Jul 14, 2017 | Explanatory Power, Notable Quotations
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 not only because they’re mediated to us through images, or because we sense ourselves to be “of the earth.” It’s also because we children of modernity live in the shadow of the world’s disenchantment. The world is no longer “deep.” There is no inherent mystery in things. God’s absence from the world is echoed in the cosmos’s deafening silence. However wondrous the things we discover in space (which can awaken a reverent awe in even the most coldly scientific mind), they can never, in themselves, overcome this spiritual lack. For though we now have even more reasons for marveling at the cosmos than our ancestors, Peter Kreeft’s insightful observation remains true: People formerly looked upward and saw “the heavens”; today they simply call it “space.” Even the greatest exploratory adventures can never make up for this primary lack of spiritual vision.
—Brandon Tucker, “Creatures in the Cosmos”
I don’t normally comment on quotations, but this one is just too perfect, as is the entire article from which it comes. It is an especially good example of the concept of explanatory power. According to Google, explanatory power is “the ability of a hypothesis or theory to effectively explain the subject matter it pertains to.” In apologetics, it shows us how much more powerful and plausible the Christian worldview is compared to any of its competitors, and in this case the explanatory poverty of atheistic materialism. One of the keys to keeping our kids Christian is to consistently show them, to persuade and sell them on, the veracity and plausibility of the Christian Faith and worldview. As this article indicates, it’s rather easy to do.
Apr 5, 2017 | Explanatory Power
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 mid-1800s of a war between religion and science. Nothing could be further from the truth. All the great strides of early science were made by Christians because they wanted to glorify their Creator by discovering how a universe created for us worked.
While some science was done by ancient Greeks, and Muslims and Chinese of the Middle Ages, it was in the Christian West where science as a continually expanding discipline was established. How ironic, then, that science has been used by secularists for the last 150 years as a battering ram against Christians. How even more ironic that we can thank Jesus of Nazareth for all the blessings of modern science and technology! Of course Christians know this, and do thank him for these blessings all the time, but just in an historical sense, without Jesus we’d still likely be stuck in some kind of “dark ages.”
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Feb 12, 2017 | Explanatory Power
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 supreme being. Specifically the life giving Triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) of Scripture. It shouldn’t surprise us that the first five words of God’s verbal, historical revelation to mankind are, “In the beginning God created . . . .” It should also not surprise us that evolution defined as a totally natural process, no God required, is the tip of the spear of Satan’s strategy to undermine belief and trust in Almighty God. God as Creator is foundational to every aspect of redemptive history. That’s why affirming it to our kids throughout their lives is also foundational to their own redemptive history.
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Feb 8, 2017 | Explanatory Power
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 a dexterity and design only a personal agent could impart, which of course he denied.
When evolutionists say that evolution can do or create certain things, they imply without the least proof that evolution is a creative force without the need for a Creator. It is self-evident, for them, that the universe is a closed system that runs on it’s own. But exactly how plausible is such an assertion (it obviously could never be proved)?
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Jan 12, 2017 | Explanatory Power
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 secure the salvation of his people. In the garden of Gethsemane he prayed three times that God would take this cup of suffering from him, and from Luke 22, “being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” Death was no picnic for Jesus. But in another scene, in the Gospel of John, when he confronts the death of another we observe his own visceral revulsion to the existence of death.
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Jan 6, 2017 | Explanatory Power
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 the other characters to ever bring up God, as if the divine being is irrelevant to life and death. I want to make the case briefly that although death and suffering often cause people to reject God, they are a far bigger problem for the materialist/atheist than the Christian. My contention is that death and suffering lends credibility to the Christian faith, while making atheism/materialism less credible.
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