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Sunday, April 26, 2020

The limits of apologetic dialogue

A common limitation or deadlock in apologetic dialogue is that one or both sides think the other side has nothing worth saying. Take debates between Christians and atheists. Many atheists think Christianity is indefensibly false. Christians only believe in Christianity due to childhood indoctrination. So when a Christian provides a rational defense his faith, the atheist isn't listening. He tunes out the explanation. He just waits for the Christian to stop talking, then the atheist launches into his prepared objections. 

The atheist has no intellectual patience for a sophisticated defense of Christianity. He assumes that's just a snow job. The more intelligent the Christian, the more sophisticated the explanation, the greater the suspicion of the atheist that he's been snowed by a blizzard of technicalities. 

The same holds true for many debates between Catholics and evangelicals, or Arminians and Protestants. It's funny how many Arminians act like compatibilism must be special pleading. An ad hoc explanation which Calvinists concocted just to defend Calvinism, even though compatibility is a philosophical position about the relationship between determinism and moral responsibility that's philosophically independent of Calvinism. But many Arminianism screen it out without bothering to understand the position. They don't think there could possibly anything worth understanding. 

The more erudite or intellectual the defense, the more preemptive the dismissal. That must be smoke and mirrors. Same thing happens in debates between Christians and unitarians. 

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