Aug 4, 2018 | Apologetics
I’d never heard of this movie with Ben Stiller until a few days ago, and when I read the premise and learned it was on Amazon Prime I figured we’d give it a go. Brad’s Status is about a 50-something middle class man watching his only son explore college, Harvard no less, before he leaves the nest. The title of the movie has to do with Brad’s obsession with his own status in life, or the lack thereof. And an obsession it is. He sees everything in his life as an indictment of his own failure to live up to his successful college friends who seem to “have it all.” If only he “had it all” he’d be just as happy and fulfilled as he thinks they are. Of course they’re not, which only adds to the irony of his obsession.
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Jun 23, 2018 | Apologetics
That we live in a secular age there can be no doubt. I’ve attacked secularism as a paper tiger (actually, Berlin Wall) in a number of posts, which is why I looked forward to reading James K.A. Smith’s How (Not) To be Secular. (It’s a book about a book, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.) In it he uses a phrase that is very helpful in combating the fundamental presumption of secularism (which includes all the Triple A’s: Atheists, Agnostics, and the Apathetic): that it is only the “religious” who need faith, or who have to believe. On page 47 of the paperback version he states:
Our secular age is the product of creative new options, an entire reconfiguration of meaning. So it’s not enough to ask how we got permission to stop believing in God; we need to also inquire about what emerged to replace such belief. Because it’s not that our secular age is an age of disbelief; it’s an age of believing otherwise. We can’t tolerate living in a world without meaning.
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Mar 31, 2018 | Apologetics
The whole of Christianity and it’s validity rests on one simple historical event that we celebrate this Easter weekend, that Jesus of Nazareth was killed and came back to life.
As I immersed myself back into apologetics over that last eight or so years, I’ve learned that the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most well attested historical fact of the ancient world. There is more solid evidence for this having actually happened than that Cesar existed and was murdered by the Roman Senate, or that Alexander the Great conquered the known world of the time, or that Plato and Aristotle were real ancient Greek philosophers. Unless a person is a complete historical skeptic, the honest seeker will take this evidence seriously.
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Feb 16, 2018 | Apologetics
When I finished up my last post on secularism and the Berlin wall, I came across an article at Evolution News & Science Today that takes on an atheist scientist Sean Carroll, who asserts that the universe is a “brute fact,” a concept I discussed in that post. If you are interested in learning just how weak naturalism/materialism (atheism) is, as I argued, you might want to become familiar with the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR).
The author, Michael Egnor, shreds the scientist, making him look like the fool he is, biblically speaking. In it he explains the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), which simply defined says that everything must have a reason, cause, or ground. The atheist (naturalist/materialist) being committed to his worldview would agree that while everything created by human beings obviously has a reason for its existence, the universe and the world we inhabit doesn’t. It’s just a “brute fact,” no explanation required. That’s a tough sell to rational human beings because the complexity of the natural world through the science that has helped us discover it, doesn’t look like an accident or product of chance. Engor, obviously a very bright man, lays out the argument for the existence of God that supports PSR based on what is known as the Rationalist proof: (more…)
Aug 9, 2017 | Apologetics
Atheists are fond of accusing Christians of believing they can’t be moral or good just because they are atheists. Christians don’t believe this, and atheists can be moral or good, but that doesn’t keep them from saying it. Atheists can be as good and moral, or bad and evil as any other human being because they are made in God’s image and so capable of good, and are fallen sinners like the rest of us and so capable of evil. It seems, though, that even many atheists think atheists are immoral, according to a recent study. One headline on this study put it this way, “Atheists more likely to be seen as immoral, finds report.” The article chalked this up to “anti-atheist prejudice,” but it is only a valid, and inevitable, logical deduction, and not prejudice at all. According to the study, even more atheists believed this than not.
The reason people believe this?
The study found people ultimately viewed god as holding the power to be a moral buffer to deter immoral actions.
Maybe so, but thinking about the issue logically, if all we are is lucky dirt, why should we feel compelled to be moral? Why would any one piece of material reality, say a rock, be of any more moral value than another, say a human being? We all know intuitively that it’s wrong to torture babies for fun, but from a purely materialistic point of view (that the material is all there is) babies have no more moral value than the rock. If there is no standard outside of the material itself, then no standard can be appealed to for us to adjudicate the difference.
This is what is known as the moral argument for God’s existence. Where does the sense justice we all feel come from? If we think of the most heinous acts of evil, like the holocaust of the Jews by Nazi Germany in WWII, every normal non-sociopathic human being knows that such evil is absolutely wrong. We feel it viscerally: this wrong must some how be judged! But according to materialism, and thus atheism, those six million plus murdered Jews were just a bundle of atoms and molecules who for no reason at all just came to exist. So why would it be wrong to kill them all? If atheism is true, these people had no more value than six million rocks.
Of course, all rational people are repelled by such an assertion, as they should be. But this only highlights the logical poverty of atheism, and the logical power of theism. The former gives us no logical reason for moral values, the latter does. Oh, philosophers and thinkers through the ages have tried to get to morality from dirt, but they just can’t do it. You can’t get ought from is, no matter how hard you try. It seems that even many of those who hold a materialist worldview agree.
Aug 3, 2017 | Apologetics
I recently saw this headline at Real Clear Politics: “DNA Contradicts the Bible on Canaanites.” Of course I had to click on it. What I found, no surprise to me, was that DNA did no such thing.
For the last 150 plus years, skeptics have declared over and over again that that Bible has supposedly been disproved by one discovery or another. And over and over again the claims of the skeptics have been proved bogus. Such is the case with this latest DNA finding. The title on RCP site was blatantly false, and I e-mailed the editors to let them know. But the title of the actual piece is only slightly less deceiving: “DNA vs the Bible: Israelites did not wipe out the Canaanites.” Whoever wrote this is obviously ignorant of what the Bible actually says, and that’s how lies spread in our modern popular culture, especially among those who automatically doubt the Bible’s authenticity. An accurate title would be, “DNA Confirms the Bible.” (more…)
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