Mar 4, 2018 | Theology
Skeptics are fond of mocking the idea that Jesus Christ had to die for our sins to reconcile us to God. Why can’t God, I’ve heard some of them say, and write, can’t God just forgive us. It can’t be that hard; we confess, he forgives, we’re good, right? No, it doesn’t work that way. If it did, our relationship to a holy God would be ground in his unpredictable whim, and nothing we could count on. Sort of like the God is Islam, who bears no resemblance to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
I’ve done many things over the years to build into my children the plausibility of the Christian faith. Unless Christianity makes sense to them on a variety of levels, i.e., it’s plausible, why would I expect that they will embrace it when they leave mom and dad’s orbit? I wouldn’t. That’s why I’ve consistently explained to them how the crucifixion is at the center of our faith, and why it makes total sense in light of the reality we experience every day. How can I say that?
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Mar 2, 2018 | Theology
I often think of what a relationship with God means for me and those I love. I may be something of an aberration, but as far back as 12 or 13 years old I was wondering about my existence in this big vast universe and what it all means. Like many sinners (i.e., all human beings) I’ve always known I fall short, of what I was not always sure. But a favorite phrase of mine lo these many years later has become, we know we can’t even live up to our own standards, let alone a holy God. Why is that? Why do we all know we fall short? Maybe it’s because we actually do! Not a person on earth is immune to conscience, and we are all condemned by it. Even those who claim not to believe in God will admit they don’t live up to their own standards, but they will insist no real objective standards exist by which they can be judged. God’s word says differently.
Here is our dilemma vis-a-vis God: since we can’t live up to his standards, we are judged guilty, and the wages of what the Bible calls sin is death, both spiritual and physical. Like Adam and Eve after the fall, in our natural state when God comes “walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” we hide. By nature, we want nothing to do with our judge, jury, and executioner. The Apostle Paul says, by nature, by birth, we are enemies of God, and objects of his wrath. This is a problem, my friends, because we don’t seek to have a relationship with our enemies; we seek to defeat them, or run away. How can this problem be solved with our Creator? In a word, the gospel. What exactly is it, and how does it overcome the problem?
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Feb 17, 2018 | Culture
I’ve been on a bit of a secularism kick of late, and as you may know I’m not a fan. I thought of secularism, and its discontents, as I heard of the latest American mass shooting in our new home state of Florida. Seventeen people killed in the prime of life, not by a gun, but by a wicked person bent on destruction. People go off to school or work one morning, like every other morning before, and don’t come home, ever. A tragedy that we hope never touches us, our loved ones or friends, but which we can’t help but wonder if it may some day. Such is life in secular 21st century America.
Do I blame secularism for the carnage that has become a staple of the latter part of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries? You bet I do! And of course I blame sin and the fall, so we always have and always will deal with evil in all of its distorted manifestations of God’s good creation. But there is something unique about the senseless nature of killing and mayhem in our time. I would argue that what we are experiencing in American culture is a cumulative case of thoughts and ideas and actions that have been brewing for centuries. There are no simple causal links one can definitively point to, but rather a rushing river of existence away from God that has brought us to this point.
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Feb 16, 2018 | Apologetics
When I finished up my last post on secularism and the Berlin wall, I came across an article at Evolution News & Science Today that takes on an atheist scientist Sean Carroll, who asserts that the universe is a “brute fact,” a concept I discussed in that post. If you are interested in learning just how weak naturalism/materialism (atheism) is, as I argued, you might want to become familiar with the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR).
The author, Michael Egnor, shreds the scientist, making him look like the fool he is, biblically speaking. In it he explains the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), which simply defined says that everything must have a reason, cause, or ground. The atheist (naturalist/materialist) being committed to his worldview would agree that while everything created by human beings obviously has a reason for its existence, the universe and the world we inhabit doesn’t. It’s just a “brute fact,” no explanation required. That’s a tough sell to rational human beings because the complexity of the natural world through the science that has helped us discover it, doesn’t look like an accident or product of chance. Engor, obviously a very bright man, lays out the argument for the existence of God that supports PSR based on what is known as the Rationalist proof: (more…)
Feb 14, 2018 | Explanatory Power
As I’ve argued in these posts, secularism as the fundamental worldview (religion) of Western cultural elites is as weak as the Berlin Wall proved to be. For the time being it appears as durable as the Wall circa 1970s, but as I contend, it’s every bit the paper tiger the Wall turned out to be. In my last post I pointed out that, “The philosophical foundation of secularism is naturalism, or materialism, the view of existence that the material is all there is.” This foundation upon which secularism rests is what makes it so weak, and gives it zero explanatory power. What exactly does this phrase mean?
Simply put, what best explains X, Y, or Z. For example, is a Creator or chance a better explanation for the bumble bee? In science it often comes down to probability, or what the likelihood is of one thing being the case versus another. In logic this is known as “Abduction or, as it is also often called, Inference to the Best Explanation, a type of inference that assigns special status to explanatory considerations.” We can find this type of reasoning used in many different sciences, as well as in courts of law where evidence is presented, and the better explanation will often determine innocence or guilt.
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