CADRE Comments

http://atheistwatch.blogspot.com/2016/04/challenge-to-athyeists-especially.html I am debating three atheists at once, I made an open challenge to atheists to debate my Cosmological argument. They are outnumbered but I'm taking it easy on them.;-)

    For many years I have been ambivalent about Saturday Night Live . The show has always been slanted against conservative-evangelical types like me, but usually with plenty of funny and mostly harmless material thrown into the mix. One recent politically geared sketch was so completely over-the-top, however, that after 40 years of sporadic SNL viewing I've finally sworn off it for good. The (overly) offensive bit was "God Is a Boob Man," a spoof of the movie God's Not Dead 2 .   In it a Christian woman named Beth, played by Vanessa Bayer, is working at a bakery when she is asked to make a wedding cake for a gay couple – an obvious reference to the discrimination case in Colorado a couple of years ago in which a Christian bakery owner was (successfully) sued for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Conflicted, Beth starts to make the cake, but then breaks down and refuses because of her Christian beliefs. This leads to what are supposed to be side-...

This week, I want to share a discussion that has been going on over at the Atheism-Analyzed blog: http://atheism-analyzed.blogspot.com/2016/01/hawking-and-probability-wave-creation.html They have been having an interesting discussion about the Hartle-Hawking state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartle%E2%80%93Hawking_state Here is an excerpt from Stan’s article: The procedure to evaluate anything Hawking et al say is to list all of the serial assumptions which are made and which have to be “the case” in order for his theories to be valid, and then to see at which of the assumptions empirical validation automatically cease, leaving the theory to be a bedtime story for physicist speculators. This theory is no different. OK, first off it is not the Wave Theory of the Universe, it is Wave Theory Within an Infinite Multiverse which is both external to our universe, and contains our universe.

Helmutt Koester This is my contribution to a book Called Defending the Resurrection edited by J.P. Holiding. I urge the reader to buy it as there are many fine arguments made in it. Not all of this article was used. This is its original form it was changed substantially in several ways, such are the needs of editors. Introduction Skeptical machinations are endless, anytime the tide turns toward the apologist the skeptic will take a further step back and seek to change the ground rules in a fundamental way. So it is with the perennial resurrection debate since the tide was shifted by McDowell and then by Craig, years ago. One of the major tactics used by skeptics to change the ground rules has been to uproot all points of the compass so the apologist can’t get his/her bearings as to what events are actually historical and thus defensible. To accomplish this, the skeptic has partly pulled off a resurrection of his own, by resurrecting old ninetieth centu...

Imagine two British gentlemen sitting in an English garden engaging in conversation about the Queen's knights. The first makes the assertion, "All of the Queen's knights have been brave." The second, a more circumspect individual, responds, "But what about  Sir Robin ? He wasn't brave at all." "Well," responds the first, "that's because he wasn't a true knight." What, if anything, is wrong with the response of the first British Gentlemen? Anyone familiar with the ongoing debate between Christians and Atheist/Skeptics on the Internet probably believes that the first of these two gentlemen has committed the "No True Scotsman" Fallacy. If you are unfamiliar with the fallacy, it probably means that you have not been engaging in these types of debates because it is almost never used anywhere else. There is a reason for that: it really isn't much of a fallacy. Perhaps I should say that the "No True Scotsman...

Argument from God Correlate: Dr. Hood, Univ. Tennessee Chattanooga: Inventor of the 'M Scale"   This article is a summary of my book, the Trace of God by Joseph Hinman ( available on Amazon ). I recently posted essays showing that the true Christian concept of Supernatural is mystical experience nothing more. Now I show mystical experience is empirical, thus SN is empirical.      We can't demonstrate empirical knowledge of God to others, even if we feel we have it ourselves. But if we can correlate something that is empirical with God, the effects of God in the world then we could know by association between sign and signified that there is divine reality. Just as the fingerprint betrays the presence of the owner of the fingers that made them, or the track in the snow proves the presence of the creature that made it, so RE as the God correlate points to the presence of God in reality is the effect of the divine upon our lives. As a theolo...