Is Timothy Keller Clueless, Self-Deceived, Or Another Liar For Jesus?

This is another post in my series, "Do You Want To Be A Christian Apologist?" This is number 16 in the series, which are tagged with the words "Christian Apologetics" below, seen in reverse chronological order. So, let's say you want to be a Christian apologist, someone who defends the Christian faith. Then what must you do? The sixteenth thing you must do is to deceive your audience, lie if necessary, in order to defend your faith. [See also the tag "Liars for Jesus" for other examples]. I have hesitated to say this before, in the cases of William Lane Craig and David Marshall, but when Randal Rauser did this my eyes were opened. Here's another clear example with Timothy Keller's book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.His book is quite popular, ranking in the top ten "apologetics" category of books on Amazon for several years now. However, Bryan Frances, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, outs him as either clueless, self-deceived or a fraud, in the Introduction of his book, Gratuitous Suffering and the Problem of Evil: A Comprehensive Introduction.See for yourself:



Final note: I realize Francis makes the same claim about Dawkins, that he too is lying. This isn't my problem if true. I find that unfortunate for the point of this post of mine. Francis is most likely trying to show his readers that he is being objective and fair with both sides. But lest someone think I left that part of his book out, I included it. Francis is correct that competence in science doesn't make someone a good philosopher. To be fair, there are arguments that might seem similar to an untrained philosopher like Dawkins, as we read in Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier's anthology, The Impossibility of God.I understand all too well the ability of the mind to deceive us. This takes place on both sides of our debates. We want to see what we want to see so bad that we see it, Dawkins and Keller and myself and YOU included. It's a tough thing to be intellectually honest about the strength of our arguments. That's the reason I argue we should look for sufficient objective evidence for what we accept and think exclusively in terms of the probabilities when it comes to the nature and working of the universe. That being acknowledged, Keller fraudulently inserted a word into a quote and then went on to mislead his readers about the strength of the argument(s) from evil, which is indeed fraud, a lie, even if we grant he is merely ignorant about the difference between the logical and evidential arguments from evil due to self-deception (which I find hard to believe if he actually read Alston in context). That is a big difference.

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