Apologetics
Dogmatically Defending Religious Dogma
This article is one of a series of articles introduced by Flawed Reasons to Believe in God. If you’re new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material below.
Apologists, perhaps more accurately called excusagists, are only employed to defend dogmatic claims and ideas, so they end up working for theistic religions almost exclusively. Science doesn’t employ excuse-makers. If you observe something in nature that doesn’t seem to comport with existing theory, point it out to the relevant branch of science. They will investigate to see if your observation is correct, and if it is, they will revise their theory to account for the new data. The same applies to historians and even such artistic endeavors as music theory. Only the world’s many competing religions insist upon the absolute truth of their holy book, excluding all the other sacred books out there.
We can consider a very religious scientist from the past to view a perfect example of how religion reacts to correction versus how science meets such challenges. Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei, often shortened to Galileo Galilei, was a profoundly religious catholic. When he pointed his homemade telescope at the planets visible to the naked eye, he realized for the first time in human history how different these objects were from our Sun and the nearby stars we can observe in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. He could see that the Sun was the center of the solar system and that Earth orbited it. He published his heliocentric findings, which led to his being tried by the Roman Inquisition and found guilty of heresy. His friends saved him from imprisonment, but he was forced to live under house arrest for decades. The Catholic church did not get around to admitting Galileo was right about the organization of our solar system until November 7. 1992, a full 359 years after the Roman Inquisition found him guilty in 1633. When religious excusagusts think up an excuse that’s not laughably fallacious, they milk it for all it is worth. Consider the Cosmological Argument; it has been reworked and enhanced and is still as flawed as when Thomas Aquinas first published it in Summa Theologica in 1274. Excusagist extraordinaire Dr. William Lane Craig is still using his customized version of it even though he’s been shown many times why the premises of his syllogism are not justified but are plagued by numerous fallacious claims.
It’s little wonder there are so many zombie apologetics still circulating.
Like other successful excusagists, Craig doesn’t need his argument to be sound; he needs it to be complex enough to baffle most of its critics. Oh, and one of his critics is Guth, an author of the Borg, Guth, Velenkum Theorem, which he misinterpreted to support his notion of time. Craig has gone right on misstating the implications of time that he falsely claims the Borg, Guth, Velenkum Theorem implies. It’s little wonder there are so many zombie apologetics still circulating.
This article is one of a series of articles introduced by Flawed Reasons to Believe in God. If you’re new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material below.
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