Is Christian physicalism really the child of naturalism that gives essentialism the heave-ho?
I really wish that evangelical institutions would pick the right fights to get into. A couple of days ago I got an email advertisement from that great bastion of substance dualism (or more importantly, that good and faithful opponent of Christian physicalism) in the modern Evangelical world, Biola University. The advertisement reads as follows:
A number of people are linking to and commenting about a recent story over at Hemant Mehta’s blog, Friendly Atheist, about “The Atheist Daughter of a Notable Christian Apologist.” The apologist is Matt Slick, and the atheist is his daughter Rachael. Essentially, the article is her relatively short life story about growing up with Matt as her Dad, how he taught her what theological terms means and all about the importance of critical thinking, and how she lost her faith after leaving her parents’ home and she no longer speaks to her Dad. This is either going to be an intellectually riveting insight, or it’s going to be an intellectually vapid, classless capitalisation on someone’s family tree and a broken relationship with one of the “bad guys.” Guess which it turned out to be.
Should we edit our creeds when we discover that people who don’t think just like us can agree with them?
A while ago (mid 2006) I became a contributor to Theopedia. It’s an online encyclopedia of theology, run as a wiki project where articles are contributed and edited by the public.
In order to be a contributor/editor at this site, one must endorse the statement of faith, which lays out a set of basic theological convictions. I accepted this statement, meaning that there was, in principle, no barrier to contributing. One of the things I did shortly after signing up was to edit the entry for “annihilationism.” It really needed to be done, as a number of other members said, because the existing piece was, to put it gently, something of an anti-annihilationist hack job. It is significantly better now (although by no means fully fair). I also offered to re-write the terrible entry on “hell,” which one of the admins encouraged me to do. I haven’t yet, although I’ve done some research and writing for that entry, which I planned to add to the site when it was ready. In addition I wrote an article on Divine Command Ethics and one on John Locke.
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