The High Price of Epistemological Buffoonery

And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

(Luke 16:23) KJV

Threatening people with hell isn’t an effective communication technique. You’ll be dismissed as a kook. The problem is, despite the fact that popular science (SciPop) appears to have a compelling rationale for why hell isn’t at the center of the Earth, it’s very easy to demonstrate the weaknesses of this rationale.

The SciPop antidote to hell is based on the Newton/Einstein concept of gravity in which matter (space-time) is the cause of gravity. The Bible has an extensively developed doctrine of gravity in which space-time existed before gravity was created on the 2nd day. That’s a serious problem. The rationale has two flawed assumptions which are used to interpret seismic wave detections. The first is a major theoretical hurdle, the second affects the details of the model which it generates.

  1. Gravity isn’t generated by the mass of the Earth, it’s emitted from a singularity that God created on the 2nd day, so a ball-drop experiment can’t give us a value for the average density of the Earth.
  2. The Biblical doctrine of gravity includes gravitational time dilation which affects the rate that time passes in proportion to distance from the center of the Earth. This affects the propagation of seismic waves in ways that can’t be predicted.

That’s the long way round to get to the point of this post. What if there’s a hell and people go there if they don’t make a public confession of faith in Jesus Christ? Christopher Hitchens enjoyed celebrity status as an elite intellectual who delighted in the public humiliation of people of faith. As far as we know, he never made a public confession of faith in Jesus Christ. What if he’s actually in hell, right now?

It’s a sobering thought which ought to fill us with dread. For Christians it’s not the dread of going to hell, but dread that there may be millions of people going to hell and we feel powerless to do anything about it.

Hitchens’s Razor – Navigation

SectionTitleScripture
1Hitchens’s RazorProverbs 16:18
2Epistemological AbuseEzekiel 45:10
3Primary or Secondary?Isaiah 5:20
4The High Price of Epistemological BuffooneryLuke 16:23
5The Fool has Said in his HeartPsalms 53:1
SalvationRomans 10:9-10
– Navigate your way around Hitchens’s razor.

July 24th – Hitchens’s Razor

Hitchens’s razor is epistemological sleight-of-hand which fails to distinguish justified belief from opinion.


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