Question with 6 notes
Anonymous asked: My dad keeps recommending the works of different apologists like Lennox and Zacharias to me, but I find that even their best arguments are completely useless because they always defend deism, not theism. It's immensely frustrating because these people are praised excessively when really, they're not contributing anything. Have you noticed this trend as well?
I have absolutely and it drives me nuts. It is easy to present a decent argument for deism, but it is a HUGE step short of theism. Even if deism is presented in a compelling way it ends up leaving me saying, so what? This is something that could have happened but if the god is deistic it really doesn’t matter. No prayers are going to matter, no “sin” is going to matter, so why would anyone care about a deistic god?
Really, for the most part, they don’t care about that but they simply have to struggle to present some possible scenario or exploit some gap in our understanding where they can insert this possible force. William Lane Craig is an perfect example with the amount of time and energy he has put in to presenting his Kalam cosmological argument but that argument does not give you the god of Christianity. He has to make a few skips and hops, all of which are entirely illogical and unsubstantiated, to arrive at the god of Christianity. That is part of the reason I’ve become more firm myself in saying that a theistic god can not possibly exist.