Refusing to use genderless pronouns

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-edition-1.3786140/i-m-not-a-bigot-meet-the-u-of-t-prof-who-refuses-to-use-genderless-pronouns-1.3786144

Adventures in transgenderism

http://nypost.com/2016/09/29/transgender-babysitter-takes-plea-deal-for-killing-toddler/

Beware of aging atheists and cessationists

Atheists inveigh about the dangers of Christianity while cessationists inveigh against the dangers of Pentecostalism. Ah, but what about the dangers of atheism and cessationism? Consider Cardinal Alba, in John Carpenter's Vampires (1998), who betrayed vampire hunter Jack Crow:

Cardinal Alba: From your expression, I assume you couldn't understand my presence here. I'm sorry to disillusion you, Jack. As one grows old, as death approaches, we begin to question... our fate. And I found mine lacking. "Is there a god? Is there a heaven?" I can no longer answer this for certain. I've witnessed no miracles, had no visions, and the prospect of death terrifies me. I've realized I've only one... alternative, and I made a bargain. With the devil if you wish. 

That's correct, Jack and I can live with that. After I have given what Valek wants, he will fulfill our bargain. And I will be transformed into one of his... new children. It's beautiful, isn't it? Eternal Life... Immortality... can change your heart.

You better not turn your back on John MacArthur. He's 77. Or Richard Dawkins. He's 75. If they panic, they might switch sides and cut a deal with a master vampire! 

Here's a checklist of symptoms in case your friendly cessationist or atheist doesn't seem to be his old self anymore: 

• Stops smiling to conceal his long sharp incisors 

• Sudden change in college major from Accounting to Phlebotomy

• Harping on the Eucharist as real blood

• Switches to the night shift

• Spontaneous combustion when exposed to sunlight

• Avoids mirrors

• Garlic bread induces anaphylactic shock

• Exsanguinated cows in the neighborhood

• Aversion to the Latin Mass. (Vatican II was a godsend for vamps)

Bubbleboy cessationism

There are roughly two types of arguments for cessationism. On the one hand, they attempt to defend their position from Scripture. On they other hand, they point to the many quacks, scammers, and heretics in the charismatic movement. 

I daresay most cessationists espouse cessationism for the simple reason that they never had a personal experience that falsified their cessationism. But, ironically, that can leave them vulnerable to the quacks, scammers, and heretics in the charismatic movement. 

It's like the proverbial bubbleboy who has no resistance to disease. If a cessationist has an experience that falsifies his cessationism, he has no immunity or resistance to the quacks, scammers, and heretics in the charismatic movement because cessationist theology was his immune system. Take that away and he has no antibodies to protect him from airborne pathogens in the charismatic movement.   

It's like kids raised in anti-intellectual, fundy churches who lose their hereditary faith the moment that comes in contact with atheism or secular science. They are intellectually defenseless because they never cultivated reasons for their hereditary faith.

Over the years I've run across several credible reports of premonitory dreams. I wasn't investigating the subject. In some cases it's something I happened to read about on an unrelated subject. Or it's something that trusted friends shared with me.

Given that this is confined to my anecdotal and incidental experience, that suggested the phenomenon is more widespread. If a random sampling turns that up, consider what a more systematic investigation would uncover?

Or to take a different, but related example: years ago I was talking to a cardiologist. A relative of mine had been hospitalized for a heart attack. The cardiologist was a graduate of Yale med school. Somehow the conversation turned to the topic of near-death-experiences. He mentioned that as an intern he had a patient who was a mafia don. The patient had a near-death-experience. That caused the patient to reconsider his career in the mafia. He took it as a warning or second chance to clean up his act.

My point is this: a hardline cessationist has no fallback position. There's no flexibility in his position. That can make him a sucker for the quacks, scammers, and heretics in the charismatic movement if he ever has an experience that falsifies his cessationism.

By contrast, if you've developed a qualified noncessationism position, you can exercise critical discrimination. It doesn't leave you wide open to anything and everything–up to and including the New Age. But if you take an all-or-nothing approach, the alternative to nothing is everything. You have no criteria to winnow the wheat from the chaff. You treat it all as wheat or all as chaff. 

The wind and the flood

And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided (Gen 8:1).

1. On the face of it, this explanation is a headscratcher. How could wind cause the flood waters to abate? If anything, this is more puzzling on the global-flood interpretation. If the spherical earth was submerged in water, wind would simply generate continuous wave action.

Flood geologists like Kurt Wise (Faith, Form, and Time), Andrew Snelling (Earth's Catastrophic Past), and Jonathan Sarfati (The Genesis Account), invoke catastrophic plate tectonics as the real mechanism causing the flood waters to subside. But on that view, the wind has no effect on the flood. So that substitutes an entirely different explanation. On that view, the wind has no explanatory value at all. It does no meaningful work. If, however, the text attributes the abatement of the flood waters to the wind, then we should seek an interpretation which takes that seriously. At the very least, that should be a primary cause. 

2. One possible alternative is that it doesn't mean "wind" but "Spirit". Commentators are quick to say 8:1 echoes 1:2. If 8:1 refers to the Spirit of God, then it might mean God miraculously caused the floodwaters to abate. There are, however, some difficulties with that identification:

i) In Gen 1:2, you have a title: "the ruach of God". Gen 8:1 doesn't use that title. So I don't assume these have equivalent referents.

ii) If it was a miracle, it's odd that it still took months for the flood waters to subside.

iii) Since Gen 7:11 cites natural mechanisms as the source of the floodwaters, we might expect, by parity, that the source of their abatement to be a natural mechanism as well.

iv) This isn't the only place in the Pentateuch where God sends wind to perform a providential task. As one commentator notes:

Moses witnessed the might of God's "wind" to induce and chase away a locust plague (Exod 10:13,19) and deliver his people from Egyptian armies at the sea on "dry ground" (Exod 14:21; 15:10). It was with the same "wind" that the Lord provided cal for the vagabond people of the desert (Num 11:31). K. Mathews, Genesis 1:11:26, 384-85. 

That suggests a preternatural force. It isn't strictly natural or supernatural. Rather, it's a natural force that's supernaturally directed. 

3. Yet that leaves unanswered the question of how wind could make the floodwaters recede. The answer depends on how we visualize the flood. Consider a local-flood interpretation: Among other things, rivers serve as drainage mechanisms. In case of torrential rain, they become swollen. As a result, river basis are flood basins.

However, this can be magnified by the further fact that torrential rain causes debris to flow downstream. Debris can dam a river when it forms a logjam. That, in turn, causes water to back up, thereby expanding the inundated area upstream. 

It doesn't take much imagination to visualize how a strong wind like a tornado or waterspout could disrupt a logjam, thereby releasing the pent-up waters. If it broke it up entirely, the runoff would be explosive. If it weakened the logjam, it might cause the natural dam to leak. In that event the runoff would be more gradual. 

4. It might be objected that my explanation is speculative. No doubt. However, postulates involving hydroplate theory or catastrophic plate tectonics are speculative. Moreover, my explanation is an extension of the text, whereas attributing the recession of the flood waters to tectonic and seismic activity has no connection to the text, and sets aside what the text says.

If we wish to understand the flood as a real event, then we need to go beyond the text to visualize a more specific scenario, extrapolating from the text to a more detailed reconstruction. That has the limitations of any conjectural reconstruction. My explanation at least has a toehold in the text, by developing explanation that's given in the text–rather than replacing that with something wholly extraneous to the text. 

The Limits of "RINO"

https://thearcmag.com/the-limits-of-rino-b8edcc43cdb7#.6muq4ctt3

“Anti-Catholicism” fueled by Liberal Roman Catholics

Over the weekend, one of my new friends at the Catholic-Protestant Debate group on Facebook posted the following:

Prejudice against the Catholics is "the deepest bias in the history of the American People" - Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.

"Catholic baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals" - Conservative writer Peter Viereck

Anti-Catholicism is "the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history" - Historian John Higham

Discuss the relative truths revealed by these quotes.

I Google’d the first phrase, and don’t you know, this article from New Oxford Review came up, a review of the work “The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice”, by Philip Jenkins, Oxford University Press. Perhaps he wanted to pin me (and perhaps others) with a kind of “current manifestation” of the kind of “anti-Catholic bigotry” that “came to America with English colonists”:

Jenkins convincingly demonstrates that modern attempts to blacken the teaching and history of the Catholic Church are related to the contorted rantings of Swift and Foxe in the 1700s, now tricked out in new attire. Jenkins reveals how smears, at one time limited to the Ku Klux Klan’s attempts to play up American fears of “kikes, koons, and katholics,” have now become lucrative sources of revenue for ordinary individuals and companies.

That portion of the story is fleshed out with allusions to NY Governor Al Smith “digging under the Atlantic to Rome” and a 1960 book that “denounced John F. Kennedy, warning that voting a Catholic into the presidency would bring the pope to Washington and destroy American freedoms”.

But the real “anti-Catholicism” that has taken place since 1960 is the result of Vatican II progressives:

Has “Pope Francis” Failed?

Has “Pope Francis” Failed?

Francis has built his popularity at the expense of the church he leads. Those who wish to see a stronger church may have to wait for a different kind of pope. Instead of trying to soften the church’s teaching, such a man would need to speak of the way hard disciplines can lead to freedom. Confronting a hostile age with the strange claims of Catholic faith may not be popular, but over time it may prove more effective. Even Christ was met with the jeers of the crowd.

(Matthew Schmitz, literary editor of “First Things”, sitting in judgment over a pope.)

A Response To Annette Merz On The Infancy Narratives (Part 6)

(Previous parts in the series: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.)

Regarding whether Jesus was a descendant of David, Merz writes:

The evidence is complicated and inconclusive. On the one hand, there is early [post-Easter] evidence for the attribution of Davidic origin to Jesus in the formulaic tradition (Rom 1:3; 2 Tim 2:8), and the title "son of David" is present in Mark (10:47-48). On the other hand, there are once again strong indications that we are dealing with a concept which was absent from or debated in the earliest sources. In the Saying Source Q (which predates Mark), no traces of a Davidic ancestry are to be found. (489)

Merz refers to the evidence as "inconclusive", but elsewhere she tells us that Jesus' Davidic ancestry is "doubtful" (491).

She provides no argument for her reconstruction of the alleged Q source, and she provides no example of a place in Q where we'd expect Davidic ancestry to be mentioned if the author of Q believed in it. Paul doesn't mention Jesus' Davidic ancestry in Philemon. That doesn't prevent Merz from concluding that Paul refers to it in Romans. Authors frequently don't mention things they believe in, often because it's irrelevant to their present context. The vast majority of scholars, including Merz, accept conclusions related to Jesus that aren't found in Q. I've given some examples in previous posts in this series, such as Merz's apparent view that Jesus' brother James was an unbeliever until he thought he saw Jesus risen from the dead. I'm not aware of any reconstruction of Q that would include that material.

Merz continues:

Is the Reformation Over?

http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/has-rome-really-changed-its-tune

While some things have changed with the Roman Catholic Church to bring Catholics and Protestants closer together after five hundred years, many major differences remain to divide them. One approach to this quandary is to minimize the division. For example, it is anticipated that within the next year, Pope Francis will declare that the Reformation is over. Working from the Joint Declaration of the Doctrine of Justification, he will emphasize the agreements achieved on this once divisive doctrine and underscore that the sixteenth century anathemas (condemnations) of Protestants by Catholics and of Catholics by Protestants are removed. Thus, the Reformation will be formally finished.

Tragically, this perspective fails to address the continuing differences between the two traditions. The Catholic Church still holds to untrue doctrines of justification, salvation, authority, transubstantiation, Mary, seven sacraments that are effective ex opere operato, and purgatory. It is not helpful to skirt those issues for the sake of unity in a lowest-common-denominator approach.

While we can agree that much has changed, we must also agree that the Reformation remains unfinished.

Fountains of the deep

One more brief comment:

As to where the extra water came from, the Bible itself refers to its sources: "all the fountains of the deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened." (Gen.7:11). The atmosphere would not have provided sufficient rain for a massive global Flood. 

http://bylogos.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-flood-and-tidal-waves.html

Yes, the Bible cites two sources for the floodwaters. For liberals, both sources have mythological overtones. The "windows of heaven" alludes to the cosmic sea above the solid dome of the sky while the "fountains of the deep" refers to the primordial abyss.

For conservatives, the "windows of heaven" is a figurative expression for rainclouds and rainwater. 

But what about the "fountains of the deep"? Some say that's poetic. Some think that refers to subterranean water. Speaking for myself:

i) The parallelism in Gen 7:11 makes the general point that the deluge had two sources: water above and water below. 

ii) "Fountains of the deep" is a poetic synonym for the ocean. 

iii) The ocean is "below" the earth, not in a subterranean sense, but in the prosaic sense that dry land is generally higher than the sea. Sea level marks the boundary between the surface of the earth, where humans dwell, and the fathomless ocean. 

That interpretation is consistent with my lunar conjecture.

iv) The primary source of coastal flooding is the ocean. My lunar conjecture would ratchet that way up. It could still be wrong, but if so, it's wrong for different reasons.

Progressive pogrom

It's an interesting time to be an orthodox Christian. 

1. The Obama era has emboldened the religious left as well as the secular left. Their theology (if you can call it that) is synchronized with the Zeitgeist. It's striking to see their ferocious enmity for traditional Christian theology. That was epitomized by Elizabeth Barnes (who teaches feminist philosophy at the University of Virginia), when she said:

I hereby declare a party on my wall for progressive Christians sick of seeing their faith tradition co-opted by people who seem unable or unwilling to understand their own cruelty. 

That's unintentionally comical. Progressive Christianity is entirely parasitic on orthodox Christian theology. Progressive Christianity is defined in reaction to orthodox Christianity. Imagine a Muslim complain that he's sick of seeing Christians co-opt Islam. It isn't even possible for orthodox Christians to co-opt the faith tradition of progressive Christians. Rather, progressive Christians are laboring to co-opt Christian tradition, but sterilize it in the process. Orthodox Christian tradition is the frame of reference, not progressive Christianity.  

In point of fact, progressive Christianity cannot be true. If you think traditional Christian theology is bad pious fiction, then, at best, progressive Christianity can only be rewritten pious fiction. Redacting offensive fiction doesn't turn it into nonfiction, but just a different brand of fiction. Indeed, derivative fiction. A fiction of a fiction. Progressive Christianity is a secondary, reactionary movement with no intrinsic identity. 

The enmity of militant atheists towards Christianity at least has a semblance of logicality. Atheism doesn't pretend to be Christian. It labors, as best it can, to avoid theological starting-points. It labors, as best it can, to provide a systematic alternative to a Christian worldview. I don't think atheism is coherent. It has to deny too many essentials. But it's more consistent than progressive Christianity.

Not surprisingly, atheists have as much or more contempt for progressive Christians as orthodox Christian. They may find progressive Christians temporarily useful allies, but once atheists gain the upper hand, progressive Christians will follow orthodox Christians into the gulags. 

It would make more sense if the critics of Richard Swinburne's SCP address were outright atheists like Daniel Dennett, Evan Fales, Theodore Drange, et al. Problem is, Swinburne's critics are progressive Christians. They aren't consistently Christian and they aren't consistently secular. They struggle to stake out a half-baked intellectual compromise. An opportunistic pastiche of ad hoc snippets gleaned from Christianity and secularism. They're in no position to attack orthodox Christianity. They have no independent standard of comparison. 

It's like watching passengers saw off one wing of the airplane they're flying in. It isn't an airplane with two wings, like Christianity. It isn't a missile, like atheism. It isn't a different design. Rather, it's just a mutilated airplane. It will crash. Why do they even maintain the pretense of Christian profession? Why is that still important to them? 

2. Yet we see strenuous efforts on various fronts to unilaterally redraw the lines. For instance, Stan Gundry, Senior Vice President and Publisher at Zondervan Academic and a past president of the ETS, recently said, "Yes, even the question of whether same-sex 'marriages' can be defended biblically," is up for debate at the ETS.

Likewise, and not coincidentally, Zondervan will be releasing a new book in the Counterpoint series. Here's the publisher's description: "Until recently most books fit neatly into two camps: non-affirming books were written by evangelicals and affirming books by non-evangelicals. Today, this divide no longer exists. Recent books written by evangelicals appeal to the authority and inspiration of Scripture as they argue for an affirming view. The question of what the Bible says about homosexuality is now an intra-evangelical discussion."

So by fiat, these are now "intra-evangelical" positions. Increasingly, we see both the secular left and the religious left laying down ultimatums.

3. Yet out of the other side of their mouth they purse their lips when Bible-believers say their views are unchristian. "How dare you presume to say who's Christian and who's not!" But in addition to the fact that progressive Christians are quick to draw exclusionary lines, there's nothing untoward about saying Christianity has boundaries. If it didn't have boundaries, it wouldn't be anything. To be Christian is not to be non-Christian. There must be something to differentiate Christianity. That's just pitifully obvious. 

4. One of the ironies of the animus directed at Swinburne is that it's coming from the religious left, even though it would be very easy to attack him from the religious right. Swinburne is by no means an unreconstructed conservative. There are modernist elements to his own position. In normal times, his critics would either be evangelicals or atheists. He himself is a theological moderate. Even so, he's too center-right for today's progressive Christians. 

Their indignant reaction to Swinburne's "offensive" view that homosexuality is an incurable condition is just bizarre. Isn't that precisely what homosexual activists have been hammering into the public psyche? Homosexuality is hardwired. Immutable. Homosexuals cannot change their orientation. Indeed, California recently passed an unconstitutional law banning reparative therapy. Why is it so unbearable for Swinburne to say exactly what homosexual activists have been screaming for years? Progressive Christians emote and react rather than think. 

5. Then there's the cult of feeling offended. To begin with, if homosexuals are really that emotionally fragile, then that alone is why they can't be trusted with positions of power. They are too unstable and vindictive.  

But in reality, LGBT activists are hardly victims. To the contrary, they are aggressors using victimology to camouflage their militancy. They aren't weak, helpless, and defenseless. Rather, the power elite has issued them a license to kill. They unwittingly demonstrate why it's dangerous to empower them. They shamelessly abuse their power. 

6. This may account for the visceral reaction to Andy Stanley's notorious sermon attacking the foundational status of Scripture. At a time and place when Bible-believing Christians are increasingly threatened, his timing seems like a betrayal. Like signaling to the power elite, "Hey, don't blame me! Don't confuse me with those Bible-thumpers over there. I'm one of the good guys!"

Should Christina Van Dyke Resign? We Report, You Decide

http://rightlyconsidered.org/2016/10/01/should-christina-van-dyke-apologize-we-report-you-decide/

Avalos on prayer

Last year, apostate Hector Avalos gave a talk on prayer:

http://www.iowastatedaily.com/news/student_life/article_277d43c6-dcc5-11e4-b244-e3f0fe813ae9.html

This appears to be a rehash of objections he raised in more detail in his article: "Can Science Prove that Prayer Works?" Free Inquiry 17 (1997). I'll comment on that article. 

The problem with this and any so-called controlled experiment regarding prayer is that there can be no such thing as a controlled experiment concerning prayer. You can never divide people into groups that received prayer and those that did not. The main reason is that there is no way to know that someone did not receive prayer. How would anyone know that some distant relative was not praying for a member of the group that Byrd had identified as having received no prayer?

I basically agree with that.

For example, many people with high blood pressure would call me to pray for them when their blood pressure rose. I would come and pray, and afterwards the blood pressure would fall. This would be regarded by me and the patient as an answered prayer. Yet most blood pressure frequently does rise and fall on its own because our bodies have systems that function like the thermostat in our homes. Many other "sick conditions" also get better on their own because the body has mechanisms to relieve itself (for example, fevers, colds, many types of aches and pains). 
Another reason for the widespread belief in divine healing among Christians, especially Pentecostals, is the dynamic of the services in which healings are said to occur. In many instances a great quantity of healings are reported by traveling evangelists. Usually the evangelist asks the patient what the problem is. 
Many may say, for instance, that they had a "kidney problem" when they have a backache. The evangelist usually does not verify if the patient is indeed suffering from kidney problems and is not usually familiar with the patient s medical history. Yet he might announce that the patient was healed of "kidney problems" to the entire audience. The evangelist also might assume that the persons who approached the altar were healed, and so he may report that multitudes of persons were healed in his previous stop. Indeed, the evangelist rarely performs follow-up examinations. Thus exaggerated numbers of reported healings can multiply rapidly in these environments.  
The psychology of the petitioner is also a contributing factor. If the evangelist, for example, asks patients if God has healed them, they are very likely to say "Yes," even if their symptoms say the opposite. [14] The reason is that many patients are embarrassed to say that God has not healed them because this appears to insult God.

i) I agree. However, citing unimpressive examples does nothing to counter more impressive examples. What about medically verifiable miracles? 

ii) Avalos fails to draw an elementary distinction. If you wish to prove the occurrence of answered prayer, then it's logical to begin with unambiguous examples. But once you establish the occurrence of answered prayer, that makes another examples more likely to be cases of answered prayer, even if they are ambiguous. 

For most of my young and adolescent life, I was a faith healer in a Pentecostal tradition. I witnessed what I then thought were resurrections, spontaneous growth of short limbs, cures from cancer, and many other types of diseases. In retrospect, I have learned much about why people believe in answered prayers even when there is evidence to the contrary or even when it is logically absurd. Every single case of a supposedly answered prayer that I witnessed can be explained by one or more of the following factors: (1) false assumptions, (2) erroneous information, and (3) wishful thinking. 

Yet he admits that he "witnessed what he then thought were resurrections, spontaneous growth of short limbs…" He fails to explain how he could misperceive the instantaneous growth of short limbs. That would be a visible phenomenon, right? Does he think his eyes played tricks on him?  

For Christian believers, answered prayers qualify as a type of miracle. According to Charles Hodge, the famous American fundamentalist theologian: "A miracle, therefore, may be defined to be an event, in the external world, brought about by the immediate efficiency, or simple volition, of God." [11] The problem with verifying scientifically that miracles as defined above ever occur is that the Christian god is supposed to have infinite characteristics, and we can never know whether a prayer has been answered by a being that is said to be infinite. 
Let me explain. One of the infinite characteristics of the Christian god is omnipresence - that is, this being is said to be everywhere in the universe at the same time. The Christian god is also said to be eternal, all-powerful, and all-knowing. Yet, we, as finite human beings, could never know that such an infinite being exists. For example, in order to know that there is a being who is everywhere at the universe at the same time we would have to be everywhere in the universe at the same time. 

i) I don't think God is literally omnipresent. God isn't a physical being. So God isn't everywhere. Strictly speaking, God isn't anywhere. 

ii) It's not uncommon to postulate the existence of spaceless entities (e.g. numbers, logical laws, possible worlds). Their explanatory power accounts for concrete states.

In order to know that there is a being who is eternal, we would have to be eternal. 

i) That's a one-sentence assertion. He fails to explain why we'd have to be eternal to know there's an eternal being. What's the principle? That you must be like what you know? The subject of knowledge must be the same kind of being as the object of knowledge? Must I be a bumble bee to know that bumblebees exist?

ii) I don't need to be timeless to know that timeless objects exist (e.g. numbers, logical laws,possible worlds). I infer their existence because they do necessary explanatory work. They are indispensable to account for certain concrete states. 

In order to know that any event we witnessed in the world was caused by a particular being, we first have to know that such a being exists. For example, it would be absurd to say: "I know my prayer was answered by an invisible Martian, but I do not know if invisible Martians exist." The reason this statement is logically absurd is that it attributes an action to a being not known to exist. 

Really? Take white explorers who saw bison on the Great Plains for the very first time. Must they know in advance that bison exist to take sightings of bison as evidence for their existence? Must they have evidence that bison exist independent of bison sightings before they can acknowledge that bison exist based on direct observation? How would Avalos ever establish the initial existence of something? If he automatically discounts the first case on the grounds that we can't accept that evidence unless we already know it exists, then that rules out novel discoveries. 

Likewise, in order to know that any event (e.g., an answered prayer or any other supposed extraordinary event) was caused by an infinite being, we first have to know that an infinite being exists. Since we can never know that an infinite being such as the Christian god exists, we can never know that any event we witness was caused by this being. In sum, knowing scientifically that an infinite God answered a prayer is logically impossible. 

That piggybacks on a couple of bad arguments (see above).

Prayer would be unnecessary if there were an all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful God. Let's suppose that the most gifted doctor in the world happens to be your friend. This doctor has the ability to cure any sickness known to modern medicine. Let s also suppose that this doctor is living with your family, which includes a six-month-old baby. 
Now if this infant were to become violently ill in the presence of this super-doctor, what would you expect from him? If the baby is choking, for example, you would expect him to use techniques that will relieve the baby s problem. You would not expect him to ask you first if you believed that he could cure your child before he was willing to help the child. You would not expect him to require you to show how much faith you had in him before he would help your child. What you would expect is for this super-doctor to act as soon as he sees the child choking. 

Among other things, prayer is designed to cultivate a sense of dependence on God. If all our needs were automatically provided for, there'd be no appreciation or realization of our dependence on God. 

Moreover, we shouldn't just expect people to do us favors. Asking for a favor is an acknowledgement that if your request is granted, the grantor is doing your a favor. Even if a parent knows that his teenager wants something from them, he may wait for the teenager to ask. A teenager shouldn't just take his parents for granted. Receiving what he asked for is a basis for gratitude. Otherwise, the child grows up to be a selfish, thankless person, since he expects everything to be provided without ever having to ask. The same dynamic applies to friendship. 

Let's also suppose that this doctor has the ability to prevent cancer in all children anywhere in the world even before it occurs. Undoubtedly, you would expect that if he had this ability then he would use it, if he really fits our definition of "good." But if the doctor has this ability, and does use it, then you would not expect there to be any cases of infantile cancer in the world. If this super-doctor has this ability, then he should not wait for anyone to ask him to prevent the suffering of children with cancer. We would expect him to act immediately out of pure goodness. 

That depends on the long-term consequences. Individual lives are not self-contained events. Rather, they have short-term and long-term impacts on other people's lives, for better or worse. Suppose God heals a child with cancer. Suppose his future grandson is a security guard at an oil refinery. He works the nightshift. One of his duties is to periodically check the gauges to make sure a system isn't going critical. But instead, he's watching a skin-flick. As a result, the refinery explodes, incinerating the inhabitants of the company town. Saving one life resulted in a thousand deaths. 

Similarly, an all-good God would not want anyone to suffer. 

Some people deserve to suffer. Take people who commit atrocities.  

An all-knowing God would know who would suffer ahead of time, and an all-powerful God could prevent suffering before it happens. Thus, if there were an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God, then there would be no need for prayer in the first place, especially if the prayer is used to alleviate illnesses or any other type of suffering. 

Of course, that's the problem of evil, for which there are different, sometimes complementary, theodicies. For instance, suffering can be a theater for soul-building virtues. Likewise, a world without suffering will have a different set of people than a world with suffering. Each scenario has tradeoffs. Each scenario has winners and losers. 

Even if someone prayed to the Christian god for healing and that person was healed, it would not prove that the healing was done by the Christian god. All religions claim to have answered prayers. For example, according to the Bhagavad-Gita, part of the sacred scriptures of Hinduism, the god Krishna claims that it does not matter which god human beings worship; it is Krishna who answers their prayer. [13] Thus, it would not be scientifically possible to show that it is the Christian god who answered a prayer even if such a prayer was answered. 

i) Avalos is equivocating. He's an atheist. So even if you can't prove that a prayer was answered by the Christian God, it still falsifies atheism.

ii) What kind of god is Krishna? He didn't always exist. He had parents (Devaki, Vasudeva). Is it even possible for an anthropomorphic deity like Krishna to exist? Is it even possible for a finite god like Krishna to answer prayer? 

iii) Hector's comparison is reversible. If the Christian God intended for Ravi Zecharias to exist, he might answer a prayer to Krishna by one of Ravi's ancestors, in case Ravi's future existence is contingent on that answer. Likewise, if God intended Tom Schreiner to exist, he might answer a prayer to Mary by one of Schreiner's Catholic forebears, in case Schreiner's existence is contingent on that answer. 

iv) There's a conspiratorial quality to Hector's objection. For instance, he teaches at Iowa State U. Now it's hypothetically possible that Iowa State U is really a front organization for a drug cartel. This deflects attention away from the cartel's nefarious activities. They bought off the local reporters and politicians to avoid detection.  

Hector's habit of floating hypothetical alternatives is a diversionary tactic. Even though it's hypothetically possible that things are not as they seem, unless we have actual evidence to the contrary, it's irrational to be suspicious. 

Even if we saw an extraordinary healing occur (e.g., a severed leg grow back instantaneously), we would not be able to prove scientifically that it was a supernatural occurrence. To say that something is supernatural is to say that something is not natural. But to say that something is not natural, one would have to be practically omniscient because that would be tantamount to saying that we know all the natural factors that could possibly be responsible for an event, and are claiming to know that none of the factors was responsible. No one has the kind of knowledge, and so consequently no one could ever call anything non-natural. 
The most we could say about an event whose cause is unknown is that the cause is unknown. As already noted, we would be less justified in attributing an extraordinary event to an infinite being. 
But even if you recovered from a potentially deadly illness in some unexpected manner, you still cannot know if it was an act of God. The most we could say is that the recovery was accomplished through an unknown process. Many recuperations that may appear supernaturally miraculous may be due to very natural processes which have not been recognized or studied previously. Indeed, one can draw up a long list of phenomena that were unknown 100 years ago but are deemed perfectly natural today. In fact, most believers in prayer have received conventional medical treatment, and so one cannot eliminate the possibility that it was the medical treatment, not the prayer, that actually had a beneficial effect, even when such an effect might be unexpected. 

i) That argument either proves too much or too little. We can turn it around. You'd have to be omniscient to disprove God's existence. You'd have to be omniscient to rule out supernatural factors. As he himself says, "there is no way to know that someone did not receive prayer". So naturalism is unverifiable. 

ii) By that logic, every biblical miracle might have happened, just as people saw it occur, yet it has a naturalistic explanation. Surely Avalos doesn't take that seriously. 

iii) If he really takes that position, then he's a secular fideist. If nothing in principle could ever count against atheism, then atheism isn't based on evidence. Atheism is indifferent to evidence. Faith-based atheism rather than fact-based atheism. 

iv) If a Christian receives conventional medical treatment, that explains the instantaneous regeneration of an amputated limb? 

God heals amputees!

Don't take my word for it. According to apostate atheist Hector Avalos, in "Can Science Prove that Prayer Works?" Free Inquiry 17 (1997):

Even if we saw an extraordinary healing occur (e.g., a severed leg grow back instantaneously), we would not be able to prove scientifically that it was a supernatural occurrence. 

For most of my young and adolescent life, I was a faith healer in a Pentecostal tradition. I witnessed what I then thought were resurrections, spontaneous growth of short limbs, cures from cancer, and many other types of diseases. 

So he's conceding that he saw the instantaneous regeneration of amputated limbs. (Notice that he uses "spontaneous" as a synonym for "instantaneously".) By his own admission, that's from firsthand observation. 

He doesn't deny what he saw. "Who should I believe–me or my dying eyes!" Instead, he says that's still not scientific proof that it was a supernatural occurrence. 

Now, Avalos is such a fanatical atheist that he might backpedal on his original, damaging admission. Again, though, how could he be mistaken? How could he see an amputated limb merely appear to instantaneously grow right before his eyes? 

Notice that he's not talking about tricks by other faith-healers, but his own direct observation.  

IMPORTANT: International Declaration of Fidelity to the Church's Unchangeable Doctrine and Uninterrupted Discipline on Marriage

There is a "Catholic-Protestant Debate Group" on Facebook. It is a closed group, but you can apply for membership there.

Not long ago, one of the moderators, Seth Murray, blocked me (I'm still a member of the group, he just can't see what I write) -- because I insisted that Amoris Laetitia actually was a big deal in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Well, now there is an IMPORTANT: International Declaration of Fidelity to the Church's Unchangeable Doctrine and Uninterrupted Discipline on Marriage attesting the very thing I was saying.

I like to razz them, so I posted this:

These guys are just way too uptight, right? I mean, TECHNICALLY no TRULY INFALLIBLE dogmas have been changed. THE TEACHING (whatever that is -- where's the "infallible table of contents", to use Scott Hahn's word, but that's another question) is UNSCATHED. These guys should just chill. So what if a brilliantly "merciful" pope has found a way around the letter of the "unchangeable law", handed down, uninterrupted, as received from the Apostles? Why change "the letter" of the law, when "the spirit" is so malleable? They should just get with the times. Be like the Easterners. Go with the flow. After all, annulments are just so easy and inexpensive to get these days. This issue never needs come up in real life. We should go with Seth Murray on this one, right? Seth is studying this stuff, and he says, "no harm, no foul." Move along. No need to make a big deal about this, much less have an IMPORTANT INTERNATIONAL DECLARATION. These guys should just get a life, right?

This is important enough, by the way, that the New York Times has been writing about it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/opinion/has-pope-francis-failed.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/dilution-of-doctrine.html

More instances where Roman Catholicism opens up the name of Christ to mockery.

Van Til vs Barth

Highly recommended: Van Til’s Critique of Barth’s Christology:

If what we have said above about Barth's thought is correct, then we must stand with Van Til in his fundamental contention: Barthianism is not simply a different expression of Christianity, but a different religion altogether. Or, to put the matter in the form of a question: is there any way to conceive of Barthianism and (Reformed) Christianity as friends? The answer must be Nein!

For this reason, we find the recent dismissals of Van Til's critique by current evangelical theologians somewhat troubling. What is perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that Barth's theology is being readily received today as being friendly toward Reformed orthodoxy. Whatever the reasons for this, it is time to once again exercise discernment, as Van Til did. In addition, we would do well to read Barth, carefully and closely as Van Til did, seeking to understand truly the deep structures of his thought and their implications for Christian doctrine and life. And when we have done that, we must stand in witness and testimony to the self-attesting Christ of Scripture.

Rome's moral weathercock

Prof. Robert George, perhaps the leading conservative Catholic public intellectual in America, candidly admits that the One True Church has done an about-face on some fundamental issues in moral theology:

In fact, the Church can and has changed its teaching on the death penalty, and it can and does (now) teach that it is intrinsically wrong (not merely prudentially inadvisable). Both John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae and the Catechism reject killing as a penalty, i.e., as a punishment, i.e., for retributive reasons. Rightly or wrongly (I think rightly, but the teaching is not infallibly proposed—Professor Feser is right about that—nor was the teaching it replaces infallibly proposed) the Church now teaches that the only reason for which you can kill someone who has committed a heinous crime is for self-defense and the defense of innocent third parties. You can’t kill him as a punishment, even if he’s Hitler or Osama bin Laden, once you’ve got him effectively and permanently disabled from committing further heinous crimes. There is no other way to read Evangelium Vitae and the Catechism. The interesting debate, I think, is about the status of the earlier teaching and what kind of assent, if any, it demanded of faithful Catholics. The same is true of the earlier teaching—plainly contradicted by the teaching of (I think) all the 20th century popes who opined on the issue—that among the valid justifications for the use of military force are retributive justifications. The Church used to teach that going to war to punish aggressor nations can be justified. It now teaches that going to war to punish aggressor nations cannot be justified (though going to war to counter their aggression can be justified). 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2016/09/had-an-interesting-conversation-with-robert-p-george.html

When Rome gives moral directions, stay alert for U-turns. 

Who's the magician?

http://paulhelmsdeep.blogspot.com/2016/09/whos-magician.html

Write up on Calvinism and the Problem of Evil

http://jamesbradfordpate.blogspot.com/2016/09/book-write-up-calvinism-and-problem-of.html