“How to be a Good Apologist” 

Nearly three years ago now, the astoundingly prolific and productive Irish Latter-day Saint writer Robert Boylan posted this interesting blog entry:

“Some tips on becoming an effective apologist”

Now, my friend Tarik LaCour, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy and a master’s degree in neuroscience at Texas A&M University, has published an interesting item on his own blog that I commend to your attention.  It’s entitled

“How to be a Good Apologist.”

I very much like his advocacy of giving attention to natural theology, which Latter-day Saint thinkers have tended to neglect when they have not altogether rejected it.  In fact, in his entry on the day following “How to be a Good Apologist,” he actually directed his readers to a debate that was focused on natural theology:

“Friday Traditio: Alex Rosenberg vs. William Lane Craig”

I must, however, quibble with his advice to “Take on the heavyweights” — at least, to the extent that he means by that advice that (as he actually says) apologists should ignore intellectually unserious challenges like the notorious “CES Letter” and the bestselling “New Atheists.”

I readily grant that “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens — to say nothing of the unfortunate “CES Letter” —  aren’t exactly “heavyweights” of the kind that Brother LaCour commends to our attention.  Their facts are often cherry-picked, when not altogether fictional, their interpretations are all too often caricatures, their logic is slipshod, and so on and so forth.  I absolutely agree.

But it’s the “New Atheists” and the “CES Letter” — and other people and arguments on a similar low level — that are damaging testimonies and destroying faith among (especially) young Latter-day Saints, and rendering many people outside the Church inaccessible to our missionary efforts.  It’s not the works of  J. L. Mackie, Paul Draper, Alex Rosenberg, or David Hume.

So, yes, it would be more gratifying always to work on a sophisticated level, and, yes, the arguments of sophisticated atheistic thinkers absolutely merit serious attention and faithful response.  I believe that academically-equipped Latter-day Saint apologists should be doing just that.  Indeed, I wish that more Latter-day Saints with the appropriate academic training and the necessary capability, from many fields, would give at least some attention to apologetics in all fields, not only in philosophy.  And, yes, this comes at a cost.  More than once, I myself have lamented the time and energy that I’ve felt that I had to allocate to analyzing the works of such relatively dim bulbs as Ed Decker, John Ankerberg, and John Weldon (as here and here), and the effusions of the balmy loon Loftes Tryk, when I ought rather to be engaging Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, al-Farabi, al-Kirmani, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), and St. Thomas Aquinas, as I was trained to do, as I want to do, and as I set out on my career to do.

But I did feel the obligation.  It seemed to me a pastoral duty.  In fact, at the risk of sounding vainglorious, it seemed to me something of a “calling.”

To conclude this hasty response — please read the two blog entries that I’ve highlighted above, and, indeed, Tarik LaCour’s blog as whole — I cite a passage that I’ve long treasured from C. S. Lewis’s classic essay The Weight of Glory.  Tarik, alas, is not a fan of C. S. Lewis.  But I am:

“To be ignorant and simple now — not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground — would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether.”