Academia & Ecclesia

In order to avoid overreactions from church leaders and members about the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage rulings, Richard Hammar gave brief points about what church leaders need to know about the rulings at www.ag.org/pdfs/DOMA_rulings.pdf . I think that pastors and teachers in churches should read his brief points first, before they carelessly say anything about the rulings in the pulpit. Some pastors have a tendency to exaggerate the implications of the events in the world of politics, in order to scare church members about the destructive impact of secularization on traditional values. Exaggerated claims due to ignorance can breed false beliefs. False beliefs can be breeding grounds for all sorts of irrationalities.            

Dr. William Lane Craig, a leading evangelical apologist, is featured in a major article in The Chronicle of Higher Education [see http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Theist/140019/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en ]. That should be a surprise, since CHE is not known for having a taste for people like Craig. I think that Craig is overrated by evangelicals, but underrated by academics. His triumphalism, I think, weakens the merits of his arguments, since it underrates what I consider to be persuasive cases for atheism. It tends to caricature his opponents’ arguments as unworthy of serious considerations. However, his skills as a debater are unparalleled. He is definitely a force to be reckoned with. Of course, winning a debate is not a sufficient condition for establishing the truth of one’s claim. But I think that his opponents, like Alexander Rosenberg (Duke philosopher) and Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist), are mistaken for downplaying the role of formal debates in ...