Christian Theism Masterpost

Why you should consider that the most useful religion may also be true

Overview: The Rationality of Christian Theism (60 pages)
Video: Why I Don’t Get Involved in the Creation Debate (7:49)

“There is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.”
― Alvin Plantinga

The Pragmatism of Christianity
Christianity has so shaped our world that, even when we condemn Christianity, we judge it by Christian standards. Christianity is the driving force behind literacy, scientific achievement, and human rights in the modern world. It would be very strange indeed that believing a preposterous lie could prove so useful for human advancement; it is more likely that Christianity is true.
Video: What Good is Christianity? (7:34)
Article: How a Defense of Christianity Revolutionized Brain Science
Article: Compatibility of Christian Faith and Science
Article: Victorian Science and Religion
Article: The Christian Origins of Human Rights
Article: How Christians Acting on Biblical Beliefs Secured the Basis for Women’s and Children’s Rights
Video: Imago Dei: The Basis for Human Rights (8:11)
Video: How Christianity Changed the World (26:39)
Essay: How the Christian Sexual Ethic Reduces Risk of Child Abuse
Debate: Wiliam Lane Craig vs. Christopher Hitchens (2:27:42)
Book: Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland
Book: Science & Religion: A New Introduction by Alister McGrath

“Science says that there are certain things that are very improbable, so improbable they shouldn’t happen at all. [But] science can’t say things can’t happen. Science does not disprove the resurrection of Jesus. It says that the resurrection cannot be explained by a natural process.”
—Alister McGrath

Pascal’s Wager
Oft-misunderstood, Pascal invites the skeptic to weigh the evidence for Christianity based on how important the truth might turn out to be.
Summary: Pascal’s Updated Wager
Video: Summing Up Pascal’s “Updated” Wager (7:40)
Book: Beyond the Wager by Douglas Groothuis

The Resurrection Argument
Accounting for the origins of Christianity without appealing to Jesus’ claims to divinity is much more difficult than people suppose, and has led many prominent skeptics to faith in Jesus.
Article: The Prior Probability of the Resurrection
Video: Is the Resurrection Reasonable? (10:11)
Video: Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Part One: The Facts (6:42)
Video: Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Part Two: The Explanation (6:46)
Debate: William Lane Craig vs. Gerd Ludemann (2:14:31)
Video: Demolishing Paulogia’s Natural Explanation of Christianity (2:25:24)
Book: The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel
Book: Person of Interest by J. Warner Wallace
Book: The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell

“To me the evidence is conclusive, and over and over again in the High Court I have secured the verdict on evidence not nearly so compelling. As a lawyer I accept the gospel evidence unreservedly as the testimony of truthful men to facts that they were able to substantiate.”
—Sir Edward Clarke

Lewis’ Trilemma
That Jesus was an admirable person is uncontroversial — is it possible to believe this without believing in His divinity?
Article: Did Jesus Actually Exist?
Video: Is the New Testament Reliable? (4:21)
Video: A Look at the Lewis Trilemma (2:45)
Video: Who is Jesus? (6:00)
Video: Who Did Jesus Think He Was? (6:35)
Article: Trilemma or Quadrilemma? Answering the “Legend” Critique of C.S. Lewis’ Trilemma
Video: C.S. Lewis’ Trilemma Is Better Than You Think (9:36)
Video: The Divine Trilemma (21:35)

“Lying on my back day after day, reflecting on life and theology and philosophy, three things started to destabilize my entire belief system. First, what’s called the design argument finally hit me. I was looking at a wall and how the bricks were arranged, and I thought to myself, ‘You know, if somebody told me that these bricks went into this order by some process that didn’t involve intelligence, I’d smack him in the mouth. And yet I believe that life formed without intelligence when the most basic living cell is unimaginably more complicated than some bricks stacked on a wall.’ …Second, I found out how most of Jesus’ apostles died… Third, I started worrying that Jesus might actually be better than me.”
—David Wood

Arguments from Design
Fine-tuning arguments, arguments from beauty, and other apparent observations of order in the universe where order need not exist are teleological arguments. In teleology, phenomena are explained by their purpose, not their natural cause.
THE AESTHETIC ARGUMENT:
Video: Pythagoras: How to Measure Beauty (2:57)
Video: Is Beauty Objective or Subjective? (10:31)
Article: A Beginner’s Guide to the Argument from Beauty
Essay: Is Beauty Actually the Most Powerful Argument for God?
Article: The Aesthetic Argument for the Existence of God
THE ARGUMENT FROM CONSCIOUSNESS:
Video: Does Freewill Prove God’s Existence? (2:37)
Article: Dualism, Physicalism, and Philosophy
Article: Do Humans Have Souls? Yes, for Two Reasons
Video: Do We Really Have Free Will? (9:31)
FINE TUNING ARGUMENTS:
Video: God and Mathematics (5:03)
Video: Impossible Universe: The Reality of Cosmic Fine Tuning (5:53)
Video: The Fine-Tuning of the Universe (6:22)
Article: Btw, Evolution is Teological
Article: The Teleological Menace: Why Biology (Still) Requires God
Article: Purpose, Evolution, and Self-Replication
Lecture: An Argument from Biology by Dr. Sy Garte (37:58)
Video: Was Evolution Inevitable? (39:17)
THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIRE:
Overview: Argument from Desire
Video: How Our Desires Point to God (4:46)
Video: The Argument from Desire (5:03)
Paper: Re-Defending Arguments from Desire (.pdf, 25 pages)

“Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive… Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”
—Patricia Churchland

The Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism
J.B.S. Haldane and C.S. Lewis observed they would not be able to understand much if their minds were simply atoms having chemical reactions. In light of this, Alvin Plantinga argues that an organism would only need to develop adaptive beliefs, not true beliefs; yet our faculties of observation appear to be accurate; therefore, evolutionary theory reinforces theism and weakens naturalism. Cameron Bertuzzi shows with logical functions that evolution is more likely under theism than under naturalism.
Introduction: An Initial Statement of the Argument
Essay: C.S. Lewis’ Rewrite of Chapter III of Miracles
Article: Naturalism, Evolution, and Explaining Evil
Video: A Defense of the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism (1:14:46)
Book: Knowledge of God by Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley

Ian Hardy’s Naturalistic Argument for Religion
RIP to my friend Ian, who put it this way: “I’ve heard all their [atheistic] arguments a million times and they still cannot refute the fact that (1) religious people are the vast majority of people on the planet and (2) religious people reproduce more prodigiously than they do. Therefore, (3) religion is an evolutionary advantage, by their own standards, and they are inferior beings.”

“Scientific proof is based on showing that something is a fact by repeating the event in the presence of the person questioning the fact. It is done in a controlled environment where observations can be made, data drawn, and hypotheses empirically verified… If the scientific method were the only method we had for proving facts, you couldn’t prove that you watched television last night or that you had lunch today. There’s no way you could repeat those events in a controlled situation. The other method of proof, the legal-historical proof, is based on showing that something is a fact beyond reasonable doubt. In other words, we reach a verdict on the weight of the evidence and have no rational basis for doubting the decision.”
—Josh McDowell

The Kalam Cosmological Argument / Contingency Argument
The material universe did not exist in eternity past. It had a beginning. Al-Ghazali and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that contingent things (things which exist but do not have to exist) ultimately rely on the non-contingent to explain their existence. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas argued that the material universe was like a huge, interlocking mechanism, and its movement implies a first mover.
Video: Leibniz’ Contingency Argument (5:14)
Video: The Kalam Cosmological Argument Part 1: Scientific (4:12)
Video: The Kalam Cosmological Argument Part 2: Philosophical (6:23)
Article: No, the Big Bang Does not Disprove God
Article: A New Defense of the Kalam
Article: Thomas Aquinas, “The Argument from Motion”
Video: God’s Existence: Argument from First Cause (10:18)

The Axiological Argument
What we call “God” is goodness itself. Arguments against violent crimes and human rights violations are dependent upon the presupposition that good and evil are more than mere opinions or convenient fictions. Actions that are objectively evil are privations of God.
Video: The Moral Argument (5:01)
Video: Is There Meaning to Life? (5:38)
Video: The Axiological Argument (12:00)
Article: Two Serious Problems for Emotivism

The Ontological Argument
Is there an alternate reality in which the best possible being might exist?
Video: The Ontological Argument (4:40)
Video: The Ontological Argument for the Triune God (11:18)
Video: A New Ontological Argument (1:03:03)
Book: Religion and Creation by Keith Ward

The Problem of Evil
Evil and suffering are unavoidable even in the best of all possible worlds, and not incompatible with a theistic system. Moreover, theism makes sense of evil and suffering.
Video: Is God Good? (1:45)
Video: Suffering and Evil: The Logical Problem (4:47)
Video: Suffering and Evil: The Probability Version (8:19)
Video: The Problem of Evil: A Christian Response (55:28)

“When a scientist comes upon an anomaly in nature, does he give up science? When our space probe found braided rings around Jupiter, this was contrary to all scientific explanations. So do you remember when all the NASA scientists resigned because they couldn't explain it? ... Exactly. They didn't give up. They said, ‘Ah, there must be an explanation,’ and they continued to study. I approach the Bible the same way. It has proven over and over to be accurate even when I initially thought it wasn't. Why shouldn't I give it the benefit of the doubt now? ... When it has proven to be accurate over and over again in hundreds of details, the burden of proof is on the critic, not on the Bible.”
— Norman Geisler, PhD

Other Objections
Article: What You Can’t Do with a Multiverse
Article: What Genesis Actually Teaches
Video: Does Biblical Inerrancy Imply Young Earth Creationism? (1:33)
Video: The Origins of Young Earth Creationism (25:28)
Article: In Defense of the Genesis Flood
Article: How to Respond to Alleged Old Testament Atrocities
Article: You Say the Bible Advocates Slavery?
Video: Does the Bible Condone Slave Masters Beating Their Slaves? (19:23)
Article: Christian Belief as Wish Fulfillment
Article: Do Other Religions Show that Christian Belief is Unreliable?
Article: The Real History of the Crusades
Article: Banished from Humanity: C.S. Lewis and the Doctrine of Hell
Article: Hell and God’s Love: An Alternative, Orthodox View
Video: Meager Moral Fruits Argument (30:46)
Video: The Conquest of Canaan: Answering Objections (55:55)
Book: The Case for Faith by Lee Strobel
Book: Seven Days that Divide the World by John C. Lennox
Book: Is God a Moral Monster? by Paul Copan
Book: But Is it Real? by Amy Orr-Ewing

Problems of Atheism
Video: Is Atheism a Religion? (2:52)
Video: Is Determinism the True Nature of Reality? (5:59)
Video: Response to Scientism (13:13)
Video: Calling the Humanist Bluff (16:19)
Video: Quantum Physics Debunks Materialism (17:29)
Irreducible Mind: Neuroscientific Evidence (18:57), Hard Problem of Consciousness (17:05), Physicalist Arguments Debunked (38:46), Quantum Biology (22:27), Near Death Experiences (28:06)
Video: What New Atheists Get Wrong about History (55:19)
Book: Can Science Explain Everything? by John C. Lennox

Why not Be a Pagan?
Article: Why Pagans Aren’t Really Pagan
Video: The Case for Ancient Monotheism (54:56)
Interview: “Everything that Neo-Pagans said about Christianity was a Lie.”
Article: Troubled Souls: Spirituality as a Mental Health Hazard
Essay: C.S. Lewis on Pagan Philosophy as a Road to Christian Faith
Letter: Theophilus to Autolycus, Book I and Book II
Letter: The First Apology of Justin Martyr
Book: The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark
Book: The Conversion of Europe from Paganism to Christianity by Richard Fletcher
Book: Dancing with the Devil by Jeff Harshbarger

Almighty God, our Maker and Redeemer, we poor sinners confess to You that we are by nature sinful and unclean, and that we have sinned against You in thought, word and deed. Therefore we flee for refuge to Your infinite mercy and ask You for Christ’s sake, grant us forgiveness of all our sins, and by Your Holy Spirit increase in us true knowledge of You and of Your will and true obedience to Your Word, to the end that by Your grace we may come to eternal life, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.