For many Christians, the existence of God is self-evident, reconfirmed in a thousand ways, and so there’s a tendency not to spend too much time on the introductory course, the “why I know there’s a God 101” course. It’s good to do so, however. Let’s consider now the purpose and design we instinctively impute to […]
Read more...Author: Albert
Simple Determinism
A central tenet of theist and especially Christian beliefs is that people have agency; that is, moral choice and therefore moral responsibility, based on a moral Authority outside themselves. The modern view of reality, however, is that there is nothing beyond matter in motion governed by laws of physics, and therefore no God, and therefore no […]
Read more...Will to Believe
Let’s look at the objection many agnostics make to belief in God: “If I don’t know, I don’t know. Nor do you. One believes because he wants to believe, that’s all.” Even if this were a completely viable position to take, it wouldn’t support a stance of perpetual agnosticism, as we shall see. Williams James was an […]
Read more...New York Public Library
We’ve talked a lot about “transcendence” on this site. “Transcendent” is from the Latin transcendere, “climb over, surpass.” We’ve used it often here in its usual sense of the supernatural “transcending” the natural, such as by experience of an interior contact with a numinous realm: the felt experience of God. This is being written in […]
Read more...Modern Oregon Trail
Micro-review: The Oregon Trail/A New American Journey, by Rinker Buck. This book came out to a lot of advance publicity in 2015. It’s the story of the author’s and his brother’s covered wagon trip from Independence, Missouri to eastern Oregon, following the old Oregon Trail as closely as possible. I picked up the book because […]
Read more...God and Origin of Life
Did the first life originate through natural processes? Did life begin in the primordial goo without direct involvement of God? To frame it as a theological question, did God create life directly and immediately, or did God set in motion the mechanical processes by which life would eventuate? If science ever demonstrates how life could […]
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