Tag: Christianity

Mailvox: The evidence for God

I really fail to understand why so many Christian apologists have such a difficult time answering such easy questions:

Don’t know if you’ve ever seen this before.  In my opinion this little kid embarrassed Eric Hovind. Eric may even have a valid point he’s trying to make but I’m not sure exactly what it is. I know its hard to present a coherent summary of evidence for God very quickly (your debate with Dominic has really given me some food for thought when thinking about evidence for the existence of a deity) but what would you give as a very short, snappy answer to someone who asked “What is your evidence for God?”

I don’t know who Hovind is, but I tend to agree.  I stopped watching after Hovind said “without God, you can’t know anything.”  Even if that is perfectly true, it’s an incredibly stupid answer.  One might as reasonably answer “without oxygen, you can’t know anything”, and to as little effect.

The correct answer concerning the evidence for God is precisely the same as it is for practically everything else in the historical record, which is to say the copious documentary evidence available.  We can no more reasonably doubt the existence of God than we can doubt the existence of Alexander the Great, Abraham Lincoln, or any other human being who existed before the invention of audio and video recording and for whom there are physical artifacts that support the documentary evidence.

Can skeptics produce plausible explanations for why so much false documentary evidence of God exists if He does not?  Sure.  Just as I can plausibly explain that the myth of George Washington was invented in order to provide Americans with founding Romulus-style figure of reverence in order to compensate for their lack of kings and common history.  I mean, there were no cherry trees in Virginia.  And isn’t it ludicrous to take literally the myth of Washington’s rjection of the proffered crown when the story is a patently a straightforward imitation of the Roman dictator Cincinnatus.

As for the other part of the question, where the boy declares that communication with God is simply a part of one’s brain talking to him, I would have asked the kid how he was able to distinguish between one part of my brain talking to me and an alien transmission from Alpha Centauri.  I would have also asked him precisely what part of my brain was doing the talking, and to what, precisely?  I would have pressed him until it became obvious that he knew nothing of neuroscience, was simply parroting something he’d been told, and that his assertion was actually less credible than the God hypothesis.

It’s one thing to claim that your brain must be talking to itself when you’re the only one who hears it.  It’s another when other people hear it too.

Most modern Christian apologists are incompetent because they approach the discourse as a chance to explicate theology rather than understanding that it is a form of intellectual combat where the goal is to discredit the interlocutor.  So, like Hovind, they explicate a little theology that looks like an irrelevant evasion while simultaneously managing to get intellectually discredited by young boys.  Frankly, I’d be surprised and a little disappointed if I didn’t have the kid in tears and questioning his faith in science within minutes after asking such a pair of stupid questions.

First things first.  Destroy the interlocutor.  Answer every question directly, on his terms, and then go after the vulnerabilities they reveal with a flamethrower.  Only then, when you are standing upon whatever quivering ashes remain, can you explicate further if you wish.

Happy Thanksgiving 2012

I hope this Thanksgiving finds you with many things for which you are grateful.  Among the many things for which I must give thanks to God are my loyal and intelligent readership, who are as quick to correct my errors as they are to commend my insights.

Even though we dwell in a place where the American Thanksgiving is not celebrated, Spacebunny presented an impeccable turkey, accompanied by her excellent mashed potatoes and other side dishes, then followed that up with home-baked pumpkin and French Silk pies. 

Church of England delays suicide

I’m a little surprised at the result of the Synod vote as I was confident that the Anglicans were literally Hell-bent on following the Episcopalians in their death spiral into the historical dustbin of post-Christianity:

In a knife-edge decision at a special sitting of the Synod in London, bishops
and clergy voted through the change by large majorities.  But the measure failed to secure the required two thirds support among
representatives of the laity by just 6 votes.  Although 324 members of the Synod voted in favour of the change, 124 voted
against and 11 abstained.

It’s amazing that so many churches are determined to follow the world rather than the Word.  But then, it was written that they would do precisely that.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a nominally Christian denomination that ordains women isn’t Christian, merely that it won’t be Christian for long.

Christians and the Law

The responsibility of Christians to obey the Law of Moses is a subject
that comes up from time to time, which always surprises me because the
Bible is perfectly clear on the matter.  While it is understandable,
though not excusable, that atheists regularly confuse Christianity with
Judaism when attempting to criticize the former, it is absolutely
bizarre that some Christians are still under the impression that they
have an obligation to abide by Jewish Law.

Christians are not Jews.  Christians are not obligated to follow Mosaic
Law.  Ask any Jew, he should be able to confirm it.  As will the Bible, in Acts 15:

The Council at Jerusalem

Certain people came down from Judea to
Antioch and were teaching the believers: “Unless you are circumcised,
according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.”  This
brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So
Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go
up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question. The
church sent them on their way, and as they traveled through Phoenicia
and Samaria, they told how the Gentiles had been converted. This news
made all the believers very glad.  When
they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the
apostles and elders, to whom they reported everything God had done
through them.Then
some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood
up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the
law of Moses.” 
The apostles and elders met to consider this question. After
much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know
that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might
hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now
then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a
yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”
The whole assembly
became silent as they listened to Barnabas and Paul telling about the
signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them. When they finished, James spoke up. “Brothers,” he said, “listen to me. Simon has described to us how God first intervened to choose a people for his name from the Gentiles. The words of the prophets are in agreement with this, as it is written:

‘After this I will return and rebuild David’s fallen tent.
Its ruins I will rebuild, and I will restore it,
That the rest of mankind may seek the Lord,
Even all the Gentiles who bear my name,
Says the Lord, who does these things,
Things known from long ago.

“It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Instead
we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by
idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and
from blood. For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”

The Council’s Letter to Gentile Believers

Then the apostles and elders, with the
whole church, decided to choose some of their own men and send them to
Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. They chose Judas (called Barsabbas) and
Silas, men who were leaders among the believers. With them they sent the following letter:

The apostles and elders, your brothers,

To the Gentile believers in Antioch, Syria and Cilicia:

Greetings.
We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said. So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul— men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore we are sending Judas and Silas to confirm by word of mouth what we are writing. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements: You
are to abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat
of strangled animals and from sexual immorality. You will do well to
avoid these things.
Farewell.
So the men were sent off and went down to Antioch, where they gathered the church together and delivered the letter. The people read it and were glad for its encouraging message. Judas and Silas, who themselves were prophets, said much to encourage and strengthen the believers. After
spending some time there, they were sent off by the believers with the
blessing of peace to return to those who had sent them. But Paul and Barnabas remained in Antioch, where they and many others taught and preached the word of the Lord.

The fact that Jesus Christ did not abolish the Law says nothing about
its continued inapplicability to those who are not Jews.  In fact, to
claim it now applies to non-Jews when it did not before on the basis of
Matthew 5:17-20 is clearly self-contradictory, for the obvious reason
that making it applicable to people to whom it did not previously apply
would be changing the letter of it.  Note particularly how Jesus states
even those who “sets
aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others
accordingly” will still nevertheless be part of the kingdom of heaven.

Mailvox: an uneven match

George: In the end, adherence to divine command theory is the province of lazy minds.

So, in the one corner, we have the irrepressible George as well as the snowflake moralist, INTJ. In the other, we have William of Ockham, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, John Calvin, Immanuel Kant (arguably), and bringing up the rear, Vox Day.

I certainly don’t mind finding myself in the company of such “lazy minds”.

Mailvox: in which corrections are requested

CS asks if there are any holes to be identified in his Contra Calvinus:

Calvinism states that a man can only be saved by God if God has previously elected him for salvation and then draws him, through irresistible grace to his salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Calvinism also states man is totally depraved; man therefore is incapable of making the choice to believe in Jesus Christ unless God first draws him. Therefore, man cannot nor will ever come to God in faith unless God first draws him and if God draws him then man is incapable of resisting. Therefore also, no one is saved whom God did not previously determine would be saved and no one is damned whom God did not previously determine would be damned.

Calvinism also states that God is completely sovereign, so that everything that happens is His specific will and nothing can happen that God does not specifically will.

We may further deduce from scripture that Calvinism would support the statement that it is God’s will that man should be free from sin. We may also deduce from the belief that in man’s total depravity he is so given to his sin that he is unable to come to God in faith, that the strength or quantity of a man’s faith is indirectly proportional to the amount of sin in his life, so that if a man could be perfectly faithful, as was Jesus Christ, he would also be perfectly free from sin, as was Jesus Christ.

Therefore, in God’s sovereignty and according to His perfect will, when man is drawn to Him in faith he must be drawn perfectly so and irresistible grace will necessarily result in the complete renewal of a man at the moment of his justification, to the point where man is no longer a slave to sin and can never be again for all eternity.

Because it is clear from Romans chapter 7 that man, even after he has been saved by the grace of God, through faith in Jesus Christ is still a slave to his sin we can logically conclude that Calvinism and scripture are logically incompatible. And because a central tenant of Calvinism is that scripture is the inspired work of God and perfectly correct it is, in itself, a contradiction, and therefore cannot be true.

The wages of theological sin

It’s really remarkable how cause and effect seems to repeatedly elude liberal Christians:

IN 1998, John Shelby Spong, then the reliably controversial Episcopal bishop of Newark, published a book entitled “Why Christianity Must Change or Die.” Spong was a uniquely radical figure — during his career, he dismissed almost every element of traditional Christian faith as so much superstition — but most recent leaders of the Episcopal Church have shared his premise. Thus their church has spent the last several decades changing and then changing some more, from a sedate pillar of the WASP establishment into one of the most self-consciously progressive Christian bodies in the United States…..

Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.

For some reason, despite the observable fact that chasing after the world and attempting to “appeal to today’s young people” has been negatively affecting church attendance since I was in junior high, no one ever seems to question an assumption that so repeatedly and reliably fails. It’s no different than politics and the fallacy of moderate appeal. People without direction seek leadership, and when the Church refuses to stand for its Christian principles as defined in the New Testament and provide intellectual leadership against the zeitgeist, it not only sacrifices its reason to exist, but counterintuitively, also loses its primary appeal.

Of course Douthat, being somewhat of a moderate conservative, fails to recognize that the gifts of progressive Christianity he cites, “Social Gospel and the civil rights movement”, were both intellectually poisonous and societally destructive in the long run. Liberal Christianity shouldn’t be saved and it won’t be saved. Having cut itself off from its Christian roots, it should be abjured by the rest of the Church and left to its inevitable demise.

There were surely wolves in sheeps clothing who helped engineer the demise of the liberal denominations and congregations, but it should not be forgotten that they were abetted by many foolish and short-sighted individuals who were genuine Christians. One of the great shortcomings of nearly every church I have ever attended is the complete lack of vigilance for the wolves. Paul warns of them, and yet most churches never stop to think that among their most avid volunteers are likely those who seek to destroy the institution.

Mailvox: the wages of stupidity

The wages of sin are death. The wages of stupidity are bankruptcy. NW writes to remind me of my prediction of the fatal consequences that result when a church leader parts company with the Bible in favor of the current worldly consensus:

Grace Community United Church of Christ will close its doors this weekend, but the pastor who says his decision to publicly support gay-marriage rights unwittingly thrust it on a path toward financial ruin plans to find a new home for his small congregation….

White said his church’s financial problems started in 2005 after he voted to support same-sex marriage at the United Church of Christ’s national synod. Attendance in the pews immediately dropped off the next week, and soon, three-fourths of his sizable congregation was gone. The departures took a financial toll, so the church took out a $150,000 loan in April 2007 to pay its bills, using the church building as collateral. The ministry owned the structure and owed no debt on the building at the time.

The high-interest loan was trouble from the start, and it was quickly acquired by Shrader and MS Properties. The church fell behind on payments, and interest and penalties began piling on, increasing the debt far beyond the initial principal. A settlement agreement called for the church to pay back $175,000 in May or $200,000 by the end of June.

Far too many members of the organized churches believe that the institutions themselves are the Church. They are not, and the true Church cannot compromise with abomination. Christianity cannot condone homogamy any more than it can condone ritual gang rape or child sacrifice. And when it purports to do so, it ceases to be Christianity.

It is fascinating, is it not, that this wolf in sheep’s clothing has no regrets about destroying his church’s solvency and driving off most of the congregation.

Philosophy leads to the Cross

This erstwhile atheist’s intellectual path may explain why the leading atheists are, to a man, so philosophically incompetent:

I was ready to admit that there were parts of Christianity and Catholicism that seemed like a pretty good match for the bits of my moral system that I was most sure of, while meanwhile my own philosophy was pretty kludged together and not particularly satisfactory. But I couldn’t pick consistency over my construction project as long as I didn’t believe it was true.

While I kept working, I tried to keep my eyes open for ways I could test which world I was in, but a lot of the evidence for Christianity was only compelling to me if I at least presupposed Deism. Meanwhile, on the other side, I kept running into moral philosophers who seemed really helpful, until I discovered that their study of virtue ethics has led them to take a tumble into the Tiber. (I’m looking at you, MacIntyre!).

Then, the night before Palm Sunday (I have excellent liturgical timing), I was up at my alma mater for an alumni debate. I had another round of translating a lot of principles out of Catholic in order to use them in my speech, which prompted the now traditional heckling from my friends. After the debate, I buttonholed a Christian friend for another argument. During the discussion, he prodded me on where I thought moral law came from in my metaphysics. I talked about morality as though it were some kind of Platonic form, remote from the plane that humans existed on. He wanted to know where the connection was.

I could hypothesize how a Forms-material world link would work in the case of mathematics (a little long and off topic for this post, but pretty much the canonical idea of recognizing Two-ness as the quality that’s shared by two chairs and two houses, etc. Once you get the natural numbers, the rest of mathematics is in your grasp). But I didn’t have an analogue for how humans got bootstrap up to get even a partial understanding of objective moral law.

I’ve heard some explanations that try to bake morality into the natural world by reaching for evolutionary psychology. They argue that moral dispositions are evolutionarily triumphant over selfishness, or they talk about group selection, or something else. Usually, these proposed solutions radically misunderstand a) evolution b) moral philosophy or c) both. I didn’t think the answer was there. My friend pressed me to stop beating up on other people’s explanations and offer one of my own…. It turns out I did.

I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth. And there was one religion that seemed like the most promising way to reach back to that living Truth.

It is both interesting and informative to once more note that whereas the religious-to-atheist transformation is closely associated with adolescence and reactive intellectual immaturity, the converse one is much more often the product of emotional maturity and intellectual exploration. And, as I’ve noted before, a higher percentage of children raised atheist convert to Christianity than children raised Christian convert to atheism, as was apparently the case here.

But those are merely observations. My main purpose was simply to share her testimony and wish her well in her ongoing walk with God.

Mailvox: the permissive will of a red-handed god

KH asks about the so-called “permissive will” that is part of the Calvinist concept of the divine:

I have followed your discussion of Calvinism with great interest. Some of these questions come up routinely in an on going group Bible study. Recently, one Calvinist used the term “permissive will” in reference to God allowing a natural disaster to kill people. (The term was new to me). He argued that God does not cause these tragedies but permits them or allows Satan to cause them. The problem I perceived with this argument is that one is still blaming God for the earthquake or tornado fatalities, whether it was His “permissive/passive” or active will. The term “permissive will” seemed like a euphemism to get around the belief of God controlling every storm and fault line without actually accusing Him of murder. I still feel like there was a missed opportunity for the use of logic to take out that argument. How would you have responded to the use of that term?

This is one of the concepts I lampoon in my occasional reference to the nine billion wills of God – actually, I think I previously referred to 17, but nine billion more appropriately reflects my view of the matter – and it refers to the distinctions that some Calvinists make between the “perfect”, the “permissive”, the “decreed”, the “directive”, the “perceptive”, and the “directed” wills of God. This isn’t quite as insane as it sounds, as there is a necessary and legitimate reason to distinguish between what God demands, what God decrees, what God anticipates, and what God wishes but does not expect, all of which can be reasonably described as what He wills.

However, KH is correct in smelling a rat. Those inclined to omniderigence will draw no such distinction; John Piper, for example, is straightforward about his belief in a literally murderous Jesus Christ who purposefully kills people with tornadoes. But this is a theologically incorrect use of “permissive will”, as that is what is used to explain Man’s ability to sin, not Man’s suffering natural disasters, which is generally considered to be a consequence of God’s “perfect will”.

This use of “permissive will” actually sounds rather more like my very non-Calvinist perspective, although I would never use such a term to describe what I observe to be Satan’s partial sovereignty over the world. It is always intriguing to compare the Calvinist claims of God’s sovereignty with the contradictory claims of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul concerning the being they describe as “the prince of this world” and “the god of this age”.