Theological disputes are often matters of great moment, even when those outside the dispute cannot track with what is going on. I think it was Gibbon who once displayed his ignorance by saying that the debate over homousia and homoiousia was somehow over the letter i — which is pretty similar to saying the debate …
Mobius Strip Reason
It has been a while since I have gone through a book chapter by chapter and, weather permitting, the next one I shall attempt is Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. Coyne is a big time Johnny in the world of evolution, so I will definitely be punching up out of my weight class. …
If It Were a Pancake
Steve McSwain, “Author, Speaker, Thought Leader, Spiritual Teacher,” has written a piece over at HuffPo that requires some sort of response. From the rigor of argument displayed in his piece, one guess could be that he is most likely a mentor of spiritual formation at a place somewhere in LA with a name something like …
Debate As a Christian Duty
For many Christians, it seems a reasonable question to ask whether it is profitable for us to engage in public debates at all. Whoever changed his mind because of some public argument? Why wrangle about words? Logomachies just make my head hurt. In contrast to this, I want to argue that such a quietist position …
Nothing Worse Than an Analytic Fairy
Yesterday I was having a good discussion on apologetics with my friend Will Little, and the discussion dislodged in me a few thoughts on the subject that I thought would be good to note here. We were talking about presuppositionalism. I think it is crucial for us to distinguish between presuppositionalism as a foundation for …
Heliocentric Worship
In an earlier post, I used the phrase “God-centered,” and there was at least one challenge that concerned what I meant by it. Let me have a quick go at explaining. First, let me note what I do not mean. I do not some form of Stoicism, where we try to pretend that how it …
Does Tim Keller Live on an Old Earth?
Tim Keller has provided us with a brief introduction to his thinking on the relationship of the current science and biblical revelation. You can find that essay here in six parts at BioLogos. After reading it, there were a number of questions I wanted to ask, and so then I decided to go right ahead. …
But Rather Established
Sam Harris is of the conviction that he can talk about the loss of freedom as though it were the loss of something that left everything else about human nature relatively unchanged — such as when your uncle loses his left leg, well below the knee. You have the same old uncle, just a little …
Flashing the Laymen
The penultimate chapter of Free Will is on politics, and is only a few pages. All it takes is a few pages to snark at conservatives. “Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism” (p. 61) “Living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren’t born …
One Burnt Cookie
G.K. Chesterton says somewhere, I think in Orthodoxy, that given materialist assumptions, it makes no sense to say to someone, “Go and sin no more,” because that involves choices, but you can put the malefactor into boiling oil because boiling oil is an environment. In his next chapter on moral responsibiliity, Sam Harris tries to …