Fundamental Atheism and the Conflicting Ideas Problem.

there is a suitable altrenate origin, that of social deception ...

RAZD writes:Problems with the conceptual map occur when a conflict arises between the {world view} and a {concept}: either the {concept} is rejected as "nonsense" or it is incorporated into a revised {world view}The fundamentalist rejects the notion that the {world view} needs to change when any such conflict occurs, thus when a {concept} conflicts with the {world view} the {concept} is rejected: it cannot be true.

In what sense is the world in which we are privileged to attest grace rightly described as a "non-Christian world"? "Non-Christian world" cannot mean that the world which is God's gift now exists without God. It cannot mean that the work of the Spirit is totally eclipsed or dysfunctional within the estranged world, just because it has been willfully spurned. It cannot mean that the world lacks the accompaniment of the crucified and risen Son, or the governance of the all-wise God.It can only mean the world that has defiantly decided to proceed as if the Incarnate Lord had not come in our midst, and has no abiding relevance for the world. It can only mean, for Christian apologetic reasoning, that unbelievers have falsely posited a world that lacks the justifying grace of the Son and from which the sanctifying fruits of the Spirit are absent. It can only point to a world which lives in despair, not realizing its reception of redeeming love by the Incarnate living God. It lives already under the judgment of the Holy One whose judgment will be made complete on the last day.Meanwhile the actual fallen world, the ongoing cosmos that runs on twenty-four hour standard time, is still in the process of being reconciled and its sin overcome by the crucified and risen Redeemer. "Actual fallen world" refers to a penultimate world situation which has not yet come to itself in repentance and faith, an actual world that still despairs over its failure to be itself before God.Apologetics within that sort of posited world must be careful not to take that world in its fallenness more seriously than it takes that world's decisive redemption. Apologetics within that sort of world which is hypothesized as if it were still unmet by the living God, as if it were still awaiting the Christ, must be careful not to be swallowed up by the power of the unredeemed imagination as to its own finality.To reify is to treat an abstraction as if substantially existing, to attribute reality to something. The reification of the concept, "non-Christian world", invites the critical qualifier that the world is and remains God's, who so loved the world that he gave his only Son that all who believe on him might have eternal life. This world is already recipient of God's saving redemption in Jesus Christ, a gift given for all and appropriable by all who repent and believe. Christian apologetics in the heat of its temporal struggle amid the fallen world is forever tempted to overestimate the fleeting temporary power of the fallen world.Christian apologetics has the privilege of speaking to the fallen world not merely in reference to fallen humanity's assumptions about itself, but more so in reference to God's own assumption of humanity through the Son. This communication always takes place within a particular Zeitgeist. But the Zeitgeist cannot itself dictate the terms of salvation, or redefine the vocabulary of the apostolic testimony, so that one concedes to the Zeitgeist the absolute truth of all its premises, many of which are false, and only then begins to seek despairingly to find some tiny opening for the light of Christian truth. That is not contextualization but abandonment of mission.Christian apologetics, just as Christian caregiving, has the task of reaching out for the fallen and hungry precisely where they are fallen and hungry, yet without encouraging the demonic pretense that this fallenness is the last word.Due to its specific commission to communicate with the fallen world in its own language, Christian apologetics is continually tempted to magnify the very power and vitality of the fallen world which almighty God is acting to redeem. Under the noble motivation of taking the world seriously, grace is trivialized.Faith encounters that conjectured world with the real world as God's gift, which when fallen, has been redeemed. The apostolic testimony within that real world does better to offer its own gifts to the world than to borrow hungrily from the world's skewed self-understandings. This requires apologetics to attend to its own texts and share its own distinctive gifts. Faith need not be thrown off track by the presumed vitality of a dying world, the imagined power of an evanescent world.

oook writes:The probability of a white bearded omnipotent being knocking on my door and explaining that it planted all of the fossils, rearranged the DNA and messed around with the laws of physics is so miniscule that it doesn’t really deserve thinking about.

Proof of omnipotency please!