fredonly wrote:
Specific to Christianity:
3. The earliest Christians died for their beliefs.
I list this because I see it so frequently, but it is a poor argument. 9/11 terrorists died for their beliefs as well. It WOULD mean something if Peter of James died for their beliefs, but there's no direct evidence that they did (just legends).
If the argument was that "Christians died for their beliefs
therefore their beliefs are true", then it would render Christian philosophers among the most stupid practitioners of their craft in human history. Self-evidently people die for a lot of things: their country, their woman, their god, their politics. The many thousands of German S.S. officers who battled in Berlin to their last breath do not render NAZI theories of Aryan racial ability any more true than if they had not died.
But, of course, this is not the Christian argument. It is a misrepresentation of it. The Christian argument - by
knowledgeable and
good apologists - is:
the early Christians would not knowingly and willingly have suffered and died for a lie. It is an indisputable truism that people seldom die for anything flippantly. Thus this argument tends to be used in an historical context to counter the claims of
bias on the part of the early Christians.
4. The rapid growth of Christianity can only be explained by a miracle.
Another poor argument. Christianity grew about as fast as the LDS church. A pretty good clip, but hardly miraculous. It REALLY took off after the emperor became a Christian.
I have never heard this argument. I think this is another misrepresentation of the actual apologetic argument:
Christianity should not have been able to grow and spread like it did under the kinds of state and religious persecution it experienced. The effort to make the apologetic argument "
Christianity grew therefore it is true" would once again imply that Christians were illogical, or their philosophers imbeciles. That is not what
good apologists argue.
The analogy to the LDS church is a fallacious one. Joseph Smith died in a gun-battle. This was seen as a heroic death not at all analogous to the "scandal of the cross" (Gal. 5:11). If Jesus had died in a sword fight, then Smith might indeed be a good analogy to use on that score.
And while it is true that the LDS church was persecuted at its inception, and its members (and some of its leaders) killed, the persecution did not last for more than two hundred years, and was not a savage state persecution that saw its members being set on fire or fed to animals.
The
Liber Pontificalis, for instance, describes the Diocletian persecutions killing 17,000 Christians in a thirty day period alone. You would not get even a fifth of that for Mormonism
over their entire course of their persecution.
So the analogy is a bad one. If you can find an ancient sect subject to centuries of sporadic violence and persecution, which nevertheless flourished in spite of its Leader and His friends being murdered, it would be a far better comparison.
5. The Gospels provide evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.
Nonsensical. The Gospels were written by believers for believers to support their beliefs. They are not news reports. Fundamentalists try to add credence by insisting the Gospels are eyewitness accounts - but these assumptions are not supported by the evidence.
Again, not the argument. The argument made by
good Christian apologists is that when the gospels are treated like historical sources (which they are), they provide testimony to the resurrection that is at least as good, and more often better, than the testimony for any other ancient event. The argument is not, "there is a document
therefore our beliefs are true".
The rebuttal that the Gospels were written by believers for believers is a truism. Of course they were. But it does not logically follow that a text written by one believer to another believer is false. That is a fallacy. And if the fallacy were true, then we would have to discount much of the limited ancient documents we possess which are considered to provide good testimony to events generally held to be true.
The idea that news reports are more likely to be true than biographies is begging the question. And what "evidence" exists to show they are not eyewitness accounts? That is again begging the question that we posses hard evidence that shows that the authors of the gospels were not eyewitnesses. Really? Where is this evidence? And how does an historian identify with such absolute certainty the authorship of a document thousands of years after it has been written? Please enlighten us with your historical methodology for it would advance the field many light years! Of course this claim is utterly bogus.
6. Because the Christian faith is based on belief in the Resurrection, it must be true.
Fallacious. I agree that belief in the Resurrection is a core belief of Christians. However, the possession of a belief is not indicative of truth; it just means people believed it and spread this belief.
Again, not the Christian argument.
Good Christian apologists
might argue that the Resurrection,
if true, proves the Christian faith, but I know of no
good apologists (and I follow the field closely) that would argue that merely because one believes in a resurrection,
therefore the belief is true. That is self-evidently absurd.
As I said previously, when one cannot even bring themselves to
represent what the other side says
accurately, fairly, and meaningfully, it means that one never has to engage with the argument. Straw men work that way.
And, further: if one prefers to engage with the
worst that one side has to offer rather than their
best arguments, it seems to me to be a tacit acknowledgement that we are content to be what I call a low altitude flyer on intellectual matters.
