Thoughts on ethics, society, politics, religion, philosophy, theology, and everything in between
Jed 
One common argument for the existence of God, developed by Medieval Muslim philosophers, is known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument. In its basic form, it runs as follows: The only way to avoid this argument’s conclusion is to claim that the universe is eternal, and so never began to exist. Indeed, many atheists have claimed … Read more
Proving God’s Existence In this final series in my year of apologetics posts on this blog, I will make some philosophical arguments for God’s existence. I have deliberately saved this topic for last, in order to avoid giving the impression that one must first become convinced by philosophical arguments that the god of the philosophers … Read more
Antisemitism is prejudice against and hatred of Jewish people. One of the most frequently made moral charges made against Christianity is that it is antisemitic. While Christianity teaches that Christians should love all people, many argue that Christianity actually produces hatred against Jews. If true, this would be a major contradiction within Christianity that would … Read more
One of the most common criticisms of biblical ethics antichristians make is that the Bible supports slavery. However, it is a gross misrepresentation of biblical teaching to claim that the Bible “supports” slavery just because there is no explicit condemnation of slavery in the Bible. In this post, I will briefly examine what the Bible … Read more
Biblical Ethics: Violence In the book of Psalms, there are a number of imprecatory psalms, in which the psalmist calls on God to smite his enemies. The most infamous of these is Psalm 137, which ends by saying, “O Babylon, you will be destroyed. Happy is the one who pays you back for what you … Read more
In a previous apologetics series on this blog, In Defense of Christian Ethics, I responded to a number of common objections to the reasonableness of Christian morality. These next few posts will supplement that series, responding to a number of additional objections to the coherence of Christian ethics. Divine Command Theory Critics of Christian morality … Read more
One of the most popular arguments for the existence of God is the moral argument for God. The argument runs as follows: In spite of the fact that this argument is very popular among Christian apologists, I do not think it is a sound argument. First, it is not at all clear that premise 1 … Read more
Previously on this blog, I made the case that there is no universal morality; there are only a variety of particular moralities. Furthermore, I made the case that any claim to objective moral truth must logically be based in some kind of transcendent reality. Thus, while Buddhist morality, Hindu morality, and Christian morality may be … Read more
We do not have access to the original compositions of any of the books of the Bible. Instead, we have access to copies of copies of those compositions. Since the printing press did not exist in the ancient world, all those copies had to be painstakingly made by hand. Whenever a text is copied by … Read more
The Torah, Isaiah, and Modern Biblical Scholarship Traditionally, Christians have believed that the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) was in its entirety written by Moses. However, in the modern period, critical biblical scholars began to call this belief into question. A number of passages in the Torah contain historical details from after the … Read more