Preconditions of Intelligibility

The reason that there hasn't been any entries on the blog in almost a year (since July of last year, in fact), was due to the fact that yours truly has had a lack of a laptop with which to write it. As much as a blessing that smart phones have been for the last ten years, sadly when it comes to writing things such as blog entries they are, at best, cumbersome. However, I was recently blessed to have been able to get a brand new laptop. Now with this, expect blog entries at a much more rapid clip. I appreciate everyone reading this and look forward to writing frequent updates to the Preconditions of Intelligibility blog. Thank you so much for your support! Blessings in Christ, Ray

" The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. "  - Arthur C. Clarke One of the most acclaimed and influential science fiction authors of the twentieth century, Arthur C. Clarke's magnum opus was the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey , which was translated into a groundbreaking film by Stanley Kubrick. As also was his contemporary titan of speculative fiction Isaac Asimov, Clarke was a devoted humanist who championed a vision of an atheistic utopia, free from the pollutant of religious belief. Clarke self-identified as a "logical positivist" - a philosophical position that asserts that only statements that are verifiable through empirical observation can contain any meaning. Other than the rather curious, self-refuting consequence of logical positivism (that the theory itself cannot be given any meaning by its own parameters) eventually relegating it to the dustbin of discarded philosophical ideas, aspects of

A brief blog entry, but I'd like to take a moment to recommend an excellent lecture series by Christopher Watkin, a professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia as well as a Van Tillian presuppositionalist. In this series he interacts with two of the most influential French postmodernist philosophers of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault, and compares their philosophy with the revelational epistemology of Cornelius Van Til. Well worth your time. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/course/derrida-foucault-bible/#course-introduction

The influential 20th century theologian C.S. Lewis was the author of "Mere Christianity," published in 1952. A transcription of three BBC radio interviews originally published in pamphlet form during World War II,  Lewis sought to smooth over theological differences between denominations by holding to the common fundamentals of the faith, such as the argument from morality, but with a distinctive lack of adherence to the Bible as an authoritative and inerrant revelation from God. Rather, this methodology focuses on philosophical rationality. As a regrettable side effect, a symptom of modern classical apologetics is the notion of the "brute fact" of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead as proof of His claims to Godhood attested by the eyewitness accounts of the Gospels, in a vacuum apart from any Biblical revelation of God's plan in history. Of course, in a Van Tillian metaphysical construct, a concept of a "brute fact" doesn't exist. Accordi