Let Us Agree on Disagreement

To learn anything through listening to teachers and reading books we have to attend to arguments, evidence and explanations. Teachability is the virtue of being open to learning from others. Yet...

Yet, have you ever heard an argument that seems convincing on the surface but something about it just feels wrong? Where do you even begin to look for what is wrong in some presentation? Did you know that there are only four reasons for which you may disagree with someone's presentation? A trained critical thinker is able to name the reasons for disagreement. Can you? For too often, we can't find reasons to disagree, rather, we simply don't like what we are hearing.

Superstition & Bad Faith

What does it mean to be superstitious? How has superstition affected religious and spiritual beliefs? Can Christians be superstitious? What are some of the superstitions that Christians hold?

Nietzsche for Christians

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most powerful critics of Enlightenment modernity and has been called the harbinger of the post modern age. Christians also have a critique to level toward modernity and may find some useful tools in Nietzsche's thought.

Ethics: 180 on Abortion

“The safest position in Canada to take is, 'We don't want to talk about it because it's settled,' so said theologian John Stackhouse recently.

Nature and Supernature

The word 'supernatural' has come to be associated with ghosts, spirits, magic and miracle. Hollywood has made billions building on caricatures received over the centuries. But where does the concept of 'above nature' - which is all that supernatural means - come from? How is it related to the natural.

St Augustine on Evil

Related to the supernatural is the notion of metaphysical evil. What is the nature of evil? Where does it come from? How is it related to the Good?

Movie: A Serious Man

The Cohen brothers allegory of the story of Job

Dr Jonathan Wilson: Theology of Creation

Hear from Carey Theological College professor Dr Wilson who has just completed a book called God's World: A Christian Doctrine of Creation.

On Equality

Some of biggest errors in social and political thinking come under the guise of equality language. Blood has been shed to promote it, and blood has been shed to prevent it. But by what standard do we measure equality?

On Justice

Is justice just 'being fair'? What could that mean? What is justice? Why to we feel a trendy need these days to add 'social' to the notion of justice? Can you have a just process yet end up with unjust outcomes?

On Political Liberty

What do mean by liberty? Is it freedom for something or freedom from something? Does it have limits? What are they? Why? Or perhaps freedom in an illusion.

April Fools

The infamous closing YouTube bash!

No One Escapes Truth

Skepticism about whether we can ever really know truth, or whether our minds have adequate contact with reality, has become a common attitude in our culture. Is what we call ‘reality’ merely belief and interpretation? Let’s carefully define truth in a way that agrees with both common sense and the deepest insights of philosophers.

This session will lay a foundation for later discussions on 'goodness' and 'beauty,' as we explore how they, in turn, are related to truth. Goodness, Truth and Beauty form a triad of what are called 'transcendentals', object that we can think about but are beyond the categories of our understanding. That there are concepts that are beyond the universals by which we think is worthy of reflection in its own right.

In any case, this session on truth will be very basic and practical and provides some clarity for students encountering the usual claptrap on the subject offered by some professors.

We repeat this session on truth at Carey Centre in Vancouver on Wednesday evening, September 28th.

Foundations & Presuppositions

Not so fast. Even with a clearer definition of truth, there are still major hurdles to getting hold of reality. Among these are biases, personal viewpoints, assumptions, and presuppositions. Where are the trust-worthy starting points for human reasoning, human knowing?

This session looks at where we are 'coming from' when we presume to think, know, observe and interpret. How do we get to an objective point of view? How do you know when we're there? Are there self-evident truths or concepts or perceptions that can act as the foundation for all our thinking? Can the Bible serve that function...or is it "turtles all the down, lady."?

We'll just scratch the surface enough to create a useful suspicion that things aren't as obvious as they seem. A little more humility will help us in our quest. This is a great follow up for those who came last week and talked about 'truth'.

Movie Debate: Does God Exist?

Two deep intellects speak about the most challenging question the earth must face.

Let’s just get it over with once and for all: put Christopher Hitchens (God’s favourite atheist) in the ring with William Lane Craig (smartest evangelical in the world) and let them debate in front of a crowd of American fundamentalists. Bring popcorn and get ready to laugh, cry, and shake your head.

The Truth about Goodness

How is goodness related to truth? How do we affirm the truth of moral prescriptions?

Here's one big pitfall: thinking you can just open the Bible to find such firm foundations. Were it that simple, we should expect clarity and agreement among Christians about what these foundations are. Furthermore, there would be little room for deliberation. Mere proof-texting would suffice.

One the other hand, pure 'reason alone' has also failed to produce anything like clarity and agreement on the relation of truth and goodness.

What is it about seeking what is 'right' and what is 'good' that seems so mysterious? Is the nature of goodness itself ambiguous? How do we even define 'the good'? And what is the relationship of truth to goodness.

This is an ancient quest. Our dissuasion will seek to clarify some points that have been glossed over by most ethicists during the last couple of centuries.

The Moral Lives of Politicians

On the possibility (and advisability) of separating private from public morals.

King David was a great king who was also a womanizer. President Bill Clinton was the same. Winston Churchill drank too much. Should we care about the personal morals and private behaviours of politicians? Can the public good truly be served by people of private vice? Aren’t some vices useful in public life?

How to come back from a political scandal:

Debt?  Let’s Just Print More Money!

What exactly is going on when the world uses inflation to escape depression?

We live in times of global economic upheaval and will probably be in them for some time. One thing to watch for is the deliberate use of inflation to escape a recession. Can this possibly work? Just what is inflation anyway? What are its moral implications.

Movie: The Tree of Life

Director Terrence Malick's cosmic vision is an unashamedly epic reflection on love and loss, nature and grace, the voice of sin and the call of beauty.

Brad Pitt in The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick's Cannes 2011 offering Terrence Malick's mad and magnificent film descends slowly, like some sort of prototypical spaceship: it's a cosmic-interior epic of vainglorious proportions, a rebuke to realism, a disavowal of irony and comedy, a meditation on memory, and a gasp of horror and awe at the mysterious inevitability of loving, and losing those we love.

Production year: 2011 Country: USA Cert (UK): 12A Runtime: 138 mins Directors: Terrence Malick Cast: Brad Pitt, Dalip Singh, Fiona Shaw, Hunter McCracken, Jackson Hurst, Jessica Chastain, Joanna Going, Kari Matchett, Laramie Eppler, Sean Penn, Tye Sheridan

Is Beauty More Than Eye-Candy?

"Beauty will save the world" - old Russian proverb

Of all the cherished human values, beauty is the one that seems most illusive to our moral understanding. Is it a purely subjective matter of taste? Does beauty have an objective basis that all could agree on? What is its relation to truth and goodness? To spirituality?

Interpreting the Genesis Creation

'Let us encode man in our own image - male and female shall we encode them.'

Genesis contain the most sublime and awesome descriptions of cosmic and primordial events: creation, human origins, evil, Noah’s genocidal flood, & more. How would you interpret these texts if you knew they were poetry, metaphor, symbolism, mythic story?

Biblical scholarship has been busy with the Book of Genesis for at least a couple of centuries. With additional insight from text analysis, archeology, philology, comparative religions and ancient near-eastern studies, today's scholars have pieced together important evidence about the type of literature that Genesis represents.

Drawing from the work of eminent Hebrew and Old Testament scholar Dr Bruce Waltke, this session will shed some light on how to interpret the first eleven chapters of Genesis. We will then have a better hermeneutical context for hearing from DNA specialist Dennis Venema next week.

A Leap of Truth

The DNA of Adam & Eve

Guest lecturer, Dr Dennis Venema, department of biology, Trinity Western University.

Back by popular demand, Dr Venema, head of the Biology Department at Trinity Western University shows us the theory and the DNA evidence concerning human origins. Lately, he has been on National Public Radio and cover article of Christianity Today magazine. Does the evidence force us to a non-literal reading of Genesis? What would be the ramifications of a non-literal reading of Adam and Eve? Is genetics crossing a 'red-line'?