If you’re wondering what the title of this post means, it’s a pithy introduction to the skeptical bias of our Enlightenment drenched post modern secular culture. I bet you’ve never heard the phrase, “leap of doubt.” No. But if I start with “leap of . . . ” how would, oh, about 100% of people finish the phrase? Leap of . . . faith, of course! Why don’t doubts take leaps, and faiths do? Why are honest doubt and blind faith common terms in our culture? Good questions.
Phillip E. Johnson, a Berkeley law professor whose book Darwin On Trial launched the Intelligent Design movement, died last weekend at 79. I remember reading it back in the early 90s when it came out, and being thrilled that someone was so effectively exposing that the emperor Darwin had no clothes. Not only was there no evidence for a Darwinian notion of evolution by random mutation and natural selection, those pushing it assumed what they ostensibly were trying to prove. In logic that is called begging the question (which doesn’t mean raising the question), assuming true what you’re trying to prove as true. What they assumed was and is naturalism, that matter is all that is, and all that matters. There were numerous articles celebrating Johnson’s life at Evolution News, and one by Stephen Meyer explains this point well: (more…)
Secularism is the religion of the 21st century West, and all the most powerful messaging cultural machinery indoctrinates us into its view of reality. At the top of that list has to be our entertainment mediums, especially movies and television. Stories on screens are reality shapers, that is, they build into our imaginations ways of seeing and interpreting the world. Sociologically speaking, they are plausibility generating mechanisms in that they, without our knowing it, paint a picture of reality that we accept as real, or what seems real to us. Over time, if we take in entertainment uncritically, our plausibility structure (the building in our minds that determines how we see reality, the seemingness of it) becomes thoroughly secular, regardless of what we “believe.” (And for a short definition, what I mean by secular is that the material world, this world, is all that matters, and the here and the now is what is most important about life.) (more…)
Critics and skeptics of the Bible think that the miracle stories in the gospels are what make them so hard to believe as history. Just the opposite is the truth. In fact, the way the stories are portrayed, and that they happened at all, are evidence for their veracity. The primary reason they are not believed is because of an anti-supernatural bias people bring to the text: Miracles can’t happen, ergo, the miracles in the Bible didn’t happen! Hogwash. The accounts we read in the gospels do not, at all, read like myths and legends, but like eyewitness testimony of events that actually happened. An important point to keep in mind as you are reading the text is the critics’ claim: What you read was made up, to one degree or another. The question we ask in return is, could or would it have been made up? Knowing human psychology as it is, I find this one of the most profound questions I can ask as I’m reading the Bible. My answer is always, no! (more…)
Recent Comments