CADRE Comments

J. Warner Wallace (the popular "Cold-Case Christianity" apologist, who converted from atheism pretty late in his life), put out a Christmas post a few days ago: "Christmas is Christmas Because Jesus is God" , which among other things serves as a quick link gathering to prior articles of his on how the Gospels report Jesus talking about himself (or about Himself, to put it in divine caps in English). Those are fine, although from a sceptical standpoint (as JWW is well aware, but not everything can be covered in a short internet post, or even in multi-volume tomes!) the more salient way to put it would be: "Even if the Gospel authors weren't, in various ways, just making up what Jesus said and did concerning himself, and those reports are accurate to that extent," which of course most sceptics are going to be highly sceptical about, JWW included once upon a time, "Christmas is Christmas because Jesus did a good enough job convincing enough p...

The charge of being “superstition” is usually leveled against Christians. A none too typical example can be found in an unimaginatively named blogpost, “ Christianity is a Superstition ” by an individual blogging under the pseudonym of Chatpilot – another back-sliding Christian who claims to have had a really good grasp of Christianity when he went to his “very fundamentalist, literalist church” until his mind was apparently polluted by the sirens’ call of the Jesus-mythers. Here’s what Chatpilot wrote about Christianity:   As I stated in my previous post religious beliefs are taught, and not only are they taught they are passed down from generation to generation within a society. What is being taught? The former superstitions of ones ancient ancestors before they even understood what science was and how the world and particularly nature functioned. God was created in the imagination of a primitive mind with limited understanding and resources about the various phenomena of natu...

(Note that this post is extremely tentative and exploratory; I have not framed the issues as well as I would like, and my sketch of the two approaches to divine action is not the best formulation they could receive. I'm simply jotting down some thoughts that I will expand more carefully in future posts) As a person who takes the current scientific consensus very seriously in the way I understand the world, one of the most challenging issues I face in theological reflection is how to understand God's action in the world, not primarily his creating and conserving the world in existence but those 'special' acts we ordinarily call miracles. The problem is that the narrative of modern science-certain controversies over the implications of quantum mechanics notwithstanding-is one of finding ever more precise regularities in the goings-on of the natural world, which many scientists are tempted to summarize as laws which govern the behavior of all objects in the natural world. ...