Christian Apologetics

[Blog of Reason]

Discussion thread for the blog entry "Christian Apologetics" by theowarner.

Permalink: http://blog.leagueofreason.org.uk/philosophy/christian-apologetics/

 

[Th1sWasATriumph]

Theo's back! A shower of garlands heralds your arrival.

Out of interest, what are your religious inclinations? My impression is that you have little time for a lot of the nonsense but a personal belief of your own, but that impression may of course be laughably wrong.

 

[Fordi]

Out of interest, what are your religious inclinations? My impression is that you have little time for a lot of the nonsense but a personal belief of your own, but that impression may of course be laughably wrong.

I believe he addressed this in another video, to the tune of "Mind your own goddamned business", in somewhat more eloquent language ^_^.

Anyway, I don't have a problem with Theo's assessment of Apologetics, from a more or less objective standpoint. From a comparative subjective standpoint, however, I perceive what can be twisted into a hypocrisy.

That is to say, we, as those who value reason, hold in the primacy of belief in the demonstrable - in scientific theory, in that which can be shown via evidence. After all, all knowledge and hypothesis is belief with added supporting evidence. We fight damned hard to get, for example, science classes to teach only science, and "science" to only contain that which can be well defined via testable theorems in the materialistic world.

Is it not the same thing? Primary in the belief in reality requires us to take on apologetic tendencies in promoting the unintuitive. The paragraph immediately after Darwin's famous quote mine, for example, appears to be him apologetically wiggling out of the complexity of the eye - even if he is right.

It's no wonder, then, that Christian Apologists, in their limited understanding of why such explanations exist, poorly ape (excuse the pun) one of the best qualities of scientific discourse - the identification and subsequent refutation of the superficially absurd.

That is, apologists can point to the end of any scholarly work, where such things are dealt with, and claim, "I learned it from watching you!"

Scientific work is more often concerned with assessing the truth, while apologetic work is concerned with asserting it - and I think it's very important to illustrate this specific difference, if the above parallel ever comes up.

 

[Th1sWasATriumph]

I believe he addressed this in another video, to the tune of "Mind your own goddamned business", in somewhat more eloquent language ^_^.

I was just asking.

 

[Fordi]

I was just asking.

Hey, no offense meant; just saying how he seemed to feel about the matter (usually, if I recall, when asked by people strongly on a particular side of an argument who'd like to use it as a prejudicial way to determine his credibility, or who would prefer to contain and dismiss him).

 

[djarm67]

Excellent post Theo. As always, quality and giga-awesomeness.