Know for Sure about Jesus’ Death? by Craig A. Evans
    • Jesus’ Resurrection and Christian Origins by N. T. Wright

    PART 4 COMPARATIVE RELIGIONS

    • Christianity in a World of Religions by Craig J. Hazen
    • The East Comes West (or Why Jesus instead of the Buddha?) by Harold Netland
    • Christ in the New Age by L. Russ Bush
    • Islam and Christianity by Emir Fethi Caner

    PART 5 POSTMODERNISM AND RELATIVISM

    • The Challenges of Postmodernism by J. P. Moreland
    • Is Morality Relative? by Francis J. Beckwith
    • Reflections on McLaren and the Emerging Church by R. Scott Smith

    PART 6 PRACTICAL APPLICATION

    • Dealing with Emotional Doubt by Gary R. Habermas
    • Apologetics for an Emerging Generation by Sean McDowell

    Contending with Christainity’s Critics

    Here is the table of contents. (Sample chapter in a PDF)

    PART 1 THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

    • Dawkins’s Delusion by William Lane Craig
    • At Home in the Multiverse? by James Daniel Sinclair
    • Confronting Naturalism: The Argument from Reason by Victor Reppert
    • Belief in God: A Trick of Our Brain? by Michael J. Murray
    • The Moral Poverty of Evolutionary Naturalism by Mark D. Linville
    • Dawkins’s Best Argument Against God’s Existence by Gregory E. Ganssle

    PART 2 THE JESUS OF HISTORY

    • Criteria for the Gospels’ Authenticity by Robert H. Stein
    • Jesus the Seer by Ben Witherington III
    • The Resurrection of Jesus Time Line by Gary R. Habermas
    • How Scholars Fabricate Jesus by Craig A. Evans
    • How Badly Did the Early Scribes Corrupt the New Testament? An Examination of Bart Ehrman’s Claims by Daniel B. Wallace
    • Who Did Jesus Think He Was? by Michael J. Wilkins

    PART 3 THE COHERENCE OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE

    • The Coherence of Theism by Charles Taliaferro and Elsa J. Marty
    • Is the Trinity a Logical Blunder? God as Three and One by Paul Copan
    • Did God Become a Jew? A Defense of the Incarnation by Paul Copan
    • Dostoyevsky, Woody Allen, and the Doctrine of Penal Substitution by Steve L. Porter
    • Hell: Getting What’s Good My Own Way by Stewart Goetz
    • What Does God Know? The Problems of Open Theism by David P. Hunt

    Before you can mount a detailed defense on any of these questions, it helps to be able to recognize them all!

    By the way, you can get a head start on the first one if you just connect to YouTube and watch the movies “Unlocking the Mystery of Life” and “The Privileged Planet”.

    News

    North Korea conducts second nuclear test, Obama sternly disapproves

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    Story from the New York Times. (H/T Stop the ACLU)

    Excerpt:

    North Korea announced on Monday that it had successfully conducted its second nuclear test, defying international warnings and drastically raising the stakes in a global effort to get the recalcitrant Communist state to give up its nuclear weapons program.

    Word of the test sent a shudder through Asian financial markets and clearly caught South Korea and the United States off guard. The news hit just as South Korea’s government and people were mourning the suicide of former President Roh Moo-hyun. And hours after the test was reported, South Korean state media reported that the North had fired a short-range missile.

    Stop the ACLU has reactions from around the blogosphere.

    • Michelle Malkin: Emergency wrist-slap to follow.
    • Ameripundit: Clearly this situation calls for additional appeasement. Oh, and a speech on how the United States should eliminate its nuclear weapons stockpile.
    • Ace of Spades: This failure of diplomacy clearly shows the need for more diplomacy…. missile defense remains unproven.

    Obama who recently cut missile defense funding, and defunded our nuclear weapons program, has issued this sternly-worded statement of appeasement to the communist dictator. Democrats, what did you expect? Did you even try to assess his voting record and qualifications during the election? This was all as plain as day to anyone who could be bothered to read about Obama before his election.

    What about Hugo Chavez?

    The Washington Post also reports on Obama’s very good communist friend Hugo Chavez. (H/T Stop the ACLU, Nice Deb)

    Excerpt:

    WHILE THE United States and Venezuela’s neighbors silently stand by, Hugo Chávez’s campaign to destroy his remaining domestic opposition continues. On Thursday night state intelligence police raided the Caracas offices of Guillermo Zuloaga, the president of the country’s last independent broadcast network, Globovision. They claimed to be looking for evidence of irregularities in the car dealership that Mr. Zuloaga also runs. In fact this was a thinly disguised escalation of an attack that Mr. Chávez launched this month against Globovision.

    In February Mr. Chávez eliminated the limit on his tenure as president after a one-sided referendum campaign that included ugly attacks on Venezuela’s Jewish community. Since then he has imprisoned or orchestrated investigations against most of the country’s leading opposition figures, including three of the five opposition governors elected last year. The elected mayor of Maracaibo, who was the leading opposition candidate when Mr. Chávez last ran for president, was granted asylum in Peru last month after authorities sought his arrest on dubious tax charges. The National Assembly, controlled by Mr. Chávez, is considering legislation that would eliminate collective bargaining and replace independent trade unions with “worker’s councils” controlled by the ruling party. Another new law would eliminate foreign financing for independent non-government groups.

    Obama can’t object, because that’s what his Democrat constituents approve of doing with the right in this country.

    What about Ahmadinejad?

    If you can’t remember his name, think of “I’m mad in a Jihad”. Remember, Iran recently tested medium range missiles capable of hitting Israel.