Bill Pratt | August 5, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you’ve probably noticed that there are quite a few blog posts dedicated to discussions of atheism (there is no god or gods) and the philosophy of naturalism (all that exists is found in the material universe). Atheism and naturalism generally go [...]
Bill Pratt | May 6, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, we discussed Francis Parker’s argument that the process of knowing cannot be physical. A purely physical account of knowledge simply does not work. In part 2, we pick up where we left off. Parker draws out more disturbing consequences of the materialistic account of knowing. [...]
Bill Pratt | May 4, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt If you are a materialist, physicalist, or naturalist, then you must say “yes” because everything reduces to physical processes on those views. Francis Parker, Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College, argues, however, that the act of knowing cannot be a physical process. Parker offers the following scenario that a materialist may [...]
Bill Pratt | January 7, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Some naturalists are betting on it, because ultimately physical laws, in their worldview, have to explain everything. For the naturalist, there is nothing but physical reality which is governed by physical laws. That being the case, everything, including the human mind, must be reduced to the purely physical and mechanistic. Philosophers [...]
Bill Pratt | June 24, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Christians believe that a supernatural being can be reasoned to by working backward from effect to cause. We observe ourselves and we observe the world around us (those are the effects) and we reason that a supernatural cause is the best explanation for the things we observe. This is how almost [...]
Bill Pratt | September 19, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Have you ever noticed that the most important questions in life cannot be conclusively answered by the scientific method of empirical observation and experimentation? We can use science to study the weather, to create wireless communication, to study the respiratory systems of whales, to better see the stars, to learn about [...]
Bill Pratt | July 23, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt According to John Heininger, the answer is “no.” What follows is an extended quotation from John, who submitted this as a comment to our blog. His comment makes some great points in a succinct fashion about the nature of science, especially with respect to the ruling of the Dover trial in [...]
Bill Pratt | April 30, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Not very well, unless you believe that fairy tales from evolution’s past count as evidence. This excerpt comes from A. N. Wilson in a recent article he wrote for the New Statesman. The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few [...]
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 [...]
Bill Pratt | February 6, 2009
As we saw in the previous post describing social Darwinism, it was a disastrous experiment for mankind in the twentieth century, but need it have been? Certainly some dastardly individuals justified their tyrannical reigns with it, but we must take a sober look at the theory and evaluate its ability to explain the moral truths [...]
