hughbiquitous

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

So concludes C. S. Lewis’s essay, Is Theology Poetry?, in The Weight of Glory.

I’m getting toward the end of that book and two things have become clear:

1. C. S. Lewis was a brilliant writer.
2. This is probably the best book of Lewis’s writings out there. More on that in another post someday…

Anyway, this was the closing of his transcendental argument. He showed that Christianity is true because everything else is demonstrably false, and Christ himself is compelling. Here are some longer quotes that capture the essence of how he made the point:

The whole picture professes to depend on inferences from observed facts. Unless inference is valid, the whole picture disappears. Unless we can be sure that reality in the remotest nebula or the remotest part obeys the thought laws of the human scientist here and now in his laboratory—in other words, unless Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one…

…More disquieting still is Professor D.M.S. Watson’s defence. “Evolution itself,” he wrote, “is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” Has it come to that? Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice? Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God?

…On these grounds and others like them one is driven to think that whatever else may be true, the popular scientific cosmology at any rate is certainly not. I left that ship not at the call of poetry but because I thought it could not keep afloat. Something like philosophical idealism or Theism must, at the, very worst, be less untrue than that. And idealism turned out, when you took it seriously, to be disguised Theism. And once you accepted Theism, you could not ignore the claims of Christ. And when you examined them it appeared to me that you could adopt no middle position. Either He was a lunatic, or God. And He was not a lunatic.

As if it weren’t enough to have Greg Koukl visit at church this weekend, then to find J.P. Moreland entering the blogosphere yesterday — now I find that William Lane Craig — once introduced as a man with “a brain the size of a planet” — has a new web site at reasonablefaith.org.

Reasonable Faith aims to provide in the public arena an intelligent, articulate, and uncompromising yet gracious Christian perspective on the most important issues concerning the truth of the Christian faith today, such as:

• the existence of God
• the meaning of life
• the objectivity of truth
• the foundation of moral values
• the creation of the universe
• intelligent design
• the reliability of the Gospels
• the uniqueness of Jesus
• the historicity of the resurrection
• the challenge of religious pluralism

Reasonable Faith features the work of philosopher and theologian Dr. William Lane Craig in order to carry out its three-fold mission:

• to provide an articulate, intelligent voice for biblical Christianity in the public arena.
• to challenge unbelievers with the truth of biblical Christianity.
• to train Christians to state and defend Christian truth claims with greater effectiveness.

HT: Melinda Penner

The so-called “New Atheism” suffers from a fatal flaw: its messengers do not commend the message.

Greg Koukl often touts the need for Christian ambassadors to be characterized by knowledge, wisdom, and character: they must have an accurately informed mind, an artful method, and an attractive manner. The New Atheists, in the estimation of one critic, fall short of Koukl’s standard of winsomeness:

What is new about the new atheists? It’s not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won’t encounter a single point you didn’t hear in your freshman dormitory. It’s their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote–both of which, the new atheists assure us, they do in lockstep with the pope and Jerry Falwell.

For the new atheists, believing in God is a form of stupidity, which sets off their own intelligence. They write as if they were the first to discover that biblical miracles are improbable, that Parson Weems was a fabulist, that religion is full of superstition. They write as if great minds had never before wrestled with the big questions of creation, moral law and the contending versions of revealed truth. They argue as if these questions are easily answered by their own blunt materialism. Most of all, they assume that no intelligent, reflective person could ever defend religion rather than dismiss it….

The faith that the new atheists describe is a simple-minded parody. It is impossible to see within it what might have preoccupied great artists and thinkers like Homer, Milton, Michelangelo, Newton and Spinoza–let alone Aquinas, Dr. Johnson, Kierkegaard, Goya, Cardinal Newman, Reinhold Niebuhr or, for that matter, Albert Einstein. But to pass over this deeper faith–the kind that engaged the great minds of Western history–is to diminish the loss of faith too. The new atheists are separated from the old by their shallowness.

In short, the New Atheists come across as ignorant, shallow, and unattractive. That doesn’t mean their arguments don’t merit serious attention, but it does mean that a tactically shrewd Christian apologist ought to leverage a powerful fact: in the marketplace of ideas, the New Atheists may just be their own worst enemies.

HT: The Christian Mind: Modern Atheism: Old Arguments, New Tone

As Jack Ryan said in The Hunt for Red October, “It is wise to study the ways of one’s adversary, don’t you think?”

Wired has an article titled Battle of the New Atheism. Read it.

HT: timake.com » Battle of the New Atheism

Michael Ramsden of The Zacharias Trust (Ravi Zacharias’s European ministry) gave a splendid talk at the European Leadership Forum titled Conversational Apologetics.

Download the MP3, have a listen, and consider it well… you will be edified, educated, and entertained as you learn to think better about ways to be an effective ambassador for Christ.