Family Man

One of the things that have always bothered me about many theistic arguments is that they appear to me to be reversed engineered. What I mean by that is that they start with the desired conclusion, then look for justifications to support that conclusion. Let me give a couple of examples we've all seen over and over again.

From a fundamentalist position, the desired conclusion is that the Bible is inerrant, that it has no errors. So when faced with such errors, say with the genealogy discrepencies, we end up hearing arguments that make no sense. In this example, we get told that Luke's genealogy is Mary's, not Joseph's. Why? There's nothing in the text to support such an interpretation, and nowhere else in the Bible is such a genealogy given. Genealogies in the Bible are always through the male line. There is no justification for such a claim, except for the fundamentalist need to have an inerrant bible.

Or from a more mainstream perspective, consider the Free Will Defense. Allowing the assumption that God exists for argument's sake, the question I've always had is how do we know that God wants us to have free will? Or is this just another argument born from the Christian need to explain evil, and not from valid observations or reasoning?

The point isn't that I want to rehash these two issues -- they've been addressed ad nauseam, so please resist the temptation to state what we've all heard over and over again, and if someone fails to address the issue I'm raising here, please ignore them. The questions I have are:

1. Have I accurately portrayed these arguments? Are they being driven by their conclusions, and not the other way around?

2. If these are reverse-engineered arguments, why should anyone put any stock in them?

sodium

I remember taking a course in the Philosophy of Religion. In an early selection from our text book, a theologian elegantly explained away all the evil of the world as being basically unavoidable, even for an omnipotent God. In a later selection, the same theologian argued that we know that our souls are immortal, because God couldn't possibly be willing that we should perish. But I couldn't help but think that if he was somehow made aware that our souls are not immortal, he could explain that fact away as easily as everything else.

Which reminds me of Thomas Aquinas. He had a clever way of deciding which sexual practices were immoral. For suspect practices, he would simply look at whether animals also engaged in the practice (as far as he knew). If they did not, he would say that it was unnatural. If they did, he would say that it was bestial. In this way, he was able to prove by reason what he knew by faith.