*John is a pre-med senior at UM-Dearborn (Biology). He has also been the student President of Ratio Christi all four years, as well as a co-founder and Vice President of Faith & Reason in his final year.

In discussing design arguments, Richard Swinburne differentiates between two different variants in this family of arguments. The first variant he describes as arguments from spatial copresence (Swinburne, 1968). These arguments intend to infer the existence of a deity from some observed physical arrangement in the world (that can be recognized at one moment in time) that would be improbable to have occurred naturally. Darwinian evolution has become a formidable barrier to this form of argumentation, so Swinburne presents an alternate form that avoids this objection altogether. I will argue that his route of argumentation is the best way to avoid the implications of Darwinian evolution.

Now that Ramadan is over, it is time to reply again to Ozair's comments to my first piece on this subject from April 14th, two posts down. In that I accused Ozair of changing the subject, all the while accusing Ted of trying to. Again, for their debate Ozair insisted on the topic—it could only be the trinity, nothing else. But Ozair does not even understand it himself, which is apparently why he changed it to the incarnation of God. The doctrine of the trinity is really that simple—There is one God who has one Essence with three persons. Period. It entails nothing necessarily about the nature of the man that was Jesus. Again, the way that the debate question was framed excludes any discussion about incarnation, so it does not concern the Arians, the Apollonians, or the Nestorians whose heresies were unrelated to the trinity. The matter of the trinity is confined to questions about Yahweh's nature, his plural-unity, not Jesus. (Also, since Allah has plural attributes in what sense is he 'absolute one' in the Islamic sense?) See Appendix 1 of my book, The Reason of Reason. 

Francis Schaeffer provides an eloquent discussion of divine plurality-within-unity in his excellent book, He is There And He Is Not Silent, although he uses the word “diversity” instead of plurality. Here I want to offer a summary of his thinking on this subject starting with an overview of this short book should you like to read it (only 80 pages plus appendices). I highly recommend it. The main argument we are concerned with is Schaeffer’s conviction that only the existence of a tri-personal God, i.e. the trinity, can make sense of both diversity and unity in reality. This is also my conviction for which I will offer my own commentary. But allow me to come back to this specific point in the fifth paragraph after a bit more overview of the whole book should you like to read it. Or you can skim down.

Last Friday I attended an informal debate between Ted Barham and Ozair Tahir on the question, "Is the trinity logical, rational?"  This is my assessment of that debate and my personal rebuttal of Ozair’s argument including a summary of the doctrine of the trinity. Ozair assumed the standard Muslim position that the trinity is non-rational/illogical. But although he is a Muslim, he did not overtly argue his position on the basis of the Qur'an, rather on the pretense of logic and reason. But what he thought was good logic and sound reasoning was, in fact, fallacious. Throughout the course of the debate Ozair repeatedly demanded of Ted, "If the Bible said there were squared circles, would you believe it?" It was a trap that Ted would not fall into. Although Ted could have been much more assertive in putting forth biblical examples of the trinity, Ozair seemed generally disinterested in such evidence anyway. Instead his mind was made up that the trinity was a "squared circle" as he repeatedly resorted to this pet question.

To our current Western ears some passages in the Torah such as Numbers 31:18 and Deuteronomy 21:10-14 generally evoke a negative emotional response, but they must not be viewed through a 21st-century lens only. We can hardly avoid using a modern-day lens, but we must also use an ancient Near Eastern as well as a broad Mosaic lens. These passages should not be misconstrued in support of slavery, sex slavery, rape, or the objectification of women. But they do require careful thought and interpretation. In light of the ancient, NE pagan moral codes that 'governed' slavery, sex, marriage and foreign relations, the skeptic’s claim that Yahweh condoned or permitted sex-slavery, pedophilia, or marital rape is untenable. Throughout the Hebrew Tanakh, Yahweh presents himself as a God of goodness, justice, and love. He explicitly set himself apart from the false gods of the surrounding nations in numerous ways. This was embodied in his miraculous acts toward his people but also through superior laws given through Prophet Moses and other prophets. In them he introduced a superior socio-sexual morality that was unmatched by any pagan society of the day or by Islam millennia later.