Monthly Archives: April 2010

Dr. Stephen Meyer has written a book that is shaking the evolutionary establishment like “ Darwin ’s Black Box” and “Evolution: A Theory in Crisis” did in previous decades. Meyer has assembled a set of ideas based on the latest research on living cells that must be answered if traditional Darwinism is to survive. So Biola University is assembling a powerful group of credentialed critics of Meyer’s “Intelligent Design” position to let him have it with both barrels. No hiding in dark libraries or murky laboratories—if Meyer has the goods, he needs to answer his toughest critics face to face! (Thanks to Reasonable Faith Dallas chapter for information on this event)

An exclusive, limited On-Demand format will allow you to watch these videos live or at your convenience:

Stephen Meyer Faces Critics Live Event

Anthony Flew, world-renowned atheist-philosopher turned deist, passed away last week.  My graduate school apologetics professor, Dr. Thomas B. Warren, debated Dr. Flew over four nights in 1976 in what could be the longest debate on the Existence of God on record. We had always hoped that the cumulative effect of debates with Christians could have a positive effect. In this case, we think they did. See the Times article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/7586929/Professor-Antony-Flew.html

See the Complete 4 night Warren-Flew debate on the Existence of God here:

http://www.thebible1.net/video/warrenflewdebate/

Here are a few tips to getting started with an Apologetics Library. Be advised that you will have to cover quite a bit of ground since the subject deals with a minimum of four great categories: Theology, History, Philosophy and Science. NOTE: This post will be updated on a regular basis as I continue to add resources I have found helpful.

Here are my thoughts:

Theology

It is essential that you have a good understanding of the theology of the Old and New Testaments. There are differing interpretations of some key theological issues. Understand your position and defend it.

These resources are important.

1. A reliable modern language Bible translation. Hint: Shy away from the King James version. Atheists often like to quote from it. Modern translations are vastly improved both in faithfulness to the manuscript tradition and readability. I prefer the New International Version and the New Living Translation, but any major translation published since 1950 should do just fine. If you really want to go deeper, get a Theology degree. Otherwise, be careful about quoting what “the Greek says” about a certain passage. Remember, atheists do not believe the Bible anyway – but for you it is a basis for your worldview, so be clear about what you believe it teaches.

2. Commentaries

The best single-set NT commentary is without a doubt the New International Commentary on the New Testament (edited by Gordon Fee). F. F. Bruce authors some of the volumes, along with Gordon Fee and other excellent evangelical scholars.

History

History is key to apologetics. This is one area where everyone should have access to the same sources, but often differ on the interpretation of an event. Be able to cite original sources for your claim. (Get serious with your Loeb Classical Library series) Certain controveries come up again and again. During the Middle Ages did the Catholic Church squelch science because it was afraid of losing authority? Did the Church torture Galileo? Did Constantine convene a meeting of church officials in order to establish the divinity of Jesus as a core church doctrine? Were the “secret gospels” (Gospel of Thomas, etc.) deliberately repressed in order to establish a more mainstream Christianity? Know the historical facts and sources to bolster your conclusion.

Philosophy

The great ideas about God, the origin of Universe, Morality and Free will/Determinism have been discussed throughout the ages – all before the rise of Christianity. Know the key personalities, their views and how ideas changed throughout time. There are some great histories of philosophy, but nothing can take the place of reading the source documents for “getting it.” With that in mind, a few recommendations:

History of Philosophy

F.C. Copleston’s multi-volume A History of Philosophy is a classic. You will often find individual volumes in bookstores – buy one when you find it. The complete set is hard to come by and usually expensive. Another good history is Bertrand Russell’s one volume A History of Western Philosophy.

If you haven’t read William Paley’s 1802 opus Natural Theology then you are missing out on a widely influential, but not widely read, masterpiece. If Paley lived today he could have easily been the author of another new and controversial book, one that is shaking up some intellectual trees, Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009). Both are available on Amazon.

Science

Know the general trend of scientific ideas from ancient times until now. Make yourself aware of the great scientists, their primary contribution and how it impacts the Christian-atheist dialogue. This is an area where conclusions often change and in which equally gifted scientists differ in their ideas. You don’t have to be a world-class physicist in order to talk intelligently about the issues, just be sure that you really do understand their position, and not just a caricature of it. It is easy to build up strawmen and destroy them – Christians and atheists are equally guilty.

Here we review important books and articles, new or old, that relate to the issues surrounding Christian Apologetics. This review focuses on David Bentley Hart’s, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, published in 2009 by Yale University Press.

Atheist Delusions, by David Bentley Hart, 2009.

Francis Bacon reminds us that “Some books are meant to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Atheist Delusions is of the “chewed and digested”  category.  It is a response to the New Atheists, the Triumverate of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. But Hart’s is not a point-by-point rebuttal. It is a studied and brutal expose of their uniform ignorance of the history of Christianity and the world into which it was birthed and grew. Indeed, he reminds us all that the very moral air we breathe today was first exhaled two millenia ago by Christianity’s uniquely clear moral vision of humanity.

It is immediately obvious that Hart is entirley at home and comfortable in the world of ancient Greece and Rome and their development through the Middle Ages. He is a first-rate historian who has given his life to the study of the thinkers of that period and their contribution to Western civilization. Hart is not interested in portraying Christianity as the answer to all of the ills of society. He is objective enough to recount its failures as well as successes. As he writes, “I feel no need to evade of excuse the innumerable failures of many Christians through the ages to live lives of charity or peace.”

His “ambitions are small” and “concerns the history of the early church, or roughly the first four or five centuries, and the story of how Christendom was born out of the culture of late antiquity.” His chief ambition “is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting: how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination of Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest apects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; and its elevation of activy charity above all other virtues.”

Some might argue that if Christianity had never existed then we would find ourselves today in much the same moral climate. It is a case that cannot be made since history did not happen this way. And so we can only trace with the fingers of study how Christianity did, in fact, influence our world for better in a number of critical ways.

If you have heard/read some apologetics resource and would like to share it, please leave us a reply with the details. We would love to share it.

I’m currently reviewing ancient Greek philosophy from the pre-Socratics through Aristotle. Christianity found much in common with certain aspects of the greek worldview. Plato’s Timaeus explains his idea of the creation of the world and man. I have a review of the Timaeus on my blog – check it out.