"Nietzsche said that God is dead... So for the last century, we've been living under the shadow of the death of God in the culture. And when God dies, all truth dies. If you dn't have an absolute moral lawgiver, you can't have any moral laws. When God dies, all truth dies and all meaning dies. So in this culture, the church is faced with reestablishing that there is absolute truth, absolute meaning, absolute morals, and that the opposite of true is false. We have to do more apologetics today than ever before."
-- Norm Geisler, as quoted by Josh McDowell in the foreward to To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview, edited by Francis Beckwith et. al.
I'm working through this book for the spring colloquium in Christian Philosophy, and thought that this statement was a succinct summary of the need for apologetics today. Unlike previous generations in this country, ours can no longer assume that people operate from the same basic cognitive framework - the same basic ideas about morality, the nature of truth, the existence of God, etc. The role of apologetics is to present the Christian worldview and demonstrate, as best we can, how and why it is true. And it is, to borrow a phrase from Francis Schaeffer, true truth. Schaeffer talked about what we call apologetics as "pre-evangelism," an important and often necessary enterprise that helps lay the foundation for the gospel. As Geisler points out, the need for such engagement with people in our culture is great.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
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Relatedly-- in discussing the existence ("trueness") of truth, I've sometimes replied to statements claiming that it doesn't exist: "That just isn't true!" More than once the reply has been a forceful assertion the import of which is essentially: "Yes it is true!" Much more often, the other person has proceeded in the discussion not by making the statement explicitly, but by defending the untruth of truth with added argument. It's quite amazing to see how commonly individuals fail to recognize the complete emptiness of language and meaning without "true truth". I certainly haven't had anyone renounce their former unbelief in truth when pointing out the inherent incoherence of the position; but I hope that some have found themselves reconsidering later. As always, of course, it would be better to say nothing than to be arrogant or condemnatory in the confrontation.
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