Tag: evidence
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Apologies to Atheists
It’s not often we as Christians have to apologize to our arch-nemeses, the Atheists. In fact, if we can help it, we never do. We’re prohibited from ceding any ground whatsoever to our enemies, because as the Bible says in verse 4, “so that thou shalt not be seen to be wrong in all thy days, whithersoever thou havest thine ever.” But as with any rulebook, laws can be broken or bent whenever life deems it necessary.
When Richard Dawkins penned his magnum opus, The God Delusion, he never expected his words to be so clearly and thoroughly confirmed as …
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Problems With Authority in Classical and Evidentialist Apologetics
To the extent that attempts are made in order to distinguish between the “evidentialist” and “classical” schools of apologetics, in an effort to salvage the “classical” method, these distinctions nevertheless fail to dodge the criticisms leveled at evidentialism by Van Tilian presuppositionalists. It shouldn’t strike us as very coincidental that the problem presuppositionalists have with the classical/evidentialist methods primarily concerns the presuppositions of these methods. Furthermore, that practitioners of either the classical or evidentialist methods borrow aspects from presuppositionalism (which I would argue is inevitable as long as the practitioner is at least to some extent devoted to sola scriptura…
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The Bankruptcy of Skepticism and the Glory of God
Christianity is a naturally offensive truth. Not that it offends, but it exposes the offense that is part of the human condition and dares to hold humans responsible. The sinful nature of man, such as it is, detests any effort of the person who would dare to point at that nature and speak about it for what it is. The rebellious man has knowledge of his Creator because it is in the Creator’s image that he has been created. What the Creator of everything calls “truth” involves every single minute, meticulous detail of reality as we know it. Indeed it …
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Falsificationism And Christianity
Another difficulty with religious language (and hence, Christianity) that non-religious people have concerns itself with “falsifiability,” or the aspect of any claim which states it must, in principle at least, be capable of subjecting to certain scientific criteria by which it can conceivably be proven false, in order to be considered meaningful. Like Verificationism, Falsificationism assumes an empiricist worldview, and so is subject immediately to some of the criticisms of Verificationism, including for instance, the seeming arbitrariness of the foundational principles undergirding it. Falsificationism was articulated as a way to circumvent the problems inherent in Verificationism. While Karl Popper …
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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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Anything But God
Well, just take a look: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/whoa-physicists-testing-see-universe-computer-simulation-224525825.html
Notable quotations:
“‘This is the first testable signature of such an idea,’ Savage said. ‘If you make the simulations big enough, something like our universe should emerge.’”
“[I]f energy signatures in our simulations match those in the universe at large, there’s a good chance we, too, exist within a simulation.”
“Interestingly, one of Savage’s students takes the hypothesis further: If we stumble upon the nature of our existence, would we then look for ways to communicate with the civilization who created us?”
To be sure, this article was listed under a section entitled “Odd …
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Calvin and Thomas
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Christianity Hinders Scientific Progress
It’s truly a tired mantra. Under the pretense that they own a corner on the Market of Reality while ignoring the fact that they are merely presuming upon the efforts of their relatively recent philosophical parents (many of whose principles are derived from the truths of Christianity), the New Atheists, evangelizing from their Holy Bible of Naturalistic Science and Witless Retorts written by their own venerated prophets, proclaim loudly and often, “Christianity hinders scientific progress.” And of course, as is commonly the hazard of religious discourse, there’s a good bit of nuance to hack through.
First, what is meant by …
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Imputation Attested in the Early, Medieval, and even Counter-Reformation Era