We'll be able to write your systematic philosophical theology, which you're very busy doing. You've revisited the definition and nature of faith. This article by Escheptic that we're going to look at gives us a chance to discuss it and perhaps apply it. And as we begin, tell us about your lecture at the Evangelical Philosophical Society conference. Because there are certain things that this article mentions that you were talking about in that lecture does Christian faith imply belief? And you talk about things like saving faith. My question that I was posing was whether Christian faith or saving faith implies belief. And I distinguished between what I call personal faith and propositional faith. Personal faith is trust in a person. Propositional faith is belief in a proposition, and it seems to me that saving faith implies both personal trust in God and in Christ, but then also propositional faith, belief in certain propositions. For example, Paul says, if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. So here Paul mentions two propositions that should be believed as conditions of salvation, and namely that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead. And so in my paper I argued that the nature of biblical faith is that it's more than just personal trust, it is also propositional belief. Richard Miller, who describes himself as a humanistic critic of contemporary religion and a transdisciplinary research scholar, exploring the cultural and literary nexus between classical antiquity and the social origins of earliest Christianity. Indico there wrote this article and we can sum up the first two paragraphs as his saying that Roman classical mythology was replaced by Christian mythology and that both were just accepted on blind faith. He says, quote, epistemic knowledge argumentation, an evidentialist ground for any rational, propositional case, were conspicuously absent, not merely non-central, in the early Christian apologetic tradition. But why? The only rational and satisfying answer to this question, earliest Christians did not proper a knowledge system, but a belief system. Oh Obil, do you think he's right? Were early Christians just interested in a doxastic faith rather than emphasizing facts and evidence? No, I think that Miller is quite wrong and that he's clearly misread the New Testament. The Christian religion is a knowledge tradition, not just a blind faith tradition. The claim is that we have knowledge of certain propositions about the existence of God, the person of Christ, and how to to be properly related to him. And I detected in Miller's article a really ugly kind of animus against Christianity that is more characteristic of Internet infidels than academic scholars. There is absolutely no grounds for thinking that what happened in the ancient world was that Roman classical mythology was replaced by Christian mythology. That's very pejorative. New Testament scholars are well aware that the category of myth or mythology is an irrelevant category when it comes to the gospel narratives of the life and teachings of Jesus, which formed the foundation for the Christian movement that followed him. Okay. And by the way, Bill, I used a term, doxastic,'re familiar with the term doxology. But what is, if you would clarify that for us, we'll call it doxastic faith. Yes, that has to do with belief. So there are three doxastic attitudes that you can take toward a proposition. You can believe it. You can disbelieve it or you can simply have unbelief or not believe it. You neither believe it nor disbelieve it. You just have non-belief with regard to it. Those would be the three doxastic attitudes that you might have toward a proposition. Now there are many other sorts of propositional attitudes that one can have. For example, you could fear that something might be true, or you could be happy that something is true, or you might be worried that something is true. But those would be non-doxastic. The doxastic attitudes are belief disbelief or non-belief. Miller goes to the New Testament next. He sites two passages that you've talked about many times Bill. John 2029 in Hebrews 111 he says quoting, So once Thomas asks for such a sign, the protagonist response makes the distinction rather explicit. Blessed are those who believe without having seen any evidence, John 2029. Indeed, the grand New Testament faith chapter, Hebrews 11, defines the term pistis quite unambiguously. Faith, pistis, is an assertion of things for which one hopes the testing of matters not visible from Hebrews 11 and 1. So Bill, how should we understand these verses? In context, when Jesus appears to Thomas, since it does not be faithless, but be believing. The problem that Thomas had was he refused to believe the apostolic testimony of the other apostles who had seen Jesus risen from the dead. Thomas wasn't there that day. And so he was skeptical. And Jesus challenges Thomas's skepticism. He shows him his wounds that he is risen from the dead. And Thomas comes to believe him. And Jesus says, well, blessed, do you believe because you have seen, blessed are those who believe without having seen. Now Miller interprets that to mean without having seen any evidence. That's not what it says. What that is saying is that those who are not members of the first generation, Jesus contemporaries who do not have the advantage of having known the historical Jesus personality can nevertheless confidently believe on the basis of the apostolic testimony to Jesus. And they are blessed for believing even though they haven't had the advantage of being eyewitnesses themselves. And so John goes on to say that Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples that are not recorded in this book, but he says these are recorded so that you can believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and by believing have life in his name. So John is rooting Christian faith here at least in these signs that the historical Jesus performed revealing his identity as the Messiah, the Son of God. And similarly in the faith chapter in Hebrews 11, what the author seems to be saying there is that faith is having a confidence in things that you can't see. And he's thinking here of things in the past because you're not there contemporaneous with those events. And he's thinking of things in the future, things that have not yet happened, you don't see those, but you can have faith that those either did happen or will happen, and you can have good reasons for that faith. For example, Christians have, I think, a solid basis for faith that Christ will come again

and that we ourselves will be raised from the dead to life eternal. And our faith is rooted and based in Jesus' historical resurrection from the dead. So in neither of these cases is the author saying that faith has to be in the absence of good evidence. Miller continues and Bill, I just want to point out to our listeners and viewers that some of these quotes here from this article are rather pretty thick, pretty complicated, but we'll parse them out. one of the weaknesses, one of Miller's weaknesses is that he has a very prolics writing style. It's almost as though he wants to impress us with his big words and complicated sentences. So I think you're quite right to warn our listeners about that. The article continues, as with today and throughout the history of Christianity, early Christian conversion essentially arose as a fideist transaction, fideist transaction, a willful indulgence in a fantastical, alternate reality as a means or strategy of spiritual enlightenment. Christian converts were not presented with proofs or evidential cases for the historical or ontological veracity of their belief system. Rather, they embraced the cultic framework of tales and cast of metaphysical figures as their conversion right into the cultic community. Many New Testament scholars today have utterly failed to recognize this radical foundation for the religion. Instead, supposing that the gospels were written and utilized as history, what's the word there Bill? History. And history. And history. Right that New Testament scholars refused to recognize his mischaracterization of New Testament Christianity. In his expressions like, a willful indulgence in a fantastical alternate reality, you see the pejorative nature of his Characterizations now certainly from the standpoint of the naturalist our belief in the existence of God and of his Resurrection rather of his incarnation in Christ and his resurrection from the dead is a tone person. These must appear fantastic to the naturalist. But of course I don't think that there's any good reason to think that naturalism is true. We would have to have good arguments from Miller for thinking that naturalism is true before we dismiss Christianity as a fantastical alternative reality. And this gets back to his point earlier that he seems to think that Christianity is some sort of a mythology that was adopted to replace Greco-Roman mythology and that's quite mistaken. As he seems to recognize in his last

sentence, New Testament scholars today recognize that the Gospels were written and utilized as historical documents. The genre of ancient literature that that they most resemble is not myth.

It is ancient biography, like the lives of famous Greeks and Romans written by Plutarch. And ancient biography quite definitely had a historical interest. And so when the Gospels are read in this way, their historical credibility emerges to the forefront. These are not of the character of myths like Greco-Roman stories of Zeus or Hercules. Rather, Jesus of Nazareth was a bona fide historical person who actually lived and wrought. And most New Testament scholars would say that we are able to have a pretty confident knowledge of the life and teachings of the historical Jesus, including his crucifixion, his burial by Joseph of Arimathea, the discovery of his empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances of Jesus to various individuals and groups, and the transformation in the lives of his earliest disciples. And so he's just completely wrong today in thinking that the foundations of the Christian system is just a kind of reworking of mythological tales rather than being grounded in the facts of what at that time was very recent history in the memory of the eyewitnesses. Yeah, Bill. And the first of that paragraph, he just says that early Christian were fedeists, fedeists, that the whole thing was just a blind faith thing. Did Jesus and the apostles simply go about preaching and inviting people to believe without grounds. Did they? Well, no. The historical Jesus understood that his claims were radical, and therefore he appealed to his miracles and his exorcisms of demonic beings in order to show tangibly and clearly the in-breaking of the kingdom of God in his person and ministry. And the apostles followed up with that same sort of approach. They would appeal to fulfilled prophecy and to Jesus miracles, and especially to Jesus' resurrection from the dead, as grounds for thinking that Jesus was, in fact, the Lord and Messiah. And so a perfect example of such an apologetic to a Jewish audience would be Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost recorded in the Book of Acts. Peter first appeals to fulfilled prophecy, then he appeals to the miracles that the historical Jesus did, and finally he appeals to the eyewitness testimony to Jesus' resurrection as a basis for thinking that Jesus was indeed Lord and Christ. Now you might not think that those are very good arguments. Maybe you think those are weak. That's fine. The point though against Miller is that they did appeal to arguments and evidence. They didn't just invite people to blindly believe. Now when it came to dealing with

Gentile audiences, those who were not Jews, the apostles would typically appeal to God's handy work in nature to show that there is a transcendent creator and designer of the universe. Seapalls

Exposition in Romans chapter 1. Are you mentioned acts?

17 and designer of the universe, Seapol's Exposition in Romans chapter 1, or you mentioned Acts 17. And then they would appeal to the testimony to the resurrection of Jesus to show that this creator, God, had specially revealed himself in the person of Jesus. So these early apostles were well aware of the availability of evidence could be given in support of the message that they proclaimed. But weren't Phineas in other words. Next the article says, Western philosophical terminology has regrettably often served to compound this pervasive delusion, applying the term belief as the common epistemological operation inherent to common knowledge and the sciences. We may use the English term in that fashion, but this has obscured the New Testament term and the peculiar posturing of ancient cultic make-believe as integral to ancient religious piety. Classical Greek Pistis, in lexical terms, most closely denoted the Dictionnal notion of belief in rather than knowing or comprehending, for example belief in Santa Claus or in re-engrination. And entailed an Ipary admission of content into one's worldview apart from sufficient evidence. End of quote. Bill, you talked a lot about some of these very terms in your lecture. The term, the term, the term, the term, the term. the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the term, the It just means to affirm or assert a proposition. That's what we were talking about with regard to doc-sastic attitudes toward propositions. And so I've heard humanists or unbelievers say that they don't have any beliefs in my dialogue with Lawrence Krause in Australia. He asserted, I have no beliefs. And I said, well, Lawrence, surely you believe that you're Lawrence Krause immediately backed away and said, well, yes, yes, I do, but I have good reasons for my beliefs. And I said, fine, I have good reasons for my religious beliefs as well. You see, the people like Miller think that belief in the religious sense has to mean that it is devoid of any evidence for it. And that's simply a mistake. With respect to the way the word pistis or faith is used in the ancient world, it is used not only in the sense of trusting in someone, but it is also used in the sense of propositional belief, as I explained in my lecture. And while I don't expect our listeners to go out and read the following book, I want to at least mention it as a decisive treatment of this subject in case anyone challenges them on this point. And this is a book by Teresa Morgan, called Roman Faith and Christian Faith. The subtitle is Pistis and Fides. Those are the Greek and Latin words for faith. Pistis and Fides in early Roman Empire and early churches, published by Oxford University Press in 2015. And Morgan makes and clearly discerns this distinction between personal belief and propositional belief, and she points out that propositional belief is associated in the New Testament with knowledge. For example, in John's Gospel over and over again, belief in certain and is associated with our having knowledge of those truths. And as I've already explained, this is not at all incompatible with having good reasons for what you believe. Okay. Well, here's how the article ends, Bill. and I just want to warn everybody. This really gets wordy here. Here we go. According now, turning attention to Bayesian appraisal of New Testament mythology, perhaps one may see the problem. Bayesian logic is meant to evaluate the possibility of some knowledge proposition as being true. The cultic posture of the New Testament, however, has set forth faith propositions, not knowledge propositions. Indeed, such modern proofs, when applying to New Testament faith claims, even if considered successful, invariably become self-refuting. The deluded mental success of the apologist merely serves to remove their one requisite virtue that of belief, replacing their salvific pistis with evidentialist certitude, however ill-founded. And the very act of proving the religion to be true in any modern scientific rational sense, the apologists falls out of faith and thus out of salvific grace, a matter of devastating irony and incomprehensible self-deception. Nothing here should surprise anyone. All religions stand on that common ground, namely that of willful belief rather than evidentialist authentication, as the mental, ritual admittance to their respective cultic societies. So Bill, I might understand him to say that offering facts and evidence for Christianity mitigates against saving faith, and so it defeats the purpose. quite right. I mean, in this vitriolic passage, what Miller seems to be saying is not that you cannot provide good evidence for Christian truth claims, you could use Bayesian probability calculus to show that Christian beliefs are very probably true as many Christian philosophers have tried to do. But he characterizes this as deluded that this would be deluded mental success because what it would mean is that you've gained evidentialist certitude of your beliefs and thereby removed any salvific value from those beliefs. He thinks that in order to be efficacious and winning your salvation, your beliefs have to be groundless. They have to be arbitrary. They can't have good reasons or evidentialist foundations. And notice Kevin how he simply asserts this. He gives no evidence for this at all. He's talking about evidence constantly and yet his own position is a tissue of groundless assertions. I would define anyone to show from the New Testament that if you have good reasons to place your faith in Christ, that somehow your faith in Christ is now null and void, and that you will be lost and damned rather than saved. I want to encourage our listeners and viewers to check out your lecture at EPS Bill and we need to discuss that on some future podcast. I thought it was just great. Does Christian faith imply So we'll talk about that again in a future podcast.