Fear and Trembling

Thanks to Apologetics 315 for a link to the Plantinga – Dennett debate on God’s existence. An anonymous first-hand account of the same debate is found here. From that account: In my estimation, Plantinga won hands down because Dennett savagely mocked Plantinga rather than taking him seriously. Plantinga focused on the argument, and Dennett engaged in ridicule. It is safe to say that Dennett only made himself look bad along with those few nasty naturalists that were snickering at Plantinga. The Christians engaged in no analogous behavior. More engagements like this will only expand the ranks of Christian philosophers and increase the pace of academic philosophy's desecularization.

Much has been written about the philosophical problems the existence of evil poses for the Christian faith. The philosophical question is simple: how can God be both all-powerful and all-good while allowing evil and suffering? I have attempted an answer to this intellectual question here , but I wanted to explore the personal side of it in this post. In my own life, many things have not worked out the way I had hoped. I have been quite disappointed. I’ve had childhood illness, watched my grandmother die of colon cancer when I was about 13, been through a painful broken engagement, been through a divorce, remarried only to struggle with infertility for several years, endured a devastating car wreck that has injured me permanently, watched my mother die a long and painful death at the hands of congestive heart failure, and wrestled with personal illness in adulthood. Above all, I have faced my own sins and failures with the pain that comes from regret and remorse. But my suffering ...

Thanks to Nightmares and Dreamscapes for the link to a video about the son of a Hamas leader who converted to Christianity .

Some conversations I’ve recently had over at The Atheist Experience made me think about some implications of certain of God’s attributes, namely His knowledge and His immutability. God is unchanging in His being, character (what theologians call His perfections), purposes, and promises. Yet God does act. He does feel emotions. And He acts and feels differently in response to different situations. God’s unchanging nature means that His knowledge does not change. He never learns new things or forgets things. He knows all things past, present and future, actual and possible, and knows them all equally vividly. This is why the universe follows logical laws . Logic helps us see how everything fits together (how facts interrelate). We can know it all fits together because God knows everything. There must be truth, and it must all logically inter-relate because it can be known in God’s mind vividly. In a sense, it can be know all at the same ‘time,’ so it must all be logical. God’s...

I was delighted to see the Steelers win the Superbowl last night. The last few minutes of the game were so exciting this year that it truly was super. The first football game I can remember seeing was when the Steelers won their first Superbowl against the Vikings. I have been a Steelers fan ever since. I can still see the faces of Bradshaw, Harris, Greene, Holmes, White, Greenwood, and others. Now I have a whole new set of faces. Steelers Superbowl victories are summarized here . As to Kurt Warner’s Christian witness, I would like to quote In Light of The Gospel : “Before the game, Warner won the Walter Payton Man of the Year award, which honors a player’s volunteer and charity work. That kind of work will last much longer than the Super Bowl victories and records.” There is more than one way to win!