Apologetics – Page 5 – Anthony G. Flood

Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them. Part 2

Pioneering Christian worldview apologist Cornelius Van Til on the steps of Federal Hall, Wall Street, New York City, 1978. (That’s Pastor Jack Miller [1928-1996] at Van Til’s left.)

Last month in the first entry in this apologetics series, I argued that, tacitly presupposed in every argument (Christian apologetical or otherwise), is a world in which argumentation makes sense.

A worldview that welcomes sense-making (instead of making it problematic) is our birthright, as it were. We spontaneously receive a world in which logical (mathematical) laws, moral absolutes and nature’s observable regularities all cohere, even though those three classes of things are wildly disparate kinds.

It’s also a world in which you and I are not the only persons. We intuit, not infer, the personhood of certain other beings, who also make sense of the world, negotiating their cognitive business with the help of logic, morality, natural law, each irreducible to the others. Persons have fallible yet reliable (or reliable yet fallible) memories, and we know that fact about everyone we meet before we meet them. (Even the preceding sentence is true only in a certain worldview.) As I noted and asked last time around:

. . . our “person-realism” is no more deducible or otherwise inferable from our nature’s logical side from our capacity to evaluate; or either is from our inductive ability; or either is from our realism about the world and the many who are “not me.” We take these radically different yet mutually comporting things for granted every waking minute of every day. What is the justification for taking for granted a network of basic beliefs that functions as a worldview?

Further:

These wildly disparate aspects—logic, the love and pursuit of truth (and other absolute values), world-realism, person-realism, pattern-grasping, the reliability (and fallibility) of memory—form a network of . . . “non-negotiables”: we won’t give up any of them. Apart from that network, none is intrinsically intelligible.

Leading to this claim:

Exactly one network of non-negotiable beliefs, argues this Christian apologist, adequately explains the unity required by this diversity because it identifies and affirms its one absolutely indispensable member: the Triune God of the Bible.

I argued that the intelligible predication we all depend on presupposes the equal ultimacy of unity and diversity; any reduction of either to the other destroys the possibility of predication. (Think Parmenides and Heraclitus). I left for a future post—this one—an argument to the conclusion that the godhead’s plurality is not just any multiplicity, but a triunity or trinity, consisting of not more or fewer than three persons. Only an argument for that is an argument for Christian theism, not a theism that bears a family resemblance to it. Continue reading “Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them. Part 2”

“Christ, Capital & Liberty”: the Libertarian Christian Institute interview

I interrupt my apologetics series to promote the 50-minute interview that Doug Stuart (Libertarian Christian Institute) conducted about my Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic last December 30th and posted a couple of days ago. I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. We cover the conduct of Christian controversy, eudaimonism (good life-seeking), the pioneering libertarian Christian scholar James Sadowsky, SJ, and many other topics ignored in the book against which mine polemizes. I’m grateful to Doug for the opportunity he gave me to elaborate and highlight. I hope you’ll give me your comments. Here’s the link.

Christ, Capital, & Liberty, with Anthony Flood

Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them.

Do apologists for the Christian worldview “beg the question”? That is, do we assume as true what we’re arguing about rather than deduce it from propositions shared by the people we’re arguing with?

No. Ironically, this charge of begging the question (petitio principii) commits the fallacy of missing the point (ignoratio elenchi).

The point? Asking questions has conditions. The Christian worldview apologist asks about the necessary characteristics of a world that fulfills those conditions. (Some might discern the “transcendental” direction of this query. It is not a “garden variety” investigation.)

The charge of begging the question here, when it’s not a dodge, reflects a failure to understand the relationship of a worldview to its component beliefs. A worldview is neither the premise nor the conclusion of a syllogism. One’s worldview will, however, make syllogistic reasoning itself possible or impossible.

To self-consciously affirm and defend one’s worldview is to bring to the foreground what is usually in the background. Its vindication is indirect; so must be any effort to discredit it.

The Christian worldview apologist draws attention to features of the experience of his or her dialectical adversary. Noting that we all take those features and their interdependence for granted, the apologist invites the critic to stop taking them for granted, at least for the duration of the conversation.

That is, the apologist bids the critic to reflect on how these radically diverse aspects can possibly comport with each other in the same world.

Biblical Worldview

The apologist claims that (a) the Triune God of the Christian scriptures is the primary, indispensable member of that network of truths we take for granted and (b) that the critic suppresses awareness of that indispensable member. According to the apologist’s theology, the suppression has a psychological driver: the suppression is “unrighteous.” (Romans 1:18-20)

This is not to “psychoanalyze” the critic ad hominem, but rather to lay out what follows from the denial of God’s self-revelation in creation and scripture.

When we ask questions, we bring into play (at least) two disparate things, each of them irreducible to the other(s). For one, we value truth. For another, in the pursuit of truth, we draw conclusions from premises.

Continue reading “Christian worldview apologists don’t beg questions. We ask them.”

Jesus’ birth, the pagan calendar, and Scripture’s

Yesterday on Fox & Friends Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, said:

We don’t absolutely know the date that Jesus was born, but it surely made eminent sense for the early Church to say, why don’t we do it at the darkest time of the year, when the sun is about to rise and the Son, Jesus, the Light of the World, is born.

Of course, the English homonyms “sun” and “Son” weren’t available to anyone in the 4th-century, when certain Church leaders officially conformed the Christian’s calendar to the pagan’s. His Eminence might have been remembering Augustine’s rendering of the metaphor:

Hence it is that He was born on the day which is the shortest in our earthly reckoning and from which subsequent days begin to increase in length. He, therefore, who bent low and lifted us up chose the shortest day, yet the one whence light begins to increase. Sermon 192

But should poetic sense trump the seasonal facts Scripture records? It would have made the opposite of eminent sense for Caesar to have ordered “the whole world” to be taxed in the dead of winter or for shepherds to be tending their flock under those conditions.

Or for a pregnant woman to be traveling in them. Continue reading “Jesus’ birth, the pagan calendar, and Scripture’s”

Norman Leo Geisler, 1932-2019: indefatigable and prolific Christian apologist

In July of this year I wrote that in 1978:

At Gabe [Monheim]’s suggestion, I bought Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance for ten dollars at (a now long-gone) Christian Publications bookstore on 8th Avenue between 42nd and 43rd, smack-dab in then-den of iniquity called Times Square. . . . I also picked up Norman Geisler’s Christian Apologetics , Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and creationist critiques of evolution. This was my introduction to the intellectual side of Christian faith.

Despite the “connectivity” we enjoy these days, I didn’t know until the other day that Norman Geisler, the great classical Christian apologist—his CV is here—had passed away only a week before my July post.

A reflection of both his intellect and humor may be found in the title of one of his many books: Should Old Aquinas Be Forgotten? Why Many Evangelicals Say No: The Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas Considered. This conservative Protestant critic of Roman Catholic theology not only grew up among Catholics, but earned his doctorate in philosophy from Loyola University, a Jesuit institution. He coined “Triple-A Theism” to encapsulate his philosophical alignment with Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas.

On April 4, 1980, after reading Christian Apologetics cover to cover, I wrote to Geisler, then a Professor of Systematic Theology at Dallas Theological Seminary:

Dear Dr. Geisler,

Since your Christian Apologetics was decisive in establishing the intellectual side of my spiritual commitment, I write to you now believing you will once again be able to help me overcome certain difficulties in defending and developing a theistic philosophy. The difficulties, which I will state shortly, were occasioned by my reading of George Smith’s Atheism: The Case Against God (Kensington, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1979). I believe Smith’s case as a whole is well-stated . . . but can be answered only by challenging the positivistic rationalism which informs nearly all his arguments. While I am trying to do this now for my concerned Christian friends and my own philosophic development, I believe I will need the assistance of seasoned thinkers such as yourself in doing so.

The difficulties center on the notion of God. . . . First, if God is unlimited, but we know only of the limited and definite, then if we ascribe meaningful attributes to Him, we diminish Him, for He is unlimited and infinite. If we ascribe “unlimited” traits to Him—omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, etc.—make Him unknowable, and our talk of Him is literally nonsense.

In short, we can have no notion of an infinite being, supreme in every way; what we have a genuine notion of cannot be God. The second difficulty . . . concerns one famous way out of the foregoing dilemma . . . : what we cannot know literally, we cannot know analogically. If the supreme being evades characterization by knowable terms, we cannot have a knowable “analogical” notion of Him. Legitimate analogy presupposes a prior successful effort at definition and cannot constitute the heart of that effort. I do not believe you addressed this aspect of the problem of analogy in your Philosophy of Religion. Can you give me a non-theistic example of analogical predication (not analogical articulation of what we already have a notion of)?

Any response to this letter will be most appreciated. While awaiting it, I will peruse pertinent sections of your writings again to see if by carelessness I have missed the essentials of your forthcoming reply. [I did. See below] Also, if you are familiar with the Smith book, and know of any critical reviews of it (maybe even – dare I hope? – one by yourself), would you please let me know? Thank you so much.

Yours in the Lord,

Ten days later Norman Geisler penned this response: Continue reading “Norman Leo Geisler, 1932-2019: indefatigable and prolific Christian apologist”

Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic

Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic is out today in paperback; xx + 331 pages, 42 chapters, four appendices. A Kindle edition is in the works. The following paragraphs should answer basic questions like, “What’s this about?”

From my Introduction:

From March 8, 2011 to September 10, 2012, nineteen months in all, I blogged my criticism of The Church and the Libertarian, Christopher A. Ferrara’s slanderous and ignorant attack on the Austrian School of Economics. He argued that no faithful Catholic could be a sincere libertarian of the ASE persuasion. One day I had promised Mr. Ferrara that if he published a book to that effect, I’d answer it. Across almost ninety posts I fulfilled that promise, and this book reincarnates them.

After a year and a half, however, I decided that life was too short to sacrifice other projects on the altar of this polemic. The issues were (and are) important, and I found researching and writing about them congenial, but I could no longer sustain the effort. . . .

This book is the record of an effort in pro-market apologetics (in the classic sense of “defense against intellectual attack”). All interference in market exchange, not only outright state control of the “means of production,” but also violent robbery, involves a degree of “socialization” of the costs of acquiring a good or service. To impose costs on individuals who have not chosen to bear them, be they contemporaries or later generations, is to “socialize” those costs. Calculating these (usually hidden) costs falls to the economist. “Socialism” and “communism” are but frank labels for the systematic, territory-wide state interference with the market exchanges of individuals. That is, it differs in degree, not of kind, from the predations of garden-variety gangsters.

From Gerard Casey’s Foreword:

Anthony Flood’s Christ, Capital and Liberty: A Polemic is a spirited and detailed defence of the fundamental compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism. . . .

Flood is critical not only of Ferrara’s conclusion, but also of the argumentative methods that Ferrara employs. “Several thorough readings,” writes Flood, “have convinced me that it is such a bad book, morally as well as stylistically, that it arguably ought to be ignored rather than critically reviewed. Its tone is continuously inflammatory, its arrangement of material lopsided . . . and his use of sources tendentious. The last-mentioned trait includes either unawareness or evasion of evidence relevant to his topic but inconvenient to his purpose.” Flood is especially critical of Ferrara’s epistemically uncharitable failure to employ responsible internal criticism of his opponents’ positions and also of his inadequate grasp of various historical controversies. . . .

Tony’s book will be of interest to many people, but perhaps especially (but not only) to those who are Catholic and who are also attracted to the intellectual coherence of Austro-Libertarianism, but are concerned that the two systems of thought may be irreconcilable. Polemical writing is not everybody’s favourite form of reading, but the multiple, mostly short, chapters of Christ, Capital and Liberty provide so many insights, engage the perspectives of so many thinkers and attack the central topic of the compatibility of Catholicism and Austro-Libertarianism from so many angles that no reader can fail to achieve a greater insight into the matter after reading it than he had before he began.

Gerard N. Casey MA, LLM, PhD, DLitt.
Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin
Associated Scholar, The Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama
Fellow, Mises UK

And finally, at least for this post, the table of contents:

Part One: Setting the Table

Chapter 1 A Question of Tone

Chapter 2 In Few Things, Charity?

Chapter 3 A Question of Competency

Chapter 4 Sound Bites, Panic Buttons, Scare Quotes

Chapter 5 An Inconvenient Jesuit

Chapter 6 An Overview of an Overview

Chapter 7 Demonize and Delete the Austrians

Chapter 8 Value-Laden and Value-Free

Chapter 9 Adventures in Meta-Ethics

Chapter 10 Aquinas’s Proto-Liberal Concerns

Chapter 11 An Inconvenient Anarcho-Catholic

Chapter 12 Doctorates, “Dummies,” and Defamation

Chapter 13 On Not Seeing the Forest for the Woods

Part Two: Main Course

Chapter 14 Capitalism: a Post-Christian Structure?

Chapter 15 Conflating Science and Ethics

Chapter 16 Disparaging Imaginary Constructions as Illusions

Chapter 17 “Statism” versus “Greed”

Chapter 18 Confusion or Calumny?

Chapter 19 The Kevin Carson (Side-)Show

Chapter 20 What Do We Mean by “The Free Market”?

Chapter 21 If I Had a Hammer: Hayek on Tool-Ownership

Chapter 22 Rothbard on Enclosure

Chapter 23 The Hammonds, T. S. Ashton, and Emily Litella

Chapter 24 Grand Theft Monastery

Chapter 25 Dismissive of the New, Evasive of the Old

Chapter 26 Lie, Rinse, Repeat

Chapter 27 Sudha Shenoy on Enclosures

Chapter 28 The Gnat of Enclosure, the Camel of Slavery

Chapter 29 Lock(e), Stock, and Jesuit

Chapter 30 Slavery, Real and Bogus

Chapter 31 If This Is Infallibility . . . .

Part Three: Dessert and Leftovers

Chapter 32 Save Money, Live Better, Just Do It

Chapter 33 Corporations as “Psychopaths”

Chapter 34 Enclosing Debate

Chapter 35 Rothbard Shaves Ferrara’s Quasi-Marxist “Beard”

Chapter 36 Shall We Prefer Government by Naked Coercion?

Chapter 37 Slavery for the Corporation?

Chapter 38 The Corporation as “Sociopath”

Chapter 39 Railroading the Free Market

Chapter 40 (Fan)Fanning the Embers of Fascism

Chapter 41 Scrooge on Externalization

Chapter 42 Ferrara’s Reserve of False Notes

Appendices

Appendix A Murray Rothbard on Abortion

Appendix B A Profound Philosophical Commonality

Appendix C Lord Acton: Libertarian Hero

Appendix D Is Anarchy a Cause of War?

Discovering Otis Q. Sellers: an autobiographical vignette

March 22, 1978. A crisp 50-degree Wednesday in the Big Apple. Jimmy Carter was President. Saturday Night Fever was in the movie houses.

A New York University grad, I was studying for a doctorate in philosophy at the City University of New York’s graduate school. Still living at home in Bronx, I earned my keep by sorting and internally delivering mail at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson—“Sargent Shriver’s law firm,” I’d tell friends and family. (Never saw him: he was based in the Washington, DC offices.) Fried, Frank was then leasing several floors of the Equitable Building, 120 Broadway. In chapter 8 of Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution Antony Sutton devoted a chapter to the conspiracies that transpired in that storied edifice. I remember reading that book during my tenure in the law firm’s mail room. (See my post on this.)

During one lunch break I encountered Gabe Monheim, a semi-retired engineer from Red Hook, Brooklyn, then in his early 40s. The temperamental and cultural opposite of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), an elderly Los Angelino formerly of Wellston and Cincinnati, Ohio.

It was where Wall and Broad Streets intersect, a crossroads for me between philosophy and the Bible, a dividing line I’d crisscross many times. But for Gabe, I may never have heard of Sellers. And you wouldn’t be reading this. (I mention Gabe in a post that complements this one.)

I had been working in the financial district for three years, and Gabe had been preaching there (and further south at the Battery) for even longer (having once worked at the engineering firm Ford, Bacon & Davis), but I never noticed him. We pay attention to what we’re looking for, and I wasn’t yet looking for what he was offering. I wasn’t attuned to his message. At a distance, all street-corner preachers looked and sounded alike.

Until that day.

Continue reading “Discovering Otis Q. Sellers: an autobiographical vignette”

Did the Apostle Paul argue for God’s existence?

Theistic philosopher Bill Vallicella recently posted again on Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1:18-20). Here are the concluding sentences:

It ought to be obvious that one cannot straightaway infer from the intelligibility, order, beauty, and existence of nature that ‘behind’ nature there is a supernatural personal being that is supremely intelligent, the source of all beauty, and the first cause of all existing things apart from itself. One cannot ‘read off’ the being instantiated of the divine attributes from contemplation of nature.

Suppose I see a woman. I am certain that if she is a wife, then there is a person who is her husband. Can I correctly infer from those two propositions that the woman I see is a wife? Can I ‘read off’ from my perception of the woman that she is a wife?”

No, we can’t read off “wife” (a relationship) from her body, but the prior question should be: can we can “read off” her being a woman from . . . what exactly? From nothing: we don’t infer “woman” (female person) from a congeries of sensory phenomena, but rather intuit “woman” immediately.

And we’re responsible for treating her with the respect due every person, and not treat her as though she were an insentient android (on the off chance that the “inference” to personhood is an inductive leap to a falsehood).

We don’t infer God from the world’s existence, organization and beauty, but that’s irrelevant to Paul’s claim. That is, Bill’s report of what’s obvious to him is not germane to Paul’s claim to have revealed something about our epistemological situation.

What is known (gnoston) of God (Roman 1:19) is understood (noumena) by the things that are made (Romans 1:20). It is not that the latter provide materials for an inference to God, but rather that they occasion the occurrence of insight (as Augustus Strong put it).

Continue reading “Did the Apostle Paul argue for God’s existence?”

“Life from non-life”? Without a prayer.

Abiogenesis, a Greek mouthful for “the origin of life,” is according to Wikipedia, “the natural process by which life has arisen from non-living matter.”

The lack of critical qualification at the outset is startling: non-living matter’s alleged once-upon-a-time issuance in life is asserted as a fact, not a hypothesis. That is, the bald assertion comes first, followed by the admission of the hypothetical nature of the whole business:

While the details of this process are still unknown, the prevailing scientific hypothesis is that the transition from non-living to living entities was not a single event, but a gradual process of increasing complexity that involved molecular self-replication, self-assembly, autocatalysis, and the emergence of cell membranes. Although the occurrence of abiogenesis is uncontroversial among scientists, there is no single, generally accepted model for the origin of life, and this article presents several principles and hypotheses for how abiogenesis could have occurred.

So the devilish details are unknown and there’s no single, generally accepted model for abiogenesis, yet some version of it must be true. That’s the “prevailing hypothesis.” Belief in its having occurred is “uncontroversial among scientists.”

That is to say, abiogenesis is a dogma, not an empirically verified fact. It is a sad commentary on the state of science that a theory with nothing going for it except the culturally regnant naturalistic prejudice is “uncontroversial.”

And by nothing, I mean . . . nothing. For an entertaining retailing of the dues the dogmatists pay for their dogmatism, I cannot recommend too enthusiastically Rice University Professor of Chemistry James Tour‘s lively video presentation (sponsored by The Discovery Institute) available on EvolutionNews.

Professor Tour’s massive case against “life from non-life” gives one an idea of the “integrated chemical complexity” that led the late philosopher (and long-time atheist) Antony Flew (not to be confused with Anthony Flood) to drop his profession of atheism for deism.

“Show me the chemistry!,” Tour demands. So did Flew, but he went away empty-handed.

It doesn’t exist.

The evidence for the existence of God—the God of the Bible, not Flew’s deistic deus—lies in (among many other aspects of creation) scientific inquiry itself, the fit of intelligibility and intelligence. It’s inexplicable apart from the worldview expressed in the Bible. The demonstrated folly of research programs for testing the abiogenesis “hypothesis”—or the dogma masquerading as one—is, at best, a suasive consideration for Christian theism.

So, again, set aside a couple of minutes for the beginning of James Tour’s pedagogical tour de force (sorry!). I defy you not to stay for the whole hour.

Two Passovers? What a difference a calendar makes.

When Jesus was brought before Pilate, “it was the day of the Preparation of the Passover” (John 19:14; emphasis added). Passover lay in the near future. And yet Jesus told his disciples, “With desire I have desired to eat this the Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15; emphasis added). What is commonly called “The Last Supper” was the Passover.

If, however, the arguments of Colin J. Humphreys’s The Mystery of the The Last Supper hold up, there is no discrepancy. We may believe Jesus did celebrate the Passover on Nisan 14, not according to the calendar devised during the Babylonian Exile, however, but according to the pre-exilic calendar of ancient Israel. Those calendars were as different from each other as, say, the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar differs from the equally serviceable calendar of the Eastern Orthodox.

The pre-exilic calendar, being 364 days in length, is evenly divisible by 7. In such a calendar, therefore, any given date falls on the same day every year. Therefore, that calendar’s Nisan 14 has always fallen on a Wednesday since the first Passover. Humphreys’s hypothesis, to which I cannot do justice here, dissolves apparent discrepancies that have challenged faithful readers of the Gospels. Image result for The Mystery of the Last Supper: Reconstructing the Final Days of Jesus

For example, even though Jesus was arrested after eating His Passover, John’s Gospel has servants of the high priest Caiaphas conducting Jesus to Pilate’s hall of judgment before the “official” Passover: “and they themselves went not in the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover” (John 18:28b).

Continue reading “Two Passovers? What a difference a calendar makes.”