My nine-year-old daughter and I, both atheists, are teaming up to review children’s apologetics book Cold Case Christianity For Kids, by J. Warner Wallace. The introduction to the series is here; posts in the series are being linked up there as I go along.
I originally planned to review one chapter per post, but that’s leading to impossibly long and unwieldy posts that are taking forever to write and that are probably a lot longer than anyone wants to read, so it makes more sense to split them into parts. This post will cover the first part of Chapter Two, in which we learn more about the skateboard.
Chapter Two: Learn How to Infer: Learn How Detectives Find the Truth
At the beginning of Chapter Two, the children examine the skateboard to see what they can learn from it. Jeffries shows them how detectives wear gloves to examine things in detail without contaminating them, and how to make lists of ‘evidence’ and ‘explanations’, which is all pretty cool – at least they’re learning something about police procedure. From the evidence gleaned, it looks as though the skateboard has been in there for at least nine years (dated from a sticker on it that has the old name of their school). They conclude that it’s an old skateboard, and Jeffries makes this statement of note:
“Remember, many explanations may be possible, but not every explanation is reasonable. For example, it’s possible that little ‘toolshed gremlins’ crafted the board to make it look old, but that’s not reasonable.”
Well said, Jeffries/Wallace! I hope Wallace makes this point forcibly to Young-Earth Creationists whenever he gets the opportunity. (Um… nope. Looks like he’s all conciliatory and ‘well, there’s probably some truth to every viewpoint’ about it.)
Two side points that struck me regarding the skateboard description:
- We learn that Daniel found this skateboard ‘hidden in a dark corner of the shed’. This, remember, is the shed at school, which seems to be where the custodian keeps stuff; it was described in the previous chapter as having rusty tools in it. Why on earth was a child allowed to go poking about in dark corners of this shed? That doesn’t sound safe to me at all. That custodian should be on the carpet for irresponsible behaviour. (Wait – maybe that’s why Daniel was allowed to take the skateboard! Maybe the custodian left the shed unlocked when it was supposed to be locked, and let Daniel take the skateboard in return for staying quiet about it!)
- The skateboard has a sticker on with the school name, but (I think this is one place where it’s reasonable to assume from silence) no sticker with the owner’s name. As a parent, I can tell you that this sounds odd; you are not going to go to the trouble of labelling your child’s stuff just to narrow it down to the school rather than the child, and you are not going to buy stickers that have your child’s school on them but not the name. I’d immediately take this as evidence that the skateboard was some sort of school equipment and that they should be talking to the school office to see whether there’s a record of such a thing. Maybe that’s going to get covered later.
Anyway, in the midst of all this we also have another of those CSI Assignment insert boxes, this one telling us to look up 1 Corinthians 2:14 – 16 and asking us what we think Paul is talking about when he describes the ‘natural man’. Since the first few translations I checked didn’t even use the term ‘natural man’ and Katie was getting pretty bored with me going through checking translations, this one was a total non-starter.
(I have finally sorted out which translation Wallace was using; I took the fill-in-the-blank quote he gave us in Chapter 1, stuck the bit we had into Google, and got it from BibleHub. He’s using the NIV. Hooray! But what on earth was the deal with not telling us this? Have I missed something obvious in the book where it tells us which translation it is? I simply cannot see it. )
Somewhere in all this, according to my notes, Katie and I got into a discussion about miracles. Can’t for the life of me work out how this fitted into the text of this chapter; we’d probably started talking about the last chapter. In any case, here it is:
(Me): How do you know miracles can’t happen?
(Katie): I’ve never seen one.
(Me): Well, there are lots of things you’ve never seen, like Australia, that are still real.
(Katie): No. But… have you ever seen one? Has Granny Constance ever seen one? Has anyone you know ever seen one? So, most people probably haven’t seen one, and some people definitely haven’t… if it’s that rare, it doesn’t seem like it could ever happen. Unless that lamp starts flying around, I think it’s pretty unlikely.
This seems like a good place to break, as it finishes the section about the skateboard. In the next part, we’ll be back to Jeffries evangelising. Although, fortunately, the smirking seems to have stopped.
Those verses undermine the whole point of the exercise, I think — he’s trying to argue that the truth of Christianity can be “deduced”, presumably by anyone, but those verses specifically refer to someone who has magical powers of deduction, that most people, presumably, do not have.
About miracles — I think it’s also worth pointing out that “miracle” is a confusing term because it can mean different things. It can mean something somewhat rare (calling a rainbow a miracle), something mysterious or complicated or poorly understood (the miracle of birth — the process of embryonic development isn’t clear or obvious), or something that actually violates the laws of physics as we know them (a perpetual motion machine would be a miracle of this sort, as would bringing the completely dead back to life).
When people say God performs miracles, what do they actually have in mind? Sometimes it seems like the latter, but sometimes it seems like one of the first two meanings. I’m thinking here about people who try to create naturalistic explanations for claimed miracles, like the splitting of the Red Sea being the result of an unusually strong and persistent wind.