Mar 31, 2019 | Epistemology - Trust
Some years ago I had an Instant Message conversation with a co-worker of mine. It had something to do with religion, and I’ll never forget a phrase she used: “For me, I’ll stick with science.” It was not the forum to challenge such a hollow contention, but it was indicative how many Americans and Westerners think. When we reflect on epistemology, which few people do (unfortunately most Christians as well), the question is how and if we can actually know things. Or in other words, can we have confidence that the things we know are in fact true. In the 21st century secular West the default position is that science is the only reliable way we can know things (scientism). Everything else is guess work or preference, or “true for you, but not for me.” Science can indeed give us wonderful and helpful knowledge, but it is dubious thing upon which to place our trust for true knowledge, and an extremely thin reed upon which to stake all our knowing.
(more…)
Mar 2, 2019 | Explanatory Power
I love secularists! They make the Christian apologist’s job so easy. For the last few hundred years of Western civilization, intellectuals and cultural elites have painted the inevitable ark of history as secularism. Full stop. As scientific knowledge increased average people would come to see religion and God as increasingly implausible and untenable. It is debatable about when this move toward atheism/materialism (the material is all that exists) started, but it is a supreme irony of history that it really gained momentum when a pious orthodox Catholic French philosopher, Renes Decartes, developed his work of philosophy as a defense against the growing atheism of the 17th century. The details of how this happened are not important for the this post, but once the starting point became man (cogito ergo sum) not God, and epistemology not metaphysics (how we know not what is the nature of reality), the jig was up. The absolute secularism of Western culture we are experiencing with a vengeance in 2019 was inevitable. But a funny thing has happened on the way to the secularists’ party: reality is crashing it!
(more…)
Jan 12, 2019 | Parents and Family
All the secular left-wing isms of our day (feminism, progressivism, liberalism, cultural Marxism, secularism, etc.) have culminated in a phrase so oxymoronic it must have been invented by Satan himself: “toxic masculinity.” To be masculine in the fevered, relativistic imagination of the secularist is poison. To our cultural elites this is simply axiomatic, so obvious only irrational religious people deny it. But true masculinity is never toxic, and in fact necessary for true human flourishing. (The popularity of Jordan Peterson with young males is one encouraging signs that the lies of the isms are possibly exhausting themselves.)
(more…)
Dec 5, 2018 | Epistemology - Trust
The history of philosophy is a fascinating study, and one Christians need to be familiar with. Most Christians, however, think that philosophy is for “intellectuals,” and not something they would be interested in or could understand. Yes, much philosophy is esoteric and difficult to understand, but the basic ideas really are’t. This is important because history reveals what ideas have given us the world we inhabit, and it’s culture, in the 21st century. In other words, in the title of an influential book by Richard Weaver written in 1948, Ideas Have Consequences. To take the title one step further, and as I’ve heard numerous times from the folks at Breakpoint and the Colson Center, “Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.” Many of the consequences of the ideas bequeathed to us from Western thinkers have been good, but the bad ones have been really, really bad. In fact, we live with the consequences of both every day. The bloody 20th century, with north of 100 million people killed, was a result of very bad ideas. (more…)
Sep 18, 2018 | Plausibility
I’ve always been a big history guy, but had never read Eusebius: The Church History until recently. As with almost everything in my life now, I had apologetic motivations for reading it. Skeptics are always distorting the history of early church, and I wanted to see what someone who lived so close to the beginnings of our faith had to say about it. I’ve always known that followers of Jesus endured horrible persecution for almost 300 years after his ascension, but reading an historian (263-339) who witnessed it first hand, and who reported on other first-hand accounts, was sobering. What stood out to me was something we in the 21st century secular West have a hard time accepting: this life is not all there is. Of course we Christians claim to disbelieve this, but we live much of our lives as if this life was indeed all their is. I’m as guilty of it as anyone else because in our thoroughly secular culture it’s very easy to do.
(more…)
Recent Comments