Recently I began think­ing about John Lof­tus’ Out­sider Test for Faith (OTF), and I have seri­ous doubts that it’s the ‘tool’ he believes it is. As a reminder (or intro­duc­tion), the OTF asks believ­ers to, “test [their] beliefs as if [they] were an out­sider to the faith [they] are eval­u­at­ing”… That “if your faith stands up under muster, then you can have your faith. If not, aban­don it…” In other words, the OTF asks reli­gious believ­ers to test their beliefs as objec­tively as pos­si­ble, with the pre­sump­tion of skep­ti­cism.1 My ini­tial thoughts are as fol­lows: -=-=-=-=-=-=- (1) If as a Chris­t­ian (or a Jew, or Mus­lim, etc.) I take the OTF and find my beliefs…

An essay recently writ­ten for a course… C.S. Lewis regarded agape love to be the great­est of the four loves. It is the kind of love Christ taught and lived. Author Richard L. Strauss notes that, “it is a love which keeps lov­ing when its object is unre­spon­sive, unkind, unlov­able, or com­pletely unwor­thy… it gives one hun­dred per­cent and expects noth­ing in return!“1 It is an impos­si­ble love if not a reflec­tion of God’s love for us. It is this kind of love, as Peter Kreeft notes, that “goes beyond worth, beyond jus­tice, beyond rea­son“2 . In the words of C.S. Lewis, it is a gift-love from God to us: God, who needs noth­ing, loves into…

Gaunilo’s famous objec­tion to Anselm’s Onto­log­i­cal argu­ment is known as ‘Gaunilo’s Island,’ it fol­lows as such from his On Behalf of the Fool: For exam­ple: it is said that some­where in the ocean is an island, which, because of the dif­fi­culty, or rather the impos­si­bil­ity, of dis­cov­er­ing what does not exist, is called the lost island. And they say that this island has an ines­timable wealth of all man­ner of riches and del­i­ca­cies in greater abun­dance than is told of the Islands of the Blest; and that hav­ing no owner or inhab­i­tant, it is more excel­lent than all other coun­tries, which are inhab­ited by mankind, in the abun­dance with which it is stored. Now if…

Kurt Willems wrote an arti­cle on theooze.com regard­ing post­mod­ern bib­li­cal author­ity, this is some­thing of a response. In his arti­cle, Willems exam­ines the decon­struc­tion­ist philoso­phies of Jacques Der­rida and Jean-Francois Lyotard and from this, attempts to show that within a post­mod­ern frame­work, the Bible can be viewed as author­i­ta­tive. Willems sug­gests we can claim an author­i­ta­tive view of the Bible as the Bible is not a meta-narrative in the mod­ern sense, but a col­lec­tion of smaller sto­ries.1 “Post­mod­ernists are sus­pi­cious of meta-narratives, but highly value the ‘small sto­ries.’ Your story mat­ters; my story mat­ters. The mod­ern meta-narrative of progress has turned out to be a lie, but the ‘small sto­ries’ are what is real in…