CADRE Comments

  Recently on Facebook, someone posted the following argument against the existence of God. He introduced it by saying that it was an argument that he had not seen very often, but he gave it the moniker “The Argument from Errancy.” The posted argument read: Premise 1. If the Christian God exists and wants to preserve His Word in the Bible, it is more probable than not that the Bible would be unambiguously inerrant and clearly of supernatural origin. Premise 2. The Bible is seemingly errant and man-made. Conclusion 1. Therefore, it is unlikely that the Bible is the inspired Word of God Conclusion 2. Therefore, it is unlikely that the Christian God would exist. The author then added these notes about Premise 1 and 2: P1 seems pretty straightforward. Jesus himself clearly saw Scripture as authoritative, and Paul says that all scripture is God-Breathed. Scripture would allow laymen to understand God. P2 requires more evidence on the skeptics’ part, but they can appeal to...

The New York Times always seems poised to publish any opinion piece that discredits Christianity. One such article was published on March 25, 2019 entitled “ The God Problem ” by Peter Atterton, professor of philosophy and associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters at San Diego State University. Dr. Attenton’s article seeks to make the belief in the existence of God irrational by claiming that both God’s omnipotence and His omniscience are incoherent. I want to focus on the charge of incoherence against God’s omniscience in this post. Dr. Attenton’s charge against omniscience begins: Philosophically, this presents us with no less of a conundrum [than God’s omnipotence]. Leaving aside the highly implausible idea that God knows all the facts in the universe, no matter how trivial or useless (Saint Jerome thought it was beneath the dignity of God to concern Himself with such base questions as how many fleas are born or die every moment), if God knows all there is to know, t...

Everyone loves Mr. Spock - except those people who mistake him with Dr. Spock, the baby doc, whose advice to mothers in the 50s ruined a generation (but that's another story for another day). No, Mr. Spock is not Dr. Spock. Mr. Spock (or Commander Spock) is that lovable, living, breathing computer-of-a-man who has dedicated his life to logic and facts. For those of us who grew up watching Mr. Spock - which pretty much includes everyone 60 years of age or younger - he represented something to which all could aspire; a person who values logic above emotion. And of course, whenever I do apologetics on the Internet, both sides try to claim the mantle of Mr. Spock. Everyone wants to claim that they are the one being logical while the opponent is being illogical. Because I already know based upon the comments that twist what I have written in previous posts that someone is going to claim that "BK hates logic" or some other similar nonsense, let me be clear: there is not...

Imagine two British gentlemen sitting in an English garden engaging in conversation about the Queen's knights. The first makes the assertion, "All of the Queen's knights have been brave." The second, a more circumspect individual, responds, "But what about  Sir Robin ? He wasn't brave at all." "Well," responds the first, "that's because he wasn't a true knight." What, if anything, is wrong with the response of the first British Gentlemen? Anyone familiar with the ongoing debate between Christians and Atheist/Skeptics on the Internet probably believes that the first of these two gentlemen has committed the "No True Scotsman" Fallacy. If you are unfamiliar with the fallacy, it probably means that you have not been engaging in these types of debates because it is almost never used anywhere else. There is a reason for that: it really isn't much of a fallacy. Perhaps I should say that the "No True Scotsman...

The other night, I listened to a Golden Age radio program that featured a phony news interview. Since I didn’t record the program, I am necessarily paraphrasing what I heard, but essentially the sketch had a radio news reporter interview the owner of a company that manufactures ventriloquist dummies. In the vignette, the reporter asked the owner to show him how the ventriloquist dummies work, and the owner responded that he was “not a very good ventriloquist” but that he would give it a try. He apparently picked up one of the dummies and used his inadequate skills to have the dummy say something like, “Hello, I am happy to be here today.” The reporter responded, “I saw your lips move.” The owner countered, “I told you I’m not very good at this.” The reporter then contended, “There’s something wrong with the dummy.”   The owner objects that the dummy is fine, but the reporter insists that the dummy didn’t work because he could see the owner’s lips move. This small vignette actual...

As I stated in part I , I cannot possibly respond to every possible objection that Christianity doesn’t make sense in a single post. However, I can take the number one post on Google and respond to the points cited therein which the author uses to support the claim that Christianity doesn’t make sense. The article that I reference is, appropriately enough, entitled  Ten Reasons Why Christianity Makes No Sense. I believe each of the reasons cited not only fail to show that Christianity makes no sense, but rather that several of the objections themselves make no sense. I also will note that I will not respond to all ten points for reasons that I will state below. Please note that I will use the author’s own sub-headings for my headings when examining each of the claims that the argument “doesn’t make sense.” In looking at these reasons arguing against the good sense of Christianity, I want to reiterate how the question of whether Christianity makes sense needs to be approached. To...

As I noted in part I , saying that something doesn’t make “sense” is not a technical term of argumentation. The dictionary says that “doesn’t make sense” is an idiom which can be translated as being incomprehensible or unreasonable. It is my contention that the only legitimate way an argument doesn’t “make sense” is if the argument is internally inconsistent or self-referentially absurd. In other words, when examining a belief for incomprehensibility, the truth of the facts claimed is not the question. The facts are accepted as true and the only question is whether the view point is internally consistent (i.e., “makes sense”) if the facts upon which the viewpoint depends are taken as true. So, does Christianity “make sense”? To answer, I am going to be careful about what is meant by Christianity.   After all, Christianity can be seen as a single basic belief, what C.S. Lewis termed “Mere Christianity,” with a number of variations on the basic teaching where the Bible is either un...

One claim I hear too often is the claim made by skeptics of various stripes that Christianity “doesn’t make sense.” Try searching the Internet with the search terms, “Christianity doesn’t make sense” and you will find a plethora of websites, blogs and discussion boards that make this statement. My Google search of these terms came up with more than six million results. (Of course, many of these are not people arguing that Christianity makes no sense, but enough of them deal with that topic that it shows that a lot of people hold the opinion that Christianity “makes no sense.”) My response is, “Of course Christianity makes sense,” but to determine who is correct, we need to define our terms. Defining “doesn’t make sense.” Saying that something “doesn’t make sense” is not a technical term of argumentation. The dictionary says that “doesn’t make sense” is an idiom which can be translated as being incomprehensible or unreasonable. It seems to me that there are two senses (pardon t...