Alexander Campbell was an influential pastor in 19th century. He came up with an interesting argument for the existence of God. I saw it nicely analyzed by Caleb Clanton. Campbell argues that human beings must have obtained the concept of God at some time in the past. But what best explains the cause of our having such a concept? There are five plausible options. First, the idea of God is innate to human minds. We never really obtained the concept; it was always within us. Second, the concept of God was acquired through direct experience of God. Third, the concept of God was arrived at by experience and reflection. Fourth,…
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If You Don’t Teach This, You Can’t Teach That
Whenever Christians cite the their faith in support of some unpopular moral view, objectors often turn to a well worn argument. I call it the ‘if you don’t teach this, you can’t teach that’ argument. The argument turns on a comparison between the objectionable view in question and some other Christian view or Biblical text. The objector accuses the Christian of cherry-picking his beliefs. One version of the argument suggests that the Christian obeys only parts of his faith that support the objectionable view while not obeying those that appear to support the objector’s moral view. The longer the list of Christian beliefs that the Christian does not support, the…
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Sentence Conscience?
In Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Williams and Bizup present several pairs of sentences and invite the reader to consider which of the two he prefers. Here is an example: A: Once upon a time, as a walk through the woods was taking place on the part of Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf’s jump out from behind a tree occurred, causing her fright. B: Once upon a time, Little Red Riding Hood was walking through the woods, when the wolf jumped out from behind a tree and frightened her. B is clearly better than A even though both sentences are, strictly speaking, grammatically correct. What is interesting is how…
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Why Jesus?
In Greek, Jesus is Ἰησοῦς (pronounced, ee-ay-sooce). In early Latin an i could be used either as a vowel (short or long) or as a consonant (as a y). Thus, the Latin, Iēsus, was pronounced yay-sus. In medievil Latin, the letter j was used to replace i‘s that where being used as consonants. The j was pronounced as a y. Hence, in modern Spanish, ‘Jesus’ is still pronounced Yay-sooce. In English, however, the j was hardened and, consequently, ‘Jesus’ is pronounced Gee-sus.
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Is Creationism a Science?
I recently got into a debate over young earth creationism. One objection to the view went as follows: “A scientific theory is a concise set of statements which has broad explanatory and predictive power within its purview. In order to be considered scientific, a hypothesis must predict what must or must not be observed if it is true. If such things are not observed/observed, then the hypothesis is considered falsified. [Scientific Creationism] does not espouse any idea which makes exclusive predictions about what must or must not be observed. Every biological observation falls under “God made it that way” or borrows from evolutionary theory and says “it adapted that way.”…
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What Wendy Fails to Prove: Refuting Inerrancy-Denying Arguments
I once went to a Don Fransisco show. I am now old enough to admit that I enjoyed it and persuaded my mother to buy a copy of One Heart at a Time. Somehow a memory of the concert sprung to mind recently so I started following him on facebook. Apparently, Don has no time for facebook. His wife runs his social media for him. Recently, Wendy Fransisco went on the attack against the doctrine of inerrancy. She gave a number of arguments that struck me as being common fare among those who deny the doctrine. First up, Wendy presents the following: …we are not inerrantists. The reason is that 4 decades…
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Why Children Should Not Govern
Possible Democrat presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, recently tweeted the following: “Children are our nation’s future. We must listen to them about what they care about and give them a voice in our government.” I am sure Harris didn’t mean that children’s opinions should the the basis for actual policy, but her words betray an increasingly common view of the opinions of youth: that their importance ought to be elevated. Children are our nation’s future. We must listen to them about what they care about and give them a voice in our government. pic.twitter.com/buBBTj1MNc — Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) August 24, 2017 Harris’ sentiment is not new. I heard this kind of…
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Pronounambulation
My paper can no more make an argument than my computer can hope for a Cubs win. People write papers and in those papers people express propositions in sentences that constitute arguments. ‘I’ is the first person pronoun and I use it to refer to myself, the person writing the paper. If I want to tell you something I am going to do in my paper, I will tell you that I will be the one doing it: “In this paper, I will argue…” ‘One’ is a personal pronoun referring to anyone to which some property or other might apply. If I say, ‘one might argue ~q’, I am referring to…
