Here’s Tim Keller absolutely killing it in a talk for Google entitled, “Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical“:
Philosophy
God’s Truth
Justin Taylor highlights the slogan, “All truth is God’s truth,” and the principles behind it, including: God exists. (“This is the most basic idea of all. It is the foundation for all that a Christian can know.”) Through the agency of his Son, God created the universe and all that is in it. We can therefore entertain an … Read more
Do Atheists Really Exist?
Philosopher Joe Bissonnette argues against the existence of atheists: Fr. Robert Barron addresses the common misconceptions about the nature of God that lead so many who worship at the altar of science to deny God exists. According to Fr. Barron, the atheist critique hinges on their mistaken understanding of God as “the supreme instance of the … Read more
How the Apostle Paul is Like Bruce Lee
Ever consider the similarities between the Apostle Paul and Bruce Lee? Aside from their mastery of the Eagle Claw Death Touch, I mean. If not, consider the similarities between this philosophy: 19 Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. 20 To the Jews I … Read more
God’s Character and Moral Law
From the Department of Posts That Affirm Stuff I Wrote Before, J. Warner Wallace writes on how God establishes the difference between right and wrong: From a Christian worldview, God doesn’t simply tell us what is righteous, He is righteous. Goodness and righteousness are attributes of his innate character. While it’s tempting to think there … Read more
The Moral Case for Freedom
Sheldon Richman explains, with lots of big words and references to Plato and whatnot, why the practical case for freedom and the moral case for freedom are inextricably intertwined (See? I can use big words too. So there.): Success is nice, but the ethical test has priority. Some libertarians often say they would favor freedom … Read more
God or Atheism — Which Is More Rational?
From Prager University:
The Brain and the Soul
Hey, you ever sit around thinking about the brain and the soul, and the relation between them? I was going to spend some time pondering those things, but then I got into a bag of pretzel M&M’s that was so good, I completely lost my train of thought. Luckily for us, a couple of smart … Read more
The Heretic
Which group is more vicious toward people who dissent from group orthodoxy: religious believers or scientific secularists? I know where I’d put my money. The Weekly Standard has a profile of one such dissenter: atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel. Though he doesn’t believe in God, he also has the temerity to say that Darwinism isn’t all … Read more
The Question Atheists Don’t Want to Face
What if the godless universe that they pine for turns out to be a bad thing? It’s one thing to catalogue the manifest faults within this or that religious tradition, which the new atheists have ably done… over and over and over again. It’s quite another to claim, as these authors also invariably do, that … Read more
"There’s Nothing Hippie About My Picture of Christ"
U2’s Bono talks about his perspective on Christianity. (The interview is a couple of years old, but I can’t read everything, okay?) I’ve always known he had a Christian background, but I didn’t think his beliefs held this close to what I would consider evangelical fundamentalism. I think I could hang out with this dude. … Read more
A 5 Minute Argument for the Existence of God
Don’t have all day to make an argument for an infinite, omniscient God? Prager University helps you boil it down to five minutes (or so): Update: My dad reminded me that this argument is reminiscent of an earlier post of mine on goodness, in which I wrote: When we say “God is good,” we’re not describing … Read more
Why Do You Choose to Read This Post Rather Than Look at Cat Pictures?
It’s because you have free will! (Or maybe you have another browser open and you’re looking at cat pictures there. Anyways…) Courtesy of Prager University, Frank Pastore discusses free will, and why you have good reason to believe that you’re not just a bundle of instincts in a bag of meat.
Does the Universe Need God?
According to physics, that is. Prosblogion explores the question, as asked by a CalTech physicist, of whether the the physical explanations of the universe need a philosophical explanation to explain them. And if you’re following that so far, and if you like words like “metaphysical” and “ontological,” you are gonna love this: Near the beginning … Read more
What Happens When a Religious Philosopher Analyzes Mainstream Religious Journalism?
Answer: 1) There’s a lot of blood, and 2) You wonder why anybody pays any attention to mainstream religious journalism. The Secular Industrial Establishment’s publishing arm (whether through malice or wish-fulfillment) routinely displays headlines which make anti-religious assertions not backed up by the data. It is natural that we trust headlines pretty spontaneously. It is … Read more
Do We Know God Exists Because We Believe in Him?
It’s the old “50 million Elvis fans can’t be wrong” argument: lots and lots of people believe in God; therefore, God must exist. The Prosblogion takes a look at this argument: The proposition that the mere popularity of a belief might constitute evidence for its truth may strike us as odd. Mill, for instance, argued … Read more
Arguing About the Existence of God with Smart People
The smarties over at the The Prosblogion take a look at a potential argument against the benevolence and/or existence of God, in a way that makes me wish I read at a higher grade level: Fleshing out this Thomistic line of thought, Ross says that God is at a higher level of reality than natural objects, … Read more
If God Won’t Stop War, Why Won’t He at Least Fix My Bunions?
Those crazy imps over at the Prosblogion are at it again, this time speculating over why God permits bad things to happen. And since that’s been done to death already, they take it to the next level–wondering why He allows great evils (like the Holocaust) versus why He allows trivial evils (like Shelley Winters‘ performance … Read more
Textbook Persons
If you’re looking for a brainier way to explain why you’re anti-abortion, the guys from Prosblogion are here to help: Even if you suppose that the predicate ‘being a person’ is vague, it is true that, at some level of vagueness, a being moves from not definitely all the way up a textbook person to … Read more
How Do We Know Our Petitionary Prayers Have Been Answered?
In other words, how do we know that God granted us a blessing because we asked for it, and not just because He was going to do it anyway? An interesting question, a little deeper than you get in Sunday School, and right up the alley of the wacky guys at Christian philosophy blog The … Read more