Category: Intro to Covenantal Apologetics
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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 33 – Ethics and morality.
By C.L. Bolt
Moral values, rules, laws, principles, standards, etc. cannot be seen, smelt, touched, heard, or tasted. They are not empirically verifiable entities. They are not part of the material or physical realm, or so most would hold. Still, people will believe that morality exists and will believe this even more strongly than they do that other empirically verifiable entities exist. Even those who deny that morality of any kind exists tend to behave in ways that contradict this claim, if they do not outright reject the claim through other claims and assumptions found elsewhere in their thought. Good …
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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 32 – Human dignity.
By C.L. Bolt
Ethics and morality are tied up in an understanding of human dignity, worth, or value. Unbelievers have difficulties making sense of human dignity and hence lose their ability to appeal to morality in the context of debate or everyday life. A consistent non-Christian worldview will posit that humans are not superior in value to any non-human animal. Lest we think that superiority in terms of value is due to the potential and actual higher reasoning capabilities that humans possess we should remember that even some of the lowest animals are better suited to find their way about …
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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 31 – Is and ought.
By C.L. Bolt
In terms of ethics and morality, people are obligated to persons, not to impersonal objects. It is problematic to try and get moral principles from impersonal objects. Some have even called this attempt a violation of logic. According to the Christian worldview God is personal, and moral principles are derived from the revelation of His nature to us. In the non-Christian worldview there is no such personal and absolute source of morality to appeal to, but only the impersonal and non-absolute or relative. Forced accounts of ethics in an ultimately impersonal universe run into a serious …
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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 30 – Uniformity of nature.
By C.L. Bolt
The Christian believes that God has created the world, controls it, and wants us to have knowledge concerning it. God has established an order in the cosmos that is representative of His own character. God has revealed to us general and specific claims that there is a uniformity of nature. Certainly there have been occasional signs (miracles) in history which were caused by God as a part of His revelatory acts and interpreted by Him, but the abnormality of these signs supposes that there is and will be norms in place, else they would not have possessed …
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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 29 – Problem of induction.
By C.L. Bolt
By induction we refer to singular and general predictive inferences. When humans think, they do not limit themselves to thinking only about what is immediately apparent to them. In fact, we often go beyond what is currently present to our senses, memories, and reasoning and make inferences; we infer things from what we have experienced in the past or are currently experiencing. For example, if we ate bread on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and found that it nourished us, then we would at least expect that bread will nourish us on Thursday as well. We may …
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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 28 – Unity and diversity.
By C.L. Bolt
The Bible teaches the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity very briefly stated is that there is one God who is three persons and each person is fully God. Although the Bible never uses the term “Trinity” each of the parts of the doctrine are clearly set down for us in Scripture and have been summed up as already mentioned with the label “Trinity” being applied to them. God is ultimately one (there is one God). God is ultimately three (God is three persons). Neither the one-ness nor the three-ness of God is ontologically …
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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 27 – Logic and the external world.
By C.L. Bolt
We have discussed a number of skeptical arguments illustrating the impossibility of the contrary. One of the more popular arguments for the impossibility of the contrary in presuppositional apologetics is based upon concerns in the philosophy of logic. Traditionally the topic of logic comes up almost immediately, often because the Christian finds it particularly rhetorically powerful to ask the non-Christian difficult questions about a perhaps mysterious topic that calls into question the very foundation of the non-Christian’s entire thought and presentation. However, the philosophy of logic is a difficult area and its discussions can become complex quickly …
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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 26 – Omniscience and unrelated objects.
By C.L. Bolt
There appears to be no universal consent on any fact of existence. Facts do not speak for themselves but they must be interpreted. If this were not the case then everyone would agree, but we have noted already that they do not.
Individuals have made mistakes before concerning the interpretation of facts. Why not again? How does someone know that she is not making a mistake even now? There are things that people feel extremely certain of, then a new fact comes along and overturns everything that is believed so strongly. What is to guarantee that there …
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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 25 – Subject dissolved.
By C.L. Bolt
We have spent a fair amount of time and space concerning ourselves with the subject of knowledge. We have shown that the subject cannot really be labeled the subject of knowledge at all when the Christian worldview is rejected and we attempt to erect an epistemology starting with the self. We mentioned that the problem of skepticism might be construed in terms of the problem of connection, and this is no less true with respect to the subject as we have already seen. However, we have not considered that this problem will go so deep as to …
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An Informal Introduction to Covenantal Apologetics: Part 24 – Memory, senses, reason, and beliefs.
By C.L. Bolt
Earlier we only very briefly alluded to the question of why we should take our senses to be reliable if they are merely the product of matter in motion through time. It is sometimes argued that we know our memory, senses, and reason are reliable for producing mostly true beliefs about the world since we are survivors in the evolutionary scheme. This explanation assumes that our beliefs affect our behavior in some way. A popular and perhaps common sense view of the relationship between beliefs and behavior is that beliefs affect our behavior by their presence and …