Category: Apologetics

In my ever-increasing search for interesting things to blog about, I’ve decided to occasionally discuss how to use the web in your search for answers to apologetics questions.  This particular post will deal with search engines.

Many times people will call the office saying "Where do I find information on [insert obscure subject of your choice]?"  Usually, within five minutes, I have found something online that I can send them.  The trick to doing so is to know how to use search engines effectively.

Most search engines require that you enter key words for it to use in the search.  The more specific the key words, the better.  For example, if the inquirer says "Sister Joan Chittister is speaking at my parish this Sunday.  Do you have any information on whether she is orthodox?" I can go to a search engine, type in "Joan Chittister dissent" and pull up articles that will tell me whether or not the sister in question is orthodox.  (Of course, in this particular case, I already know the answer.  My purpose in running a search in this case would be for links I could send the inquirer documenting Sr. Chittister’s positions on various issues.)

Remember, specific key words are critical.  If you want to information about the Polish Christmas tradition of oplatek and you type "Christmas" into the search engine, you’re going to have to search through a lot of pages to find a recipe for oplatek.  A more fruitful search would use the key words "oplatek recipes."

Where do you find search engines?  The most helpful I’ve found is Google, which has in fact become nearly synonymous with web searching.  Indeed, some unhelpful people will simply tell a novice Internet surfer looking for an obscure bit of trivia to "google it," without explaining what is meant by the term.  If I want to search through a particular site and that site’s own search engine is poor, I use the Google Advanced Search. 

Google will suffice ninety- to ninety-five percent of the time.  For those looking for alternatives, a couple of old reliables are Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! An interesting development in search engines are those that search multiple search engines simultaneously.  A few of them are YaGoohoo!gle (a meld of Yahoo! and Google, natch), DonkeyDo.com, and Dogpile.  (I’m guessing those last two titles might be an intriguing commentary on what must be expected to be found alongside the gems during random Internet searches.)

Once a search engine has spit out a list of results, then one must pan the gold from the silt.  I do this primarily by looking for web URLs with which I am already familiar and know to be from web sites that are orthodox.  Failing that, I must then scan through a prospective article looking for biases and agendas.  Does the writer clearly state only what the Church teaches and use supporting documentation to allow the Church to speak for itself?  Or is the writer stumping for a cause and conscripting the Church’s documents to serve that agenda?

If a new site proves to be especially helpful in providing reasoned, meticulous explanations of the Church’s teachings, I then bookmark it for future reference and send the link off to my inquirer.  If the site has one helpful article but nothing else to recommend it, I may include a caution to the inquirer that the article is helpful but the host site is problematic.

Happy hunting!

A reader writes:

I have an issue that comes up in my classroom often enough. Throughout the year I present and flesh out a list of different reasons to my students why Catholicism is the one, true religion. Included among those reasons are (a) trusting the biblical testimony about Jesus and His miracles, and (b) the collective testimony of 2 billion people today professing belief in Christ and His teachings.

Some students will typically respond that the same two things could be said for Islam–people believe the Qur’an’s testimony about Muhammad and his alleged miracles, and there are alot of Muslims in the world today, too. There question ultimately is: Why should we accept these two reasons when they support Christianity but reject them when they support Islam? I do have a response to this question, but I would be curious to know how you would deal with it.

I would be careful about using the two billion people argument. One might suppose that God has a desire to reach the greatest number of humans and thus would work to see that the true religion is the largest, this argument is subject to a number of significant objections:

• The fact that Christianity is the largest at the moment doesn’t mean that it always was or always will be (indeed, Jesus seems to indicate that it will end up small). Why should we prefer this time period?
• During much of world history, the number of worshippers of the true God has been very, very small. This seems to cast doubt on the supposition used to support the argument.
• To the extent the argument provides evidence for Christianity, it seems to provide half as much evidence for Islam, there being half the number of Muslims in the world that there are Christians.

It thus seems to me that I’d stay away from this argument, at least as here articulated and interpreted. It may have some evidential value, but that seems to be only very limited.

It is possible to argue for the Church as a moral miracle that points to God, but the argument that will need to be made will involve much more than what is presented here.

As to how to defend the first claim, here we are on much firmer ground.

If you read the Qur’an, one of the recurrent themes that comes up with tiresome frequency is the question of why Muhammad can’t perform a miracle. In contrast to Jesus, who performed many miracles in his career, Muhammad seems unable to cough up any. Apparently people were regularly asking Muhammad to perform a miracle so that they might believe what he says (or to prove that he was no prophet at all by his failure to perform them) and he dictated suras explaining why he can’t do so. These suras tend to say the following things (or variations on them) each time the question is raised:

1. Muhammad is only a prophet and so can only do what God lets him.
2. Just look at creation! That’s a miracle!
3. At the end of the world there will be the resurrection of the dead, and that’s a miracle.
4. You’ll get yours for disbelieving God’s prophet!

Not a very convincing set of replies.

The few miracles that are attributed to Muhammad are problematic in various ways: (a) they are not clearly miraculous (e.g., "Hey! We won this battle against our enemies instead of losing it!"), (b) they are based on doubtful interpretations of verses in the Qur’an, or (c) they are based on late sources that do not appear to go back to the time of Muhammad.

By contrast, the evidence for Christianity’s miraculous origin is abundant.

This is not to say that every individual miracle Jesus performed can be verified. In fact, the great majority cannot be at this late date, when all of the eyewitnesses have been dead for so many centuries.

But the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, taken together, are the subject of a very powerful apologetic. Numerous alternatives for these can be tried (the Lord, liar, lunatic trilemma, the testimony of the apostles under pain of death, the failure of alternative explanations), but in the end the evidence supports the fact that Jesus both rose from the dead and then rose from the earth.

Other religions may have reports of miracles, but no other religion has miracles that can withstand the type of cross-examination (no pun intended) that the Resurrection and Ascension can. Therefore, no other religion has the kind of miraculous evidence for its veracity that Christianity does. This gives us a reason to believe in Christianity.

The Center for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), which publishes Skeptical Inquirer magazine, has an anti-supernatural bias, but occasionally they get on right.

They just did!

(Well, technically they did in their November-December 2004 issue, which just showed up onlin.)

HERE’S A PIECE DEBUNKING THAT WHOLE DA VINCI CODE, HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL NONSENSE ABOUT THE RENNES-LE-CHATEAU, THE PRIORY OF ZION, THE MEROVINGIAN KING LINE BEING DESCENDED FROM JESUS, WHO WAS MARRIED TO MARY MAGDALENE, ETC.

(I wonder if everyone on their staff is a P-10. Sure would be helpful in ferreting out information for their magazine.)

Just did a half-hour radio show (Catholic Spotlight) on KWKY in Des Moines, Iowa. (Unfortunatley, the shows aren’t archived online anywhere–I asked.)

It’s a Catholic show on a Protestant station, and they sometimes get Protestant callers. One such caller tonight was very interested in Bible prophecy. Unfortunatley, she was reading some not-that-great authors on this subject (and was a big fan of The Bible Code), so I tried as charitably as I could to recommend that she not put much faith in some of the stuff she was reading.

For example: She read a passage from a book that claimed the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was what was referred to in Revelation 8:10-11, which prophesies the fall of the star Wormwood and the making bitter of a third of the rivers, killing a bunch of people. She suggested that St. John had no way to recognize a nuclear explosion and thus described it as a star. Confirmation of this interpretation was found in the fact that the Ukrainian word for "wormwood" is "chernobyl."

Well, it ain’t.

I was immediately suspicious of this claim and noted that such rumors often get started and find their ways into people’s books and they survive because people don’t take the trouble to check the original language, which isn’t that hard to do.

I also pointed out that the Chernobyl plant did not have a nuclear explosion (as I later verified, it had a steam explosion, followed by a graphite fire), and so St. John–had he foreseen the event–would not have seen a star falling from the sky or a nuclear explosion. (In fact, he apparently would have seen a nuclear power plant blow off its lid and vent steam and then, depending on the angle of his view, he would have seen a graphite fire start).

To illustrate how easy it is to check language claims of the type made above, I promised to look up the meaning of the word "Chernobyl" after the show and report back.

Here’s what I found . . .

Continue reading “Checking Suspicious Claims”

PROSE PIECE.

FATHERS PIECE.