I have a few topics I want to hit today.

The first thing is that I want to, in two sentences, reiterate a point I tried to make in my previous post. That is: If we seek to justify God before we will believe in him, then any justification would necessitate that the jutsification itself is our ultimate standard of truth, rather than God's own self-sufficient word. This applies, in varying ways, to logic, morality, and every other aspect of life to which God has spoken.

Up next, presuppositions and evidence:
God being the ultimate, unjustified standard does not mean that there is no evidence for his existence. A good example I want to use to make this distinction clear is the theory of evolution. It would be dishonest of me to say that I don't see any merit to it at all as a speculative theory. Indeed, it has been very thoroughly speculated upon!

Now, the evidence we have for and against evolution is ultimately inconclusive. I've spoken with a person before who told me that evolutionary theory was a scientific fact, with the same amount of credibility as the theory of gravity itself. Frankly, that's ridiculous. Evolution simply isn't as set-in-stone as many people would like to believe. It is not what I would call a "justified fact", but there are many people, some of whom I've met, who passionately (that is, with strong emotional tones) defend it as if it were. They treat evolution in the same way that I treat God. They accept it as a fact a priori, and then argue for it afterwards.

The point I thus far attempted to make is: Just because you presuppose something to be true before you approach the evidence, it doesn't mean that the thing which you presupposed was wrong, and it doesn't mean that you were wrong to presuppose it to be true. Now, I don't believe that macro evolution occurred, but this here-ending paragraph is intended to make my point to people who believe that evolution occurred.

In any case, here we are looking at the same evidence, and drawing different conclusions from it. The variable is not in the evidence; it's in the people. It would be truly foolish for an atheist to claim neutrality in his view of the evidence. I know that's a favorite thing for atheists to do, but the brain is simply not inactive in receiving information, no matter what your religious presuppositions are.

Here's a quote:

"Intellectual activity in the mind is never totally passive or even receptive, but always more or less active...Indeed, all sciences proceed from a series of unproven and unprovable presuppositions." - Bavinck

There's a bunch of stuff around that quote that I agree with, but I am too lazy to write it out here. It's in his Prolegomena.

The evidence itself is important, but it's only part of the puzzle. We have to examine our own presuppositions first of all, to see if they are able to support and account for basic logical operation, before we can even approach the evidence. Your interpretation of the evidence is meaningless without an answer to the question "why do you interpret it that way".

I had two more topics that I wanted to continue into -- Postmodernism and Sheoul -- but me and my friend had a plan to watch Inuyasha tonight. We agreed with one another that we would finish the series, no matter how dumb it got, and it has gotten pretty dumb in some places, (like, I suppose the author occasionally forgets major plot points). Time to go watch that.

"It's not even funny"