Bill Pratt | April 20, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Recall that in part 2, we looked at a couple skeptics’ views on testimony. The first skeptic’s view appeared to be self-defeating, but the second skeptic singled out testimony about supernatural events, thus avoiding the self-defeating approach of the first skeptic. However, the second skeptic has a different sort of problem, which [...]
Bill Pratt | April 18, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In the previous post, we talked about the role of testimony in our everyday lives. There are some, however, who cast serious doubts on the reliability of testimony. Here is a typical quote from a skeptic who commented on this blog: As we all should know, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. There are [...]
Bill Pratt | April 16, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt There are 3 ways that a person can gain knowledge: experience, reason, and testimony. Experience simply means that we observe something directly with one of our five senses for ourselves (e.g., “There is a computer screen in front of me”). Reason means that we make rational and logical inferences from knowledge we [...]
Bill Pratt | April 6, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Recently I was listening to the Unbelievable podcast and heard something telling from atheist James Croft. As he was discussing the historical, eyewitness evidence of Jesus’s resurrection with Christian Chris Sinkinson, he said the following (this is a paraphrase of what he said): The amount of eyewitness testimony of the death and [...]
Bill Pratt | November 28, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt One of our goals with this blog, from the beginning, was to try to answer honest questions that people have about the Christian faith. Why do I stress the word honest? Because one of the first things you learn when you write a blog about ultimate issues (i.e., God, morality , meaning [...]
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Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist” he “exposes” the Bible’s moral commands to be largely immoral and hopelessly outdated.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 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 | June 22, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt This is a familiar theme for long-time readers of the blog. I am deeply interested in where the scientific method can shed light and where its light begins to fade. For mankind, to know everything is to know all that really exists. If you think of everything that exists as falling [...]
