Picking and Choosing

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 by Dan Carrington posted in Apologetics, God's Character | Comments Off

If you were to ask most apologists, Christian philosophers or theologians what the most difficult objection was to Christianity, they would mostly give you the same answer. The Problem of Evil. Some might refer to this as the "Problem of Evil and Suffering" or some such thing, but it usually involves the same idea. Briefly, the Problem of Evil is the argument that says that if God is all loving and all good and all powerful, ...

Double Standards

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 by Dan Carrington posted in Apologetics | Comments Off

It always is fascinating to me when people will try to refute a theistic claim and then turn around and make a claim based on the very logic they are trying to use to refute the other's claim. An example of this came up during a recent debate with Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Lawrence Krauss. The topic of the debate was "Is there Evidence for God?" It seemed to me, while listening to the ...

The Truth – Works Both Ways

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 by Dan Carrington posted in Apologetics | 2 Comments »

The truth has an interesting characteristic about it. If something is true, you can generally work the idea backward or forward and it just works. Let's take a simple math problem, for example. If you add together 2 + 3, you get 5. Now, if you work it backwards and start at 5 and subtract 3, you end up back at 2. Most math teachers will tell their students that this is a good way ...

What About the Alternatives?

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011 by Dan Carrington posted in Apologetics | Comments Off

There are many arguments for the existence of God. Many of the best philosophers in the marketplace today will use various cosmological arguments, teleological arguments (arguments from design) and moral arguments among others. A common tactic from non-believers is to post some alternative explanation and claim that this eliminates the necessity of belief in God. These alternatives can often seem like  very powerful arguments against the Christian faith. It is not without certain problems, however. Before I ...

The Rhetoric of Philisophical Naturalism

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011 by Dan Carrington posted in Apologetics | Comments Off

It is no secret that rhetoric can be very powerful when used the right way. It can be a very effective tool to persuade people to your point of view without ever offering any sort of argument or evidence to back them up. There have been so many times that I have heard this tactic used to make Christianity, or even theism in general, seem ridiculous. However, when it is used in the way I've heard ...

Assuming Evolution

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011 by Dan Carrington posted in Apologetics | Comments Off

It seems to be taking me an obscenely long time to read through Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. One reason for this is the fact that shortly after starting the book, I began to realize how utterly ridiculous Dawkins’ arguments were against theism. They were riddled with double-standards and self-refuting ideas. There is one particular thing that I would like to draw attention to that is in his book. It is also an argument that I ...

Some Just Refuse to Believe

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011 by Dan Carrington posted in Apologetics | Comments Off

There was a podcast that I used to listen to called The Atheist Experience. One of the hosts, Matt Dillahunty, was once a Christian and was planning to go into seminary until he eventually lost his faith because he felt it was not reasonable to be believe any more. On one particular show, I remember him talking about the evidence that it would take to believe. He was asked if he would believe if his grandmother, ...

Indoctrination of Children

Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 by Dan Carrington posted in Apologetics | 1 Comment »

Perhaps the most outspoken person against the idea of religious indoctrination of children is Richard Dawkins. When writing about it in The God Delusion or talking about it in interviews and such, he becomes quite venomous toward those who would teach their children their own system of beliefs. What I find interesting is that he doesn't seem to even realize that he is begging the question. While Dawkins is a renowned biologist, one thing that those ...

Was the Resurrection Physical?

Wednesday, December 29th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Apologetics, Miracles | Comments Off

Over these many centuries since the time of Jesus of Nazareth, many ideas have been offered to attempt to explain certain things about Him and about God in general. Many of them have been denounced as heresies throughout this time. However, now and again, these same ideas that were written off as unbiblical or heretical crop back up in different ways. One such heresy is based on the gnostic offshoot called "docetism." Docetism is from the ...

Exodus

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010 by Dan Carrington posted in Apologetics | 2 Comments »

I have heard it often claimed that there is absolutely no evidence for the Old Testament recounting of the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt as told in the book of Exodus. This is a pretty significant claim since it is fairly well known that the Egyptians had a tendency to keep fairly comprehensive records. So, this leaves the question...Is there evidence of the Exodus? To answer that question, a quick search turned up some pretty ...