Mar 27, 2020 | Truth
There is something that the vast majority of people in the world take for granted: the modern world. Not only the most obvious things like science, medicine, and technology, or the infinite number of conveniences and blessings we enjoy every day, but things like universal education, universities, hospitals, human rights, equality, caring for the weak and the poor, in other words, all the things that make the modern world, well, modern! It seems that very few people bother to stop and wonder where all these things come from, and why they exist. This doesn’t surprise us because we live in the most ahistorical generation ever to have lived. The modern obsession with progress, itself a Christian concept, leaves little room for the critical importance of learning about the past. But the modern world is a miracle that itself only exists because of another miracle, a man 2000 years ago who died on a Roman cross, was buried three days, and rose from the dead, Jesus of Nazareth. The most consequential figure in all of history, his life, death, and resurrection, in a typically modern cliche, changed everything. Why and how did it do that? (more…)
Mar 25, 2020 | Theology
I’m working on a post about how Christianity completely transformed the world. In my other writing obsession, I’ve been writing my way through the Bible since April 2014, one of the best things I’ve ever done. God’s word is a bottomless well of profundity that gets more profound to me every day. Having come to this part of the well on love, I realized it is the reason that wherever Christianity goes it transforms (however imperfectly in a fallen world). Nothing of merely human origins can do what it has done and can do, and that’s only one of the many reasons Christianity is the Truth. Some thoughts on love: (more…)
Mar 18, 2020 | Explanatory Power
I can imagine that the title of this post would make people think there is something seriously wrong with me. There is! I’ve been afflicted most of my life with contemplating my own death, and, as I hit my early teen years, obsessing over what in the world it might mean. It blows me away that people will do everything they can to ignore the most obvious, and disturbing, fact of our existence: we die. It seems to never occur to them to ask what death means. Or why is there death. Maybe it’s a good opportunity to address this question with a pandemic known as the Coronavirus making its way across the world. Nothing like a scary pandemic to get people thinking about their mortality. (more…)
Mar 13, 2020 | Apologetics
If that question doesn’t make you laugh, you haven’t thought about it enough. I listened to a podcast the other day on the cosmological argument. Simply, it is a philosophical argument for God’s existence that everything that comes to exist has a cause, that there must have been a first cause for all the things that exist, and that this first cause must itself be uncaused. The logic is unassailable, even though otherwise intelligent people claim that something can somehow come from nothing. That would have to be the case if matter and the universe were eternal, but Einstein, the Big Bang, and the second law of thermodynamics kind of put the kibosh on the Aristotelian notion of an eternal universe (also known as the Steady State theory). (more…)
Mar 8, 2020 | Parents and Family
I recently came across an article at The Public Discourse called “The Best Practices—and Benefits—of Religious Parenting.” Given I have some interest in the topic, I was curious to see what these best practices might be. We learn that religion in general has positive outcomes for parenting. In an increasingly secular culture, studies that prove the positive influence of religion are a good thing. But something was missing from these best practices that to me is, by far, the most important single factor of religious parenting: truth. Why would anyone want to raise their children in a religion that they don’t believe to be the truth? Probably because they don’t believe in truth, at least when it comes to religion. If it works, makes you happy, etc., that will do. Most Americans believe that just because something is true for you doesn’t mean it necessarily has to be true for me. Or put simply, true for you but not for me! Such a contention is ridiculous on the face of it, but many otherwise thoughtful and intelligent people actually believe this. (more…)
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