This month we discuss Pragmatic Arguments and the History of Christianity. The latter is an area of expertise for our guest Steve Tomkins and he joined us right through the recording. Steve did a Phd on the subject and is now editor for the in-house magazine of a leading UK denomination. He is also a lot of fun.

We kick off discussing Ed’s appearance on the ’Unbelievable?’ Show of 20-10-2018
https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Shows/Saturday/Unbelievable/Episodes/Unbelievable-A-tale-of-two-doubters-Austin-Fischer-Ed-Atkinson

Ed got the feedback he was fishing for, and then we moved on to the reason his discussion partner on the show, Pastor Austin Fischer, employs to stay in the faith: it is useful for him. Here is the Dostoyevsky quote from Austin’s book “If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth.” We widened the discussion into general Pragmatic Arguments. These replaced the ‘dud’ argument last time from the 50 Arguments for Faith book.

These are not remotely convincing as Arguments, but Steve points out that they are not meant to be. We got on to the most famous example: Pascal’s Wager. Everyone has their take on this and we hope that we don’t disappoint. It is usually a fun topic, especially the likelihood that we will suffer infinite harm in hell.

Steve was on-form as he discussed Church History and what lessons we might take from it. Sadly we could have carried on for another hour and had to call time.

Find Steve on
www.stephentomkins.com (and watch out for Google changing it, adding a rogue ‘p’). He can be contacted there for shows.
His books:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stephen-Tomkins/e/B001JRURNI
His Guardian profile:
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/stephen-tomkins



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(Note - 50 Arguments for Faith book:
“Evidence for God: 50 Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History, Philosophy and Science” by Mike Licona and William Dembski. It can be found on Amazon.)