CADRE Comments

Skeppie challenges me to show him one miracle. Me: 65 officially validated at Lourdes Skepie: By the church. Sorry, I don't buy it. Show me a miracle that has been observed by someone who isn't under the influence. Now we begin the game of a thousand qualifications, he didn't want just one miracle; turns out he wants it to be perfect. Okay, let's start the haggling.  But is there anyone out there who for a minute believes that he will ever be satisfied no matter how may qualifications I meet?  But he's not question begging he's just assertive that because he's right no evidence can count against his position. Supernatural effects. What has been said so far implies that the supernatural is not a juxtaposed realm that has to break in upon the natural, but something that works within the natural to draw nature to a higher level, Ontologically, this is the “ground and end” of the natural. There might also be “superna...

Over at Cold Case Christianity , the extremely informative website of J. Warner Wallace (who I would like to call a friend to our blog since he has tweeted several of our posts over the past few months, but I have never spoken to him in person), Mr. Wallace (hereinafter, JWW) posted an article entitled " Does the Temple Prediction Invalidate the Early Dating of the Gospels? " responding to challenges raised by skeptics arising from Jesus' prediction of the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem. What exactly is the problem with Jesus having predicted the fall of the Temple? Nothing actually, unless the people raising the challenge are wedded to a viewpoint that says that it is impossible for anyone to prophesy because that would mean that they know the future - which is impossible. For those unfamiliar with Jesus' prophesy that the temple would be destroyed, it is repeated in three places in the Bible, Matthew 24:1-2, Luke 21:5-6 and Mark 13:1-2. All three of the predictio...

The entry below was eventually substantially revised for an article for the Christian Research Journal. *** Is slapstick comedy unbiblical or immoral? Is it a sin to laugh when Bugs Bunny blasts Elmer Fudd with his own shotgun? And more broadly, is it wrong to enjoy it when other people suffer, even if (we might say) they "deserve" it? These seem like odd questions, but they were raised of late in the context of some of my YouTube videos, in which I freely make use of outrageous physical humor which resembles that found in the classic Warner Brothers cartoons. And closer to home, my local ministry partner Carey and I have discussed the enjoyment of reality television programs like Survivor , in which contestants are frequently subjected to public humiliation. According to some, the sin here concerns what some term schadenfreude -- a German word that refers to pleasure felt at someone else's troubles. According to my YouTube critic, we enjoy seeing Elmer Fudd ...

Recently a friend on Facebook argued that Christians have no business declaring the Resurrection of Jesus to be the most probable ( a posteriori ) explanation for the relevant facts, since they are unable to first pin down the prior probability of the Resurrection independent of those facts. I think that's a reasonable enough objection and deserves a reply. After all, posterior probability by definition is a function of both likelihood on the evidence and prior probability. [1] Clearly, then, one cannot determine posterior probability without some idea of the prior.   My friend went on to say that the prior probability of a hypothesis is typically established as a ratio of previous instances of the event and total opportunities for the event to have occurred: "Normally we determine the probability of X by how many occasions of X we have seen out of how many opportunities for X there have been. Is the resurrection of Jesus some kind of exception?" This amounts t...