Jun 12, 2017 | Apologetics
Logic is an amazing feature of the universe God created, but one that is unfortunately often ignored. It is no longer taught in public schools, which is obvious from the tenor of public debates over politics and religion. And those of us who attend weekly worship services at our local church also get very little, if any, teaching about logic. But if we are to think well and critically through life, logic is indispensable, especially in a hostile, post-Christian Western culture. (The one encouraging bright spot in this logical wasteland is the growth of Christian (and public charter) classical education, but it’s only a drop in a very large bucket at this point.)
Most people tend to think that logic drives people away from Christian faith, but logic is in fact one of our faith’s most powerful allies. I recently learned about an atheist turned Christian who found this out much to her surprise. Sarah Irving-Stonebraker was once a committed atheist, and she tells her story of coming to embrace the Christian message in a piece at The Veritas Forum. Growing up in a “loving, secular home,” as she puts it, she just knew that “Christians were anti-intellectual and self-righteous.” She doesn’t seem to have known any Christians at the time, but that is the perception in the Western cultural air we breathe.
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Apr 28, 2017 | Apologetics
A common question when talking to children about God being the creator of all things is, “Who created God?” The question is logical enough, but absurd. Many atheists and agnostics, who often think like children, often ask the same question:
Amazingly, it’s the chief objection raised to religious belief by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. It’s also a complaint you hear all the time in response to intelligent design. Regarding the “natural temptation…to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself,” Dawkins replies:
“The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.”
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Mar 9, 2017 | Apologetics
Most Americans do not believe that the Bible gives us reliable history, let alone a divinely inspired authoritative history we can trust for the salvation of our souls. Most Christians do believe they can trust Scripture, but few know why. This is unfortunate because in the history of the Church there has never been so many solid, scholarly, easy to understand resources available for Christians to defend that trust.
One issue that is a popular target for skeptics of the New Testament is the idea of canon, which means “a collection or list of sacred books accepted as genuine.” Critics of the New Testament insist that what we find in our Bible was the result of a power play by early Church Fathers. What’s at stake is the authority of what we find in our Bible. The goal of skeptics who attack our canon is to undermine that authority by claiming it’s formation was no more than some Shakespearean tragedy.
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Feb 17, 2017 | Apologetics
The more I read the Old Testament, the more amazed I am that a people could be proud of such a book. I’m currently reading through Jeremiah, a prophet to the southern kingdom of Judah that was shortly to be destroyed by the Babylonians as God’s judgment for their sin. The northern kingdom of Israel endured God’s judgment, having been conquered by the Assyrians, a hundred years earlier
Jeremiah weeps for his people because, as he says, “they are all adulterers, a crowd of unfaithful people.” Images of sexual infidelity are woven all throughout the prophets’ writings as they declare the Lord’s judgment upon his people. They prostitute themselves to false gods who are worthless idols in whom they think they will find their salvation and fulfillment.
What kind of people (the Hebrews/Jews) would write a book about their history that is so unrelentingly negative? I would argue people who are writing history that really happened! We can have confidence that this is so because of the criterion of embarrassment. Human nature is such that we are loathe to reveal embarrassing information about ourselves. We even lie in the face of facts that are less than flattering to us.
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Jan 27, 2017 | Apologetics
I can imagine you thinking at this moment, What kind of person would ask such a stupid question! Hang with me, and you’ll realize it’s not such a stupid question after all.
In my previous post I shared an Alice in Wonderland adventure I had with a postmodernist. As always in such encounters, one thinks of things one could of or should have said afterward. At one point I shifted the conversation to something called the moral argument. Simply stated, this means that the best explanation for morality, the sense that all human beings have of right and wrong and justice, can best be explained by the existence of a personal God. The postmodernist is a relativist, meaning morality is whatever an individual person or culture thinks it is. For them, there is no objective standard of right and wrong which exists outside of their own feelings or perceptions. By happy happenstance I was able to share a perfect example of postmodern relativism just this morning with my son. (more…)
Jan 9, 2017 | Apologetics
In my previous two posts I wrote about how death in a movie contributes to a secular plausibility structure, and how death lends more credibility to Christianity than atheism/materialism. In this post I want to explain what death is from a Christian perspective, and where it came from.
According to Christianity, death is an aberration. It’s not the way things were supposed to be, and all human beings know this regardless of their beliefs. In Genesis 1 we read that God created the world very good, and Adam and Eve had the run of the place, it was all theirs. Except, that is, one tree. Would Adam (Eve wasn’t around yet) trust and obey his Creator:
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
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