Bill Pratt | May 16, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Re-post from Feb 2010 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 [...]
Bill Pratt | November 2, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt One of the most common mistakes in thinking I have seen in discussions on the blog is the making of self-refuting statements. According to philosopher J. P. Moreland, a self-refuting statement is a statement which “refers to itself and fails to satisfy its own criteria of rational acceptability or truthfulness.” An [...]
Bill Pratt | August 29, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Last night I watched the DVD, The Case for Faith, featuring Lee Strobel. The video deals with two issues from the book that bears the same name: 1) How can Jesus be the only way? and 2) How can God exist and there be so much evil, pain, and suffering? In [...]
Bill Pratt | August 25, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Critics of Christianity and of religion, in general, like to take a page from Sigmund Freud and accuse believers of forming their beliefs for purely psychological reasons. Freud held that believers are projecting their need for a father figure on God. God is merely a psychological projection of the ideal father. [...]
Bill Pratt | February 10, 2009
In the previous post, we introduced the ethical theory of optimistic humanism. In this post, we will start to analyze optimistic humanism in order to see whether it can adequately explain morality. Many of the same objections can be cited for optimistic humanism as were cited for social Darwinism because both base their ethics on [...]
Bill Pratt | February 9, 2009
In previous posts, we have built an understanding of seven aspects of morality that seem to be true. Following those posts, we examined a popular ethical system in the early 20th century known as social Darwinism, and we found that it utterly fails to explain what we know of moral norms. But social Darwinism is [...]
Bill Pratt | February 7, 2009
Continuing from yesterday’s post on What Is Wrong With Social Darwinism? Part 1: Fourth, morality is characterized by an “oughtness” that weighs upon us before we act. It is prescriptive, not descriptive. Ethics derived from evolution, however, are only descriptive. Ethicist Francis Beckwith offers the insight that evolutionary ethics only tells us “what behaviors in [...]
Bill Pratt | January 19, 2009
No, not many of them. I suspect that this just mirrors the fact that most people aren’t thinking about anything. But it shouldn’t be that way for those who call themselves followers of Christ. He called us to love God with our mind . Read these quotes below and see if any of them apply to [...]
