Alvin Plantinga on the new iconoclastic book by philosopher Thomas F. Nagel: [Nagel has] performed an important service with his withering critical examination of some of the most common and oppressive dogmas of our age. Read the whole review.
Culture
Isn’t It Ironic, Don’t You Think?*
Last week or so I was driving somewhere and listening to an ad on the radio, an ad that (like those Geico commercials [TV, 2007*] with the Pierce Brosnan look-a-like) was intentionally ironic, self-referential. That is, it made fun of itself, pretending to be a non-ad...
Two Interesting Articles From Arabs on the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Two interesting articles on the Arab-Israeli conflict: Abdulateef Al-Mulhim, a retired commodore of the Royal Saudi Navy, argues that Arabs have invested untold billions in a fruitless conflict with Israel that has only left their own people divided, poor, and...
The Artistic Theologian
Check Out The Artistic Theologian, a new journal put together in part by my friend Scott Aniol and, in its first issue, featuring articles by Scott, Kevin Bauder, and T. David Gordon. I was given the opportunity to submit a review to its inaugural volume.
A Breathtaking, Truth-Suppressing, Tu Quoque Argument Tops the NY Times Most-Emailed List
The most e-mailed article at nytimes.com right now is opinion writer Thomas L. Friedman's "Why I Am Pro Life." Friedman, who comes from the left side of the opinion roster, argues that the right has hijacked the abortion debate by winning the title "pro life." He...
The Secularist’s Religion
Unbelief is not described in Scripture as absence of belief, but as mis-directed belief. Religion ... is man’s ineradicable situation. —H. Evan Runner
Review: Everyday Church: Gospel Communities on Mission
Everyday Church: Gospel Communities on Mission by Tim Chester My rating: 4 of 5 stars The times they are a changin’. If America ever was a Christian nation, it certainly isn’t one now. It would do us good, therefore, to listen to conservative Christians whose nation...
Read more
[All knowledge] proceeds out of faith. All science presupposes that we ourselves believe; presupposes a belief that the laws of thinking are correct; presupposes beliefs about life; and presupposes above all faith in the principles from which we proceed…. The conflict is not between faith and science, but between the claim that the present state of the cosmos is normal or abnormal…. It is not faith and science, but two scientific systems that stand, each with their own faith, over against each other…. They are both in earnest, disputing with each other across the entire domain of life and cannot desist from the attempt to pull to the ground the entire edifice of each other’s contradictory claims.
Kuyper on Overlapping Magisteria
[All knowledge] proceeds out of faith. All science presupposes that we ourselves believe; presupposes a belief that the laws of thinking are correct; presupposes beliefs about life; and presupposes above all faith in the principles from which we proceed.... The...
Frame on Churches in Politics
[One] danger [for politically active churches], of course, is that churches will get so caught up in political activism that they lose sight of Christ. The solution is not to avoid political issues, but to see politics as [Abraham] Kuyper did, as an opportunity to...
Instagram vs. Kodak
I’m not a business guy. I’m a blogger. A purveyor of amateur opinions. But now that I’ve worked in a business for six years, I’ve come to recognize that some business savvy is required to get things done—even and especially if you hold none of the purse strings. (I...
The Flip Side of Atheism
This thought has really stuck with me since I read it some weeks ago: It's belief [and not unbelief] that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while...
Thomas Nagel
Even those who cannot accept the theist alternative should admit that Plantinga’s criticisms of naturalism are directed at the deepest problem with that view—how it can account for the appearance, through the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry, of...