According to Dr. Craig Hazen of Biola University, Bill Maher’s new film, Religulous, most of which is devoted to mocking Christianity, is built upon shaky intellectual foundations.  You can read Hazen’s full review here.  I haven’t seen the film yet myself.

Dr. Hazen, the head of the Christian Apologetics program at Biola, points out that Maher never bothers to consult any serious scholars for the defense of Christianity, choosing instead to display fringe expressions as if they were representative.  His approach is lazy.  Of course, out of the billions of religious people in the world, you can highlight examples from kitsch to extremism to make your case the religion is useless at best, dangerous at worst.  Isn’t this the basic “straw man” fallacy where you caraciturize your opponent, making it easy to knock him down while avoiding a real confrontation of serious ideas?

Hazen notes that one of Bill Maher’s favorite attacks is that boring old canard that the Bible is unreliable as a historical document because the Gospels were all written generations after the death of Jesus.  One of my favorite refutations of that proposition comes from this article in Skeptic Magazine.  Non-Christian historian, Robert Sheaffer dismantles the more ludicrous claims of The Da Vinci Code, including the idea that the Gospels are late documents.

- Reprinted from The Burr in the Burgh