Tag: bad arguments
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Public Display of Religion
Few things really irk me in this world. There’s waking up, missing church, missing the gym, slow internet connections – to name a couple. One thing in particular that always tends to turn the knob on my internal oven, and I’ve been seeing a lot of it lately, is the insistence by the non-religious that “private religion” is to be kept out of the public realm, or that religion is to be kept out of politics, etc. I understand that, particularly with regard to Christianity, there are some debates on what a Christian body politic would look like, but my …
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Verificationism And Christianity
One of the many problems atheists have with Christianity involves the issue of Verificationism. They may say, “I can’t believe Christianity because it can’t be verified,” and some might include, “…scientifically.” Some may even say, “It’s not true unless it can be verified.” Greg Bahnsen has a chapter in Always Ready entitled, “The Problem of Religious Language,” wherein he deals with both Verificationism and Falsificationism. The summary of the problem is that any religious utterance cannot be considered “meaningful” unless it can be checked against real-world data. Any talk of God, for instance, must correspond to something observable in the …
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Addressing a Common Evidentialist Retort
My brother-in-law went to school with an atheist who excelled in virtually every subject he studied. This particular atheist was a sharp thinker. He was also firm in his atheistic convictions. But he liked to drink. A lot. One night he had a bit too much. By the end of the night he was weeping and crying out about how there has to be a God. Plenty of his friends witnessed the event. They brought it up later. His response was to grumpily tell them not to talk about it.
My old Sunday School teacher had a friend who came …
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Some Questions for Matt Oxley
Matt Oxley describes himself as a “former Christian helping others work through the battle of a lost faith.” One aspect of his mission is “to promote intelligent discussion.” So he won’t mind my probing a bit concerning his claim, “I’m a former Christian.”
Recall Scripture states, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” (1 John 2.19) Recently a professing Christian cited this verse for Matt. The implication …
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Pat Mefford on Liar Paradox and Titus 1.12-13a (Again)
Here’s a history of the exchange with atheist Pat Mefford regarding, most notably, the Liar Paradox:
https://choosinghats.org/2012/12/pat-mefford-on-titus-1-12-13a/
http://bcaskins.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/the-liar-paradox-and-presuppositional-apologetics/
http://servileconformist.typepad.com/servile-conformist/2012/12/more-thoughts-on-chris-bolt.html
Valuable points were made in the comments by David Byron and B.C. Askins. I will limit my response to addressing Pat’s most recent post http://servileconformist.typepad.com/servile-conformist/2012/12/more-thoughts-on-chris-bolt.html.
My previous reply to Pat on Titus 1.12-13a was not merely “a brief comment” but a refutation of the point Pat has most recently attempted to proffer regarding our exchange. Pat reiterates his earlier claims in his most recent post. He notes, “All we have is the text.” Of …
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Atheism, Subjectivism, and Meaning
Introduction
An atheist visitor to the site, Jnani, wrote the following in a comment:
Meaning is subjective and since we are all subjects, there is plenty of meaning in the universe. It’s only delusional to see meaning where there is none which I would contend the Christian WV does.
I have been interacting with atheists for quite a while now. Their blindness still occasionally amazes me.
“Meaning is subjective.”
Would Jnani apply this claim to itself? Is the meaning of, “Meaning is subjective” merely subjective ? If so, then Jnani’s claim is self-referentially problematic. The meaning of the claim is …
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Inconsistent Atheism Better Than Atheism
The other day I had an exchange with an atheist friend on Facebook. We’ve had a couple exchanges in the past, so there is a context to some of the things being said. He posted a graphic of a Christian ditty-response (in other words, not the best kind) to the recent school shooting up in Connecticut, and expressed outrage at the audacity of Christians to suggest that God did nothing to help because He’s “not allowed in schools anymore.” In any case, I attempted to draw out some inconsistency between what he said he believed, and the outworking of that …
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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 …