Apologetics to the Glory of God

Choosing Hats

  • Watch Those Presuppositions

    The following is a comment from the Choosing Hats Facebook Group:

    So, if god is a “necessary being” then his necessity would be axiomatic—meaning there is no other option available other than for him to be necessary. Since the possibility that god does not exist hasn’t been refuted by the sheer impossibility of the contrary, your claim that god is necessary is unsubstantiated.

    The comment has several minor problems. I will focus on a major one.

    If God exists necessarily, it is not possible that God does not exist. In this post – https://choosinghats.org/2012/12/response-to-the-problem-with-presuppositionalism – I noted that the …

  • Switching Prisons

    Not too long ago a good friend sent me this article: http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=usnj&c=words&id=15275 The author is a Wiccan philosopher. I wanted to respond to it for my friend, and even for myself, as it helps to articulate a position you disagree with. The following is somewhat of a rough sketch, and I’m sure I didn’t get to everything in it. It’s not a response to Wicca per se, but to the philosophical underpinnings highlighted throughout.Here it is:

    Alright so here are some of my initial thoughts. The author is clearly using a particular jargon, at times using terms only someone familiar …

  • “Atheists around world suffer persecution, discrimination: report”

    http://news.yahoo.com/atheists-around-world-suffer-persecution-discrimination-report-000945958.html

    Surely somebody can make a blog post or two out of that.…

  • Advent

    As it approaches the Christmas season, we’ll hear more and more about how “Christ is the Reason for the Season”, the “War on Christmas” and all that. Whether the so-called “War on Christmas is simply the inevitable result of living in a post-Christian society, or a coordinated effort to “take Christ out of Christmas” is singularly irrelevant, if you ask me. Instead of worrying about whether other people take Christ out of Christmas, shouldn’t we be worrying about putting Him at the center of our remembrance of His advent? We need to be able to clearly elucidate this centrality as …

  • Response to “The Problem with Presuppositionalism”

    One of our readers brought this post – http://philosophiles.net/2012/09/28/the-problem-with-presuppositionalism – to my attention. For some reason I was unable to comment on the post, so I have reproduced a brief response here.

    The author is probably correct to think that premise four is the one that presuppositionalists are going to object to, but in attempting to defend that premise he makes at least three errors.

    First, he focuses on, “The only effective way to falsify premise four,” which assumes that the burden of proof is on the presuppositionalist to falsify the premise. But that’s not the way arguments work. Since …

  • Presuppositionalists Are Too Negative

    Transcendental arguments are traditionally used in response to skepticism. See Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Strawson, Grayling, and Stern.

    Transcendental argument in Van Til and Bahnsen is likewise a response to skepticism. They were not arguing for skepticism, they were arguing against it. It just so happens that the only answer to skepticism is the Christian worldview.

    Presuppositional apologists often appear to argue for skepticism because their opponents attempt to respond to it through rationalist, empiricist, and pragmatic schools of thought. But it is unreasonable to assume, given the evidence, that any of these three general responses to skepticism really works.

    Thus …

  • The Truth About Presuppositions

    “Presuppositional apologetics” are the same thing as “covenantal apologetics,” but only when we recognize that presuppositions are covenantal. It is relatively uninteresting to posit that everybody has presuppositions. However, to point to the content of those presuppositions as reflecting a relationship to God is something quite different.  Every person is under either the grace or the wrath of God. People view the world in virtue of their relationship to God.…

  • Calvin and Thomas

    Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is

    …

  • Abraham Kuyper on the Absurdity of Secular Art

    There is no unity in your thinking save by a well-ordered philosophical system, and there is no system of philosophy which does not ascend to the issues of the Infinite. In the same way there is no unity in your moral existence save by the union of your inner existence with the moral world-order, and there is no moral world-order conceivable but for the impression of an infinite Power that has ordained order in this moral world. Thus also no unity in the revelation of art is conceivable, except by the art inspiration of an eternal Beautiful, which flows from

    …

  • When Atheists Are Too Obvious

    Glance over the atheist’s Twitter account below and note the constant topic of discussion.

    https://twitter.com/RosaRubicondior

    Then, read the excerpt below from Chapter 5 of George Orwell’s 1984.

    ’How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said Winston, raising his voice to overcome

    the noise.

    ’Slowly,’ said Syme. ’I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.’

    He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed

    his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese

    in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without

    shouting.

    ’The Eleventh Edition …