Thought of the Day

You know, I'm not sure if it is hilarious or sad that I was impressed by the activity of my first day of blogging, only to click on the "stop counting my visits button" and come to the realization that I was the only one visiting. Now I am considering changing my blog's description to "philosophy's colostomy".

Christianity VS Philosophy

         I am often left astonished that people in the believing community shun fellow believers for their foray into the discipline of philosophy. With so many of the "village type" atheists claiming logic as a weapon when belittling believers on Youtube or various other forums, philosophy and subsequent branches such as logic and reason have become four letter words for a large portion of the body of Christ. I am unsure if this is due to a lack of faith or anger, but one thing I am sure of, is that it is misguided. If you have ever heard the expression "fight fire with fire" then you should be able to follow my point I am trying to make. 
         When a skeptic says that the arguments for God's existence are "weak", they usually forget to mention that the arguments for their position are even more "weak" than ours. They usually will counter with "you can't prove a negative" but this is simply false, all one has to do is show that something is self-contradictory, - i.e. a married bachelor -  to prove it doesn't exist. If they say they still don't understand, then point them in the direction of a group of arguments called the "Incoherence of Theism" which tries to show the various attributes of God are self-contradictory; the omnipotence paradox for example. What has also been demonstrated is why the "I lack belief" card gets played. Here is a blog entry from PZ Myers addressing that. But let's stay on point.
         Now what I did there was use what I have learnt in my ongoing study of philosophy - like there is any other kind -  to answer something you hear and read so often. You can prove a universal negative! But I didn't learn that in the Bible, just like I am sure you didn't learn the many skills you use at the workplace or at home, such as cooking for instance. Philosophy is a discipline like any other, and Christian philosophers (and there are lots of them) are members of the body of Christ too.          
         So "fight fire with fire"? Well a lot of people cite Colossians 2:8 to try and drive the point home: See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. Here is the kicker to this, as William Lane Craig so eloquently put it (although I am unsure if he can lay claim to this quote),"The man who claims to have no need for philosophy is the man who is most apt to be deceived by it." In other words, if you want to ensure that you are not fooled by hollow and deceptive philosophy, you have to fight fire with fire. Or put your fingers in your ears, literally or figuratively, either way is fine.        
         We are all philosophers whether we realise it or not, we can be good at it and reap the benefits, or we can be bad at it an be conned out of the incredible gift that God gave to us, when His precious Son died on the cross for our sin.


In Christ


P.L.

Mable's Suffering

        One of the hardest things about belief in God has to be the suffering in the world. Whether it is the philosophical probabilistic problem of evil or an emotional problem brought one by the loss of a loved one or for tribulations we face in our lives, suffering sucks. This is something most of us in the 1st world really only experience in small doses and where suffering and pain and evil is what keeps most of us in the first world from belief in God, in the third world it is the complete opposite. 

        I, myself, have endured some horrible things that I wouldn't wish on anyone. But I know that it was through suffering I was brought to God and through suffering I came to belief, through suffering I have been strengthened and through suffering I will be sanctified. My story is one you don't hear everyday and this story that I am posting now is one that is different and ultimately inspiring. It brought tears to my eyes, and I for one can't wait to meet Mabel so I can let her know just how much her example of endurance helps me to persevere through my own challenges. This is taken off of a transcript of one of William Lane Craig's Defenders class over at the Reasonable Faith website.  

In Christ

P.L.

In weakness, God’s power is displayed most manifestly. So Paul accepted all the more gladly the weaknesses and the sufferings that were his lot because God’s power is made perfect in weakness.

I can think of no better example of this than the story of Mabel, which was shared with me by one of my former colleagues at Westmont College, where I taught for a year. Some of you may have heard this story when we talked about the problem of evil, but I want to share it again because I think it illustrates the point that I am trying to make here about the perfection of God’s power in suffering.

Tom, my colleague, had the habit of visiting nursing homes in the area where he would try to bring some cheer into the lives of the people who were there. And he talks about how one Mother’s Day he visited a particular nursing home. He says:

On this particular day I was walking in a hallway that I had not visited before looking in vein for a few who were alive enough to receive a flower and a few words of encouragement. This hallway seemed to contain some of the worst cases. Strapped onto carts or into wheelchairs and looking completely helpless.

As I neared the end of this hallway I saw an old woman strapped in a wheelchair, her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek and it had pushed her nose to the side, dropped one eye and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly. I also learned later that this woman was 89 years old and that she had been bedridden, blind, nearly deaf and alone for 25 years. This was Mabel.

I don’t know why I spoke to her. She looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in that hallway. But I put a flower in her hand and said, “Here is a flower for you, Happy Mother’s Day.” She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it and then she spoke and much to my surprise her words, though somewhat garbled because of her deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind. She said, “Thank you, it’s lovely, but can I give it to someone else? I can’t see it you know, I’m blind.”

I said, “of course,” and I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought I could find some alert patients. I found one and stopped the chair. Mabel held out the flower and said, “Here, this is from Jesus.”

It was then that it began to dawn on me that this was not an ordinary human being. . . . Mabel and I became friends over the next few weeks and I went to see her once or twice a week for the next three years. . . . It was not many weeks before I turned from a sense that I was being helpful to a sense of wonder. And I would go to her with a pen and paper to write down the things she would say. . . .

During one hectic week of final exams, I was frustrated because my mind seemed to be pulled in ten directions at once with all of the things that I had to think about. The question occurred to me, what does Mabel have to think about? Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, not even able to know if it is day or night. So I went to her and asked, “Mabel, what do you think about when you lie here?”

And she said, “I think about my Jesus.”

I sat there and thought for a moment about the difficulty for me of thinking about Jesus for even five minutes. And I asked, “What do you think about Jesus?” She replied slowly and deliberately as I wrote, and this is what she said,

I think how good he has been to me. He has been awfully good to me in my life, you know. . . . I’m one of those kind who’s mostly satisfied. . . . Lots of folks would think I’m kind of old-fashioned. But I don’t care. I’d rather have Jesus, he is all the world to me.

And then Mabel began to sing an old hymn:

Jesus is all the world to me,
My life, my joy, my all.
He is my strength from day to day,
Without him, I would fall.
When I am sad, to him I go.
No other one can cheer me so.
When I am sad, he makes me glad.
He’s my friend.

This is not fiction. Incredible as it may seem, a human being really lived like this. I know, I knew her. How could she do it? Seconds ticked and minutes crawled, and so did days and weeks and months and years of pain without human company and without an explanation of why it was all happening – and she laid there and sang hymns. How could she do it?

The answer, I think, is that Mabel had something that you and I don’t have much of. She had power. Lying there, in that bed, unable to move, unable to see, unable to hear, unable to talk. . . , she had incredible power.

I think that that is such a beautiful illustration of this point: God’s power is made perfect in weakness and manifested there. So we are, indeed, walking sticks of dynamite; but this may not evidence itself in great triumph or great success in some persons, who are called upon to suffer for the Lord. It may manifest itself in incredible strength and perseverance in hardship.

An Old Joke

When I heard this a while back it was introduced to me as "an old joke", so I will introduce it as the same. 

A first year philosophy major bursts into his professors office early one morning. His face unshaven, hair a mess, bags under his eyes and the same clothes on from the day before. He had the look of someone who had been up all night. In his hands he clutched a book by Descartes and with tears in his eyes said, "Professor! Do I exist!?" His professor looked at him with a cheeky grin and asked, "Who wants to know?"

Some Argumentation and Logic Basics Part 1

      Perhaps one of the scariest things you can hear is when someone refers to logic as "their logic". When I hear this I often think to myself that they have no idea how right they actually are, as often times, their rules of logic are just that, their own and no one else would dare to lay claim to them. Often times too, people get critical thinking confused with logic, but this is something we will cover in another series. In this series I want to cover the basics, being as how I am not a professional philosopher or logician myself, this is probably the only area I should be covering. Let's start with arguments; what they are, different types and what makes them sound.  

So what is an argument?

It's not a heated quarrel that often times leads to physical altercations, or hair pulling (if you play in the NBA). Well, it can be, but that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about an argument in the philosophical sense, which is a group of statements called premises which lead to a conclusion.  

What kinds of arguments are there?

There are two kinds of arguments. There are deductive arguments, whose conclusions are guaranteed from their premises and inductive arguments, whose conclusions are more probable than their negations. 

What makes for a sound argument?

Four things: 

1) It must be formally valid, which is to say that it's conclusion must follow from it's premises via the rules of logic. 

2) It must also be informally valid, which is to say that although it may be formally valid, it commits an informal fallacy in one or more of it's premises thus negating it's conclusion or must be reformulated.

3) It's premises must be true.

4) It's premises must be more plausible than their negation. You do not need to be 100% certain, and the more you get into philosophy, the more you realize that only your own existence can be 100% certain. A lot of people seem to forget this, or are just ignorant to it and presuppositions go a long way in what side of the argument you end up on.

So that is a quick introduction into argumentation. Next we will get into the 9 laws of inference. For a deeper discussion on philosophy from a Christian perspective - and what I am using as a reference - I would suggest picking up a copy of Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview . I can't stress enough how important it is that if you are a Christian, and interested in philosophy, to be learning this from a Christian perspective. 

For a more in-depth discussion on inductive and deductive arguments I would suggest going here:

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 

In Christ

P.L.

Introduction

Hi there! I'm writing this as a short introduction to you about me, in hopes that I come across interesting enough for you to come back.

So who am I? Well, first off, that is a deep question! But in descriptive terms, I am a Christian; a sinner saved by Grace; a disciple of Jesus; a lover of philosophy; apologetics; creative writing; science; music; clean humour and athletics. If these things interest you too, than you may be interested in this blog. You still might not be interested in my blog even if you are interested in these things, but that's OK, we can still be friends.

Hope to see you around

In Christ

P.L.