Scott Cherry's Assessment of the 4/9 Debate Between Ted Barham and Ozair Tahir
Last Friday I attended an informal debate between Ted Barham and Ozair Tahir on the question, "Is the trinity logical, rational?" This is my assessment of that debate and my personal rebuttal of Ozair’s argument including a summary of the doctrine of the trinity. Ozair assumed the standard Muslim position that the trinity is non-rational/illogical. But although he is a Muslim, he did not overtly argue his position on the basis of the Qur'an, rather on the pretense of logic and reason. But what he thought was good logic and sound reasoning was, in fact, fallacious. Throughout the course of the debate Ozair repeatedly demanded of Ted, "If the Bible said there were squared circles, would you believe it?" It was a trap that Ted would not fall into. Although Ted could have been much more assertive in putting forth biblical examples of the trinity, Ozair seemed generally disinterested in such evidence anyway. Instead his mind was made up that the trinity was a "squared circle" as he repeatedly resorted to this pet question.
Is God Consistent in His Moral Standards? Does He Have to Be?
The God of the Torah is consistent, it is one of his divine attributes. God is not arbitrary or random. He is consistent in both his attributes and His moral standards. That's why passages about his love for foreigners matter, and why they are not irrelevant. Nothing about God is irrelevant. The LORD is consistent in his love. We Christians don't just ascribe love to God because we want him to be loving. It's because HE said he is loving. God gave Moses his divine truth in the Tawrat, or Torah. In it God revealed much about His nature. He revealed his essential attributes to Moses who penned them for the Jews, the Muslims, and the world: Power, Holiness, Compassion, Righteousness, Mercy, and Love, for example. Who are we to question what God says about Himself in His own words?
A Reaction to Kelly Smith's Attribution of Reason to the Universe
Dilbert: And we know mass creates gravity because more dense planets have more gravity.
Dogbert: How do we know which planets are more dense?
Dilbert: They have more gravity.
Dogbert: That's circular reasoning.
Dilbert: I prefer to think of it as having no loose ends.
–Scott Adams, Dilbert (March 1, 1999)
Apparently there are universal rules of good thinking. They seem to apply to everyday living and to academic disciplines like science and others. We don’t get to choose them; they are imposed on us, but science doesn’t know for sure by whom or what. The rules seem to be very rigid such that if you break them other people might scold you and bad things can happen. One of these rules is called circular reasoning, also called begging the question. It says that your conclusion cannot be part of your premise. It’s just not allowed. Another rule is that if you make a claim about something you have to be able to back it up. You need evidence.
John Locke vs. Thomas Hobbes
by Christian Ledford—
In analyzing the creation of Adam by God, Locke made two arguments. The first argument is relatively simple; Locke argued that humans have rights and are free because God created Adam with explicit intention for him to have rights and be free. Specifically, Locke said that, although natural, rights of humans do not come randomly from nature itself or natural processes but as a direct endowment by God to mankind. The second argument is a bit more nuanced; Locke argued that, because God granted the Earth not to Adam specifically as some sort of divine monarch but to mankind in general, all of whom would come to possess the exact same rights that God endowed upon Adam, no individual has the right nor allowance to violate the rights of another. Specifically, rejecting and rebelling against the brutish Hobbesian notion of rights, Locke said that the rights of one man end where the rights of another man begin.