The term “gospel” means “good news.”  However, the good news can only be properly understood in light of the bad news.  The bad news is found in the history recorded in the book of Genesis – a history that many people now reject because they have been taught that neo-Darwinian evolution is the way life came about, contrary to the Genesis record.  We will see that such a belief is not compatible with the good news of Christ.  Thus, Christians must be prepared to expose the absurdity of particle-to-people evolution so that people can embrace true history and make sense of the Gospel.

In this final article of the series, we will examine some of the logical fallacies in Phillip Dennis’s latest attempt to refute the conventionality thesis of the physics of Einstein.

In this article, we continue to expose the errors in Phillip Dennis’s attempt to overthrow the conventionality thesis of the physics of Einstein.  We have already refuted Dennis’s antibiblical philosophy of presentism and shown it to be incompatible with relativistic physics and the Bible.  Here we refute several more of Dennis’s errors in physics, but we begin with something that Dennis actually got right.

In this article we expose and refute some of Phillip Dennis’s mistakes in physics in his latest attempt to overthrow the conventionality thesis of relativity.  Recall that the conventionality thesis is the position that the one-way speed of light is not a property of nature, but a stipulated convention by which a given observer judges whether two clocks separated by some distance are synchronized.  I showed in my first refutation of Dennis that he had arbitrarily assumed the ESC convention in his attempt to establish the ESC convention over ASC (Lisle 2024).  But this is the fallacy of begging the question.  I also showed in this same paper that the conventionality thesis follows logically from the relativity of simultaneity (Lisle 2024). 

In this article, I will demonstrate that the philosophy of presentism as espoused by Phillip Dennis is not compatible with the physics of Einstein.  Recall that presentism is the claim that “only present things exist.”  In its strong form, it denies the existence of past things and future things.  I have already shown in the last three articles that presentism is unbiblical and illogical and that arguments against eternalism are fallacious.  Indeed, the Bible affirms eternalism – that the past, present, and future are equally real.  In fact, all events that have ever happened or ever will happen are already fully known to God (e.g., Isaiah 46:9-10).  In this article, we will show that the physics of Einstein requires the reality of past and future events and, therefore, is incompatible with presentism.  Indeed, the physics of Einstein has rightly been seen as a vindication of the biblical view of time.

We have been examining the philosophy of presentism – the claim that “only present things exist.”  In its strong form, presentism would insist that “only present things exist, have existed, or will exist.”  Of course, biblically, presentism is false because past things and future things are real according to Scripture (and are known by God).  Thus, the Bible endorses eternalism – the claim that past, present, and future are equally real.  But Phil Dennis has criticized eternalism and insists that presentism is true.  Yet nearly all of his arguments are strawman fallacies – criticizing a misrepresentation of eternalism as if it claims that past, present, and future all exist now – in the present.  Sometimes a presentist will retreat to a trivial claim that “only present things exist now – in the present.”  But no one would disagree with this.  Eternalists accept that only present things exist in the present.  But we maintain that the past and future are just as real (true to the mind of God) as the present.  Let’s continue to analyze Dennis’s claims.