Apologetics-Exam-0

The ancient and ongoing discipline of defending and advocating Christian theism

The complex of concepts that explain and give meaning to reality from where a person stands, given his ancestries, histories, tuitions and religions.

Christianity cannot be the only way, given so many religions

Apologist for atheistic Darwinism

“defense” or“vindication” 

Both rational legitimacy and emotional appeal

The investigation of significant truth claims through rational analysis. 

The exercise of untoward or unethical influence on a person

• John Warwick Montgomery
• and C S Lewis

"come now, let us reason together"

the very character of God

• 1. If they deny the religion
• 2. If their predictions did not come to pass

• Jesus - Saducees - woman with 7 husbands
• Peter - Ready to give an answer to every man with meakness and fear
• Paul - Epicurians and Stoics - finding common ground - Greek poets

• Establish common ground with audience
• Distinguish Christian worldview from other philosophies
• Call unbelievers to respond rightly to the truth of Jesus Christ

• Humility
• Animated by the virtues of love

• Wisdom
• Right Words
• The Audience

Christian Conversion and Intellectual Confidence

A radical turn away from sin, selfishness and Satan and a turn to God and His kingdom

Intellectual

The understanding of what the gospel requires of a persona and on what basis it requires it.

• Sacred Narrative
• Doctrine
• Ritual
• Social and institutional expression
• Experience
• Ethics

A comprehensive view of reality in terms of which one attempt to understand and 'place' everything that comes before one's consciousness.

• Various levels of certainty and commitment
• Various degrees of integrity and consistency

Biblical truth.

we are ignorant.

• The Scriptures
• (properly interpreted and applied)

• God
• (whether recorded in Scripture or not)

How we know what we know.

God's fingerprints in creation and his voice in conscience and through Scripture.

knowable.

• Creation 
• Fall
• Redemption

• Judaism
• Islam
• Unitarianism

No property, power or principle deeper than that of the divine person himself.

• deity (Godhead)
• persons (Trinity)

• invisible - immaterial
• personal - relational

for God to be alone."

Humans

• God
• Divine majesty

A constitutional corruption that has been passed down to every human being (except Jesus).

• consciously return praise to God
• curse our Maker

• those who say to God, 'Thy will be done'
• those to whom God says, 'thy will be done'

the reality of a personal and moral God who is free to interact with his creation in order to impact moral knowledge.

a religion that values ignorance.

"Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."

a sin."

critical thinking.

• the knowledge of God.
• It commends a well-informed and volitional step of faith.

"hollow and deceptive philosophy.

only false philosophy.

• Hume
• Kant

• No two contradictory statements can both be true at the same time and in the same way.
• Ex: God either exists or does not exist.

• A statement that cannot stand on its own weight.
• Ex: “I cannot speak a word of English.”

universal negative or positive statements.

• Stick with the basics – "Mere Christianity" –
• Major on the majors - Don't get sidetracked.

• intellectual
• emotional

get Christians back into the academies.

Evangelical Philosophical Society – Philosophia Christi (Journal)

Society of Christian Philosophers – Faith and Philosophy

a book where leading philosophers wrote of how their Christian beliefs inform their philosophical pursuits.

Unity in diversity

the Christian West.

• Francis Bacon
• Blaise Pascal
• Isaac Newton
• Johannes Kepler
• Galileo
• – were believers in God and Christians

Europe… Because of the biblical and Christian worldview behind it.

they believed it could be done and should be done.”

• Racist and Pro-Slavery
• Sexisto  
• Homophobico  
• Coercive and Imperialistic
• Anti-Environmental
• Unappealing in its vision of the afterlife

• What is the nature of truth itself?
• Truth claims must be rationally tested (Epistemology - how we know what we know)

meaningful - it must put forth an understandable truth claim.

A belief or statement is true only if it matches with, reflects or corresponds to the reality it refers to.

FACTS! (not mere belief)

truth-maker.

the measure of all things"

• Truth is relative
• There is no objective truth
• Nothing is true or false in itself

religious confidence.

• Religion = too structured, authoritative, exclusive and rigid
• Spirituality=more customized, subjective, inclusive and open to pragmatic experimentation.

• reality
• unswervingly

you must no fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."

We don't know because we don't want to know

Truth has had to be fought for every step of the way.

"I should, therefore, like to arouse in man the desire to find truth, to be ready, free from passion, to follow it wherever he may find it... it should not blind him when he makes his choice, nor hinder him once he has chosen."

we can only discover it.

was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetites of man."

A relaxed attitude toward religion and irreligion that he takes to be laudable. Beliefs simply do not mean that much, no should they.

A kind of patience that refuses to hate or disrespect those with whom we disagree, even when disagreement concerns the things which matter most.

Compatible with strong convictions on religious matters and with raging controversies. Tranquility above truth.

TRUTH.

escape reality. It is revelatory of a moral and spiritual malaise.

a serious and disciplines pursuit of truth.

arguments may be understood and appreciated.

personal benefit and detriment in matters of belief in genera and concerning Christianity in particular.

we must wager for or against Christianity.

the benefits promised only to the believer.

reasonable self-interest.

• any finite good
• mere extinction

the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason

• Lust
• Charity

• You cannot be said to have faith is there is any tentativeness involved.
• It is cultivated only to save one's own skin and get a heavenly payoff.

• Christian tradition offers incentives for those no yet fully convinced to seek fuller assurance. "Ask, seek and knock"
• One need not be a religious mercenary and commit all intellectual and moral integrity to the flames for the off chance of infinite reward.

the premises deductively entail a conclusion  that is secured beyond any doubt.

• Posteriori or empirical arguments - unknown by reason alone - (cosmological, design, moral and religious experience)
• Priori argument - derived from reason alone (apart from empirical world)

• 1 Biblical omission argument
• 2 Biblical authority argument 
• 3 Noetic effects of sin argument 
• 4 Direct knowledge argument 
• 5 Proofs lead to pride
• 6 Natural theology in competition with special revelation
• 7 Religion irrelevance argument
• 8 Complexity of proofs argument
• 9 Rational weakness argument

Not prohibited by Scripture

Establishes authority

Reason itself is not fallen

Direct knowledge through conscience is suppressed by sin.

Pride obscures our need for spiritual redemption. Apart from Christ we cannot know God.

God is author of book of nature and Scripture... these books will not conflict.

Can move a skeptic closer to taking Christianity more seriously

??

Can boil down complexity to a few simple principles.

• It is general because it is made known to everyone
• IIt is natural because it is disclosed through the natural order of creation
• It is continuous since the creation of the world
• It is creational because it reveals God glory through creation.

• The cosmos depends on something outside itself.
• The universe is finite, and therefore began
• to exist, to the necessity of God.

A worldview claiming that nothing has any ultimate meaning.

God created everything out of nothing.

• Out of nothing, nothing comes
• The universe began to exist - (The impossibility of an actual infinite - cannot divide or cross over an actual infinite)

science of energy.

the universe is moving irreversibly toward a state of maximum disorder and minimum energy.

a blind leap of faith in nothing at all at the source of everything whatsoever.

complexity

the regularity and unity of the universe.

• Cause and effect – they are linear
• There cannot be an infinite regress of time,causes, etc.

equal.

actuality and potentiality.

infinite (no boundaries).

greater than it was before; and, hence,the greater of the two bodies.

also be of finite magnitude.

inferior to the larger.

• 1.   Cause and Effects can be circular instead of linear and therefore “eternal”.
• 2.   Creation of a finite object (such as the Universe) only requires that the Maker be bigger than the Universe he created, no that he himself be infinite.
• 3.  The cause of the Universe does not have to be a personal God, it could be an impersonal God.

If there is design there must be a Designer

• Various parts of the universe exhibit behavior which is adaptive or which help bring about desirable ends
• They work together.

• The watchmaker.
• If we find a watch, you would not assume that it had “self-assembled” itself.

• The mouse trap - it is complex but if you reduce it more, it will no longer serve it's function.
• Bacteria - single cell - electric motor that propels -  the phlagelim

• Information demonstrates an Intelligent Designer
• Encyclopedia Britanica
• DNA molecules – 6 foot long – in every single cell of the body - complete instructions for building all we need in our body

• Contingency - not explained on the basis of natural law or automatic process
• Complexity - a form of probability
• Specificity - exhibits a pattern independent of its mere improbability.

• If rate of expansion one second after BB would have been smaller, the universe would have re-collapsed
• If rate of expansion one second after BB would have been larger, the universe would have been empty now.

There are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.

Adapting to environment withinthe species – brown to yellow

Change species – frog to a dog

The rotation of the earth

• the nature of God
• the way of salvation
• morality
• history
• the cosmos

• abiogenesis - evolution of life from nonlife
• Darwinism - evolution of all species

they are directly fashioned in the image of God.

Darwinism

The universe and all life were created in 6 24-hour days and is not more than 10,000 years old (young earth)

• God created the universe
• God created each "kind" through macro-evolution
• Humans were created specially (not evolved)

Natural selection - all aspects of development can be explained according to time, chance, space, natural law, etc.

God created the universe out of nothing and then left it to evolve.

.

only material states exist; there is nothing immaterial, spiritual or supernatural

Even is God or the supernatural exists, it cannot be evident in the universe

macro-evolution.

the arrival of the species.

Keeps all living things within more or less fixed limitations.

.

a new organism that suddenly arrives on the evolutionary scene without incremental change

• deleterious
• adaptive

• similar structures can perform different functions in different organisms
• Ex: Porpoise flipper and bat wing

• human coccyx - muscle attachment
• appendix - immune system
• pineal gland - endocrine gland
• thymus and thyroid - immune and endocrine glands
• "junk DNA" - regulation of gene activity

Atheist can be moral without believing in God; therefore, religion is no necessary for morality.

God's character and will.

• moral judgments are dependent on contingent social and historical arrangements.
• Morality is merely human.

we should follow the morals of our culture.

• Moral judgments and obligations are based entirely on an individual's personal preference.
• Depends on what you think.

• morality inherently depends on cultural factors.
• (Takes a half truth and inflates it to a whole lie)

• if all morality is dependent on culture, and if cultures differ, then morality will differ from culture to culture.
• What about murder, incest and others.

• standard
• ideal

• standard
• retreating

we can do no measuring.

• CR cannot justify tolerance as a universal moral principle.
• A commitment to objective moral principles that stand over cultures does not necessarily endanger tolerance.

anarchism.

any moral authority outside the autonomous individual's views and choices.

intrinsically and always wrong.

• damnation.
• This condemnation is "absolute and certain".

supernatural justice.

moral legislator.

the denial of objective value of any kind.

Moral meaninglessness.

"I decide whether it is the right thing in me; there is no right outside of me."

idea of God.

• God
• final evaluator
• merely human system

the idea that each person is his own ultimate evaluative authority.

the eternal character, nature and substance of a loving, just and self-sufficient God.

Objective moral values are "brute facts" in a godless universe.

God.

moral motivation

• transcendent goodness
• violation of this goodness

• 1 God created the universe ex nihilo
• 2 God create each kind specifically (not macro-evolution)
• 3. Species may change in limited ways (micro-evolution)
• 4 Considerable time between creation of species and creation of humans
• 5 God created humans specifically
• 6 First couple created by God and fell in space-time history.