Bill Pratt | August 29, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Another favorite story told by those who want to argue that religion and science are at complete enmity is the Huxley-Wilberforce debate of 1860. The debate was between T. H. Huxley (a Darwin supporter) and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, and was to be about Darwin’s The Origin of Species which had been [...]
Bill Pratt | August 26, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt The Galileo affair has often been put to work to demonstrate that religion has always been at war with science. But what really happened to Galileo? Does what happened to him prove that religion – Christianity in particular – has always been in conflict with science? Philosopher John Lennox thinks not; [...]
Bill Pratt | August 19, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In the first 2 posts of this series, I presented Richard Dawkins’ “answer” to the question “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?” At the end of part 2, I said that Dawkins did not actually answer the question, even though that’s what he led the reader to believe he [...]
Bill Pratt | August 17, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In Dawkins’s next chapter, “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist” he “exposes” the Bible’s moral commands to be largely immoral and hopelessly outdated. What the reader will find in this chapter is Dawkins riffing on how morally backward the Bible is. In fact, Dawkins concludes that “those who wish [...]
Bill Pratt | August 15, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, there is a section entitled “If there is no God, why be good?” I eagerly devoured this section as I sincerely wanted to see what answer Dawkins would give. After all, he is the most prominent intellectual atheist in the world today, right? What did [...]
Bill Pratt | August 12, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, we looked at Edward Feser’s first 2 gradations of conceptions of God. In this second part, we will finish looking at the last three gradations and than talk about why this is important. Grade 3: God is not an object or substance alongside other objects [...]
Bill Pratt | August 10, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Is God a bearded old man living in the sky somewhere or is he completely unknowable? Both of these conceptions of God are held by various religious believers. When presenting a Christian conception of God on this blog, we have striven to follow the traditional, mainstream views of the church as [...]
Bill Pratt | August 8, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt As I’ve corresponded with skeptics of Christianity over the years, I have been amazed at what I call hyper-skeptics. These are people who throw the word “contradiction” around when they should really use the word “difference.” A contradiction occurs between two statements when one statement is “A is B” and the [...]
Bill Pratt | August 5, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you’ve probably noticed that there are quite a few blog posts dedicated to discussions of atheism (there is no god or gods) and the philosophy of naturalism (all that exists is found in the material universe). Atheism and naturalism generally go [...]
Bill Pratt | August 3, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, Tim Keller presented historian N. T. Wright’s analysis of Jewish and Greco-Roman attitudes toward an individual resurrection. Would the ancient world have accepted the story of Jesus’s resurrection without serious skepticism? According to Keller, Wright’s research indicates that the Greco-Roman world would not have been [...]
