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God is not honored when His people use bad arguments for what may actually be correct conclusions.

Consequences of abandoning commitment to truth and reason -- A people that does not care about these will be easily led to behave in certain ways by rhetoric, image, narcissistic self-infatuation, etc... If our allegiance to Christianity is not based on the conviction that it is true and reasonable, then we are treating it as a means to some self-serving pragmatic end.

Sorokin claimed that a sensate culture will eventually disintegrate because it lacks the intellectual resources necessary to sustain a public and private life conducive of corporate and individual human flourishing. And this is precisely what we see happening to modern American culture.

Many people today, including Christians, rarely read or think deeply. When they do read, it’s often limited to self-help books or light material. "I once wrote a piece for what is most likely the top Christian periodical of the last 30 years and I was warned to keep my prose to about an 8th grade level." This highlights how far we’ve strayed from the days of Joseph Butler, when the church could out-think its critics.

A plausibility structure is the set of ideas a person considers possibly true. For example, most people wouldn’t attend a lecture defending a flat earth because it falls outside their plausibility structure (as it should) . However, if a culture excludes Christian claims from its plausibility structure, fewer people will even consider the possibility of its truth.

Colossians 2:8 Distortion. Sometimes seen as a command to avoid secular studies, particularly philosophy. However, Paul was warning against "hollow and deceptive philosophy" that contradicts orthodoxy, not philosophy as a whole. Paul demonstrated his knowledge of philosophy by understanding and critiquing proto-Gnostic philosophy threatening the Colossians and even citing pagan philosophers positively in Acts 17:28

1 Corinthians 1-2 is often misinterpreted as rejecting human reasoning, especially in evangelism. Paul’s message isn’t a condemnation of reason itself but of prideful misuse and rhetoric. Greek orators would persuade a crowd of any side of an issue for the right price. Reason still plays a role in assessing the evidence for God’s actions, as Paul demonstrates in his arguments for the Resurrection (1 Corinthians 15).

Wesley admonished ministers to know what would sound truly odd and almost pagan to the average person in the pew today: logic, metaphysics, natural theology, geometry, and the ideas of important figures in the history of thought(philosophy, history, literature)

"To imagine none can teach you but those who are themselves saved from sin, is a very great and dangerous mistake. Give not place to it for a moment."

John Wesley focused on something seldom expressly valued by most pastoral search committees: "Ought not a Minister to have, First, a good understanding, a clear apprehension, a sound judgement, and a capacity of reasoning with some closeness?"

1 John 2:27 is sometimes misused to suggest that believers don’t need teachers. If that were true, John wouldn’t need to teach this principle himself.
He's addressing a historical situation where Gnostic-like teachers claimed to possess special, secret knowledge of Scripture. He reassures believers that through the Spirit, they already have the truth and don’t need this so-called exclusive insight.

Moreland goes over 2 Corinthians 2:14-15 to explain how people often misinterpret it to justify that the Holy Spirit helps us to understand the meaning of scripture(on a cognitive level). This is often used to justify the idea that hard study or intellectual work is unnecessary to understand scripture.

Religion is now viewed by many as a placebo or emotional crutch precisely because that is how we often pitch the gospel to unbelievers.

"...fewer people regarded the Bible as a body of divinely revealed, true propositions about various topics that requires a devoted intellect to grasp and study systematically. Instead, the Bible increasingly was sought solely as a practical guide for ethical guidance and spiritual growth. "

Re-reading this book through rough times always seems to help since I tend to forget a lot of the techniques.

He completely lost me on the examples of propositions that are impossible to determine the possibility of. "Can you see without eyes?" This question lost me. It seems obviously not. But I think some clarification is in order... Maybe I'm just unfamiliar with this "dispute" but it seems biologically impossible. I'm also tired and this is not a light read. Time for bed.

Plantinga further explains how identifying necessary truths can expose contradictions. He introduces 'broadly logical necessity'. This includes truths of logic, mathematics, and other propositions that are necessarily true based on the relationships between concepts or the meanings of terms. Examples include "Nobody is taller than himself" and "Bachelors are unmarried."

Plantinga responds to Mackie's claim that the theist contradicts himself. He clarifies the difference between explicit contradiction and formal contradiction. He then argues the propositions "God is omnipotent," "God is wholly good," and "Evil exists," are not formally contradictory because the laws of logic do not allow us to deduce the negation of any of these propositions directly from the others in the set.

Mowing the lawn analogy: Plantinga's analogy suggests that just as we can believe in a connection between a decision --a cognitive process that can proceed the action by quite a bit of time -- and a series of complex bodily actions without knowing the exact nature of that connection, theists can believe in God's reasons for permitting evil without knowing the specifics of those reasons.

Suppose the theist admits they don't know why God permits evil. Why suppose if God does have a good reason for permitting evil, that the theist would be the first to know?... The fact that the theist doesn't know why God permits evil is, perhaps an interesting fact about the theist, but by itself shows little to nothing relevant to the rationality of belief in God.

Now one reply would be to specify God's reason for permitting evil or creating a world that contained evil. Such an answer to Hume's question is sometimes called a theodicy.

'Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?' - Epicurus - Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion- David Hume

...what I have called natural atheology -- the attempt to prove that God does not exist or that at any rate it is unreasonable or irrational to believe that He does.

...the typical function of natural theology has been to show that religious belief is rationally acceptable.