CADRE Comments

Ho hum. Every few months, some scientist who almost certainly has an animosity towards belief in God will stand up and make an announcement that his/her research has somehow disproven God or the need for God, etc., etc. And every time these types of claims arise, people with cooler heads usually look at the claims and show them for the nonsense that they are. (Of course, true adherents never understand that the arguments have been discredited, but that's why certain arguments like the Argument from Evil continue to pop up as supposedly air-tight arguments against the existence of God.) Today, a good friend who is an atheist posted an article which seems to fall into that category on Facebook. The article is entitled "Origin of the Universe Riddle Solved- and,er, It Wasn't God" Claim Canadian Physicists . According to the article: A group of scientists led by Prof Mir Faizal, at the Dept of Physics and Astronomy, at the University Of Waterloo, Canada, has positiv...

(Note: this is cross-posted at my new blog, The Ring of Truth ) Of all the proposals put forward for understanding the structure of the positive case for theism, that by Dallas Willard as he described it in a famous article strikes me as the most plausible. Willard distinguishes his own approach from one which "in one stroke, from one set of true premisses, purports to establish or render plausible the existence of Jehovah, understood by Christians to also be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." He does not present a series of independent arguments, each of which lead to the same conclusion, the existence of the Christian God. In his view, the evidence for God is built up in stages, where the conclusions at each stage do not serve straightforwardly as premisses for arguments at the next stage. Rather, "what is shown or evidentially supported in the earlier stages only determines a framework of possibilities within which the considerations of the later stages ar...

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...

After actively engaging others in discussions on Christianity over the last ten years, I have become more and more convinced that logic in the hands of some atheists is like matches in the hands of children. While many skeptics use logic responsibly, some misuse or abuse logic becoming a danger to themselves and others. Today's case in point is an address that was made by a skeptic named Diana Mertz Hsieh who gave a speech before the San Diego Ayn Rand Salon entitled Why Be An Atheist? In the address, Ms. Hseih attempts to give a logical analysis of arguments for theism, agnosticism and atheism and to absolutely no one's surprise concludes that the only logical, rational and reasonable arguments support atheism. The only problem is that her analysis is, to put it bluntly, poor. She begins with an analysis of the cosmological argument from cause through what I will call the Uber-Turtle analogy. She says: The Cosmological Argument attempts to prove God’s existence by arguing: ...