# articles

title: What Christianity Is About
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/what-christianity-is-about
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Christians have to be able to communicate to the rest of the world. We’ve got to be able to make coherent sense of our message, even before we demonstrate that our message is actually true.</em></p>

<p>A consistent theme of this show is how critically important it is for us to have a foundational understanding about what Christianity is about. Most of us who have been in the church for a while know a few things: God loves us. Jesus forgives our sins. Unless you believe in Jesus you’re going to Hell. We can have a relationship with God. We have these scattered bits of theological facts, but what we don’t often have is an understanding of how it all fits together.</p>

<p>I was wondering today what could be more important for the church than what I’m about to talk about? If I could have my way, if I could dream up a certain consequence for the church, if I could have one thing be true, what would that thing be? I would want for the church in this day and age to simply have a clear understanding of what Christianity is about.</p>

<p>A conversation that I had with a gentleman yesterday evening at the retreat was about a frustration that he was confronting with a young lady and a young man who was her boyfriend. The young lady was a Christian, the young man was not a Christian. You can imagine what the first frustration is, right? What’s this committed Christian doing with a non-Christian in a relationship? That’s forbidden by the Bible, and for very good reason. 2 Corinthians 5 or 6, “Do not be unequally yoked with non-believers.”&nbsp;That is, don’t be tied together with them in a vital way because when you have two oxen pulling the same plow in different directions one is going to be pulled off the furrow by the other. And Paul’s concern is that the Christian will be pulled off by the non-Christian, so he says don’t even get in the same plow with a non-believer, and certainly not a personal, intimate relationship. Boyfriend/girlfriend is an example of that. And I don’t have to spell out why, I hope.</p>

<p>There’s a practical consideration, as well, because you’re just gonna drive each other nuts if you take seriously your Christianity, and that person takes seriously their non-Christianity. They are just two different worldviews, two ways of thinking about reality. In fact, in this relationship, there was conflict. The young lady is trying to make sense of Christianity to the young man and she is not able to do it because the substance of her Christianity is a feeling about God. Let’s face it, when we talk about relationships, generally we are cashing this out in personal, subjective, emotional terms.</p>

<p>When we read books, or have seminars, or listen to tapes or teachings that talk about improving our relationship with God, it is never about knowing something about God that we don’t already know. It’s always about some trick that makes us feel differently. Get closer to God, have this deep, personal, warm experience with God.</p>

<p>By the way, I’m not against having an emotional closeness to God. I just think it’s the tail and not the dog. And to a great degree, we have the tail wagging the dog. My concern is that sometimes you have the tail wagging so hard that the dog disappears altogether. The dog is the truth of Christianity, the substance of what it is about. The Christian is the tail, not the dog. The feelings are the tail, not the dog. And relationship is the tail, if you’re cashing it out in experiential terms, not the dog.</p>

<p>This young lady has a relationship with God in primarily subjective terms. What’s the problem? She can’t communicate the ineffable attributes of her relationship. And who can? I mean gentlemen, you love your wives, women you love your husbands. How do you explain that to somebody? You could say “I love them”&nbsp;but it is very difficult to communicate the subjective elements of a relationship. Once you feel it, you know it, and sometimes that’s how we relate our relationship with God. You want to become a Christian? You’ve got to have the faith, then you feel it, you know it. When you really connect with God, then you really know what it is.</p>

<p>That was the best she could do, and her frustration is that she couldn’t explain this deep feeling that she has for God. And her non-Christian boyfriend wants to make sense of her point of view. She wants him to become a Christian. “What does that mean?”&nbsp;“Well, I want you to believe in Jesus. Then you can have your sins forgiven, and you can go to Heaven. But if you don’t believe, you’re in big trouble.”&nbsp;And he says, “That’s Greek to me. That makes no sense. I don’t even know how to comprehend the meaning of those words.”</p>

<p>When we take little pieces out of the entire system, how can we expect people to understand Christianity? It’s like saying, “You want to understand how a car works? Here, look at this carburetor.”&nbsp;Even if you understood some things about the carburetor, you have know how the carburetor fits into the whole machine. When you understand the system, then they understand what we’re saying. He’s trying to get it, but he doesn’t have the big picture to fit all the parts. The problem is that the young lady doesn’t appear to have the parts, either. She has a part. She doesn’t have the system. If she had the system, she could explain it.</p>

<p>We have two problems here. First of all, she is living in disobedience. I can understand if one is cashing out religious truth in experiential terms, it’s very easy to move from one experience to another. She experiences a love relationship with God, and now she’s experiencing a love relationship with this guy. They’re kind of both love relationships and if the experience is what makes it valid. But if it is truth that is driving someone in their relationship with God and not experience, then it becomes pretty evident for somebody who has a marginal understanding of the text that there is a violation of truth in this relationship. There’s a difference.</p>

<p>The core issue is a basic understanding of Christianity. The boyfriend has an honest question about Christianity. The gentleman I talked to last evening told me about spending three hours with the young man trying to lay it out for him because he didn’t understand it.</p>

<p>Think about this just for a minute. When the non-believer asks, “Why is Jesus the only way?”&nbsp;he’s asking her to make her view coherent. He’s asking her to tell the Christian story such that the idea that Jesus is the only way is a sensible idea. He’s not even really asking her to prove that such a thing is actually true. That’s a separate question. He’s just trying to understand the view.</p>

<p>I am sympathetic to a non-believer who wants to know why Jesus is the only way; I am frustrated when a Christian wants to know why Jesus is the only way. The non-believer does not have the whole picture; the Christian is expected to understand the basic picture.</p>

<p>There’s a new book out that is exceptionally well done. It’s written by Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcy entitled <em>How Now Shall We Live?,</em> reminiscent of a title of a Schaffer book some 25 years ago. Of course, they revisit a lot of Schaffer’s themes. If you are at all confused about what the big picture is, this is the book to get. Colson and Pearcy engage this question intelligently and they employ a very standard motif that consists of four areas: creation, fall, redemption and restoration. In a more popular sense, you can say: Where do we come from, what's wrong with us, how do you solve the problem, and then how do you put everything else right that has been hurt by the problem?</p>

<p>Do you realize that every worldview had to answer those questions? How you start will determine where you move from there. How you understand the nature of the problem will determine how you characterize the solution. If the problem is just ignorance, then the solution is education. If the problem is genetic error, then the solution is genetic manipulation. If the problem is sin, then the solution is forgiveness.</p>

<p>In the Christian worldview, God created a world, He’s in charge, and He created human beings to have fellowship, companionship, and involvement with Him. Human beings are special in that regard, they are a higher order of creation. They have a capability that other creatures don’t have: moral choice. They use this capacity that was meant for good for something evil and become rebels in God’s kingdom. As rebels in God’s kingdom, they become guilty of crimes against God and liable for punishment. That’s our problem.</p>

<p>Many of you heard me tell the story before about the gentleman I met at Barnes and Noble giving a presentation on the book <em>Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-air</em> that I co-authored with Frank Beckwith. I gave a presentation and started signing books and answering questions. A Jewish gentleman came up and said, “I just don’t get it. Why do I have to believe in your Jesus? I’ve got my Judaism, I’ve got my belief in God. I try to lead a good life.”&nbsp;To him that just made sense.</p>

<p>Do you understand that he has a picture of reality here? His picture of reality is that God exists and demands moral conduct. This gentleman is basically a good person so he’s in on that view, but he doesn’t understand why he’s got to add some theological notion about Jesus to the equation. His view seems adequate. What the Christian has to do in answering his question is to go back to the foundation and show what’s wrong with the foundation. In fact, I think people already know what’s wrong with their foundation, they just haven’t thought it through.</p>

<p>I offered him a couple of questions to help him see the difficulty with his foundation. I asked him two questions: Do you believe that people who commit moral crimes ought to be punished? He said, “Well, since I am a prosecuting attorney, yes, I guess so.”&nbsp;“Great so do I.”&nbsp;I agreed with him at that point.</p>

<p>Second question: Do you, have you, ever committed any moral crimes? Now it’s a personal issue, right? What do you think he said? He said, “Yes, I guess I have.”&nbsp;What do you think I said? “So have I. Now, here’s where we’ve come so far. We both believe that people who commit moral crimes ought to be punished, and we both believe that we’ve committed moral crimes. You know what I call that? Bad news.”</p>

<p>There’s a little wake-up cal. Even by his own standards, he is not good enough. And this is where the cross comes in. We identify the problem, and we offer a solution that is adequate to the problem. Jesus is the only way because He is the one who has solved the problem. He is the one who died for sins. Buddha hasn’t done that. Mohammed hasn’t done that. Krishna hasn’t done that. No other religious leader or world leader has done what Jesus has done. He is the medicine that cures the sickness. Even though there are other medicines out there, they are not adequate to the task.</p>

<p>This is the point that Christians have to be able to communicate to the rest of the world. We’ve got to be able to make coherent sense of our message, even before we demonstrate that our message is actually true.</p>

<p>This is what I wish upon the church, what I pray for the church: that we would have at least a foundational understanding of why Jesus is necessary. That ought to be a basic part of our Christian education. We should have at least an adequate understanding to be able to say clearly what Christianity is and what it’s about before we even think about defending it to someone else.</p>
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title: Who Are You to Say?
topic: Tactics and Tools
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/who-are-you-to-say-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>The “Who are you to say?”&nbsp;challenge is used by non-Christians <em>and</em> Christians, especially by those who deplore the “heresy hunters”&nbsp;in the church. This rejoinder, though, deftly sidesteps the real issue.</em></p>

<p>Today I was thinking about a concept that came up in conversation, a challenge raised to Christians who offer their point of view. The challenge is: “Who are you to say?”</p>

<p>This question it comes up in one of two contexts. The first one is secular. You’ll hear it quite frequently when another person disagrees with your point of view, especially a moral one. They immediately challenge you with, “Who are you to say?”</p>

<p>Taken at face value this is an attack on <em>you</em>. It’s a response that focuses on the person, not the argument. Instead of dealing with a person’s point, you attack the individual in some way. This is called an <em>ad hominem</em>, a type of informal fallacy. An <em>ad hominem</em> might be when you say, “You jerk. You’re just stupid,”&nbsp;or, “What do you know?”&nbsp;or something of that order. It’s a form of name calling.</p>

<p>There are lots of sophisticated ways people use <em>ad hominem</em> that slip by us in addition to the obvious ones just mentioned. “Who are you to say?”&nbsp;is one of them. It’s a challenge addressed to the person and not the argument.</p>

<p>The challenge comes up in a second context, when Christians with positions of visibility challenge those inside the church who disagree with them. They sometimes refer to their attackers as “heresy hunters”&nbsp;to disparage them. (Some, I guess, might have called me that, though I don’t know specifically if I’ve been labeled in that way.) This is the same kind of comment as, “Who are you to say? Who made you in charge? What right do you have to challenge my doctrine?”</p>

<p>This question is completely irrelevant. Here’s why. When I offer a point of view—whether it’s moral, to a non-Christian, or theological, inside the church—the strength of the objection is not based on who I am, as if I were speaking on my own authority, but on the content of my objection.</p>

<p>The challenge “Who are you to say?”&nbsp;misses the point, because I’m not offering a judgment by fiat, based on my own authority. I’m not saying, “This is the way it’s got to be because I say so.”&nbsp;If I were speaking by fiat, based on my authority, then it would be appropriate for someone to say, “Who died and left you God? Who made you the authority so that whatever you speak ought to be listened to and ought to be obeyed?”</p>

<p>When someone fires the who-are-you-to-say salvo, I carefully explain to them they’ve misunderstood my approach. I’m not saying anyone should believe me <em>because I say so</em>, because I’m the authority, because I have the proper jurisdiction to proclaim truth by fiat, whether it’s moral truth or theological truth. I’m saying something quite different.</p>

<p>So-called heresy hunters, those who are trying to correct problems inside the church, are never saying, “Believe me on my own authority.”&nbsp;They are generally appealing to the authority of the Scriptures instead, which should be the deciding factor in any discussion of truth. Instead of going back to the Scriptures in question, though, those under question simply cry “heresy hunter.”&nbsp;They attack the person and not the argument.</p>

<p>It’s an ironic challenge because this is actually the kind of claim these so-called “heresy hunters”&nbsp;are trying to oppose: errant teaching by those who claim <em>their own</em> authority to speak for God. These false teachers don’t make the foolish mistake of saying, “I am the authority.”&nbsp;No, it’s done more delicately. They say, “God told me,”&nbsp;which really amounts to the same thing: Their subjective opinions have the weight of divine decree.</p>

<p>And you see, it creates problems in the Body of Christ when some person proposes to speak for God and then doesn’t allow his point of view to be challenged or questioned. When you question it, someone will say, “Where do you get off? Who made you the chief heresy hunter in the world?”&nbsp;Well, that misses the point.</p>

<p>So when one says to me, “Who are you to say?”&nbsp;they misunderstand the issue. I’m not saying you ought to believe me on my own authority, but rather that you ought to believe my views because of my reasons, including my justifications for my view from Scripture. There’s a difference. I’m not saying, “Listen to me.”&nbsp;I’m saying, “Listen to my argument. Consider my evidence. Search the Scripture.”</p>

<p>The irony, ladies and gentlemen, is that those who make this challenge almost never make any attempt to deal with the argument, the text, the evidence itself. They ignore it completely. Instead they choose the diversion of attacking the person. Their response is “to the man,”—<em>ad hominem</em>—not to the point. Their response misses the real point entirely.</p>
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title: The Zeitgeist Movie & Other Myth Claims About Jesus
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-zeitgeist-movie-other-myth-claims-about-jesus
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Why should we consider the stories of Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, and Addis as myth, yet think Jesus of Nazareth is history? The answer is that there is good primary source documentation for the latter and not for the former, for Jesus of Nazareth and not for the others.</em></p>

<p>There’s a challenge to Christianity that seems to be growing in popularity: The Jesus we worship is just a fiction, a conglomeration of myths from the past. A film on the Internet called “Zeitgeist,”&nbsp;apparently well done, attempts to make the case that Jesus was a fiction created by cobbling together pieces of myths, such as Mithras and Zoathra. Lee Strobel's book, The Case for the Real Jesus, has a whole chapter on this subject, and I recommend it highly for the case it makes for the historical Jesus. The challenge in “Zeitgeist”&nbsp;is why we should consider the stories of Adonis, Osiris, and the other pagan mystery saviors as fables, yet treat as factual essentially the same story told in a Jewish context.</p>

<p>I want you to think about this for a moment. Part of what we do at Stand to Reason is, not just teach you what to think, but teach you how to think. So I’m going to sum up the argument, and I want you to ask yourself whether it works. What is the big idea of this challenge?</p>

<p>People make the challenge that Jesus is a fiction. How do we know He’s a fiction? Because some of the details of His life have appeared in other literature from the past. There are some past mythical figures that have virtually all the characteristics Jesus has in the Gospels: born of a virgin, 12 disciples, betrayed by a friend, died and rose again, etc. The Jesus story is just a reworking of those myths. You can see bits and pieces of the details borrowed from different myths that are just cobbled together to create the story of Jesus. This is taken as evidence.</p>

<p>Think about this. The claim is that Jesus is a fiction, a myth like the other so-called saviors in ancient literature. The evidence for that claim is pieces of seemingly similar detail from clearly and uncontroversially mythical characters. And the conclusion is that the story of Jesus must also be fictional.</p>

<p>Is that a good argument? And if not, why not?</p>

<p>I say these stories are allegedly similar because we are presuming the facts asserted in the challenge are true. In the Tactics book, you’ll find a chapter called “Just the Facts, Ma’am.”&nbsp;Sometimes certain challenges with regards to Christianity can be resolved by just getting the facts straight. And that’s one of the keys to answering this challenge. The facts in the challenge just aren’t accurate.</p>

<p>Mithras is an individual in one of these mystery religions. The claim is that Mithras was born of a virgin and that’s a parallel with Jesus, but not even the mythical Mithras was born of a virgin. Mithras was born out of a rock so there is no parallel there. The challengers claim Mithras was born on December 25th, but Jesus wasn’t born on that date. There is no biblical or Christian claim that Jesus was actually born on this date. We simply celebrate His birth on that date.</p>

<p>It turns out that a lot of the facts don’t match up as claimed. There are problems with the factual characterizations of these other mythologies insofar as they allegedly parallel the life of Jesus. But even if we take the facts offered at face value—even if Mithras was born of a virgin, and Jesus was born on December 25th—there’s something else even more fundamental with this challenge. This is a classic example of application of the Colombo tactic, the second question. Once we get a clear picture of what they believe—Jesus is a myth—we want to know why they believe it.</p>

<p>Here’s the problem. This is an example of circular reasoning. It’s an example of assuming what you are trying to prove. (It also falters in another way and I’ll explain that in a moment.) I have said in the past that whenever anyone attacks something other than the Christian claim itself that they’re missing the point. For example, they are missing the point when we say that Jesus is the Messiah, risen from the dead, and someone responds by sayings that we believe that only because we were raised in a Christian country. Notice how these objections are not focusing on the idea, they’re focusing on you. That’s a mistake. That should be a red flag whenever the argument is about something else.</p>

<p>So what is the something else here? The something else is the myths. So Jesus is a fictitious person. How do you know? I know because I have these other myths. What does the evidence of myths from the past, even prior to the time of Christ that sound like Christ, have to do with whether Jesus is a historical person? Here’s the answer: absolutely nothing. Those myths are unrelated to the question of whether Jesus’&nbsp;story is true. Those myths are only valuable if you first determine that Jesus is a fiction by looking at the primary source historical documentation. If you look at the historical record and decide that it is unreliable, if you first conclude that there is no good reason to believe that Jesus of Nazareth existed the way the Biblical records say He did, then it might then, and only then be useful to ask the question: How did this story come to be?</p>

<p>Here I’m using C.S. Lewis’s words: “It does no good to talk about how a person came to be wrong unless you first establish that he is wrong to begin with.”</p>

<p>Here’s why he lied. Do you notice that when I make that statement—Here’s why he lied—I am presuming something? He lied. I have to show that a person lied before it makes any sense to say that I have good reasons to show why he lied. We first have to show that Jesus is a fiction before it makes any sense to ask how the fiction came to be. All of this evidence from other myths turns out to be evidence for how a fiction could come to be, but only after you know it is a fiction. It is not evidence that it’s a fiction. That’s a different question. Yet that is how this evidence is offered in “Zeitgeist”&nbsp;and other times I’ve heard it.</p>

<p>So why should we consider the stories of Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, and Addis as myth, yet think Jesus of Nazareth is history? The answer is because there is good primary source documentation for the latter and not for the former, for Jesus of Nazareth and not for the others. The documentation is very different. And if the historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth taken on its own merits is good, then it doesn’t matter if there are other myths that have some similar details.</p>

<p>Michael Shermer raises this myth challenge in his debates with Christians. He says there are other dying messiahs and rising messiahs all over ancient literature. Jesus is just another one of them.</p>

<p>Part of my response to that is this. I could go up to Michael Shermer and say to him that he was Michael Shermer, right? And when he responded he was, I could say no, he couldn’t be. Why not? Because I just met five different people who said they were Michael Shermer in the last three weeks. Of course, it doesn’t mean this is the real Shermer no matter how many impostors there are. The existence of impostors doesn’t undermine the possibility that there could be the real Shermer. That fact is determined by different information and not by counting the heads of the impostors.</p>

<p>Did you know there’s a book that was written around the turn-of-the-last-century about a ship that was an unsinkable ship, which hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank? The name of the ship was the Titan. This is remarkable because some 15 years later the Titanic sunk on its maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg. Now what if you had read the novel and then later heard that a ship called the Titanic had actually sunk? I’m sure you can see that rejecting the story of the Titanic on its face would be foolish only because you’d read a novel similar to the actual event. Whether or not the Titanic sank is determined by the evidence for its sinking, unrelated to any other fictional stories that were like it.</p>

<p>By the same token, the story of Jesus described in the primary source documents, the historical documents we know popularly as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, stands alone on its own merit. The story stands or falls on the strength of the historical evidence.</p>

<p>If it turns out, based on the historical information, Jesus’&nbsp;story is false, then it becomes interesting to ask where such a story come from if it isn’t rooted in history. But you only do that work, the explaining how the fiction came to be, after you can demonstrate by separate evidence the story is a fiction to begin with. And that’s what’s wrong with “Zeitgeist”&nbsp;and every other similar challenge.</p>
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title: Unbelievable Unbelief
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/unbelievable-unbelief
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>If the wager is your life, what odds will you take? Find out how to pick a winner.</em></p>

<p>The last three days I’ve had a chance to exercise my mind with a lot of the folks over at Hope Chapel as I gave a talk called “<a href="https://store.str.org/product-p/cd124.htm">You Bet Your Life</a>.”&nbsp;It is a simple case against atheism. I made some observations about the whole process of thinking through issues. It is remarkable sometimes what otherwise intelligent people will do or say or believe to avoid what strikes me as obvious truths about the nature of the universe and what must have caused the universe that we live in.</p>

<p>My point is that we can accomplish quite a bit simply by sitting back and reflecting on the universe—not exploring it using the scientific method, though that is valuable and it does seem to tell us some things that are true about the universe. But some people think that the only truth you can know about the universe is truth that you can stick into a test tube in some fashion. In other words, only the truth that science can show you.</p>

<p>It seems to be that there are a lot more things in the universe to discover that science just simply doesn’t have access to. I’ve mentioned before that when you reflect for just a moment on what is most important in life, if I were to ask you to make a list of the particular things that are of the highest value and importance to you, I’d be willing to bet that, unless you are mentioning individual persons, there will not be a physical item on your list. You’re not going to say your car is the most important thing to me, or cash is the most important thing, or your fishing rod. No, you are going to say things like happiness and kindness and love and fulfillment and relationships, and even if you did say your wife, you are talking about a person who also qualifies in the same sense that all of those things that are most important are non-physical. The personhood that you happen to love in your wife is non-physical.</p>

<p>The most important things in life are not things that can be measured and assessed by any means of science at all anyway. So one could argue, and I have in the past, that science doesn’t ultimately tell us anything important because the really important things in life are not the kinds of things that can be measured or weighed by any kind of scientific experiment or scientific method.</p>

<p>When we reflect about the nature of the universe, the fact is we can come to some conclusions that I think are very reliable. We reflect on the fact that the universe exists. That there is something here. We also reflect on the fact that there seem to be indisputable moral rules as part of this universe that we discover. It is wrong to torture babies for fun, for example. When we reflect on these two things, we can learn something about the nature of the universe. What this reflection demonstrates for us is that, first of all, there are truths about the universe that exist, and secondly, that it has some immaterial qualities to it—that being the existence of moral rules that are self-evident, qualities that require an explanation and invite us to speculate on how such things could be. Since they are true and real, how could they be? And when we speculate on how those things could be, we realize that it turns out that there has to be some kind of explanation for their existence. These are things that came into existence, in the case of the universe, at some particular point in time. It was an event that needed a cause and the cause had to be a personal cause. Also, in the case of moral rules, they require a moral rule maker. There must be a personal agent who gives moral standards in the universe and this is why we’re aware of them.</p>

<p>You might say I’m wrong and those two things don’t prove the existence of God. Well, I could be wrong on this, but what you are going to have to show me is that it is reasonable to believe that the universe always existed, and there are serious problems both philosophical and scientific with that point. You are going to have to show me that if the universe didn’t always exist that it can pop out of nothing, fully charged with energy. You are also going to have to show me that moral rules either don’t exist or they just happened by chance and still possess their weight and their incumbency, their “oughtness,”&nbsp;even though they are accidents themselves. I don’t think you are going to be able to give me a good explanation for how those things could be.</p>

<p>Here is the incredible thing: What people will opt is so improbable, rather than believing that a personal, moral God created the universe.</p>

<p>There were some questions raised this weekend after I spoke because I was arguing that something can’t come from nothing. There were questions that were raised about quantum physics, for example. Some have said that quantum physics seems to have an explanation about how something could come from nothing because it seems that quantum particles come from nothing and go back to nothing for a brief millisecond, or a billionth, trillionth of a second, or whatever it is. Therefore, my point about the necessity of a creator for the universe is refuted. Now what is very interesting about this is that, first of all, we have to keep in mind what is at stake here. Secondly, we have to then keep in mind what it is that people opt for rather than believing what I think is the obvious especially in light of what’s at stake.</p>

<p>My reflection isn’t so much on this point about proving the existence of God or proving the existence of moral rules. We’ve talked about that at other times. My point is that it is curious to me how people respond to such proofs. I’ll tell you what is at stake. Each person is betting right now. The bet is their life—forever and forever and ever. That is what is at stake here. You say you’re not a betting man. Whether you are or not, you are in this game and you can’t help it. You have to ante up. The ante is the cash you put up at risk, so to speak, that you can lose if you lose the bet. In this bet the cash that you put up, the thing at risk is your entire eternal life, forever and ever.</p>

<p>If this is what in fact is at stake, then people would want to place their bets with the odds-on favorite. They want to be the most careful they possibly can be. When we talk about the universe coming to be—which I think both philosophy and science through the second law of thermodynamics and Big Bang cosmology makes clear that the universe did come to be at some particular time—what you are not going to want to try to do is take refuge in a statement like this: Well, maybe the universe was uncaused. It jumped into existence out of nowhere and it was caused by nothing.</p>

<p>The reason you are not going to want to take refuge in that is because the evidence for that is very, very poor. Why would you opt for such a thing? Why would you argue for such a thing? That’s treating nothing as if it were something. And nowhere as if it were somewhere. It is like saying that something caused the universe and nothing was that something.</p>

<p>Ladies and gentlemen, nothing is not something. Nothing is nothing. Nothing comes from nothing.</p>

<p>Someone will point out that quantum physics has proven that things can come from nothing. Well, first of all, I don’t know that quantum physics has proven that at all. My understanding is that that is an abuse of some very speculative information related to quantum physics. They don’t know where quantum particles come from so they presume they might come from nothing. By the way, it strikes me as difficult to prove that. How do you prove that something comes from nothing—especially scientifically? It seems to me that the best you could do scientifically is at least be agnostic on that particular issue.</p>

<p>But you know what is interesting? You can give them something like the Kalam cosmological argument, which is a very powerful argument for the existence of God, and then what they will do is offer you some speculative scientific theory. And they feel that because they have given an alternative explanation that they have refuted your point. But an alternative explanation is not a refutation. Just because you can come up with a different idea of how something might have come from nothing, in this case, it doesn’t mean that you’ve made the case that the universe did come from nothing and that your speculation is a better argument or a better explanation than some kind of theistic argument for the origin of the universe.</p>

<p>Even if you could prove to me that the quantum particle does come from nothing and goes back to nothing, and therefore something could come from nothing, you haven’t proven to me that the universe came from that. Do you see the difference? This is what I am talking about the abuse of information. Some people will seize upon a speculative idea, pretend like it is evidence, and then go further than that. They pretend like the idea is evidence and that it is better evidence than what you have for design creation. That is ludicrous, especially when you consider what it is that is at stake. Why would somebody want to opt for a crazy, wildly speculative, completely unlikely solution instead of going with the best bet, when it’s their whole eternal life that is on the line?</p>

<p>This isn’t the only problem. The other problem is a mystery to me. I’m not exactly sure how to explain it. It is a self-destructive quality of human beings that are separated from God. That’s the only thing that I can think of. Man, who is separated from God, is so hostile to the notion of bending his knee that he would rather believe absolute absurdities, absolute idiocy, and put his entire eternal future on the line than to accept the idea that a personal God is responsible. Now this is self-destructive and suicidal. Why would somebody be so suicidal?</p>

<p>It is similar to Pascal’s wager. Pascal pointed out that we’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose by believing in God. If you are right, you’ve got heaven. If you are wrong, what have you lost? Nothing. But you have everything to lose and nothing to gain by being an atheist. You’ve got everything to lose if you are wrong, and if you are right, what have you gained? Nothing. Nothing of any significance or meaning. Why would anybody put their eternal destiny on some crazy idea that’s not even an even push.</p>

<p>If it was only a 50/50 chance, I’d go with God. It seems to be a better bet to me. But it is not 50/50, the odds are much better than that. The odds are in favor of a personal creator. What that demonstrates is how tenaciously, how completely, how aggressively, how radically men run from God. People ask about the poor Hindu, the poor Muslim, about the heathen in Africa who never heard? You know what is true about them? They are running from God, too. They run from God, Paul says in Romans 1. So inbred is man’s hostility and rebellion against God that they would rather risk their eternal destiny on idiocy than come to their senses and bend their knee in the face of a gracious but omnipotent creator.</p>
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title: Is God Just an Idea?
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/is-god-just-an-idea-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Some charge that God is an imaginary “cosmic father”&nbsp;invented for our emotional protection, created in our image to comfort us, a phantom to fill the hollow places. But two things are wrong with this claim.</em></p>

<p>Recently someone suggested to me that God was not a reality, just a comforting idea in my mind, an emotional crutch, wishful thinking.</p>

<p>German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach was the first to suggest that God was nothing more than a psychological projection. Religion to him was a universal neurosis. Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche all picked up that same theme.</p>

<p>Is God just an imaginary “cosmic father”&nbsp;invented for our emotional protection, created in our image to comfort us, a phantom to fill the hollow places?</p>

<p>Any challenge put this way is beset with problems. Is it fair to simply dismiss theism because belief in God happens to fulfill emotional needs? Is there a real connection between our psychological state of mind and the truthfulness of our ideas?</p>

<h2>The Genetic Fallacy</h2>

<p>First, this salvo is fired at the wrong target. Does it follow that since I want God to exist, therefore He doesn’t exist, that since I draw comfort from believing He cares for me, therefore He can’t care for me? This is crooked logic.</p>

<p>How does what we wish to be true influence what actually is true? One can no more disprove God by citing the emotional advantages of belief than he can prove God exists because of emotional motivations for denial. Put simply, psychological motivations give you information about the one who believes, but they tell you nothing about the truth of his beliefs.</p>

<p>This is a form of the genetic fallacy in reasoning, faulting an idea solely based on its origin. In this case, the offending source of belief is allegedly psychological, making this challenge an example of the psychogenic fallacy.</p>

<p>You can’t refute an idea by showing—even correctly—the psychological reasons a person happens to believe it. Why? Because psychological motivations have nothing to do with whether a belief is true or not. That evidence must come from other sources.</p>

<p>People have all kinds of twisted motivations to believe things that actually turn out to be true. Others have noble motivations to believe things that are false. Framing the issue this way gets us nowhere in either direction.</p>

<p>Someone says that Christians just want a father figure. I say, “Maybe we do and maybe we don’t, but what does that have to do with whether God exists or not?”&nbsp;I could be wrong in my belief that God is a protective father, and the critic could be wrong in thinking God is a mere psychological projection. Assessing our psychological condition, however, isn’t going to get either of us any closer to the truth.</p>

<p>C.S. Lewis explains why this approach fails:</p>

<p>“Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is ’wishful thinking.’&nbsp;You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself...If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at arithmetic...but only <em>after</em> you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely mathematical grounds...In other words, you must show <em>that</em> a man is wrong before you start explaining <em>why</em> he is wrong”&nbsp;(emphasis in the original). [Lewis, Clive Staples, <em>God in the Dock</em> (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 272-3.]</p>

<p>Lewis shows that our initial question—Does God exist?—must be answered with reasons first, not dismissed with misleading talk about motives.</p>

<h2>Reasons, Not Desires</h2>

<p>Suppose I make note of the apparent order and design of the universe, for example, and conclude that some intelligent Being is responsible for them. How could you refute me? There’s only one way: address the merit of the reasons themselves.</p>

<p>It does no more good to say one loves the idea or hates the idea than it does to dismiss one’s conclusion because he has heartburn. Reasons cannot be chased away by desires, motivations, or upset stomachs.</p>

<p>If there are good reasons to believe in God that are not dependent on my emotional condition, then assessing my psychological condition misses the mark entirely. One can never answer the question, “Is God just and idea?”&nbsp;by looking at motivations. Any refutation of God must address my reasons, not my desires.</p>

<p>The question of motivation only enters in as a psychological curiosity once the hard work of refutation has been done. Give me convincing arguments that God doesn’t exist before you ask why I’d believe in such a fantasy.</p>

<p>Many detractors, though, are simply not up to the effort of&nbsp;careful thought. It’s easier, instead, to ignore the arguments and fault the feelings. In this kind of intellectual bullying, “refutation is no necessary part of argument,”&nbsp;Lewis points out. “Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet.”&nbsp;[Lewis, Clive Staples, <em>God in the Dock</em> (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 272-3.]</p>

<h2>Variations on the Theme</h2>

<p>This same theme pops up in many different contexts.</p>

<p>For example, some say, “You only believe in Christianity because you were raised in Western culture.”&nbsp;This remark misses the real issue. It may be true that my culture has influenced my beliefs, but this fact cannot make those beliefs themselves true or false. First, establish that the religious views of Western culture are wrong, then ask why so many would be inclined to believe them. Cultural factors can be significant, but only as they touch the <em>motive</em> of my belief, not its <em>truthfulness</em>.</p>

<p>This error happens all the time in political discourse. A recent newspaper article on banning affirmative action had this subheading: “National Group Says Board Is Motivated by Politics.”&nbsp;But what does motivation have to do with the merits of affirmative action?</p>

<p>Still another variation of the genetic fallacy surfaces in the abortion controversy. If the pro-lifer is male, he’s liable to be dismissed with, “You’re a man.”&nbsp;Some seem to think that gender makes a difference in this debate. However, since arguments have neither testicles nor ovaries, the observation hardly seems relevant. An argument is either a good one or a bad one. The sex of the person voicing it makes no difference. Note, by the way, that the Blackmun court of <em>Roe v. Wade</em> fame was comprised of nine men, no women.</p>

<p>Yes, a pro-lifer might be a man. He might also be uncaring, unloving, and insensitive to the plight of women. He might have a host of other unspecified character flaws, as some claim. But none of these factors bears on the question of whether it’s moral to take the life of an innocent, unborn human being or not. That issue must be decided on other grounds.</p>

<p>Once in a while it is helpful to look at psychological motivation, but only in special situations. Sometimes a thing is believed to be true simply because it’s widely held. Lots of people believe it, so it must be true—or reject it as unpopular, so it must be false.</p>

<p>Certain appeals to general consensus have merit. There may be universal truths that everyone seems to be directly aware of, a collective wisdom reflected in popular beliefs. Usually, though, it’s fair to ask if there is some other explanation for the agreement.</p>

<p>Here the psychological angle does some work, offering an alternate explanation why widely held views might receive popular support. Once again, though, this only identifies the range of possible explanations, inviting us to consider other alternatives. More work needs to be done before a conclusion can be drawn.</p>

<h2>Inventing Non-God</h2>

<p>There’s a second problem with the view that dismisses God because people have emotional reasons to believe in Him. Let’s turn the question “Is God just a idea?”&nbsp;on its edge for a moment. As C.S. Lewis puts it, let’s “play the game the other way around.”&nbsp;Is <em>atheism</em> a reality, or is atheism just an idea, an emotional crutch, wishful thinking? The ax cuts both ways.</p>

<p>Perhaps atheists are rejecting God because they’ve had bad relationships with their fathers. Instead of inventing God, have atheists invented non-God? Have they invented atheism to escape some of the frightening implications of God’s existence? Think about it.</p>

<p>People of all cultures, from the most primitive to the most advanced, believe in God. There’s more than just psychology here; there’s a reason. They don’t have to work themselves into belief. Quite the contrary, it’s a natural conclusion based on the observed order of the world, more like an effortless response than a contrivance. Even Helen Keller—blind, deaf, and mute—knew of God without being taught.</p>

<p>Most people, when left to their own wits, see beyond the visible to what’s behind it and what explains it. Even atheistic naturalists posit “Mother Nature.”&nbsp;Why would they use this particular phrase? They use it because it seems like <em>someone</em> is there—assembling, building, organizing, designing.</p>

<p>Atheism, not belief in God, is the real anomaly—the response that’s unnatural, forced, and artificial. Disbelief, not belief, takes the real effort. It’s almost as if man has to talk himself out of believing in God; he has to engage in mental gymnastics to dissuade himself of the obvious.</p>

<p>Why would anyone do that when the evidence is so apparent? The motive, I think, is obvious (and here is where the question of psychological motivation has its proper place). If we can somehow convince ourselves God doesn’t exist, then He won’t be cramping our style on Saturday night or keeping us off the beach on Sunday morning. When it comes to our own lives, we don’t like riding shotgun; we want to hold the reins.</p>

<h2>God in Man’s Image?</h2>

<p>Maybe we made a trade-off, some might suggest. By creating a god who makes demands we surrendered a little autonomy, but we received meaning, significance, and security (or at least the illusion of it) in the swap. But then there’s a different problem.</p>

<p>If we were to invent a god, what would he be like? If we fashioned a god of our choosing, would we create a god like the one in the Bible? A god formed by human hands would mirror human sensibilities and human proclivities. He would think and act, more or less, like we do. As our invention, his morality would reflect our desires. When we erred, he’d cluck his disapproval and then dismiss our frailties with an affectionate kids-will-be-kids shrug. After all, nobody’s perfect. And this is the kind of god many religions seem to produce. Not Christianity, though.</p>

<p>The curious thing about the God of the Bible is how unlike us He is. His wisdom confuses us; His purity frightens us. He makes moral demands we can’t live up to, then threatens retribution if we don’t obey. Instead of being at our beck and call, He defies manipulation. In His economy, the weak and humble prevail and the last become first.</p>

<p>Is the Christian God just an idea? Did we invent Him? Could we invent Him? Is He the kind of god we would create if left to our own devices? Or have we seen the true God and trembled—closed our eyes, hid our faces, and turned our backs?</p>
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title: Who Are You to Force Your Morality?
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/who-are-you-to-force-your-morality-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Some thoughts on the question “who are you to force your morality on someone else?”</em></p>

<p>I got two calls yesterday that dealt with the same issue. The first call was a challenge. You know, “Who are you to force your beliefs on others?”&nbsp;The second call was really a question from a concerned Christian: “How do we know when we should force our beliefs on others?”&nbsp;Let me give you a couple of comments about this whole concern about forcing our beliefs.</p>

<p>Such a thing generally comes up when a Christian is giving his opinion in one fashion or another about morality. He is saying what he thinks is right or wrong and how that ought to play out in society. If the Christian viewpoint goes against the grain (which much of Christian morality does—sexual morality, the morality that relates to the rights of the unborn children, those kinds of things), frequently we are going to get a challenge and the challenge is, “Who are you to force your morality on someone else?”</p>

<p>It is good for you to know up front that this challenge is usually offered in a self-refuting way. It defeats itself because it is a challenge to you that you ought not force others or ask others to live according to your moral point of view. Yet that challenge itself is a moral point of view that someone else believes in and is asking you to live by. To put it simply, they’re forcing their morality on you when they say that you shouldn’t force your morality on someone else.</p>

<p>I usually just point that out because, tactically, when I get approached with that issue, when someone says, “Who are you to say?”, I back off just a little bit and offer a series of questions that are meant to get at the self-refuting nature of that objection. I want to show the person that, as the objection stands, it defeats itself.</p>

<p>I think there is a legitimate way to raise the question, but this isn’t it. I think the legitimate way to raise the question is to acknowledge that all of us have a moral point of view that we are seeking to have believed and acted upon in society, and we are seeking to do that by some measures. It may be through very forceful measures—by the force of law—and it may be through less forceful measures. But one way or another, we have our moral point of view. Why don’t we all agree that we each have a point of moral view that we are seeking to have enforced in some fashion in society, and we are seeking to compel other people to believe. Then the question becomes, Is our moral point of view legitimate? Is it appropriate to have this forced? This, I think, is at the heart of the question from our caller right at the end of the day yesterday.</p>

<p>I want to give you a couple of tools to answer that question. Given the fact that all of us have a moral point of view that we are seeking to impact our society with in some way or another, the question then becomes, How legitimate is that moral point of view? And beyond that, even if it is legitimate, we have to ask, How weighty is the moral concept?, before we can know how much force we need to apply in enforcing this moral concept.</p>

<p>I am going to give you four concepts here—two categories with two things in each category to make it simple.</p>

<p>The first has to do with the nature of forcing morality. What do we mean by forcing our beliefs? In other words, what do we mean when we talk about compelling others to act in a way that we think is right? There are two things that we can do or two ways that we can force our beliefs. One would be the strong way and the other you might say is the weak way of enforcing it. A strong way of forcing morality would be law enforcement. Laws that are enforced by a threat of punishment.</p>

<p>The second way would be compelling people to act in the way that you think is right in a less forceful way. We do that by encouraging or discouraging patterns of behavior by using social approval or disapproval.</p>

<p>How do we force our view? Well, we could use the strong arm of the law to force our view, and the second way is we can just kind of frown and scowl at people and use social means of approval and disapproval to get people to do what we want. There may be things that we don’t think are morally weighty enough that we would throw somebody in jail for doing, but we do think are valuable enough that we would frown at them and be disgruntled or exert peer pressure on people in order to get them to comply with our wishes. Call it peer pressure or social approval or disapproval. Do you see the difference? Both of these things are in use in our society.</p>

<p>What’s curious about the nature of the moral climate today is the kinds of things that are enforced nowadays and the kinds of things in which people are allowed to have liberty. Since we have two different strengths of enforcement, we have to make a decision in our culture which strength we use to enforce a moral point of view and it all depends on the moral weight.</p>

<p>The first concept has these two qualities: the strong enforcement (punishment) and the weak enforcement (disapproval).</p>

<p>The second category has to do with moral weight. In other words, we have some things that I would call, for the sake of cultural order, high morality, and then we have other things, in the context of cultural order, that we would call low morality. What is high morality? High morality is those kinds of things that are so critical to the common good, to the notion of fundamental rights—rights like life, liberty and property—that society must demand their adherence under penalty of severe punishment. For example, it is absolutely critical that property is protected, therefore if someone steal somebody’s property, we use the law to punish them. If someone take somebody’s life, we use the law to punish them. There are issues related to the common good that are so morally weighty that we have to use the force of law in order to get compliance. That’s what I call high morality.</p>

<p>You have a whole lot of other things that relate to the common good on a lower order of morality of sorts, things that are not so critical to the common good that the society must demand their adherence under penalty of severe punishment, but are still things that are morally good and good for society at the same time. In those circumstances we don’t use the force of law, we generally use a different force—the force of social approval and disapproval. We use peer pressure.</p>

<p>By the way, peer pressure is very effective. We could make better use of peer pressure in a lot of issues we are facing right now than we have. Some people might consider some things so morally critical that we should have the force of law governing them and others wouldn’t. I personally consider that most of sexual behavior is of the low morality type. In other words, righteous sexual behavior ought to be encouraged and immoral sexual behavior ought to be discouraged by using the softer enforcement of peer pressure, social disapproval, and shame, rather than by passing laws about certain behavior.</p>

<p>This issue comes up sometimes regarding homosexuality. People ask me if I believe that homosexuality ought to be made illegal. My personal opinion is no. I don’t think that homosexuality ought to be made illegal, though I think it is immoral—in the same vein that I don’t think that heterosexual premarital sex ought to be made illegal, though I think that is immoral, or adultery ought to be made illegal, though I think that is immoral. I don’t think that all immoral things ought to be made illegal because you would have a society that becomes impossible to manage.</p>

<p>I think the things that ought to be made illegal are the things of the highest social concern for the stability of the common good of society and to insure the basic inalienable rights, like liberty, life, and property. The reason I say property there instead of the pursuit of happiness is that the phrase “pursuit of happiness”&nbsp;is just too vague and misunderstood in our modern perspective. Incidentally, in the first drafts the Declaration of Independence the phrase “life, liberty, and property”&nbsp;was there instead of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”</p>

<p>In any event, there is a judgment call in low morality, and in my particular opinion, I think that sexual morality is of the second order and we should use social mores and peer pressure and notions like shame, for example, to keep people in line, rather than using the force of law to get people to conform to sexual morality. When I say keep them in line, I mean encouraging people to pursue behavior that is helpful for the common good.</p>

<p>What’s curious about the point of view nowadays is the kinds of things that are, in a sense, enforced by this soft type of enforcement—disapproval. Society has gone topsy-turvey. When was the last time you ever heard someone talk about something they ought to be ashamed of? It is almost like we have this phobia against people feeling ashamed. I understand that if you want to hire somebody, you can’t ask them about their criminal record. You can’t ask them about their sexual habits. These things fall under the issue of privacy, but there is also a suggestion that there is nothing to be ashamed of.</p>

<p>If people are on welfare, they can’t be made to feel bad for being on welfare. In the past that used to be one of the things that really helped us because welfare was considered a shameful thing. People got on it when they had to be on it and got off it as fast as possible so they weren’t a burden on society. Instead, they were encouraged by the mores of society to make a contribution rather than just draw from society and do nothing. You don’t see too many situations nowadays where people cast shameful aspersions on particular behavior, at least not on the kinds of behavior that they used to in the past.</p>

<p>However, we do see a kind of shame being cast, but now the shame is upon those who still hold to a traditional morality and believe in things like hard work, making a contribution, and sexual purity and express those views in the public square. When they do they are faulted for “forcing their morality on other people.” In other words, what’s being shamed nowadays are people who would like to use the notion of shame to apply to common moral principles. It is shameful to find something wrong with homosexuality as a lifestyle. It is shameful to make someone feel badly for their sexual behavior. It is shameful to make someone feel badly because they are on welfare.</p>

<p>Both of these things are still happening nowadays, but the things are all twisted up. We still use the law to enforce the common good when we have a high moral issue in question. How do we decide that? Frankly, it is a matter of cultural consensus.</p>

<p>But the cultural consensus has changed in the area of using social approval and disapproval, though it is very effective. Those things that were considered virtuous in the past are now considered vices and visa-versa. Those things that were considered vices in the past have now become virtues. The vices are now being encouraged by social approval, and the virtues are being discouraged by disapproval.</p>

<p>If you are a moralistic person, shame on you.</p>
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title: What Is Apologetics?
topic: Tactics and Tools
author: Brett Kunkle
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/what-is-apologetics-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>When Christians ask me what I do for a living, I’m hesitant to answer. Inevitably my reply includes something about “apologetics.”&nbsp;But for some believers, apologetics has a questionable reputation. It amounts to intellectual bullying or argumentative one-upsmanship. It’s all head and no heart. So you can understand my hesitation. However, is this an accurate view of apologetics?</p>

<p>I Peter 3:15—kind of the apologist’s theme verse—says to “always be ready to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.”&nbsp;Simply put, that’s apologetics. But in this short description, we discover three important details.</p>

<p><strong><em>First, doing apologetics means playing defense.</em> </strong>The Greek word for “defense”&nbsp;is <em>apologia</em>, from which we get the word “apologetics.”&nbsp;Think about a football game. At any time during the game, one team is trying to score (the offense) while the other is trying to stop them (the defense). If your team has a really bad defense, you’ll get blown away. Similarly, maybe you’ve been roughed up by some really tough objections to Christianity. You’ve heard the challenges before. “How can a good God allow suffering?”&nbsp;“The Bible is full of errors.”&nbsp;“Jesus can’t be the <em>only</em> way to God.”&nbsp;Apologetics helps us defend Christianity against tough questions.</p>

<p><strong><em>Second, doing apologetics means playing offense.</em></strong> Back to the football analogy. A good defense is vital but you can’t win if you don’t score. The offense <em>must</em> advance the ball to get a touchdown. In the same way, apologetics attempts to give a “reason”&nbsp;for our hope by advancing arguments in favor of Christianity. We offer evidence for God’s existence, reasons to trust the Bible, and arguments for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. By playing offense, we give others good reason to think Christianity is true.</p>

<p><strong><em>Third, doing apologetics means giving hope.</em></strong> What are you defending and giving evidence for? “The hope that is in you.”&nbsp;Ultimately, apologetics points people to our hope, Jesus Himself. That’s why “we demolish arguments and every high-minded thing that is raised up against the knowledge of God, taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ”&nbsp;(2 Corinthians 10:4-5). Objections raised against Jesus must be demolished. But notice something. The Bible doesn’t say we demolish people. Rather we demolish arguments. Belittling others is not our goal. Merely winning arguments is not enough. Instead, we remove obstacles of doubt to Christianity so people can take a serious look at Christ, the only source of hope for this world. True apologetics is hopeful.</p>

<p>Notice, I Peter 3:15 is sandwiched between two very important sentences. Peter starts the verse with a challenge: “Set apart the Messiah as Lord in your hearts.”&nbsp;Apologetics should be done amidst a certain kind of life, one where we surrender more and more of ourselves to Christ. When we do this, He transforms us. So a transformed life is the beginning point for our apologetics.</p>

<p>And what will this kind of apologetic look like? Defense doesn’t mean being defen<em>sive</em>. Offense doesn’t mean being offen<em>sive</em>. Rather, verse 16 tells us our defense is made “with gentleness and respect.”&nbsp;Doing apologetics with Jesus as Lord and Master of our lives means our encounters will be marked by humility, warmth, grace and love, even while we stand boldly for the truth. By doing so, we follow in the way of Jesus, who was “full of grace and truth”&nbsp;(John 1:14).</p>
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title: Worldviews & Earth Day
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/worldviews-earth-day
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>If Earth Day is justified by the moral concept of stewardship of the planet, its celebrants might be surprised about what else comes in that worldview package.</em></p>

<p>I think there needs to be some clarification about the issue of worldviews before I even make my comments about Earth Day.</p>

<p>I think Earth Day proves the Christian worldview, or at least is evidence for it. But I think that most people who practice Earth Day are living in a contradiction. Here is why I say that. A world view is just what one understands the structure of the world to be, the way someone believes the world really is. Worldviews come in packages. They are like puzzles with particular parts of them fitting together. For example, if you believe that there is a God who is the moral standard of the universe, then moral rules seem to make sense because God establishes moral rules and we seek to obey those rules, there is a sense of “oughtness”&nbsp;and accountability such that, if we disobey the moral rules, there is punishment from the One who gave the moral rules.</p>

<p>You may disagree whether there is a God and there are such moral rules. The point I’m making to you is there is a package effect to these beliefs. Moral rules seem to fit in with the idea of a Rule Maker. So the Christian worldview fits in a certain package. Certain things follow from that worldview. If God is God, then we are creatures who are created by Him. We are contingent beings. He is non-contingent. He makes the rules. We follow them. The world is a place that God created which we can discover—we can make sense of it. These are all things that follow from a Christian worldview. You see how that fits together?</p>

<p>There are other worldviews, of course, like atheism. If God does not exist, it seems to me there are other pieces to the package, too. If God does not exist, there is no justification for morality and morality is simply what people choose to decide at any given point. Next week they can change it. That’s part of the package. If God doesn’t exist, then obviously there is no accountability to a higher being and we’re not accountable to anyone. It’s just the natural order—cause and effect. You see how that fits together in a package?</p>

<p>When one examines particular views, you don’t just examine the view itself, you examine how it fits in the larger package. If somebody argues that there is no God, he isn’t simply making the point that there is no God; he is also making the point that there are other things that go with the package. If there is no God, it seems hard to argue for any ultimate meaning in the universe or any ultimate order. Certainly you can’t argue for design. If there is no God, then there is no design. Everything is a matter of accident, so if someone believes that there is no God, but then talks about the world and the universe in design language, he is saying something contradictory. He doesn’t believe in design, so why use design language? Phrases like “This was meant to be used in this way,”&nbsp;“Hands were meant to grasp,”&nbsp;“Male bodies were meant to fit into female bodies”—that “meant to”&nbsp;means that somebody designed them to do that when He made them. But if nobody made them, then nobody “meant”&nbsp;them to fit at all. Do you see that, ladies and gentlemen? The language is kind of incoherent.</p>

<p>Beliefs have to have justification or grounding. They have to fit in a worldview in a coherent way to be defensible. You can’t just pluck things out of the air and believe in them. Well, you can, but justifying them is an entirely different thing.</p>

<p>“I have a right to do anything I want.”&nbsp;People say things like that, but what does that mean? How do you justify that statement? A right is a particular kind of thing. A person isn’t saying that they are capable of doing anything they want or they can exercise personal freedom to do what they want, they are saying that they are owed the liberty to do whatever they want. That is what it means to have a right. Now, how are they owed? The language of rights implies a higher law. It’s a just claim to something based on some higher law. Where is that higher law? You see, that question is asking for justification or grounding in terms of a broader world view. Virtually everything in our lives, if we were careful in our thinking, would have to tie into a foundational worldview that gives sensibility to our beliefs.</p>

<p>Do you think that animals are different than human beings such that we can gas termites but not people? What grounds or justifies that distinction? As a Christian I think we’re aware that there is a difference and I have a way of grounding that belief or justifying it. I believe that there is a God who made human beings differently from animals. Human beings are made in God’s image so they have a different kind of value, a transcendent value. Animals have value that is not transcendent. Therefore, human beings, as an order of creature, are more valuable than any other creature. Why do I say that? Because of the grounding that I have in my worldview that God has made man in that way.</p>

<p>But how could I argue that man is special or unique if there is no God who makes him so? I’m talking qualitatively unique not quantitatively. I mean that he is made of more valuable stuff. Not that he is bigger or stronger or brighter, but he is made of more valuable stuff. This is all the notion of grounding.</p>

<p>I want to tell you how Earth Day is a testimony to the existence of God, and how in the minds of most people who practice Earth Day it is completely contradictory to what they profess to believe.</p>

<p>Think for just a moment—and I don’t want to over-generalize here, but I think it is fair to say—what is the prevailing worldview of people who are involved in Earth Day? Would it be fair to say that they are naturalists? These aren’t biblical Christians. There may be some who believe in a god who is distant and removed, but most of them tend to be naturalists. They are into nature. Nature is really what is going on. Many of them will say that the belief in God and the Bible is what has caused the problem, so they have a contrary view. Some are New Agers, but characteristically they tend to be naturalists. What is a naturalist? It is a person who believes that the way the world is constructed includes only the natural order of things, the world and the physical universe and the laws of nature and that’s it. It is a closed system. There is no God on the outside who is interacting with the natural order, creating miracles or answering prayers. That’s just kind of the old pre-scientific way of looking at the world. We know better now that the earth is governed by evolution and the laws of nature so there is no need for God. That is naturalism.</p>

<p>Let me ask you a question. How does naturalism as a worldview ground or justify something like Earth Day? What does naturalism teach? Evolution. What is evolution? Survival of the fittest. What is that? That entails—at least in its broadest sense—that each species or population struggles to survive using all that it can in its natural resources (raping the environment, one might say) for its own benefit. May the best bug win. That’s kind of the way it works, isn’t it? In other words, the notion of individual stewardship seems to be completely missing from evolution. You don’t hear the locusts saying, “Let’s leave some for the boll weevils.”&nbsp;No, they want to eat the boll weevils out of house and home. That’s the way that works. In other words, the balance of nature is this: if nature is what demands and commands the flow of things, everybody fights like hell to survive and beat everybody else up and that’s the way they stay in balance. Everybody destroys everything else and in the process there is this balance. So in one sense, no organism can ever upset the balance of nature. In that sense, there is nothing that is unnatural. Everything is working together.</p>

<p>Given this foundation, where do you get the idea that man has a moral responsibility to care for and be steward over the natural realm? There is theological baggage even in the word steward because a steward is someone who takes responsibility from someone else and answers to someone else. If we are stewards and responsible, then we are responsible to someone.</p>

<p>The question is, who are we responsible to? Earth Day is justified by the notion of stewardship. Now who are we responsible to? We are responsible to each other. That doesn’t count. We’re not big enough. I don’t owe anything to you. We are just creatures in the great scheme of things banging heads to survive.</p>

<p>Do you see when you say that someone is responsible you are introducing a moral concept? Where did this moral concept come from? There is no place for the moral concept in the natural order of things if it is just nature. There is no place for stewardship if it’s just nature because we are stewards for no one other. We are not responsible to someone. Certainly not Mother Nature. Mother Nature is nobody. There is no Mother.</p>

<p>So how do you make sense of this? You can’t make sense of it. But someone says, “It just seems right that we are responsible and we ought to be careful.”&nbsp;You are right. It does seem that way because that is the fact. That is true. We are responsible. But what is the grounding for that? There is no grounding for that in a naturalistic worldview. If we are responsible and ought to be good stewards, and there is no place for such a thing in a naturalist worldview, naturalism is false because it doesn’t give an accurate and complete picture of the world as it really is.</p>

<p>In what kind of world does Earth Day make sense? Well, in a world that has a God Who has given stewardship to man over His creation such that man is then responsible to Someone, the Owner of the garden, for taking care of the garden. Now, that makes sense. No problems there. It is fully grounded. We will have an Earth Day because we owe God responsible behavior with regard to the planet that He has given us. Now Earth Day makes sense, but guess what? There is something else that comes along with the package because that is the way world views work. God comes with the package with a whole bunch of other things that most people don’t want to mess with. Like morality that relates to personal behavior. They don’t want that, you see.</p>

<p>I think Earth Day proves God. Why? Because people adopt Earth Day because it just seems to make sense. It seems intuitively to be the case that we should be responsible. We ought to be stewards over what we’ve been given. The minute we say that we ought to be stewards, it necessarily implies a Person that we are responsible to. It necessarily implies God. I go with the intuitions here. I think we ought to be stewards and Christians ought to be much more active in ecology as stewards.</p>

<p>By the way, there is another little tweak in this. It is not nature for nature’s sake, it is nature for man’s sake. That is part of the puzzle as well. Human beings aren’t on equal par with all the rest of nature. They are different because God made them different.</p>

<p>Now, you have a choice. You can accept one or the other worldview. But I want to say, if you are going to be intellectually honest, you should live consistently with whatever world view you believe is correct. If you think naturalism is correct, then don’t complain about raping the environment. Not only does that not make sense, it is fully consistent with naturalism. It doesn’t make any sense to place moral values at all on man’s conduct.</p>

<p>If you think we ought not rape the environment, then the reason is that we have a stewardship. But then you’ve got God in your lap, as well, and a whole bunch of other things come with it, too. That’s the way worldviews work.</p>
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title: Essential Christian Doctrines
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/essential-christian-doctrines
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>A list of the key elements of Christianity</em></p>

<p>What are the essential doctrines of the Christian faith? There are differences of opinion throughout the history of the church on this issue. For example, you might find a different group of doctrines at different times from the Catholic Church than you might from a Protestant church. As a matter of fact, as I understand it, believing in the primacy of the Catholic Church was an essential doctrine at one time. Now, not only need you not believe in that, but you don’t even need to believe in any of these six doctrines I’ll list to go to heaven now according to Catholic doctrine. I’m just making the observation that there are differences of opinion abut what is an essential doctrine. I’ll give you what I believe are the essential doctrines, and I will give you the verses that I believe support them.</p>

<p>The first one is that you must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him in order to please God (Hebrews 11). But of course, it is clear that it is not enough to believe just in God and leave it at that because the First Commandment condemns those who have other gods before them other than the true God. So the first essential doctrine is that you must believe in God as He is in Himself. You must have an accurate picture about the fundamental nature of God. I think that entails the Trinity. You cannot deny the nature of God, the God of the Scripture, and still call yourself a Christian. In John 4:24 Jesus says, “God is spirit and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.”&nbsp;Must. Exodus 20:2,3 says, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”</p>

<p>The God of the Bible is a triune God, one God in three Persons. Jesus seems to hint at the necessity of that in John 8 when he says, “Unless you believe that I am, you will die in your sins.”&nbsp;He might have meant, You must believe that I am He (i.e. the Messiah), but it looks like it was probably a reference to His deity because later on He uses the same language and makes a very clear reference to His deity when he says, “Before Abraham was, I Am.”&nbsp;You must believe in God as He is in Himself and He is a Trinity.</p>

<p>Secondly, you have to believe in Jesus as He is in Himself. That entails believing in the deity of Christ and His full humanity. One reason that I can say this is because the Scripture makes distinctions between another Jesus and the true Jesus. It does this in 2 Corinthians, and I believe Galatians does as well. There are at least two places that warn against another Jesus. Galatians refers to another gospel.</p>

<p>So there is Jesus and then there is another Jesus. The Jesus who is an incarnation of the angel Michael is not the Jesus of the Scriptures, but the Jesus of the Watchtower Society. The Jesus who is the spirit brother of Lucifer is not the Jesus of the Scriptures and of salvation, but it is the Jesus of Mormonism. The Jesus who is a Hindu guru is not the Jesus of the Scriptures, but the Jesus of the New Age movement. You cannot believe in these other Jesuses and be saved because you believe in someone who can’t save you.</p>

<p>There is an issue of theology general in the Trinity and an issue of Christology.</p>

<p>Third, you must also believe the bodily resurrection. Paul makes the comment in I Corinthians 15, “If the dead are not raised and Christ is in the grave, our faith is worthless. We are still in our sins and those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.”&nbsp;Romans 10:9 says very clearly, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.”</p>

<p>What is the resurrection that is referred to here? It is the bodily resurrection, not a spiritual resurrection because a spiritual resurrection is not a resurrection. In a spiritual resurrection nothing is resurrected. A resurrection is when something is revivified, resuscitated, re-surrected. It is done again. The body that was once dead is now alive. It may be that the body has some qualities that are changed, but the original body is the body that is raised. That’s the bodily resurrection. When you say a spiritual resurrection, the spiritual resurrection is not a resurrection. Only a bodily resurrection is a real resurrection.</p>

<p>Fourth, you must believe in man’s fallenness and culpability. This follows from the gospel message. Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”&nbsp;Frankly, the issue of salvation is that you get forgiven because you’ve sinned. If you say you haven’t sinned and man has no sin and hasn’t fallen, 1 John 1 says that you’ve called God a liar and you are still in your sins. Man in guilty. He may not even feel guilty of certain things, but guilt is not a feeling. Guilt is a judicial reality. If we say that we have not sinned, then the truth is not in us and we call God a liar. Romans 11:32 says, “God has shut up all in disobedience that He might show mercy to all.”&nbsp;Because of the gospel message, if you don’t acknowledge the bad news, you can’t make use of the good news. The bad news is that we have sinned and are guilty before God.</p>

<p>Fifth, salvation is by grace through faith. You must believe in the substitutionary atonement. Romans 11:6 says, “If it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works otherwise grace is no longer grace.”&nbsp;“This is the work that we are to do, believe in Him whom He has sent,”&nbsp;Jesus says in John 6. We are saved by grace through faith in the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ. There are quite a number of verses that make that point that Jesus is the only way. This is probably the best substantiated of all of these.</p>

<p>Those are the usual five you get on a list: the Trinity, the deity and humanity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, salvation by grace through faith.</p>

<p>Sometimes people add the Scriptures. You’ve got to believe that the Bible is inspired. That is not essential doctrine, although I would consider the authority of Scripture is a functional necessity because without it none of the other truth could be affirmed or asserted with confidence. Once you get rid of the authority of Scripture, the other ones fall one by one like dominoes. I’ve added man’s fallenness and culpability because it seems to be a necessary qualifier for the gospel, although most don’t include that on other lists.</p>

<p>I will tell you another essential doctrine that the Scripture makes very, very clear that I have never seen included on a list. You must believe that Jesus is the Messiah. If you repudiate such a notion, you cannot be saved. By the way, whenever the word “Christ”&nbsp;appears in the New Testament, that is simply the Greek translation of the Hebrew word <em>meshiac</em>. Christ is the Greek for Messiah. When the Bible says “Jesus the Christ”&nbsp;it means Jesus the Messiah. Whenever it says Jesus Christ—by the way, Christ isn’t Jesus’&nbsp;last name, that’s His title—it means Messiah. 1 John 2:22 says, “Who is the liar, but the one who denies that Jesus is the Messiah? This is the Antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son. Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father, the one who confesses the Son has the Father.”&nbsp;That’s pretty clear. 1 John 4:2 says, “By this you know the Spirit of God, every spirit that confesses that Jesus Messiah has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God, and this is the spirit of Antichrist.”&nbsp;2 John 7 says, “For many deceivers have gone out into the world. Those who do not acknowledge Jesus Messiah as coming in the flesh, this is the deceiver and the Antichrist.”</p>

<p>The Scripture has no kind words for people who repudiate the Messiahship of Christ. A very strong conclusion can be drawn from this. The New Testament teaches that Jews who repudiate Jesus as the Messiah do not ultimately have a love for the Father. That is not my opinion. That is the opinion of the Apostle John, and it is also the opinion of Jesus Christ. “You have rejected Me because the love of the Father is not in you.”&nbsp;Those are strong words.</p>

<p>Someone could say, How can you say that about Jews? You don’t know all the Jews. No, I don’t. God does. This is not my opinion. To be honest with you, I don’t personally like this particular teaching. If it were up to me, I would change it. But it’s not up to me. It is not my opinion. I don’t like it, but there it is. It is God’s opinion. And if we are people who hold the Bible to be revelatory on the issue of salvation, then we cannot at the same time be people who acknowledge that nice people who are Jewish but reject Jesus as Messiah find their way into heaven. That is not in the Bible. If we say that, we are saying something that is contrary to the biblical teaching. The Bible makes it clear that an essential doctrine is a belief in Jesus as the Messiah.</p>

<p>The six essential doctrines would be: the Trinity, the deity and humanity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, man’s fallenness and guilt, salvation by grace through faith by the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ, and belief that Jesus is the Messiah. And you have a seventh doctrine that strikes me as a functional necessity, that is the ultimate authority of Scripture without which none of the other truths can be affirmed or asserted with confidence.</p>

<p>By the way, it’s really important that people know these doctrines because many Christians are quite kindhearted and they end up not being very careful about drawing distinctions between truth and falsity because they don’t want to disagree. I understand that. But if you were really kindhearted then you would be honest and straight-forward with people about the demands of the gospel on their lives. The demand of the gospel is that you believe particular things to be true. It’s not just a matter of mere belief, as if these are just some incidental details of theology that you might happen to be mistaken about. And if you just happen to be mistaken, why should you go to hell because of that?</p>

<p>You don’t go to hell because you just happen to mistake a doctrine. You go to hell because you have broken God’s law. It is very critical to understand that. God only judges guilty people. People get judged by God not because they mess up on their theology but because they are guilty. People who are guilty get condemned. That’s it. There is a way to get around that but you’ve to know a couple of particular things that are true before you can take advantage of the forgiveness God offers. That’s where the essential doctrines come in.</p>
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title: The Christian Story
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-christian-story
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Religions are like puzzles that represent, when pieced together, a picture of reality. These pictures are not all basically the same because the puzzle pieces are different for each religion.</em></p>

<p>It’s easy to think of all religions being basically the same if you don’t know much about all religions. If you just know very little, you might think they all teach if you’re good you go to Heaven, if you’re bad you go to Hell. That is actually false because when you look at the major religions of the world, it’s only the monotheistic world religions, like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam who have a notion of Heaven and Hell, and not all proponents of those religions believe in both those things. When studying religions, the point is not to focus on the things that are similar because it’s the differences that really matter.</p>

<p>I understand the impulse, but I don’t understand the durability of this approach to religion after thoughtful reflection. I understand the impulse of people to survey all religions, and since everybody thinks they’re right, and religions seem to all attempt to do the same kind of thing, to think that maybe it turns out that everybody’s on to a little bit of the right idea. If we could find the similarities of them all then we’d know the truth that’s in all religions. Some pluralists like John Hick have tried to go in that direction.</p>

<p>The problem is that if you take each individual religion seriously on its own terms, they really aren’t making the same claim. They don’t have a similarity that can be the nugget of truth in all of them because there is nothing that is taught in all religions. To each religious system, the details do matter for those who are serious adherents of it. When I hear people say that all religions are basically the same, I have a Columbo question I ask. It’s a variation of the first Columbo question: “What do you mean by that?”&nbsp;The question is, “Really? In what way are they all basically the same?”&nbsp;I want them to enumerate the basic similarities.</p>

<p>You can say that all Christian denominations are basically the same, if what you mean is they hold to a basic core of doctrine that represents the bones of Christianity. That’s what holds all Christian denominations under the broad rubric “Christian.”&nbsp;But those denominations are part of one religion, Christianity. When it comes to different religions, there simply are no similarities that are represented in all of them.</p>

<p>A student made this claim, that all religions are basically the same, at University of California, Irvine, when I lectured on campus. I remember turning around to the board behind me and drawing two small circles, and then asking the young lady, who had made this comment, if the circles, in her mind, were basically the same. They were about tablet size. And she looked at the circles. She said, “Yeah, those are basically the same.”&nbsp;And then labeled one “aspirin,”&nbsp;and I labeled the other “arsenic.”&nbsp;Then I asked her the same question: “Now do you think they’re both basically the same?”&nbsp;And she said, “No.”&nbsp;I said, “The point is, it’s the differences that matter. Saying that all religions are basically the same is like saying that aspirin and arsenic are basically the same because they both can come in tablet form. It’s the differences that matter.”</p>

<p>Mike Horton makes the comment in his book Christless Christianity that what’s missing in people’s knowledge of Christianity is any detail about the person and work of Christ, who is Jesus. To believe that Jesus is God is not enough because God is a very generic term. To have any substantive understanding of what “Jesus is God”&nbsp;means requires understanding how that ties in with the work of Christ, and why the work of Christ was even necessary.</p>

<p>This is one reason that I’m starting to write a new book this summer that I’m entitling Credo, which means “I believe.”&nbsp;And the subtitle of the book is something like A Story of Reality, or some have suggested maybe it should be The Story of Reality. Christianity teaches a worldview, and I’m pretty convinced that most Christians don’t know that worldview. They have some pieces, but they don’t know how it all fits together. It’s like having a puzzle box full of interlocking puzzle pieces and saying, “Now I’ve got a puzzle.”&nbsp;Well, you don’t have a puzzle, you have pieces. You don’t have a picture, what you have is pieces. You might have the whole puzzle there in the box, but you don’t have the puzzle picture. You get the picture by assembling the pieces in the right order.</p>

<p>Religions are like puzzles that represent, when pieced together, a picture of reality. These pictures are not all basically the same because the puzzle pieces are different for each religion. Now, it may be that some religions share a similar-looking piece, but the piece goes into a different picture. Monotheistic religions may all teach there is one God, but the nature of that God is very different in each religion. In the case of Christianity, God is triune, and He is not like the one God of other monotheistic religions. So even in that point of apparent similarity, there are distinctives.</p>

<p>What is the picture of the Christian worldview? What is the story that the Christian worldview tells?</p>

<p>There are just five points. So if you could get these five points, then you’ve got the five points of the Christian worldview. Now, the five points aren’t just the five points. You’ve got to know something about the points to be able to add flesh to it. But these points represent the skeleton, as it were, of the picture of reality that Christianity offers. And those five points are God, man, Jesus, the Cross, and the resurrection (the resurrection of all believers).</p>

<p>Then for a good story you have to have conflict. That’s what stories amount to. Then the conflict has to be resolved, and then the story ends. “They lived happily ever after.”&nbsp;Those are essential parts of all stories. The Christian story has those elements, as well. One might look at them in this outline: Beginning—creation, the Problem the fall, the solution redemption, and the resolution the final resurrection.</p>

<p>All worldviews conform to that concept of story, but they come up with different answers to the elements so they are not basically the same.</p>

<p>Here is the way the story goes for Christianity. There is a personal God who created everything else out of nothing. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”&nbsp;He made it all. He is the king over that which He’s made. That’s what a kingdom is: a “king”&nbsp;and a “dom.”&nbsp;He created man as a unique being, different from everything else. He made man especially valuable, in that man bears God’s image in some deep and profound way. One aspect is man’s ability to make moral choices, and man used that moral freedom to rebel against his King, his Maker. That resulted in a rift in the kingdom, which made the beneficent King angry because His subjects broke His law, and those subjects came under His judgment for their crimes. So that’s the conflict.</p>

<p>What’s the solution? God acted to become a man Himself in Jesus to rescue man by giving Himself as a payment for the crimes man committed. By the way, that is called substitutionary or vicarious atonement, if you want the fancy theological term. God paid, in the person of Jesus, to rescue man. And those men who respond to the offer of pardon by putting their trust in the God-Man receive pardon, which they don’t deserve. And that’s an act of mercy and grace.</p>

<p>Finally, the resolution, the ending, isn’t “they lived happily ever after,”&nbsp;because all don’t. All mortal men will be raised to immortality. All of the subjects of the Kingdom, those still in rebellion and those who have asked for mercy and have made their peace with their Sovereign, all are raised again into immortality. Everyone lives forever in the Christian story. But only those who have received pardon and put their trust in the Savior will spend eternity with God, enjoying His company forever because of the pardon. Those who continue in rebellion, now immortal human beings, will be banished forever to a place of punishment, torment, and interminable isolation from God and aloneness for their crimes. And that’s the way the story ends.</p>

<p>What other religion is even remotely like this? None. Are all religions basically the same? No. Nothing is like the Christian story.</p>
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title: 8 Witnessing Tips
topic: Tactics and Tools
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/8-witnessing-tips
content:
            <div> 
		<p>I overheard a conversation on the airplane coming back from my vacation in Wisconsin. A Christian gentleman was vigorously sharing his faith with a gentleman in the seat directly behind me. There are some things we can learn, both good and bad, from what I overheard. We can take his effort—which was a good one—and channel it in a more constructive direction.</p>

<p>So I am going to give you eight points of application.</p>

<p><strong>1.</strong> <em>Look for opportunities.</em> This man was an ambassador for Christ. He was clearly there <em>looking</em> for opportunities to share his faith. He had a captive audience for 3 ½ hours. I wondered if he chose the middle seat on purpose just so he would have two people to talk to instead of just one. I wouldn’t be surprised with this person because obviously he took evangelism very seriously. He was looking, and a good ambassador does this, for opportunities. Good ambassadors always are alert for what might turn out to be a divine appointment.</p>

<p><strong>2.</strong> <em>When you get an opportunity, don’t over complicate&nbsp;things. Keep it simple.</em> Don’t give people too much information. Don’t give them Theology 101. Don’t give them Eschatology 101 or Creationism 101. Now, it might turn out that that’s the thing that’s at issue that brings you into the conversation. Somebody is talking about evolution, and even if you’re a young earther, I would say don’t make that the issue but rather attack evolution and offer some broader sense of intelligent design, because that’s what’s really important for getting the Gospel to this person at the time. That’s a judgement call. If it doesn’t come up, then don’t bring it up. The Gospel is hard enough for some people to accept as it is. Don’t over complicate things by bringing in way too many things for them to consider. Just try to put a stone in their shoe.</p>

<p><strong>3. <em>Try to stay away from religious language, terminology, and religious affect.</em></strong> This person was very religious in his whole approach. I think this is hard for us as Christians because we are brought up in a Christian environment and it’s natural for us to talk this way, but it sounds weird to people outside of that environment. I think there are a lot of people who may be, in principle, interested in a bona fide, genuine relationship with God through Jesus Christ but who are not interested in the Christian religion as they perceive it. This is where I think a lot of the emergent guys have a legitimate bone to pick with Evangelicalism. Let’s try not to sound like Bible-thumping fundamentalists if we can avoid it, even if that’s what we are, because there’s no need to sound that way if it puts people off. Find another way to communicate the message. Just talk in a straightforward manner. Be conscious of using religious language the other person may not understand or may think is strange. Avoid all of that so they can hear the message you’re trying to communicate.</p>

<p><strong>4. <em>Focus on the truth, not personal benefits of Christianity.</em></strong> I appreciated the gentleman’s approach in that he kept talking about truth. One person he was talking to said he liked reincarnation. The Christian man said that even if he liked reincarnation, that wouldn’t make it true if it’s not true. Liking something is not going to change reality. That’s a great point. He was focusing on the truth claims of Jesus. He wasn’t giving a bunch of promises. He wasn’t saying, “Jesus is my ice cream. He’s a great flavor. Try Him to see if you like Him, too.”&nbsp;Or, “Try Jesus because He’ll make your life so wonderful.”&nbsp;Focus on truth and not personal benefits.</p>

<p><strong>5. <em>Give evidence.</em></strong> This gentleman was giving all kinds of evidence for his seatmates to consider. Good for him! You should too. You know why? Because people in the Bible did, too. Jesus, Paul, Peter, all the Apostles. If you look at the details of how they communicated their faith, they gave evidence for the truth of what they were saying about Jesus. In fact, if you want to get the content of the Gospel, one of the most famous passages for the articulation of the Gospel is the beginning of 1 Corinthians 15. Paul gives all kinds of evidence. It’s all right there as he is explaining the Gospel. We see that all through the New Testament. So give evidences. It’s appropriate. People do respond to that, even in a postmodern age.</p>

<p><strong>6. <em>Stay Calm</em></strong>. Don’t get mad. Don’t get crazy. Don’t get frustrated. Just stay calm and keep your cool. The more calm you are, the more confident you look, and the more persuasive you sound.</p>

<p><strong>7. <em>Let them walk away if they want.</em></strong> I guess you can call this “don’t bruise the fruit.”&nbsp;When it seems like they’re finished with the conversation, their eyes are wandering, they’re calling for the flight attendant, or looking for an exit, let them go<em>.</em> They are not listening anymore so don’t press the issue. You don’t need to close the sale in every conversation. In fact, most conversations will probably end with you having given them more to think about, but no decision. Don’t press them if they aren’t ready. We can’t pressure the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives. Ultimately, it’s God’s job to persuade them, you’re the messenger God is using. Be conscious of evaluating where this person might be in the process God is working in them.</p>

<p><strong>8. <em>Leave them with something or give them something (e.g. Gospel of John).</em></strong> The gentleman on the airplane was giving out New Testaments or the Gospel of John. I think the Gospel of John is a good choice. Maybe the Gospel of Mark is good but you usually can’t get this one by itself. (It is an easier read—shorter and clearer, not as high Christology, not as much to stumble over.) Just tell them, “Here, just read what Jesus said. Let Jesus speak for Himself.”&nbsp;Sometimes if I don’t have that with me, I’ll leave a business card so that they can go to our STR website. Maybe your card could include information about your email address or phone number so you can continue the conversation. Get that information for them to follow-up. Give them some way to take the next step. Not only put a stone in their shoe, also give them some tangible way of following up on what you’ve given them to think about.</p>
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title: Is the Bible Authoritative?
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/is-the-bible-authoritative-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>How do we justify our belief of Biblical authority when some don’t believe that the Bible is inerrant?</em></p>

<p>Part of the apparent scientific contradictions have to do not with scientific facts, but with scientific interpretations. Like, evolution and the Bible I think are incompatible, the general theory, that is. Darwinism, the neo-Darwinian synthesis. But I think that goes beyond the facts. I think the facts of science can be well connected. Also, I think there is some misreading when you see language that is really poetic, language that wasn’t meant to be read in a sense scientifically, and that gives the impression that the Bible contradicts science.</p>

<p>But I think the broader question about why should I trust the Bible as an authority should be addressed. One of the things about the Christian world view, foundational, is that God has spoken. That “He is there and He is not silent,” to quote the title of Francis Schaeffer’s book. God has made Himself known to us. That’s what Christians believe. And we believe that He has done that through the Bible. So, the question is, How do I justify or rationalize my presupposition of Biblical authority because some don’t believe that it is inerrant. I’m not going to rationalize it. I will try to give you some reasons why I think that it is the word of God. But if I give you reasons, then it is not a presupposition. A presupposition is something that you presuppose before you come to the evidence. So, I’m just taking the Bible at face value, at least for the purpose of our discussion.</p>

<p>Here is a book that claims to be the word of God, which is an unusual claim, by the way. Most religious works don’t make the claim that it is God Himself who is communicating through His mouthpiece, other human beings.</p>

<p>Now, some people have the view that, by virtue of the fact that human beings are involved in the process, therefore it must be flawed. Well, that simply doesn’t follow. It certainly doesn’t follow that because a human being wrote it that it can’t possibly be the word of God. That just isn’t the case.</p>

<p>Paul, for example, used <em>emmanuensai</em>. These were like secretaries. Those of you who are in business may have someone like that. You use them to take dictation, and they write down what you tell them to write down, and then you send it on. Does it follow from the fact that they’re writing your words that they can’t <em>be</em> your words? No, not at all. Does it follow from the fact that they’re writing your words that they must get them wrong? No, that doesn’t follow either, even when you’re just talking about a human being.</p>

<p>So you can’t just say, <em>Well, men wrote it, therefore it must be flawed,</em> because that doesn’t follow. If the claim of the Bible itself is true, it doesn’t seem to be the case that if God is actually involved, He can’t get men to do and to write down what He wants them to.</p>

<p>There’s nothing incoherent about the claim itself. There’s nothing self-refuting about the claim that men write the very words of God and that it is inerrant. So we’re going to dispatch those objections immediately because they’re not good objections.</p>

<p>I do think, however, that the burden of proof is upon the Bible to demonstrate that what it says is, in fact, true. It does say throughout, especially in the Old Testament, things like “and God said,”&nbsp;“thus saith the Lord,”&nbsp;etc.</p>

<p>More than that, we also see in the person of Jesus, His stamp of approval on virtually the entire Old Testament. He quotes from every section of the Hebrew Bible: the Pentateuch, the Wisdom Literature, the Poetry, the Prophets (both major and minor), the Historical material. He quotes them as if they were authoritative, from God Himself.</p>

<p>In fact, sometimes Jesus refers to the text itself as “God said.”&nbsp;Sometimes He says “Scripture says...”&nbsp;sometimes He says “Moses says...”&nbsp;or whatever writer. But clearly, when you examine the words, in His mind those terms are interchangeable.</p>

<p>This gives us one way of arguing for the authority of the Hebrew Bible, at least here. If Jesus gave His imprimatur to the Hebrew Bible, and if Jesus is someone whose word we might be able to trust, then that gives us good reason to trust the authority of the Hebrew Bible.</p>

<p>This is a way of defending the authority of the Scriptures that John Warwick Montgomery has championed. It’s called retroduction. He says that the first thing you do is go to the Gospels and treat them merely as an historical document or documents that claim to give historical evidence. Then you test them by the standards of historical research to see whether they are, in fact, historically reliable.</p>

<p>One caveat here: You cannot arbitrarily presuppose that there cannot be anything like a miracle. This is where many of the higher critics start. They have a presupposition that they make no attempt to justify in many cases. They simply say there are no miracles, and therefore when you come to the New Testament and you see miracles, they immediately cross them out. They disregard them. <em>Oh, that couldn’t have happened.</em></p>

<p>If, instead, you just go with the idea that you’ll give credibility to any fact of history that seems well-substantiated—and that’s what a historian should do—you can take the independent testimony of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and test them according to the canons of historical research. When you do that, they actually pass with flying colors as good history, as good accounts of that time.</p>

<p>Now if they come out as good accounts of that time, we can look at what it is these things record: They record a man named Jesus who teaches certain things, who works miracles, who predicts His own death and resurrection, who dies on a cross and then self-consciously raises Himself from the dead.</p>

<p>Now, if those are good history, if that really happened—if Jesus did give these teachings that many think are the greatest moral teachings the world’s ever seen, if He taught powerfully and with great insight into the spiritual realm and then punctuated His claims with miracles and the capping miracle of all, the resurrection—if that really did happen, if the historical evidence seems to be compelling, well then, it strikes me that this man’s opinion about the source of the Old Testament matters.</p>

<p>If He claims to be God, for example, as He did in the context of His culture, and then demonstrates through His life and actions that the claim quite possibly is true, or might probably be true, then when He identifies the Bible as the word of God, He is speaking from the inside, not the outside.</p>

<p>Now, this may not be completely compelling to you as a listener. But I want to tell you something: It is a good argument. It’s a fair way to argue. We’re not presupposing anything here. We’re taking the Gospels at face value as an attempt to explain history, and then we’re testing them to see if they are good history.</p>

<p>If they turn out to be good history, then we take the accounts seriously, as if they happened. And this gives evidence that Jesus is more than a mere man; He’s someone who can speak with authority about the spiritual realm. And that Jesus gives His imprimatur to the entire Hebrew Bible as the very word of God.</p>

<p>So that would secure the authority of the Hebrew Bible. It would also seem to secure the authority of His words in the Gospels. If it appears that He transferred authority, in some sense, to His disciples in the upper room—where He said He would give His Spirit so that they would recall everything He wanted them to recall and would write down everything He wanted them to write down—that would appear to give advance authority to the things that His bona fide apostles were going to write and teach to the church.</p>

<p>So this is a way of arguing that has some merit. It does raise other questions, like what about the apparent contradictions? But you see, now I go to the Bible with good reason to believe it is not merely a book written by men about God and therefore would be subject to all of man’s errors. I approach it as a book given by God to men about Himself, even though men were involved in writing it down.</p>

<p>If the Bible is the word of God, and God can’t err, then His word can’t err. If I have good reason to believe that this is a fair way of looking at it, then when I come to a possible apparent contradiction, since my evidence is on the side of being authoritative, what I’m going to look for is a way to resolve the contradiction.</p>

<p>I’m not going to camp on one apparent problem and use that to disqualify all the rest. Because if one apparent problem disqualifies the Bible as the word of God, then Jesus was wrong about His source of authority—the Scriptures—as coming from God.</p>

<p>But Jesus was the one who worked the miracles, who rose from the dead, etc. And I think it’s less likely that Jesus was mistaken than that I’m mistaken. I’m probably the one who’s misreading. That’s my take on it.</p>

<p>That’s one way of approaching the issue. There are some other ways. I just want to give you that to chew on. It’s called retroduction. John Warwick Montgomery. There’s plenty of good reason to believe <em>a posteriori</em> (after the evidence), not <em>a priori</em> (before the evidence), that the Bible is, in fact, God’s word to mankind.</p>
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title: Apologetics Aren’t Enough to Connect You with a Person
topic: Christian Living
author: Amy K. Hall
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/apologetics-aren-t-enough-to-connect-you-with-a-person
content:
            <div> 
		<p>This morning I was thinking about someone who left a comment on our blog last year. After immersing himself in apologetics, “Searching”&nbsp;had found himself struggling with his faith. Since I first read his comment, I’ve heard virtually the same story at least twice more, so I suspect that talking about this could be helpful for some of you—if not to deal with a current situation, then at least to avoid these difficulties in the future. Below is an abbreviated version of his comment followed by my (edited) response:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>Having been a committed and serving Christian for nearly 30 years, I have been going through a real crisis of faith over the past few years. During that time, I have been increasingly engaging in the debate that has arisen with the New Atheists, and I have come to the conclusion that the case for God’s existence cannot be finally settled one way or the other. The evidence is inductive, rather than deductive, and cumulative. It will get you so far and then the move from merely cognitive to relational and existential takes place, and one places one’s trust in God.</p>

<p>But that’s where it has broken down for me. For, at the same time as I was exploring the apologetic arguments, I suffered from a very severe case of depression (induced, most likely, by an underactive thyroid). I was overwhelmed by a whole series of completely non-rational emotions that caused me to doubt almost everything in life, including my relationships with those closest to me.</p>

<p>I have leveled off emotionally now, and am much more in control of my feelings. However, the nagging uncertainties remain; I <em>think</em> I still trust in God relationally, but I am often assailed by doubts from my analytical side—you’re deluding yourself, you’ve been suckered into this, this is purely wish fulfillment. Set against this are 30 years of very real experience of the truth and reality of my relationship with God.</p>

<p>So which do I believe? How do I reignite the existential side of my relationship with God without being bombarded by questions and doubts from parts of my rational thinking? I desperately want to reclaim my faith, but I fear I am slipping into the agnostic camp.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>When it comes to putting our trust in God, I wouldn’t describe it as analytic thinking getting you “so far”&nbsp;and then intuitive/relational thinking “taking over.”&nbsp;I don’t think that’s exactly what’s going on. I think, rather, that we get information from both of these types of thinking and they interact with each other. So in your case, when you lost all accurate input from your relational thinking because of your depression, you were working on less complete information, and your confidence failed (just as it did with your other relationships).</p>

<p>Now think about how spending a large amount of time on atheist blogs will affect you when you’re in a less-than-optimal emotional state. Imagine if, while you were feeling severely depressed, you had spent all your time with someone who was constantly trying to prove to you that your family and friends didn’t care about you. How would your relationships have come out? Not so good. So it’s not surprising that you’re feeling this way now about God.</p>

<p>We’re such complicated beings, and our physical bodies affect so much of how we think and feel. I know from experience what depression does for a person’s relationship with both God and man, and it’s not pretty. I don’t blame you at all for feeling disconnected from God and not knowing where to go from here.</p>

<p>The important thing to remember is that our relationship with God is a relationship with a person. Sometimes I think we forget this and start treating Him as if He were a thing that we walk around, look at, and learn about, rather than a person whom we know and relate to. When you’re asking what to do about reigniting the existential side of your relationship with God, ask yourself what you would do about reigniting the existential side of <em>any</em> relationship after a situation of distrust like this.</p>

<p>First, you’re going to have to work through your <em>cognitive</em> issues against the relationship, just as you would with a friend whom you no longer trusted, but with whom you wanted to try again to develop a friendship. Keep looking for answers. You’re probably better off reading some good, new apologetics books than hanging around blogs. It’s just quieter that way. Give yourself a chance to focus on one question at a time.</p>

<p>But secondly, if you were working to reignite a relationship with someone, you would also <em>spend time</em> with that person, right? Again, speaking from my own experience with depression, if you stop spending time with <em>anyone</em>—God or man—the relationship will seem shaky, less real, distant. The trouble is that when we’re depressed, we don’t have the strength to keep going back to a shaky relationship when it’s not immediately rewarding. So here’s the oh-so-annoying answer: you have to do it anyway. Even if it’s boring and plagued with doubts.</p>

<p>What I’ve found with prayer is that it’s very difficult to start up again after being away from it. But don’t stop. Because I’ve also found there’s a dramatic difference in my life when I pray and when I don’t pray. The older I’ve gotten, the more God has not allowed me to drift. I’m forced to depend on Him and stay close because as soon as I stop meeting with Him, things get very difficult. Not in terms of my belief necessarily, but my life, and drive, and love for God, and connection to Him.* I’ve learned firsthand that my soul is real, and it’s a spiritual reality that if I don’t eat and drink prayer and the Bible, my soul will starve. I wrote about this <a href="http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2011/05/a-praying-life.html" target="_blank" title="Prayer Begins with Hope in God">here</a>: “The answer to your apathy or despair might be as simple as beginning to eat again.”&nbsp;You need to place as much urgency on these things as you do on eating physical food. This makes all the difference for me.</p>

<p>In addition to prayer, I highly recommend you try something like <a href="http://scriptoriumdaily.com/james-gray-on-mastering-the-bible/" target="_blank" title="James Gray on Mastering the Bible">this</a>. Pick one of the shorter books in the New Testament (Ephesians, Galatians, etc.) and read it twice or more a day for a month, then move on to the next one. Memorizing whole chapters can also help you to meditate on them. See what happens.</p>

<p>I also recommend you get out of apologetics a little and start listening to people who plumb the depths of God. Apologetics aren’t always focused on the person of God, so you’re not getting the full picture if that’s where you’re spending all your time. Read some books that are hundreds of years old (I love <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Life-Spirituality-John-Newton/dp/1573831182/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1360879922&amp;sr=8-13&amp;keywords=john+newton" target="_blank" title="John Newton: An Authentic Narrative">this autobiography</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Christianity-Hendrickson-Christian-Classics/dp/1598561227/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1336071871&amp;sr=8-11" target="_blank" title="A Practical View of Christianity">this book</a>). Listen to <a href="http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/biographies/by-title" target="_blank" title="Desiring God Biographies">these</a>. God is bigger than the discussion that’s happening right now, and maybe it would help to see that.</p>

<p>I’m not saying spending time with God will make up for intellectual doubts, but neither would I say that answering intellectual doubts will make up for a lack of time with God—don’t go after one at the expense of the other. Remember that God is a real person, not just an argument. If you’re not interacting with Him as a person—even if only weakly—you can’t expect to strengthen your relationship just by thinking about arguments about Him. You wouldn’t approach a relationship with any other person that way, right?</p>

<p>And just as it would be the case with a person other than God, it means something that you have a past relationship with Him that you remember and cherish. Don’t forget that—it’s something for your analytic side to keep in mind. Knowledge of that past relationship makes it worth doubting your doubts about the current relationship and trying again.</p>

<p>_______________________</p>

<p>*Of course, I’m speaking of my subjective <em>sense</em> of connection here. My <em>actual</em> connection with God is objective and unshakable because it depends on Christ’s work on the cross, not on my feelings. Think of the difference this way: I am securely my earthly father’s daughter no matter how well I know him, and yet there are real relational benefits from closely and consistently interacting with him and knowing him more deeply. In the same way, my standing before God depends only on my union with Christ, and yet the relationship can be experienced more deeply by me, and I will be more affected by it, as I spend time with Him.</p>
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title: Why We Should Trust the Gospel Witnesses
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/why-we-should-trust-the-gospel-witnesses
content:
            <div> 
		<div class="Section1"><em>The best reasoning as to why we can rely on the Scripture accounts of the life and death of Jesus.</em>
<p>I. The disciples had little motivation to lie.</p>

<p>A. Not only was it contrary to their strict morality, it would gain them nothing.</p>

<p>B. Being a Christian back then was a ticket to ridicule and persecution. They were promised the same fate as their Master (Matt. 10:23-25).</p>

<p>C. Every apostle except John (who probably died a natural death) was killed because of his belief in Jesus. In other words, they signed their testimony in blood.</p>

<p>II. In a court of law these writers would qualify as the very best of witnesses.</p>

<p>A. In court, the testimony of a witness can be impeached by one of five lines of attack:</p>

<p>1. By proving that the witness, on a previous occasion, has made statements inconsistent with his present testimony.</p>

<p>2. By demonstrating bias in the witness.</p>

<p>3. By attacking the character of the witness.</p>

<p>4. By questioning the capacity in the witness to observe, remember, or recount the matters testified about.</p>

<p>5. By proving through other witnesses that material facts are otherwise than as testified.</p>

<p>B. The testimony of these men is not vulnerable to any of these charges:</p>

<p>1. There is no conflicting or inconsistent testimony.</p>

<p>a. There is no evidence that the Gospel writers claimed at a previous time that the events in question never happened.</p>

<p>b. Instead, they began proclaiming the salient facts from the outset and those facts didn’t change.</p>

<p>2. The issue of bias and self-interest strengthens the credibility of the witnesses’&nbsp;testimony rather than weakens it.</p>

<p>a. The lives of the witnesses to Jesus Christ were continually in peril. In many cases the early Christians were driven underground into hiding, yet they clung fervently to their testimony, affirming the teachings of Jesus and His resurrection from the dead.</p>

<p>b. For this testimony they were crucified en mass, fed to the lions, sacrificed by Roman gladiators, beheaded or made into human torches.</p>

<p>c. One simple thing would have saved them this torment: recanting their testimony. These witnesses did exactly the opposite of what self-interest would dictate.</p>

<p>3. There is no evidence to impugn the witnesses’&nbsp;character, indicating that they might be lying.</p>

<p>Not only was it totally inconsistent with the moral standard they professed and lived by, but also there was no motivation to fabricate.</p>

<p>4. The unique nature of the events and the nature of the testimony lend themselves to accurate observation and recall.</p>

<p>a. Their is no direct evidence that the witnesses’&nbsp;capacity to observe was distorted.</p>

<p>b. The accounts are clear and lucid, giving an abundance of detail.</p>

<p>c. The accounts read like the testimony of one intimately acquainted with the facts of the issue, someone who was personally involved with the process, who was proximal to the events in question, and who had repeated opportunity to observe those events.</p>

<p>d. Matthew and John personally made visual identification of the risen Christ, an individual they had spent more than three years with in intimate, personal contact.</p>

<p>5. John and Matthew corroborate each other and are supported by other extraneous evidence.</p>

<p>a. Disproving the facts of the first witness is generally accomplished using the testimony of a second witness. When we compare the testimony of the eyewitnesses John and Matthew, however, we find that their accounts mesh.</p>

<p>b. Their accounts also coincide with the historical summaries given by Luke, the companion of Paul, and Mark, the Apostle Peter’s companion.</p>

<p>c. Since each one’s experience with Jesus was not the same, there are some differences, as you’d expect.</p>

<p>1) There is sufficient unanimity between the witnesses to demonstrate corroboration.</p>

<p>2) But there is sufficient variation in details and viewpoints in the accounts to eliminate the charge of collaboration.</p>
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title: Can God Make a Rock So Big He Can’t Lift It?
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/can-god-make-a-rock-so-big-he-can-t-lift-it-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>This is known as a pseudo-question. It’s like asking, “Can God win an arm wrestling match against Himself?”&nbsp;or, “If God beat Himself up, who would win?”&nbsp;or, “Can God’s power defeat His own power?”</p>

<p>The question is nonsense because it treats God as if He were two instead of one. The phrase “stronger than”&nbsp;can only be used when two subjects are in view, for example, Bill is stronger than Bob, my left arm is stronger than my right arm, etc. Since God is only one, and since He has no parts, it makes no sense to ask if He is stronger than Himself. That’s why this is a pseudo-question. It proves nothing about any deficiency in God because the question itself is incoherent.</p>

<p>This pits one aspect of God’s ability against another—in this case, His creative ability against His ability to lift. The goal is to show that there are some things God can’t do, thus undermining the Christian concept of an omnipotent Creator. This illustration, however, miscasts the biblical notion of omnipotence, and is therefore guilty of the straw man fallacy.</p>

<p>Omnipotence doesn’t mean that God can do anything. The concept of omnipotence has to do with power, not ability per se. In fact, there are many things God can’t do. He can’t make square circles. He can’t create a morally free creature who couldn’t choose evil. He can’t instantly create a sixty-year-old man (not one that looks sixty, but one that is sixty). None of these, though, have to do with power. Instead, they are logically contradictory, and therefore contrary to God’s rational nature. The “Can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it?”&nbsp;challenge is no threat to Christian theism.</p>
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title: What Does Faith in Christ Mean?
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/what-does-faith-in-christ-mean
content:
            <div> 
		<p><strong>The three aspects of faith—knowledge, assent, and trust—are all necessary for saving faith.</strong></p>

<p>This issue has gotten me a little bit worked up, to be honest with you. It's one thing when you're dealing with a somewhat academic issue and you're talking about something that is important, but merely factual, as opposed to something that hits at the heart of who you are and also relationships that are close to you. I've been trying to sharpen my thinking (bring it into clearer focus) on this issue of salvation and lordship. The ironic thing is that characteristically I have argued against the idea of repentance/lordship in relationship to salvation on the air. The reason is that it just seems to me that it is not a prerequisite for a person who is not a Christian to somehow surrender their lives and turn from their sins as a condition to receive salvation. My view is that Jesus catches his fish first and then cleans them. So, I've kind of been resistant to that, but at the same time I've been very serious about the issue of obedience and holy living and having your life make a difference, and not just getting fire insurance by saying some magical prayer that never ultimately influences your life.</p>

<p>But recently I found myself in two conversations with family members that forced me to do some more work on this issue. I found myself sounding like I was arguing on both sides of this issue. By the way, it's no one here in Southern California so no one here knows them. But I want you to know they're family so you know that this was not merely an academic exercise.</p>

<p>One claimed she was a Christian because at some point, as I recall it was about eighteen years ago, she "received" Christ. When I questioned her she believed that Jesus died for her sins. That sounds like she's in. She's got the right answers on that issue. But I'll tell you quite frankly, from a practical point of view, she is living the life of an atheist. I asked her at one point, how would I know by looking at your life that you're a Christian? She said that she doesn't use the Lord's name in vain too often. I said, that sounds to me like you trying to convince me that you love your husband because you only call him an S.O.B. once a week. That to me is not a compelling argument that either you love your husband or you love Christ. She asked me if I thought she was a Christian and I said no. Now, I don't know what's in her heart. I don't know what God thinks about it. I've got to judge based on what I see, and except for this somewhat banal confession of faith, there is nothing that indicates to me that there is any more dimension to her Christian life than that one statement.</p>

<p>Now, another person in my family is leading a very thorough-going Christian life but he heard a tape in which John MacArthur was very exercised on this issue of lordship/salvation and he began doubting his faith. Now, how do I make sense out of this? Actually, my encouragement to both was quite different.</p>

<p>All sides on this issue, by the way, agree that salvation is by God's grace alone. I guess the question is: What is entailed in the notion of receiving the grace of God for salvation? One side is very sensitive to it being a free gift of grace; the other one doesn't want to turn grace into cheap grace that leads to licentiousness. How do you deal with it? The problem is this: How do we proclaim salvation by grace without implying that salvation is somehow isolated from the concept of obedience, that salvation is a prayer that you utter, and then everyone can breath a sigh of relief because you're in and we can always look back on that date no matter what happens afterwards because you said the magic words, even though you do not have any kind of emphasis on obedience. That does sound like cheap grace to me.</p>

<p>On the other hand, how do we give a proper emphasis to obedience without making such things as lordship an additional work? That's the question. The fact is that with every Christian there are different levels of lordship at any given time. People ask me, is Jesus Lord in your life? I say, yeah. Do you obey Him in every single thing? Well, no. According to the slogan, "If Jesus is not Lord of all, then He's not Lord at all." I think that slogan says nothing meaningful at all. It just gets people confused. By the way, one of the problems with reducing Christian truth and significant issues to a simple slogan is that it mutes the more refined tones necessary to make critical distinctions between important things. Some things cannot be reduced to slogans and Christians are often prone to do that because it makes theology easy. Some theology is not simple, though. This is one of those things that is not simple.</p>

<p>As one family member said: "It's impossible for me to obey completely; I'm always falling short. So how can you make obedience (lordship) a requirement at all?" That was a good point. And those were the horns of the dilemma that I was on.</p>

<p>One of the ways that I resolve this is understanding that there is faith and there is faith. There's a Biblical difference between two entirely different kinds of faith. You can see that in James 2 where James says, "Show me your faith without works and I'll show you my faith by my works." He says very directly at the end of that chapter that the first kind of faith is a dead faith. So there is a faith that is dead and a faith that is alive. Two entirely different kinds of faith. Jesus, in John 1:45-51, was addressed by Nathaniel as the Son of God. It says after that, you think you've seen something. Hang around and you'll see a lot more. It says that after that in John 8:30-45 "many were believing in Him, but Jesus did not entrust Himself to any of them because He knew what was in the heart of man." There's a section in there where it says that He was saying these things to those who had believed on Him, and He goes on and calls these people not Sons of Abraham, but Sons of their father the Devil. So it seems clear that there is a kind of faith and belief that just doesn't make it.</p>

<p>There are a number of ways of expressing this. The early church Fathers and Reformers recognized three aspects or types of faith. In Latin they call it notitia (knowledge) assensus (assent) fiducia (trust), which simply means that there is a knowledge element, an assent to the truth that you know. But it can't stop there. There also has to be trust. All three are necessary for saving faith.</p>

<p>My distinction is between belief vs. faith. In other words, it's possible to believe in something but not exercise faith in it. This is a critical distinction in what we're talking about. You can talk about belief in marriage all day long, but you never exercise faith in marriage until you walk down the aisle and say "I do." You can watch a guy push a wheelbarrow across a tightrope across Niagra Falls a hundred times. You have knowledge that he's capable of doing it. You assent to the fact that he can do that. But you don't exercise faith in his capability until you get into the wheelbarrow.</p>

<p>Do you see how there is a big difference between belief and faith? There is belief on the one hand and the faith on the other.</p>

<p>If you say "I do" what happens? You go on a honeymoon, then set up housekeeping. Why? Because that's what married people do. There is a life change that is connected with this act of faith and trust and belief. Remember, C.S. Lewis was married twice. He got married legally. But it wasn't a real marriage the first time because they signed the paper, they said the words and they went on to live separate lives. After that, though, we see a real marriage because they shared their lives.</p>

<p>If you get into the wheelbarrow then you get pushed across the high-wire. Why? Because that's the whole point of getting into the wheelbarrow to begin with, to put your life on the line for what you believe. If you don't get out on the wire, then nothing has been invested. No trust has been expressed. Trusting has measurable results. This is the critical different between the faith and the faith, the living faith and the dead faith of James 2, the knowledge and assent on the one hand, and the trust on the other.</p>

<p>Let me give you another illustration that I think really catches this idea. Have you ever played that game where you put your back to someone that you supposedly trust, close your eyes and fall backward and allow them to catch you? You can say that you know that they are capable of catching you. You agree that they will catch you. But of course, you don't exercise trust until you fall backwards. Then you trust.</p>

<p>Christianity is just like that. You can say, I know Jesus is the Savior. I believe and agree that He died for my sins and is coming back again. You can run through the whole list of doctrinal truth. But unless you fall back into His arms, you have not exercised trust. Now, watch this: the act of falling back in His arms leaves you in His arms. He's in control of you. The act of faith throws you into His Lordship. That's what Biblical faith is: an act of falling into the arms of Jesus. Lordship is not a separate condition in itself, but a logical and necessary and unavoidable result of fiducia , of trust. If we're actively trusting ( fiducia ) Jesus, such that His work of the cross is useful to us, we can't avoid being in Jesus' arms, and when we're in His arms and He's in control. As Ron Arnold said, the director of Christian Discount Bookstore, "We have to be in His arms or else we'd be on the ground."</p>

<p>So, merely accepting Jesus frequently has a merely one-dimensional and flat effect. We look back on those things and think, "It's okay because she made a decision." But this is not just fire insurance. That's why I think that Bible doesn't just say pray to receive Christ. The problem with praying to receive Christ is that it suggests that there's some magic in the words and after we've prayed it's all over.</p>

<p>Now, how much lordship is required to qualify? I don't know. But the fact is there's a wide gulf between those who are working out their salvation with fear and trembling and those who confess Christ privately in moments of guarded candor yet are practical atheists.</p>

<p>We shouldn't have to probe into the past to find out if someone made a decision or not. It should be plastered all over their lives. A Christian life is a life characterized by concern for the things which concern God. Call it lordship if you want. I don't care. But I don't see how a true Christian can be anything else.</p>
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title: The Ambassador Model
topic: Tactics and Tools
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-ambassador-model
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Here’s the model we use at Stand to Reason to help us fulfill Paul’s admonition to be ambassadors for Christ.</em></p>

<p>Paul says you and I are ambassadors for Christ (2 Corinthians 5:20). An ambassador is someone who represents the desires of his king in a foreign land. I can relate to that. Can you? This land gets more foreign every day; it seems, more unlike God’s kingdom.</p>

<p>But then Paul adds something vital: “We are ambassadors for Christ as though God were entreating through us...”&nbsp;When I thought about these words I realized that wherever you and I go, everything we do or say will be “as though God were entreating through us.”</p>

<p>It’s a sobering thought. I want to be the finest ambassador for Christ I can possibly be...and I know I’m not alone in this desire. But what does it personally mean for us to represent Christ everywhere we go, “as though God were entreating through you.”</p>

<p>Here’s the model we use at Stand to Reason to help us fulfill Paul’s admonition to be Ambassadors for Christ.</p>

<p>An effective ambassador has three essential skills. First, he must have some basic knowledge. Minimally, he must know the character, mind, and purposes of his king.</p>

<p>Second, this knowledge must be deployed in a skillful way. There’s an element of wisdom, a tactical and artful diplomacy that makes his message persuasive.</p>

<p>Third is character. Because an ambassador brings himself along in everything he does, his personal maturity and individual virtue will either make or break the message.</p>

<p>These three areas—knowledge, wisdom, and character—are the three areas all Ambassadors for Christ need to continue to grow in. Sometimes the task can be confusing and even overwhelming. but breaking the job down into these three areas makes it simpler. You can lay a foundation you can build for the rest of your life. Plan to grow in knowledge, tactical wisdom, and character to be a high impact ambassador for Jesus Christ.</p>

<p>If you are learning and growing in these three ways, you’ll be able to say with conviction, “I am an Ambassador for Jesus Christ. I can explain precisely what that means, and I can clearly defend my conviction in the truth of Christianity in an attractive manner that commends the message.”&nbsp;It���s not that hard to do, either, when you cultivate a sensible faith by increasing your knowledge, sharpening your tactical wisdom, and building your character.</p>

<p>I asked myself what it would look like if I listed the intellectual and moral attributes an ambassador for Christ should possess. I had in mind something like the Boy Scout Law I had memorized as a youngster (be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, etc.).</p>

<p>My musings led to a list of ten virtues. I then spent time clarifying precisely how I thought each virtue played its way out in day-to-day conduct.</p>

<p>The creed has been a great help to me. I reread it every month as a regular reminder of the kind of man I want to be for Christ.</p>
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title: New Pro-Choice Tactic Equivocates on “Life”
topic: Bioethics
author: Amy K. Hall
date: 02/06/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/new-pro-choice-tactic-equivocates-on-life-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>As a follow-up to <a href="/w/abortion-and-slavery-the-same-old-arguments" target="_blank">last week’s post</a> on the <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/01/23/so_what_if_abortion_ends_life/" target="_blank">article</a> arguing that the unborn are human lives “worth sacrificing,” it’s important to note that the latest tactic being used by pro-choicers is to equivocate on the word “life”—using it to refer to both the mother’s <em>life</em> <em>situation</em> and the unborn child’s <em>life</em>—in order to make it appear as if the moral claim of the unborn (to live) is equal to the moral claim of the mother (to have the life she wants).</p>

<p>I’ve noticed people making this move lately—for example, this man from <a href="http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/01/25/40-years-later-roe-v-wade-decision-continues-to-change-lives/" target="_blank">MSNBC</a>: “In some ways that choice [to abort my child] saved my life.” Well, no, it didn’t save his life, he merely thinks it gave him a better <em>life situation</em>. But the same word “life” is used so that we’re left with the impression that it was his life vs. his child’s life—that the moral claims of both human beings were equally strong.</p>

<p>And more explicitly in <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/01/23/so_what_if_abortion_ends_life/" target="_blank">last week's article</a>:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>Of all the diabolically clever moves the anti-choice lobby has ever pulled, surely one of the greatest has been its consistent co-opting of the word “life”….</p>

<p>[Abortion] saves lives not just in the most medically literal way, but in the roads that women who have choice then get to go down, in the possibilities for them and for their families. And I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>She says she puts “the life of a mother over the life of a fetus,” but she doesn’t mean that both the mother's and the child's literal lives are at stake, she simply uses the same word “life” to compare actual life to “quality of life” in an attempt to equalize their moral claims in the mind of the reader. What she’s actually saying is that she puts the mother’s option to save money, or prevent difficulties, or simply to live the life she prefers, over the literal life of another human being.</p>

<p>At first I thought it was just a coincidence that a few people happened to be using language that obscures the moral claims of the two parties (mother and child), but then I came across another <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/roiphe/2013/01/planned_parenthood_abandons_the_term_pro_choice_what_about_pro_freedom_instead.html" target="_blank">article</a> about how Planned Parenthood is leaving behind the term “pro-choice” and trying to come up with something new:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>It may be that a change in language frees those who believe in an absolute right to abortion to a more honest wrestling with the issue. <em>Let’s imagine a scenario in which we admit that abortions may involve an obliteration of something that could legitimately be called life</em> <em>but that they are done to protect something that could also be called life</em>. Planned Parenthood is, after all, in the business of protecting women’s lives, their futures, their ability to pursue education, to establish security, to have homes filled with future children, and their freedom to decide how best to use their short time on earth [emphasis mine].</p>
</blockquote>

<p>So it’s deliberate.</p>

<p>What this shows is that we’ve made good progress convincing people that unborn children are live human beings, and that pro-choicers realize that our moral intuition, once we understand that the unborn are live human beings, goes in favor of the unborn child. We know the moral claims to “life” and “the life situation I want” aren’t equal, but if pro-choicers consistently use the same word enough for both, maybe they can reshape our intuition.</p>

<p>Expect to see this rhetorical trick more often, and challenge it when you hear it. Ask the person to define explicitly what he or she means by “life” in the case of the mother and in the case of the child, then examine whether or not those two rights claims are truly morally equal.</p>
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title: God Cares More about Behavior Than Most People Think
topic: Theology
author: Amy K. Hall
date: 02/17/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/god-cares-more-about-behavior-than-most-people-think
content:
            <div> 
		<p>I heard a man I respect (religious, but not Christian) object to the Christian idea that a person can only get to heaven “through Christianity,” his response being that “God cares more about behavior than theology.” That is, the Christian idea (or rather, what he understands to be the Christian idea) that it’s belief in Jesus that makes a person heaven-worthy doesn’t make sense to him. God is clearly concerned about&nbsp;<em>moral</em>&nbsp;categories—good and evil. Therefore, he says, it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’re a good person.</p>

<p>But this man has misunderstood Christianity. The difference between us is not that Christians think God doesn’t care about behavior, the difference is that Christians think God cares a great deal&nbsp;<em>more</em>&nbsp;about behavior than this man thinks God cares.&nbsp;</p>

<p>This man thinks his behavior passes God’s standard for heaven-worthy behavior, but Christians think the standard is much higher—that the standard is perfect, in fact, and that God’s holiness would rightly destroy&nbsp;<em>any</em>&nbsp;of us who tried to stand before Him based on our behavior. In other words, God cares&nbsp;<em>so much</em>&nbsp;about behavior that we all face His righteous and perfect condemnation.</p>

<p>Is this too high a standard? Does this make God unreasonable? No, this makes God perfectly just. This man wants God to care about moral categories. The bad news for him is that God&nbsp;<em>does&nbsp;</em>care. Perfectly and completely. There’s no grading on a curve, there’s no compromising justice.</p>

<p>This puts us in a very bad position. When Isaiah—a very prophet of God who wrote part of the Bible, no less—came face to face with God, He realized what a bad position he was in, crying out, “Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts" (Isaiah 6:5).</p>

<p>From the murderer who considers himself a good person (as I read in a blog post by a murderer in prison once) to this man who wants God to care about behavior, we all fool ourselves into thinking we’re good by comparing ourselves to the sinful people around us. We can all pass the test if we just lower the standard. But as with Isaiah, when we finally see Perfection, we will see ourselves as we really are and despair. &nbsp;</p>

<p>So Christianity takes behavior quite seriously. Nothing in Christianity would make sense without that. The reason Christians think we need to trust in Jesus and be joined to Him in order to be heaven-worthy is that we need&nbsp;<em>Him</em>&nbsp;to stand before God in our place precisely because His behavior&nbsp;<em>was</em>&nbsp;perfect and His sacrifice on the cross fulfilled the justice we deserved on our behalf. In this way only can we stand—not because God will lower His standard for us, but because He upheld His perfect righteousness and justice through Jesus.</p>

<p>The alternative is to say that God&nbsp;<em>doesn’t</em>&nbsp;perfectly care about behavior or justice—that He’s willing to accept a certain level of sin. That is not a good alternative for a perfect God.</p>
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title: Ryan Anderson: What Is Marriage?
topic: Philosophy
author: Amy K. Hall
date: 02/07/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/ryan-anderson-what-is-marriage-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>The book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Marriage-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1359237229&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank">What Is Marriage?</a></em> argues that only if marriage is defined as a conjugal union between sexually complementary spouses is there a reason for the monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and permanence that marriage entails. When we remove the key component of sexual complementarity from the definition, none of these other aspects will logically hold. And weakening marriage in this way will cause much harm to our society.</p>

<p>In a recent <a href="http://www.dennisprager.com/blog/g/485feebd-70ce-4d5e-96d0-3121d800c366" target="_blank">radio interview</a> with Dennis Prager, Ryan Anderson (one of the authors, along with Robert George and Sherif Girgis) summed up the four main points covered in his book:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><strong>1. <em>What is marriage?</em></strong> “You have to answer [this question] before you can say whether or not a marriage policy is just or unjust and is treating citizens <a href="/w/federal-judge-strikes-down-prop-8" target="_blank">equally or inequally</a>. The problem has been that a lot of the rhetoric is ‘we’re for marriage equality,’ but they don’t say <a href="/w/the-competing-views-of-marriage" target="_blank">what marriage is</a>. The reason that we title the book (and the [Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy] <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1722155" target="_blank">article</a> that the book really grows out of) ‘What Is Marriage’ is that that’s the <a href="/w/we-re-arguing-definitions-not-rights" target="_blank">central question</a>.”</p>

<p><strong>2. <em>Why does marriage matter for policy?</em></strong> “Why is the government in the marriage business? The government’s not in the business of promoting my romantic life just for the sake of romance; the government’s in the marriage business because the sexual act that unites a man and a woman also creates new life, and the government needs to make sure that that new life is reared to maturity responsibly.”</p>

<p><strong>3. <em>What would be the harms of redefining marriage?</em></strong> “If you redefine marriage to exclude the norm of sexual complementarity, all of the other traditional norms associated with marriage—monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and the pledge of permanency—they don’t make any sense.”</p>

<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>Monogamy</em>: “There’s nothing magical or special about the number two. The reason we got to monogamy was that it was one man and one woman [that complete the <a href="/w/inconsistent-same-sex-marriage-advocates" target="_blank">union</a>].”</p>

<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>Sexual Exclusivity</em>: “There’s no reason that if marriage is just an intense emotional relationship for spouses to pledge sexual exclusivity. But marriage isn’t just an emotional relationship if you understand it as a <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/299550/marriage-and-presidency-ryan-t-anderson" target="_blank">conjugal union</a> between sexually complementary spouses [i.e., the kind of union that unites mind, heart, and body, creating new life].”</p>

<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>Permanency</em>: “If marriage [as an institution] isn’t a <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/05/5263/" target="_blank">fruitful union</a>…if it’s not <em>meant</em> to result in kids, there’s no reason beyond just sheer preference for why it should entail a pledge of permanency.”</p>

<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><em>The Harm</em>: “The harm of redefining marriage isn’t so much that this or that lesbian or gay couple is going to do something that causes harm, it’s that it’s going to redefine, in the public understanding, what marriage is, and that law shapes culture, culture shapes belief, and belief shapes practice.”</p>

<p><strong>4. <em>What would be the consequences for the least of those among us?</em></strong> “As the marriage culture has collapsed, we’ve seen a host of social ills: increases in crime, decreases in graduation rates, increases in poverty, decreases in social mobility, increase in the growth of the welfare state, increase in the growth of the judicial system, prison system. So anything that you would care about—if you care about limited government and if you care about social justice—depends on a strong marriage culture. But if the government redefines marriage and it brands people like you and me <a href="/w/we-re-arguing-definitions-not-rights" target="_blank">bigots</a> because we hold on to an “unfair, unjust” vision of marriage because you and I think kids <a href="http://www.michiganfamily.org/index.php/what-every-child-needs/" target="_blank">need moms and dads</a>, then it’s going to be really hard for marriage to do the work that the government needs marriage to do.”&nbsp;</p>
</blockquote>

<p>For the detailed arguments, purchase Anderson’s book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Marriage-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1359237229&amp;sr=8-1" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>
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title: The Strength of God & the Problem of Evil
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-strength-of-god-the-problem-of-evil
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>What makes you think the ability to take away evil from the world has anything to do with God’s strength?</em></p>

<p>I was thinking about this issue of the problem of evil. I’ve read a number of books on it. I’ve done a whole teaching on suffering, evil and the goodness of God. I wrote an article called “Sophie’s Dilemma”&nbsp;which we will have in our up-coming journal which will be coming out in June called <em>Clear</em> <em>Thinking</em>. We had Doug Gievett on four weeks ago, who has written a whole book on the problem of evil and we talked about the issue—the in’s and out’s about it. I was thinking about this the other day. I often try to think through some of these issues and try to get a handle on this to see if there is a shortcut to the solution without undermining the real argument.</p>

<p>When we talked to Doug Gievett, he articulated for us the classical objection to the problem of evil. The most damaging, potentially, objection to Christianity. That objection is that there is something inconsistent that Christians believe about the nature of the world and the nature of God. In other words, the Christian belief is contradictory. As Dr. Gievett pointed out, having an argument that is contradictory is the worst thing that could happen to you, because it means your view is false. Period. So if it can be shown that the Christian view is contradictory then at least at that point of the Christian world view it is false.</p>

<p>Here’s how the objection is usually stated: If God were all good, as you say, He would want to deal with the problem of evil. And if God were all powerful, as you say, then He would be able to deal with the problem of evil. Obviously, evil exists, therefore He is either not all good or He is not all powerful, or maybe He is neither. In any case, the presence of evil in the world is disproof of the Christian view of God. See how that argument works? It is called a defeater. This particular observation of an apparent contradiction defeats the Christian’s viewpoint of God.</p>

<p>Now of course if the argument is sound, then Christianity has been defeated. I think that is fair to say. I don’t think the argument is sound, though. And we’ve talked in different ways about how Augustine has argued and C.S. Lewis has argued and others have unfolded this particular argument and for some it might have been complex. Well, I’m going to give you a short cut. Because what Doug Geivett said really stuck in my mind. He questioned both of the premises. And his question was, What makes you think that taking away evil in the world has anything to do with God’s strength? Because that is what the assumption is to make the point against Christianity.</p>

<p>Here is how it can be played out. This will make it very clear. When someone raises this to me, I would tell them this story. Say, Let’s suggest that your claim is that you are the strongest person in the world. More than that, you are the strongest person in the universe. You can pick up an entire building. You are so strong that you can pick up an entire city. You are so strong you can pick up an entire country. In fact, if you had a place to stand, you could lift the entire planet, even the solar system. You have so much strength, you can do anything that strength allows you to do. This is your boast to me. I say, OK, let’s see if you can prove that. And you say, Just give me any test you want. I say, If you are so strong as you say, then make a square circle. You say, Well, I can’t do that. So I could say, You are not very strong, are you?</p>

<p>You say, This has nothing to do with strength, does it? Because no matter how strong I was, I could never make a square circle because making a square circle has nothing to do with power. It is a self-contradictory concept, having square circles. They can’t be made by anybody regardless of how strong they are. It is unrelated to the issue of power.</p>

<p>Now, how does this tie into our discussion of the problem of evil? Simply this. God certainly is strong enough to obliterate evil from the earth or to have prevented it in the first place. No question about that. But is it a good thing that God created human beings as free moral creatures, capable of making moral choices? The answer to that strikes me as Yes. Because of God’s goodness, which is what is in question here, God creates free moral creatures.</p>

<p>Now we come to a different kind of problem. What makes you think that strength has anything to do with God creating a world in which there are genuinely free moral creatures and no possibility of doing wrong? You see, that’s the square circle kind of thing. It is just as ridiculous to ask God to create a world in which we have genuinely free creatures with no possibility to do wrong, as it is to ask Him to create a square circle. It has nothing to do with His strength. It has to do with the nature of the problem. If you are going to have a particular good, morally free creatures, human beings that can make moral choices for themselves, if God is good, then He is going to create creatures that can be morally free, but that entails of necessity the possibility at least of evil in the world. It has nothing to do with His power. It is unrelated to the issue of power just like making square circles is unrelated to the issue of power. It relates to the nature of the good universe that God created. A universe that was populated by beings that were morally free. Morally free creatures by necessity, by definition, have the possibility of going bad. That’s why that is not a good argument against the existence of God. It just doesn’t apply. One could argue that it’s a kind of category error because in this particular case, in the Christian world view, capability of dealing with evil has nothing to do with strength. It has to do with the nature of the game itself.</p>

<p>What’s neat about the Christian point of view, is that God was capable of doing the good thing and creating morally free creatures that did go bad and still cleaning up the mess that they created in such a way that greater good results. Now that’s the result of a Master mind.</p>
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title: Testing Religious Truth Claims
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/testing-religious-truth-claims
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>How do we know whether a particular thing is true or not, especially when it comes to religious issues? Greg discusses several ways we can know the truth...and ways we can deal with those who reply “Who’s to say?”</em></p>

<p>It’s not unusual for someone to say to me, “I’d like to get together with you and pick your brain.”&nbsp;To this I have a standard response: “You can’t pick my brain unless you’re a brain surgeon, and only then if you use a scalpel. You can only pick my mind.”</p>

<p>I have to modify that a bit when I have dinner with my brain surgeon friend. We get together every couple of months. He frequently brings friends with him, generally non-believers.</p>

<p>The brain surgeon is a growing Christian, learning how to defend his faith and stand up for Christ. On our dinner jaunts I’m sort of the hired gun. He lobs me a softball to bring the conversation around to spiritual issues, then I respond and the conversation moves along from there. It makes for a very stimulating evening.</p>

<p>At our last dinner my brain surgeon friend invited a radiologist he worked with. He was a very well-trained and intelligent man, but suspicious of spiritual truth claims—an agnostic, not an atheist.</p>

<p>We spent most of the evening discussing whether Christianity is true or not. The heart of the radiologist’s challenge was this: How could anybody know whether a thing is true or not, especially when it comes to religious issues? I was quite surprised to hear what this otherwise very intelligent person had to say against my view.</p>

<p>I outlined three basic ways we know things are true. (I deal with these in detail in the Stand to Reason resource, “Any Old God Won’t Do.”) Incidentally, this is what epistemology deals with. You might have heard this twenty-five-cent philosophical word before, but not known what it meant. Epistemology deals with the field of knowledge. It answers the question: How do we know what we know? So when asked how we test religious truth claims, I give some epistemological tools. These tools are nothing fancy, nothing out of the ordinary. Basically, you respond to religious truth claims in the same general way you deal with any other claims.</p>

<p>The first way we know something is by authority. Frankly, most of the things we think we know we don’t know because we’ve discovered them ourselves, but rather because someone we trust told us they were so.</p>

<p>If I wanted to know something about radiology, for example, I’d ask a radiologist whose credentials I trusted. Even if I consulted books on radiology, it would have amounted to the same thing: taking the word of someone who was an expert in the field. I wouldn’t start from square one to rediscover radiology all on my own. I’d fall back on the books or the counsel of others who know better, and would probably be justified in believing what they had to say.</p>

<p>It’s interesting how people will sometimes balk at the notion of trusting an authority like the Bible, when virtually everything they think they know, they’ve gotten from some authority or another.</p>

<p>Think about everything you know about the past before your own lifetime. Think about everything you know about things that are too small for you to examine yourself—the microscopic world, for example—or too big, too distant for you to examine, like distant stars. Think about every place you think you have accurate information about that you’ve never personally visited. Think about everything you think you know about disciplines in which you didn’t personally do the primary research.</p>

<p>This probably amounts to about 99.9 percent of all of the things we think we know. We don’t know them through testing of our own, but through the testimony of others we think we have reason to trust. So, rather than being odd that we would take certain things on authority, it’s actually the foundational way we know things. We trust the words of other people who are reliable. The reliability and credibility of the authority is the key issue.</p>

<p>This teaches us an important lesson. It’s very natural for us to function on the principle that if the authority is credible, then we’re justified in believing the information he gives us.</p>

<p>I think a good case can be make that Jesus was that kind of authority. First He made certain claims about the nature of the universe, about Himself, and about God. He then worked miracles, cast out demons, raised the dead, predicted his own crucifixion, death and resurrection, and then self-consciously raised himself from the dead.</p>

<p>Now if Jesus, in fact, did those things, I think He’s earned the right to speak authoritatively about spiritual things. He’s got my vote.</p>

<p>So first we might be able to verify the truth of a religious claim, at least in principle, based on the authority of the one who made it. If he’s a credible authority—if he’s trustworthy—then we can trust what he says.</p>

<p>But there’s a second test that’s really valuable. It has to do with the definition of truth. When we say that a thing is true—and this is the garden-variety definition of “truth”—we mean the thing itself corresponds to the way the world really is. This is the ��correspondence”&nbsp;definition of truth. A thing is true if it corresponds to the way the world really is. Simply put, if you know what a lie is, truth is just the opposite.</p>

<p>So if I said that it’s true that Greg Koukl is in the studio broadcasting a radio show right now, that claim is true if I am, in fact, in a studio broadcasting a radio show. My claim corresponds to the way the world really is.</p>

<p>So the second test for the truth of religious claims is to see if those claims fit the world.</p>

<p>Hinduism, for example, says the world is an illusion—Maya. We’re not real. God is just dreaming about us and we are part of that dream, so to speak. Our “salvation”&nbsp;involves transcending the illusion and to get back to the godhead.</p>

<p>Now I have to ask myself, “Is that claim true?”&nbsp;I’ll tell you something, I don’t think it is. My own cursory examination of the world seems to indicate that I am real and the world is real. I live my life as if it were real. I experience the world first person, firsthand.</p>

<p>Now, I could be mistaken, but I don’t know how I’d know I were mistaken if I were just an illusion. In fact, it’s almost a nonsensical claim. If I’m an illusion and I don’t really exist as an individual self, then how is it that I could have accurate, factual knowledge that I don’t exist? You see the contradiction here?</p>

<p>You might put it this way: Does Charlie Brown know he’s a cartoon character? I doubt it, because Charlie Brown is fictitious. He only exists in our imagination and therefore can’t know anything. For me to claim that I know I don’t exist turns out to be self-contradictory.</p>

<p>Do you know what that means? That means I don’t even have to pause for more than a second and consider the viability of Hinduism as an accurate view of the world, because its foundational tenet—that the world is just an illusion—is obviously false.</p>

<p>And, by the way, this throws into question everything else built on that foundation including reincarnation. If the foundational tenet is false, then everything built on top of it begins to crumble.</p>

<p>If you’re looking for truth in religion, then you want to narrow your search to religions that take the real world seriously and don’t dismiss it as an illusion. Christianity and Judaism do, by the way, which is why modern science was birthed in the West and not in the East. Since this religious claim corresponds to the way we discover the world to be, it’s evidence that Christianity and Judaism are true, at least at this point. And there are other claims biblical theism makes that correspond to the world as we seem to discover it.</p>

<p>So when the radiologist asks how one could know whether religious claims are true or not, I answer: You apply the same general principles of knowledge to religious claims that you apply to test any other kind of truth: authority and correspondence. If you do, you find that the Christian view of the world is very well substantiated.</p>

<p>As the conversation moved forward I introduced another concept: intelligent design. I’m actually convinced that most people believe the world was designed for a purpose. I know this because there are many things in their language that betray this conviction.</p>

<p>Whenever we talk about things being “made for”&nbsp;something, we’re actually expressing our conviction that they’ve been designed for a purpose. People say our bodies are not “made for”&nbsp;junk food, but for natural, healthy food. The goal is to be healthy. Health is an optimal functioning of something, that is, operating at the level it was intended to operate at.</p>

<p>The notion of health, then, depends for its meaning upon a design concept, an intention. Intentions are functions of minds, not things. Whenever we talk about health of the human body or any other living thing, then, it implies we believe it was intended to function a certain way.</p>

<p>Here’s another way of putting it. How would you know if any machine were broken? Say you stumbled upon some kind of machine on an alien planet, a technological remnant of a forgotten culture. How would you know whether the machine was broken or not. How would you know if it was functioning properly? The only way you could know that is if you knew what it was made to do. And if it didn’t fulfill that function well, or if didn’t do it at all, then you could say there was something wrong with it. It was broken.</p>

<p>Our ability to see that things in the world are broken—that some living systems are unhealthy, for example—is evidence that we understand that some things in the world were designed for a purpose. They didn’t happen by accident. Our language reflects our discovery of design and purpose.</p>

<p>Now this discovery in the world corresponds to an important detail of the Christian world view. Christianity teaches that God created and designed things for a purpose. So we have another touchstone, so to speak, a way in which a particular truth claim about Christianity seems to match the world as we experience it. Clearly this doesn’t match certain philosophies people hold about the world, but it does seem to match the world itself. This is evidence that those philosophies which don’t correspond to the world are falsified at that point, and Christianity is affirmed at that point.</p>

<p>I also talked about Big Bang cosmology and how, according to current scientific consensus, everything came into being at a moment called the “singularity”&nbsp;some 14 to 17 billion years ago. If the universe came into being, then it’s an effect, and all effects have causes. So we can ask, what is an adequate cause for the effect of this universe? In one sense, this is a very scientific question about the origin of the universe.</p>

<p>This is where the radiologist started getting very uncomfortable. It was becoming obvious to him that I was leading up to the big “G”—the God issue. He didn’t like that and started objecting.</p>

<p>Maybe something else was responsible for the universe and not God, he said. One could postulate lots of different scenarios. Who’s to say it wasn’t a principle or force that we don’t know about that was responsible for everything? Of course, it’s fair to raise the question, but the question itself doesn’t count as evidence. Yet that seems to be the way he treated it.</p>

<p>The minute I began making sense, building a legitimate and compelling case for design, he began inventing all kinds of stories. They were not probative, offering actual evidence against my view. They were just imaginary speculations ending with the dismissal, “Who’s to say?”</p>

<p>Whenever somebody says to you, “Who’s to say?”,&nbsp;you know you’re probably winning the argument. Usually when they say that they begin inventing options that don’t exist. They are giving you phantom arguments because they don’t have any real ones to offer you.</p>

<p>The answer to the question “Who’s to say?”&nbsp;is “We are the ones to say. We are to look at the evidence, weigh it and draw reasonable conclusions based on what we know, not on what we don’t know.”</p>

<p>My radiologist friend responded with a stunning remark. I’ve often said that some of the most intelligent, educated people say some of the most foolish things when spiritual issues are at stake. This was a stellar example. He said to me, “Wait a minute. You’re saying you believe in something just because you have all this evidence for it and because there is no evidence for contrary views. That’s not a good reason to believe anything.”</p>

<p>I replied, “Did you hear what you just said? Think about it for a moment. You’re faulting me for believing in something because there’s evidence for it, and rejecting things that don’t have evidence for them.”&nbsp;That wasn’t a fault, it was a virtue. “I rest my case.”</p>
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title: Monkey Morality: Can Evolution Explain Ethics?
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/monkey-morality-can-evolution-explain-ethics-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Recent studies suggest that animals are capable of rudimentary forms of moral behavior. God isn’t the source of morality, evolutionists say; Mother Nature is. The evolutionary answer, though, does not explain morality; it denies it.</em></p>

<p>Bongo is a chimp. He’s being punished by other members of the chimpanzee band for not sharing his bananas. Bongo is selfish. Bad Bongo. Moral rule: Chimps shouldn’t be selfish.</p>

<p>One of the strongest evidences for the existence of God is man’s unique moral nature. C.S. Lewis argues in <em>Mere Christianity</em> that there is a persistent moral law that represents the ethical foundation of all human cultures. This, he says, is evidence for the God who is the author of the moral law.</p>

<p>Not everyone agrees. Scenarios like the one above have been offered as evidence for rudimentary forms of morality among animals, especially the “higher”&nbsp;primates like chimpanzees. This suggests that morality in humans is not unique and can be explained by the natural process of evolution without appeal to a divine Lawgiver.</p>

<p>This view of morality is one of the conclusions of the new science of evolutionary psychology. Its adherents advance a simple premise: The mind, just like every part of the physical body, is a product of evolution. Everything about human personality—marital relationships, parental love, friendships, dynamics among siblings, social climbing, even office politics—can be explained by the forces of neo-Darwinian evolution.</p>

<p>Even the moral threads that make up the fabric of society are the product of natural selection. Morality can be reduced to chemical relationships in the genes chosen by different evolutionary needs in the physical environment. Love and hate; feelings of guilt and remorse; gratitude and envy; even the virtues of kindness, faithfulness, or self-control can all be explained mechanistically through the cause and effect of chance genetic mutations and natural selection.</p>

<p>One notable example of this challenge to the transcendent nature of morality comes from the book <em>The Moral Animal—Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology</em>, by Robert Wright.</p>

<h2>How Morals Evolve</h2>

<p><strong>The Blind Moral-Maker</strong></p>

<p>In his popular defense of evolution, <em>The Blind Watchmaker</em>, Richard Dawkins acknowledges that the biological world looks designed, but that this appearance is deceiving. The appearance of intelligent order is really the result of the workings of natural selection.</p>

<p>Robert Wright holds the same view regarding man’s psychological features, including morality. The strongest evidence for this analysis seems to be the explanatory power of the evolutionary paradigm when dealing with moral conduct. The argument rests on the nature of natural selection itself:</p>

<p>If within a species there is variation among individuals in their hereditary traits, and some traits are more conducive to survival and reproduction than others, then those traits will (obviously) become more widespread within the population. The result (obviously) is that the species’&nbsp;aggregate pool of hereditary traits changes.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>

<p>Wright argues from effect back to cause, asking what is the simplest, most elegant solution adequate to explain the effects we see. To Wright, the evolutionary explanation is “obvious.”&nbsp;In order to survive, animals must adapt to changing conditions. Through the process of natural selection, naturalistic forces “choose”&nbsp;certain behavior patterns that allow the species to continue to exist. We call those patterns “morality.”</p>

<p><strong>Wired for Morality</strong></p>

<p>The thesis that evolution explains all moral conduct requires that such conduct be genetically determined. Morality rides on the genes, as it were, and one generation passes on favorable morality to the next. Wright sees a genetic connection with a whole range of emotional capabilities. He talks about “genes inclining a male to love his offspring,”<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> and romantic love that was not only invented by evolution, but corrupted by it.<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3">3</a></sup> Consider these comments:</p>

<p>If a woman’s “fidelity gene”&nbsp;(or her “infidelity gene”) shapes her behavior in a way that helps get copies of <em>itself</em>, into future generations in large numbers, then that gene will by definition flourish [emphasis in the original].<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4">4</a></sup></p>

<p>Beneath all the thoughts and feelings and temperamental differences that marriage counselors spend their time sensitively assessing are the stratagems of the genes—cold, hard equations composed of simple variables.<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5">5</a></sup></p>

<p>Some mothers have a genetic predisposition to love their children, so the story goes, and this genetic predisposition to be loving is favored by natural selection. Consequently, there are more women who are “good”&nbsp;mothers.</p>

<p>What is the evidence, though, that moral virtues are genetic, a random combination of molecules? Is the fundamental difference between a Mother Teresa and a Hitler their chromosomal makeup? If so, then how could we ever praise Mother Teresa? How could a man like Adolph Hitler be truly guilty?</p>

<p>Wright offers no such empirical evidence. He seems to assume that moral qualities are in the genes because he must; his paradigm will not work otherwise.</p>

<h2>Wright’s Double-Standard</h2>

<p><strong>Morality Above Morality</strong></p>

<p>In a public relations piece promoting his book, Robert Wright says, “My hope is that people will use the knowledge [in this book] not only to improve their lives—as a source of ’self-help’—but as cause to treat other people <em>more decently</em>”&nbsp;[emphasis mine].</p>

<p>This statement captures a major flaw in Wright’s analysis. His entire thesis is that chance evolution exhausts what it means to be moral. Morality is descriptive, a mere function of the environment selecting patterns of behavior that assist and benefit the growth and survival of the species. Yet he frequently lapses, unconsciously making reference to a morality that seems to transcend nature.</p>

<p>Take this comment as an example: “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, <em>tragic</em> in their propensity to <em>misuse</em> it, and <em>pathetic</em> in their constitutional ignorance of the <em>misuse”</em>&nbsp;[emphasis mine].<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6">6</a></sup> Wright reflects on the moral equipment randomly given to us by nature, and then bemoans our immoral use of it with words like “tragic,”&nbsp;“pathetic,”&nbsp;and “misuse.”</p>

<p>He writes, “Go above and beyond the call of a smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren’t likely to help you in return, and do so when nobody’s watching. This is one way to be a truly moral animal.”<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7">7</a></sup></p>

<p>It’s almost as if there are two categories of morality, nature’s morality and a transcendent standard used to judge nature’s morality. But where did this transcendent standard come from? It’s precisely this higher moral law that needs explaining. If transcendent morality judges the “morality”&nbsp;that evolution is responsible for, then it can’t itself be accounted for by evolution.</p>

<p><strong>Social Darwinism</strong></p>

<p>Like many evolutionists, Wright recoils from social Darwinism. “To say that something is ’natural’&nbsp;is not to say that it is good. There is no reason to adopt natural selection's ’values’&nbsp;as our own.”<sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8">8</a></sup> Just because nature exploits the weak, he argues, doesn’t mean we are morally obliged to do so.</p>

<p>Natural selection’s indifference to the suffering of the weak is not something we need to emulate. Nor should we care whether murder, robbery, and rape are in some sense “natural.”&nbsp;It is for us to decide how abhorrent we find such things and how hard we want to fight them.<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9">9</a></sup></p>

<p>Wright argues that the <em>reductio ad absurdum</em> argument from social Darwinism is flawed. Though life in an unregulated state of nature is, as 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,”<sup id="fnref:10"><a href="#fn:10">10</a></sup> we’re not required to take the “survival of the fittest”&nbsp;as a moral guideline.</p>

<p>Evolutionists may be right when they argue that we’re not compelled to adopt the morality of evolution. The danger of social Darwinism, though, is not that society is required to adopt the law of the jungle, but that it is allowed to. The exploitation of the weak by the strong is morally benign according to this view.</p>

<p>What Darwinists cannot do is give us a reason why we ought not simply copy nature and destroy those who are weak, unpleasant, costly, or just plain boring. If all moral options are legitimate, then it’s legitimate for the strong to rule the weak. No moral restraints protect the weak, because moral restraints simply wouldn’t exist.</p>

<p><strong>Monkey Morality</strong></p>

<p>Recent studies have attempted to show that animals exhibit rudimentary moral behavior. In one case, a group of chimpanzees “punished”&nbsp;one “selfish”&nbsp;member of their band by withholding food from it. Apparently, the moral rule was this: Chimps shouldn’t be selfish.</p>

<p><strong>Conduct, Motive, and Intent</strong></p>

<p>There are some problems with this assessment. First of all, drawing conclusions about animal morality simply from external behavior reduces morality to conduct. Why should we accept that morality is exhaustively described by behavior? True morality entails non-behavioral elements, too, like intent and motive.</p>

<p>One can’t infer actual moral obligations from the mere fact of a chimp’s conduct. One might talk descriptively about a chimp’s behavior, but no conclusion about morality follows from this. One can observe that chimps in community share food, and when they do they survive better. But you can’t conclude from this that Bongo, the chimp, <em>ought</em> to share his bananas, and if he doesn’t, then he’s immoral because he hasn’t contributed to the survival of his community.</p>

<p>Further, in fixing blame, we distinguish between an act done by accident and the very same act done on purpose. The behavior is the same, but the intent is different. We don’t usually blame people for accidents: The boy didn’t intend to trip the old lady.</p>

<p>We also give attention to the issue of motive. We withhold blame even if the youngster tripped the old lady on purpose if the motive is acceptable: He tripped her to keep her from running in front of a train.</p>

<p>Motive and intent cannot be determined simply by looking at behavior. In fact, some “good”&nbsp;behavior—giving to the poor, for example—might turn out to be tainted if the motive and intent are wrong: being thought well of with no concern for the recipient. Indeed, it seems one can be immoral without any behavior at all, e.g. plotting an evil deed that one never has the opportunity to carry out.</p>

<p>Morality informs behavior, judging it either good or bad, but it’s not identical to behavior. Morality is something deeper than habitual patterns of physical interaction. Therefore, one can’t draw conclusions about animal morality simply based on what he observes in their conduct.</p>

<p><strong>Morality: Explained or Denied?</strong></p>

<p>This leads us to the second problem, which runs much deeper. When morality is reduced to patterns of behavior chosen by natural selection for its survival value, then morality is not explained; it’s denied. Wright admits as much. Regarding the conscience he says:</p>

<p>The conscience doesn’t make us feel bad the way hunger feels bad, or good the way sex feels good. It makes us feel as if we have done something that’s wrong or something that’s right. Guilty or not guilty. It is amazing that a process as amoral and crassly pragmatic as natural selection could design a mental organ that makes us feel <em>as if</em> we’re in touch with higher truth. Truly a shameless ploy [emphasis mine].<sup id="fnref:11"><a href="#fn:11">11</a></sup></p>

<p>Evolutionists like Wright are ultimately forced to admit that what we think is a “higher truth”&nbsp;of morality turns out to be a “shameless ploy”&nbsp;of nature, a description of animal behavior conditioned by the environment for survival. We’ve given that conduct a label, they argue. We call it morality. But there is no real right and wrong.</p>

<p>Does Bongo, the chimp, actually exhibit genuine moral behavior? Does he understand the difference between right and wrong? Does he make principled choices to do what’s right? Is he worthy of blame and punishment for doing wrong? Of course not, Wright says. Bongo merely does in a primitive way what humans do in a more sophisticated way. We respond according to our genetic conditioning, a program “designed”&nbsp;by millions of years of evolution.</p>

<p>The evolutionary approach is not an explanation of morality; it’s a denial of morality. It explains why we think moral truths exist when, in fact, they don’t.</p>

<p><strong>Why Be a Good Boy Tomorrow?</strong></p>

<p>This observation uncovers the most serious objection to the idea that evolution is adequate to explain morality. There is one question that can never be answered by any evolutionary assessment of ethics. The question is this: Why ought I be moral tomorrow?</p>

<p>One of the distinctives of morality is its “oughtness,”&nbsp;its moral incumbency. Assessments of mere behavior, however, are descriptive only. Since morality is essentially prescriptive—telling what should be the case, as opposed to what is the case—and since all evolutionary assessments of moral behavior are descriptive, then evolution cannot account for the most important thing that needs to be explained: morality’s “oughtness.”</p>

<p>The question that really needs to be answered is: “Why shouldn’t the chimp (or a human, for that matter) be selfish?”&nbsp;The evolutionary answer might be that when we’re selfish, we hurt the group. That answer, though, presumes another moral value: We ought to be concerned about the welfare of the group. Why should that concern us? Answer: If the group doesn’t survive, then the species doesn’t survive. But why should I care about the survival of the species?</p>

<p>Here’s the problem. All of these responses meant to explain morality ultimately depend on some prior moral notion to hold them together. It’s going to be hard to explain, on an evolutionary view of things why I should not be selfish, or steal, or rape, or even kill tomorrow without smuggling morality into the answer.</p>

<p>The evolutionary explanation disembowels morality, reducing it to mere descriptions of conduct. The best the Darwinist explanation can do—if it succeeds at all—is explain past behavior. It cannot inform future behavior. The essence of morality, though, is not description, but prescription.</p>

<p>Evolution may be an explanation for the existence of conduct we choose to call moral, but it gives no explanation why I should obey any moral rules in the future. If one countered that we have a moral obligation to evolve, then the game would be up, because if we have moral obligations prior to evolution, then evolution itself can’t be their source.</p>

<p><strong>Evolutionists are Wrong about Ethics</strong></p>

<p>Darwinists opt for an evolutionary explanation for morality without sufficient justification. In order to make their naturalistic explanation work, “morality”&nbsp;must reside in the genes. “Good,”&nbsp;beneficial tendencies can then be chosen by natural selection. Nature, through the mechanics of genetic chemistry, cultivates behaviors we call morality.</p>

<p>This creates two problems. First, evolution doesn’t explain what it’s meant to explain. It can only account for pre-programmed behavior, which doesn’t qualify as morality. Moral choices, by their nature, are made by free agents, not dictated by internal mechanics.</p>

<p>Secondly, the Darwinist explanation reduces morality to mere descriptions of behavior. The morality that evolution needs to account for, however, entails much more than conduct. Minimally, it involves motive and intent as well. Both are non-physical elements which can’t, even in principle, evolve in a Darwinian sense.</p>

<p>Further, this assessment of morality, being descriptive only, ignores the most fundamental moral question of all: Why should I be moral <em>tomorrow</em>? Evolution cannot answer that question. It can only attempt to describe why humans acted in a certain way in the past. Morality dictates what future behavior ought to be.</p>

<p>Evolution does not explain morality. Bongo is not a bad chimp, he’s just a chimp. No moral rules apply to him. Eat the banana, Bongo.</p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">Robert Wright, <em>The Moral Animal—Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology</em> (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), p. 23. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:2">Ibid., p. 58 <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:2"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:3">Ibid., p. 59. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:3"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:4">Ibid., p. 56. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:4"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:5">Ibid., p. 88. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:5"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:6">Ibid., p. 13. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:6"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:7">Ibid., p. 377. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:7"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:8">Ibid., p. 31. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:8"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:9">Ibid., p. 102. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:9"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:10">Thomas Hobbes, <em>Leviathan</em>, 1651. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:10"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:11">Wright, p. 212. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:11"> ↩</a></li>
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title: Relationship vs. Religion?
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/05/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/relationship-vs-religion-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Greg comments on the often-used phrase “Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship.”</em></p>

<p>I’d like to pick up today where we ended yesterday. The last call mentioned that Christianity is a relationship, not a religion. Jesus practiced a relationship with God the Father and then offered that to us. The Jews offered religion; Jesus was different.</p>

<p>First, we ought to walk softly in condemning the religion of the Jews. By and the large, the religion the Jews practiced was the religion that God had given them. It wasn’t religion itself that was the problem. It was something else, something that makes the offer of <em>relationship</em> with God appealing in contrast to what seemed like the empty rigors of religion and ritual.</p>

<p>This slogan has been a rallying cry of 1970’s and 80’s evangelicalism. The emphasis on having “a relationship with God,”&nbsp;I think, is a new phenomenon coming out of the sixties. It smacks of T-groups and sensitivity training, emphasizing freedom and feeling rather than form and content.</p>

<p>The crux here is what is meant by the words “religion”&nbsp;and “relationship.”&nbsp;If “religion”&nbsp;means a body of truth pertaining to God and the afterlife and the unseen world, combined with a way of life <em>informed</em> by that truth, and a community of faith seeking to <em>follow</em> that way of life, then Christianity certainly is a religion.</p>

<p>But I understand the motive behind the distinction. Christians meant to combat the notion that liturgy and doctrine captured <em>everything</em> that Christianity was about. Young people in the 60’s had grown up in the church dutifully practicing religion in this sense, yet having no reality of God in their life at all. That was my experience.</p>

<p>And I think this distinction is very helpful in that sense. When we tell someone about Jesus—as my younger brother Mark did with me—we’re careful to distinguish what we’re offering from what they had in the past. “No, it’s not like that,”&nbsp;we say, “not all those rules, all those do’s and don’ts, all that <em>religion</em>. This is a <em>relationship</em>.”</p>

<p>Yes, it’s a very valuable distinction, but at this point we have to be very careful not to mislead by replacing one error with another, equally as bad. The fact is, Christianity <em>does</em> have rules, it <em>does</em> have do’s and don’ts. It <em>is</em> a religion. But it was never meant to be just information, and that’s where this slogan touches on truth.</p>

<p>When you read the New Testament there simply isn’t any rift between accurate knowledge <em>about</em> God and profound experience <em>of</em> God. In fact, the second depends on the first, as I’ll point out in a moment.</p>

<p>Classically, true knowledge of God <em>necessarily</em> entails the experiential. A man knows his wife well not just because he can rattle off a series of facts about her (even a stranger can do that), but because he’s deeply acquainted with her person on a day to day basis. Yet even so, there have been periods in the history of the church when true knowledge of God has given way to mere <em>information</em> about Him—a dead scholasticism of sorts.</p>

<p>Following the spiritual vitality of the Reformation came a period of high orthodoxy. It was characterized by very elaborate systems of theology which, for some, replaced knowledge of God (along with spiritual intimacy) with mere information about Him. The pietistic movement was a reaction to this. But it didn’t <em>mend</em> the breech. It just substituted one extreme for the other. True spirituality came to be defined not by right knowledge of God, but by profound and intense experience of the mystical. (Notice I didn’t say “experience of <em>God</em>,”&nbsp;but rather “experience of the mystical.”&nbsp;Much of pietistic experience—then and now—never includes God at all, because it’s not informed properly by truth.)</p>

<p>So I understand how there could be a perfunctory religious practice without any life in it that would cause one to hunger and yearn for something much more personal. And the offer of relationship touches that hunger.</p>

<p>But here’s the problem: “having a relationship with God”&nbsp;in this sense is not at all unique to Christianity. Virtually every religion, it seems to me, has as its goal something intensely personal.</p>

<p>And this is why this distinction actually weakens our message if we’re not careful. It’s a version of “try Him you’ll like Him.”&nbsp;People can easily say, “No thanks, I’m trying something else right now and I like that just fine.”&nbsp;In fact, that’s been the response I’ve frequently gotten when I’ve offered Christianity to a non-believer with the appeal that it’s not religion but a relationship. Their response: “I’ve already got a relationship with God, thank you.”</p>

<p>The core of the Gospel isn’t having a relationship <em>with</em> God, but being rightly related <em>to</em> God. The prepositions are absolutely critical here. Another way of putting it is you must have peace <em>with</em> God before you can have the peace <em>of</em> God, and there’s a profound difference.</p>

<p>“Well, Koukl, now you’re just fussing about words.”&nbsp;Yes, I’m fussing about words because words often make all the difference in the world.</p>

<p>In Romans 5 the first verse, Paul makes this important statement: “Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God.”</p>

<p>There are two kinds of peace in the New Testament, ladies and gentlemen. First is the feeling of peacefulness. It’s mentioned as a fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22, and is the feeling that guards our hearts and minds after prayer that Paul talks about in Philippians 4:6-7.</p>

<p>The second kind of peace is the cessation of hostility between two parties. Nations at war declare a truce and then enter into a period of peace. They’re not fighting with each other any more.</p>

<p>This, by the way, is the meaning of “peace”&nbsp;that’s in view in the frequently misused passage, Colossians 3:15 where Paul says, “And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.”&nbsp;This is <em>not</em> a peaceful <em>feeling</em> that’s meant to guide you in figuring out God’s will. Paul is saying that the Christians in Colossae should quit <em>fighting</em>. Instead they should, as he mentions in the verse just above, be “bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone.”</p>

<p>This is also the sense of “peace”&nbsp;that Paul is speaking of in Romans 5. Jesus introduces us, by faith, into God’s grace <em>ending the conflict between</em> us and God. In short, Paul is saying, “God is not angry with us anymore.”</p>

<p>Do you realize that? Do you <em>know</em> that God is not angry with you anymore, that through Jesus we’re <em>at peace</em> with God, that the war is <em>over</em>? Think about it a few moments. Chew on it a little. The war between you and God is <em>over</em>. God’s not mad at you anymore. Isn’t that a wonderful truth! How does that make you feel? This is such a profound reality that when it sinks in it produces something wonderful. Paul goes on to say that the resulting exultation in hope allows him to face his tribulations with joy.</p>

<p>All this not because He has the peace <em>of</em> God but because He has peace <em>with</em> God, not because He has a <em>relationship</em> with God but because he’s rightly related <em>to</em> God.</p>

<p>Do you see how the two begin to work together, right knowledge and experience? This is a perfect example of what I mentioned a moment ago that accurate knowledge <em>about</em> God is the foundation for profound experience <em>of</em> God. Paul <em>knows</em> that the enmity—the hostility—between He and God has been destroyed through the forgiveness that’s in Jesus Christ, and this <em>produces</em> exultation.</p>

<p>Yes, Christianity is a religion, but it’s true religion. True religion produces right relationship <em>to</em> God which leads to right experience and right intimate relationship <em>with</em> God.</p>
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title: Red Letter Christians
topic: Theology
author: Melinda Penner
date: 02/14/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/red-letter-christians
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Christians and non-Christians sometimes quote Jesus' words in the Bible as though they have more authority than the rest of the Bible.&nbsp; People might dismiss something taught by Paul or Moses by saying, "Well, Jesus never said anything about..." and fill in their specific topic. Some Bible versions have Jesus' words printed in red, leaving the rest of the text in black.&nbsp; Some have developed the mistaken notion that the "red letters" are more authoritative than the black letters, that we should pay more heed to quotations from Jesus' ministry than what is taught elsewhere in the Bible.</p>

<p>This is an incorrect understanding of the Bible, though.&nbsp; And it's especially troubling when Christians take this approach because it's not the orthodox, historic Christian view.&nbsp; All of the words of the Bible were God-breathed, inspired by God, and have equal authority.&nbsp; Jesus, as part of the Trinity, then is speaking from Genesis 1 through Revelation.</p>

<p>Peter expresses this in 2 Peter 1:21: "For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God las they were carried along by the Holy Spirit."</p>

<p>Wayne Grudem explains in his book <em><a href="https://secure2.convio.net/str/site/Ecommerce/2007460973?VIEW_PRODUCT=true&amp;product_id=1447&amp;store_id=1161" target="_blank">Systematic Theology</a></em>,</p>

<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Thus God's words spoken through human lips [or pen] were considered to be just as authoritative and just as true as God's words of personal address.&nbsp; There was no disminishing of the authority of these words when they were spoken thorugh human lips.&nbsp; To disbelieve or disobey any of them was to disbelieve or disobey God Himself." (p. 100)</p>

<p>An example of this is in Act 4:25-26 where Peter and John, praising God after having been released from the Sadducees said,</p>

<p style="padding-left: 30px;">[Sovereign God], through the mouth of our father David, your servant, said by the Holy Spirit,<br>
“‘Why did the Gentiles rage,<br>
and the peoples plot in vain?<br>
The kings of the earth set themselves,<br>
and sthe rulers were gathered together,<br>
against the Lord and against his Anointed</p>

<p>They credited David's words recorded in the Psalm 2 as having been God's own words through the Holy Spirit. This is the Christian view of the entire Bible.&nbsp;</p>

<p>As Christians, we cannot focus primiarily on the red letters.&nbsp; The whole Word of God is our teacher and guide.&nbsp; If you want red letters, make them all red because they're all from Jesus.</p>
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title: How Do You Know Christianity Is True?
topic: Christian Living
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/19/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/how-do-you-know-christianity-is-true-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Greg explains how you can respond when a young person asks this question.</em></p>

<p>A friend of mine and someone who is very involved with Stand to Reason told me that she was asked by her son, “Why do we believe Christianity is true?”&nbsp;She had to pause for a minute. The reason she had to pause is that she had all of this information from being exposed to Stand to Reason and she had to sort through and decide what the best way was to communicate to her young son and answer his question.</p>

<p>It is possible to go into all kinds of lines of thinking about the authority of the Bible, about the necessity of the existence of God, about fulfilled prophecy, about the historical Jesus, about discussion of a philosophic nature—there are all kinds of different ways of approaching his question. I got to thinking about that myself, and I thought how I would answer that question from a youngster? What is the simplest, most direct way—without sacrificing the compelling nature of an argument—to answer this question? Why do I believe that Christianity is true?</p>

<p>Not only is it good to have an answer, a simple, direct but useful answer for someone who is younger and perhaps can’t negotiate the details of a more philosophic and complex argument. And there happen to be a lot of other people who just aren’t interested in that kind of thing. Even if they are adults, they aren’t going to sit still long enough to listen to that kind of argument.</p>

<p>It reminded me of a time maybe six years ago when I was doing some speaking about witnessing on airplanes and how I explain the Gospel in a simple way. I gave my answer, I believe Christianity is true because Jesus said it was. Of course more follow up dialogue is important here, and I will show you in just a moment that there are some liabilities here. But there is something really cogent and powerful about this answer because what it does is remove all the responsibility from your shoulders to be the expert and the one who has all the answers. In fact, what it amounts to is an admission that we have to go to an expert to answer questions like this.</p>

<p>If a youngster would ask me a question like that I would say, “What do you do when you have a difficult question about an area you don’t have a lot of knowledge of? Well, you come to your parents, right? Why would you come to ask me? Because you don’t know something and you think that I might because I’ve been around longer and I have more knowledge. That is a wise thing to do.”</p>

<p>Of course, the question then is, “Does the person you go to have the qualifications to answer the question well?”&nbsp;That is why it is helpful to defer the question one more step. You can say, “You come to me because you think I know better, and I’ll tell you how I solve this. I go to someone else that I think knows better than me. I seek out an expert, someone who has the qualifications to know what he is talking about in a given area—in this case, the area of spiritual truth.”</p>

<p>Simply put, I believe Christianity is true because Jesus said it was. Or to put it more precisely, Jesus said He was true. So I believe Jesus and Jesus’&nbsp;explanation of knowing God and understanding the spiritual realm, accessing the Father and being accepted by Him. Jesus’&nbsp;statement was that He had the truth, and I think Jesus had tremendous credibility. In other words, this is an argument by authority. The simplest way to answer the question is just to appeal to Jesus.</p>

<p>There is a liability that in the minds of many people what Jesus had to teach was open to vast interpretation. This can work against you unless you know how to handle that issue.</p>

<p>What’s amazing to me is that most people actually have a respect for Jesus, they are very willing to quote Him when they think something that He said substantiates their own point of view. But when you call up Jesus, they object that that’s just your interpretation and no one can know for sure. Sometimes this is the case of the tail wagging the dog. Jesus isn’t right because he agrees with you, you’re right because you happen to agree with Him.</p>

<p>The liability in using Jesus as an authority is that you have to have a clear idea of what Jesus taught. You must understand something about the life of Jesus and his teachings in order to defer to Jesus’&nbsp;authority on these things. Most people genuinely look up to Jesus as some sort of spiritual and ethical authority. That is why it always mystifies me that those who quote Jesus almost have never given His life and His teachings a very thorough study. They sometimes end up attributing to Jesus sentiments that were exactly the opposite of what He taught.</p>

<p>If people are willing to quote Jesus as somebody who is an authority, doesn’t it seem to make sense to be careful to quote not just Jesus’&nbsp;words, but Jesus’&nbsp;ideas. We can’t just pluck statements that Jesus made out of context to support our point of view. We undergird our point of view by referring back to Jesus as an authority, but that only works if we accurately understand what Jesus had to say. The only way we can do so is by studying the teachings of Jesus in some kind of systematic fashion. It’s mystifying to me that so many people who quote Jesus in this fashion have not the slightest idea of what Jesus was all about and what He taught.</p>

<p>When you appeal to Jesus’&nbsp;authority like that, the rejoinder you might get—and this represents the liability in presenting this kind of argument—is something like this: Who are you to say? That is just your own interpretation. It’s an effective parry unless you know how to deal with it because this objection misses the point entirely.</p>

<p>My response is this: I am no one to say. That’s the point. I am not speaking about spiritual things on my own authority. I am deferring to Jesus. I am not asking you to listen to my view of the truth. Jesus is the one who is the expert, so let’s listen to Him.</p>

<p>What about the issue of it being your own interpretation? That is why we have to look closely at what Jesus said. I’ve studied Him for twenty some years. I’ve studied His teachings carefully. That doesn’t mean that I understand everything accurately, but it strikes me that one who has given more consideration to the full body of Jesus’&nbsp;teachings in the context of the language, culture, and thinking of the time is more likely to give an accurate interpretation than someone who has given no thought whatsoever to it and is simply plucking sayings out of the sky hoping that it will substantiate his own point of view.</p>

<p>This brings us, by the way, to the goal of interpretation. The goal of interpretation is not to invent ideas that I can put into Jesus’&nbsp;mouth and then call it my interpretation. The goal of interpretation is to figure out what Jesus meant since He is the authority, not I.</p>

<p>This, by the way, is where the argument turns into a liability—not for me, since I’ve clarified now what we are trying to accomplish with interpretation and who the authority is, but it turns it into a liability for the objector. The reason is because Jesus’&nbsp;teaching is not all that hard. It certainly is not as hard as people make it out to be. It just takes a little attention.</p>

<p>Quite frankly, the real problem is that much of what Jesus taught is not only obvious, but so deeply offensive to the modern mind, that only the most benign and general of His teachings and moral principles can be seized upon without much threat. People who make these kinds of statements never seize on statements of the woes and judgment that will fall on those who reject Him and don’t believe Him. Rather, they seize things like “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”&nbsp;Or, “You must have the faith of a child to enter the Kingdom of God.”&nbsp;Or, “The Kingdom of God is within you.”&nbsp;All these kind of mysterious, gentle, easy-going ideas that don’t make a strong challenge to your moral choices.</p>

<p>Don’t forget the one that is quoted more often than anything other of Jesus’&nbsp;sayings: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”&nbsp;Of course, that is always brought up to get out from underneath the thumb of Jesus. They don’t know where it is at or what it means, but it sounds like it gets them out of a fix. “Don’t judge me.”&nbsp;That’s what Jesus said. Ladies and gentlemen, Jesus was among the most judgmental of all people if you look at the corpus of His teachings and His work, but He judged properly and appropriately.</p>

<p>Other than those simple sayings, virtually everything else that Jesus taught is so obviously an indictment that it is avoided, ignored, or dismissed as only your interpretation. The one strong sentiment that those who are non-believers do raise has to do with religious hypocrisy. Almost without exception, that statement of Jesus, rather than being a tool that they can use against Christians, becomes a weapon that God uses against them.</p>

<p>Curiously, people say to you, “Get out of here with your ’Jesus only’&nbsp;business. I’m not a sinner. I am not in need of salvation. I haven’t done anything really wrong. You religious people, you are the people that Jesus squawked about. He was more on my side, like the people with the prostitutes, and the homosexuals, and all the down and out.”&nbsp;Jesus wasn’t on their side. Jesus was against anyone who felt that they didn’t need forgiveness because of their own sense of righteousness. Jesus aligned Himself with those who, because their unrighteousness was so obvious to them, were willing to reach out and ask for forgiveness.</p>

<p>How do I know Christianity is true? Jesus said it was. I think Jesus knows what He is talking about. He is the expert, not me. If you don’t believe me, just read it. It’s all there, plain as day.</p>
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title: The Myth of Moral Neutrality
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/05/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-myth-of-moral-neutrality
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Moral relativism. It sounds so reasonable, so tolerant, and so neutral. But there’s a fundamental flaw.</em></p>

<p>One of the most entrenched assumptions of relativism is that there is such a thing as morally neutral ground, a place of complete impartiality where no judgments nor any forcing or personal views are allowed. Each takes a neutral posture towards the moral convictions of others. This is the essence of tolerance, the argument goes.</p>

<p>Moral neutrality, though, is a myth, as the following illustrations show.</p>

<h2>“Neutral”&nbsp;Values</h2>

<p>Moral relativism has become institutionalized in our education system through different forms of instruction in morality that claim to be values-neutral. The most well-known, values clarification, was developed in the mid-60s by social scientists Louis Raths, Sidney Simon, and others. It became very popular and was widely used in public schools during the seventies and early eighties.</p>

<p>According to Simon, values clarification “...does not teach a particular set of values. There is no sermonizing or moralizing. The goal is to involve the students in practical experiences, making them aware of their own feelings, their own ideas, their own beliefs, so that the choices and decisions they make are conscious and deliberate, based on their own value systems”&nbsp;[emphasis in the original].<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>

<p>The foundational assumption of values clarification, however, is not the student’s own. The notion that morality is exhaustively described by one’s own personal feelings, ideas, beliefs, and values is the contribution of Simon and Raths. This is not a neutral point of view, but rather is a particular view of morality called relativism.</p>

<p>This leads values clarification advocates into contradiction, as Paul Vitz, professor of psychology at New York University, points out: “The theorists clearly believe that values clarification is good...They criticize traditional teaching of values as ’selling,’&nbsp;’pushing,’&nbsp;and ’forcing one’s own pet values.’&nbsp;But when it comes to the value of their own position, relativism has conveniently disappeared, and they push their moral position with their own sermons.”<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup></p>

<h2>Values Clarification in Hawaii</h2>

<p>My youngest brother raised his children in Hawaii. At the time, the public school system there conducted exercises in values clarification in which the students were encouraged to develop their own beliefs about morality. The teacher was “neutral,”&nbsp;explaining to the students that it was up to them to formulate their own moral conclusions to these ethical dilemmas.</p>

<p>The children were asked to solve this problem. An aged man had taken the life of his seriously ailing wife to put her out of her misery. He was being tried for murder. Should he be punished for his “mercy killing,”&nbsp;or should he go free?</p>

<p>My brother made a visit to the school to register his concern, but the teacher defended the practice. “We’re not pushing our views or imposing our values,”&nbsp;he said. “We’re careful to let the students know that it’s up to them to decide what to do. This is ’value free’&nbsp;instruction. We’re neutral.”</p>

<p>My brother pointed out that the teacher’s approach was anything but neutral. “You’re telling my children that when they face the hard questions of right or wrong, when they’re confronted with the most difficult problems of morality, there are no guidelines. There are no absolutes. There are no rules. You’re teaching my kids that when they must decide critical issues of right and wrong, it’s simply up to them.”</p>

<h2>The Value of Cheating</h2>

<p>Philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers exposes the moral confusion of values clarification in this true story she relates:</p>

<blockquote>One of my favorite anecdotes concerns a teacher in Newton, Massachusetts, who had attended numerous values clarification workshops and was assiduously applying its techniques in her class. The day came when her class of sixth graders announced that they valued cheating and wanted to be free to do it on their tests. The teacher was very uncomfortable. Her solution? She told the children that since it was her class and since she was opposed to cheating, they were not free to cheat. “In my class you must be honest, for I value honesty. In other areas of your life you may be free to cheat.”<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3">3</a></sup></blockquote>

<p>Think about this response for a moment. Does the teacher’s solution follow from the instruction on values clarification she has just given to her students? Of course not. If the teacher values honesty, then she should be honest without imposing her values on her students. They should still decide for themselves, which they had.</p>

<p>At best, the instructor is stuck in a contradiction. When faced with the destructive consequences of relativism, she falls back into imposing her morality on her students—the very thing she’s been teaching against.</p>

<p>At worst, the teacher’s lesson is that power is the ultimate element in morality, that might makes right: “I give the grades. If you cheat, I’ll flunk you.”&nbsp;Technically, this is called the fallacy of argumentum ad baculum, or to paraphrase Mao Tse Tung, “persuasion from the barrel of a gun.”<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4">4</a></sup></p>

<p>Values clarification is not neutral. Vitz points out five areas of bias. First, its exercises embody the moral ideology of a small, ultra-liberal segment of America. Second, its values are relative to individual tastes. Third, possible solutions to the moral dilemmas posed to students are limited to the most liberal options. Fourth, the exercises focus on the individual in isolation from family and society. And fifth, morality is construed simply as self-gratification.<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5">5</a></sup> Vitz concludes, “It is a simple-minded, intellectually incompetent system.”<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6">6</a></sup></p>

<p>What are values clarification exercises meant to teach? That there are difficult ethical circumstances in which the lines are not clear and the solutions are ambiguous? We already know that. No, these exercises go further. They imply that because some circumstances are ethically ambiguous, there are no ethical certainties at all.</p>

<p>Values clarification aggressively promotes a particular ethical view called moral relativism. It uses ethical ambiguities to encourage agnosticism about universal moral rules. By posing extremely difficult problems to children untutored in ethical decision-making, values clarification destroys their confidence in moral absolutes.</p>

<h2>Tolerance and Moral Neutrality</h2>

<p>One of the alleged virtues of relativism is its emphasis on tolerance. An extremely articulate example of this point of view was written by Faye Wattleton, the former President of Planned Parenthood. The piece is called, “Self-Definition: Morality.”</p>

<blockquote>Like most parents, I think that a sense of moral responsibility is one of the greatest gifts I can give my child. But teaching morality doesn’t mean imposing my moral values on others. It means sharing wisdom, giving reasons for believing as I do—and then trusting others to think and judge for themselves.</blockquote>

<blockquote>
<p>My parents’&nbsp;morals were deeply rooted in religious conviction but tempered by tolerance—the essence of which is respect for other people’s views. They taught me that reasonable people may differ on moral issues, and that fundamental respect for others is morality of the highest order.</p>

<p>“I have devoted my career to ensuring a world in which my daughter, Felicia, can inherit that legacy. I hope the tolerance and respect I show her as a parent is reinforced by the work she sees me doing every day: fighting for the right of all individuals to make their own moral decisions about childbearing.</p>

<p>Seventy-five years ago, Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood to liberate individuals from the ’mighty engines of repression.’&nbsp;As she wrote, ’The men and women of America are demanding that...they be allowed to mold their lives, not at the arbitrary command of church or state but as their conscience and judgment may dictate.”</p>

<p>I’m proud to continue that struggle, to defend the rights of all people to their own beliefs. When others try to inflict their views on me, my daughter or anyone else, that’s not morality: It’s tyranny. It’s unfair, and it’s un-American.”</p>
</blockquote>

<p>This is impressively and persuasively written, one of the finest expressions of this view available in the space of five short paragraphs. It sounds so sensible, so reasonable, and so tolerant, but there’s a fundamental flaw.</p>

<h2>Wattleton’s Fundamental Flaw</h2>

<p>Faye Wattleton’s assessment is based on the notion of neutral ground, a place that implies no moral judgment. Wattleton is not neutral, however, as her own comments demonstrate.</p>

<p>In her article, Wattleton in effect argues that each of us should respect another’s point of view. She then implies, however, that any point of view other than this one is immoral, un-American, and tyrannous. If you disagree with Wattleton’s position that all points of view are equally valid, then your point of view is not valid. Her argument commits suicide; it self-destructs.<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7">7</a></sup></p>

<p>In fact, Wattleton has her own absolute she seeks to impose on other people: “Fundamental respect for others is morality of the highest order.”&nbsp;This is a personal moral position she strives to mandate politically. She writes, “I have devoted my career to ensuring a world in which my daughter, Felicia, can inherit that legacy.”&nbsp;What legacy? Her point of view. How does she ensure this? By passing laws. Faye Wattleton has devoted her career to ensuring a world in which her point of view is enforced by law.</p>

<p>I don’t object to anyone seeking to use the political process to enforce his or her particular point of view in this way. In our system, everybody gets a voice, and everybody gets a vote. We each get to make our case in the public square, and may the best idea win. Because we each can vote, no one can inflict the majority with his point of view (unless, of course, he’s a judge).</p>

<p>What is disturbing in Wattleton’s article is her implication she is neutral, unbiased, and tolerant, when she is not. She is entitled to her point of view, but she’s not neutral. The only place of true neutrality is silence. Speak up, give your opinion, contend for your view, and you forfeit your claim to neutrality.</p>

<p>As a case in point, in May, 1994, Congress passed a law making it a federal offense to block an abortion clinic.<sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8">8</a></sup> Pamela Maraldo, then president of Planned Parenthood, commented to the press, “This law goes to show that no one can force their viewpoint on someone else.”&nbsp;The self-contradiction of her statement is obvious: All laws force someone’s viewpoint.</p>

<p>Moral neutrality seems virtuous, but there’s no benefit, only danger. In our culture we don’t stop at “sharing wisdom, giving reasons for believing as [we] do—and then trusting others to think and judge for themselves,”&nbsp;as Wattleton says, nor should we. This leads to anarchy. Instead we use moral reasoning, public advocacy, and legislation to encourage virtue and discourage dangerous or morally inappropriate behavior.</p>

<p>Faye Wattleton is offering an ethic which, although it sounds fair and tolerant, turns out to be the most bankrupt of all moral systems. It’s called moral relativism. It’s not even tolerant, as Ms. Wattleton makes clear when she condemns those who disagree with her. It sounds persuasive, but it’s also misleading and fallacious.</p>

<h2>Reaping What We Sow</h2>

<p>In the Los Angeles riots of 1992, we watched with horror as buildings burned all over the city. Shops were plundered not by hooded looters, but by families—Mom, Dad, and the kids—moral mutants on the shopping spree of their lives, giggling and laughing with impunity while stuffing their spoils into shopping carts and oversized trash bags.</p>

<p>We shouldn’t have been surprised. During the L.A. riots these families did exactly what they had been taught. Nobody wanted to “impose”&nbsp;their morality on anyone else, so they learned that values are relative, that morality is a matter of personal preference. Make up your own rules, define your own reality, seek your own truth. In the spring of ’92, thousands of people did just what we told them to do, and civilization burned.</p>

<p>If we reject truth, why should we be surprised at the moral chaos that follows? As C.S. Lewis said, “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9">9</a></sup></p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">Simon, Howe, and Kirschenbaum, <em>Values Clarification</em>, rev. ed. (New York: Hart, 1978), back cover; also pp. 18-22. Quoted in Paul Vitz, “Why Values Clarification Must Be Rejected,”&nbsp;Francis J. Beckwith, ed., <em>Do the Right Thing</em> (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 1996), p. 83. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:2">Paul Vitz, “Why Values Clarification Must Be Rejected,”&nbsp;Francis J. Beckwith, ed., <em>Do the Right Thing</em> (Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 1996), p. 85. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:2">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:3">Sommers, Christina Hoff (Asso. Prof. of Philosophy, Clark University), “Teaching the Virtues,”&nbsp;reprinted in <em>AFA Journal</em>, January 1992, p. 15. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:3">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:4">Chuck Colson voiced the same objection when he argued that it’s impossible to teach ethics At Harvard Business School. Because Harvard is relativistic, its business “ethics”&nbsp;simply collapse into pragmatism. If you cheat in business and get caught, you’ll go to jail. The lesson? Either don’t cheat, or don’t get caught. Power matters, not morality. Might makes right. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:4">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:5">Vitz, p. 86-7. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:5">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:6">Ibid., p. 90. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:6">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:7">I wonder if she takes this approach with her daughter. Does she “inflict”&nbsp;Felicia with moral obligations about bedtimes, homework, drugs, cheating, etc., or is she “tolerant”&nbsp;of Felicia’s divergent opinions on these issues? <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:7">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:8">The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE). Passed in the Senate on May 12, 1994. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:8">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:9">C.S. Lewis, <em>The Abolition of Man</em> (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1955 paperback), p. 35. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:9">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
</div>

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title: There Is No Truth
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/19/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/there-is-no-truth
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Some say there is no truth, but at least fifteen things have to be true before this statement can even be uttered in English. What are they?</em><br>
&nbsp;</p>

<p>I recently was asked a question that I get asked a lot. It’s a common challenge Christians face on the campus. It was offered as I spoke in the lecture hall at Oregon Institute of Technology in Klamath Falls, Oregon, to a Christian group who had rented the facility.</p>

<p>As I flew back this morning I reflected on the question. I started jotting some notes down, and it was interesting the way it all fell together. The question was this: How do you deal with somebody who says there is no truth?</p>

<p>Now this is very popular claim on campus because of deconstructionism and postmodernism—the radical skepticism that’s sweeping the academy. It’s the idea that you can’t know anything for sure. Nothing is set in concrete. Everything is influenced by our culture, our upbringing and our presuppositions, so it’s impossible to get at any objective truth.</p>

<p>I flatly reject this notion that there is no truth or, if there is, it is unknowable. I think there are a number of things we can know for sure simply because the opposite is not possible. If we can even utter the sentence, “There is no truth”—and, of course, we must at least utter the sentence to make the claim—then a number of things must be objectively true of necessity.</p>

<p>First of all, if someone holds that there is no truth, then there’s at least one thing that’s true: the statement they just uttered that there is no truth.</p>

<p>It’s one of those awkward situations for a person making a claim, because there’s no way their claim can be true. If it’s false, it’s false (of course), but if it’s true, it’s still false. If it’s true that there is no truth, then it’s also false, because the statement itself identifies a truth.</p>

<p>This is called a self-refuting statement. It’s as if I said, “I can’t speak a word of English,”&nbsp;and said it in English, that would be self-refuting of course. The claim “There is no truth”&nbsp;is one of those kinds of statements. Even to utter the statement itself is a statement of truth, and so the statement “There is no truth”&nbsp;can’t stand. It defeats itself. It commits suicide. So it’s true that the statement, “There is no truth”&nbsp;is false. That’s one thing that’s true. But there’s more.</p>

<p>In order to state the phrase “There is no truth,”&nbsp;an individual must exist to make the statement and to ponder whether there are truths or not.</p>

<p>Remember Descartes, sitting in his oven back in the 17th century? He said, “I can doubt everything except for one thing. I can’t doubt that I am doubting.”&nbsp;From this reflection came his famous dictum, <em>Cogito, ergo sum,</em>&nbsp;���I think, therefore I am.”</p>

<p>I must exist if I’m pondering my existence, Descartes concluded. Someone who states that there is no truth must exist to make the statement, and so it’s true that at least one individual, the one uttering the statement, must exist. So now we have at least two things that are true. But there’s more.</p>

<p>Time must also exist.</p>

<p>In order to express the sequence of words “There is no truth”—or even have such thoughts in one’s mind—the word “is”&nbsp;must come after the word “there,”&nbsp;and the word “no”&nbsp;after both of them, and one thing can only follow another in temporal sequence if time exists—present, past and future. So time must exist as an objectively true thing, because this statement was uttered with words in temporal sequence.</p>

<ul>
	<li>The statement itself is a proposition, so propositions must exist. That’s a truth.</li>
	<li>The phrase also contains tokens, words that token the ideas (types) behind them. It’s true that tokens and types must exist.</li>
	<li>The concept of negation expressed in the word “no,”&nbsp;must exist as an idea.</li>
	<li>There has to be the concept of unity (the idea that the four words work together in a sentence).</li>
	<li>There must be plurality (the multiple words each distinct from one another).</li>
	<li>Individuality must exist to differentiate one word from another, separating the units.</li>
	<li>The law of non-contradiction must exist and be true. If the statement “There is no truth is true,”&nbsp;then its opposite must be false, i.e., if there is no truth, then it is not the case that there is truth.</li>
	<li>That statement is also distinguished from all of its contradictions, so the law of identity—that a thing is identical to itself—must be true. A thing is itself and not something else.</li>
	<li>There’s at least one sentence that exists, because the person just uttered it. That must be true.</li>
	<li>There are English words, and grammatical relationships between the words—subject and predicate. That must be true.</li>
	<li>The numbers one through four must exist because there are four different words.</li>
	<li>Addition must be true, because you add those units up and get the number four.</li>
	<li>The alphabet exists.</li>
</ul>

<p>Parts of speech, like nouns and verbs, exist as truths.</p>

<p>Do you see the point? In order to even utter the statement, “There is no truth,”&nbsp;there must be at least 17 things true. They must, in fact, be necessarily true, given the statement itself. When I say necessarily true, I mean there’s no way they can be false, given the statement “There is no truth”&nbsp;uttered in English. If there is such a statement uttered in English, then all these other things must be true. It’s impossible for them not to be true.</p>

<p>That’s why radical skepticism like this is not justified. As one thinker put it—Dallas Willard, a Christian philosopher at USC—if we want to be intellectually honest skeptics, we must be as skeptical about our skepticism as we are about our knowledge. We should take the burden of proof to defend our skepticism instead of simply asserting our skepticism. Anyone can assert disbelief. Whether they can make sense out of it is a different thing.</p>

<p>Just uttering the statement, “There is no truth,”&nbsp;in itself establishes the truth of many different things. And if we can establish their truth just by uttering such a statement, then it seems to me there are a whole lot of other things we can determine to be true as well, and can be just as certain about.</p>

<p>Therefore, radical skepticism is unjustified. The statement “There is no truth”&nbsp;is false.</p>
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title: When Tolerance Is Intolerant
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/when-tolerance-is-intolerant
content:
            <div> 
		<p>There’s one word that can stop you in your track. That word is “tolerance.”</p>

<p>Let’s take a look at the confusing and mistaken ways tolerance is used in our culture today.</p>

<p>Using the modern definition of tolerance, you will see that no one is tolerant, or ever can be. It’s what my friend Frank Beckwith calls the “passive aggressive tolerance trick.”&nbsp;Let’s start with a real life example.</p>

<p>I had the privilege of speaking to seniors at a Christian high school in Des Moines. I wanted to alert them to this “tolerance trick,”&nbsp;but I also wanted to learn how much they had already been taken in by it. I began by writing two sentences on the board</p>

<p>“All views have equal merit and none should be considered better than another.”</p>

<p>“Jesus is the Messiah and Judaism is wrong for rejecting that.”</p>

<p>They all nodded in agreement as I wrote the first sentence. As soon as I finished writing the second, though, hands flew up. “You can’t say that,”&nbsp;a coed challenged, clearly annoyed. “That’s disrespectful. How would you like it if someone said you were wrong?”</p>

<p>“In fact, that happens to me all the time,”&nbsp;I pointed out, “including right now with you. But why should it bother me that someone thinks I’m wrong?”</p>

<p>“It’s intolerant,”&nbsp;she said, noting that the second statement violated the first statement. What she didn’t see was that the first statement also violated itself.</p>

<p>I pointed to the first statement and asked, “Is this a view, the idea that all views have equal merit and none should be considered better than another?”&nbsp;They agreed.</p>

<p>Then I pointed to the second statement—the “intolerant”&nbsp;one—and asked the same question: “Is this a view?”&nbsp;They studied the sentence for a moment. Slowly my point began to dawn on them. They’d been taken in by the tolerance trick.</p>

<p>If all views have equal merit, then the view that Christians have a better view on Jesus than Jews is just as true as the idea that Jews have a better view on Jesus than Christians. But this is hopelessly contradictory. If the first statement is what tolerance amounts to, then no one can be tolerant because “tolerance”&nbsp;turns out to be gibberish.</p>

<p>“Would you like to know how to get out of this dilemma?”&nbsp;I asked. They nodded. “Return to the classic view of tolerance and reject this modern distortion.”&nbsp;Then I wrote these two principles on the board:</p>

<p>“Be egalitarian regarding persons.”</p>

<p>“Be elitist regarding ideas.”&nbsp;(This way of putting is comes from Peter Kreeft.)</p>

<p>The first principle is true tolerance, what might be called “civility.”&nbsp;It can loosely be equated with the word “respect.”&nbsp;Tolerance applies to how we treat people we disagree with, not how we treat ideas we think false. Tolerance requires that every person is treated courteously, no matter what her view, not that all views have equal worth, merit, or truth.</p>

<p>Don’t let this new notion of tolerance intimidate you. Treat all people with respect, but be willing to show them where their ideas have gone wrong. The modern notion of tolerance actually turns this value on its head. It’s one of the first responses deployed when you take exception with what someone has said. “You’re intolerant.”</p>

<p>To say I’m intolerant because I disagree with someone’s ideas is confused. The view that one person’s ideas are no better or truer than another’s is simply absurd and contradictory. To argue that some views are false, immoral, or just plain silly does not violate any meaningful definition or standard of tolerance.</p>

<p>The irony is that according to the classical notion of tolerance, you can’t tolerate someone unless you disagree with him. We don’t “tolerate”&nbsp;people who share our views. They’re on our side. There’s nothing to “put up”&nbsp;with. Tolerance is reserved for those who we think are wrong, yet we still choose to treat them decently and with respect.</p>

<p>This essential element of classical tolerance—elitism regarding ideas—has been completely lost in the modern distortion of the concept. Nowadays if you think someone is wrong, you’re called intolerant no matter how you treat them.</p>

<p>Whenever you’re charged with intolerance, always ask for a definition, then point out the contradiction built in to this new view.</p>

<p>Most of what passes for tolerance today is intellectual cowardice, a fear of intelligent engagement. Those who brandish the word “intolerant”&nbsp;are unwilling to be challenged by other views, to grapple with contrary opinions, or even to consider them. It’s easier to hurl an insult—“you intolerant bigot”—than to confront the idea and either refute it or be changed by it. In the modern era, “tolerance”&nbsp;has become intolerance.</p>

<p>As ambassadors for Christ, however, we choose the more courageous path. In Paul’s words, “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God”&nbsp;(2 Corinthians 10:5). In a gracious and artful way, we accurately speak the truth, and then trust God to transform minds.</p>
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title: Christianity as the Best Explanation
topic: Philosophy
author: Melinda Penner
date: 02/19/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/christianity-as-the-best-explanation
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Christianity can be seen as an explanatory hypothesis to account for certain phenomena we observe in the world: the origin of the universe, the design of the universe, and the universality of morality. The explanations that Christianity provides to this empirical data provide a cumulative case for the rationality of Christianity, and in fact, the superiority of Christianity to other belief systems. Monotheistic religions (namely Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) enjoy a special rational advantage over other kinds of religious beliefs in their explanatory power, but, as will be shown, Christianity is the most rationally satisfying. Three criteria can be applied to developing the positive case for Christianity and simultaneously the negative case against other religious belief claims: logical consistency, empirical adequacy, and existential viability.</p>

<p>Logical consistency seems to be more “cut and dry”&nbsp;than the other two criteria. Logic is a natural function of human minds and is universally practiced. In fact, the universality of logic itself needs to be explained in a religious worldview. Many religious beliefs can be dismissed at the outset because they fail this first criterion, for example eastern religions that deny rationality and logic. They not only cannot account for logic, they fail the test of rationality since they hold contradictory beliefs.</p>

<p>Christianity is sometimes accused of being illogical, but on closer inspection is rigorously logical. The doctrine of the Trinity is often dismissed as illogical, but is only done so because it is misunderstood or mis-defined (sometimes by ill-equipped Christians). The charge that the Trinity entails a contradiction fails from a category fallacy because the doctrine is sometimes defined as “three gods and one god,”&nbsp;or more simply “three in one.”&nbsp;The doctrine of the Trinity was carefully and meticulously formulated by the early church with great attention to the laws of logic and metaphysical categories. In fact, much of the first 1500 years of the history of Christianity was marked by great intellects who recognized that, if God created the world, then rationality was one of the features of the creation and it must be brought to bear on the development of doctrine.</p>

<p>Monotheistic religious beliefs also explain the existence of rationality and logic. The laws of logic seem to have a different feature than the laws of nature. The laws of nature are a posteriori inductive observations about how the world functions. There does not seem to be an necessity to them though they are regular, nor is the violation of them in a supernatural act really the same as if the laws of logic were violated. In fact, it is impossible to imagine a real world scenario where the laws of logic could be violated. The laws of logic are discovered a priori, they are features of the mind that bear on our thinking before it even begins. There is an incumbency to them that we cannot escape. The best explanation for this seems to be a rational Designer of the universe Whose own rationality is reflected in the operation of our minds.</p>

<p>Morality is the same kind of case. There is an advance incumbency to morality that is not just an a posteriori observation about how humans tend to function. There is an obligation feature to morality that cannot be reduced or explained away by naturalistic theories. Other religions than Christianity, and even atheists, can offer explanations for morality, but none seem to capture our true experience of morality as monotheistic religions do. Morality cannot be explained adequately in functional or reductionistic terms because they omit a central feature of morality, namely the obligation and quality of morality. Naturalist explanations for morality have a much less satisfying explanation of the grounding requirement of obligation. Obligation seems best understood in terms of minds and persons. A “thick”&nbsp;naturalism, as Plato’s, may be able to account for non-physical features of the universe, such as morality, but the obligation feature is still troublesome. Obligation seems to beg for another person to be obligated to. Morality may be a natural feature like health, but it is normative in a different kind of way than mere observation of proper functioning. The obligation is best understood in terms of persons, which narrows the field of religions that can account for this feature.</p>

<p>Empirical adequacy is a second criterion that should guide the evaluation of possible religious explanations. Science is a deprived discipline without the possibility of theistic explanations. There are good scientific and philosophical reasons to believe that the universe had a beginning and that that cause was personal. Clearly this would rule out natural explanations for the origin of the universe. This also rules out some religious beliefs that maintain that the universe is infinite. The personal cause must be adequate for the origination of the universe, and the monotheistic religions describe this kind of God. The God of monotheism is the best explanation for certain features of design we encounter in the universe. Rationality and logic, morality, regular laws of nature all seems to suggest a Designer of a certain kind: one who reflects these kinds of features.</p>

<p>Existential viability is the final criterion and the most subjective. This criterion is not about the most convenient or appealing religion to live out. It is the most deeply satisfying in a way that is incongruent with the modern notion if satisfaction or happiness; it is a teleological notion. It deals with deep, fundamental issues human beings question. Christianity best answers the challenge of evil in the world. Not only does Christianity explain the origin and redeeming purpose of evil, it gives it a rational basis in that it is the deviation of the good that was innate in creation as God made it. Thus far, Islam and Judaism fare well in their explanation. However, Christianity offers a rational and satisfying solution to evil with the final judgment and the offer of forgiveness for the evil we perpetrate. Christianity does not deny the reality of evil or make it a necessary part of the universe; it presents it as an aberration that will be corrected on a cosmic and personal level. Eastern religions and New Age variations do not account for the real experience of evil, nor do they offer a satisfying solution.</p>

<p>Monotheistic religious beliefs offer existential satisfaction in offering a relationship with a personal God. The universe is real and our desire for relationship with a Person is real. The goal of Christianity is not to deny the reality of the world or our personal identity, as some religious beliefs offer, but to satisfy our deepest longings.</p>

<p>Much of the evidence thus far is congenial to three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. How can Christianity be demonstrated to be rationally superior to these other viable options? First, Jesus made substantive authority claims that were uniquely affirmed by His acts, including the resurrection, and contemporary testimony. The Bible offers historical evidences that can be verified that do not stop in the Old Testament, but continue in the New Testament and the coming of the Messiah. Jesus grounds His authority in His miraculous works and the resurrection, which are all testified to by eyewitnesses. He is the promised Messiah of the Old Testament and the most superior Prophet sent by God. The New Testament offers fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies and makes a more substantive authority claim than the Koran. Jesus is not only a prophet, but God Himself; and Jesus validates His identity claim with His deeds, including the resurrection. It also offers further information that solves Old Testament problems, such as the hints of the Trinity. The New Testament also offers a New Covenant that is superior to the promises and relationship that Judaism and Islam offer. Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism and God’s plan in the Old Testament.</p>

<p>Christianity offers the most rational satisfaction of the three criteria. It best incorporates and explains our experience of the world and our own existential experience. Christianity takes logic seriously, and, indeed, grounds logic. Christianity is the most rational of religions, and therefore it can be recommended as superior to all other religious beliefs.</p>
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title: The Intolerance of Tolerance
topic: Arts and Culture
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/05/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/intolerance-of-tolerance
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Probably no concept has more currency in our politically correct culture than the notion of tolerance. Unfortunately, one of America's noblest virtues has been so distorted it's become a vice.</em></p>

<p>There is a modern myth that holds that true tolerance consists of neutrality. It is one of the most entrenched assumptions of a society committed to relativism.</p>

<p>The tolerant person occupies neutral ground, a place of complete impartiality where each person is permitted to decide for himself. No judgments allowed. No "forcing" personal views. Each takes a neutral posture towards another's convictions.</p>

<p>This approach is very popular with post-modernists, that breed of radical skeptics whose ideas command unwarranted respect in the university today. Their rallying cry, "There is no truth," is often followed by an appeal for tolerance.</p>

<p>For all their confident bluster, the relativists' appeal actually asserts two truths, one rational and one moral. The first is the "truth" that there is no truth. The second is the moral truth that one ought to tolerate other people's viewpoints. Their stand, contradictory on at least two counts, serves as a warning that the modern notion of tolerance is seriously misguided.</p>

<p><b>Three Elements of Tolerance</b></p>

<p>Many people are confused about what tolerance is. According to <em>Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition</em>, the word tolerate means to allow or to permit, to recognize and respect others' beliefs and practices without sharing them, to bear or put up with someone or something not necessarily liked.</p>

<p>Tolerance, then, involves three elements: (1) permitting or allowing (2) a conduct or point of view one disagrees with (3) while respecting the person in the process.</p>

<p>Notice that we can't tolerate someone unless we disagree with him. This is critical. We don't "tolerate" people who share our views. They're on our side. There's nothing to put up with. Tolerance is reserved for those we think are wrong.</p>

<p>This essential element of tolerance--disagreement--has been completely lost in the modern distortion of the concept. Nowadays, if you think someone is wrong, you're called intolerant.</p>

<p>This presents a curious problem. One must first think another is wrong in order to exercise tolerance toward him, yet doing so brings the accusation of intolerance. It's a "Catch-22." According to this approach, true tolerance is impossible.</p>

<p><b>Three Faces of Tolerance</b></p>

<p>Adding to the confusion is the fact that tolerance could apply to different things--persons, behaviors, or ideas--and the rules are different for each.</p>

<p><em>Tolerance of persons</em>, what might be called "civility," can be equated with the word "respect." This is the classical definition of tolerance: the freedom to express one's ideas without fear of reprisal.</p>

<p>We respect those who hold different beliefs than our own by treating them courteously and allowing their views a place in the public discourse. We may strongly disagree with their ideas and vigorously contend against them in the public square, but we still show respect for the persons in spite of the differences.</p>

<p>Note that respect is accorded to the person, here. Whether his behavior should be tolerated is an entirely different issue. This is the second sense of tolerance, the liberty to act, called <em>tolerance of behavior</em>. Our laws demonstrate that a man may believe what he likes--and he usually has the liberty to express those beliefs--but he may not behave as he likes. Some behavior is immoral or a threat to the common good. Rather than being tolerated, it is restricted by law. In Lincoln's words: There is no right to do wrong.</p>

<p>Tolerance of persons must also be distinguished from <em>tolerance of ideas</em>. Tolerance of persons requires that each person's views get a courteous hearing, not that all views have equal worth, merit, or truth. The view that no person's ideas are any better or truer than another's is irrational and absurd. To argue that some views are false, immoral, or just plain silly does not violate any meaningful standard of tolerance.</p>

<p>These three categories are frequently conflated by muddled thinkers. If one rejects another's ideas or behavior, he's automatically accused of rejecting the person and being disrespectful. To say I'm intolerant of the person because I disagree with his ideas is confused. On this view of tolerance, no idea or behavior can be opposed, regardless of how graciously, without inviting the charge of incivility.</p>

<p>Historically, our culture has emphasized tolerance of all persons, but never tolerance of all behavior. This is a critical distinction because, in the current rhetoric of relativism, the concept of tolerance is most frequently advocated for behavior: premarital sex, abortion, homosexuality, use of pornography, etc. People ought to be able to behave the way they want within broad moral limits, the argument goes.</p>

<p>Ironically, though, there is little tolerance for the expression of contrary ideas on issues of morality and religion. If one advocates a differing view, he is soundly censured. The tolerance issue has thus gone topsy-turvy: tolerate most behavior, but don't tolerate opposing beliefs about those behaviors. Contrary moral opinions are labeled as "imposing your view on others."</p>

<p>Instead of hearing, "I respect your view," those who differ in politically incorrect ways are told they are bigoted, narrow-minded, and intolerant.</p>

<p>A case in point was an attack made in my community paper on Christians who were uncomfortable with the social pressure to approve of homosexuality. I wrote the following letter to the editor to show how the modern notion of tolerance had been twisted into a vice instead of a virtue:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>Dear Editor:</p>

<p>I am consistently amazed to see how intolerant South Bay residents are to moral views other than their own. Last week's letters about homosexuality were cases in point. One writer even suggested that your publication censor alternate opinions!</p>

<p>This narrow-mindedness and self-righteous attitude about sexual ethics is hypocritical. They challenge what they view as hate (it used to be called morality) with caustic and vitriolic attacks. They condemn censure by asking for censorship (there's a difference). They accuse others of intolerance and bigotry, then berate those same people for taking a view contrary to their own.</p>

<p>Why is someone attacked so forcibly simply for affirming moral guidelines about sex that have held us in good stead for thousands of years?</p>

<p>Not only that, the objections are self-defeating. The writers imply that everyone should be allowed to do and believe what they want and that no one should be permitted to force their viewpoint on others. But that is their viewpoint, which they immediately attempt to force on your readers in an abusive way. Those with opposing beliefs were referred to in print as bigots, lacking courage, disrespectful, ignorant, abominable, fearful, indecent, on par with the KKK, and--can you believe it--intolerant.</p>

<p>Why don't we abandon all of this nonsense about tolerance and open-mindedness? It's misleading because each side has a point of view it thinks is correct. The real issue is about what kind of morality our society should encourage and whether that morality is based on facts and sound reasoning or empty rhetoric.</p>
</blockquote>

<p><b>Intellectual Cowardice</b></p>

<p>Most of what passes for tolerance today is not tolerance at all, but rather intellectual cowardice. Those who hide behind the myth of neutrality are often afraid of intelligent engagement. Unwilling to be challenged by alternate points of view, they don't engage contrary opinions or even consider them. It's easier to hurl an insult--"you intolerant bigot"--than to confront the idea and either refute it or be changed by it. "Tolerance" has become intolerance.</p>

<p>The classical rule of tolerance is this: Tolerate persons in all circumstances, by according them respect and courtesy even when their ideas are false or silly. Tolerate (i.e., allow) behavior that is moral and consistent with the common good. Finally, tolerate (i.e., embrace and believe) ideas that are sound. This is still a good guideline.</p>

<hr>
<p style="font-size: x-small;">This is a transcript of a commentary from the radio show "Stand to Reason," with Gregory Koukl. It is made available to you at no charge through the faithful giving of those who support Stand to Reason. Reproduction permitted for non-commercial use only. ©2003 Gregory Koukl<br>
<br>
For more information, contact Stand to Reason at 1438 East 33rd Street, Signal Hill, CA 90755<br>
(800) 2-REASON • (562) 595-7333 • <a href="http://www.str.org">www.str.org</a></p>

<hr>
<p><strong>Resources for Additional Study</strong><br>
<a href="http://edrmx.rxdtq.servertrust.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=BK125" target="_blank">Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air</a></p>
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title: Faith and Facts
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/05/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/faith-and-facts
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Can you give a good definition of biblical faith? How does it relate to science?</em></p>

<p>I don’t like the word “faith.”&nbsp;Not because faith isn’t valuable, but because it’s often deeply misunderstood. “Faith”&nbsp;in this twisted sense is what you use when all reason is against you. It’s religious wishful thinking, in which one squeezes out spiritual hope by intense acts of sheer will. People of “faith”&nbsp;believe the impossible. People of “faith”&nbsp;believe that which is contrary to fact. People of “faith”&nbsp;believe that which is contrary to evidence. People of “faith”&nbsp;ignore reality.</p>

<p><strong>Some suggest we cannot find facts to support our faith, nor is it preferable to try. This is silly. We’re enjoined to have faith in part because we have evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.</strong></p>

<p>I think part of the confusion is because Christians are often told to ignore circumstances, meaning that we’re not to get overwhelmed or discouraged by them because God is bigger than our troubles. “Have faith in God,”&nbsp;we’re told. I think that’s good counsel as far as it goes, but sometimes it breeds misunderstanding, implying that faith is a blind leap that has no relationship to fact.</p>

<p>Some suggest we cannot find facts to support our faith, nor is it preferable to try. Faith is not the kind of thing that has anything to do with facts, they say. If we have evidence to prove what we believe, then that takes away from real faith.</p>

<p>Somehow these people think that genuine faith is eviscerated by knowledge and evidence. We’ve made a virtue out of believing against the evidence, as if that’s what God has in mind for us. This is all wrong.</p>

<p>Think about it for a moment. J.P. Moreland has suggested that if this is really the Christian view of faith, the best thing that could happen to Christianity is for the bones of Jesus to be discovered. Finding His bones would prove He didn’t rise from the dead. When Christians continue to believe that He did, then, they would be demonstrating the most laudable faith, believing something that all the evidence proved was false.</p>

<p>This is silly. We’re enjoined to have faith in part because we have evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. If we’re encouraged to believe because of the resurrection, then that proves this other view of faith is false. It may be the view Christians hold in many cases, but it is not the view of the Bible. It is not the view of Christianity.</p>

<p>Frankly, if religion is merely an exercise in wishful thinking for me, I wouldn’t wish up Christianity. It’s far too inconvenient. Indeed, it seems that’s part of the reason people hold many of the ludicrous religious views they do. They’re appealing. They wish God was impersonal, because an impersonal God can’t make the kind of demands on them that a holy God can. An impersonal divine force doesn’t cramp their style on Saturday night. Eastern religions are high on individual liberty and low on individual responsibility. That’s appealing.</p>

<p><strong>Biblical faith isn’t believing against the evidence. Instead, faith is a kind of knowing that results in action.</strong></p>

<p>No, biblical faith isn’t believing against the evidence. Instead, faith is a kind of knowing that results in action. Let me explain what I mean.</p>

<p>If we want to exercise biblical faith—Christian faith—then we ought first to find out how the Bible defines faith. The clearest definition comes from Hebrews 11:1. This verse says, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”&nbsp;Now, there’s something very important in these words. We see the word “hope,”&nbsp;we see the word “assurance,”&nbsp;and we see the word “conviction”—that is, confidence. Now, what gives us confidence?</p>

<p>If you buy a lottery ticket, do you <strong>hope</strong> you’ll win the lottery? Yes, of course you do. Do you have any <strong>assurance</strong> you’ll win the lottery? Absolutely not. You have no way of knowing that your ticket is any better than the millions of other lottery tickets out there competing for the same pot.</p>

<p>But what if you had x-ray vision, and you could see through the gray scratch-off coating on the lottery tickets you buy at the supermarket? You’d <strong>know</strong> if you had a $100, $200 or a $1,000 winner, wouldn’t you? In that case, would you merely hope you’d win? No, you’d have <strong>assurance</strong>, wouldn’t you? You’d have assurance of those things you previously only hoped for. It would be hope with conviction, not a mere hoped, but a hope buttressed by facts and evidence.</p>

<p>That’s why the Christian faith cares about the evidence, friends. For the biblical Christian, the facts matter. You can’t have assurance for something you don’t know you’re going to get. You can only hope for it.</p>

<p>This is why the resurrection of Jesus is so important. It gives assurance to the hope. Because of a Christian view of faith, Paul is able to say in 1 Corinthians 15 that when it comes to the resurrection, if we have only hope, but no assurance—if Jesus didn’t indeed rise from the dead in time/space history—then we are of most men to be pitied. That’s what he says: <em>We are of most men to be pitied.</em></p>

<p>This confidence Paul is talking about is not a confidence in a mere “faith”&nbsp;resurrection, a mythical resurrection, a story-telling resurrection. Instead, it’s a belief in a real resurrection. If the <strong>real</strong> resurrection didn’t happen, then we’re in trouble.</p>

<p>The Bible knows nothing of a bold leap-in-the-dark faith, a hope-against-hope faith, a faith with no evidence. Rather, if the evidence doesn’t correspond to the hope, then the faith is in vain, as even Paul has said.</p>

<p>So, faith is knowing, and that knowledge is based on evidence leading to confidence or conviction. But biblical faith is more than that. There’s another element. Faith is not just knowing. Faith is also acting. Biblical faith is a confidence so strong that it results in action. You’re willing to act based on that belief, that faith.</p>

<p>Many of you know that my engineer, Bobby the Bouncer, got married today. Bobby has <strong>believed</strong> in marriage for a long time, but Bobby never exercised <strong>faith</strong> in marriage until he walked down the aisle and said “I do”&nbsp;to Jennifer. That’s when he put his life on the line for what he believed to be true. He exercised faith.</p>

<p><strong>Friends, Christianity is not denying reality. Biblical Christians don’t deny reality, they discover reality. And once they’ve discovered it, they act on what they’ve learned.</strong></p>

<p>It’s the same way with biblical faith. It’s not just intellectual assent. It’s not just acknowledging that certain facts about Jesus, the Bible, the resurrection, or whatever, happen to be true. It’s taking your life and putting it on the line based on your confidence in those facts.</p>

<p>Consider a guy who pushes a wheelbarrow across Niagara Falls on a tightrope every day. You’ve seen him do it so many times it doesn’t even occur to you he won’t make it. You believe with all your heart he can do it.</p>

<p>One day he comes up to you and asks, “Do you believe I can push this wheelbarrow across the tightrope without falling?”&nbsp;And you say, “Of course I do. I’ve seen you do it hundreds of times.”&nbsp;“All right,”&nbsp;he says, “get in the wheelbarrow.”</p>

<p>Well, now we’re talking about a whole different kind of thing, aren’t we? The first is an intellectual belief, an acknowledgment of certain facts. The second is active faith, converting your knowledge to action. When you climb into the wheelbarrow, your belief in facts is converted into active trust.</p>

<p>Faith is knowledge in action. It is active trust in the truth. You go to the airport. You say, “This plane goes to New York. I believe it. I’ll get on the plane. I’ll invest myself in the things I believe to be true.”&nbsp;That is biblical faith.</p>

<p>So, when someone asks me the question, Are faith and science compatible?, I’m going to immediately ask for a clarification. What do you mean by faith? If you think faith is mere fantasy and science is complete fact, well then, fantasy conflicts with fact, doesn’t it? If faith is a blind leap in the dark, if faith has no concern for the facts, you’re in trouble.</p>

<p>If, however, your faith is an intelligent trust in what can’t be seen that’s inferred from evidence that can be seen—if your faith is a commitment to reality, to acting on what you have good reason to believe is true—well then, there doesn’t need to be any conflict at all.</p>

<p>Friends, Christianity is not denying reality. Some people think it is. I’m sympathetic to them because some Christians act as if faith is a kind of sanctified denial. But that isn’t what biblical Christianity is about. Biblical Christians don’t deny reality, they discover reality. And once they’ve discovered it, they act on what they’ve learned.</p>

<p>Indeed, if Christianity is true, in the deepest sense of the word, then it must fit the facts of the real world. So, when we discover the facts of the real world, they can only support Christianity—if Christianity is true—given that you’ve interpreted the facts of the world correctly and you’ve interpreted the scriptural teaching correctly.</p>

<p>Christianity does comport with the facts. If science and religion both have truth as their ultimate goal, then there’s no inherent conflict between the two.</p>
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title: The Trouble with the Elephant
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-trouble-with-the-elephant
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>The ancient fable of the blind men and the elephant is often used to illustrate the fact that every faith represents just one part of the larger truth about God. However, the attempt is doomed before it gets started. Here’s why...</em></p>

<p>In the children’s book, <em>The Blind Men and the Elephant</em>, Lillian Quigley retells the ancient fable of six blind men who visit the palace of the Rajah and encounter an elephant for the first time. As each touches the animal with his hands, he announces his discoveries.</p>

<p>The first blind man put out his hand and touched the side of the elephant. “How smooth! An elephant is like a wall.”&nbsp;The second blind man put out his hand and touched the trunk of the elephant. “How round! An elephant is like a snake.”&nbsp;The third blind man put out his hand and touched the tusk of the elephant. “How sharp! An elephant is like a spear.”&nbsp;The fourth blind man put out his hand and touched the leg of the elephant. “How tall! An elephant is like a tree.”&nbsp;The fifth blind man reached out his hand and touched the ear of the elephant. “How wide! An elephant is like a fan.”&nbsp;The sixth blind man put out his hand and touched the tail of the elephant. “How thin! An elephant is like a rope.”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>

<p>An argument ensued, each blind man thinking his own perception of the elephant was the correct one. The Rajah, awakened by the commotion, called out from the balcony. “The elephant is a big animal,”&nbsp;he said. “Each man touched only one part. You must put all the parts together to find out what an elephant is like.”</p>

<p>Enlightened by the Rajah’s wisdom, the blind men reached agreement. “Each one of us knows only a part. To find out the whole truth we must put all the parts together.”</p>

<p>This fable is often used to illustrate one of two points. The religious application holds that every faith represents just one part of a larger truth about God. Each has only a piece of the truth, ultimately leading to God by different routes. Advocates of Eastern religions are fond of using the parable in this way.</p>

<p>The second application is used by skeptics who hold that cultural biases have so seriously blinded us that we can never know the true nature of things. This view, <em>de rigueur</em> in the university, is called post-modernism.</p>

<p>This skepticism holds for all areas of truth, including the rational, the religious, and the moral. In <em>Folkways</em>, a classic presentation of cultural relativism, anthropologist William Graham Sumner argues that morality is not objective in any sense. “Every attempt to win an outside standpoint from which to reduce the whole to an absolute philosophy of truth and right, based on an unalterable principle, is delusion,”&nbsp;he states.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup></p>

<p>Sumner is making a very strong assertion about knowledge. He says that all claims to know objective truth are false because each of us is imprisoned in his own culture, incapable of seeing beyond the limits of his own biases. Sumner concludes, therefore, that truth is relative to culture and that no objective standard exists.</p>

<p>There are three serious problems with the elephant, but first a procedural concern.</p>

<h2>Pictures Don’t Prove</h2>

<p>There is a difference between an assertion and an argument. An assertion is just a point of view, an opinion. An argument is a point of view supported by reasons that demonstrate the view is a good one.</p>

<p>The parable of the blind men and the elephant is a clear and powerful illustration, but an illustration is a mere point of view in more vivid terms. It is not an argument, but a well-articulated assertion. It doesn’t prove anything in itself. It doesn’t make one’s point valid. It only makes it clear.</p>

<p>Proving the point is another matter. It requires evidence and justification. Given the illustration of the blind men and the elephant, why should anyone believe this parable actually describes the way things really are?</p>

<p>I’ll give you three reasons I think the illustration fails at what it attempts.</p>

<h2>Talking Elephants</h2>

<p>The first serious limitation is that even though the men are blind, the elephant isn’t necessarily mute. This is a factor the illustration doesn’t allow for: What if the elephant speaks?</p>

<p>The claim of Christianity is that man doesn’t learn about God by groping. Instead, discovery is through God’s own self-disclosure. He is not passive and silent, leaving us to guess about His nature. God tells us what He is like and what He wants.</p>

<p>If God speaks, this changes everything. All contrary opinions are silenced, all conjectures are put to rest. God has made Himself known, giving us a standard by which to measure all other religious claims. The parable of the blind men does not take this possibility into account. Yet three of the world’s great religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—make this claim.</p>

<h2>Deductive Not Inductive</h2>

<p>There is a second problem with the parable. It presumes that Christians reject pluralism because they lack exposure to other beliefs, much as the blind men erred because each explored only a part of the elephant. Had they searched more completely, they would have seen their error. Christians are just uninformed.</p>

<p>This is not the case, though. Christians reject pluralism, in part, because defining elements of different religions contradict each other. It’s not an inductive problem of discovery; it’s a problem of coherence.</p>

<p>Judaism teaches Jesus is not the Messiah. Christianity teaches He is. Jesus either is the Messiah or He’s not. Both groups can’t be right. The notion that Christianity and Judaism are somehow equally true is contradictory, like square circles.</p>

<p>What if the elephant in the parable was a miniature, so small the blind man could close his hand and completely encompass the elephant? If another then claimed, “The elephant is bigger than a house,”&nbsp;the first would be correct to disagree. Why? Because an elephant can’t be small enough to fit into one’s hand and also be as big as a house at the same time.</p>

<p>No possible future discovery is going to change the fact that religious claims cannot be harmonized. Rather, exploration complicates the issue. The more one knows about the core beliefs of various faiths, the more complex the problem of harmonizing becomes.</p>

<p>Appealing to the ubiquity of something like the “golden rule”&nbsp;is no help. It is a moral action guide that says almost nothing about any religion’s fundamental understanding of the shape of the world. Profound contradictions between foundational beliefs are not removed by pointing out shared moral proverbs.</p>

<p>Contradictory claims can’t be simultaneously true. This has nothing to do with further discovery. Religious pluralism is false on deductive grounds, not inductive.</p>

<h2>The Suicidal Elephant</h2>

<p>The third objection is the most serious. The application of this parable to issues of truth is doomed before it gets started. The view commits suicide; it is self-refuting. Here’s how.</p>

<p>There’s only one way to know our cultural or religious biases blind us to the larger truth that all religions lead to God. Someone who sees clearly without bias must tell us so. This parable, though, teaches that such objectivity is impossible.</p>

<p>For example, in order for William Graham Sumner to conclude that all moral claims are an illusion, he must first escape the illusion himself. He must have a full and accurate view of the entire picture—just as the king had of the blind men and the elephant from his balcony. The Rajah was in a position of privileged access to the truth. Because he could see clearly, he was able to correct those who were blind.</p>

<p>Such a privileged view, though, is precisely what advocates of both religious pluralism and the radical skepticism of post-modernism deny. Completely objective assessments are illusions, they claim. The truth lies in some combination of opinions or, for the more skeptical, is out of reach for any of us. This is precisely the kind of thing, though, the parable does not allow one to say.</p>

<p>The skeptical view itself is a claim meant to be understood as an objective and true assessment of the world. It’s as if one said, “Each of us is blind,”&nbsp;and then added, “but I’ll tell you what the world really looks like.”&nbsp;This is a clear contradiction.</p>

<p>The problem becomes obvious by offering this challenge. Ask, “Where would <em>you</em> be in the illustration? When you apply this parable to the issue of truth, are you like one of the blind men or are you like the king?”</p>

<p>This dilemma is unsolvable. If the story-teller is like one of the six who can’t see—if he is one of the blind men groping around—how does he know everyone else is blind and has only a portion of the truth? On the other hand, if he fancies himself in the position of the king, how is it that he alone escapes the illusion that blinds the rest of us?</p>

<p>At best, this parable—if it were accurate—might justify agnosticism, not religious pluralism. All one could really say is that it <em>may</em> be the case we’re all groping about with no one in full possession of the truth—but this can’t be known for sure.</p>

<h2>The King Sees</h2>

<p>If everyone truly is blind, then no one can know if he or anyone else is mistaken. Only someone who knows the whole truth can identify another on the fringes of it. In this story, only the king can do that—no one else.</p>

<p>The most ironic turn of all is that the parable of the six blind men and the elephant, to a great degree, is an accurate picture of reality. It’s just been misapplied.</p>

<p>We are like blind men, fumbling around in the world searching for answers to life’s deepest questions. From time to time, we seem to stumble upon some things that are true, but we’re often confused and mistaken, just as the blind men were.</p>

<p>How do I know this? Because the King has spoken. He is above, instructing us, advising us of our mistakes, and correcting our error. The real question is: Will we listen?</p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">Lillian Quigley, <em>The Blind Men and the Elephant</em> (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959). Possible original sources of the story are the <em>Jataka Tales</em>, a collection of Buddhist birth stories, and the <em>Pancatantra Stories</em>, Hindu religious instruction fables. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:2">William Graham Sumner, <em>Folkways</em> (Chicago: Ginn and Company, 1906), excerpted in Louis B. Pojman, ed., <em>Ethical Theory - Classical and Contemporary Readings</em> (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1995), p. 27. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:2">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
</div>

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title: Faith and Works: Paul vs. James
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/05/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/faith-and-works-paul-vs-james
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>One of the thorniest textual problems any Christian can face is the apparent contradiction between Paul and James. Is justification by faith, as Paul claims, or by works, as James seems to say? This problem actually has a very simple solution.</em></p>

<p>For some Christians, one of the thorniest problems in the Bible is the apparent contradiction between Paul and James. It’s enough to make anyone committed to complete inerrancy wither.</p>

<p>In Romans, 5:1-2, Paul writes, “Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in hope of the glory of God.”</p>

<p>James seems to say just the opposite, “You see that a man is justified by works, and not by faith alone.”&nbsp;This appears to be a first rate contradiction.</p>

<p>I have seen people twist themselves into theological pretzels trying to deal with this problem. There are a few unresolved conflicts in the Bible, but this is not one of them.</p>

<h2>Justified by Faith</h2>

<p>In Romans 4:1-5, Paul lays out his case for justification by faith. He goes back to the very beginning, citing Abraham as the archetype:</p>

<blockquote>What shall we say that Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh, has found? For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about; but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? ’And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.’&nbsp;Now to the one who works, his wage is not reckoned as a favor, but as what is due. But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness.</blockquote>

<p>Paul makes two points here. First, if Abraham is justified by works, if salvation is his personal accomplishment, dependent on his effort alone, then he can brag about it. Second, any system of works makes God indebted to the one who qualifies. Salvation is not a gift, but a wage paid to the one who earns it.</p>

<p>Then Paul quotes Genesis 15:6 to prove that neither is the case: “Then he believed in the Lord; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness.”</p>

<h2>Two Terms</h2>

<p>Two different terms used to illustrate Abraham’s salvation. The first is “reckoned,”&nbsp;and the second is “justified.”&nbsp;As you will see, these are two aspects of a single act of redemption.</p>

<p>The word “reckoned”&nbsp;is a term that emphasizes an action God takes on behalf of poor sinners. To “reckon”&nbsp;means “to credit to the account of.”&nbsp;God responds to our spiritual poverty with the abundant gift of righteousness. He places it into our empty bank accounts, under our names. In Paul’s words, “Though [Jesus] was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.”</p>

<p>This transaction took place early in Abraham’s life. We read in Genesis 15:6, “Then he [Abraham] believed in the Lord and He reckoned it to him as righteousness.”&nbsp;Paul reminds us that Abraham “grew strong in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that what He had promised, He was able also to perform. Therefore also it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”</p>

<p>From that time on God saw not Abraham’s spiritual poverty, but his wealth. Abraham’s moral bank account was rich with God’s righteousness.</p>

<p>“Justification,”&nbsp;our second term, is the result of this transaction. It means “to declare free of blame; to absolve.”&nbsp;Because God reckons righteousness to us, He declares us free from guilt, absolved, and pardoned. Reckoning, the action, leads to justification, the result. Therefore, salvation is a result of justification, which comes by faith.</p>

<h2>Ever Heard of the Ten Commandments?</h2>

<p>Salvation must come from God and not ourselves for one very good reason: Our bank accounts are truly empty. Once, while I was discussing God’s qualifications for heaven with a waitress, she said, “God will approve of me.”</p>

<p>“How do you know that?”&nbsp;I asked.</p>

<p>The question was a pivotal one, but she’d never considered it. After a long, awkward silence she offered feebly, “Well, I don’t take drugs.”</p>

<p>“That’s good, but I think God is concerned about more than that,”&nbsp;I countered. “Have you heard of the Ten Commandments?”&nbsp;I began to list them.</p>

<blockquote>1) Have you ever given allegiance to anything else above God in your life?</blockquote>

<blockquote>
<p>2) Have you ever used any thing as an object of worship or veneration?</p>

<p>3) Have you ever used God’s name in a vain or vulgar fashion?</p>

<p>4) Have you consistently honored God by worshiping Him on a regular basis?</p>

<p>5) Have you ever disobeyed or dishonored your parents?</p>

<p>6) Have you ever murdered anyone? (Jesus said in Matthew 5:22 that if you’re merely angry with a brother, you violate this principle).</p>

<p>7) Have you ever had sex with someone other than your spouse? (Jesus said that if you look upon someone and entertain the thought, you’re guilty of sin here.)</p>

<p>8) Have you ever taken something that was not yours?</p>

<p>9) Have you ever told an untruth about someone else?</p>

<p>10) Have you ever desired to have something that was not yours?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>We’d only gotten through two before she began to wilt. “Now you’re making me feel guilty,”&nbsp;she complained. That’s the point. We are guilty, each one of us. This is God’s Law. These are God’s requirements. Yet is there anyone who doesn’t consistently violate every one?</p>

<p>Any attempt to whittle down God’s requirements to make them easier is doomed. The Pharisees tried this, asking Jesus which commandment was the foremost of all. Jesus answered, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’&nbsp;The second is this, ’You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”&nbsp;Which of us does not violate each command hundreds of times a day?</p>

<h2>The Built-in Defeater</h2>

<p>We want to compare ourselves to other people, but that doesn’t work. We may fancy ourselves law-abiding citizens, but the truth is we’re a lot more like Hitler than like Jesus Christ, and His righteousness is the standard.</p>

<p>Saved by works? The Law gives us no hope because it has a built-in defeater to any attempt at justification by works: The Law demands perfection.</p>

<p>“Behold I, Paul, say to you that if you receive circumcision, Christ will be of no benefit to you. And I testify again to every man who receives circumcision, that he is under obligation to keep the whole Law”&nbsp;(Galatians 5:3).</p>

<p>James agrees. He writes, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all”&nbsp;(James 2:10).</p>

<p>In God’s view, there are only two kinds of people: innocent and guilty. One violation of the Law, one sin, makes you guilty. This is enough to silence the most noble mortal: “...that every mouth may be closed, and all the world may become accountable to God”&nbsp;(Romans 3:19).</p>

<p>“The Scripture,”&nbsp;Paul concludes, “has shut up all men under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe”&nbsp;(Galatians 3:22).</p>

<p>There is only one hope: God’s mercy. The Scripture is replete with this teaching. “He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy”&nbsp;(Titus 3:5). “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God”&nbsp;(Ephesians 2:8). “But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace”&nbsp;(Romans 10:6). “If righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died needlessly”&nbsp;(Galatians 2:21).</p>

<p>That’s why Paul states clearly, “Now to the one who works, his wage is not reckoned as a favor, but as what is due. But to the one who does not work, but believes in Him who justifies [absolves] the ungodly, his faith is reckoned [credited] as righteousness”&nbsp;(Romans 4:5).</p>

<p>But we still have a problem. Why does James contradict Paul by saying we’re justified by works and not by faith alone? He even quotes Abraham for proof of his point, just as Paul did.</p>

<h2>One Word, Two Meanings</h2>

<p>Whenever one encounters an apparent contradiction, it’s good to keep in mind a basic rule: Always first explore the possibility of a reconciliation between the two. Not all statements that appear to contradict actually do.</p>

<p>Take the two statements “Napoleon was a very big man”&nbsp;and “Napoleon was not a big man; he was a small man.”&nbsp;At first glance, these two sentences appear contradictory. The word “big”&nbsp;is equivocal, though. It can mean two different things. Napoleon was a big man regarding his impact in <em>history</em>, but was small in <em>physical size</em>.</p>

<p>Consult any dictionary and you’ll discover that virtually every word has more than one meaning. The word “peace”&nbsp;could mean cessation of hostility between two parties. When a war is over and the fighting stops, there’s peace. Romans 5:1 carries this sense: “Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”</p>

<p>“Peace”&nbsp;could also refer to peace of mind, a freedom from anxiety or worry. This is what Paul had in mind when he promised that, after prayer, ���the <em>peace</em> of God, which surpasses all comprehension, shall guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”&nbsp;Proper interpretation of any passage depends on a clear understanding of which meaning is in view.</p>

<p>The word “justify”&nbsp;is no different. It has two meanings, not just one. In addition to “absolve, declare free of blame,”&nbsp;it can also mean “to demonstrate or prove to be just, right or valid; to show to be well founded.”&nbsp;In the case of salvation, the first is the cause; the second is the effect.</p>

<p>This second definition is what is usually in view when we use the word “justify”&nbsp;in English. “Justify your position,”&nbsp;we say. We’re asking for evidence; we want proof.</p>

<p>The Bible frequently uses this sense of the word, too. Jesus taught that a person’s true nature will be evident in his conduct:</p>

<blockquote>The good man out of his good treasure brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of his evil treasure brings forth what is evil. And I say to you, that every careless word that men shall speak, they shall render account for it in the day of judgment. For by your words you shall be justified, and by your words you shall be condemned.</blockquote>

<p>Jesus teaches here that the man with good treasure brings forth good fruit, which “justifies”&nbsp;him. This external display demonstrates the quality of the man within. This is not justification in the sense of salvation. One’s words don’t absolve him (first definition). Rather, they bear testimony of the inner man (second definition).</p>

<h2>The Crux</h2>

<p>Now we face a key question. Which definition did James have in mind? How do we know when he uses the word “justify,”&nbsp;that James is not referring to salvation—as Paul clearly is—but rather is pointing to the proof of salvation?</p>

<p>This is remarkably simple to determine. The cause must come before the effect. Salvation must come first, before it can be evidenced in a changed life.</p>

<p>When Paul makes his case for justification by faith, he cites the beginning of Abraham’s walk with God in Genesis 15:5-6: “And He took him outside and said, ’Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’&nbsp;And He said to him, ’So shall your descendants be.’&nbsp;Then he believed in the Lord; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness.”</p>

<p>The justification James has in mind comes much later in Abraham’s life, recorded in Genesis 22:12: “And he said, ’Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.’”</p>

<p>Paul and James are cite two different times in Abraham’s life, events separated by 25 years. <em>They can’t be referring to the same thing.</em></p>

<p>The works of Abraham that James mentions were a result of justification which came by faith a quarter of a century earlier. Abraham was not being saved again. Rather, he was showing evidence of his salvation. He was being confirmed in the justification by faith that had already been accomplished years before.</p>

<p>Abraham’s faith was no passive, intellectual exercise. He proved his faith to God. The words of the text show this to be true: “Now I <em>know</em> that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”&nbsp;God witnessed Abraham’s faith first-hand, as it were. It was demonstrated. That’s why James concludes, “And the Scripture was <em>fulfilled</em> which says, ’And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.’”</p>

<p>James speaks to the man who is all talk and no action. His simple message is that true salvation always proves itself. That’s why he asks, “What use is it, my brethren, if a man says he has faith, but he has no works? Can <em>that</em> faith save him?”&nbsp;The apostle John echoes the same sentiment: “The one who says, ’I have come to know Him,’&nbsp;and does not keep His commandments, is a liar and the truth is not in him.”</p>

<h2>One Coin, Two Sides</h2>

<p>James and Paul go together. Like two sides of the same coin, they don’t conflict with each other; they complement each other. Both teach us something vital. Paul looks at what goes on internally; James talks about the external results. Paul says, “We’re saved by faith.”&nbsp;James says, “This is what saving faith looks like.”</p>

<p>My own interpretive paraphrase captures the sense of it:</p>

<blockquote>(21) Consider Abraham for a minute (remember him, the father of true faith?). His life is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. He demonstrated to everyone the content of his faith when he obeyed God by offering up Isaac on the altar. (22) His action was a clear, visible demonstration to us that his faith was not a bunch of words. To him, faith and works went hand in hand; they were two sides of the same coin. The exercise of one caused the other to grow. (23) Years before, God had declared Abraham righteous because of his faith (“And Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness”&nbsp;Genesis 15:6). Abraham’s obedience regarding Isaac was visible proof that God’s earlier declaration of his faith was accurate and well deserved. Abraham’s actions fulfilled God’s word, demonstrating his friendship with God.</blockquote>

<p>The entire truth is conveniently captured for us in one passage, Titus 3:4-8:</p>

<blockquote>But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that being justified by His grace we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life. This is a trustworthy statement; and concerning these things I want you to speak confidently, so that those who have believed God may be careful to engage in good deeds. These things are good and profitable for men.</blockquote>

<p>Christians need “justification”&nbsp;plus “justification.”&nbsp;Faith alone saves, but faith that is alone is not the genuine article. It’s not saving faith.</p>

<h2>Resources for Additional Study</h2>

<p><a href="http://edrmx.rxdtq.servertrust.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=CD105" target="_blank">Decision Making and Will of God</a></p>
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title: The Real Murderers: Atheism or Christianity?
topic: History
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-real-murderers-atheism-or-christianity-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>I got a call from a gentleman from San Francisco who was exorcised about Christian missionaries going into foreign lands. Then he started talking about not only the destruction of indigenous beliefs, but also the destruction of missionaries. That’s what he wanted to see happen. He also said that Christians and religious groups are responsible for the greatest massacres of history. It turns out he was quite supportive of Wicca and indigenous religions which worship the Mother Earth force, Gaia. This is essentially the basic foundation for witchcraft and I made a comment then that this was basically what he was talking about.</p>

<p>But a couple of the things that he said were a challenge to me. Not only did he assert that historically missionaries have destroyed cultures and indigenous religions at the point of a gun, but also Christianity and religion were responsible for most of the bloodshed in the world, or the great majority of it. I’ve heard this claim before. I wanted to respond with more detail because I’m sure you’ve heard these things as well.</p>

<p>I have a tactic that I employ in situations like this that is called “Just the Facts, Ma’am.”&nbsp;In other words, there are times when you’re faced with objections to Christianity or your point of view that really fail with an accurate assessment of the facts. There are people who make accusations and assertions that are empirically false. This is one of them.</p>

<p>The assertion is that religion has caused most of the killing and bloodshed in the world. The greatest atrocities committed against man were done in the name of God.</p>

<p>Before I get to the particular facts, there is more than just a factual problem here. There is a theoretical problem as well, and I tried to make the point that we must distinguish between what an individual or group of people do and what the code that they allegedly follow actually asserts. The fact is that there are people who do things consistently that are inconsistent with the code that they allegedly follow. But often times when that happens, especially where religion is concerned, the finger is pointed not at the individual who is choosing to do something barbaric, but at the code he claims to represent. The only time it’s legitimate to point to the code as the source of barbarism is if the code is, in fact, the source of barbarism. People object to a religion that used barbaric means to spread the faith. But one can only use that as an objection against the religion if it’s the religion itself that asserts that one must do it this way, as opposed to people who try to promote the spread of the religion in a forceful fashion in contradiction to what the religion actually teaches.</p>

<p>It’s my understanding that much of Islam has been spread by the edge of the sword. That isn’t because Muslim advocates were particularly violent. It’s because their religion actually advocates this kind of thing. The difference between that and Christianity is that when Christianity was spread by the edge of the sword it was done so in contradistinction to the actually teachings of Christianity. This is when individual people who claim to be Christians actually did things that were inconsistent with their faith.</p>

<p>I’ve had some people that have told me when I’ve brought this up, “That’s not a fair defense. You can’t simply say that those people who committed the Crusades or the Inquisition or the witch burnings weren’t real Christians. That’s illegitimate.”&nbsp;My response is, why? We know what a real Christian is. A real Christian is someone who believes particular things and lives a particular kind of lifestyle. John makes it clear that those who consistently live unrighteously are <em>ipso facto</em> by definition not part of the faith. So why is it illegitimate for me to look at people who claim to be Christians, yet live unrighteous lives, and promote genocide to say that these people aren’t living consistently with the text, therefore you can’t really call them Christians. I think that’s legitimate.</p>

<p>For example, no one would fault the Hippocratic Oath, which is a very rigid standard of conduct for physicians, just because there are doctors who don’t keep it. We wouldn’t say there’s something wrong with the oath, the code that they allegedly follow. We’d say there was something wrong with the individuals who don’t live up to the ideals of that code. That is the case frequently where people waving the Bible in one hand are also waving a bloody sword in the other. The two are inconsistent. So it’s not fair or reasonable to fault the Bible when the person who’s waving the sword is doing things that are contradictory to what the Bible teaches ought to be done.</p>

<p>So that’s the first important thing to remember when you face an objection like this. Distinguish between what a person does and what the code they claim to follow actually asserts. Christianity is one thing, and if we’re going to fault Christianity we must fault its teachings and not fault it because there are people who say they are Christians but then live a life that is totally morally divergent from what Christianity actually teaches.</p>

<p>As I said earlier, this kind of objection falls when you employ a tactic I call “Just the Facts, Ma’am,”&nbsp;and I’d like to give you some of those facts. My assertion as I responded to the gentleman who called last week was simply this, it is true that there are Christians who do evil things. Even take people’s lives. This is an indication that these people aren’t truly Christians, but it may be true also that people with the right heart, but the wrong head do things that are inappropriate, like I think might have been the case in the Salem Witch Trials.</p>

<p>My basic case is that religion doesn’t promote this kind of thing; it’s the exception to the rule. The rule actually is that when we remove God from the equation, when we act and live as if we have no one to answer to but ourselves, and if there is not God, then the rule of law is social Darwinism—the strong rule the weak. We’ll find that, quite to the contrary, it is not Christianity and the belief in the God of the Bible that results in carnage and genocide. But it’s when people reject the God of the Bible that we are most vulnerable to those kinds of things that we see in history that are the radical and gross destruction of human lives.</p>

<p>Now for the facts.</p>

<p>Let’s take the Salem Witchcraft Trials. Apparently, between June and September of 1692 five men and fourteen women were eventually convicted and hanged because English law called for the death penalty for witchcraft (which, incidentally, was the same as the Old Testament). During this time there were over 150 others that were imprisoned. Things finally ended in September 1692 when Governor William Phipps dissolved the court because his wife had been accused. He said enough of this insanity. It was the colony’s leading minister, by the way, who finally ended the witch hunt in 1693 and those that remained in prison were released. The judge that was presiding over the trials publicly confessed his guilt in 1697. By the way, it’s interesting to note that this particular judge was very concerned about the plight of the American Indian and was opposed to slavery. These are views that don’t sit well with the common caricature of the radical Puritans in the witch hunt. In 1711 the colonies legislatures made reparation to the heirs of the victims. They annulled the convictions.</p>

<p>I guess the point is that there was a witch hunt. It was based on theological reasons, but it wasn’t to the extent that is usually claimed. I think last week the caller said it was millions and millions that were burned at the stake as witches. It certainly wasn’t the case in this country. It seemed that the witch hunt was a result of theological misapplication and the people who were involved were penitent. The whole witch hunt lasted only a year. Sixteen people were hanged in New England for witchcraft prior to 1692. In the 1692 witch hunt nineteen were executed. So you’ve got thirty-five people. One hundred fifty imprisoned. This is not at all to diminish or minimize the impact of the American witch hunts which resulted in thirty-five deaths. But thirty-five is not millions. It is not hundreds of thousands. It’s not even hundreds. It’s thirty-five. This was not genocide.</p>

<p>Now in Europe it was a little different. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft in 1431. Over a period of 300 years, from 1484 to 1782, the Christian church put to death 300,000 women accused of witchcraft, about 1000 per year. Again, I don’t want to minimize the impact of 1000 lives lost a year, but here we’re talking about a much, much smaller number over a long period of time than what has been claimed in the past.</p>

<p>In America we’re talking thirty-five people. In Europe over 300 years, we’re talking about 300,000. Not millions. The sources here are <em>World Book Encyclopedia</em> and <em>Encyclopedia Americana</em>. You can also read in <em>Newsweek</em>, August 31, 1992. I was accused of being a liar last week. I’m trying to give you the facts from reputable sources that show that the accusations from last week aren’t accurate.</p>

<p>There were two Inquisitions. One of them began right around the end of the first millennium in 1017. It began as an attempt to root out heretics and occurred chiefly in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The Spanish Inquisition followed in the fourteenth century and was much bloodier. It began as a feudal aristocracy which forced religious values on society. Jews were caught in the middle of this and many of them were killed. About 2000 executions took place. The Inquisition that took place at the turn of the millennium, less than that. So we’re talking about thousands of people, not millions.</p>

<p>There were actually seven different Crusades and tens of thousands died in them. Most of them were a misdirected attempt to free the Holy Land. Some weren’t quite like that. There were some positive aspects to them, but they were basically an atrocity over a couple hundred years. The worst was the Children’s Crusade. All of the children who went to fight died along the way. Some were shipwrecked and the rest were taken into slavery in Egypt.</p>

<p>A blight on Christianity? Certainty. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religion criminals have committed.</p>

<p>My point is not that Christians or religions people aren’t to vulnerable to terrible crimes. Certainly they are. But it is not religion that produces these things; it is the denial of Biblical religion that generally leads to this kind of things. The statistics that are the result of irreligious genocide stagger the imagination.</p>

<p>My source is <em>The Guinness Book of World Records</em>. Look up the category “Judicial”&nbsp;and under the subject of “Crimes: Mass Killings,” the greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign against the government of another is 26.3 million Chinese during the regime of Mao Tse Tung between the years of 1949 and May 1965. The Walker Report published by the U.S. Senate Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed the parameters of the total death toll in China since 1949 between 32 and 61.7 million people. An estimate of 63.7 million was published by <em>Figaro</em> magazine on November 5, 1978.</p>

<p>In the U.S.S.R. the Nobel Prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimates the loss of life from state repression and terrorism from October 1917 to December 1959 under Lenin and Stalin and Khrushchev at 66.7 million.</p>

<p>Finally, in Cambodia (and this was close to me because I lived in Thailand in 1982 working with the broken pieces of the Cambodian holocaust from 1975 to 1979) “as a percentage of a nation’s total population, the worst genocide appears to be that in Cambodia, formerly Kampuchea. According to the Khmer Rouge foreign minister, more than one third of the eight million Khmer were killed between April 17, 1975 and January 1979. One third of the entire country was put to death under the rule of Pol Pott, the founder of the Communist Part of Kampuchea. During that time towns, money and property were abolished. Economic execution by bayonet and club introduced for such offenses as falling asleep during the day, asking to too many questions, playing non-communist music, being old and feeble, being the offspring of an undesirable, or being too well educated. In fact, deaths in the Tuol Sleng interrogation center in Pnom Penh, which is the capitol of Kampuchea, reached 582 in a day.”</p>

<p>Then in Chinese history of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries there were three periods of wholesale massacre. The numbers of victims attributed to these events are assertions rather than reliable estimates. The figures put on the Mongolian invasion of northern China form 1210 to 1219 and from 1311 to 1340 are both on the order of 35 million people. While the number of victims of bandit leader Chang Hsien-chung, known as the Yellow Tiger, from 1643 to 1647 in the Sichuan province has been put at over one million people.</p>

<p>China under Mao Tse Tung, 26.3 million Chinese. According the Walker Report, 63.7 million over the whole period of time of the Communist revolution in China. Solzhenitsyn says the Soviet Union put to death 66.7 million people. Kampuchea destroyed one third of their entire population of eight million Cambodians. The Chinese in medieval history, somewhere in the vicinity of 35 million and 40 million people. Ladies and gentlemen, make note that these deaths were the result of organizations or points of view or ideologies that had left God out of the equation. None of these involve religion. And all but the very last actually assert atheism.</p>

<p>It seems to me that my colleague Dennis Prager’s illustration cannot be improved upon to show the self-evident capability of Biblical religion to restrain evil. He asks this in this illustration. If you were walking down a dark street at night in the center of Los Angeles and you saw ten young men walking towards you, would you feel more comfortable if you knew that they had just come from a Bible class? Of course, the answer is certainly you would. That demonstrates that religion, and Biblical religion in particular, is a mitigator of evil in the world.</p>

<p>It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the detail it produces evil because the individual people are actually living in a rejection of the tenants of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it can produce it, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people a result of the rejection of God.</p>
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title: Evil as Evidence for God
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/05/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/evil-as-evidence-for-god
content:
            <div> 
		<p>The presence of evil in the world is considered by some to be solid evidence against the existence of God. I think it proves just the opposite. The entire objection hinges on the observation that true evil exists “out there”&nbsp;as an objective feature of the world. Therein lies the problem for the atheist.</p>

<p>To say something is evil is to make a moral judgment, and moral judgments make no sense outside of the context of a moral standard. Evil as a value judgment marks a departure from that standard of morality. If there is no standard, there is no departure.</p>

<p>Evil can’t be real if morals are relative. Evil is real, though. That’s why people object to it. Therefore, objective moral standards must exist as well. This discovery invites certain questions. Where do morals come from and why do they seem to apply only to human beings? Are they the product of chance? What world view makes sense out of morality?</p>

<p>We can answer these questions by simply reflecting on the nature of a moral rule. By making observations about the effect—morality—we can then determine its characteristics and then ask what cause is adequate to produce it.</p>

<h2>Four Observations about Morality</h2>

<p>The first thing we observe about moral rules is that, though they exist, they are not physical because they don’t seem to have physical properties. We won’t bump into them in the dark. They don’t extend into space. They have no weight. They have no chemical characteristics. Instead, they are immaterial things we discover through the process of thought, introspection, and reflection without the aid of our five senses.</p>

<p>This is a profound realization. We have, with a high degree of certainty, stumbled upon something real. Yet it’s something that can’t be proven empirically or described in terms of natural laws. This teaches us there’s more to the world than just the physical universe. If non-physical things—like moral rules—truly exist, then materialism as a world view is false.</p>

<p>There seem to be many other things that populate the world, things like propositions, numbers, and the laws of logic. Values like happiness, friendship, and faithfulness are there, too, along with meanings and language. There may even be persons—souls, angels, and other divine beings.</p>

<p>Our discovery also tells us some things really exist that science has no access to, even in principle. Some things are not governed by natural laws. Science, therefore, is not the only discipline giving us true information about the world. It follows, then, that naturalism as a world view is also false.</p>

<p>Our discovery of moral rules forces us to expand our understanding of the nature of reality and open our minds to the possibility of a host of new things that populate the world in the invisible realm.</p>

<p>Second, moral rules are a kind of communication. They are propositions: intelligent statements of meaning conveyed from one mind to another. The propositions are in the form of imperatives, commands. A command only makes sense when there are two minds involved, one giving the command and one receiving it.</p>

<p>There’s a third thing we notice when we reflect on moral rules. They have a force we can actually feel prior to any behavior. This is called the incumbency of moral rules, the “oughtness”&nbsp;of morality we discussed earlier. It appeals to a person��s will, compelling him to act in a certain way, though he often disregards its force and chooses to disobey.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>

<p>Finally, there is a deep discomfort that is felt when we violate clear and weighty moral rules, an ethical pain, making us aware that we have done something wrong and are deserving of punishment. This sense of guilt carries with it not just the uncomfortable awareness of wrong-doing, but also the dread of having to answer for our deed. Distraction and denial may temporarily numb ethical pain, but it never entirely disappears. Only sociopaths succeed in silencing the conscience completely.</p>

<h2>Narrowing Our Options</h2>

<p>These four observations provide us with a foundation from which to answer the question, “Why morality?”&nbsp;We need only determine the possible options, then ask which option best accounts for our observations.</p>

<p>A word of caution here. At this point our discussion gets personal, because the ultimate answer to our question has serious ramifications for the way we live our lives. It’s tempting to abandon careful thinking when conclusions that make us uncomfortable come into focus. Faced with a limited number of options, no one sits on the fence. When the full range of choices is clear, rejection of one means acceptance of another remaining.</p>

<p>Our options are limited to three. One: Morality is simply an illusion. Two: Moral rules exist, but are mere accidents, the product of chance. Three: Moral rules are not accidents, but instead are the product of intelligence. Which option makes most sense given our four observations about morality?</p>

<p>Some want to argue that morals just don’t exist. They’re nothing but illusions, useful fictions that help us to live in harmony. This is the relativist’s answer. This view is not an option for those who raise the problem of evil. Their complaint about the injustice of the universe is a tacit admission of morality. C.S. Lewis observed:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple...If there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. <em>Dark</em> would be without meaning&nbsp;[emphasis in the original].<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>

<p>Some take a second route. They admit that objective moral laws must exist, but contend they are just accidents. We discover them as part of the furniture of the universe, so to speak, but they have no explanation, nor do they need one.</p>

<p>This won’t do for a good reason: Moral rules that have no ground or justification need not be obeyed. An illustration is helpful here. One evening in the middle of a Scrabble game, you notice the phrase “do not go”&nbsp;formed in the random spray of letter tiles on the table. Is this a command that ought to be obeyed? Of course not. It’s not a command at all, just a random collection of letters.</p>

<p>Commands are communications between two minds. Chance might conceivably create the appearance of a moral rule, but there can be no command if no one is speaking. Since this phrase is accidental, it can safely be ignored.</p>

<p>Even if a person is behind the communication, one could ignore the command if it isn’t backed by appropriate authority. If I stood at an intersection and put my hand up, cars might stop voluntarily, but they’d have no duty to respond. They could ignore me with no fear of punishment because I have no authority to direct traffic. If, on the other hand, a policeman replaced me, traffic would come to a halt.</p>

<p>What is the difference between the policeman and me? My authority is not grounded. It doesn’t rest on anything solid. The policeman, however, represents the government, so his authority is justified. The state can appoint legitimate representatives to carry out its will because it is operating within its proper domain.</p>

<p>We learn from this that a law has moral force when it is given by an appropriate authority, one operating within its legitimate jurisdiction. If one violates such a law, he could be punished. The same is true of moral laws. They have incumbency—force to them—if there is a proper authority behind them. Moral rules that appear by chance have no such grounding.</p>

<p>Our second option fails because it doesn’t explain three important features we observed about morality. Chance morality fails to be a communication between two minds, and therefore, cannot be imperative. It doesn’t account for the incumbency of moral rules, nor does it make sense of the guilt and expectation of punishment one feels when those rules are violated.</p>

<h2>One Remaining Answer</h2>

<p>Only one answer remains as a possible source of morality. If morality is not an illusion and not the product of chance, then morals must be the result of an intelligent designer. Universal moral laws that have genuine incumbency require an author whose proper domain is the universe, who has the moral authority to enforce his laws, and the power to ultimately mete out perfect justice.</p>

<p>What is the best explanation for the existence of morality? A personal God whose character provides an absolute standard of goodness is the best answer. An impersonal force won’t do because a moral rule is both a proposition and a command, and these are features of minds. Ethicist Richard Taylor explains:</p>

<p>A duty is something that is owed...but something can be owed only to some person or persons. There can be no such thing as a duty in isolation...The concept of moral obligation [is] unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain, but their meaning is gone.<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3">3</a></sup></p>

<p>Only one option makes sense of each observation about morality: a personal God, who is the creator of both the material and the immaterial domain. Moral laws suggest a moral law giver. His laws are a communication of his desires, imperatives expected to be obeyed.</p>

<p>The existence of God also explains the incumbency of morality. Ethics are adequately grounded because God is a proper authority for moral rules. The universe is his possession because he created it, and he has the right to rule over it.</p>

<p>Ethical pain—true moral guilt—also makes sense. Since morals are not disembodied principles, but personal commands, a violation is not just a broken rule, but an offense against the person who made the rule. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard has pointed out that a man could not have anything upon his conscience if God did not exist.</p>

<p>Some attempt to argue that they don’t need God to have morality. They can live a moral life even though they don’t believe in a divine being. No one argues, though, that an atheist can behave in a way one might call moral. The real question is, “Why ought he?”&nbsp;Trappist monk Thomas Merton put it this way:</p>

<p>In the name of whom or what do you ask me to behave? Why should I go to the inconvenience of denying myself the satisfactions I desire in the name of some standard that exists only in your imagination? Why should I worship the fictions that you have imposed on me in the name of nothing?<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4">4</a></sup></p>

<p>A moral atheist is like a man sitting down to dinner who doesn’t believe in farmers, ranchers, fishermen, or cooks. He believes the food just appears, with no explanation and no sufficient cause. This is silly. Either his meal is an illusion, or someone provided it. In the same way, if morals really exist, as I have argued, then some cause adequate to explain the effect must account for them. God is the most reasonable solution.</p>

<h2>The Final Verdict</h2>

<p>The argument against God based on the problem of evil can only be raised if some form of moral objectivism is true. Morals, therefore, exist. I need not give a complete taxonomy of ethical guidelines to make my case. If there is even one moral absolute, it invites the question, “What kind of world view explains the existence of this moral rule?”</p>

<p>Atheism can’t make any sense of it. Neither can most Eastern religions. If reality is an illusion, as they hold, then the distinction between good and evil is ultimately rendered meaningless. Something like the Judeo-Christian or Muslim idea of God must be true to adequately account for moral laws.</p>

<p>Morality grounded in God explains our hunger for justice—our desire for a day of final reckoning when all wrongs are made right, when innocent suffering is finally redeemed, when all the guilty are punished and the righteous are rewarded.</p>

<p>This also explains our own personal sense of dread. We feel guilty because we are guilty. We know deep down inside that we have offended a morally perfect being who has the legitimate authority to punish us. We also know we will have to answer for our own crimes against God.</p>

<p>In the end, we’re forced to accept one of two alternatives. Either relativism is true or morality is true. Either we live in a universe in which morality is a meaningless concept and are forever condemned to silence regarding the problem of evil, or moral rules exist and we're beholden to a moral God who holds us accountable to His law.</p>

<p>There are no other choices. As Dr. Francis Schaeffer put it, “These are not probability answers; [these] are the only answers. It is this or nothing.”<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5">5</a></sup> If one is certainly false, the other is certainly true. That’s the way rationality works.</p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">Some object to the term “moral law”&nbsp;because moral laws can be broken, while scientific laws are inviolable. I have two responses. First, it’s not obvious that scientific laws can never be violated. Miracles entail the suspension of natural law, and miracles seem to at least be possible, if not actual, unless one arbitrarily asserts naturalism. Second, moral laws are different from natural laws precisely at this point. The nature of a moral law is that it can be disobeyed by creatures with moral free will. If it couldn’t be disobeyed, it wouldn’t qualify as a moral law. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:2">C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1960, paperback), p. 45. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:2"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:3">Richard Taylor, Ethics, Faith, and Reason (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1985), pp. 83-4. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:3"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:4">Quoted in Phillip Yancy, “The Other Great Commission,”&nbsp;Christianity Today, October 7, 1996, p. 136. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:4"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:5">Francis Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, from The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1982), <em>vol. 1, p. 303.</em> <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:5"> ↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
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title: Abortion and Human Rights
topic: Bioethics
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/04/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/abortion-and-human-rights
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Greg convincingly describes how the issue of abortion is truly no different than the issue of slavery. The issue to be considered is the issue of human rights.</em></p>

<p>Let me ask you a question. Are you against slavery? Do you believe that the issue of slavery is a moral position? Are laws legislating that particular moral position appropriate? What you’ve said is that it’s appropriate to legislate certain moral issues and that you’d be in favor of that. The economic issue would actually be on the side of the South because slavery is what propped up the economic system of the South. When slaves were emancipated it gutted them of their economic force. Let’s remove the economic argument.</p>

<p>Based solely on morality, are you willing to say that the moral issue of slavery should be enforced simply as a moral issue? This is a very important point. Many people have offered the objection that we should not force a particular morality in the issue of abortion. My questions are very pointed and leading, and they were simply to make the point that virtually everybody who makes that kind of objection actually does believe that there are cases in which morality should be legislated. We talked about the obvious issue of slavery because there is the human rights issue that is at stake.</p>

<p><strong>The question for us is whether the unborn child is a human being that has inalienable rights in the same way that a black is a human being that has inalienable rights.</strong></p>

<p>My encouragement to you and anyone else who would espouse the same position is to understand that the pro-life side is arguing this issue on the basis of human rights. The question for us is whether the unborn child is a human being that has inalienable rights in the same way that a black is a human being that has inalienable rights. If that is the case, it is just as appropriate for us to legislate on the abortion issue as it is in the slavery issue. It’s not just a casual parallel because in 1859 Judge Taney on the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision that declared that black people were not human beings and did not deserve protection under the law. That was a Supreme Court decision that was later overturned by The Emancipation Proclamation.</p>

<p>The point I’m making is that if you don’t address this issue on a human rights basis then you’re not addressing it on the basis that pro-lifers are addressing it. The questions should be asked about the appropriateness of abortion or about laws against abortion based on a human rights issue. To be honest with you, I and virtually every other pro-lifer will abandon the fight if the unborn child is not a human being worthy of being protected. We’re not interested in getting into people’s bedrooms and telling them how to have sex and how to live. We’re not interested in restricting choices because we are bigoted and want to make people’s lives miserable. We’re interested in human rights just like those who argued against slavery.</p>

<p>If you are to reject my position on abortion, that’s your prerogative. I respect your right to do that. But I would encourage you to engage intellectually the real critical issue: is the unborn child a human being? If you can answer for yourself with some rationality that there is no reason to believe that this is a human being, then I think you’ve justified your position. But I don’t think the simple objection that it’s not appropriate for one person to force their morality on someone else is ultimately legitimate. When questioned a little bit you acknowledge that that’s not a valid way of approaching human rights issues.</p>

<p>What about cases of rape and incest?</p>

<p><strong>During the slavery debate, both in this country and at the turn of the century in England, the issues were framed in the same way: choice, the government shouldn’t be in the position of legislating morality, the government shouldn’t tell us how to run our private lives. Yet there a human being clearly was at issue.</strong></p>

<p>I don’t say that it’s permissible in those cases. I think you’re pointing out an inconsistency in this discussion that is very valid. I agree entirely and this is why I do not hold that abortion should be allowed in those cases. This really demonstrates how important the question of the human rights of the child is because it compels us to certain conclusions. It removes from us the liberty of making ad hoc decisions based on our emotions. We must approach this in a disciplined way as a transcendent human rights issue. If we don’t do that we are not doing the issue justice.</p>

<p>But what I don’t want anybody to do is to mistakenly frame this issue as one of choice. It is not an issue of choice any more than slavery was an issue of choice. It’s not an issue of what a woman can do with her body. Frankly, a woman can’t do what she wants with her own body and neither can men. Laws restrict those freedoms given the right set of circumstances.</p>

<p>The issue to be considered here is the issue of human rights. It’s unfortunate that the press and certain people arguing for one position have framed the question differently because they have missed the entire point. During the slavery debate, both in this country and at the turn of the century in England, the issues were framed in the same way: choice, the government shouldn’t be in the position of legislating morality, the government shouldn’t tell us how to run our private lives. Yet there a human being clearly was at issue. Even then when you had a living, breathing human being standing there staring back, they still could argue that way. I’m not a bit surprised that it could be done with an unseen infant that is growing out of sight in the womb of its mother.</p>

<p>Anyway that’s my personal challenge to you to rethink this issue in a different fashion.</p>
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title: A Second Endowment Ceremony?
topic: Other Worldviews
author: Amy K. Hall
date: 01/16/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/a-second-endowment-ceremony-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>I have just now learned something about Mormonism I never heard about before today: the second Endowment ceremony (or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_anointing" target="_blank">second anointing</a>)—the “calling and election made sure.” It’s a temple ceremony offered only to married couples who have proved their worthiness over time and been personally invited by the prophet. The ceremony is not well known by members, and those who are invited to receive it are not allowed to tell others of their change in status, which I suppose explains why it isn’t much talked about.</p>

<p>I still need to do some more research into this, but here’s what it appears to be about: While the blessings of the covenant Mormons enter into through baptism and the first Endowment are conditional (that is, exaltation to the highest level of heaven and advancement to godhood depend on obedience to their commandments and ordinances), those who receive the ceremony of second anointing are sealed <em>unconditionally</em> to the highest blessings. The receipt of the blessings has been “made sure.” Here are some <a href="https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1976/07/accepted-of-the-lord-the-doctrine-of-making-your-calling-and-election-sure?lang=eng" target="_blank">words</a> from Bruce R. McConkie (who is now deceased, but formerly held the office of Apostle in the LDS Church) describing the concept:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><strong><em>[5] What is meant by having one's calling and election made sure?</em></strong></p>

<p>To have one’s calling and election made sure is to be sealed up unto eternal life; it is to have the unconditional guarantee of exaltation in the highest heaven of the celestial world; it is to receive the assurance of godhood; it is, in effect, to have the day of judgment advanced, so that an inheritance of all the glory and honor of the Father's kingdom is assured prior to the day when the faithful actually enter into the divine presence to sit with Christ in his throne, even as he is “set down” with his “Father in his throne.” (Rev 3:21.) (<em>Doctrinal New Testament Commentary</em>, 3:325–353)</p>
</blockquote>

<p>A man who went through the ceremony described his understanding of it <a href="http://blog.mrm.org/2013/01/the-second-anointing-of-modern-day-mormonism/" target="_blank">this way</a>:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>With the second endowment, the conditions are removed as you have already proven your faithfulness and entitlement to the blessings. Therefore, you are sealed up to the highest degree of the celestial kingdom unconditionally. Any sins committed afterward may render you liable to the buffetings in the flesh, but they will not prevent you from attaining your exaltation. The only sin that is unpardonable is denying the Holy Ghost (or in some passages the shedding of innocent blood).</p>
</blockquote>

<p>While our goal as Christians is not to “[b]ecome as God is, enjoying to the full every characteristic, perfection, and attribute which he possesses and which dwell in him independently,” as McConkie <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20041105211710/http://emp.byui.edu/marrottr/CallElectSurJSBRMc.htm" target="_blank">describes</a> his expected blessings, I’m nevertheless excited to see that something exists in Mormonism similar to the security and rest we experience as God’s adopted children.</p>

<p>Here’s why I’m so happy to find this: Communicating Christian theology to Mormons is very difficult. We use many of the same words but ascribe different meanings to those words. The result is that one is never quite sure if the gulf of understanding has been crossed. One minute they seem to agree, and in the next, they’re saying the opposite.</p>

<p>But here is a point of contact! A concept in Mormonism of certainty about receiving all eternal blessings! What do they think of this idea? Do they long for it? How would they feel if they received it? I can’t wait to ask them this! For this is what we Christians have already, and we didn’t achieve it through our works, as Paul explains in Ephesians 1-2:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>In [Christ], you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Having <em>believed</em>, we were <em>sealed in Him</em>. God “has seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (2:6) and “has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” (1:3)—both statements are past tense. Christ has permanently obtained all blessings for us, and as God’s adopted children (1:4–5), we are certain heirs of them.</p>

<p>And now I know the concept is out there, in their own religion, for Mormons to ponder and be captivated by—a glorious, but distant, guarantee of secured blessings, out of reach for most. Now we can tell them the good news that Christ has already reached it for us.</p>
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title: Why Not Use Ridicule?
topic: Tactics and Tools
author: Amy K. Hall
date: 01/30/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/why-not-use-ridicule-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Should we use ridicule as a tool of persuasion? Atheist John Loftus says yes.</p>

<p>Christopher Hitchens famously used to ask Christians to “name one moral action performed by a believer that could not have been done by a nonbeliever.” One of the problems with answering Hitchens’s challenge (see a more detailed discussion <a href="http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2008/09/hitchenss-chall.html" target="_blank">here</a>) is that a person who has a naturalistic worldview is unlikely to have exactly the same understanding of right and wrong as that of a Christian. Of course an atheist can act within his moral framework and do what he considers to be good, but if his ideas about what is moral are incorrect, then his actions will follow. And there are too many questions about who we are as human beings, the purpose of life, the diagnosis of what’s gone wrong and the prescription for fixing it, etc., etc. that we answer differently for us to come to the exact same conclusions about what is right and what is wrong.</p>

<p>For this reason, Hitchens’s charge is logically unanswerable. It’s simply the case that if there truly exists something moral a believer can do that a nonbeliever can’t, it’s because the believer sees it as moral <em>because he’s a believer</em> while the nonbeliever fails to see it as moral <em>because he’s a nonbeliever</em> (worshiping God would be one example of this). And if the atheist fails to see that action as moral, he won’t accept it as an example of a moral action he can’t (or won’t) perform. Therefore, no answer will ever satisfy him, even if it’s true.</p>

<p>So I don’t expect atheists to see this post as a challenge to their morality either. They reject the idea that we’re made in the image of God, so they reject the morality that flows from that idea. That’s to be expected. Proving to atheists that their morality is faulty is not my purpose in writing this (though I’d be happy for their moral intuition to be stirred). Instead, what I hope this will do is shed some light on how our different worldviews affect our understanding of what is moral. We live in a society that’s been soaked in the Christian worldview for centuries, and we’ve come to think that what we believe to be moral is just “obvious.” People haven’t thought about how their understanding of morality has been <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-ortberg/six-surprising-ways-jesus_b_1773225.html" target="_blank">shaped by Christianity</a>, nor have they considered the consequences of stripping it away (though a look through past cultures would reveal that not everything is obvious).</p>

<p>Atheists don’t need to believe in God to do good—that is, they can follow moral precepts, informed by their moral intuition, which is capable of apprehending real moral truths. But what happens when their moral precepts (and <a href="http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/abortion-and-the-malleable-conscience.html" target="_blank">malleable consciences</a>) are wrongly shaped by their idea that there is no God?</p>

<p>Consider how John Loftus of Debunking Christianity reasons to the conclusion that one <a href="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2013/01/on-justifying-use-of-ridicule-and.html" target="_blank">ought to use ridicule</a> as a method of persuasion:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>The use of ridicule can be justified pragmatically. It works well under the right circumstances, depending on the issue and the potential effectiveness of using it. It is best used when the arguments are there to back it up, and when more people agree against the ideas that are being ridiculed…. That is, because we know Christianity is a delusion, and since deluded people cannot usually be argued out of their faith because they were never argued into it in the first place, the use of persuasion techniques like ridicule are rationally justifiable. So satire, ridicule and mockery are weapons that should be in our arsenal in this important cultural war of ideas.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>He explains how ridicule works:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>These people cannot be convinced by satire, so satire is not written to change their minds. It's written to marginalize them by laughing at them. It persuades people who don't yet have a settled opinion on the issue, in part by using social pressure. No one wants to be a laughingstock. No one wants to be the butt of a joke. If people are laughing at a particular view it pressures the undecided to distance themselves from it. It draws a line in the sand, so to speak. It can also silence people who think otherwise, for they won't want to speak up in a class on behalf of something most others will laugh at….</p>

<p>When something cannot be taken seriously it deserves our laughter…. It's a way to "come out of the closet," so to speak, to let others know they will be laughed at if they espouse certain ideas with a straight face. There is power in social pressure. There is power in numbers.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Ridicule is an effective tool, so why not use it? Why not use power to move people over to your side, if it “works”? There’s only one reason, and it’s a reason from the Christian worldview: human dignity.</p>

<p>For Loftus and others who do not believe in the sacred intrinsic value of every individual, the greater goal outweighs the damage to individual human persons—the simple moral precept of maintaining another’s dignity crumbles before a lofty cause. The morality of Christianity, on the other hand, offers no such exemption, as Jordan Ballor explains in his excellent post “<a href="http://www.acton.org/pub/commentary/2013/01/09/mundane-morality-les-mis%C3%A9rables" target="_blank">The Mundane Morality of Les Misérables</a>.” In Christianity, because of who God is and who we are as human beings under God, no one is excused from the everyday morality of treating people well, regardless of his goal, or his power, or whether or not doing otherwise would “work”:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>We find that the obligations of the moral order fall equally upon all human beings; we are all, regardless of our wealth, power, or fame, moral agents responsible for our actions before God and toward others….</p>

<p>It is tempting to think sometimes that the basic rules of morality do not apply to us, that we are somehow above or beyond the law. But the reality is that there is no special morality for those who exercise greater responsibilities, whether in familial, economic, ecclesiastical, or political contexts. It is true that there is often in such cases greater moral complexity, but there is no dispensation for those in places of authority [or influence] from mundane moral obligations.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>One of those mundane moral obligations is the obligation to respect the dignity of human beings because they are made in the image of God. God values individuals, not movements, so our actions had better reflect that. We’re commanded to reflect God—His undeserved grace and love—through the <em>means</em> of our persuasion as well as the ends (as I wrote about <a href="http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2013/01/be-a-parable-of-gods-grace.html" target="_blank">here</a>).</p>

<p>Why does Loftus reach such a different conclusion about how to treat his ideological enemies? Why is his determining question, “What works to achieve the desired goal?” rather than, “What would be in keeping with the dignity of human persons?” In an article titled “<a href="http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-910282?hpt=hp_c3" target="_blank">Why I Raise My Children Without God</a>,” another atheist gives us a clue:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>When we raise kids without God, we tell them the truth—we are no more special than the next creature. We are just a very, very small part of a big, big machine….</p>
</blockquote>

<p>And Loftus’s approach is the result of that “truth.”</p>

<p><a href="http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2013/01/why-not-use-ridicule.html#comments" target="_blank">COMMENTS</a></p>
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title: The New Atheists and the Old Testament
topic: Other Worldviews
author: Amy K. Hall
date: 01/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-new-atheists-and-the-old-testament
content:
            <div> 
		<p>I came across a <a href="http://www.apologetics315.com/2013/01/old-testament-new-atheists-peter-j.html" target="_blank">lecture</a> by Peter J. Williams that I found to be an excellent complement to this month’s Solid Ground (if you haven’t yet read Greg’s “The Canaanites: Genocide or Judgment?” you should read it <a href="/w/the-canaanites-genocide-or-judgment-" target="_blank">here</a>). The lecture is worth taking the time to watch (see below) or download as an <a href="http://apologetics315.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/peterjwilliams-oldtestament-newatheists.mp3" target="_blank">MP3</a>.</p>

<p>Williams points out that the New Atheists often make a very elementary mistake in the way they critique the morality of stories like the judgment of the Canaanites in the Old Testament: They don’t evaluate the whole story as it <em>is</em>, they critique a naturalistic story of their own making—a story where God doesn’t really exist and men are evilly using the idea of God to achieve their own nefarious ends (for example, as an excuse to commit genocide). When they examine the Bible this way, surprise! They find evil.</p>

<p>I’ve encountered this many times before (read these <a href="http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2009/11/shut-down-a-prolife-youtube-channel-with-a-good-argument-if-there-is-one/comments/page/4/#comments" target="_blank">comments</a> to see one of these conversations in action), so it’s something you need to be aware of and know how to counteract. Here’s how Williams responds to this move by the New Atheists:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>If we’re going to look at the fairness of something, it doesn’t matter whether it happened or not. We look at the fairness of the <em>story</em>. We could look at that in Tom and Jerry’s world, we could look at it in any story, whether something is fair or not. But if I’m going to judge the fairness of the story, I think it’s only fair to look at the <em>story world</em> that I’m looking at. I can’t judge the morality of Jerry’s actions against Tom, thinking of our physical laws. That’s not actually entering properly into understanding the story.</p>

<p>So I believe that in order for an atheist to critique the morality of the story in the Old Testament, they have to enter into that story…. If we’re going to consider the story, we have to consider <em>all</em> of the details in the story, including all of the characters in the story—and one of them, by the way, is called “God.” He’s a character in the story, and I can’t just say, “Well I don’t believe in God, so as I’m judging the story, I’ll sort of omit Him from the story.” That’s not fair….</p>

<p>When Dawkins tells the story [of the Old Testament], it goes like this: God doesn’t speak to anyone, no miracles are performed, there's no massive exodus. But then, I can judge all of the characters as if God hadn’t actually told them to do anything.</p>

<p>So in other words, he’s got his own naturalistic, watered-down version of Exodus, and <em>that’s</em> the thing that he attacks.</p>

<p>What’s the reality? When we look at the story in the Old Testament, firstly we have to go back to the beginning. And to understand God, we have to understand what He set up in the beginning. In the beginning God gave everyone life. That’s part of the story. I can’t just miss that out—it’s actually there. I could also say that God clearly doesn’t think violence is good, because in the beginning there was none. When I look at the end of His story in the Old Testament, as outlined in the prophets, I can see again His vision of peace—that the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and so on.</p>

<p>So that gives me some guidance as to how to understand the story. Trying to understand a bit of a story without reading the beginning and the end usually isn’t the best way before you write your literary criticism.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>When you’re having a conversation about the morality of the Bible, be sure that you’re actually discussing <em>the story in the Bible</em>, not a blend of the Bible’s story about God and the atheist’s naturalistic story without God. You need to hold the atheist to the idea that in order to judge the morality of a story (not its <em>truthfulness</em>, but its morality) and the characters in that story, one must take the story <em>as it is</em> and look at what it portrays from <em>within</em> that story.</p>

<p>Williams goes on in the lecture to evaluate the story of the judgment of the Canaanites in its own context and then concludes by noting how their destruction clarifies the gospel:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>Arguably, we could say that if the destruction of the Canaanites is the punishment for their sins, then that’s what sin deserved. And if Christ on the cross took our sins on Himself, then what happened to the Canaanites becomes [in] some way a picture for us of how awful sin is and how much Jesus Christ did on the cross for us, taking on Himself—that <em>one</em> person—the punishment for so many.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>That’s truly a staggering thought, when you consider it.</p>

<div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9" data-embed-id="ulCbh_1SlwE" data-styles="{&quot;width&quot;:&quot;100%&quot;}" style="width:100%"><iframe allow="encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" class="embed-responsive-item" frameborder="0" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ulCbh_1SlwE?rel=0" tabindex="0"></iframe></div>

<p>(HT: <a href="http://www.apologetics315.com/2013/01/old-testament-new-atheists-peter-j.html" target="_blank">Apologetics 315</a>)</p>

<p>See also:</p>

<p><a href="/w/the-judgment-that-led-to-salvation" target="_blank">The Judgment that Led to Salvation</a><br>
<a href="/w/not-genocide-but-capital-punishment" target="_blank">Not Genocide, but Capital Punishment</a><br>
<a href="/w/israel-s-failure-led-to-evil-and-suffering" target="_blank">Israel’s Failure Led to Evil and Suffering</a></p>
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title: Romans 1 on Homosexuality
topic: Sexuality and Gender
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/04/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/romans-1-on-homosexuality
content:
            <div> 
		<p>A. The text: Rom 1:18-32:</p>

<ol>
	<li>A rather lengthy passage in which Paul seems to use homosexuality as indicative both of man’s deep seated rebellion against God and God’s proper condemnation of man.</li>
	<li>“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks; but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.
	<p>&nbsp;</p>

	<p>“Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.</p>

	<p>For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.</p>

	<p>And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; {they are} gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and, although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.”</p>
	</li>
</ol>

<p>B. Argument to be analyzed:</p>

<ol>
	<li>This is the Jewish Paul looking across the Mediterranean at life in the capital of Graeco-Roman culture. Homosexuality is not the focus of his condemnation, but just one item on a list...Paul’s explanation for all this is that they have refused to acknowledge God, and therefore God has given them up to their own wicked desires...</li>
	<li>Paul is speaking to those who violate their sexual orientation, those that go against their natural desire. But a homosexual’s natural desire is for the same sex. Therefore this verse doesn’t speak of them. In fact, if you encourage a ’constitutional homosexual’&nbsp;to become heterosexual you are violating this passage.”</li>
</ol>

<p>C. Analysis:</p>

<ol>
	<li>First observation: This is about God being mad (“For the wrath of God [orge] is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men...”)</li>
	<li>Second observation: There is a specific progression that leads to this “orgy”&nbsp;of anger.
	<ol>
		<li>They “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”&nbsp;(v18)</li>
		<li>“They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.”&nbsp;(v25)</li>
		<li>“God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity...”&nbsp;(v24)</li>
		<li>They “exchanged the natural [sexual] function for that which is unnatural.”&nbsp;(v26)</li>
		<li>They encourage others to do the same (v32)</li>
		<li>Therefore, the wrath of God rightly falls on them (v18), they are worthy of death (v32), they are without excuse (v20).</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
</ol>

<p>D. Condemnation of homosexuality in the New Testament:</p>

<p>This text is a crystal clear condemnation of homosexuality in the New Testament by the Apostle Paul right in the middle of his most brilliant discourse on general revelation (i.e., he’s not speaking to a localized aberration of pedophilia or temple prostitution of “Mediterranean life in the capital of Graeco-Roman culture”)!</p>

<ol>
	<li>Here are the specific words Paul uses to describe this behavior:
	<ol>
		<li>An impurity and dishonoring to the body (v24)</li>
		<li>A degrading passion that’s unnatural (v29)</li>
		<li>An indecent act and an error (v27)</li>
		<li>Not proper and the product of a depraved mind (v28)</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>There’s only one way this can be missed: if you’re in total rebellion.
	<ol>
		<li>According to Paul, homosexual behavior is evidence of active, persistent rebellion against God.</li>
		<li>According to v32, it’s rooted in direct, willful, aggressive rebellion against God—true of any “Christian”&nbsp;defending his homosexuality.</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
	<li>“But I’m seeking God.”&nbsp;No, according to Paul you’re rejecting Him and instead are obeying your deeper rebellion.</li>
	<li>God’s conclusion: there’s “no excuse”&nbsp;(2 verses).</li>
</ol>

<p>E. Does this apply to all homosexuals?</p>

<ol>
	<li>What if one’s “natural”&nbsp;desire is for the same sex (co-called constitutional homosexuality)?</li>
	<li>There are five different reasons this is a bad argument. The first four are good; the fifth is unassailable.
	<ol>
		<li>The court is still out on scientific evidence.</li>
		<li>The “genetic" argument is a non-argument because it commits the naturalistic fallacy, i.e., you can’t get an “ought”&nbsp;from an “is.”
		<ol>
			<li>Many laws exist to keep you from doing what comes naturally.</li>
			<li>Paul is addressing this on a moral level, not a physiological level.</li>
		</ol>
		</li>
		<li>This interpretation introduces a whole new concept that is entirely foreign to the text.
		<ol>
			<li>If Paul did not understand genuine homosexuality, then how can one say that he excepted constitutional homosexuals when he wrote they “exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural”? This argument, therefore, self-destructs.</li>
			<li>Paul would also note that some men burned unnaturally towards women, &amp; vice versa if his interest was only in violating whatever sexual orientation one was born with.</li>
		</ol>
		</li>
		<li>Creates another problem: if all who have a desire for the same sex do so “naturally,”&nbsp;then who does this verse apply to? If everybody is only following their “natural”&nbsp;sexual desires, then to whom is Paul speaking?</li>
		<li>None of these previous arguments are even needed because Paul was not unclear about what he meant by “natural.”
		<ol>
			<li>1:26-27 “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another...”
			<ol>
				<li>“Function”&nbsp;(#5540) v 26&amp;27 kreesis, is used only these two times in NT but is frequently used in other literature of the time.</li>
				<li>According to Bauer, Arndt and Gingrich (BAG), A Greek/English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (University of Chicago Press), the definitive Greek language standard reference work, the word means “use, relations, function, especially of sexual intercourse.”</li>
			</ol>
			</li>
			<li>Paul is not talking about natural desires here in this instance, but natural functions.
			<ol>
				<li>“Natural”&nbsp;is not determined by what you want sexually, but by how you function sexually.
				<ol>
					<li>The body was built to function a specific way.</li>
					<li>Men were not built to function sexually with men.</li>
				</ol>
				</li>
				<li>Natural desires go with natural functions. The passion that exchanges the natural function of sex for the unnatural function is what Paul calls a degrading passion.</li>
				<li>Jesus clarified the natural, normal relationship:
				<ol>
					<li>Matthew 19:4-5 “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said ’For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother and shall cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh [sexual intercourse]’?”</li>
					<li>The desire is unnatural because it abandons the natural function.
					<ol>
						<li>Extramarital heterosexual sex is wrong because it exploits a natural function in an immoral way.</li>
						<li>Homosexuality is worse because it’s an immoral act based on the perversion of a natural function.</li>
					</ol>
					</li>
				</ol>
				</li>
			</ol>
			</li>
		</ol>
		</li>
	</ol>
	</li>
</ol>
</div>

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