Showing posts with label "Geisler's Review". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "Geisler's Review". Show all posts

Are My Arguments Really Emotional and Superficial?

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Some Christians have basically charged that I left the fold for emotional reasons and that my book is superficial. In talking to Norman Geisler, a former student claims Geisler doesn't recommend it because of my arguments but because it shows I left the faith for emotional resaons.

Let it be said that former believers like me left the fold because of emotional reasons. That's just another delusion they have. The fact is that the emotional upheavals in people's lives merely shock them into doing what sane reasonable adults should have done all along, questioning what they believe in the first place.

And so I don't deny Geisler thinks this. He said as much in a series of personal email exchanges. But I think many of the arguments used by some of the top Christian apologists and philosophers are superficial too. Bill Craig even called J.L. Mackie's argument against miracles "shockingly superficial"! Really? That is shocking to even read that. Mackie's arguments are not superficial at all. I find them persuasive.

Where does that get us?

My case rests upon the fact that we simply "see" things differently, and I argue in the first half of my book for why I see things differently. We see through a particular cultural set of controls beliefs. I have an anti-supernatural bias. Christians have a supernatural bias. The real debate is on settling that particular question. No other atheist author that I know of seems to appreciate that point but me, at least not to where s/he will spend over half of a book defending an anti-supernatual bias before looking at the Biblical evidence in the later half of it.