Apologetics to the Glory of God

Category: Authors

  • The Problem of Evil – Part 2

    The Argument Formalized

    Sometimes it is useful to formalize an argument in order to work through it. The argument we have presented already can easily be placed in such a form as follows:

    a) God is all powerful
    b) God is all loving
    c) God knows that evil exists
    d) Evil does exist
    e) Therefore, God does not exist

    What we can see here is that the first three premises seem to describe a being that knows evil exists, wants it to go away, and is able to make it disappear. Therefore, the introduction of the fourth premise, that evil …

  • Zoroastrianism, Part 2

    The contributors to https://choosinghats.org/ make an apparently radical claim: People cannot know anything if God has not revealed Himself to them. Certainly then, people cannot know God without revelation. Our epistemology is revelational; we start with the presupposition that God has spoken and stay there throughout our thoughts and actions. Finite, fallible, sinful humanity can know nothing of God apart from His revealing Himself to us, hence Christian apologists who desire to move from some would-be autonomous position to the conclusion that God exists engage themselves in futility. Likewise for those who wish to prove the existence of some …

  • The Problem of Evil – Part 1

    The Problem of Evil

    One of the most common complaints against Christianity is the Problem of Evil. This particular complaint has plagued Christian apologists for literally thousands of years. For as long as evil has existed in the world, mankind has questioned why a God who is seemingly able to rid the world of such pain and suffering, does not choose to do so.

    It was the18th Century Scottish philosopher David Hume who popularized the Problem of Evil to the world as “proof” that God does not exist; at least the Christian God of the Bible. But even if …

  • A Conversation with “Blast”

    The other day I had a very interesting conversation with an unbeliever in an IRC discussion room I frequent. I wanted to share it here because I think it is a fairly good representation of how to put the presuppositional method of apologetics into practice.

    The conversation lasted about an hour. There was no repentance – no conversion – nothing remarkable like that. In fact, I heard later that the individual “Blast” might not have even been genuine in his side of the discussion. No matter, I think that God was glorified as the gospel was shared and it was …

  • The Myth of Neutrality

    Is it important to be taught in a distinctively Christian way? Does it make a difference to know Christ first before knowing the “facts”? Our first study in the Always Ready Study Group (ARSG) was focused for the most part on the idea of “neutrality.” This is easy for Christians to accept when it comes to “spiritual” issues: as a sinner either you trust in the work of Christ, or you accept the full wrath of God as punishment for your sins, but when it comes to mathematics, history, and science that’s different…right?

    Truth: Correspondence or Coherence?
    In Van Til’s …

  • A Study of “Always Ready” – Part 1

    Yesterday afternoon (or yesterday evening, depending on whether you live in Norway or not) the four of us here at Choosing Hats conducted our first Study of the book “Always Ready” by Dr. Greg Bahnsen. For those unfamiliar with the book, this is really the seminal work in presuppositional apologetics. Although the book doesn’t go down too far into the details, it definitely gives enough to get started with.

    We thought we would try out a little experiment with this study, and so decided to record our conversation. Since we all live in different parts of God’s great big world, …

  • In the Church but not of it…

    Sometimes it is as if no matter where I go, I cannot cease to be in the world.

    Duh.

    Where else would I be? Now, certainly I could lock myself up in my house or my closet…maybe move to Phoenix, Arizona and be an ascetic (oh wait, people actually LIVE out there!), but for the most part I am going to be in the world. That is not the difficult part of the little cliche, “We are to be in the world, but not of it”.

    Being in the world does not mean living ungodly, saying stupid things, mutilating your …

  • Zoroastrianism, Part 1

    At base, there are only two worldviews, Christianity and non-Christianity. There are numerous instances of texts of Scripture which give rise to this understanding of worldviews. Of course, within the realm of non-Christian thought there are many manifestations of the non-Christian worldview. For example, Islam and agnosticism are two different manifestations of the rejection of the Christian worldview. These manifestations are what people typically refer to when speaking of worldviews. This may serve to raise some interesting discussions about the terms we use when describing the aforementioned entities, but for now we will set this issue aside.

    A frequent objection …

  • What’s in the queue?

    At the suggestion of Paul (Paul seems to have a lot of suggestions), the contributors to this blog will be starting a weekly discussion of presuppositional apologetics, centered around the book “Always Ready” by the late Dr. Greg Bahnsen.

    The reason I mention this here is because we are planning on recording the audio from these discussions in order to post on the site. It is our hope that the questions raised and problems tackled in our discussions might be of use to others who frequent this site.

    On another note, Paul also had the idea (see what I mean?) …

  • A Study In The Nature Of God’s Word (Authority) – Part 2

    The nature of faith and knowledge

    Some of you might complain about my goal to demonstrate the Bible as inerrant. You might say “Brian, doesn’t the Bible speak about faith? Isn’t that how we are supposed to approach Jesus Christ – on faith? Isn’t all of this discussion about ‘proving this’ and ‘demonstrating that’ simply unnecessary, based on what the Bible says about faith?” After all, we don’t know the Bible is inerrant, we just have faith that it is, right?

    Well there is no doubt that scripture speaks about faith and belief. However, are we supposed …