I was a fundamentalist until my literal interpretation of the Bible collided head-on with the real world in 1985 when I began tertiary education. The particular event which triggered my first crisis of faith was realising that Noahs flood could not have been global as a population of eight would rapidly be wiped out by all the obligate human pathogens they would have been carrying. My faith recovered, but it was no longer a fundamentalist one. Unlike too many other fundamentalists, I had enough intellectual honesty to recognise that evidence that refutes a worldview does not go away simply by ignoring it, or explaining it away. That event began my interest in apologetics, one that continues to the present day. Being spurred into apologetics after an adolescent crisis of faith is quite a common story among Christian apologists. I suspect that one of the main reasons is to ensure that other believers dont have to endure unsupported the emotional and intellectual crises that come when they are confronted with evidence that cannot be easily reconciled with what they believe. How the apologist resolved the cognitive dissonance they experienced when they had their crisis of faith is critical. Did they resolve the tension simply by constructing elaborate rationalisations for their fundamentalism, or did they accept that fundamentalism was untenable, rationally examine the evidence, and present a Christianity that was consistent with all the evidence? Unless one lives in a fundamentalist bubble and is Dunning Kruger incarnate, eventually, the stress of trying to rationalise away the evidence that refutes fundamentalism will be too much, and the fundamentalist apologist will lose faith, often in a protracted, painful way. Ironically, the fundamentalist apologist who entered the apologetics game after a crisis of faith in order to defend it ends up merely facilitating the reconversion of others by inculcating them with a flawed way of defending the faith. Its a reminder for every apologist to remember the importance of following the evidence, rather than explaining it away. christadelphianevolution.blogspot.au/2014/03/why-fundamentalist-apologetics-is.html
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 07:42:32 +0000
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