Does Christian DISAGREEMENT Mean Christianity is False?

Atheist, Michael Beverly asks, If Christians believe they're filled with the Holy Spirit of truth, and all have the Bible, logic, reason, and evidence, how can they so viciously disagree? Chris Date defends the truth of Christianity in light of this concern.

Michael Beverly's channel: @michaelsbeverly

Chris Date's channel: @Theopologetics

[avivastudios]

Since the Bible is not a list of propositions but a collection of stories and poems and sayings it makes sense that people can get different things out of it. I don't see anything wrong with this. Stories are absolutely important to the faith. Our minds latch on to stories more.

[SamHarless-whed]

I am a believer but do think Mr Beverly has a good and valid critique. Some version of “free will” is definitely the only way to help this dilemma. Having a Calvinistic believer try and tackle this is problematic. The Spirit obviously does not impose His will on anyone or this would not be an issue.

[michaelx]

Michael Beverly had his moments but I think he mostly showed that he did not understand Christian theology and confirmation theory. Chris Date did better than I thought he would, I respect him more than I did before (although I bet that comment about Megan Basham is going to come back to bite him lol).

[brando]

I like Michael, he actually listened, and even though he got on the upper end of “heated” a few times, I don’t think it was over the line, and it was in service of the point he was trying to make, I thought it was fine.
I don’t agree with Michael, but it would be nice to have him back on.

[robinhood]

Here as a supporter of Michael Beverly.

[steverational]

The list of “things” that he mentions that Christians disagree on are all minor issues. Moreover he presents absolutely no evidence or data on the magnitude or significance of these disagreements. Rather it appears to be mostly anecdotal. So to make the claim he presents which I take to be that it is so bad that it undermines the truth of Christianity he needs to provide the detailed analysis.

[atheistcomments]

When the god is only an imaginary character based on a book character, there are going to be differences in the way people imagine and fantasize about its character. 😁

[avivastudios]

It's like they want us to be a hivemind. 😂

[the_conflationist]

Consider the implications of humans not having free will.

[JadDragon]

Engaging and exciting indeed. Thank you.

Jesus lives! ♥️ and is Yahweh God 🙏🏻 Christ ✝️ and King 👑

[BLynn]

So I'm about @1:22:26 in and Michael has challenged that on the whole the "church" should agree more than secular groups, but what group of secular individuals are shown to be in more agreement than those within the "church"? I'm not saying he is wrong, I just have no idea how you quantify that.

[lkae]

What made you a real Christian? The most learned ex-Christian I know left Christianity for empathy which is a fictional mutant power from the X-Men universe. I'm still looking, man.

[robertguiler]

Although I think Calvinism is an abhorrent version of Christianity and should be mocked, Chris Date is a Christian, he loves people and Jesus, and he obviously doesn’t think of Calvinism as I do. He thinks it’s true. He is wrong 😉 but he is genuine and a genuine follower of Jesus.

Well done both Chris and Braxton!

[GabrielMillen]

I would have loved a defense from the idea of sanctification. Where each of us as Christians relying on the Holy Spirit are growing into the unity Christ prayed for.

I’ve had amazing experiences where I’m traveling and meet someone who and feel an unexplainable unity with them and as we talk inevitably they are also a believer. It’s happened to me multiple times. I know it’s anecdotal but it’s been impactful to my confidence in the faith.

[Chris-Stockman]

Chris in the 24th minute mentioning those who will treat the other side with scorn and derision…when he’s the guy that broke off all contact with Warren, Leighton et al. over the comments that sparked Baalgate, which weren’t even about Chris. Pot, meet kettle.

[robinhood]

First, I know many non believers who support Trump. I also no many christians who dont. So to conclude that any person who would be happy to see Trump dead is a non believer is just false. To be generous to the definition of christian as morally superior, i have a very hard tome understanding support of him.

[pascalpowers]

One of the most obviously false presuppositions Michael has is that people like doctors and scientists are all in wide agreement. The doctors I see who all practice in the same building disagree all the time. For nearly any position you can find a formally educated professional who's worked in that field for decades who advocates for that position. They also can only really be said to agree on the "core" concepts - that reality is testable and truth can be known and so forth, and then they disagree on the results of those tests, interpret the results differently, and make different truth claims based on those results. The reality is that great efforts are taken against any of these educated and trained professionals who go against the accepted orthodoxy of scientific thought to discredit them for going against the consensus. It happened to Semmelweis when he advocated for washing hands before delivering babies, which doctors at the time thought was ridiculous. If we're comparing Christian unity against secular unity, I'm not sure you can go here to make that argument.

Regardless I appreciated how gracious this conversation went. Even when it got a little intense, everyone stayed very friendly.

[stormburn]

Regarding the scientific method talk around 59:00: the difference I would posit with science is that scientists hold themselves and each other accountable to scientific standards of testability, falsifiability, reproducibility, explanatory power, etc. They have a formalized method for comparing their beliefs to reality and what is true that can be pointed to regardless of personal beliefs or biases.

A better way of framing Michael's question, then, would be "What standard are you and other theists holding yourselves accountable to or are willing to be held accountable to in order to determine who is correct?" Theists don't have one aside from appeals to authority/prophets. This is why historical scientific disagreements like around germ theory, relativity, the age of the Earth, plate tectonics, etc. get resolved within decades while theistic sects have stayed separate for centuries if not millennia.

[michaelx]

One thing I’ll add is that a hypothesis can predict data without that data confirming the hypothesis (and sometimes the data could still disconfirm the hypothesis!) so if Pr(D|H) = I think we all would agree that H predicts D, but if Pr(D|-H) = 1, D is still evidence for -H over H. So Christianity could predict discord and wrongdoing from within, but that doesn’t mean that discord and wrongdoing from within is not evidence against Christianity. So long as a competing hypothesis does a better job predicting it, the skeptic is going to get access to disconfirming evidence.

[ciaran]

Christianity—as it pertains to unity—behaves just as we would expect it to behave if, in the words of Captain Cassidy, there were no real live god at its back end. The role of Hunter and Date is to explain away why this is so. The role of the apologist, as ever, is to explain away the shortfall between Christianity and reality. The Holy Spirit is meant to lead Christians into “all” truth. Date conveniently leaves out the word “all” when discussing the Holy Spirit’s leading of Christians into truth. Thus, we would expect Christianity, as in Science, to converge upon positions rather than diverge upon positions. Science manages to converge upon propositions even absent a Divine-Convergence Catalyst such as the Holy Spirit. Christianity diverges into competing sects and theologies about as much as I would expect if the Holy Spirit did not exist.