I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
So I often read the works of William Lane Craig, a well known Christian apologist, who believes archaeological evidence exists for every detail in the Gospels, down to the ressurection.
ReplyDeleteRobert J Price, who is a former Southern Baptist turned atheist, says taking the same road as Craig "eroded my faith", and that he realized his zealous search for evidence of the Gospels would make him a disbeliever because "there is simply always more evidence around the corner". Price ended up coming to the conclusion that the Gospels were written as stories, nothing more.
Price then spent many years trying to see what was the message of the Gospels, and not whether it was true.
Here is the irony - you can learn much more from Price than from Craig. From Craig, you hear nothing but dry academic arguments. From Price, you see simple down to earth explanations of what the parables about Jesus tried to convey.
Jesus' message about the "experts of law" seems to ring amazingly true for Christian apologists.