Defeater Beliefs

Our purpose with these defeaters or doubts is not to ‘answer’ them or ‘refute’ them but to deconstruct them. That is, to “show that they are not as solid or as natural as they first appear” (Kevin Vanhoozer). It is important to show that all doubts and objections to Christianity are really alternate beliefs and faith-acts about the world. (If you say, “I just can’t believe that there is only one true religion”—that is a faith-act. You can’t prove that.) And when you see your doubts are really beliefs, and when you require the same amount of evidence for them that you are asking of Christian beliefs, then it becomes evident that many of them are very weak and largely adopted because of cultural pressure.

Recently, I’ve been listening to several messages by Tim Keller on evangelism, and this morning, read an article called Deconstructing Defeater Beliefs: Leading the Secular to Christ. Tim Keller explains a defeater belief as the following: “Belief-A that, if true, means Belief-B can’t be true.” As an example, a defeater belief may go something like this: because Christianity is exclusive, it cannot be true. When many defeater beliefs are widely held, there is a “cultural implausibility-structure.”

Tim Keller argues that in order to overcome this implausibility structure, we must start with a compelling and appealing presentation of the gospel. But, additionally, we must deconstruct their faulty worldview. Having done so, we must return to the gospel and clearly show a need for the truth.

What I appreciate about Tim Keller is his awareness of cultural thought. Like Paul in Acts 17, we need to be aware of culture and offer them hope where their worldview fails. For example, our culture has a concern for unity in diversity—emphasis is placed upon acceptance. “Contemporary people ask: How can we get past exclusion and exclusivism? How can we live at peace in a pluralistic world? How can we share power rather than using power to dominate one another? How can we embrace the ‘Other’—the person of a sharply different viewpoint and culture?” What we, as Christians, must do, is respond with grace, but truth. Tim Keller does it this way. “Jonathan Edwards (again, a man ahead of his time) recognized that if your highest love and greatest is your nation, your family, your career, even your religious performance, then you will disdain other nations, families, classes of people, and other religions. If anything but God is our “highest good” (i.e. if we make anything an idol) then we have to demonize or at least exclude some part of creation. But if God is our ultimate good, then we are free to develop deep love for (what Edwards calls) “Being in general.”

Keller does an excellent job of explaining this in much greater detail here. Additionally, here are three sermons that communicate Keller’s heart in evangelism.