Tim Keller at Westminster

The evidential style is what was so bad. It doesn't work unless the person is willing to take that evidence seriously.

Now, in fairness to the apologists, one of their biggest arguments was the "witness of the martyrs," that the fact that a goodly number of people were willing to get killed for what would seem on its face to be a pretty silly idea. But that argument died at Jonestown and was buried at Waco and is rarely used now from what I can gather. That pretty much knocked the wind out of the evidentiary concept because, let us be honest, unless one is willing to believe in the Shroud of Turin, there is damned little physical evidence left and the witnesses quoted would not be considered exactly reliable.

That pretty much leaves faith alone. One cannot argue effectively against a strong faith held by another and it is probably impolite to do so but it is not always a good method of persuasion in and of itself.

The problem with Lewis book is that it is totally bound up with the culture of its intended audience. The opening argument about the universal appeal of fairness sounds pretty funny to people who firmly disbelieve in it as a value at all ("Life is not fair." John Kennedy, August 1961) and when he talks about how we would feel about someone who avoided getting shot at in a war, most of us I would dare venture, would say that he was showing great good sense and that is why we voted for Bill Clinton in such large numbers (and also why the National Guard business never made a dent in George Bush). His arguments fail because his examples just don't work any more. Now, to be fair to Lewis, he could conceive of a situation where his words would fall flat but he died before he could see that situation extended to an entire, and much larger, culture. To put it simply, Americans in 2008 are not British in 1943, looking out at the ruins and finding comfort in the fact that the tea service survived the blitz.

It is interesting that Keller spoke about implausibility factors being different from culture to culture. For me the fact that different cultures have different religions and religious views is itself one of the implausibility factors.

To illustrate my point. Math is universally recognized and agreed upon by all cultures. While what is considered good music does vary. So math does not appear to be opinion, while good music is one culture's opinion. This tends to create a lowest common denominator approach to what is the truth as cultures get co-mingled.