In the Beginning, God -- by Winfried Corduan

(Adapted from Amazon review, just posted.)

I have been fascinated by evidence for God in non-western cultures for some thirty years, since first reading Don Richardson's Eternity in Their Hearts. One chapter of my own first book, True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture (which Corduan has apparently not read) described God as he was worshipped, and often neglected, in China. Since then, as regular readers of this blog know, I have read, written, and even debated the idea with atheists like Richard Carrier and Hector Avalos. But in some ways, this book takes the debate to a whole new level.

Avalos attacks TACT (and me, and, yes, Christianity)

Beginning in 2000, in Jesus and the Religions of Man, I have offered an argument for God that we might call the Theistic Argument from Cultural Transcendence (TACT). 


The Altar of Heaven in Beijing, where the emperor came to
worship "Huang Tian Shangdi," a strong theistic term used
in the Classics. (My photo, 1984.)

The gist of the argument is that (a) if an understanding of God transcends a particular culture, it is much more likely to be true than if it does not.  (b) The idea of God does, in fact, transcend the Abrahamic tradition from which monotheism is often said to have arisen.  It can, in fact, be found in many highly scattered and diverse cultures, where it must have arisen independently.  (c) Therefore God is much more likely to be real than religious ideas that are limitted to one particular culture, or flow out from one localized source. 

One of my arguments was that even some well-known atheists admit the first premise of this argument -- when they think it will hurt Christianity.  I cited Emile Durkheim in paricular, who admits that a concept of God closely resembling the Christian concept can be widely found in Australia, even though on another page, he uses the first premise of TACT to argue against religion.   Several years later, in The Truth Behind the New Atheism, I cited Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who also argued against religion based on the first premise of TACT. 

This February, William Lane Craig having monopolized so many other good arguments for theism, I thought I'd take this one out for a spin in public debate with Richard Carrier. 

In the heat of the moment, Richard Carrier didn't offer much of a response to TACT, which was the second argument in my opening statement.  Now Iowa State Religious Studies professor Hector Avalos has posted an article rebutting my argument.  Avalos, who has studied anthropology and finds mine grossly defective, if not dishonest, is prepared to show where TACT falls flat, and where I fail miserably as a scholar.