Bill Pratt | November 14, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Tom Howe, in his book Objectivity in Biblical Interpretation, makes the case that there is unity, objectivity, and absoluteness in truth. To start his explanation, he quotes Mortimer Adler from his book Truth and Religion: 1. The human race is a single biological species, renewed generation after generation by the reproductive [...]
Bill Pratt | September 28, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, we looked at contemporary notions of objectivity, as reported by philosopher Tom Howe. In part 2 we continue to flesh out the concept of objectivity. Tom Howe quotes philosopher Mary Hawkesworth: In the context of philosophical and scientific investigations, an objective account implies a [...]
Bill Pratt | September 25, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt We’ve recently featured several blog posts centered around the idea of moral objectivity. Objectivity is also a concept that can be applied to truth, knowledge, interpretation, and even beauty. Although we’ve tried to carefully define objectivity versus subjectivity, it might be worth revisiting this concept to see what contemporary thinkers have [...]
Bill Pratt | December 29, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Some statements about the world are objectively true, meaning they are true for all people, places, and times, regardless of whether anyone actually believes the statements. Other statements about the world are subjective, meaning they merely refer to a person’s preferences or tastes. An objective statement would be: “The sum of [...]
Bill Pratt | May 16, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt 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 those hypotheses with empirical [...]
Bill Pratt | April 19, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Continuing from part 1, below are 5 more reasons you should doubt a scientific consensus, taken from Jay Richards’ article on the topic. 8. When the subject matter seems, by its nature, to resist consensus. An an engineer, this point has always bothered me about both evolution and climate change. Richards [...]
Bill Pratt | April 18, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Lately on the blog I’ve had some people question why I side with the majority of experts on some issues and not with others. I had never really thought about this before, but then I ran across an article written by Jay Richards, entitled, “When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’“. Richards [...]
Bill Pratt | February 23, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt One of the most common accusations hurled at Christians is arrogance. If Christians believe that only they are right about who God is, that is arrogant. Usually, but not always, I hear this accusation from atheists. They say something like, “If you think that the Christian God is the only true [...]
Bill Pratt | October 22, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Darrell and I were talking today about people who claim that one interpretation of Scripture can be no better than another. Or, put another way, we can’t know what the correct interpretation of Scripture is, so we shouldn’t debate it. To each his own interpretation. My sense is that people who [...]
Bill Pratt | March 11, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Philosopher Ken Samples, in a recent “New Reasons to Believe” (Vol 1 , No 1) publication, argues that naturalistic evolution cannot explain how human beings can have true beliefs about anything. Naturalistic evolution posits that there only exists the material, natural world around us. Everything that exists is the result of [...]
