God. Real. Right.

2.1.2.1.3 The significance of contingency and revelation are directly proportional.
This post does not argue that revelation would have to be unimportant if determinism were true, but rather that the more likely indeterminacy and contingency are, the more fundamentally important special revelation is. It is a point which emerges from the freedom of God and leads then inevitably to the responsibility of people to respond to submit to the revelation.
The fact that the universe could be otherwise, its contingency, is what makes revelation so essential. There are a couple of different means by which humanity can discern truth: reason and revelation. By reason (which is really just an aspect of general revelation) people discern what is necessarily true. (At the conclusion of this post it is implicit that “necessarily” only means something is necessary subsequent to God’s choice to make it so.) But truth which cannot be known by reason alone—what is not necessarily so, but only contingently so—people can know only Read the rest of this entry »

The closer an election, the greater the shallow promises intended to convince a few more voters toward one side or the other. Since by definition the majority of people are not wealthy, many of those shallow promises are aimed at the middle class and lower. “We will not raise taxes (or we will lower taxes) for anyone making less than $xxxx.” But promises are not the only way to win a middle-class heart. There are also attacks on a minority, in this case the wicked people who make more money than they do. “Greedy corporate executives have abused the free market and they ought to be punished.” Never mind that it is not greed, but the success at acting on their greed which actually aggravates the critic’s audience. That is, there is no political bounty to be had by attacking those who are greedy but fail to gain wealth through it: only those whose greed brings them wealth face the criticism, revealing the hypocrisy of a criticism motivated more by its disdain for wealth (or even profit) than for greed.
But back to the point: even a cursory analysis of those attacks extrudes Read the rest of this entry »

This post continues the series begun here, the to-date-compilation of which is available here.
2.1.2.1.2 That God repents is evidence that God makes things the best, not that He must simply act within some externally defined best.
Even accepting the mistaken idea that there are a finite number of possibilities (too great a limit on God) there is still no reason to believe that there cannot be a plurality of morally equivalent possibilities. The scriptural use of “repentance” in reference to God makes the point. Reducing repentance to relenting neither addresses the problem nor deals fairly with the vocabulary—no one has a problem using the same word to mean repentance when it concerns humans. Is it not the case that every time God has mercy it is because He has repented? His pronouncement of judgment is not false. His mercy is real because the condemnation of the guilty is real and that guilty soul’s future without God is as really condemned as any future can be real. His act of mercy then overturns His pronouncement of judgment—which is why it is mercy. It is not necessity. If it were necessity, then His mercy Read the rest of this entry »

What seems like a contradiction in terms is actually a handy tool for analyzing almost everything people do, whether in isolation, in relationships, in society in general, or as a political body. The mechanism which produces the “problem with solutions” can be described behaviorally and seen in action everywhere. A quick look at ethics will produce the realization that there is a problem with such behavioral solutions. And finally, it needs to be made clear that Christian teachings oppose such behavior.
The mechanism which produces the problem:
Behaviorism is hardly a Christian enterprise. The doctrine Read the rest of this entry »

A note on terms in the argument: in this post, biology serves as the representative of material reductionism or just of naturalism, since it is the closest a reductionist can come to anything complex or progressive enough to explain the features which non-reductionists claim to exist. Similarly, evolution in this post is simply the most consistent model with which to explain biological advantages. In both cases, the position given to naturalism is intended to give it the most favor available.

Humans have many behavioral and functional characteristics which are biological by nature, none of which makes us human. To be clear, they may be necessary to being human, but they are not sufficient. For example, it is necessary to eat to be human. But many non-human things eat. So what separates humans from, say, pigs? Not much, biologically. But plenty, if Aristotle has anything to say about it; reason, to be specific. So Aristotle calls man the rational animal. From his perspective the definition is sufficient because it distinguishes humanity from every other thing.
There are characteristics other than reason which could be used to pull humanity out of the category of all other animals: consciousness, spirit, aesthetics, or ethics, for instance, depending on who is doing the pulling. But the one of most interest here is ethics.
Long since Aristotle, skeptics regarding human nature have argued that there is no cut-and-dry distinction between other animal species and humanity. There are differences of degree, but nothing absolute, they contend. Previously, value-laden characteristics like ethics seemed inexplicable in terms of biology alone. But once evolutionary theory takes on a social element, that explanation no longer seems Read the rest of this entry »

John Wohlstetter’s book, The Long War ahead and the Short War upon Us, is a politically and culturally plain-spoken revelation about the ideological realities behind the already present and inevitably future conflicts facing Western Civilization. For details on the book, visit http://www.longshortwar.com/.
The best quote from the book is a famous one normally attributed to British General Charles James Napier from the 19th Century. It deals with the Hindu practice of Sati:

You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.

Unbelievably, the practice exposed by Napier’s quote is still sometimes referred to as “self immolation” and still defended as an honorable form of expression for women by some multi-culturalists. Jiminy Cricket!

Still on the second part of the overall journey engaged by this set of posts, this entry attempts to show why a sub-point of the claim that even God acts only within reason (rather than with radical freedom) results in a fallacious limitation of God’s sovereignty.
2.1.2.1.1 There is no reason to exclude contingency from descriptions of God.
As the previous post argues, there is no reason to believe God needed to choose between worlds, one of which was best or even better than the others.
But there is something else wrong with the assumption that this world is the best of all possible worlds. The rationalist’s question is why, if God knows everything about all possible worlds and has all power, it would not make sense to surmise that He has actualized the best of those worlds in submission (a term anathema to the supremacy of God) to reason. The question itself is misleading and overlooks something about what is possible to God.
There is an old paradox about Read the rest of this entry »

This question is particularly addressed at kingdom-minded believers who claim that patriotism, military service, and government authority are the wrong places for Christians to live out their Christianity. It is a very simple question rooted in the golden rule (the universalization of ethical claims; what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.)
What do believers pray will come from government, from those in authority? Simply this: “…that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” 1 Timothy 2:2. How do “kings and all who are in authority” bring about such a condition? Although Romans 13 does make explicit that it is accomplished with the sword, that passage would not be necessary to figure it out. In all the affairs of men, it is the exercise of Read the rest of this entry »

Warning: this post contains dangerously opiatic speculation about truth and intelligence. It is an effort to clarify for myself what I see as a misguided feature of some hermeneutics, some apologetics, and much if not most skepticism. But it simply will not be interesting to people with real lives!
Intelligence can mean many different things: for example, the mental ability to comprehend things, the essential element of a purposive existence, and the ability to perform computer functions. This explanation uses the first definition, the mental ability to comprehend. So the level of intelligence refers to the capacity of a given person to comprehend something at a given time. The given time is important because it is beyond doubt that mental capacity is variable within a person over time. (For instance, the more a person memorizes, the greater becomes that person’s ability to memorize.)
Truth can also be defined many different ways, only one of which has any real meaning. So while authors can define truth as Read the rest of this entry »

How should Christian parents, church leaders, friends, and strangers react when they hear about the pregnancy of a young woman who is not married? This issue is very easy to address once confusion over it is resolved.
Where is the confusion? Well, when an unmarried teenager gets pregnant, there are actually two distinct issues influencing people’s behaviors and opinions: the sexual activity which brought about the pregnancy and the pregnancy itself.
Now there really should be no controversy regarding the sexual activity itself. Sex outside of marriage is precluded for those who follow Jesus. Admittedly, the presumption and even pressure of society is toward exactly what is precluded by New Testament Christianity, but there is no getting around passages against “promiscuity”, “fornication”, and the activities referenced by other lead-up and descriptive terms throughout the New Testament. But those prohibitions apply whether pregnancy is possible or not; even whether STD’s exist or not (and, duh, of course they do). So if an observer is not the parent of the pregnant teenager and does not have knowledge of the sexual activity of every non-pregnant teenager she is around then Read the rest of this entry »