My non-Christian correspondent responded to my 10 points on the problem of evil (9th Feb), arguing that: for a proposition to be intellectually respectable, it must be in principle falsifiable.
Of course, its worth pausing to note that a true proposition wont in fact be properly falsifiable since it is true and not false.
The Christian faith is in principle falsifiable: if you could prove that you’d dug up Jesus’ body you would have disproved the physical resurrection of Jesus and hence the historic Christian faith. You would have shown that the Christian faith did not correspond to reality.
One could also show that the Christian faith were nonsense if it contained a logical contradiction. You would have shown that the Christian faith was incoherent.
A great deal of ink could be spilt on how one would know that one had demonstrated that the Christian faith erred.
Much of the work of the Christian apologist will be to show how he makes sense of Christianity as a system. It is not narrow minded, but perfectly reasonable for the Christian to say “since I am convinced on good grounds that God is loving and omnipotent I reason that he must have some morally sufficient reason for allowing suffering and evil”.
Many of the claims of Christianity concern special or even unique historical events such as miracles and so are not susceptible to scientific experimental dis-proof since you can’t go to a lab and repeat something to see if it wont work.
If I had the time and inclination to think about this more, I’d head for John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, P&R Publishing, 1987), esp. parts 2 and 3 on the justification and methods of knowledge.
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