Bill Pratt | August 3, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, Tim Keller presented historian N. T. Wright’s analysis of Jewish and Greco-Roman attitudes toward an individual resurrection. Would the ancient world have accepted the story of Jesus’s resurrection without serious skepticism? According to Keller, Wright’s research indicates that the Greco-Roman world would not have been [...]
Bill Pratt | August 1, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt A common claim of resurrection skeptics is that the people who lived in first century Palestine and the surrounding Roman Empire would believe just about anything. They would have easily embraced the story of Jesus’ resurrection without thinking twice. So, for the early proponents of Christianity who thought they really saw [...]
Bill Pratt | July 18, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In a recent post, we discussed the fact that whenever a person makes something or someone their highest love in place of God, divisiveness occurs. Tim Keller, in stark fashion, also shows us what the other negative effects of placing our faith in these God substitutes can be. Here is an [...]
Bill Pratt | July 13, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt I have just completed reading The Reason for God by Timothy Keller, which has provided me much material for the blog in recent days. In one powerful section of the book, Keller carefully draws out the distinction between one definition of “religion” and the Christian gospel. Today I pick up the [...]
Bill Pratt | July 11, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt I have just completed reading The Reason for God by Timothy Keller, which has provided me much material for the blog in recent days. In one powerful section of the book, Keller carefully draws out the distinction between one definition of “religion” and the Christian gospel. First, Keller clarifies what he [...]
Bill Pratt | July 8, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt A couple of years ago, I asked one of my good atheist friends what he thought the biggest problem facing mankind was. His answer: our propensity to form exclusionary groups. He explained that everywhere he looked, people were grouping themselves and casting everyone not in their group as “the enemy.” He [...]
Bill Pratt | June 17, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt A couple months ago I attended a debate between a Christian scholar and an atheist scholar at a local university. At the conclusion of the debate there was a Q and A session and one of the atheist students stood up and asked something like the following to the Christian scholar: [...]
Bill Pratt | June 15, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt The vast majority of us believe in some kind of supernatural realm, but more and more people are uncomfortable saying that one religion possesses more truth about the supernatural than others. We are becoming, in the US, a nation of religious pluralists. A popular mantra of the religious pluralist, according to [...]
Bill Pratt | June 13, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt For some secular, non-religious people, their hope is that religious people will some day be the minority, that mankind will finally grow out of this unfortunate phase of history. Religion may have helped our distant ancestors to explain where we came from, why we are here, why we have moral feelings, [...]
