In a previous post I discussed my two-and-a-half-hour grilling at the hand of a quintessential rationalist. One thing especially stood out to me was how The Rationalist used evidence as a weapon against me by discounting anything that I claimed was evidence. Only what he counted as evidence was evidence. It’s a common tactic of atheists. The Rationalist, like most rationalists, is an empiricist, meaning only what is empirically demonstrably provable counts as “evidence.” Here is a definition of empiricism:
Empiricism, in philosophy, is the view that all concepts originate in experience, that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience.
Key word: only. In the history of philosophy the rationalists and the empiricists often didn’t see eye to eye, and many saw these two approaches to epistemology as mutually exclusive. But that debate is for scholars who have too much time on their hands. In fact, most people who reject the existence of God are rationalist empiricists because they believe all knowledge does in some way only come through sense experience and that it can be rationally deduced as real knowledge, the only knowledge that is in fact real. However, nobody can be perfectly consistent in this because human beings are more than senses and reason, as I think The Rationalist demonstrated in our conversation.
Now let’s take a look at a definition of evidence:
Evidence is anything that can be used to prove something — like the evidence presented in a trial, or the trail of breadcrumbs that is evidence of the path Hansel took through the woods.
The word evidence is derived from the Latin ēvidēnt-, meaning “obvious.” The word evidence shows up frequently in legal documents and dramas, because evidence is necessary proof in linking someone to a crime or crime scene. Evidence is used in many ways to show that something is true, as in “the chocolate stains around your mouth and the crumbs on the table are evidence that you ate the last of the brownies.”
Given all human beings see things differently to some degree, what is obvious to some is not so obvious to others. Notice the phrase “necessary proof” in the definition above. Rarely does “proof” in a court of law equal absolute certainty. In fact, people are sent to prison when certainty is far from certain, and different crimes require different levels of “proof” to convict someone. There are also different levels of “proof” to convict someone in criminal verses civil trials. But, evidence, whatever that might be, is “necessary proof” in a court of law. In other words, it is reasonable to come to a conclusion based on that evidence.
The point, though, is that proof is never absolute, and anyone who thinks it is, in Paul’s words, does not yet know as he ought to know. Also, evidence can never compel someone to believe something against their will. Someone is either open to the evidence, or they are not. Even if they are willing to consider it, they may not be persuaded by it. The Rationalist, and those of his ilk, doesn’t seem to understand that, or more accurately, refuses to think evidence he doesn’t find persuasive as “necessary proof” is ipso facto not evidence! How convenient. This kind of person is deluded by the ghost of René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy who brought the concept that absolute certainty was possible into Western thought. It’s not. Finite beings cannot be absolutely certain of anything, and if they think they are, they are living a delusion. Such people are often unpleasant to interact with because they are absolutely certain anyone who disagrees with them is absolutely wrong! And they are not shy in saying so.
Given I don’t have enough room in this post to get into what I see as evidence for the veracity of Christianity and why I embrace it, I will do that in another post, but I will mention something here called the cumulative case argument. The phrase explains itself. As evidence accumulates the argument for the case become more compelling until it becomes for certain people “proof” that the argument is true. Put another way, it is that multiple arguments or pieces of evidence come together to form a stronger conclusion. Rather than aiming to prove the conclusion with absolute certainty, the goal is to establish a conclusion that is more likely to be true than false. I would argue that for Christianity, the cumulative case for its being true rather than false is like a tsunami combined with an avalanche that turns into a Noah like flood. For me, it’s impossible to not believe it is true.
That doesn’t mean over the last four plus decades of being a Christian there were not times when I doubted whether it might not be true. Although, this is not exactly the case. I’ve never believed some alternative to Christianity might be true. If I were to believe that I would have to believe the cumulative case for whatever that view of reality was, was more compelling than the Christian faith. I’ve always known what I now call “the consideration of the alternative” must be embraced, meaning if Christianity isn’t true, something else has to be. What has waxed and waned over the decades for me is the plausibility of Christianity. At times it just didn’t seem as real as other times. I now look back at those times and call them times of plausibility insanity. What changed? My deep dive into apologetics in 2009.
I had an encounter with a co-worker that year trying to engage him about the truth of Christianity, and I was pathetic. It was embarrassing, although he wouldn’t have thought so. I determined that would never happen again. I had just purchased a car with an aux cable jack, got a small MP3 player, and started listening to apologetics podcasts. I was amazed to learn there had been an explosion of apologetics resources since I’d last studied this theological discipline in the 1980s. So listening and reading, and reading and listening, I was drinking deep of the cumulative case that yes in fact, Christianity is the truth! And that there was more than enough evidence to make the case that Jesus was indeed the risen Lord and Savior, Creator of the heavens and earth, and the reason for my existence. I will say it as I often say, quoting C.S. Lewis:
I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not because I see it but because by it I see everything else.
I will do a third and final post in response to The Rationalist on some of the evidence that to me, makes the cumulative case and has convinced me beyond a reasonable doubt that Christianity is true.
Who knew Russell Brand would turn into such a beast for truth! I recently wrote about the inevitable fall of the left because lies will always eventually be exposed for what they are, lies. This is happening now with the Covid scam among many other lies being exposed, and the J6 “insurrection” which in fact was an FBI “color revolution” set up. Regarding the latter, just last week Naomi Wolf penned an apology to conservatives about buying into the lie that J6 was an insurrection. She is an old school liberal who believes truth matters, and not narratives pushed by globalist Uniparty elites. And Steve Cortes published a piece with a nice description of how this elite lives on lies. He calls it The Cathedral of Lies, and this cathedral needs to be taken down brick by brick.
As for Brand, he is an old-fashioned lefty who who still believes in what the left used to believe, speaking “truth to power.” Now that all the power is controlled by the left be it government, corporations, or the culture, the left lies and uses “narratives” to push it’s ideology and shuts down any dissent and anyone who dares question it. The Uniparty, or the globalist ruling class, which includes all Democrats and way too many Republicans, is the power against the people, and they knowingly propagate lies to maintain it. It ain’t working! Truth will always win in the end because Jesus is the truth, and he is over all power in the universe, spiritual and temporal; He will not allow lies to triumph. Here are a few short videos of Brand on Bill Maher’s show and they’re worth watching as he speaks truth to power which nowadays takes guts.
Here he takes down the lies in the name of a virus.
Here is obliterates a lefty MSNBC host who is either delusional or lying in claiming this propoganda organ of the deep state is an objective media news source.
Here he comments on a portion of his appearancce and absolutely nails the corporatizing of politics which a grift and the MO of most politicians. Politicians are influenced more by corporate money (doners and lobbyists) than their constituents, whether they admit it or not, or more likely deny it. It’s a real problem.
I stumbled on the video below about the drama surrounding Matt Walsh speaking brutal truth to some guy pretending to be a woman. You have to see this guy pretending to believe he is actually a sexy woman to believe it. Appropriate words fail when you encounter something so wrong. It’s like watching something so nauseatingly evil that you’re dumbfounded, literally struck dumb, unable to speak. Like watching old films from the end of WWII and the allies coming upon the death camps with piles of bodies, that kind of nauseating. What can you say about such a thing other than feel anger and disgust and a yearning for justice that feels like vengeance. No, I do not believe a transgender male pretending he’s a woman is in any way comparable to genocide. There are obviously gradations of evil, and while these two examples are significantly different on the scale, transgender sin is deeply evil and elicits in us revulsion, and it should!
The reason I decided to comment on this is because it’s a critical cultural moment for the church and America. I encourage you to watch the 13-minute video to better understand the issues I’m addressing. If you watch through to the end you’ll see a touching video of a girl who now wants to be called Mike reading a letter from her grandmother telling her she cannot do that because of Jesus, but affirming how much she still loves her. Walsh is the one who plays the video, so he’s not the heartless monster his critics say he is. Some of these critics while not saying he’s a “monster” do think his tone and words were unfortunate, not winsome, and basically counterproductive. I couldn’t disagree more because the two examples are apples and oranges: the dude playing the woman needs tough love, and the struggling young lady just needs plain old love, and guidance. This gets to the cultural issue.
The word stigma was dropped a long time ago as a remnant of a hostile and intolerant religious (i.e., Christian) past in America. The simplest definition:
An association of disgrace or public disapproval with something, such as an action or condition: synonym: stain.
Oh no, we certainly wouldn’t want to do that! Stigmatizing “the other” was so last century before we entered secular Utopia and became tolerant of others’ lifestyles in the 1960s. Now in American culture we’re tolerant of all lifestyle choices, and accept everyone for who they decide to “identify” as. Only, we’re not. Far from it. Let’s use a simple example of why this “narrative” is a lie.
What are the two most common criticisms of Christians? We hate homosexuals (we’re intolerant), now including trans people, and we’re hypocrites. Even though the first one is demonstrably untrue, and the second one is true of every human being (nobody lives up to their own standards let alone those of a perfectly holy God), what do these accusation do to Christians? Why, they stigmatize them! We’ve seen a growing phenomenon over the last several decades that has become as obvious as a Mount Everest in our midst. Those who are supposedly the most tolerant among us are the most blatantly intolerant people imaginable. It was not too many years ago when liberals were, well liberal. Here is one definition of the word liberal that makes one laugh out loud thinking we used to call these people liberals:
Favoring reform, open to new ideas, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; not bound by traditional thinking; broad-minded. synonym.
The most narrow-minded bigots in America today used to be called liberals. They are more commonly called progressives now, but any honest person would call them communists. As ex-communist and leftist David Horowitz has accurately said, “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” This is an especially virulent form of communism, though, informed by a cultural form of Marxism, in popular parlance, wokism. This isn’t the old style communism a la Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s hit man who had a penchant for shooting people in the back of the head, but a more subtle form of political murder. In 2023 we call this cancel culture. Another word for this? Stigma.
In the olden days in America, women who got pregnant out of wedlock (what an antiquated word that is!) were stigmatized. Now this is perfectly normal. When I was growing up the phrase, “living in sin” meant two people not married were living together, and people actually used it. If you used that phrase today to anyone under 40, they would have no idea what you’re talking about. Divorce was an embarrassing reality for some families. A man not having a job and living on the government dole was a disgrace. Those who lived on the street were bums, not “homeless people.” People who got drunk often were drunkards, now their alcoholics and supposedly have a disease. And I could go on.
Now, everything in America has become morally inverted. What was once stigmatized and considered immoral, is considered perfectly “normal,” and morally good. What is stigmatized is anyone who questions the morality of such things, those who do are considered intolerant; they must not be tolerated! Free speech, speaking what you think, is now considered by our progressive, woke cultural elites as “dangerous.” If it goes counter to the accepted moral standards of the woke cultural elites, it is hate. How convenient.
Which brings me to the video and Matt Walsh speaking brutal truth to cultural power to the trans guy who claims to be a sexy woman. What Walsh is doing it attempting to re-stigmatize what ought to be stigmatized. In the upside-down, inside-out world of progressive Alice in Wonderland, what should be stigmatized isn’t, and what should not be stigmatized is. There is no moral neutrality in the universe. The idea is a myth of the secular lie. Christians are especially susceptible to the lie because they often buy into the secular cultural stereotype of Christians as Big Meanies who hate “sexual minorities” or some such thing. Those in the video criticizing Walsh as a Big Meanie are blind or naïve, and have no wisdom about the brutality of spiritual warfare in a fallen world.
Which finally brings me to Voddie Baucham, the great Christian culture warrior. At 7:48 and 10:08 in the video, he tells us about the Eleventh Commandment Christian, a phrase I’d never heard before. These well-meaning Christians, he says, believe “that every problem in the world is a result of Christians not being nice enough.” Whenever the “controversial” topics around sex are brought up by Christians or Christian pastors, they die the death of “a thousand qualifications.” As an example, he uses Christian pastors preaching on adultery, and it’s spot on. Pastors would never qualify the evil of adultery so they don’t offend the adulterers in the audience, but on the topic of homosexuality, that’s a different story.
The importance of this cultural moment is that we have two choices as we encounter the cultural hostility to all things Christian the left hates, and that’s pretty much everything. We either call a spade a spade, even if some Christians think that’s “mean,” or the left will continue to try to stigmatize us out of existence. We must culturally re-stigmatize any sex outside of marriage, for example, among many other things. There is no “getting along” with the woke elite. As Ronald Reagan said about the Soviet Union when asked what victory would look like, he answered, “We win, they lose.” The mutually exclusive worldviews of cultural Marxism (wokeness) and Christianity cannot coexist.
The spirit of “the 60s” is at its cultural and political apex; it has no higher to go. But as I argued in my previous post, the fall of the left is inevitable because nothing built on lies can last. It is the examples of Matt Walsh and Voddie Baucham who show us the path to victory and the advance of the kingdom of God.
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