Dec 22, 2016 | Explanatory Power
If we’re to raise our kids in a hostile 21st Century secular culture so that they maintain their Christian commitment throughout their lives, we need to continuously show them how reality affirms what they believe. This sounds so ridiculously obvious, but I think many Christians would not be quite certain what I mean. What follows is a simple example.
The Bible tells us that man was made in God’s image, male and female he created them. Then something very bad happened. The first humans rebelled against their Creator, and sin and death entered the world, just as God predicted it would. At the heart of this fall from grace is the temptation of Adam and Eve we read about in Genesis 3:
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
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Dec 30, 2015 | Explanatory Power
What is the materialist creed? Modern materialism denies that we have a soul and reduces us to a mere body. In doing so, it assumes that all our actions are determined by physical forces, and therefore denies that we have free will. It therefore declares to be unreal our everyday experience of freely choosing this or that action, and in doing so, removes the possibility of moral action. It reduces love and hate, courage and cowardice to chemistry, and makes of human adventure and human history predetermined paths marked out from the beginning by the laws of nature. And finally, based upon the notion that the universe is a great self-winding, law-driven machine, materialism declares that miracles are impossible and God does not exist.
–Benjamin Wiker, “The Greatest Story, Because It’s True!”
Dec 2, 2015 | Explanatory Power
I came across an article today entitled, “The Astounding Truth About the Hubble Space Telescope’s Most Famous Image.” In it was an image pretty much like the one on the left. We learn in the piece that:
The specks of color and light you see are not stars; they are galaxies — 10,000 of them in fact! It is the deepest image of the sky over obtained, gazing back approximately 13 billion years.
You might be thinking as I was, 10,000 galaxies! That’s a lot of galaxies! We’re not talking stars, or solar systems; we’re talking 10,000 Milky Ways! And our galaxy isn’t a small place. In fact, it’s 100,000 to 120,000 light years in diameter, and one light year is six trillion miles! Is your brain scrambled yet? Well, that isn’t even the one-forty millionth of it! (more…)
Oct 25, 2015 | Apologetics, Explanatory Power, Plausibility
We live in a secular age, at least in the West, in which the dominion of science for all the good it has done has essentially replaced God for many people who find religion untenable. If “Science” says it, people believe it, few questions asked. In a little discussion with a co-worker recently the issue of religion came up, and being the consistent agnostic she is she said, “I’ll stick with science.” I guess she thinks science can answer the questions and address the issues religion and philosophy address. It can’t. She obviously hasn’t thought deeply about any of this. No surprise. Most Americans don’t.
Many atheists misuse the authority of science as a battering ram against belief in God, as if science itself makes belief in God a relic of a bygone era of simplistic faith. One reason they do this is because they define faith in a perversely self-serving way. Faith, which for them only applies to religious belief, is either believing something when evidence is lacking, or believing something we know is not true. If that is what faith actually is, I wouldn’t be religious either! (more…)
Oct 15, 2015 | Explanatory Power
[T]he disciples of scientism had a material explanation for the universe that they thought was rock solid. Now that explanation has collapsed, and we have the discovery of fine tuning pointing toward intelligent design strongly enough that it has convinced several Nobel laureates in physics. This is just one of the spectacular counterexamples to scientism’s grand progress narrative. The evidence for intelligent design is growing, not shrinking. Believers need not shrink back from the academy, from the sciences, or from the public square. We’re on the side of history and evidence — not to mention the Alpha and the Omega.
–Jonathan Witt, “The Scientific Evidence for God is Growing, Not Shrinking: The atheism that masquerades as science misrepresents the history of science.”
Oct 1, 2015 | Explanatory Power
The Planned Parenthood videos (see a “Quick and Easy Guide” to them at the Federalist) have put the pro-abortion movement on the defensive unlike at any time in the sordid history of legal abortion in America. Of course many abortion defenders have just attacked the messenger, as if Planned Parenthood was not in fact selling baby body parts for a profit. All justified in the name of Science, don’t you know. But one of the most telling and sad responses is by a Lindy West who started something called #ShoutYourAbortion. What stood out to me in an article she penned for The Guardian announcing it was this intro:
Last week I realised that, even among my pro-choice friends, I never, ever talk about my abortion. We need to chip away at stigma, at lies, at the climate of shame.
So we are to believe that any shame a woman feels for killing her child is simply a stigma imposed from a society that doesn’t understand or accept her decision? And what lies? That having an abortion is killing a human being? That is simply an indisputable fact of science. At conception what comes to exist inside the mother is a unique individual completely distinct from the mother and the father with it’s own distinct genetic code. So it is indeed a human being. But according to the Supreme Court these last forty plus years, not a person and thus it’s life can be snuffed out for any and every reason up to birth. That is the law of the land.
Unfortunately for Ms. West, and fortunately for the human race, shame isn’t a matter of climate; you can’t just turn the thermostat down on shame. Nope, the human condition is filled with shame, and thank God for it. The first thing Adam and Eve did after their fall was to hide; they were afraid because they were naked. They had done something wrong by eating what God had told them not to eat, they had disobeyed and were now afraid. Judgment is like that. It doesn’t feel good to know we’ve done wrong and admit it. We prefer to hide. The hiding isn’t necessarily good, but feeling the shame for having done wrong certainly is. We admit there is such a thing as wrong, that God’s law exists, that we live in a moral universe where right and wrong are objectively real, as I argued recently in a post on natural law.
What could be more shameful, more worthy of shame, than a woman purposefully ending a life that grows within her. Here is the bottom line: If there is no God, there are then no objective moral values, no right and wrong that exist outside of our own personal preferences, and thus absolutely nothing inherently wrong with killing unborn babies. If there is a God, then the shame a woman feels for killing her unborn child is sadly deserved, and we don’t do her or anyone else a favor by pretending otherwise.
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