When You Go Back to School

I seem to go back to school every fall for at least one course. Not a single semester (or six-week period, or quarter, or whatever) has been wasted, because every time I learned something that I really needed to know. Sometimes students in school learn things that are very specialized and that not everybody needs […]

The Host of Heaven

The phrase “the host of heaven” occurs often in the Bible, mostly in the Old Testament. You will find this phrase used to denote the following: ((Adapted from James Orr, “Host of Heaven,” International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, ed. Orr, 4 vols. [Peabody: Hendrickson, 1939], 3:1433-34)) The stars and other heavenly bodies. There truly is a […]

A Pyramid Scheme

Those of us who are engaged the Restoration Movement are opposed to all man-made creeds and manuals for religion. Instead, we beg our friends and neighbors to return to simple obedience to the Bible and nothing else. Some have objected to the Restoration by saying something like this: “Creeds are actually good. Everybody in Christendom […]

A Christian’s View of a “Christian Worldview”

I grew up hearing a lot of Bible-based sermons, but nothing about “worldviews”. I became a Christian without knowing that I even had such a thing as a “worldview”. I did not start hearing regularly about the so-called “Christian worldview” until I went to some conferences on education where there were many denominational folks and […]

“Both Stories Can’t Be True”

If you pay attention to the political media, you constantly hear competing narratives, or ways of explaining the facts. Sometimes the various explanations of, for example, why a presidential candidate lost, are so radically different that we wonder whether all of the experts are even trying to explain the same phenomena. We may respond by […]

Leave It to the Experts?

A friend of mine (call him Bob) recently told me that, when it comes to religious doctrine, he lets the experts tell him what’s true. After all, Bob says, the experts have spent years learning how to interpret the Bible, and so we can trust them to tell us the what the Bible says. Bob […]

“You Can’t Reason Anyone into the Kingdom”?

I recently saw a video in which a prominent New Testament Greek scholar, Dr. Bill Mounce, talks about what apologetics can and can’t do. The content of the video is worth considering, because Dr. Mounce takes three critical positions, all three of which are typical of what is frequently called “presuppositional” apologetics. Think about each […]

Questioning Authority

One of the basic principles introduced to students of philosophy is that it is important to question authority, i.e., that one of the signs of a mature mind is that it doesn’t believe everything it is told by an authority figure simply because the source is an authority figure. ((E.g., Robert C. Solomon, et al., […]

The Eye of The Beholder (Part Two)

In the first part of this discussion, I explained why it is reasonable to think that truth is objective. I then noted that many people think that beauty, unlike truth, is totally subjective, or “in the eye of the beholder.” But if beauty is purely subjective, and standards of beauty vary from one person to […]

The Eye of The Beholder (Part One)

More than once, especially during my teenage years, I told my friends how great I thought some music was, and I was bewildered that they did not share my opinion! What could explain our difference of opinion, when the quality of the music seemed so obvious to me? Nowadays, many people think that truth is […]

- 2024

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