The Swedish Atheist, the Scuba Diver and Other Apologetic Rabbit Trails

162 Pages·2012·2.76 MB·English

by  Randal Rauser

God breathes through us so completely.. so gently we hardly feel it.. . yet, it is our everything. Thank
you God.
John Coltrane
Introduction
1. The Sacramental Properties of Caffeine
2. Why a Good Argument Ain't Such a Bad Thing
3. The Grande Conversation Begins
4. "Reasonable" Scientists, "Deluded" Believers and the Quest for Objectivity
5. What Must You Do to See a Buffalo or Cast a Vote?
6. God, Matter and Other Astonishing Hypotheses
1. Faith: It's in the Air
8. So Which Beliefs Are "Properly Basic"?
9. God Is Not a Hypothesis
10. How to Show That "God Loves Me" Is False.
11. The Swedish Atheist and the Scuba Diver
12. Will the Real Atheist Please Stand Up?
13. I just Happen to Believe in One Less God Than You
14. The Pastry I Freely Choose
15. Naturalism, Scientism and the Screwdriver That Could Fix Almost Anything
16. God as a Simple Answer
11. A Giant Mickey Mouse Balloon and the Keebler Elves
18. From Personal Cause to Most Perfect Being
19. Why Zeus, at Least, Isn't God
20. Would a Most Perfect Being Have a Most Imperfect Church?
21. Would a Most Perfect Being Command Genocide?
22. What Hath a Most Perfect Being to Do with a Most Horrendous Hell?
23. An Eternal Eye for an Eye
24. Three Types of Relativist and Two Types of Evil
25. Good Humans, Genocidal Aliens and Serial Killers Who Know What They Want in Life
26. Playing Games with Morality
27. God Is Dead and You Have Killed Him, Et Cetera.
28. What Does God Taste Like?
29. The Light Cast by Little Amazing Moments of Providence
30. The Taliban and the Serenity Prayer.
31. Feel Free to Sit on the Fence, but Don't Get Caught in the Lava Flow
32. Adieu
33. A Love Supreme
Acknowledgments
Notes
Since this is a book about apologetics, it makes sense to begin with a description of what I take
apologetics to be. Open a dictionary and you'll find a definition like this:
a•pol•o•get•ics n. The branch of theology that defends Christian belief and critiques opposing
belief systems.
That's more or less correct. However, we all operate with our own subtle understandings of words
that go beyond dictionary denotations. For years my understanding of apologetics was a good deal
more militaristic than that offered by Webster's. Had I ever bothered to write it down, it might have
looked like this:
a•pol•o•get•ics n. Christian intellectual warfare with nonChristian belief systems that utilizes the
weaponry of sound argumentation.
If you're wondering why I held such a battle-happy view of apologetics, let me assure you that the
warfare motif hardly originated with me. Many Christians trace the conception of apologetics as
battle right back to the New Testament. After all, Paul describes the Christian life in terms of wearing
armor and wielding a sword (Ephesians 6:10-18). What's more, he bequeaths to apologists a mandate
that, but for a few words, could have been excerpted from a William Wallace speech: "We demolish
arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive
every thought to make it obedient to Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5). Terms like "demolishing" and
"taking captive" certainly sound like warfare, so it doesn't take much imagination to picture the
apologist as beating back the forces of darkness with arguments and evidence.
However, as solid as apologetics' militaristic credentials may seem, I was eventually forced to
confront two serious shortcomings with this view. First, thinking of apologetics in terms of warfare
tends to create highly adversarial situations in which the apologist is pitted against an "enemy." The
result is a polarizing framework of "I'm right and you're wrong" that blurs the fact that nobody is
right-or wrong-all the time. You've probably heard it said that truth is the first casualty of war. The
subtle distinctions of real life have no place in war, which divides the world into a simple binary
between good guys and bad guys. The same thing happens when the war is shifted to the apologetic
battlefield. When we practice warfare-based apologetics, we tend to miss the right, good and true in
the "enemy," as well as the wrong, bad and false in ourselves.'
Second, and most disturbingly, I discovered that the warfare approach to apologetics produced
almost no change in others. Even when I "demolished" other people's arguments (or at least thought I
had), they typically didn't see it that way. More often than not they'd continue to crouch in the ruins of
their worldview, firing RPGs back at my rumbling convoy of apologetic Humvees like stubborn
insurgents.
It didn't take much of that before I started to ask myself, what good is winning arguments if I lose
people? And that led to the recognition (for me a minor revolution at the time) that the warfare motif
was missing something. Maybe apologetics should be concerned with more than defeating arguments.
Maybe it should also be concerned with persuading people. And while warfare can compel, it rarely
persuades.
Scripture itself supports the notion that persuasion is central to apologetics. Although the
militaristic motifs are present in the New Testament, for the early Christians the goal of persuasion
was always primary. "When Silas and Timothy came from Macedonia, Paul devoted himself
exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ" (Acts 18:5). Paul didn't
spend time testifying to the messiahship of Jesus so he could win arguments. Rather, his goal was to
win people through arguments: "Every Sabbath he reasoned in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews
and Greeks" (Acts 18:4).
So with the military motif of apologetics in my rearview mirror, what was my new definition?
Something like this:
a•pol•o•get•ics n. The discipline of making converts to Christianity through the use of argument
and evidence.
This made more sense. After all, Jesus commanded us to go into the world to make disciples, not
simply win arguments. And so I began to pursue apologetics as a grand project focused on converting
people to my Christian beliefs. That meant honing my arguments and delivery to facilitate the prized
conversion of my unsuspecting future convert-a person formerly known as the enemy.
Unfortunately it wasn't long before storm clouds appeared once again. I began to notice that most of
the non-Christians with whom I interacted viewed apologetics with derision and suspicion. It soon
became clear to me that the derision was directed largely at the evangelistic emphasis of my
apologetics.
Why? Well, have you ever have a friend who joined Amway? An innocent invitation to go out for
coffee soon becomes an invitation to "join the Amway family." That's the way people look at
Christian apologists. The secret is out: apologists use arguments so they can make converts. It doesn't
take long for would-be converts to notice that an apologist wants to talk with them only in order to
convert them.
In other words, real conversation is not possible. Would a politician admit that his opponent holds
a superior economic policy? Would a lawyer confess her client's guilt? Would a salesperson advise
against the purchase of his company's inferior products? So why would anyone trust an apologist
whose raison d'etre is simply to make converts?
These troubling reflections led me to a third revolution in my definition of apologetics. I didn't
reject rigorous argumentation or evangelistic persuasion-far from it. Yet while I continued to embrace
both tactics, I came to recognize that they must be submitted to another end: the pursuit of truth.
In his famous exchange with Pilate, Jesus Christ declared, "For this reason I was born, and for this
I came into the world, to testify to the truth" (John 18:37). If Jesus came to testify to the truth, then
surely truth should be at the center of our concerns as well. What good is it to win an argument or a
convert if your position is not true? If Jesus was shaped by the truth so completely that he could be
equated with truth (see John 14:6), then surely Christfollowers ought likewise to seek to be shaped by
the truth.
With that in mind, I gradually came to realize that the best apologetic witness is found when we
subordinate all other goals to the tireless pursuit of the truth. When people see that you can be trusted