CADRE Comments

Tomb of St. Paul the Apostle Found From World Net Daily, "Vatican to announce St. Paul's tomb found: Sarcophagus could contain remains of apostle" : Vatican archeologists are preparing to announced they have positively identified the tomb of St. Paul the apostle. Giorgio Filippi, a specialist with the Vatican Museums, said a sarcophagus that might still contain the apostle's remains was identified in the basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, reported Catholic World News. The independent Catholic news service said the sarcophagus was discovered during excavations in 2002 and 2003 around the basilica in south Rome. * * * The Vatican team found the sarcophagus during a second excavation under the basilica's main altar. Under the altar, a marble plaque is visible, dating to the 4th century, bearing the inscription "Apostle Paul, martyr." Surprisingly, said Filippi, "nobody ever thought to look behind that plaque," where the Vatican team ...

St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument and Gaunilo’s Perfect Island Most people have heard of the ontological argument, but few actually know its formulation. The purpose of this short essay is to briefly examine this argument as first enunciated by St. Anselm in his Proslogion . If you have never read the Proslogion , it is worth the time. The Proslogion is only a couple of pages long, yet the discussion that has followed it has filled libraries. This follows from the fact that Anselm’s argument, which to all appearances is logically sound, seems to lead to the conclusion that because one can imagine a perfect something then that perfect something must exist. Anselm’s arguments begins with the proposition that everyone can envision a being “greater than which cannot be thought of,” i.e., a being who is the greatest thing such that nothing else can be greater. For theists, this is an easy concept because theists in the Judeo-Christian realm regularly deal with the idea of an omnipotent, om...

The Groningen Protocol: Shorthand For An Appalling Brutality Just a brief recommendation that everyone interested in the issue of euthanasia read a short essay published by friend of the CADRE Apologia Christi at his blog Resting on the Shepherd's Portico entitled "The Groningen Protocol: Shorthand For An Appauling Brutality" . Here is a portion of the essay: The Abstract Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in the Netherlands suggest that a person's "quality of life" is the criterion to decide whether or not they deserves to live or be terminated. This argument states that humans are only valuable at a stage of existence. If the infant doesn't immediately qualify then regardless of it's instrumental worth, it can be discarded. The issue here is "suffering." The doctors and parents want to end the life because the potential life of the child is arbitrarily deemed to suffer. What if the euthanasia doesn't end their suffering though? What's ...

Shout Out For The Centurions Breakpoint has a great shout out for the Wilberforce Forum's Centurions program. This is a program dedicated to training one hundred persons to go forth into culture and engage ideas redemptively from a Biblical worldview. Part of that mission is to start in the church and challenge Christians to think holistically and Biblically about all of life. Christian worldview thinking has shrunk to the point that Christians are having little or no impact in the marketplace of ideas or in shaping culture. The tide is turning, however, and it is programs like Centurions which are starting to make a difference. I am graduate of the 2004 class of Centurions (the inaugural class). The 2005 class is in the midst of an intensive year of training. In the fall, Wilberforce will be recruiting for the 2006 class. Some of you readers of the Cadre Comments should seriously consider enrolling in this program. The faculty of this program is world class ... the opport...

Ignatius of Antioch and the Gospel of Matthew The question of whether Ignatius was familiar with the Gospel of Matthew has been a subject of scholarly dispute for quite a while. Basically, there are two positions taken by mainstream scholars. First, that Ignatius was familiar with the Gospel of Matthew and made good use of it in his own epistles. Second, that Ignatius was familiar with oral traditions similar to, perhaps even related to, the Gospel of Matthew in some way, but that he did not know the Gospel of Matthew itself. If you want to look into the issue yourself, this website is a useful starting point. It shows, in Greek, the linguistic similarities between Ignatius' letters and the Gospel of Matthew. To see them in English you can check the references and look them up in your Bible and at Peter Kirby's earlychristianwritings.com . Another helpful resource is Eduoard Massaux's excellent study of the apostolic father's use of the New Testament books. Th...

First Round for Gay Marriage in California A Superior Court in San Francisco (talk about forum shopping) has ruled that the State of California cannot legislate that marriage is only to exist between a man and a woman because it violates the California Constitution . In the eagerly awaited opinion likely to be appealed to the state's highest court, San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer said that withholding marriage licenses from gays and lesbians is unconstitutional. "It appears that no rational purpose exists for limiting marriage in this state to opposite-sex partners," Kramer wrote. The judge wrote that the state's historical definition of marriage, by itself, cannot justify the denial of equal protection for gays and lesbians. "The state's protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional," Kramer wrote. I would like to say I'm surprised, but I'm n...

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion Rationality seeks to evaluate arguments using rules that label some arguments as good and some arguments as bad from a purely objective point of view. Formal logic is a tried and tested method for determining the soundness of many arguments since it allows the argument to be tested by rigorous standards. Informal fallacies are less stringent but still very helpful tools for evaluating the soundness of an argument. Almost everyone has run into such informal fallacies as ad hominem attacks, poisoning the well, guilt by association, improper appeals to authorities and false dilemmas. Anyone arguing for Christ with a skeptic should become familiar with all of these informatal fallacies since they are regularly practiced by both sides in the debate over the truth of Christianity. I think, however, that a newer error in logic has been gaining ground in all types of debates, but few recognize it as the sloppy thinking that it is. It is regularly used in politica...

Christian Logic -- Is it Different? In response to a post that I made on Tuesday , an anonymous commenter (*sigh*) made a rather ascerbic comment about Christian thought which I thought deserved more attention than an exchange of comments. As I read it, Anonymous' comment shows a misunderstanding of the probative value of logic. While you can re-read the comment in its entirety by the link, I will summarize it for purposes of this post. Anonymous used an e-mail from a Prof. Welty that he contends shows that Christian logic can be used to "defend the idea that we have one leg." The e-mail began with two claims: A: Everybody except me has one leg. B: My memory is that almost everybody has two legs. Of course, this is not a logic syllogism. It is simply a couple of statements which appear contradictory. Ignoring for the moment the idea that the person making the claim is somehow singled out as an exception to the rule that everyone has one leg (why this exception is being ma...

Worse Than First Reported: Killing Infants in Europe A few months ago we learned that the Netherlands had a policy of killing infant children deemed to have little chance of survival. Chilling in an of itself, the fact that the issue was taken out of the hands of parents was also horrifying. Having read the articles on what was going on, I was disturbed enough to rethink my usual objections to slippery slope arguments. As it turns, out, it is much worse over there than we thought. According to the AP : Dutch doctors estimate that at least five newborn mercy killings occur for every one reported in that country, which has allowed euthanasia for competent adults since 1985. In a follow up post I did on this topic, I questioned whether the government and medical authorities who advocated such policies were underestimating The Value of a Short Life . Today, while reading The Corner (a blog for National Review contributors), I found reported this emai l by a pediatrician and medical g...

Fun with Logic: A Logical Proof that God is Dead Philosopher Victor Reppert of Dangerous Idea has used logic to establish that God is dead in a post entitled "A proof that Bill Clinton was right, or was it Nietzsche?" Here is his logic: 1. God is Love. 2. Love is Blind. 3. Ray Charles is Blind. 4. Ray Charles is God. To which we can now add the Nietzschean addendum 5. Therefore God is dead. Obviously, this is tongue in cheek. Prof. Reppert is the author of C.S. Lewis' Dangerous Idea -- a book that one of the CADRE's favorite atheists, Richard Carrier, has attacked in a response that was longer than the original book. (Fortunately, Prof. Reppert is taking the time to respond to Mr. Carrier and part I of his response can be found here .) But it is interesting to note how he has managed to warp the logic in a syllogism to have it seem legitimate even though it obviously is not. All Christians need to keep in mind that logic is an essential tool for the apologist and w...