Choosing Hats
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Absurdity In Atheism And Incredulity Concerning Inquiry
It can often be entertaining (though ultimately it is really and truly sad) to observe unbelievers flinching at the utter absurdity of their own worldview when they are asked direct questions about even their most basic beliefs. For example, while being grilled on such topics as morality Dan Barker has been known to appeal to the audience and imply that his opponent is too dumb to know right from wrong as he did in his debate with Doug Wilson. Or, recall Barker’s debate with Paul Manata where he responds to Manata’s questions by saying, “You’re not serious about that” to …
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Some of Nocterro’s Presuppositions
Someone commenting on the site by the name Nocterro recently posted the following:
…I just have one final point to make regarding presuppositions.
Presuppose: To believe or suppose in advance. (American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition).
You said earlier in this discussion: “You presuppose autonomy in that you reject the Lordship of Christ and the interpretation of the resurrection provided by Scripture which states that it was a supernatural event and assume that a naturalistic interpretation is possible for any given evidence.”
This is wrong. In fact, you could say that I started with similar presuppositions to the ones that you
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An Objection That Does Not Count
Non-Christians can and do engage in activities using logic, science, and morality. Christians do as well. Presuppositionalists claim that these two groups can do so only because the world is what God says it is.
The argument advanced for this claim begins with one of the accepted activities mentioned above (logic, science, or morality) and illustrates how this activity is possible if the world is what God says it is. Then the accepted activity is shown to be inconsistent with what anyone else other than God says the world is.
While it might be said that the non-Christian cannot and …
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Where’s the Data?
Although I don’t spend as much time in apologetic discussions as I used to, I do, on rare occasions, find the time to have a short conversation here and there. One recent encounter I had provided me with a text book example of the potential problem with making self-referencing universal statements; that is, statements which are unqualified in their extent, and are worded in such a way as to include themselves as referents.
By way of example, consider the statement “any assertion is a statement which implies its own truth”. Since the statement “any assertion is a statement which implies …
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An Internal Critique of Physicalism: Freedom and Responsibility
Peter Smith and O.R. Jones begin their discussion of causality and freedom by restating three points to provide a context for their discussion.
…First, it is a deeply entrenched presumption of science that all physical changes are to be explained entirely in terms of physical causes… (252)
Second, we humans belong to the physical world, at least in the sense that there is no more to our make-up than ordinary organic stuff… (252)
Third, we have claimed it as a virtue of our broadly functionalist account of the mind that it allows us to speak of mental states while still
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Bravo Nocterro
Kudos to Nocterro (who sometimes comments here) for writing a pretty clear explanation of what presuppositionalists have been saying for some time now.
…Showing that the Bible is correct in its historical claims does not show it is correct in its theological claims…
Imagine for the sake of argument that someone showed that Jesus did indeed resurrect…All it would show is that a man resurrected, not that Yahweh exists and that such a being was the cause of such an event. It could have been that it was the doing of some other sort of god, or even something else