Posts

Showing posts from May, 2009

Sin, Evil, And The Boondock Saints

[Read this only if you like philosophy] The great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton had this idea that of all the central Christian doctrines, sin is the only one that is empirically evident. That means that, of all of our core beliefs (God's sovereignty, human sin and error, the Incarnation, the atonement of the cross), the idea that there is evil is the most provable based on observations of the world around us. I think there are some hard-headed Nietzscheans and the like who would reject the notions of good and evil, but these are philosophical idealists. I also think that, for the most part, all the upper echelons of philosophical academia have abandoned this notion of "absolute moral relativism". Heck, I'd even make the argument that moral relativism in its purest form was never even an idea entertained by any respectable thinker. "Everything is relative; there is no absolute moral law" is not embraced by anyone but misled and misinformed Stuyvesant stud

In the end we lie awake and we dream of making our escape

_ As indebted as I am to my alma mater, I'm kind of mad at Gordon College's great books honor course because it took the name that I was originally going to use as the title to my blog: The "Jerusalem Athens Forum". I realized while writing my last college philosophy paper (ever) that the things that I am most passionate towards- that which I spend the most time thinking and reading about- all have to do with the mediation of faith and reason. _ In this blog I'd like to explore the issues of "reason verse revelation", "science verse religion", "unreasonable faith" and "unfaithful reason". My aim is mainly cathartic; I want to use this place to dump the questions and issues that I think about all the time. But it is also didactic; I hope to be able to educate and challenge those who are reading, especially the Christians, to think more deeply about their faith. Not more academically or scholarlily, mind you, but dee