Book review of Frank Turek’s “Stealing from God”

WINTERY KNIGHT

This book review was posted at Apologetics 315.

It says:

From the very onset of the book, it is clear that Turek has the so-called “new atheists” in his crosshairs and his main contention is that “atheists are using aspects of reality to argue against God that wouldn’t exist if atheism were true. In other words, when atheists give arguments for their atheistic worldview, they are stealing from a theistic worldview to make their case. In effect, they are stealing from God in order to argue against Him.” [p. xviii]

[…]The author explains that since stealing is a crime, and atheists are stealing from God to make their case, the book will use CRIMES [1] as an acrostic to demonstrate the intellectual crimes atheists are committing. Each letter in CRIMES is representative of “one or more aspects of reality that wouldn’t exist if atheism were true.” [xviii]
They are:

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William Lane Craig’s secret weapon is his amazing wife Jan

WINTERY KNIGHT

I want to draw your attention to a talk on “Vision in Life” given by Dr. William Lane Craig. Dr. Craig is the ablest defender of the Christian faith operating today. He has done formal academic debates with all of the best known atheists on major university campuses in front of thousands of university students.

It turns out that he owes a lot of his success to his amazing wife Jan.

The MP3 file is here. (32 minutes)

This talk was Dr. Craig’s chapel address to Biola University students.

About 11 minutes into the talk, Bill describes what happened after he finished his Bachelor’s degree at Wheaton:

And so I joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ for 2 years, and was assigned to Northern Illinois University. And that was where I met my wife Jan. She was a graduate of the University of North Dakota where she had…

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How Jesus became “God,” per Ehrman

Larry Hurtado's Blog

Having been asked to review Bart Ehrman’s new book, How Jesus Became God (HarperOne, 2014), for the Christian Century, I take the opportunity here also to comment on it.  This book is another of his now “best-selling” publications directed to a general readership, and, as with these earlier books (e.g., Misquoting Jesus), this one seems intended to startle naïve Christians uninformed about biblical scholarship, agitate and respond to Christian apologists, and reassure fellow sceptics and agnostics (Ehrman’s self-description) that they have some basis for their doubts.

Ehrman is generally a good communicator, and one of the positive things one can say about the book is that it is clearly written, and readily accessible to readers with little or no prior acquaintance with the issues and scholarly methods involved in the topic.  Indeed, at a number of places Ehrman gives an admirably clear description of this or that technical matter, e.g., his…

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Predictable Christmas fare: Newsweek’s Tirade against the Bible

Daniel B. Wallace

Every year, at Christmas and Easter, several major magazines, television programs, news agencies, and publishing houses love to rattle the faith of Christians by proclaiming loudly and obnoxiously that there are contradictions in the Bible, that Jesus was not conceived by a virgin, that he did not rise from the dead, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. The day before Christmas eve (23 December 2014), Newsweek published a lengthy article by Kurt Eichenwald entitled, “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin.” Although the author claims that he is not promoting any particular theology, this wears thin. Eichenwald makes so many outrageous claims, based on a rather slender list of named scholars (three, to be exact), that one has to wonder how this ever passed any editorial review.

My PDF of this article runs 34 pages (!) before the hundreds of comments that are appended. Consequently, I don’t have…

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William Lane Craig on the unexpected applicability of mathematics to nature

WINTERY KNIGHT

You might remember that Dr. Craig used a new argument in his debate with Lawrence Krauss in Melbourne, Australia.

My notes on the debate record it thus:

The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics:

  • The underlying structure of nature is mathematical – mathematics is applicable to nature
  • Mathematical objects can either be abstract objects or useful fiction
  • Either way, there is no reason to expect that nature should be linked to abstract objects or fictions
  • But a divine mind that wants humans to understand nature is a better explanation for what we see

And now Dr. Craig has expanded on it in the Q&A section of his Reasonable Faith web site.

The question:

Dear Dr Craig

Firstly can I thank you for all your work. My faith in Christ has been enormously strengthened through studying your work in apologetics in particular and I have grown in confidence in my Christian witness.

My…

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Basic Logical Fallacies

In Defense 3:15

Self Contradiction

– A statement that fails to satisfy its own conditions for rational acceptability or truthfulness.

False Dilemma

– When two or more options given when there are actually more available.

Ad Hominem

– Attempting to undermine the truth of an idea by attacking the person who proposes the idea.

Slippery Slope

– This aims to show that a protocolar proposition is untrue because of increasingly unacceptable events that could follow.

Complex Question

– To otherwise unrelated points are joined together and treated as a single proposition or question.

Appeals

– To force, pity, consequences and popularity.

Hasty Generalizations

– Making assumptions about the whole based on a small sample set.

Begging the Question

– A person will make an assumption that puts a conclusion into one of the premises.

Straw Man

– Making a case weaker than it actually is so as to defeat the argument more easily.

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Did Jesus Have To Do Apologetics?

THINKAPOLOGETICS.COM

Recently a friend of mine wrote an article on the need for apologetics. Someone wrote a response that said the following:

“If more Christians lived the faith and spent less time trying to figure it out. We could then have people see for them selves that the peace we have, can be there’s . Jesus did not have to defend his position, He spoke what the father said to speak. The defense of the Christian is to try and convert people and Jesus said all you have to do is believe. So by living it, people will see it and believe. “

So is the truth here? Did Jesus have to defend his position? Was Jesus an apologist?  Since there was no New Testament canon at that time, it is not as if Jesus was walking around with the text 1 Peter 3:15-16 where we read, “But sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts…

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Sorry; No Such Thing as a Scientific Argument Against the Existence of God

THINKAPOLOGETICS.COM

Here is excellent post from Melissa Cain Travis

I love science. I mean, I REALLY. LOVE. SCIENCE. My earliest, most vivid memories of school go back to my kindergarten class at C. Wayne Collier Elementary School, watching film strips (remember those, children of the 80s?) about dinosaurs, volcanoes, or the solar system, being transfixed by the awesomeness. My deepest desire in the sixth grade was to attend Space Camp. To this day, I am a sucker for a good science book or documentary–when it sticks to the actual science. Unfortunately, many productions these days promote a deeply philosophical agenda that isn’t scientific in the least (think of the recent TV series, Cosmos, hosted by atheist Neil DeGrasse Tyson). The tragic result of such propaganda is that some impressionable Christians end up questioning the rationality of their belief in God.

However, the statement, “God does not exist,” has never been, is not now…

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