Bill Pratt | May 22, 2013
Post Author: Bill Pratt Many people know that it is wrong to rape, but know nothing about the goodness of the Christian God. How we come to know moral facts is often different from how we come to know theological facts. Based on this truth, many skeptics claim moral facts must be independent of God. [...]
Bill Pratt | April 24, 2013
Post Author: Bill Pratt Clearly the answer must be “yes.” In fact, the apostle Paul teaches this very truth in the book of Romans. There are some moral truths that can be known without a person ever acknowledging God’s existence. In fact, the world would be a complete disaster if everyone had to agree on [...]
Bill Pratt | January 16, 2013
Post Author: Bill Pratt I know this seems like a ridiculous question to normal people, but this is actually a very live and contentious debate among the professors teaching your children at the university. So you need to pay attention to these debates, lest your college expenditures be flushed down the drain! The classical Christian [...]
Bill Pratt | November 16, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Actually the answer is neither, but we’ll get to that soon enough. Why ask this question in the first place? Because philosophy is a discipline that builds one layer upon another (just like many other disciplines), and since philosophy provides a foundation for all of the sciences, it is extremely important [...]
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 | November 23, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Thomas, the disciple of Jesus, is famous for the following statement: ”Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.” There have always been people like Thomas who demand that they directly experience [...]
Bill Pratt | November 7, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt I’ve been reading the famous eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant lately. Kant’s theory of knowledge only allowed for human knowledge to extend to those things we can directly experience through our senses. Kant argued that we could not have direct experience of our self, the cosmos, or God. Kant’s empiricism ruled out rational knowledge of [...]
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 [...]
