Does Christian apologetics encourage people to be dishonest ?

[RedTagAlan]

I think it does, certainly the US version anyway.

Apologetics trains people to ignore scientific evidence presented to them. To handwave it away, and to make contorted non logical arguments in support of their belief in the Bible. Because the Bible can't be wrong.

An example here.

Global Evidences of the Genesis Flood | Answers in Genesis

"Fossils are one of the best evidences of a global flood, especially where many fossils are found. For example, we don’t find marine creatures, such as fish, clams, and corals, buried and fossilized on the sea floor where they once lived. Instead, we find most of them buried in sedimentary rocks on the continents, even on high mountains. For that to happen, the ocean waters had to totally flood the continents. And that’s exactly what the Bible describes during the global flood."

The above quote from that site was written by a Dr Andrew Snelling. Who has a PHD in..... geology. Please read the article to get the full gist. Almost every logical fallacy is in there, including outright dishonesty.

This is a big industry, with colleges and university courses etc, and I think that ironically, teaching people to ignore evidence, and to use dishonest debate methods, is destructive to society. Because it teaches people to lie in support of their theology, and perhaps more importantly, it teaches them to ignore political lies at election time, and to vote for the candidate who says "God".

What do folk think ? Agree or disagree?

The framing that apologetics teaches people to be dishonest.

The observed scientific world is one circle on a venn diagram.
Religious belief is another.

Apologetics explores whether they can overlap anywhere. That’s all.

The lying and deceit is just people, I’m afraid. We all tend to spin things in a way that makes most sense to us. You seem to think everything in the religious circle is by definition false so there can’t be an overlap. I’m more interested in what does and what doesn’t overlap.

As I wrote before your issue is with the Ouran, the Torah and the Holy Bible, so Islam, Christanity and Judaism. They all teach the flood story. It is strange that you single the Bible out which Christians use.

For sure such a venn diagram will have an overlap.

The Catholic Church for example, so far as I am aware, accepts evolution. It takes an intelligent design position. Same with cosmology etc. It does not rubbish science. Indeed, it was a Catholic priest who coined the term " big bang".

But I am talking about full on Young Earth Creationism. Where there is not a gentle overlap of circles. Their venn diagram has their theology barge the science cirle off the paper and onto the floor.

It’s another argument for separation of church and state, particularly in education. Am very pleased that DT’s had an education where religious teaching was prohibited. I didn’t want them indoctrinated.

So YEC encourages people to be dishonest is actually what you want to say? Not apologetics. I wouldn’t argue with that. I don’t know enough about it, and would be working on the superficial impression that they are a, loons and b, stuck in the Victorian era.

TBH, I am not sure/ don't know. where the dividing line is between extreme Christian apologetics and mainstream normal "Sunday School" is.

But yes, I am mainly talking about YEC level apologetics being dishonest, beyond the point of "white lies".

The sort of apologetics that produces so many politicians across the pond.

With something like a global flood, it does. Floods leave a ton of evidence. We have evidence of massive, cyclical flooding around the world going back 2.6 million years, associated with ice melts and re-glaciations. We don't have any evidence of a planet-wide flood since 3 billion years ago.

There are traditions of global floods caused by gods in almost every region, not just the Middle East and Mesopotamia. This would be because flooding devastates communities, the survivors commemorating them in oral histories that become folklore. They called them global as their knowledge of geography was limited.

We even have evidence of destructive events that aren't in any religious traditions, such as gigantic lava flows that annihilated everything in their paths. The evidence - flood basalt - is here for all to see, yet no religions incorporate them because the last one (so far) happened before humans existed.

Ignorance is so annoying, now we have access to search engines.

My dc went to a CofE school where no indoctrination happened. They learned about all major world religions. One left as a form atheist. One has never managed to work out exactly what he believes.

I don’t think there should be any faith schools funded by taxpayers. Separation of church and state. Religious education should be kept out of school. An understanding of world cultures is more important.
I’m pleased we had the option of an education for DC’s without any religious studies.

I remember seeing footage of massive flooding from Pakistan a few years back. Entire valleys washed out, forests reduced to a massive jumble of broken trees, withs cars/houses, livestock, literarily everything just a massive mess.

I recall thinking at the time, that with humans about, that stuff would all be cleaned up, and in years to come, the evidence it happened would not be so clear. That would not be the case with a global flood, where the population of earth was down to half a dozen people.

In any case, even with all that put aside, the creationists cannot solve the heat problem their model of a 5000 year old earth, with flood, has.

That is, the sheer amount of heat created in all their proposed tectonic shifts, raising of mountain ranges, and more important, their increased speed of radioactive decay, would not be dissipated in the 4.5 k years since the flood. Because the earth is a big ball in a vacuum. and vacuums do not conduct heat. And radiant cooling would not be fast enough.

Yes, to make their model work, they have god vary the speed of radioactive decay, as well as plant fake dino bones etc.

How dishonest is that ? Their model has a heat problem, and they can't solve it. But they still say it happened.

Meanwhile, the standard scientific model of the earth does not have a heat problem.

Here is one of their papers trying to solve the heat problem:

genesisfloodheatmagmaticactivity.pdf (answersresearchjournal.org)

Their own conclusion, from that paper is:

"Conclusions and Recommendations for Future Work

The main conclusion of this article is that the total amount of geological heat deposited in the formation of the ocean floors and of LIPs is overwhelming: it cannot be removed from the biosphere within a biblically-compatible timescale by known natural processes. Using CPT-style Flood models as our theoretical framework, no more than a tiny fraction of the total could have been released into the atmosphere and oceans during and after the Flood. Given that the highest bulk ocean temperature in the early Cenozoic did not exceed 13°C in contrast with the present-day value of ~2°C (Worraker 2018; the lower figure of 2°C may be taken as a representative pre-Flood minimum temperature), the total heat absorbed by the oceans, earth’s main environmental heat sink, would have been of order 6×1025 J at most, assuming a thermal capacity of 5.5×1024 J/K (as estimated above). This is only 0.04% of the total heat deposition: the remaining 99.96% must have been removed or absorbed elsewhere. It seems that this must have been accomplished by some special, hitherto unrecognized mechanism"

That is just the headline of their conclusion. Note the bolded part. 99.6% of the heat generated in their model would have to be magicked away.

Their own research shows their model is impossible, yet they keep it going.

But hey, at least they were honest enough to publish it.

And they have the heat problem because their is not enough water to cover Everest. So they tried to solve that by saying there were no mountains before. They were all formed in the flood.

I wish we still had the 🤣 react. That is bonkers! "Our sciencey science paper demonstrates that our theory is false. Send us more money to develop a reasonable-sounding explanation that will make our sciencey theory look true."

Why not just say "God works in mysterious ways"?

... Just checked. They did!
this is only a problem for our limited understanding of the processes at work during the Flood, which very probably involved supernatural intervention: God was in full control of every aspect throughout.

Yup. The scientific model has no massive problems like those found in Creationism apologetics.

Their model is akin to a flat earther model ( flerths don't actually have one). When challenged on any specific, their attempts to explain it always impact on another problem they have, and create more.

The only difference I can see is that flerths blame "NASA", YECs say "GODDIT".

And creationists want their model taught in schools.

Hence my accusation of "dishonesty".

The subject is Christian Apologetics.

I honestly do not know if other religions have an equivalent.

I used the flood story because it is the most dramatic example of their dishonesty, And most people aware of Christianity know that story too.

Given the overwhelming evidence that there was not a Biblical global flood, as they insist, would you not agree they are being dishonest in claiming, and teaching, that there was.

Do you think these people would be upstanding rational members of society, if it weren’t for that pesky bible? They strike me as people who would be in one cult or another. Flat earther, anti vaxer, they aren’t thinkers who would otherwise be contributing much to society I don’t think.

The issue with Church schools, I think, is that in the uk at least the church started educating people for free long before the rest of society/the government. So we have a heritage of church schools. The Government has presumably not cared enough to try and buy them, or provide enough alternatives. Church schools that open now are a bit suspect imo as there are free, reputable alternatives. They are inevitably a bit homeschool like, teaching things in ways other schools don’t. And I say that as someone who chose to send 2 DC to one.

The Old Testatment belongs to the Torah. It is Judaism. Christians are under a new convenant with Jesus Christ. They can learn of the Old Testatment stories but are not under this law.

A mark of a tolerant society is that people can get along with their life and beliefs and to be able raise their children as they want within the law.

This dishonest question of yours in relation to faith does not really work and can look like mind games and playing on Christian principles..you like to convict people of sin to it seems. How do you know it never happened at any level with your take someone could turn your question just as easily around to you.

My views (found the quotes online) regarding the flood and Noah’s Ark

It’s a bedtime story; it’s a myth. The idea of a global Flood is too big to be true: water covering the entire earth, all those animals fitting on a single boat, one family saved out of a numberless multitude of people. Where’s the evidence? And, most importantly, how can we possibly reconcile with such death and destruction with what Christians claim is a loving god?

The dishonesty is for topics to be presented as fact (especially to children) when the evidence purports otherwise.

It's a Philosophical/ moral question for discussion.

I do not believe in sin.

The biblical flood did not happen. Sure, there was maybe a local flood, but not a world wide flood as creationists claim, and teach.

My proposition is that it is dishonest to claim it did, insist it did, and want it taught to be fact, when it is not. It is not an attack on anyone's right to believe in what they want to.

You basically wrote was I commiting sin in another thread for having a different opinion so I know your style somewhat and you wrote I was being dishonest like I pointed out earlier when I was actually correct.
This style of using shocking words can be mind games on people when they have their own faith and tell them they are being dishonest in their faith. You seem to not to see it that way. It can be like provocation and someone who can take the mick.
I don't really see the point of what you are doing, but I will step out of this thread.

This is one of the things I detest most about religion: it encourages woolly/lazy/illogical/
dishonest thinking.

I can understand why people came up with anti-scientific explanations for things they didn't understand hundreds of years ago, but you'd have thought we'd have moved on by now.

I also loathe evangelical behaviour, whether it be a friend or relative shoving it down your throat at every available opportunity, or someone bellowing into a loud hailer at Oxford Circus.

Quote :

"You basically wrote was I commiting sin in another thread for having a different opinion so I know your style somewhat and you wrote I was being dishonest like I pointed out earlier when I was actually correct."

I think that was in reference to you breaking one of the rules of your own religion ?

Anyway, this is just a chat, and if you disagree with my premise you are totally free to debate against it. For example, I have posted above AIG's own heat problem analysis of their earth model, and how it concludes that AIG's own model is false. To me, that means to keep pushing their model is dishonest. If you disagree, then you are free to show how there is not a heat problem for the YEC model.

I agree OP. I don't need the threat of eternal punishment to be a good person. Others however seem to need it.

There was nothing that was broken in the rules of my faith. I asked somebody if they were a Christian and did they believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God to try and understand where they stood as they had varying opinions. They replied with a question and I thought to forget it. They asked again why I was asking and I told them their varying views which made me ask, no big deal. Most people in that thread stated where they stood if they were involved. It felt I was getting comments that could be quite varying at times and couldn't work it out. There was no rules broken in this if this what you mean.
You need to know what somebody thinks before you try and convict people of wrong doing.

I agree - the threat of hell is just a control mechanism to try and force people to worship and obey the rules set up by a god - ridiculous!

Are you not potentially breaking 1 Tim 2:12 now ?

Anyway, did you open and look at my link at the top ? Here it is again-

Global Evidences of the Genesis Flood | Answers in Genesis

Do you genuinely not see anything dishonest in there ? Is everything in this document true ?

This is not just one of the tens of thousands of such documents I specifically picked because of "issues". I picked this at random from the Noah ones.