Limit and Mind

> Show me the evidence > Sure, that's a reasonable request. Here are the eyewitness testimonies to Jesus's life, death, and Resurection > That's not evidence > Ok, how about the myriad of archeological findings that support the historical Biblical account? > That's not evidence > Alright, let's use science. The Big Bang and Fine tuning show that a Creator is more likely than not > That's not evidence > Ok, perhaps a philosophical argument will do the trick. Contingency, MOA, Moral argument, and the Kalam. > That's not evidence > Ok, it's hard to see what you'll accept as evidence at this point. I'm starting to think you don't actually want the evidence.

The name is the Forgivengen All the best to you, brother

Christian Bale is Josh Brolin's father.

Your weekly reminder that statistical concepts like correlation, conditional independence, etc. are distinct from causal ones like intervention, confounding, influence, etc., and the latter cannot be reduced to the former.

"Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall" - Proverbs 16:18

Is Bukele about to annex Haiti to establish the El Salvadoran empire?

Don't mind if I do

"I would like to have seen Montana"

I like @worldviewdesign's new piece on “What caused God to cause the universe?”. It answers a common objection that comes up in these discussions when we (theists) run a contingency or cosmological argument that leans on the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). The usual worry is this... if everything contingent needs a cause and/or an explanation, then God’s act of creating the universe seems to need one too. Accepting that, you either get > an infinite regress (no bueno) or > you allow an uncaused event, which makes the argument self-undermining. Rasmussen’s move in the article is to say every event just needs a causal condition, something required for it to happen, but not every event needs its own separate causing event. Conditions are needed, not necessarily events. God can just be the condition for the act of creating. Nothing else has to cause God to will the universe, God is the condition for that willing, and the willing can still be motivated by reasons that don’t force it. Agent causation applied to the fundamental level of reality. Beautiful, really. This is very complimentary to the work that Pruss and Koons have been writing for years to keep a strong PSR compatible with free will. Free choices can be explained by the agent and the reasons without being determined and without needing a fully contrastive explanation of why this option rather than that one. We are just applying that same structure to the divine case so the act of creation doesn’t start a regress or collapse everything into necessity. And this doesn’t leave us with chaos, because the nature of the necessary being constrains which outcomes are possible. That isn’t a limit on divine power, it’s part of what makes coherent power even intelligible. This article also includes I think an implicit critique of Hume's formulation of causation, but that's for another post at another time. The quote at the end is particularly good "On this picture, God is ... like a living ocean that begins to cause waves within itself. These waves are not grounded in a timeless state, but emerge from a being interested in motion." worldviewdesign.substack.com…

Powerful message from David. I use the Enduring Word commentary often. Really solid resource to help you understand the Bible better.

I cannot endorse this idea enough

There’s a concerted effort to discredit men who preach God’s Word without apology. It takes the following form: 1. Magnify old or minor mistakes until they’re framed as permanently disqualifying. 2. Ignore every apology and piece of clarifying context that has already been offered. 3. Count on your lazy audience that already disliked them (usually because they called out your audience's sin) to accept the smear at face value and never look further. If you still think this is just ordinary criticism and not spiritual warfare, you’re not paying attention.

"I'm on a break from Twitter." If the poster is not in my camp, it is because they were comprehensively bodied, publicly dismantled, and mogged with such relentless, unanswerable force that the residual fragments of their ego required immediate cryogenic suspension merely to prevent total psychic disintegration. If this person is in my camp, it is because the most noble and clear sighted among us periodically withdraw to recover their full strength before returning once more to enlighten the ignorant of this world. The temporary silence is deliberate rearmament... an interval in which their superior faculties are restored so that the subsequent illumination can be delivered with greater precision, greater force, and greater permanence upon those still stumbling in the dark. Hope this clears things up.

Dan McClellan is about as Christian as my dog is feline and was about as effective at destroying Wes Huff's reputation as George McClellan was in destroying Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia during the Civil War.

A funny description of what must have been a terrible moment of war. Taken from "Emma Gees" by H.W. McBride, an American serving with the Canadians, witnessing the "Ladies from Hell" H.W. McBride was basically the Ernst Junger of the Allies. Smart, daring, seemingly indestructible and who wrote down all of his wartime experiences. This excerpt is from the Battle of St. Eloi, where the allies detonated mines under the German lines at the start of the attack but realized that the resulting craters were difficult to defend from counter-attack. "Early next morning we had a chance to see some of the "Kilties" in action with the bayonet, during a counter-attack, which they repulsed. As I remember it, they did very little shooting but jumped out of their trench to meet the attackers with the cold steel. I never saw any lot of soldiers who seemed so utterly determined to wipe out all opposition. They were like wild men; savage and blood-thirsty in the onslaught and, although the Germans must have outnumbered them at least three to one, they never had a chance against those brawny Scots. But few of the boches got back to their own line and no prisoners were taken. We then appreciated the nickname given by the Germans (first applied to Canadian Highlanders at Langemarck, but afterward used to designate all "Kilties"), "The Ladies from Hell." "

An interesting article came out recently from Josh Rasmussen pointing out the flaws in Sobel's objection to the Cosmological Argument from Koons The cosmological argument: every wholly contingent fact needs a cause, the total contingent reality is itself wholly contingent, so it needs a cause that is not contingent (a necessary being). The objection, Sobel's parity move: the ordinary inductive evidence for “wholly contingent facts have causes” is equally evidence that those causes are themselves contingent. So, by parity, we should expect the total contingent reality to have a contingent cause too, which then creates circularity problems for any cosmological argument. Sobel’s parity move does look clever at first glance. When we get to the big contingent fact, which is the whole contingent world, we should expect a contingent cause for that too, which of course transports us to circularity land. We are talking about the contingent whole of reality, but we are still demanding a contingent cause by parity which would be in the whole already. Contradiction. But the probabilistic/inductive side of this is where it starts to fall apart. The principle Sobel is relying on really has two parts that pull in opposite directions, and because of this, his objection is self-undermining. > One part says every wholly contingent fact has some cause. > The other says that whenever it has a cause, that cause is itself contingent. Once you apply this to the total contingent fact, the first part gives you a reason to expect a cause for the whole thing. Yet any cause that could actually do the job would have to be non-contingent, which directly undercuts the second part. So the evidence that is supposed to support the principle ends up counting against one of its own components. Give the article a read, short and sweet. Remember also that the evidence for God's existence is abundant. worldviewdesign.substack.com…

When you meet God, the mocking stops. And now we have another dear brother. I see Jesus change lives all the time, and not the least my own. So it’s quite surprising when I hear people say He doesn’t exist. What do you mean? I talk with Him every day. Jesus is coming back soon, will he meet you as a friend or as a stranger?

Had an Aussie woman scold me in New Zealand for praising her countrymen because they punch Kangaroos in the face (you’ve seen the videos). She tried to lecture me about making generalizations or something like that. Her husband, a Scot, sat by silently. Best interaction I’ve ever had with an Aussie.

Wife and I's marriage anniversary today. 8 years! The Lord has blessed us. Here's to another 8 more (at least). Funny aside, the wife in one of our family's worst marriages just texted us "remember, the wife is always right :)" To which I responded "yeah no"

Kingdom of Heaven is a visually stunning movie, and could have been an absolute masterpiece if it tried to be historically accurate. When I watch it, I enjoy it for what it is.