The Christian Vanguard

The year is nearing its end, and I reflect. The theme is impenitence. Final Impenitence is the opposite of Final Perseverance. We die without confession or contrition of sins. This causes the soul to be eternally damned. I have many sins which I have confessed, and have tried to correct. The biggest attempts to correction have been my previous relationships with women. I felt as though I matured enough, was willing to explain and admit anything when asked, because I know the women I have hurt must have questions.  I started with Chandler. I dated Chandler some years ago, and it ended terribly. I felt as though she pressured me into the relationship, and I was too much of a coward to tell her 'no'. This lead to a disaster of a relationship, and the only way I had the courage to break it off was to be a total jerk to her, so that she  could break it off. This year, I dated a woman, Meghan, who actually happened to know her. So that motivated me to reach out to Chandler and ...

The following is a study guide I typed out for my philosophy of religion class. The Problem of Evil A. “Evil and Omnipotence” J.L. Mackie (1) Explain the problem of evil. The problem of evil states there is a contradiction within this set of statements: God is omnipotent, God is wholly good, and evil exists. Since God is omnibenevolent, God wishes to abolish evil, and since God is omnipotent, then God could abolish evil. If an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God exists, then evil does not exist. But since evil exists, then an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God does not exist. (2) Explain the problems with the four fallacious solutions Mackie considers. 1. “Good cannot exist without evil” or “Evil is a necessary counterpart to good” The main problem with this response is that it restricts God’s omnipotence, if not outright rejects it. If God and evil are necessary counterparts, then God cannot eliminate evil. This would also make “good” and “evil” similar to being “great” and “small”, but ...

Baker’s constitution view states that personal identity depends on mental property of the First Person Perspective. This is the ability to conceive oneself as oneself, or as a referent to the first person pronoun. This is not to say it is a being with a point of view, as mere animals do, but mere animals cannot conceive of themselves as the subject of such thoughts. Having a point of view is necessary but not alone sufficient for being a person. Having a FPP is sufficient for being a person. Further, human persons are constituted by human bodies. Now constitution is a relation between different primary kinds, which entails that they are not identical. A statue may be constituted by copper, but the statue is not identical to the statue because they have different persistence conditions. For example, a bronze statue may be flattened to make copper wire, and though the copper persists, the statue does not. On the other side of the coin, a statue may be made of marble or cheese, and the ...

James’ response to Clifford suggests that we cannot, just by willing it, come to believe something. Thus it is a mistake to think belief is something largely within our control. We don’t believe something because we have logically come to this or that conclusion, but largely because of our volition, which is to say, our non-intellectual nature influences our convictions. So when we are confronted with and have to decide between two propositions that cannot be decided by the intellect, our passions must decide. Even not deciding, as Clifford may have us do, is a choice of the passions.  There are two epistemic goals which are to avoid error and to believe truth. These are distinct. Just because we disbelieve B, it doesn’t follow that we believe A, for we may instead fall into other kinds of falsehoods. Clifford emphasized avoiding error over and above knowing truth, but a good epistemology will have both.

Clifford asks us to consider a ship owner with a bad boat that needs repairs. This thought that it needs repairs makes the ship owner uncomfortable and so he eventually pushes those beliefs aside and then genuinely believes his ship will be just fine for another voyage. Alas, his ship sinks. Clifford believes that the owner is to be held responsible for the death of voyagers because he had evidence to believe otherwise, and his sincerity should be of no help or defense to him. On the other hand, if the ship does not sink and is safe, this still would not excuse the owner because when an action is done, it is right or it is wrong and no accidental feature of the fruits will alter that. So for Clifford, it is wrong to believe things on insufficient evidence.  Clifford states that no belief is truly insignificant because all beliefs prepare us to receive other beliefs, they make us disposed to confirming our beliefs and indisposed to disconfirming them, and it lays the groundwork...

Pascal’s wager asks us to consider that either God is, or He is not. Provided that reason cannot decide for us which is true, we must wager which is true. To not wager is not optimal. The die is cast, in virtue of being alive and finding ourselves in this situation where we will experience the consequences of our beliefs. If we wager that God exists and thus act on that, and it happens to be that God does indeed exist, then whatever sacrifices we may have made in this life are minimal compared to the infinite glory that we will experience with God. If however, we wager that God exists but God happens to not exist, then we only have a finite amount to lose anyway. Analyzing the possible consequences if we were to wager that God does not exist, we would experience an infinite loss, the loss of an infinite God in our lives, and only a finite amount of worldly gain if it happens to be that God does indeed exist. Finally, if we wager that God does not exist, and it happens to be that God ...

Collin’s argument goes as follows. The Existence of the fine-tuning in question is not improbable given theism. The existence of the fine-tuning is very improbable under the atheistic single-universe hypothesis. So the fine-tuning provides strong evidence to favor the theists design hypothesis over the atheistic single-universe hypothesis. Underlying this argument is the Prime Principle of Confirmation, which states that whenever we consider two competing hypotheses, an observation counts as evidence in favor of the hypothesis under consideration if the observation has the higher probability. So Collins thinks fine tuning is evidence of there being a God rather than there not being a God. Fine tuning is the idea that the basic structure of the universe such as the fundamental laws of nature, distribution of matter, the initial conditions of the big bang, etc. is balanced on a razors edge for life to occur. The atheistic single universe hypothesis states that there is only one universe...

I wrote the following for my medical ethics class. Nothing in here is original. There were footnotes, but they don't transfer over in a copy-paste.  In this paper, I will argue that abortion is morally impermissible. I will begin with narrowing down questions that need to be answered in the debate. From there, I will examine what it is that I am, then explore why I have moral status, and argue that I am numerically identical to the fetus. Throughout all this, I will be contrasting it with the personhood view, which I take to be the strongest opposing view.  Suppose one day you are washing dishes, and your child comes up behind you and asks, “Mommy, can I kill this?” It would be foolish to answer without turning around and seeing what “this” refers to. If it is a worm on a fishing hook, it’s probably permissible to say, “Sure. Go do it outside.” However, if you saw your child was holding a knife to a puppy’s throat, you probably would not respond the same way. This sho...