Apr 4, 2018 | Explanatory Power
A popular narrative in secular Western culture goes like this. There was a time called The Dark Ages when religion reigned in Western civilization, and all people were benighted, miserable, and poor. Then came a Renaissance when ancient literature and languages were rediscovered after religion had ruined everything. Once Western thinkers realized that reason was the highest form of attaining knowledge, religion and God were superfluous. This period of time was of course called The Enlightenment. During these years math and science made great strides in knowledge and discovery, and it was obvious to Western educated elites that religion’s days were numbered because math and science could tell us everything we need to know about reality.
The fundamental assumption of secular elites, and the narrative pushed in many overt and covert ways, has been that the more science advances, the less plausible religion becomes, and one day it will fade into irrelevance. Unfortunately for these elites that is proving, for them, to be uncomfortably wrong. In fact, the explosion of scientific knowledge has completely turned this secularist narrative on its head! Why? Because the fundamental assumption upon which their worldview is based is proving increasingly implausible and impossible to defend. That would be materialism.
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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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Feb 10, 2018 | Culture, Explanatory Power
In my previous post I dealt with why secularism might be appealing in our modern context. I argued that it’s not anything inherent in secularism that makes it more appealing than Christianity, but the cultural messaging machine that promotes it. That’s why it’s a paper tiger and can be no more enduring than was the Berlin Wall. Remember that for those of us who lived through the Cold War from the 60s through the 80s, the Berlin Wall appeared like an unalterable fact of existence we’d just have to live with for the foreseeable future. It certainly didn’t seem like a paper tiger, until Ronald Reagan came along. But now we know it was as brittle as the worldview that upheld it. Secularism is, I contend, no different. Why? Tomes have been written about what secularism is, why it will or will not endure, and why it is or is not a credible worldview. A measly little blog post can’t do any of that justice, but a few thoughts about the weakness of secularism as a worldview will have to suffice, and why it doesn’t ever have to appeal to our children.
The philosophical foundation of secularism is naturalism, or materialism, the view of existence that the material is all there is. The good news for Christians, and their children, is that such a view of reality is logically, rationally, and philosophically absurd. The cool kids, culturally speaking the secularist/naturalists as I wrote about in my last post, want to make us think that naturalism is the most obvious thing in the world, that only a religious obscurantist would think there might be some spiritual reality beyond what our five senses experience. But the more scientific knowledge advances, the less cool these kids become.
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Nov 12, 2017 | Explanatory Power
If you’re like every human being on the face of the earth, you sometimes doubt what you think you know. It’s part of what’s known as the human condition, and being finite. We can only know so much. There is in fact much more that we don’t know, way much more, than we do know. One of the nine ideas I explore in my book is epistemology, which is the study of knowing, what we know, how we come to know it, etc. If a person doesn’t doubt what they believe they know (no matter what it may be—doubt is not a religious concept), I don’t question their humanity, I question their sanity! A person who thinks they don’t experience doubt is deluded.
As for me, I’m terribly human. Just ask my family. So of course I experience doubt. Sometimes I doubt if I should go to a doctor for a nagging ache somewhere in my body I just know is cancer—of course I doubt that too! Or I doubt if I should lease a new car. Or I doubt if I should cook for dinner, or do take out. Mundane stuff all, but proof that doubt is a fundamental fact of human existence. What, though, if I doubt big things, like God’s existence?
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Oct 4, 2017 | Explanatory Power
In my previous post I argued that secular Western culture often makes belief in God problematic. For those who go with the secular cultural flow, instead of continually challenging and fighting it, God can seem less than real, less plausible. This has nothing to do with reason or logic or evidence, but with only what seems real. As I argued, for many people God seems no more real than Santa Clause. Whether he is or not isn’t the point, only the seeming of him.
This is a huge problem for the 21st century church, but invisible as a topic of concern. Most Christians are taught what they believe at church, but rarely why they believe it. Without the why, however, the what has much less staying power in the current secular cultural context. I have a very simple solution to this secular plausibility challenge. It’s called explanatory power.
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Sep 17, 2017 | Explanatory Power
Death is ugly. Jesus himself agreed, as we can surmise from his response to the death of his friend Lazarus. Standing before the tomb where his dead friend had been buried four days Scripture says, “Jesus wept.” Why in the world would Jesus cry when in moments he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead? Because he saw, powerfully, what he created as good (Col. 1:15-17) experiencing the horrific effects of the Fall: Death. Paul says that “the wages of sin is death,” and the Lord God says to Adam in the Garden of Eden (Eve had not yet been created) that if he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he would surely die. This is why we cry. Death is . . . . wrong!
I felt emotions of despair this morning when I learned that Nabeel Qureshi, all of 34 years old, had finally had succumbed to the cancer that had begun to ravage his body a bit over a year ago. Part of the reason the death of this stranger effected me is because I’ve been praying for him since I learned of his diagnosis. Yet he experienced all too soon the wages of sin that we will all experience one day. There is nothing in life so as inevitable as death, and something we need to reflect on more.
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