Apologetics to the Glory of God

Letter To A Common Naturalistic Atheist Part 3

I recently found this response to an “atheist” man I was having a discussion with long ago. It is unedited, and therefore may not make sense in some places. Hopefully it will be useful to you in some way none the less.

__________________
Now, you claim to know that animals cannot talk, and I have asked for you to explain how it is you can know this. The first thing you say in regards to this is that we have no evidence that miracles of a supernatural nature can occur. Hopefully you see that this begs the question though, because if miracles have happened, then we do have evidence that miracles of a supernatural nature can occur. In Scripture we have such evidence. It is invalid (circular) reasoning to reject that evidence by saying that we have no such evidence. You have not told me how you can know that animals cannot talk. You also say that if you accepted the miracles of the Bible, then you would have no reason to not accept the miracles of the Koran as well. You ask if you should believe in the other virgin births of mythology. Well, perhaps you should, but we cannot know without taking them each within their own proper context. I do not believe the Koran to be what it says it is and have good reason not to. According to Surah 42.11 Allah is incomparable and so transcendent that human language cannot describe him. So then, if we accept the truth of the Koran we must accept that it cannot be the revelation of Allah. It is a self-refuting book. I do not accept the virgin births in other religions because they contradict conclusions drawn through inductive reasoning. You will ask if miracles in Christianity do the same thing, and I will answer that without Scripture we have no basis upon which to draw any conclusions through induction, since only the Christian God controls everything that comes about through His own will and He makes this known to us. There is reason to hold that the future will resemble the past, and thus reason to rest upon induction, but only within the Christian worldview.

You will need to be more specific about the many alleged similarities between Christian doctrine and other beliefs from the Christian and pre-Christian time period. Even if these similarities are granted, I do not see how it invalidates the claims of Christianity in any way, shape, or form. Should I assume that since my Mach 1 shares parts with a Cobra neither of them exist? This concern does not make a lot of sense to me. Anyway, there are significant problems with some of the myth theories about Christianity.

As for the definition of “love”, I have not changed it. It is what Scripture says it is. Attempting to apply an unbiblical definition of it to the Bible and then concluding that the Bible is wrong is methodologically problematic. Now it might help for me to say that hatred goes necessarily along with love. If God loves the good, and He does, then He also hates evil, and He does. God is love, and God is the standard of justice. I find no such objective standard of either love or justice outside of Christianity, so to judge Christianity from presumably non-Christian standards is again problematic, and I would say much more than that, impossible. To help you understand the thing with Adam and Eve the way I do; if your Grandfather had done something stupid which winded up getting him killed before he ever was able to do what was necessary for your Father’s birth, then you would not be alive. Such is the case with Adam and Eve, for when they disobeyed God they brought sin into the world of humanity. This resulted in their spiritual death, and it affects all of their descendents just as in the illustration with your Grandfather. Of course, we may say that if we were in that position we would not have done the same thing, but this is highly unlikely, especially in light of the fact that we continue to sin every day, if not every moment, of our lives. The reason that the perfect Word of God is not perfectly understood is not because of God, it is because of us. As we have just examined, we are sinful, and so sinful that our epistemology is affected by our sin and disables us from always having a perfect understanding of Scripture. God is a perfect communicator, but humanity does not always want to accept what He has to say.


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *