This appears to be a strange question. You might answer, I see a leaf of Romaine lettuce, and of course you would be right, but you would also be wrong. Am I contradicting myself? No. The leaf, as with all created things, points beyond itself. So yes, the leaf is a leaf, but it is also an amazing creation of Almighty God! If we don’t see all of reality this way, we are not seeing reality biblically, and have been sucked into the vortex of the stultifying secular culture we swim in every day. I’m not sure there is anything more important as we raise our kids, or develop our own faith, than learning to see reality biblically. That means we daily, hourly, minutely, constantly affirm God as Creator, of everything! That means we stop taking those things for granted, and have moments of wonder at the sheer bizarreness of existence. As I did with my Romaine leaf. (more…)
Since the great enemy of Darwinism Phillip Johnson went to be with the Lord recently, I’ve been listening to talks and interviews he gave over the years, and seeing again why he was such a formidable opponent to those espousing the bankrupt theory of evolution. He uncovered how the “scientific consensus” in favor of Darwinian evolution is one big project of begging the question, or assuming what you are ostensibly trying to prove. In one interview he compared Darwinism to alchemy, “a medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy aiming to achieve the transmutation of the base metals into gold, the discovery of a universal cure for disease, and the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life.” Alchemy proved to be a fool’s errand, as is Darwinism.
Secularism is the religion of the 21st century West, and all the most powerful messaging cultural machinery indoctrinates us into its view of reality. At the top of that list has to be our entertainment mediums, especially movies and television. Stories on screens are reality shapers, that is, they build into our imaginations ways of seeing and interpreting the world. Sociologically speaking, they are plausibility generating mechanisms in that they, without our knowing it, paint a picture of reality that we accept as real, or what seems real to us. Over time, if we take in entertainment uncritically, our plausibility structure (the building in our minds that determines how we see reality, the seemingness of it) becomes thoroughly secular, regardless of what we “believe.” (And for a short definition, what I mean by secular is that the material world, this world, is all that matters, and the here and the now is what is most important about life.) (more…)
My youngest, our 17 year-old son, came to me the other day and said I had to watch the beginning of this short video:
The mechanism that allows human beings to hear is insanely complex. Either we are incredibly lucky, or that mechanism was created by an all powerful, all creative, all intelligent divine being. Can something so intricate that works as perfectly as does human hearing not be designed? Luck is a terrible explanation, as is an unguided process of natural selection and random mutation (Darwinism). The design inference (e.g., looking at human hearing and inferring a designer), is something I’ve used innumerable times with my children as they’ve grown up. It’s the reason my son would see this and instantly make the comparison: chance versus design? Luck versus God? I’ve programmed (we need to do this) my kids to see such things biblically, so of course they see God as the only plausible explanation, and chance as ridiculous, even ludicrous (more on this below).
When I first came up with a title for my book four plus years ago I was going call it, Apologetics for Parents: How to keep your kids from becoming “Nones.” Since most Christians don’t know what apologetics is, or what “Nones” are, that wasn’t ideal. Keeping our kids from becoming “Nones,” however, is an increasing challenge in our secular 21st century. Over the past 20 or 30 years the fastest growing segment of the population when asked their religious affiliation chooses “None of the above,” thus the press christened them Nones. A piece in The Atlantichighlights how and why this might be happening. (more…)
Recent Comments