Apologetics to the Glory of God

Tag: worldview

  • 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 …

  • Stockholm Syndrome And Sympathizing With Sinners

    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 …

  • On God’s “Evil” Actions

    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 …

  • 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…

  • 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 …

  • 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. …

  • 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 …

  • Public Display of Religion

    Few things really irk me in this world. There’s waking up, missing church, missing the gym, slow internet connections – to name a couple. One thing in particular that always tends to turn the knob on my internal oven, and I’ve been seeing a lot of it lately, is the insistence by the non-religious that “private religion” is to be kept out of the public realm, or that religion is to be kept out of politics, etc. I understand that, particularly with regard to Christianity, there are some debates on what a Christian body politic would look like, but my …

  • 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 …

  • 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 …