Such as Anthony Flew?
Of course, you’ve smuggled in your own criteria of “sufficiently substantiated.”
None of this answers the question, if I want to be skeptical enough, for it all relies on your subjective criteria of “important issue,” “compelling arguments,” “reliability of the witness,” “probable event,” etc.
My point is that whether or not you accept my claim has nothing to do with the reasons I put forth - the very point you were making in attacking the authority of the Church.
Francis Collins has been a Christian since his mid-twenties, he’s now about 60, not exactly a recent convert. And he didn’t convert because of philosophical arguments for the existence of God, he did it for the reason most people do, an inner feeling that it was truth, or a calling, whatever you want to call it.
Collins pronounces himself a theistic evolutionist much charmed by the grand design of the universe. As for his own conversion, he freely admits to belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, a belief that was made inevitable first by reading a key passage from C.S. Lewis, and then by encountering, during a nature hike in the Cascade Mountains, the unexpected grandeur of a frozen waterfall hundreds of feet high. Collins had learned to approach God by fusing together the visionary power of both intellect and imagination. He has described his youthful adoption of atheism as one of “willful blindness.” He was converted at the age of 27, by his account. That would be 1977, some time after the Big Bang was considered a settled matter and many in the scientific community were wondering how Moses got the idea 3,000 years before a priest named George LeMaitre.
The main criticism I have of Craig is his critique of John Meier’s claim that the ressurection falls outside the realm of historical investigation and comes down to an issue of faith. Craig IMHO seems to be over confident in trying to “prove” the resurrection. I think Meier is quite right on this one, history can only go so far and Craig seems to want to take it further than it should be taken. See Noli Me Tangere Why John Meier Won’t Touch The Risen Lord by William Lane Craig Heythrop journal 50 (2009): 91-97 which can be found on his website reasonalbe faith.
That’s exactly what my problem (problem probably isn’t the right word) with Craig is, it’s the overconfidence in his “proofs” for the existence of God, the resurrection, etc. If he took a more humble approach and just said “there’s good evidence” or “belief in God is consistent with what we know from modern science” or something along those lines, I’d like him better. Like I said earlier, the Evangelical Christian apologists try a little too hard to make belief in God into an intellectual exercise where you can be led to belief by their “proofs”. And when people who’ve based their tenuous “faith” on the arguments of a Craig and then they find out those “proofs”'aren’t as slam dunk as Craig implied, their faith can then be seriously damaged, all because it was built on the wrong foundation in the first place.
This is clearly wrong, isn’t it? The existence of God belongs to the preambles of faith for Aquinas, does it not? It belongs to that which can be known prior to faith, by the use of reason. I thought Aquinas was quite clear about that - ? (I think you’re right about the resurrection, though - that’s a very different matter.)
My own criteria? I have the Brooklyn Bridge for sale at a reasonable and affordable price. Are you interested? No? Maybe because you do not accept my word for it? Maybe because I simply made a claim without “sufficiently substantiating” it?
It has everything to do with what you put forth. The trouble is that you do not have anything, except the self-proclaimed authority of the church.
Of course not. The question is why should I accept your word (or the church’s word) for it, since neither of you can “sufficiently substantiate” it?
But you have no proof it is true. No real tangible proof at least.
William lane Craig has done much to move Christianity outside the realm of fairy tales in to the realm of something that is to be intellectually respected (whether he be right or wrong). In case you didn’t notice, Christianity is being attacked intellectually and it would be apparently successful if it was not for people like Craig. The problem is, while you are willing to have a blind faith, this doesn’t mean that everybody else ought to. It seems that you are promoting fideism, since all you are saying here is that you are willing to believe without reason, simply because you hope Christ is lord regardless of whether or not God can be proven to exist or not.*And when people who’ve based their tenuous “faith” on the arguments of a Craig and then they find out those “proofs”'aren’t as slam dunk as Craig implied, their faith can then be seriously damaged, all because it was built on the wrong foundation in the first place. *
How many build their faith on the likes of William Lane Craig? If you can’t build your faith on the likes of Jesus Christ, you have no faith to begin with. Craig is not the meat and potatoes of our faith. He is, at best, a modest dessert, with which I can dispense any time the dessert goes bad, without destroying the meat and potatoes.
With out rational evidence, such wisdom is based on a blind assumption that Christianity is true, and only has emotional and pragmatic value.
It hardly needs to be said that arguments for the existence of God do not show that “Christianity is true”. They merely “prove” (to the extent that they “prove” anything since they are all arguably flawed and open to debate) that there is some sort of “god”, be it the God of Islam or New Agers or deism or the god of Spinozza. Again, IMHO these intellectual exercises are overrated
The trinity, 3 persons in one nature, is admittedly a revelation, but the God of Abraham, as defined by his attributes, can be proven to exist through human reason alone. This is a doctrine of the Catholic faith. I don’t know what you are talking about.
Which argument for the existence of God “proves” specifically “the God of Abraham” but not the generic god of deism?