A few people have questioned what I call “the Undeniable Fact” (i.e. that God consistently fails to show up in real life), on the grounds that believers will surely just insist that He does show up, to them at least. My argument, however, is that believers cannot deny the Undeniable Fact without inevitably demonstrating the …
Monthly Archive: December 2011
Dec 20 2011
Archbishop: “Pray for marriage”
Headline: “Catholic archbishop calls for prayer in defense of marriage.” In a recent letter to his flock, Archbishop John Nienstedt of St Paul and Minneapolis wrote of the duty incumbent upon Christians to defend the proper definition of marriage. The Archbishop also included a prayer in his letter, asking for God’s help in promoting the …
Dec 19 2011
Gospel Disproof #22: The unfortunate alternatives
A couple days ago I posted about the Undeniable Fact and its Inescapable Consequence. As some of the commenters have pointed out, this is not a complete disproof of the Gospel, because believers can simply insist that yes, God does so show up in real life. In other words, they can simply deny the Undeniable …
Dec 18 2011
The emotional rationalization of suffering
Over at the other blog, it’s time for this week’s installment of our chapter-by-chapter look at William Lane Craig’s apologetics manual, On Guard. Craig deals with the problem of suffering by assuming that it’s not really an intellectual problem, since he can imagine the possibility that God might be working under some set of unknown …
Dec 17 2011
Gospel Disproofs #20 and #21: The undeniable fact and its inescapable consequence
[Originally posted, in slightly different form, on July 27, 2007] Debating apologetics can be a tricky matter: Christians have 2,000 years of experience in rationalizing their beliefs, and generally know better than to allow themselves to be pinned down to anything that would settle the matter fairly and objectively. There is, however, one undeniable fact, …
Dec 16 2011
Jesus vs Santa
The other day I mentioned the fact that, if you’re just looking for something to believe in, one belief works just as well as any other. And if you are looking for something to believe in, why not believe in something nice, like Santa? With that in mind, here is my list of the Top …
Dec 15 2011
A Mormon story
Back in my evangelical Christian days, I took an interest in what my fellow believers and I called “the cults”—chiefly Mormonism, Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Hare Krishnas, Moonies, and so on. My favorite radio show was “The Bible Answer Man,” with Walter Martin, and I devoured his book, The Kingdom of the Cults. But …
Dec 14 2011
Gospel Disproof #19: Lying for Santa
When our kids were little, my wife and I faced the usual young parents’ dilemma: do we lie to our kids about Santa, or do we take away all the fun by telling them the truth? We decided not to do either one: we told them from the very beginning that we were playing “The …
Dec 13 2011
The meaning of life
In a comment on my latest post at Evangelical Realism, advenioadveritas writes, It also appears that in your zeal to dismantle Craig’s argument you fail to provide any meaning to life in place of the Christian one he is arguing for. The Dostoevsky quote is especially apt for Craig’s argument because it recognizes the ultimate …
Dec 12 2011
Stray thoughts
This just popped into my head and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, so I decided to just post it as-is. Q: Why does time only flow forwards and not backwards? A: Some time does flow backwards, but since its point of origin is also the big bang, we can’t see it …
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