Apologetics to the Glory of God

Tag: evidence

  • The Recent Rise of Covenantal Apologetics (4 of 10)

    Happy Birthday Choosing Hats!

    If I am going to post anything resembling an attempt to “toot my own horn” I might as well get it done early so that people will forget about it by the time I write on more significant contributing factors to the recent rise of covenantal apologetics.

    Choosing Hats was founded by Brian Knapp and Chris Bolt in July of 2008 in an effort to promote Van Tilian presuppositional apologetics at an introductory level and free of charge on the Internet. Choosing Hats is four years old today, and the next issue of the In Antithesis…

  • Steve Hays Responds: Wintery Knight On Van Til

    http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2012/07/wintery-knight-on-van-til.html…

  • Answering the Evidentialist Objection

    Introduction

    Oversimplification. The unbeliever, and the New Atheist in particular, thrive on it. The situation is no different when it comes to the strong demands for “evidence” in the context of apologetic debate. “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence” was the plea Bertrand Russell planned to use when he came face to face with God. I suspect it did not go over well.

    Yet the loudest non-Christian voices among us continue to parrot Russell’s silly sentiment. It has even been given a name. The “evidentialist objection.” It is quite frequently captured in the contention that Christians should immediately provide …

  • The Unbeliever’s Problem

    A former classmate who serves as a professor at the college level sometimes has students who come to his office expressing doubt about the existence of God. Before engaging them in any sort of intellectual conversation, he wisely asks such students, “What sin are you currently struggling with?”

    The problem of unbelief is first spiritual, then moral, and only then intellectual. While a Reformed anthropology should take the human as a whole, analytic abstractions require an emphasis upon the spiritual aspect of doubt. The unbridled irrationality of spiritual waywardness ruins the moral uprightness and intellectual acuity of the individual. All …

  • “If the existence of God is so obvious, then why do we debate it?”

    Atheists sometimes make the rhetorical point that if the existence of God were so obvious as many Christians hold it to be, then we would not have to hold debates about His existence. We don’t go around having debates about the existence of particular people, or certain types of animals, or various aspects of the world that are immediately present to our sensory experience, so why do we have them about something or someone who is supposed to so obviously exist? Is God just incapable of revealing Himself clearly enough that we might believe in Him the way we believe …

  • Why Christians Are Stupid and Atheists Are Not

    If you were to buy into atheist propaganda on the Internet you would have no choice but to conclude that Christians are some of the most ignorant, irrational, dishonest, deluded idiots on the planet. In short if you are a Christian, then you are stupid. You can substitute whatever other derogatory term you would like in the place of stupid. The point is that something is seriously wrong with the idiots who believe these nonsensical fairy tales, etc. etc. You have heard it all before. You get the point.

    Of course I do not really need the atheists to tell …

  • Internet Skeptics and Bart Erhman

    Justin Taylor points out an interesting point in the introduction of Bart Erhman’s book Did Jesus Exist? where Dr. Erhman was surprised people were using his work (even to the extent of misquoting him) to argue that Jesus didn’t exist. This may come in handy next time you are in a conversation and your conversation partner keeps misquoting Erhman.

    http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/2012/03/30/the-historical-evidence-of-the-existence-of-jesus-of-nazareth/…

  • A Fantastic Insight into Redaction Criticism and the Islamic use of it

    Two brief excerpts:

    I can tell you, without hesitation, that the vast majority of those who embrace form and redaction criticism in all of its flavors and kinds do so out of tradition, not out of having examined the case set forth in defense of these methods. In fact, very, very few of those who glibly repeat the party line have ever even given thought to any other viewpoint. Anyone who thinks there is a fair, open dialogue in “the academy” over these topics is simply misinformed. To “get ahead” in Christian scholarship you must—not should, MUST—toe the line when

    …

  • Two New Apologetics Books

    First, Jamin Hubner has released the Second Edition of his The Portable Presuppositionalist.

    Second, Clifford B. McManis has published Biblical Apologetics: Advancing and Defending the Gospel of Christ. Several people have let me know about this book prior to its release, so I excitedly read everything I could in its online preview. I have some initial concerns with respect to the rhetoric and tone of the work.

    McManis makes rather large implicit promises about putting a different spin on apologetics, but the portion of the book that I read contains very little, if anything, “new.” Of course McManis …

  • Some thoughts on the upcoming debate

    In my preparations for the debate on Sunday, and in dealing with the quite providential example Paul Copan gave us last week of the importance of the subject, I felt it might be valuable to give a few impressions I’ve had along the way. My opening statement has been written for a week or so now – prior to Dr. Copan’s comments, in fact – and my first thought after reading it was this. I wouldn’t change anything I had to say. First, because Dr. Copan’s comments weren’t anything we hadn’t seen before. Second, because I’m giving a positive presentation …