Aug 29, 2018 | Explanatory Power
This phrase came to mind the other day as our family got word that my wife’s beloved stepmother, Dora Walston Haggard, had died unexpectedly. She had been going through some health challenges, but none that appeared remotely life-threatening. All of a sudden when death comes calling for those we love, the loss and separation is devastating. It’s difficult to comprehend that this person we knew so well, who was a presence in our lives, in a moment appears to be no more. But as Christians, we don’t believe they are no more. We trust that their souls continue to live, but in an altered state with God. As Jesus said to the thief being crucified next to him, “today you will be with me in paradise.” So are all those who die in Christ.
But my response to death’s reality and inevitability is to wonder if what we believe as Christians is actually true. Because I can’t “see” this reality beyond the grave I find it difficult to believe. It brings great anguish as I contemplate this person so loved by so many gone from us for what appears forever. But as I’m going through this anguish, the second part of the title’s sentence impinges itself upon me with even more strength; I find it even more difficult to not believe. I ask myself, What alternative belief makes death more palatable, or makes any more sense of death? Or life?
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Aug 20, 2018 | Truth
When I read the title of this post at WhatfingerNews, I thought for sure it had to be an Onion article. It’s gotta be satire, right? Wrong. A couple, postmodern relativist liberals through and through, who thought human beings are fundamentally decent and good, were killed by terrorists. How sad, but instructive: reality will not be mocked. This is an object lesson for the futility of a certain 21st century secularist mindset that says what we think about reality, as opposed to what we discover in it, is what ultimately counts.
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Aug 18, 2018 | Notable Quotations
The belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs. Makes perfect sense.
Aug 17, 2018 | Explanatory Power
Death is an underrated tool in the apologists’s toolbox. Put another way, we can use death more often and more effectively to defend the veracity of the Christian faith. Christians are usually put on the defensive when the subject of death (and suffering) comes up because, well, I don’t know why. Ever since the so called Enlightenment when human beings began to believe they could sit in judgment on God, death (and suffering) became known as “the problem of evil.” Succinctly, the argument goes this way. If God is all powerful he should be able to keep evil from happening, but he obviously can’t, so he’s not. If he’s all good, he should not allow evil to happen, which he obviously hasn’t. So God is obviously not all powerful, nor all good, ergo he doesn’t exist. Or something like that.
The problem with this explaining away of God is that it leaves a far bigger problem in its wake: if there is no God, why, then, is there evil and suffering at all? The atheist’s answer: Uh, because. Now that’s intellectually satisfying, and emotionally fulfilling. NOT! And why is it bad? I guess because it’s not pleasant. But the only thing the God-less can say of evil and suffering (and death) is that it just is, deal with it. Brute fact, too bad, so sad. But getting rid of God only makes the problem of evil worse because, then, there is absolutely no reason at all for the misery all human beings experience. It is meaning-less.
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Aug 10, 2018 | Apologetics, Explanatory Power
Back in 1968 as the sexual revolution was raging, Pope Paul VI wrote a profoundly counter-cultural encyclical called Humanae Vitae. One of the things that made it so profound (and something completely missed by the Evangelical leaders of the day) was its appeal to natural law, or telos in nature. If you are not familiar with the word telos, in Greek it means purpose, and it was used as an important means of understanding the world for the ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle. Evolution News recently had a piece that connected the Pope’s arguments of telos in nature, and Intelligent Design (ID). The latter is a very simple, biblical, assertion that there is evidence of design in nature, and thus a designer. I know, shocking! I’ll explain why ID, and thus telos, is so “controversial” in a moment, but Paul tells us in Romans 1 that God, thus design, thus telos is obvious from his creation:
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
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