Cold Case Christianity: Wallace fails trying to resurrect Turek's moral argument

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Why the University of Miami’s Chair for Atheism Confirms the Existence of God

Posted: 19 Mar 2018 01:02 AM PDT

Two years ago, the University of Miami established the Appignani Foundation Chair for the Study of Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics. It is the first of its kind, filled this year by a former “professor of metaphysics and the philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame.” Louis J. Appignani funded the position with a 2.2-million-dollar endowment, hoping to “legitimize the word ‘atheism’” in the public sphere by creating a foundation whose “founding principle asserts that the planet will only survive if ‘non-acceptance promoted by faith-based ideology’ is replaced by ‘rational scientific reasoning.’” The creation of this foundation, however, only confirms the existence of the God it seeks to replace.
In the original New York Times article, Appignani (himself a committed atheist) said, “I’m trying to eliminate discrimination against atheists, so this is a step in that direction…” In a recent interview with  The Atlantic he argued that “atheists are one of the few minority groups in the country to still be widely ostracized by society. While other marginalized populations, such as women and LGBT people… are active in American politics, that’s still not the case for atheists.” In essence, Appignani believes that atheists are being treated unfairly, and he funded the foundation in an effort to correct this morally inappropriate, discriminatory behavior.
As a theist (someone who believes in God), I can’t help but wonder what Appignani means by unfair or immoral in the first place. If atheism is true, after all, moral truths are simply subjective.

Morals being mere opinions, doesn't mean they don't exist.  The time you require your kids to go to bed on a school night is completely subjective, but nobody would saw your kids could therefore legitimately object to your parental authority in this on such grounds.   

In other words, they emerge from the beliefs of individuals, or groups of individuals (like communities or nations). Who decides if a behavior is right or wrong? Individuals or communities decide under atheism, because this worldview denies the existence of any transcendent moral judge, like God. But if individuals determine what is right or wrong, how are we to decide what is morally true when two individuals (or two groups of individuals) disagree?

There is no such thing as moral "truth", as morals are mere value judgments, and you might as well say that a grandmother hosting a garage sale is "wrong" to value a used lamp at $5.   There is no objective basis upon which to assign such value, which is precisely why people at garage sales often haggle.  There's no way to "prove" that the seller is asking too much or that the buyer is offering too little.

While it might be tempting for Appignani to appeal to “rational scientific reasoning,” history demonstrates that individuals can disagree, even on scientific grounds, and moral truths are entirely philosophical, rather than scientific.

And since Christianity is itself divided on exactly those subjects too, it has no more claim to be guided by a God who has the alleged answers to those problems, than secular society does.

If, as atheism must admit, moral truths come from people groups, the majority consensus is all that we can appeal to for direction.

And you cannot demonstrate any higher basis for morality than this, either. That's precisely why cultures and nations change through the years.  There is no objective basis for morality

Regardless, you are a fool to say majority consensus is all we have to appeal to.  Many moral changes can take place, being initiated by the minority and their grass roots efforts.  The U.S. Supreme Court's gay decision in Obergfell v. Hodges was prime case of the minority view eventually replacing a majority view.

As far as moral "guidance", we are guided by our childhood conditioning, the chemicals in our brains and bodies, our fear of jail or consequences, and our instinct, which causes us to agree or disagree with the majority on occasion.

But, when it comes to the way atheists are treated in America, Appignani appears to disagree with the majority consensus.

 There is nothing about atheism that says majority consensus is the only legitimate guide to morality.

He is correct in observing that most Americans are suspicious and distrusting of atheists. A 2016 Pew Research Center Poll revealed that more than half of us would be less likely to support an atheist for President, for example. Another recent study even revealed that atheists are suspicious of atheists.

And Christians are suspicious of other Christians, as testified to most abundantly by the likes of Christian Research Institute and 2,000 years of internal disagreement and finger-pointing.  So?

And here-in-lies the dilemma for Appignani if atheism is true.
If most of us agree that distrust and suspicion of atheists is morally acceptable and fair (and this appears to be the case in America), on what grounds can an atheist object?

We call it "fuck the majority, in this matter we find our own intuition better than the majority view."

To whom (or what) can the atheist appeal?

To arguments that the majority view is worse for society than the atheist perspective.

And you Christians fare no better.  Despite your alleged access to God to resolve moral dilemmas, you have experienced denominational splits on moral and not just theological issues, for 2,000 years.  Apparently, adding a "thus saith the Lord" to whatever moral position you take, doesn't actually solve the problem of the two people disagreeing with each other.

The majority has already made its moral proclamation on the matter, and for every reasoned argument related to “survival of the fittest” (or any other atheistic standard), his or her counterpart could make an equally reasoned counter-argument. To whom or what then could the atheist even appeal for a decision about the rational, reasonability of the arguments?

By analysis of the presuppositions behind those arguments.  Furthermore, you use of polls is just stupid, as atheists come in all moral and ethical flavors, just like Christians.  If the majority of people think Christians are more trustworthy, they are sorely mistaken. 

In both situations, humans would be the final moral and rational arbiters, and if history has taught us anything, it’s demonstrated that humans can find a way to twist their moral reasoning to suit their own nefarious purposes.

Aren't Christians guilty of the same?  You consistently fail to tip the balance in favor of Christianity, Wallace.

Theism offers a better alternative. If God exists, moral truth is grounded not in the minds or opinions of humans, but in the nature of God.

But with so many Christians disagreeing about the nature of God (Calvinists seriously think God infallibly predestined all child rapists to perform they rapes they did, and because of the decree's infallibility, there was no possibility that the rapist could avoid it or choose to act differently), apparently adding "thus saith the Lord" to whatever moral position you take, doesn't fix the problem.  

Christians would hardly be as divided on gun control, birth control, abortion, death penalty, military service, etc, if God existed or was interested in providing them the "right" answer to these moral issues.

And if we assume the bible is the basis for morality, have fun showing from the bible that a 25 year old man, living in a country where adult-child marriages are legal, is morally wrong to marry and have sex with his 8 year old child-bride. God was apparently more worried about homosexuality and bestiality than he was about pedophilia.  Romans 7:7, if it's not mentioned in the Mosaic Law, you cannot show that it is a sin. So why do you believe sex within adult-child marriages would have been a sin in the eyes of the Hebrews living in the days of Moses, Wallace?  

Moral righteousness is a reflection of His Divine nature,

Not if the Christian debate on killing children in OT days has anything to say about it.  Google Lydia McGrew and Matthew Flannagan.  What, does God have a schizophrenic divine nature?  How could Christian scholars disagree about God's morals, if the issue was as capable of definitive resolution as you imply?

and humans can appeal to this nature to decide between right and wrong

 and doing that resulted in little more than a Christianity that become more and more internally splinterred over the last 2,000 years.

Moral reformers like Martin Luther King Jr. (himself a Baptist minister) understood this. He began a movement as an individual who held a minority moral view; he would have been powerless to effect change if moral truths were determined by the majority.

Well you were wrong, most mature adults do not feel constrained to act a certain way merely because the majority happens to see it that way.  Martin Luther could have accomplished his moral reform even if he never mentioned god.  God was added because he was addressing a nation that was predominantly Christian, but the basis for equality of the races is the U.S Constitution, not "god" or "bible".

King, instead, successfully appealed to a transcendent moral standard to make his case.

he reminded a racist America that their own bible said all men are made in the image of God.

That doesn't constitute going to "god" for guidance, that only constitutes appealing to the popular authority for argument.  You can often prove a currently popular mormon belief wrong by appeal to how the original book of Mormon read, or how original Mormonism viewed something...but that is hardly an appeal to "god", except in the eyes if the Mormon.

If Martin Luther King Jr.’s example, as a believer, is invalid to someone like Appignani, he might consider the words of a fellow atheist, C. S. Lewis, who, before becoming a believer, argued against the existence of God based on the injustice he observed in the world. He eventually realized his definition of injustice only confirmed God’s existence:

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust?

Easy, people naturally feel anything that inhibits them from doing what they want to do is "unjust".

A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.

Correct, and we all have "some idea" of what actions are morally good/bad.  That hardly implies 'god'.

What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

You were comparing it to your own desires.  Whatever gets in your way, you feel is immoral.

…Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too—for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies.” (from Mere Christianity)

But 'really' unjust only goes back to one's personal feeling.  i feel that rape is unjust because the women is being harmed.  I suppose if I had been raised to believe women were of inferior status and their experiencing harm was less important than when a man feels harmed, I might have a different view.  

I hope the new Appignani Foundation Chair for the Study of Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics will begin its study by examining the basis for that thing at the end of its title: “ethics.” They just may find that moral and ethical principles are more than a matter of personal or cultural opinion.

They already know that.  Unfortunately, dishonest Christian apologists often capitalize upon an unbelievers choice to speak in a normal unguarded way.  If I say that rape is immoral, I'm NOT appealing to a standard any higher than the standard I was raised with and the standard of the society in which I live.  And indeed, the world shows us that your mind can be conditioned to believe that actions most Americans view as immoral, are good.  We would not expect the mind to be that malleable if there were some other-dimensional invisible friend planting his absolute values in our hearts.  you cannot blame that on "sin", since in the bible, God instructs his own followers to do things you think are immoral, such as burning teenage prostitutes to death (Leviticus 21:9).  Nothing could be more obvious than that the barbaric morality of the OT reflects absolutely nothing but the minds of the ancient brutes who wrote it.

Transcendent moral truths confirm the existence of a transcendent moral truth giver.

That follows logically, unfortunately, there are no transcendent moral truths.   A grown man having sexual intercourse with a 4 year old girl is not wrong for transcendent reasons, its wrong because of purely naturalistic and subjective reasons; the child needs to grow up to realize the purpose of being conceived and born, and this is threatened if she is raped, and even brute animals instinctively retaliate when their young are treated in a way that threatens their lives (i.e., you don't need to be made in the image of god to recognize that some act is immoral), and the pain caused to the girl is a universal sign that something is contrary to the normal order, that's why we have a sense of pain (which is admittedly not perfect, since not all pain is bad, pain from a workout hurts, but builds up muscle). 

You cannot analyze that situation apart from the sense of conditioned morality you already have.  And you don't have jack shit in the bible to show that sex within adult-child marriages is immoral or sinful, and you sure as hell have no interest in having a scholarly discussion about those few passages that you think proscribe it.

If Appignani’s foundation truly seeks to correct a transcendent injustice such as discrimination, it will first have to admit the existence of a transcendent, just God.

 Nah, we get rid of the transcendent by pointing out that a) our motive to call some act immoral arises from purely naturalistic desires, and b) all talk about any "non-physical" intelligence "transcending" the human level is, as David Hume said, nothing but sophistry and illusion.  Your God is nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Cold Case Christianity: Why do most people believe in miracles? Because they lack critical thinking skills and prefer what feels good to what's most likely

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Why Almost Everyone Believes in the Miraculous

Posted: 16 Mar 2018 01:00 AM PDT

As an atheist, I considered myself a committed philosophical naturalist, and I rejected supernatural explanations related to scientific or historical inquiry. If I encountered an ancient account describing a supernatural event, I immediately rejected it as “history” and assigned it to the category of “mythology.”

You still do that as a Christian, at least with respect to ancient stories that aren't in the bible.  When you say you are open to the possibility that ancient pagan accounts of miracles are describing something miraculous, you don't do so because you find the account historically compelling, but solely to avoid the criticism that you only believe biblical accounts of miracles.  Telling me that you think miracles happen in ancient pagan religions, but that these were accomplished by use of black arts and demons, merely shows your willful ignorance.  You have no compelling evidence that demons exist, just like you have no compelling evidence that miracles ever happen.  The only reason you don't openly discount all ancient pagan miracle claims is because you know you will be hit with the "you-only-believe-ancient-accounts-of-miracles-when-they-appear-in-the-bible" criticism. Other than that, you couldn't give a fuck less about Caesar's ghost rising to heaven from the funeral pyre, or about a cow giving birth to a lamb as Josephus asserted.

Unfortunately, the fact that you haven't spent near as much time investigating the ancient pagan miracle claims as you have spent investigating Christianity, prevents you from completely covering up your obvious bias against anything that it outside the bible.Your present commitments to Christ as a "bible-believing" Christian would also naturally require that you spend little to no time "investigating" ancient pagan miracle claims and devote most of your time to promoting your own religion.

True history, after all, cannot involve supernatural fictions. As with most atheists, miracles were not part of my worldview, even though many of my Christian co-workers seemed quite comfortable with them.

Did you also, during your atheism, deny the miracle-healings alleged by televangelists and others?

Now, many years later, I’ve come to realize I also believed in miracles, even when I was a philosophical naturalist. Dictionary.com provides the following definition of a “miracle”:

1. An effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.

Given this definition, nearly everyone believes in one kind of miracle or another, including those who reject the existence of a supernatural God.

Then you were an incredibly stupid atheist. No wonder you write incredibly stupid apologetics books and obsessively mistake promotion of yourself as promotion of Jesus.

Even as an atheist, I accepted the reasonable reality of at least one supernatural event. The Standard Cosmological Model (SCM) of naturalism is still the “Big Bang Theory,” a hypothesis that proposes that all space, time, and matter (the attributes of the natural universe) had a beginning (at a point of “cosmological singularity”).

I was right, you were an incredibly stupid atheist, given how many scientific and metaphysical problems there are in standard big bang cosmology, and which could have been found through reasonable study even back before the 90's.

I accepted the SCM wholeheartedly as an atheist, even though the model presented a problem for my naturalistic worldview. If the SCM is true, we are living in a caused universe (whatever begins to exist must be caused; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe must be caused).

No, your appeal to the kalam cosmological argument is unavailing.  The only reason "whatever begins to exist must be caused" sounds reasonable, is because we often say something "came into existence" when in reality it was just a new reconfiguration of previously existing atoms.

If by "whatever begins to exist must be caused", you mean "any new configuration of preexisting atoms must be caused", there is no problem, we see that happening all day every day.  The metal that makes up a car once existed only as ore in the earth.  Of course that metal ore taking the new shape of the car, or the car "coming into existence" had to be "caused".

But...if by "whatever begins to exist must be caused", you mean there are some things that were formed from new atomic substructures that didn't previously exist in any way, shape or form, then you have no evidence that this particular type of "creation" has ever occurred, which means that first premise of your Kalam argument is bullshit, which means your Kalam argument, built upon bullshit premises as it is, fails.

Which means you don't have an argument that anything was ever created by new unprecedented matter, and that means you kiss goodbye your "Creation Ex Nihilo" interpretation of Genesis 1:1.

Which means you fail to overcome the implications of the 1st law of thermodynamics, namely, matter and energy have always existed, the only "begin to exist" that ever happens is when preexisting materials are reconfigured to make a different form. Sure, that book on your coffee table "didn't exist" 15 years ago, but the paper it is made out of did, in the form of a tree or other preexisting object.

You have ZERO evidence that any such thing as brand new creation or creation "ex nihilo" has ever occurred.

The cause of this universe, however, could not have been spatial, temporal, or material (because these attributes of the natural realm came into existence as a result of the cause).

There is no compelling evidence that the universe was created or once didn't exist.  Quite the contrary, the Hubble Deep Field shows exactly what we'd expect if space were infinite...as far as our best telescopes can peer into space, there appear little more than an endless field of stars, galaxies and supervoids.  There is literally no end to it.  You might have to deprogram yourself of some prior bad thinking habits before you can appreciate that the limitations normally applicable to earthly things we ponder about, would not apply to the entire cosmos.

As Thomas Aquinas first argued, something cannot cause itself to come into existence because it would have to exist before it could bring itself into being, and this is clearly absurd.

Sure, but since you have no evidence that your specific type of "come into existence" has ever occurred in the first place, Aquinas' trifle doesn't benefit you here.

So, even as an atheist, I believed there was a non-spatial, a-temporal, immaterial first cause of the universe.

I was right, you were an incredibly stupid atheist.

Let’s return to our definitions for a moment to examine the meaning of “supernatural”:

1. Of, pertaining to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal.

Our non-spatial, a-temporal, immaterial first cause clearly fits within this definition of “supernatural,” doesn’t it?

If you give credence to things supported by zero evidence, then yes.

The cause of the universe is, by definition, “above or beyond what is natural” in that it does not possess the attributes of the natural realm (it is not spatial, temporal, or material) and cannot be explained “by natural law.”

One atheist argument is the argument from the incoherence of religious language. You people are always talking about what is "above or beyond what is natural", when in fact anything that exists thus qualifies to be called "natural". God is no less natural than trees, IF she exists.  Therefore, the whole "natural/supernatural" debate is a classic case of deceptive semantics.  That dichotomy doesn't actually exist, it was invented so as to keep God separate from the "world" and to be thus more "biblical", but from a purely metaphysical perspective, there's no more reason to say God is "above" nature than there is to say that fish are. And certain biblical passages, by crediting God as the basis for all material things, tends to support a pantheism you don't believe it, even if the biblical authors themselves fallaciously refused to go what their own logic led.

As it turns out, the most spectacular and impressive miracle recorded in the Bible is actually found in the opening line of Genesis Chapter 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

It's a wonderful story, I'll grant you that.  But we also grant a floating sleighs when speaking to children and people who need to grow the fuck up.  Then again, if you can find a bunch of people to oooo and ahhh at you because they also believe the fairy tale, then by all means, engage in the herd-mentality that macro evolution conditioned you to engage in.  You survive better when you believe your social support structure approves of you.  It's how the Mormonism grew by leaps and bounds in the last 150 years, despite the fact that their Book of Mormon is an obvious fraud.

Christians believe the beginning of the universe to be a supernatural miracle. Atheists agree.

Go fuck yourself, count me out.  I am an atheist who denies the traditional big bang model, and by crediting the evidence that the universe is infinite in size and extent, there is no "beginning" to it that needs to be trifled about. And you apparently are still blissfully unaware of the many atheists who cite to the traditional Big Bang model as evidence against God.

You also say nothing about the obvious discord there is between a primal cosmic explosion, and the purposeful divine artistry that the Genesis 1 author ascribes to God.  the originally intended and mostly illiterate readers or hearers of Genesis 1 would never have construed that account of creation to have involved some gigantic explosion and millions of years of time. Yet, how the text was likely understood by its originally intended audience is a normative rule of hermeneutics.  You need to worry more about what Genesis 1 is teaching, and less about how to "reconcile" what it says with modern cosmology.

As a skeptic investigating the claims of Christianity, I eventually had to admit I also accepted at least one supernatural, miraculous event, and if I was willing to accept there might be a force capable of accomplishing something this remarkable, the lesser miracles described in the New Testament seemed much less implausible.

I was right, you were an incredibly stupid atheist, given that academic and scientific opposition to the traditional Big Bang model existed even back in the days when you were an atheist. Apparently, something other than concern to investigate thoroughly was driving you toward Christianity.

As an atheist, my “reasonable” account of the history of the universe included a miraculous event. How could I then reject the Christian accounts of the Jesus’ life and ministry just because they also included miraculous events?

Easy; because the gospel stories contain obvious embellishments from pre-Christian pagan religious concepts, like virgin birth, going to the underworld, coming back to life, etc, etc.  

Gee, Wallace, if the "miracle" of the creation of the universe stopped you from classifying the gospel stories as fiction, did it also stop you from classifying other non-biblical ancient miracle stories as fiction?

Did you do as much research into Herodotus' miracle claims as you did into biblical claims?

Or did you predict that your results from researching ancient pagan authors probably wouldn't sell very well?

To be consistent, all of us (theists and atheists included) need to suspend our presuppositional biases against the supernatural to assess the claims of Christianity fairly.

That's right, if somebody comes to us saying they can prove that the things that went bump in the night in the Amityville Horror House were actually demons, we should forget all the evidence indicating the story was total bullshit and allow this ignoramus to make their case first.  FUCK YOU.

Do you suspend your Christian beliefs when an atheist gives you an argument you haven't heard before?

If so, you aren't being very biblical, the bible's comments on investigating things NEVER express or imply that you should be open to Christianity being false.

If you don't suspend your Christian presuppositions when listening to atheist arguments you haven't heard before, you are a hypocrite to expect atheists to suspend their atheist presuppositions when dealing with a Christian argument they haven't heard before, for then you expect your adversaries to be more objective than you expect yourself to be.

The truly biblical Christian doesn't say "I'll go wherever the evidence leads."

The truly biblical Christian will instead bring every thought captive to Christ:

 3 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh,
 4 for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.
 5 We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, (2 Cor. 10:3-5 NAU)

 The truly biblical Christian dons a tinfoil hat and talks to himself like we talk to children:

 8 Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. (1 Pet. 5:8 NAU)

You Christians have thus adopted a view that inhibits you from being as objective as you could be.

Contrariwise, atheists have no creed or magical book requiring them to take every thought captive to naturalism, or that some invisible enemy is responsible for causing them to doubt their atheism.  FUCK YOU.

Cold Case Christianity: Mark's textual variation from the other 3 gospels destroys Christianity

This is my reply to a post by J. Warner Wallace entitled

How Can the Bible Be Inerrant If It Contains Variants? (Cold Case Christianity Broadcast #106)

Posted: 15 Mar 2018 01:45 AM PDT

In this episode of the Cold-Case Christianity Broadcast, J. Warner answers listener email about the existence of variants in the earliest manuscripts we have for the New Testament. Does the fact that ancient copies of the Gospels don’t agree entirely mean that we can’t trust them?

 Yes.  The consensus of Christian scholars is that Mark intended to end his gospel at 16:8.

The consensus of Christian scholars is that Mark is the earliest published of the 4 canonical gospels.

If we  put these two facts together (i.e., the earliest gospel said nothing about a resurrected Jesus being seen by anybody) then we are reasonable to conclude that the correct form of the gospel (the earlier version of the story is usually closer to the truth, its the retellings years later that usually contain all the add-ons and embellishments) does not assert the existence of any person actually physically witnessing a resurrected Jesus. 

Wallace might be talking about textual variants in the existing ancient manuscripts of the NT, but Mark's resurrection story, being textually shorter and less embellished than those of Matthew, Luke and John, provides the unbeliever with rational warrant for saying the eyewitness testimony to Jesus rising from the dead, is limited to later embellished gospels, not the original, and that of course makes legitimate the question of whether the whole "resurrection eyewitness testimony" stuff is pure fiction.  If it was original, why does it only appear in the later versions of the gospel?

If Mark believed the resurrected Jesus made all the appearances to the disciples that we know from the endings of Matthew and Luke and John, would Mark have "chosen to exclude" such stories?  Obviously not, especially if we assume he agreed with apostle Paul and all other Christian "apologists" that Jesus' resurrection from the dead is the main pillar upon which Christianity rests.

How does this impact our notion of Biblical inerrancy?

Jesus and Paul told you everything you need to know to be true and spiritually growing Christian.

Not once did they ever express or imply, by word or their own actions, that Christians should go around trying to convince the world that there are no errors in the scriptures.  In the days of Jesus and Paul, the Old Testament was the authoritative 'scripture', yet despite the obvious fact that there would have been professional philosophers who put no stock in such holy books (Acts 17), never once does the NT indicate that Jesus or any of his followers ever tried to convince unbelievers or other "liberal" Christians that the Old Testament was free from all mistakes/errors.  And in Acts 17, when the Gentile philosophers laugh at Paul's bullshit, he leaves immediately:

 30 "Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent,
 31 because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead."
 32 Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some began to sneer, but others said, "We shall hear you again concerning this."
 33 So Paul went out of their midst.
 34 But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them. (Acts 17:30-34 NAU)

But if that passage were modified to reflect modern Christian apologists and their ways, it would read like this:

 30 "God cannot overlook times of ignorance because he is all-holy and must punish sin according to his infinite nature.  God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent,
 31 because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.  However, a day with the Lord is as a thousand years, so while you need to live as if each step was the end, the end probably won't come for thousands of years.   Therefore it can be correct to for Jesus to say in the first century that the end is near, and yet for the end to still be thousands of years into the future."
 32 Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some began to sneer, but others said, "We shall hear you again concerning this."
 33 So Paul stayed there and issued to them the chicken-challenge, taunting them to prove an error in the bible.  Some said this, others said that, and Paul wrangled words with them for many months.

So any Christian of today who chooses to make "bible inerrancy" an issue, is a hypocrite and fool.   And Lord knows, the way the inerrancy debate has played out in the last 2,000 years of Christianity, Jesus probably thinks all "apologists" for inerrancy are just as guilty as the Pharisees of straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, and neglecting the more important matters in the process.