Apologetics to the Glory of God

Tag: evidentialism

  • Unintelligent Design?

    Allow me, for a moment, to explain some of my initial thoughts concerning what denial of God’s existence entails with respect to Design. If you hold that there is no God, and that there is no Design to the universe, there are a few things that follow. If there is no Designer, and if there is no Design, then there are no “designers” and there are no individual “designs.” None, at all, anywhere. I will now proceed to explain the same thing in probably too many ways and in probably too many words.

    There is only cause and effect. “Intention” …

  • You Didn’t Build That

    You wake up in the middle of a cornfield.

    You sit up and rub your eyes, and then you look around. Instinctively, you stand up and start walking. As you push your way through thousands of stalks you suddenly find yourself in a small clearing, a row of flattened corn stalks. Considering you’ve been navigating through fully grown, standing stalks, as far as you’re concerned this clearing is nothing short of odd. You continue on past the clearing, back into the stalks, and a minute later you find yourself in another clearing, this one sort of curved. After a half …

  • 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…

  • Proof and Persuasion Confusion

    I was pointed to a post by J. Warner Wallace where he seeks to give a distinction between evidence and proof. This is in itself something good to do because who has not heard people scream “SHOW ME THE EVIDENCE!” as though if they are shown enough evidence that it is proof [of something].

    The following statement seems to provide the basis of Wallace’s apparent confusion between proof and persuasion. Wallace writes the following:

    While evidence is a matter of objective truth, proof is in the mind of the evaluator, and many of us resist the truth in spite

    …

  • When Contra Munda isn’t All About You

    Back in the third century of the church, as I’m sure some of our readers are aware, there was a bishop named Athanasius – his tenacious defense of the doctrine of the Trinity, in opposition to the swiftly growing heresy of Arianism gave rise to the statement “Athanasius contra mundum” – Athanasius against the world. In a sense, this wasn’t quite true – there were other defenders of the Trinity around, but none so prolific, and none who were targeted nearly so heavily as Athanasius, who was ejected from his church five times, and was only vindicated after his death. …

  • 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 …

  • Listen to Chris Bolt on Backpack Radio this Sunday, December 16

    Lord willing, Vocab Malone will be interviewing me on Backpack Radio this Sunday, December 16, 2012 at 6PM on KPXQ-AM in Phoenix, Arizona. You can live stream the program from this website – http://www.kpxq1360.com – or catch the recording when it goes up on this website – http://backpack.podbean.com. Make sure to tune in, and don’t forget to check out other episodes of Backpack Radio!…

  • 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

    …

  • A Christian Epistemology of Testimony

    Epistemology of Testimony

    In the Word of God we have the testimony of God. We accept this testimony on faith. We are warranted in doing so. One might say that we have a testimonial epistemology.

    Doubting Scripture

    Unbelievers often call the aforementioned testimonial epistemology into question. They question our accepting the Word of God on faith. They question the notion that we have the Word of God.

    Frequently the aforementioned doubts stem from other testimony. So for example, a young person reads that naturalistic, macro-evolutionary biology is true and that he would be stupid or wicked for not accepting …

  • Jamin Hubner Reviews “Biblical Apologetics” By Clifford McManis

    http://www.realapologetics.org/blog/2012/11/20/review-of-clifford-mcmaniss-biblical-apologetics/…