Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 16: My Conclusion



See Part 1 General Comments

            Okay, so I have not gotten close to covering this whole book.  I’ve just covered the problems with the first 10 pages.  If I were so inclined, and if I had an infinite amount of free time and nothing else to do, I could easily keep going like this through all 271 pages of the book.
            I’m not going to, but just because I’m giving up here does not mean the rest of the book is not problematic.  The huge leaps in logic, the self-contradictions, and the misrepresentations and falsehoods that I’ve pointed out on the first 10 pages continue all the way through the rest of the book. 

            If you’ve been reading my review carefully so far, I hope I’ve done enough to show that the book is complete nonsense, and that at this point we can just write the rest of it off, and that it would be pointless to go on debunking every stupid thing Lee Strobel says when we’ve already proven there’s no point in taking him seriously.

            Much more likely, you probably haven’t been carefully reading everything I’ve been writing.  You probably have only glanced briefly at these dense, text-filled computer screens, before getting a headache and going on to do something else.  But in that case as well, all the more reason to stop writing now rather then continue to waste my life writing long rebuttals of forgotten Christian apologetic books that no one is reading.  Either way, we’ve come to the end of this review.

            If you do continue on with The Case for Christ, you shouldn’t need my assistance to see how stupid the whole thing is.  Just make sure you:
1) Always look up every biblical reference Lee Strobel gives to see if it actually means what he’s claiming it means (much of the time it doesn’t), and
2) Always double check to see if modern scholarship says what Lee Strobel is actually claiming it says (most of the time it isn’t), and
3) Just use your own common sense.

4 comments:

dpreimer said...

I must say it looks like you got your money's worth out of this book. Fifteen posts (and counting) is nothing to sneeze at. You've gone and beat my Chesterton run.

Joel Swagman said...

Although I've titled this post "My Conclusion", I've actually got two more posts coming (some addendums). So be forewarned.

So, yeah, I guess I've definitely gotten my money out of this book.

Whether this was all a huge waste of time or not is I suppose a moot question at this point, because it's all written and done already now. I do feel somewhat like I've wasted a lot of time and energy on an obscure book nobody really cares about anyway.

Or is it that obscure? I've never heard of this book before it was recommended to me, but I've heard a few people describe this book as the most widely read apologetic book of the last decade.

For example Here
http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2009/10/top-fifteen-must-have-books-on-apologetics/

and here

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/september/29.101.html?paging=off

and here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j60-eK5sfwk&list=PL8B722E1FA8681B70

...so maybe this book is worth spending a bit of time debunking. I don't know. At any rate it's done now.

dpreimer said...

"Reclaiming the mind" -- scored a bitter chuckle from me. Thank you (I guess).

Strobel's dog-and-pony show is anything but obscure. I first spotted the book in a Canadian Costco, and they don't bother stocking anything they can't sell by the skid-load.

As for the time spent, I've devoted (substantially) more to video games, so ...

Joel Swagman said...

>>>As for the time spent, I've devoted (substantially) more to video games, so ...

Thanks! That does help to put it in perspective. Come to think of it, I've wasted substantially more time on TV, mindless Internet surfing, et cetera. Maybe spending a few hours debunking Lee Strobel is not the worst way to spend time ever.