This episode is a sermon/talk that I delivered on Sunday the 27th of July at our church, Grace Bible Church, here in Dunedin, New Zealand.
I was asked to preach on Mark 13, the Olivet Discourse. Yes, the whole thing. In one sermon. That meant I had to be pretty simplistic about it, and I couldn’t go into a huge amount of depth. It was an introductory talk to an audience that had never really looked at the issue before (at least, it had never been spoken about in church). So basically, it’s an introduction to Mark 13, and therefore an introduction to preterism.
As I’ve been saying a bit about Plantinga in the podcast recently, it’s fitting to comment on something that I recently found online. Evan Fales, back in 1994, wrote a book review critical of Alvin Plantinga’s Warrant and Proper Function. The review was originally published in the journal Mind, and you can read it here.
For those not already familiar with Plantinga’s epistemology, his idea of warrant (that is, the thing that makes a belief into knowledge, and not just a lucky true belief) involves the further idea of proper function. Fales, like me, takes Plantinga to hold to a variety of what’s known as reliabilism, but as not everyone shares that view (apparently), and since that doesn’t really matter for what I’m going to say about Fales’ attempt, let’s ignore that. For Plantinga, we have warrant for our beliefs if they are formed by a properly functioning set of belief forming faculties, functioning in a truth aimed way, in an enviromnment to which they are well suited, in accordance with a design plan. His argument is aimed at the conclusion that if atheism were true, knowledge would be impossible, since our belief forming faculties – indeed all of our faculties – simply don’t have a proper function, much less a design plan.
But Evan Fales thinks he has demonstrated a flaw in Plantinga’s view of knowledge. Here I will comment on only one such attempt on Fales’ part. He poses the following counter example: Read the rest of the entry »
Here’s Episode 13, which is part 2 of my coverage of Plantinga and presuppositional apologetics.
In this episode I present Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. I then close by summing up the similarity between Plantinga and Van Til and co., and respond to one objection that is common to them both.
Also, for the first time ever – we have mail! I reply to it at the end of this episode.
Remember folks, if you’re regular listeners, I encourage you to subscribe via itunes (or download the file from this site, rather than listening to it at my site). That way, you download the whole episode just once even if you listen to it more than once, instead of effectively downloading it again every time you listen to it at this site, which really eats up the bandwidth. New listeners, feel free to listen to it at my site to get an idea of whether or not you want to subscribe.
Here’s Episode 12 of the Berettacast: “Plantinga and Presuppositional Apologetics.” I’ve decided to give Plantinga two episodes, as it ended up filling up a big chunk of time. This is part 1, which looks at Plantinga’s argument for theism from Warrant.
The new version of the Apple iPhone hits New Zealand this week on the 11th of July. The only telco company to provide iPhone plans is Vodafone. They teased the nation recently by advertising that they’d be selling the iPhone from only $199 on a two year plan.
It sounded great, and I was going to buy one. It turned out not to be great at all, and I won’t be. For that price you get the 8Gig iPhone on a two year plan, at TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS PER MONTH, considerably more expensive than the most expensive plan that will be offered in any other nation on earth, with a plan that offers significantly fewer minutes and data.
The price is almost unbelievable. It seemed impossible, but them’s the facts. Needless to say, the excitement has worn off. Here’s John Campbell grilling a rather unfortunate Vodafone public relations employee who had the very unenviable task of fronting up to the media.
This episode is an explanation of “presuppositional apologetics,” one of several approaches to defending the Christian faith.
Episode 12 will be about the anti-naturalistic arguments of Alvin Plantinga, and I will argue there that Plantinga and not Van Til should be the one to whom presuppositionalists look.
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