Reasons for God

Are We All Nihilists Now?

Earlier this week a student at Harvard asked a great question in a small group meeting: How should a nihilist behave? When asked for the context, he said he had just had lunch with another student, who had proudly proclaimed his dedication to nihilism. The summary of the other student’s position? “There’s no purpose, no meaning, no morality, no God: I can do what I want to do and that sounds great!”

As the group processed the question of this rough-and-ready nihilism, we all agreed: if you are a true nihilist, it is foolish to announce this to the world. Everyone felt that they would be far less likely to trust someone who was so proudly selfish and fundamentally unconcerned about basic claims of morality. If your nihilism is a means of justifying selfishness, you’d do best to keep that to yourself. If nihilism is true, what’s the problem with shrewdly deceiving others and manipulating them to do your bidding?

Physicalism and Reason

Dr. Matt Dickerson, a professor of computer science at Middlebury College, recently gave a lecture at MIT on the relationship between physicalism and reason. The lecture was based on the fourth chapter of his book The Mind and the Machine. After developing an account of human identity on physicalism, and developing an account of what a logical reasoning process requires, he concluded that physicalism is unable to support the ability of humans to reason. In this post I will largely build off of his remarks at the lecture.

Were Jesus’ Disciples Gullible?

One of the common attacks on the reliability of the Bible, and the New Testament in particular, is the idea that “people back then were a lot more gullible about things like miracles and people rising from the dead.”

A commenter on a BBC internet thread put it like this, “Were the disciples just gullible? Aren’t the followers of all religious leaders?”

Or as Rudolph Bultmann offered, in regards to our own comparative enlightenment,

It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.

So that is our question: were the disciples of Jesus gullible?

Radical: Taking Back Your Faith From the American Dream by David Platt – A Book Review

Ghandi is reported to have said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”

And what could be more different than the example of a homeless, penniless, persecuted, despised, and finally crucified person – and his followers waking up in multimillion dollar homes, watching the morning news on flat screen TVs, checking for Facebook updates on their iPhones, driving to church in their luxury sedans, stopping at Starbucks for a four-dollar cup of coffee, being chauffeured into the multimillion dollar church building on golf carts, singing along to a professionally produced rock concert, listening to an entertaining message from a celebrity pastor, and finishing up the experience with an enormous lunch at one of the nicest restaurants in town? Or as Platt would contrast it:

How and When to Revise a Life Plan

When I ran cross country in high school, my team’s coach changed the workout schedule every week. Why did he do that? Because after following his workout plan for one week, we were in better shape and needed new challenges.

The Devil’s Delusion by David Berlinski – A Book Review

Bias. In order to undercut an unpleasant argument, just claim that prejudicial self-interest blinds another person from seeing the error of their ways.

So what to make of Dr. Berlinksi, with a Ph.D. from Princeton and time spent as a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University, who opens his critique of the New Atheists by claiming:

How to Use a Life Plan

Has your office ever announced a “new and exciting mission statement” that is subsequently ignored?

We all know, whether from real life or from Dilbert, that good intentions and eloquent documents don’t mean much on their own.

What really matters is what we do. How we actually live.

In other words, you need to plan to use your Life Plan. It does you no good to write out your goals and then ignore them.

Here are four time-tested strategies for using a Life Plan:

The Reason for God by Tim Keller – A Book Review

The Reason for God, by Tim Keller, is an outstanding response to the biggest questions of our day. (In the very unlikely chance that anyone is wondering: no, there is no connection whatsoever between Tim Keller and this website).

Tim Keller is the highly regarded pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, a church with weekly attendance around 5,000. Redeemer has planted dozens of other churches and is generally considered to be one of the most influential churches in America. From the first page, then, Keller has earned substantial credibility for his excellent track record of addressing people’s toughest questions in one of the world’s great cities.

How to Write a Life Plan

Let’s say that you are now excited to develop your own Life Plan. How do you go about writing it down? What does that process look like?

Your number one enemy is procrastination. So the best strategy is to get started immediately. Before you read the rest of this post, why not take the next five minutes to get started on your life plan?

However, if you have the time to read this post AND write your life plan, all the better. Let’s get started!

The Breaking Glass Strategy

Our voices can, obviously, be used to communicate. But did you know that, under the right conditions, the sound waves of the human voice are powerful enough to break glass? Though this was once thought to be more of an urban legend than scientific fact, in 2005, on the TV show Mythbusters, the rock singer Jamie Vendera actually broke a crystal glass using only his voice!

Defining the “Breaking Glass Strategy”

The “Breaking Glass Strategy” is a tactic used when one message appears to be communicated, but in reality, the goal of the communication is to break things. To put it another way, the Breaking Glass Strategy is used when the actual words of the message make it sound like we’re have a reasoned discussion, but the real meaning of the interaction is entirely different.