Chapter 10 of Before You Lose Your Faith finally leaves behind evangelicals’ beloved culture wars. It dives into the evils of scientism instead. Scientism is a notion beloved of right-wing Christian culture warriors. It means putting trust in reality rather than in Christians’ inept apologetics attempts. This book being a product of those exact kinds of Christians, obviously its writers will want to gaslight their marks into rejecting reality as a means of gaining objectively true knowledge of the world. But there’s a very serious downside to basing one’s apologetics on scientism strawmen.
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Everyone, meet Keith Plummer, the scientism hating writer of Chapter 10 of Before You Lose Your Faith
According to his book blurb, Keith Plummer holds some impressive credentials. He earned his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) in Illinois. The school’s Wikipedia blurb, in turn, describes it as being “among the most conservative and largest theological educational institutions.” Among other notable alumni, its hallowed halls gave us William Lane “Won’t ANYONE Think of Those Poor Li’l Ancient Israelite Genociders?” Craig and Scot “Choosy Beggar” McKnight. Interestingly, Plummer does not appear on Wikipedia’s list of “notable alumni.”
Nowadays, he is the dean of the School of Divinity for Cairn University in Pennsylvania, as well as a professor of theology and apologetics there. It’s a relatively small, private, nondenominational school with about 1200 students. Overall, the Wiki writeup does not sound exceptionally favorable to the school. Despite that problem, I’ve actually heard of a few of its notable alumni and of one of the notable faculty on that Wikipedia writeup. Again, Plummer doesn’t appear there.
I haven’t been able to dig up his full curriculum vitae. (A CV is like a resume, but for academics; it’s a lot longer and contains much more information as well. It’s kind of weird that I can’t find it.) But what I have seen of his educational background and professional experience indicates that he is not qualified in the very least to speak about matters of science or evolution. His knowledge base is entirely evangelical, and entirely culture-warrior at that.
Rather, his knowledge of these two topics starts and stops with the strawmen of both that evangelicals have constructed over the past few decades.
In short, Keith Plummer doesn’t know beans about science and evolution. But he’s still very certain that neither field of study may ever be used to evaluate his religious claims.
An introduction to scientism
The term scientism came to life around the 1860s. It always meant about what it means now: reliance on the tools of science, notably the scientific method, to test and evaluate religious claims, as well as trust in the laws of nature that humans derived from the use of those tools. In The Apocalypse: A Series of Special Lectures on the Revelation of Jesus Christ, published by Joseph Augustus Seiss in 1865, we find him railing about scientism while discussing 2 Timothy chapters 3-4:
Speaking of the Man of Sin and his doings, Paul writes that the day shall not come, “except there come a falling away first.” There is then to be a general sinking from the true faith, and the substitution of human conceits, philosophies, and “science falsely so called,” in the place of true divine verities, eating away the substance of true religion, and dissolving its hold on the hearts and minds of men. Such a terrible deceit could not be unless all society were first thoroughly corrupted. And so it will be.
The Apostle says: “Know this, that in the last days perilous times shall come” [. . . from 2 Timothy 3:1-5] Among the active causes of all this we are forewarned of a certain boastful and blatant scientism and naturalism which does not hesitate dogmatically to negative the doctrines of faith. . .
Throughout the rest of the late 1800s, we find Christians railing against scientism in similar ways. In 1880, some Reformed Presbyterians complained about England, then compared the situation there to America:
Matthew Arnold has said of England: “We have an upper class materialized, a middle class vulgarized, and a lower class brutalized.” Such distinctions will not be acknowledged in this land. As Holyoke says, “There are no common people in America, as in the English sense.” Nor does the irreligious scientism of the day vulgarize and brutalize its subjects.
I’m not surprised by the timing of any of this sudden hatred for scientism.
Scientism has always been a product of its times
In 1859, Charles Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, was published. It immediately garnered intense hostility from religious people. In addition to hinting that humans themselves had purely natural and evolutionary origins, an idea which made Christians explode, Darwin also talked about testing scientific ideas to figure out which ones should be kept and refined—and which ones discarded. I’m sure all of that enraged the Christians of his day. That reformists leaped onto his ideas would only have pissed Christians off worse.
In addition, the American Civil War broke out in the 1860s. It had huge effects on American culture, provoking some truly sappy, overly-sentimental, and moralistic literature. But it also affected gender roles, work and home spheres, and even various people’s responses to increasing industrialization.
Still, scientism remained a niche concept for a very long time, according to Google’s Ngram Viewer. The concept began picking up serious steam in the 1940s, which also isn’t any surprise at all. Those were turbulent years to say the least, but also years in which our scientific knowledge and embrace of human rights grew exponentially.
Once Christians had finally fully latched onto scientism as a tribal enemy, they never looked back. These days, Christians discuss scientism everywhere. One can even easily find Christian-written books including scientism in the books’ titles.
There’s a very consistent throughline to all of the Christian-written works I consulted over the years. Christians always criticize scientism, without fail and without holding back. It is always their enemy and something they feel they must fight to conquer. As the world grows increasingly more scientifically and technologically sophisticated and advanced, Christians’ hatred for scientism grows accordingly.
Scientism in Chapter 10 of Before You Lose Your Faith
Keith Plummer’s chapter in Before You Lose Your Faith is titled: “Science: Why Scientism Can’t Explain Morality or Reality.”
The moment you see a Christian using the term “scientism,” buckle up. They’re about to shovel a huge load of bullshit right onto your feet. Plummer does not break the combo here, either. He describes an assignment he always gives his apologetics students: interviewing a non-Christian using a set of questions he provides. He says he assigns this task to help his students learn to listen, as well as to learn how non-Christians think.
But questions tend to reveal a lot more about the person making them than the person answering them. That maxim definitely applies here, because his list of questions reveals the gotcha style of apologetics he himself mistakenly thinks are effective (p. 86):
“Is there anything that could persuade you that Christianity is true? If so, what? If not, why?”
At least that’s a set of questions that savvy ex-Christians and non-Christians alike love to answer. But he doesn’t include the dealbreaker answers that such people would give. Instead, he zeroes in on the easy, softball, low-hanging fruit answers that he’d rather have his students get:
My students commonly hear requests for empirical or sensory evidence. Some describe this as needing “tangible” evidence, while others speak of needing “scientific” proof for the existence of God or the possibility of miracles.
And this, Plummer is quick to tell us, is not a valid set of demands at all.
In either case, people seem to assume that only what can be scientifically confirmed is worth being called “evidence.” [Oooh! Scare quotes! Poisoning the well, professor? An appeal to ridicule, already? Don’t worry: he’ll top this feat many times over in this chapter.] Maybe that’s your assumption, too, and a reason why you’re deconstructing your faith. If so, I think you’re asking the impossible of science.
Oh, really.
No. We’re actually asking the impossible of his nonexistent god.
In ridiculing the idea of evidence and trying to set his religious claims as incapable of being tested at all, he’s attacking our means of verifying reality. And he does it make his meritless, completely unsupported claims sound better than they do.
Scientism as a snarl word
Then, Plummer goes on to make an invalid comparison (another logical fallacy called false equivalence). In this case, he compares his religious claims to claims about the real world:
Science is a wonderful means of discovering the workings of the natural world. But claiming reality is restricted only to that which we’re capable of detecting with our senses is, as philosopher Alvin Plantinga has said, like a drunk looking for his lost car keys under a streetlight because the light is better there. It’s a form of naturalism or materialism, a view that holds that the natural world is all that exists. This claim is not scientific in nature but philosophical. It’s not a scientific conclusion but an ideological pre-commitment concerning the nature of reality.
Let’s examine this statement.
The tools of science, by which we mean stuff like the scientific method, are the literal only reliable way we have ever found to discover objective truths about the universe, our world, and the various life-forms on it. The field of study that we use those tools to explore is called science. We have never found any other method of testing claims that leads to objective truth.
Lots of people, particularly religious ones, have put forward other methods of testing claims. But none of those have been found to be reliable or to give true answers to our questions.
Any claim about reality can and should be tested. That rule particularly includes religious claims, which often come with demands for our obedience and resources.
If he thinks that more exists to reality than that which can be detected and tested with the tools of science, moreover, it is on him to demonstrate that point with real-world support.
He is already laying down a framework for exempting his religious claims from testing and evaluation. There’s only one reason he’d do that, and it is a cowardly one.
Like all other literalist culture warrior evangelicals, he both aches for the validation that real-world science would give his religious claims if they were true, and hates real-world science to his marrow and fingertips because it never, ever does that—because they aren’t.
Completely redefining “God” to exempt him from testing and evaluation at all
Having laid his groundwork, Plummer now seeks to redefine his god in a way that exempts him from any kind of testing or evaluation:
PROBLEM OF SCIENTISM
The demand that God’s existence be subject to scientific verification fails to account for the kind of being Christianity claims he is.
Excuse me? Christianity claims that Yahweh/Jesus is a real live god who does real live things in the real live world for his followers. This being meddles constantly in every sphere of life and in matters both microscopic and cosmic.
If Christians claimed the god of deism, who doesn’t really meddle in the real world at all, that’d definitely be one thing. A god who doesn’t do anything in the real world would, by definition, leave no traces of his passage or influence. But the adherents of Keith Plummer’s particular flavor of Christianity do not claim that.
Instead, these Christians claim a personal god who cares so much about them that he will preserve their lives, give them good fortune, make their relationships happier and more harmonious, help them secure great jobs and educational opportunities, heal them from all kinds of sickness, injury, and wedding-day acne, save them from natural disasters, and help them win elections, wars, and football games alike while also finding their lost car keys for them and getting them great parking spots at crowded shopping malls.
As such, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that such a god would leave tangible evidence behind all of these deeds.
It’s just that he doesn’t. Ever. It’s so weird.
The evidence that should be everywhere, yet is never found
Instead, we find that Christians suffer from calamity and poor health as much as (or more often than) non-Christians do. Their relationships are hardly enviable at all.
Miracles also should be easily ascertained as inexplicable. And here, Christians are happy to attribute any bit of good fortune to divine aid in the form of miracles. But when we carefully examine their miracle claims, we uniformly find that these are either exaggerations or fabrications, or else easily attributable to random chance or human effort. Some of these miracle claims are downright cringeworthy. None are actually studied or examined to a sufficient degree.
Worse, no Christians can predict when miracles will happen despite their holy book laying down the concrete conditions that dictate a yes to the requests they make to their god. They’ve evolved countless ways to hand-wave away those concrete conditions. But that’s not my problem. When we compare the terms and conditions of miracles in the Bible to how miracles actually work in the real world, we can easily see that Christians’ claims about miracles do not look a thing like those T&Cs.
If we move past the supernatural claims they constantly make, and focus only on their social systems and roadmaps, we find even less supporting evidence there. Despite claiming that a god designed their rules and roadmaps, not one of them works the way that it should. As a group, these particular Christians are more marked by hypocrisy and dishonesty than they are by obedience.
And there is literally nothing, it seems, that Plummer’s flavor of Christians claim about their history that is actually true. Christian propaganda does not reflect reality there.
In every one of these cases, reality simply does not support Christians’ claims about it. Not in any way at all.
So if Keith Plummer wants us to believe his claims despite an utter lack of supporting evidence for them, he needs us to accept the shit-tier pseudo-evidence that he has cultivated instead.
First, our author uses scientism to attack the very idea of having real evidence
It’s funny how Keith Plummer tries to attack reality-based evaluation tools. First, he tries to set up some kind of moral obligation not to test religious claims.
Because all creation owes its original and continued existence to God, we shouldn’t expect him to be detectable as if he were simply a grander piece of nature’s furniture. He qualitatively transcends what he has made; he’s not a part of it. Saying you can only believe that the God of the Bible is there if empirical evidence confirms it is essentially to say that you’ll only believe Christianity is true if it’s other than what it is.
So expecting Christians to support their own religious claims about their god’s activities is showing disrespect to their god. In addition, ignore all the stuff Plummer’s tribe says about how their god interacts with reality. This is the one time that something or someone can meaningfully and substantially interact with reality without leaving a single trace behind.
So if it looks like they lie constantly about their god giving them money, good jobs, power over other people, salvation from sickness and disasters, and nonstop miracle cures, that’s just their god never showing up in any photographs taken of him. Why? Oh, he just hates it when people believe in him for good reasons. He’d rather they believe for invalid and nonsensical reasons. It’d be super-easy for him to make it so that Christians became well-known for having much better luck, relationships, and fortune than any other group has experienced in history. He just doesn’t. He’s not furniture, shitlord! Stop expecting him to leave evidence of his activity!
Something something, not a tame lion, something something, blah blah blah.
What Keith Plummer offers instead: ignorance masquerading as evidence
As I said earlier, Keith Plummer has a lot of invalid and shit-tier pseudo-evidence to offer instead of real evidence. And we finally get to that on p. 87:
I’m not willing to concede the absence of scientific findings consistent with and supportive of a Christian perspective.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for him to produce even one “scientific finding” that is consistent with his religious perspective. He isn’t willing to concede it, but that just means he knows there are none. If he had even one, he’d already have shown that card to us. He doesn’t have any such findings, which is why he’s about to tell us what he has instead:
But, for the sake of argument, the biblical narrative still makes sense of existential phenomena common to humanity, such as our aspirations for justice, our belief in human rights, our appreciation of beauty, and the inevitability of making moral judgments about human behavior. These values may not be scientific, but they should still be acknowledged as evidence. They’re simply other kinds of evidence.
That’s not true at all. These are all values that can be tested with the tools of science. All exist completely independently of any gods, especially human rights (as we discussed last time). In fact, we’ve got a pretty good idea of how all of these values evolved in humans.
If you don’t accept the appeal to beauty, you suffer from dreaded scientism!
Like consider beauty. We have some remarkably consistent ideas about what constitutes beauty, both in ourselves and in nature. At the same time, our human eye for beauty is vastly influenced by both our individual subjective opinions and our cultural ideals.
And now, consider justice. As far back as the 1700s BCE, when the Code of Hammurabi got made, humans were trying to nail down justice concepts and figure out how to run justice-oriented societies. Our oldest stories, like The Epic of Gilgamesh, talk about morality and ethics, as well as our obligations to our fellow humans.
Nothing Plummer names as PROOF YES PROOF of his religious claims is actually anything of the sort. In fact, the truth about all of his named values contradicts a number of his particular tribe’s claims.
Dude actually thinks he’s rejecting scientism “without disparaging science”
We’ve now dismantled all his “other kinds of evidence” as nothing of the sort. They’re just him unsuccessfully grabbing at straws to try to make his religious claims sound like they’re true.
But he thinks he’s made his case that his sales targets are being very mean by insisting on real evidence for his marketing claims. He moves on smoothly to claiming that he’s totally not actually trying to attack real evidence or the means of getting it:
[Scientism is] so deeply ingrained in some people’s minds that they regard anyone who would dare contest it as backward and anti-scientific. But that’s to conflate science and scientism. One can (and, as I’ll argue, should) reject scientism without disparaging science.
In other words, he reaches for real science whenever he can. When he can’t, as in the case of his religious claims, he attacks those who value objective truth as suffering from “scientism.” He wants to have his cake and eat it too, to have a life filled with the fruits of real science, but also to have his religious claims sequestered away in a little box that real science may not ever open or examine.
Whatever happened to never fearing what real science had to say about one’s beliefs, because one had such strong faith that they just knew that the scientific method would always support those beliefs? That’s how I was when I was Pentecostal. My faith could have withstood a battering ram. I was never worried about investigating anything related to my beliefs. At least, I wasn’t until the day I actually did it.
But this guy already knows damned well that no tool of real science will ever support his claims. His entire goal here is to persuade doubting Christians to refuse to use those tools.
And now, the strawman attacks on real science
This wouldn’t be a chapter of Before You Lose Your Faith without the construction and dismantling of at least one strawman. And now we have arrived at that part of the program. Here are the reasons why Keith Plummer, a theology professor who is not even educated or trained a tiny little bit in real science or its tools, thinks that real science is completely bogus (p. 87):
Perhaps the greatest intellectual deficit of scientism is that it’s self-refuting. It fails to meet its own standard. Remember, according to scientism, science is the only way of knowing what’s true or real. If something hasn’t been verified by science, we’re not justified in saying we know it to be true or real. We can say we believe it, but we can’t legitimately claim to know it.
He is skilled at mixing truths with lies, I’ll give him that. Yes, he’s right in saying that without support from reality, he cannot legitimately say that he knows a claim is true. He can only say he believes it to be true. But his particular flavor of Christianity absolutely needs a literally true and real god, Bible, and religious claims. None of those things can be metaphorical or instructional. They must also be literally, objectively true—even though none of them get any support from the real world. But he’s not finished yet:
The problem for scientism arises, though, when we ask: “how do I know that science is the only means of knowing what’s true or real?” If that assertion is really true, then the only acceptable answer to that question would have to be “Science says.” If we appeal to anything other than science to answer the question, we’ve denied its exclusive claim. But while the sentence makes a claim about science, it’s not a scientific claim. There’s no way to establish its truth on the basis of experimentation or sensory experience. That’s because it’s not a scientific conclusion but a philosophical commitment to a particular theory about the means to and extent of our knowledge.
He is being exceptionally, breathtakingly dishonest here. He’s trying to confuse-and-lose the target audience for this book. And he’s doing it to throw a petulant fit over the scientific method never validating his religious claims.
Here’s how his Just Asking Questions question really works in the real world
He’s just asking questions here, not really asking because he’s just thirsting to know the real answer. This is just his particularly cringey attempt at a gotcha zinger. He seriously thinks this will totally stop doubters dead in their tracks, like OH NO! Real science suffers from circular logic!
Oh, to see a real scientist take this guy’s disingenuous arguments apart.
Alas, I’m not one of those folks. You’ll have to put up with me, a cheerleader for real scientists. And here’s what I’d answer, if he asked me that question:
That’s an interesting question, because it took humans a very long time to develop the scientific method and our other tools for testing claims. We’ve been working on these tools for a while, sometimes for thousands of years. It’s a good question, though. If we don’t understand why those tools work to reveal objective reality, then of course we’ll make a lot of mistakes in evaluating claims using invalid tools.
The scientific method and other tools may not be the only means of discovering truth. But they are the only means that we know for sure discover truth. Every time we’ve ever tested any other method claiming to lead to a better understanding of reality, it’s turned out to be a false lead. For example, consider the many methods of prognostication: astrology, ghost mediums, examining animal intestines after sacrifice, even watching how birds fly. Sometimes those methods can lead to a better subjective understanding of a situation. But they do not ever lead to a better understanding of reality. They do not hold up under testing with the tools we have. Those prognostications aren’t indicative of reality.
You think you have a better way to ascertain objective truth using some other tool. So it is on you to demonstrate that it does, indeed, do what you claim. So far, not one Christian has ever done that. If you ever do, then you’ll probably get some huge Nobel prize or something.
You’d deserve it, too. After all, you would be fundamentally changing the entire nature of religion forever.
Only his circular logic isn’t good and not ickie scientism
Further, he’s trying to set up the idea that real science and its tools suffer from circular reasoning:
- How do we know that only real science leads to objective truth?
- Science says so.
- Therefore, only real science leads to objective truth.
This is exactly and precisely the same circular reasoning that apologists like him use all the time:
- How do we know the Bible is true?
- It says it is, and it says that the god who inspired it cannot lie.
- Therefore, the Bible is true.
But apparently, in this case, now circular reasoning is bad.
Of course, in reality, nobody uses circular logic to embrace real science. We don’t put faith in science the way that he puts faith in his religious claims. Instead, we know science works to reveal objective reality and truth because we can test those claims and make predictions based on them that actually come true. The tools of science work, and we know that because we have tested them countless times. Every time, they pass those tests.
When something fails a test, we say it has no support for itself and we discard it. Slowly, we winnow out the false to get to the true.
Nobody can say any of that about religious claims, ever, nor the substandard tools that religious people use to tentatively poke at their own claims.
Next, Keith Plummer tries to tell us that scientism means history isn’t real
This guy is just Gish galloping all over the place. His second big criticism of real science is that it totally invalidates the study of history. I’m not kidding (p. 88):
Historical knowledge is not the result of repeated experimentation and observation. A great deal of our knowledge of the past depends on the testimony of people who lived in those times. But if scientism were true, then we’d have to give up any claim of historical knowledge, since it wouldn’t be the finding of science. Even claims to knowledge of the recent past, including ours, would have to be abandoned if science is the only means of knowing what is true or real.
Speaking as a major history wonk, I can tell you that this guy is completely, utterly, gobsmackingly wrong.
The study of history, within the general framework of science, has rigorous standards regarding testing claims and predicting new avenues of research.
For instance, a bit ago I mentioned Christians’ own historical revision about their religion’s past. They have an entire lively mythology built up about the earliest years of Christianity. Over time, they just assumed that those myths reflected reality. The more literalist the Christian, the more they assume this.
One myth they take as a given is that Jesus seriously disrupted Jerusalem in the early 30s. They think he was a rock star who commanded vast crowds, impressed the religious leaders of his day, and annoyed the Romans enough to warrant his execution.
But we have never once ever found any evidence in contemporary sources for any of these claims. In fact, if Jesus really existed at all, it’s clear that he was a very minor, irrelevant nutjob during those turbulent years. And also, somehow the obsessively record-keeping Romans never once wrote his name down in a single document at the time.
Plummer’s clearly never trained in science. But I also now wonder if he’s ever trained in history. Even I know this stuff, and I only took enough to get a minor in it.
And now, one last jab at real science that completely misunderstands the scientific method
We will be splitting Chapter 10 into two sections like we did with Chapter 9. There’s just too much here to cover it all in one post. I know this is getting long, and I truly thank you for sticking with me as I examine this material. I’ll close out with one last anecdote that he offers. Perhaps more than any other science mistake he’s made up to now, it shows that he really has no idea how real science operates (p. 88):
I have no doubt that I ate a chicken burrito bowl for lunch shortly before typing this paragraph. But my knowledge of that delicious meal doesn’t rest on science. Of course, someone could pump my stomach and verify that I did, in fact, consume what I claim; that would be a finding of science. But that in no way means my confidence concerning what I ate isn’t knowledge.
He couldn’t be more factually wrong.
He’s trying to say that his religious faith is something he knows is true, the same way he knows that he ate a chicken burrito bowl for lunch.
But he’s once again making a false equivalence. His religious claims do not in any way equate to his knowledge of his lunchtime repast.
How he could test his memory of his lunch with real science
If Keith Plummer ever really wonders what he ate, like if he forgot exactly what he’d eaten, he could look in his wastebasket and sink for the detritus of the meal. He could check his credit card receipts or his bank statement. Or look in his fridge, or ask someone who ate with him what they remember of the meal.
Or yes, as he suggests, he could have his stomach pumped and its contents examined.
Indeed, if someone in a Chubby Emu video presents to the emergency room in a state of being unable or unwilling to tell doctors what they recently consumed, there are a number of ways for those doctors to get that information. All of those ways rely on science and the tools of science.
But there is not one way to test a Christian’s religious claims for their objective veracity. They are all subjective. All a Christian can do is see how a religious claim fits into their existing framework of beliefs. If it fits, it sits. If it doesn’t, they reject it—or, more rarely, change their beliefs to fit this new claim instead.
This is why there are tens of thousands of different quirky takes on Christianity. It’s why Christians only splinter further apart into new denominations, rather than coming together and streamlining as time goes on. There’s nothing real in the religion for them to use as a base and tether.
Here’s the truly most damning thing about Christian claims
Imagine a person presenting to a religious version of an emergency room like this one:
They’re unwilling or unable to tell the religious quacks there what they believe. No symbols on their body or clothes provide any hints.
In this case, there’s no way whatsoever for those quacks to figure out which of countless religions the patient belongs to. They can’t scan the person’s brain to find out if they’re Calvinist or Catholic or pagan or atheist. There’s no religious stomach pump that can expose the contents of their beliefs.
In fact, Penn Jillette once wrote this of religion. It is the most damning thing anyone can possibly say about Christians’ claims:
“There is no god, and that’s the simple truth. If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.”
Only the most delusional of Christians could gainsay this. It is, indeed, the simple truth. These are folks who can read the same Bible verses and come out with completely different interpretations of those verses’ meanings. So I have no confidence in future humans’ ability to recreate Christianity if all signs of it ever disappeared.
And I say that with confidence because we have yet to figure out what the oldest, long-vanished religions were about. We don’t even have any way of knowing what the earliest humans believed. They left no writings at all about it, of course. What they did leave behind is tantalizing but ultimately impossible to decipher.
For all Christians know, the one true religion died out tens of thousands of years ago, which means that everything that’s come since then then is wrong—and potentially offensive to that one real god.
Hopefully, that god is very forgiving of heretics like the folks behind Before You Lose Your Faith.
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4 Comments
'Before You Lose Your Faith' appeals to morality, fails Unicorn Test - Roll to Disbelieve · 12/19/2022 at 3:47 AM
[…] Last time we met up, we talked about the first part of Chapter 10 of Before You Lose Your Faith. The writer of this chapter of the book, Keith Plummer, made a whole slew of false comparisons, committed half a dozen logical fallacies, egregiously mischaracterized the scientific method itself, then tried to forbid anyone from using reality-based evaluation tools on his religious claims for a variety of self-serving reasons. But that doesn’t mean he’s all out of tricks. Now, let’s get to the meat of his argument, the PROOF YES PROOF that all of his claims are ultimately true, the slam-dunk he thinks will have naysayers sobbing on their knees for his imaginary friend’s forgiveness. […]
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[…] isn’t it? Chapter 10 was all about how awful scientism is. So evangelicals needed to avoid using the tools of real science […]
'Before You Lose Your Faith' retrospective: Who's its intended audience? - Roll to Disbelieve · 01/16/2023 at 1:22 AM
[…] Constant strawmanning of enemies, particularly scientists […]
How Christians rationalize their utter lack of miracles - Roll to Disbelieve · 07/03/2023 at 3:37 AM
[…] the same as no gods being involved at all, then he and his followers don’t get to pitch fits about “scientism” and the like when nobody believes that any gods are behind his […]