Like the rest of evangelical Australia I’m a bit of a John Lennox fan at the moment. His turn on Q&A last week was a masterful attempt at presenting the gospel graciously in a relatively combative adversarial format. Those critical of his content (and I’ve seen a couple of Christians suggesting he could have answered a couple of questions better) should pay heed to the format, and the way both Eva Cox and the ABC’s moderator Virginia Trioli were keen to jump in on him before he could finish answering their questions. He articulated the need for forgiveness and the intellectual legitimacy of a God who intervenes in creation in a personal and relational way. I thought he did a stellar job. I thought Virginia Trioli’s banging on about circular reasoning was a little bit annoying because truth will essentially be self authenticating and circular, circular reasoning is a fallacy, but it’s not a defeater.
Anyway. Here’s John Lennox on a topic I wrote an essay about this semester.
Comments
I’ve long been a Lennox fan – his book is excellent, and his style is incisive but friendly.
His comment about forgiveness was really good – but I too felt like Virginia’s comment about it being circular was not only wrong, but because the Muslim lady just agreed it was she didn’t bother to give Lennox a chance to show why it isn’t (he was using argument from best explanation). I suspect, however, that his comments about SRI and agreement with Cox about teaching kids to think won’t have gone down so well with the ACL crowd..