I got a bit of pushback from Dule Tuggy, professor of philosophy at SUNY Fredonia, on my posts about Jesus and faith. Dr. Tuggy’s series on my posts begins here. His view is that although Jesus is never spoken of as having faith, nevertheless he demonstrated faith: I’ll stick to this point: the gospels don’t need to say that Jesus had faith in God, because they clearly portray Jesus’s faith in God. Before I respond to that, let’s jump ahead to…
I was looking over my bookshelf the other day when Fulton Oursler’s The Greatest Faith Ever Known caught my eye. I’ve never read it (like too many other books I own), but I know it’s about the apostle Paul. And it got me wondering: didn’t Jesus have the greatest faith ever known? No, he didn’t, at least not according to the Gospels. Jesus uses the word “faith” 41 times in the Gospels (English Standard Version), and in every case he was…
Voice your opinion: What is faith? A one-minute online questionnaire! ***** What is Faith? Following last Saturday’s McGrew/Boghossian debate, radio host Justin Breierley ran a Facebook poll asking Christians and non-Christians their views on faith. In cooperation with others who have had an interest in Boghossian, I’ve developed an improved version for many, many people to voice what they really mean when they use the word “faith.” It’s very short: most people will finish it in a minute or so….
This Saturday’s Unbelievable with Justin Brierley features a debate between Peter Boghossian, Ed.D., and Timothy McGrew, Ph.D., on Boghossian’s, Manual for Creating Atheists. It’s a radio show airing at 2:30 pm in England, and available live online everywhere else, from the link above. For North Americans, if I’ve got my time zones right it’s playing at 9:30 am EDT. Dr. Boghossian is an instructor in philosophy at Portland State University, whose book and lectures I have interacted with at length….
Randal Rauser on Peter Boghossian Chapter 2 of A Manual for Creating Atheists addresses the topic of “Faith”. In this installment I’m going to camp on pages 21-22 as I analyze Boghossian’s use of the concept of “deepity” and his list of alleged paradigm instances of deepitiness as regards faith. I’m camping on this brief section because it highlights effectively the degree of Boghossian’s unparalleled analytic confusion, inexcusable sloppiness, and barbaric hermeneutical presumption. [From Peter Boghossian’s Manual for Wasting Paper…
Part of the extended series Evidence for the Faith Ah, the interaction problem finally appears on the stage. I was expecting it to arise in the course of my discussions about humanness and evidence for the faith. I had decided not to include it until someone brought it up. The question is: if the physical brain is not the whole story, and if human mind is immaterial, how does that immaterial mind interact with the physical world? Not Ruled Out…
One more thing needs to be said by way of understanding faith and reason. I alluded to this briefly in a late edit to yesterday’s blog post, but I need to expand upon it. Here’s a somewhat more complete statement: Faith in God is entirely rational, but rationality will not cause faith in God. Faith is not just cognitive but also relational: to trust God is not only to agree to facts about God but to yield to his always-good…
Part of the extended series Evidence for the Faith I thought I was about to launch into a series on evidence for the Christian faith. Recent discussion here tells me there’s one more preliminary step to take first, however. I haven’t yet defined just what it is I’m about to provide evidence for. You see, there’s one sense in which the New Atheists are right: there’s no evidence for faith. They’re right, however, only to the extent that they misunderstand…
TFBW’s assessment of the Boghossifying project in my earlier post seems accurate. If Boghossian is correct, Abe cannot have veridical evidence for his faith. So let’s parse this out a little further: IF Abe has faith, and IF Boghossian’s substitutions are accurate, THEN we know Abe has no (veridical) evidence for his faith. We can conclude this strictly on the basis of Boghossian’s Substitution Theorem. (I made that name up. It seems appropriate enough. Abbreviating it might or might not…
