Bethinking 6/6: Questions & Discussion (WL Craig, G Habermas, PJ Williams, PS Williams)

Marvis okay I think these are record you mean this one's a magnifying my voice dear so I'm Peter s Williams I'm at this end of the line and that's Peter J Williams and he's at that end of the line and if we ever meet we have to be very careful not to shake hands because the matter/antimatter conflict destroy the whole universe so that's why we're opposite ends here just for your safety tonight so we have a plethora of something very heartfelt some very technical some very interesting questions from you and unfortunately because the wait times gone we've got about 15 minutes to try and discuss these so I'm going to try and pick some of the the sort of broader things and hopefully pull some of the threads together from what we've been doing here together today I want to start off by asking you a sort of slightly more personal question if I may on the role that you would say apologetics or thinking about evidence and even an argument has played in the vitality of your own spiritual life out as thinking about apologetics actually integrate with the Christian discipleship fiing and whoever wants to speak our first jump in an hour do we the microphone off yes so what yes I need to point the microphone along I do okay according I must say that apologetics played no role whatsoever in my coming to Christ I became a Christian in my late teenage years and it was simply through reading the Gospels and being so arrested and captivated by the person of Jesus of Nazareth in his teaching that I came to faith in Christ but my subsequent studies I have to save deeply enriched my worship of God and my confidence in Christianity's truth I remember a statement by CS Lewis that he made once where after debating Christian truth with unbelievers in a public forum he said it was at that time that his faith seemed most uncertain and and shakiest and I just can't identify with that at all I'm just puzzled that Louis would say that when I come out of these debates like last night my fate is so strengthened I think these really aren't good arguments I think I am totally convinced by these arguments I think they're really great so this gives my faith the tremendous boost okay I was raised in a Christian home but the doubt I described briefly happened later and that occupied a long period of my life 10 to 12 years it centered on the resurrection pretty quickly so somebody asked me yesterday at another college he said how did you get into the resurrection I said for purely selfish reasons because I started checking Christianity I rejected the inspiration the scripture I had some debates with Christians at college and people were saying check this out check that out I checked several things I mean you know they they were discovered Noah's Ark about once a week in those days and I just didn't find too much that was really thrilling me but then it occurred to me that if I could settle on resurrection if if it was what it purported to be it would solve my questions but I did have an aha moment to I remember walking around the house after I was a Christian after I was just getting to the end of my doubts and I remember saying one time go out of the house wow he really was forest of the Dead so I agree those kind of covers thank you yeah for me I was brought up in a Christian family and I went to university to wanting to become a Bible translator learning all the languages that we were elevant for that and it was when I was 20 I first came across the academic study of the Bible Cambridge in a context where people didn't believe it and that after a while sent me into some pretty serious doubt because here were people who were knew the Bible better than anyone I knew and didn't believe it and that nothing had prepared me for that my parents didn't go to university or anything and so I had to work through that for a number of years really looking for answers and it was really over a period of about four or five years working quite intensely for that and then after eight years of research then realizing that I knew more about my area than some of the best people in the world in that small area very very very small but then then you realize actually my faith works in this area that I know more than anyone else about so what if that's the same for all the other areas and that gives you a sort of new level of confidence and in terms of Christians gaining that kind of confidence in Christ from our study of apologetics does this mean that we all have to master modal logics so that we can talk about the ontological argument with people and and to think at the very high level that you've done I think people often get the impression you know apologetics is for people who've got their PhDs on the wall and could you want to say something about and the different kind of appropriate levels that that everyone is called to apologetics by by the Bible the scripture commands us to all be prepared to give a reason to anyone who asks us for the hope that is in us and so all of us should be to some level prepared to explain to people what we believe and why we believe it that doesn't mean that everybody has to be a scholar but I hope that there will be some of you here today some of you young folks who do feel called to become a Christian scholar and that some of you will take up this calling from God say yes I want to become a Christian philosopher or a Christian scientist not a cult member but I mean a you know physicist or something or a biblical scholar that calling is one that God may be directing in your life and I hope you will take it up totally agreed it it is commit in Scripture and you know one thing about apologetics when I first started reading it the the folks who were writing decades ago the the Wilbur Smiths and the people who had good understandings but it was very very broad and and I mean they were they were good but but today apologetics is more specialized than ever before and if somebody called me on the phone and said hey talk to me about Oh tests what our new test might say call Pete they say it talk to me about modal logics they called bill I mean I'd do that too and I'm saying well you want to talk about resurrection that depends what would I meant you know we really do have a generation of specialized errs but that doesn't mean that people wherever they are and studying maybe maybe you you folks are folks who say well I'll never you know I'm working this area I don't do that some of you will be doing what we're doing but but some you know others of you you'll be hey you'll have opportunities to take on people that we don't brush shoulders with I mean just today coming here we were talking about zeitgeist and the movie and people who respond to popular websites where they do popular apologetics I think it's fair to say I mean I never go there I don't know how anybody else's but but we need folks doing that too so you know you know find wherever you are and it and you know assuming maybe you're in a different place 10 years from now but where you are now or where you are three years from now keep responding at that level all the way up I am more convinced than I ever have been in my whole life of the truth of Christianity and the more I see from other religious systems I just think to myself nobody even tries to do this kind of stuff that we have in Christianity that's very very encouraging yeah I'd say I've gone through a phase of being quite an argumentative male you know males like to win arguments at least I found that and sometimes in certain contexts you know it's not very helpful to try and do that so I would say as I've learned more I would show more weakness just be brutally honest with people when you don't know something and I think that means that whatever level of knowledge you're at you know that's fine what people don't want to see is you pretending you know a little bit more than you do and then they catch you out that's just nothing no use it's a good word this ties in quite nicely one of the questions on paper that you've had it in here someone's asking are there potential pitfalls in using enlightenment or modernist methods of apologetics when we're following that commander to to take down strongholds and capture every argument and so on using reason in evidence does that mean we're kind of playing on on modernism's playing field is there a danger there and I'm going to start at the other end well I would say that logic and reason come from God so they're not you know something that comes from the Enlightenment what the Enlightenment is really about is the autonomy of the human so I'd want to say of course you know use reason but one of the things we don't want people to do is have the sense that they're the people who can sit as judge over God and I think sometimes we can present arguments like that and we actually you know that person needs to be humbled and realized that they're the person in the doc not God so I think that's something we've got to make come across not everybody perhaps will agree with me but I think one way to I'm out of love with Pete just said about reason and logic and also sense data we're going to use it because of who we are and those are the two classic responses through history of thought Christian thought but I think one thing that we have added late in the 20th century is that we're more a word we throw around a lot is the word chastened we're a little more careful if you're going to throw your hat into the field of history are you going to throw your hat into the one of the fields of science or how sure we have this text or that text there probabilistically couched and I think that's another huge difference from some of the Enlightenment thinking of say a Descartes or somebody like that so I think the way we talk about things not just the data but the way we talk about it is also different today hmm I think one of the dangers might be that people would think that faith is rational if and only if it's based upon argument in Evan and I don't think that's correct and and here I want a second what Peters said about rejecting the autonomy of human beings before God I think reason and evidence are confirmatory of the truth of Christian theism but it's not the basis upon which Christian faith is rightly placed the basis I think is the witness of God himself to us through his spirit and this is available to all persons at all times and places in history not just those who are literate and have the leisure time and library resources to investigate the evidence and arguments well this reminds me of probably to be the last question we'll have time to get to but another one of the questions that was handed in asks about the role of emotion in arguing is it legitimate to use the emotional the more personal the more existential to argue is it a sort of either/or or both and from your points of being a good persuasive speaker will always try to move his audience I think emotionally I think that that is part of the art of persuasion and so we want to do persuasive argument ation and I would however lead with I think the intellectual because in our culture people are taught or given the impression that Christianity is purely emotional and so it's best not to lead with that but I think it's appropriate at some point along the way to appeal to issues of the heart and the emotions as well we're not just left or right brain where we're both and we should I think appeal to both I think there are some arguments today that some Christians unpacked that are very worthwhile from a more effective type angle I mean I think of CS Lewis's joy argument I think of Pascal's the heart has its reasons that reason though and things like that I think there are some things we can go to but if there's also a warning some of you know I've done a fair amount of working in doubt and I work with the clinical psychologist on this and you can you can ascertain empirically that the vast majority of doubt today perhaps along an order of 70 or 80 percent is emotional and we questioned God for other than rational reasons and I've had 500 conversations with doubters and I can tell you especially males especially males they will keep pounding factual data and their doubt doesn't go away and they wonder why it doesn't and they'd say well it can't be emotional not me my patron saint's mr. Spock lived long the crossword and and they don't realize it's coming there I did see a recent testing and secular psychology test I I don't remember who the largest group was but but one of the largest groups who struggle the most emotionally and who hate God the most are atheists in a recent test and think about that to which to which a scholar responded one philosopher said I don't believe in unicorns but I don't spend all my life hating them I'm gonna do it okay and so just to finally wrap up I think we've talked about giving evidence and argument to people who don't believe what we do and we've talked a little bit about the emotions and being more personal and you're saying there that you think that maybe a lot of the issues that we're actually dealing with or maybe more emotional than the rational but that we should lead with the rational because of people's wariness of emotionalism laws sort of just being sucked into something by emotion and so on so there seems to be a bit of a sort of disconnect there if we want to for cultural reasons for tactical reasons and for good sound biblical reasons be giving reasons an argument but people's actual reasons you're claiming empirically are really emotional what does that have to tell us about how we should be as as as people engaging with people when we're evangelizing rather than simply as as you know philosophers trying to win an argument very quickly I had a guy challenge four years ago actually build something up here and since he was in the question I'll tell you what the guy asked me he said hey your buddies JP Moreland the bill clerk you guys go to state universities debate tell me something does anybody ever come to Christ after your debates okay well we have standard answers for that that we give and I started talking the guy goes okay okay okay he said I'm just trying to make a point he said do you guys spend time walking a mile in somebody else's shoes and befriended them he said because in my opinion the arguments go a lot further when you have a relationship with somebody well that question haunted me this was 20 years ago this question haunted me and I kept thinking about it and thinking about it and I I started going out of my way after that to befriend atheist skeptics unbelievers and I got to a point where I had about 15 really close friends for atheists and skeptics you know this is the gods credit because you know salvation is not a human Enterprise and by the way I don't think arguments are going to force anybody in the kingdom but it's a work of God but what's incredible is when you spend time and you kind of walk a mile in their shoes Greg Colville talks about putting a stone and somebody's shoe when you walk a mile with them it's incredible how the arguments start clicking and people are willing to come over the fence it's absolutely incredible how many people come to that way it's the same arguments but you took time to talk to them as a friend well thank you I think I'm afraid to say everyone that that's is the time that we have because we obviously need to get out of here get the whole lot of everything but I think if there's one sort of take-home message if I'm going to try and summarize the whole conference just as gary did with a whole letter of the bible earlier it is perhaps that we can not simply argue with people who disagree with this or love people who disagree with this but that we could love people who disagree with us by arguing with them for the truth of the gospel thank you very much for attendance today and give these guys Reavers the channel and to all of you we're coming along they're making this a great day have a great journey back and thank you you you

Channel: ReasonableFaithTour

Views: 18,663

Rating: 4.8189301 out of 5

Keywords: William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, Peter S Williams, Peter J Williams, Reasonable Faith, tour, bethinking, conference, God, theism, atheism, arguments, evidence, Jesus, Christianity, Delusion, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Came, questions, discussion, apologetics, reason, emotion, evangelism, history, philosophy, science, New Testament, Old Testament, religion, UCCF, Premier Christian Radio, Damaris, defence, CS Lewis, debate, intellect, 2011, UK, psychology, theology, logic, autonomy, judge, love, Tyndale, Darwin

Id: zqoEleAFEDY

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 28 2013