The other day I finally purchased Timothy Keller’s bestselling 2008 book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Riverhead). Why the long delay? Simple: it took that long to find a copy for 2 bucks at Goodwill and folks, I am cheap. I’m also cynical when it comes to bestselling […]
Archives for March 2013
Nike says “Winning takes care of everything.” Stalin agrees
I was taken aback by Nike’s sage advice in this new Tiger Woods ad released yesterday: You got to hand it to Nike. This takes chutzpah. Not exactly the Dalai Lama, eh? But I can think of many folk who would agree with the sentiment including more than a […]
God is responsible for the legally insane. Therefore, God exists
Two years ago Richard Kachkar stole a snow plow and began driving it down the streets of suburban Toronto. In the process he struck and killed police sergeant Ryan Russell. On March 27, 2013 Kachkar was found not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. Philosophically the verdict is interesting. On the one hand, the evidence presented […]
Does the US Postal Service discriminate against atheists?
The Atheist Shoe Company of Germany claims they’ve been discriminated against by the United States Postal Service. In short, it seemed that an inordinately large number of their shoe shipments to the US were disappearing enroute to their secular destinations. Could it be the “Atheist” packing tape they were using on their packages which was tipping off […]
A tale of three kitties
Say I wrote a book and it took off and then one day I got a call from a Hollywood producer who was offering me a hundred thousand dollars to option it for a film. Would I stop for one moment to ask if that is the right thing to do? Or would I say […]
Come on, stomp on Jesus! Do it!
Bilbo sent me a link for a news article titled “Professor Makes Students ‘Stomp on Jesus’“. For those of you not sufficiently motivated to click the hyperlink I provided here’s the quick scoop: a prof at a university in Florida asked his students to write the word Jesus on a piece of paper in an […]
God and Evil: The case for God in a world filled with pain: A Review
Chad Meister and James K. Dew Jr., eds. God and Evil: The Case for God in a World filled with Pain. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013). God and Evil is an expansive collection of nineteen essays (plus a sizeable appendix featuring the transcript of a debate between William Lane Craig and Michael Tooley). The […]
A hell of one’s own making
I will never forget the day in kindergarten when we baked gingerbread cookies. Each child got to decorate his or her own cookie with candies and sparkles. Then we placed them in the oven and waited. Soon after the teacher removed them from the oven and left them on the cooling tray. I waited eagerly […]
Abusing the Argumentum ad populum
Yesterday I was listening to an old Bill Craig debate on the resurrection (because what else are you going to listen to when washing dishes?) when I heard an audience member in the Q&A accuse Craig of argumentum ad populum … and then have the gall to start chanting “Shame!” Geez man, if you want […]
The chief end of Man in Reformed perspective
I’m currently reading through a new book called God and Evil (InterVarsity, 2013) for review in the blog. However, a comment by Paul Copan in his essay on the origin of evil caused me to pause. He writes of what he calls “strong Calvinists” that they find themselves in tension with “the Westminster Catechism’s own […]
On Halo Publishers
It was somewhere in 2004 or 2005 when I first received an email out of the blue from an editor at Oxford University Press asking me what I was working on at the moment. For a young professor that’s quite an email to receive. It’s like the consummate doodler of superheroes getting an email from […]
On the dying of Christopher Hitchens
At the moment I’m reading through Christopher Hitchens’ posthumously published Mortality (Signal, 2012). Hitchens lived his life as, among other things, a brash iconoclast of “religion” and slayer of many sacred cows. He especially seemed to despise the idea of God and regularly expressed his belief that a universe with God would be tantamount to […]
Is the loss of the autographa an argument against biblical inspiration? (Part 1)
The autographa of the Bible (that is, the original copies of the writings that now form our Bibles) are lost to us. This is not a serious issue for identifying what the texts originally said. Textual criticism has established the original text of the vast majority of the New Testament (well north of 99%). We […]
On John Loftus contradicting himself
It is kind of strange that my interview with John Loftus should have been overwhelmed by my one observation about his self-referential contradiction, but such is life. Here’s what John said: “I don’t have any beliefs about ultimate reality at all, for to have them I must positively assent to a proposition about ultimate reality.” […]
