Home > Work > On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision
21 " Christians have an unfair advantage in the marketplace of ideas: We have truth on our side! You "
― William Lane Craig , On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision
22 " Richard Dawkins’ assessment of human worth may be depressing, but why, given atheism, is he mistaken when he says, “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference.… We are machines for propagating DNA.… It is every living object’s sole reason for being”? "
23 " If life ends at the grave, then it makes no ultimate difference whether you live as a Stalin or as a Mother Teresa. Since your destiny is ultimately unrelated to your behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it: “If there is no immortality … then all things are permitted. "
24 " my favorite is the cosmological argument. But cosmological and teleological arguments don’t touch people where they live. The "
25 " Whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause”). Second, "
26 " Naturalism Naturalism is the belief that only natural explanations (as opposed to supernatural ones) should be considered. Because a designer is defined as supernatural—beyond nature—naturalism rules out this explanation, regardless of evidence. "
27 " if you’re a first-century Jew, and your favorite Messiah got himself crucified, then you’ve basically got two choices: Either you go home or else you get yourself a new Messiah. But the idea of stealing Jesus’ corpse and saying that God had raised him from the dead is hardly one that would have entered the minds of the disciples. "
28 " the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith unceremoniously crowned Stephen Hawking’s argument against God in A Brief History of Time as “the worst atheistic argument in the history of Western thought.”[3] With the advent of The God Delusion the time has come, I think, to relieve Hawking of this weighty crown and to recognize Richard Dawkins’ accession to the throne. "
29 " Christians find in God a source of moral strength that helps us to lead better lives than those we would have led without Him, still it would be arrogant and ignorant to claim that unbelievers don’t often lead good moral lives—in fact, sometimes lives that put ours to shame. "
30 " A fallacy is an error in reasoning. Fallacies can be either formal or informal. A formal fallacy involves breaking the rules of logic. An informal fallacy involves an argumentative tactic that is illicit, such as reasoning in a circle. The “taxicab fallacy” would be an informal fallacy. "
31 " All historians agree that the gospels were written down and circulated during the first generation after the events, while the eyewitnesses were still alive. In order for the gospels to be legendary at their core, more generations would be needed between the events they record and the date of their composition. "
32 " Multiverse Some cosmologists speculate that our observable universe is just an expanding bubble in a much wider sea of energy, which is also expanding. Since this wider universe contains many other bubbles in addition to ours, it is often called a multiverse. The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem also applies to the multiverse as a whole, not just to the individual bubbles within it. Thus, even if there is a multiverse, it cannot be eternal in the past but must have had a beginning. "
33 " Premise The steps of an argument that lead to the conclusion are called the premises of the argument. "
34 " If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life? "
35 " the universe without God remains objectively meaningless, no matter how we happen to regard it. "
36 " The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist. "
37 " The Cosmic Landscape The so-called “cosmic landscape” of worlds permitted by M-theory has become something of a phenom lately. It’s important to understand that the landscape is just a range of possibilities. Some people have misinterpreted it to mean that all these different universes actually exist. Some have thought it undermines the argument for design because the landscape must include life-permitting worlds like ours. But the cosmic landscape is not real; it’s just a list of possibilities. It describes the range of universes that are consistent with M-theory. "
38 " Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.” But man cannot live this way. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God. "
39 " One rabbi who survived the camp summed it up well when he said that at Auschwitz it was as though there existed a world in which all the Ten Commandments were reversed. Mankind had never seen such a hell. "
40 " Ghazali frames his argument simply: “Every being which begins has a cause for its beginning; now the world is a being which begins; therefore, it possesses a cause for its beginning. "