I'm Headed to My Alma Mater to See Paul Copan
The last time I visited Lincoln Christian Seminary, in Lincoln, Illinois, was nearly 10 years ago to hear Dr. Craig give the James D. Strauss lecture series. This lecture series sprang out of a student apologetical group called the Chi Lambda Fellowship, of which I was the vice-President and founding editor (of the now defunct) student journal called A Journal For Christian Studies (first issue Mar 1982). It was at Lincoln that Dr. James Sennett and I were student/friends.
Dr. Paul Copan is doing the lectureship this week, and I'm specifically interested in his lectures titled: "The Perplexing Problem of Evil," and "Divine Hiddenness and the Problem of Hell." But I'm more interested in meeting him, since he asked if I could come. Paul is very interested in my upcoming debate with David Wood of Answering Infidels this weekend, and will probably write up some comments about it (although he said five books of his are coming out this year, so he's really busy).
Paul and I have a lot in common and we've struck up an internet friendship this year. He entered Trinity Evangelical Divinity School the Fall of the same year I graduated in June 1985. We both studied under Dr. Craig. We both studied at Marquette University. Paul graduated but I did not. I dropped out of Marquette primarily because my Dad had just learned he had cancer and I wanted to spend some time with him for his remaining days, so I took a church back home to be with him. I thought I'd finish school later....but I never did.
There are professors and administrators at Lincoln who know I'm an atheist. The present President was a good friend of mine while we were both students there. How will I be received? The strange thing is that I feel like the same person I was when I attended there. I just don't believe the same things anymore. To me it's like rooting for the Colts when everyone else is rooting for the Steelers, and that's it. No big deal. But to them, and to Christians on the internet, my beliefs threaten them and are dangerous. I miss these people. We're all good people. We'll see.
Dr. Paul Copan is doing the lectureship this week, and I'm specifically interested in his lectures titled: "The Perplexing Problem of Evil," and "Divine Hiddenness and the Problem of Hell." But I'm more interested in meeting him, since he asked if I could come. Paul is very interested in my upcoming debate with David Wood of Answering Infidels this weekend, and will probably write up some comments about it (although he said five books of his are coming out this year, so he's really busy).
Paul and I have a lot in common and we've struck up an internet friendship this year. He entered Trinity Evangelical Divinity School the Fall of the same year I graduated in June 1985. We both studied under Dr. Craig. We both studied at Marquette University. Paul graduated but I did not. I dropped out of Marquette primarily because my Dad had just learned he had cancer and I wanted to spend some time with him for his remaining days, so I took a church back home to be with him. I thought I'd finish school later....but I never did.
There are professors and administrators at Lincoln who know I'm an atheist. The present President was a good friend of mine while we were both students there. How will I be received? The strange thing is that I feel like the same person I was when I attended there. I just don't believe the same things anymore. To me it's like rooting for the Colts when everyone else is rooting for the Steelers, and that's it. No big deal. But to them, and to Christians on the internet, my beliefs threaten them and are dangerous. I miss these people. We're all good people. We'll see.
11 comments:
I have made a reply to certain aspects of Joe E. Holman's "deconversion" story on my blog:
http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2006/10/critique-of-some-key-fallacies-in.html
Anyone who would like to respond on my blog will be treated charitably and fairly.
I wrote to Joe's e-mail address also.
Dave Armstrong
(Catholic and general Christian apologist)
Will your debate with Wood be recorded?
I'd love to hear your report on this event. I especially want to hear what Paul Copan says on "Divine Hiddenness and the Problem of Hell." From the title, it sounds like he may be able to deal with the topic in a way that won't have me vomiting, though I can't conceive of how. (I've written that fundamentalist attempts to defend some of their doctrines tend to convince me that fundamentalism must be opposed.) If you can get a trasncript, that would be ideal.
Dave, do me next! Okay? ;-)
Daddy Cool, yes, there will be a video made of it.
Hallq, There's been a change of plans, we aren't going to be able to stay for the hiddenness/hell lecture. But when I'm there Copan and I are going to trade books, and he says the one he's giving me essentially has the same material in it.
I just can't see how he can justify the existence of hell. Such a doctrine is a theistic killer, in my opinion.
I just remember what Dan Barker has said about how Christianity becomes perfectly logical once you accept certain assumptions. If you believe that rejecting Christianity is the worse worse possible crime (paraphrasing J.P. Moreland) or that "a person refuses to come to Christ... because he loves darkness rather than the light."
Anyway, hat's the title of Copan's book? I'll try to get ahold of a copy for myself.
Just got back. Will fill in the details later, but I was warmly received, and I'm glad I went. But the book he traded with me is That's Just You're Interpretation. I skimmed through it while my wife drove part way home. It looks like some of the best reasons a Christian can up with on the specific questions he deals with. I may review a few of his chapters here, even though it's an older book, 2001.
By the way, hi Mr. Books! [Inside thing, ya know]
Hi John,
>Dave, do me next! Okay? ;-)
Yeah, maybe, especially if given the extra motivation of knowing that you may actually interact with what I wrote (atheists have a strange, curious habit of strongly tending to disappear upon serious criticism of their tenets and gripes against the Bible and Christianity - or else resorting to evasion and obscurantism). That would be a nice little bonus.
I think I glanced at your deconversion. Wasn't the problem of evil key? I consider that the most serious objection to Christianity (though, not, of course, fatal at all, as you'd expect). So while I could still quibble with that, it would be in an entirely different league from the sort of shallow stuff that usually constitutes reasons for deconversions.
You know how that goes: there are reasons that one disagrees with, while considering them highly respectable and serious and worthy of attention, and others which are downright frivolous and trivial or plainly fallacious.
We'll see.
Dave Armstrong
Dave,
In speaking for myself, the problem of evil was not only key, but the absolute faith-breaker. Between my father's cancer and a close friend's suicide, I seemed to have finally "seen the light" wrt the PoE.
My wife just recently lost a childhood friend at the age of 24 to breast cancer.
I've read some theodicies, but I simply find them inadequate. They dash themselves against the slab of logic and evidence for the argument against god's existence. They always posit that God has a "higher good" in allowing evil. The "slab" that they have to lift is:
1) There must have been absolutely no other way to accomplish this "higher good", which on itself seems a defeater for omnipotence
2) This "higher good" has to require every single bit of the evil, pain, and suffering that we observe
To clarify (2):
a) Imagine there is a set of all things bad: pain, suffering, disease, disfigurement, birth defect, ugliness, abuse, rape, murder, torture...etc. We will call this E
b) Imagine that there is a higher purpose that God allows E for, call it H
c) God's omnipotence and omnibenevolence requires that God accomplish H while minimizing E
d) We can imagine various scenarios, call them X, where some terrible thing that happened is the result of a complete accident, natural disaster, miscommunication, and produced no tangential consequences whatsoever. Imagine it's the year 2000 BC, and an orphan who gets lost out in the woods, and no one knows she is lost, or that she even exists, because her parents died at home and she was walking to get help. Imagine she dies, and neither she nor her parents are ever discovered or even known of. God didn't give her the knowledge she needed to find her way out, although she obviously wanted it (her free will). We can safely say that her death qualifies as an X scenario. It affected no one, no one knew of it, and it produced no consequences for anyone or anything.
e) Because God must accomplish H using E - X, but because we see X, this God cannot exist.
We can go into this further, but I doubt we'll make too much progress, since the problem has remained unsolved since the time of Epicurus (and before). But it's an interesting thing to watch people try to solve the problem.
Hi Daniel,
Here are my own shots at solving the problem. I don't claim all that much for them, except that I think they exhibit some degree of thought and that they're not lightweight, breezy attempts at solutions. The latter debate I consider one of the best I have had with anyone: Christian or atheist (I wonder if Mike is still around on the Internet these days?):
Christian Replies to the Argument From Evil (Free Will Defense): Is God Malevolent, Weak, or Non-Existent Because of the Existence of Evil and Suffering?
http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ124.HTM
Can God be Blamed for the Nazi Holocaust? Reflections on the "Problem of Evil" and Human Free Will
http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2006/06/can-god-be-blamed-for-nazi-holocaust.html
Dialogue With an Atheist on the "Problem of Good" and the Nature of Meaningfulness in Atheism (The Flip Side of the Problem of Evil Argument Against Christianity)
(vs. Mike Hardie)
http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ542.HTM
Perhaps if we are to dialogue, you might want to check these out as a Christian attempt to grapple with the problem, knowing that I'll be glad to defend my points of view and even to admit that I have no answer in particulars if that is the case (or to retract particulars if that is required, too).
Dave Armstrong
http://socrates58.blogspot.com/
Speaking of the problem of pain, has anyone read "Organisms that Look Designed" written by Allan Glenn?
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/Organisms.cfm
(Allan ended his article with a link to an article by me, "Why We Believe in a Designer.")
Sadly, Allan died last November at age 20, after struggling his whole life with Cystic Fibrosis. His moving final memoir, written in expectation of his death, remains online at Skeptic Wiki:
http://www.skepticwiki.org/
Just add his name to the search engine to find his wiki entry there. A brave, talented, and loving lad.
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