Tag Archives: Apologetics

Humanist Ad Campaigns, Part 1

Posted on January 16, 2011 | 3 Comments

Humanists have recently begun a number of ad campaigns.  They are silly.

Note I didn’t say “intolerant” or “in bad taste.”  My concern is not that they “hurt people’s feelings,” as if the skeptics and humanists need to step on eggshells when it comes to religious folk.  No, my claim is that the ads demonstrate the very signs of irrationality that humanists and such claim to eschew.

Some of the ads are patently absurd.   Take, for instance, the ad above.  Any thinking person who doesn’t have an axe to grind and isn’t already blinded by an agenda will recognize that Jesus is using hyperbole.  He was a Jew, afterall, who affirmed the Jewish Law, which includes the Ten Commandments, which includes the commandment “honor your father and mother.”   He is making a comment about the superiority of one’s love to God in comparison with one’s love towards everything else.  The ad obviously lacks charity, which is a pre-requisite of rationality when dealing with one’s ideological opponents.

Also look at this second ad.  It commits the fallacy of equivocation; it subtly uses another meaning of the word “fear” than what the passage intends.  Plus, it’s not as if fear is never a legitimate response to something.

And a third…how in the world does the group making the ads think that the proverb is actually saying that evidence and logic are bad things? (more on this later)  There are several perfectly good explanations of the meaning of that proverb, they make good sense, and for the ad makers to ignore them is the height of willful ignorance.

You might respond by saying that I’m setting too high of a standard for the ads.  They are advertisements, afterall, not graduate philosophy papers.  Yes, they are ads, and ad makers are usually given a pass to play more fast and loose with words and persuasive tactics than other genres of communication, but I still maintain that a little more charity and rationality and a little less caricature isn’t too much to ask.

I had a discussion with a friend on Facebook about this recently.  In the several posts that follow, I’m going to catalogue the conversation to unpack what I’ve started to say here in this post.

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Atheist Ad Campains

Posted on January 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

One of my buddies, a fellow Christian, emailed that picture to me the other day.  Some of his family members were floating it back and forth, commenting on how clever it was.

I had to chuckle, but not because I thought it clever.  IMO, it leaves atheists open to several responses.  One could just as easily retort back something to the tune of “Religion inspired Martin Luther King.  Science inspired Hiroshima.”

Someone could respond to that by pointing out that I shouldn’t be blaming a whole methodology for a particular thing that someone abused said methodology to invent…which is my point precisely in the retort in the first place. 

You see, the ad commits the fallacy of hasty generalization.  It lumps all religious ideologies into one amorphous whole, and it uses the evil caused by some specific religious ideologies to paint all religions.  Not a very rational or honest thing to do, yet I find some atheist types doing it all the time.  They completely ignore all the huge differences between religions and treat them all the same.  As one author quipped, saying all religions are ultimately the same is like insisting that aspirin and arsenic are ultimately the same because they come in tablet form.

I don’t know how folks can logically put the worldview of Jesus and the worldview of Mohammed in the same boat, but that doesn’t stop people from foolishly trying.

Talk to these folks, and you get the impression that belief in and devotion to any and all higher powers is dangerous.

I guess that depends on what the character of that higher power is.

I have reason to hold that when I pass away, I will be held accountable for my actions in this life by a powerful, just, loving Creator God who insists that I treat my fellow man with compassion…BOO!  Fear me.

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Another Reason why I Love my Job

Posted on October 3, 2010 | Leave a comment

I have this kid in one of my English classes that is quite the lil “new atheist.”  Self-proclaimed, btw.  He told me the first day of class that his goal is to be a spokesman for the new atheism, and to help rid the world of religion.  He is ambitious, if nothing else.

I’m telling you, this guy is uber-aggressive.  Quite the evangelist, really.  Anytime he finds a Christian student, he starts attacking and just will not stop.  In class, he constantly raises his hand and steers the conversation onto religious topics.  He frequently stays after class to debate me.  Rather than viewing his presence as an obstacle, liability, or nuisance (ok, I admit…a time or two I have thought in my head, “can’t I just eat my chicken in peace, pal?”), I view him as a great opportunity to use my gifts for the greater good.   Almost every day I get to use my education to hopefully get him (and his classmates) to pause and think things through.

When he steers conversations in class, I usually stick to asking good questions, and most of the time, I give him enough rope such that he hangs himself.  One of the students once asked me, “Mr. B, why don’t you just shut him down?”  My answer was that I want anyone and everyone to feel free to express their views in my class, and really, I don’t have to shut him down for the rest of the class to get it.  When he’s talking, I look around the rest of the class and often see eyes rolling.  Most of the time, quite a few hands go up in protest of his statements.  Sometimes, you don’t have to positively prove someone wrong for an audience to see it…sometimes, all you gotta do is let him talk.  Get out of the way.  I’m confident my questions are also doing work.

There has been one instance after class, though, where I have been a bit more aggressive.  One day he was ranting and raving to another student about Stephen Hawking’s new book.  Hawking boasts in the book that God is no longer needed to explain the origin of the universe, so it’s not surprising that this student would love the book.  Listening to the conversation, I couldn’t help but smile, and, seeing me smile, he asked, “What do you think of the book?”

I replied that I haven’t read the book (its on my list, don’t worry), but I’ve read some reviews, and I know a bit about Hawking outside of them.  His determinism certainly gets in the way, and I attempted to explain this to my budding new atheist.  According to determinism, the physical world is governed by the laws of physics, chemistry, or some other natural science (depending on what kind of determinist you are talking to).  So far so good, but the determinist goes on to argue that the physical world is all there is.   Therefore, the cause-and-effect laws of physics/chemistry governs everything, including thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and the words Hawking writes on the page.  Hawking might say or think that he believes his beliefs because he has good reason to, but rationality has nothing to do with belief, according to determinism.  Beliefs are caused by prior physical states.  Someone, say, my new atheist student, might think he chooses his beliefs based upon reason, logic, and evidence (he goes on and on and on about those three things in class, anyway), but that is illusory, if determinism is true.

All that doesn’t mean that his or Hawking’s  beliefs are false, it just undermines confidence in their beliefs.  How can Hawking or my student know their beliefs to be true, on determinism?  They can’t.  It all has to do with the particles, and nothing to do with a self or individual choosing based upon rationality and logic.   On determinism, there really is no such thing as a self or individual anyway…that, too, is illusory.

Add into all this that determinists advocate for their views like determinism is false.  They wax eloquent about everything being caused by the laws of physics, but then then write books, giving reasons, attempting to persuade individuals to choose determinism because it is true.  Thus, out of one side of thier mouths, they say, “I’m a vegetarian,” but out of the other side squeaks, “gimme that Inn n Out burger!”  Tough spot for a determinist.

The student just couldn’t see all this…he thought it was possible for c-fibers firing in the brain to cause the beliefs and for someone to choose based upon rational reasons.  He just couldn’t see that if determinism is true, the c-fibers are doing all the work, and the whole bit about rationality is just illusory mumbo-jumbo.

Determinism wreaks havoc on morality as well.  If everything is determined by prior physical states, including our actions, how can we hold moral agents accountable?  There are no moral agents who choose their actions on determinism, yet both are needed for a robust morality…more on that in a future blog post.

In my opinion, naturalism (the view that the physical world is all there is) is the real culprit here.  No room for legitimate free will in naturalism.  If this kid kicks his naturalism to the curb, he wouldn’t have problems like these.

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Dealing with an Atheist Gadfly, Concluded

Posted on July 1, 2010 | 4 Comments

Read the first post here.

Some of you have asked how it all went…it went mighty well, thank you.

It all went down like this: the Christian student group I sponsor at school had an end-of-the-school-year party, and I crashed it.  Yep.  I let them mingle and eat the pizza for a bit, then gathered the group together (kinda large…about 25 or so, most of which I had never seen in the club before.  Funny how that happens when you bring pizza and make it a party) and went at it.  I don’t think they were expecting that, even though I told them a few days before what I wanted to do.  I think they just expected me to briefly announce something and back off.  Well, that is not my style.  :)

First, I recapped what happened for those that weren’t there, then I had those that were there for the conversation rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 meaning the atheist totally walked all over them, 10 meaning that the Christians defended the faith exceptionally well.  Everyone gave a 4 score or below…which is an F.

I pointed this out to them.  My intent in this point, I told them, was not to put them down and make them feel bad about themselves, but to give them a chance to realistically assess their ability to articulate their faith and to handle themselves in a conversation like that.  Friends hold up mirrors when appropriate.  We went on to discuss the challenges that lie ahead for them in college and beyond.  The challenges are far from insurmountable, but when an unprepared Christian with a toddler’s ability to defend the faith and think through tough questions meets a hostile secular environment that *appears* intellectual and learned (key word right there, appears), the result is that usually the Christian ends up walking away from Christ sooner or later.

This all was a great reality check for them.  I’ve discussed it with most of them before, but, as Hugh Hewitt says, repetition is a precondition of success.  They need to hear that message over and over again, for experience has taught me that their prior mental habits and ways of talking die hard: most of the times I say it to them, they nod in agreement then go right back to faith and feeling talk.  Hey, it’s the religious diet they’ve been brought up on in youth group, so what do you expect?

The first day we didn’t cover any specific objections the atheist had.  We spent most of the rest of the time walking through how to handle a conversation with an aggressive contrary person.  This is all tactics, not specifics.  The atheist in the group (I got confirmation that he was just there to argue, btw) was a total steamroller.  He would make an aggressive accusation that usually involved attacking strawmen or using loaded language–more on that stuff later–and as soon as the Christians in the group would start answering the charge, he’d interrupt, change the subject, and make another charge.  They really didn’t know what to do with the guy.  I talked about how to reign the conversation in, how to keep it on topic, and how to graciously hold the other person’s feet to the fire on his use of loaded language.  This is a crucial lesson to learn, for most I’ve encountered don’t know how to identify loaded words that have an emotional impact but little argumentative force.  Most simply let the emotive power of the words fluster them, and they accept the legitimacy of the terms without question.  This is bad strategy.

Next we discussed how to go on the offensive a bit with questions of our own.  Why assume the burden of proof on everything and let the other person control the conversation?  Everyone in the discussion has a worldview; we’ve got our sticky parts to explain, but the atheist has more!  Why should we have to always be in the “hot seat?”  We went over a few easy, simple questions to ask in any conversation that are gracious, yet at the same time force the other person to do his fair share of ‘splainin.

I also spent some time on discussing the atheist’s use of straw men.  Some of the objections he had involved him foisting trumped up beliefs onto the Christians, then attacking those.  Example: at one point in the conversation he said, “so let me get this straight.  You guys believe that God fathered himself through a virgin, then was tortured to death to pay a punishment that he himself inflicted in the first place?”  There are so many straw men there in that one question that it’s hard to know where to begin.  For starters, Christians don’t believe God fathered himself.  We are trinitarians, not modalists.  Three persons, one substance.  That is why we are comfortable saying that there is one God substance, that Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit are all God, yet Christ prayed to the Father often.  Hard to totally wrap my mind around that, granted, but God as Trinity is a world away from that guy’s rubber dummy.  The “Father/Son” titles of the first and second persons of the trinity do not connote any physical siring on the Father’s part.  God the Father did not physically sire God the Son (or Himself, for that matter); the titles are figurative, reflecting the intimate relationship they share with each other and of the roles each play functionally in the plan of salvation.  To suggest otherwise by charging that Christians believe God “fathered himself” is a laughable straw man.

I counseled the students to listen carefully in the conversation for straw men attacks because they occur frequently in conversations like these, and I gave them a few pointers on how to dismantle them.

That was the first day.  I told them to come back the next day to discuss specific objections.  I forgot, though, that I double booked that day, and I wasn’t even going to be on campus!  I was instead at a middle school about 15 minutes away doing presentations to the PE classes there about wrestling.  One of the presentations I was scheduled to give overlapped a bit with lunch at my school, so I was in a bit of a pickle.  Luckily, I had some assistants with me there, so I left them in charge of it during lunch and raced over to the high school so I could meet the kids for another lunch tutoring session.  It was a hard transition to swing, but with some considerable Providential assistance, I made it work.

About twelve or thirteen students returned that day.  We reviewed the previous day’s material, and then went over a few specific objections the atheist had.  We talked about God commanding the Israelites to wipe out the Caananites, a bit about “tolerance,” and a tad about freewill and determinism.  I’m surprised the atheist harped on that last one, for its an argument that’s been largely abandoned in philosophic circles.  His argument was that if God was omniscient (all-knowing), then that would exclude human freewill: God would know the future, including what I would do tomorrow.  Being God, his knowledge would be perfect and certain, therefore there’s no way I could choose otherwise.  If God knows that I’ll eat an orange for breakfast tomorrow, that means I have to eat that orange.  I am not free to choose.

The problem with this argument is that it does not follow that if God knows I’ll eat the orange that I therefore have to eat the orange.  All that follows is that I will eat the orange, not that I must.  There is a difference.  To see this, think about the direction of causality: does God’s knowledge cause my action, or vice versa?  For the person to show that God’s knowledge excludes human free will, he must show that God’s knowledge causes me to eat that orange, but that is a pretty tough thing to show.  How does merely knowing event X will happen, even if that knowledge is certain, cause event X?  Knowledge causes jack squat.

A much better way to look at it is to view it from the opposite direction: my actions causes God’s knowledge.  This doesn’t mean his knowledge is any less certain or perfect.  It just means that in the future if I choose to eat cereal instead, that will be the content of God’s knowledge.

If this is still a bit fuzzy, think of it in possible worlds terms.  A possible world is simply a fancy philosophical way of thinking about a way things could be.  The actual world, including the future events that will happen, is one possible world.  A world in which I choose to eat an orange is a possible world; a world in which I choose to eat cereal is another possible world.  A world in which I choose to eat oatmeal and play the piano (rather than wrestle) is another possible world.  Theoretically, there are infinitely many possible worlds: worlds which are logically possible (a world in which a square circle exists is not possible.   Since that concept is contradictory, it is not a possible world) but which might or might not be actualized.

For every possible world in which God exists (some think he exists in every possible world, making him a necessary being…another post for another time, perhaps), he is omniscient…without getting too far into the details, I’ll just say that it comes along with the territory of being God.  We therefore say that God’s omniscience is necessary: he must be omniscient.  It is impossible for him to be not omniscient.
This does not mean, however, that the content of God’s knowledge is necessary.  The content of God’s knowledge varies with every possible world.  In a possible world in which I eat an orange, that is the content of God’s knowledge; in a possible world in which I eat oatmeal, that is the content of his knowledge.  In every possible world, my actions are freely chosen, yet God is still omniscient.  My actions cause His knowledge.  It does not follow that his knowledge is not certain or it is somehow tarnished.  No meaningful definition of omniscience is sullied.

Heady stuff, I know…But I explained that to them, and wrapped up with some more general perspective.  I gave them a few resources for further study (a few Greg Koukl books, an str youth website, and Love Your God with All Your Mind by JP Moreland), and sent them on their way.
The feedback I received was overwhelmingly positive.  Students told me later that the tutoring sessions created much good conversation outside my classroom, which was one of the goals.  I’ve also received some messages recently from students saying that they’ve begun to frequent the websites I referenced….

Good stuff, good stuff.

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May Cooler Heads Prevail–No Pun Intended

Posted on June 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

One of the many academic weaknesses of most high school students is making the jump from mere persuasive writing to research writing.  The senior students I’ve taught this year are decent at writing persuasive essays.  They can write a structured essay complete with some sort of debateable thesis, and they can elaborate on it some and most attempt to give a bit of support.  Ok, that’s a good start.
But research writing, which is the kind of writing required for my Research Methods class, is a horse of a dif’rent color.  The rigor of analysis and depth of evidence that a research paper calls for is quite a jump in sophistication for the typical high school student.

Throughout the year I have grown increasingly frustrated at the task of helping students make this jump.  At times, it seems like climbing K2, for their bad habits are quite recalcitrant to correction.  It can be done, though.

I’m going to seek to correct two such habits tomorrow.  Well, let me take it down a notch: just one lesson won’t cure the itch, but it’s a start.

What 99% of my students do when it comes to research is they decide what their thesis will be prior to any research.  This leads to them trying to fit the evidence to their previously conceived theses.  I recognize everyone has their biases, and this is almost impossible to avoid completely, but my students are champs at this.  It is very, very evident in their papers: almost all of them had immense difficulty dealing with opposing viewpoints with any sort of scholarly effort at all.  If they even addressed opposing viewpoints, they typically gave them nothing more than a handwave, as if their falsehood was obvious to all. 

All this was just one of the many signs of their cart-before-the-horse ways.

What I’m going to do tomorrow is show An Inconvenient Truth alongside a lecture from “the other side,” so to speak, by Jay Wesley Richards.  Most students–at least the ones who did their research reports on global warming (quite a few!)–aren’t even aware that there are doubts.  Most are quite content to take the prevailing popular story as axiomatic. 

After watching both films, their assignment will be to do a small amount of google research (there isn’t enough time to do in depth library  research that I’d normally like them to do…though a few might do that, who knows.  A general grasp of the issues and a broad overview of the evidence–which is what I’m shooting for–is quite accessible via google, so that will suffice for this assignment), then write an analytical essay evaluating the evidence of one of the films.  In their essay, they must make use of at least one researched source from each side, and though they must focus on one of the films in their essays, I expect them to work in the other film at points here and there.

The point of all this is to impress upon them the importance of a) not jumping to conclusions, b) honestly assessing both sides with as cool a head as possible, c) people can doubt popular “consensus” (assuming there is one here) and not be crazy–they deserve to be heard, and d) evidence, evidence, evidence.  I’m quite ok with them taking a position in their essay that I don’t hold.  Who knows, maybe I’m wrong…I have only done a small amount of research on the issue and I’m definitely fallible.  I’m open to evidence…but it must be evidence and it must be addressed analytically.  I simply want to impress upon them those four things I just mentioned, regardless of what side they end up coming down on. 

In the end, clever camera angles and emotional pulls do not win the day, though they might garner Nobel Prizes every once and a while…:)

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Round 2: Relativism in Public Schools

Posted on May 31, 2010 | 2 Comments

A “project” I have undertaken recently as a teacher in a public high school is to attempt to thaw the dogmatism of relativistic thinking amongst the students I teach. Over the past few years I have created some lessons in a unit that are designed to accomplish that purpose.

Some people might balk at this. They might express caution that such a venture could “get me in trouble” with parents and administrators, since the lessons question cherished beliefs and smack of “church and state” violation (despite the fact that I don’t bring up religion at all in the unit).

However, while very few other teachers waltz into such territory, I have found that I have little to fear regarding repercussions. After all, the lessons I have made that are designed to guide students in questioning relativism are very much in line with state-adopted Language Arts standards. Many are quite apprehensive and “jumpy” when it comes to touching controversial subjects, but as I quip quite often, “you’d be surprised by what you can get away with…if you know what you’re doing.”

Therefore, the obstacle I have run into is not the administrative resistance. In fact, the last time I taught these lessons, a representative from my district was observing me. After the lesson she glowed with interest, saying, “I just did not want the discussion to end! It was so interesting and needed!” This was coming from someone whom I have every reason to believe is quite secular in her thinking.

The biggest obstacles, rather, have come from the minds of the students themselves. Relativistic thinking is incredibly popular amongst youth today, and because I am conversing with fallen human beings with free will, there will always be those whom I can’t convince, no matter how powerful my arguments are and no matter how effective my communication tactics may be; that much has always been clear to me. Still, my students’ resistance to worldview correction, even when gentle and indirect, has baffled me. Getting them to question relativism—heck, even to grasp what relativism is and what the basic moral categories are—has been akin to asking a fish what wet feels like.

The lessons have not been without fruit, mind you. The proverbial light bulb over the head sparks on for some students. But every time I teach these particular lessons, the gargantuan nature of the task becomes more and more clear. What could be at the bottom of this recalcitrance?

I have always been baffled at how utterly relativistic students are. When I discuss this with them, many doggedly maintain their moral nonchalance even when doing so forces them to affirm the most outlandish and inhuman practices. During one such discussion, one of my students expressed doubt about whether infanticide in China was morally wrong. “It’s their culture and they think it’s right,” she maintained. That was the only justification she needed in her own mind. She could not get any deeper than that.  This came from a very sweet girl, but she just couldn’t connect the dots.

Though I have always been dismayed at how hard many cling to their dogmatism, it began to trouble me much more a month ago, the last time I taught on the topic. After discussing a few hypothetical moral scenarios and whether it was ok to judge the actions in them (actions in which people behave in racist ways. This was an attempt to pit dearly held postmodern values against each other in students’ minds, for example, non-judgmentalism vs. condemnation of racism and imperial oppression. The aim is to get them to choose the latter over the former.), we read an essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education written by a university professor. In the essay, the professor expresses much frustration over what he calls “absolutophobia,” his students’ unwillingness to condemn even the most horrible moral atrocities. He then goes on to point out the logical contradictions in such a stance, and he argues that acknowledging that absolutes exist doesn’t mean we are committed to inflexibility in dialogue and hatred of other cultures. We also read Shirley Jackson’s famous story “The Lottery,” in which a fictional small town holds a lottery each year…the “winner” gets stoned.

 Next, we discussed both the essay and the story in a Socratic Dialogue. What was interesting was not that the students maintained their relativism; that much I expect by now. What surprised me is that many had difficulty in even grasping the basic moral categories under discussion. Simon, the “absolutophobia” professor, obviously and clearly believed in absolutes, yet many of the students failed to understand that. When I asked them to summarize various parts of his essay, they made him out to be a relativist!

They did the same thing to me when I commented. To them, I, too, did not believe in absolutes; every time I would make a moral objectivist statement or ask a question that implied the existence of objective moral values, they would interpret me as being a relativist! Part of this was due to them not reading close enough (quite a few students do not take much interest in the readings and therefore do not read close enough to “get it right.”), but much of it was because they had not thought in objective moral categories much before. Therefore, when they encounter a moral objectivist, some hefty cognitive dissonance happens.  Either their relativistic framework has to give way, or the moral objectivist in front of them.  More often than not in that discussion, the former won. 

They have had much experience thinking in sociological categories, and their statements reflected this. Rather than talking about reasons why an action is right/wrong, they instead frequently focused on the sociological factors that caused the beliefs. They could not evaluate the beliefs and practices themselves, but they easily gave sociological causal explanations as to how they were accepted and really had difficulty fathoming the notion that there was more to be discussed.   They are so used to refraining from judgment when studying other cultures that they assume that it is somehow always out of bounds to judge.

They also thought in personal taste categories when it came to morality. Morally condemning actions and beliefs made about as much sense to them as morally condemning ice cream flavors.

Lastly, because we are in such an entitlement-centered culture, we become easily offended when others critique us. Our collective skin has become thin. Many, especially the young, don’t want to cause offense, so they go to extremes to avoid appearing accepting of any and all beliefs and practices.

All this does not mean they lacked any moral scruples whatsoever. Their moral intuitions would come out at certain points in our discussions, but they would express relativistic sentiments the next moment. When I tried to point out gently how they were trying to have it both ways, they had difficulty seeing the problem.

In the end, I tried to suggest that everyone, including the students themselves, makes moral judgments, that it is unavoidable, and therefore we shouldn’t worry about it. They saw my point that they themselves make moral judgments all the time despite claiming to be non-judgmental. I thought I had made a connection, but their reaction to that was surprising: they thought they should try harder to avoid judging!  It was like the fable of the man who was convinced he was dead.  All the doctors in the world couldn’t sway him, but one doctor had an idea: I’ll convince him that dead men don’t bleed, then I’ll show him that he bleeds!  The doctor amassed all the evidence he could and convinced the man that dead men don’t bleed.  Next, the doctor pricked the man’s finger, at which the man exclaimed, “I guess dead men do bleed afterall!”

I can give all the causal explanations I want, but in the end this boils down to suppressing the truth and exchanging the truth of God for a lie. That explains it best. We humans want to maintain our autonomy and moral independence at all costs. The existence of absolutes or objective moral values would be an obstacle to that desire. Relativism gives us intellectual justification to do what we want and feel good about it. We do not have to bend our knee, so we think, to any moral law or Moral Lawgiver. No moral law means no moral obligation. Everyone wins! Even though my students might not be consciously thinking that way, they think that way at some level. That is the only thing that fully explains my students’ recalictrance: they simply want to believe what they want to believe. It is as simple as that.

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Just Can’t Talk Rationally with a Christian

Posted on March 14, 2010 | Leave a comment

The first debate I ever attened between a Christian and an atheist was when I was a freshman in college at Ohio State.  It was the William Lane Craig-Peter Atkins debate.  Having come to faith only a few months before, I had no clue about apologetics or anything revolving around the intellectual matters of the faith, and how worldviews played into spirituality.   While walking to the venue that night, though I told this to no one, I was so scared about what would happen: how would the Christian guy do?  What would I do if he was soundly beaten?  Thankfully, my confidence in the worldview of Jesus was bouyed greatly that night.  Craig did just fine.  That is actually an understatement.  My experience has been the same with virtually every debate I’ve attended/read/viewed since.

Last night I watched a recent debate on God and morality online (the question was “is God necessary for morality?”) that continued that trend.  There’s so much to discuss about it (whether or not the atheist actually understood the nature of the question and the key terms involved in the issue would make an interesting post in and of itself.  For instance, he seemed to reduce morality, which includes things like obligation, oughtness, and prescription, to something that in the end isn’t morality at all–behavior that has survival value and social utility. Yet here and there he would smuggle in these heavily weighted irreducible moral concepts and terms–like evil, wicked, should–but the reduction he espoused before didn’t have room for those kinds of concepts…I wonder if he really knew he was doing this and if he really knew the implications of his view), but there were a few statements the atheist made in the debate that caught my eye.  They are popular sayings, to be sure, but I often wonder why, because they aren’t very sound things to hold.

Here’s one: in his opening statement, he claimed that “it is dangerous to even challenge (his opponent’s) views with rational questions.”

Time out…back up.  What?  That would kinda make sense if it came at the end of a debate where the atheist clearly(or even clearly *thought*) he had won and where the Christian clearly was a crazy-eyed fool, but this came right out of the gate, within the first 2 minutes of his opening statement.

This attitude is something I caught from him throughout the debate.  Sadly, I’ve seen and heard this same outlook coming from a lot of the atheist/agnostic “free-thinking” (a term they have given themselves) crowd.  It’s even more popular to think that way in the New Atheist bunch.  Some commentators on this website love to spout that kind of blatherskeit, and I think it is the reason why atheists and agnostics who engage in public debates tend to show up at least looking rather unprepared.  The attitude is, “well, we free-thinkers are the rational ones and all the Christians are the ones who wouldn’t know logic if it poked them in the eyes, so what is there to debate?  I mean, what, really, can the Christians say?  Buncha wood-hippies.”  It’s almost as if they expect to win just by showing up.  

Hey, I’m not the only guy to notice this.  Take it from one within their own camp.

I hope that Jim (the atheist debater)–as well as the atheists/agnostics in attendance–put that view out to pasture after his exchange with McDowell (the Christian).
Some might say that there are a lot of stupid Christians out there.  This is true.  As my favorite radio talk show host says often, there are also lots of stupid atheists out there, so I don’t know where the comeback gets anyone.

Speaking to those who hold the above view (atheists are, automatically and obviously, more rational than Christians): so you disagree with me.  So you have good reasons.  So you say you “believe in science”–whatever that means.  Ok.  I get it.  You’ve got some good objections to Christianity.  Allright.  Fair enough.  Perhaps I’m badly mistaken.  I think it’s ok to think you are right and I’m wrong.  I do the same with you, and I’m not offended when you confidently proclaim that your views are true.  But at least realize that your group isn’t the only place in which rationality and logic lies.  Even if you disagree with guys like McDowell (and me), that should be obvious from all the literature written by smart, capable, and intellectual Christians throughout the ages (including the last 30 or so years) and from the plethora of debates out there on the web, DVD, and print.  Acknowledging this could keep you from some uneccessary embarrassment in your future engagements with those who don’t see it your way.

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