Oct 10, 2020 | Explanatory Power
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! This is of course really dumb, because there are all kinds of things I can’t see, or understand, or comprehend, but which I live by all the time. I can’t “see” gravity or wind or logic or love or quarks or smells or my thoughts or any number of other things, but that makes them no less real. In fact, the more we learn about the so called “natural” world, the more inconceivable and incomprehensible it becomes, but we still “believe” in it. It’s impossible to read a book like Michael Denton’s Nature’s Destiny, like I’m currently doing, and find atheism/materialism the least bit plausible. In fact, it is absurd! That everything came from nothing for no reason at all, and that by chance, is truly unbelievable! With all that said, spiritual reality is still hard for me to believe. (more…)
Oct 3, 2020 | Explanatory Power
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 importance of conversion testimonies. In the early years of my Christian life, experience seemed to take precedence over the objective testimony of God in Scripture. The focus, I felt, was too much on our subjective experience of God to validate the truth claims of Christianity, rather than his revealed truth in Scripture. I now believe that’s wrong, and a false trade-off. God’s truth revealed in the Bible is validated by people’s experience, and of course it would be if the Bible is true! And oh how true it is! Many of the testimonies I’ve heard bring me to tears because of how real God makes himself to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, to as the Apostle John says, every tribe and peoples and language. If Christianity is true, this is exactly what we would expect, God having a real impact on real people in ways that defy predictable explanations. (more…)
Jul 24, 2020 | Explanatory Power
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 themselves, as if they got there by some “natural” process. Although it’s completely insane and illogical, people too easily accept that life just created itself. I know, it’s ridiculous. Yet our cultural elites, our supposed intellectual betters, expect us to believe that some king of random, unguided, material process can explain everything. In fact, it explains absolutely nothing! I’ve been slowly reading through a series of 81 articles at Evolution News about “The Designed Body,” and reading it makes it impossible for one to be an atheist. And when I use the word impossible, I mean impossible! I challenge anyone to read how heart valves work, and then tell me with a straight face that “random, unguided, material processes” could account for it: (more…)
Jul 18, 2020 | Explanatory Power
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 Jewish-Christian notions about the nature of man and sin, and the inherent struggle that is life. I’m slowly reading through his 12 Rules for Life with one of my sons, and this paragraph (p. 93) blew me away:
We are always and simultaneously at point “a” (which is less desirable than it could be), moving towards point “b” (which we deem better, in accordance with our explicit and implicit values). We always encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek its correction. We can imagine new ways that things could be set right, and improve, even if we have everything we thought we needed. Even when satisfied, temporarily, we remain curious. We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all. We wouldn’t even be able to see, because to see we must focus, and to focus we must pick one thing above all else on which to focus.
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Jul 3, 2020 | Explanatory Power
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. He had escaped this mortal coil on our living room floor, so thankfully we didn’t have to give the vet the order to “put him down.” God mercifully did that. We thought we’d lost him two months previously, but he recovered, and it seemed fully. In the last few days, though, we noticed the familiar listlessness, but didn’t think it would happen so quickly. It did. Anyone who thinks or claims that death is “natural” is in denial. They can say or think that, but they know in their bones it isn’t true. Death is wrong! Death shouldn’t be! We hate death! I’ll get to why in a moment, as I have here many times, but first . . . animals. Or more accurately pets. I’m not a big animal person in the first place, but I marvel at God’s handiwork in creating so many varieties of them. That is yet another apologetic for the reality of our Creator God; chance doesn’t do that. (more…)
Jun 27, 2020 | Explanatory Power, Truth
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 you can’t escape politics now without it, literally, hitting you in the face. I thought in Florida we may have escaped relatively unscathed, and by that I don’t mean cases or deaths for an over-hyped virus, but without our lives being turned completely upside down. Now, unfortunately, because of an “order requiring face coverings,” aka masks, by our county board of commissioners, everywhere I go it’s masks, masks, masks! Of course I refuse to wear a mask because, well, it’s absurd for healthy people to be required to wear a mask! On Thursday I entered The Zone. I went into a local RaceTrac, and three employees pointed at me and hissed, “You have to wear a mask!” No I don’t, I said right back. For this I was summarily refused service, even as I pointed out that there is a very clear exception in the so called “order” (item 10). Kafka himself would have been proud. (more…)
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