Apologetics to the Glory of God

Tag: determinism

  • Without God and Without Hope: An Atheist on the Connecticut School Shootings

    Atheist Matt Oxley comments on Christian responses to the shooting in Connecticut as follows:

    Despite how angry this makes me, how silly and offensive I find these notions, suddenly I find myself envious of people with some form of a god to comfort them and answer their questions, even if those answers are shallow and ignorant, because I am simply without any answers that can even begin to make sense of this. Answers like this seem almost blissful.

    Note that Matt is angry at the application of Christian tenets to tragic events. As I mentioned in my debate with Matt, …

  • What Happened to Paul Manata? and "Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Reformed Theology: A Contemporary Introduction"

    Paul Manata has been silent for nearly a month. Where did he go? Well, now we know. He has been writing a lengthy paper called, “Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Reformed Theology: A Contemporary Introduction.” Find out more about it and get a copy here.…

  • Mr. White, Mr. Grey, and Mr. Black V

    These posts contain lengthy quotations from Defense of the Faith, by Cornelius Van Til – this post will deal with pages 319-323. In the previous post, Van Til dealt with the unbeliever’s state before God, his self-deception, suppression of the truth, and the proper apologetic methodology to use with the unbeliever. Beginning here, he begins to answer the charge that a covenantal apologetic is “circular reasoning”, or has no “point of contact” with the unbeliever.

    The one main question to which we are addressing ourselves in this series of articles is whether Christians holding to the Reformed Faith should

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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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