{"id":1409,"date":"2010-09-17T06:04:43","date_gmt":"2010-09-17T13:04:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=1409"},"modified":"2010-09-17T06:04:43","modified_gmt":"2010-09-17T13:04:43","slug":"more-rationalistic-apologetics-sigh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2010\/09\/17\/more-rationalistic-apologetics-sigh\/","title":{"rendered":"More Rationalistic Apologetics: Sigh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scot McKnight writes about Dallas Willard’s new collection of apologetic essays, A Place for Truth:\u00a0 Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Questions<\/a>.\u00a0 Scot and many others like this kind of book.\u00a0 For me, it provokes more of a frustrated shrug.<\/p>\n

First \u2014 looking at the Table of Contents of this book, it\u2019s an odd collection of folks who don\u2019t agree with each other on many important things. Francis Collins and Hugh Ross speaking of faith and science in the same book? Really a radically different apologetic between those two, even though they both agree on the age of the earth (Ross thinks the Bible is a scientifically precise document and its supposed scientific precision is what led him to faith).<\/p>\n

This strikes me as problematic, not just fot the coherency of the book, but for the presumption about apologetics and truth that underlie the book. It still is in this rationalistic vein of evangelical apologetics, isn\u2019t it? Don\u2019t get me wrong, there\u2019s a place for such arguments \u2014 as where McGrath pokes holes in the \u201cmeme\u201d idea, for example. But if the Big Idea underlying the book is that Truth is One and Truth is Rational and The One Rational Truth is Accessible to All Through Reason \u2014 then it\u2019s a huge problem to feature radically contrasting perspectives on what the truth is about something like whether Gen. 1-11 is a kind of embedded pre-science (Ross) or an allegory (Collins).<\/p>\n

Second \u2014\u00a0even the general “fine tuning”\u00a0arguments Francis Collins makes are not in themselves<\/em> terribly convincing. I think they are<\/em> convincing, or at least \u201chelpful,\u201d for someone starting from a position of faith, in order to support<\/em> or show the coherence of faith. But taken strictly on the grounds of secular reason, they don\u2019t really prove anything.<\/p>\n

And this, once again, is the central problem with Willard\u2019s style of apologetics: it presumes that the propositions of Christian faith are demonstrable at least in significant part through the exercise of natural reason. This just isn\u2019t so (or as Barth would say: \u201cnein!\u201d). A genuinely Christian epistemology and apologetic must begin<\/em> with the claim that \u201cJesus is Lord,\u201d a claim known only through revelation, and then work outwards by employing reason to demonstrate the coherence, beauty, and correspondence to reality of that claim (or better, the contingency of reality upon that claim).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scot McKnight writes about Dallas Willard’s new collection of apologetic essays, A Place for Truth:\u00a0 Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Questions.\u00a0 Scot and many others like this kind of book.\u00a0 For me, it provokes more of a frustrated shrug. First \u2014 looking at the Table of Contents of this book, it\u2019s an odd collection of folks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-epistemology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-mJ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}