Posts Tagged ‘God’
Month Six as a Henry Fellow: Human Uniqueness, Origin, and Destiny
I’m having a fantastic time as a Henry Fellow at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School this academic year. To date, I’ve written four chapters in my popular level book tentatively called Eleven Stones: Discovering the True Story of the World, the majority of a chapter on “Teleological Arguments” for a textbook, a chapter on “Neo-Aristotelian Accounts of Divine Creation” to be included in a forthcoming book on divine causation, and the first part of a book on Theism and the Nature of Nature.
Why Did God Create Armadillos?
God is often portrayed as serious and cranky; a curmudgeon holding a thunder bolt in his hand ready to strike anyone having too much fun. God has no sense of humor, we are told. As a result, church is often portrayed as somber and formal, a weighty place where we sober-minded creatures go to worship our cranky grandpa in the sky.
Three Reasons We Should Care about Logic According to Isaac Watts
The great English theologian and hymn writer Isaac Watts is best known for classics such as “Joy to the World” or “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” Lesser known is that Watts was one of the premier logicians of his day. He wrote a text in logic that became the standard text at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Yale for well over 100 years. In the introduction to his Logic: The Right use of Reason in the Inquiry after Truth Watts provides three reasons why we should care about logic. These reasons are as relevant today as they were in 1724. Dare I say, they carry even more relevance today in a culture focused on image, overrun with anti-intellectualism, and captivated by mindless and constant attention to social media.
Does God Know What It Is Like To Be Me?
In the information age, knowledge has fallen on hard times. Google, spell-checking software, and public schools that “teach toward the test” have lulled us to sleep. Why learn when we can passively watch another video on Netflix? Why read a book when I can scroll through my Instagram feed? We don’t want knowledge. And we don’t want God to have it either.
The Evidence for God is Widely Available and Easily Resistible
When asked what he would say if, upon his death he found himself before God, the great 20th century atheist Bertrand Russell famously replied, “God, you gave us insufficient evidence.”[1] While this reply has the ring of wisdom and steady confidence to our modern ears, my guess is that such responses will sound hallow on the other side of eternity. Is it really the case that there is insufficient evidence for God, as the atheist so often asserts? Or, as the theist so often replies, is all creation “charged with the grandeur of God,”[2] pointing, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, to a transcendent reality?
God the Most Joyous Being in the Universe
We humans are a bit cranky. We upset easily. To share some painful examples from my recent past: I pick the wrong line in the grocery story causing me to become impatient and resentful. An unexpected meeting invades my plan for the day. Anxiety fills my heart. I feel unjustly attacked and return the favor by being rude to some undeserving victim. There is a daily struggle in my heart, a tug-of-war between self-assertment and surrender to Another. I long for wholeness. I long for the “fullness of joy” in God’s presence (Psalm 16:11). More often, my heart wanders from God, seeking solace in small things, created things, which will not ultimately satisfy.
God and Logic Part 1: The Logical Euthyphro
What does God have to do with logic? It seems that the reality of the laws of logic force God into a dilemma. Either God is subject to the laws of logic or he is not. If God is subject to the laws of logic, then God is not absolutely sovereign. If God is not subject to the laws of logic, then God is illogical. Either way, God is less than worship worthy. Or so it would seem.
The High Cost of Cynicism and Unbelief
In a comical scene that turns tragic, the Dwarfs in C. S. Lewis’s Narnian tale The Last Battle vow to never again allow themselves to believe in Aslan. Why? They had been duped into thinking that Puzzle (the donkey) was Aslan and once King Tirian revealed the truth about Puzzle, the Dwarfs become mystified at how easily they had been fooled. They determined to never be fooled again. They would rather remain in unbelief and cynicism than believe in Aslan, out of fear of being “taken” once more.
The Argument from Reason to God
Naturalism is the view that there are no supernatural beings. The natural world is causally closed: there is nothing outside the box, nothing transcendent, nothing that impinges on the world from beyond. Thus, the basic level of analysis is physics: all reality, at rock bottom is captured by tiny bits of matter (quarks? strings?) that are properly understood by the discipline of physics. On this picture, a deep puzzle—conflict even—arises: how is it that our world is intelligible, if man is just a product of chance and necessity? Whence reason?
God, the reasonable, and the possible
In my philosophy of religion class we are working through the excellent book Debating Christian Theism, edited by Moreland, Meister, and Sweis. The strength of this book is that it places leading defenders of opposing views on the nature and existence of God in dialogue. The book highlights the current state of play in the God debate as well as the strength (and firm ground) of the arguments for God in the face of atheism. It also highlights what I think is a kind of double standard that is sometimes applied to theistic arguments by its detractors.