Consider the following: Adam and Eve are created by God, are conscious and can understand God and each other when they speak. Although it is possible that both human beings were made with a fully working language system programed in from the start, it is more likely that both human beings had to learn to speak and understand after they were conscious. Just like children, Adam and Eve could have been trained by God to understand and speak. There are some good reasons for believing such a hypothesis. First, it seems implausible that the first humans would have innately known a language. Of course, it is not beyond the power…
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Something and Nothing
… What do we mean by “nothing”? To define nothing one has to be able to conceive of nothing. Some say that it is impossible to conceive of nothing since nothing entails somehow the non-existence of time and space. We might be able to conceive of a particle-free space, but spacelessness and timelessness seem illusive. Of course, this does not touch on abstract objects, if one believes in such things. Others suggest that the findings of logic conclude that necessarily, something exists. Logic cannot, on that reading, conclude that nothing is possible. One suggestion is to say that time and space are matter dependent, that time and space are relations of material…
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Creation and Evolution: Plantinga’s Solution
Just how do we relate science and faith, specifically, the Christian faith? Christians who take their Bible seriously will also take reason seriously. God is eminently reasonable; one could even say God is reason. But all too often there is a feeling that Christians are caught between irrational, reason and science denying positions and compromise with their faith. Plantinga outlines three approaches to the problem. First, the two-truth approach. According to this view one might affirm a proposition in science and deny it in theology. Second, the truth-from-a-standpoint approach suggests that we can hold to apparently contradictory propositions since we can be sure of both being true according to the discipline…
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Young Earthers and Presuppositionalism
Does one’s view of origins have anything to do with apologetic method? This was the subject of a recent debate held at Southern Evangelical Seminary. Three views were held at the debate. Jason Lisle argued that a presuppositional apologetic assumes a hermeneutic of literalism. Since presuppositionalists typically hold that scripture is the ultimate authority on what is true and since there is no indication found in the text that the six day creation account was anything but an account of actual events in 24 hr days there is no reason found in scripture to abandon a young-earth, six day creation position. The only reason for abandoning this view is found…
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Creation Worldview
God Created the World just as Genesis describes. But what does this mean for one’s worldview? To believe that God created the world is to accept a set of principles by which one interprets experience, knowledge and by which one comes to conclusions about the fundamental nature of reality. To believe that God created the World is to believe something like the following: God made, from nothing, all that exists and is not God. This means that what is not God is not eternal. God is eternal. Creation has a beginning. The universe, cosmos, creation also refers to the arrangement of all that exists. (order) God has created stuff and its governing…
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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…