Recently I had one of those strange moments. I had seen something that made me think that it was not something that I would do. What it was isn’t important. What is important is that the reason I felt that I wouldn’t do the same was because it wasn’t a very “Christian” thing to do.
It always is fascinating to me when people will try to refute a theistic claim and then turn around and make a claim based on the very logic they are trying to use to refute the other’s claim. An example of this came up during a recent debate with Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Lawrence Krauss. The topic of the debate was “Is there Evidence for God?”
The truth has an interesting characteristic about it. If something is true, you can generally work the idea backward or forward and it just works. Let’s take a simple math problem, for example. If you add together 2 + 3, you get 5. Now, if you work it backwards and start at 5 and subtract 3, you end up back at 2. Most math teachers will tell their students that this is a good way to verify that they have answered a math problem correctly.
There are many arguments for the existence of God. Many of the best philosophers in the marketplace today will use various cosmological arguments, teleological arguments (arguments from design) and moral arguments among others. A common tactic from non-believers is to post some alternative explanation and claim that this eliminates the necessity of belief in God.
I thought this would be a good time to go back into the recesses of history and bring up a topic that was taught in my church quite a number of years ago, now. That is, as the title of this post suggests, guilt and shame.
