Painting Fakes

I am not a Christian because it makes logical sense or because I can prove the message to be true.  I am a Christian because the teachings and life of Jesus seem to me to be the best and most compelling guide to living a good life. A few years ago I read lots of apologetics of various sorts. It started with me reading some of the New Atheist writers - Dawkins , Dennett , Harris , Shermer - who were getting a lot of airplay.  With the exception of Shermer, these learned gentlemen all have a great certainty that religion is an ancient anachronism.  However, their efforts to refute religion are compromised by their failure to actually learn anything about the religions they are attempting to disprove.  Nuanced, mature faith just seems like a mystery to them - Harris even suggests that religious 'moderates' are dangerous because they provide cover for fundamentalists.  Dawkins seems to believe that if he can disprove young earth creationism he has therefor...

So, my rather haphazard journey through the world of Christian apologetics has brought me to William Lane Craig.  The much-traveled Craig is perhaps the most prominent conservative evangelical apologist in the English-speaking world, holding debates with militant atheists in all sorts of places in between his day job as Research Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology in Southern California.  He was even part of a widely advertised debate here in Brisbane City Hall with prominent atheist scientist Lawrence Krauss.  I couldn't get to the debate but friends who did told me I didn't miss much. Craig is a prolific author and speaker, with over 30 books in print as well as numerous articles, scholarly and popular, and DVD's of his lectures and debates.   Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics  is his attempt to bring all this together in a package.  It started life as material for his seminary courses in apologetics and was origin...

I love it when people recommend good books to me, especially when they make it easy for me by sending them to me.  Like Tricia, who sent me a copy of this lovely book, Unapologetic: Why despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense , by Francis Spufford. As its title suggests, this is sort of a work of apologetics, but not quite.  Nor is Spufford your usual earnest Christian apologist a la Dinesh D'Souza or Alister McGrath.   Rather he is a professional writer and master of engaging prose.  You won't find yourself wading through  Unapologetic wondering how many pages there are to go.  He also largely avoids the fraught questions which dominate modern apologetics - has science disproved God?  Is the Old Testament God a monster?  Is the probability of God's existence so low as to amount to an impossibility?  Such questions are relegated to pithy, entertaining footnotes in which he refutes the standard ath...

My search for a decent Christian apologetic has had mixed results so far.  I have read many fascinating books, as well as some disappointments, and seen some very silly claims made in the name of the Christian faith.  The search has recently brought me to Dinesh D'Souza's  What's So Great About Christianity, the lack of a question mark providing a most eloquent summary of the author's views. I was nervous before I picked up this book.  D'Souza is an unlikely person to write something I would enjoy.  Born in Mumbai, India, he moved to the USA as an exchange student in 1978 and stayed to become a professional right-wing nutter.  He worked as an advisor in the Reagan White House, and has written books with titles like What's So Great About America (also without question mark), The Enemy At Home: The cultural left and its responsibility for 9/11 , and most recently The Source of Obama's Rage in which he suggests that Obama's foreign policy is driven b...

Well blow me down with a feather duster.  After not hearing Lewis' Trilemma (the "lunatic, liar or Lord" argument) for years, I hear it twice in a fortnight. I couple of weeks ago I told you how I heard it from the pulpit in my own church.  Fair enough, our rector is a busy working pastor and doesn't have time to think through the fine points of every sermon.  Then last Thursday a good friend graduated from the Queensland Theological College and I went along to clap as he got his hard-earned piece of paper.  There it was again, popping up its three ugly heads at the close of Douglas O'Donnell's guest speech.  I hope the theological graduates were shaking their heads at the faux pas . It slightly spoiled what was otherwise an intriguing address.  O'Donnell's subject was the Sermon on the Mount, and his point was that the central theme of the sermon is Jesus' authority.  In support of this idea he cited four pieces of evidence. The first ...

I was surprised in church last Sunday to hear our preacher propound the "lunatic, liar or Lord" argument.  I thought he might have known better. This argument did not originate with CS Lewis, but he popularised it in his 1952 book Mere Christianity, and it has been widely used by Evangelical apologists ever since.  The argument runs something like this: Jesus made a number of quite startling claims about himself, like "the Father and I are one", or "no-one comes to the Father but through me".  In the light of these claims, it is not reasonable to suggest that Jesus was merely a good man or an inspired teacher.  If he made these claims believing them to be true, but they were not, he was a lunatic with delusions of gradeur.  If he made them knowing they were  not  true, he was simply a charlatan.  If he was neither of these things, then we are forced to acknowledge his lordship and submit to him. Apologetics serves two purposes.  It...

I have noticed that most, if not all, of my fundamentalist Christian acquaintances are also climate change deniers.  I've been wondering whether there is a connection and I've concluded that there is, and that it's young earth creationism. Young earth creationism often goes under the name of Creation Science, but it's not science, it's apologetics.  Science is an open pursuit of knowledge - it seeks explanations for observed phenomena, and tests these against the evidence.  Its hypotheses may be proved or disproved - both proof and disproof are valid scientific outcomes. Apologetics, on the other hand, is the task of defending a particular view or idea.  The truth is already known and the task of the apologist is to bolster belief in that truth by marshalling evidence in its defence.  In this case the faith position is the literal inerrancy of the Bible, and in particular the literal truth of the early chapters of Genesis which are understood to...

Having had a rave about the seeming inhumanity of one of our favourite worship songs, perhaps now is as good a time as any to post my review of Rachel Held Evans' Evolving in Monkey Town.   I enjoy Evans' blog , with its combination of deep compassion and theological challenge, and wanted to read more. In many ways Evans' spiritual journey has been like my own, from fundamentalism to a more liberal view of Christianity.  However, she was more deeply immersed in fundamentalism than I was, and has taken 20 fewer years to travel the path.  Perhaps this shows that she's smarter than me - she certainly writes better! Evans grew up in Dayton, Tennessee, venue of the infamous "Scopes Monkey Trial" in 1925 in which school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution in his science class, contrary to Tennessee statute.  She went to fundamentalist Christian schools before attending Bryan University, named after William Jennings Bryan, ...

Apologies for my short absence.  I've been busy with work, it being the end of the financial year and all, and not much spare time to write down the thoughts clattering around my head.  Anyway, in between other things I've been gradually working my way through Eusebius' History of the Church.   Eusebius has been called the "father of church history" and this work, which first appeared early in the 4th century, is the earliest surviving attempt at a comprehensive account of the first three centuries of Christianity. I say "attempt" because the work is hardly comprehensive.  In the first place, it is almost entirely a history of the Greek-speaking church of the Eastern mediterranean, with occasional insertions of events from the West, especially Rome.  Yet for me this was the least puzzling thing about it.  As a 21st century reader it is easy to see what it lacks as a work of history. For a start there is no real sense of development....

In my reading of various works of apologetics I noticed that quite a few Christian writers refer in approving tones to GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy, so I thought I'd have a read. Chesterton was one of those archetypal English "men of letters", a high-class journalist who churned out books on a massive range of subjects.  He was a jack of all trades and master of none, an eccentric individual famous as much for who he was as for what he wrote.  Most of his works are rarely read these days, but the Father Brown   mysteries are still popular, as is this little book.  It was published in 1908 when Chesterton was 35, and explains his reasons for converting from agnosticism to orthodox Roman Catholic Christianity. I find it interesting not only that this book is still read, but that it is beloved of more or less orthodox Protestants like CS Lewis and Philip Yancey, who wrote the foreword to this edition.  It's interesting because Chesterton is quite ...

I first heard of Francis Collins in Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain , where his faith journey served as a contrast for Shermer's own journey from evangelical Christianity to atheism.   The Language of God is Collins' own telling of that story, along with his reflections on the relationship between science and faith. Collins is famous for his role as the director of the Human Genome Project, in which a host of geneticists pooled their efforts to develop a complete map of the human genome.  He is also a committed evangelical Christian, and this makes him something of a poster boy for the idea that Christianity and science can be compatible.  After all, if such a distinguished scientist is also a believer then faith must be smart. The Language of God opens with his own description of his conversion.  Brought up in a non-religious household, he more or less drifted into atheism as the default option for a budding scientist, before his switch to ...

Being something of a heretic myself, in a modest sort of way, I was interested to read Alister McGrath's Heresy.   McGrath is currently a theology professor at Kings College, London and has a glittering academic carreer, representing the educated face of moderate orthodox Christianity in the UK and beyond.  I've enjoyed a couple of his previous books - The Twilight of Atheism   provides a handy, accessible summary of the trajectory of atheist ideas in modern Western thought, while The Dawkins Delusion provides a pithy response to Richard Dawkins The God Delusion . Here he's moved on from atheism, which challenges the church from without, to heresy, which provides a challenge from within.  He is at pains to stress that heretics ancient and modern are not outsiders attacking the church, they are insiders trying to reform it, generally with the best of intentions.  So what is it that distinguishes heresy from orthodoxy?  There is a thread of thinking in 2...