Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

There are my own personal problems. 1) The Original Sin. I believe that man damaged God’s perfect created world, but as to when, where, and how, I don’t know and don’t care to speculate. The details are unknowable, but my solution is to thank our lucky stars that this non-trivial explanation of why the omnipotent [...]

These are the two basic worldviews. Pessimism brought to its logical conclusion says: “Nothing will be.” The opposite of pessimism is “something will be,” which is just barely optimistic, but I am interested in what optimism is when also brought to its logical conclusion. And that is expressed in the Catholic prayer: “As it was [...]

“On that same day the LORD told Moses, ‘Go up into the Abarim Range to Mount Nebo in Moab, across from Jericho, and view Canaan, the land I am giving the Israelites as their own possession. There on the mountain that you have climbed you will die and be gathered to your people, just as [...]

The parable (Mt 25:1-13) ends with “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.” People keep looking for signs of the end of the world, even in the Bible. They fail to grasp that all the alleged references to the “Second Coming,” the “Armageddon,” and so on are in fact [...]

What is the meaning of the following? “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. “So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the [...]

Did you know that this famous phrase uttered by Paul (1 Cor 2:9, also Isa 64:4) was also written down by the Greek Empedocles? “Week and narrow are the powers implanted in the limbs of men; many the woes that fall on them and blunt the edge of thought; short is the measure of the [...]

As a Johnny-come-lately to Avatar, I must say that of course I was amazed by the effects and 3D and all that. But it was interesting to think of the problem posed in the movie, namely, whether a peaceful solution to the problems of both the humans and the Na’vi could be found. At first [...]

Regarding the kalam argument. Craig has build a huge case for the existence of God based on it. The argument is: (1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being. (2) The universe began to exist. (3) Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being. Craig needs to [...]

In the first philosophy book I ever read, Philosophy for Dummies by Thomas Morris (which is a brilliant introduction to numerous philosophical ideas), Morris articulates the “principle of belief conservation.” First he argues that some of our beliefs are rational, or else the term “rational belief” would have neither referent nor meaning. The usefulness of [...]

Rothbard posed the question: who are the greater villains with respect to liberty, the unwashed masses or the power elite? His answer was: First, even granting for a moment that the masses are the worst possible, that they are perpetually Hell-bent on lynching anyone down the block, the mass of people simply don’t have the [...]

In “The Outsider Test for Faith” John Loftus exhorts us to step outside our faith and examine it with the skeptical eyes of a foreigner. His argument is that an average person’s coming to have the particular faith that they have does not depend on the virtues of the faith itself but on factors that [...]

What a beautiful argument! So, we have: P(F|E) = 1 / (1 + P(E|F’)/P(E|F)) Then if P(E|F) > 0.5 > P(E|F’), then the hypothesis is confirmed (in that its probability becomes greater than the prior of 0.5).

Robert Adams interprets Kant’s argument for the existence of God as follows: (A) We ought (morally) to promote the realization of the highest good. (B) What we ought to do must be possible for us to do. (C) It is not possible for us to promote the realization of the highest good unless there exists [...]

Amy Sayers makes a case against an argument of the following sort: (1) That no miracles are performed today entails that no miracles have ever been performed. (2) No miracles are performed today. Therefore, (3) There have never been miracles. (HT: Victor Reppert) I do have qualms about some of her arguments: for example, the [...]

This is a reply to the first of Ben “The Warrior on Error”‘s atheistic challenges. As far as balancing good and evil, God may allow physical evil (such as: illness or temptation) in order to produce higher-level moral good. But man can rarely calculate sufficiently well to ensure that good will eventually prevail. When he [...]

Now I admit that the theory presented below is somewhat unsatisfying. Why shouldn’t God be my Father? Don’t I love Him? Well, why should He? I mean, consider a person racked with cancer, or a compulsive gambler who lost all his money to blackjack, or whatever miserable folks you can imagine. Is the world satisfying [...]

This is a crucial question, to which the answer is “no, not in this life.” Believing otherwise is, in my view, responsible for the resilience of the problem of evil. God is Father only of God the Son and of the blessed in heaven. To unbelievers He is as if He did not exist; to [...]

Consider the following points: (1) In the order of study, ethics is first philosophy; theology is last philosophy. (2) “Murder is wrong” seems much more obvious than “God exists.” These would suggest that there are few controversies in ethics. Oh yeah? Fat chance! The deeper you dig, the more complexity you encounter. For example, Miller [...]

I say yes, for the following reasons.

Or, at least, some of them.