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pnewton
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I don’t get it. If truth doesn’t have sides (which it doesn’t) how can one give both sides. Wouldn’t it be more dishonest to argue a point of view one new to be untrue just for balance?
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mchale
Guest
With respect, having done a year of Graduate School for Medieval Religious History, I found that there was plenty of bias in academia. Indeed, the humanities tended to argue against the existence of an objective truth and claimed bias to anyone who clung to the notion of the existence of an objective truth. As a result what I found was relativism where various interpretations of the evidence were generally critiqued by whatever social theory a professor found popular. I actually read criticisms of some people’s books based not on the evidence contained within the book but rather on the fact that the book disagreed with the critic’s view of the world. Hardly an argument for academia undermining one’s bias.
With respect, it depends on the apologist and their intended audience. Certainly St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae can be considered a form of apologetics, and yet no one would claim that it was simple. Likewise St. Augustine in the City of God did not address his issues simply.
Further I would argue that historians in fact do operate adversarily. Perhaps their arguments unfold over longer time scales and generally are more hidden. While there is a relatively large audience for history books, most history books and almost journal articles are targeted at a much narrower professional audience and many of those works make progress by attacking the work of another historian.
I would say that I think you might have a little too much esteem for your own profession. I saw plenty of that when studying history was my full time occupation.
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Bill
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Gottle_of_Geer
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But…you aren’t the one who needs convincing; you know already what your position is, & (presumably) don’t intend to change.
The person who needs convincing of the excellence of your view may very well have a lot of objections to it - & even if (as is not unlikely) some of them are based on misunderstanding of the Catholic position, doesn’t that person deserve a balanced explanation both of your position, &, of the reasons that his objections are not as fatal or as weighty as he thinks ?Apologetics is (surely ?) not concerned to state the apologist’s own stance inso far as it is his, but with stating why that stance is considered to be valid for others as well as for himself; and why no objections are fatal to it - even though it may seem that they are, or should be. ##
It’s possible to be intellectually rigorous, & to try one’s best to see all sides of a question - including the objections - while being convinced of the validity of the position for which one is an apologist.
If an apologist were try to convince me that the Papacy is in some sense of Divine origin, I’d be very disappointed (& I would suspect his position was rather weak) if he didn’t make some attempt to explain how the Papacy can be “of God” even though there have been several periods when it has been occupied by men whose morals bear little resemblance if any to those of St Peter; holiness of life is not the most obvious quality of some of them. If the CC is all it’s cracked up to be, it ought to be possible to be honest about the less attractive things in its life - past or present. ##
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Gottle_of_Geer
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1. The apologist will have his own convictions - to be aware that there are solid arguments against them, is not the same as being convinced by the counter-arguments. One can have a sympathetic understanding of Calvin’s doctrine of the Eucharist, without being convinced that it is as valid as Calvin supposed it to be, & as it was for him - even if one is a “High” Anglican 
Not agreeing with someone is not the same as thinking they are stupid, immoral, or bad.
- Sympathetic insight into the views of others, is not the same thing as personal conviction oneself. To understand a doctrine is not at all the same as being convinced of its validity.
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Maranatha
Guest
I believe that if you cross the line from explaining why your position is right to trying to convince others that your viewpoint is correct then you have gone from being an apologist to and evangelist.
As for giving a balanced answer, as an apologist, I think we do not need to give a balanced answer. As an philosophical example, if someone ask me why I think God exists, I can give them the proof or proofs I think is most convincing. I don’t also have to explain the problem of evil in my answer as well. If my answer leads to another question then that question is taken in turn.
OTOH, if I were writing an academic paper about the proofs for the existence of God and I did not bring up the “problem of evil” then I would expect a failing grade on the paper.
Agreed. But as I stated, apologists don’t have to bring up every possible objection to an answer when asked a question.
Agreed. In fact I think it is obligatory to be intellectually rigorous because academics will automatically react condescendingly at an apologetic answer.
We absolutely have to be honest about the less attractive things. If you want to evangelize anyone you have to be 100% honest in every statement otherwise you will loose credibility and will be unable to convince anyone.
As for the Divine Office of Papacy, we don’t have to list every bad act a pope has made in history when someone asks if the office was divinely authored.
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Keikiolu
Guest
“Trying to convince” doesn’t equal “dishonesty”.
You’re only dishonest if your,… dishonest.
Acts of intellectual violence, such as multiple meaning or threats of infliction of pain, would be being dishonest, because the GOAL is to have the convincee come to BELIEVE, not to simply ACCEPT what you have to say.
The only difference between a true apologist and a true evangelist is their level of vehemence.
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Contarini
Guest
Truth in itself doesn’t have sides, but truth as perceived by us does. A “side” of the truth is simply the truth as viewed from one limited human angle. If we are serious about truth and if we really believe that there is truth outside us (in other words, truth is not just something we make up), then we have to try to look at the truth from as many angles as possible. We will never succeed entirely, but to choose deliberately not to look at things from a particular angle is an intrinsically dishonest act. It shows a fundamental lack of respect for the truth.
Obviously no one is suggesting that anyone should do that!
Was Aquinas dishonest in every question of the Summa? He deliberately gave the objections to every single position he argued. In the case of the existence of God, the two arguments he gave are staples of atheist arguments till this day. That’s why Aquinas is the first person we still turn to (at least I do!) for a sound argument in favor of God’s existence. He took a serious look at the other side, even though almost no one in his day actually disbelieved in God’s existence.
Edwin
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Pug
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If they give themselves away, yes, we can know.
Your remark about clarity in discussion brings to mind some I’ve watched, for example, those about what type of certainty Catholics have that they know the truth. Those don’t seem to yield clarity. I am tempted to figure the (other) Catholic is being deliberately obtuse, but that doesn’t mean they actually are. Perhaps I am merely blind, I freely acknowledge. But lack of clarity to me is not a sure signal of foul play on their part. It can be an indicator, I agree.
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valient_Lucy
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I have to agree with some of what you’re saying. I think there is a lot of bias in history, and in academics in general. ( I think people tend to be pretty biased, period.) I think we need to make a distinction between “arguing a position” which every scholarly paper does, and ignoring and minimizing the other side. Most scholarly papers do argue for a specific opinion, yet we would not necessarily call that dishonest. Every scholarly paper attempts to persuade a person of their position. I guess I’m still not sure what the difference is. I agree that apologists can be dishonest, as can everyone else in the world. We need to be cautious with regard to arguments.
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jimmy
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I think there is a big element of self-seeking in apologetics. I don’t know if there is dishonesty.
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Contarini
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Of course I didn’t dispute that.
Well, I don’t know exactly what you encountered. I’ve certainly run up against a great deal of this, but it can mean a lot of different things. At one end, postmodernism can offer a healthy critique of the idea that we have direct, unmediated access to the truth, which we clearly don’t (see my previous post). Everyone has a bias, and the postmodernists are right that claims not to be biased are generally signs of particularly dangerous bias. However, in its more radical forms postmodernism simply throws in the towel and turns scholarship into naked advocacy. In my experience, this is particularly the case with the scholars who were themselves educated in postmodernism. I may have been lucky in that the most postmodernist person I studied with was an older scholar (I don’t know her age but I’m pretty sure she’s in her 60s now) who had had a very rigorous education as a church historian before she ever got into the postmodernist stuff. She was an ex-Christian whose views could not have been more antipathetic to mine in many ways, but she had a rock-solid historical honesty at her core. At the end of the day she could spout Derrida and Foucault all she wanted to, but she wasn’st going to play any games with the evidence. My advisor was a much more conservative scholar (of much the same age–in his 60s). So I guess I wasn’t as directly exposed to some of this radical nonsense as you may have been.
Still, even granting that what you describe is characteristic of much contemporary scholarship in the humanities, you are making my point for me. Postmodernism is completely at odds with traditional historical methodology and has found less purchase among historians than in any other discipline (in fact a candidate for a history position at my college questioned the other day whether a historian can be a postmodernist, and our most senior history professor agreed with him). Historians resist radical postmodernism precisely because their discipline teaches them to seek truth and to do so with as much fairness and open-mindedness as possible.
I never said that that particular fact was an argument for my position. But to make an argument against it you would need to give me some reason to think that these people would be less biased if they hadn’t had an academic training.
Here’s an example in favor of my point: Bart Ehrman, professor of early Christianity at UNC-Chapel Hill (and a good friend of the ex-Christian patristics scholar with whom I studied, though I never took a class with Ehrman himself), wrote a book debunking the DaVinci Code. Why would he do this? His entire career is built on criticizing orthodox Christianity, recovering “lost Christianities,” making the most of textual variants in order to argue against Biblical inspiration, etc. Yet he devoted his energes to writing a whole book attacking a view of early Christianity that on the whole suited his prejudices. He did this because, postmodern as he is, ex-Christian as he is, he’s also an honest scholar and he owed a duty to the truth.
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Contarini
Guest
Well, first of all both the Summas (the SCG has a clearer apologetic focus) were in fact intended to be simple. They aren’t simple by our standards, but they were relatively clear and simple compared to other works of medieval philosophy. However, I take your point. Note that I’m speaking of apologists, by which I mean primarily professional apologists. This is really a modern invention–I think that the people who bill themselves primarily as apologists owe more to Madison Avenue than to Hippo or the Sorbonne. Traditionally apologetics was done by people with other responsibilities–scholars, pastors, etc.–who felt the need to defend some point under attack. My main concern is with the way apologetics have become an industry in themselves, and you find people (especially on the Internet) whose only interest in the Christian tradition seems to be searching it for ammunition to use against some supposed enemy.
Apologetics has to be done, but it’s best done by those who are working out of a broader and more edifying discipline. Augustine and Aquinas are obvious examples of this–C. S. Lewis is another. Fulton Sheen would be another–he was an effective apologist in large part because he was a pastor. Peter Kreeft and Scott Hahn–to name two of the better Catholic apologists working today–are both academics. I’m not saying that apologetics are wrong, but that in and of itself they have a tendency to make people less ardent lovers of truth and more ardent lovers of victory. They should be incidental rather than central to one’s intellectual life.
Very true, and in an increasingly overcrowded and competitive scholarly world this can be a serious temptation. But nonetheless, this adversarial quality is incidental to the historian’s task. The purpose of writing a book is to shed light on some subject. Obviously in order to do that you need to say something that hasn’t been said before (unless, as you note, you are writing for a general audience and simply digesting the work of others). But this is only incidentally adversarial–you also need to build on the work of others. And in principle you have to be open to agreeing even with people whose arguments you find unappealing, and disagreeing with people you would love to agree with. I, for instance, have a great love of high-church Anglicanism. I’d love to be able to endorse the Anglo-Catholic interpretation of sixteenth-century Anglicanism. But I can’t, because for the most part it’s historically indefensible. (Obviously this argument can’t be pushed too far, because one’s own motives are always complicated.)
I never disputed that historians do this. My argument is that they do this because they are sinful and fallible human beings. But it remains true that the discipline of historical scholarship works against this tendency, while the discipline (if we can call it that) of professional apologetics enflames it.
Is my argument idealistic? Sure. I’m describing historical scholarship without the many factors that can and often do corrupt it. I’m describing the intrinsic tendency of the discipline. I’m also describing my own experience, even though I got my Ph.D. from Duke, which is usually considered one of the most postmodern schools out there. I’m sorry your experience was different!
In Christ,
Edwin
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rr1213
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There is certainly a minority of apologists and lawyers who are consciously dishonest, as well as a much larger group consisting of honest advocates who nonetheless operate under their own preconceptions. However, I think that the human tendency to rationalize is a greater risk. The best advocates don’t simply argue a position, they believe whole heartedly in that position. Sincerity may or may not be an aid to finding the truth, but it definitely is an aid to being a more persuasive advocate. If you believe in your cause, you work more fervently for it, you are often more creative in the way you present your case and you are more sympathetic because you are openly sincere. Usually, these things also help you to be more persuasive. You become capable of not merely negating the other side’s best argument but, instead, using that very argument as a building block in showing how your position is the correct one.
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Revelation13_16
Guest
I agree with Edwin.
Apologists are like Lawyers in that their life depends on what they argue for.
But while a lawyer will argue for money, and money is plentiful, an apologist argues for the faith he has chosen.
Honestly, do you know how humiliating it would be for a guy like Steve Hahn or Jimmy Akin to go back to Protestantism?
They’d be called a ‘flip-flopper’.
They have presumably made the choice for Catholicism for life and choice is wound up with pride, you are judged by your choices, your choices are you.
So apologists are defending themselves by proxy, which is why they will always try and make their choice seem like the right one.
A true apologist will very quickly cease to become an apologist and will merely be a neutral commentator.
One should read apologists not a neutral perspective of things, but to gain the best possible argument for something.
Ergo, If I were to read “Upon this rock” by Stephen Ray, it would be followed by “The Matthew 16 Controversy” by William Webster.
You read Ray for a strong pro-Matt 16:18 view, and Webster for a strong anti-Matt 16:18 view - in the end you decide.
Love,
Rev
Apologists are like Lawyers in that their life depends on what they argue for.
But while a lawyer will argue for money, and money is plentiful, an apologist argues for the faith he has chosen.
Honestly, do you know how humiliating it would be for a guy like Steve Hahn or Jimmy Akin to go back to Protestantism?
They’d be called a ‘flip-flopper’.
They have presumably made the choice for Catholicism for life and choice is wound up with pride, you are judged by your choices, your choices are you.
So apologists are defending themselves by proxy, which is why they will always try and make their choice seem like the right one.
A true apologist will very quickly cease to become an apologist and will merely be a neutral commentator.
One should read apologists not a neutral perspective of things, but to gain the best possible argument for something.
Ergo, If I were to read “Upon this rock” by Stephen Ray, it would be followed by “The Matthew 16 Controversy” by William Webster.
You read Ray for a strong pro-Matt 16:18 view, and Webster for a strong anti-Matt 16:18 view - in the end you decide.
Love,
Rev
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pnewton
Guest
I have never read a book that does not mention the opposition. It is a necesary part of making a response. Thomas Aquinas while listing objections did not give equal space to them. Still, look how long the Summa is. Not a very useful tool except for the really dedicated.
You mentioned Peter Kreeft. Have you ever listened to him or read him? He always mentions the opposing arguements an knows them quite well. He can argue for atheism better than most atheist.
As to the converts, which seem to be the focus. I would like to point out they, er… converted. That would indicate that they were willing to examine the truth unbiased. When a protestant undergoes conversion, it requires a deep evaluation of what is truth and almost always involves personal loss. I still have those who look at me askance when I meet them and family that does not understand. I can not imagine what it must be like to convert when it also cost your job. I do not see this biased you speak of in these people. They just have “been there, done that.” Perhaps I can relate to the situation a little better than some.
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Malcolm_McLean
Guest
Yes. Few people are perfect, and complete intellectual honesty and consistency comes at a very high price.
Most scientists are also slightly dishonest. Once their reputation is tied to a certain idea they will often continue to defend it long after the evidence has made it untenable. Teachers usually engage in a bit of pedagogoical lying; a lady teacher friend of mine replaced clean nails with rusty ones in her pupils’ “copper treatment” test tubes when they failed to respond as hoped. For politicians, salesmen, journalists, and doctors there is often even no pretence to be otherwise.
Normally in an apologist you have someone doing his best. However that may be a rather stupid, self-deluded best. Anyone can set themselves up as an apologist, after all.
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jimmy
Guest
So a true apologist in your eyes would be a relitivist who says that all paths are equal? There is objective fact. I have to disagree with you. What you are saying about these apologists is pretty offensive. You are basically saying that they are not Christians. They have chosen what they like and they would not follow the truth if they saw it. You assume that because a Catholic apologist defends his faith that means he just ignores facts and is consequently dishonest. But the fact is that Catholics and protestants have a different worldview. Everything has a different meaning from a Catholic perspective than it has from a protestant perspective. What you find to be ignoring facts is infact a matter of a fact being irrelevant. You have fallen into the trap of modernism, namely that you can be objective. Objectivity is a crock and it is an impossibility, or very near it. Each man has a worldview that he views things from and he can not view the world from another mans eyes.
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Revelation13_16
Guest
I erred, a true apologist is any apologist who argues from reason.
I mean’t to say an ‘ideal’ apologist, one who, concievably change his mind if the right argument or piece of information came along.
But like lawyers who see conceding as a sign of weakness, I don’t think apologists - once they’ve thrown their sword in the sand and tied their reputation to a certain belief - will change it at a later date.
Some might, but it’s rare.
My comments were about all apologists.
He cannot view the world through another mans eyes.
Apologists don’t try to make a case for the other side, they try to quash it.
Hence they are biased.
Love,
Rev
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jimmy
Guest
I realize your comments were about all apologists, I was just using the Catholic as the example.
I don’t think apologists are as dishonest as you think. I do think that many may be decieved by themselves but I think that most would be willing to change faiths if they came to a new realization. It takes sort of a revelation for a person to change their position and to change their faith. You can’t simply make logical conclusions and come up with a reasoning that one church is the truth. Those logical conclusions may be valid and true but that is not enough to get a person to change. People will always view those facts from their own perspective. A switch of faith usually is a switch of viewpoint. One fact obtains a whole new meaning.
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chicago
Guest
I would tend to agree with this. Apologists frequently have a particular personal perspective which they are out to defend. They may genuinely believe that it is true, but it could fail to take into account the veracity of other opinions which are legitimate. Also, much apologetics is done on a very basic level which doesn’t dig as deep as it should. But, then, this is where many people who it is “taking on” or answering questions for are in their journeys. A fair amount of Catholic apologetics in the contemporary period is quite onesided, too, in that it tends to be aimed at countering the attacks of hardline evangelicals, but fails to answer arguements well from other Christian perspectives or even non Christian concerns. As such, I often find the state of apologetics wanting.
I will say that I have a genuine respect for Jimmy Akin as he is an exception to this norm who DOES do his homework extensively and is willing to step outside the box and argue for a point which many other apologists might not if he finds worthy points of value there.
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