Tag: Aristotle

Christian Individualism and Cosmic Intelligibility, Part VII: Can God Communicate Infallibly? On the Conditional Necessity of Biblical Inerrancy.

After a considerable hiatus, I conclude a series of posts wherein I engage Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella about philosophizing before and after Christ. (See Parts I, II, III, IV, V, and VI.)

I thought I was finished repurposing for Substack my site’s 2024 series on philosopher Bill Vallicella’s criticisms of my worldview approach to defending the Christian faith.

Last week, however, he added “Biblical Inerrancy and Verbal Plenary Inspiration”; please study it before considering my comments. He does not name me but seems to have me (among others) in mind.

A while ago, he declined an invitation to “rejoin” the Evangelical Philosophical Society (EPS), an outfit to which he had never belonged. He had published in EPS’s journal, Philosophia Christi, but that’s as far as things went. He cannot in good conscience join because of the first sentence of the Society’s doctrinal statement:

The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and therefore inerrant in the original manuscripts.

Bill is unable to identify without qualification the Scriptures with “the Word of God” because the latter symbol also applies to the timeless Second Person of the Trinity who became flesh as Jesus Christ in time. Continue reading “Christian Individualism and Cosmic Intelligibility, Part VII: Can God Communicate Infallibly? On the Conditional Necessity of Biblical Inerrancy.”

Murray Rothbard: Notes on His Philosophical Starting Point

Complementing last week’s post is another unfinished essay from my Rothbard biography project, aborted two decades ago.

“All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty.”1

Reason may be man’s most distinctive attribute, but his liberty, his essential freedom (as distinct from his effective freedom) is his noblest. For it is by his exercise of liberty that man decides either to be faithful to his rational nature or to evade its demands. Man is by nature a knower, but how he ex­presses that nature depends on how he exercises his liberty.

Murray Newton Rothbard denied that liberty was man’s highest end and that it may excuse license. He did believe, however, that man must protect liberty above all else in his political life, the realm of legitimate interpersonal violence. There is of course much more to life than politics. There is, for instance, religion, philosophy, and art, not to mention the love of family and friends. To enjoy them, however, requires liberty. It is therefore incoherent to constrict liberty in the name of art, religion, philosophy, or love. An attack on liberty is an attack on the great goods that presuppose it. Continue reading “Murray Rothbard: Notes on His Philosophical Starting Point”