Can You Believe It’s True? Christian Apologetics in a Modern and Postmodern Era is really a book about truth: “even though this is a book is usable as a general text in apologetics, the greatest burden and passion of the book is to defend the notions that there is truth, humans can find it, and we can “know that we know” what is true” (p.11). Feinberg’s interlocutors for his discussion are skeptics, those who resist Christian claims to truth. In our contemporary setting, such skeptics come in two flavors – modern and postmodern. Modern skeptics regard the claims of the Christian to be unsupported by the evidence. Postmodern skeptics, on…
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Review: “If God Then What?” by Andrew Wilson
Apologetics is seldom funny. In part that is because souls are at stake but also because apologists are often grumpy and argumentative. So a book that is easy to read, clear and jammed full of quips, anecdotes and good arguments is refreshing. Andrew Wilson is a Brit, a pastor and, as it turns out, a good writer. His contribution to apologetics is novel not due to any originality in terms of content, but due to a conversational style that will help even the most non-apologetically inclined reader get to the end of the book. If God Then What? Begins with Wilson’s journey from “fundamentalism,” the belief that one is right…
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Dealing with Nil
A facebook-only friend (we have never met) said this: “Everything we define as “reality” is filtered through chemical processes tuned over millions of years and evolved explicitly to keep us alive and reproducing. It’s entirely possible that we are microbes on the crust of a burning pebble among cosmic events that we cannot influence, destined to evaporate in the unfathomable void of time and space. When faced with someone who glimpses the absurdity of human function in the context of our nihilistic reality, we consider them to be broken, and their illusion of purpose in need of repair. In a sense, depression is a logical response to abject hopelessness, in…
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Cheating
If you want to make large groups of high school or college students look sheepishly at the floor you should bring up the topic of cheating. Cheating is “to deceive or mislead somebody, especially for personal advantage, break rules in the a game, exam, or contest in an attempt to gain and unfair advantage” and apparently it has reached epidemic levels (see here). The question that interests me is how cheating is justified by students – why they might think it is okay to cheat. I recently observed a group of high schoolers discussing three scenarios to bring out various lines of reasoning. They gave some insight into the minds…
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Ethics Pie
There are three schools of thought in contemporary ethics. The first, and most common in the West, is consequentialism. It is the idea that an action is deemed to be right or wrong depending on the outcome of the action. The second, duty ethics (sometimes called “deontological” ethics), deems an action to be intrinsically wrong or right despite the consequences. A third way to look at ethics is to focus less on the action and more on the agent. Virtue ethicists argue that ethics is a matter of character – lies, when repeated, are determined by a liar, a person for whom the truth is repeatedly denied. Instead of the…
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Blog Break
As you may have noticed I am taking a break from the blog. This is in order to make some headway in my thesis. In the meantime you are welcome to take a listen to a series of classes I gave on “Worldview and Apologetics” at Fourth Presbyterian Church. These classes mostly rely on using the superb teaching methods of professors who taught me, especially Bryan O’Neal at Moody Bible Institute who could explain virtually any worldview in terms of cake! If you listen to my talks you will notice that I teach visually. This can impair the listening experience. The “worldview cake” I refer to is simply a visual way to explain how…
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The Supreme Court is Missing the Point
If we are going to discuss marriage, then we should have a go a defining what marriage is before deciding on who might take part. Defining marriage should, at the very least, seek to define marriage. It is no good arguing about whether one might marry one person or two, whether it is okay to marry someone of the same sex or whether it is somehow immoral to exclude a coupling based on age, gender or quantity if one does not actually talk about what it is that unites someone in marriage. There are at least three ways of thinking about the actual relationship between people. First, and most popular presently, is…
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Why Young Earthers are Not Nutters…
Being a “nutter,” for my non-British friends, means being crazy, doolally, mad and irrational. And young earthers, those who hold to the view that God created the universe six to ten thousand years ago in roughly six twenty four hour days, are, according to many people (mostly in academia or media), nutters. The reason they might be deemed nuts is mostly a matter of supposedly ignoring what’s in front of them – the evidence. Of course there might be more to it than mere stuff (see here for my comments about the logic of evolution), but let’s leave that aside for a minute. I want to suggest that it is not nuts to think…