Testing The Christian Apologists

I wanted to attempt and bring this specific topic here. ringo has challenged me to discuss the apologists whom I listen to and defend (or expose) them appropriately. I will say from the outset that the argument has already been done informally through us here on the forum. It boils down to faith vs evidence, which in my mind is inconclusive because I won't allow evidence to be the only default standard used when discussing concepts that have no way of being objectively proven initially to begin with.

The first Christian Apologist that I want to present is Frank Turek.

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Turek was a Naval Flight Officer in the U.S. Navy, and has a master's degree in Public Administration from George Washington University and a Doctor of Ministry in Apologetics from Southern Evangelical Seminary. He has also taught classes in Leadership and Management at George Washington University.

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I was listening to the following podcast this morning:
What Makes Something Right Or Wrong? In it, Dr.Turek brought up one of our old arguments which we have discussed to death here at EvC, namely that God can have foreknowledge without sacrificing human free will. It is at about the 25-30 minute mark. Dr.Turek has a passionate argument. Listen to the 5 minutes and see if anyone can spot dishonesty or logical errors...I am sure they are there. (I don't see him as dishonest, but my critics might)

I dont have time to write it all out at the moment, but it can be rediscussed here. We have done it before, and I feel that there was no conclusion. Free Will vs Ultimate Foreknowledge

I may find a transcript later.

Edited by Thugpreacha, : No reason given.

Thread copied here from the Testing The Christian Apologists thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

I don't really get what you are "testing" here. I listened to quite a bit of the talk, and except for his being an Arminian/antiCalvinist in my view it's a good basic talk on Christian issues.

I listened to the five minute. It covered two topics.

The first insisted that it was all right to make laws because they were consistent with the Bible rather than being based on it. That sounds like a distinction without a difference.

The second made a hash of the moral argument. Arguing that the standard of morality must be a person pretty much denies the existence of objective morality. So Turek evaded the point and talked about the “source” - by which he meant an enforcer - of justice.

So, two points - and neither of them honest.

He did make the valid point that the Calvinist God is not all-loving, which is at least true. But then the Bible can be used to argue that point so it’s not a killer blow.

Faith writes: I don't really get what you are "testing" here.

ringo wanted me to present 1 honest apologist to him, as he claims that they are all liars. Of course, lest we have a kangaroo court here, we all need to agree what form such a lie would take. ringo thinks that I know better than to hold on to the messenger as an excuse to reject the message. I disagree. But I am honest enough to engage the counter-argument advocating shutting up, throwing Jesus away(in the sense of throwing proselyting away) becoming friendly to inclusivism and helping everyone without worrying about whether they are Christians or not. A couple of scriptures challenge jar and ringos ideology.

Primarily found in John, concerning Jesus:

John1:10 writes: He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him.

Why would Jesus advocate being quiet and simply being a servant towards others?

John 15:18 writes: “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.

According to the stories, the world at large did in fact hate Jesus...perhaps because like us, He never shut his mouth. If His message was to simply help others, would He not show by example? jar will argue that He did.
(go and tell no one)

In short, what is being tested in this topic is worldviews vs apologetics. One could argue that you, I and jar are all apologists and yet we don't agree on much of anything. You and I may find some common ground, and I'm glad that we do...you will always be a sister even if I don't necessarily always agree with you I am commanded to love you. Is the same command to love extended to Leftists? Muslims? Gays? or are we to love the church first and foremost...comments?

PaulK writes: Arguing that the standard of morality must be a person pretty much denies the existence of objective morality. So Turek evaded the point and talked about the “source” - by which he meant an enforcer - of justice. So, two points - and neither of them honest.

Arguably the points are honest coming from his belief. We believe in the person and character of Jesus Christ. We believe that the enforcer of justice being living and active. How is that dishonest? He may argue that people who claim that belief and acceptance are unnecessary are being dishonest because deep down they know better. Of course, he couldn't prove it.

I have two more to introduce.

They have an interesting podcast called Thinking Out Loud

Here is one such podcast:
Alright, the Culture Is Increasingly Hostile to the Church. Now What?
Snippets from the transcript:

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So I was in Dallas, Texas and I was speaking to a gathering about of about 120 people. Now do bear in mind that location, Dallas, Texas. That's important and you'll see why.

But increasingly the questions coming in after the talks were really along these lines. “If you're a Christian, how do you hold to biblical values and theological orthodoxy while so much around you in the culture is resisting that and pushing you away from it even?”

But the tone of these questions was in some ways revealing because I think the hope was how can we basically hold onto these convictions without clashing too deeply. And what has become increasingly clear, and what I was realizing as I was answering these questions is clashing is unavoidable and we're coming to a juncture in this nation's history where it's not possible to hold on to all of our theological convictions, all theological orthodoxy in a comfortable way. It's going to come with a social cost.

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This gets back to the idea of throwing away the ideology and just becoming inclusive(meek) and living out the message. It also causes me to question why it is important to hold on to the perceived values of the faith.

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I feel the contrast there myself as a missionary kid from Vienna, Austria, which is nominally Catholic, but as it is a very secular nation. And there all of the features that you just described, Nathan, they're pretty much absent except you do have, actually you do have the fragments of Christendom still all over Europe.

There are these beautiful cathedrals and they're architectural marvels, but they're not filled with worshipers of course. They are filled with tourists and they're looked at almost...They're museums essentially. (...) But also the practical outworking of that is just so many people don't know the language of Christianity at all. They don't know scripture. They don't read the Bible. A lot of people think they know it, but it's largely regarded as an irrelevance.

And so when you actually press into the specifics of Christianity, the message Jesus is Lord is always, always deeply counter-cultural. If you're total and complete allegiance and fidelity is to Christ, it's certainly going to put you at odds with any culture in which you find yourself. Whether that culture is like the United States where it's fiercely individualistic or if it's a culture that's more along Eastern lines where fidelity to the family and tradition is highly cherished and honor occupies a huge seat. It's always going to clash with all of those notions.(...) We(humans)just don't like to be told what to do.(...)"Wow, that's just a fascinating line that sums up America so well." So we're still hanging onto this kind of like pseudo-religious, it's a totally religious idea to say that people were created to be equal. All right, let's balance that as a divine dictation as it were, or pronouncement.(...)

But then we've added the American autonomy into that. So we were created to be equal to pursue our own version of happiness. And so we want the right to be autonomous, not the ability to be obedient to the authority. I believe in God, but I don't believe my personal beliefs, and there's some weird grammar in here, okay, so just bear with me. But I don't believe my personal beliefs of which we can't confirm should override scientific facts and what we can confirm.

And it's funny because, so essentially what this person is saying is I believe in God and I love God, but that's just my personal opinion and I don't want that to be forced on anyone. And I don't want that to cloud anybody else's sort of day.

But it's a funny sentiment because if Christ is Lord, by definition that cannot be just your personal opinion. I mean, that's where I love Lesslie Newbigin's phrase, the gospel is public truth. That would mean it's true for everybody and he's King of all, whether you acknowledge it or not.

But Americans, we love to hold on to stuff but we all want it on our own terms and we want it in these small manageable units that really will prevent all conflicts.

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I like these two despite their obvious bent towards conservatism.

Edited by Thugpreacha, : No reason given.

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Arguably the points are honest coming from his belief.

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I hardly think that answering a completely different question can be considered honest.

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We believe in the person and character of Jesus Christ. We believe that the enforcer of justice being living and active. How is that *********?

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Because being the enforcer of justice is different from being the source of morality. To make an analogy with the legal system, the cops aren’t the legislature.

I don’t see much of interest in the other quotes. No specifics at all.

OK I get your point. You basically accuse the apologist of conflating the issues in order to make his point. If so, I can see your concern.
Turek attempts to answer similar questions here:

Upon watching this video, I will say that Turek is bad at science...his arguments are PRATTS. Watch and see what you think.

Edited by Thugpreacha, : No reason given.

Edited by Thugpreacha, : No reason given.

you will always be a sister even if I don't necessarily always agree with you I am commanded to love you. Is the same command to love extended to Leftists? Muslims? Gays? or are we to love the church first and foremost...comments?

As Turek points out later in his talk love is often misunderstood by Christians as if it implies agreement when we cannot agree with those whose belief systems violate God's commandments. So we love them by treating them kindly and helping them as they need help.

Phat writes: ringo wanted me to present 1 honest apologist to him, as he claims that they are all liars.

What I've been trying to get you to do is to defend specific lies that apologists tell, like claiming God told the truth in Genesis 3.

One apologetic defense is this:

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When the serpent first speaks in Genesis, the woman is eager to correct him. His opening speech is probably best construed, according to many modern scholars, as an incomplete subordinate clause: in Robert Alter’s translation “Though God said, you shall not eat from any tree of the garden—” (Gen. 3:1). And then the woman jumps in to tell him there is only one tree that is forbidden. So far, so good!

But she is a bit vague on which tree is actually forbidden, so the serpent responds by tacitly correcting her, directing her attention away from “the tree in the midst of the garden” (Gen. 3:3), which is the tree of life (Gen. 2:9) to the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 3:5). She is so far from disobedience at this point that he has to instruct her how to disobey by picking the right tree.

The serpent is thus not simply a purveyor of ignorance and falsehood. Like every clever liar, his words contain many elements of truth. Indeed, falsehood is unintelligible—and therefore impossible—without a whole landscape of truth in the background. How could any evil exist without a world of good things to hide in, deform and corrupt? Without the good of truth, you wouldn’t even know which fruit to eat in order to sin.

So the serpent points out that the forbidden tree is the one that will give knowledge of good and evil. It will in that sense make her like God, he says (Gen. 3:5). True enough.

But he starts by saying: “you shall not surely die!” (Gen. 3:4). That is the great lie. Yet even this lie is a half truth: she does not die the very day she eats the forbidden fruit. Some scholars, amplifying the serpent’s point, have noted that God said, “ on the day you eat of it , you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17). What both the serpent and the scholars leave out is that this will be the day she is condemned to death. The phrase, “shall surely die” (or more literally, “will die, die,” a reduplication of the verb for emphasis) is legal terminology for the death penalty—often translated as “shall be put to death” (e.g., in Exodus 21:15-17 and Leviticus 20:10-16).

So the serpent gets the facts right about God’s word (the commandment is about the tree of knowledge, not the tree of life) but twists its meaning (as if it did not announce a death penalty). The upshot is that his lie is fundamentally about human death (“you shall not surely die!”). He leads her away from the tree of life and brings her to precisely the death he denies. For to believe his lie is to disbelieve the word of God, and that is death indeed.

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I know that you stick to your guns about a plain reading, but there are ways to dance around a bit. The question is are they honest ways or not.

I might add that in your defense and to your credit, apologetics assumes a few things to be true apriori.

That the serpent is evil.

That God cannot lie...therefore the need to dance.

I happen to agree with those two assumptions. Is there any reason to question them? Because if we question those premises, anything is permissible.

Edited by Thugpreacha, : No reason given.

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Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. ~RC Sproul
"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." ~Mark Twain "
~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith

You can "get answers" by watching the ducks. That doesn't mean the answers are coming from them.~Ringo

“As the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, so the denial of God is the height of foolishness.”
? R.C. Sproul, Essential Truths of the Christian Faith

Phat writes: I know that you stick to your guns about a plain reading, but there are ways to dance around a bit. The question is are they honest ways or not.

The nonsense about "which tree" is clearly dishonest. There is no confusion in the story about which tree God was talking about. He said that Adam and Eve had become like Him, "to know good and evil."

The bit about being, "condemned to death," is also dishonest. God said they would die on the same day, not be sentenced on the same day.

Phat writes: I happen to agree with those two assumptions. Is there any reason to question them?

All assumptions should be questioned.

Edited by ringo, : No reason given.

I think that the apologists argument is problematic.

His reading relies on the phrase meaning a death sentence rather than an execution. But, by his own admission it is read as an actual execution (“put to death”) and since the repetition is typically for emphasis I think that is more likely the case.

And I think that it is a bit of a stretch to consider the actual sentence a literal sentence of death. There is no execution involved at all.

But there is more. The serpent does NOT correct the woman. The serpent says that the tree has the properties of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and ****, but he does not say that it is a different tree.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; 5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,[a] knowing good and ****.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.

(NRSV)

Let me note that the woman does not know the properties of either tree. If she were originally thinking of the Tree of Life she would still be thinking of the Tree of Life and eat from that.

PaulK writes: His reading relies on the phrase meaning a death sentence rather than an execution.

It is even stupider.

Adam & Eve were already sentenced to death; unless they ate from the Tree of Life. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge was totally irrelevant when it came to whether Adam & Eve would die. It was why God kicked them out of the garden because he feared they would become even more like God and live forever.

Basically the snake's message is to go with your own intuition. Did Jesus do that in the wilderness? NO. He questioned what was whispered to Him. (by using scripture)So should we.

Edited by Thugpreacha, : No reason given.