Yeah but this thread is about The Case for Christ.

WLC makes an appearance in the book iirc but he's not a main theme in it.

Strobel interviews multiple experts and goes outside of philosophy for much of the book.

Rly...some of the observations from the medical doctor for example could only be made by someone who knows the human body from an m.d.'s level of proficiency.

No layman is able to say with confidence the things the m.d. in the book says and how would Strobel challenge that? By asking useless hypotheticals?

A lot of skepticism towards Christianity revolves around asking "What if" questions as if they are compelling. Skeptics like to layer Christianity with hypotheticals it doesn't level at other groups. That isn't compelling. That's raising objections that the situation doesn't warrant.

I do not believe in god. I am a former Christian.

Been a while since I read it so ill have to look up that specific interview, but my statement applied to all the interviews. There are plenty of well known rebuttals and counter arguments to answers given and anyone truly interested in the material would have prepared and pressed the experts. The interviews read as if it were a follower of Christianity asking questions and receiving answers they already ascribed to without challenge or follow up. The book is fine to get a basis for some of the arguments out here for christianity, but useless if you're actually looking to potentially be swayed or for a worthwhile debate.

It was almost as blatant as: "well, reverend, I don't believe god exists. Does he exist?"
"Yes, of course he exists."
"Well, I'm convinced"

It depends on what you consider Apologetics. There is little argumentation.
Its more critical background and observations from experts in various fields.

Strobel goes in and asks one or two questions then lets them expound.

So if you only accept debate as Apologetics then it won't be an Apologetics text to you.

he credits this journey of discovery with his conversion. The way he conducts the interviews makes this claim highly dubious since they were so incredibly weak and amateurish. They only people that kind of process would "convert" are people who were already Christians. Again, it lacks the thorough debate I think any real atheist or agnostic would have to undertake to actually be swayed by the weak arguments in the book. It's fine for an introduction to some apologetics but further research will yield plenty of good arguments against what he learned.

I read this at a time I was actively seeking God and spending a lot of time with Christianity. The premise of the book, that he was made a believer by his journey and inquires, was very intriguing. I was thoroughly disappointed. Looks like something kirk Cameron would write if he were a little smarter.

The thread is about The Case for Christ. The post to which I was responding was about I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.

The problem is if you are trying to determin whether or not something is true you probably want to interview the experts who don't think it is true too.

True.

But read it yourself. The facts related by the medical doctor in The Case for Christ would most likely not be open for debate from another doctor.

The medical doctor is only showing how modern medicine corroborates that the medical events related in the Gospels is naturally possible and could have occurred.

I apologize for the delayed responses. I am at PCA for the next week or so and only have internet access intermittently.

In an effort to get this thread back on track...

Who has read "The Case for Christ"?

What made sense?
What didn't make sense?

A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. I know two things that are certain...there is a God and I am not Him.

I didn't believe that Jesus was who he said he was until I was nearly 25. So, I can understand how some of you would think otherwise. I used to. Then, I honestly wanted to know the truth. I sought after the truth until I found it. If you really want to know the truth you will find it. If not, that is obv your choice.

I just figured if I was wrong I would spend eternity in Hell. But, if I discovered that Christ really is who he said he is then I would spend eternity in Heaven.

It is the biggest gamble of our lives to decide that Christ is not real/not who He said he was/etc. I wasn't willing to gamble my eternity on what my feeble mind thought.

Yet you casually dismiss Lord Vishnu, the prophet Mohammed, the mighty Zeus, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Any of these and countless other deities besides could make you pay dearly for your insolence if you're wrong and they exist. Your afterlife insurance policy provides very narrow coverage indeed.

Is Pascal's Wager one of the central arguments of Case for Christ? If so, free would definitely be the right price for the book.

No you don't. You can't be certain of something that is unknowable. Even if God himself came to you and told you who he was, there is a non zero chance that you're insane or were hallucinating.

Wow, what a horrible justification. Choosing Christ is almost as big a gamble as remaining an atheist given the number of religions to choose from. If you're wrong, you're going to suffer the same fate as the rest of us.

Or he could be lying, right? How do I determine if it was Satan or God that came to see me??

I have read it. Not every sentence in the book is wrong. But that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about how somebody putting forth a book and declaring it a fair assessment as to the question of whether or not Jesus was who he said he was that only interviews the people who do believe he was is flat out dishonest, and it gives serious doubt to his claim that he was an atheist whose mind was changed while gathering this information, especially when that former atheist is a journalist. He should know better than that.

What about all of the people who have honestly sought him and came up with nothing? Christians and atheists alike?

Actually, by this rationale it is the biggest gamble to decide that he is real and who he said he was. If we are trying to maximize our expectation for an afterlife, then what we ought to do is believe in as many gods as possible who offer it. Since the first of the ten commandments is 'thou shalt have no other gods before me' we can reject Christianity right off the bat.

You would also have to factor in which religion is more likely to be true based on evidence/reason, which could make Christianity the best to gamble on.

The problem is (as other might have pointed out) that you need to use your "feeble mind" to determine whether or not Jesus was who he said he was.

So if you claim that ones mind is too "feeble" to come to the correct decision about reality, you then have to give an alternate mode of discovering this reality.

So what do you suggest?

I want to add that the above is the same problem we have with the views of people like Sub who suggest that we (average people like me) are not intelligent enough to come to the conclusion about God. So we need to look to the most intelligent people to tell us. But the problem is that I still have to have use my intellect (which we have already determined is poor) to determine which intelligent people to listen to.

If you have decent evidence for Christianity, why invoke Pascal's Wager at all? I'll concede that if there's scant evidence for Christianity (enough to give it a 1 in a million shot of being true let's say), but zero evidence for all the other religions, then Pascal's Wager makes Christianity the best bet. Which is an argument for wanting to be a Christian, but it still wouldn't actually make anyone a Christian who wasn't a Christian already. At least it seems to me that if you thought there was only a 1 in a million chance of Christianity being true, you aren't a Christian even if you want to be one. If you think something is almost certainly false then you don't believe it, regardless of the favorable afterlife equity assessment.

Yes, I agree w/ you. I was just arguing that if we were to gamble on a religion that Christianity could be the best to gamble on, even though you can only worship one god, rather than choosing a bunch of different religions that allow you to worship many Gods and that also have an afterlife.

Fair enough, I agree with that.

Well Strobel was a lawyer...he went to law school at Harvard iirc...before he was an investigative journalist.

I think you make an assumption that people just believe blindly and that asking questions is some how more noble.

But my guess is that Strobel approached things a bit like me or a Simon Greenleaf would. We would approach the Gospels the way people approach a witness's testimony in a court of law then reach a conclusion whether or not we think the testimony is true or not. We don't have to insert a lot of questions or assumptions. You don't do that in a court case. In a court case you just hear the facts and base your opinion on it. You're assumption is that people don't reason because they didn't debate in the same way you yourself do. But that's not how a court room operates. People in the jury box are reasoning and observing the case as it unfolds and in a sense that's what Strobel did. Instead of trying to control everything through questions he asked a few open questions then let the experts lead with their expert knowledge.

This blind faith concept is an exaggerated one. It overlooks that people's minds are always observing, assessing and processing with or without interrogating the subject in question.

I'll reiterate. The information he gathered and presented in The Case for Christ I in no way believe was sufficient to sway a true atheist/agnostic. The book was presented as though it caused his conversion. It is not possible for that to have been enough as most of the information there wasn't particularly new, was available to read and already had many coherent rebuttals. Either he was already a Christian when undertaking this endeavor, or something else in addition to this inspired his conversion. The book and the interviews were not from the perspective of a true skeptic/agnostic/atheist and were not conducted accordingly.

You cite a lawyer background. Any self-respecting lawyer who did not believe in Christianity would have conducted a much more thorough an in-depth interview, raising reasonable doubt wherever possible. He did none of this. These interviews were not conducted by an atheist/agnostic.

It's been a long time since I read the book. But I believe what got his attention was the reformation of his wife's behavior after she converted. It initially got his attention and he went on to check things out for himself.

Is there a "true perspective" for skeptics, agnostic or atheists? I thought they were all different groups of people, from different backgrounds and experiences and different personality types.

A lawyer doesn't raise irrelevant questions as much as a philospher does. There is no reason to widen the parameters of a case with hypotheticals. Sometimes they confuse the issue. You widen parameters when you are defending not when you are proving a case. You widen parameters through questions to create doubt. It's generally presumed an expert knows what he's talking about. You don't go to an expert to second guess his expertise. He allowed the experts to build a case from multiple angles that people can relate to. He's not suppose to be the prosecution and the defense. He named the book The Case for...note that...The Case for Christ. Presumably it became "the for" case after he himself was convinced.