I
listened to an annoying “debate” between Raphael Lataster and
Trent Horn. The question presented was “Does God Exist?” Trent
Horn argued the classic contingency case as well as making an appeal
to recognition of moral absolutes. Raphael Lataster stated that
those arguments didn’t measure up and that Mr. Horn needed to argue
from probability and said that things like polytheism, pantheism, and
deism could also be options on the basis of the arguments that Mr.
Horn made. He also asked why God did not simply reveal himself, if
he was all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful. He claimed that he was
agnostic but not unfriendly to theism or Christianity in particular,
that he was willing to believe if God would just reveal himself.
This he described as “troubling”.
As
the debate went on, Mr. Horn continued to explain deductive
reasoning, give examples, defend his arguments and ask Mr. Lataster
to make an argument. Mr. Lataster continued to make statements about
the necessity of considering alternative theisms and his not needing
to defend his position since his position was agnosticism while
saying that Mr. Horn was not sufficiently proving his point and that
he was using controversial premises and that God, if extant, ought to
just show himself.
In
the cross examination, though, it seemed pretty clear that he was not
actually willing to see God. He favours pantheism and materialism,
but is agnostic.
I
then was listening to Dr. Taylor Marshall and Timothy Gordon talk
about Tolkein and Thomas Aquinas on Analogy of Being. As they were
talking about the story telling, and the ridiculousness of explaining
in the midst of a story or a game the symbolic nature of something,
Dr. Marshall said, “You have to let the person listening do some of
the work and risk them not getting it.”
One
of the comparisons they made was of playing with children (they have
eight and five children respectively). If you are playing cops and
robbers, you do not explain “Now, you realize this isn’t really a
gun.” or “This isn’t really a jail, it’s a tree,” because
that ruins the fun. The children know that the gun is fake, the tree
is a tree, but for the purpose of the game, the tree IS
a jail and the guns are dangerous.
Too
often in Christian fiction and movies, the authors make things too
explicit. They are message rather than story driven. Think of God’s
not Dead.
This one actually had some decent stories set up, but they allowed
the story to be dictated by the message. The atheist professor had
to be a jerk who kept his girl-friend waiting on the table of her
superiors. He was an atheist because God did not heal his mother.
They made sure to tell you, “God’s not dead,” but then, while
they set up a premise of a debate happening in the classroom, they
did not follow up on that by actually having a debate. And all the
Christians go to the concert to sing “God’s not Dead” while the
atheist gets hit by a car and is given the opportunity to say a
death-bed prayer.
There
is a reason Christian movies have a reputation for being cheesy and
preachy.
I
enjoyed Priceless
more than God’s
not Dead
in the end, but even that one has the dude who just sounds like a
preacher sermonizing rather than being the sheriff that he was
supposed to be. Still, overall it was driven by the story of a man
who took a job at a low point in life, only to realize it was a bad
job. What happens next? They follow the story through. It does have a happy ending, but they did allow the characters to grow and the story to build.
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