Answering Cerebral Faith's 4 questions, plus a whole lot more...

This is my reply to an article by Evan Minton entitled

Cerebral Faith

4 Questions Everyone Investigating The Case For Christianity Should Ask Themselves

posted by Evan Minton on July 09, 2019  

When it comes to investigating the evidences and arguments for and against worldviews, we need to realize that we human beings are not mere thinking machines; only considering the facts and logic, and generating conclusions based on hard, cold rationality. We're not perfect, and one of the effects of the fall said by theologians is said to be "The Noetic Effect", that the sin nature affects our ability to reason properly.

Maybe that explains why apostle Paul prohibited the very type of "word-wrangling" that you ceaselessly engage in:

 12 If we endure, we will also reign with Him; If we deny Him, He also will deny us;
 13 If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.
 14 Remind them of these things, and solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle about words, which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearers. 15 Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.
 16 But avoid worldly and empty chatter, for it will lead to further ungodliness, (2 Tim. 2:12-16 NAU)

That is, while you should do 'apologetics' you must still avoid "wrangling words".  See Titus 3:9-11 for an example of Paul's idea of how to convince those who are in error.  they get two chances to shut up and confess Paul's belief true. If they persist in disagreeing with Paul, you avoid them thereafter.  There is no "constantly discussing" the issue.  Like so many other apologetics blogs and websites, you appear dedicated to violated this word-wrangling prohibition with all of your might, on a rather consistent basis.

Then you increase your sin by using your word-wrangles as a means to make money, by asking people to donate money and in exchange they can have more access to your word-wrangles.

Sin doesn't completely debilitate us from reasoning. If that were the claim, it would be self-refuting in nature for we could ask "Did you use your reason to come to the conclusion that you cannot trust reason?"

Good point, so apparently you agree that Paul erred by pushing the human/pot analogy too far in Romans 9:20-22?  I have to wonder why Paul didn't absolve sinners of sin right there, since under his pressing logic, pots avoid doing lots of things, such as "sinning".

Nevertheless, we need to be aware that biases, emotional like or dislike of implications, and other things can lead us away from the truth.

So can the belief that the Holy Spirit is empowering you to believe whatever you believe.  This "holy spirit" crap is precisely what makes many fundamentalists equally as close-minded to their errors as you think atheists are.  What's sad is that you'd think by being at least "Christians", the fundamentalists would have a somewhat better track record of recognizing when they have erred.  But no.

None of us is immune, whether we are Christian or Non-Christian, and each one of us needs to do deep introspection when we're evaluating competing systems of thought.

on the contrary, you are to blindly presuppose that anything against Christ is automatically from the devil:

24 The Lord's bond-servant must not be quarrelsome, but be kind to all, able to teach, patient when wronged,
 25 with gentleness correcting those who are in opposition, if perhaps God may grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth,
 26 and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil, having been held captive by him to do his will. (2 Tim. 2:24-26 NAU)

Minton continues:

In this blog post, I will mention 5 questions we need to pose to ourselves and meditate upon when it comes to evaluating whether Christianity is true or false.
 Question 1: If I Knew Beyond a Reasonable Doubt That Christianity Were True, Would I Follow Christ?

Yes.  But that answer means nothing useful, since I might decide that the Christianity that is "true" is Marcion's gospel, which said the OT YHWH was a demon.  So my ability to be objective and answer your question "yes" doesn't really accomplish much in your eyes unless I get lucky enough to pick the particular set of beliefs YOU say are essential to salvation.

The first thing you need to decide is whether or not if Christianity were demonstrated to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, you'd become one of Christ's followers. If you knew God existed, would you worship Him?

No.  that would be about as dumb as a lower life form worshipping YOU merely because you are in fact, a higher life form.  Well your being a higher life form doesn't automatically imply that anything you do is morally good or realistic. 

Would you try to live the life that God wants you to live?

Not if you are talking about the god of the OT.  No, I wouldn't go around killing children even if I was convinced the bible-god was telling me to do it for the sake of his mysteriously good reasons.  I'd instead tell him to fuck off, just like I'd tell any enemy that is more powerful than I, to fuck off.

Furthermore I don't see any reason to give a fuck about obeying God, given that the arguments for literal conscious eternal torment are themselves unbiblical and contradict the type of justice the bible says God requires.  So disobeying god would only result in me dying and going out of existence, something I already believe will happen and have no fear of.

Would you give up anything in your life that He considers sin?

Jesus told his followers that giving up custody of their kids would cause material and spiritual abundance to flow into their lives (Matthew 19:29), but you are crazy if you think I'd follow that kind of advice 2,000 years after the fact.

If you hesitate or if your answer is no, then your problem is not with regards to the strength of the evidence for Christianity or lack thereof, your problem is either emotional or moral.

That's right.  Your God threatened to cause men to rape women (Isaiah 13:15-17), and like you, I consider rape to be without rational justification, so whoever causes rape is IMO best avoided or killed.

In other words, you simply don't want Christianity to be true.

If you mean I don't want to serve a god that inflicts rape and torture on children, then yes, like you, I cannot imagine myself ever giving in to the whims of such sadistic lunacy.

If Christianity were true, then you would have to repent or else face judgment.

Correction:  if the Christianity YOU believe is the right form, were true, then we'd have to repent or else face judgment.  But as far as I can tell, the Christianity of the NT contradicts the OT god's standard of justice and is not consistent about the nature of hell, so once again, I don't see the danger in telling your pedophile savior Christ to fuck off.  It apparently involves as much danger as giving the bird to the driver who cuts me off in traffic.  Let's just say I'm not exactly fearful of the wrath of an obviously fictitious god.

Rather than live life in open rebellion against God knowing that Hell awaits, they comfort themselves by talking themselves into believing that The Bible is nothing but a book a fairy tales.

But hell is contrary to the OT god's standard of justice.  So it's reasonable for me to react to the contradiction by viewing the OT as the golden standard.  Therefore eternal hell does NOT await.  Only physical death and extinction of consciousness...something I already accept without fear.

It's much easier to live your life in sin if you can convince yourself that there isn't someone who's going to hold you accountable beyond the grave.

If you intended to talk to stupid shit juvenile delinquents, then i guess you had a point.  But most of your readers aren't that depraved, so your characterizing them as living in sin is questionable at best and insulting at worst.  If you are so fanatical that you think I'm "sinning" by going to work everyday, guying groceries, paying the bills, and doing the daily routine most other Americans do, then i'm afraid your fanaticism puts you beyond any possibility of reasoning with.  You might not say its good to play with live rattlesnakes in church, but your bigotry and closed-mindedness are still as intense as it is for those fools.

If Christianity is true, then several implications follow.

But only after you've reasonably decided which denomination is true.  You aren't going to do that...not with evangelicals themselves being in so much disagreement they've been fighting each other for years over every biblical thing except perhaps Jesus' gender.

It means that if you're living in sin, you'll have to repent.

I'm not living in sin.  Sin presupposes god's existence.  God doesn't exist, for the same reason that bwickfullmers don't gofleding.  "God" is an incoherent concept.

Jesus said that if you even look at a woman with lust, you've committed adultery in your heart (Matthew 5:28), and adultery is one of the things God said not to do (Exodus 20:14).

But Jesus' refusal to insist on the death penalty for any man who lusts after a woman, indicates his disagreement with Moses.  You will say Jesus is God and can modify his law at will, but I say the prohibition on adultery is something Frank Turek would say emanates from God's morally good "nature", and therefore God can no more allow exceptions to his mandated justice, than you can choose to levitate yourself over a traffic jam.

If you like to spend your evenings downloading and looking at pornography, you'll have to get that out of your life or answer to God for it (2 Corinthians 5:10).

Or we can blame God, who, like the parent guilty of child neglect, has the power to make us do whatever he wants (Ezra 1:1, and Cyrus was a pagan idolater whose sins were therefore far worse than merely gazing at nude women), but who chooses to avoid employing that magic fairy dust. 

But porn watchers don't want to do that. Watching porn is fun! It's exciting! Porn watchers don't want to give up porn because they enjoy it too much.

If God didn't want me to watch porn, he'd use his Ezra 1:1 magic fairy dust to convince me otherwise.  If that crap works on pagan idolaters like Cyrus, well, I don't fuck animals or burn children alive, so if your god has a method of convincing that works on sinners far worse than myself, your god is a dumb fuck and therefore less likely a higher life form and more likely a fiction or lower life form.

Others may want to sleep around, bouncing from woman to woman. According to Hebrews 13:4, this is a no-no. If someone engaged in this behavior doesn't repent, they'll be facing judgment.

But the OT doesn't condemn the single guy who has sex with a non-virgin woman, and since you aren't allowed to add to the word of the Lord, (Deut. 4:12), that type of activity cannot be called sin.  See Romans 7:7 if you think you could have discovered coveting was sin without seeing it condemned in the Law.

Romans 1:26-28, 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, and 1 Timothy 1:9-11 prohibit homosexual relationships. Some people don't want Christianity to be true because it means they'll have to stop having sex with their same-sex partner.

Agreed, but i'm not homosexual, so, dismissed.  But you might wish to send those verses to James Patrick Holding. He is a closet homosexual or else was before I started telling the world the evidence for it, as abundantly documented at this blog.

2 Corinthians 6:14 prohibits a believer marrying an unbeliever. Some people may not want Christianity to be true because they know that if it is, they need to become Christians or else they face Hell, and if they're Christians themselves, they'll be prohibited from marrying their boyfriend or girlfriend who is also an unbeliever.

You are assuming Christianity's truth involves apostle Paul.  I say Paul was a heretic and liar, so Paul's legalistic bullshit wouldn't really bother me.  I'd become a follower of Christ, not a follower of his dishonest followers.

For many people, it's a purely intellectual issue. Merely being presented with the evidence for Christianity, as I've done in several posts on this blog and as I've done in my books, will be sufficient to persuade them to become Christians. For others, they will talk themselves out of any argument, no matter how compelling it otherwise would be. They have to. Their autonomy is at stake.

Not according to 5 point Calvinists.  According to them, we resist the gospel because God infallibly decreed that we resist the gospel.  Then God judges us with pain and punishment for doing exactly what he wanted, when he wanted, where he wanted, how he wanted, while he was pulling our puppet strings in those directions the whole time.

This is why the Christian Apologist and Oxford mathematician John Lennox said: "If religion is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark, then atheism is a fairy tale for those afraid of the light."

Cute talking point.  Dismissed.

1 Lennox was echoing the words of Jesus; "This is the verdict; that light has come into the world, but people loved the darkness rather than the light for their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will come nowhere near the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed." (John 3:19-20).

And what would you think of an atheist who says "everyone who resists atheism is resisting correct knowledge"?  If sound bytes don't convince you, how can you expect sound bytes to convince us?

Ask yourself, am I suppressing the truth in my unrighteousness?

No, in fact you and most other apologists studiously avoid debating me despite the fact that I always argue on the merits.  Maybe you should ask yourself the same question.  You deal with me, and you start giving your readers less reasons to donate money to your word-wrangling ventures. 

Is my love of sin overriding my love for finding the truth?

No, I have extensively reviewed and meticulously falsified the dogshit put out by Habermas, Craig and Licona.

Do I love truth when it enlightens me, but hate it when it convicts me?

Maybe.  So what?  You are a sinner, your Christianity does nothing to make you more welcoming of uncomfortable truth, as evidenced by the obvious fact that you refuse to debate me.  I've said too much and debated too often for you to pretend that I'm just too ignorant.  Your motive to avoid debating me is your fear that actual truth might be different than what you've chosen to make money with.

Love of sin is not the only non-intellectual "reason" you might have for rejecting Christ. Perhaps, like Charles Darwin,3 you know that if Christianity is true, someone you loved who died as a non-believer is in Hell. If you can convince yourself there is no God and there is no Hell, you don't need to walk around with that uncomfortable thought. But, our feelings do not determine truth. How you feel about Christian doctrine is irrelevant to whether or not it's true.

But not irrelevant to whether I have rational warrant for rejecting your religion.  And yes, I've already decided that rape cannot be morally justified, so I am smart and wise to say "fuck you" to any notion of a higher life form that threatens women with rape, such as your God (Isaiah 13:15-17, Deut. 28:30).

Question 2: What Evidence Would I Expect There To Be If Christianity Is True and Is This Expectation Reasonable?
 The second question you need to ask yourself is how what kind of evidence you would expect to find if Christianity were true? What kind of evidence are you looking for that would lead you to say there is or is not any evidence?

What kind of evidence would convince you that space aliens control your thoughts from another dimension?

For me, a universe with an ex nihilo beginning that is impeccably fine-tuned to permit life to exist on both the cosmic and local levels,

The universe did not have a beginning, see 1st law of thermodynamics (matter cannot be created nor destroyed, only changed).

The Big Bang and you and Turek depend so heavily on, is considered unbiblical, unscientific, and a lie of the devil by multiple creationist Christian organizations like AiG and ICR.

Life is nothing but the natural result of the circumstances.  Gazing in wild wonder at life on earth is about as smart as gazing in wild wonder that mold grows in damp attics, or that a cup holds water.

the existence of the moral law,

Sorry, there are no objective or absolute morals.  You aren't meeting your burden by simply blurting out "thou shalt not torture babies to death solely for entertainment" and then pretending the debate is foreclosed thereby.  You are forgetting that there is a very good but purely naturalistic reason most people find baby torture immoral, and you would be forgetting that your own god tortured at least one baby for 7 days before allowing it to die (2nd Samuel 12:15-18).  All of the atrocities you think are absolutely immoral, are caused by God, including parental cannibalism and murder (Deut. 28:15-63, 32:39).

the modal possibility of the existence of a Maximally Great Being,

your worship of Anselm is truly revolting, since, like the term "god" itself, "maximally great being" is also incoherent, as "greatness" is horrifically subjective. 

and five historical facts about Jesus' death and what happened afterward and the fact that only the resurrection can account for all five of those facts is exactly what I would expect if Christianity were true.

You were already schooled by me on why those five facts do not place any intellectual compulsion on the skeptic, but you chose to let me have the final word, and you walked away from that debate.

If Christianity were false, the universe should have always existed,

Good call.  it has.

the possibility of biological life should be way more probable,

It is.  If another planet formed the way earth did, similarly near to its home star, there is no reason to think life wouldn't eventually form.

we should have no moral law written on our hearts,

We don't.  According to your bible, those morals come from a stick.  See Proverbs 22:15.

a Maximally Great Great Being should be conceptually incoherent,

it is.  What's greater, a god who can play guitar as fast as Paul Gilbert, or a god who has decided to avoid learning how to play the guitar?  Or did you forget that Paul prohibited you from word-wrangling?

and Jesus' tomb should have remained occupied with all of his disciples moving on with their lives as they did before they even met Jesus.

No, you need to surf youtube if you think religion cannot cause people to believe crazy shit upon little or no evidence.  And the evidence for the empty tomb is laughable.

But we don't live in that kind of world. 4
 However, that's just me. What kind of evidence are you looking for?

Can it be reasonable for me to arrive at that time in my life when I think I don't need to examine Mormon claims anymore, and to therefore draw a skeptical conclusion about it's ultimate nature? 

Then it can also be reasonable for me to consider that I've done enough study of the bible to justify drawing a skeptical conclusion about its ultimate nature.  You don't know where to draw that line, so you'll pardon me if I draw it for myself.

If you say "there's no evidence", you must either have not encountered the aforementioned evidence or else they don't fit your definition of evidence.

There's plenty of evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.  But it is so horrifically lacking in plausibility and authentication that it isn't worthy of credence.

Moreover, is what kind of evidence you're looking for reasonable to expect if the Christian worldview is true?

Christianity is too convoluted and contradictory to predict what kind of evidence should be showing itself if the religion were true.  What kind of evidence would you expect if "aliens control my thoughts from another dimension" were true?

Perhaps your epistemology is too restrictive. There are those who hold to a view called Scientism. This view asserts that the only truth that can be known is what can be tested by science.

That's true.  The more you push data that can be seen and heard, the more you testify, even if unwittingly to the stupidity of being open to messages from aliens living in other dimensions.

If this view is true, then supernatural entities like God, angels, demons, souls, et. al. cannot be known since they cannot be tested by science.

Sure, there might be truth out there science cannot currently detect, but if that's the case, YOU wouldn't know about it either, because you don't provide any justification to think you are some special person with special powers to peer into the unknown.

Although, I do think that science can provide evidence in a premise in a philosophical argument for God's existence (e.g The Kalam's premise that "The universe began to exist").

The universe didn't begin to exist.  Try again.

If scientism is your epistemology, then it's no wonder why you aren't convinced by philosophical arguments for God's existence or the historical evidence for Jesus' divine self-understanding and resurrection from the dead. This is because philosophy and history aren't scientific enterprises. Science is great and it has provided us with much knowledge of our world over the past several centuries. However, it is fallacious to say that science is the only path towards truth. Think about it. Can the statement "Only science can provide knowledge" subject to scientific testing?

It doesn't need to be.  There are such things as axioms, which are beyond "testing".

Can you put the claim "Only what science can establish as true is true" underneath a microscope or a super collider? No!

But science isn't limited to what can be seen through a microscope or supercollider.  you are also doing scientific testing when you compare what somebody says about themselves, with their known pattern of behavior.  It's all induction.

These are philosophical statements not subject to scientific testing. Since they cannot be verified through science, and only that which can be verified through science can be known, then the epistemology of scientism cannot be known! Scientism is self-refuting. It collapses under its own criterion.

Sounds like you love the sin of word-wrangling.

Question 3: Am I Setting Too High Of A Standard Of Proof? How much evidence is enough evidence?

You cannot know, therefore, you cannot condemn those who decide for themselves when enough is enough.

You need to reflect on whether or not you're setting the bar too high.

The Holy Spirit needs to get off his ass now that he knows his sinners cannot do his job for him.  You will say arguments can never take the place of the work of the Holy Spirit in convicting a person of sin, but pretending your arguments can never do the job of full convincing merely turns the Holy Spirit into a gratuitous afterthought.  Can you imagine a lawyer or criminal investigator making his best empirical case, then telling the jury "empirical arguments cannot convince, only the Holy Spirit can convince"?

Are you a skeptic or a hyper-skeptic? What's the difference?

Nothing but rhetoric, sort of like you christians who constantly recharacterize consistent 5 Point Calvinists as "hyper-Calvinists".  No, they are just consistent, that's all.

I'll never forget a Facebook post my friend Luke Nix made several years ago. He said, "Hyper-Skepticism is having to drink an entire carton of milk before concluding that the milk is bad and should have been thrown out after the first sip."

And regular skepticism says if the first taste of milk is sour, you are a fool to think that if you keep drinking it, the sour will go away.  Well excuse me, but I've already tasted Christianity and found it rotten.  There is no intellectual compulsion on me to continually worry that maybe it was just my taste buds that deceived me into thinking the milk was bad. You Christians cannot even figure out what types of theology-milk are bad.

The fact is that the vast majority of the conclusions we reach, even in our daily lives, are based on probability, not absolute certainty.

Correct.

I don't even have 100% certainty that I'm sitting at my desk right now typing up this blog post. It's possible that I'm just a brain in a vat of chemicals with electrodes hooked up to my brain, and there's a scientist sending stimulates into my brain to make me experience the sensation of sitting at my desk, typing up a blog post. There is a possibility that that is the case, but that possibility is so unfathomably tiny that I don't give such a scenario any serious consideration. I am 99% certain that I am not a brain in a vat, but I still can't get up to 100% certainty.

Good point.

If you can't believe with 100% certainty that you are not a brain in a vat of chemicals, yet you still give mental assent to the claim that the external world is real, why wouldn't you give mental assent to the truth claims of Christianity?

Because, as i demonstrate over and over, Christianity's best apologists fail miserably to show their supernatural hypothesis of Jesus' resurrection is better than a naturalistic hypothesis.  It doesn't really take a degree in philosophy to recognize that reasonable doubt materializes where the experts fail to make their case.

J. Warner Wallace wrote that "In legal terms, the line that must be crossed before someone can come to the conclusion that something is evidentially true is called the 'standard of proof” (the 'SOP'). The SOP varies depending on the kind of case under consideration. The most rigorous of these criteria is the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard that is required at criminal trials. But how do we know when we have crossed the line and are 'beyond a reasonable doubt'? The courts have considered this important issue and have provided us with a definition:
 'Reasonable doubt is defined as follows: It is not a mere possible doubt; because everything relating to human affairs is open to some possible or imaginary doubt. It is that state of the case which, after the entire comparison and consideration of all the evidence, leaves the minds of the jurors in that condition that they cannot say they feel an abiding conviction of the truth of the charge.'
 This definition is important because it recognizes the difference between reasonable and possible that we discussed earlier. There are, according to the ruling of the court, 'reasonable doubts,' 'possible doubts,' and 'imaginary doubts.' The definition acknowledges something important: every case has unanswered questions that will cause jurors to wonder. All the jurors will have doubts as they come to a decision. We will never remove every possible uncertainty; that’s why the standard is not 'beyond any doubt.' Being 'beyond a reasonable doubt' simply requires us to separate our possible and imaginary doubts from those that are reasonable."5

I'm sorry to hear that you too give in the stupid "legal apologetic".  You have to be horrifically ignorant of court rules and case law if you think the gospels would pass authentication tests demanded by modern American courts.

Question 4: I Find Theological Position X Unreasonable. Is This A Central Tenet Of Christianity or Is This Debated Within The Church? Can I Be A Christian and Still Reject X?
 Just can't bring yourself to believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old?

No.  Neither can conservative Christian apologist and creationist Hugh Ross and many other creationists, to say nothing of the consensus of non-Christian geologists.

Don't believe a good God would causally determine people to sin?

Is causing another person to sin, objectively immoral, or do you have to first inquire as to who is doing the causing?  Why would you have to first ask who is doing the causing?  Might it be that yes, the bible claims your god causes people to sin, and that is the ONLY reason you don't immediately condemn the causing of sin?

Don't think a just God would leave people in eternal conscious torment?

No, not when he can get rid of sin by arbitrarily declaring it removed (2nd Samuel 12:13).

It's possible that these seem unreasonable because they are unreasonable. And guess what? Many Christians would agree with you. Not every position you find a Christian defending is central to the Christian worldview. Some are. You can't be a Christian and not believe that God exists, that God is one being who consists of three persons (The Doctrine Of The Trinity),

Sorry, but nowhere does the NT express or imply that confession of the Trinity is essential to salvation or to being "Christian". 

that we're sinners in need of salvation,

Jesus doesn't seem to do a whole lot of informing his Gentile followers that they need salvation.  Does god do a healing miracle for a Gentile and then just say nothing about her need to repent?

and that Jesus died on the cross and bodily rose from the dead.

Jesus obviously taught the true gospel before he died and rose from the dead, so the original gospel did not demand that people believe he died and rose from the dead.  If you think things changed since he died, that's your problem.

However, other issues are debatable, such as how to interpret Genesis 1, whether humans have free will or whether God causally determines all things, and whether or not God lets human experience eternal conscious torment or whether God annihilates the condemned from existence (a view known as Annihilationism).
 Don't reject Christianity simply because you find some secondary doctrine unreasonable. I myself find two of the three secondary issues mentioned above unreasonable. That's why I'm an Evolutionary Creationist and a Molinist rather than a Young Earth Creationist and a Calvinist.

Or maybe we can be reasonable to reject Christianity because its apologists appear eager in their effort to commit the sin or word-wrangling, and encourage their readers to do the same by pretending that the word-wrangling that goes on between Christians on the subject of evolution, creation, Molinism, Old earth creationism and Calvinism are useful and lead to the edification of the hearers.  I suggest you read 2nd Timothy 2:14, ALL of it.