Articles on Explanatory Power
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conversion: The Poverty of Atheism and an Eschatology of Hope
My next book, currently in the publishing process, has Great Awakening in the title. Those familiar with Western Christian history know that phrase refers to two periods of spiritual renewal and the spread of Evangelical Christianity in America and England. I believe...
On Never Tiring of the Moon
During the most recent full moon, and the nights around it, as I gazed upon its never-ending beauty a thought kept coming to mind: why do we never tire of looking at the moon? Why is it we marvel at its beauty, find it mysterious, and awe inspiring, in the literal...
Jordan Peterson Leaves Atheist Sam Harris SPEECHLESS on God!!!
Jordan Peterson has become one of the most effective apologists for Christianity in the 21st century. This is quite something to say about a man who has yet to embrace a version of Christianity we might consider orthodox. His wife is a strong Catholic Christian, and...
The Powerful Conversion Story of Shia LaBeouf
God has given us another powerful cultural moment for truth in a most unlikely conversion to Christianity. The other moment I’m referring to happened a few years back in the most unlikely conversion to Christianity of Kanye West. In this case actor Shia LaBeouf has...
“Compared to Bach, We All Suck”
I love writing about God’s creation, and how in Paul’s words, that “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” However, there is always a moral quality to God’s revelation of himself...
The Bee Nails It: ‘Why Do Good Things Happen At All?’ Asks Atheist Struggling With His Faith
If I had to play a one-note Samba in apologetics it would be the consideration of the Alternative. In my last post I mentioned a Christian who advertised his "deconversion" on Facebook, and suggested he might want to put his new alternative faith...
Have You Ever Tried to Kill a Fly?
I'm not sure there is anything more annoying then a pesky fly, other than maybe a pesky mosquito. Recently one of those pesky flies somehow made its way into my office, and didn't want to leave. Eventually, swatting it withy my hand wasn't going to dissuade it from...
McCartney 3, 2, 1: Only God Can Explain Music!
I recently learned of an interview legendary producer Rick Ruben did with one of the two remaining Beatles, Paul McCartney, called McCartney 3, 2, 1.
Are We Mere Matter? Logic and Mind Proves We Are Not
It's amazing to me how many Christians in the 21st century live in a state of insecurity about their faith and the nature of reality. I'm not myself immune to the secular temptation that wafts unseen through the secular culture pushing material reality as the only...
Do You Want To See the Invisible God? Try This Thought Experiment
Most mornings when I pray I find myself thanking God for revealing himself in creation, Scripture, and Christ. I think how futile existence is without God's revealing himself to us. Without that revelation, the human race is like a blind man in a dark box groping...
Agnostic Explains His “Taking Leave of Darwin”
If you've ever had any kind of conversation with a hard core Darwinist, especially of the most ignorant kind, you'll have heard the phrase, "Evolution is a fact." This statement is affirmed in the most cocksure way, as if nobody with half a brain would question it. Or...
Nancy Pearcey on the Meaningless of Materialism
I'm reading a wonderful book by Nancy Pearcey called Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, & Meaning. You can tell she was deeply influenced by the great Francis Schaeffer as she weaves the implications of thought through history...
God Has Made It Possible to be an Intellectually Fulfilled Christian
The subject of this post might sound slightly familiar. It comes from a statement on the other side of the metaphysical divide from world-famous atheist Richard Dawkins who said that, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." What Darwin...
Dawkins Is Knocked “Sideways with Wonder” by Cell’s Design
If you're not familiar with the name Dawkins, that would be the world's most famous atheist, Richard Dawkins. He along with several others earlier in the century were Christened (pun intended) by the media as the New Atheists. There was nothing new about them, just...
My International Breakthrough for The Persuasive Christian Parent!
If you haven't had a chance to read my book yet, shame on you, it's officially become an international best-seller. I recently sat down, virtually, with a new Canadian friend of mine, Ian McKerracher for a chat about the book on the Faith Beyond Belief Podcast....
A Porn Star and the Awesome Power of the Gospel
I've been a Christian for more than 42 years, and I am more blown away by the grace, mercy, and love of God in Christ than I have ever been. It continually astounds me how God in Christ can take lives wrecked by sin and guilt and shame, and turn them into something...
Minerals, The Human Body, and the Amazing Creativity and Power of God
There are been some silver linings in this COVID Scam-demic for me (these interviews on Steve Bannon's War Room is why I believe that). One is that my mind has been open to some things I wasn't open to before. (I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks!) For...
What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
Those words from James chapter 4 are a sobering reminder of a fact of existence we all too easily ignore. Yet most people live as if this life was eternal life, as if death will not eventually find them. Everything they focus on is this life as if the next life isn't...
How Do You See God In Everything? See God In Everything!
Well, that wasn't so hard now, was it. This thought came to me as I was reading an article yesterday about "How the body builds a healthy relationship with 'good' gut bacteria." There is only one explanation, only one, for the preposterous complexity of the human...
Was Feuerbach Right: Is Religion Merely a Human Projection? Yes and No
If you're not familiar with Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), he was a significantly influential atheist philosopher, primarily because he influenced two of the great malevolent thinkers of the modern age, Marx and Freud. The misery left in the wake of their influence on...
If You Want to Strengthen Your Faith, Read an Honest Atheist
I just finished a book by British Philosopher, and atheist, Thomas Nagel called Mind & Cosmos. The reason I read it was because of the subtitle: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. It's a short but very dense read by a...
God Exists! Who Knew! The Return of the God Hypothesis
For the last couple hundred years in Western culture Christianity has been on the defensive. The 20th century saw the full flowering of militant and confident secularist materialism to the point where our cultural elites see Christianity not just as wrong and backward...
Existentialism Bummer and Death: We Must Ask, What Does it Mean!
A gifted communicator who said some seemingly wise and thoughtful things, until you really think about what he’s saying. It sounds so profound on the surface, but it’s as solid as the surface of an egg shell.
Say it Ain’t So, Ravi!
As everyone in the Evangelical world, and many beyond, know by now, evangelist and apologist Ravi Zacharias was a phony and serial sexual abuser. Those are words I never thought I'd write, to say the least, but they also don't surprise me. Christianity assumes and...
The Gospel: The Only Thing That Makes Sense of Anything-Part 2
In my last post I discussed the explanatory power of Christianity, why it better explains reality as we experience it than any other religion or worldview. I wasn't able to address why it isn't only Christianity as a worldview that makes sense of everything, but...
The Gospel: The Only Thing That Makes Sense of Anything
Ideas for blog posts often seem to come when I start praying in the morning. As has been my habit for almost seven years, every morning I wrestle my way through a text of Scripture and write my thoughts in my uncreatively named Walk Through the Bible blog....
Happy New Year! Another One Closer to Death!
I'm such a Debbie Downer! I can't help it. After I became a Christian when I was 18, I haven't been able to attend or see a New Year's celebration with out being struck by how ridiculous it all is. Do not these people, I always think, realize that they are celebrating...
God in Christ: Inconceivably Conceivable, Incomprehensibly Comprehensible, Unbelievably Believable!
I don't know about you, but I find this whole spiritual, Christian, life after death, life is more than matter thing very hard to believe at times. Scripture tells us we live by faith, and not by sight, but I find it so much easier to live by sight and not by faith!...
Testimonies: God in Christ is Real, and Transforming Lives All Over the World!
Given I spend my days in front of two computers, one for work, and one for me, I've started listening to Christian conversion testimonies on Youtube when I have busy work to do. For reasons related to my Christian fundamentalist past, I've tended to downplay the...
The Human Heart: There Absolutely *HAS* to be a God!
Living in a culture that is so suffocatingly secular, we are programmed to think that life explains itself. Whether we think of evolution or Darwinism, or not, the tendency for most people is not to see God in everything, as we should, but to see things in and of...
Jordan Peterson Gets Much, But Not The Most Important Thing
So far, anyway. That most important thing would be Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, but he hasn't been able to make what to him is probably a leap. That's a shame, for obviously possible eternal reasons, but also because his worldview is so infused with...
Hunter, Our Cat, Is Dead. RIP
I don’t even like cats! And yet there I was balling as my wife was holding our dead cat in the backseat on the way to the vet’s this morning.
Masks, Masks, Everywhere Masks . . . .To Keep from Getting a Cold, Maybe?
I feel like I've entered an episode of The Twilight Zone, although I'm convinced Rod Serling couldn't have imagined the absurdities of COVID-19 2020 America. Since this is a blog dedicated to the defense of the Christian faith, I try to stay away from politics, but...
Watch This Movie, and be Freed from Practical Atheism!
On Friday I came across an article at Breakpoint about a movie called The Master Designer—the Song, and I, my wife, and son watched it in dumbfounded awe. It's so refreshing to watch a documentary about the wonders of the natural world and not be told over and over...
What’s the Benefit of a Virus? Death
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...
The Stupefying Complexity, Functionality, and Beauty of Creation: God is the Only Explanation!
When I pray in the morning it seems that I always start praising God for revealing himself to us in creation, Scripture, and Christ. Each means of God revealing himself to us astounds and flabbergasts me in its own way.
What do YOU See in a Romaine Leaf?
This appears to be a strange question. You might answer, I see a leaf of Romaine lettuce, and of course you would be right, but you would also be wrong. Am I contradicting myself? No. The leaf, as with all created things, points beyond itself. So yes, the leaf is a...
Darwinists are Modern Alchemists, Only with Less Credibility
Since the great enemy of Darwinism Phillip Johnson went to be with the Lord recently, I've been listening to talks and interviews he gave over the years, and seeing again why he was such a formidable opponent to those espousing the bankrupt theory of evolution. He...
Philip Johnson Unmasked Darwinism: RIP
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 heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands!
In my last post I wrote about the concept of Explanatory Power, specifically in the context of life's meaning, or not. The concept of what most powerfully, compellingly, explains the reality we experience extends to the heavens and the skies. You may be familiar with...
Shakespeare and Richard Dawkins: Is It All Pitiless Indifference Signifying Nothing?
The great English playwright William Shakespeare expressed his inner Richard Dawkins, born almost 400 years later, when he wrote these almost immortal words coming from the mouth of murderous King MacBeth: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty...
“Science Uprising”: New video series unmasks materialism for what it is: Wrong!
Too many Christians allow low-simmering doubt into their minds because the dominant Western secular cultural narrative assumes materialism at every point, that is that the material, matter, is all that exists. And, if materialism is true, Christianity is not. In the...
The Pac Man Called Time, and The Great Question Mark
If you're young, say south of 40, stop now; you'll think these the irrelevant musings of an old man (middle aged nowadays, but whose counting). If you're in your 40s you're starting to relate to what I'll have to say (whatever I end up saying), and if you're in your...
Where Did The Idea of a Personal, Creator God Come From?
Being a person of extreme apologetic bent, I'm always looking to validate Christian truth claims. Apologetics is critical in a Western culture drenched in secularism, where most people fit into one of the Triple A categories: Atheist, Agnostic, or Apathetic. For them...
The Complexity and Fine Tuning of the Universe: Atheism is Literally Impossible!
I often visit the Evolution News website because as a Christian the most obvious thing in the world to me is that the universe and everything in it had a Creator and cannot be a product of random chance. (The site is a great repository of information from the...
Watch Out for that Time Grapevine: “If this is all there is, why bother?”
On April 8, 2010 prior to heading to bed I went to check e-mail. It was around 11:00 p.m., and I saw a message from my uncle that I had trouble processing: my cousin, Anthony, whom I affectionately called Ants, had died in a motorcycle accident that day, all of 45...
This Is Why The Multiverse Must Exist: An Exercise in Pretzel Logic
If you've ever heard the term "pretzel logic" (not the Steely Dan album), you'll get the oxymoronic logic: logic shouldn't look like a pretzel! Those who believe in a God-less universe increasingly have to turn themselves into pretzels to try to explain a universe...
Early Sun’s ‘Goldilocks’ Rotation Rate May Be Why We’re Here: Nope, it’s God!
I love secularists! They make the Christian apologist's job so easy. For the last few hundred years of Western civilization, intellectuals and cultural elites have painted the inevitable ark of history as secularism. Full stop. As scientific knowledge increased...
Mommy, Mommy! Watch Me!
Human nature is one of the most powerful apologetics for the veracity of the Christian faith. What else can explain so well the glory and mess that is humanity, but that man was made perfect in God's image, a glorious creature capable of the most exquisite heights,...
Are You Saying There’s an Oak Tree in that Acorn?
Our family moved from Illinois (thank God!) to Florida in June of 2017. Talk about a contrast, one that doesn't have to be explained. We moved to the Tampa area, and the first thing I noticed is that oak trees and their moss are practically ubiquitous. They evoked in...
Apollo 8 and Our Privileged Planet
When I was eight years old the Apollo 8 astronauts took the first ever trip around the moon. The trip was launched on December 21, 1968, and became the first manned spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit, reach the Moon, orbit it, and return. Even as an eight-year-old I...
Darwin Ain’t So Great After All
If you have ever had any kind of interaction with an atheist/materialist/skeptic, etc., one of the things they hang their hat on is that evolution is a "fact." Darwin was a genius, and only a benighted, troglodyte, imbecile would argue with the scientific "consensus."...
Why Is Homosexuality Unnatural in Addition to Sin?
Given this is ostensibly a blog about parenting, and that I soon have a book about parenting to be published, and we live in the 21st century, I can't escape commenting on homosexuality. As you know it is ubiquitous in our culture, and if you have children you won't...
It’s So Hard to Believe, But It Is So Hard Not to Believe
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...
No, Death is Not Natural
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...
Telos: The Secularists’ Worst Nightmare
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...
The Picture of Dorian Gray – The Human Dilemma Without Christ
I recently finished The Picture of Dorian Gray by the famous 19th century provocateur Oscar Wilde. The book was itself a profound picture of a lost soul trying to come to terms with life devoid of a true north with which to make sense of it all. I read it with special...
“Conspiracy” and the Longing for Justice
In the soon to be blockbuster best-seller, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I tell the story of "the clicker." Yes, that clicker, more commonly known as the remote control. As you'll read in the book, the clicker is a great tool for engaging popular culture with our...
Science: We’ll Never Know For Sure How Everything Began
According to the current secularist worldview the only sure epistemological foundation (basis for knowing) is science. At some point in the last hundred or so years through popular culture, education, and media, science replaced religion in the modern imagination as...
There is a God! Is There a Better Explanation for the Complexity of Tendons?
A popular narrative in secular Western culture goes like this. There was a time called The Dark Ages when religion reigned in Western civilization, and all people were benighted, miserable, and poor. Then came a Renaissance when ancient literature and languages were...
Secularism and the Berlin Wall, Part 5 – The Power of Explanatory Power
As I've argued in these posts, secularism as the fundamental worldview (religion) of Western cultural elites is as weak as the Berlin Wall proved to be. For the time being it appears as durable as the Wall circa 1970s, but as I contend, it's every bit the paper tiger...
Secularism and the Berlin Wall, Part 4 – Secularism Unmasked
In my previous post I dealt with why secularism might be appealing in our modern context. I argued that it's not anything inherent in secularism that makes it more appealing than Christianity, but the cultural messaging machine that promotes it. That's why it's a...
When In Doubt, Open Your Eyes
If you're like every human being on the face of the earth, you sometimes doubt what you think you know. It's part of what's known as the human condition, and being finite. We can only know so much. There is in fact much more that we don't know, way much more, than we...
When In Doubt: Is This All Really A Grand Cosmic Coincidence?
In my previous post I argued that secular Western culture often makes belief in God problematic. For those who go with the secular cultural flow, instead of continually challenging and fighting it, God can seem less than real, less plausible. This has nothing to do...
Nabeel Qureshi, RIP
Death is ugly. Jesus himself agreed, as we can surmise from his response to the death of his friend Lazarus. Standing before the tomb where his dead friend had been buried four days Scripture says, "Jesus wept." Why in the world would Jesus cry when in moments he was...
Of Course the Solar Eclipse is an Act of God, But So Is Everything Else!
In case you've been in a cave somewhere without this Internet thing, or access to any TV, Radio, the regular or short wave kind, you likely know there is going to be a total solar eclipse tomorrow across much of America. This doesn't happen very often so it's kind of...
Dunkirk and the Wages of Sin
When we came out of the movie theater having just watched the very intense and entertaining hit movie Dunkirk, all I could think of was the Apostle Paul's phrase in Romans 6:23 that "the wages of sin is death." This phrase about sin's ultimate consequences points back...
Religion and Faith: All Human Beings Partake of Both Regardless of What They Believe
When I read a (long) piece recently titled, "Can We Be Good Without God? On the political meaning of Christianity," I was reminded yet again that ideas have consequences, and that there is no neutral space where ideas inspired by "religion" do not have implications...
Eulogy from a Physicist and the Power of Self-Delusion
My daughter recently went to a funeral for a teenage girl who tragically died from meningitis. Also, tragically from my perspective, her family is part of the Unitarian Universalist faith. As such, they don't believe in a personal God, let alone anything to do with...
Notable Quotations – Explanatory Power
In an inversion of the ancient dictum, we might say: “As below, so above.” What we experience of space “out there” will reflect our inner spiritual state. Perhaps this is why, as glorious as the modern discoveries of the heavens are, they often leave us cold. This is...
The Human Circulatory System – There is a God!
I recently finished reading a book called The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution by James Hannam. The title appealed to me when I first heard of the book because of a fiction that has been promulgated since the...
Praise Chance! Can It Really Do What Evolutionists Claim?
In my last post I discussed how evolution as an unguided, impersonal, and material process cannot do what evolutionists claim it can do; it cannot create anything. A much better explanation, infinitely so in my estimation, is an omniscient, omnipotent, wildly creative...
What does evolution DO? Nothin’!
In a recent conversation with an agnostic, I was consistently amazed by this person's insistence that intimate objects have "purpose." He didn't use the word, but that was what he described. The cell, he averred, does such and such, and creates this and so, all with...
Jesus’ View of Death Might Not Be What You Think
I wrote in previous posts about how human beings have a visceral revulsion toward death. We hate it. You might be surprised to learn that Jesus hated death too. How do we know? First, Jesus wasn't exactly thrilled to have to be tortured and endure a Roman cross to...
Why Death????
In my last post on the nature of plausibility structures, I used a movie with death as a central character to show how subtle messaging in movies leads to making God seem more or less real to people, thus more or less plausible. As I said, death never caused one of...
Notable Quotation
In her fiction, O’Connor deliberately tried to alter her readers’ perception, to get them to notice what she called the “distortions” of modern life and to look at the created world closely enough that they might perceive in its depths proof of a creator. For secular...
Famous Christian’s Son Rejects His Father’s Liberal Faith
Liberal Christianity (J. Gresham Machen's Christianity & Liberalism is an excellent study on the differences between liberal and conservative Christianity) got it's start in America in the late 1800/early 1900s. It started with the 17th Century Enlightenment that...
The Non-Religious Person Does Not Exist
If we're to raise our kids in a hostile 21st Century secular culture so that they maintain their Christian commitment throughout their lives, we need to continuously show them how reality affirms what they believe. This sounds so ridiculously obvious, but I think many...
Notable Quotation
What is the materialist creed? Modern materialism denies that we have a soul and reduces us to a mere body. In doing so, it assumes that all our actions are determined by physical forces, and therefore denies that we have free will. It therefore declares to be unreal...
Modern Science Makes Belief in God More Plausible Than Ever
I came across an article today entitled, "The Astounding Truth About the Hubble Space Telescope's Most Famous Image." In it was an image pretty much like the one on the left. We learn in the piece that: The specks of color and light you see are not stars; they are...
Science is Becoming God’s Best Friend
We live in a secular age, at least in the West, in which the dominion of science for all the good it has done has essentially replaced God for many people who find religion untenable. If "Science" says it, people believe it, few questions asked. In a little discussion...
Notable Quotation
[T]he disciples of scientism had a material explanation for the universe that they thought was rock solid. Now that explanation has collapsed, and we have the discovery of fine tuning pointing toward intelligent design strongly enough that it has convinced several...
#ShoutYourAbortion
The Planned Parenthood videos (see a "Quick and Easy Guide" to them at the Federalist) have put the pro-abortion movement on the defensive unlike at any time in the sordid history of legal abortion in America. Of course many abortion defenders have just attacked the...
Ashley Madison: Men Acting Like (Sinful) Men
As shocking as it may seem, a website dedicated to helping people find extra-marital dalliances is used almost only by men! Who could have seen that coming. The tag line for the Ashley Madison website, much in the news this past week or so, is, "Life is Short. Have an...
What the Heck is Natural Law Anyway?
At the website of the Theopolis Institute a piece was recently posted by Mark Horne with the curious title, "If There is 'Natural Law' How Can People Believe in Same-Sex Marriage?" I say curious because I'm not sure why five lawyers in black robes declaring gender...
Yes, Atheists Can Be Fine Upstanding Citizens, and Here’s Why
I was looking for a quotation allegedly by G.K. Chesterton (I haven't been able to find where it came from) to the effect that when people don't believe in God it isn't that they believe nothing, but that they will believe anything. We can see throughout history where...