A blog post by Jericho Brisance, “Christian Agnosticism and Touching Earth,” was drawn to my attention. It emphasizes that it is unacceptable to use history and science in an attempt to justify the Bible without being open to the disconfirmation of the Bible through the use of those same methods. Here is a taste:
We claim normative knowledge in the Bible. It is subject to normative evaluation, and that means that such claims are indeed verifiable… and falsifiable… by normative means, objectively and with all evidence on the table.
The abdicating response of Christian agnosticism simply will not do. Those that think we cannot evaluate the truth or falsehood of Christianity objectively succeed only in fulfilling their own prophecy. Its amazing what happens if you exert an unflinching effort to try.
I find that people often really do not want to know. Serious inquiry of adversarial sources is rarely undertaken. The deck of apologetic material tends to be well stacked. We turn to the resources on our church book tables to answer. We have ready-to-hand conspiracy explanations for the really tight corners. And we invoke our skepticism toward science and history that are backed with reams of data, in order to claim high confidence in texts backed by little or none.
Click through to read the rest.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In