Peace & Blessings Beloved,
TGBTG for allowing us to see another day. I pray all is well with you and yours, and that your week has been fruitful & blessed thus far.
Before we dig into our apoloetic arguments, I think it will be helpful if we have a baseline understanding of philosophy, as it is foundational to the concept of arguments, logic, ethics, and truth- each of which we'll thoroughly cover in the future.
The term philosophy literally means, love of wisdom. In a broad sense, philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand fundamental truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationships to the world & to each other. As an academic discipline philosophy is much the same. Those who study philosophy are perpetually engaged in asking, answering, and arguing for answers to life's most basic questions. Philosophy is traditionally divided into the following major areas of study: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics. We'll briefly cover them below.
At its core the study of metaphysics is the study of the nature of reality, of what exists in the world, what it is like, and how it is ordered. In metaphysics philosophers wrestle with such questions as:
Is there a God?
What is truth?
What is a person? What makes a person the same through time?
Is the world strictly composed of matter?
Do people have minds? If so, how is the mind related to the body?
Do people have free wills?
What is it for one event to cause another?
Epistemology is the study of knowledge. It is primarily concerned with what we can know about the world and how we can know it. Typical questions of concern in epistemology are:
What is knowledge?
Do we know anything at all?
How do we know what we know?
Can we be justified in claiming to know certain things?
The study of ethics often concerns what we ought to do and what it would be best to do. In struggling with this issue, larger questions about what is good and right arise. So, the ethicist attempts to answer such questions as:
What is good? What makes actions or people good?
What is right? What makes actions right?
Is morality objective or subjective?
How should I treat others?
Another important aspect of the study of philosophy is the arguments or reasons given for people's answers to these questions. To this end philosophers employ logic to study the nature and structure of arguments. Logicians ask such questions as:
What constitutes good or bad reasoning?
How do we determine whether a given piece of reasoning is good or bad?
A Historical Look The study of philosophy involves not only forming one's own answers to such questions, but also seeking to understand the way in which people have answered such questions in the past. So, a significant part of philosophy is its history, a history of answers and arguments about these very questions.
What often motivates the study of philosophy is not merely the answers or arguments themselves but whether or not the arguments are good and the answers are true. Moreover, many of the questions and issues in the various areas of philosophy overlap and in some cases even converge.
Now that we have a rudimentary understanding of philosophy, we can proceed with our study of apologetic arguments.
May we establish, nurture, and grow a sincere love for the word of God, and study it lovingly & faithfully.
I pray you receive this with the love intended, and apply it to wisdom.
Love you much.
Stay Safe, Stay Healthy, Stay Blessed!
-Humble Servant
P.S- If you have not given your life to Jesus Christ, I implore you to take the time to do so right now. Use John 3:16 & Romans 10:9-10 as a foundation for making your confession of faith. And use Ephesians 2:1-10 to provide proper context for your salvation.
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