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Brian Auten reviews William Lane Craig’s new basic apologetics book

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Here’s the book review on Apologetics 315.

Excerpt:

On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision by William Lane Craig is an introductory-level text from one of the leading apologists today. Written with the layman in mind, Craig has geared his most powerful arguments found in Reasonable Faith into a more approachable, readable book. It is not only easily accessible for the layman, but the book itself contains illustrations, sidebars, argument maps, and summaries that make understanding and retaining the material an easier task. This review will provide an overview of the content and an assessment of the book’s usefulness for its intended audience.

[…]The book’s included questions provide a good starting point for personal and group study. In sum, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision is a great contribution as a layman’s apologetics textbook. When the study guide is published, this will be a tremendous resource for small groups. Highly recommended – excellent content, very accessible to the layman, and well-suited for small group use.

The actual review goes over the 10 chapters in more detail, and talks about specific features that make the book more useful for beginners. My Dad is reading Reasonable Faith, 3rd. edition right now, and he skipped a lot of the science part. But he still loves to book and he’s into the history now. Maybe I should have gotten him “On Guard” instead? And it’s only $10 from Amazon.

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”.