Apologetics to the Glory of God

Tag: philosophy of religion

  • Pragmatic Point: The Failure of the Cartesian Method of Doubt

    In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes utilizes a method of doubt in order to determine whether or not there is any such thing as certainty. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce later critiques Descartes not necessarily on the basis of what many other philosophers find fault with in Descartes, but rather on the very method of doubt itself. While there appears to be plenty of room for debate about whether or not Peirce is fair to Descartes with respect to parts of Descartes’ method of doubt, Peirce is justified in the main point of his critique which …

  • On Divine Simplicity and Malformed Arguments

    Reformed theology, as properly expressed, considers the doctrine of God’s unity not as the classical formulation used by Aquinas and the Scholastics, but as a unity of being; in which all attributes of God are distinct in their display, necessarily interrelated but not identical to each other, despite being differentiated expressions of God’s singular, essential nature. The Scholastics (following the lead of earlier writers) may be summed up as follows: “It is commonly said in theology that God’s attributes are God himself, as he has revealed himself to us… It was further asserted by the Scholastics that the whole essence …

  • Anthropic Arguments and Assumptions

    If God is morally perfect then He must perform the morally best actions, but creating humans is not the morally best action. If this line of reasoning can be maintained then the mere fact that humans exist contradicts the claim that God exists.

    HT: urbanphilosophy.net

    Look at the assumption required for the second half of this sentence. “creating humans is not the morally best action”. Says who? By what standard? As usual, I think we can guess what that is.

    Walker suggests that God is morally culpable for creating human beings with defective natures (defective in comparison to God’s).

    Is …

  • The Problem of Religion (Part 2): Hume and Freud

    David Hume

    Hume is similar to Nietzsche in that he attacks philosophical norms, but what is pertinent to this article is that he likewise attacks religion. Hume finds many philosophical worries with religion. One of these worries is with the inadequacies of supposed proofs such as arguments from experience and miracles, which are at the core of many religions.

    Hume presents a proof for the existence of God from experience through the character Cleanthes. This is the popular argument from design, which contends that since there is in the universe design and order there must also be a designer. After …

  • The Problem of Religion (Part 1): Introduction, Descartes, and Nietzsche

    Introduction

    From within the Non-Christian worldview it may be rather easily seen that the term “religion” is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to define. This is no doubt due to the subjective nature of the term once it is divorced from the Christian worldview. A number of thinkers will be discussed in this series in order to show the great difficulty of even involving oneself with philosophy of religion without a solid foundation to work from. People tend to cast upon the term their own ideas and experiences of a particular religion or philosophical categories they think pertain to religion. …

  • Nothing is Absolute

    I was checking in on some discussion boards I used to post regularly on and came across the following statement by an atheist in response to a discussion over the Bible:

    Atheist: All interpretation of the bible is subjective. You don’t hold the final word on it. It’s all in your own mind and isn’t absolute. Nothing is.

    If this gal had left off the last sentence, she probably wouldn’t have gotten my attention. After all, she was just sharing her own opinion about another gal’s interpretation of the Bible – nothing remarkable there. But that last sentence … …