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Those opposed to the pro-life movement think that their opponents have a nefarious motive for their activism: "they don't really care about babies. They just want power or control, or they just want to win." In the following debate, the Hitch makes this explicit. Watch Bill Craig's response. Starts at 1:16: Craig's response is right. The Hitch presumes that Christians don't have the intellectual resources to care for people in the present. All they have is a hope that the future, post-resurrection world will be better. All the Christian talk about life is really a veiled attempt to control others. Craig's response is the denial of this premise. He argues that we do indeed have the intellectual resources to care about people in the present. It is because people are made in the image of God that each person has intrinsic moral worth and comes with a set of inalienable rights. In other words, Christians have good reason to care for people in the present...

Louis Pojman makes a convincing case for the conclusion that if there is any case for the equal dignity of human beings, then God exists: “The doctrine that all people are of equal worth, and this endowed with inalienable rights, is rooted in our religious heritage…The originators of rights language presupposed a theistic world view, and secular advocates of equal rights are, to cite Tolstoy, like children who see beautiful flowers, grab them, break them at their stems, and try to transplant them without their roots. The egalitarian assertions of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights are similar to those of our Declaration of Independence, with one important difference—God is left out of the former; but that makes all the difference. That posit…is not just an ugly appendage or a pious afterthought but a root necessary for the bloom of rights.” (295). His argument begins with two contrasting assumptions, the empirical counter-evidence to egalitarianism (C...

In honor of earth day, here are three fallacious earth day arguments: The first one suggests that scientific research strongly entails some particular government policy. It is used to suggest that any disagreement over government policy is directly related to one's attitude toward science. Here is a formal version: If you accept science, then you accept policy P. You reject policy P Therefore, you reject science A good example of this sort of fallacy is provided by Bill Nye (a good source of silly fallacies , by the way). "All science is political" he said. And then he proceeded to bash the highly qualified scientist who disagreed with Nye's position on the role of government in reducing emissions. The problem with the argument is that even if one accepts the most 'alarmist' conclusions about human damage of the environment, this does not entail any particular government policy. The second sort of argument links a worldview with science such tha...

Conservative Christians keep losing at culture wars. So argues Johnathan Merritt . Merritt thinks he knows why. They are obsessed with arguing about worldview. Consequently, Conservative Christians are failing to persuade people: They focus on ideology while ignoring people: When Christians talk about [x], they often frame it as a clash of worldviews or ideologies...Those who have a more progressive view... use concrete language and share specific stories. They talk about real... people with real struggles who experience real oppression. Narrative framing usually wins in public debates because it touches listeners’ hearts. Whether or not Merritt is right about convincing people is hard to tell. What I would like to quibble with is the suggestion that to argue about worldviews is to ignore people. Worldviews matter and are worth arguing about because worldviews are about people . Every personal story assumes a worldview, every way we interpret the world assumes a worldview, ...

The picture of a dead lion and the videos of Planned Parenthood workers went head to head this past month. Who won? Time will tell. One thing we do know is that evidence, the type of evidence you can see and hear, doesn't always change a person's mind. "How can anyone, any human being, see that poor defenseless lion and feel no moral outrage?" some people said. "No one with any moral scruples can watch the Planned Parenthood videos and remain a supporter of such an organization," others cried. Yet, for some reason, many people defy the supposedly obvious evidence. Are they mad, irrational or psychopathic? I suppose many people just throw their arms in the air and give up. "How on earth can I persuade someone about the evils of Planned Parenthood or big game hunting if they cannot see what is in front of their face?" Of course, they did see it; they just didn't get it. There are many other evidences that seem, to some, to be incontro...

Naturalism has peeked. And when it has collapsed something else will take its place. The question is: What? Naturalism is a combination of a method and an assumption. Methodologically, naturalism is the attempt to understand the world through the natural sciences. The assumption, which, theoretically at least, can be overturned at any moment, is that all that exists is material (whether these two are happy bedfellows is a discussion better left for another day). I say that this assumption can be overturned at any moment because natural sciences don't claim to have all data at their finger tips. Fairies could be found at the bottom of an English garden and God might appear from behind a far off planet, but neither of these events seems plausible given only the data that the natural sciences have produced so far.

1+1=2. What has this got to do with worldview? Surely math has no need of a worldview, 1+1=2 in any worldview. Roy Clouser argues that 1+1=2 might be true in any worldview, but why it is true varies tremendously. Clouser considers the options and spots a mischievous assumption - all mathematical theories depend on a religious assumption.

What worldview, apart from Christianity, can coherently account for, explain and oblige hatred for sin and love for a sinner? Answer: not one. This cliche has been the standard response of the church to issues such as gay marriage. It attempts to articulate that while the church opposes sinful actions that does not mean we oppose people in the same way. Its significance is not that it sounds reasonable, but that it is possible at all. How could it be that the sin of a person can been opposed, hated even, yet the person can be deeply loved at the same time by the same person? It is possible because Christianity is true. Let me try to show you how. Christians believe that all human beings are created by God and endowed with the image of God. They are valuable in an objective sense since they are valued by God. Human beings were not always sinful. Adam and Eve were sinless before their rebellion. All human beings are now subject to fallen conditions, rendering them sinful, capable of...

A class changes your life. Ideas gained from reading, discussing and listening to lectures usually transforms, to some degree, how one sees and lives in the world. This fact is fast becoming the aim of education. Whereas modernity stressed the objective analysis of differing theories, new education systems will, perhaps, stress what has, up to now, only been implicit - that theory should shape life.

The aim of this post is cultural awareness. Not merely an awareness of what is happening in culture, what culture produces and an awareness of one’s own reactions, but an awareness of assumptions, “underpinnings” as I will call them.