Pushing The Antithesis – Part 4 – Worldview Features

The fourth chapter of the book focuses on the different components that comprise a worldview. They are the building blocks of a worldview and without any one of them you can not have a complete worldview and this is why it’s so important to define each one and to expand upon each level to under the questions that they need to answer.

Another key factor that each of these worldview building blocks serve to show how utterly non-sensical the Atheist worldview is in that since it cannot accept order in the Universe and therefore is left to attribute every event to chance he cannot justify in what he observes.

Metaphysics

The study on what is the nature of reality. Beyond the physical as in laws of logic & science.

Metaphysics seeks to address three core questions:

  • What does it mean to exist?
  • What is the nature of man? Is he free? Good? An animal?
  • What is the nature of the universe? Is it objectively real? Or is it simply appearance?

Metaphysicians seek to understand the world as a whole.

What Metaphysicians study is actually Christian theology in secular dress.

God is the ultimate ground of all reality. – Gen 1:1, Exodus 20:11, Neh 9:6, Rev 4:11

Epistemology

The study of the nature and limits of human knowledge.

Epistemological inquiry focuses on four class of questions:

  • What is the nature of truth & objectivity?
  • What is the nature of belief and of knowledge? What are their relationships? Can we know and yet not believe?
  • What are the standards that justify belief?
  • What are the proper procedures for science & discovery? How can they be trusted?

The unbeliever will not be able to rationally to account for the order of the universe which he experiences, since he is committed to the fate of chance.

There is no way to account for reason in the non-Christian system.

Ethics

Studies right & wrong attitudes, judgments, and actions, as well as moral responsibility and obligation.

Focuses on four main areas of concern:

  • What is the nature of good and evil?
  • What are the standards for ethical evaluation?
  • What about guilt and personal peace?
  • How do we attain or produce moral character?

For the non-Christian there is no sure basis for ethics.

The chapter can be best summed up in this Atheist Creed crafted by Christian scholar Steve Kumar:

There is no God.
There is no objective Truth.
There is no ground for Reason.
There are no absolute Morals.
There is no ultimate Value.
There is no ultimate Meaning.
There is no eternal Hope.

Recommended Reading

Bahnsen, Greg, “The Concept and Importance of Canonicity

Butler, Michael R., “A Truly Reformed Epistemology

Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

Humanist Manifesto II

Thompson, Bert, “In Defense of the Bible’s Inspiration” Part 1 | Part 2

Building Metasploitable 3 on Ubuntu/Debian

Recently I attempted to build the new Rapid 7 Metasploitable 3 VM for use in my pentest lab on Ubuntu 16.10. Followed the instructions on their Github page to the letter, but failed in variety of areas. The good news is that I was able to hack my way through all them to get it built. This blog entry is going the steps you need to take to successfully build the VM on a Ubuntu/Debian based system. I’m assuming you may run into similar issues on a Fedora-type system, but your mileage may vary.

 

Packer

No issues with Packer, beyond just installing it with: sudo apt-get install packer

Vagrant

First you to need to install Vagrant: sudo apt-get install vagrant

Second, you before you can build the vagrant-reload plugin, you need to install the ruby-dev package with:

sudo apt-get install ruby-dev

Now you can install the plugin with: vagrant plugin install vagrant-reload

Due to the dependency upon WinRM and with the Vagrant version in the Ubuntu/Debian repo you will need to install:

vagrant plugin install winrm --plugin-version 1.8.1
vagrant plugin install winrm-fs

The 1.8.1 version is key in order for the build to complete successfully.

Metasploitable 3 Build Script

The Metasploitable 3 build script has some checks that fail due to the latest version of Virtualbox that’s in the Ubuntu/Debian repo. The main reason is they are checking for a specific version of Virtualbox and since with Ubuntu/Debian your running a newer version than what the build script requires, it fails.

Since we know we already have the necessary dependencies built, we can just run the build commands manually:

TMPDIR=/home/tmp packer build windows_2008_r2.json

The TMPDIR directive was another gotcha as I only had 1GB of space allocated to my /tmp filesystem and the process ran out of space. Point the TMPDIR variable to a path where you have enough space.

Now we can create the Vagrant box with:

vagrant box add windows_2008_r2_virtualbox.box --name metasploitable3

And then start it up with just: vagrant up and your good to go.

Happy Hacking!