Thank you for taking the time to write your perspective about that – I truly do appreciate it!

vm

I understand what you’re saying (even though your version is a lot less accusatory than Manny’s ) but I still think it’s a false dichotomy. No God does not imply that we all make up our own rules. We are inside a culture and clearly bounded by the consensus morals of this culture. Only truly sociopathic individuals (like the Columbine shooters or the deeply unsettling Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs) operate completely outside the boundaries of consensus morals. Sure, morals are thus not absolute or set in stone, but they are still meaningful and have consequences.

About apologetics. I may have used the word in a slightly non-standard sense towards Manny, but I tend to use it when people look for evidence to bolster their faith. This separates it from critical history or science by starting with the conclusion and then looking for the evidence. After a few iterations, apologetics starts looking like critical science to the untrained eye, because it ostensibly starts with the facts and then traces the apologetic route “backwards” towards the conclusion that the Bible is true.

The same thing can be done with anything – a hypothesis I put to the test during the last Nanowrimo, where I invented a fake story and then went looking for real history to back it up. It ended up as a surprisingly solid “historical” novel, with the story clearly false and yet with nothing but true historical facts (over 200 separate interlocking facts, in fact.) The trick is to ignore all the historical stuff that runs counter to your conclusion. It was a fun exercise.

The importance of apologetics? It has been important in shaping our culture, to be sure. Also, it provides the believers who aren’t comfortable with just swallowing dogma raw with reasons for their faith. The flip side is that apologetics never teaches the reader to be truly critical about everything – only stuff that runs counter to the desired conclusion.
As a skeptic, I am forced to critically assess everything I *believe* as well – which is interesting indeed. (During this very debate, for instance, I discovered that the oft-repeated tale about “Jesus being a Xerox of the older god Mithras” doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, so I stopped believing it. This untrue tale is mentioned in more than one atheist documentary and I have heard it repeated often, even on respectable TV shows like “QI”.)

It sometimes saddens me how many billions of brain-hours have been wasted on the mental contortions of apologetics. Every single Bible verse has been pored over, analysed again and again as the knowledge-base and the culture changed, and every bible verse needs to be re-crowbarred into the version of reality we have discovered so far. It’s a never-ending battle, resulting in numerous conflicts of facts where apologists are forced to attempt discredit established research as all their other pathways are blocked. It is counter-productive and deeply confusing to the interested layman.

If I were to speak on the importance of apologetics, I would focus on its role as a primary source of distraction from geniune inquiry. That HAS had a strong impact on the way the world looks, though not, I fear, in a good way.

Of course you don’t agree, but you asked for my opinion and there it was. I am sure you can incorporate something about how we skeptics percieve your endeavour into your sermon. Good luck with it, and let me know how it went!

In fairness to Manny, he does not seem to be claiming to read Tim’s mind.

It seems rather plain when he says, “There are no truths in your mind, only perspectives, everything is the color of the crystal you see it through” that he is saying there is no absolute truth if there is no God. This means in place of a Universal Lawgiver, we all make up our own rules and refer to ourselves as the ultimate standard of whether something is true or not. This means everything is subjective by default.

And Tim, you called Manny an apologist in your comment back. I am curious, would you define any Christian that tries to give a reason for their beliefs as a sort of ‘de facto’ apologist? I just wonder what you think, since I am preaching on the importance of apologetics this Sunday at our church and wanted to get your opinion.

vm

ps – for you locals that wanna come, check out rooseveltchurch.org

You just presented Pascal’s Wager. Please google it so you can see the many problems with that argument.

“If you’re right, then…”

What if God loves atheists, but hates Christians? There are an infinite number of situations we can make up.

Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Tim claimed that there is no God.

Lastly, you wrote: “In your effort to disprove the existence of God you have crowned yourself as your own god. There are no thruts in your mind, only perspectives, everything is the color of the crystal you see it thru.” Please support this claim or retract it, as I have a hard time believing that you have mind-reading abilities.

yeah, you strayed from the topic at hand somewhat, but I’d like to try and address your comments none the less.

My main point would be that I am NOT asking you to have faith in me. At all. I am inviting you openly to do your own research and reach your own conclusions. All I am trying to do is point out some possible logical fallacies, so you can avoid them yourself and get closer to the truth. Don’t believe anyone including me. The only way to ever get close to the truth is to do your own research.

I sort of admire your statement that you choose to believe in God because it makes you feel good. I simply can’t pick and choose my beliefs like that. My mind won’t allow it – I need to know if I’m right or if I’m wrong. Also, I enjoy discovering I am wrong, because that means I learned something.

Atheists can’t disprove the existence of God, of course. Nor can they disprove that the resurrection occured. But equally obviously, the atheists don’t need to. There are literally an infinite amount of claims a person could make about the world and how it operates, and most of those claims are impossible to disprove (for instance, the claim “there are 349,444,399 clones of Rosie O’Donnell floating between the stars in the Andromeda Galaxy.”) Do you feel compelled to believe this claim without evidence. I hope not. Can you disprove it? No. The reasonable stance to such a claim – to ANY claim – is to start out by not believing it, and gradually believe it more and more as more and more evidence comes in that it is true. That’s what I try to do with all claims (although I suspect I have many mental bugbears left over from misunderstandings and childhood).

About your claim about the color of sky, I disagree that I could not have my mind changed. If the color of the sky is to be taken as a fact (and not just some unmeasurable internal qualia) then the color of the sky can for instance be meaured as a wavelength of light – say, 410nm. If I had mutated color receptors in my eyes and perceived red and blue colors in the same way, and I had never seen blue objects described by others as “not red”, then sure, I would believe that the sky is red. However, if I were to analyze the wavelength of the light from the sky and the light reflected off a tomato, I would see that they were at either end of the spectrum and I would be forced to conclude they were different colors, and that my eyes were unable to resolve the difference. I would, in other words, be able to correct my mistake with measurable evidence. Your claim that it would always be word against word is false. The evidence wins.

Ending on Pascal’s Wager is a bit of an intellectual cop-out since it has been debunked literally hundreds of times. I would have thought any apologist would avoid it by now. The standard answer to the false dilemma is “what if we’re both wrong? then we both get punished by the God neither os us believed in – Vishnu, perhaps, or Thor, or Htyeheheyru, a God no-one thought to believe in – maybe you more than me because you so often denounced the true God as a false idol.”

In the absence of evidence, as always, we do not believe in Htyeheheheyru, or Thor, or Vishnu. You believe in God without evidence. I don’t. But we both disbelieve in an infinity of Gods who may turn out to exist. In other words, our odds are the same.

We as Christians should be candid enough to admit that it’s not only professing
atheists who have doubts about the bodily resurrection of Jesus – cause plenty
of other kinds of people do as well. I recognize this fact and understand it;
that’s what we’re trying to get at the bottom of it in this debate …

vm