Author: McFormtist
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Apologies to Atheists
It’s not often we as Christians have to apologize to our arch-nemeses, the Atheists. In fact, if we can help it, we never do. We’re prohibited from ceding any ground whatsoever to our enemies, because as the Bible says in verse 4, “so that thou shalt not be seen to be wrong in all thy days, whithersoever thou havest thine ever.” But as with any rulebook, laws can be broken or bent whenever life deems it necessary.
When Richard Dawkins penned his magnum opus, The God Delusion, he never expected his words to be so clearly and thoroughly confirmed as …
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Stockholm Syndrome And Sympathizing With Sinners
We are an imperfect people. We believe God is perfect, and that He is perfecting us, conforming us to Christ’s image, who is perfect. But until we are perfected, we are sinners. We live in a world with limited privacy, and as such many of our mistakes are in public view. We profess there is a standard by which men should live, and yet sometimes we fail miserably to live by that very standard. Often, those who aren’t Christians are watching our lives, scrutinizing us, to see whether what we profess is true. When we stumble, we’re called out, and …
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On God’s “Evil” Actions
Probably one of the most common objections to Christianity that we hear is one that relates to the Problem of Evil. While the problem of evil asks, “How can an Omnipotent, Good God exist with evil in the world,” this particular one asks, “How can God be ‘good’ if he has done all these evil things?” Men will object to Christianity saying that God has done evil things. And from this they conclude God either doesn’t exist, or if he does exist he is not worth believing.
We answer the former problem by demonstrating from the Bible that the …
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Problems With Authority in Classical and Evidentialist Apologetics
To the extent that attempts are made in order to distinguish between the “evidentialist” and “classical” schools of apologetics, in an effort to salvage the “classical” method, these distinctions nevertheless fail to dodge the criticisms leveled at evidentialism by Van Tilian presuppositionalists. It shouldn’t strike us as very coincidental that the problem presuppositionalists have with the classical/evidentialist methods primarily concerns the presuppositions of these methods. Furthermore, that practitioners of either the classical or evidentialist methods borrow aspects from presuppositionalism (which I would argue is inevitable as long as the practitioner is at least to some extent devoted to sola scriptura…
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The Bankruptcy of Skepticism and the Glory of God
Christianity is a naturally offensive truth. Not that it offends, but it exposes the offense that is part of the human condition and dares to hold humans responsible. The sinful nature of man, such as it is, detests any effort of the person who would dare to point at that nature and speak about it for what it is. The rebellious man has knowledge of his Creator because it is in the Creator’s image that he has been created. What the Creator of everything calls “truth” involves every single minute, meticulous detail of reality as we know it. Indeed it …
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Falsificationism And Christianity
Another difficulty with religious language (and hence, Christianity) that non-religious people have concerns itself with “falsifiability,” or the aspect of any claim which states it must, in principle at least, be capable of subjecting to certain scientific criteria by which it can conceivably be proven false, in order to be considered meaningful. Like Verificationism, Falsificationism assumes an empiricist worldview, and so is subject immediately to some of the criticisms of Verificationism, including for instance, the seeming arbitrariness of the foundational principles undergirding it. Falsificationism was articulated as a way to circumvent the problems inherent in Verificationism. While Karl Popper …
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Public Display of Religion
Few things really irk me in this world. There’s waking up, missing church, missing the gym, slow internet connections – to name a couple. One thing in particular that always tends to turn the knob on my internal oven, and I’ve been seeing a lot of it lately, is the insistence by the non-religious that “private religion” is to be kept out of the public realm, or that religion is to be kept out of politics, etc. I understand that, particularly with regard to Christianity, there are some debates on what a Christian body politic would look like, but my …
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Verificationism And Christianity
One of the many problems atheists have with Christianity involves the issue of Verificationism. They may say, “I can’t believe Christianity because it can’t be verified,” and some might include, “…scientifically.” Some may even say, “It’s not true unless it can be verified.” Greg Bahnsen has a chapter in Always Ready entitled, “The Problem of Religious Language,” wherein he deals with both Verificationism and Falsificationism. The summary of the problem is that any religious utterance cannot be considered “meaningful” unless it can be checked against real-world data. Any talk of God, for instance, must correspond to something observable in the …
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Inconsistent Atheism Better Than Atheism
The other day I had an exchange with an atheist friend on Facebook. We’ve had a couple exchanges in the past, so there is a context to some of the things being said. He posted a graphic of a Christian ditty-response (in other words, not the best kind) to the recent school shooting up in Connecticut, and expressed outrage at the audacity of Christians to suggest that God did nothing to help because He’s “not allowed in schools anymore.” In any case, I attempted to draw out some inconsistency between what he said he believed, and the outworking of that …
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“Why Do So Few Atheists Take Their Faith Seriously?” – Justin Taylor, The Gospel Coalition
Justin Taylor of The Gospel Coalition brings us some words from Carl Trueman, commenting on a question asked during his recent debate with Chad Trainer. Trueman highlights for us in his characteristic, poignant manner, the utter impotence of Atheism to speak to life’s most pressing and emotional concerns, as well as the unwillingness of atheists to walk their talk. When not even atheists take their faith seriously, why should anyone else?