- Initial announcement
- Week 1: "Doesn't science disprove Christianity?
- Week 2: Does God exist?
- Week 3: The Problem of Pain
- Week 4: Doesn't the church produce hypocrites and injustices?
- Week 5: Is the Bible reliable?
- Week 6: Who was Jesus?
- Week 7: Could there be just one true religion?
- Week 8: The next step
Although the course was entitled "God and Reason", this was (as I guessed) a misnomer. Reason played very little role in what was presented, with the last presenter, John North, even disparaging reason as a tool for understanding the world. A much more representative title would have been "Why you should be a Christian" or (as the presenters sometimes called the course) "Christianity 101".
The course was largely evangelical in nature. There was not that much scholarly content. The usual evangelical claims were presented, and only rarely was there any acknowledgment that these claims were controversial or debated or (even, in some cases) largely abandoned by serious scholars. One claim, made by Prof. Matthews, that there are "85,000 quotations from or allusions to the NT in documents of early church fathers, 100-200 CE", seems very likely to be false. I raised this issue with Prof. Matthews but never received a response about it.
It was clear that much of the reason for being a Christian was based on emotion and culture, rather than reason.
By far the best talks were given by Robert Mann. This is probably, in part, because he has given a course covering some of the content of his lectures before, and also because I think he takes more seriously the objections of non-believers. He also had the best argument, which is the argument of "fine-tuning", although I don't find it very convincing.
It also didn't seem to me that the professors (with the exception of Robert Mann) were really interested in answering the challenging questions put forth by some in the audience. It seems we were more of an annoyance than offering a chance to explain some questionable point in Christian doctrine in more detail.
Not everybody seemed to agree with me. I saw some comments on Facebook that said things like "I love this course! It is the best one out of all of the courses I have taken so far at university because "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge"."
Overall, I would give this course a "C-", with some sessions (those of Robert Mann) getting an "B+".
How could the course be better? For one thing, I'd like to hear people who are really experts in the fields they address. Why no religion professor? Why no historian specializing in the middle East of Jesus' time?
Here's another idea. Guy Harrison has a new book out, entitled "50 Simple Questions for Every Christian". I haven't read the whole book yet, but there are significant excerpts on amazon and here, and it seems really good. I'd love to see a short course built around that book, where Christian academics do their best to answer the questions that skeptics usually ask. It would have been a lot more interesting than what was presented.
5 comments:
Excellent work Jeff! I've followed your whole series and you've summarized it well. I can honestly say I would have bailed after about 10 minutes of this nonsense. Thanks for doing the hard work for us.
Mann also had the best argument, which is the argument of "fine-tuning", although I don't find it very convincing.
Is that because you believe in the multiverse?
I don't find the "fine-tuning" argument convincing because we have no idea whether more than one universe is possible.
Fine-tuning proponents argue by assuming that any universe must be very similar to ours, and then play with the known constants. But we have no idea how constants are set in these universes, nor the possible ranges of the constants, nor even the possible kinds of universes there might be. When I ask where in their list of possibilities we get a universe that is a two-dimensional grid with Conway's Life as the rules, they just stare blankly. That shows they really haven't considered all the possibilities.
I don't think you quite answered my question. I'm asking if you require a multiverse in order to avoid the fine-tuning argument.
You sound comfortable saying "we have no idea whether more than one universe is possible," but I imagine you have a big problem saying "we have no idea whether a designer is possible."
Choosing one over the other (or choosing to doubt one over the other) seems to be a personal preference.
I'm asking if you require a multiverse in order to avoid the fine-tuning argument.
I don't require anything, and I don't need to "avoid" the fine-tuning argument. I simply don't find it convincing. We don't know enough about how universes are constructed to put any probability distribution on them at all.
but I imagine you have a big problem saying "we have no idea whether a designer is possible."
We know designers are possible because we see people who design things. Heck, I'll even grant you the brute possibility of a Designer. But we should base our conclusions on evidence, not possibilities.
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