Evangelical Realism

Via Americans United comes this report of how a failure to separate church and state leads to a dilution of the church.

In a friend-of-the-court brief filed today, Americans United and allied religious leaders and organizations take issue with a federal court decision allowing Utah officials to place crosses along highways to memorialize state highway patrol officers who have died in the line of duty.

State officials insisted that the Christian symbol is a secular symbol and can be used regardless of the personal religious beliefs of the officer being honored.

Did you catch that? The state of Utah is telling mainstream Christians that the Cross is no longer their symbol. Nope, it’s been secularized. It has nothing to do with the Gospel, or with paying the penalty for sin, or even with anticipating the Resurrection. All a cross means is death. You walk into a Christian church, you see a big cross up front, and according to the state of Utah, all it means is that someone died in church.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the Chronicles of Narnia, there is a story of how two children and a “marsh wiggle” named Puddleglum travel deep into underground realms to rescue a kidnapped prince from the clutches of an evil witch. Using gentle music, and some strange, narcotic herbs thrown into the fire, the witch begins to enchant the three of them, telling them there is no sun, no sky, and above all no Aslan (the messianic Lion who is the real hero of Narnia). Just when the enchantment is almost complete, Puddleglum rallies, stomps on the fire, and tells the witch that even if there is no sun, sky, or Aslan, he’d rather believe in them all anyway because they’re a darn sight nicer that what the witch is telling them.

You hear the same argument from people in real life. Suppose there is no God (or at least no Christian God). Suppose the Gospel really is just a myth. But it’s such a nice story. What’s wrong with just believing in it anyway? If the fable is pleasant and comfortable, and the truth seems unappealing, why not go ahead and believe the fable anyway? What’s the harm?

Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide when he found out the FBI was preparing to accuse him of sending anthrax-tainted letters that killed 5 people, wrote a number of letters to his local newspaper during his career. These letters are now available online, thanks to the Frederick (MD) News-Post, and they make for some fascinating reading. Dr. Ivins, it seems, was no Richard Dawkins.

August 24, 2006

Rabbi Morris Kosman is entirely correct in summarily rejecting the demands of the Frederick Imam for a “dialogue.”

By blood and faith, Jews are God’s chosen, and have no need for “dialogue” with any gentile. End of “dialogue.”

And there’s more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Vox Day closes his chapter on Christopher Hitchens with a look at three topics where he feels Hitchens does particularly badly: historical Biblical accuracy, child abuse, and charity. Let’s look at the first of these and see how Vox does.

In discussing the Bible, Hitchens claims that the four Gospels were not in any sense a historical record and claims their multiple authors “cannot agree on anything of importance.” His only source is Bart Ehrman, an apostate former evangelical whose Misquoting Jesus is an interesting and respected textual criticism of the inerrant inspiration of the New Testament. But Hitchens is apparently unaware that Ehrman has been forced to admit that the Gospels are in accordance that 1) Jesus was crucified and buried, 2) his tomb was discovered to be empty, 3) his disciples believed they encountered him after his death, and 4) his disciples sincerely believed that Jesus had risen from the dead.

That’s an interesting rebuttal, considering that the earliest and most reliable manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark end at chapter 16 and verse 8, which mentions an angel and an empty tomb, but not any actual encounters with the allegedly risen savior, or subsequent belief on the disciples’ part. So of the 4 areas of broad general agreement that Ehrman was “forced to admit,” two of them aren’t even in the originals of one of the four Gospels.

Read the rest of this entry »

Via AnswerTheSkeptic.com comes this report, from Dr. Hugo Ross, on what Martian ice ages teach us about God.

Schorghofer demonstrated that the mid-latitude subsurface ice was well explained by large intermittent increases in the tilt of Mars’ rotation axis. His explanation implied that, unlike Earth, the main driving force behind Mars’ ice ages was changes in the tilt of its rotation axis…

What makes Earth so extraordinary is that the variation in the tilt of its rotation axis is virtually nil and changes in the eccentricity and inclination of its orbit are very small compared to the other solar system planets. Evidently, Earth’s orbital and rotational features have been exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the long-term survival of advanced life on its surface.

Read the rest of this entry »

For today’s trip to toonland, I want to finish up a few loose ends in Holding’s attempted defense of C. S. Lewis’ famous “Liar, Lord or Lunatic” trilemma. First, though, let’s take a quick look at a comment Holding made about this blog in the “July Screwballs” section of theologyweb. He introduces a comment of mine with this little gem:

And, Dumplin’ Dumbash on why he responds to me, and why he therefore has Dunning Syndrome:

The reference to “Dunning Syndrome” is apparently a reference to an Ig-Nobel-award-winning paper (available in PDF here) in which authors Kruger and Dunning discuss people with very low mental aptitude (e.g. 12th percentile) having impaired ability to assess their own intellectual performance. Wikipedia has an entry for this phenomenon under “Dunning-Kruger Effect” (not “Dunning Syndrome), and describes it as “the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge (or skill) tend to think they know more (or have more skill) than they do.” Holding wants to accuse me of suffering from this problem, but in his rush to accuse, he mistakenly calls it a “syndrome” and gets the name of the authors wrong, thus demonstrating that he really doesn’t know as much about this condition as he thinks he knows. The gypsy curse strikes again!

Read the rest of this entry »

(Book: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST, by Geisler and Turek, chapter 9.)

Now that they’ve established the fact that, yes, we have a pretty fair idea of what the original text of the New Testament was, Geisler and Turek are ready to move on to the question of whether the claims made by the NT are actually true. They begin by listing seven points which they cite as being the seven tests historians use to determine whether or not a historical document should be regarded as factually accurate.

1. Do we have early testimony?
2. Do we have eyewitness testimony?
3. Do we have testimony from multiple, independent eyewitness sources?
4. Are the eyewitnesses trustworthy?
5. Do we have corroborating evidence from archeology or other writers?
6. Do we have any enemy attestation?
7. Does the testimony contain events or details that are embarrassing to the authors?

The first thing one notices about these seven questions is that they are an apologetics checklist, not a list of tests for determining the relative credibility of a particular document. “Let’s see, what can we use to convince people that Christianity is true? Do we have eyewitnesses, or something we can claim to be eyewitness testimony? Do we have anything we can cite as being multiple, independent eyewitness sources? Can we argue for the trustworthiness of the eyewitnesses? Is there anything from archeology or ancient literature that we can use as evidence? Can we make it sound like the writers are being embarrassingly forthright and honest in their accounts? What can we use to convince people we’re right?” It’s all apologetics.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s like a scene from an old B-grade black-and white horror flick: Jesus is walking down some dank alleyway in Jerusalem and carelessly bumps into an old gypsy woman, knocking her in the mud and muck, and then thoughtlessly laughing at her misfortune. Her deepset eyes blaze, and she scowls at him. “A curse upon you,” she mutters. “From now on, your followers and supporters will be unable to accuse their critics of any fault or fallacy without being guilty of the same thing themselves.” He, like all B-grade movie heroes, doesn’t take her seriously until her curse starts coming true. Only then does he realize, to his horror, that the curse is inexorable, inescapable, and infallible.

I’m not the only person to see this curse in action. PZ Myers has a post about a reporter, in Salon no less, who falls prey to the old gypsy’s revenge. According to the reporter,

Myers has earned notoriety with his blog, Pharyngula, in which he reports on new developments in biology and indiscriminately excoriates those he views as hostile to science, a pantheon of straw men and women that includes theologians, journalists and churchgoers.

Having accused Myers of excoriating straw men and women, he then goes on to attack a bizarre version of Myers’ views which he seems to have defined by taking the opposite of whatever Myers actually said, and calling it “what he really means.”

And in the background, thin and distance, you can almost hear a gleeful cackle.

Obama is not the only guy claiming that America is no longer a Christian nation. According to the World Net Daily, a coalition of Christian organizations is saying the same thing. Unlike Obama, however, the Christian groups have a foolproof plan to change this situation.

A blanket of prayer for America is being proposed for Sept. 11, 2008, the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, because it no longer is the Christian nation it once was, according to a coalition of organizations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another recent comment on the old wordpress.com version of Evangelical Realism. Commenting on Apologetics vs Bible-based faith, “Greg” writes:

I don’t expect you to change your opinion, but I just would like to voice mine. I am a “skeptical” Christian, and following your advice, I would like to know what exactly is the “specialized knowledge and training” and “exposure” you have had?

“he’d just point out that the Bible (if we even needed to have one) could be confirmed by simply asking God.” Before Adam sinned, he spoke to God daily, the very thing you are requiring of Holding to produce. This is now infact impossible, because God doesn’t talk to people that way since sin separates us, as you already know from your specialized training and exposure.

As a skeptic, you stink. Your basic logic is not even logic, it is completely skewed.

“In fact, Holding is quite plainly wrong in asserting that critics of the Bible need to acquire some impossibly difficult list of academic credentials in order to falsify Scripture’s claims to divine infallibility.”

This is exactly what you skeptics expect of Christians. Nice double standard, how “hypocritical” something you skeptics often accuse Christians of. BTW, I have never claimed to be perfect, just forgiven.

More of your supremely flawed logic: “You do not need a post-PhD mastery of the mathematics of quantum physics to know that the equation “2+2=17? does not add up.”

This is a classic straw man. You have achieved nothing here other than exhibiting your own ignorance of basic logic. I don’t mean to say this in a harsh or demeaning way, I truly don’t, but you could seriously use some more training and exposure to basic logic before you tackle the monster of Biblical Inerrancy.

Hi, Greg, thanks for writing. Taking your last point first, I think if you look it up, you’ll find that a straw man argument involves misrepresenting your opponent’s argument in some way. When I say that you don’t need to know calculus to recognize arithmetic errors, I’m presenting my own argument, not describing someone else’s. Clearly, then, this isn’t a straw man fallacy.

Read the rest of this entry »