What should Christian apologists say?

AV1611VET said:

My favorite argument for the existence of God is pointing out Christian hymns, carols, holidays, churches, bumper stickers, debates, martyrs, organizations, and so on.

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But the Christian holidays are only fun when they're ruined by secularism!

Nicholas Deka said:

But the Christian holidays are only fun when they're ruined by secularism!

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John 3:19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.

cloudyday2 said:

This question is for Christians or non-Christians - but mostly non-Christians. I was watching a debate between a Christian and an atheist over the existence of God ( ). The Christian made a philosophical argument for a generalized creator of some kind, and seemed to consider this sufficient justification for belief in the very specific theology of Christianity. This apologetic strategy seems to be very common, and it is very unpersuasive to most non-Christians. Maybe this argument gives Christians a fig leaf to continue in their belief, and maybe that explains its popularity among apologists.

Assuming Christianity was actually true, what kind of apologetics arguments would you find persuasive? I like hearing personal testimonials about changes in lives, miraculous healings, or whatever. Why aren't these arguments presented by apologists?

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Much of my faith comes from experiences that do nothing to someone else other they can find out for themselves. Unlike your self most people who do not beleive in God will mock an experience from God. To most people these are sacred experiences and should be saved for those who will gain a stronger understanding of the power and love of God.

cloudyday2 said:

This question is for Christians or non-Christians - but mostly non-Christians. I was watching a debate between a Christian and an atheist over the existence of God ( ). The Christian made a philosophical argument for a generalized creator of some kind, and seemed to consider this sufficient justification for belief in the very specific theology of Christianity. This apologetic strategy seems to be very common, and it is very unpersuasive to most non-Christians. Maybe this argument gives Christians a fig leaf to continue in their belief, and maybe that explains its popularity among apologists.

Assuming Christianity was actually true, what kind of apologetics arguments would you find persuasive? I like hearing personal testimonials about changes in lives, miraculous healings, or whatever. Why aren't these arguments presented by apologists?

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About your last question: Simple, apologetic's purpose is to defend the Christian faith through reason and arguments. Personal testimonies and miracles are good but they are more subjective, you've got to either live it yourself or believe the person who shares with you.

Nicholas Deka said:

That's an okay definition for evidence. What I'm seeing though is when someone presents their evidence, and then you point out that what they believe the evidence states is wrong, it ceases to be evidence. Like if someone said that ice cream causes drownings. But was it really evidence to begin with if it was never really useful for proving a statement?

To take it a step further, if I present that person with the real evidence, that summertime causes an increase in both things, and not that one causes the other, yet they persist in their belief that ice cream causes drownings, I would say they believe something without evidence because what evidence they claim to have does not actually support their statement. That may be wrong based on the definition of evidence, but that is what it is when people argue and make claims and debunk evidence. Just another semantic truth to face when having discussions to understand both sides better instead of getting bogged down arguing about two different things.

I'll state now that I don't feel that way about every bit of evidence presented by Christians and Apologists, but some of the claims made, yes.

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Saying that there is no evidence for a belief is saying that there is no information that can be interpreted to support that belief and is essentially claiming that a belief has no cause. You are free to think that the evidence for someone's belief has been debunked, but as long as they don't agree with your assessment, then I don't see how you can deny that they are using it as evidence for their belief. What if their belief is actually true and you are the one who is wrong about the evidence being debunked? Everyone thinks that their beliefs are right, or else we wouldn't hold them, but it would seem arrogant someone to say that only their beliefs have real evidence for them. We should recognize that other people interpret evidence in ways that we don't think are correct or that they give more or less weight to a piece of evidence than they should, but I don't think we should deny that they used evidence to reach their belief.

Sapiens said:

About your last question: Simple, apologetic's purpose is to defend the Christian faith through reason and arguments. Personal testimonies and miracles are good but they are more subjective, you've got to either live it yourself or believe the person who shares with you.

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Hi,

And what I don't like about Apologists, is the lies they tell.

Even when shown to be wrong, by Christians, within Christianity, they show now remorse or ethics, and possibly all of them.

God is objective, not subjective.

LOVE,

Soyeong said:

Saying that there is no evidence for a belief is saying that there is no information that can be interpreted to support that belief and is essentially claiming that a belief has no cause. You are free to think that the evidence for someone's belief has been debunked, but as long as they don't agree with your assessment, then I don't see how you can deny that they are using it as evidence for their belief. What if their belief is actually true and you are the one who is wrong about the evidence being debunked? Everyone thinks that their beliefs are right, or else we wouldn't hold them, but it would seem arrogant someone to say that only their beliefs have real evidence for them. We should recognize that other people interpret evidence in ways that we don't think are correct or that they give more or less weight to a piece of evidence than they should, but I don't think we should deny that they used evidence to reach their belief.

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Wow, I never went that far with it. It sounds like you think I'm claiming that I believe Christians have no evidence for Christianity, and I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that some things people interpret to be evidence for their belief are not interpreted correctly which means it isn't evidence for that belief anymore.

The ice cream and drowning thing is true, by the way, it isn't just a hypothetical. So once you show that summertime is the real cause of the increase in both things, interpreting it to be a cause/effect between ice cream/drownings is interpreting it wrong. Therefore that fact ceases to be evidence for that belief. After that point, claiming that it is evidence for the belief is no better than saying, "I believe the sky is blue because apples are red".

I'll use another real example that I think you can get on board with: atheist arguments. I think the most common argument made by atheists to prove God isn't real involve showing a contradiction between the qualities of God, for instance omniscience, omnipotence, and omni-benevolence. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that an atheist proves that something cannot be omniscient and omnipotent at the same time, then they say, "See? God can't exist because I've proven that his qualities are contradictory!" But that isn't what they proved. All they really proved is that God is either not omniscient or not omnipotent, or not both. They proved the definition of God wrong, but that doesn't mean they proved God doesn't exist, just that he isn't the way we think he is. Therefore their argument is not evidence that God doesn't exist.

katerinah1947 said:

Hi,

And what I don't like about Apologists, is the lies they tell.

Even when shown to be wrong, by Christians, within Christianity, they show now remorse or ethics, and possibly all of them.

God is objective, not subjective.

LOVE,

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I'm sorry sister, I don't really know what you mean. The apologists I've encountered so far are good Christians, as far as I know. Did you have any particular example in mind of a bad apologist or a lie they would tell?

"God is objective, not subjective."

Actually, that's very interesting. God is a person, a personal being. Therefore, He is subjective because He is a subject and has His own personal experience of life, I would imagine. He is objective, especially to us, because He is the one who designed everything and even life. His opinion is The-capital "t"-Truth. Did you mean something else?

Sapiens said:

I'm sorry sister, I don't really know what you mean. The apologists I've encountered so far are good Christians, as far as I know. Did you have any particular example in mind of a bad apologist or a lie they would tell?

"God is objective, not subjective."

Actually, that's very interesting. God is a person, a personal being. Therefore, He is subjective because He is a subject and has His own personal experience of life, I would imagine. He is objective, especially to us, because He is the one who designed everything and even life. His opinion is The-capital "t"-Truth. Did you mean something else?

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Hi,

Yes on Apologists.

I have encountered a cult like response from them in two subjects, that they are wrong on.

I am very surprised that you did not know that Apologists are really like that.

Ask an Apologist in any Religion, and soon you will see what is there.

Are the Muslim, The Jehovah's Witness, The Mormon Apologists infallibly correct?

Is the defense attorney or the offense attorney infallibly correct in a trial?

Yes, when dealing with truth, provable truth in religion also, Apologists and attorneys are similar.

I have dealt with attorneys on both sides, when truth was the issue.

Neither of the ones I normally find, care what that truth is. Winning is what they care about.

Apologists are not objective. They are subjective.

God is Objectively True, not Subjectively true.

LOVE,

Hammster said:

I'm not sure what arguments I would find persuasive. But you're right in that many apologists will make an argument for a creator, but cannot tie that argument to the biblical God in any way that's convincing.

If you've noticed, you don't see me arguing on here much. I'm a presuppositionalist. I don't believe that any argument I make will convince you. I believe that in order for you to believe, the Holy Spirit must change your heart. That doesn't mean that I cannot answer questions. 1 Peter 3:15 says that I should. But I will not try to argue you into the Kingdom.

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cloudyday2 said:

One argument I often hear from Christians is that God does not want to give us too much reason to believe, because He wants us to have faith. On the other hand, in the story of doubting Thomas, Jesus tells Thomas to touch his wounds so that he may believe. Jesus says those with faith are blessed, but he seems to want everybody to have the evidence they need. Those with less faith will eventually get more evidence. That is how I understand the story anyway.

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Hammster said:

Whichever Christian said that is just wrong.

But I'm curious about what you'd accept as evidence.

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Hammster, you seem to indicate that there is no compelling case that could be made for the existence of God, and then you say that you disagree with the notion that God does not want to give us too much reason to believe. I don't understand your reasoning at all. We don't need God to come down from heaven and appear to us. What we need are good arguments.

You are curious about what we'd accept as evidence. I think you're starting in the wrong place. Before we even discuss evidence to make a positive claim for Christianity, we need to deal with the truckload of problems. For starters, here's a few crippling issues:

1. God demonstrates repeatedly in the Old Testament that he is above the law. Being above the law, God can forgive everyone at a whim. Christ's sacrifice was unnecessary. This makes Christianity, at its core, entirely pointless.

2. The book of Joshua appears to be written by genocidal maniacs. The books of Moses appear to be written by men who do not differentiate between consensual sex and rape, and who also advocate chattel slavery. Also, the writers of almost all of the Old Testament seem to be quite racist, and all writers of the Bible (New Testament included) seem to be quite sexist. You need to either explain that this is not the case, or else find a way to connect with a rational society that believes in equal rights.

3. The Bible contradicts itself. At best, these are transcriber errors. Therefore, either God cannot or God will not preserve his Bible. Being omniscient, it follows that God willfully chooses to not preserve the Bible, or at the very least he is allowing some corruption to propagate. What's worse is the understanding that these errors presumably came to be despite the best efforts of men who devoted their entire lives to the discipline of preserving the scriptures and who presumably prayed for divine guidance and did not receive it (John 14:13???). Combine this with the fact that there is an entity who is described as clever at every opportunity, and also malicious towards the Gospel, and we see that it is unreasonable to believe that Satan could not have corrupted the Bible at least to the degree that he could match the blunders of the saints.

I suppose that, knowing these things, one would have to be a presuppositionalist to believe.

Sapiens said:

I'm sorry sister, I don't really know what you mean. The apologists I've encountered so far are good Christians, as far as I know. Did you have any particular example in mind of a bad apologist or a lie they would tell?

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Ever hear of Matt Slick?

The first lie of his that comes to mind is something that I believe I can prove, but would take a lot of digging in my computer. In discussion with him on the radio, I eventually asked him if he'd gotten my email about a particular subject* and he said that he had read my email and it was obviously antagonistic. He was portraying me that way because I was whipping his butt on the air and he needed to poison the well for the listeners. After all, the listeners can't see the email so they're going to believe him 10 times out of 10.

*CARM wants to claim ownership of all emails sent to them (or at least they did at the time), and I said that I had a contradiction which I wanted to publish because it was unknown to scholars, so I wanted to send it to them for their evaluation without surrendering intellectual property rights. Turns out the obscure contradiction was already known to scholars, but I still had found it myself while I was still Christian and no one I had ever spoken to was aware of it on any level.

Nihilist Virus said:

Ever hear of Matt Slick?

The first lie of his that comes to mind is something that I believe I can prove, but would take a lot of digging in my computer. In discussion with him on the radio, I eventually asked him if he'd gotten my email about a particular subject* and he said that he had read my email and it was obviously antagonistic. He was portraying me that way because I was whipping his butt on the air and he needed to poison the well for the listeners. After all, the listeners can't see the email so they're going to believe him 10 times out of 10.

*CARM wants to claim ownership of all emails sent to them (or at least they did at the time), and I said that I had a contradiction which I wanted to publish because it was unknown to scholars, so I wanted to send it to them for their evaluation without surrendering intellectual property rights. Turns out the obscure contradiction was already known to scholars, but I still had found it myself while I was still Christian and no one I had ever spoken to was aware of it on any level.

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Hi,

I am sorry for your experience.

I wish it was rare, rather than normal.

Even though, I know how The Bible is Real, and have the Proofs, and even though I know God is Real, and in my case, maybe because I know God, personally, and that also makes a difference, what the apologists say about religion and God, is often wrong and filled with lies. Often.

In one case, they have four hundred years of lies by Apologists, on one subject alone.

On a newer subject that I am working on, it is only 40 to 60 years of lies.

Yes, much of what they say is true, but some of it is lies passed off as truth.

In, my posts since being on CF, two of those issues have been covered in detail.

I am willing to reopen both of them here again, for veracity. However, I would rather not, unless someone really needs that for personal or religious reasons, and is willing to not quote rumors or here say, but follow and do the work required, to stay out of arguments, by sticking to discussion.

LOVE,

cloudyday2 said:

That is how I would expect it to be for everybody, but for some reasons these types of experiences never find their way into apologetics. I don't get that.

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Some are personal and sacred but I have many that I could share

Sapiens said:

I'm sorry sister, I don't really know what you mean. The apologists I've encountered so far are good Christians, as far as I know. Did you have any particular example in mind of a bad apologist or a lie they would tell?

"God is objective, not subjective."

Actually, that's very interesting. God is a person, a personal being. Therefore, He is subjective because He is a subject and has His own personal experience of life, I would imagine. He is objective, especially to us, because He is the one who designed everything and even life. His opinion is The-capital "t"-Truth. Did you mean something else?

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The word "lie" in terms of apologists may be strong, based on my encounters anyways, but dishonest isn't. Being intentionally misleading is still being dishonest without telling a "lie".

Whats-his-name, Craig, does this. I'll use him as an example because he is awfully popular, and a lot of apologists model their arguments after his.

The argument of objective morality is set up so that the atheist either has to say God is real, or some terrible thing is okay. But that is like asking someone, "Have you stopped raping women?". Regardless of what people think the conclusion comes to, that is the reasoning behind it. It creates a false dichotomy of morality.

The argument about if something has a beginning, it has a cause, is dishonest because it hides the real argument, that the cause has to be personal, behind what seems like common knowledge.

The Fine Tuning Argument I actually find impressive, except that most apologists add "for life" in it, and that is misleading. They state, "The physics of the universe are fine tuned for life" and then state, well sure all the other stuff wouldn't exist either, but I'm using the word "for" differently than you are assuming.

This arguments are intentionally misleading, and that is a common place that people can find Apologists to be dishonest. Jumping to the word "lying" isn't that far of a stretch when you're talking about dishonest people.