(Part 2) Best products from r/ChristianApologetics

These are four books and a lecture series that would certainly be good at getting you started, all of them are academic rigor level, so not something that you'll be able to flip through at the bus stop. They take a bit of time to digest.

• Evidence that Demands a Verdict- good summary of the reasons we have to think that Christianity is historically true.
  
  https://www.amazon.com/New-Evidence-That-Demands-Verdict/dp/0785242198
  
  
• Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology- Natural theology, the arguments from reason for why we have good reason to think that there is a God. Written by academic philosophers.
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Blackwell-Companion-Natural-Theology/dp/1444350854
  
  
• Philosophical Foundations of the Christian Worldview- Another excellent book providing a systematic narrative from the ground up.
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Foundations-Christian-Worldview-Moreland/dp/0830851879/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=6HXK5P412QMRNR2XB37B
  
  
• New Essays on Divine Hiddeness- If God is real, then why doesn't he just appear to me? This collection of essays from both atheists and Christians explores that argument and offers (what I think) are some pretty good responses.
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Divine-Hiddenness-Essays-Daniel-Howard-Snyder/dp/0521006104
  
  
• Faith and Reason Lectures by Peter Kreeft- Excellent lecture series by a philosopher who approaches the topic of religion from an introductory level and takes the time to examine the arguments for and against. A great place to start since it covers everything from a general perspective.
  
  https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Scholar-Reason-Philosophy-Religion/dp/B001JHT8DI

The scholar who best unpacks these questions is professor John Walton
from Wheaton. I really think you should read his books or listen to his lectures.

Professor Tim Mackie from The Bible Project is really good at communicating biblical scholarship. Please check out The Bible Project on Youtube if you haven't yet. It's literally the best Bible resource I've found, either for new Christians or mature. Here is a relevant, incredible podcast episode on Genesis, science, and faith.


For questions of science and faith, [Biologos](
https://biologos.org/) is the best place for you to be. Check out the contributers there. My favorite is N.T. Wright. He is the leading New Testament scholar in the world, and tackles all sorts of questions with the appropriate nuance and wisdom. The Ask N.T. Wright Anything podcast is a great start.

Infinite regress is a problem because you just keep pushing the problem one level further. Take for example, the World Turtle of Hinduism. The World rests on the World Turtle. What does the World Turtle rest on? An even larger Turtle. What does that even larger Turtle rest on? Another even larger Turtle. And on it continues. What holds up these Turtles?

Circular reasoning is when you make two statements that depend on one another for their veracity. It is similar to infinite regress in that what was sought (justification of the first statement) is ultimately grounded in the first statement (which was never justified, so no justification was ever actually done).

1. X is true because Y.
   
2. Y is true because X.
   
   It usually isn't quite as obvious as this and is hidden with a few steps.
   
   A common example in Christianity is:
   
   The Bible is true because God says so. How do we know God says the Bible is true? God said it in the Bible!
   
   (This is a bad argument. The Bible is true, but not because of this argument.)
   
   We've moved well past your original question and are now in the realm of general philosophy and structure of sound argumentation. While I am glad to answer your questions, you would be better served if you seek out some introductory books or courses in philosophy or logic. If you have questions about Christianity, you are always welcome to post them here in the subreddit. (After doing some homework! A well-researched question always garners better answers.)
   
   

• "On Guard" by William Lane Craig is an intro book in philosophical arguments for Christianity. Craig discusses infinite regress quite a bit in the chapter on the Kalam argument.
  
• /r/philosophy/wiki/readinglist has a good list of introductory resources.
  
  While there is a wealth of good resources online, I would highly recommend finding a class or philosophy group to discuss things face-to-face. Philosophy gets deep very quick and when you are face-to-face with someone, you can simply ask "What do you mean by that?" and get further explanation right then. With a book, you don't get that luxury. (Not saying to avoid books, but merely augment books with real conversation.)

The terminology itself I believe originated with Anselm, but is more commonly referred to as "perfect being theology".

However, the definition comes from simple pure reason. Take your example of "creative being". I assume you mean creator being. But, if there is something greater than the creator being, that thing would be god to the creator being - so on and so forth - until you reach the greatest possible being.

Then the question is "what are great making qualities". They are usually defined as power, knowledge and goodness, with perhaps some more.

Here is an excellent defense of PBT

You might be interested in the book Heaven: A History By Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang. It describes different ideas of Heaven throughout Christian history.

For the best collection of descriptions of the Mormon version of Heaven, I strongly recommend The Plan of Salvation: Understanding Our Divine Origin and Destiny by Matthew B. Brown.

One of the best descriptions of Mormon Heaven, come from the near-death experience of Jeddediah Grant. He described everything from enhanced senses to plants with flowers of multiple types and colors on the same vine.

Wow, I'm flattered! I do try to respond to the best of my ability. I can think of no greater thing than defending and commending the faith, so I take it really seriously. Additionally, not everyone spends years and years formally studying the Bible, so I feel that I should make whatever knowledge I have accumulated from that study available to everyone; of course, I have also been corrected by being active in this community and have appreciated the opportunity to gain something in that way too. I wrote a book you might be interested in also: The Anthropic Fallacy https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GFMP9PX/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_LdqYBbQMVY5EB

This is an issue I have wrestled with a lot recently - this book is a really interesting read on creation (Piper talks about it here and there is a great exposition of it here). It isn't exactly on what you are talking about, but is an examination of the Genesis narrative. The exposition I mentioned above is definitely worth a read.

You will face a lot of questioning of your faith and its intersection with science. My response was typically that I do not find science and religion to be in contradiction but, rather, find science as a beautiful expansion of my understanding of how God works in the universe. Through science, I see more of God. Francis Collins, head of the human genome project, has authored a number of books and articles about the intersection between religion and science - this interview should give you a pretty good flavor of his response.

I had a comment in here giving a reason for he post, though that's not an explanation.

> Note: may not be the best place to post, but I needed to post somewhere in order to link it in Dr. Feser's open thread today, which he only does a couple of times each year. I've been working through his books since early this year, and developing this concept map as I progress.

By way of explanation, this is a work in progress to visualize the relationships between the concepts brought to bear in the philosophical advances of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Beginning for the fundamental argument for the necessary reality of the distinction between actuality and potentiality, the concept map walks through the conceptual divisions of act and potency. Notably, the divisions of act arrive at a core conception of God as Pure Actuality, Being Itself, utterly devoid of any potentiality or passivity. This is not a proof of God, but rather simply serves to define God's role as the First and Unmoved Mover and Sustainer of all things.

The divisions of act and potency expand to the right of the map, where you see how actuality and potentiality come together as Form and Matter to produce concrete, material things.

Branching off of from the soul (here defined as the substantial form of a living substance), there is a section which details the powers or capacities of the different levels of living substances, which are hierarchically related, with respect to the corporeal order.

For now, the section on the Four Causes is placed on its own, as I still haven't decided where best to tie it in, since many topics make use of this principle. Particularly, Final Causation (defined as the end, goal, purpose, directedness or teleology of a thing) is essential to understanding the concept of objective goodness, which carries into the section on ethics (which, in this view, amounts to an understanding of the directedness of the will).

Also included, but not yet connected as well as it could be, is a section on the divine attributes, along with a brief explanation of how we can know them.

There is much more that can be included. As mentioned elsewhere, this was posted here so that I could link to the WIP. I had hoped that I could catch Edward Feser's attention in the comments of his open thread, which he posted on his blog site yesterday, and which he does only a couple times per year. This concept map is the result of my learning from his books:

• Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science
  
  
• Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide)
  
  
• Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide)
  
  
• Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Scholastic Editions – Editiones Scholasticae)
  
  I am still working my way through this last one, and when done I intend also to read:
  
  
• Five Proofs of the Existence of God

If you're talking about Libet's experiments, these don't eliminate free will. They show that actions are preceded by brain activity before the person is conscious of making the decisions to act. The problem with interpreting this as meaning the unconscious brain activity determines the act is that there are also experiments in which a person is able to override that previous brain activity at the last minute.

Another problem with interpreting Libet's experiment as eliminating free will is that the results were only recorded in case where a person moved their wrist. If a person's brain ramped up prior to moving their wrist, and then they did not move their wrist, it was not recorded.

You should check out Alfred R. Mele's book, Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will.

If you're a compatibilist, then Libet's experiments wouldn't be a problem even if they did show that our actions are determined by antecedent conditions. Under compatibilism, we are responsible for our actions as long as we do them on purpose, and to do something on purpose is to act on your own antecedent desires, motives, plans, intentions, etc. That means your antecedent mental states do determine your actions, and that's precisely why you're responsible for them.

Christianity doesn't depend on libertarian free will, and a lot of Christianity doesn't support that idea anyway. According to Jesus, a person's decisions are determined by the condition of their heart. He said, "The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart" (Luke 6:45). That sounds a lot more like compatibilism than libertarianism.

I think I've heard more than one systematic theologian define it as the effort to make Christian doctrine comprehensible to a contemporary audience. That definition may be technically a good one, but I think it's also potentially misleading. It makes it sound as though systematic theology is almost a form of evangelism, where theologians try to address their audience's "felt needs." That's not a good description.

If you actually read a work of systematic theology, such these by Wayne Grudem or Louis Berkhof, you'll see that they are a topic-by-topic explanation of what, in the view of the author, Christianity teaches. Conventionally they begin with "theology proper", which is the study of God himself: the doctrine of the Trinity, God's perfection, His omniscience, omnipotence, etc. They'll cover things like the nature of revelation, creation, the fall, salvation, and so on. Usually it's not just the author sharing his thoughts. He's interacting with and responding to the work of his contemporaries and to concerns that contemporary people have with respect to Christian doctrines.

What you are talking about largely is ontology, and related is Epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

Charlie Nason does a fantastic job tackling Belief "production" in Gospel Powered which is a Gospel centric understanding of Belief. It is deeply well informed.

you may want to check out karl popper related are Hume. Also i got interested in this theory of knoweldge via Martin Gardner, who supports Rudolf Carnap in sharp contrast to Popper.

An interesting book specifically about Modern philosphy with respect to Christianity is Suspicion and Faith: The religious Uses of Modern Atheism which covers primarily Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche.

Jason Lisle - The Ultimate Proof For Creation - a great starter book on the subject and easier to read.

Then you have anything by Greg Bahnsen (Read/Listen to "The Great Debate" with Gordon Stein) or Cornelius Van Til (father of presup.).

5 Views of Apologetics is good as well - http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0310224764

Yes, googling things is not a rigorous way of approaching the topic. But also, the first response agrees with what I'm saying. In fact, if you actually look at the accepted answer of the stack exchange question you found, you will see they also agree with me.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/596028/does-cardinality-really-have-something-to-do-with-the-number-of-elements-in-a-in


> What is a number? It is an informal notion of a measurement of size. This size can be discrete, like the integers, or a ratio, or length (like the real numbers) and so on.

> Cardinal numbers, and the notion of cardinality, can be seen as a very good notion for the size of sets.
>
> One can talk about other ways of describing the size of an infinite set. But cardinality is a very good notion because it doesn't require additional structure to be put on the set. For example, it's very easy to see how to define a bijection between ℕ
> and ℤ
>
> , but as ordered sets these are nothing alike. Cardinality allows us to discard that structure.
>
> Once accepting this as a reasonable notion for the size of a set, we can now say that the number of elements a set has is its cardinality.


But none of that matters, here is a excerpt from an actually rigorous book on the topic.

https://i.imgur.com/8IUGcYa.png

Just to note:

>The cardinality of a set X is a way of measuring in precise mathematical terms the number of elements in X.

Go read any math book on these topics and you will see unanimous agreement with this point. This is a mathematical statement that has been proven for well over 100 years.

The question I usually encourage people to ask is, "Who is influencing whom?" If you are influencing him then it's good to keep him around with appropriate boundaries.
This is a good book that can help you witness clearly to your cousin about what God's word says. The goal is to get him to see the greatness and the value of Christ and what it means to be his.

It always breaks my heart when people identify as their sin. The world in hopelessness just gives up. Sinful sexual impulses okay just be gay. They give up the beauty of being made in the image of God.