CADRE Comments

Visualize in your mind a geometric shape: a square. What image comes to mind? If you are actually visualizing a square you will see a two-dimensional shape with four right angles (90 degree angles) and four sides of equal length. If you don't have four right angles but have sides of equal length, you don't have a square - you have a parallelogram. If you don't have sides that are equal in length but have four right angles, again you don't have a square - you have a rectangle. In fact, unless you have a two dimensional shape with the aforementioned properties, you simply don't have a square - you have something else - because the definition of a square requires four sides of equal length and four right angles. Now, consider the number three - not the written Roman numeral, but the actual idea of three things - and it doesn't matter the nature of the three things being counted (be they physical, non-physical, ideas, etc.). To go from two things to four things, t...

CT Direct has just put out a new article written by William Lane Craig, Ph.D., entitled God Is Not Dead Yet: How current philosophers argue for his existence . As the sub-title promises, Dr. Craig takes a brief look at some of the current arguments of natural theology (including the cosmological argument, the Kalam Cosmological Argument, the Teleological Argument, the Moral Argument and the Ontological Argument) and examines argumentation for God in a post-modern age. Here is a sample: However all this may be, some might think that the resurgence of natural theology in our time is merely so much labor lost. For don't we live in a postmodern culture in which appeals to such apologetic arguments are no longer effective? Rational arguments for the truth of theism are no longer supposed to work. Some Christians therefore advise that we should simply share our narrative and invite people to participate in it. This sort of thinking is guilty of a disastrous misdiagnosis of contemporary c...

[Introductory note from Jason Pratt: the previous entry in this series of posts can be found here. The first entry can be found here. ] In the previous chapter (i.e. the previous few journal entries), I brought to the forefront a term I have already begun to use here and there in this book: the IF, the Independent-or-Interdependent Fact. Now I will discuss this concept directly, not only because I will be using it with increasing frequency as I continue, but because I think its existence must be accepted to avoid nonsensical positions. [Footnote: the acronym for Independent or Interdependent Fact happens to be the English word 'if'; but this is only coincidental.] I have just finished explaining why I reject the position that God must be an abstract generality (and thus can have no particular aspects, even in principle, to be discovered). My reply was that in my experience the abstract describes the real (or, more accurately, we use 'the abstract' to describe the re...