Category Archives: Apologetics
Final Question from the Reddit Thread
This is, at last, the very last question from the Reddit thread of questions that theists supposedly can’t answer. It is a three-part question:
- Does free will exist in heaven?
- If so, what’s to prevent god from kicking you out after the fact?
- If not, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of giving man free will in the first place?
In general, as a Calvinist, I’m not overly impressed with questions about free will. We Reformed folks don’t really think that humans have it. In the sense that when faced with path A or path B, do I believe that we can pick either without respect to God making us choose the one he desires? Yes, I think we can do that. But, I also believe that in so doing we are doing God’s will and advancing his plan for our lives as he saw fit to declare from eternity. It seems to be a contradiction, but the Bible affirms both an exhaustive divine decree and the free moral agency of humans. Therefore, the two might appear to conflict to us but in reality work in harmony.
As a Christian theist, I’m also not overly impressed with atheists who bring up free will as a supposed airtight objection to the concept of God. Without God, there could be no free will. In the Westminster Confession of Faith, we see that human freedom is upheld and founded on the decree of God. In fact, metaphysically speaking, it seems illogical given the atheistic commitment to naturalism that we would have a free will. Read the rest of this entry
In Defense of Kim Kardashian
I don’t normally wade into pop culture debates, but this one brings a lesson from the Bible into some focus.
There is a huge huff over a recent tweet from Kim Kardashian. The controversial tweet:
https://twitter.com/#!/KimKardashian/status/88311109865578497
Per my previous post, I think we need to be very, very careful about what we believe from the news. The primary goal of the media is to sell more papers, and nothing sells better than a good controversy. The Casey Anthony case is a fine example of something that will continue to sell papers for weeks to come, even though it’s ostensibly over.
The problem that people have with Kim’s post is that she is the daughter of the late Robert Kardashian, one of the attorneys that helped OJ Simpson. So what? Kim was 15 when her father presented the OJ case. That had nothing to do with her. She didn’t sit by OJ.
How many of my skeptic readers are siding with the backlash against Kim? If you are, and you have previously argued that it is ridiculous that God holds us responsible for Adam taking a bite of the wrong fruit, you are being really inconsistent.
On one hand, you think that it is outrageous, unfair, and illogical that you are held responsible for your father Adam’s sin per Ezekiel 18:19-20. You were not there, you did not pull the fruit off the tree, you did not take a bite. You shouldn’t be condemned for it! Yet, you’re now condemning Kim Kardashian for something her father did but she had nothing to do with. It’s okay for you, but not for God.
Thing is, God doesn’t condemn us for what Adam did, and I’ve repeatedly answered this point (for example: here and here). We don’t suffer for the sin, we suffer the effects of the sin.
Unfortunately, Kim is not suffering the effects of her father’s actions in this backlash. People are tying the so-called irony of her statements directly to her father’s actions. That’s outrageous, unfair, and illogical.
Lay off Kim Kardashian, people. If she is outraged over this verdict, she has every right to be. Her father’s actions during the OJ trial have nothing to do with her, so let her be and stop holding her responsible for her father’s actions. Skeptics make repeated fluff about that being unfair when they perceive it done to them by God, but people seem to have no difficulty doing it to a fellow human being. That’s terribly inconsistent.
Casey Anthony and the Real Goal of the Media
The entire debacle with the Casey Anthony trial brings something into sharp focus that we all should consider. The media has two goals:
- Increase circulation (i.e. sell more papers)
- Report the news
And they go at these goals in that order. Controversy sells papers, so they tackle stories like a mother allegedly murdering her toddler because they know that that is going to sell like crazy.
Now, Casey Anthony has been found not guilty by a jury of her peers. But, in the court of public opinion, she had long ago been convicted and sentenced. But, we have to ask ourselves, did we hear all of the facts?
I’m going to guess not. We didn’t hear all of the facts of the Rodney King case. We saw an edited version of the tape, that when played in its entirety, cleared the officers involved of any wrong doing. I saw the entire tape a long time ago, and believe me those officers acted in self-defense. They got a bit excessive and should have been disciplined for that, but they didn’t act as disproportionately to the situation as the media had us believe.
I’m not saying that the media deliberately distorts the facts of a case. They don’t. But, they give us a minimalist set, the set most convenient to the story they are trying to tell. They leave out or gloss over other facts.
For those of us that have taken journalism classes, we know that a news story is written in the “inverted pyramid” style. First comes the lead, which is supposed to grab our attention and pull us into the story. It’s the most interesting and attention-grabbing part of the story. Then, the facts of the case are presented, in order of importance.
But, who gets to decide that order? The reporter. I may disagree with the reporter ordering of the facts. But, knowing that news stories contain the substance of the story in the first half or so, I seldom read an entire news story. I give the reporter the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he is going to get the important facts correct in the first part of the story and use the leftovers at the bottom of the article. So I seldom read a newspaper article beyond the sixth or seventh paragraph, knowing that is “unimportant facts” after that.
Or is it?
It occurs to me that these “fluff” facts might make all the difference. It might be facts that the reporter or his editors wish to minimize or conceal. Print journalism is all about word count, so some facts may have been omitted altogether.
None of this amounts to deliberate distortion, but you do have to wonder if this case, like many others, presented the public with a minimalist set of facts to paint Casey Anthony as guilty when she’s not and we’d know she’s not if we were given the remainder of the facts. So, let’s remember that we weren’t on the jury and maybe we should trust that the 12 people in possession of facts we weren’t privy to made an informed decision.
Questions Theists Can’t Answer, Election/Predestination
More questions from the Reddit thread that proposes questions theists can’t answer. These are focused on election/predestination.
If god knows everything that is and will ever be, and he knows that you will not accept him before you are even born, why would he send you to hell? You are essentially judged before you can do anything. What kind of “good” god would do that?
So, basically, if you don’t accept God’s free gift of grace, it’s his fault? No, no, no, no, no, no. The only way that someone is judged before he has a chance to do anything is if God actually creates the unbelief and decrees the sin leading to, nurturing, and sustaining the unbelief. God doesn’t do any of that; he knows all of that in advance.
“Knowing” that something is so is a far cry from “making” it so. The example I gave recently is rather crude, but it works. Ted gave Bill two choices. Either Bill could watch Eliza Dushku privately re-enact the scene where she models bikinis in The New Guy just for Bill, or Ted can slap Bill in across the face with a wet codfish.
Ted knows without a doubt that Bill will pick the bikini modeling thing. There can be no question in anyone’s mind, even if you haven’t seen Eliza model the bikinis in The New Guy, that Bill will pick that option. Ted didn’t make Bill pick that option. He only knew that Bill would select it.
In other words, God knowing that a creature will do X is not the same as God forcing a creature to do X. Or, more appropriately, ordering the universe in such a way that it is inescapable the creature will do X. Read the rest of this entry
Apt Description of God
Chris Reese from Cloud of Witnesses featured a concise and excellent quote that perfectly describes the nature of God, as cited by Dallas Willard:
God is “the eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from Himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.” [Adam Clarke in Cyclopaedia, vol. 3 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 903-4, quoted by Dallas Willard in Knowing Christ Today, chapter 4, n. 1.]
Let’s break take a look at just a few of these descriptors. Read the rest of this entry
More on Traditional Marriage: Classic Francis Beckwith
When the mayor of San Francisco was passing out marriage licenses for gay couples in defiance of state law in 2004, philosopher Francis Beckwith suggested a better way to handle it than the legal remedy which was sought:
I believe, however, that given present circumstances that the best strategy is to take the mayor at his word and employ “street theatre” in a provocative way in order to force the other side to defend their marital nihilism in all its glory. Here’s the plan: Have about 50 folks go to San Francisco city hall and request marriage licenses, but not for gay marriages, rather, for other sorts of “unions” that are also forbidden by the state: three bisexuals from two genders, one person who wants to marry himself (and have him accuse the mayor of “numberism,” the prejudice that marriage must include more than one person), two married couples who want a temporary “wife-swap lease,” a couple consisting of two brothers, two sisters, or a brother and a sister, an adult mother and son, and a man who wants to add a second wife and a first husband in order to have a “marital ensemble,” etc., etc. Let’s see if the mayor will give these people “marriage” licenses. If not, why not? If not, then the jig is up and the mayor actually has to explain the grounds on which he will not give licenses to these folks. But what could those grounds be? That it would break the law? That marriage has a nature, a purpose, that is not the result of social construction or state fiat? If so, then what is it and why? (source)
Beckwith goes on that article to state that marriage isn’t a social construction, but an institution with precise meaning and confers a specific benefit to society.
. . . [O]nce marriage is defined merely as a contract between consenting adults rather than as an institution grounded in our natures as men and women, recognized and honored by the wider community, then marriage simply does not exist. According to the mayor of San Francisco, marriage is not something we enter; it is something we create or undo by our willfulness. It is not part of the order and nature of things that we honor and preserve by subjecting ourselves to its moral grandeur; rather, it is like the colors of traffic signals, diplomatic immunity, or the dollar amount of parking fines, arbitrary rules created by governments in order to facilitate safe travel, economic transactions, international relations, state funding, and/or public peace.
Marriage is a covenantal institution recognizing that men and women need each other to survive and flourish. We’re two sides of the same coin. If men can marry men, and women can marry women, why not the other institutions that Beckwith suggests, above? No, marriage has a meaning and a purpose grounded in something greater than just state law. It is grounded in our own nature, which must have both genders present to see its fulfillment. Which means that folks like myself who, according to detractors, “deny” gays the “right” to marry are not denying them anything–they never had this “right” in the first place. You can’t deny a man something that isn’t his to begin with.
My 3-year Old Thinks Deeper than Some Atheists
It sounds crazy, but I think my three-year old daughter actually thinks more deeply than the average atheist. She understands a distinction in the divine essence that many atheists fail to see.
I, and other apologists like me, out-of-hand reject statements like, “You’re an atheist to literally thousands of gods. I’m only an atheist to one more god than you!” I’ve discussed some reasons here. One of the most compelling reasons to reject such a statement is the very ontology of the gods under discussion.
Polytheism usually starts with two gods, a male and a female. The male generally represents Heaven or the Sky, while the female represents Earth. Immediately, we see that these beings are tied to a material reality, with what Dungeons & Dragons supplements (such as Deities and Demigods) refer to as a “portfolio.” The portfolio is the area of supreme power for that deity.
Sky and Earth then have children, which become the initial gods of the pantheon. In Greek mythology, these children are Cronus and Rhea. Cronus then usurps Sky’s (Uranus) power and becomes king of the entire universe. This represents another common element of polytheism–the supreme god, always dwelling in or characterized by the Sky, is defeated or rendered impotent.
Cronus and Rhea then gave birth to Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Demeter, Hestia, and Hera. None of these gods are the causal agent of the force they control. Zeus controls thunder, and his lightning bolt was fashioned to harness the already extant power. Same with the remaining siblings: Poseidon controls the water, Hades shepherds departed souls, Demeter manages the seasons, Hestia the household, and Hera blesses marriage.
The universe, when discussed, is usually already there. It is never “created” by any god, and the gods master extant powers rather than creating them. Further, the gods are always seen as finite, as having a definite beginning and it always seems possible that they could have an end, in either death or imprisonment.
Contrast that with God, the transcendent creator of the universe. There was nothing before God, and there will be nothing after God. He is eternal, and exists on the pure necessity of his own nature. All that we see, he spoke into being. Light through the darkness, material from immaterial, land out of water, vegetation on the land, fish in the sea, then creatures on the land. He commanded it all into existence; he didn’t harness what already existed.
This concept is weighty, but not so much that Ashleigh couldn’t grasp it, and she’s only three! The atheists I deal with are much older than that, yet seem unable to grasp this concept.
How do I know Ashleigh gets it? Because the other day, I hear her declare to my son, Gabriel, and anyone else in earshot, that she was the “god of weather.” I told her that she shouldn’t claim to be God, as that is very wrong indeed.
She replied, “I’m not God, daddy. I’m only god of weather!”
Indicating she understands the fundamental difference between claiming to be the ultimate creator, and a powerful entity with a limited portfolio (such as “weather”). Maybe I’m reading too much into her comment, but it seems to me that she gets a truth that escapes our atheist friends who make the “I’m an atheist to one more god” claim. Maybe she’ll follow in my footsteps into Christian apologetics.
On Traditional Marriage: Where Charlie Went Wrong
Martin over The Atheist Experience chided a recent caller going by Charlie the Atheist Homophobe:
When he called Tracie and me two weeks ago, the burden of his argument was that the word homophobia has a colloquial meaning that has changed and evolved from its dictionary definition, so as to incorporate such things as “disgust” rather than strictly “irrational fear” (the meaning of “phobia” in a nutshell). Charlie was supportive of this evolution of homophobia’s meaning, of course. (source)
Then, Martin points out that it is inconsistent not to be supportive of the same evolution for marriage:
While homophobia gets to expand its meaning to include a variety of emotional states, marriage does not get to expand its meaning to include a variety of relationship commitments, including same-sex couples (even though the almighty dictionary says it can). And Charlie’s whole justification for opposing any expansion of marriage‘s definition is an appeal to tradition and consensus, the very things he thinks should be ignored in the case of homophobia.
It’s a pure double standard, of the sort that people who are smart enough to know better often hold, so as to convince themselves that an intellectually and morally offensive point of view is in fact intellectually and morally justified. But as Russell said, if the guy isn’t actually out to impinge on anyone’s rights, then his word games are just so much noise.
Martin is absolutely right. But, the essence of Charlie’s arguments hold, provided that he would have been more careful about phrasing himself. Read the rest of this entry
Are Christians Superior to Atheists? (via Twitter)
This discussion started with a simple tweet from about.com writer Austin Cline, and quickly spiraled out of control from there into a shouting match of personal insult. I’m happy to say, that none of that was from me; I really tried to keep to the issues this time (though as commenter Doc can attest, I don’t always):
https://twitter.com/#!/AustinCline/status/84365427945381888
So, I replied:
https://twitter.com/#!/tucholskic/status/84369235840741376
This is in keeping with a controversial YouTube video by Cardinal Cormack Murphy-O’Connor where he said that atheists are less than human, but I thought perhaps he might have meant atheists haven’t embraced the fullness of their humanity. Read the rest of this entry
Comment Round-up! (part 2)
The second part where I reply to Doc’s comments is much shorter. Only two comments remain, and they aren’t as long as the previous.
Context: Doc echoes some sentiments from Alex in my much-derided post on methodological naturalism vs. metaphysical naturalism. Alex had previously stated:
the implications for just how loud and clear your god’s message in the bible really is, needing an army of theologians to explain and ponder and postulate and theorize and channel and project and often just make up stuff in order to make sense of the bible
Now, to Doc’s comment:
Exactly this. What kind of God would rely on an ancient text that he knows (if he is truly omniscient) will be doubted, misinterpreted, and only followed properly by a fraction of believers (since only one religion, or none, would be right; whichever one follows his exact message exactly as he intended) and argued for centuries by people who clai to know the truth and disagree among each other on the message’s details?
This would either be a sadistic god (sending to hell all those who innocently believe in a different interpretation of his message) or an incompetent god (relying on an unsuccessful game plan if he wants to keep believers).
Of course, the easy answer is that it’s all BS.
Nope. It’s not BS. But I hardly think that disagreement on exact interpretations qualifies all of Christianity as BS. Scientists often disagree and debate, sometimes for decades. Does that mean science is BS?
Nope, and neither is theology. At the end of the day, God’s grace alone saves you, which is actuated by your faith. The denomination of Christianity matters little, I think. Knowledge of the person of Jesus may not even be necessary, so long as you make that step in faith with enough knowledge of God (and that is easier to come by then you guys like to think; see Rom 1:19-20, 10:5-21).
C. Michael Patton has some thoughts on that topic as well.
A few comments down, he makes the following statement:
You make a charge and then back off from it when I call you out on it.
You KNOW I was focusing on how you said, ” Evolutionists, the honest ones, admit that evolution only explains what happens to life when it’s already here. ”
You are implying here that Evolution is used as a way to cover up the question of the origin of life, and the *honest* ones will “admit” that it doesn’t.
This is loaded language, and by backing off of it and saying, “Oh I was just saying that evolution does not explain the origin of life, that’s all!” Is being purposely dishonest.
I used the “gravity” example to illustrate that it’s not “admitting” something. It’s not claiming it to begin with. Nobody “admits” that evolution doesn’t explain the origin of life in the same way nobody “admits” that evolution doesn’t explain the origin of life; they don’t need to, because that’s not what evolution is about. You plainly did not see the analogy I was making and replied with the snarky, “Um, good for them?” Because it went right over your head.
And during this retreat from the loaded statement you made, you actually have the nerve to try to play it off like *I’m* the one who lacked understanding of what you were saying.
No wonder you people are less respected every day.
One potential explanation for the origin of life is that it was gradually assembled from single molecules, then diatoms, then … etc. Eventually, an entire cell (a bacterium, most likely) was the result. These cells eventually began to specialize, and thus formed more complex organisms. This gradual assembly of life from molecule up to a cell, and then diversifying from there is an extrapolation of evolutionary theory.
Now, this explanation for the origin of life probably isn’t a very good one. But, the fact remains that some scientists regard evolution as capable of explaining the origin of life. However, most do not. So I will admit my use of “admit” wasn’t the best choice, since that particular theory isn’t in wide acceptance among evolutionary scientists. However, I was not wrong to imply that evolutionary theory could attempt to explain the origin of life.
That concludes us for now. I have some great posts in the draft stage, so don’t go too far!
Back Rome Again 