As a rough outline of this apologetics method, Sye attempts to respond to attacks on Christianity (sometimes people who use his method even use it on fellow Christians who do not use said method) by asking them questions about the foundations of their knowledge, and what truth is, with his point being that non-Christian worldviews cannot account for truth, and thus any attack on Christianity borrows from it. He has an interactive website called proofthatgodexists.org which takes the visitor of the site through his script.
So without further ado, let's begin. I will respond to different parts of his talk by identifying the timestamp of when the thing Sye says that I am responding to ends. There are some things which Sye says which I agree with however, and I will not comment on them.
Ending at 11:20- Sye uses Romans 1 to try to make a point about the evidential apologetics he used to appeal to, but the argument is very weak. He argues that since Romans 1 says everyone knows that God exists, that therefore we shouldn't give people evidence for a God that they already know exists. The section of Romans 1 that he cites is directed at those who surpress the truth of God in unrighteousness, and nowhere is it indicated that it refers to everybody that isn't a Christian. Whether an atheist, or anyone else, is fully aware of the truth of Christianity and is surpressing it is not something that anybody can know other than that individual and God. One of the things God has given mankind so that we can know Him is reason, and there is nothing wrong with using reason to that effect with non-Christians.
Ending at 12:55- Sye makes an argument that is tangential to the issue of apologetic methods but one that I think needs addressing. He says that the reason we send missionaries is because people who do not know about Christ are going to Hell without Him. He argues against the doctrine of invincible ignorance by strawmanning it- he says that if the ignorant would be going to Heaven anyway then we would build walls around them rather than send them missionaries. The problem of course, is that he treats the ignorant as one monolithic whole that are either all going to Heaven or all going to Hell, which of course is a false dichotomy. There is a third option, which is that the ignorant, like everyone else, are judged by how they responded to God's grace in their lives.
Ending at 15:49- Sye responds to the question of why do apologetics if everyone knows that God exists by saying that we should do so because God tells us to do so in the Bible. However, this response avoids the issue. If the argument that there's no point in apologetics if everyone knows that God exists, if it went through, would prove that God had no reason to command us to do apologetics. Saying that the Bible tells us to do apologetics does not answer the question of why God inspired said commands into the Bible. Furthermore, this question that Sye is responding to can be used as a response to Sye's argument that we shouldn't do evidential apologetics if everyone knows that God exists. What's poison for the evidential goose is poison for the presuppositional gander, and Sye does not address this. Also, wouldn't the justification for apologetics he gives be turned around against what he said about missions also? By Sye's logic, one could accept Sye's strawman of the doctrine of invincible ignorance, and say that everyone who dies ignorant of Christ goes to Heaven anyway, but that you should still go on missions because the Bible tells us to.
Ending at 20:41- Sye says that Romans 8:38-39 cannot be true of God is "probable" (we'll get to why he uses this terminology later). However this is just a non-sequitur. The passage simply says that nothing can "separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord". Saying that nothing could make God not love us has no implications with regards to apologetic methods.
Ending at 21:34- Sye continues on and distinguishes between a "probable god", which he cites Pascal's Wager as an example of an argument which argues for such a god, as opposed to the "certain God" which he believes in. However, whether a being can be known to exist and to what confidence someone can be justified in believing in something is not a property of something, and thus distinguishing between a "possible god" and a "certain God" the way Sye does is nonsense.
Ending at 32:32- Sye does a quick critique of some of the theistic arguments he claimed to have defended previously.
Sye attacks the Kalam Cosmological Argument in ways that if he had known about the traditional theistic arguments as much as he would want us to believe, he would not have brought up. I'm sorry, but if you're going to say "who created God?" in response to the Kalam, then you did not now the first thing about it back when you defended it. He also goes on to critisize the Kalam because it doesn't argue for Christianity, but instead argues for a "general god" which a Christian could then go on to argue is the Christian God. However, he never explains why this is problematic.
Sye responds to the teleological argument (he never brought up the fine-tuning argument, which he would have known about had he studied the theistic arguments for any decent amount of time) by appealing to much of the same responses he used with the Kalam. He then goes on to make an argument built on "probable vs. certain God" argument- he says that arguing from the odds of some feature of the universe being here without God is inprobable- no matter how improbable- is still arguing for a "probable god", and that given any huge number-to-one odds, the unbeliever will take that "one" any day of the week if they don't want to believe in God. This is a huge concession on Sye's part. He admits that these types of arguments can make disbelief in God irrational! An apologetic could not ask for more than that- that's kind of the whole point of apologetics (offensive apologetics anyways, which are what these arguments usually are).
Sye responds to the argument for the Resurrection by saying that the Resurrection could be argued to be a natural event. This is absurd. Some people believe that Jesus could have survived the crucifixion, and that itself is almost universally rejected by modern scholarship simply because of what we know about what Roman crucifixion was. But nobody believes that Jesus could have died of a Roman crucifixion and then naturally rise from the dead. If you can drive a non-Christian into believing that rather than believing in Christianity then you have done all the job you can do as an apologist.
Sye then wraps up his critiques of traditional apologetics by giving a summary of what happens when a non-Christian becomes a Christian by way of traditional apologetics: "Yep, I have all the evidence I need that Christianity is true, and based on the overwhelming evidence, I want to become a Christian". Sye thinks that this is bad because said non-believer assumes the position of God by saying that they will come to Christianity because of the evidence. Err, isn't that how everyone comes to Christianity? Everyone decides that they are going to become a Christian. If we go by Sye's logic we should never encourage anybody to become a Christian, because by doing so they are assuming the position of God. This is absolute nonsense.
Ending at 33:30- Sye attempts to defend his ridiculous argument by saying that when an unbeliever becomes a Christian via traditional apologetics, they are becoming the judge iver whether God exists rather than God being the judge over them. This is to equivocate on the term judge. Obviously, nobody is saying that if someone examines the evidence and concludes that God does not exist that that makes God not exist somehow, or makes belief in God irrational somehow. This obviously has nothing to do with the way which God is the judge over us. Furthermore, even with Sye's apologetic, Sye is giving his apologetic to the unbeliever to show them the error in what they are saying. Wouldn't giving them this apologetic and leaving it up to them to understand it count as putting them in the judge's seat by Sye's logic? Again, what's poison for the evidential goose is poison for the presuppositional gander.
Ending at 34:48- Sye expands on what he said previously and applies it to the Garden of Eden- Eve weighed what God told her to do and what Satan told her, Sye says, and she said that she would choose between the two. This again is nonsense- is Sye seriously saying that if Eve said "this is what God says, this is what Satan says, and I am going to choose God because I love God and want to obey Him" that that would be sinful? What Sye said Eve should have done is to tell Satan to go away and say "thus sayeth the Lord". But how would Eve decide to do that? Again, she would have to make a choice to choose God over Satan, which would be idolatry by Sye's standards.
Ending at 35:19- Sye cites Scriptures to try to prove a point about apologetic methods.
Sye cites Proverbs 9:10, "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom". If taken in the way Sye takes it however, it proves too much- notice how it says "the fear of the LORD" is the beginning of wisdom. You see, what Sye tries to do is say that all you need to do to have knowledge is to believe in God, but not necessarily worship God or be a Christian. However, if you were to take this literally (and convert wisdom to knowledge so it applies here), you would say that because everyone knows things everyone fears the Lord. Oopsies!
Sye cites Collossians 2:3, "In (Christ) are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge". However neither side of the issue of which apologetic method we should use denies this. We all believe Jesus is God and is omniscient.
Ending at 37:00- Sye cites Scriptures to try to prove that Christians have to know Christianity is true with certainty (it is unclear what he means by certainty, but in order for his argument to work it needs to be a certainty that the traditional apologetic method cannot provide). However, when you look at the context of these passages it's pretty clear that they don't mean what he wants them to mean.
In Luke 1 Luke is simply saying that he has carefully investigated what he put into his gospel so we can be sure they were true. It's pretty clear this is just the common usage of the word "sure"/"certain", and there is no reason to extrapolate from this usage of the word anything more profound about apologetic methods, especially as the context has nothing to do with apologetics.
John 17:8 is another such case. There is no reason to put Sye's spin on Jesus' usage of "certainty" here, and it is especially ridiculous to apply this to apologetics, as what Jesus was saying has nothing to do with apologetics.
Acts 2:36 is a particularly dubious case. The word here for certainty doesn't even mean certainty, it means assuredly (http://biblehub.com/greek/806.htm). Applying this to apologetics is again ridiculous, as Peter said what he did right after the crowd had heard the apostles speak in tongues for themselves.
At the end of the first part Sye gives a bit of a preview of what is to come in the second. I'll leave my comments on those for my response to the second part of the talk.
Update 1/28/2024: I remember around the time I originally wrote this, my understanding of certainty might have been contrary to the teaching of the Church. Though I still don't have all of the details of certainty ironed out, I thought it might be helpful to paste these quotes from the Catechism of the Catholic Church to help clarify Church teaching and that I adhere to it:
CCC 36: ""Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason." Without this capacity, man would not be able to welcome God's revelation. Man has this capacity because he is created "in the image of God"."
CCC 157: "Faith is certain. It is more certain than all human knowledge because it is founded on the very word of God who cannot lie. To be sure, revealed truths can seem obscure to human reason and experience, but "the certainty that the divine light gives is greater than that which the light of natural reason gives." "Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.""
No comments:
Post a Comment