Bill Pratt | May 19, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Recently I met a woman in her thirties who had grown up Christian, but over several years, starting in her late teens/early twenties, she grew away from her faith and now considers herself agnostic (we’ll call her Judy). She doesn’t know that God doesn’t exist, but she finds it very unlikely. [...]
Bill Pratt | May 16, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Re-post from Feb 2010 The use of the scientific method as a way of learning about the natural world has yielded fantastic technologies and discoveries over the last few hundred years. Nobody can doubt the power of the scientific method – collecting data, developing hypotheses about that data, and then testing [...]
Bill Pratt | May 12, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Re-post from Jan 2009 God, people, and things. That is the proper order of importance. If you look at those three, I think that our ability to exhaustively know each one decreases from God to people to things. Our knowledge of an infinite God is very small compared to all that [...]
Bill Pratt | May 9, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Hardly, yet many Christians seem to forget this fact. God gives us the privilege of participating in the cosmic drama that is unfolding under his direction, but his script leaves nothing to chance. We don’t need to fret over whether His plans will succeed; we already know the end of the [...]
Bill Pratt | May 6, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, we discussed Francis Parker’s argument that the process of knowing cannot be physical. A purely physical account of knowledge simply does not work. In part 2, we pick up where we left off. Parker draws out more disturbing consequences of the materialistic account of knowing. [...]
Bill Pratt | May 4, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt If you are a materialist, physicalist, or naturalist, then you must say “yes” because everything reduces to physical processes on those views. Francis Parker, Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College, argues, however, that the act of knowing cannot be a physical process. Parker offers the following scenario that a materialist may [...]
Bill Pratt | May 2, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Joseph Owens’ book, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics, argues for the existence of an immaterial human soul. In part 1 of this post, we looked at three of his arguments for an immaterial soul: 1) the human intellect’s ability to know things as universals, 2) the human intellect’s ability to know in [...]
