Imagine you are one of the thousands of people who have been looking forward to receiving a brand new Samsung Galaxy Note. However, after hearing news of their vulnerability to spontaneous combustion, you call Samsung and are told that there is indeed a possibility of your phone exploding in your pocket. If you so choose you may decide to stop the delivery and the phone will be destroyed along with all the other phones that have yet to be delivered. The trouble is, you really want the phone. If you choose to receive the phone it may never explode, but you will always live in fear that at any moment…
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No Concept, No Belief
You couldn’t believe in something unless you knew something about it. If I said to you that a meroganon lives at the end of my street you might say I am nuts, but you would first want to know something about a meroganon. You couldn’t know if I am nuts unless you knew something about a meroganon. I could describe one to you by listing some of its basic features. After some time you would have in your mind the concept of a meroganon and you could then be justified in thinking that I have lost my mind. Consider the person (there may be more than one) who has not…
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Defense of Calvinism: A Response to Spencer Toy
Spencer Toy has written a critique about the presuppositional method of apologetics. His main critique seems to be that, given the Calvinistic underpinnings of the method there would be no way to sure that God has not revealed some error to the Calvinist to further his own glory. The problem, as Toy sees it, is the relationship between human reasoning and Calvinism. This, Toy argues, produces a problem for presuppositionalists. There are two ‘presuppositions’ Toy thinks produce the problem: TD: Total Depravity, the view that “human reasoning is so totally depraved that any effort to understand or believe the Gospel is futile. Unless and until the Holy Spirit regenerates the…
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Not a Victim
This was Politico’s attempt to explain one man’s evil deed: “He fell victim to an increasingly common, sometimes overwhelming, temptation that the online world offers up to exhibitionists.” When in doubt, Politico informs us, blame the internet and some kind of personal identity. The identity in question is ‘exhibitionist’; that’s just what he is. It’s not something he does that is wrong, but an immutable part of his personal identity. And if you give someone who has that kind of identity a twitter account, then the inevitable follows and who can blame him? If anything is to blame it is the ‘online world’, a kind of playground for his type.…
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Make America Trust Again
This election season has produced a lack of trust. This is especially true in the media. In a recent article in WaPo a journalist complained to Alberto Ibargüen, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, “that we no longer have trusted sources in our 21st century, social-media environment.” Ibargüen’s repose is telling: “How can there be,” he asked, “until we figure out … how to decide what a trusted source is?” What I want to suggest is that we need to re-build an atmosphere of trust. There are two virtues involved in doing so. The first is perhaps quite trivial in principle but we seem to be…
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Review: Redeeming Science by Vern Poythress
A Christian worldview maintains that in a sense the world has no bottom. The doctrine of creation out of nothing denies the eternal existence of any ‘prime matter’. There is no matter that is just ‘there,’ before God starts to work. Rather, God created everything, not just structure on top of previously existing prime matter. And God created everything by his word. The word introduces the structure and the meaning. The law of God is the continued structure for the world. The world has no ultimate independence from this word or law of God, but is utterly dependent. Understanding the world does not mean understanding the prime matter, because there…
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Notes: Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible by Joel Green
Joel Green’s Thesis: “If, as is often alleged, neuroscientists have discredited a dualist interpretation of the human person, I want to explore the usual corollary that, in doing so, they have also discredited the biblical faith. It will become clear that I take the former claim to be true, the latter to be false.”[1] According to Green, the sciences have discredited a dualist ontology of the human person. Green argues that human identity is not grounded in the reference to a substantive, embodied soul but to a set of capacities or functions enabled by a physical base.[2] Green thinks a non-reductive physicalism is compatible with Christian belief and that the…
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Naturalism and the Language of Thought Hypothesis
According to naturalism, the world can be adequately described in terms of what is physical. But what is a good naturalistic explanation of thought? Beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes appear not to fit within the physical universe. While the physical universe can be analyzed in terms of causation, and laws of nature, the life of the mind appears to involve more. What it is to reason about some action seems very different to what it is for a neuron to initiate a causal chain that results in an action. If causation cannot account for reasoning, then what it is that does the reasoning cannot be accounted for in physical…