Category Archives: Apologetics

Fideism

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Some early Christian teachers, such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, believed that God could been known through a consideration of philosophical arguments.  Tertullian, on the other hand, maintained an extreme fideism, believing that Christian faith is actually contradicted by human philosophy.

Luther emphasised the fallenness of human reason, and the necessity of faith in overcoming reason’s impotence.

Calvin followed closely the Pauline outline sketched above.  He held that a seed of knowledge of the divine has been planted in each human heart. …

Disappointed with Jesus

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An episode of Premier Radio’s Unbelievable show (20th August 2011) featured a thoughtful and civilised discussion between Rebekah Bennetch & Sheridan Voysey.  (The show’s host, Justin Brierley, also played a major a role in the conversation).

Rebekah had offered to appear on the show in order to explain her ‘deconversion’ from Christianity to atheism.  She had been raised in a strongly Christian family, had attended two Bible colleges, taught in Sunday School, and served with her parents in the mission field.…

Brideshead Unvisited

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I’m not a huge movie buff, but, faced with a long rail journey, I settled down to watch Brideshead Revisited on the tiny but effective screen of my iPod.

I won’t attempt to re-tell the story here, but just to say that I was interested in the strong religious thread running through the plot.  The leading character, Charles Ryder, is presented as a level-headed, fair-minded atheist.  He comes into contact with an aristocratic family with a strong Roman Catholic tradition. …

Evangelicals and child abuse (?)

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Peter Lewis writes in a recent edition of Evangelicals Now:-

A short while back, Bel Mooney interviewed Philip Pullman, author of the famous children’s books where the church is the evil power that abuses children and ‘God’ is a fake, an extremely old angel who came into existence as a throw-up of evolution, pretended to be ‘God’ and has to be preserved in a block of ice by other angels. The great deliverance is to be freed of the idea of God and then everyone is free to go on into non-existence when they die.

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Five things science cannot account for

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It is, perhaps, the defining characteristic of ‘scientism’ to claim that all truth is susceptible to scientific enquiry, and that only truths discovered by the scientific method are true at all.

William Lane Craig, in a 1998 debate with atheist Peter Atkins, responded to this claim by listing five types of truth that are not scientifically demonstrable:-

1. Logical and mathematical reasoning;

2. Metaphysical truths, such as the existence of other minds, or that the external world is real, or that the past did not come into being five minutes ago;

3.…

Love Your Logic

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A lot of everyday thinking, and not a little academic thinking, is riddled with logical fallacies.  It pays to know what counts as logical thinking, in order to keep one’s mind on the straight and narrow.

Here are some notes, helpfully summarised from Peter Kreeft’s book Socratic Logic by Justin Taylor:-

There are three kinds of thoughts, or three acts of the mind:

  1. Simple apprehension [understanding a simple term—e.g., “man”]
  2. Judging [relating two concepts by predicating one term of the other—e.g.,
…

Genes: masters or slaves?

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In Richard Dawkins’ celebrated book The Selfish Gene, there is a passage which (rather typically for him) smuggles non-empirical assumptions into a statement that purports to be a scientific one.

The passage reads as follows:-

[Genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.  They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.

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The Curious Case of Madalyn Murray O’Hair

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Madalyn Elizabeth Mays was born in Pittsburgh on Palm Sunday (April 13) 1919.  She married John Henry Roths in 1941.  During the war, she worked as a cryptographer in Italy.  While apart from her husband, she became pregnant with her first child.  Although William J. Murray, a senior American officer, did not acknowledge the child as his own, she seemed to regard herself as married to him.  She divorced Roths, and called her son William Joseph Murray III and referred to herself as Madalyn Murray. …

Atheisms

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Mike Ovey, Principal of Oak Hall College, gave a talk a little while back on the history, convictions and impact of atheism, also offering some hints on how Christians might interact with atheists today.

Understanding Atheism

Of particular interest was his division of atheism into four types:-

1. Protest Atheism.  Someone might say, in the face of personal tragedy or global disaster, “An all-powerful and all-loving God would never allow that to happen, and therefore such a God cannot exist.”…

Has science eliminated God?

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The best short summary and discussion that I have seen of Richard Dawkins’ view that science has ‘eliminated’ God is that of Alister McGrath in an article published the journal Science and Christian Belief.

Although published in 2005, and not interacting directly with Dawkins’ The God Delusion, the article nevertheless takes account of the opinions of Dawkins as they have developed from 1977 (The Selfish Gene) onwards.

McGrath expresses admiration for Dawkins’ scientific writing, but notes that when he touches on the subject of God, evidence-based reasoning seems to have been left behind, to be replaced by over-simplification and, not infrequently, misrepresentation.…