CatechumenPatrick
Puritan Board Freshman
Please consider my questions thoughtfully.
Perhaps some of you listen to the Reformed Forum. I just listened to the newest Reformed Media Review, on the movie Collision with Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens. Some of you may have seen it. In any case, I know many of you have read the works of Van Til, Clark, Frame, Bahnsen (and of course listened to his debates). Some of you are presuppositionalists, others evidentialists, many others I’m sure love apologetics but don’t see the need to side with any school. That’s fine. My questions are for all of you.
So I just listened to the latest Reformed Media Review, on Collision, and I’ve heard the debates between Wilson and Hitchens. The central argument throughout the movie and debates that Wilson employs is one we’ve all heard. How can the atheist (or any non-Christian) account for moral truths? That is, how can the atheist provide a justifiable standard for objective moral truths, and avoid complete moral nihilism? Hitchens, by the end, more or less admits that he can’t, that it’s a work in progress. I’m sure many Christians got the warm-fuzzies when they heard his concession toward the end. These sorts of apologetic questions come in many flavors. We all remember Bahnsen asking atheists like Stein how they can account for the laws of logic in the materialistic, godless atheistic universe, and we all know and love the usual, pitiful non-Christian responses that are given, like Stein’s silly appeal to conventionality.
Some of us, like myself, don’t care too much for the quick debate format, and prefer extended articles and books—and, of course, many of us have read these types of arguments in detail in countless books, and not just by presuppositionalists (there’s nothing exclusively presuppositional about asking non-Christians basic philosophical questions, remember). That’s all well and good.
But wait a minute. Non-Christians (let’s use atheistic naturalists as the example) have philosophers, scientists, and intellectualists of all sorts who spend their lives trying to answer these basic questions. At the risk of being arrogantly pedantic, when it comes to the question “What account of moral truth can the atheist give?” as proposed throughout the movie, I want to ask, what about moral realism (reductionistic or Cornell realism), sensibility theories, nonnaturalism(s), intuitionism(s), expressivisms and projectivist quasi-realism, anti-realist constructivism, and so on? In other words, it’s not like atheists are left speechless by this question, and I find it incredibly arrogant and self-defeating to argue, as Wilson did throughout the movie and as many other Christians do, that atheists have no response to the question “Whence morality?” without responding to the many proposals they have in fact given. It’s comparable in methodology to the atheist Bible critics who know nothing about Christian theology and biblical studies, who insist on pointing out the many inconsistencies of the Bible and its dogmas they know are there. Consider too the Bahnsen-Stein debate. Bahnsen stumped the ignorant Stein with questions about how atheists can account for universal laws of logic. Does Bahnsen really intend to go into the philosophy and foundations of logic or is he just trying to score debate points? I think we have to conclude the latter, considering the fact that he never did any serious work on the philosophy of logic, as far as I've been able to tell.
Look at all our Reformed apologists—thow much scholarly work have they done in trying to respond to the answers atheists have indeed given to the foundational philosophical questions apologists throw at them? Little as far as their Vitaes show. I used to think that this was because Reformed and Christian apologists were mostly writing to lay-people audiences, but that can’t account for the serious void of literature.
My question is, what do you think? I often feel like Christians are lazy: We don’t do our homework. We write dozens of books against (for example) evolution saying the same things again and again, rarely ever advancing the debate. We are more interested in proclaiming arguments (and their victory, and the ignorance of atheists and their counterarguments) than doing our research and homework. I feel like almost all Christian apologists write solely for the laity at a less than undergraduate level (e.g., Clark!), all the while expecting those arguments to cut-ice among actual atheist scholars or intellectuals.
It’s hard to take 120 minute debates with more than a grain of salt. Why, though, do so many books and articles by Christian apologists accomplish little more than these sound-bite exchanges? Here’s my wish: that Christian apologetics would have the same scholarly standards that have been shown in recent Christian work in critical commentaries and historical theology (like Muller’s Post-Reformation Dogmatics and the many other great works on Post-Reformation Scholasticism that show countless years spent in research while at the same time not being hasty or arrogant in their conclusions).
Perhaps some of you listen to the Reformed Forum. I just listened to the newest Reformed Media Review, on the movie Collision with Doug Wilson and Christopher Hitchens. Some of you may have seen it. In any case, I know many of you have read the works of Van Til, Clark, Frame, Bahnsen (and of course listened to his debates). Some of you are presuppositionalists, others evidentialists, many others I’m sure love apologetics but don’t see the need to side with any school. That’s fine. My questions are for all of you.
So I just listened to the latest Reformed Media Review, on Collision, and I’ve heard the debates between Wilson and Hitchens. The central argument throughout the movie and debates that Wilson employs is one we’ve all heard. How can the atheist (or any non-Christian) account for moral truths? That is, how can the atheist provide a justifiable standard for objective moral truths, and avoid complete moral nihilism? Hitchens, by the end, more or less admits that he can’t, that it’s a work in progress. I’m sure many Christians got the warm-fuzzies when they heard his concession toward the end. These sorts of apologetic questions come in many flavors. We all remember Bahnsen asking atheists like Stein how they can account for the laws of logic in the materialistic, godless atheistic universe, and we all know and love the usual, pitiful non-Christian responses that are given, like Stein’s silly appeal to conventionality.
Some of us, like myself, don’t care too much for the quick debate format, and prefer extended articles and books—and, of course, many of us have read these types of arguments in detail in countless books, and not just by presuppositionalists (there’s nothing exclusively presuppositional about asking non-Christians basic philosophical questions, remember). That’s all well and good.
But wait a minute. Non-Christians (let’s use atheistic naturalists as the example) have philosophers, scientists, and intellectualists of all sorts who spend their lives trying to answer these basic questions. At the risk of being arrogantly pedantic, when it comes to the question “What account of moral truth can the atheist give?” as proposed throughout the movie, I want to ask, what about moral realism (reductionistic or Cornell realism), sensibility theories, nonnaturalism(s), intuitionism(s), expressivisms and projectivist quasi-realism, anti-realist constructivism, and so on? In other words, it’s not like atheists are left speechless by this question, and I find it incredibly arrogant and self-defeating to argue, as Wilson did throughout the movie and as many other Christians do, that atheists have no response to the question “Whence morality?” without responding to the many proposals they have in fact given. It’s comparable in methodology to the atheist Bible critics who know nothing about Christian theology and biblical studies, who insist on pointing out the many inconsistencies of the Bible and its dogmas they know are there. Consider too the Bahnsen-Stein debate. Bahnsen stumped the ignorant Stein with questions about how atheists can account for universal laws of logic. Does Bahnsen really intend to go into the philosophy and foundations of logic or is he just trying to score debate points? I think we have to conclude the latter, considering the fact that he never did any serious work on the philosophy of logic, as far as I've been able to tell.
Look at all our Reformed apologists—thow much scholarly work have they done in trying to respond to the answers atheists have indeed given to the foundational philosophical questions apologists throw at them? Little as far as their Vitaes show. I used to think that this was because Reformed and Christian apologists were mostly writing to lay-people audiences, but that can’t account for the serious void of literature.
My question is, what do you think? I often feel like Christians are lazy: We don’t do our homework. We write dozens of books against (for example) evolution saying the same things again and again, rarely ever advancing the debate. We are more interested in proclaiming arguments (and their victory, and the ignorance of atheists and their counterarguments) than doing our research and homework. I feel like almost all Christian apologists write solely for the laity at a less than undergraduate level (e.g., Clark!), all the while expecting those arguments to cut-ice among actual atheist scholars or intellectuals.
It’s hard to take 120 minute debates with more than a grain of salt. Why, though, do so many books and articles by Christian apologists accomplish little more than these sound-bite exchanges? Here’s my wish: that Christian apologetics would have the same scholarly standards that have been shown in recent Christian work in critical commentaries and historical theology (like Muller’s Post-Reformation Dogmatics and the many other great works on Post-Reformation Scholasticism that show countless years spent in research while at the same time not being hasty or arrogant in their conclusions).