Evan Minton's Blog, page 18
July 6, 2020
Q&A: Questions About The Problem Of Evil, Divine Hiddeness, and Struggles With Doubt
Dear Evan,
Greetings!
Before anything, I want to tell you that I really appreciate your work. I greatly admire Christians such as yourself who wish to share the truth of Christianity to nonbelievers and believers alike. I love reading through your blog posts and I have learned a lot from them. I first found out about you through a video you had with Crash Course Apologetics. It led me to your website and I began reading your articles....
July 4, 2020
True and False Cases Of The God Of The Gaps Fallacy
Perhaps the most common response from atheists when it comes to arguments for the existence of God is “This is a God Of The Gaps argument!” The God of The Gaps fallacy occurs when we are faced with some phenomenon that scientists haven’t yet been able to explain in natural terms, so we just plug “God did it” into the gap in our knowledge. For example, hundreds of years ago, we didn’t know how lightning worked, so people in Norway said ...
June 30, 2020
Why Theology Needs Philosophy
I could name so many Christians (mostly in the Calvinist camp for some reason) who are either anti-philosophy or think it’s much less important than theology. There are also many atheists who, while not anti-philosophy, think it’s either less important than science, or not important at all.
The truth is that philosophy undergirds all other academic disciplines. It is the bedrock upon which science, theology, law, and so on are built. ...
June 28, 2020
Q&A: Evidence and True Premises
Hi,
I’m a new Christian trying to improve my apologetics. I recently stumbled upon an article you wrote for CrossExamined and there was something you wrote that confused me:
“For an argument to be successful, it must meet three criteria. It must have valid logic (i.e., it must follow the rules of inference such as modus ponens, modus tollens, hypothetical syllogism, disjunctive syllogism, etc.), it must have true premises, and it mus...
May 31, 2020
BOOK REVIEW: “Out Of Zion: Meeting Jesus In The Shadow Of The Mormon Temple” by Lisa Brockman
This book tells the story of a young woman who grew up in the Mormon church a.k.a The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints (often abbreviated LDS). The book is not a primarily an apologetic for orthodox Christianity and against Mormonism. By that it mean, that it’s not a heavily argumentative book with scripture quotations showing Mormon Doctrines X, Y, and Z are wrong, there’s no chapter comprehensively defending the doctrine o...
Anime Theodicies!
In my previous blog post, “Super Hero Theodicies” I talked about how some of the most popular contemporary super hero movies provide some powerful illustrations to arguments against The Problem Of Evil. In this blog post, I will be looking at illustrations we can draw on from anime. In case you don’t know, anime are Japanese animated television shows. They come in a wide variety of genres and different shows are targeted at different a...
May 28, 2020
Super Hero Theodicies!
Making pop culture references when doing apologetics or trying to explain any philosophical or scientific or theological point is always fun. You have a chance to get nerdy and talk about your favorite anime or comic book characters and illustrate your point at the same time. I always love it when I can reference Doctor Who in a blog post about The Moral Argument for God’s Existence (see “Daleks, Davros, and The Moral Argument”) or Pok...
May 27, 2020
How An Atheist Helped Me Overcome The Divine Hiddenness Objection
Divine Hiddenness is one of the arguments that atheists give against the existence of God. I’ve considered this an even more potent objection than the problem of evil. The Divine Hiddenness argument goes like this: If the Christian God exists, and if He wants everyone to believe in Him (because not believing in Him results in eternal damnation), then why doesn’t He just make His existence more obvious. God, being omnipotent according to...
Why The Problem Of Evil Is a Failed Argument For Atheism
This is a paper I wrote on The Problem Of Evil. It’s 30 pages long, so I’ve made it available as a downloadable PDF for anyone who wants to save it for later. This paper was written to supplant the 8 part blog post series I wrote on The Problem Of Evil a few years ago. I figured that people would rather be able to read everything I had in one long article than in 8 short ones. If you want to download the PDF, click here –> https://www.d...
May 24, 2020
Calvinists and The Fallacy Of Illegitimate Totality Transfer
You may remember my blog post series on logical fallacies way back in 2016 when this website was still on a Blogspot platform. There were 28 posts each examining a formal or informal fallacy that often come up in the kinds of discussions I have with atheists and even other Christians. But did you know that there are fallacies unique to biblical studies? Yep. They’re called “Lexical Fallacies”. Luke Geraty of ThinkTheology.org explains ...
