CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS
HERE ARE A FEW STATEMENTS THAT ADDRESS THE APPROACH TO CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS
- A brief analysis of the relationship of faith and understanding in evangelism, and a look a several ineffective approaches and seven aggressive steps to effective evangelism.
- A brief summary of factors determining whether the manuscript evidence for the Old and New Testament books is sound, or highly embellished and corrupted over time and transmission. How reliable are the texts of both Testaments we now have?
- Barrow and Tipler's attempt to stave off the inference to divine design by appealing to the Weak Anthropic Principle is demonstrably logically fallacious unless one conjoins to it the metaphysical hypothesis of a World Ensemble. But there is no reason for such a postulate. Their misgivings about the alternative of divine design are shown to be of little significance.
Is there a man in human history who claimed to be God and backed up those claims? Has any man ever conquered death and risen from the dead? This article looks at the claims and life of Jesus Christ. Who was he? What did he do? - It has been argued on the basis of Paul's testimony that Jesus's resurrection body was spiritual in the sense of being unextended, immaterial, intangible, and so forth. But neither the argument appealing to the nature of Paul's Damascus Road experience nor the argument from Paul's doctrine of the resurrection body supports such a conclusion
- On the contrary, Paul's information serves to confirm the gospels' narratives of Jesus's bodily resurrection. Not only is the gospels? physicalism well-founded, but it is also, like Paul's doctrine, a nuance physicalism.
- In order to effectively communicate the gospel, it is important to build bridges to lost people where they are, by seeking to understand them and share the gospel in a way that is meaningful to THEM rather than to US.
If life after death cannot be proved scientifically, is it then intellectually irresponsible to accept it? Only if you assume that it is intellectually irresponsible to accept anything that cannot be proved scientifically.
Quentin Smith has recently argued that (I) the universe began to exist and (II) its beginning was uncaused. In support of (II), he argues that (i) there is no reason to think that the beginning was caused by God and (ii) it is unreasonable to think so. I dispute both claims. His case for (i) misconstrues the causal principle, appeals to false analogies of ex nihilo creation, fails to show how the origin of the universe ex nihilo is naturally plausible, and reduces to triviality by construing causality as predictability in principle. His case for (ii) ignores important epistemological questions and fails to show either that vacuum fluctuation models are empirically plausible or that they support his second claim. - For making sense of any of the modern ideologies, nothing works better than identifying its view of creation. One's view of ultimate origins shapes the rest of one's thinking, as Nancy Pearcey shows in this catalog of Worldviews, published in Boundless (December 1999 ) and based on her new book "How Now Shall We Live?" (coauthored by Chuck Colson).
Recent discussions have raised the issue of the metaphysical implications of standard Big Bang cosmology. Grunbaum's argument that the causal principle cannot be applied to the origin of the universe rests on a pseudo-dilemma, since the cause could act neither before nor after t=0, but at t=0. Levy-Leblond's advocacy of a remetrication of cosmic time to push the singularity to - involves various conceptual difficulties and is in any case unavailing, since the universe's beginning is not eliminated. Maddox's aversion to the possible metaphysical implications of the standard model evinces a narrow scientism. Standard Big Bang cosmogony does therefore seem to have those metaphysical implications which some have found so discomfiting.
Drafted by Charles E. Whisnant and Proof Checked by Charity Whisnant, on Mother’s Day May 13th 2007
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