Charles Colson on the American creed.

Google Preview of Groothuis Book

You can get access to a Google Preview of Christian Apologetics on the InterVarsity Press page advertising my book.

The Truth About Islam

“The chasm [between Islam and Christianity] cannot be bridged by rickety planks of compromise. Syncretism would be equivalent to surrender; for Islam thrives only by its denial of the authority of the Scriptures, the Deity of our Lord, the blessedness of the Holy Trinity, the cruciality and significance of the Cross, (nay, its very historicity) and the pre-eminence of Jesus Christ as King and Saviour. And this denial is accompanied by the assertion of the authority of another book, the Koran, the eclipse of Christ’s glory by another prophet, even Mohammed, and the substitution of another path to holiness and forgiveness than the way of the Cross. These denials and assertions are imbedded in the Koran and are the orthodox belief of ninety percent of the people. On every one of these points the true Moslem stands arrayed in armor against the missionary and the Truth, of which he is the custodian and preacher.” (Samuel Zwemer, “The Chasm” The Moslem World, vol. IX, no. 2/April 1919, pp. 112-113)

The Constitution and Slavery (note qualification added)

The Constitution was not perfect, but it was moving toward abolition. Thus, the founders (as their ideas were represented in the Constitution) were working to end slavery eventually. Thus, Michele Bachmann's comments about the founders working to end slavery were essentially correct (but not in every detail), despite the fact that the Constitution in itself did not end the institution.

Please read this article by David Foster on the Constitution and slavery.

The Lone Tree Declalation

The following was released in conjunction with the upcoming Western Conservative Summit, sponsored by Colorado Christian University. I fully endorse it.

1. In our adherence to the self-evident truths of the American Founding, we are conservatives.

2. In our debt to the civilizational heritage of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia, we are Westerners.

3. In our concern for the mounting threat to liberty, seeing freedom in the balance, we convene with solemn purpose at this Summit.

4. We seek a conservative renewal for our country through civic action that puts principle above party, resists the corruption of power, bridges intramural disagreements or rivalries, and protects an open public square centered on the nation’s Judeo-Christian core.

5. We commit ourselves unswervingly to a political and social order that upholds individual freedom and personal responsibility, limited government and the rule of law, free enterprise and private property, traditional family values and sanctity of life, compassion for the poor and voluntarism in service to others, natural law and morality, strong defense and secure borders, all in keeping with the original intent of the Constitution.

6. We reject, and will resist, the socialist temptation, transnational progressivism, secular utopian illusions, appeasement, disarmament, or capitulation to jihad and sharia.

Kindlized

A book I co-edited, In Defense of Natural Theology (InterVarsity, 2005), is now available on Kindle. This is good, since there will be no more printings of the paper edition. It includes essays by J.P. Moreland, Paul Copan, Keith Yandell, and others.

Technological Nostalgia (corrected)

Here is some technological nostalgia from an old guy. Let's go in the way-back machine to 1976.

We had telephones: one per house. The receiver is connected to the base by a short cord. You dial; you do not punch. Long-distance costs a lot of money. You get "busy signals." There are no voice mails. There is no call waiting. There are no personal computers. Computers are big, strange things that the civil government and corporations have. My mother once addressed a letter to "Dear Computer," since we were not getting resolution on an unjust bill. People wrote letters; romances were conducted this way; friendship were preserved (and destroyed) this way. Cars had no computers, so many fixed their own cars.

TV stations were received by rabbit ears (antennae). TV screens were small. You could not record TV shows; it was real time or nothing. In Alaska, where I grew up, we got TV shows two weeks late, because the tapes had to be shipped up from the lower 48 (as we called it).

Music came on vinyl discs or on the radio or live. Music was only portable in car radios. Eight-tracks allowed you to play your own music in the car.

There were no electronic security checks in airports.

Banking was done by talking to humans at a physical location or sending things in the mail. Electric guitars has wah-wah pedals, phase shifters, and distortion boxes and echoplex and reverb. That was it. There were no electronic drums. Synthesizers were just being introduced.

Video games were no more sophisticated than the glacially slow game, "Pong." There was no Internet. Books were bound in paper and not electronic.

Yes, it was pre-historic--and we puzzled less over the black boxes that pervade and dominate our technopolis today.

Doug Groothuis teaching at Metro State this fall

I am teaching Introduction to Philosophy this fall (as an Adjunct Faculty) at Metro State College of Denver on Saturdays from 11:00-13:30. These are my texts:

1. Ronald Nash, Life’s Ultimate Questions. Zondervan.

2. Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates. Barnes and Noble.

3. Blaise Pascal, Human Happiness. Penguin.

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions. Citadel.

Alvin Plantinga and Christian Philosophy

Here is a heartening essay by historian Mark Noll on the recent conference for Alvin Plantinga's retirement. It gives an instructive overview of the development of Christian philosophy in the past sixty years. As a Christian philosopher, I must gladly give thanks to God.

Mussolini and Us

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) on fascism: “The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone.”

Michele!

Here is an excellent article on Michele Bachmann from The Weekly Standard.

We have lost the art and discipline of attending to the sacred.

My email to Hugh Hewitt

Dear Mr. Hewitt:

For several days, you have been upbraiding Congresswoman Michele Bachmann for not appearing on your program recently, insinuating that something nefarious is going on. This puzzles and bothers me, since she may simply have more important things to do for the moment. You are not a king-maker, however influential you may be.

Mrs. Bachmann is the strongest and most principled conservative candidate (far more so than Mitt Romney). As such, she deserves far more respect than you are now giving her.

Sincerely,

Douglas Groothuis

The Accidents of Style

From Charles Harrington Elster, The Accidents of Style: "What readers crave is writing that respects their intelligence, not writing that mimics their vulgarisms" (p. 35). I recommend this careful, witty, and needful corrective to sloppy writing.

Truth Animals

Of all the creatures in the universe who experience what is the case, we are the only ones who make explicit what is the case, and assert that it is the case. We are explicit, or truth-bearing and falsehood-bearing animals, and to see truth truly is to see ourselves truly.--Raymond Tallis, "Saving Truth," Philosophy Now, May/June, 2008, p. 39.

Which worldview best explains this fact?

Backmann and ID

Michele Bachmann supports Intelligent Design in the schools. The civil government should not dominate the ideology of the state schools, as it now does. Darwinism is the de facto religion of mandatory, state education. How free and democratic is that?

My tax money goes to support a scientifically-flawed ideology that I do not accept and which I oppose. This is wrong. A wise politician will see it. Michele Backmann does.

Pro-life or Not?

Find out who the consistently pro-life Republican candidates are.

Leibniz in The Monadology (1714):

And supposing that there were a machine so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, we could conceive of it as enlarged and yet preserving the same proportions, so that we might enter it as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push against another, but never anything by which to explain perception. This must be sought for, therefore, in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine.

My Candidate

Michele Bachmann in The Wall Street Journal.