Apologetics: What are the most convincing evidences for Christianity?

Well sure!

If you can list salvation as one of your accomplishments in life then unlike that guy in Matthew 19 you can go away with the feeling that you have it all take care of and you are now entitled to a rich afterlife.

And if you think I am not one of those guys, then you are RIGHT!

It doesn’t take much to turn a religion into an evil force in the world and the feeling of entitlement does that for Christianity. That is the story told in world history. Christians feeling they are entitled to slave labor, so why not put the people of Africa to good use. Christians feeling they are entitled to the land in the Americas so why not exterminate the natives just like God ordered the extermination of those in Palestine to make way for his chosen people. Christians feeling entitled to all the resources, wealth, and rulership over the world, so they divided it all up between the nations of Europe and America and established their dominion and control.

One doesn’t have to embrace the culture, narrow minded exclusivity, entitlement, and enmity to the rest of the world in order to believe in the Bible and Christianity.

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If you stick around a while @Isaac_Philo, and continue to read with an open mind, you’ll quickly discover that the Forum is a very large tent. There is all sorts here, whether Christian or otherwise. :slight_smile:

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I was going to say the same. You have disciples from all kinds of denominations, political stances, and societal expectations on what is and what is not normal or expected of citizens. The most common thread you’ll find among the Christians here is that some parts of the Bible was wrote in a manner not to be read literally. Something most Christians already do when you get to symbolisms of revelation or psalms 74. Many here just apply that also to how genesis 1-11 is wrote and the war accounts. Beyond that, and even within that, there are tons of different theological positions. If we all agreed the threads would be really short lol.

Christianity is a pretty large tent. I am frequently startled by the failure of some to comprehend this. I think it is primarily fostered by a battle mentality: Christians against the world.

But Christianity including all its forms and variations is still the biggest religion: 2.38 billion compared to 1.91 billion in Islam, 1.19 billion nonreligious, 1.16 billion Hindu, 506 million Buddhist, etc… Which is one of the reasons I looked in askance at Isaac’s talk of a “culture inundated with Godlessness.”

The biggest problem isn’t that the world isn’t Christian enough, but that Christians need to be better Christians. And I mean all of them. It’s not that the super religious ones are ok and all the others need to be more religious as if that is what God wants most – the Bible says otherwise!

P.S. I was amused to see the Unitarian Universalists listed as a different religion and it makes me wonder exactly who are counted as Christian in that 2.38 billion. It is not like some of the disputed groups are going to change the numbers by any great amount: 16.7 million LDS(mormon), and 8.5 million Jehovah witnesses, being the largest. Looking that up, I stumbled across the explanation for not including the UU which is that they apparently don’t call themselves Christian anymore.

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I would say there are some interesting cases of miracles and religious visions, which defy explanation, as there certainly are. But I think there are interesting cases of miracles both inside ‘and’ outside of Christianity. Rather, I believe Christianity is the religion which rings true best to me, in the sense that it is a metanarrative (about how we are all are sinners and need to repent) that is quite plainly true. Also whilst care for creation is good, we also need to distinguish humans from animals when making ethical decisions between the two, and I think the notion of the Imago Dei gives a good justification for that.

This may seem close to fideism, but I think Dr Rota’s formulation of Pascal’s Wager can help to avoid this. As long as there is a decent amount of evidence, it is reasonable to believe, even if we are not 100% sure.

As one who frequently condemns Pascal’s Wager I was prompted to look this up. I ended up listening to the “classical theism” (Catholic) webcast where they listed the following objections to Pascal’s wager:

  1. You cannot control your beliefs
  2. Many gods/religion objection.
  3. It’s not Christian because it is profit seeking rather than about love.

My response to these objections are

  1. This idea you cannot control your beliefs is nonsensical and Rota’s solution is just word games. You choose your beliefs for a variety of reasons and the only question is whether this Pascal’s wager provides a good reason or not. To be sure a benefit for believing may not sound like a good reason to you because you are not a pragmatist in matters of belief.
  2. This certainly does change things because the god and religion changes the benefits. And I see no reason to restrict the choices either. The fact that Buddhism would certainly not condemn atheism just goes to show how the benefits are greatly changed. And classifying Hinduism as not being monotheistic is just plain ignorant.
  3. No Pascal’s wager is not Christian. But the reason given is a strawman argument.

In any case these are certainly not my objections. My objections are the following:

  1. The assignment of benefit values are completely subjective and self serving.
  2. Those particular assignment of benefit values are based on the premise that belief in God is all that God cares about. But the evidence from both the Bible and the world doesn’t support this premise at all. Rota’s version only changes this to Christian religious practices being all that God cares about which is likewise dubious in the light of what the Bible says.
  3. Pascal’s Wager is the opposite of faith according to Paul in Romans 10. He says that faith doesn’t imagine you can say who is going to heaven and who is going to hell. Faith doesn’t look for rewards and accepts that you are not entitled to any rewards. So expecting rewards nullifies any supposed faith.
  4. So contrary to the premise of Pascal’s wager I think it is all too possible that these are the results:
    God exists, you don’t believe, but doing what is right for its own sake earns the highest rewards.
    God exists, but you believe because of Pascal’s wager so get the worst results.
    God does not exist and you do believe then you live a stressful life fearing a nonexistent threat.
    God does not exist and you don’t believe so you have the peace of mind that death is the end and absolutely nothing to worry about.
    So I can assign benefit values (rationally scaling everything to a +/-100 scale): +100,-100,-50,+50 Then your calculation of the expected result assuming equal probabilities is: belief -75 (poor expectation), disbelief +75 (good expectation).

Just demonstrating how subjective are the assignment of benefit values to these possibilities.

As for me, I believe God does exist but don’t expect that belief to earn me anything and instead do what is right for its own sake and have faith that God will do what He can for me and my regard for God is entirely based on who He is and not at all upon some expectation of benefits.

I agree that fideism as we understand it in some evangelical culture is mistaken. However, I wonder if you have read “Salvation By Allegiance Alone”? Saved by ‘Allegiance’ Alone? On a New Attempt to Revise the Reformation (thegospelcoalition.org)

I have some sympathy with Matthew Bates here; especially as Paul wrote about following Jesus with allegiance in the face of persecution, not just the act of believing. However, I can see what Schreiner says, too.

Maybe I’d better start a new thread for this! Sorry; Moderators, please feel free to redirect me.
Thanks.

You’ll get no argument from me here.

I also whole-heartedly agree that a central theme within the Bible is that Christians need to be better Christians, and 100% include myself in that class. I am also grateful that by, God’s grace, the Holy Spirit assists us in this endeavour. Otherwise, knowing my own hearts proclivity towards sin, it would certainly be a fools errand.

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Nope.

But I will, right now…

Hmmmm… new idea… and it may alter my understanding of faith, but at most to add on to the facets I already consider… faith as choice, faith as a means of knowledge, faith as doing things without expectation of payment, faith as trust that something (such as life, goodness, God, love,…) is worthwhile.

You may notice that “belief” is NOT one of those I consider.

Allegiance? eh?

Brings to mind the battle/warfare metaphor which is certainly not one of my favorites.

Bates says, “The advantage of allegiance is that it includes the idea that good works are necessary for final salvation.” This is certainly not something I would say. I would say rather that an advantage of allegiance is that it doesn’t mislead us into thinking faith is just some intellectual work of belief, but something which engages our whole being – it is who we choose to be.

But I guess my conclusion is that “allegiance” is only good as a metaphor for faith – some might find it a useful way of explaining things.

As for election I believe that is only about participation in God’s providence. I do not believe individual and corporate salvation are mutually exclusive. That would seem to be largely a matter of personality. I certainly don’t buy into the idea that salvation is only for those with a herd mentality and that the lone champion is damned any more than people are damned for being a scientist. I don’t think the Bible supports such a claim either.

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My guess is that’s more in the vein of James…faith without works is dead, as you say.

My guess is that it is very very Roman Catholic just like that “classic theism” webcast. (Not to say this is a necessarily bad thing… but to remind everyone that we are not all Roman Catholic LOL)

The way protestants and especially evangelicals like to harp on the notion of salvation by grace and faith as opposed to work, they would avoid saying it the way Bates does without negating the explanation of James that faith without works is dead. And you may notice how I cast the faith as belief notion into the mold of “intellectual work” as a way of supporting this.

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From my understanding, he’s Protestant, even though he teaches at a Roman Catholic college. He felt this presents a bridge between the two understandings.

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Books I recommend are The Intelligible Universe: A Cosmological Argument by Hugo Meynell (if you can find it, since it is out of print) and Miracles by C.S. Lewis.

The New Testament does not shy away from the idea of evidence for God from creation (Rom 1:20). To say that the universe just happens, as a brute fact, to conform to laws or abstract formulations is incoherent. What does explain the predictable conformity of nature to abstractions is intelligent will at the ground floor, so to speak, upholding it (Heb 1:3).

A purely physical or materialistic philosophy struggles with the phenomenon we know more directly and certainly than any other–our own consciousness (1 Cor 2:11).

Then there is the moral order written in the human heart (John 1:9; Rom 2:15) which defies explanation as mere instinct. Objective, immutable moral values lie outside physical descriptions. Again, it is easier to envision a real moral dimension to the world if intelligent will, characterized by love, is at the root of everything.

Jesus Christ as the embodiment of self-sacrificing love answers to my own experience of the moral reality better than the sages, mystics, and claimants to spiritual truth associated with other religious traditions.

Of course, there is much more that could be said concerning these points. However, Jesus himself was not averse to providing evidence for belief (Mark 2:8-12; John 10:37-38). I think that insofar as we can, we should do likewise.

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That’s post hoc of believing in the first place. Cart before horse. Affirming the consequent. Nature just happens from eternity and there’s nothing abstract about its laws. Order does not imply or require meaning. Except when it gets up to our level of awareness. Are you suggesting a God-of-the-gaps magic explanation for it? All over the infinitesimal universe? That that is somehow the trump card?

[And I WANT, need to believe.]

If you mean no cosmic watchmaker needs to be involved, I agree. But that hardly makes the progression toward greater complexity and freedom less amazing. It needn’t be intended to be appreciated. In some ways it is even more amazing.

Aye. I imagine the watching cosmos[es] maker is pretty chuffed with it [all] from eternity.

[A gentleman is never bored after all.]

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Suggesting that you’re not a ‘crazy person’ and that the alternative is a ‘mass delusion’ sounds dramatic - an emotive appeal to incredulity; but a non-believer would have an equally valid alternative interpretation using the same evidence you have cited.

The fact that you find that it’s always other people like you, who’ve had similar experiences, that come to believe in Jesus, could equally well be taken as evidence that, in those circumstances, certain people are particularly susceptible to that belief…

If, on the other hand, you’d found that there was no significant resemblance between all those people and their experiences, other than the belief itself, you might have a little more justification for thinking that was evidence it wasn’t just a ‘mass delusion’.

But in any case, given that nearly a third of the world’s population has Christian beliefs, I would suggest that a single anecdotal account that they have a ‘family resemblance’ and have ‘similar stories’ and ‘similar experiences’ is probably not representative.

Laws of nature are inferred, not observed. The laws are not physical, therefore abstract. Take a look at the mathematical expression of General Relativity. That’s abstract, not concrete.

If there are no laws of nature, then the patterns of nature from which they are inferred are generated by nothing but chance (brute fact) and the predictability of natural events is pure illusion. This is just another way of expressing the Problem of Induction made famous by David Hume.

Concerning motivated belief, I would like to believe, truthfully, that I will be offered Covid vaccine this week. My wanting to believe it does not compel me to believe it. It might even make me doubly suspicious of someone’s facile claim that Covid vaccine will be made generally available in my area within a few days. Motives are not as easy to parse out as it may seem, and we have the choice to push back against our predispositions in the search for truth.

The natural laws are logically preveniently what they have to be prior to instantiation and funnily enough that’s what nature does, continues to do, with its laws.

No laws, no nature. No problem.

It wasn’t an emotive appeal to incredulity, it was recognizing I’m not offering anything close to “proof” or “evidence.” I’m appealing to stories. I actually don’t have much use for apologetics. I am well aware that we all pick our preferred narratives. So I think that if Christians want to be convincing to people outside the faith, they should tell the best stories.

Um, except I specifically pointed out that it wasn’t people like me whose stories I find most compelling, it’s people most unlike me, from totally different cultures, time periods, and religious backgrounds, who in spite of our differences, have similar experiences.

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