Aug 30, 2019 | Truth
I recently wrote about a wonderfully nostalgic (for me) documentary about John Lennon and the making of his album Imagine. For some reason ever since, I haven’t been able to get out of my mind his somewhat quirky song, “Gimmie Some Truth.” It’s typical hard-edged Lennon speaking “truth to power,” or something like that. It’s almost quaint looking back at it from our 21st century “post-truth” age. That term is politically loaded, so not as helpful as understanding the philosophical assumptions of postmodernism that got us here. In case you’re not familiar with it, the term came from a response to modernism, an Enlightenment concept that objective truth exists, and is accessible to reason. On the surface that doesn’t seem particularly controversial, but reason ended up becoming rationalism, the idea that reason was the only way to know truth. Every other means of knowing was discounted as invalid. But paraphrasing Jesus, man shall not live on reason alone.
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Aug 24, 2019 | Apologetics
I can’t tell you how many moronic, absolutist, immature, know-it-all atheists I’ve come across in online comments sections who declare with absolute certitude that the Bible is all myths and fairy tales, full of metaphorical unicorns and other such unbelievable nonsense. These people, and I’m sure mostly young males, have never bothered to actually read the Bible, only other skeptics like them who haven’t read it either. The problem for such dolts is that the Bible doesn’t read anything like myths and fairy tales, not in the least. In fact it reads like straight ahead history that takes place in real time, in real places, with real people, and real events. History outside of the Bible confirms this again and again. We can take comfort, and have confidence, that our faith is rooted in history, not human wishful thinking and fiction (which didn’t exist in the ancient world).
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Aug 21, 2019 | Apologetics
Not many Christians are familiar with first century Jewish historian Josephus, which is unfortunate. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus (the latter rejected purely out of anti-supernatural bias) are the most well-attested facts in all of ancient history. But skeptics insist that because the writers of the Bible, and specifically the gospels, had a religious ax to grind, it cannot be trusted as objectively historical. I’m not sure there is such a thing, but if it can be established that the basic outline of Jesus’ life and death, and the Jewish, Greco-Roman world he inhabited, all existed, then the biblical record becomes incredibly compelling.
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Aug 18, 2019 | Epistemology - Trust
My last post was on the faith and doubt, and how both are part of what it means to be human. The concepts are not specifically religious, and apply to all human being, religious or not, contrary to secularist assertions. Similar assertions, in effect, have implications for how we think about the concept of certainty as well. A recent article at The Gospel Coalition about a book by the late Lesslie Newbegin opened my eyes to how important this is. Since I wrote my book, I’ve experienced push back from some Christians who almost seem offended at the confidence I have in my faith, and that I can confidently pass on that confidence to my children. Now I know why: We’ve all accepted the epistemological presuppositions of the Enlightenment, and confuse confidence with certainty. Let me explain.
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Aug 11, 2019 | Epistemology - Trust
My last post on Harris was on plausibility structures and how they create a reality that seems real to people, whether it is or not. Twenty first century plausibility secular structures are also important to the issue of doubt. Christians at a disadvantage in these discussions because doubt is assumed to be a one way street: Christians either believe (have faith) or doubt; if they doubt they no longer believe, if they believe they don’t doubt. This way of looking at faith and doubt puts Christians on the defensive because it assumes that belief and doubt are uniquely religious, in this case Christian, things. It takes about 10 seconds to realize this is ridiculous, yet Christians too often talk and write as if such secular assumptions are true.
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