All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/
Polemics

Is the Bible’s definition of faith opposed to logic and evidence?

4 Comments

Probably the biggest misconception that I encounter when defending the faith is the mistaken notion of what faith is. Today we are going to get to the bottom of what the Bible says faith is, once and for all. This post will be useful to Christians and atheists, alike.

What is faith according to the Bible?

I am going to reference this article from apologist Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason in my explanation.

Koukl cites three Biblical examples to support the idea that faith is not blind leap-of-faith wishing, but is based on evidence.

  1. Moses went out into the wilderness and he had that first encounter with the burning bush, and God gave him the directive to go back to Egypt and let his people go. Moses said, Yeah, right. What’s going to happen when they say, why should we believe you, Moses?God said, See that staff? Throw it down.Moses threw it down and it turned into a serpent.God said, See that serpent? Pick it up.And he picked it up and it turned back into a staff.God said, Now you take that and do that before the Jewish people and you do that before Pharaoh. And you do this number with the hail, and the frogs, and turning the Nile River into blood. You put the sun out. You do a bunch of other tricks to get their attention.And then comes this phrase: “So that they might know that there is a God in Israel.”
  2. [I]n Mark 2 you see Jesus preaching in a house, and you know the story where they take the roof off and let the paralytic down through the roof. Jesus said, “Your sins are forgiven.” And people get bugged because how can anyone forgive sins but God alone?Jesus understood what they were thinking and He said this: What’s harder to say, your sins are forgiven, or to rise, take up your pallet and go home?Now, I’ll tell you what would be harder for me to say : Arise, take up your pallet and go home. I can walk into any Bible study and say your sins are forgiven and nobody is going to know if I know what I am talking about or not. But if I lay hands on somebody in a wheelchair and I say, Take up your wheelchair and go home, and they sit there, I look pretty dumb because everyone knows nothing happened.But Jesus adds this. He says, “In order that you may know that the Son of Man has the power and authority to forgive sins, I say to you, arise, take up your pallet and go home.” And he got up and he got out. Notice the phrase “In order that you may know”. Same message, right?
  3. Move over to the Book of Acts. First sermon after Pentecost. Peter was up in front of this massive crowd. He was talking about the resurrection to which he was an eyewitness. He talked about fulfilled prophecy. He talked about the miraculous tongues and the miraculous manifestation of being able to speak in a language you don’t know. Do you think this is physical evidence to those people? I think so. Pretty powerful.Peter tells them, These men are not drunk as it seems, but rather this is a fulfillment of prophecy. David spoke of this. Jesus got out of the grave, and we saw him, and we proclaim this to you.Do you know how he ends his sermon? It’s really great. Acts 2:36. I’ve been a Christian 20 years and I didn’t see this until about a year ago. This is for all of those who think that if you can know it for sure, you can’t exercise faith in it. Here is what Peter said. Acts 2:36, “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.” There it is again. “Know for certain.”

What is faith according to Bible-based theologians?

I am going to reference this article from theologian C. Michael Patton of Parchment and Pen in my explanation.

Patton explains that according to Reformation (conservative, Bible-based) theologians, faith has 3 parts:

  1. notitia – This is the basic informational foundation of our faith. It is best expressed by the word content. Faith, according to the Reformers must have content. You cannot have faith in nothing. There must be some referential propositional truth to which the faith points. The proposition “Christ rose from the grave,” for example, is a necessary information base that Christians must have.
  2. assensus – This is the assent or confidence that we have that the notitia is correct… This involves evidence which leads to the conviction of the truthfulness of the proposition… This involves intellectual assent and persuasion based upon critical thought… assensus… says, “I am persuaded to believe that Christ rose from the grave.”
  3. fiducia – This is the “resting” in the information based upon a conviction of its truthfulness. Fiducia is best expressed by the English word “trust.”… Fiducia is the personal subjective act of the will to take the final step. It is important to note that while fiducia goes beyond or transcends the intellect, it is built upon its foundation.

So, Biblical faith is really trust. Trust(3) can only occur after intellectual assent(2), based on evidence and thought. Intellectual assent(2) can only occur after the propositional information(1) is known.

The church today accepts 1 and 3, but denies 2. I call this “fideism” or “blind faith”. Ironically, activist atheists, (the New Atheists), also believe that faith is blind. The postmodern “emergent church” denies 1 and 2. A person could accept 1 and 2 but deny 3 by not re-prioritizing their life based on what they know to be true.

How do beliefs form, according to Christian philosophers?

I am going to reference a portion of chapter 3 of J.P. Moreland’s “Love Your God With All Your Mind” (i.e. – LYGWYM).

J.P. Moreland explains how beliefs form and how you can change them.

  1. Today, people are inclined to think that the sincerity and fervency of one’s beliefs are more important than the content… Nothing could be further from the truth… As far as reality is concerned, what matters is not whether I like a belief or how sincere I am in believing it but whether or not the belief is true. I am responsible for what I believe and, I might add, for what I refuse to believe because the content of what I do or do not believe makes a tremendous difference to what I become and how I act.
  2. A belief’s strength is the degree to which you are convinced the belief is true. As you gain ,evidence and support for a belief, its strength grows for you… The more certain you are of a belief… the more you rely on it as a basis for action.

But the most important point of the article is that your beliefs are not under the control of your will.

…Scripture holds us responsible for our beliefs since it commands us to embrace certain beliefs and warns us of the consequences of accepting other beliefs. On the other hand, experience teaches us that we cannot choose or change our beliefs by direct effort.

For example, if someone offered you $10,000 to believe right now that a pink elephant was sitting next to you, you could not really choose to believe this… If I want to change my beliefs about something, I can embark on a course of study in which I choose to think regularly about certain things, read certain pieces of evidence and argument, and try to find problems with evidence raised against the belief in question.

…by choosing to undertake a course of study… I can put myself in a position to undergo a change in… my beliefs… And… my character and behavior… will be transformed by these belief changes.

I think definition of faith is important, because atheists seemed to want to substitute their own definition of faith as blind belief for this Biblical definition, but there is no evidence for their view that faith is belief without evidence. I think this might be another case of projection by atheists. Blind faith is how they arrive at their views, so they are trying to push it onto us. But the Bible is clearly opposed to it.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

News

Is the Biden administration using law enforcement to label conservatives “domestic terrorists”?

Leave a comment

There were four very troubling news stories that came out on early this week. I tried to share them on Facebook, but Facebook tends to censor anything that makes their beloved Democrat party look bad. So, I decided to write a blog post about the 4 pieces of evidence. I think people should know before the 2022 mid-terms what kind of people are in the Biden administration.

The big story of the day is from the New York Post:

Sen. Ted Cruz grilled a top FBI official Tuesday about whether the bureau had undercover agents incite violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6 of last year, focusing on whether a man named Ray Epps was a FBI plant who encouraged others to storm the building.

[…]“A lot of Americans are concerned that the federal government deliberately encouraged illegal and violent conduct on Jan​. 6​,” Cruz (R-Texas) ​told Jill Sanborn, the executive assistant director of the FBI’s national security branch during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

“M​y question to you​ -​- and this is not an ordinary law enforcement question,​ t​his is a question of public accountability​ — ​d​id federal agents or those in service of federal agent​s​ actively encourage violent and criminal conduct​ on Jan. 6​?” he asked.

Sanborn responded by saying she couldn’t disclose “sources and methods.”​​

“Ms. Sanborn, was Ray Epps a fed?” asked Cruz after stating that Epps was captured on video the night of Jan. 5, 2021 rousing people to “get into the Capitol.”

“Sir, I cannot answer that question,” replied Sanborn, who added that she was “aware of the individual,” but didn’t have “specific background” on him.

Cruz went on and stated that on Jan. 6, Epps was seen talking to rioters moments before they ripped down police barricades outside the Capitol.

Sanborn responded that she couldn’t answer whether Epps urged them to knock down the barricades.

Cruz then noted that Epps initially appeared on a poster issued by the FBI seeking information about people connected to criminal activity on Jan. 6, but was absent from another FBI “seeking information” poster distributed July 1.

“Magically, Mr. Epps disappeared from the public posting,” he said. “According to public records, Mr. Epps has not been charged with anything. No one’s explained why a person videoed​ urging people to go to the Capito​l​,​ a person whose conduct was so suspect the crowd believed he was a ​fed​,​ would magically disappear from the list of people the FBI was looking at​.”

The video is here:

I tried to share this multiple ties on Facebook, and the distribution was much lower than for my normal posts. It really makes the Democrat party look bad.

Ted Cruz talked about the questioning later, with Sean Hannity:

Very interesting. This is pretty typical for the secular left through history. They commit atrocities themselves, then blame their own evil on their ideological opponents.

A very similar story came out from Michigan, as reported by the Washington Examiner:

Problems continue to pile up for federal prosecutors in the lead up to the March 8 trial for the five men charged with plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Prosecutors confirmed in mid-December they would not call on three FBI agents closely linked to the investigation due to allegations of personal and professional misconduct. Also in December, a key undercover informant involved in the case was charged with fraud in an unrelated case in Wisconsin.

In a pair of explosive filings submitted on Christmas Day and on Wednesday, defense attorneys presented evidence they said proves the FBI and its confidential informants “conceived and controlled every aspect” of the plot to kidnap Whitmer.

[…]The evidence in the new filings includes communications between the FBI agents and their confidential, embedded sources. Federal prosecutors, however, deny the five suspects were entrapped.

It will be interesting to see what happens at the trial, but remember, this will happen in a court in Michigan, not Tennessee.

The third story is very interesting, and it was reported by Fox News:

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is facing calls to resign after it was revealed Tuesday that, according to a National School Boards Association official, he had solicited the controversial letter from the NSBA last year that compared protesting parents to domestic terrorists.

President Biden’s Department of Justice relied on the NSBA letter in creating its own Oct. 4 memo directing the FBI and U.S. attorney’s offices to investigate “threats of violence” at school board meetings in order to combat what it called a “disturbing trend” of harassment of school officials.

Previous emails had revealed that the NSBA was in contact with the White House and Justice Department in the weeks before it publicly sent its letter, but an email exchange obtained by the parents group Parents Defending Education through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and reviewed by Fox News Digital indicates the Education Department was more involved with the letter’s creation than previously known.

[…]”Stunning,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, reacted on Twitter. “The original source of the letter lobbying the Biden admin to use the Patriot Act to target parents as domestic terrorists? THE BIDEN ADMIN ITSELF. Biden Education Secretary: in effect, ‘Please ask us to treat Moms & Dads as terrorists.’”

I think that everything they “don’t know” they actually do know. But they can’t say the truth, because it makes them look bad before an election. And Big Tech will back them up.

And finally, this one, reported by The Post Millennial:

Project Veritas released documents Monday night which appear to contradict NIH Director Dr. Anthony Fauci’s sworn testimony regarding gain of function research.

The documents come from a report at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which were allegedly hidden in a top secret shared drive.

[…]According to the documents, NIAID, under the direction of Dr. Fauci, proceeded with the research at the Wuhan Virology Lab in China and at several sites other across the US.

Fauci has repeated under oath during multiple Congressional hearings that the NIH and NAIAD have not been involved in gain of function research with the EcoHealth Alliance program.

According to Project Veritas, “The report goes on to detail concern regarding the COVID-19 gain of function program, the concealment of documents, the suppression of potential curatives, like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine, and the mRNA vaccines.”

I lump this one in with the others mostly because it shows possible corruption at the highest levels of the Biden administration, and because dissent from the government’s handling of C0VID has been labeled by some on the secular left as “domestic terrorism”.

Make sure that you remember all this in the 2022 mid-term elections. Share the truth with other people so they know, too. I’d like to see the Republicans gain majorities in the House and Senate, so they can investigate and find out the truth.

News

New study: white progressives are more racist against minorities than white conservatives

1 Comment

What’s the definition of racism? Well, it seems to me that a person is racist if they treat people of a different skin color differently than they treat people of their own skin color. So, if a white person treats a black person differently than they do a white person, then the white person is a racist. Because they’re discriminating on the basis of skin color. So, who are the real racists? Conservatives? Or Progressives?

The Yale School of Management reports on a new academic study that provides the definitive answer to the question:

According to new research by Cydney Dupree, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Yale SOM, white liberals tend to downplay their own verbal competence in exchanges with racial minorities, compared to how other white Americans act in such exchanges. The study is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

[…]Dupree and her co-author, Susan Fiske of Princeton University, began by analyzing the words used in campaign speeches delivered by Democratic and Republican presidential candidates to different audiences over the years. They scanned 74 speeches delivered by white candidates over a 25-year period. Approximately half were addressed to mostly-minority audiences—at a Hispanic small business roundtable discussion or a black church, for example. They then paired each speech delivered to a mostly-minority audience with a comparable speech delivered at a mostly-white audience—at a mostly-white church or university, for example. The researchers analyzed the text of these speeches for two measures: words related to competence (that is, words about ability or status, such as “assertive” or “competitive”) and words related to warmth (that is, words about friendliness, such as “supportive” and “compassionate”).

[…]The team found that Democratic candidates used fewer competence-related words in speeches delivered to mostly minority audiences than they did in speeches delivered to mostly white audiences. The difference wasn’t statistically significant in speeches by Republican candidates… There was no difference in Democrats’ or Republicans’ usage of words related to warmth.

More testing confirmed the patronizing white supremacist attitude of whites on the political left:

They designed a series of experiments in which white participants were asked to respond to a hypothetical or presumed-real interaction partner. For half of these participants, their partner was given a stereotypically white name (such as “Emily”); for the other half, their partner was given a stereotypically black name (such as “Lakisha”). Participants were asked to select from a list of words for an email to their partner.

[…]The researchers found that liberal individuals were less likely to use words that would make them appear highly competent when the person they were addressing was presumed to be black rather than white. No significant differences were seen in the word selection of conservatives based on the presumed race of their partner.

Conservatives aren’t racist at all – they’re color blind.

One of the reasons why I get along so well with white conservatives is that they don’t patronize me with low expectations, the way that white leftists patronize non-whites. The view of white progressives is similar to the view of white supremacist racists – they think that there is something defective about people like me because of our non-white skin color.

White supremacists and white progressives agree on this: that non-white people aren’t competent enough to make our own decisions. We need help from big government in order to do what whites can do without help. We need to be told what to think for our own good, and shamed if we step out of line. It’s amazing to me that white racist progressives are seen as “compassionate”, when they are the ones who actually believe in the racial inferiority of non-whites.