Truth Claims

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWY-6xBA0Pk#action=share

Apologetics

So often I have heard it said that apologetics can't do a whole lot for people and that only the gospel can turn a heart.

When I say "but I find this and that really helpful and I find it quite convincing", then they say that is only so because I believe already.

That could be.

What changes a mind?

I don't find that I am really so much in the business of trying to change a mind, but to learn and to bolster and to analyze.  You may take from it what you will and what you like.  You have a mind and a heart.

So, why "apologetics"?

I don't know. -- It does help me.

When I listen to Swineburn, or read David Berlinksy, as I did recently, or contemplate the complexity of a single cell, and the impossibility of getting organic life from rocks without a miracle, it does help me believe.  I find it profound.  If I find it profound, would I not think that there are others who find it profound?  Am I not supposed to talk about it?

And then there is all this opposition.  Don't talk about this.  Don't talk about that.  Keep it in the church, don't bother me with it. And so on.  It makes one think.  It makes one think that it is convincing other people, too, but they just don't want to admit it.  Otherwise, they would refute it.  But they don't.  They just throw rocks or walk away.

Richard Dawkins proposed that life might have been seeded on earth by aliens.  Now there is something that does not convince.  Creation has to be excluded from all discussion because it is not "scientific".  Science will find the answer, it is always asserted.  There is a faith. -- Science will find an answer how we got life from inorganic material?  Science will find the answer how we got the big bang from Nothing?  Science will find an answer to the question of the incredible complexity of living things and the fine tuning of the universe?  Physics will make sense of the incomprehensible revelations it is finding out about and can't really compute?  We will get answers that will make sense to us?  Even if we find answers to some of these questions, will we know how mind, consciousness, sensory perception, love, emotion, justice, and such essential intangibles come to be?

Ravi Zacharias, Apologist.

Good talk, as far as I have listened (2 hrs).




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3drzfhRr0is

C.S. Lewis and his teacher Kirkpatrick / 2

    If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk.  Born a little later, he would have been a Logical Positivist.  The idea that human beings should exercise their vocal organs for any purpose except that of communicating or discovering truth was to him preposterous.  The most casual remark was taken as  a summons to disputation....  Some boys would not have liked it;  to me it was red beef and strong beer...  The only two kinds of talk I wanted were the almost purely imaginative and the almost purely rational; ...  Kirk excited and satisfied one side of me.  Here was talk that was really about something.  Here was a man who thought not about you but about what you said.  No doubt I snorted and bridled a little at some of my tossings;  but, taking it all in all, I loved the treatment.  After being knocked down sufficiently often I began to know a few guards and blows, and to put on intellectual muscle.  In the end, unless I flatter myself, I became a not contemptible sparring partner.  It was a great day when the man who had so long been engaged in exposing my vagueness at last cautioned me against the dangers of excessive subtlety.
   If Kirk's ruthless dialectic had been merely a pedagogic instrument I might have resented it.  But he knew no other way of talking.  No age or sex was spared the elenchus.  It was a continuous astonishment to him that anyone should not desire to be clarified or corrected.  When a very dignified neighbor, in the course of a Sunday call, observed with an air of finality, "Well, well, Mr. Kirkpatrick, it takes all sorts to make a world.  You are a Liberal and I am a conservative;  we naturally look at the facts from different angles,"  Kirk replied, "What do you mean?  Are you asking me to picture Liberals and Conservatives playing pee-bo at a rectangular Fact from opposite sides of a table?  If an unwary visitor, hoping to waive a subject, observed, "Of course, I know opinions differ--Kirk would raise both his hands and exclaim, "Good heavens!  I have no 'opinions' on any subject  whatsoever."  A favorite maxim was, "You can have enlightenment for ninepence but you prefer ignorance."  The commonest metaphors would be questioned till some bitter truth had been forced from its hiding place.
... It will be imagined that Mrs. Kirkpatrick led a somewhat uneasy life:  witness the occasion on which her husband by some strange error found himself in the drawing room at the beginning of what his lady had intended to be a bridge party.  About half an hour later she was observed to leave the room with a remarkable expression on her face;  and many hours later still the Great Knock was discovered sitting on a stool in the midst of seven elderly ladies begging them to clarify their terms.

It seems to me that this kind of dialectic has gone out of favor.  The people I have come dispute with seem to care nothing about facts, logic, clarity, defining terms.  They want an elenchus out of pure insult and ad hominems.  They want new ideas from vagueness and think that there is no one right way to look at things.  Though it appears that any real dialectitian is obsessed with his craft and can't seem to gauge a social situation.  This is probably not so wholesome.  I wonder how they could mitigate this professional handicap.

I think, that I probably also have a kind of scrappy edge that some feel inappropriate.  I probably also am somewhat impatient with the kinds of subject matter that usually serves as conversation topics.  I want to talk about truth, too.

Chronicle of Higher Education on William Lane Craig

http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Theist/140019/

Here is a current article on William Lane Craig "The New Theist".  I've watched William Lane Craig's debate in Mexico.  Three hours, available on Youtube.  There are other talks I should get to as time permits.

Secular Morality and "Love" / D'Souza

Dinesh D'Souza.  "What's so great about Christianity."

Secular Morality on "Love."

Quote:

The deepest appeal of secular morality is its role in the formation and preservation of “love relationships.” How do we know that we love? There is no other way but to reach deep into ourselves and consult the inner voice, which is not the voice of reason but the voice of feeling. We succumb to that inward self so completely that we feel that we have lost control.  We don’t love, but are “in love,” and we are now not entirely responsible for what we do.

Love is the sin for which we find it almost impossible to repent. That is why Paolo and Francesca, the two adulterers who inhabit the outer ring of Dante’s inferno, still cling together like doves, appealing to the law of love, “which absolves no one from loving.” Love has transported them into an almost transcendental state outside the real world, and yet more real than the world. Love of this kind is, quite literally, “beyond good and evil,” and that is why the new morality has become such a powerful justification for adultery. When the inner self commands love, it does so authoritatively, defiantly, and without regard to risk or cost or all other commitments. As C.S. Lewis once observed, erotic love of this kind tends to “claim for itself a divine authority.”  p. 256