There are two levels at least to the debates over the freedom of the will. The first has to do with the intersection of time and eternity, and is a problem that theists have to deal with. Arminians believe that God knows the future exhaustively, and Calvinists believe that He knows this future exhaustively because …
Sam Harris, Moist Robot
So then, Sam Harris has a new little book out, and for such a small book (66 pages), it promises to be a lot of fun. I say this because the book appears to be filled with epistemological obliviousness, cover to cover. The name of the book is Free Will, released by Free Press (heh) …
Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, and Kim Jong Il
On the death of Kim Jong Il, one wit tweeted that he liked to think that God had let Havel and Hitchens decide who would be the third one to go. That’s funny, but if ideas have consequences, and they do, then there are a few other considerations. We often say, when someone passes away, …
Logic Without Color or Weight
“Once you grant that the world works this way, anyone who comes bustling up to you with stories about men who came back from the dead is a prima facie nutjob. Simple. But you need to look at your closed-system-universe again and look more closely at the price tag this time. Not only is this …
Too Easily Gobsmacked
“And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also” (Gen. 1:16). Too many of us take this as saying nothing more than that God put a big shiny thing up in the sky for the daytime, and a …
Too Many Hypocrites in the Halls of Reason
This is why I could never become an atheist or part of the skeptic community. Too many factions, divisions, snarls, petty fights, and so on. Worshipping the goddess Reason, they descend into frenzies of irrationality at the slightest provocation. I am tempted to say of them what Chesterton once observed about the enlightened ones at …
Blinded With Science
Karl W. Giberson is vice president of The BioLogos Foundation, and has recently written a provocative piece on how Jesus would believe in evolution, and “so should you.” This is because Jesus claimed to be the Truth, and since evolution is true, darn it, our acceptance of whatever He “would have held” would seem to …
A Little Something Called Context
Howm’I supposed to defend the faith against these swamis of reason when they keep making me wheeze like they do? Sam Harris, aspiring scientist and indignation impresario, is promoting this project, in order to advance the sweet voice of reason. You can look at a really cool graphic they have put together here. The base …
Champion of Our Freedoms
There is a crucial point to be taken away from Peter Hitchens’ last chapter in the The Rage Against God. This issue of whether God must be recognized by us collectively is at the heart of the culture wars, and culture means generations, and generations means that the education of the next generation is right …
Personal Not Private
Just a brief comment about Peter Hitchens’ next chapter, which addresses the bloody war on the church conducted by secularist revolutionaries. The end result was this: “The link between the people and their Christian inheritance — in custom, seasons, traditions, music, and belief — had been effectively broken, and Christianity had been reduced to a …