Apologetics to the Glory of God

Year: 2011

  • An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 5 – Arguments that Christianity is true.

    By C.L. Bolt

    There are many arguments that Christian tenets are true. For example, we believe that everything that begins to exist has a reason for its coming into being. Intuitively we believe that something cannot come from nothing, and so everything that comes about must have a cause for its coming into being. If there were no conditions to be met through a cause before something could start existing, then it seems that things would pop into being right away and saturate the entire universe with entities of all shapes and sizes. We are impressed by performing arts magicians …

  • An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 4 – Evidence that Christianity is true.

    By C.L. Bolt

    Sometimes presuppositionalists place so much emphasis upon presuppositions that others think we must assume that evidence is just useless. While it is not useless, sometimes evidence simply will not convince people that their position is wrong. This is because their presuppositions prevent them from taking some evidence seriously. For example, Jesus told a story where a man was told that even if someone should rise from the dead, the man’s family would not believe. Instead, the man’s family had Moses and the prophets. Not even the evidence of the miracle of a person raised from the dead …

  • An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 3 – There is no neutrality.

    By C.L. Bolt

    Presuppositions are held firmly at the very most basic level of thought and are what people use to make decisions regarding evidence. Not only do we all have presuppositions that we approach evidence with, but these presuppositions disallow neutrality. Putting together everything we have learned so far, we see that there are two worldviews, the Christian and the non-Christian, and that within the non-Christian worldview there are variations or manifestations which we label appropriately. All of these manifestations are simply variations on the one theme of the rejection of the Christian worldview. They are all predicated upon …

  • An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 2 – Everyone has presuppositions.

    By C.L. Bolt

    Presuppositions are beliefs that people take to be the case as they come to some other belief or piece of evidence. A person who comes to the barber shop with a credit card and wants a haircut presupposes that the barber shop accepts credit cards as a means of payment. Note that presuppositions might be true or false in this sense. To ”presuppose” something is to “suppose” that something “beforehand;” “pre-suppose.”

    People have all sorts of presuppositions as you can likely imagine. However when we speak of presuppositions in this treatment of covenantal apologetics we will speak …

  • An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 1 – There are two worldviews.

    By C.L. Bolt

    There are only two worldviews. Within these two worldviews, or at any rate within one of them, is a whole plethora of other entities usually referred to as wordviews. A worldview is a network of presuppositions, beliefs, concepts, ideas, etc. through which an individual or individuals view the world. Every person has a worldview; every person has a network of presuppositions and beliefs by which he or she views the world. By viewing the world here I mean thinking in terms of what is right and wrong, good and bad, logical and illogical, sensical and nonsensical, worthwhile …

  • An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics – Introduction

    By C.L. Bolt

    What I endeavor to accomplish in the following pieces is not to provide an exhaustive account of all things presuppositional but to grant the readers a very basic level knowledge of Van Tillian presuppositionalism also known as Covenantal Apologetics without fancy terminology or at least with definitions when technical language is used. My hopes are to write something merely from memory as opposed to turning to sources and then collecting them in a Works Cited or Bibliography. I don’t mean to go back and correct much of what I write or to answer objections that people might …

  • Infallibility and the Church

    A few weeks back I started digging into Catholicism pretty deep, due to some discussions I was having.  Much of what I have been doing is trying to understand just what the Roman Catholic Church teaches, in order to evaluate it.  I have tried to be as “objective” as possible, but as I am presently learning about what the RCC teaches based on talking with others and reading web sites, I realize that it is very possible that I may be fed information that is not consistent with what the RCC actually teaches.  In my quest for understanding, I was …

  • How about a little offense? by defectivebit (Guest Post)

    In the thirteenth chapter of Always Ready Dr. Greg Bahnsen states

    “The Christian cannot forever be defensively constructing atomistic answers to the endless variety of unbelieving criticisms; he must take the offensive and show the unbeliever that he has no intelligible place to stand, no consistent epistemology, no justification for meaningful discourse, predication, or argumentation.”[1]

    I have often wondered why it is that in most debates I watch between a Christian and a non-Christian that the Christian spends very little time on the offensive side of the battle. This affinity to a defensive posture was also made clear to …

  • Does the Triune God of Scripture Exist? Jamin Hubner vs. Ben Wallis

    Jamin Hubner has made public his debate with Ben Wallis here and Ben Wallis has done so as well and reviewed the debate here. You can download or listen to the debate here or here and apparently there is a transcript of the debate here. Don’t forget to check out the debate that I had with Ben Wallis here if you have not already and to take a look at the subsequent discussion regarding that debate here and here and here and here.

    That should keep people busy until I get the time to review the Hubner …

  • Dear Eldnar

    The following comment and response may be found on this post.

    Hi there,

    Some would take a leap and state that “this cause is God”, but such a leap is unwarranted.

    *GASP* I’ve only heard two people *ever* try to say that the uncaused cause is not God, and you are the second of the two. Here’s what happened to the first person:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCUE10dY3Rc

    There is nothing in the premises of the argument that necessarily leads to the conclusion that the cause of the universe is God.

    True. But it points to God “beyond reasonable doubt”. A person can

    …