Mar 2, 2019 | Explanatory Power
I love secularists! They make the Christian apologist’s job so easy. For the last few hundred years of Western civilization, intellectuals and cultural elites have painted the inevitable ark of history as secularism. Full stop. As scientific knowledge increased average people would come to see religion and God as increasingly implausible and untenable. It is debatable about when this move toward atheism/materialism (the material is all that exists) started, but it is a supreme irony of history that it really gained momentum when a pious orthodox Catholic French philosopher, Renes Decartes, developed his work of philosophy as a defense against the growing atheism of the 17th century. The details of how this happened are not important for the this post, but once the starting point became man (cogito ergo sum) not God, and epistemology not metaphysics (how we know not what is the nature of reality), the jig was up. The absolute secularism of Western culture we are experiencing with a vengeance in 2019 was inevitable. But a funny thing has happened on the way to the secularists’ party: reality is crashing it!
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Feb 10, 2019 | Explanatory Power
Human nature is one of the most powerful apologetics for the veracity of the Christian faith. What else can explain so well the glory and mess that is humanity, but that man was made perfect in God’s image, a glorious creature capable of the most exquisite heights, who then rebelled and fell into a self-centered morass that brings him lower than the animals. Remember this fundamental fact of human existence: something must explain the conundrum of human nature, or explain it away. As I never tire of telling my children, and anyone else who will listen, if people reject the Christian explanation of things, they must offer an alternative explanation. If they don’t or refuse, they are not to be taken seriously.
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Jan 20, 2019 | Explanatory Power
Our family moved from Illinois (thank God!) to Florida in June of 2017. Talk about a contrast, one that doesn’t have to be explained. We moved to the Tampa area, and the first thing I noticed is that oak trees and their moss are practically ubiquitous. They evoked in my mind images of a hot, muggy South of the 19th century, with gentlemen and ladies sitting on their porches sipping mint juleps in those days before air conditioning. There are none of these kind of oaks in the Midwest, that’s for sure. In my daily half-hour walk through the neighborhood listening to podcasts on my trusty little MP3 player, I would see these hard little nut looking things and step on them trying to hear a little crunch. It took some time before I realized these were acorns because they didn’t have the little acorn hat like the one our furry little friend from Ice Age is holding. (more…)
Dec 28, 2018 | Explanatory Power
When I was eight years old the Apollo 8 astronauts took the first ever trip around the moon. The trip was launched on December 21, 1968, and became the first manned spacecraft to leave low Earth orbit, reach the Moon, orbit it, and return. Even as an eight-year-old I remember it well. The three-astronaut crew—Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders—were the first humans to witness and photograph an Earthrise. The picture beamed back to earth was stunning; a little blue ball of life in a vast cosmic wasteland. Human eyes had never beheld such a contrast human minds had only speculated about. It inspired the crew to read the first verses of Genesis 1 as a billion people on that little blue ball listened and watched. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that this happened on Christmas eve. (more…)
Nov 17, 2018 | Explanatory Power
If you have ever had any kind of interaction with an atheist/materialist/skeptic, etc., one of the things they hang their hat on is that evolution is a “fact.” Darwin was a genius, and only a benighted, troglodyte, imbecile would argue with the scientific “consensus.” Funny thing about the “consensus,” though, is that the “science” upon which is hangs is in a shambles. The only place where neo-Darwinian evolution is a “fact” is in the minds of the secular cultural elites who are committed a priori to a worldview that claims the material is all that exists. For Christians, and their children, the most fundamental “fact” of existence is that God is the creator of all that exists. It is affirmed all throughout the Bible from the very fist verse of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The reason secularists are so passionately committed to neo-Darwinian evolution is because they believe it’s the most effective way to rid the world of the necessity of a creator.
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Nov 11, 2018 | Culture, Explanatory Power
Given this is ostensibly a blog about parenting, and that I soon have a book about parenting to be published, and we live in the 21st century, I can’t escape commenting on homosexuality. As you know it is ubiquitous in our culture, and if you have children you won’t be able to escape addressing it with them either. We’re confronted with it all the time. Just recently we were watching a new TV series called Manifest. It’s interesting because it has a Lost-like premise, and it’s always good when mystery is inserted into popular culture, but the writers just had to introduce homosexual characters into the plot. I turned it off. The same happened with the Amazon show Man in the High Castle, and off that went as well. Yes, I know, that’s narrow-minded and judgmental of me, but I serve a narrow-minded, judgmental Savior (just read the gospels carefully, and you’ll see lovey-dovey, affirm everyone Jesus is a figment of wishful thinking, and popular cultural imagination).
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