Mikey keeps post­ing quotes from this philoso­pher guy Al Planti­nga (wiki). It turns out the book he’s quot­ing from — War­ranted Chris­t­ian Belief — is avail­able in its entirety online. And free.

Might be worth a read if, like me, you keep get­ting in over your head in philo­soph­i­cal argu­ments with athe­ists. It’ll save you reach­ing out for the suc­cor offered by a quick Google. And it’ll give you an intel­li­gent “scholar” to quote…

Here’s a (long) quote on his­tor­i­cal crit­i­cism — par­tic­u­larly on why it’s hard to argue with peo­ple who pre­sup­pose that the mirac­u­lous accounts in the Bible are myth­i­cal because they are mirac­u­lous, and why this shouldn’t be convincing:

The Troeltschian scrip­ture scholar accepts Troeltsch’s prin­ci­ples for his­tor­i­cal research, under an inter­pre­ta­tion accord­ing to which they rule out the occur­rence of mir­a­cles and the divine inspi­ra­tion of the Bible (along with the corol­lary that the lat­ter enjoys the sort of unity accru­ing to a book that has one prin­ci­pal author). But then it is not at all sur­pris­ing that the Troeltschian tends to come up with con­clu­sions wildly at vari­ance with those accepted by the tra­di­tional Chris­t­ian. As Gilkey says, “Sud­denly a vast panoply of divine deeds and events recorded in scrip­ture are no longer regarded as hav­ing actu­ally hap­pened.” Now if (instead of ten­den­tious claims about our inabil­ity to do oth­er­wise) the Troeltschian offered some good rea­sons to think that, in fact, these Troeltschian prin­ci­ples are true, then tra­di­tional Chris­tians would have to pay atten­tion; then they might be obliged to take the skep­ti­cal claims of his­tor­i­cal crit­ics seri­ously. Troeltschi­ans, how­ever, appar­ently don’t offer any such good rea­sons. They sim­ply declare that nowa­days we can’t think in any other way, or (fol­low­ing Har­vey) that it is immoral to believe in, for exam­ple, Christ’s res­ur­rec­tion on other than his­tor­i­cal grounds.

Nei­ther of these is remotely per­sua­sive as a rea­son for mod­i­fy­ing tra­di­tional Chris­t­ian belief in the light of Troeltschian results. As for the first, of course, the tra­di­tional Chris­t­ian knows that it is quite false: she her­self and many of her friends nowa­days (and hun­dreds of mil­lions of oth­ers) do think in pre­cisely that pro­scribed way. And as far as the implicit claims for the supe­ri­or­ity of these Troeltschian ways of think­ing go, she won’t be impressed by them unless some decent argu­ments of one sort or another are forth­com­ing, or some other good rea­son for adopt­ing that opin­ion is pre­sented. The mere claim that this is what many con­tem­po­rary experts think will not and should not intim­i­date her.

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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