The Christian Vanguard

The following was written for a class assignment. Footnotes are omitted.  Chance is a species of the genus spontaneity. Chance is a cause, but unlike other causes it doesn’t have a regular effect. This is because chance does not have an end or telos for the sake of which it strives. While our understanding of causes has a necessary connection to their effects, the connection a cause by chance had with the effect is accidental. So for example, someone may heal an injured person, and he does so because he is a trained doctor. So the doctor is the cause of healing. The doctor may also be a surfer, and it would also be true that the surfer healed the person, but his status as a surfer is not what caused the healing. The surfer status is an accident, that is, it has no necessary connection to the effect. In the same way, chance causes have no necessary connection to their effects. Chance happens for a purpose, but that purpose does not cause it since incidental cause never come...

There is an argument I hear quite a bit against the necessity of baptism. It says something like:  1. If it is possible to go to heaven, or be saved, without baptism, then baptism is not necessary for salvation.  2. It is possible to go to heaven, or be saved, without baptism.  3. So baptism is not necessary for salvation. There's something funny going on with the word "necessary" here. To flesh this out, take a similar argument:  4. If it is possible to go to heaven, or be saved, without knowing Jesus, then knowing Jesus is not necessary for salvation.  5. It is possible to go to heaven, or be saved, without knowing Jesus (Romans 1 and Old Covenant Jews)  6. So knowing Jesus is not necessary for salvation.  This should make the proponent of the first argument uncomfortable because they often times say that we shouldn't really make big deal out of baptism, at least not to the degree that we Catholics (or any other Protestant gr...