Students in the Real World, 3-2

Then, you need an approach for intellectual engagement that is both flexible and invincible, that can adapt to any situation and that will always win. For our purpose, we will group the major approaches to apologetics into two general categories.

The first kind of apologetics is evidentialism, a misleading but accepted name. We will include both classical and evidential apologetics under this category. These two methods share enough similarities so that we may discuss them together, but there are also significant differences between them. Since at this time we prefer convenience over precision, we will use the term "evidentialism" to represent both schools of apologetics.

Evidentialism has three major weaknesses.

First, biblically speaking, it is unfaithful. Its assumptions, reasonings, and interactions do not reflect what Scripture says about God, man, truth, and sin. But since we are doing apologetics to defend the faith of the Scripture, this approach undermines its own professed purpose from the start. And if the Bible is a revelation of truth, then anything that contradicts it must be false.

Second, rationally speaking, it is impossible. It begins and proceeds with the same first principles – the same irrational basis – that the unbelievers affirm. The non-Christian trusts his own sensation, but he cannot provide a justification for empiricism. He appeals to his intuition, but he cannot show that it reflects anything other than his subjective bias. He relies on inductive reasoning, but he cannot demonstrate its rational validity. He practices the scientific method, which besides being formally fallacious, rests on induction, sensation, and often also intuition.

In connection with this, notice that our three criticisms against evidentialism are in fact directed at the non-Christian method of reasoning. It just happens that evidentialism has adopted the same non-Christian approach. This being the case, these three criticisms against evidentialism will also destroy the arguments that unbelievers employ against the Christian faith.

Third, practically speaking, it is unusable. Even if we ignore the first and second sets of problems with evidentialism, in practice its effectiveness depends on the opponent's gullibility. This approach can make assertions and claims about the "evidences" that support these assertions, but it cannot present these evidences at the moment of debate. The relevant scientific data, manuscript fragments, ancient artifacts, and so on are not so readily available or portable that one can show them to the opponent as arguments are made on the basis of these evidences.

Moreover, due to the numerous premises of evidential arguments, and the complexity involved in establishing each premise, it might take anywhere from several minutes to several decades just to move pass the first premise in almost any argument used in evidentialism. Of course, in almost every case, there are many premises that the unbeliever will never agree on. And since these premises depend on irrational methods to establish (sensation, intuition, induction, science, etc.), evidentialism will allow the stubborn unbeliever to indefinitely maintain his resistance.

Therefore, unless the opponent blindly believes the Christian concerning these evidences, or unless from previous exposure he has already been convinced of them (with just as little justification as the believer now uses them), the best that the evidentialist can hope for against a truly skeptical unbeliever is a stalemate. That said, there are indeed more than enough irrational and gullible unbelievers so that evidentialism tends to achieve greater success than it deserves.