But even if you should suffer for the sake of righteousness, you are blessed. And do not fear their intimidation, and do not be troubled, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you yet with gentleness and reverence; and keep a good conscience so that in the thing in which you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ will be put to shame.  1 Peter 3: 14-16

The Holloway Quarterly - Apologetic Report
Thursday, 02 November 2017 19:52

Normativity and Motivation

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According to Christine Korsgaard, there is a distinction between explanatory and normative adequacy for a moral theory. In a really interesting passage, Korsgaard asks us to think from two points of view - a third person point of view and a first-person point of view. She then takes a standard...

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Monday, 30 October 2017 22:45

Notes: Divine Necessity by Robert Adams

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Adams writes "to refute two...objections to the doctrine of divine necessity" (742). In doing so, he provides a refutation for evolutionary naturalism and an argument for the existence of God.Obj #1: The proposition, 'God exists', cannot be a necessary truth because only analytic truths can be...

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Thursday, 26 October 2017 20:07

Combatting AI Hype

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In "The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions" Rodney Brooks argues that we ought to push back against mistaken predictions about artificial intelligence. Optimism about A.I. has simultaneously led to utopian visions of a workless future and fears of an AI that might destroy us. His main point is...

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Wednesday, 25 October 2017 23:01

CERN: The Universe Should Not Exist

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Physicists puzzle over how the universe got going. The most plausible answer that does not rely on the existence of God is that the universe emerged from a 'big bang'. However, it is not clear that the theory stands up to scrutiny. Apparently, the theory seems to entail that there would be no...

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Wednesday, 25 October 2017 05:09

Legal Nativism?

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Over at Law and Liberty, John McGinnis favorably quotes legal scholar Harold Berman. Berman apparently told The Fulton County Daily Report(although, I can't for the life of me find the quotation in its original context):
A child says, ‘It’s my toy.’ That’s...

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Tuesday, 24 October 2017 23:05

The Value of Hard Work

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"Labor not to be rich"(Prov 23:4)
"The thoughts of the diligent tend only to plenteousness; but of every one that is hasty only to want"(Prov 21:5)
"So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God." (1 Cor 10:31)
Hard work has a non-monetry value priorto its...

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Tuesday, 24 October 2017 19:59

Generous Interpretation - The Bedrock of Good Relations

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Relationships only work when we generally impute good motives to the speakers of sentences. Due to the nature of natural human languages, vagueness and ambiguity are inevitable in speech. Every-day talk is not supposed to be precise. But it works well because we assume the best of other people.At...

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Monday, 23 October 2017 20:24

Free Will: More Than One Game in Town

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I have spent many an hour in the company of friends who hold to a form of libertarian free will. Most conversations on the matter are gracious and good spirited. Some people are slightly mystified by my Calvinism, but they earnestly seek to know what it is and why anyone would hold to such a thing.O...

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Saturday, 14 October 2017 00:15

Original Sin: Disposition or Ability.

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Since the fall, human beings are said to be born with original or inherited sin. By whatever means we inherit this problem, we have it innately. We do not acquire it sometime in our lives. Paul tells us that Adam's sin affects the whole human species (Rom 5:12). Luther wrote, "all men are...

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Wednesday, 04 October 2017 05:49

Language and Fellowship

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"Aphasia, the loss of language following a brain injury, is devastating, and in severe cases family members may feel that the whole person is lost forever." (Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct,2).Is fellowship possible without language? I don't mean without the constant presence of language....

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Tuesday, 03 October 2017 00:06

Classical Education: Loving the Rock of Reality

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"Why Latin? Why Logic? Why only 'great' books?" 
Such are the questions levied at the classicist. They are good questions, but the best answers are not found in pragmatics, a list of the benefits of a classical education. Instead, the reason anyone ultimately prefers a classical approach to...

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Sunday, 01 October 2017 21:04

The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition

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In , linguist, Noam Chomsky, repeated his claim that there must be some innate feature of human beings that makes it possible for them to acquire natural languages:
“No one holds that the rules of language are innate. Rather, the faculty of language has a crucial genetic...

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Wednesday, 27 September 2017 19:14

Voices in Our Heads?

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James Krugel is Professor of Hebrew Literature at Harvard University. Krugel suggests that neuroscience can lend some understanding to biblical scholarship on how human beings might hear the voice of God. In a recent interview, Krugel suggests that the ancient worldview of the prophets included the...

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Tuesday, 26 September 2017 20:04

Why No One Mentions Dogs and Aliens Anymore

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No one lies about what happened to their homework anymore. We don't tell teachers that the dog ate it, or that aliens stole it. Instead, contemporary excuses are of two sorts. The nativistexcuse suggests that there is some innate deficiency in the student that determines that she is unable to...

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Monday, 25 September 2017 23:40

Human Beings - the New Morality and Kind Determination

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Pre-mods generally thought of human beings as a kind.Humans have a nature; they are 'rational beasts' or embodied souls. Mods were not so concerned with human nature; they were more concerned with what we could know and how we could know it. According to mods, we are thinking things or blank...

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Tuesday, 19 September 2017 20:18

From Sentences to God

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From a very young age, we can recognize the quality of sentences. We evaluate sentences according to some standard, some criteria of good, bad, better, or worse. If God created the world then it is likely that he would endow human beings with some way to recognize good and bad sentences according...

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Monday, 18 September 2017 21:19

Logic and Obligations

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Jason Lisle argues that we have a moral obligation to be logical: "Thinking rightly is not optional... It is something God requires of us." His argument is as follows:
To think logically is to think – in a sense – like God thinks. And, by definition, to be logical is to reason...

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Sunday, 17 September 2017 06:13

Alexander Campbell's Argument for the Existence of God

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Alexander Campbell was an influential pastor in 19th century. He came up with an interesting argument for the existence of God. I saw it nicely analyzed by Caleb Clanton. Campbell argues that human beings must have obtained the concept of God at some time in the past. But what best explains the...

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Sunday, 10 September 2017 07:31

If You Don't Teach This, You Can't Teach That

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Whenever Christians cite the their faith in support of some unpopular moral view, objectors often turn to a well worn argument. I call it the 'if you don't teach this, you can't teach that' argument. The argument turns on a comparison between the objectionable view in question and some other...

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Friday, 08 September 2017 21:04

Sentence Conscience?

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In Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace,Williams and Bizup present several pairs of sentences and invite the reader to consider which of the two he prefers. Here is an example:A: Once upon a time, as a walk through the woods was taking place on the part of Little Red Riding Hood, the...

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Tuesday, 05 September 2017 01:06

Why Jesus?

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In Greek, Jesus is Ἰησοῦς (pronounced, ee-ay-sooce). In early Latin an i could be used either as a vowel (short or long) or as a consonant (as a y). Thus, the Latin, Iēsus, was pronounced yay-sus. In medievil Latin, the letter j was used to replace i's that...

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Monday, 04 September 2017 21:26

Is Creationism a Science?

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I recently got into a debate over young earth creationism. One objection to the view went as follows:
"A scientific theory is a concise set of statements which has broad explanatory and predictive power within its purview. In order to be considered scientific, a hypothesis must predict what must or...

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Saturday, 02 September 2017 20:39

What Wendy Fails to Prove: Refuting Inerrancy-Denying Arguments

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I once went to a Don Fransisco show. I am now old enough to admit that I enjoyed it and persuaded my mother to buy a copy of .Somehow a memory of the concert sprung to mind recently so I started following him on facebook. Apparently, Don has no time for facebook. His...

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Saturday, 02 September 2017 05:34

Why Children Should Not Govern

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Possible Democrat presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, recently tweeted the following: "Children are our nation’s future. We must listen to them about what they care about and give them a voice in our government." I am sure Harris didn't mean that children's opinions should the the basis for...

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Thursday, 31 August 2017 20:44

Pronounambulation

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My paper can no more make an argument than my computer can hope for a Cubs win. People write papers and in those papers people express propositions in sentences that constitute arguments. 'I' is the first person pronoun and I use it to refer to myself, the person writing the paper. If I want to...

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