The Inerrant, Infallible Word of George Lucas

I recently saw a Facebook thread in which Star Wars fans were explaining the odd design of the Millennium Falcon. The question was raised regarding why the cockpit is on the side of the craft rather than in the middle, a design flaw that makes visually navigating something like a ridiculously jam-packed asteroid field even more difficult than the 3,720 to 1 success ratio certain protocol droids might estimate. The consensus was that it was primarily designed to be a cargo vessel and was later modified as a smuggling vessel. That makes some sense until one looks at the similarly flawed design of the B-Wing, which was supposed to be a heavy attack craft in the Star Wars universe. Other explanations had to be offered for that apparent flaw. All the while interlocutors were pointing out the obvious: it looks freakin' cool and was part of the imagination of the filmmakers, so who cares? It's just a movie.

Presuppositional Atheism?

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was a Presuppositionalist. I've discussed this briefly before, but having grown wary and suspect of the weaknesses of apologetic methods like Thomistic arguments and evidentialism, I turned to the seemingly-unassailable circularity offered by this “epistemology.” I just used scare quotes there because Presuppositionalism probably isn’t as much of an epistemology as it is an apologetic method (if it’s even that). The basic claim of Presuppositionalism is that the Christian understanding of reality is the only internally consistent worldview and that the propositions contained in the Protestant Bible, and implicitly the Westminsterian interpretation of those propositions, are to be taken axiomatically. All other worldviews will fail the internal scrutiny of a reductio ad absurdum.

Elijah and the Apologist of Baal

I Kings 18:17-40
And Ahab went to meet Elijah. And it came to pass, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto him, “Art thou he that troubleth Israel?”

And he answered, “I have not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father's house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of Jehovah, and thou hast followed Baalim. Now therefore send, and gather to me all Israel unto mount Carmel, and the prophets of Baal four hundred and fifty, and the prophets of the groves four hundred, which eat at Jezebel's table.” So Ahab sent unto all the children of Israel, and gathered the prophets together unto mount Carmel. For even though this was a ridiculous request, Elijah was some kind of svengali.

Whenever I hear Christian apologetics...I reach for my Bible

It's true. And yes, I just adapted an oft-misquoted line from a Nazi play for the title of this post. I figured I'd go ahead and get Godwin out of the way from the outset.

It is my opinion that the greatest impediment to the intelligibility of the Christian faith is, in fact, its foundational set of documents. Far from being an asset, the Bible is the Achilles' heel soft underbelly of most Christian systems of belief, especially the more fundamentalist ones. It is my observation that the more reliant upon the Bible a brand of Christianity is, the more easily it is collapsed upon itself. Even brands of Christianity that aren't closely tied to it like Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and Mainline Liberal Protestantism largely fall victim to it as well, often via the very arguments those other denominations more closely tied to the Bible would use against them. Time and again the Bible will contain material that just completely wrecks otherwise coherent systems of Christian doctrine and often the heavy-lifting has already been done by some other group within Christianity.

God's Not Dead film to bring urban legends to life on the big screen

Social media recently brought my attention to a trailer for an upcoming film called God's Not Dead. The film stars Kevin Sorbo, known for his portrayal of a fictional hero from Ancient Greek mythology. Sorbo is instead cast in the role of a fictional villain from Contemporary Christian mythology, the evil atheist professor. A relative unknown plays the heroic Christian student. Both characters appear to be adaptations of those found in famous urban legends.

The film is based on a book, based on a popular CCM song and has accompanying workbooks, lectures, t-shirts, necklaces, seminars, evangelism kits, a complete sermon series with Power Point slides and numerous other consumer products. It's just further evidence that the foolishness of preaching has been replaced by the foolishness of the savvy copycat marketing of repackaged weak arguments for Christianity along with a heavy dose of the straw man fallacy. Throw in a dash of Christian pop culture icons from Duck Dynasty and you've got a formula for some financial success. All of this is sure to keep young people in the church and convince skeptics, right?

Canon Revisited: a response

I suspect that most Christians regard the Bible as a single book and take for granted how and when those constituent parts were composed, much less how and when those 66 (or more?) books came to be collected and arranged into a single book. I myself became more aware of this process several years ago when I began looking into the claim that the King James Version was supposedly the only un-corrupted English translation. Bound up in that issue was, of course, the question of why certain books were included in the Bible and why others were left out. Not long after, I became embroiled in a lengthy online debate with a Roman Catholic over the question of canonicity. For those not aware, Catholics include some books in their Bibles that Protestants do not.

After the debate, which I felt I had "won", I came away with the sneaky suspicion that there were apparent weaknesses in the Protestant argument that my Catholic opponent had failed to point out. Perhaps the reason why that person didn't point out those weaknesses was because their argument was in many ways susceptible to the same sorts of critiques, namely the question of authority. My Catholic opponent would've done well to expose the fact that when I said that the Bible as a whole and the books individually attest to their own authority, my argument was completely circular. Of course, had my Catholic friend done that, I would've countered that relying on a supposedly infallible church body to decide what belongs in the canon only introduces one more participant into the circle.

I revisited the subject a few years later when I was teaching part of a Sunday School series on the doctrine of Scripture and the topic I was to teach on was the canon. Again I discovered the same problems, but this time I sought resolutions to those difficulties. What I discovered was that even Protestants within the Reformed tradition disagreed with one another over how best to go about addressing those issues and, in truth, none of them could satisfactorily escape the problems of circularity and subjectivity. This was certainly one of the things that helped precipitate my questioning of other doctrines with problems I had been brushing aside and ignoring.

Fast forward to a few months ago when I revealed to my church leadership that I no longer believed. When I mentioned in a discussion that the question of canonicity was one of the problems that led me to begin questioning the claims of Christianity, I was told that there was "more recent scholarship" that would address those questions. This, of course, raises the question of why it took 2,000 years for theologians in Christ's chruch to come up with a reasonable justification for the belief that the 66 books of the Protestant Bible are the right ones.

What follows is my written response to that "more recent scholarship" which turned out to be a book entitled Canon Revisited, written by a New Testament professor and president of Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, NC. I wrote this response after the book was presented to me and I returned the book along with this response, so I no longer have a copy in my possession. Keep that in mind if and when you decide to comment.

On a personal note, I think it's noteworthy that after I took the time to read this book and type up this response, the person who sent the book to me decided they no longer felt the desire to "cross swords" over this issue and instead just wanted to "express [his] love." In all honesty, it's hard for me not to see that as little more than an emotionally manipulative cop-out, even though I don't doubt the sincerity of the expression itself.

Flat tire urban legend redux

Jay, Mark, Mateo and Lucas - everybody called Lucas "LT" because those were his initials and he sort of resembled a certain Giants linebacker - all met each other freshman year while attending Liberty University and became good friends. Often they would try to register for the same classes when convenient, given their majors. One semester they were all taking the same Chemistry class and had all done pretty well on all the material up to that point. Going into the final all four had a solid A in the class. In fact, the four were so confident going into the final that they decided to head over to Virginia Beach and party with some friends on the weekend, even though the final was on Monday. They had a great time, but they overslept and didn't make it back to Lynchburg until early Monday morning.

I've been such a fool

Many will be familiar with Psalm 14:1 and, of course, since my apostasy I've had it quoted to me. After reflecting on this verse a bit, I now think the people who say the godless are fools may be right after all.

One of the reasons often bandied about to explain why brilliant scientists and other egghead professor types try to push their secular agendas in fields like anthropology, sociology, archeology, biology, psychology, cosmology, geology and other areas that can make claims that run counter to sacred texts is that these folks are just trying to convince themselves and everybody else that there is no God. They desperately don’t want there to be a God and the reason they and other non-theists don’t want there to be a God is really quite simple. They don’t want to have to feel like any divine judge can hold them accountable for all their vile wickedness. That’s the whole motivation behind secular humanism and atheism, right?

Resurrection reply

As people have been made aware of my apostasy, a few [read: exactly three thus far] have made attempts to engage me in correspondence about matters of religion while remaining civil in tone. One mailed me a book, but two have done so in their own words. Both of them have my respect.

What follows is a response to a letter one of them wrote me in which they provided their expanded personal testimony along with an appeal to the historicity of the resurrection, among other things for my consideration. I've left out identifying remarks and portions pertaining to their personal testimony. This is, admittedly, only one side of the dialogue. However, I'm putting it up as a reference I can point people toward if and when they bring this particular issue up with me. Also, today is Easter Sunday so I felt it was appropriate.

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