Congratuations - You are this week’s Frappr winner. Thanks very much for listening to STR’s podcast and posting on our Frappr map. Greg will announce your name on Sunday’s show and your signed book will be in the mail next week.

Yay! ^_^ For those wondering what this is all about …

Frappr: A Google Maps “mashup” which allows people to form online communities.

STR: Stand to Reason, one of the premiere sources of clear thinking on tough issues on the web.

STR Podcast: Greg Koukl’s radio show archives are available online.

So STR has a Frappr map set up on their podcast page (registration req’d to see it unfortunately) and each week they choose a winner to receive a free autographed book by Greg.

BTW the STR radio show is on Sundays 6-8pm EST (5-7pm PST) via online streaming audio, or locally on KBRT 740AM in Southern California. (And I think it’s also syndicated on some other stations too.) It’s the only radio show I listen to regularly, and I highly recommend it! (And not just because of the free book!)

I’m not sure how accurate its numbers are, but this “World Clock” purports to give you statistics on a number of different worldwide metrics, updated dynamically, including:

• Population
• Births
• Deaths (sorted by method)
• Abortions
• Number of cars, bicycles, and computers produced
• Etc …

You can also click the Year, Month, Week, Day, and Now buttons at the top to limit the results to a specific period of time. For example, since I started writing this post, 200 abortions have occurred. In the last week, the number of abortions that occurred was approximately 258,000, compared to 17,000 from all STDs including HIV/AIDs. Now, all of these figures are sad and alarming, and I am in no way trying to belittle the AIDS epidemic. In fact I regularly support the blood:water mission in their efforts to provide clean drinking water and clean blood to help battle the HIV/ADS crisis in Africa.

However, although the shockingly large number of abortions does not itself prove anything about the ethics of abortion, it should lead us to think seriously about the morality of this issue: Year-to-date nearly 31 million abortions have occurred. If abortion does take the life of a human person, that is 31 million murders.

• For more on this subject, please see my previous post Abortion = Profits?.

Lately I’ve been hanging around Foru.ms (formerly known as ChristianForums.com, RIP), mostly in the Apologetics, Christian Philosophy & Ethics, and College / Bible College forums. Recently I observed a fine example of a fallacious sort of argument that we might call “argument from overwhelming”.

Greg Koukl might call it the steamroller tactic. In its electronic, forum-based version, a person will post (usually as his/her first and only post(s) on a forum) a ridiculous amount of information, usually copied and pasted from other websites. Then, they will add their own comments as the last paragraph of the post, something along the lines of “See Christianity has been proven wrong!”

Now, I’m sure people of every religious persuasion are guilty of doing the very same thing. But this sort of tactic is dishonest regardless of who is doing it. The perpetrator can confidently fold his or her arms and gloat, since it’d be practically impossible for someone to respond to everything that has been pasted into the thread.

Anyways, the post on CF demonstrated a second fallacy. The thread I quote from below has been rightly deleted as trolling/spam, but I saved a copy of the post before it was removed. Here’s a portion of what the author actually wrote him/herself:

The truth is that all religions were simply made up by ancient peasants that didn’t have the science and facts we do today and just took a guess based on nothing which is that a ghost with magical powers created everything.

Here we have an example of the fallacy of chronological snobbery. (Which, I just learned, was coined by C. S. Lewis and friend Owen Barfield.) Essentially, it is the unjustified assumption that all thinking, art, science, etc of previous eras is inherently inferior to our own. (As an aside, this comment also uses loaded language as its author builds a straw man depiction of God.)

Chronological snobbery assumes that all “ancient” people were ignoramuses who can’t be trusted. Where the line is to be drawn in history to divide these supposedly ignorant savages from today’s enlightened, intelligent thinkers is never explicitly stated, but likely lies just prior to the birth of the person espousing such a view. I certainly hope that, a hundred years hence, everything we think and believe isn’t dismissed out of hand by those living in 2107 just because “Everyone in 2007 was ignorant of modern science.”

Even though ancient peoples were indeed ignorant of many areas of modern science, they still knew how to make accurate historical claims. For example, people knew that, generally speaking, dead people stay dead. Unless, of course many independent witnesses were convinced, to the point of their own deaths, that a dead mad had risen …

Related reading:

• The Facts Concerning the Resurrection - Dr Gary Habermas explains why even if we don’t accept the Bible as “inerrant” we can build a case for the resurrection using only facts agreed upon by the vast majority of critical scholars.
• Good people - What makes a person “good”? What did Jesus say when he was asked this question?

Sometimes I think that I might like to study philosophy at a graduate level. To cure myself of this notion, I’ve found it to be effective to simply open up a scholarly journal of philosophy and read some of the articles (or even just the titles). For example:

Does Existence Itself Exist? Transcendental Nihilism Meets the Paradigm Theory - William F. Vallicella

I mean, come ON. (Love the conspiracy-theory-site type design on that site; this article was published in a scholarly collection of philosophy long before being posted here.) I can see how the topic would be of interest to some, but personally I couldn’t endure writing about such a subject. Even as someone who’s interested in epistemology and ontology, I don’t feel the need to debate whether existence exists.

I guess I’ll leave this particular area of philosophy to real pro philosophers.

That said, Dr Vallicella (author of the existence article above) does run an interesting blog called Maverick Philosopher that I read on occasion … it’s where I came across the article, and his blog is worth checking out.