Mr. Catsimpiris responds

Dear Mr. Rosenbaum:

I’d like to thank you for offering feedback to my article and to apologize for those aspects of it that seemed “offensive “; I assure you I never intended to offend anyone, but merely to provide a robust apology of the Christian worldview in an academic context.

I’ll move now to respond to a few of your criticisms, roughly in the order in which they appear:

First, Church councils were never a means of determining doctrine ex nihilo. Rather, all bishops representing the entire Christian world were invited to meet to settle a very specific challenge facing the Church - in the case of Nicaea, the Arian heresy - not to create novel dogma.

On the topic of miracles and other evidence for Christianity, the proof that Jesus’ miracles were publicly witnessed is not limited to the Bible; for instance, passages in Josephus’ history (Josephus was not a Christian) and contemporary pagan works establish the fact that thousands of the earliest Christians at least claimed to have witnessed the miracles of Christ and the Disciples firsthand. But you’ve established a catch-22 here by assuming your conclusion: naturally, the majority of those believing to have seen a miracle are going to be Christians, but they might have become Christians as a result of actually witnessing the inexplicable. While they may well be reliable eyewitnesses, you question their credibility precisely because they actually believe what they’re claiming. Ultimately, insofar as you have assumed your conclusion – i.e., that there is no God, and that Jesus Christ is certainly not His Son – you are doomed to dismiss evidence to the contrary without justification, which is in fact the hallmark of terrible science, is it not?

Next, Mark 9:1’s claim is not that the Second Coming is to occur within a generation of Christ’s Ascension – He says “the Kingdom of God” will come with power. As we find out later in the Gospel of John and the Acts of the Apostles, as well as the Epistles of St. Paul, Christ is promising here the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, whose inspiration would be the founding of the Church - which is, quite literally, itself the very Kingdom of God on earth.

Further, I could not agree more that “science is a body of accepted, reproducible knowledge.” I am not arguing against science, but rather against atheism. My claim is that Christianity’s personal-psychological claims are testable empirically, not that scientific practice is dubious. Speaking of “logical fallacies” (which you bemoan but fail to indicate in my article), you suggest that since scientific claims have been proven, so have your atheist “beliefs” - i.e., “the inverse square law obtains, therefore, there is no God.” Such assertions are blatantly fallacious, and I expect I needn’t explain to you why.

Further, Christianity is not “‘proven’ by the text that establishes it.” As I’m sure you’re well aware, the first Christian texts were not composed until at least thirty years after the death and Resurrection of Christ, and not compiled in current form until almost 300 A.D.; the Christian Church, however, was already being persecuted (and therefore, obviously in existence) within ten years of Christ’s death (this is a matter of historical record). I do not believe in God merely because of the miracles of Christ, but because of the body of “proof” for God (all of which merely points to the His existence) suggested by my own personal experience, the beauty and inherent reasonableness of the Christian message, and the centuries of Christian history including miracles and the lives of the saints.

My claim is only that a rejection of Christianity on the ground that it is somehow “unscientific” or “irrational” is baseless. If, upon honestly and earnestly examining the philosophical, historical, moral, and experiential claims of the faith you find it to be in some way repugnant or dubious, I think it’s reasonable to reject the religion. But a person who is remotely interested in truth (as any good scientist ought to be) must be willing to challenge their preconceived notions and to experiment. Christianity provides the possibility of experiment to test its most fundamental and important stipulations. And so you can’t argue that we Christians are acting irrationally or anti-scientifically - in fact, we’re experimenting on regions of the universe that atheists have refused to explore.

Peter Catsimpiris ‘08