Suppose you asked me what today’s date was and I answered that the Maori Electorate seats in Parliament should be scrapped. You would quite rightly wonder what I was on. The question of what the date is is a completely different question as to whether a particular social policy is just. Oddly enough, however, when […]
Entries Tagged as 'Philosophers'
Cultural Confusion and Ethical Relativism I
December 2nd, 2008 19 Comments
Tags: Ethics · Frances Howard-Snyder · Philosophy of Religion · Relativism · Robert Adams
What About the Poor? More on Sustenance Rights
November 19th, 2008 9 Comments
In my last post, What About the Poor? Sustenance Rights Examined, I noted the position of Nicholas Wolterstorff that, “If a rich man knows of someone who is starving and has the power to help that person, and chooses not to, then he violates that person’s rights as surely and reprehensively as if he had […]
Tags: Christian History · Nicholas Wolterstorff · Role of the State · Welfare
What About the Poor? Sustenance Rights Examined
November 18th, 2008 4 Comments
When I began university I had strong socialist leanings. The reason was that I believed, as a Christian, we had a duty to help the poor. Studying at Waikato University, however, brought me face to face with socialist academics and left-wing activists and I discovered a hostile and dangerous social agenda that I could not […]
Tags: Christian History · Nicholas Wolterstorff · Role of the State · Welfare
Sentience Part 2
November 2nd, 2008 2 Comments
Following on from Sentience Part 1, I will now address the conclusion of Bonnie Steinbock’s argument. Steinbock’s Conclusion Similar ambiguities affect Steinbock’s conclusion. Steinbock asserts that for killing an individual to be unlawful homicide, the individual must be sentient. However, this is ambiguous; as Don Marquis points out, this could mean that the individual will […]
Tags: Abortion · Bonnie Steinbock · Don Marquis · Feticide · Sentience
Sentience Part 1
November 1st, 2008 Comments Off on Sentience Part 1
Following on from my series on the illiberality of Abortion, discussion in the comments section turned to the issue of sentience. Commenters asked whether perhaps sentience is the property that a newborn possesses and a fetus does not that warrants such unequal application of the non-initiation of force principle by liberals. Is sentience the property […]
Tags: Abortion · Bonnie Steinbock · Feticide · Harry Gensler · Michael Tooley · Sentience
Some Autobiographical Remarks: How I Discovered Christian Philosophy
October 23rd, 2008 6 Comments
Increasingly so of late, I find myself in conversations, in the receipt of email requests or blog comments asking where to begin and how to expand one’s Christian philosophical understanding. I have been asked to recommend books and places to study and to share my own journey in this area. I started my studies at […]
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Apologetics · Bruce Reichenbach · Faith and Reason · Paul Helm · Philosophy of Religion · Richard Swinburne · Steve Kumar · Thomas Morris · William Lane Craig
Does Pluralism Make Faith Arbitrary?
October 20th, 2008 2 Comments
Recently I have been reading Timothy Keller’s book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. (This is not like me because I don’t typically read popular apologetics books, and it is even more rare that I would lead a blog entry with one.) One thing that interested me is that when Keller […]
Tags: Apologetics · Faith and Reason · Pluralism · Timothy Keller · William Alston
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
