A declarative sentence is said to express a proposition. Propositions have truth-values: they are either true or false.[4] Furthermore, the truth-value of a proposition is objective. It is true or false whether or not it is believed by anyone. The alternative to thinking that propositions have objective truth-value is self-refuting. This is clear from the following dilemma: Either propositions have objective truth values or the proposition expressed by the statement, “no propositions have objective truth values,” has no objective truth value. Clearly, the proposition expressed by the statement “no propositions have objective truth values,” has an objective truth value. It cannot be both true and false, something in between or neither…
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Confusion over Calvinism at McKnight’s Blog
Wesley Walker, writing on Scot McKnight’s blog over on patheos, argues that Calvinists don’t have a good definition of good and evil. Walker writes: “In a Calvinistic worldview, everything is as God wills it to be… The world exists the way it does because God wills it to bring himself as much glory as possible. Therefore, in this system, the definition of “good” is relegated to whatever is because whatever is somehow brings glory to God.” There are two arguments here. Some of the premises are not explicit, but the first one goes roughly as follows: 1. Everything that happens is God’s will2. Some of the things that happen are…
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Review: Forsaken by Tom McCall
In his hour of agony on the cross, Christ cried out to his Father, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46). What did he mean? Did the Father reject the Son in such a way that the Triune God was temporarily broken? Does the Son suffer the rejection of his Father as the Son or is Christ forsaken in an entirely different way? Tom McCall argues that the forsakenness of Christ does not mean a rupture in the unity of the Trinity, but that the Father forsakes the Son to his death at the hand of sinners for the purpose of our salvation.[1] McCall contends that…
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A Case for Punishment
“Lock ’em up!” Punishment, in our culture, conjures up images of a Dickensian, authoritarian and bleak society, one marked by shouting and hitting. While there is no doubt that evil people use punishment as an excuse for cruelty, I’d like to suggest that punishment itself is morally justified. Much as I’d like a world without punishment, I don’t think we can have it if that same world has moral evil in it. So, I’d like to go against the grain: punishment is right, not always and not every kind and certainly not with hatred in the heart, but justified in a fundamental way. Actually, I’d like to go a tad…
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Bertrand’s Blunderbuss
Bertrand Russell and his pipe “As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles. Whose authority? The Old Testament? The New Testament? The Koran? In practice, people choose the book considered sacred by the community in which they are born, and out of that book they choose the parts they like, ignoring the others” (Bertrand Russell). Russell liked to have a go at religion with the argumentative equivalent of a blunderbuss: He shoots out many different arguments that go all over place and hopes that something will hit the target. There are at least three arguments in…
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Are Human Beings Basically Good?
Good People All the Way Through? What does it mean to say that humans are basically good? It is by no means an immediately obvious statement. On some days, days like we have all seen in recent weeks, the contrary appears far more likely. What is usually meant by it is that people intend to be good: people want to be good, want others to be good, and want others to think they are good. Perhaps, by basic, we mean something like essential: there is some essential, intrinsic feature of human personality that is good. All the mess, the evil in the world, is really done by those with good…
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Conrad’s Consciousness
“[W]hatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part… I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which… is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds.” (Joseph Conrad). There are a number of reasons to hold such a view. First, there is the argument from awesomeness: God is neither necessary nor sufficient in order to find nature awesome. Nature is awesome enough without God. Or perhaps the argument from sense:…
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Equality plus Evil equals Confusion
George Marsden once wrote: “The sensibilities of Christians toward the poor and the weak have been dulled by the very success of the assimilation of these same sensibilities by the wider Western culture and lately world culture.” (George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, p. 93). In other words, they are taking your stuff and you are letting them. Consider the fantastically trendy value: equality. Christians, who once stood at the forefront of championing equality, are now suspicious of it. The problem is not with equality itself, but with what it is mixed with. Equality has been rent from its theological mornings and now lies at the heart of a dangerous,…