Posted in apologetics, pluralism, tolerance on 21 April 2008 | 6 Comments »
Well I’ve finally dug myself out from under a pile of year-end marking and grad has come and gone, so I thought I should at least wrap up some of the topics we covered over the past few weeks of my apologetics class. We spent the last few classes talking about the challenge [...]
Posted in Jesus, apologetics on 18 April 2008 | 3 Comments »
The Christian faith is dependent on an historical event; it is dependent on the fact of the empty tomb. As Paul himself wrote, ‘If Christ has not been raised then your faith is futile’ (1 Cor 15:17). So there is very little doubt that, at least historically, Christians have been people who have staked [...]
Posted in Jesus, apologetics on 29 March 2008 | 2 Comments »
We live in a world in which the name ‘Jesus’ is not entirely unfamiliar. The Western world was born out of the ruins of the Roman empire and this world, from the time of Constantine onward, was a fusion of imperial power and the Christian religion. With this as the historical backdrop of [...]
Posted in Jesus, apologetics on 29 March 2008 | 1 Comment »
It would not be much of an overstatement to say that the historical claims about Jesus of Nazareth get very close to the heart of the Christian faith. While Christianity may be many other things, it is above all, a commitment to a personal God that we believe was revealed in an actual flesh [...]
Posted in apologetics, theodicy on 6 March 2008 | 1 Comment »
We’ve spent the better part of the last three weeks talking through what is surely the most significant challenge to Christian belief and undoubtedly one of the questions that casts a shadow over all of human existence. The problem of evil has occupied the brightest philosophical and theological minds for most of recorded history [...]
Posted in apologetics, creation, science on 12 February 2008 | 5 Comments »
Having discussed some of the theoretical issues, we’re now dealing with a succession of challenges that are often made by inquirers and critics of the Christian faith. The first of these has to do with a cluster of issues that could fall under the heading of the perceived conflict between science and religion. [...]
Posted in apologetics, faith, theology on 5 February 2008 | 5 Comments »
The title of this post is somewhat misleading but it speaks to the difficulty of making a positive case for the existence of God. I don’t mean to simply categorize all of the mystery inherent within human experience and then apply the name ‘God’ to it but an apologetic interest in the question doesn’t [...]
Posted in apologetics, atheism on 29 January 2008 | 20 Comments »
Before getting into some (in my opinion) useful questions that point toward God’s existence, we went through some of the reasons why belief in God has come to be seen as less likely over the past few centuries. Here I borrowed from Alister McGrath’s The Twilight of Atheism which presents a helpful survey of [...]
Posted in apologetics on 24 January 2008 | 3 Comments »
Given the previous discussion on what kinds of knowledge are available (personal and impersonal) and the implications that this might have for our understanding of truth and how we might approach it, it is important to return briefly to the goal of apologetics (at least as I’m conceiving it).
For me the question of whether or [...]
Posted in apologetics, epistemology on 17 January 2008 | 19 Comments »
So where to begin a course that aims to demonstrate the plausibility of the Christian faith? It seems to me that any discussion of whether or not Christianity makes sense, whether or not God can be known (indeed whether or not God even exists) must start with a theory of knowledge. What kind [...]
