Archive for the 'apologetics' tag

This post is part of an ongoing discussion between Russell Glasser and Pastor Stephen Feinstein. Here are all the previous posts in the series. Stephen 1 Russell 1 Stephen 2 Russell 2 Stephen 3 Russell 3 Stephen 4 I’ll be disabling comments one more time in this post, as per Stephen’s initial request. However, since we have agreed that the fifth round will be the last, I’ll be opening up a post-mortem open thread with comments enabled after my next post. At that point, I’ll add links to the open thread from all of the previous posts. Stephen, I can’t help noticing that in your last post, you seem to have reimagined your role in this debate.  Here I thought that you were simply a collegial fellow participant, but you have decided to award yourself the position of judge and arbiter.  After all, you did apparently award yourself the victory about a dozen times — rather cockily, I must say — and we haven’t even finished yet.  That shift in tone will be taken into account in this response. Of course, this change of roles shouldn’t come as any surprise to the readers of our exchange.  It was obvious from the beginning that you would have awarded yourself the victory without exchanging a word if you could have.  When you said that you wanted to have a battle of epistemology, clearly what you really meant is that you wish there were no demands of support and evidence for your belief in God.  Instead, it would be so much easier if we’d both come around to accepting your God as “necessary,” irrespective of any observations we might make that confirm that the God actually exists. Read more

This post is part of an ongoing discussion between Russell Glasser and Pastor Stephen Feinstein. Here are all the previous posts in the series. Stephen 1 Russell 1 Stephen 2 Russell 2 Stephen 3 As before, I’ll be disabling comments in this post, as it is supposed to be a conversation only between the two of us. Stephen, I hope you’ll excuse the amount of time it took to complete this post; your last post was about twice as long as the one before it.  Also, you appear to be getting frustrated by the conversation, and I think I’ve identified a significant source of miscommunication between us. It seems to me that your continued efforts to prove God are based on a serious double standard, and in this post I intend to point out where this lies. Before I get to that though, I’d like to invoke a rule that we discussed before we started.  Since I don’t intend to continue this conversation indefinitely, I propose that we wrap it up after a total of five rounds.  That means after this, you and I will each write two more posts, with the last ones being dedicated to closing statements.  Is that acceptable to you?  I could see reducing it to one more, or extending it to three, but I really don’t want to go much longer than that, so it’s your call from there. With that bit of bookkeeping out of the way, I’ll begin. Read more

This post is part of an ongoing discussion between Russell Glasser and Pastor Stephen Feinstein. Here are all the previous posts in the series. Stephen 1 Russell 1 Stephen 2 As before, I’ll be disabling comments in this post, as it is supposed to be a conversation only between the two of us. Stephen, I want to take a moment to remind our readers again of the first thing that you said in this discussion.  You promised to make the case that “atheism is untenable, irrational, and ultimately impossible.”  That was a pretty bold acceptance of the burden of proof that you took on.  In fact, I’d venture to say that if you don’t start clearly progressing towards making this case, it will be as good as a concession that you’ve lost the debate. Read more

  Hi folks, I’ve been asked by a third party to get involved in a discussion with a Christian named Stephen Feinstein. Stephen has created his own blog for the occasion, and his very first post is here: http://sovereignway.blogspot.com/2012/07/debating-atheist.html In order to keep this as a one-on-one discussion, I’ll be disabling comments on my posts and so will he. Hope you enjoy the discussion, which I imagine will probably last several weeks. When we both agree that we’re finished, I’ll probably open up a big post-mortem comment thread. Until then, enjoy and be patient. Read more

Last week, Matt and Tracie got in a brief argument with a caller named Charles before hanging up on him.  Charles has continued to email us, and although Matt has decided that he’s a fake, I usually feel that genuine stupidity is the less extraordinary claim.  Anyway, I’m going to excerpt selected parts of this exchange, because it illustrates a couple of principles. First, there is this perenially weird argument that if any one thing is found to be true in the Bible, then the whole thing must be true.  As I mentioned on the latest Non-Prophets, it’s as if fundamentalists live in this sharply divided world like the logic puzzles of Raymond Smullyan.  Everyone in the world is either a knight, who always tells the truth, or a knave, who always lies.  In Smullyan’s puzzles, proving that a person has made one true statement is enough to conclusively prove that everything that person has ever said or will say is also true. In the real world… not so much. Second: People who are bad at arguing commonly use a tactic known as “Quick!  Change the subject!”  NEVER allow the argument to continue if they’re dodging the point. Charles says: U discredit the bible you say you don’t care what the bible says. Then u validate it saying there are facts in the bible but then say there’s also false things in the bible (which is an unsupported assertion). That sir is a contradiction. Matt: No, it’s not a contradiction. It’s true. There are true things in the Bible (like Herod and Jerusalem). There are false things in the Bible (like the cure for leprosy, the global flood, the genesis story, the exodus). Imagine that I wrote you a letter and the letter read: “Dear Charles, The sky is blue. The Earth is a rough spheroid that orbits the sun, which is a star. Mars is the biggest planet in our solar system. You should eat more vegetables. I am the supreme ruler of the universe.” ...
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