FreezBee

Apologetics is Greek for 'bad excuses'. You know an apologist by his/her use of bad excuses. So, if someone comes up with bad excuses, you probably have an apologist.

Does this help?


- FreezBee

diana

Good morrow, sir.

Scholars apply historical method.

To be an actual scholar, you must discard your presuppositions and depend ONLY on the evidence available. Also, you must invariably apply sound, cogent logic to your facts to reach any conclusions. You must be willing to discard any conclusion should new evidence come to light. (I believe the link I provided above will get you started on what qualifies as "evidence." Also, you may feel free to ask some of our resident scholars what's the difference. This is a very important point to get straight.)

d

Jack the Bodiless

mdd344:

I submitted my post #117 more than four hours before the next post, #118, made by you. And yet, in YOUR post, you chose to ask a question that MY post apparently answered for you.

...What part of my post did you fail to read?

...What part of my post did you fail to understand?

...What part of my post did you disgree with?

...What part of my post did you summarily reject?

Please explain your conduct.

post tenebras lux

And yet mdd344 waited only 23 minutes between posting #106:and posting #107::huh:

Jack the Bodiless

That's actually quite a good indicator.

If the Bible says X, but the historical evidence says Y, then most apologists don't even try to argue that the evidence actually says Y (...with one VERY notable exception: when defending Young-Earth Creationism, they apparently consider it to be OK to lie about the evidence in this fashion, they seem to have more respect for history than for science). For instance, I have yet to see any apologist actually argue that "historians have got it wrong, Belshazzar WAS the son of Nebuchadnezzar".

Instead, we see "bad excuses": fabrications, but not as direct as "Belshazzar WAS the son of Nebuchadnezzar" (or "no transitional fossils" or "mutations cannot create information" or whatever). For instance, "maybe that Hebrew word might also mean grandson-in-law or whatever, and maybe there was indeed a relationship that was something like that..."

...But with no actual evidence to support such a notion.

Toto

This is tongue in cheek. Actually, an apologist is a lawyer. An apologist finds reasons to support what he believes on faith or ideology, just like a lawyer comes up for arguments for his client.

In theory, apologetics does not have to be bad. But in practice, apologists usually sound like they are defending the local drunk driver.

anexa

I get this argument a lot from Christians. "But don't you believe the fulfilling of the prophecies is proof of God?" No... No I don't. That argument doesn't even make sense to me. It's like the Bible saying it is the end-all, be-all makes it such. That just doesn't work and that people in this day and age are ok with believing in some book because the writers of the book say it should be believed in is very odd to me.

Perhaps I have simplified this too much, I would like to see if this argument includes anything more than that. Anyone?

hatsoff

Biblical scholarship is no different than any other scientific field, except for the presence of extremist Christians. "Scholars" have formal degrees from accredited institutions and make an original contribution to the community. It's that simple. There's no big conspiracy to oust Christian believers.

hatsoff

I think that's the *ideal* scholar, not the actual scholar.

Toto

Part of the reason we look to scholars is that they interact with other scholars, and we hope that peer review will weed out the obviously incorrect claims and force scholars to refine and correct their work. It isn't just that some scholars are better or smarter than others, but that the process of scholarship is designed to get us closer to an accurate answer.

But this is a long term process. There are undoubtedly errors in current scholarship.

Apologetics, in contrast, starts out with the conclusion, and shapes arguments to defend what is believed by faith.