ChrisBolt

God Is The Potter

October 5, 2008 / C. L. Bolt / One Comment

…my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored Him who lives forever,

for His dominion is an everlasting dominion,

and His kingdom endures from generation to generation;

all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing,

and He does according to His will among the host of heaven

and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay His hand

or say to Him, “What have you done?”

Daniel 4.34-35

That any human being might possess the ability to frustrate the will of God is one of many exceedingly arrogant doctrines …

C.S. Lewis…The Presuppositionalist?

September 20, 2008 / C. L. Bolt / 3 Comments

Even though I strongly disagree with C.S. Lewis in many areas, I find myself strongly attracted to his ability to display the truth in powerful and beautiful words all at once. I have pulled some quotes from the works of C.S. Lewis that I most certainly agree with and could never dream of improving upon. Some of these thoughts are representative of the presuppositional method of apologetics, which I cannot imagine anyone ascribing to C.S. Lewis. If the claims of this method of apologetics are true though, we should expect to find it resting at the bottom of apologists’ arguments.…

Is it sinful to call evidentialism…sinful?

August 25, 2008 / C. L. Bolt / 14 Comments

Recently I was directed toward a blog post found here:

http://calvindude.com/dude/blog/2008/08/on-the-%E2%80%9Cappropriate%E2%80%9D-apologetic-method/

I must confess that I am unfortunately not familiar with this particular writer.

In his post Calvin Dude presents a number of arguments against the use of the presuppositionalist method in certain contexts. The arguments look as though they are almost wholly based upon misunderstandings of the presuppositional method. As best I can tell this writer’s concerns are dealt with directly in most presuppositionalist literature.

The author of the entry begins by taking issue with an apologist who claims that presuppositionalism is the only valid method of apologetics, which …

Zoroastrianism, Part 2

August 19, 2008 / C. L. Bolt / 0 Comments

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 …

In the Church but not of it…

August 10, 2008 / C. L. Bolt / 0 Comments

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

August 9, 2008 / C. L. Bolt / One Comment

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 …

The Asparagus And The Ape – Part 2

August 4, 2008 / C. L. Bolt / 0 Comments

One of the wonderful things about presuppositionalism is that one need look no farther than the very basic teachings of the Bible in order to get one’s answers about philosophical issues which worry and weary the unbeliever. One such problem before the unbeliever is how the essential assumption of human dignity is accounted for in a non-Christian worldview. Our society is ruminated with the implications of human dignity, and yet we saw in Part 1 of the treatment of this subject that there are fatal flaws in attempting to consistently adhere to both a non-Christian view of the world and …

The Asparagus And The Ape – Part 1

August 2, 2008 / C. L. Bolt / 0 Comments

“It was nothing to brag about, just a sort of squishy blob…”

The mysterious squishy blob described above is a character in the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. The blob lives “half a billion years ago”. Ishmael, a story telling gorilla, relates the details of the blob’s environment.

Nothing at all stirred on the land, except the wind and the dust. Not a single
blade of grass waved in the wind, not a single cricket chirped, not a
single bird soared in the sky…Even the seas were eerily still and silent, for
the vertebrates too were tens of millions of