Apr 13, 2019 | Explanatory Power
On April 8, 2010 prior to heading to bed I went to check e-mail. It was around 11:00 p.m., and I saw a message from my uncle that I had trouble processing: my cousin, Anthony, whom I affectionately called Ants, had died in a motorcycle accident that day, all of 45 years of age. That’s not possible, is it? How could Ants be gone, just like that, forever? I cried. And beat myself up because I’d meant to call him for several months, but hadn’t. Now, I would never ever be able to talk to him again, on this earth, although I know by our very well established faith I shall talk to Anthony again.
Every year on the anniversary of Anthony’s death I text or call my cousin Greg, his brother, to remember Anthony and affirm the value he had in our lives. It’s still hard to believe he’s gone. When I said to Greg how fast the nine years has gone since Anthony left us, he replied, “If this is all there is, why bother?” Exactly! The swift passage of time is of course a cliche, but primarily among those of us who’ve lived four decades or more. For those younger, the words “swift passage” are an abstraction with little or no meaning. For me, it wasn’t until I got north of 40 that this time thing started to get out of hand. I came up with an analogy to convey the creeping, unsettling experience of time’s acceleration.
(more…)
Mar 23, 2019 | Explanatory Power
If you’ve ever heard the term “pretzel logic” (not the Steely Dan album), you’ll get the oxymoronic logic: logic shouldn’t look like a pretzel! Those who believe in a God-less universe increasingly have to turn themselves into pretzels to try to explain a universe that sure seems to point to something beyond matter to explain its existence. Thus the multiverse. I thought of the title of the Steely Dan album when I saw this piece in Forbes insisting that the “multiverse” must exist. What exactly is this multiverse, and why must it exist? Well, you can read Mr. Siegel’s argument and see if you agree, but I couldn’t understand about, oh, 90 percent of it. No doubt, that’s a great way to persuade people! I think it’s a lot easier, and more plausible, to say God created the universe, and if there are others, he created those too! (more…)
Mar 2, 2019 | Explanatory Power
I love secularists! They make the Christian apologist’s job so easy. For the last few hundred years of Western civilization, intellectuals and cultural elites have painted the inevitable ark of history as secularism. Full stop. As scientific knowledge increased average people would come to see religion and God as increasingly implausible and untenable. It is debatable about when this move toward atheism/materialism (the material is all that exists) started, but it is a supreme irony of history that it really gained momentum when a pious orthodox Catholic French philosopher, Renes Decartes, developed his work of philosophy as a defense against the growing atheism of the 17th century. The details of how this happened are not important for the this post, but once the starting point became man (cogito ergo sum) not God, and epistemology not metaphysics (how we know not what is the nature of reality), the jig was up. The absolute secularism of Western culture we are experiencing with a vengeance in 2019 was inevitable. But a funny thing has happened on the way to the secularists’ party: reality is crashing it!
(more…)
Feb 10, 2019 | Explanatory Power
Human nature is one of the most powerful apologetics for the veracity of the Christian faith. What else can explain so well the glory and mess that is humanity, but that man was made perfect in God’s image, a glorious creature capable of the most exquisite heights, who then rebelled and fell into a self-centered morass that brings him lower than the animals. Remember this fundamental fact of human existence: something must explain the conundrum of human nature, or explain it away. As I never tire of telling my children, and anyone else who will listen, if people reject the Christian explanation of things, they must offer an alternative explanation. If they don’t or refuse, they are not to be taken seriously.
(more…)
Jan 20, 2019 | Explanatory Power
Our family moved from Illinois (thank God!) to Florida in June of 2017. Talk about a contrast, one that doesn’t have to be explained. We moved to the Tampa area, and the first thing I noticed is that oak trees and their moss are practically ubiquitous. They evoked in my mind images of a hot, muggy South of the 19th century, with gentlemen and ladies sitting on their porches sipping mint juleps in those days before air conditioning. There are none of these kind of oaks in the Midwest, that’s for sure. In my daily half-hour walk through the neighborhood listening to podcasts on my trusty little MP3 player, I would see these hard little nut looking things and step on them trying to hear a little crunch. It took some time before I realized these were acorns because they didn’t have the little acorn hat like the one our furry little friend from Ice Age is holding. (more…)
Dec 28, 2018 | Explanatory Power
When I was eight years old the Apollo 8 astronauts took the first ever trip around the moon. The trip was launched on December 21, 1968, and became the first manned spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit, reach the Moon, orbit it, and return. Even as an eight-year-old I remember it well. The three-astronaut crew—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—were the first humans to witness and photograph an Earthrise. The picture beamed back to earth was stunning; a little blue ball of life in a vast cosmic wasteland. Human eyes had never beheld such a contrast human minds had only speculated about. It inspired the crew to read the first verses of Genesis 1 as a billion people on that little blue ball listened and watched. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that this happened on Christmas eve. (more…)
Recent Comments