My name is Josh Nichols. I love the God of the Bible, golf, my supportive family, my iPhone, John Piper, Coldplay, David Crowder Band, Kernersville, and most things Tiger Woods does.

The Hemlock Society was founded to fight “for voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide to be made legal for terminally and hopelessly ill adults.” – Wikipedia.org

Come to think of it .. maybe the United States government ought to cancel all assistance to LA until these people develop an ability to think rationally. -Neal Boortz regarding California’s stand on Arizona’s immigration laws.

I know Neal Boortz is being facetious and being facetious is entertaining, but he seems to be trying to be rational and reasonable in the rest of his post. It just gets under my skin when talk show hosts make ad hominem attacks even if they are kind of kidding around. All talk show hosts are guilty of this more or less and it makes it hard for me to listen to anything else they have to say, even if I already agree with their position.

A year after losing the use of their legs and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives. -Dan Gilbert

Coined by English biologist Thomas Huxley in 1860, the word agnostic has taken several forms over the years. Agnosticism typically addresses the knowledge of God’s existence, but most agnostics don’t stop there. They often take a position on the existence of objective truth as well. One agnostic will say, “I don’t know, but you don’t know either,” or, “I don’t know, and I can’t know. And, neither can anyone else.” Others say, “I don’t know now, but maybe some day there will be more evidence and I’ll know then.”

So I have a question for anyone who is an agnostic. How do you know that agnosticism is correct?

If you say, “Well, I don’t know,” then, why are you agnostic if you have no basis for it? Or maybe you say, “In the absence of any convincing evidence, agnosticism is the best position to take.” But how do you know that agnosticism is the best position to take in the absence of any convincing evidence? Where’s your evidence for that?

It seems that, no matter how you slice it, agnosticism is a claim to knowledge.

My question for Bob is this: If there is no justification for saying, “I don’t know”, then on what basis would anyone say, “I know”? Under what circumstances is one justified in saying, “I don’t know.” Maybe the correct position to take is one of silence. If you don’t know, then maybe you should remain silent.

*A question for agnostics. Here is the link to the article itself, but to get to the comments you have to go here.

The scientist asks not what are the currently most important questions, but “which are at present solvable?” or sometimes merely “in which can we make some small but genuine advance?” As long as the alchemists merely sought the philosopher’s stone and aimed at finding the art of making gold, all their endeavors were fruitless; it was only when people restricted themselves to seemingly less valuable questions that they created chemistry. Thus natural science appears completely to lose from sight the large and general questions.

– Ludwig Boltzman (Taken from The Mind’s Sky by Timothy Ferris)

“Absolute Tuth Exists”
“Absolute Truth Does not Exist”
“I Don’t Know if Absolute Truth Exists”
“I Don’t Care if Absolute Truth Exists”

The first button takes you to a page with two buttons.

“Laws of Logic Exist”
“Laws of Logic Do Not Exist”

If you continue to click on the first button on each page then you will read that the laws of logic, math, science and absolute morality are immaterial, universal and unchanging and could only exist in a universe governed by God.

This sounds like a syllogism:

(1) Absolutes exist.
(2) Absolutes can only exist in a universe governed by God.
(3) Therefore, God exists.

In order for the conclusion (3) to be true, both (1) and (2) must be true. I don’t know if the first is true, but it seems to me that it is possible that it is true. [I have discussed elsewhere the idea of absolute morality.] Premise (2) on the other hand is more difficult to believe. Maybe it is just part of the nature of matter to behave in a way that gives us what we call the laws of science. When I have discussed my doubts with Christians they tell me to ask God to show himself to me. They say that if I immerse myself in the Bible I will begin to see the truth of God’s existence. If prayer is necessary to believe in God, then what is the point of using deductive logic?