Chrisitian Apologetics

A friend and I were talking after class about Christian Apologetics and we have both come to pretty much the same conclusion. Most of these so called Christian Apologists are intellectually dishonest. I think my main problem can be summed up in two assumptions that most Christian Apologists make:

1) The Bible is infallible

2) We can reason ourselves to belief in God

The first assumption seems to me to be the most intellectually dishonest of the two. Even if we throw away the fact the the “Bible” is a book that has hundreds (if not thousands) of textual variants between the same passages, then we are still left with problems pertaining to internal inconsistencies. Take for instance the varied accounts of Christ’s resurrection in the Gospels. Each Gospel tells a separate story, non of them match up perfectly and some seem to tell two different versions of the same story. We would not expect this if the books were infallible as the Apologist claims. Some Apologists go to great lengths to try to harmonize the Gospels (saying things like different angles can account for different perspectives of the same event…etc). I personally find these attempts to retain infallibility to be a worthless.

Why not just admit that the books in the Bible were written by humans and are subject to the same limitations of all humans? In doing this the Christian has only acknowledged that the Bible is not the fourth person in the Trinity. This does not seem to me to be a wrong. The one rejoinder I can think of to admitting this is that people will ask what then is the authority on Christian Theology? I would reply that church tradition, apostolic succession and reason (things that we use anyway) seem to fill the spaces left by an incomplete account in the Bible.

The second assumption seems to me to be nothing short of intellectual hubris. While it may seem logical that God would create the universe to point to him, it is not true. The traditional arguments for the existence of God are pretty weak (utter failures if you ask some philosophers) and do not seem to convince anyone of the existence of God. It seems more right to me to believe that there is some intuitive manner in which we come to believe that there exists a God. Perhaps it’s personal experience coupled with some inference towards the existence of God from Teleology or Cosmology, but whatever the reason is to believe it is not as well defined as most apologists would have you believe. Faith is something messy irrational and at times non-existent.