Those opposed to the pro-life movement think that their opponents have a nefarious motive for their activism: “they don’t really care about babies. They just want power or control, or they just want to win.” In the following debate, the Hitch makes this explicit. Watch Bill Craig’s response. Starts at 1:16: Craig’s response is right. The Hitch presumes that Christians don’t have the intellectual resources to care for people in the present. All they have is a hope that the future, post-resurrection world will be better. All the Christian talk about life is really a veiled attempt to control others. Craig’s response is the denial of this premise. He argues…
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If Equality, then God.
Louis Pojman makes a convincing case for the conclusion that if there is any case for the equal dignity of human beings, then God exists: “The doctrine that all people are of equal worth, and this endowed with inalienable rights, is rooted in our religious heritage…The originators of rights language presupposed a theistic world view, and secular advocates of equal rights are, to cite Tolstoy, like children who see beautiful flowers, grab them, break them at their stems, and try to transplant them without their roots. The egalitarian assertions of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights are similar to those of our Declaration of Independence, with one important…
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Earth Day: When Earth and Rationality Part Company
In honor of earth day, here are three fallacious earth day arguments: The first one suggests that scientific research strongly entails some particular government policy. It is used to suggest that any disagreement over government policy is directly related to one’s attitude toward science. Here is a formal version: If you accept science, then you accept policy P.You reject policy PTherefore, you reject science A good example of this sort of fallacy is provided by Bill Nye (a good source of silly fallacies, by the way). “All science is political” he said. And then he proceeded to bash the highly qualified scientist who disagreed with Nye’s position on the role…
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Why We Should Argue About Worldview: A Reply to Jonathan Merritt.
Conservative Christians keep losing at culture wars. So argues Johnathan Merritt. Merritt thinks he knows why. They are obsessed with arguing about worldview. Consequently, Conservative Christians are failing to persuade people: They focus on ideology while ignoring people: When Christians talk about [x], they often frame it as a clash of worldviews or ideologies…Those who have a more progressive view… use concrete language and share specific stories. They talk about real… people with real struggles who experience real oppression. Narrative framing usually wins in public debates because it touches listeners’ hearts. Whether or not Merritt is right about convincing people is hard to tell. What I would like to quibble…
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Babies and Lions: Why What We See Doesn’t Always Change What We Believe
The picture of a dead lion and the videos of Planned Parenthood workers went head to head this past month. Who won? Time will tell. One thing we do know is that evidence, the type of evidence you can see and hear, doesn’t always change a person’s mind. “How can anyone, any human being, see that poor defenseless lion and feel no moral outrage?” some people said. “No one with any moral scruples can watch the Planned Parenthood videos and remain a supporter of such an organization,” others cried. Yet, for some reason, many people defy the supposedly obvious evidence. Are they mad, irrational or psychopathic? I suppose many people…
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After Naturalism…
Naturalism has peeked. And when it has collapsed something else will take its place. The question is: What? Naturalism is a combination of a method and an assumption. Methodologically, naturalism is the attempt to understand the world through the natural sciences. The assumption, which, theoretically at least, can be overturned at any moment, is that all that exists is material (whether these two are happy bedfellows is a discussion better left for another day). I say that this assumption can be overturned at any moment because natural sciences don’t claim to have all data at their finger tips. Fairies could be found at the bottom of an English garden and…
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Numbers Need Worldviews
1+1=2. What has this got to do with worldview? Surely math has no need of a worldview, 1+1=2 in any worldview. Roy Clouser argues that 1+1=2 might be true in any worldview, but why it is true varies tremendously. Clouser considers the options and spots a mischievous assumption – all mathematical theories depend on a religious assumption. To see this, Clouser asks us to consider what a number is. There are two main approaches to this question (Clouser has a few more, but I will focus on a couple for the purposes of brevity). The first option is to say that numbers are real things in another dimension of reality.…
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Hating Sin and Loving People is Only Possible if Christianity is True
What worldview, apart from Christianity, can coherently account for, explain and oblige hatred for sin and love for a sinner? Answer: not one. This cliche has been the standard response of the church to issues such as gay marriage. It attempts to articulate that while the church opposes sinful actions that does not mean we oppose people in the same way. Its significance is not that it sounds reasonable, but that it is possible at all. How could it be that the sin of a person can been opposed, hated even, yet the person can be deeply loved at the same time by the same person? It is possible because…
