Whole Reason

I recently lis­tened to apol­o­gist Peter S. Williams (blog) deliver this talk at the 2010 Euro­pean Lead­er­ship Forum on the topic: Argu­ments for The­ism, and finally under­stood the Onto­log­i­cal Argu­ment for God’s existence.

How­ever, it brought up a ques­tion in my mind, which I sub­mit­ted to William Lane Craig’s web­site. I’ll post the answer if I get one, but here’s the question:

If the Onto­log­i­cal Argu­ment assumes that God is the max­i­mum qual­ity of attrib­utes of good­ness and greatness:

1. Which cat­e­gory does ‘being’ or ‘exis­tence’ fall into? Good­ness or greatness?
2. If that is an attribute of great­ness, could we not then use this argu­ment to argue for the exis­tence of a max­i­mally great and max­i­mally evil (instead of good) being, then con­clude that that being must also exist?

Com­ments?

I was recently in a dis­cus­sion at the skep­tic site NW Ohio Skep­tics, and got into a dis­cus­sion about the dif­fer­ences between Evan­gel­i­cals and Fun­da­men­tal­ists, and one topic that came up is that of inerrancy.  While I think all Fun­da­men­tal­ists hold to a ple­nary inerrancy, I don’t think that that posi­tion is the only one among evangelicals.

First check out Daniel Wallace’s great essay My Take on Inerrancy.

Then, check out the dia­gram I made com­par­ing the dif­fer­ent types of Chris­tian­ity and their stands on dif­fer­ent doc­trines, includ­ing inerrancy — Neo-fundy Doc­trines?

Now, you are ready to read my expla­na­tion of how I view inerrancy, and how I think many Evan­gel­i­cals view it — but I bet there is a bit of diver­sity on this topic in Evangelicailsm.

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Face­book giv­ing me the TURING test

I didn’t know he was lost. Seri­ously though, if they found him, I can tell you where.  Sup­pos­edly, his body is buried in the Mosque of the Prophet in Med­ina.  How­ever, the point is, he is dead, but Jesus rose from the dead. And may I add, Momo’s words bring death, but Jesus’ bring life.

Not sure that Jesus actu­ally rose from the dead?  You can always lis­ten to William Lane Craig or Lee Stroble defend that proposition.

Here’s my list of resources for those inter­ested in the his­tory of reli­gion and sci­ence, both pro and anti-religious.

THEIST

For the Glory of God: How Monothe­ism Led to Refor­ma­tions, Sci­ence, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slav­ery by Rod­ney Stark

Stark argues that faith in God encour­aged Chris­tians to invent sci­ence. Hav­ing read other books mak­ing the same claim, I think Stark’s approach to this ques­tion is one of the best. Not only does he go over the devel­op­ment of tech­nol­ogy in the so-called “Dark Ages,” and show how the “Enlight­en­ment” pic­ture of Coper­ni­can era sci­ence is a myth, he stud­ies 52 key early sci­en­tists, and shows that more than 60 % were “devout,” while only 2 were skep­tics. The critic below who asks why Chris­tian­ity did not pro­duce sci­ence in Rus­sia did not read atten­tively: Stark argues that faith in God was a nec­es­sary, but not suf­fi­cient, cause of the rise of sci­ence. Other fac­tors were also involved. ~ From this excel­lent review

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In one of my classes, we have been watch­ing The Athe­ism Tapes, a BBC series where athe­ist Jonathan Miller inter­views other promi­nent athe­ists on their dis­be­lief and other related top­ics. Today, we watched his inter­view with Richard Dawkins.

I was sur­prised at who poorly Dawkins han­dled Miller’s God’s-advocate (as it were) ques­tions. Miller was obvi­ously not push­ing the the­ist point of view, but he asked Dawkins ques­tions from what he believed to be a the­is­tic view point in order to elicit a pro-atheistic answer from the for­mer pro­fes­sor at Oxford. When he was unable to explain his ratio­nale for hold­ing a cer­tain posi­tion, Dawkins sur­pris­ingly to me fell back on what he so often attacks in oth­ers — faith.

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“What can be asserted with no evi­dence can be dis­missed with no evi­dence.” — Christo­pher Hitchens

It sounds so con­vinc­ing, so log­i­cal and seem­ingly so dev­as­tat­ing to reli­gious belief. How­ever, I can guar­an­tee that Hitchens most assuredly beliefs some­thing with no evi­dence and all I need to prove it is the state­ment I just quoted.

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I love the whole debate scene, and I have lis­tened to a lot of Chris­t­ian and non-Christian news pod­casts, and nar­rowed down my favorites to Guide: Favorite Pod­casts for Chris­tians. Now, I want to ven­ture out into the land of my ide­o­log­i­cal oppo­nents.  Here’s my list so far.  Most of these I got from the list at Pod­cast Alley.

Last Update:  03.01.10

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Mir­a­cles have long been a stum­bling block for many inves­ti­gat­ing Chris­tian­ity and other reli­gions. Why would a per­son liv­ing in the 21st cen­tury believe that the mirac­u­lous not only could hap­pen, but did happen?

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Much has been made of the phrase “Jesus of his­tory.” Many lib­eral the­olo­gians have attempted to argue the Jesus of the Bible is dif­fer­ent from the Jesus of his­tory. They most often do this by appeal­ing to the Gnos­tic Gospels and the ver­sion of Jesus they present.

That was always struck me as strange. Why would they use doc­u­ments writ­ten hun­dreds of years after Jesus lived and died to refute doc­u­ments that were writ­ten within decades of His life, if they were truly con­cerned with an accu­rate his­tor­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tion of Jesus?

At this point, those skep­ti­cal of the Chris­t­ian claims of Jesus will point out, “I do not believe any of those descrip­tions of Jesus since they were writ­ten with a reli­gious bias.” What would the pic­ture of Jesus be if we sim­ply exam­ined the his­tor­i­cal, non-Christian records?

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Luke over at Com­mon Sense Athe­ism is engag­ing in a let­ter exchange with Tim Chal­lies.  I have taken it upon myself to answer Luke’s let­ters, since I am not Tim Chal­lies, and see things a litle dif­fer­ently.  Luke has not answered my responses, but per­haps he may.  Here’s the Series links, in chrono­log­i­cal order

1. Luke’s First Letter
2. My First Response
3. Tim’s First Response
4. Luke’s Sec­ond Letter
5. My Sec­ond Response
6. Tim’s Sec­ond Response
7. Luke’s Third Letter
8. My Third Response
9. Tim’s Third Response