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Christians claim that the Bible is not just like any other book. It is a book that is said to be divinely inspired. God moved the human authors to write books that contain the content God intends to communicate without entirely bypassing the human author. What follows from this? Let's say it's true. What properties does a divinely inspired book have that other books may not have? The very least we can say is that if scripture is divinely inspired then what scripture asserts is true. [22]  God cannot lie or be mistaken in any claim he makes. If the Bible is divinely inspired then everything it affirms as true is a statement God intended the human author to make. The uniqueness of this feature of the Bible is well illustrated by Plantinga: Scripture itself is taken to be a wholly authoritative and trustworthy guide to faith and morals; it is authoritative and trustworthy, because it is a revelation from God, a matter of God's speaking to us. Once it is clear, therefore, ...

Just how do we relate science and faith, specifically, the Christian faith? Christians who take their Bible seriously will also take reason seriously. God is eminently reasonable; one could even say God is reason. But all too often there is a feeling that Christians are caught between irrational, reason and science denying positions and compromise with their faith. Plantinga outlines three approaches to the problem. First, the two-truth  approach. According to this view one might affirm a proposition in science and deny it in theology. Second, the truth-from-a-standpoint approach suggests that we can hold to apparently contradictory propositions since we can be sure of both being true according to the discipline in which they are held. What we don't know is how the two propositions fit together. Not knowing how   the propositions fit together shouldn't diminish our belief in either. The  territorial  approach suggests "science... properly deals with matters ...

Herodias Jared Wilson likens our time to a transition from Herod to Herodias (see  here ). He quotes Mark: "For John had been saying to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” And Herodias had a grudge against him and wanted to put him to death. But she could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he kept him safe. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed, and yet he heard him gladly." John makes a public claim, rooted in his worldview, that is "heard gladly" by Herod even while not taken to heart. Herodias, on the other hand, reacts more strongly, she wants to kill John. Wilson suggests that the climate for those who follow in John's footsteps is becoming more Herodiasian. It is hard to make any empirical judgement about Wilson's claim, but it certainly seems right to me. When I joined Youth for Christ in 1992 there was general agreement that Christians were somehow honorable, vir...

John Calvin On the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation it is a little odd that we are still talking about Calvin's sensus divinitatis . For one thing, the sensus appears only at the beginning of the Institutes and is somewhat dismissed by Calvin as being inadequate for saving anyone. The sensus is also a species of innate idea. But ever since John Locke's Essay forced a retreat by nativists, talk of innate knowledge of anything has remained largely a niche activity. More recently, however, some philosophers of religion have proposed interpretations of Calvin's sensus that do not entail innate ideas and thus do not fall foul to Locke’s criticisms. Although much of the discussion of nativism has focused on the source of innate knowledge or its justification, I will focus on the nature of the sensus . Just what is it? There are two questions at hand. First, what did Calvin mean by a sense of the divine? In the first section, I will argue that, given Calvin...

In the canal of thought between epistemology and apologetics there exists a triad of thinkers who contribute, in different ways, to both disciplines. Yet few have articulated positive relationships between the thought of Cornelius Van Til, John Frame and Alvin Plantinga. Scott Oliphint, a Van Tillian, denounced Plantinga as beginning from an anti-Christian premise. Bahnsen, another Van Tillian, dismisses Frame for not being Van Tillian enough. Plantinga, for his own part, entirely ignores Van Til even though even though he presents very similar lines of argument. And then there are those, like my old prof, John Feinberg, who, though convinced of the success of Plantinga's work, are nonetheless  opposed to Van Til's and Frame's apologetic method. One exception to all this is James Anderson, associate professor of theology and philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte. Anderson is, not uncritically, favorable to...

I have become fascinated by a single thought lately. I began thinking about it last year and have been trying to understand it ever since. The thought is something like this: In order for anyone to know anything, someone must know everything. Expressed more visually: if there is knowledge, there must be KNOWLEDGE. I found the idea in the writings of Cornelius Van Til who writes, “there must be comprehensive knowledge somewhere if there is to be any true knowledge anywhere.” 1 The following, gleaned from something I wrote for a class during my MA, traces some of my thoughts on the matter, in particular, relating the idea to divine foreknowledge and human anxiety. What I want to suggest is that God's exhaustive, comprehensive, complete knowledge of the past, present and future is what makes human knowledge possible. Furthermore, in order for God to know anything, God must know everything, including all future events. Because God knows the future comprehensively, he is able to des...

We are used to hearing from the expert in our information-overload society. There is just too much to grasp on our own and so we need someone who spends his or her life on one subject. The media draw on experts to comment on news stories they feel ill equipped to analyse. But what if there was a person who knew everything about everything? God, it appears, fits that bill.