Ben Wallis’s counter-apologetics blog

Christian apologist and New Testament historian Mike Licona has written a review of Bart Ehrman's new book, Forged (2011). To my knowledge, it is the first significant review of Ehrman's book to make the rounds on the internet. In this response, I will address a number of Licona's most striking objections, and show that all but one of them are founded on serious mistakes of one kind or another. I will argue that he deeply misunderstands Ehrman in several instances, and that his objections are periodically irrelevant and fantastic. Given all this, it certainly appears to me that Licona has permitted his rather strong religious biases to cloud his reasoning. Overall, I'm very disappointed with his analysis, and can find little insightful in his critique.

Philosopher and Calvinist apologist James Anderson, in Paradox In Christian Theology , devotes a chapter spanning 62 pages to outlining the epistemic status of Christian theism. I would like to highlight two observations regarding this chapter which I think are important for best understanding his position: First, he does not present an argument for the existence of God, nor does he attempt to lay out any good reasons for taking a theist position; and second, he neither attempts to show that Christian theism is warranted, but only defends the more modest assertion that it is warranted if it is true . Given these observations, we are obliged to conclude that Anderson's purpose in this chapter is not to secure a convincing case for the existence of God, nor for the truth of Christianity.

In religious discussions, among other situations, we often raise the issue of whether or not moral values are objectively determined. By "objective" moral values, we typically refer to moral values which are not determined by human opinion or disposition. For instance, CSUSB philosopher Tony Roy characterizes objective moral values as those which are not "dependent on the attitudes of a person, group of persons, tradition, practice, or the like directed at" accepting that value. [ 1 ] Apologist-philosopher William Lane Craig considers an objective moral value to be one discovered "independently of whether anybody believes it to be so." [ 2 ] In this way, moral objectivism springs from the sense of morality laying in large part beyond our creative power, either as individuals or even as a society. Indeed, I take the view that circumstances far beyond our control determine the most fundamental moral values, and that no mere human opinion or social tre...

Over the course of my various exchanges with presuppositionalist apologist Chris Bolt, he has repeatedly and mistakenly boasted that he has a satisfactory answer to the problem of induction which involves the Calvinist God (he calls it the "Christian" God). Until now, I've largely ignored this unusual (and, as we shall see momentarily, obviously false) claim, instead preferring to vigorously defend my own view of induction. It's usually fairly easy to go on the offensive, and poke holes in another person's argument; but it's considerably more challenging to defend one's own positive arguments for a given position. So, I've been more interested in meeting that challenge of defending my views than I have been in the comparatively simpler task of criticizing Chris's. In the case of induction, I think I've presented a solid case for my view over the course of my Skype debate with Chris and our subsequent written correspondence in the blogospher...

This past Thursday, 2011 Jan 13, I debated the Calvinist apologist Jamin Hubner, who according to his web page is the professor of theology at Jesus Bible Institute in Rapid City, SD, on the existence of God. You can listen to that debate online here , and read a transcript here . The debate was held over Skype, with moderator Joshua Whipps. Jamin is involved with Prof. James White's Alpha and Omega Ministries , though I do not know in what capacity (except that he blogs on their website). He's a presuppositionalist apologist, and has authored/edited at least three books on that subject in the past few years.

Here I reply to Don Collett's online paper "Van Til and Transcendental Argument Revisited" [sic], by denying his implication that arguments following Bas van Fraassen's presuppositional semantics are distinct from deductive arguments, and also by pointing out the invalidity of his sole stated example of a transcendental argument. Twentieth-century developments in the Reformed tradition of theology have led a number of apologists to assert that there exist arguments which they call transcendental , which are neither identical with nor reducible to arguments of deductive or inductive form, and that only these arguments are faithful to God's plan for ministering to the unregenerate, that is, to non-Christians. However, this position leads us to certain problems---namely, if transcendental arguments are not deductive or inductive, then in what sense ought we regard their conclusions as justified? Collett's paper appears framed at least in part as an attempt to ...

Here I respond briefly to James N. Anderson's online essay entitled "The Theistic Preconditions of Knowledge: A Thumbnail Sketch" (2006) by pointing out two serious problems I see in his outlined case for theism. To that end, I critique his central argument against naturalism, as well as his contention that epistemic normativity cannot be subject to human convention. Following a tradition of presuppositionalist apologetics, Anderson takes up the position that God stands among the necessary preconditions for knowledge itself, and that we must assume the existence of a divine author of the universe if we are to free ourselves from a paralyzing epistemological skepticism. He bases his outlined case, a kind of transcendental argument for theism, on the observation that one of same notorious difficulties of metaethics also frustrates inquiries into epistemology, namely the question of how normative standards can arise out of the impersonal properties of the universe; for t...