Soft Targets

Ever noticed that people often prefer arguing against a charicature of someone's position than what their opponent really believes? *

Here's a quote I came across today:

"Scripture is entirely trustworthy in the sense that its message conveys the true knowledge of God and his works, especially the way of salvation."

{International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, quoted in Essentials of Evangelical Theology, DG Bloesch}

That strikes me as a pretty good working definition of what I believe by 'inerrancy'.

If there is a God that created - out of nothing - the universe, humanity et al, then it seems to me a very small step of faith to believe that He has given a self-revelation to us that is amply adequate to lead us (back) to Him.


* This fallacy is known a 'Straw man' argument.

The tooth and nothing but the tooth..

... I'm in the middle of having a root canal done. Expensive and painful.

Just waiting for the local to wear off to see exactly how painful the second session was.

Only one more to go! {Smiles lopsidedly... dang anasthetic}

Yawn or Vomit?

CS Lewis has this to say about those who hold to naturalism and yet make pleas for our action towards a better world:

"Do they remember while they are writing thus that when they tell us we 'ought to make a better world' the words 'ought' and 'better' must, on their own showing, refer to an irrationally conditioned impulse which cannot be true any more than a vomit or a yawn?'

{Miracles, chapter 5 - CS Lewis}

There's no sin

There's no sin so vile that people won't condemn it in others while practicing it themselves.



Sigh... human nature...

If Evolution is true, then Naturalism is false?

Plantinga has an interesting argument along these lines:


"... if naturalism is true, there is no God, and hence no God (or anyone else) overseeing
our development and orchestrating the course of our evolution. And this leads directly to the question whether it is at all likely that our cognitive faculties, given naturalism and given their evolutionary origin, would have developed in such a way as to be reliable, to furnish us with mostly true beliefs. Darwin himself expressed this doubt: "With me," he said, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the
convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?


The same thought is put more explicitly by Patricia Churchland. She insists that the most important thing about the human brain is that it has evolved; this means, she says, that its principal function is to enable the organism to move appropriately: Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F's: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive. . . . .

Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism's way of life and enhances the organism's chances of survival [Churchland's emphasis]. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.

(....)


Churchland's claim, I think, is best understood as the suggestion that the objective probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given naturalism and given that we have been cobbled together by the processes to which contemporary evolutionary theory calls our attention, is low."


Basically, Plantinga is saying that evolution does not select for true beliefs, but for advantageous behaviours - and this, given no oversight of evolution by a Creator, means that it is unlikely that our beliefs are true.

Spam me

Spam - the curse of email - has now moved into blogdom.

Lovely people will spam comments on your blog inviting you to check out their 'blog'. And when you do, it is a site advertising refinancing your mortgage or some such nonsense.

Check out the comments on the post below for a couple of examples. Feel free to visit the sites and add your spam to their site...

Bleh!

Post-script: The post above has had a spam comment added not less than 20 minutes after I posted it. : (

Internally incoherent agnosticism?

A very tought-provoking post from 'FoolForChrist':

If God exists as described in the Bible (the Creator and sustainer of all - including our minds and our very thoughts), then independent verification is clearly impossible since, at every point, our attempts to verify any fact (even the fact of God's existence) is dependent upon God's upholding power. Therefore, we say that man's knowledge is mediate, analogical, and proximate. It is not autonomous, immediate, or ultimate. And since independent verification is impossible (if it is the case that God exists), insisting on it is logically equivalent to precluding the possibility of God's existence (at least, the existence of the God described in the Bible).


Since independent verification of facts is impossible given God's existence and autonomous man insists on verifying facts independently, his insistence on "verification" of God's existence (via facts/proofs acceptable to man's arbitrarily chosen standards of knowledge/truth) is really a pretense because he has made verification impossible by insisting on independent verification. That is, what autonomous man really wants God to do is, at least temporarily, "undo" man's createdness and resign His own Creatorship so that man can go "back of" his Creator and double-check the facts for himself without dependency on the fact of his createdness.

So, we see that independently verifiable proof of God's existence is neither independent nor verifiable. This is a presuppositional conflict. There is no common ground (theoretically, in any case) available from which discourse can begin to resolve the problem. Thinking in a certain way (autonomous reason) precludes the possibility of God's existence. And worse, Insisting on mental autonomy while making a pretense of agnosticism w.r.t. God's existence is dishonest and internally incoherent (I know and don't know fact X, where fact X in this case is "God does not exist"). So, autonomous man chooses irrationality over acceptance of God's rightful authority in every realm - including epistemology.

{emphasis added}


Read the whole thing here

Don't you tell me

what I can't do.

Locke - 'Lost' TV series

Latchkey kids

Somsak gets home from school at about 5pm, depending on how much time he spends playing computer games at the Net cafe. Some days he sees Mum or Dad for an hour or so before they go off to work their shift at the factory.

Weekends are pretty boring. Usually Dad and Mum both work at least one day in the weekend, and the other day they're to tired to do much anyway. So mostly Somsak watches Japanese cartoons on TV and reads comics.

School's not much fun either - he's in a class with 50 other 14-year-olds, and there are more than 3,000 kids at his high school. It's a pretty impersonal place. Most of his teachers don't know his name unless they read it from the front of his school shirt. Some days Somsak can't really focus on his study - those late nights up alone watching TV really tire you out.

But it's not all bad... in a couple of years Somsak will be able to leave school, and hopefully he can find a job - maybe where Dad and Mum work. He might be able to get a place packing instant noodles into cartons for shipping.

Then he'll be set - he can save up and buy a motorbike... a nice Honda Wave 150 would be really cool. With that, Somsak will be able to impress a girl, maybe even get a steady girlfriend. That's the ticket then... doze through high school, get a job in a factory, a motorbike and a girl...

What more could life have to offer?