"And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.'" -Luke 2:13-15 (KJV) This must have been an amazing scene. It is one of many moments in the Nativity story that I would liked to have seen with my own eyes. But it’s ...
Recall from a previous post that I have recently read a book called Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction by Robert Kane. In that post, I introduced the Free Will Problem and explained the basic position of compatibilism. To review, a compatibilist holds that free will and determinism are not at odds with one another; in other words, someone ...
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| From despair.com |
Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell." I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."
The reader will recall from a previous post that I recently finished How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, with my small group. Overall, our group found it to be an incredibly helpful guide for how to approach the unique nature of the Bible with all its different genres and books. In that post, I summarized the first ...
In this last post of the series on the problem of evil (here are parts one and two), I will skim the surface of the two issues that now take up most of the conversation among contemporary philosophers. The Evidential Version The evidential version of the problem of evil (also known as the probabilistic version) differs from the logical problem in that ...
They may take our lives, but they'll never take our freedom! -William Wallace, Braveheart Who doesn't love these words spoken by the fictional rendition of William Wallace in the movie Braveheart? Hearing such a phrase, we know that something truly meaningful is being communicated. But why is the concept of freedom so important? Perhaps it is because ...
Talk with just about any self-proclaimed atheist sitting next to you on an airplane, at Starbucks, or online; if you try to critique their own position they will almost invariably say, "Ah, atheism isn't a belief that there is no God, it is simply a lack of belief in God or gods." Or something to that effect, sometimes much less charitably. This ...
Over the past few months, my small group read through the book How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart. This book has been incredibly helpful in terms of both practical tips and theoretical background knowledge necessary for really understanding the Word of God. Some passages left me feeling stupid for never ...
Here we have two separate series' converge. This is the second part of three on the problem of evil, but it is also the third part of the ongoing series on Alvin Plantinga. While the first two parts of the Plantinga series were almost a book summary (as the book itself is credited by the likes of William Lane Craig for kicking off Christian ...
The following is a guest post by the user idunno from the Reasonable Faith forums. The authors of this blog intend to use guest posters from time to time in order to promote diversity of ideas and viewpoints. In his work Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton poses the question, “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?” I think ...
Historically, the problem of evil is without a doubt the most famous and most compelling argument against the existence of God. More broadly, the existence of evil is something with which every person must grapple, regardless of religious views. The staggering amount of evil in the world, on display in the news, in our own lives, and in the books ...
Continuing on from my previous post on the Trinity in the Old Testament, I will now discuss the use of the plural "we" in Genesis 1:26. This verse has interested scholars and theologians for centuries; how it is both translated and interpreted could have a significant impact on one's theology. To set the stage, I will first remind the reader of ...
xkcd comic Since the first two parts of the Plantinga Pwns series were pretty intense philosophically and covered quite a lot of ground, and given that the next topic in the series is the problem of evil - which also promises to be pretty intense - I decided to write this post as a bit of a breather. Here I'll cover the basics of philosophy ...
This is the development of a thought experiment that I took part in coming up with on a fourm a while back. Consider the following three hypothetical situations: ...
In my last post, we ended with Plantinga's rather disappointing conclusion that the arguments for the existence of God are not compelling. In the quest to determine whether belief in God is rational, he moves on to some of the arguments against the existence of God. It should come as no surprise that the main argument discussed is the Problem ...
The Doctrine of the Trinity is one of the most important pieces of orthodox Christian theology, having been with the Church since its earliest days. The first known use of the Greek word "trias" was by Theophilus of Antioch in the late second century, and the first use of the Latin word "trinitas" was by Tertullian in the early third century, each translating ...
Alvin Plantinga, now 80, is professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and has taught at Calvin College and Wayne State University, when it was a hotbed for analytic philosophy. He studied at Calvin College, Harvard, the University of Michigan, and received his PhD from Yale. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Chicago, Michigan, ...
As alluded to several times in past posts, a major interest of the writers of this blog is the origin of the universe, the earth, and mankind. Specifically, the relationship between the historical sciences and the book of Genesis is a subject by which we are both fascinated. In this post, I plan to give my view on a topic that is often brought up in discussions ...
From time to time, I hope to discuss some of the philosophical conundrums that currently plague philosophers. And defining knowledge is one of the chiefest. It is perhaps the main point of contention in the world of epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, rationality, and justification. While metaphysics - the study ...
Reasonable Faith, the organization of Dr. William Lane Craig, has recently made an animated video on the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The KCA argues for the existence of a first cause of the universe, which it posits as God. We plan on doing some extensive writing on the KCA in the future, based on the section of the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology with the same name. In the meantime, ...
I recently (in the last year) read an outstanding book on the resurrection by Michael Licona called The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographic Approach. What follows is a brief review of the book. I do not intend this review to be exhaustive, but encourage readers to pick up the book themselves. As will be evident in the below text, I highly recommend ...
As many reading this may be familiar, the term "apologetics" derives from the classical Greek word apologia. In Greek law, the prosecution would give a kategoria, and the defense would respond with an apologia. Today, apologetics can refer to the defense of any religion. In the case of Christianity, followers are told in the Bible ...
The following post is a continuation of what will be an ongoing series, "The State of the Church," where we look at issues relevant to the current state of the body of Christ. Through these posts, we hope to bring to light issues of both encouragement and criticism which we feel deserve more attention. I landed early this morning at George Bush Intercontinental ...
Videmus enim quod aliqua quæ cognitione carent, scilicet corpora naturalia, operantur propter finem (We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end). ~Thomas Aquinas In order to move things along, I have decided to forgo explanations and arguments for Aquinas' Third and Fourth Ways, the Arguments from Contingency and ...
"A flabby mind is no badge of spiritual honor." ~David Hazard Many circles in Christianity have been accused of anti-intellectualism. In many cases, rightly so. There is often an intellectual laziness that affects the minds of some Christians. In terms of defending the faith, it most often shows itself as an underlying assumption that any argument that ...
After a short break, we will now continue along in our series on Thomas Aquinas, focusing today on the first two of his arguments for the existence of a First Cause, or God. These first two "ways of knowing God," can broadly be categorized as cosmological arguments. According to the philosopher Alexander Pruss, "a cosmological argument takes some cosmic ...
"The philosophical case against Christianity is rather easily dealt with. There is no philosophical case against Christianity." ~G.K. Chesterton There are many objections to the existence of an all-powerful creator God, and even more to Christianity. They range from the powerful - even compelling - to the truly embarrassing. ...
I am currently reading through Gordon Wenham's commentary on the first few chapters of Genesis in order to gain a better understanding of what has been a controversial issue in the church for some time, and especially in recent decades (the issue I am referring to is, as you might have guessed, the relationship between modern science and the Genesis creation ...
To provide a contrast to Austin's ongoing series on Thomistic philosophy, I thought I would start a series to look at notable Christian philosophers of the analytic tradition, and some of their contributions to philosophy. Before diving in, it is necessary to give at least some explanation of what on earth analytic philosophy is. Since this a ...
Resuming our series on Thomas Aquinas, we will now delve into his metaphysics. You'll recall from a previous post that metaphysics is basically the study of the fundamental nature of reality, or first principles. Metaphysics is critical for coherently piecing together all those seemingly independent beliefs that together constitute a worldview. ...
The following post is the first part of what will be an ongoing series, "The State of the Church," where we look at issues relevant to the current state of the body of Christ. Through these posts, we hope to bring to light issues of both encouragement and criticism which we feel deserve more attention. This is a pretty common question today in the church, ...
It is often asserted by the New Atheists that there is no evidence for the existence of a god, much less the god of Christianity. One reason for this is that the presuppositions derived from their metaphysics (subconsciously) do not allow them to consider the possibility of anything non-material. This leads them to hold to an epistemology, or method for ...
After my last pretty heavy-hitting post, this one should be a bit easier to follow. Identifying a fallacy requires some subtlety, but can become second-nature after some practice. That being said, one of the real pitfalls of catching fallacies is that one can obsess over them, seeming to find them everywhere. This is often due to misusing ...
In preparation for a series of posts on Thomas Aquinas and his Five Ways of knowing God, we thought it would be helpful to write something explaining what metaphysics is. Though this post may seem somewhat dry and abstract, it is a critical first step toward the understanding of much more interesting subjects to come. We encourage the reader to take a deep breath, watch this ridiculously ...
We thought it would be good to do a brief primer on logic before moving forward with any other posts. This will be a series consisting of two posts, the first dealing with some of the basics of argument and propositional logic, and the second with informal fallacies. Obviously, these two posts will hardly even scratch the surface of the field of logic, ...
Let's play a game. I'm going to throw out three names, and you tell me what they have in common: Aristotle John Calvin Thomas Hobbes ...
If you've stumbled upon this blog, welcome. It is run by two friends who met in their undergraduate days and – rather strangely – found out that they grew up within minutes of each other, several hundred miles away from their alma mater. We have been interested in defending the Christian faith for some time, as well as hearing out the objections to that faith. Both of us are engineers by training, ...
