Apologetic Methods

Have you ever had one of those weird experiences where you decide you need to read up on something, and suddenly almost everything you happen to see has to do with that thing? I've been studying the various apologetic methods within the Christian tradition lately, and one of those serendipitous - or providential - supplements to my own study materials was Barry Carey's excellent series of blog posts summarizing the book Five Views of Apologetics, Steven Cowan, editor. Though brief, Barry's summaries of each of the five contributors' views serve as a great introduction to the basic issues surrounding the various methods in Christian apologetics. His conclusion is pretty close to where I'm at right now as I have evaluated the different approaches, which I may post on later.

In any event, for those interested in this sort of thing, here are the links to the individual blogposts in the series:

Doing Apologetics [an introduction]
Classical Apologetics
Evidentialist Apologetics
Cumulative Case Apologetics
Presuppositional Apologetics
Reformed Epistemology Apologetics
My Apologetics Strategy [a conclusion]

Gone again...

Just wanted to let everyone know I'll be gone for the rest of this week. My wife and I are celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary, and we'll be gone on a trip - without the kids, no less. Needless to say, I won't be blogging :)

God willing, regular new posts will continue starting next week.

And thank you, Amy, for being my love and companion for the last decade. Every man should be blessed to have a wife like mine.

Koukl on Relativism - On Video - FOR FREE!

It turns out that Google Video has Greg Koukl's classic lecture on moral relativism (this one in particular given for the Vertitas Forum). Everyone I know should watch and think about this. Greg is one of the most clear-thinking guys I know, and this is his forte, or at least one of them. Here it is.

UPDATE 4/17/07: I'm not sure if this video is bootleg and infringing on STR's copyright, or if they would be kosher with it. I should probably check - if it is bootleg, I'll take it off. Does anyone know?

Elaborating on Evil

I meant to respond to a few of my commenters a while back, but life did as life does and prevented me at the time from doing so. Now that I have more time, I want to make sure I don't ignore the kind people who read and comment on my blog, so I'm going to bring those comments to which I'd like to respond back to the top of the queue. The first one is from my loooong-time friend Nick Jenkins regarding my April 20 post, In the Face of Evil. Nick said:

On the subject of Evil, I'm not sure this is a healthy way to deal with the situation. I think it aids people in distancing themselves from someone (like Dahmer) by saying "It's EVIL!". The fact is that he was a man. He had problems, serious ones, but none the less... he was a human being that fell apart at some point. Trying to recategorize him into something "mythic" to me kind of hurts the cause. It alleviates us as a society from trying to correct problems.

I appreciate Nick's concern, and if I were doing what he cautions against, I would be concerned as well. However, I think he has misunderstood the way I am using "evil" - perhaps I wasn't being very clear in my original post. In my understanding, "evil" is not some mythic category removed from the context of human nature. I don't view Dahmer, or Cho, as somehow less than human, ontologically, when I talk about them and their actions as being evil. When I look at someone who has done something evil, it is in full view of their humanity.

As a technical definition, evil is a privation, the absence of good, and not a thing in itself (taking a cue from Augustine) - in other words, that which deviates from the character of the God who is good. You'll recall that I spoke of "the core of evil in each of us"; I think that the pull, the desire to rebel against God's goodness is a part of each person's nature, yours and mine and Cho's, as broken image-bearers of our Creator. These men have done nothing that I myself, absent certain conditions, am not capable of doing. Evil, to me, is not an abstract; it is wound tightly around each individual's human nature. So I do not in any way lose sight of the fact that these are men (in the gender generic sense) doing these thing, nor do I endorse any view that would lead to this kind of distancing or a shirking of societal responsibilities.

As a side note, perhaps another difference at play here is one that I'm only inferring from what Nick wrote, so I can't be sure this is his actual position (please correct me, Nick, if I am wrong!). It seems to me that Nick is operating from the view of human nature similar to that made famous by Rousseau - that man is basically good and is only later corrupted by outside forces - whereas I see the seeds of man's corruption as being internal, pervasive, and present from the moment the individual becomes an individual. I may be wrong in attributing this to Nick, but it is an interesting subject that maybe I'll post on separately sometime later.

The Desire to Justify

British historian Paul Johnson has written a book entitled Intellectuals, in which he chronicles the life and thought of such (arguably) great minds as Rousseau, Marx, Russell and Sartre. His conclusion was that most of their arguments and philosophies were based, not on noble rational convictions but on the choices they had made in their own lives. (Ex: Rousseau had five children out of wedlock and abandoned them all. He then maintained that children do not need parents to give them guidance or discipline, and that the state should bear the responsibility for raising them - all this supposedly out of his reasoning, intellect and common sense.)

While I certainly wouldn't want to be accused of committing the genetic fallacy, it is hard to escape the view that conclusions like this are not based on true reason but rather on the desire to justify and rationalize the moral choices already made. In my case, I think this statement would be free of that particular fallacy because it isn't my basis for rejecting their ethical theories. But it is an interesting aside.

Defensiveness and guilt

I find I am the most defensive when I am feeling particularly guilty and inadequate. Are others no different?

Authority of Revelation vs. Reason

I had forgotten about and lost track of Paul Scott Pruett's blog, Pensées, over the last couple of years, but happily stumbled upon it again today, and this quote caught my eye:

If we reject reason in relation to biblical revelation, then the very words of God become nothing but unprocessed photons striking the retina.

A healthy reminder to those who reject all forms and uses of philosophy as Godless and unbiblical.