Another Atheist Gives Up

Paul Jenkins asks, “How come so many people claim to believe patently crazy stuff?”

I’ve reached my nonsense-tolerance limit as far as presuppositional apologetics is concerned, and I’ll no longer engage with it in any but the most cursory way. PA is a minority belief within the broader theistic morass (indeed it appears to be an undesirable bedfellow to much of that morass) so ignoring it will be of little consequence.

So there you are. Paul J has joined the ranks of atheist quitters. I have not seen where he has established anything close to his implicit claim that …

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The Recent Rise of Covenantal Apologetics (6 of 10)

One of the largest contributing factors to the recent rise of covenantal apologetics is, oddly enough, the response of its anti-Christian critics.

Just in the last year or two, podcast after atheistic podcast has trumpeted everything from mere disdain for to the utter defeat of presuppositional apologetics. Podcasts that come to mind are Fundamentally Flawed, Skepticule Record, and Reasonable Doubts. There are others. Militant atheists are also mouthy atheists. On the one hand, they want to dismissively scoff at covenantal apologetics, making up some of the worst puns on “presuppositionalism” you have ever heard. On the other …

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But you use your senses to read the Bible!

A common objection fundamentalist Atheists will sometimes make after a presuppositionalist has shown that skeptical arguments from within the Atheist’s worldview sever the senses is usually stated O: “But you use your senses to read the Bible!” Let’s take a closer look at this objection and bring some clarity to why it fails.

Worldview A: “The Atheist Worldview.”
Worldview C: “The Christian Worldview.”
Conclusion X: “The senses fall to skeptical arguments.”
Objection O: “But you use your senses to read the Bible!”

The objection usually comes about when the Christian has taken on A for the sake of argument and …

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Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics by C.L. Bolt


An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics – Conclusion

By C.L. Bolt

What I endeavored to accomplish in the pieces preceding this post was not to provide an exhaustive account of all things presuppositional but to grant the readers a very basic level knowledge of Van Tillian presuppositionalism also known as Covenantal Apologetics without fancy terminology or at least with definitions when technical language was used. My hopes were to write something merely from memory as opposed to turning to sources and then collecting them in a Works Cited or Bibliography. I did not mean to go back and correct much of what I wrote or to answer objections …

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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 45 – Redemption.

By C.L. Bolt

Non-Christians suppress the truth in unrighteousness, distorting every fact. Unbelievers are both spiritually and intellectually lost, believing themselves to be final authorities with respect to their own intellectual evaluations of the world. Yet in appealing to one’s own authority one appeals to a shifting foundation that certainly does not serve as a norm. Truth itself is relative in this scheme. The standards, purpose, meaning, motivation, etc. for reasoning are completely lost in this assumption of the possibility of thought independent of God. This series has sought to show in some detail how the creaturely mind asserting its …

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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 44 – Islam.

By C.L. Bolt

Islam is much more similar to the Christian worldview than atheism or agnosticism. Some varieties of the non-Christian worldview are so much like the Christian worldview that they actually admit to borrowing from the Christian worldview, and Islam is one of these. Islam states that faith is the starting point and Muslims place their faith in the Bible “like” the Christian does (on the surface). When the Bible is claimed as the starting point by an unbelieving system of thought, how might we begin to answer that system?

Many Christians are unaware that Muslims claim that the …

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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 43 – Agnosticism.

By C.L. Bolt

Since Romans 1 teaches a universal belief in God, if the Christian world view is true, then agnosticism is contradictory and thus false. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that agnosticism is true, and the agnostic really does not know whether or not God exists:

If God exists, then everyone knows that God exists;
The agnostic does not know that God exists;
Therefore, God does not exist.

The agnostic’s position of agnosticism assumes at the outset that God does not exist. But this is atheism, not agnosticism. For agnosticism to both be agnosticism and not …

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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 42 – Atheism.

By C.L. Bolt

So much work has been done regarding atheism that one hesitates to add much more concerning it in an introduction to covenantal apologetics. The atheist must be pressed for consistency in every area, and her inconsistencies immediately pointed out. The problems of skepticism described in this series are so easily applied to atheism that those new to this method of apologetics sometimes mistakenly think that the method is only applicable to atheism.

The atheist will mockingly demand evidence for the existence of God all the while pretending as though she is neutral with respect to any evidence …

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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 41 – Polytheism.

By C.L. Bolt

Polytheism posits that there are multiple entities which go by the label “god,” but these entities are often so much like humans that they do not merit the label. Positing all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful gods in the plural results in a number of contradictions between those attributes such that these conceptions typically only possess slightly above and beyond what humans possess in terms of knowledge, presence, and power. They are nothing like the God of the Bible. It is not difficult to see why, given what has been discussed in this series; polytheism fails to provide an account …

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