Apologetics to the Glory of God

Choosing Hats

  • Debate Q & A – and You!

    Now that we’ve done some discussion and a bit of interaction with Chris’ position – and you’ve had the opportunity to really sit down and listen through what he has to say, and what he’s had his guests on to say, I’d like to encourage you to start formulating some questions for either Chris or I to answer.

    Be sure to email Dee Dee at preteristpodcast@gmail.com if you want to pose a question to either participant. The debate will be pre-recorded, so Dee Dee will be asking questions on behalf of those who send them to her in advance. Make

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  • You Don’t Want to be a Fish?

    50:46 Joey: You know, parables! As I bring up here. Some of the parables have almost nothing in them that actually transfers over. I bring up the parable of the fish, in Matthew 13:47-50. In that parable, it’s very brief, it speaks of a fisherman, he catches fish, the bad fish he throws away, the good fish he keeps. Now, the good fish represent the saved, but you do not want to be a fish! (Laughs) Just think about it, either way you get killed. And in fact, though I don’t know what fishing culture was like back in the

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  • How does Scripture describe punishment and death?

    (44:23) Chris: So what do you make of it? Is it the case that punishment, by definition, is consciously, ongoingly experienced?

    Ronnie: Well, I mean obviously not. Well, the punishment for some sins is pain, the punishment in certain contexts is some sort of suffering. Scripture describes many different types of punishments for sin, so you have people being struck blind, you have people being made barren, you have people’s entire family line being wiped out, you have entire nations being wiped out. Yeah, so there’s many possible types of punishment, and Scripture describes a number of those punishments. The

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  • Think of how an Atheist views death…

    “Think of how an atheist views death, and what happens when we die; like, you don’t have a mind, you can’t think, you can’t feel, you have absolutely no conscious[ness] or awareness of anything, you’re simply a corpse. That’s essentially what we’re saying happens to people. They can’t be tormented, because, like if you poke a corpse with a knife, or set it on fire, no matter what you do to it, it’s not going to feel pain, or think, or anything. It’s just inert matter. That’s all that we necessarily are saying; now, whether the atoms are destroyed, like,

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  • “If the existence of God is so obvious, then why do we debate it?”

    Atheists sometimes make the rhetorical point that if the existence of God were so obvious as many Christians hold it to be, then we would not have to hold debates about His existence. We don’t go around having debates about the existence of particular people, or certain types of animals, or various aspects of the world that are immediately present to our sensory experience, so why do we have them about something or someone who is supposed to so obviously exist? Is God just incapable of revealing Himself clearly enough that we might believe in Him the way we believe …

  • “How do you know that for certain?”

    A quick qualm…

    I’ve noticed a slew of presuppositional apologists on the Internet basing the entirety of their apologetic around the issue of certainty in knowledge.

    That has its place. Richard Pratt does something similar here – http://www.amazon.com/Every-Thought-Captive-Defense-Christian/dp/0875523528/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1337572150&sr=8-2

    But not all knowledge claims are claims to certainty.

    And not all knowledge is certain.

    Enough about certainty itself though; that is not the subject of this post.

    Rather, when the apologist is engaged with an unbeliever it needs to be pointed out not merely that the unbeliever cannot know anything for certain, but that the unbeliever cannot know anything at …

  • Atheist John Loftus Calls It Quits

    I won’t comment other than to point out that 1) John Loftus has finally given up, for which we can all be thankful and 2) we have interacted with Loftus in the past as may be seen in the links provided below the quote.

    Loftus made his announcement yesterday on his blog:

    http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2012/05/okay-time-has-come-im-done.html

    I have no more desire to engage Christians. They are deluded, all of them. I have never been more convinced of this than I am now. I have better things to do. I spent 39+ years of my adult life on a delusion. If I add the

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  • Undying Worms and Unquenchable Fire

    It is often asserted that there is a problem (for so-called “traditionalists”) with the use of Mark 9:48 due to it’s relation with Isaiah 66:24. This problem, according to Fudge, is that 1) Jesus quotes it “without amendment” 2) That the body is “already dead” and 3) That the fire “is a consuming, irresistible fire”. He relates “salted with fire” to mean the salting of a field, or of a place in order to make it uninhabitable. He cites Fields for his source, but we aren’t told, by Fudge, why this is supposed to have any connection with the passage …

  • Two Objections to Meticulous Providence

    Some people find it strange that God should meticulously provide for His creation in terms of His presence, oversight, and power in every aspect of the creation. Yet Scripture teaches that God is at every moment and in every place both preserving and governing the universe.

    Our objections to the providence of God often stem from the fact that – quite unlike God –  we are both wicked and finite. We are careless about some aspects of the creation because we are evil, and we neglect others because in our finitude we are incapable of tending to them all …

  • The Problem With Saying “Goddidit”

    Covenantal apologists are often mocked in virtue of their alleged recourse to repeatedly claiming “Goddidit” as an answer to all challenges in the apologetic context.

    The mockers are mostly wrong, but partially right.

    Complaints about “Goddidit” usually stem primarily from the rejection of the frank acceptance of authority inherent to the apologist’s presuppositional program. In this the mockers are wrong.

    Meanwhile, complaints which focus not upon the authority involved in “Goddidit” but its content are valid objections, for the Christian worldview consists of much more than a trite, reductionistic, sound byte solution to some problem that faces another worldview.

    Just …