My basic position is that it is epistemologically invalid to accept the existence of God from the existence of logic.
This is an excerpt from Evidence Considered: A Response to Evidence for God. Evidence for God is a book edited by William Dembski and Michael Licona that presents fifty arguments for faith from the Bible, history, philosophy, and science. This chapter responds to an essay by Gary Habermas entitled: “Near-Death Experiences: Evidence for an Afterlife?”
Answer these three yes/no questions: Do extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Are your religious claims extraordinary? Is it possible that…
I’ve avoided this topic for a while for a number of reasons. Mostly, I wanted to be clear that I…
My basic argument can be summed up in five words: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This phrase, popularised by Carl Sagan…
I used to have other reasons (meta arguments, in the sense that they do not use the text of the Bible directly) for accepting the validity of the claims of the Bible. Ultimately they do not matter—for me, the whole thing falls apart with the lack of credibility of the Bible, taken on its own terms, rather than based on some meta-argument. In other words, the biblical text is itself not credible where it matters (discussed in Section 3). But people use these meta-arguments to establish the credibility of the Bible, regardless of how incredible the text is, so I wanted to look at a few of them, and one in particular, which is the continued existence of the Christian church. I do not intend to look at this rigorously, but rather to point out a way that might be helpful to understand this and to explore where this kind of thinking might get us.
In this post I want to recall some conversations I’ve had with various people that made an impression in some…
I read a post on FB recently by the Archbishop of Canterbury, which went like this: “People often ask me…
iStock/photoarthouse I became a Christian at age 5. Or so I’m told. I have a memory of it, but can’t…
