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How viable is Christianity as a belief system?(r/askphilosophy)

Christianity is, as far as I’m aware, as coherent and rigorously defended as other competing systems, due to its pedigree of at least a thousand years of dedication to its defense. That said, there are books such as Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism that methodologically dismantle these defenses.

We are then left with a problem: some philosophers find all or most of these criticisms to fall short while others think they sufficiently undermine theism generally, a fortiori undermining Christianity as well.

This leaves us with something like Kołakowski’s Law:

>The law of the infinite cornucopia…applies not only to philosophy but to all general theories in the human and social sciences: it states that there is never a shortage of arguments to support any doctrine you want to believe in for whatever reasons. These arguments, however, are not entirely barren. They have helped in elucidating the stats questiones and in explaining why these questions matter.

Or the shorter quip from Dretske, ‘one man’s modus ponens in another man’s modus tollens.’

There’s plenty of books that directly deal with this problem. One of my favourites is W.W. Bartley’s The Retreat to Commitment (1st Edition, not the 2nd Edition) which focuses in the first half on Protestant theologians and philosophers presenting the tu quoque defense against secular philosophy and the second half proposing a solution to the tu quoque.

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