Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity

Comprehensive practice flashcards defining foundational terms in Christian apologetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and ethics from J. P. Moreland's text Scaling the Secular City.

Kalam Cosmological Argument

A form of the cosmological argument popularized by medieval Arabic philosophers and defended by William Lane Craig, which argues that the universe had a beginning, that this beginning was caused, and that the cause of the universe was personal.

Thomist Cosmological Argument

A cosmological argument originating from Thomas Aquinas that begins with the existence of contingent beings and argues that an ongoing, simultaneous regress of dependent beings must be grounded in an uncaused, metaphysically necessary Being whose essence is not distinct from its existence.

Leibnizian Cosmological Argument

A cosmological argument formulated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that utilizes the principle of sufficient reason to conclude that the existence of anything at all requires an intrinsically intelligible, self-explanatory Being whose existence is logically necessary.

Actual Infinite

A set or collection considered as a completed totality that contains an actually infinite number of members ($\aleph_0$), possessing properties such that a proper subset can be placed into a one-to-one correspondence with the whole set.

Potential Infinite

A series or collection that increases indefinitely through time by successive addition, remaining finite at any given moment and never achieving completion as an actual totality.

Entropy

A thermodynamic measure (denoted by $S$) of disorder, unavailable energy, or randomness in a closed system, which according to the second law of thermodynamics increases irreversibly toward maximum disorder and uniform energy distribution.

Teleological Argument

An argument for God's existence (also known as the design argument) which infers an intelligent Designer from pervasive features of order, functional complexity, beauty, information, and purposeful arrangement in the natural world.

Anthropic Principle

The observation that fundamental cosmic singularities and physical constants (such as gravity, the expansion rate of the big bang, and nuclear force constants) are finely balanced within extremely narrow limits necessary for the emergence of living observers.

Synthetic A Priori Truth

A proposition about the real world (synthetic) that is known directly by rational intuition without empirical investigation (a priori) and expresses a metaphysically necessary state of affairs.

Substance Dualism

The philosophical view that a human person is constituted by two distinct substances: a physical body and an immaterial soul or mind that possesses causal powers, intentionality, and the capacity to survive physical death.

Epiphenomenalism

A form of property dualism holding that mental states are nonphysical, causally inert byproducts generated by physical brain events, akin to smoke given off by fire, without possessing any causal power of their own.

Intentionality

The distinctively mental property of 'aboutness' or 'ofness,' referring to the mind's ability to hold thoughts, beliefs, or desires that refer to or point toward objects beyond themselves.

Indiscernibility of Identicals

The logical principle (Leibniz's Law) stating that for any entities $x$ and $y$, if $x$ and $y$ are identical, then every property $P$ true of $x$ must also be true of $y$, and vice versa.

Self-Refuting Statement

A statement that falls within its own field of reference and fails to satisfy its own criteria of validity or truth, rendering it necessarily and unavoidably false upon assertion.

Emergent Property View (EPV)

A holistic materialist thesis asserting that when matter reaches an advanced level of structural complexity (such as the brain), novel mental properties supervene and emerge from the underlying physical organization.

Nihilism

The philosophical position that human existence is totally and irremediably devoid of objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value, reducing life to an absurd, purely naturalistic accident.

Optimistic Humanism

A secular philosophy that rejects cosmic purpose and objective transcendent values while maintaining a life-affirming stance, claiming individuals can subjectively invent purpose and find satisfaction in life.

Immanent Purpose View

The philosophical view that objective moral values exist as brute constituents of the universe giving real meaning to human life, without requiring God or a transcendent purpose for the cosmos.

Emotivism

A noncognitivist metaethical theory asserting that moral judgments do not state objective facts or convey truth value, but merely express personal emotions and feelings (e.g., 'hurrah for $x$' or 'ugh for $x$').

Ethical Naturalism

A reductionist metaethical theory asserting that ethical terms (such as 'right' or 'good') can be fully defined by and reduced to natural, empirically measurable physical, biological, or psychological properties.

Ethical Nonnaturalism

An objectivist metaethical view holding that moral properties (such as goodness, worth, and rightness) are real, unanalyzable, and irreducible features of reality that cannot be equated with natural or empirical properties.

Bibliographical Test

A critical historiographical test examining the textual transmission of an ancient document by analyzing the total number of surviving manuscript copies and the time interval separating them from the original autographs.

Criterion of Dissimilarity

A historical-critical method stating that a recorded saying of Jesus in the Gospels is authentic if it cannot be paralleled in contemporary first-century Judaism or in the subsequent life and theology of the early church.

Scientific Realism (Rational Realism)

The philosophy of science maintaining that mature scientific theories are approximately true descriptions of a mind-independent world, their theoretical terms refer to actual entities, and scientific progress converges on truth.

Phenomenalism

An antirealist view of science asserting that scientific knowledge is limited exclusively to observable sensory phenomena, regarding theoretical terms as shorthand rules or summaries for sets of possible sensory experiences.

Operationism

An antirealist philosophy of science holding that theoretical concepts do not designate real unobservable entities, but are strictly synonymous with the concrete laboratory operations and procedures used to measure them.

Constructive Empiricism

An antirealist view of science formulated by Bas van Fraassen asserting that science aims solely to produce empirically adequate theories that save the observable phenomena, rather than literally true accounts of unobservable entities.

Incommensurability

Thomas Kuhn's concept that competing scientific paradigms cannot be objectively compared or judged against common neutral standards because perception, concepts, and criteria of rationality are theory-laden and paradigm-dependent.

Numinous Experience

A direct, non-sensory religious perception of a personal spiritual Reality who is holy, awesome, distinct from the perceiver, and the source of moral goodness and dependence.

Principle of Credulity

Richard Swinburne's epistemological principle stating that, in the absence of positive defeating conditions or counter-evidence, what a person seems to perceive is probably so.

Category Fallacy

The logical error of attributing a property to an entity that belongs to an entirely different logical category where that property cannot meaningfully apply (such as demanding that an immaterial Spirit be physically visible).

Genetic Fallacy

The logical fallacy of confusing the historical origin or psychological genesis of a belief with its epistemic validity or warrant, and invalidating the belief based entirely on how it arose.

Normative Relativism (Conventionalism)

A substantive ethical position asserting that an action is morally right if and only if it accords with the moral code of the agent's society, obligating all individuals to follow their cultural norms.

Metaethical Relativism

The conceptual claim that the very meanings of moral appraisal terms like 'right' and 'wrong' are society-relative, such that '$x$ is right' literally means '$x$ is approved by society $A$.'

Reformer's Dilemma

A philosophical objection against normative relativism noting that if cultural codes define what is morally right, any moral reformer who seeks to correct or alter a society's code is, by definition, immoral.