Tag: philosophy of religion
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An Evidence Problem
Professor Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, recently asked the people of faith who correspond with him from time to time to say what evidence they would accept for the non-existence or non-reality of God. His point is that he’s able to say what evidence he would accept for the existence or reality…
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Maybe Metaphysics After All
Almost no one operates without some metaphysical paradigm, if indeed anyone does. Being a modernist-postmodernist kind of thinker, I have gone along for decades assuming that whatever those metaphysical premises are, they are simply unprovable. At some point, a person just has to decide what she’s going to accept. That view traces back to Kant,…
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What People Mean By “God”
Professor Stevenson has written a remarkable book: clear enough to understand the first time through; short enough to read through again, just to be sure; engaging enough to want to do that; interesting and important enough to want to hang on to for future reference. Stevenson, Leslie. Eighteen Takes on God: A Short Guide for…
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Being Self-Aware
God is self-aware. [Surely, implied by Exodus 3:14. Still, never thought about it before. …]
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Christian Doctrine (6)
Summary notes on Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr. Christian Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994) Chapter 6 “What Is God Like? The Doctrine of the Attributes of God” The “God is dead” movement in theology represents the death of inadequate models of God: the indulgent “heavenly Granddaddy;” the sovereign, arbitrary tyrant; an abstract idea (98).…
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Christian Doctrine (3)
Chapter 3 of Christian Doctrine focuses on the doctrine of “general revelation” – the idea that God is or can be known “by the light of nature and the works of creation” (Westminster Confession, 1.1). Guthrie presents the following summary arguments – things people have offered/frequently offer in favor of the doctrine of general revelation:…
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Maybe Not So Little
An article showed up in my Flipboard feed yesterday, “Little Things Can Make an Atheist.” I read it, because I was curious to see what the “little things” were. It struck me that the “little things” the author referred to were specific theological claims, rather than propositions about defensibility of the reality of [any version…
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God’s Communication Problem pt. 3
The daily lectionary this morning included Jeremiah 36, the story of Jeremiah getting Baruch to transcribe a scroll with all the messages against Judah and read it out at the Temple; Temple officials look over the scroll, and then take a report of it to the king, Jehoiakim; Jehoiakim calls for the scroll to be…
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God’s Communication Problem pt. 2
Continuing to think about the communication problem. Assuming God, and God’s classical attributes (“the omnis,” which is what got me thinking about this problem in the first place, the seeming inconsistency of the omnis with God’s ineffective communication …): God differs from humanity. Not following Barth into the land of the ganz anderes, the “wholly…
Matters of Interpretation 