Bill Pratt | January 21, 2013
Post Author: Bill Pratt So many people complain that God, if he exists, is a tyrant who expects too much of human beings. To ask that we trust only his Son for salvation is unfair and exclusive. How do Christians respond to these accusations? Pastor R. C. Sproul once spoke about God’s fairness in his [...]
Bill Pratt | January 4, 2013
Post Author: Bill Pratt Is it abortion, or gay marriage, or euthanasia, or any of the other culture war battlefronts? Does the culture war consume our time and money? David French took a look at Christian charities a couple years back to see who Christians give their money (thanks to Greg West for the link). [...]
Bill Pratt | November 29, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this series Philosopher Edward Feser demonstrated that reason, not faith, brings us all the way to the conclusion that Jesus is divine. Once we arrive here, where do we go? Feser explains: Suppose you know through purely rational arguments that there is a God, that He raised [...]
Bill Pratt | November 28, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt A typical accusation of atheists toward Christians is that we only believe what we believe because of blind faith. In other words, we have no rational reasons for believing in God or believing that Jesus died for our sins. The person who believes in fairies or unicorns is no different than [...]
Bill Pratt | November 12, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In the last post, I mentioned an interview with Christian philosopher Clifford Williams about his book Existential Reasons for Belief in God. One of the most interesting aspects of the interview is Williams’s description of some of the existential needs that are common to most people. I gleaned 10 existential needs from the [...]
Bill Pratt | November 9, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt On this blog, we talk a lot about evidence for the Christian faith. We talk a lot about using reason to defend Christian beliefs. Philosopher Clifford Williams, however, points out that for many people the journey to faith is not purely intellectual. Williams was recently interviewed about his 2011 book, Existential Reasons [...]
Bill Pratt | June 29, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In this fourth post of the series, we will examine a final reason why the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence fails as a paradigm for determining burden of proof. Mike Licona argues that even if we accept this maxim at face value, it still has intractable problems. Let us suppose that [...]
Bill Pratt | June 27, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 2 of this series, we started discussing Mike Licona’s analysis of Sagan’s Saw, as he calls it. Licona offered two examples of his wife coming home from the grocery store and telling him about people she met there. We saw that even if she told him about the extraordinary event of meeting the [...]
Bill Pratt | June 25, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this series, we looked at William Lane Craig’s response to the skeptical maxim, “Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.” Now we will review Mike Licona’s response from his book The Resurrection of Jesus. Licona reminds us that this was a statement that atheist astronomer Carl Sagan used to frequently [...]
Bill Pratt | June 22, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I cannot count how many times skeptics of Christianity have trotted out this statement when conversing with me, usually in the context of Jesus’s miracles and resurrection. There are many possible responses to this statement, but in this four-part series of posts, I want to present [...]
