CADRE Comments

Do Christians live inside an intellectual box? That's the opinion of the self-promoting John Loftus in a blog on Debunking Christianity entitled Christians Live in an Intellectual Box and Cannot Think Outside of it . He wrote it in response to a series of very good questions that Brad Haggard wrote responding to a post by Loftus. Loftus clearly ducked Brad, but when I chimed in and pointed out a problem, Mr. Loftus decided to fire off his "see how smart I am that I can respond to you" post when he really makes no good response at all. And much as I don't like to give any blog space to Loftus and his arguments (because he almost invariably takes the opportunity to plug his apparently weak book in the comments), I thought it was appropriate to respond. Let's look at what Mr. Loftus said. Brad asked: How exactly do you imagine God would have given us the knowledge? Would it be written revelation, instincts, or some sort of self-presenting knowledge? I’m arguing at a ...

In a comment to a recent post from Chris Price (aka Layman, here ), where he and other commentors have taken John Loftus to task for uncritically picking up and simplistically restating an already inept statement from John Shelby Spong’s Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (although I will point out that John has not admitted yet anywhere, so far as I know, to simply picking up this statement and reprinting it in a simplified form--the evidence is pretty strong but is not deductively conclusive), John has “defied” us to say that an excerpt from another of Bishop Spong’s books ( The Sins of Scripture , cute title) isn’t well-reasoned and doesn’t reflect good scholarship. John’s reproduction of this chapter (in total, as far as I've been able to tell), and his own defense of Bishop Spong’s arguments (in the comments below) can be found here. (I will note that Bishop Spong follows up this chapter with another one concerning his theory about the fabrication of Judas Iscariot; and also tha...

A favored tactic of John Loftus is to try and play Christian scholars off against each other. Consistent with this tactic, in his book, Why I Became an Atheist , John Loftus leads off his assault on the empty tomb with this assertion: Several mainline Christian scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, argue against the empty tomb, including C.H. Dodd, Rudolf Bultmann, Raymond Brown, Reginald Fuller, Hans Kung, Karl Rahner, D.H. Nineham, along with many others. Ibid. , page 365. Loftus provides no citations to support this assertion. When I read this passage while thumbing through his book, the listing of Raymond Brown quickly caught my attention. A moderate Catholic scholar, I seemed to remember that he was at the very least sympathetic to the empty tomb story. I did some research and confirmed my initial reaction, but because I had not read everything written by R. Brown and scholars sometimes modify their positions, I e-mailed John Loftus in April 2009. I asked for his basis in ...

Bulverism, which C.S. Lewis defined as the art of explaining away dissent from one's own views via psychological mechanisms, has been a mainstay of atheist apologetics for hundreds of years. In the face of what Lewis also aptly called the obstinacy of belief, atheists scramble to find psychological rationales for the persistence of this strange neurosis. John Loftus over at Debunking Christianity has been ramping up his bulverism. In recent posts he claims to have ' figured out ' Christianity and attributes the lack of interest among Christians in reading the 'best' atheist apologetics (which, of course, includes his own at or near the top of the list) to fear that it will undermine their beliefs. The fact that people familiar with apologetics on both sides tend not to be too impressed with his arguments, a few positive reviews notwithstanding, must be puzzling to him. For the most part I've been content to ignore these increasingly belligerent provocations (in...

Intro note from Jason Pratt, guest author for the Cadre... Warning: 14 page post approaching! The original discussion, such as it was, can be found scattered through here on the Cadre journal page. John Loftus eventually continued his replies, first to BK and then to myself, here on the Debunking Christianity journal. You’ll need to scroll down a while through the comments to get to mine, and then to John’s reply. I’m around #11. Where I quote John Loftus, I am sometimes using double-fancy brackets {{like this}}. For in-paragraph quotations, I’ll use regular double-quote marks. Single-quote marks indicate a paraphrase. Since I’m going to end up repeating myself several times, I won’t blame John if he synopsizes in any reply he makes. I would of course prefer that he recognize I made such-n-such reply and include some reference to it, at least in principle, in his own replies. This is one way how discussions ‘continue’ as ‘discussions’. {s} John, {{I hope that [mutual learning] happen...