Jordan Peterson’s Daughter Converts to Christianity

Jordan Peterson’s Daughter Converts to Christianity

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday when I learned Jordan Peterson’s daughter, Mikhaila, had recently become a Christian. If you’re not familiar with Peterson, five or six years ago he became a cultural phenomenon by speaking what to most people is common sense, but not in the Canadian university setting in which he worked. One piece on him put it well, “Mr. Peterson is the canary in the toxic coal mine of political correctness and petty thought police.” He became a Youtube sensation back in 2015 when he started to challenge leftist Canadian groupthink. He then published a best seller called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which launched him into a popularity he seemed to endure far more than he enjoyed. A good introduction is a documentary you can see on Amazon Prime called The Rise of Jordan Peterson. (more…)

According To Evolutionary Science The Human Voice Exists Only Through Chance

According To Evolutionary Science The Human Voice Exists Only Through Chance

That, my friends, is from the first sentence in a college textbook my son purchased for a class on how chance can work such wonders as the human voice. If you don’t believe me, get yourself a copy of Your Voice: An Inside view 3: Voice Science & Pedagogy by Scott McCoy. On second thought, just believe me. It’s not surprising, is it, because according to the secularist, materialist, Darwinian view of reality, everything is a product of chance—every single thing. Now, if you’re a Christian, or any person with a shred of common sense, you will realize the absurdity of “evolutionary science.” Yet, the dominant narrative of the secular West is that chance can in fact explain every single thing. Not things created by human beings, mind you, because we know chance can’t create anything, not pencils or computers or cars or glasses or tables or anything. Things that humans create have function and purpose, obviously, and we know they are designed and made with a specific end in mind, a telos (purpose), or as Aristotle called it, a final cause. Let’s looks at Aristotle’s four causes, or why things exist: (more…)

The Nature of Progressive Revelation: God Making Himself Obvious to Us

The Nature of Progressive Revelation: God Making Himself Obvious to Us

When I pray I always seem to thank God for revealing himself to us in creation, Scripture, and Christ because I am blown away that God reveals himself in ways that makes doubting his existence and who he is, for me, impossible. I freely admit I find it difficult to believe in an invisible reality, an invisible God, and an invisible life after death. At the same time, I find it impossible to believe in any of the alternatives to Christianity, especially materialism (matter is all there is). As I daily confront this difficulty, I’m always brought back to the idea of God’s revelation. Thankfully, he has not left us benighted,  i.e., in a state of moral or intellectual darkness, or unenlightened. Without his revelation that is exactly what we would be, without light. And without light we run into things we can’t see, and it hurts. We wonder, why didn’t anybody tell us that was there. And God says, I did! So, what has this to do with progressive revelation? (more…)

Some Reflections on 1984 in 2021

Some Reflections on 1984 in 2021

I recently re-watched the 1984 movie 1984, with John Hurt and Richard Burton, and I forgot how depressing it is. I’ve read George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four (written in 1949), several times, and it’s not as painful to read as the movie is to watch, until the ending. Director Michael Radford did a commendable job bringing dystopia to the screen. The reason the ending of the book is more devastating is because a movie can’t compete with a book which allows you to live in a character’s head, and living in Winston’s thought throughout the book made his ultimate defeat devastating. The absolute totalitarian power of the state is reflected not just in Winston’s outward obedience to the dictates of Big Brother, but in the end actually falling in love with Big Brother; he realized 2+2 can in fact equal 5. He was in every sense a broken man. An all powerful state can do that, but only to a man who has nothing outside of the material world in which to appeal. That’s what makes the movie, and the book, so depressing, but so hopeful for those who refuse to accept the worldview assumed by it. (more…)

The Last Kingdom and How I Was Programmed by Modern Medicine

The Last Kingdom and How I Was Programmed by Modern Medicine

You might be familiar with the Netflix series, The Last Kingdom, and if so you might think it a very strange thing that it would have anything to do with my mind being programmed by modern medicine. I realized, looking back, how easily I, and by extension all of us, can be programmed to believe certain things. That programming is the result of the power of culture to shape and mold our perspectives on reality. The sociological term for that is plausibility structures, or the frame of reference in our mind that makes certain things seem real, and other things seem not real, plausible or not. (more…)

What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

Those words from James chapter 4 are a sobering reminder of a fact of existence we all too easily ignore. Yet most people live as if this life was eternal life, as if death will not eventually find them. Everything they focus on is this life as if the next life isn’t coming, soon. Ignoring the next one never made sense to me because we’re going to be dead a whole lot longer than we’re alive, and if there is life after death I want to know about it. If there is, in an understatement for all time, that changes everything. Every. Single. Thing. One of the most important things we can teach our children is the truth of James’ words. In fact, practicing what I preach, we just learned last night that our daughter is pregnant with our first grandchild (yipee!!!). Being the morbid realist I am, I said to her, you know, as soon as that little creature was conceived, it was condemned to death. Well, thanks, Dad! My daughter knows that’s par for the parenting course she got from me. We can never be reminded of that too much, and she knows that too. (more…)