Christocentric Philosophy

As human beings, we are wired to think in generalities. To know particular things, we usually place them in broader, more general contexts. We try and see the qualities a thing shares with other things, and through a process of abstraction, we create classes and general categories. Abstraction is an integral part of human thought. So it is no surprise that when it comes to the question of the existence of God, philosophers have applied the process of abstraction. Van Til taught that abstract reasoning is the hallmark of non-Christian thought. What he meant by this was that unbelievers would always think in general terms so as to avoid dealing with the concrete claims of Christian Theism. So, for example, they will speak and argue about God in abstraction. Not the Christian God in particular - not Yahweh - but some vague sense of “god”. A lot of philosophy of religion is done in abstract. “Naturalism” and “Theism” are conceived in abstraction. By reasoning abstractly, the unbeliever nev...

One of the most important philosophical and theological questions we can ask is about God’s relation to the world. There are various ways to think of God’s relation to the world, and the way we prefer would have an impact on our view of God. The Bible itself is fond of the use of analogies to help us understand God’s relation to the world. So there is biblical warrant for the use of analogies. The analogy I think is the best is the authorial analogy. The authorial analogy frames God’s relation to the world as the relation between an author and his story. So God is the author of this story called history. I won’t go into the reasons why this analogy best explains God’s relation to the world in this article (there’s a really good article explaining that here ). That’s because in this article I want to highlight the authorial analogy’s strength in dealing with objections to Christianity - specifically, the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil has been a topic of debate in philosophy of re...

 

T his argument can begin with any object that exists. Think of anything. Let's say.. A red cup. Now, this cup has qualities it shares with other objects. This means that it is related to many other objects. Its redness, for example, relates it to other red things. And its "cup-ness" (the qualities that make it a cup) relates it to other cups. This is true for any object we come across in our experience. If there was an object that had nothing in common with other objects, we wouldn't even be able to recognize it as an object. An interesting observation to make is that the relations between objects transcends time and space. Think of that red cup. It's redness relates it all red things in the past, and also all red things in the future. The implication of this is that all objects form part of a timeless system which encompasses all objects and in which all objects are related. Let's call this the  Comprehensive Timeless System  (CTS). So even before any particu...

  Revelational Epistemology: A Brief Sketch I will begin by quoting a passage from Cornelius Van Til’s A Survey of Christian Epistemology : According to Scripture, God has created the “universe.” God has created time and space. God has created all the “facts” of science. God has created the human mind. In this human mind God has laid the laws of thought according to which it is to operate. In the facts of science God has laid the laws of being according to which they function. In other words, the impress of God’s plan is upon his whole creation.  We may characterize this whole situation by saying that the creation of God is a revelation of God. God revealed himself in nature and God also revealed himself in the mind of man. Thus it is impossible for the mind of man to function except in an atmosphere of revelation. And every thought of man when it functioned normally in this atmosphere of revelation would express the truth as laid in the creation by God. We may therefore call ...

This is an excerpt from a project I’m currently working on. I thought I’d post it here.

It has been something of a recent trend in contemporary philosophy of religion to appeal to considerations of theoretical virtue and Bayesian probability theory in order to adjudicate between competing worldviews. This move has been championed mostly by Graham Oppy, considered by many to be the best defender of atheism alive, however many more atheist and theist philosophers have adopted this approach. What I aim to show in this brief article is that the method proposed by thinkers such as Oppy is far from a neutral method, and is insufficient to settle the dispute between competing worldviews.  This method treats Theism and Naturalism as theories or hypotheses and aims to figure out whether there are any reasons to prefer one over the other. In his book, The Best Argument Against God, Oppy provides a number of theoretical virtues that would serve as the criteria for the comparison of the two views. The first is simplicity, which he characterizes this way: (a) Simplicity: If everyt...