Very frequently, the Christian claim that the Bible provides valuable information on morality, including sexual ethics, is met with the objection, “But aren’t you cherry picking the Bible? After all, you don’t follow all those laws in the Old Testament either. If we should refrain from an activity because it is outlawed in the Bible (such as the sexual prohibitions outlined in … [Read more...]
What We Can Learn From Jehovah's Witnesses
Almost everybody has been visited at home by Jehovah's Witnesses, and most people probably wouldn't hesitate to call the group crazy. It's difficult to reach any other conclusion when they start conversations with, "Do you think God punishes people with natural disasters?" Nonetheless, I've found that when given an opportunity to speak, they're willing to discuss their beliefs, … [Read more...]
Thought Experiment: The Burning IVF Facility
Dean Stretton imagines a case in which an emergency arises and a person is faced with the choice of rescuing ten frozen human embryos or five adult patients. Since virtually everyone would choose to save the adult patients rather than the embryos, this indicates that the patients have a higher moral status than the frozen human embryos. [1] … [Read more...]
Philosophers' Carnival…
...is out, and includes my submission Does Grounding Moral Truth in God’s Nature Violate Hume’s Is-Ought? Thanks, Nick :) Submit to the next carnival here. . … [Read more...]
Deep Hunger and Dark Games
I'm a big fan of honesty in fiction. I don't want cookie-cutter personalities, saccharine love, or shallow stereotypes. I want the author to convince me to cheer for heroes and against villains - and I want to know why the heroes and villains are worthy of the label. I want grit and beauty, despair and hope, love and loss. If a story tells me what the world is like, I … [Read more...]
What Is Literary Apologetics?
As an apologist, I work in the field of cultural apologetics, and more specifically in imaginative apologetics -- which can be loosely defined as developing the use of the imagination, as well as the reason, as a mode of knowledge. Imaginative apologetics includes the presentation and exploration of truth through all the different art forms - painting, music, theater, film, … [Read more...]
Does grounding moral truth in God’s nature violate Hume’s is-ought?
The short answer is, no, only if you try to justify that truth by referring back to God’s nature. Here is the long answer. It is possible to blend Hume’s is-ought distinction in Ethics with Plato’s justified-true-belief theory of knowledge. A catchy name for it is the Ought-Is-Belief theory of knowledge, moral or otherwise. … [Read more...]
How To Fix Society According To Atheists
Yet another tactic that I see atheists use against God and religion, is visualized in the picture above (You'll have to click on it a few times to read it) This picture is apparently trying to convey that the quality of life in these societies is better because they're some of the least religious countries in the world. Such reasoning is quite problematic however, for various … [Read more...]
Bodily Rights Arguments
So far we’ve considered three different objections to the pro-life case: that the preborn are not humans biologically, that the preborn are human but are not persons, and that the preborn are humans biologically but are not full-fledged human beings in a morally relevant sense. That is, when someone claims the preborn are human but not persons, they agree that they are human … [Read more...]
It Won't Hurt Your Marriage
Redefining marriage won't hurt yours will it, so what's the big deal? How many of us have heard this one? What's the big deal about letting homosexuals marry? It won't hurt your marriage. This sounds like a powerful objection, but it's simply empty rhetoric. … [Read more...]