All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/

Is pre-suppositionalism a Biblical way of defending the faith?

I’m a classical apologist, so I do use pre-suppositional arguments to question my opponents about whether their non-Christian worldviews can ground rationality and objective morality, etc. But I also use evidential arguments from nature and history. Some people think that evidential arguments should not be used and that they are not as persuasive as pre-suppositional arguments.

When I look the Bible, I don’t see any Biblical support for the view that pre-suppositional apologetics is the only approved way of defending the faith. Instead, the standard method seems to be evidentialism.

In Romans 1, Paul writes that people can learn about God’s existence from the natural world.

Romans 1:18-23:

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness,

19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

And in Acts, Peter appeals to eyewitness testimony for the resurrection, and Jesus’ miracles.

Acts 2:22-24, and 36:

22“Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know.

23This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.

24But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.

And finally from the same chapter:

36“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”

So, I see that God uses nature and miracles to persuade, which can be assessed using scientific and historical methods. Can anyone find me a clear statement that states that only pre-suppositional arguments should be used? I could be wrong, and I am willing to be proven wrong.

Now that global warming is dead, what was it all about anyway?

Consider Melanie Phillips writing in the UK Spectator.

Melanie cites this e-mail about the Medieval Warming Period from Phil Jones, the director of the now disgraced Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.The Medieval Warming Period is a period during the Middle Ages when the Earth’s temperature was higher than it is today.

Phil Jones writes:

Bottom line – their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.

The first graph has no MWP, and the second graph (the real temperatures) has the MWP.

What happened to the Medieval Warming Period?
What happened to the Medieval Warming Period?

(Source: UK Telegraph)

Melanie comments:

In other words, despite the fact that science (or history) tells us that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today, thus destroying the basis of the AGW myth that we are living through an unprecedented warming of the climate caused by carbon dioxide arising from industrialisation, it cannot be true – because the Hadley CRU Director’s ‘gut’ tells him so.

All the manipulation, distortion and suppression revealed by these emails took place because it would seem these scientists knew their belief was not only correct but unchallengeable; and so when faced with evidence that showed it was false, they tried every which way to make the data fit the prior agenda. And those who questioned that agenda themselves had to be airbrushed out of the record, because to question it was simply impossible. Only AGW zealots get to decide, apparently, what science is. Truth is what fits their ideological agenda. Anything else is to be expunged.

Which is the more terrifying and devastating: if people are bent and deliberately try to deceive others, or if they are so much in thrall to an ideology that they genuinely have lost the power to think objectively and rationally?

I think that the terrible history of mankind provides the answer to that question. Nixon was a crook. But what we are dealing with here is the totalitarian personality. One thing is now absolutely clear for all to see about the anthropogenic global warming scam: science this is not.

They had so much blind faith that they just knew that the real temperatures were wrong – so they felt justified in manipulating the data. They had faith that they were right and that the objective world was wrong.

Why they did it

Now consider this article from Pajamas Media. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Excerpt:

Global warming was a fraud, and it has now been exposed.

That little fraud would have cost the taxpayers of the world trillions of dollars, not to mention wrecking their economies with carbon taxes and penalties.

But that’s not even the worst of it. The most important take home lesson is that global frauding was the clear and conscious work of a political machine aiming to steal your money,  your liberties, and your country. It was a massive, worldwide attempt at a coup d’etat, and the victims were going to include all the free and prosperous peoples of the world. Hitler had his Reichstag fire. Today’s transnational left had its global warming fraud. The political goal was exactly the same: maximum power through maximum fear.

Now that we know for certain that global warming IS false, I think it’s time to ask why the global warming alarmists pushed it so hard. I think the best answer is that the government wanted to control the free market and the production and consumption of individuals. They thought we were using up too many resources doing stupid things like driving. They thought we were having too many babies. They thought that there was no sovereign God in the universe, so they had to step in and take control.

So, they took a bunch of taxpayer money and paid a bunch of arrogant scientists to invent a compelling myth, complete with fabricated data. They paid unionized teachers to teach that myth to vulnerable children in government-run schools. Some of them bought shares in companies that stood to gain from the hysteria they were manufacturing. And they used that myth to deceive people into voting them into power so they could override our fundamental liberties. They thought we were too stupid to run our own lives.

First report on Meyer-Shermer-Sternberg-Prothero debate

UPDATE: The audio is here.

The 4-man debate took place last night in Beverly Hills.

The first after-action report from Evolution News.

Excerpt:

It was all shaping up to be a serious heavyweight bout. And then Meyer and Sternberg simply KO’d the competition in the opening round. If I were being generous I might say that Prothero tripped over his own arrogance and impaled himself on his condescension, but let’s be honest; he was completely knocked out by Sternberg. I think Sternberg earned a third degree tonight, one in evolutionary bulldozing.

The debate video will be made available at some point by American Freedom Alliance, the sponsors of the debate, along with Center for Inquiry, The Skeptics Society and Discovery Institute.

[…]To call the debate a massacre would be a discredit to Sitting Bull. The only thing I can say is that Shermer needs to add a point to his booklet on how to debate “creationists” — namely, leave Donald Prothero at home in his van by the river.

Read the whole thing. I’ll post a link to the debate when I get it.

Note, I’ve never heard Rob Crowther sound this harsh before. It really must have been a blowout.