If one is uncertain; one is certainly an evidentialist?

/ defectivebit / 0 Comments

Someone pointed me to the following quote on facebook yesterday:

The Baptist is inherently an evidentialist. They must look to subjective always changing evidence to prove covenant membership.

A Presbyterian assumes an objective, universal standard for membership that can be known with certainty.

A Baptist cannot claim certainty.

Granted, this is a non-sequitur in its own right as it stands. It seems to be a post meant to start what those of us who have been around Internet discussions a while call a “flame war” about the subject of baptism in some purported presuppositionalist sub-group. I choose to ignore that …

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False If It Helps?

/ McFormtist / 2 Comments

Many people come to believe and embrace Christianity by means of some tragedy or crisis. They’re driven in desperation to look for something that will help them rationalize and file away their grief, and many times, they find Christianity. Many other times, they grab hold of other things, such as drugs, alcohol, other religions, or even a perceived freedom achieved from relinquishing religion. In any case, tragedy has a way of forcing people into a spiral of desperation while their flailing arms are reaching for something outside themselves hoping that thing can withstand the force, and grant stability once again. …

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No Tool In The Shed Sharp Enough

/ McFormtist / 0 Comments

It’s a curious thing, to me, witnessing atheists commenting on moral or ethic issues. Between the popular guys who appear on TV and the regular guys who may or may not appear on YouTube, the tone varies, depending on what the medium allows for or demands. But it’s not even so much the tone that keeps me watching or listening or reading. It’s the very clearly moral language they’re utilizing to disparage the audacity of Christians to allow their freely held ideas to breach the boundaries of their intellects, and, you know, to act in a way that reflects what …

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The Atheist’s Guide to Reality

/ defectivebit / One Comment

Christian philosophers have been developing and refining arguments for the existence of God since the earliest times, but it’s not often one comes across a convinced atheist making a powerful philosophical case for the existence of God. Yet that’s precisely what we find—quite contrary to the author’s intent—in Alex Rosenberg’s book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.

Check out this review of Alex Rosenberg’s book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. Enjoy!…

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For the Love of God and Philosophy

/ McFormtist / 3 Comments

One of the biggest roadblocks to accepting the Bible as the Word of God is putting biblical theology in terms of philosophy (and by this I mean modern philosophy, or the formulation of thought in the tradition of the popular philosophers), rather than putting philosophy in terms of biblical theology. The philosophical categories, which have largely been fabricated in ignorance of the Bible, are often insufficient to expound the doctrines of the Bible. At the same time, many of the modern philosophical categories are created with intent to circumvent the implications of biblical theology. This same deference to man’s philosophy …

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Unintelligent Design?

/ McFormtist / 8 Comments

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” …

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You Didn’t Build That

/ McFormtist / 2 Comments

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 …

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Stockholm Syndrome And Sympathizing With Sinners

/ McFormtist / One Comment

We are an imperfect people. We believe God is perfect, and that He is perfecting us, conforming us to Christ’s image, who is perfect. But until we are perfected, we are sinners. We live in a world with limited privacy, and as such many of our mistakes are in public view. We profess there is a standard by which men should live, and yet sometimes we fail miserably to live by that very standard. Often, those who aren’t Christians are watching our lives, scrutinizing us, to see whether what we profess is true. When we stumble, we’re called out, and …

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On God’s “Evil” Actions

/ McFormtist / 3 Comments

Probably one of the most common objections to Christianity that we hear is one that relates to the Problem of Evil. While the problem of evil asks, “How can an Omnipotent, Good God exist with evil in the world,” this particular one asks, “How can God be ‘good’ if he has done all these evil things?” Men will object to Christianity saying that God has done evil things. And from this they conclude God either doesn’t exist, or if he does exist he is not worth believing.

We answer the former problem by demonstrating from the Bible that the …

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