Nov 17, 2018 | Explanatory Power
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.” Funny thing about the “consensus,” though, is that the “science” upon which is hangs is in a shambles. The only place where neo-Darwinian evolution is a “fact” is in the minds of the secular cultural elites who are committed a priori to a worldview that claims the material is all that exists. For Christians, and their children, the most fundamental “fact” of existence is that God is the creator of all that exists. It is affirmed all throughout the Bible from the very fist verse of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The reason secularists are so passionately committed to neo-Darwinian evolution is because they believe it’s the most effective way to rid the world of the necessity of a creator.
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Nov 11, 2018 | Culture, Explanatory Power
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 be able to escape addressing it with them either. We’re confronted with it all the time. Just recently we were watching a new TV series called Manifest. It’s interesting because it has a Lost-like premise, and it’s always good when mystery is inserted into popular culture, but the writers just had to introduce homosexual characters into the plot. I turned it off. The same happened with the Amazon show Man in the High Castle, and off that went as well. Yes, I know, that’s narrow-minded and judgmental of me, but I serve a narrow-minded, judgmental Savior (just read the gospels carefully, and you’ll see lovey-dovey, affirm everyone Jesus is a figment of wishful thinking, and popular cultural imagination).
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Aug 29, 2018 | Explanatory Power
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 death comes calling for those we love, the loss and separation is devastating. It’s difficult to comprehend that this person we knew so well, who was a presence in our lives, in a moment appears to be no more. But as Christians, we don’t believe they are no more. We trust that their souls continue to live, but in an altered state with God. As Jesus said to the thief being crucified next to him, “today you will be with me in paradise.” So are all those who die in Christ.
But my response to death’s reality and inevitability is to wonder if what we believe as Christians is actually true. Because I can’t “see” this reality beyond the grave I find it difficult to believe. It brings great anguish as I contemplate this person so loved by so many gone from us for what appears forever. But as I’m going through this anguish, the second part of the title’s sentence impinges itself upon me with even more strength; I find it even more difficult to not believe. I ask myself, What alternative belief makes death more palatable, or makes any more sense of death? Or life?
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Aug 17, 2018 | Explanatory Power
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 because, well, I don’t know why. Ever since the so called Enlightenment when human beings began to believe they could sit in judgment on God, death (and suffering) became known as “the problem of evil.” Succinctly, the argument goes this way. If God is all powerful he should be able to keep evil from happening, but he obviously can’t, so he’s not. If he’s all good, he should not allow evil to happen, which he obviously hasn’t. So God is obviously not all powerful, nor all good, ergo he doesn’t exist. Or something like that.
The problem with this explaining away of God is that it leaves a far bigger problem in its wake: if there is no God, why, then, is there evil and suffering at all? The atheist’s answer: Uh, because. Now that’s intellectually satisfying, and emotionally fulfilling. NOT! And why is it bad? I guess because it’s not pleasant. But the only thing the God-less can say of evil and suffering (and death) is that it just is, deal with it. Brute fact, too bad, so sad. But getting rid of God only makes the problem of evil worse because, then, there is absolutely no reason at all for the misery all human beings experience. It is meaning-less.
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Aug 10, 2018 | Apologetics, Explanatory Power
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 natural law, or telos in nature. If you are not familiar with the word telos, in Greek it means purpose, and it was used as an important means of understanding the world for the ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle. Evolution News recently had a piece that connected the Pope’s arguments of telos in nature, and Intelligent Design (ID). The latter is a very simple, biblical, assertion that there is evidence of design in nature, and thus a designer. I know, shocking! I’ll explain why ID, and thus telos, is so “controversial” in a moment, but Paul tells us in Romans 1 that God, thus design, thus telos is obvious from his creation:
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
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Jun 1, 2018 | Explanatory Power
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 fascination as a Christian whose fundamental assumption about reality is that we have no chance of figuring out the true meaning of life without divine revelation. Christianity is above all a revealed religion which asserts that without God revealing the truth of things to us, we will always be benighted. That is, we will be stuck to one degree or another in darkness and remain unenlightened.
As I’ve raised three children with much help, and balance, from my longsuffering wife, I’ve continually impressed upon them that the options of meaning in life are not Christianity and nothing, but Christianity and some other worldview, between Christianity and some other faith commitment, between one set of beliefs and another set of beliefs. The Triple A’s, as I’ve called them (atheists, agnostics, and the apathetic) are convinced (and deluded) that there are religious people out there who believe things, and have faith of some sort; then there are the Triple A’s. They think they are not religious, don’t believe things, and don’t require faith. In baseball we call that a strikeout!
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