tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post4832362890811150497..comments2024-03-27T09:11:00.450-04:00Comments on Incinerating Presuppositionalism: Response to MadMaxBahnsen Burnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-81381537740370418362009-09-01T19:18:30.531-04:002009-09-01T19:18:30.531-04:00The very notion that "God cannot lie" se...The very notion that "God cannot lie" seems to contradict what the <a href="http://www.reformed.org/documents/wcf_with_proofs/ch_II.html" rel="nofollow">Westminster Confession of Faith affirms</a>, which is that the Christian god is "most free". It references Psalms 115:3 to support this: "But our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased." If it is the case that "God cannot lie," then how can one say it is "most free"? It is not free, it is constrained in a way that even man is not. Moreover, since "God cannot lie," its truth-telling is amoral - it has no choice in the matter. Where there is no choice, there is no morality. So the Christian god certainly could not itself be moral for this reason, and thus it is incoherent to point to it as a model or standard of morality. <br /><br />Also, Bolt did not deal with my point about lying by omission. Since the Christian god selects what it will reveal to human beings, this means that it chooses not to reveal certain things. Since there is such a thing as lying by omission, how does the Christian escape this problem? I suppose that if Bolt had a good response to it, he would have shared it.<br /><br />Regards,<br />DawsonBahnsen Burnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11714522.post-84010484878496240652009-09-01T13:35:45.600-04:002009-09-01T13:35:45.600-04:00Dawson,
I'm so glad that you liked the Bernst...Dawson,<br /><br />I'm so glad that you liked the Bernstein article. Bernstein is my favorite Objectivist writer. His writing has great precision. He wrote an essay on heroism which was awesome. He carefully defines the word breaking it into 4 subparts and then explains every one. It was the best thing on heroism that I ever read. In the essay I linked to, he totally destroyed Stark's thesis. It was a joy to read.<br /><br />Regarding Noetic, I too have seen it referred to as a stand in for all things cognitive. But a few Christians I have encountered use it to give consciousness a supernatural aura as they describe it as an intuitive conduit to a "higher reality" which the "materialist" secularists, of course, can't disprove. <br /><br />And thanks for the link to Chris Bolt's video. I didn't listen to the whole thing but it sounds like he is doing what theists always do - give their god inherent properties so as to avoid contradictions; i.e. "god can't lie", "god can't violate the laws of logic", "god can't square circles", "god can't declare eating small children as the moral good", etc..<br /><br />Regards,<br /><br />MMmadmaxhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14375140131881725965noreply@blogger.com