Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Is Loftus a serious thinker?

YOU write a book like I have done, okay? YOU find important people on both sides of this so-called battle to recommend your book in the same manner they recommend mine, okay? You be as helpful to your side in this so-called battle as I am being on the other side, okay?

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/09/paul-manata-is-not-serious-thinker.html?showComment=1222481700000#c1908158342145428996

After LCS I attended Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), and graduated in 1985 with a Th.M degree, under the mentoring of Dr. William Lane Craig, considered by many to be the foremost defender of the empty tomb of Jesus and his bodily resurrection from the grave.

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/02/my-conversiondeconversion-story.html

Craig goes on to say that if you look at these testimonies closely we didn't leave for intellectual reasons. Instead we left for emotional reasons "having to do with a negative experience" of some sort. To "make it look credible" he says, "they [we] will emphasize the intellectual aspects of it."

In this context Justin mentions my name and Dr. Craig said "exactly," as if I am a typical case of what he just talked about. Craig says: "The merit of John Loftus's testimony is that he's candid about his adultery and pornography and the way he felt burned and abandoned by the local church when he fell into sin; that it was really these things which prompted him to leave the faith, not the intellectual problems."

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/09/william-lane-craig-talks-about-me.html

William Lane Craig is an important person. Indeed, Loftus even claims him as a mentor. Loftus has been riding on Craig’s coattails for years. Evidently, Craig doesn’t regard Loftus as a serious thinker.

5 comments:

  1. "Is Loftus a serious thinker?"

    Some rhetorical questions aren't that easy to identify as rhetorical questions when you first read them. And even when you do identify them as rhetorical questions, you sometimes still want to answer them literally.

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  2. Are you suggesting there are only emotional reasons for leaving the faith, or only that it was Loftus' reason?

    You make it sound as if believing in Jesus is the only viable intellectual option.

    In reality, either atheism or belief requires a leap: only agnosticism does not.

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  3. James: "You make it sound as if believing in Jesus is the only viable intellectual option."

    Let's put some parameters around "viable" and "intellectual". Let's say that any viable intellectual option must embrace absolute, objective truth.

    Then yes, I think that believing in Jesus as one's Lord and Savior is the only viable intellectual option.

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  4. JAMES SAID:

    “Are you suggesting there are only emotional reasons for leaving the faith, or only that it was Loftus' reason?”

    In context, I was responding to Loftus on his own level—although that’s certainly applicable to many other unbelievers.

    “You make it sound as if believing in Jesus is the only viable intellectual option.”

    So true!

    “In reality, either atheism or belief requires a leap: only agnosticism does not.”

    That’s illusory. Agnosticism is not a neutral or noncommittal position. Rather, agnosticism renders a value-judgment on the state of the evidence. And it does so by making assumptions about what is possible or probable, what counts as evidence, &c.

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  5. James,

    "In reality, either atheism or belief requires a leap: only agnosticism does not."

    To follow up on what Steve said. Say that one popular take on Romans 1 is true, i.e., *all* men *know* that God exists, yet supress that truth.

    Now, an agnostic would have to say that he *does not* "know" that God exists. Indeed, he would say that he knows that he doesn't know.

    This entails, logically, that he knows that Romans 1 is false.

    That entails that God has lied.

    That entails that the biblcial God doesn't exist.

    Thus agnosticism entails a contradiction: (A) I do not know whether the Christian God exists, (~A) I know that the Christian God doesn't exist ('cause if he did, then I'd know him, and I don't).

    ReplyDelete