# articles

title: Ground Rules for Talking to Mormons
topic: Other Worldviews
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/ground-rules-for-talking-to-mormons
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>You want to inform them, in as polite a way as possible, that they cannot knock on your door as missionaries promoting their religion, proselytizing and seeking to convert you, and then say you are out of bounds when you try to dig a little deeper to see if their case holds water or not.</em></p>

<p>Driving to the studio today I passed two young men in white shirts and bicycle helmets pedaling down the road, going from community to community LDS, Mormons on their missionary rounds. It triggered a thought I want to pass on to you because there are times when young men like that will be knocking at your door.</p>

<p>Much could be said about how to respond to them. One thing I have noticed is frequently they are glad to share with you their point of view, but they’re very quick to take offense if you actually offer up a challenge to their ideas. They’ll object if you want to have a principled discussion about what is true using your information from your Bible or other lines of evidence to challenge their ideas. This doesn’t always happen, but I’ve seen it enough to see a pattern.</p>

<p>When LDS missionaries knocked on my brother Dave’s door while he was working, he took off his tool belt and sat down to talk with them. When he began to press them on their case, though, they took offense. "We just came here to share our point of view and now you are trying to have an argument with us," they said. "We’re not here to argue with people. We just want to talk about our view and our experience." Dave pointed out that <em>they</em> knocked on <em>his</em> door for the purpose of changing his point of view. They weren’t just "sharing."</p>

<p>Sometimes they’ll take another tack. When you try to offer evidence counter to their view they’ll say, "You’re persecuting us." I have heard that as well. I’m not sure if LDS missionaries are actually taught to take that approach when challenged. Maybe they just see it modeled by their mentors, or maybe they have a persecution complex, but this is ready on their lips the minute you offer an objection to their point of view.</p>

<p>How do you get around that? If those young men I saw pedaled up to my house and knocked on my door, I’d want to politely set some ground rules.</p>

<p>It’s axiomatic that every door-to-door missionary thinks his view is true and yours is false when it comes to religion. That’s why he’s knocking in the first place. This is inherent in the missionary enterprise itself. When Dr. Beckwith was here last week he pointed out that when Mormons complain that we think they’re wrong and that’s being judgmental, as a part of a missionary religion themselves they don’t have that option open to them. They’re missionaries because they think they’re right and they’re out trying to persuade other people of their view. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.</p>

<p>With this in mind, it might be a good thing to settle this up front right after you answer the knock and hear, "Hello. We’re with the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, and we want to talk to you a little bit about our beliefs." I think it’s fair to first ask some questions, being very careful not to be quarrelsome or nasty.</p>

<p>Here’s the way I’d introduce the first question: "Great. I’d be glad to talk to you. I just want to be clear on a couple of things before we get going. <em>Do you think your religion is actually true, I mean really true?"</em></p>

<p>Now this is a "yes" or "no" question. Either they’ll say "yes"which is the right answer, because they do think their religion is true and that’s why they’re proselytizing or they’ll say "no," in which case I would ask, "If you don’t think Mormonism is true, then why are you knocking at my door?" So they are probably not going to say that. They might say, "Well, it’s true for us." Then I’m going to ask what that means. If it is just "true" for them that is, just their opinion that works for them then why should I listen? I have my own "truths" that work for me. What we are getting at is the fact that they actually believe their view about religion is right and ours is wrong. It’s not just true for <em>them</em>. That’s why we should change our religion and become Mormon.</p>

<p>Of course, that’s a politically incorrect way of putting it, and they may be uneasy having their position stated so baldly. (I had one LDS young man say, "I would never say anyone else is wrong in their religious view," a statement he ultimately retracted after my probing questions forced him to think a little more carefully about that remark in light of his missionary efforts.) To ease the discomfort you might say, "I’m not in the least offended by that view. My religion is a missionary religion, too. We think we’re right and others are wrong in so far as they differ from our beliefs. I just want us both to be clear on our positions. We both think we’re right and the other is mistaken. That’s all."</p>

<p>We continue. "Okay, so you believe your view is correct. That’s why you’re here. If my view is different from yours, then mine is incorrect and I should change my view if I’m a reasonable person and become a Mormon. So what this discussion is about is who��s view is true, yours or mine. Is that fair? Great—come on in."</p>

<p>Here’s what you’ve done: You’ve closed the back door on them. You’ve taken away their option to complain when you begin to challenge their claims and critique their views. You’ve established the ground rules.</p>

<p>Once again, the reason this is necessary is you may have LDS come to your door to share their view, to persuade you Mormonism is correct and your Christianity is false. Then when you get into discussion and point to problems with their view, they cry foul. That is illegitimate.</p>

<p>You want to inform them, in as polite a way as possible, that they cannot knock on your door as missionaries promoting their religion, proselytizing and seeking to convert you, and then say you are out of bounds when you try to dig a little deeper to see if their case holds water or not. That’s my point.</p>
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title: Who Says God Is Good?
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/28/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/who-says-god-is-good-1
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Central to the Gospel is the notion of “goodness.”&nbsp;God is good; we’re not good. God’s goodness prompts Him to rescue us from our non-goodness, our sin. Seems clear enough.</p>

<p>To some people, though, it is not clear at all. Something so central to Christianity is hopelessly vague to them: What is “good”?</p>

<p>“Well, that’s simple,”&nbsp;one may be tempted to say. “’Good’&nbsp;is whatever God says it is.”&nbsp;That answer, though, only magnifies the problem. It may explain what we mean when we say certain actions are good, but it makes it impossible to ever say God is good. And if God isn’t good, then a Gospel based on God’s goodness loses its legs.</p>

<p>Many philosophers have attempted to expose this as an internal flaw in the Christian’s notion of God and goodness. Is a thing right simply because God declares it so, or does God say it is good because He recognizes a moral code superior even to Him? There is the dilemma, and neither option seems right.</p>

<p>The general strategy used to defeat a dilemma is to show that it’s a false one. There are not two options, but three. And that’s the solution to this dilemma: a third option.</p>

<p>The Christian rejects the first option, that morality is an arbitrary function of God’s power. And he rejects the second option, that God is responsible to a higher law. There is no Law over God.</p>

<p>The third option is that an objective standard exists (this avoids the first horn of the dilemma). However, the standard is not external to God, but internal (avoiding the second horn). Morality is grounded in the immutable character of God, who is perfectly good. His commands are not whims, but rooted in His holy nature.</p>

<p>Could God simply decree that torturing babies was moral? “No,”&nbsp;the Christian answers, “God could never do that.”&nbsp;It’s not a matter of command. It’s a matter of character.</p>

<p>So the Christian answer avoids the dilemma entirely. Morality is not anterior to God—logically prior to Him—but rooted in His nature. As Scott Rae, professor at Biola University, puts it, “Morality is not grounded ultimately in God’s commands, but in His character, which then expresses itself in His commands.”&nbsp;In other words, whatever a good God commands will always be good.</p>

<p>The Christian’s job is not done, though, because the dilemma suggests a second problem I’ll address in our next podcast: What is “good”?</p>

<p>Yesterday I showed you the way out of the dilemma about goodness and God. But that raises another question: What is “good”? It doesn’t help to say that God is good unless we know what the term refers to.</p>

<p>According to Christian teaching, God is not good in the same way that a bachelor is an unmarried male. When we say God is good, we are giving additional information, namely that God has a certain quality. God is not the very same thing as goodness (identical to it). And goodness isn’t just whatever God is. It’s an essential characteristic of God, so there is no tautology.</p>

<p>A proper understanding of Christian teaching on God removes one problem, yet we still face another: What is “good”? How can we know goodness if we don’t define it first?</p>

<p>The way Abraham responded when he first learned of God’s intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah gives us a clue to the answer:</p>

<p>Far be it from Thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous and the wicked are treated alike. Far be it from Thee! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly&nbsp;(Genesis 18:25)?</p>

<p>Here’s the question. How did Abraham know justice required that God not treat the wicked and the righteous alike? As of yet, no commandments had been handed down.</p>

<p>Abraham knew goodness not by prior definition or by some decree of God, but through moral intuition. He didn’t need God to define justice (divine command). He knew it directly. His moral knowledge was built in.</p>

<p>Even the atheist understands what moral terms mean. He doesn’t need God in order to recognize morality. He needs God to make sense of what he recognizes.</p>

<p>This is precisely why the moral argument for God’s existence is such a good one. The awareness of morality leads to God much as the awareness of falling apples leads to gravity. Our moral intuitions recognize the effect, but what is the adequate cause? God is the only explanation for moral terms that make them coherent and our moral intuitions make sense.</p>
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title: The Rap on the Rapture
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/28/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-rap-on-the-rapture
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>What is the apocalyptic event described in First Thessalonians 4 and First Corinthians 15? Perhaps not exactly what you think it is.</em></p>

<p>The Old Testament doesn’t talk about the Rapture. The New Testament just makes casual references to it. Some might suggest details like Daniel 9 and the missing week of Daniel’s prophecy.</p>

<p>I was raised in a strong pre-tribulation rapture environment. To put it simply, I was raised at the feet of Hal Lindsey, spiritually speaking. The first three years I studied at his Bible training center in Westwood Village, called the Jesus Christ Light and Power House. I got a lot of good teaching there, but the eschatological teaching we got was this teaching, so I am very familiar with the point of view. I actually accepted it somewhat uncritically because that was my background, until I began to do some study and I made a couple of observations.</p>

<p>The first observation I made was that this doctrine, the disappearance of the church seven years prior to the return of Christ, is not a doctrine that anyone in the history of the church ever held to until about 150 years ago. That was the first red flag. There might be justifiable explanations for that and some people make those explanations. But my question is, if the Bible teaches this, why didn’t anybody see it for almost 2000 years? All of the church fathers expected to see the Antichrist which would leave at least a mid-trib rapture. My suspicion was, the reason the church didn’t see it for 2000 years is because it wasn’t there. The information about the rapture actually came from a prophecy that was external to the Scriptures, the Plymouth Brethren prophecy. With that prophecy in place, people went back to the Scriptures and then began to see what they saw as hints of this doctrine in different passages.</p>

<p>The second observation is something that people said on a regular basis. They would say, regarding this issue of the rapture, that it’s not really clear when. There are no direct Scriptures that specifically teach when. They maintained that we have to draw simple inferences from the Scriptures and this is why you see these kind of convoluted systems meant to infer the pre-trib rapture or the mid-trib rapture from the text. I saw something entirely different when I actually went to the text itself.</p>

<p>We have to have a procedural question that is answered first. What is the foundation from which we approach any issue of theology? In a broad sense, it’s going to be the Bible. In order to understand inferences best, we are safest when we proceed from an explicit Biblical teaching. If we have an explicit Biblical teaching, then the rule of Analogy of Faith is applied. That is, we interpret the unclear in light of the clear. The question is, do we have some clear statements in the Scripture about the timing of the event that is commonly called the rapture? I think we do. We have two very explicit statements that clearly describe the event that most people call the rapture. 1 Thessalonians 4 and then 1 Corinthians 15. There are other verses that some say refer to the rapture, but these are the only two I know of that explicitly describe this event.</p>

<p>What is interesting about both of these passages, is that both passages say exactly when it’s going to happen. There is no ambiguity. 1 Thessalonians 4 says, “For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with a voice of the archangel, with a trumpet of God and the dead in Christ shall rise first.”&nbsp;Then the next verse talks about being caught up with the Lord in the air. When does this happen? It happens at the coming of the Lord, according to verse 15. Then Paul says the dead in Christ shall rise first. Paul doesn’t call this event the rapture, which is our popular word. He calls it a resurrection. This is the resurrection that happens at the coming of the Lord.</p>

<p>1 Corinthians 15 gives another description of what most people would acknowledge to be the same event, where in a moment, or the twinkling of the eye at the last trumpet, the dead will be raised imperishable and the living shall be changed and the mortal will put on immortality. We see some of the same language used in this passage and we see some more details about this event. Notice that in 1 Thessalonians 4 he was talking about a resurrection. In 1 Corinthians 15, the entire chapter is about resurrection. But he tells the timing of it in verse 23. It says, “but each in his own order, Christ at the first fruits, after that those who are Christ’s at his coming and then comes the end.”</p>

<p>We can’t start with a prophecy from the Plymouth Brethren and then try to read all this new doctrine we got from outside of the Bible into our Bible. I’m just trying to start with the text and see what it says. The text says that the resurrection that we call the rapture happens at the coming at Christ. It says it very clearly in verse 23. First Christ, then those that are his at his coming, and then comes the end. It couldn’t be plainer that the resurrection, this event that is called the rapture, described by these verses, happens at the coming of the Lord. That is foundational and it’s explicitly taught in the text.</p>

<p>Let’s try to pull this together. It is very important for us to start from a foundation of an explicit Biblical teaching on this issue so that we can build from there and take what is really clear and then answer the other objections based on what we know to be true from the clear text. We have two passages that give, by all counts, an explicit description of what has been called the rapture. Both accounts tell when it is going to happen. They say it is going to happen at the coming of the Lord. That is our explicit foundation. Both describe it, both tell when. Now the question becomes, which coming of the Lord does the author here, Paul, have in mind?</p>

<p>Here is my answer. The second coming. Not the third coming, not the one-and-a-half coming. The passages call it the coming of the Lord. Not a coming. They call it the coming of the Lord. I don’t know how it can be made more clear. It is very straight-forward. What some want to do is bring a lot of theology from the outside and twist the plain sense of those words. They say, “Well, he’s coming in the air.”&nbsp;What does that have to do with anything? In both cases, Paul calls it the coming of the Lord. And he says, right after that, then comes the end. That’s the order. The writer of Hebrews says in Hebrews 9 “In as much as Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, shall appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin to those who eagerly await him.”&nbsp;My point is that there are only two comings. The coming when Jesus accomplished the work of the cross, and the second coming.</p>

<p>We read about the second coming in Matthew 24. That is a visible, powerful and conclusive coming. He says everyone will be able to see Him, right? Paul says these events that are called the rapture happen at the coming of the Lord and the coming of the Lord, according to Jesus, is visible and there is only one second coming. This falls together so neatly, I don’t know why it isn’t more obvious to more people.</p>

<p>That leaves room for only one point of view, as far as I can see, from what the Scripture teaches. What is called the post-tribulation rapture. I don’t even like the term. I think we should teach what the text teaches and what the church has taught for 2000 years, that the resurrection happens when Jesus returns. It’s that simple.</p>
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title: Was Jesus Reincarnated?
topic: Christian Living
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/28/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/was-jesus-reincarnated-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>How to answer the critic who claims Jesus was reincarnated.</em></p>

<p>“I am the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.”&nbsp;This was the claim of one very popular guru in India. This is not a totally unusual claim—others have made it. What do you do with that? To quote my former room-mate, Larry Kersten, “What the heck is that?”&nbsp;What does this statement actually mean?</p>

<p>I want you to think about this claim for a few moments. It’s a claim that many have made, many that turn out, remarkably, to be contemporaneous with each other; they all live at the same time, all saying they are the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. That raises other questions like, how could Jesus Christ be simultaneously reincarnated in different persons who are all living at the same time? I don’t think that’s the way reincarnation works, unless that’s a really high level of Nirvana. Maybe you have to be really bad to be reincarnated into a bunch of people because you get all of their suffering all together, but why would somebody make this claim? You would think, especially with a religious leader, that he is laying claim to something about Jesus for himself. In a sense, he is saying, I am Jesus. I am just in a different body. But that’s a different issue.</p>

<p>Let’s just take the claim itself at face value. What then? How would one know this claim was true? Why should we be convinced that this guru was speaking accurately?</p>

<p>How would you test it? I could imagine some ways. I guess we’d start looking for similarities. We wouldn’t look for physical similarities, because obviously the body is different. We’re talking about a different physical body. But something is the same—and here’s the kicker—what is the same, allegedly, in reincarnation?</p>

<p>There could be a couple of ways to understand this. Maybe it’s the soul that’s the same. I believe in the soul and I believe the soul has—well, your soul is what you are. Your soul possesses your body, in one sense. What you genuinely are in your person, your characteristics, are all soulish things—your temperament, your ideas, your beliefs, your emotions—all of these things have physical expression through your brain and central nervous system, but they originate in your soul, such that when your soul goes, you go with it.</p>

<p>If it’s the soul that is being reincarnated, basically you have the same person in a different body. If you were placed in someone else’s body, you would still be you with everything that you know—your language, your knowledge, your temperament, whatever. The only thing that would be different is your body.</p>

<p>But clearly that’s not what people have in mind when they talk about reincarnation. It is not just a transfer of souls because souls have memories and one would remember the experience of a past lifetime. Not only that, you would have the learning, the temperament, the knowledge, the thoughts and all of that other stuff. So this guru guy is not a carpenter, but if the abilities were what was reincarnated, then he would have carpenter skills. If it was the intellectual abilities, I’d imagine that he’d have the knowledge of a Jewish rabbi like Jesus had. But he doesn’t have the knowledge of a Jewish rabbi. He’s teaching Hinduism. So he doesn’t have Jesus’&nbsp;physical body, and he doesn’t have Jesus’&nbsp;physical skills, or his soulish faculties transmitted. Not Jesus’&nbsp;memories, or ideas. Then what is transferred in reincarnation has got to be something minus those things.</p>

<p>So, something gets reincarnated. But it isn’t the soul in all of its flower. It’s something less than that. It doesn’t include physical capabilities, or learning, or knowledge. It doesn’t include memory. It doesn’t include emotions of the past life. When you start stripping that stuff away, it seems like what you end up with kind of a naked, bare human thing. It’s called a bare particular, by the way, in philosophical language. But it’s kind of stripped down to nothing.</p>

<p>Wait a minute. If reincarnation is true, then something gets passed on. Something is reincarnated and it’s not personality. It’s not capacities. It’s&nbsp;some kind of bare essence. What is it? Precisely what is reincarnated? A bare human particular. If it’s just a bare human particular, it’s hard to imagine how a human particular can be reincarnated as a bug. What sense does it make to say that a human being is now a bug? What’s the same between the bug and the human being? Well, it’s nothing to do with humanness because a bug doesn’t have humanness if it’s reincarnated.</p>

<p>So you’ve got to strip off the humanness from this thing that gets transferred. I’m going to tell you what you are left with. You are left with a bare living particular. An irreducible “it.”&nbsp;It has got to be living because you can’t be reincarnated into an ice cube, or a block of wood, or a stone, right? So what is transferred is a bare living particular. This makes the claim of Jesus being reincarnated utterly worthless.</p>

<p>This irreducible “it”&nbsp;has no properties, no personality, no nothing. It’s just a nothing “it”&nbsp;that gets transferred in reincarnation. That’s why, by the way, according to this view of transmigration of the soul, I could be reincarnated as a beast or a bug, because there is nothing left of me except for my bare naked irreducible particularity. What’s a particularity? It’s what left when you take everything else away. But there is still one thing left, and if you took away that one thing left, nothing would be there.</p>

<p>So this guy says, “I am the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.” My question is: In what sense is he the reincarnation of Christ? Well, if you’re the reincarnation of Jesus’&nbsp;bare particular—His essence stripped of personality, stripped of morality, stripped of memory, stripped of skills, stripped of human essence, stripped of any other distinguishing characteristics—then who the heck cares if you are the reincarnation of Christ? If you have nothing—nothing that is similar to Jesus in a meaningful way—then what’s the point?</p>

<p>Now if you do have something that’s similar to Jesus that is passed on, well, what is it? Tell me. Show it to me. Can you speak Hebrew? Or Aramaic? Do you have His memories. Do you have His skills? No. You don’t have His humanity, do you? No. What have you got? “I’ve got this bare, naked ’it’&nbsp;that was passed on.”&nbsp;Why should I be impressed that Jesus’&nbsp;bare naked “it”&nbsp;that is stripped of everything that makes Him wonderful—why should I be impressed that was passed on to you?</p>

<p>How would you even know that? How would you know that it was Jesus’&nbsp;“it”? How would you even be able to identify it? There is nothing left that distinguishes Jesus Christ’s bare particular from anyone else’s bare particular. In other words, there is no difference between Jesus Christ’s bare particular being reincarnated in you and Adolph Hitler’s bare particular being reincarnated in you, so who cares? What difference does it make?</p>
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title: People Believe What They Want
topic: Tactics and Tools
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/people-believe-what-they-want
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>My mind's made up. Don't confuse me with the facts. Come again? Don't get caught with this wrong-headed attitude!</em></p>

<p>People believe what they want to believe, much of the time. I don't mean to say that they believe things without any reason, but they believe, oftentimes, without good reason.</p>

<p>Most people will give some reason why they believe something. But an indicator of the fairness of their point of view is how they respond to even-handed, fair criticism of their view and to evidence for an opposing view. Lots of people have reasons for what they believe, but when those reasons are refuted—when they're taken away or weakened by other evidence—do they still stand on their point of view, or are they willing to adjust their view based on the evidence that comes in?</p>

<p>Sometimes the evidence people are initially faced with seems compelling. We were talking this morning about the Mars rock. As far as I've been able to tell, I think the Mars rock is much ado about nothing. NASA wants to send a probe to Mars and they don't have the money for it. All of a sudden this rock makes it into the news. They see a couple of forms one-hundredth the width of a human hair through an electron microscope. Scattered around it are some chemicals that are sometimes, but not necessarily, associated with life. As one person pointed out, if this had been found on earth, no one would have ever drawn the conclusion that this was life.</p>

<p>Indeed, these shapes you read about in the paper weren't even mentioned in the peer review piece sent to <em>Scientific America—</em>the one reviewed by the scientists, so it must be more careful and rigorous. The reason they weren't mentioned is that these shapes were not good indicators of life. It sounds good in the press to the rank and file, but apparently no scientist in the field would take those shapes seriously. They were interested in the chemistry.</p>

<p>The point is, the evidence for ancient life on Mars wasn't conclusive in any way, shape or form. Yet those who want to believe in life on other planets or in evolution—and even if there was life on Mars, it wouldn't prove evolution, as I pointed out—they seize on this scanty evidence.</p>

<p>So, people will say, "Life on Mars! It's already been proven." Well, it hasn't.</p>

<p>Another example of this is, "Everybody knows that homosexuality is genetic; it's constitutional. Science has proven it." But science hasn't proven it. There is some indication that there may be some physiological factors contributing to a person's homosexuality, but no one has demonstrated any necessary genetic link.</p>

<p>Here's an example to give you an idea how careful you've got to be in drawing some conclusions. I was challenged on this issue by someone who pointed out there were enlarged hypothalamus in one study of homosexual cadavers. I asked, "How do we know that the enlarged hypothalamus in the homosexuals was the <em>cause </em>of homosexuality and not the <em>effect</em>? These men were dead. Their lives were over. What evidence justifies our presumption that an enlarged hypothalamus was their in the beginning, causing the homosexual behavior? Why not rather presume that it was the homosexual behavior that caused the enlarging of the hypothalamus later in life?</p>

<p>To be honest, I don't know one way or another, because I'm not an expert in this field. I'm just raising the issue to show you how you can't simply jump to that conclusion. Those who are careful about the scientific evidence haven't come to that conclusion. The ones who have are those who are not in the field, who are not careful, yet who have something at stake in making the case for constitutional homosexuality.</p>

<p>I actually don't care if it turns out that homosexuality is genetic. It's irrelevant to the moral question. Just because homosexuality may come naturally for some doesn't mean it's moral to practice it. Indeed, one could say that the difference between just doing what comes naturally and principled self-restraint is called civilization.</p>

<p>Do we want to argue that whatever we "naturally" feel like doing at any moment ought to be morally allowed? That's the same as living like animals, because animals always obey their base physical impulses. Human beings are different. They have moral rules that constrain their behavior.</p>

<p>The point I'm making here is that, even if homosexuality did turn out to be hard-wired into the physiology, it still wouldn't begin to answer the question of whether it is moral to act on the desire. That's a different issue entirely.</p>

<p>My point is that people seize upon scanty evidence to justify something because they want it justified, not because they've examined the issue carefully. They'll say animals practice homosexuality. How do they know that? Because they see male dogs mounting other male dogs, or licking them in their genital areas. See? It's obvious: homosexuality is natural.</p>

<p>But it's not so obvious. Think about this for a second. If you ever had a male dog, you know that they don't just mount other male dogs. They also mount sofas, and trees, and will mount the leg of your guests if you're not careful. This is not homosexual behavior. This is auto-eroticism.</p>

<p>The only way one could show this behavior was homosexual is if one could demonstrate that the dog was desiring the male gender of the animal he was mounting. One can't conclude from the observed activity alone that any animal has homosexual desires. This is just another example of a hasty judgment.</p>

<p>Christians are also capable of hasty, unbalanced judgments. They often hold points of view that are not well justified or even are consonant with the full counsel of the Scriptures.</p>

<p>I get frustrated when people proof-text their pet point of view, but are unwilling to look at any other texts against their view. They just want to keep citing their pet verses, even when those verses are equivocal.</p>

<p>I've faced this in my teaching on Decision Making and the Will of God. For those who disagree with my particular approach, please take the time to look at my biblical assessment and critique the verses. Frankly, after I've given the talk I've had people come up to me and say, "That's pretty thorough. I think you're wrong, but I can't find any arguments against your biblical analysis."</p>

<p>Why would someone say such a thing? That's pretty good evidence I'm right, not wrong. I could be mistaken, but the way to correct me is to show how my treatment and assessment is not legitimate, given the texts I cite.</p>

<p>Here's what bothers me. We've talked a lot here about the issue of salvation, and whether God is the ultimate author of it or man is. This is the Calvinism vs. Arminianism debate. I've noticed a tendency of people who argue against my view—that God chooses man for salvation—and they simply keep going to their texts that talk about man choosing God.</p>

<p>Those verses do have to be taken into consideration in any overall assessment. Sometimes, though, it's like they're saying, "Where are Koukl and the rest of these Reformed guys getting this stuff? They're just making it all up, because here are my proof texts that are so clear."</p>

<p>Friends, what I'm trying to do is to make sense out of the whole Bible. It's my job to construct a way of viewing any particular doctrine which does the best justice to the most verses and references. I can't just camp on my pet verses and say, "There it is, plain as day. What's wrong with you?"</p>

<p>What bothers me is that many won't take the time to construct a theological point of view that attempts to integrate all the verses pertaining to an issue. I want to ask them, "If your point of view is correct, then make sense out of this verse, and this verse and this verse... and I'll give you hundreds for my side. I could be wrong about my view, but you're going to have to work a lot harder at making sense of verses for my view in light of your theology."</p>

<p>I work hard at integration. This includes trying very hard to make sense of verses that seem to be contrary to my point of view. Anyone who does not do that simply is not interested in the truth. Anyone who sits on his verse and doesn't try to carefully deal with contrary verses—doesn't try to offer an explanation of them that fits in with his overall view of the issue—is not taking truth seriously.</p>

<p>I'm not saying that if you disagree with me then you're not taking truth seriously. I'm also not saying that you've got to be able to explain every single verse, because I can't do that either. Every point of view has its problems.</p>

<p>What I'm saying is this. If you're even-handed and fair-minded, you have to say: "I've looked at all the verses, and here's my understanding of it. This verse seems to state my view rather clearly, and here's a verse that seems to contradict my view, but there may be something else going on in this second passage. Here's what I think it is, and here's why I think it's stated in this particular way, so it gives the appearance of a contradiction, but it isn't really a contradiction. Here is a way to solve the apparent contradiction."</p>

<p>That's called scholarship, ladies and gentlemen. That's called even-handed Bible study. That's called clear thinking. And if all you're willing to do is sit on your own verses, you have no guarantee you aren't going to be completely wrong in your view. You can only have confidence if you're careful to integrate into your particular point of view, as much as you possibly can, even those verses which seem contrary to it.</p>

<p>This is very important. It doesn't matter whether you happen to agree with me or not. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about care in study, whether it's Bible, or science, or Mars rocks, or homosexuality, or whatever. It's a willingness to engage all the facts, and try to integrate them as even-handedly as possible into a theory or view or hypothesis so you have the least amount of conflict with all of the facts concerned.</p>

<p>Those people who use the scientific method in the best sense are people who try to fit all of the facts in and not just grab onto those facts they like. They don't play, "Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil" with facts they don't like.</p>

<p>This is bad scholarship with scientists, but it's reprehensible for a Christian when you consider what's at stake, the source of the information (the Bible), and that it's the most important truth we could ever be thinking about. We'd better be giving that kind of issue our best shot.</p>

<p>[<em>The above is a transcript of a radio commentary by Greg Koukl.</em>]</p>
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title: Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?
topic: History
author: Brett Kunkle
date: 02/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/did-jesus-really-rise-from-the-dead-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>If the bones of Jesus were found tomorrow, would you walk away from Christianity? You should. Why? Because faith in a dead Jesus is worthless. Even the Apostle Paul says so. In I Corinthians 15:14, he writes, “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”&nbsp;Did you catch that? The bones of Jesus would make our faith <em>useless</em>.</p>

<p>C’mon Paul, isn’t that kind of harsh? No and here’s why. Imagine a group of people who have dedicated their lives to Peter Pan. They construct a beautiful building to gather in celebration of Pan’s life. They sing songs to him and tell stories about his wonderful deeds. What would you think about such a group? What a waste of life. Peter Pan is a fairy tale. We should feel sorry for such people.</p>

<p>Well, <em>if</em> Jesus did not rise bodily from the grave, then Christianity is a fairy tale. Just like Peter Pan, it’s make believe and Christians are wasting their lives. And what should people think about us? Paul concludes that if Christ hasn’t been raised, “we are to be pitied more than all men”&nbsp;(verse 19).</p>

<p>So, when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus, what’s at stake for Christians? Everything.</p>

<h2>History 101</h2>

<p>How in the world do we show that a 2,000-year-old event actually happened? Mary Magdalene didn’t whip out her flip camera and record footage of the resurrected Jesus. The disciples didn’t snap post-resurrection photos on their iPhones and then upload them to Facebook for all their friends to see. So what’s a historian to do? Two things in particular:</p>

<p><em>#1 - Find the facts.</em></p>

<p>Historians rely on historical data like archaeology, ancient documents and recorded eyewitness testimony to reconstruct the past. In addition, certain principles guide them in determining which historical accounts are reliable and which are not. For example, if there are several independent sources reporting the same event, that’s pretty reliable history. If those sources are actual eyewitnesses and not secondhand reports, that’s pretty reliable history. If those eyewitness accounts are closer in time to the actual event, that’s pretty reliable history. Given this process of investigation, historians can discover historical facts.</p>

<p><em>#2 - Find the best explanation.</em></p>

<p>Once the historian has gathered her facts, she looks for an explanation that fits the facts. She has to determine if the facts support an alleged historical event. Sometimes she concludes “yes,”&nbsp;and sometimes “no.”&nbsp;There are plenty of times when there just aren’t enough facts, so the historian simply says, “We don’t know what really happened.”&nbsp;Since there is no video footage for most of human history, the honest historian does her best to the follow the facts to the best possible explanation.</p>

<h2>Cold Hard Facts</h2>

<p>Do we have any facts that support the historical resurrection of Jesus? Absolutely. And we won’t just use arguments from guys on our side. To make the strongest possible case, we’ll rely on those facts that virtually all scholars who study this subject agree upon, including critics of Christianity. Resurrection scholars Gary Habermas and Michael Licona call this the “minimal facts”&nbsp;approach.*</p>

<p>Notice this approach does not require us to defend an error-free Bible. It does not require us to show the Bible is the inspired word of God. Although they’re important issues, inerrancy and inspiration are not essential to our case for the resurrection. Instead, the minimal facts approach lets us build common ground with the critic. Basically, we’re saying to the skeptic, “You show me <em>your</em> historical facts and I’ll show you how they are evidence for the historical resurrection of Jesus.”</p>

<p>So, what are the minimal facts? Habermas and Licona list five:</p>

<p><em>Fact #1: Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.</em></p>

<p>Not only is Jesus’&nbsp;crucifixion recorded in all four gospels, but non-Christian sources report the event too. Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historian Tacitus are just a couple of those sources.</p>

<p>And remember, virtually all scholars accept this fact.</p>

<p><em>Fact #2: The disciples believed they had seen the risen Jesus.</em></p>

<p>Scholars recognize two important pieces of evidence for this fact. First, the disciples claimed to have seen the risen Jesus. Paul lists the eyewitnesses in I Corinthians 15:3-8:</p>

<p>For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.</p>

<p>By the way, it’s legit to cite the Bible here. Even critical scholars believe I Corinthians is an authentic letter written by Paul. At this point, we’re simply using it as a source of ancient history, not as an inspired book of the Bible. Thus, we have a reliable list of people who believed they saw resurrection appearances of Jesus.</p>

<p>Second, the disciples really believed they had seen Jesus such that it totally transformed them. Jesus, their leader, had been brutally killed before their eyes. Understandably, they split. Peter even denies Jesus three times. But something happened, transforming them from cowards who abandoned Jesus to courageous men who risked life and limb for His message. They didn’t just claim Jesus rose, they really, <em>really</em> believed it.</p>

<p>And remember, virtually all scholars accept this fact.</p>

<p><em>Fact #3: Saul of Tarsus (Paul), an enemy of the church, converted because he believed he had seen the risen Jesus.</em></p>

<p>Before his Road-to-Damascus experience, Paul tried to destroy the Christian church. He beat Christians, imprisoned them, and killed them. But suddenly, he converts to Christianity. Why? Paul and Luke both report it was because he believed the resurrected Jesus had appeared to him.</p>

<p>And remember, virtually all scholars accept this fact.</p>

<p><em>Fact #4: James, the brother of Jesus and a skeptic, converted because he believed he had seen the risen Jesus.</em></p>

<p>The Gospels tell us James was skeptical of Jesus’&nbsp;ministry (Mark 3:21; John 7:5). He was unconvinced. However, James eventually converts and is even martyred for his faith in Jesus. What transformed this skeptic into a believer? He believed he saw the risen Jesus. Remember the eyewitness list in I Corinthians 15? Verse 7 tells us “[Jesus] appeared to James.��</p>

<p>And remember, virtually all scholars accept this fact.</p>

<p><em>Fact #5: The tomb of Jesus was empty.</em></p>

<p>Where was Jesus publicly executed? In Jerusalem. Where did the disciples start proclaiming Jesus’&nbsp;resurrection? In Jerusalem. Think about those two facts together. How does Christianity get started if Jesus’&nbsp;corpse is still in the tomb? It doesn’t. Jewish and Roman leaders simply pull out the dead body and game over. But that doesn’t happen. Instead, the disciples preach the resurrection in the very city Jesus is crucified. That’s only possible if the tomb is empty.</p>

<p>This is the one fact not accepted by “virtually all scholars.”&nbsp;However, Gary Habermas found that about 75% of scholars buy this one and that’s still a large majority.</p>

<p>There you have it - five historical facts that need an explanation.</p>

<h2>Colossal Conclusion</h2>

<p>What do these facts point to? That Jesus Christ is no longer dead. His resurrection explains all five facts very well. The minimal facts give us solid evidence He has risen indeed. However, that won’t stop the skeptic from offering other explanations. When you encounter one, remember this: just because an alternative explanation is <em>possible</em>, it does not make it <em>probable</em>. Anyone can give a different explanation, but we want one that best fits the facts.</p>

<p>For example, some scholars suggest the disciples stole Jesus’&nbsp;body. Does that fit the facts? No way. It doesn’t explain the resurrection appearances of Jesus. It doesn’t explain Paul or James’&nbsp;conversions. Indeed, if the disciples stole Jesus’&nbsp;body, then they knew his resurrection was a hoax. But why would they die for something they knew was false? They wouldn’t, and thus, we can discard this possible explanation.</p>

<p>Facts are stubborn things. And after looking at the cold hard facts surrounding the end of his life, the best explanation is that Jesus rose bodily from the grave almost 2,000 years ago.</p>

<h2>Resurrection Changes Everything</h2>

<p>First, a resurrected Jesus confirms the truth of Christianity. Our faith is not founded on a fairy tale. It’s founded on fact. Jesus declared Himself to be God, to be equal with the Father, to forgive sins, to be the only way to God, and a host of other radical claims. His resurrection is confirmation of the truth of those claims. Thus, we can have total confidence Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6).</p>

<p>Second, a resurrected Jesus makes transformation possible. Sin no longer has to dominate our lives. There’s a new way to be human. Paul, an eyewitness to the risen Jesus, explains: “But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you”&nbsp;(Romans 8:10-11). If the power of God’s Spirit raised Jesus from the dead, cannot that same power transform you and me? Absolutely.</p>

<p>*<em>The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus</em> (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2004).</p>
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title: Pluralism?
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/pluralism-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>One of us must be wrong, at bare minimum. Maybe we both are. But one thing that we can never say is that we’re both right.</em></p>

<p>I want to continue to pursue this concept of pluralism. Triggered by a comment made last week: “They may not believe in Jesus, but they love God and serve God with all of their hearts. They love God. You love God. How can you say one is wrong and the other is right?”</p>

<p>This kind of comment is so common and, on the surface, so reasonable, that to question it immediately brands you as some kind of religious fanatic, someone so blinded by his narrow-minded convictions that he has no tolerance for other’s beliefs.</p>

<p>Now here is the hitch in the new pluralism. Tolerance used to mean that everyone has a right to their beliefs. It doesn’t mean that anymore, because all of these Christians who are considered intolerant still believe, as far as I can tell, that everyone has a legitimate right to his own beliefs.</p>

<p>No, the new pluralism demands that you must not say that anyone else’s belief is inferior or, worse yet, flatly mistaken. To say someone is wrong is to be intolerant, to be close-minded and provincial, to be extreme and is impossible to reason with.</p>

<p>How can I say one person’s view is wrong and the other is right? Very easily. Precisely because reason and rationality demand it. Here’s what I mean.</p>

<p>I’m praying to God who is Jesus. They’re praying to God who isn’t Jesus. God can’t be Jesus and not be Jesus at the same time. therefore, we both can’t be praying to, loving, or worshiping God. One of us must be wrong, at bare minimum. Maybe we both are. But one thing that we can never say is that we’re both right, that we’re both worshiping God.</p>

<p>This underscores the irrationality of this kind of pluralism, an irrationality that is based, I think, on an errant understanding of what it means for something to be true.</p>

<p>To many, the concept of truth is deep, esoteric and indefinable. Let me give you a definition in one syllables. It’s from Aristotle, I think. If you say “It is,”&nbsp;and it is, or “It is not,”&nbsp;and it is not, then you speak truth. If you say “It is,”&nbsp;and it is not, or “It is not,”&nbsp;and it is, then you don’t speak truth. This is called correspondence, in other words, a thing is true if and only if it actually corresponds to what is really there. Truth, therefore is not determined by opinion or belief. Believing something to be so doesn’t make it so. It is not true merely to me. It might be true to me and still entirely false.</p>

<p>By the way, in saying this I am making what I’d consider a critical distinction between fantasy and reality. When someone starts talking about what God is to them, they’re talking about their fantasy. I’m not really interested in fantasy; I want to know what truly is.</p>

<p>This is so fundamental it should go completely without saying, but nowadays our thinking is so befuddled and cock-eyed about fundamental issues that people can merely voice their beliefs and think it ends the discussion. If believing something makes it true, then there’s nothing more to talk about. And persistence in the issue violates pluralism because you’re implying that your view is better than someone else’s.</p>

<p>But because another’s beliefs may differ doesn’t need to mean that discussion is at a standstill. Beliefs may be equally valid in that they are consciously held by sincere people, but they can’t be equally true if they are contrary beliefs.</p>

<p>How do we get past the impasse? How do we determine whose view is the right one/ The same way men and women of sound mind and judgment have done for thousands of years: with reason and revelation.</p>

<p>If everyone’s opinion was equally true, there would be no point to the art of persuasion. I’d have no place in the marketplace of ideas trying to reason with people, if all beliefs were equally true, and neither would you. There would be no meaningful discourse to have on issues. We’d all just state our opinions and beliefs, nod, smile, and then go home, none the wiser.</p>

<p>The reason that we discuss, debate, banter about is that some beliefs are better than others, in other words they’re more worthy of belief, they are more sensible, they are more sound, more credible, more noble, more moral, more right, more true.</p>

<p>Therefore, those with bad beliefs (that is, unsound beliefs) are not merely different, they are wrong; and we should not be squeamish about that kind of language.</p>

<p>Friends, I’m not trying to persuade you of a particular religious point of view; I’m trying to get you to think of ultimate issues and ultimate questions in a particular way.</p>

<p>Why is this important? If a person is persuaded that belief doesn’t make something true, then maybe he will employ himself in finding out what is true , not merely in waste time fabricating opinion.</p>

<p>At least, that’s the way I see it.</p>
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title: Christianity: Bolted to Reality
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/christianity-bolted-to-reality
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>You can huff and puff but you can’t blow this house down. Christianity is a system bolted down to reality.</em></p>

<p>The other night a friend was telling me about a friend of hers who was quite disdainful of Christianity. It reminded me of a whole raft of people who are dismissive of theism generally and Christianity specifically. Nowadays, they’re not dismissive in a passive kind of way, but people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett the new wave of atheists are taking shots at Christianity and are doing so quite aggressively. This is one of the big obstacles facing us, in the U.S. at least, as we represent Christ as ambassadors.</p>

<p>We have the so-called “new atheists”—no new argument, really, just a lot of new attitude. We also have the situation with Islam, and the concern with postmodernism and the emerging church; all areas that we need to address as a church. STR is taking a particular look at these worldviews. We want to be a place to come to for answers about these things.</p>

<p>Here’s a reflection on the so-called new atheists. Some people have this idea that theism, in general, and Christianity, in particular, is just a house of cards. They are utterly dismissive. As Bill Maher says, “If you believe in religion, it’s a mass psychosis. You’re out of your mind! You’re crazy!”&nbsp;Richard Dawkins has essentially said that people shouldn’t be allowed to believe crazy things. Sam Harris has the same disdain.</p>

<p>Their arguments are quite shallow, though. Often they attack what people who claim to be Christians do, they over blow the significance of that, and then dismiss the Christianity these people say they represent. The critics never ask the question of whether these people who do these evil or unpleasant things are actually representing the thing they’re rejecting, Biblical Christianity, the teachings of Jesus, the Judeo-Christian worldview.</p>

<p>Christianity can’t be dismissed that easily. It just isn’t going to go away. You can’t find just one questionable thing in the Bible and then have the freedom to completely disregard all of it. It’s not going away. It doesn’t have durability because there are a bunch of idiots who believe it and they don’t go away. There are a lot of idiots who believe stupid things that aren’t going away, and those things are still stupid, but they keep them going. That’s not the issue with Christianity. Christianity is not a house of cards; it’s a big, giant, complex, durable worldview. It’s a way of thinking; it’s an ideology; it’s an explanation of the world that is bolted to reality.</p>

<p>There’s a house across the street from me that burned down a year or so ago that is being rebuilt now. You can see inside that there are big, metal things attached to the studs. There are big, metal things with bolts and other stuff that will be hidden later that secure this house to make it safe from earthquakes. The whole house is bolted down to the ground in many different ways.</p>

<p>The same thing is true of Christianity. It’s not a flimsy structure that someone has sunk a couple of nails in and the first guy to come by who can huff n’&nbsp;puff real strong is going to blow it away. Christianity is a system bolted down to reality.</p>

<p>Now I’m using these terms advisedly because for a thing to be true in a classical sense you have to have a point of view that fits the way the world really is. When the world is the way you think it is, that’s a classical understanding of the word true. It’s true that I’m on this radio show right now because here I sit. So my statement fits the way the world really is. When it comes to the particulars of Christianity there are so many ways that the Christian worldview, properly understood, is bolted down to reality that it is going to be very hard to shake it free.</p>

<p>I understand that there are some problems with it and questions that people raise. But we just didn’t make this up overnight. We’re not just simply emoting. There are a lot of Christians that are just emoting, but those who understand Christianity as we’ve received it for over 2,000 years and comprehend its deep structure, know that it can be defended apart from one’s feelings, or fantasies or wishful thinking.</p>

<p>Frankly, there are many things about Christianity I wouldn’t wish up, nor would you. It’s counter to what natural man would come up with. If we were just going on our own devices we wouldn’t want a God who watches everything, keeping account of our sin. More likely, we’d dream up a God who grades on a curve. But our intuitions are such that we believe in justice and that no crime should go unpunished. There is also mercy in the midst of this far-reaching and thorough-going justice and that’s part of the message of Christianity, too.</p>

<p>My conviction is that the foundational principles of Christianity resonate with our deepest intuitions. That’s why I can go into a philosophy class and say, “Let me give you five or six foundational elements of a Christian worldview and I think you’ll have a hard time arguing against these ideas taken individually. These are the things that make up the foundation and the basic superstructure of the view we call Christianity.”</p>

<p>Some people might want to fuss about the window-dressing. Okay, fine. But they’re not going to be able to find too many things wrong with the foundation. Take this simple example. One of the foundational, cosmological questions is why something exists, rather than nothing. Why is anything here at all? We know through science that the universe wasn’t always here. We’ve got the Second Law of Thermodynamics saying that things are running down. That means they must have been run up at some time. If they’d been running down forever, they’d be dead right now. The universe would have stopped long ago. No, the universe is not infinite. This is the view of secular science, not my religious wishful thinking. That means the whole physical universe came into being at some point, before which nothing existed.</p>

<p>What caused this kind of thing? To suggest that someone outside of the physical system caused it someone, by the way, not some thing is completely reasonable. In fact, it seems to be the inescapable conclusion of modern physics. Could I be wrong? Maybe. But it’s not nothing is the point that I’m making. You can’t just make God go away because you don’t like Him looking over your shoulder.</p>

<p>It turns out that Christianity explains what it means to explain. It is adequate to do the job. It explains how we got here, how everything got here. Evolution doesn’t answer the question of how everything got here to begin with. It only explains, or purports to explain, how it developed. Atheist Richard Dawkins said that the biological world is a complex world that gives every appearance of having been designed for a purpose. But he’s quick to add that you shouldn’t be misled by appearances. His explanation is that the apparent watchmaker design was really the blind watchmaker of natural selection and genetic mutations, i.e., neo-Darwinian evolution. That’s what he holds. But notice that he says it sure looks designed.</p>

<p>I think there are real problems with Darwinism. But even if I were willing to grant that it is a possible way of explaining design, maybe another possible, legitimate, reasonable, rational way of explaining design is through design. Maybe the world looks designed because it is designed. Is that outlandish? Not at all.</p>

<p>So the Christian worldview has one big bolt to reality. We can explain the non-physical source of all physical things.</p>

<p>We can explain it in terms of something we already understand. It’s called “agency”&nbsp;or agent causation. We know that agents can start things from nothing. How do we know that? Because we do it all the time. We initiate action. We are not just a domino in a string of dominoes, doing what the domino before us forced us to do. We have freedom. This is why we condemn criminals and punish them, and reward people who do good. In both cases they deserve it because they are morally free creatures. To be free means you can start actions.</p>

<p>Agents start things. Things don’t start things. They just react to things before them. But agents can start things. If the whole physical universe was started, it seems reasonable that some non-physical agent did so, who himself was not started by something else. I’m not trying to persuade you that it happened. I’m trying to show you that it’s a reasonable explanation. It’s imminently reasonable.</p>

<p>Cosmology and design teleology are just two of many examples that are solid bolts to reality for the Christian worldview.</p>
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title: A Stone in His Shoe
topic: Tactics and Tools
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/a-stone-in-his-shoe
content:
            <div> 
		<p>In some circles there’s pressure for Christian ambassadors to “close the sale”&nbsp;as soon as possible. When pressed for time, get right to the meat of the message. Get to the Gospel. If the person doesn’t respond, you’ve still done your part. Shake the dust off your feet and move on.</p>

<p>A wise ambassador, though, “seasons his words.”&nbsp;He weighs his opportunities and adopts an appropriate strategy for each occasion. Sometimes, the simple truth of the cross is all that’s needed. The fruit is ripe for harvesting. Bump it and it falls into your basket.</p>

<p>Usually, though, the fruit is not ripe; the nonbeliever is simply not ready. He may not even have begun to think about Christianity in the right way. Dropping a message on him that, from his point of view, is meaningless or simply unbelievable doesn’t accomplish anything. In fact, it may be the worst thing you can do. He rejects a message he doesn’t understand and then he’s harder to reach next time.</p>

<p>Now here is my own more modest goal. I want to put a stone in his shoe. All I want to do is give him something worth thinking about. I want him to hobble away on a nugget of truth that annoys him in a good way, something he can’t simply ignore because it continues to poke at him.</p>

<p>Whether the opportunity is a short one with a transient audience or a long one with a captive audience, my goal is the same—a stone in the shoe.</p>

<p>Some people are good “closers.”&nbsp;They’re good at getting the sale. What they don’t realize is that harvesting often comes easily for them because, in God’s sovereignty, many ambassadors came before them planting, watering, and weeding, one by one tending to the plant, cultivating healthy growth until it was ripe and ready to reap.</p>

<p>So here’s my suggestion. Follow the strategy I use when God opens a door of opportunity for me. I don’t know how long the door will be open, so I pray quickly for wisdom, then ask myself, “In this circumstance, what is one thing I can say, one question I can ask, one thought I can leave that will get him thinking?”</p>

<p>Then I simply try to put a stone in his shoe.</p>
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title: He’ll Do Something He Would Not Have Done
topic: Christian Living
author: Amy K. Hall
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/he-ll-do-something-he-would-not-have-done
content:
            <div> 
		<p>A month after reading this in a <a href="http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/five-promises-for-your-bible-reading-and-prayer" target="_blank">post</a> by Steve Fuller at the Desiring God Blog, I can say that it has tremendously reinvigorated my prayer life:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>One reason we don’t pray is because we believe Satan’s lie that prayer does nothing. But that’s not what Jesus taught (<a href="http://biblia.com/bible/esv/Matthew%207.7" target="_blank">Matthew 7:7</a>).</p>

<p>Jesus promises that every time we pray, God will answer. He will either do exactly what we ask, or something even better, which he would not have done had we not prayed.</p>

<p>So if I start the day praying about my heart, marriage, children, work, and ministry, then God will do things in my heart, marriage, children, work, and ministry that he would not have done had I not prayed. Trust Jesus’ promise about prayer — and pray.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>It was that last paragraph that pierced me, that I continue to hear in my head every time I sit down to pray, that indeed compels me to sit down to pray when I’m tempted to skip prayer that day.</p>

<p>When we pray about something, God will do something in that situation He would not have done if we hadn’t prayed.</p>

<p>Those are words of great promise, and hope, and responsibility. I hope they’ll move you to pray like never before.</p>
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title: Is God Culpable for Evil He Knows Will Take Place?
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/is-god-culpable-for-evil-he-knows-will-take-place-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Why doesn’t God save everybody?</em></p>

<p>This question is among the most difficult that Christians and Christian philosophers have to face.</p>

<p>This is not merely a problem for Christians. It is a problem for non-Christians as well. I have stated in the past that I think one of the best arguments for the existence of God is the presence of evil in the world. One way I can demonstrate that is to ask the non-Christian that raises this question, do you believe there is evil in the world? They must believe it because that’s what prompts the question they are raising.</p>

<p>Then I ask them to tell me, as a non-Christian, where it comes from. Secondly, tell me where good came from. Thirdly, tell me how you distinguish between good and evil. Those are very thorny problems of which the Christian only has to answer one, but the non-Christian has to answer three. This is a philosophical question that applies to all people, it’s not a drawback on the Christian religion, it is a drawback of life. It’s a comment more on life than religion.</p>

<p>Before you had children did it occur to you that your children would disobey and do bad things? You had the option to have children. You knew the children would do bad things, some could turn out very, very bad. Yet you still decided to have children. Why? There are some ineffable kinds of motivations that one has for creating life. If that’s true of human beings, it strikes me that it’s true of God as well. From our perspective God has some inexplicable motive to create, to make children, to create someone in His image though He knows that they will go bad at some point in the future, just as you know that those that you create out of your love for each other will go bad in the future.</p>

<p>When your children do go bad are you as parents responsible for the bad that they do? You are not morally culpable because human beings are free moral agents. If that is true for you, it’s true for God as well. It seems to me to be very reasonable.</p>

<p>What about if I knew the child I was to have would be Adolph Hitler?</p>

<p>The issue here is not just the extremes like Adolph Hitler, it is all the little Hitlers in all of us that we express at different times. You knew in one sense or another that you were giving off a little chunk of Adolph Hitler. You have a little human being that has his own mind and wants his own way and you’re training him not to live out that natural brokenness and become a Hitler. The fact is that everyone has a little of that in them.</p>

<p>I would say that the parallel between you and God is precise. You do know that your child is going to do some things wrong. The only difference between you and God in this case is that God knows the particular things that every one of His children is going to do wrong. You don’t know the particulars, but you know it’s inevitable. If it is true that God is morally responsible for what His children do because He knows in advance, then it is also true that you’re morally responsible. But if it’s true that you’re not morally responsible because you know in advance, then it’s also true that God is not responsible. That’s why I argue that neither is morally responsible because the wild card, in a sense, in this discussion is free moral agency.</p>

<p>Human beings are not mechanistic. If you take a long stick and poke somebody in the eye with that long stick, that stick is not at fault. It is merely responding in a mechanistic way to your will. That’s why the person that initiates the action with the stick is the one that is culpable, the person to blame. But if what’s standing in your way is not a mechanism, but another human being that has free moral agency, that removes your culpable role in the process because you are not causing somebody to do something else. You merely give birth to somebody else who then makes choices for themselves. Because men can make choices, good choices and bad choices, they are moral agents in themselves and it’s not appropriate to look back on you as the parent or God as the creator as the one who is morally responsible. That’s true because men are not mechanistic, they are moral agents.</p>

<p>Why does God create a child He knows will go to Hell?</p>

<p>First, we have to distinguish between a goal and a desire. I would say it’s not God’s goal that all of His children come to Him. God never has a goal that is thwarted. God gets what He starts out to get. But His desire can be thwarted if we make a distinction between His sovereign desire and His moral desire. For example, it is God’s desire that nobody ever sin. Clearly people do sin. So here is a desire of God’s that can be thwarted.</p>

<p>One of those things that God desires of a moral nature, God’s moral will that He desires men to do that men can choose not to do, is to believe in His Son so that they can be forgiven for the times that they don’t obey Him. That is a choice that men have to make and men can choose against God and therefore thwart God’s desire.</p>

<p>But God also has a goal. The goal is that all of whom He chooses and gives to Jesus, Jesus loses none but raises them up on the last day. That’s John 6 and that goal will never be thwarted because it is something that God has purposed to do.</p>

<p>I need to make this clarification: nobody turns to God and they don’t turn to Him unless they are elected. In other words, unless God works on them to draw them, nobody would turn so if men are operating in their complete free will, then nobody is going to turn to Him. They consistently and persistently run from the God that pursues them. And God’s merciful response to that condition is to rescue some. Those are the elect.</p>

<p>God is certainly not unjust to rescue some because it is just to punish anybody who breaks God’s law. But one rightly raises the question of curiosity, why does God save some and not others? And if he’s not going to gather up all men, then why doesn’t He not create those He doesn’t gather up? In a way that is another way of asking why doesn’t He save everybody?</p>

<p>One could argue that God hasn’t created a lot of people that He wouldn’t be gathering up. There’s an infinite number of those He didn’t create that wouldn’t believe. Logic shows that that question is answered, but it doesn’t answer the more fundamental question: why doesn’t God save everybody? To that I have no answer. I can only say that in the long run it will work out more to His glory that He does not save everyone. I don’t know how that works out.</p>

<p>That sounds lame to some people, but if I have to come up with some response I think that it probably has something to do with God’s glory and I think we’ll understand later how that does not impugn His justice. To some people His justice is impugned and they assume He’s guilty until proved innocent. My response is that there are lots of things that tell me about God’s goodness and graciousness and mercy that gives me confidence in Him. In those things that I do see I have confidence in Him, so that helps me to have confidence in those things that I don’t understand. I got this from a poster but it makes the point very well: All of those things that I do know about God give me reason to trust him for those things that I don’t know. That’s reasonable. That’s fair.</p>

<p>It points out two things. First of all, there are some aspects of it that cannot be answered. We have to simply settle. We have to say we can’t answer that. It points out also that there are aspects of it that can be answered in a very reasonable way if we argue from analogy to human beings. The third thing that it points out is that the person who asks the question has a bigger problem than the person that has to answer it. The person who asks must answer the problem of evil in light of a holy and powerful God. But the person who asks the question must also solve the problem of evil. They must also solve the problem of good and they must thirdly solve the problem of distinguishing between evil and good in a universe in which there is no God to give any sense to either of then. So the non-believer has the thorniest problem but they just aren’t put on the defensive enough and we are.</p>

<p>God is not necessarily culpable and worthy of blame because He creates human beings that He knows to some degree will go bad in the future.</p>

<p>There is a tendency in that whatever we don’t understand we just stick God in the gap. There is a truth that we need to be able to say that there are some things we don’t understand about God. However, there are a lot of things that can be explained that people don’t take the time and energy to articulate. But there will be some things that we just can’t fathom. But that’s true of the unbeliever as well.</p>
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title: How Much Sin Can God Forgive?
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/how-much-sin-can-god-forgive-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>How do you respond when someone challenges the notion that God can forgive a Hitler or a mass-murderer?&nbsp;</em></p>

<p>I want to talk to you a few moments about Jeffrey Dahmer before it gets too far away.&nbsp; I am not so much concerned about his death,&nbsp;<i>per se,</i>&nbsp;but rather about some issues that have been raised about the fact that he died a Christian--this man in Wisconsin who was convicted of multiple murders, cannibalism, atrocious crimes, crimes that make us completely shudder when we think about them.&nbsp; Yet while in prison he apparently committed his life to Jesus Christ and was baptized, and is someone that we have reason to consider a brother in Christ.&nbsp;</p>

<p>I’ll tell you frankly that I had mixed feelings when I thought about Jeffrey Dahmer being killed.&nbsp; The first thing that I thought of--and I will be quite honest with you--is I’m glad he got his just desserts.&nbsp; I felt that he was guilty of a capital offense and he should have been punished capitally.&nbsp; He should have had his life taken, though I thought the way he ended up dying at the hands of other inmates wasn’t right.&nbsp; He should have instead been executed at the hand of the law, as God ordained.&nbsp; But I still felt that he got his just desserts.&nbsp; And frankly, I had to back off just a little bit and to correct my thinking because I didn’t want to feel gleeful about this fact.&nbsp;</p>

<p>I wasn’t proud of that feeling because it was more than justice that was being satisfied in me.&nbsp; There was something else that said, Yeah that guy got what he deserved.&nbsp; There was a bad edge to my feelings and I had to back off a little bit, especially when I found out that he had made a profession of Jesus Christ and had gotten baptized and died a Christian.&nbsp; I genuinely hope that was the case.&nbsp;</p>

<p>Yet there are some who are unsettled about the notion, especially non-Christians.&nbsp; I have confronted this a number of times in public forums on other radio stations as we talked about religious issues.&nbsp; When I proclaim the truth of forgiveness in Jesus Christ for anybody, that this forgiveness is available to even the worst criminal, the question comes up, How is it possible that God could forgive such a criminal as a Hitler, for example?&nbsp; This question came up on a local station here in Southern California pertaining to Jeffrey Dahmer.&nbsp; The two fellows that were the talk jocks on that show asked the question during drive time.&nbsp; How could God forgive a Jeffrey Dahmer?&nbsp; How could a good and righteous God see His way clear to take somebody like a Jeffrey Dahmer, a person guilty of multiple murders and homosexuality and of cannibalism?&nbsp; How could God forgive such a person?&nbsp;</p>

<p>Apparently there were a lot of Christians that called the show to make a defense for such a notion, and it was quite disappointing to hear the Christians’&nbsp;rather shallow, and I would say, inaccurate, responses.&nbsp; Many Christians just said, “Sin is sin.&nbsp; All sin is the same to God, so if God can forgive you He can forgive a Jeffrey Dahmer.&nbsp; It’s all the same to Him.”&nbsp; Of course, this invited the response--and it’s fully understandable--by the non-believer, “Listen, even I can tell the difference between stealing a pencil and killing someone or eating someone.&nbsp; Why can’t God tell the difference?”&nbsp; Apparently the Christians were not well-equipped to give a reasonable and even-handed defense on this issue.&nbsp;</p>

<p>The fact is, all sin is sin and you haven’t really said anything profound when you say sin is sin.&nbsp; But what you imply is that all sin is equally offensive to God, and that is not true.&nbsp; That simply is not true.&nbsp; There are some sins that are more egregious than others.&nbsp; Jesus made the statement very clearly when He was speaking with Herod at the time of His crucifixion when He said, “The one who delivered me up to you has the greater sin.”&nbsp; Indeed, even common sense dictates this.&nbsp; That it is certainly more egregious, it’s more morally weighty to take a person’s life than it is to steal a pencil.&nbsp; In fact, if this wasn’t the case you could never solve an ethical dilemma where you have two particular things that come in conflict with each other.&nbsp; When taken in isolation both would be wrong.&nbsp; Like whether you ought to obey the government or obey God in preaching the Gospel.&nbsp; Well, we are supposed to do both, but when they come into conflict we do the greater; we obey God and preach the Gospel, and we disobey the government.&nbsp; We can do that because we know that some things are more morally important than others.&nbsp; Common sense seems to dictate that, too.&nbsp;</p>

<p>But when someone says sin is sin, there is another aspect they may be getting at.&nbsp; That is, any sin disqualifies you from heaven and brings you under God’s judgment.&nbsp; Even the least of the sins.&nbsp; That is true.&nbsp; James says if you are guilty of one sin and not of another, you are still guilty of breaking the law, so you are guilty of the whole law.&nbsp; Then, if you break even the smallest portion of it you become a law-breaker.&nbsp; You are guilty before the court and you end up being punished for such a crime.&nbsp;</p>

<p>I had this same question asked of me by Dennis Prager on his program, and he brought up the pencil illustration.&nbsp; “Are you saying that it’s just as bad to kill somebody as to steal a pencil?”&nbsp; No, it’s not.&nbsp; But stealing a pencil is still a crime that one would be judged for.&nbsp; But the fact is, nobody is guilty of only stealing a pencil.&nbsp;</p>

<p>I have calculated this.&nbsp; Just starting from the time you are ten until you were 60--no sin is accrued to you up to ten years old and no sins accrued to you after sixty, just those fifty years--sinning ten sins a day.&nbsp; Keep in mind we’re talking about sin.&nbsp; We’re not talking about just rape, pillaging and stealing.&nbsp; We’re talking about everything--the attitudes of your heart, your motives, the actions and failing to love God with your whole heart, mind, soul and strength, failing to love your neighbor as yourself.&nbsp; Those are moral requirements that we fail constantly.&nbsp;</p>

<p>Just with ten sins a day for 50 years, it comes out to something like 182,500 infractions of the law.&nbsp; What judge would let you off with that kind of a rap sheet?&nbsp; And that is the best case scenario.&nbsp; The point that I’m making is that if people ask the question how could God forgive a Jeffrey Dahmer?, they ought to take inventory of their own lives for just a moment and speculate for just a little bit the kind of debt load they’ll have before God when their time for judgment comes.&nbsp; They’ll find that they have a lot more to be forgiven for than what they thought.&nbsp; That puts them more in the class of Jeffrey Dahmer than a Jesus Christ.&nbsp; The fact is, we sin many more than ten times a day.&nbsp; So each of us is quite an egregious sinner in that regard, even though we have a pretty high opinion of ourselves.&nbsp;</p>

<p>I will have to admit that the talk show hosts from the secular station did have a point.&nbsp; They were concerned about justice.&nbsp; How could God be considered just if He releases a Jeffrey Dahmer from his sins?&nbsp; I think the distinction between our actions and Dahmer’s actions kind of misses the point because it suggests that the question of God’s justice only arises with extreme crimes or extreme individuals.&nbsp; As if God is within His rights, as it were, to forgive minimal crimes but He is not within His just rights to forgive extreme crimes.&nbsp; It seems to me that the real question of justice is, how can God forgive any sins at all--not just a Jeffrey Dahmer, but even our measly little sins?&nbsp; At least that’s the way we see them.&nbsp; How can God even forgive any sin, because the fact is, if He lets anybody off--even us moral light-weights--then He still has a conflict with the issue of justice.&nbsp; I don’t see any inconsistency in God forgiving little sins or few sins, and God forgiving greater sins or many sins.&nbsp; In fact, it is consistency that requires such a thing.&nbsp; If the cross atones for sins at all, it seems to me it atones for all.&nbsp; That’s the exciting thing about the cross.&nbsp;</p>

<p>This is the other lesson.&nbsp; Whether you have one billion sinners being forgiven of one sin, or one sinner being forgiven for a billion sins, it all amounts to the same thing--a billion sins.&nbsp; The work of the cross is such that it can forgive even the most egregious of sinners.&nbsp; The fact of Jeffrey Dahmer’s forgiveness, if it is a fact, ought to teach us an entirely different lesson.&nbsp; Paul put it this way in I Timothy 1:15-16, “It is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance (in other words be confident of this), that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all.&nbsp; And yet for this reason I found mercy, in order than in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate his perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in him for eternal life.”&nbsp; Paul says, Look, I am the biggest of sinners.&nbsp; I persecuted the church of God.&nbsp; I led people to their death because they were Christians.&nbsp; If God could forgive me, He could even forgive a Jeffrey Dahmer.&nbsp; He could even forgive a Greg Koukl.&nbsp; He could even forgive a Ken and John.&nbsp;</p>

<p>For those of you who are tempted to say, Listen I’m no Jeffrey Dahmer, my response is simply this:&nbsp; Maybe not, but you are no Jesus Christ either.&nbsp; You are more like Jeffrey Dahmer than you are like Jesus Christ.&nbsp; That’s the comparison that ultimately will matter.&nbsp; If God can forgive Jeffrey, He can forgive you.&nbsp; And that is good news.&nbsp;</p>
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title: Is Ignorance Necessary to Preserve Faith?
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/is-ignorance-necessary-to-preserve-faith-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Is faith in opposition to knowledge? Are Christians ignorant by definition or is there a place for reason and faith?</em></p>

<p>Materialists—people who don’t believe in God and souls and demons and angels and heaven and hell and the afterlife and all of that—believe in what you can experience with the five senses, and that is the physical realm. That’s their metaphysical view. Metaphysical views are views about what you believe is real, and a materialist believes that the only thing that is real is matter in motion. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, for example, hold to this view. “Materialism”&nbsp;is the view that, at least methodologically, drives modern science. It’s the worldview of the “new atheists”&nbsp;who are very aggressive arguing that religion is irrational and dangerous.</p>

<p>They say you can believe in God if you want, but when it comes to doing science, you cannot make reference to agency outside of the natural realm. Materialists have a tremendous amount of confidence that science will answer all of the relevant questions, because all of the relevant questions only entail things that are physical, since only physical things exist. There’s no need, in other words, for sticking God in the so-called gap.</p>

<p>I think that Christians are in part responsible for the confidence that materialists have that science will fill the gap because many Christians make a consistent mistake regarding the relationship of faith and reason. The error itself is evidenced in this question that I hear variations of this all the time: “If there is so much evidence for God, then what’s the point of faith?”&nbsp;If our evidence for Christianity is so great that it amounts to giving us knowledge of facts that we can know for sure, then it squeezes faith right out of the equation.</p>

<p>Notice something very important about this perspective that many Christians hold. It puts faith in opposition to knowledge. There’s an inverse relationship between the two, such that when you increase one, you decrease the other. You increase knowledge, faith decreases because you can’t have faith in what you know. Faith is what you exercise when you don’t know. This casts faith as a kind of religious wishful thinking because wishful thinking is all that’s available to you when you don’t know something.</p>

<p>Knowledge is what you know so faith is reserved for ignorance. This is what some people think Paul meant when he said, “We walk by faith and not by sight.”&nbsp;We walk by believing—faith—not by knowing—sight. And if we know, it’s no longer faith. Knowledge, in this equation, is the enemy of faith, and Christians are told to have faith.</p>

<p>This view is clearly false in a moment’s reflection and examination of Scripture. The opposite of knowledge is not faith, it’s ignorance. And the opposite of faith is not knowledge, it’s unbelief.</p>

<p>It’s also not what the Bible teaches about faith, and this is the salient point. There are many Christians who have a view of faith that is not Biblical. In fact, it is contrary to the Bible. And this view of faith that’s contrary to the Bible ends up giving aid and comfort to materialism, theism’s primary worldview rival in our time.</p>

<p>The Bible teaches that faith is trusting in what you know to be true because you have reason to believe it’s true. I develop this point at length in an article entitled “Faith Is Not Wishing,”&nbsp;so I’m not going to pursue the details here, except to give you a couple of examples.</p>

<p>Jesus said in Mark 2, “In order that you may know that the Son of Man has the power to forgive sins,”&nbsp;because He had just said to the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven.”&nbsp;This annoyed people. Of course, nobody could see whether the sins were actually forgiven, so He said, “In order that you may <em>know</em> that I have the power to forgive sins, I say to you, take up your pallet and go home.”&nbsp;The act of healing was something they <em>could</em> see to secure the reality, the knowledge, the certainty, the fact of something they <em>couldn’t</em> see—forgiveness of sin. And it was this that inspired their acts of trust. They had <em>knowledge</em> that sin could be forgiven, and this is precisely why they were able to exercise trust.</p>

<p>Acts 2, Pentecost Sunday. Peter gave his message about the resurrection of Christ and the visible effects of the Spirit on their lives—the manifestations of speaking in many languages and tongues of fire that the people heard and saw. Peter said, “We’re not drunk. This is the Holy Spirit.”&nbsp;This is a fulfillment of prophecy, another evidence. He explains the evidence of the manifestations they could see and hear, evidence of fulfilled prophecy, and Jesus risen from the dead. “This man you crucified, God raised from the dead.”&nbsp;That’s another proclamation of an evidence—the empty tomb, the resurrection of Christ—and this was also prophesied. David the Psalmist spoke of it—another evidence. He gives evidence, after evidence, after evidence, and then concludes, Let all the House of Israel take a big leap of faith, because you can’t know any of this. No, of course not. He says, “Let all the House of Israel know <em>for certain</em> that God has caused Him to be Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you’ve crucified.”&nbsp;There is no leap of faith. There isn’t faith based on ignorance, but rather an act of trust that is based on knowledge, and the knowledge is based on the evidence.</p>

<p>The atheist looks at the misconstrued equation about faith and knowledge in exactly the same way as many mistaken Christians do. There are things you can know, and therefore there’s no need for faith. Faith is what you use when you’re ignorant.</p>

<p>As science and other fields of knowledge have advanced, we are ignorant about fewer things. Therefore, on this errant definition of faith, the things that we can actually exercise faith in has decreased because science has explained it. So those things that we might have, in ignorance, posited God for, have now been explained by science or will soon be explained. Science has explained so many things that <em>seemed</em> to need God to account for them, that there is now less need for God, on this view of faith. As a result, the God hypothesis, then, has less and less explanatory power, because the mysteries are giving way to knowledge and science.</p>

<p>Materialists, atheists, are buoyant. They’re exuberant. And I am completely sympathetic, at least in principle, to the atheists’&nbsp;point if this is the way it is with faith and knowledge. The gaps, at least in principle, will all be filled by scientific knowledge and religion will be finally seen to be wishful thinking and superstition. That’s what we’re facing on this view of knowledge and faith as polar opposites.</p>

<p>On the contrary, faith is not opposite or contrary to knowledge. The expansion of knowledge by science, or by any other means, is no threat to faith and Christianity. If faith involves trusting in what we know, then the more we know, the more opportunity we have to trust. Faith and knowledge are companions that help us place our trust in God.</p>

<p>On the Biblical understanding of knowledge and faith, as knowledge increases, the ability to trust increases—the ability to exercise Biblical faith, which is an act of trust. The more we know about the intricate design in the universe, the reality of Jesus the Nazarene, the historical fact of the resurrection, all as well-justified true beliefs, the more we can put our trust in the God who became a man in Jesus, rose from the dead to rescue us from the debilitating and ultimately deadly disease of sin.</p>

<p>There’s no wishful thinking here. No leap of faith. No blind faith. Just a reasonable step of trust—trusting something we have good reason to believe is true. That’s the Biblical view. And it does not aid and abet the atheist.</p>
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title: Religious Stew
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/religious-stew
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Religious pluralism is the idea that when it comes to religious issues, all roads lead to Rome. This is an approach to religion that is quite popular now, but it admits of a serious flaw.</em></p>

<p>Religious pluralism is the idea that when it comes to religious issues, all roads lead to Rome. In other words, it doesn’t really matter what philosophy or religion you follow, as long as you’ve got God in there somewhere and you’re following your religion sincerely. This is an approach to religion that is quite popular now, but it admits of a serious flaw.</p>

<p>Forgive me for stating something so obvious, but there is a difference between choosing an ice cream flavor and choosing a medicine. When choosing ice cream, you choose what you like. When choosing medicine, you have to choose what heals.</p>

<p>Many people think of God like they think of ice cream, not like they think of insulin. In other words, they choose religious views according to their tastes, not according to what is true. The question of truth hardly even comes up in the conversation.</p>

<p>More than that, the question of truth is somewhat of a confusing, almost incoherent issue to them. How can you test something like a religious claim to determine if it’s true or not? Religious truth is what you believe. It’s that leap of faith you take. It has nothing to do with reality, ultimately. It is not anything you can test or measure. It is something you have to believe and hope against hope that it’s true. It becomes a kind of wishful thinking, a religious placebo of sorts.</p>

<p>However, I think you can test religious truth, and I’d like to offer one of those methods to you.</p>

<p>A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from a gentleman who challenged me about Eastern meditation. He accused me of not being open-minded in that I wouldn’t meditate to see if meditation was for me. This reveals something about how people choose religion. They choose what they like, rather than what’s true. I was considered close-minded because I wouldn’t try it to see if I liked it.</p>

<p>But this admonition was misplaced because religion isn’t the kind of thing you choose because you like it. It isn’t a matter of tasting, and sampling, and seeing if it appeals to you.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, not only is this a mistaken way of encouraging somebody to engage a particular religious view when done by Hindu or Buddhist or any religion, it is also a mistaken way for Christians to appeal to non-Christians because ultimately it is not going to do the job.</p>

<p>“Try Jesus, you’ll like Him.”&nbsp;Well, frankly, I’ve been a Christian for 22 years and there are a lot of times I don’t particularly like Jesus. He is not my favorite guy sometimes. He is not the kind of guy you <em>like</em>, in a sense. In other words, the appeal of Christianity is not to preferences but to truth. The real question is this: “Is Jesus God, Lord, and Messiah, or not?”&nbsp;That ought to be the watershed issue regarding Christianity.</p>

<p>The real issue is whether your religious beliefs are true or not, not whether you like them, not whether you try them and find them appealing.</p>

<p>I call this idea religious stew—taking little bits and pieces of different religions and putting them together in one ’pious porridge,’&nbsp;so to speak—the eclectic view, the religious smorgasbord view, where you go down the line and pick a little here and a little there, and you put it on your plate and call it your religion. When you put things on your plate you put them there for a reason. You put things on the plate in a smorgasbord because they are the things you like, not necessarily things that are good for you. That is the same problem with the religious stew approach.</p>

<p>If you have an eclectic viewpoint and take a little here and a little there, how do you know you haven’t just invented a religious placebo that doesn’t do you much good ultimately, but just satisfies your appetite? It may be spiritual junk food, frankly. It may just be empty religious calories—something that appeals to the palate, but does nothing for genuine spiritual health.</p>

<p>Much of religion in people’s lives is a placebo. It’s like a sugar pill that they take to make them feel better—not a pill that does any medicinal good, but a pill that helps them talk themselves into believing it will do some good. A placebo is given to people who are hypochondriacs and aren’t really sick, but just think they are, so you give them a sugar pill. And they think it does some good and they feel better, but nothing has changed.</p>

<p>If you are looking for a religion that suits you, a religion that fits what you like, it may be that you are simply manufacturing a religious view of your own invention. This, of course, is the attack that some have used against Christianity—people like Freud and Nietzche and Feuerbach. They have accused Christians of inventing God out of psychological reasons. We create God in the image of our own desires.</p>

<p>If I were inclined to invent a religion and a god, the God of the Bible is the very last God I would ever invent. I rather like the pantheistic god myself, the monistic god of eastern religions. Eastern religions are high on individual freedom and low on personal responsibility. I like the notion that god is in all of us and we are god, and we are a law to ourselves. Life would be a lot easier if that were the case.</p>

<p>I certainly would not invent a holy God whose perfect moral character becomes the absolute law of the universe. He is utterly demanding, encroaching on every corner of our life. Who would invent a God like that? That isn’t the kind of God that would make me feel more comfortable. That God makes me feel uncomfortable because His demand is so much greater than my ability to deliver.</p>

<p>So I don’t think Christianity’s God is one that is the result of invention. But I think other people’s gods are. And I think there are things about these other gods and other religions that are seriously problematic.</p>

<p>Some might think this idea of testing a religious truth is unusual, an implausible thing in itself, because in this day of religious stew pluralism, the notion that any one religion is true is somewhat anathema. It is impolite. It is incorrect. It is ludicrous. You just don’t say that anymore. It is simply bad manners to suggest there is only one right way. This is why Christians are <em>persona non grata</em> in many cases.</p>

<p>What mystifies people is the suggestion there is even a possibility that one could know whether a religious claim is true or not. After all, religion is what you merely believe. You take a leap of faith and you hope that it is true. It really doesn’t have anything to do with reality. Science measures reality; religion measures this mystical world of faith. We ought not confuse the two such that a test we could use for science can be applied to religion. We must not think we can arrive at something akin to true knowledge in religious areas like we can in scientific areas.</p>

<p>But I actually think that we can. I think that the tools we use to measure reality in other ways can also be used to measure religious truth. I want to talk about one of those tools.</p>

<p>For example, if I told you that out in my car, in my glove box, I have a square circle, how many of you would want to take a peek? I always get a couple of contenders. You are the same people I’d like to talk to about buying beach front property in Montana!</p>

<p>The fact is, there are no beaches in Montana because there are no oceans there, and there are no square circles. There are no square circles because a square circle is a contradiction in terms.</p>

<p>It’s like a person who said, “I met a woman who was ten years younger than her son.”&nbsp;Now, no empirical search is necessary for you to reject this claim. By definition, mothers are older than their children. That is why there can’t be a woman ten years younger than her son. Even if the most brilliant person alive said this to you, you could immediately reject it.</p>

<p>The point I am making is this. There are some particular things you can judge as false without ever leaving the room because a moment’s reflection tells you there is something wrong. Like the mother who wrote to her son in college, “Your sister had a baby this morning. Haven’t heard if it’s a boy or a girl so I don’t know whether you’re an aunt or an uncle.”&nbsp;I think this is the same lady who wrote, “If you don’t get this letter, let me know and I’ll send you another one.”</p>

<p>Listen, there is a problem here. Something is wrong with this and it’s wrong internally. These things can’t be true and so you reject them outright. Why do you reject them? Because they violate a test we call the test of coherence. In other words, it doesn’t make sense; it’s contradictory.</p>

<p>The objection, by the way, to Christianity on the basis of the existence of evil in the world is an objection of this nature. Objectors say Christians believe God is good and that He is powerful. But evil exists in the world, and if God was really all good then He would be willing to deal with the problem of evil, and if He was really powerful He would be capable of dealing with the problem of evil. But evil is still here, so either He is not all good or He is not all powerful. In either case, you have a contradiction, an incoherence in Christianity, and therefore it must be false.</p>

<p>I will tell you that if this objection cannot be answered in the way it was given, then Christianity is refuted, because if a thing can be proven contradictory, it is false. So here is the employment of this test called coherence, or you could just say the test of “does it make sense?”&nbsp;You can apply a test like this to disqualify a religious view.</p>

<p>I think that this question can certainly be answered with regards to Christianity. I have answered it a number of times on the air and I have a <a href="http://store.str.org/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=CD106" target="_blank">talk on the problem of evil</a> where we discuss it. We also have a commentary called <a href="http://www.str.org/articles/the-strength-of-god-the-problem-of-evil#.UYA9epVV_F8" target="_blank">“The Strength of God and the Problem of Evil.”</a>&nbsp;It shows that the supposed dilemma offered is not a legitimate dilemma with regards to the Christian view of God. I think it turns out that the presence of evil in the world is one of the best arguments <em>for</em> the existence of God, and not the other way around.</p>

<p>You can see how you can use a test like this called coherence to generally disqualify a view as false, and then it can be rejected. If your belief doesn’t conform to the laws of logic—if it violates coherence, then your view is false. Period.</p>

<p>What about this religious stew view that all religions ultimately lead to God? What it fails to take into consideration is that much of religious truth is actually competing and not complimentary. Religions have contradictory claims. For example, God in the Christian tradition is personal and in the eastern tradition is impersonal. God can’t be personal and not personal at the same time. It’s like turning left and right at the same time. It can’t be done. Christianity teaches that when you die, you will go to heaven or to hell. Eastern religions say you will be reincarnated. Maybe there is some third option. Now you could go to hell or heaven, or be reincarnated, but one thing I know for sure, you are not going to heaven or hell <em>and</em> be reincarnated at the same time. One view must be wrong.</p>

<p>The point is, we can use this test of coherence to disqualify certain views as being false on their face. The religious stew view—the idea that all religions lead to God, that all roads lead to Rome—is false on its face because all religions can’t be true at the same time. The religious stew view must be false according to this test. This is why I reject Hinduism and why I wasn’t at all interested trying it out through meditation. Hinduism teaches that our individual identities are part of a large, divine illusion called Maya. In other words, we don’t really exist as individuals.</p>

<p>Now it strikes me as incoherent that we could know such a thing. How could you know if you were part of a dream? It’s like two characters in your dream asking the question, Do I exist? How would they test such a thing? Everything that they would measure to find out if they were real is not real itself either, only part of the dream. How could they have true knowledge of this?</p>

<p>To put it most simply, does Charlie Brown know he is a cartoon character? Of course not. It is a ludicrous, incoherent kind of concept. That is why in my view Hinduism is disqualified on its face. When somebody say I’m close-minded because I won’t even try it, that’s like a 20-year-old saying to me, you’re so close-minded you won’t even come to my house to meet my ten-year-old mother. It implies that knowing this truth involves an exploration of some kind, and I’m wrong for not taking the effort to find out.</p>

<p>Some things are obviously and irrefutably false. It’s obviously false that a 20-year-old could have a ten-year-old mother. It’s obviously false that individual people can have true knowledge that they don’t really exist and are just an illusion. This is a contradiction and therefore Hinduism must be false. That is why I have no temptation nor feel a rational obligation to even consider Hinduism.</p>

<p>Religious stew has got to be false by its very nature. That is why I reject the notion.</p>
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title: Am I Going to Hell?
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/am-i-going-to-hell-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Do you think that people who commit moral crimes ought to be punished?</em></p>

<p>I talked in the past about the difficulty in clarifying our communication of the need for salvation. Frankly, to a lot of people the message of Christianity is not going to be palatable, but at least we can make it clear. It will not be the kind of thing they will be happy with. Yet, at the same time, there are things we can do that make it clearer and not inappropriately put stumbling blocks in people’s way.</p>

<p>This is why I’ve often said that the Gospel is offensive enough all by itself. Don’t add any more offense to it. But we should not take out the offense that is inherent to the Gospel, either. This is why we are not pluralists even though there is pressure to be pluralists or at least inclusivistic with the Gospel. At the same time, we don’t want to communicate the exclusivity of Christ in such a way as to confound those people who are listening.</p>

<p>Christians often say, “if you believe in Jesus you go to Heaven; if you don’t believe in Jesus you go to Hell.” Is that true? Well, it is true, but it doesn’t communicate a sense of the true circumstance. It’s not coherent to most people because it just seems bizarre why what one person thought about some guy who died 2000 years ago has anything to do with their eternal destiny. Whether they believe in him or not seems irrelevant to anything that might happen after we die. So we have often not been careful to communicate the sense of things.</p>

<p>We need to be clear so that someone rejects the real message and not some incoherent mess that some Christian has handed him that they can’t make sense of. So, I don’t say, “if you believe in Jesus you go to Heaven, and if you don’t believe you go to Hell,”&nbsp;because this is misleading. I’d rather try to explain it more accurately.</p>

<p>Many of you are familiar with the conversation I had with a fellow at Barnes and Noble in which he asked me a question. I was giving a talk there as part of the book on relativism that Dr. Frank Beckwith and I co-authored,&nbsp;<em>Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air</em>. Since I was talking about it in the bookstore, he came up afterwards and started asking questions about Jesus. Instead of unloading this slogan on him, I asked him this question. Do you think that people who commit moral crimes ought to be punished? He said, “Yes.”&nbsp;I said, “Good, so do I.”&nbsp;Second question, “Have you ever committed any moral crimes?”&nbsp;Pause. Then he said, “Yes, I guess I have.”&nbsp;You know what I said to him? “So have I.”</p>

<p>This just took 30 seconds, right? Then I reflected back to him, “Look where we’ve come so far. We both believe that people who commit moral crimes ought to be punished. And we both believe we’ve committed moral crimes. You know what I call that? Bad news.”&nbsp;And it is bad news.</p>

<p>Most people are concerned with doing what is right. That was one of the first things he told me. “I’m Jewish. I believe in morality. I believe in God. Why do I have to believe in your Jesus?”&nbsp;Here is a man who has some level of commitment to the moral life. The problem is, he knows that that commitment does not guarantee that he is going to live a fully moral life and he’s aware of his own moral crimes. And so am I. Now what? That is the issue? We are guilty. That is the bad news.</p>

<p>This is why it is so important to get the bad news before the good news. The bad news gives meaning to the good news. I was able to talk about the fact that now we both admit we have a problem, but that there is a solution that God has ordained. Since He is the one who is offended, He is the one who can call the shots on how to fix the problem. The answer is through His Son Jesus, who provides mercy because he took the rap for our crimes. We got off. He went to jail. A modern metaphor to put it in perspective.</p>

<p>There at least is the sense of things about Jesus being the only way. I hear it even asked on TV. The question is often asked honestly, but I think most of the time it is asked for an inflammatory effect. The person who is asking the question is wording it very carefully because he knows precisely how the faithful evangelical Christian will respond. He is counting on it so that the Christian says something that sounds to the rest of the people to be bizarre. Therefore, they can discount what the Christian says.</p>

<p>I don’t want you to sound bizarre when you answer the question I am about to offer. I want you to sound sensible. Here is the question. Do you think I am going to Hell? Now the only person who asks that is a person who thinks you think they’re going to Hell. Ninety per cent of the time they would ask it because they think you are nuts and they want other people to think you are nuts, too. They want to get you to say in public that people who disagree with you are going to Hell so that you will look silly and they will look good. How do you deal with that?</p>

<p>The problem, of course, is, first of all, it’s probably true they are going to Hell. Secondly, it doesn’t communicate the sense of things and so it is misleading. The people who ask this are generally not criminals. It’s going to be some nice guy who is basically good and sincere. You are in a tough spot. You are on the defensive already, you want to answer truthfully, but you know by giving a truthful answer you are going to play into his hands.</p>

<p>Jesus faced this frequently. He always got out of it, and I’m going to give you a way to get out. Answer the question truthfully and don’t sound like an idiot. It doesn’t mean everyone is going to believe you, fall at your feet, and want to receive Christ, but at least you will be able to give a proper and appropriate answer to those who ask you to make a defense for the hope that is within you (2 Peter 3:15). The answer is simply this.</p>

<p>When somebody says, “Do you think I am going to Hell?”&nbsp;and you think they are, you say something like, “Well, I believe in justice, do you?”&nbsp;“Yes.”&nbsp;“What is justice but that people who are guilty get punished in an appropriate way to their guilt? I believe that people who are guilty pay for their crimes unless they have been pardoned.”</p>

<p>This is very straightforward language. It fits entirely with our culture. It is terminology that has meaning immediately. It is also terminology that the person you are talking with not only is familiar with but they agree with the concept. We both believe the same thing here: justice. If you have committed any moral crimes, if you have done anything wrong, I think you will be punished for them unless you receive pardon. The punishment for moral crimes is Hell.</p>

<p>You are saying yes, I think you are going to Hell unless you receive Jesus. But you are putting it in terms that are making more sense to that individual. In fact, he has already affirmed the underlying concept, as well he should, because he believes in it.</p>

<p>Most people believe in justice. It is built in. It is part of their moral intuition, the image of God in man that is being expressed. They clamor for justice. There is a place for mercy, and pardon. We both agree. From God’s perspective, if you have committed any moral crimes, then you are going to be punished for them. You’ll only receive God’s punishment if you are guilty of something. Are you guilty of anything? What is so controversial about that? Don’t want to be punished? God has a means for a pardon. That is the whole point of our conversation. I don’t want to be punished either. I want to experience a pardon.</p>

<p>See how that works? That’s part of the tactical elements of communicating the knowledge truthfully.</p>
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title: The Ambassador and the Waitress
topic: Tactics and Tools
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-ambassador-and-the-waitress
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Sometimes being a good representative of the Kingdom hinges on the simplest things</em>.</p>

<p>We talk a lot at STR about what it means to be an ambassador for Christ (remember 2 Corinthians 5:20?). You might have wondered how this works out in the nuts and bolts of daily life. It occurred to me that sometimes being a good representative of the Kingdom hinges on the simplest things, almost trivial.</p>

<p>Let me give you an example from my own life.</p>

<p>I have had some of the most interesting conversations about spiritual matters with ordinary people who serve my table in restaurants. Since any contact with others is an opportunity to be an ambassador, I try to keep an eye open for what might turn out to be a “divine appointment.”</p>

<p>This is something you can do, too. Here are some ways to set the stage to engage them in a friendly way.</p>

<p>First, find out the server’s name.</p>

<p>This is simple if they’re wearing a name tag. If not, simply ask. If it’s a unique name or suggests some ethnic history, ask about it. It’s a friendly thing to do—even flattering—and will help you remember their name better.</p>

<p>The second thing to do: Leave a decent tip. (The after-church crowd is notorious for stiffing the restaurant help.)</p>

<p>There’s one last thing I do, and it may be the most important. As I’m walking out, I make a point to find the waiter or waitress and simply say, “Thank you.”&nbsp;It’s a small gesture, but I want their last impression of me to be as pleasant as their first.</p>

<p>What’s the real goal behind this modest effort? Simply this: People are important to the Lord, and if they are important to Him, they should be important to you and me.</p>

<p>Addressing a person by their name and showing genuine appreciation for service are simple ways to show that they are valued. This speaks volumes about the One you represent. Never underestimate the role of simply being warm and pleasant.</p>

<p>How do they know I’m a Christian? Maybe they don’t. However, since we always bow our heads to give thanks at our table, and the server may overhear snatches of conversation about spiritual things, it’s certainly possible they’ll make the connection. The last thing I want anyone to do is associate my prayer or my Bible or my Christian tract with rudeness, stinginess, or a demanding, high-maintenance customer.</p>

<p>It may be that we never get around to spiritual matters—in point of fact, we usually don’t. Even so, I still want to leave behind a “fragrant aroma”&nbsp;for the sake of Christ. That’s one of the reasons Paul says in Colossians 3:17, “And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus”—that is, as His representative and consistent with His wishes.</p>
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title: Is It Reasonable to Say All Sin Is Sin?
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/is-it-reasonable-to-say-all-sin-is-sin-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Greg gives an answer to this question that is both biblical and rational.</em></p>

<p>A “pastorism”&nbsp;is a slogan that is meant to communicate a spiritual truth, but it does so in an imbalanced way, because it also communicates something that’s false. There are lots of these. “God loves the sinner, but He hates the sin,”&nbsp;is an example of one. “God turned his back on Jesus on the cross,”&nbsp;is another. In each, there’s something that is true, but there’s also something that’s misleading.</p>

<p>A student heard her Christian professor say, “All sin is sin,”&nbsp;as a response to a statement that suggested that some sins were worse than others. It is true that sin is sin. It’s hard to argue. It’s a tautology: A equals A. Every sin, even the most minor sin, is egregious in God’s sight, and enough to disqualify somebody from salvation. That’s why James says in James 2:10, that if you break one of the points of the Law, you’re guilty of the whole thing.</p>

<p>But James is not saying that all sins are equally egregious, which was the application the professor was making. I know that James couldn’t be making that point because if he did, he’d be contradicting his half-brother, who was Jesus of Nazareth, because Jesus said the opposite.</p>

<p>Jesus said in a very straightforward way in John 19:11, before Pilate, “The person who delivered Me up to you has the greater sin.”</p>

<p>This citation alone should be enough to end the debate from Scripture that no sin is greater than another sin. Jesus says quite the contrary. There are greater sins. It’s the word He uses.</p>

<p>In Matthew 23, Jesus is excoriating the Jewish leadership for their displays of piety before people, yet down inside they are like a dead man’s rotting bones. Here He delivers a series of woes, one of which identifies the habit of tithing “mint, dill, and cumin.”&nbsp;In their observance of the Law they even divided up their seasonings. So they kept the Law to the extreme in giving one-tenth of that, but then they ignore “the weightier provisions of the Law.”&nbsp;So you have lesser provisions and greater provisions of the Law, and you’re obliged to keep both of them. But if you disregard the greater provisions, it seems straightforward that you’re guilty of a greater sin. Scripture clearly states there are greater sins than other sins.</p>

<p>You can also argue the statement by saying, “All crime is crime.”&nbsp;Is it just for somebody to get the same punishment for petty larceny as murder? People would say it is unjust. If I insinuated that no matter what the crime, the punishment should be the same, people would look at me like I was an idiot.</p>

<p>In any other circumstances where issues of justice are at stake, it would be easy for people to discern the difference between crimes, and understand that different punishments are appropriate for different crimes. The legal concept is called “lex talionis,”&nbsp;or the “law of the claw,”&nbsp;from the Latin. It’s referring here to an Old Testament principle, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”&nbsp;Jesus’&nbsp;comments about this in the Sermon on the Mount are often misunderstood and contribute to the abuse of this notion. This is actually a principle of justice that the punishment should fit the crime.</p>

<p>There’s a commonsense notion, when you reflect about our moral intuitions, that what is appropriate and just in one circumstance isn’t appropriate and just in another. So why would anybody be inclined to think that somehow, in God’s assessment of things, it’s going to be any different?</p>

<p>Why can’t we as Christians admit that it doesn’t make sense to say, “All sin is sin”? Who would believe such a thing? We wouldn’t accept it in our own criminal system because it wouldn’t be just—the same principle of justice used in the Old Testament. Why should we accept it from God? That doesn’t make any sense at all.</p>

<p>The impulse is that some people have this idea that we can’t simply ask ourselves the question, “Does that make sense,”&nbsp;because we’re people who believe things that don’t make sense. We’re people who believe things that are weird, stupid, foolish, or silly. We believe them because we are fools for Christ.</p>

<p>Incidentally, Paul’s tone in the phrase “fools for Christ,”&nbsp;in 1 Corinthians is sarcasm. The Gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing. It isn’t foolish; it’s foolish to the perishing. They can’t figure it out. It doesn’t make sense to them, but it doesn’t mean it’s foolish.</p>

<p>I’m not diminishing the possibility of odd or unusual things in faith, like the Trinity, or other moral quandaries. We don’t understand God’s perspective entirely, but in this particular case, there is no revelation that supports the idea that “sin is sin,”&nbsp;and indeed there is revelation to the contrary.</p>

<p>A lot of Christians think that faith and reason are at opposite ends of the spectrum; that reason is used to get knowledge on one side, and on the other side are the things that you don’t have good reasons for like faith. There is a sense that Christians in faith are leaping in the dark and believing ridiculous things because this is all that we have available to us. If we use reason and are thoughtful about our faith, somehow we are not doing what God wants.</p>

<p>Many Christians would nod their head to that statement. These are the kind of people who say, “If you’ve got all this evidence for it, then where is room for faith?”&nbsp;They see faith and reason as opposites, and the relationship might be considered the relationship of divorce. These are two entities divorced from each other, one on either side.</p>

<p>David Horner uses a metaphor in his wonderful book, <em>Mind Your Faith</em>. He says it’s not divorce; it should be marriage. Faith and reason are partners working together.</p>

<p>Horner states that one of the biggest objections that the New Atheists have brought against religion is that religious people have blind faith. They believe in things for which there is no evidence; ergo, the conflict between faith and reason. But Christians are people of reason and faith, but not people of blind faith.</p>

<p>It’s curious, as David Horner points out in his book <em>Mind Your Faith</em>, that when New Atheists make this charge, they never define reason or faith so that we can compare what we mean by reason and faith. In his book, he does both.</p>

<p>Horner states that reason is: “Assessing reasons for a point of view and logical relationships to see if there’s adequate justification for a belief. But faith has four components.”&nbsp;I’ll say three, because I think the last two are very similar. “First, there is an object. When you have faith, you have something or someone you have faith in. Secondly, there is content, which are details about what it means to put your faith in that thing, like a chair.”&nbsp;That’s the object of your faith. The belief, or the content, is that the chair will hold your body weight. And the third thing is an act of trust or commitment when you go over and sit in the chair. So those are three elements of faith: object, content, and trust or commitment. I thought that was a pretty good characterization.</p>

<p>When you think about the definition of rationality and the definition of faith, where is the conflict? The answer is there is none. If you define what reason is, and you define what faith is, you realize that there’s no conflict.</p>

<p>Reason assesses, faith trusts. Reason assesses whether or not something or someone is trustworthy, and then faith believes that certain things are true in light of the reasons. Not blind faith, but a reasonable step of trust.</p>

<p>It’s a great distinction I’m going tout as a great way of characterizing the relationship of faith and reason: not divorce, but marriage.</p>

<p>Reason assesses, faith trusts. No conflict. The opposite of faith is not reason; the opposite of faith is unbelief, or lack of trust. The opposite of reason is not faith; the opposite of reason is irrationality. So it certainly is possible to have reasonable faith, and it is also possible to have unreasonable unbelief. From a biblical and a logical point of view, it is therefore unreasonable to say all sin is sin.</p>
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title: Strategy for Dealing With Bible Difficulties
topic: Tactics and Tools
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/strategy-for-dealing-with-bible-difficulties
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Last week I got a call from my brother who lives in Florida. He had stumbled upon a website apparently done by Jewish scholars and meant to serve the Jewish community that was experiencing in-roads by evangelists from Christianity. Some were ethnic Jews who had come to trust that Jesus is the Messiah promised to Israel and have now gone back to their Jewish communities proclaiming the message that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah that was prophesied. These Jews make their case much like the early Jewish followers of Jesus did. They use the Hebrew Scriptures and show how prophecies about the Messiah were fulfilled by Jesus of Nazareth.</p>

<p>As my brother Dave was reading through this website, it was clear that they were trying to make the case that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Messiah and the characterizations of the nearly 300 prophecies that many people say have been fulfilled in the life of Christ are inaccurate. They put what might be called a “Jewish spin”&nbsp;on those Hebrew prophecies to show that Jesus was not the one who fulfilled them and, therefore, Jesus of Nazareth was not the Messiah and Christianity is just wrong.</p>

<p>My brother’s response was somewhat like mine is when I stumble upon things like this. Of course, I’m interested in what they have to say but, like a lot of people when you find a website that apparently has a lot of smart guys involved in giving a rebuttal to Christian claims, it makes me a little nervous. I think, “Gee, I wonder what they’ve got? I wonder what they know that I don’t know?”</p>

<p>Proverbs says, “The first person who pleads his case seems just until another comes and examines him.”&nbsp;The first guy to come along and explain what happened is going to explain it from his own perspective and convictions. When Christians explain that prophecies have been fulfilled in Christ, they’re going to give it the best possible explanation because they think they were fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. They sound convincing. But don’t you sometimes ask yourself the question, “Gee, what if someone from another perspective asks these same questions? What if they were confronting these verses, what would they say about our case?”</p>

<p>It’s a good question to ask. It’s always fair to say, “Okay that sounds good. But what would someone who doesn’t hold your view say about those passages?”&nbsp;You want to see what the other guy thinks so you can get more of a balanced perspective. It might be that we’re fudging a little bit because these are the things that we hold to be true.</p>

<p>This is true in any circumstance. Somebody has been wronged. You talk to the first person, and they’re going to tell you their side, and it’s going to make a lot of sense. In fact, if you took it at face value you’d think this person is in the right, the other person is in the wrong. That’s why Proverbs says, “The first person who pleads his case seems just until another comes and examines him.”&nbsp;Now you have a hostile witness. You have a cross-examination situation and that helps you get to the truth.</p>

<p>Sometimes we don’t want to examine both sides because we’re nervous about what we may find out. Some Christians shy away from things like Skeptic magazine or Sam Harris’s books because we don’t want our faith shaken. They might hear something they can’t deal with. In fact, when my brother Dave went to this website he found some pretty persuasive things.</p>

<p>One of them was Numbers 23 (and other places) where it clearly says a prophet that is meant to prophesy against Israel can’t do it if God doesn’t allow him to. And God isn’t allowing him, and God’s not going to change His mind because “God is not a man that He should lie nor son of man that He should repent.”&nbsp;But Christians say God is a man in Jesus, right? So Christians say God is a man while Hebrew Scripture makes it clear God is not man. Therefore, Christianity must be false.</p>

<p>This question can be answered quite simply, I think. First, we need to be more careful about what we mean when we say that God became a man in Jesus because, in fact, to be precise God did not become a man. Nothing in the divine nature of God changed. Rather humanity was added to the person of Jesus Christ. So you have one person, two natures, the Chalcedonian formula. Precision in our understanding helps us to overcome that problem.</p>

<p>The larger point is that people see things in websites and books that trouble them. I want to offer guidelines for dealing with things like this. I didn’t know what Dave was going to ask me about any of the over 300 Biblical prophecies that were allegedly fulfilled in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. I’m not an Old Testament scholar. That’s not my expertise. I’m certainly not into prophecy much, even prophecy of the First Coming, and much less prophecy of the Second Coming. I’m more of a generalist. So though I can’t always deal with those specific things, I have strategies that will help me deal with challenges from a more general perspective that you can use, too.</p>

<p>Here are the guidelines I offered to my brother:</p>

<p>First: No Jew has privileged insight into any passage of Scripture in the Hebrew Old Testament simply in virtue of the fact that he’s Jewish. I know there’s a tendency to think that because Jewish people must really know what the Hebrew Scripture means, but nothing about Jewishness gives any insight into the meanings of Jewish prophecies made two to four thousand years ago. Being Jewish may give someone some insight into what it means to be a Jew in the 21st century, but it gives him no special insight into the Scriptures that were originally written by Jews.</p>

<p>How does he know what those passages mean? The same way anyone of any ethnicity knows what they mean. He has to study language and history. Now if he has done his study and knows Hebrew and history, then he may have some insight but it’s in virtue of his knowledge of the language and the text from his academic studies, but not because of his Jewishness. I, as a Gentile, or someone else could master Hebrew and do the academic work that pertains to these prophecies from long ago just as well. You have to look at someone’s point of view based on their scholarship alone and not on their ethnicity. It’s kind of a reverse genetic fallacy (finding fault simply based on its origins). This is the flip side of it where you credit something simply based on its origins.</p>

<p>Second: Keep in mind when you deal with any particular challenge that is brought to bear on the question of whether the Christian worldview is correct—including the messiahship of Jesus—that our case as followers of Christ, believing that Jesus and the Bible got it right, does not depend on any one thing for its truthfulness.</p>

<p>I’m not saying that there aren’t some things that if found to be false would undermine the whole enterprise. If Jesus never rose from the dead, for example, then that’s it for Christianity. What I’m saying is that as followers of Christ we have a massive amount of information from which we can make a cumulative case in favor of our views. We have evidence for the existence of God through intelligent design, using a cosmological or design argument. We have arguments based on morality, history, and the Scripture itself. What do we make of this collection of 66 books called the Bible? We have prophecies fulfilled in the life of Jesus. We have historical details that relate to Jesus and His miraculous works. We have arguments about the resurrection. These all work together to build a strong, persuasive case for the truthfulness of Christianity.</p>

<p>The case for Christianity doesn’t just rely on Messianic prophecy. We’ve got the whole historical case for the events of the life of Jesus and the resurrection.</p>

<p>If I have good evidence for the historical reliability of the Gospels and, therefore, His claims, His miracles, and His resurrection, then that evidence bears on this question of Messianic prophecy because Jesus was the one who claimed some of these things to be prophetic that some scholars think are not. So whom do we believe? The interpretation of scholars now 2,000 years removed or the interpretation of Jesus who was in that milieu itself—2,000 years ago—and performed miracles demonstrating that He is actually the one who He claims to be?</p>

<p>That changes it a bit. It adds another wrinkle. Maybe I can’t refute these critics, but Jesus can. Even if I can’t answer all their challenges, we still have to contend with Jesus. There’s a whole lot more than fulfilled prophecies in the case for Christianity.</p>

<p>Finally, I don’t promote the idea that more than 300 prophecies were fulfilled in the life of Jesus. That may be the case, but it can seem like an overstatement since many of those prophecies are vague and unspecific. In fact, when you see some of the prophecies stated to be fulfilled in the New Testament and go back to the Hebrew Scriptures you wonder how they got one out of the other. Not all of the prophecies are like that some are very clear and specific—but there are enough vague ones in the 300 that people will start scratching their heads if you start quoting some of these vague ones. That’s exactly what happened on this website. They say, “Look at all these 300. They’re not as clear as many Christians claim they are.”&nbsp;And because the 300 claim is now questionable, the whole case from prophecy appears weak.</p>

<p>If I were going to make the case in Biblical prophecy, and I think there is legitimacy to it, I’m going to stick with those prophecies that seem to be most clearly tied in with the life of Jesus of Nazareth: Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, and Daniel 9, for example. These are powerful testimonies that seem to be clearly fulfilled in Jesus. We know these prophecies antedated Jesus’&nbsp;advent on earth because we have the Dead Sea Scrolls that show the prophecies came before Jesus. These are specific and clear. So to strengthen our case we don’t have to go for all 300. If we can point to four or five that are really specific and clear, and then tie Jesus of Nazareth to the Old Testament prophecies that preceded Him, we have a much stronger case. It’s not necessary to use a large, impressive number to make a compelling appeal to prophecy. Even just a few strong examples create a compelling case.</p>

<p>Sometimes you are faced with a challenge to Christianity that you don’t know how to respond to specifically. You don’t always need to. Take a step back and evaluate the strength of the objection, especially weighed against the entire case for Christianity.</p>
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title: Hitler and Mother Teresa
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/hitler-and-mother-teresa
content:
            <div> 
		<p>“You’re saying that Hitler and Mother Teresa would both suffer the same fate before God if they didn’t believe in Jesus?”</p>

<p>The words echoed over the radio airwaves as the host of “Religion on the Line”&nbsp;on ABC’s L.A. affiliate station patiently waited for me to answer. I knew the question was coming, but I had no tidy theological retort that would put the ball back into his court.</p>

<p>Someone once said that if you word the question right, you can win any debate. The question that evening was a classic case in point. The host might as well have asked, “Do you still beat your wife?”&nbsp;Simply answering “yes”&nbsp;or “no”&nbsp;wouldn’t do.</p>

<p>At the root of this discussion is the issue of Jesus as the only way to salvation. It is one of the biggest stumbling blocks of Christianity to those who are sincerely interested in leading moral lives and working hard to mitigate the impact of evil in the world. To make Jesus the sole issue of salvation seems to ignore the obvious difference between people of conscience and others who are entirely without scruples. Does that make sense?</p>

<h2>Radical Surgery Required</h2>

<p>Let me give an analogy that may add perspective. All things being equal, it’s good to practice healthy living. People who eat their vegetables, get proper rest, exercise sensibly, and don’t smoke or drink to excess, generally reap the benefits of longevity and vitality. Those who don’t, get sick.</p>

<p>But what if all things aren’t equal? What if there’s a hidden element, a terminal disease quietly sucking life out of the body? Healthy living does nothing to avert the underlying disease. In that case, the undisciplined junk food addict and the diligent athlete suffer the same fate. The silent tumor breaks its silence; the grave claims them both.</p>

<p>There’s a parallel to this in the spiritual realm. On the one hand, it’s good to live righteously. Holy living contributes to spiritual health. Those who continually practice sin eventually suffer its consequences.</p>

<p>There’s another side to the equation, however, a crucial element too often ignored. Our most valiant attempts at goodness are met with failure because a deep-seated malignancy sucks the life from our efforts. No matter how hard we try, each of us is dying from a spiritual disease no amount of righteous living can heal.</p>

<p>The sad truth is this: Ultimately, no person lives completely right. Sure, they’re capable of doing good things, sometimes phenomenal things. Even a dying patient can have healthy eating habits. But good works, like good meals, cannot restore vitality to a diseased patient; they can only maintain it. Restoration must come through surgery.</p>

<p>At first glance, it seems unfair that God wouldn’t consider all the good we’ve done. Think about it, though. When was the last time you received a letter from the D.A. congratulating you for not holding up a bank or shooting your neighbor?</p>

<p>Obedience to the law is expected. A year of good behavior doesn’t cancel out a year of lawbreaking, evening up the record. Every person, from the greatest to the least, has broken God’s law. That makes them guilty, and guilty people must seek God’s surgery: forgiveness. Agreed, some need more forgiveness than others—sometimes much more, just as a disease can ravage one body more violently than another. But every person is fatally stricken, nonetheless.</p>

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

<p>Have you read the Ten Commandments recently? Take a quick inventory by asking yourself these questions.</p>

<p>Have you ever given allegiance to anything else over God in your life or used anything as an object of worship or veneration? Have you ever used God’s name in a vain or vulgar fashion? Have you worshiped God on a regular basis? Have you even once disobeyed or dishonored your parents? Have you murdered anyone, or even had harsh thoughts about someone (see Matthew 5:22)? Have you had sex with someone other than your spouse, or even thought about it (see Matthew 5:28)? Have you taken something that wasn’t yours? Have you lied? Have you simply wanted something that wasn’t yours?</p>

<p>Sound tough? It is. This is God’s Law. These are God’s requirements. Even in grammar school, 60% is a flunking grade, yet who among us has not violated each of these commandments many times?</p>

<p>Reducing the Ten Commandments to only two doesn’t help. Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,”&nbsp;and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets”&nbsp;(Matthew 22:37-40). Even the best of us violate these two laws daily.</p>

<p>Whenever you’re tempted to trust in your own ability to please God, take a good look at the standard, God’s Law, then look at your own score card. To use Paul’s words, each of us is “shut up under sin”&nbsp;(Gal. 3:22). Our mouths have been closed, and we all have become accountable to God (Romans 3:19). Saved by our own goodness? The Law gives us no hope.</p>

<p>Try this calculation. If you sinned only ten times a day from your tenth birthday to your sixtieth—and keep in mind we’re not just talking about rape, pillage, and murder, but the full range of human moral failing, including heart attitudes and motives—what would your rap sheet look like? You would have amassed 182,500 infractions of the law. What judge in his right mind would turn you loose with a record like that?</p>

<h2>Ghandi vs. Al Capone</h2>

<p>The worst of us tend to whitewash our own contribution to evil. Al Capone said, “I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>

<p>By contrast, Ghandi—a man utterly committed to a life of virtue—was not so optimistic. Towards the end of his life he lamented, “It is an unbroken torture to me that I am still so far from him whom I know governs every breath of my life and whose offspring I am. I know it is because of the evil passions within me that keep me so far from him; yet I can’t get away from them.”</p>

<p>C.S. Lewis captured this contrast with these words:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less...Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>

<p>If Lewis is right, then the One who is most holy sees sin most clearly. The One who is perfectly righteous understands the full tragedy of even the most “trivial”&nbsp;breach of goodness. God’s purity is without flaw, so He sees sin as it really is. That’s why He is not so inclined to dismiss our moral imperfections with a “boys will be boys”&nbsp;mentality.</p>

<h2>Hitler and Mother Teresa</h2>

<p>Could Adolph Hitler and Mother Teresa suffer the same fate? No and yes.</p>

<p>No, because they’d answer for different crimes and, as such, their judgment would be different. Just as there are degrees of sin (see John 19:11), there are degrees of punishment. Jesus said Sodom would fare better than Capernaum in the day of judgment (Matthew 11:24), though each would be condemned.</p>

<p>Yes, because each person must ultimately answer for his own sins—Hitler for his, Mother Teresa for hers, you and I for ours. Unless, of course, Jesus is allowed to answer for them.</p>

<p>That is the good news: Jesus, though rich, for our sake became poor, that we through His poverty might become rich (2 Cor. 8:9).</p>

<p>To stay alive physically, first cure the disease, then keep fit to maintain your health. To experience spiritual well-being, God must do surgery on the root problem, sin. Living righteously afterwards secures our spiritual vitality, but it can never cure our disease. Only Jesus can do that.</p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">Dale Carnegie, <em>How to Win Friends and Influence People</em> (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), p. 20. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:2">Clive Staples Lewis, <em>Mere Christianity</em> (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 73. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:2"> ↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
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title: Do Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Evidence?
topic: Philosophy
author: Melinda Penner
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/do-extraordinary-claims-demand-extraordinary-evidence-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Hume offered this challenge in “Of Miracles”&nbsp;in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.</em></p>

<p>This requirement is offered in response to the miracle claims of Christianity as though it’s an obvious, well-established principle. But it’s actually not clear what the criteria of “extraordinary evidence”&nbsp;is, and here are three lines of response. These are rebuttals, calling into question the principle in the requirement, rather than refutations because the challenge itself has to be supported by an argument and clarified for the nature of what is being required.</p>

<p>First, there needs to be a clarification. The nature of the “extraordinary evidence”&nbsp;required can be understood in two ways: extraordinary with respect to quality or extraordinary with respect to quantity.</p>

<p>If the former (quality), then the evidence produced is itself extraordinary, and it will also need to meet the requirement of having extraordinary evidence, and a vicious regress ensues. If the quality of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be also be extraordinary in quality, then it will also have to have extraordinary evidence. But then the condition can never be met, and suffers from the fallacy of “begging the question”&nbsp;against extraordinary events in an unfair manner. The game is rigged by the request.</p>

<p>And perhaps that is the point of the requirement because it presupposes naturalism, precluding the possibility of offering evidence that will justify a supernatural claim.</p>

<p>If the requirement is for an extraordinary <em>quantity</em> of evidence, then the next question is, how much ordinary evidence is necessary for the total quantity to be considered extraordinary? This is perhaps a “problem of heaps”—how much is enough? There is no determinate solution (at least epistemically, if not metaphysically determinate). So once again, it’s begging the question to ask for extraordinary evidence.</p>

<p>An alternative for answering the question of sufficient quantity of evidence would be to allow that there is some amount of evidence sufficient for establishing the probability of an ordinary event. But then, the fact that we find a certain multiple of the ordinary amount of evidence sufficiently extraordinary is either a case of evidential over-determination or is itself an extraordinary event, and once again leads to an infinite regress.</p>

<p>A third response to the demand recognizes that very extraordinary events happen all the time if the concurrence of several features in a state of affairs is evaluated probabilistically. (That an American high school kid from Seattle would be at a Halloween party in Tel Aviv and there meet an American high school girl from Pensacola and later marry her is highly improbable; in fact, the people I know who this is true of might be the only two people in all of history who fulfill that concurrence of events.)</p>

<p>So no matter how extraordinary the event, no explanation is needed because extraordinary events happen all the time.</p>

<p>(Thanks to Dr. Garry Deweese, Biola University, for help on this line of response.)</p>
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title: Cosmic Child Abuse?
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/cosmic-child-abuse-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Speaking of dads on this Father’s Day, I want to talk about the Heavenly Father for a moment and transition here into a theological issue dealing with fathers and sons; this would be the Father God, and His Son, Jesus Christ.</p>

<p>We’ve talked a lot over the last few years about our concern over the emerging culture and the church that is emerging from that culture. I have actually isolated four particular concerns since, if you make a critique of a broad, diversified group it’s easy for people to say, “Well, that’s not what I believe.”&nbsp;Instead of doing that, we’ve isolated four different ideas that many people in the emerging culture who call themselves Christians are embracing.</p>

<p>Those four areas are kind of watershed issues for me. One is the area of truth and knowledge. The second one is the authority of the Scriptures. The third one is the cross of Jesus Christ. And the fourth one is the Great Commission.</p>

<p>I want to talk for a few minutes here about the third item, which is somewhat more theological than the kind of issues that I think many Christians talk about. Yeah, we talk about truth, and the authority of the Bible and inerrancy, and the Great Commission. But not much has been said about the cross in general, except that Jesus died for your sins. We don’t work hard to cash that out in most churches, and most Christians haven’t thought much about what that entails. I think if you did think more about it, it would benefit your spiritual life. You would be deepened and drawn closer to your Savior when you understand more of what’s involved on that transaction on the cross.</p>

<p>Now I’ve written a Solid Ground piece that describes this called “<a href="/w/the-christ-of-the-passion-what-the-movie-couldn-t-show-" target="_blank">The Christ of the Passion: What the Movie Couldn’t Show</a>.”&nbsp;In this piece, I characterize a classic notion, and I would say a strongly Biblical notion—Pauline in particular—though Jesus made reference to this as well, the idea that Jesus died in our place. We deserved to die. He died for us. Such was God’s love that He “gave His only Son, that whosoever would believe in Him would not perish but have everlasting life.”&nbsp;And those who believe are rescued from the wrath of God, while those who don’t believe, the wrath of God continues to abide on them.</p>

<p>Now this is classically also understood as the “stumbling block of the cross.”&nbsp;Why would the cross rescue anyone? Why do we need to believe in the weakness of the cross, the curse of the cross. “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.”&nbsp;“Jesus took the curse for us.”&nbsp;This is weird to non-believers. Paul mentions that. He talks about the cross being a stumbling block, “to the Greeks’ foolishness.”</p>

<p>However, the cross understood that way is also a stumbling block to a lot of believers nowadays. In fact, it is characterized by some as “divine child abuse”&nbsp;of a father on his son. The idea that Jesus would die for my sins, i.e., that the Father would punish Jesus for what I did instead of just forgiving me outright. It seems barbaric that He requires a blood sacrifice.</p>

<p>Yet, it is a cornerstone of Christianity. A leader in the emergent church asked me, “What does the cross get me? What does the substitutionary atonement get me, this view of the cross that Jesus died in my place?”&nbsp;I said, “It gets me saved. It gets me rescued. It gets me forgiven. Jesus did something for me. He paid my debt.”</p>

<p>This idea that God must get his “ounce of flesh,”&nbsp;as it were, is odious to non-believers and now, more and more, to believers of one stripe at least. God tells us to forgive, but He won’t do the same Himself without drawing blood. This concept has been played with by a number of different authors. One of them is Brian McLaren who quoted the term, coined by Steve Chalke of the UK, “cosmic child abuse”&nbsp;to describe this understanding of the cross. McLaren puts that on the lips of one of his most attractive characters in one of his books. From what I understand, recently in a podcast, he affirmed that this was his notion, that he thought that the notion that Jesus died for my sins, that God punished Jesus, was an example of cosmic child abuse.</p>

<p>Let me quote from author Steve Chalke, “The fact is that the cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse—a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith. Deeper than that, however, is that such a concept stands in total contradiction to the statement: ’God is love.’ If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by his Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus’&nbsp;own teaching to love your enemies and to refuse to repay evil with evil”&nbsp;(Steve Chalke and Alan Mann, The Lost Message of Jesus, [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003], pp. 182-183).</p>

<p>Let me try to answer the charge that this is not becoming of a God who is love, the charge that this is just another example of God repaying evil with evil, which He tells us not to do, that this is just cosmic child abuse.</p>

<p>The first question is why won’t God do what He tells us to do. The answer is that He does. He tells us to forgive. What are the grounds upon which we are to forgive? It is God’s forgiveness of us. If we read in Ephesians 4, it says that just as you have been forgiven, you forgive others. Jesus prayed in the Lord’s prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive others.”&nbsp;So we are enjoined to forgive whatever people have committed against us. And the reason we are able to forgive is that God has extended forgiveness to us. Now there are grounds upon which God can extend forgiveness, and that is that His Son has paid the penalty. His Son has made it possible for God the Father to extend forgiveness to us, and therefore we should forgive others.</p>

<p>Why is it we don’t take our own revenge? The answer is because it is not up to us to punish crimes against us—that is God’s province. You see God doesn’t say to not take your own revenge because it’s wrong for anybody to expect punishment for harm that’s done, and it’s wrong for any sovereign to extend punishment for harm that is done. No. He says that it isn’t our job to punish sin. It is His job to do that.</p>

<p>You see, the rules for God are different from the rules for us, just like the rules for parents are different than the rules for kids. God has privileges we don’t because He is God, our Creator. He does appropriately as an act of justice. Chalke says we shouldn’t be returning evil for evil. It is not evil when God punishes crimes committed against Him, as all sin is. That isn’t a response with evil, that’s a response with good. It’s God’s job to judge. It’s our job to forgive. We forgive because we have been forgiven, and we’ve been forgiven because God has arranged for a method of forgiveness through His Son.</p>

<p>God judges and punishes out of justice. And He tells us to be like Him, just, in that regard, especially since it’s not our job to punish.</p>

<p>The second question has to do with the nature of the cross itself, and this is where I recommend that you go back to our website at www.str.org and look up the piece that I wrote called “The Christ of the Passion: What the Movie Couldn’t Show.”&nbsp;There I go into detail on what the Bible teaches about what Jesus of Nazareth accomplished on the cross. My point there was that the biggest suffering on the cross was not at the hands of men, but at the hand of God during those three hours when darkness shrouded the cross, the greatest agony was when the Father poured out His wrath on His son.</p>

<p>I want you to see that the Bible actually teaches that there was an exchange that took place on the cross, that the Father poured out His anger on the Son, as if guilty of our sins. The Scriptures speak of this in a number of places. II Corinthians 5:22 makes this very clear: “He made Him who knew no sin, to become sin on our behalf that we could become the righteousness of God in Him.”&nbsp;Paul talks about a certificate of debt, i.e. decrees against us. We owe God perfect obedience. We violate that. Now we stand in His debt and He must be paid. That’s just another way of saying justice is due. He took the certificate of debt that amounted to decrees against us of those crimes that describe the rebellion against the Father, and He took that and nailed that to Jesus’&nbsp;cross.</p>

<p>Jesus took the punishment for the world such that, as Paul says in Ephesians 2, “We were dead in our trespasses and sins, in which we formerly walked according to the course of this world.”&nbsp;That’s accomplished by what Jesus did. We were lost. Now we’re rescued because of what Jesus paid. Redemption is the rescue or the ransom of someone in slavery by the payment of a price. Peter says that the price was the blood of Jesus.</p>

<p>The Bible says unequivocally that Jesus paid for our crimes. This is not only not cosmic child abuse, but it is not contrary to the concept of “God is love.”&nbsp;The cross is not just an example of Jesus’&nbsp;love, because Jesus was the one who suffered, but an example of God’s love. If you understand how this is the case, you will see that the cross could never be an example of cosmic child abuse, but the greatest act of self-sacrifice and mercy that the world has ever known.</p>

<p>I always ask people who struggle with the justice of the cross if they are a parent and if they love their children. Yes. Do you ever punish your children? Now there’s a pause because they know the answer to that is yes, but they also see where I’m going. They have just said to punish is inconsistent with love, and since God is love then God shouldn’t punish. He should just forgive.</p>

<p>If you carry this objection to its logical conclusion, then Hell is out of the picture. There can’t be any Hell because that would be inconsistent with love. But God punishes throughout the Bible, from the beginning to the end. In fact, the end is one big, massive punishment. In the beginning, it’s one big punishment being tossed out of the Garden. I don’t know where people get the idea that punishment is inconsistent with love.</p>

<p>Now here’s the question I have for you: Is it an act of love that Jesus died on the cross for man’s sin? The correct answer is yes—John 3:16. So this is an act of God, the Father’s love, that Jesus would paid for sins of mankind.</p>

<p>Here’s the second question: Why is it an act of love for God the Father to punish His Son? How is it the Father’s love? I could see it being an act of love for Jesus if he chose to do it, but how is it an act of love by the Father that Jesus would lay down His life? How is it loving that the Father would punish a third party?</p>

<p>If you did something bad to me, and I grabbed Joe Blow over there and said to you that I was going to forgive you because I’m going to punch this guy out, you would wonder how it’s an act of love for me to forgive you by punching him out? It might be his love if he said to punch him out on your behalf, but hardly an act of my love. Unless—in the case of God the Father, and the Son, Jesus, that the Son is also God. That is, it is not just another man that the Father is punishing for our sins, but God who became a man Himself and took upon Himself His own just punishment.</p>

<p>This is why it’s so important to approach this challenge with an understanding of the Trinity, and understanding of the nature of God Jesus is God; He isn’t just an innocent third party. He is the Judge Himself suffering, the One who determines the punishment takes it, the One who passes judgment receives it. It is Jesus, the incarnate God. That is how it’s an example of the love of God.</p>

<p>It is precisely because God is love that He has made a way for sinful men to be forgiven and His holy quality of justice to be upheld at the same time so that, as Paul writes, He can be both the just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.</p>

<p>The idea that the cross is an example of cosmic child abuse just mistaken. This objection gets the cross wrong, Christology wrong, and theology proper wrong. Mr. Chalke and Mr. McLaren are deeply confused on this point, to the harm of the Christians that follow them.</p>
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title: Do the Facts Matter?
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/do-the-facts-matter-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>It is not important for the truthfulness of Christianity for the Bible to be without error.</em></p>

<p>I talked to a church this morning about the fact that the Bible has not been changed as it has been translated and re-translated through the ages. But in fact, we have a document that is 99.9% pure. I explained in that session about how it is that such a thing could be, but one of the points that I made is that they are accurate to history. That is, the broad issues of the Gospels can be trusted as being historically reliable. And I made a point to them this morning that I’ve made here before. It really relates to a broad strategy that I have about defending the faith.</p>

<p>My broad strategy is simply this: I do not go beyond the evidence. I make a very modest case. I don’t overplay my hand. That is, I stay well within the kinds of conclusions that I think I am justified in making given the evidence.</p>

<p>For example, I personally believe that the Bible is inerrant and I have particular reasons for believing there aren’t any errors in the Bible even though some people disagree with me. But I will not try to make that case in public because I don’t think it is that easy to do. I think it is much harder. There are a number of different angles to it if you want to make the case credibly.</p>

<p>There is another case that I can make that is much easier. The evidence is much more in my favor. It is much harder to refute. And it turns out that this other case is actually the more important one for defending Christianity. As I explained this morning, it is not important for the truthfulness of Christianity for the Bible to be without error. It is just irrelevant.</p>

<p>Think of it for a moment. Did the early Christians, say the Gentiles who heard the testimony of Jesus Christ from Paul, did they believe they had an inerrant Bible? Well, first of all, a third of the Bible wasn’t even written yet. And secondly, the 2/3 that were written, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Gentiles didn’t pay any attention to it. So for all intents and purposes, they had nothing like an inerrant Scripture.</p>

<p>What did they have? They had a testimony from Paul and the Apostles about a man named Jesus of Nazareth, who said certain things and did certain things, who died on a cross and rose from the dead. As far as Paul was concerned, that was enough. That is, if the salient details, the broad issues of Christianity and the life of Jesus were actually true, that was all he needed to convince people.</p>

<p>He didn’t need to prove the inerrant Bible. He didn’t even offer them a Bible. He didn’t walk there with a Bible in his hands when he spoke to the Gentiles. He didn’t say, here, believe this first as the word of God and then we will go from there. No, he started with Jesus.</p>

<p>Actually, I think this is a great approach from a philosophic perspective. Sometimes we take a two-step approach. We’ll start with the fact that God exists and make arguments for the existence of God. Then we move from there to the evidence of God in nature and the evidence for the Bible, etc. So, first step we prove the existence of God and then we demonstrate that God has spoken through Jesus. But it is not necessary to take those two steps; there is a shorter way around. Just start with Jesus.</p>

<p>If you can demonstrate that Jesus did the things that the Gospels say He did, well, you are well on your way to proving the case for Christianity. And in fact, if the Gospels are reliable at face value on the broad issues, then the case for Christianity has been made. This is a much more modest claim. It is more difficult to prove inerrancy. It is not difficult to demonstrate that it is reasonable to believe not only that the New Testament documents have been passed down in tact, but also they reflect accurately the larger issues of the life of Christ.</p>

<p>Why do I put it that way? Because someone could ask how is it that the disciples can remember all of these little bitty words of Jesus after so many years that they waited, allegedly, to write the Gospels down? I think there are some answers to that, but I’m not going to go into them right now. For one, they were taught specifically by Jesus, day after day, on these specifics. Trained. Following the pattern of the day, they memorized large portions of things, and then Jesus sent them out on forays to practice. Little short-term missionary trips. So they didn’t just have to recall a conversation from ten or fifteen years ago. They had to recall the kinds of things they had been repeating time and time again.</p>

<p>In fact, this morning I did three services. I never used my notes one time. Because I knew this material. Why? Because I’d been over it so many times. Were there differences from one talk to the other? Yes, minor ones. But the main points were all there because they had become part of me. And I suspect that was the same thing that happened with the Apostles.</p>

<p>But that aside, I don’t have to have all of those particulars precisely recalled by the Apostles in order to make my case. Let me ask you something. If you were sleeping in a boat, and you were awakened by a tremendous storm that this small boat was going through, the waves were crashing over the side, and you despaired even of life, it is one of the most traumatic experiences of your life. Then someone else in the boat stood up and said, “Be still!”&nbsp;speaking not to you but to the wind and the storm, and instantly everything was calm and quiet. Do you think you’d forget that?</p>

<p>Do you think that you would forget what that person said and what happened? Do you think you’d forget a statement like, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man comes to the Father but through me,”&nbsp;especially spoken many times?</p>

<p>Do you think you’d forget the statement, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in me will live even if he dies,”&nbsp;if it is spoken at a time when immediately after that phrase is spoken the speaker then says, “Lazarus, come forth!”&nbsp;and a dead man comes to life? Do you think you’d forget that in five years, ten years, thirty years, fifty years? Don’t you think that you can lie on your deathbed seventy years later and still recall that incident? That’s not far-fetched, ladies and gentlemen.</p>

<p>I am not overplaying my hand in making that suggestion. That’s all we need. We just need disciples who remember those claims and remember those miracles. The feeding of the five thousand. The casting out of demons. The calming of the storm. The healing of the sick. The lame walking. The blind seeing. Would you forget that? Would you say, you know what? I thought that guy was blind and then Jesus put mud in his eye and he could see, but I don’t know maybe I’m getting confused. Maybe he didn’t see after that. Maybe I’m just imagining this. No, that’s not going to happen.</p>

<p>Think about this for a minute. Do you think you are going to be mistaken about seeing your leader, the one whom you’ve talked with, walked with, ate with, slept with, done everything with for three years, crucified, dead, embalmed, and buried, and then three days later you see him alive and well and many times until his ascension. Do you think you would mistake that? I don’t think you would. I think we are talking about such life shaking and earth shattering kinds of things that these are not the kinds of things you are going to forget.</p>

<p>This morning somebody asked me afterwards, “I have some friends who say you can’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ because nothing like this ever happens.”&nbsp;First of all, that is circular reasoning because our claim is that it did happen at least one and we have reason to believe so. David Hume argued against miracles. He said they just don’t seem to happen very much, so when someone claims they do happen, we are not rationally obliged to believe in such a thing because they certainly aren’t very probable.</p>

<p>But no act of history is very probable. All acts are arguably unique in some sense. And it is precisely because resurrections are unique that they have the force that they do to demonstrate truth in the spiritual realm. If people were rising from the dead all the time, then you would have no reason to doubt the resurrection and you would have no reason to apply any spiritual significance to the resurrection. It’s precisely because they are rare that they are relevant to the claims of Jesus Christ.</p>

<p>The important question isn’t whether they are rare. The important question is whether Jesus rose from the dead. Is the evidence good that He did? And when you think about the authority of Christ or the claims of Christianity, as long as we can demonstrate that it is reasonable to believe that the disciples recorded accurately His claims to be God, to be the source of salvation, to be the resurrection and the life, to be the Alpha and Omega, all those dramatic claims that no sane person would make with a straight face, and also accurately record the healings, the calming of the storm, the walking on water, the casting out of demons, the raising of the dead. If you were there when Jairus’&nbsp;daughter was raised from the dead, or a man embalmed and dead and stinking for three days, Lazarus, and he hobbles out, would you forget that? I doubt it.</p>

<p>But if those things are actually true, if Jesus did claim those things and did do those things, if He predicted His own death and resurrection three days after His brutal crucifixion, and He by His own power raised Himself from the dead, do you think that then becomes relevant to the question of whether Christianity is true or not? Whether Jesus is someone to be reckoned with?</p>

<p>You know, there is this magazine article in <em>Newsweek</em> this week, the cover story. “Visions of Jesus: What the other religions think of Jesus.”&nbsp;Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism—for the most part, people think pretty highly of Jesus. He’s a good man, a good teacher. Based on what? Just based on what He taught. Most of these people don’t take the miraculous stories seriously. Just based on what He taught, His presence of mind, the depth of His insight, people are inclined to think highly of Him. Just on the force of His words.</p>

<p>Do you realize how much more important, how much more powerful the evidence would be if all the miraculous statements about Jesus are also reasonable to believe as having been recorded accurately? Of course. This is why the Christian has nothing to be ashamed of. The Christian case given the evidence is actually quite modest and reasonable.</p>
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title: No Lost Books of the Bible
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/no-lost-books-of-the-bible
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Some people claim there are “lost books”&nbsp;that should have been included in the Bible. Greg says this view doesn’t make sense, whether or not you think the Bible has supernatural origins.</em></p>

<p>The whole question of lost books of the Bible hinges on what the Bible is. Now the Bible can only be two things. What is it that we mean when we use the word “Bible”? Well, a Bible is either God’s supernatural Word—God supernaturally oversees its production and its care. Or it’s a statement of beliefs of the leaders of Christianity. They say “this represents what we believe.”&nbsp;Disregarding any supernatural element, it’s based on consensus. Let’s just say we’re the only Christians in the world. We say we believe in these things, but we don’t believe these other things so throw them out because they don’t reflect what we believe. Any group has the right to determine what it is they believe.</p>

<p>Now, notice that there are two ways of looking at this: a supernatural or natural perspective. I would contend that there are no other ways of looking at this question; no other options. No matter who you are out there you either think of the Bible as being God’s inspired Word (most of the conservative Christian world holds this view, in some form), or the Bible is merely the statement of beliefs of the early church, without any supernatural content. Pretty much the rest of the world looks at it this way.</p>

<p>Now, the question of the lost books of the Bible comes up. But my problem is: how is it possible that there can be any lost books of the Bible?</p>

<p>Is it possible that in the first sense of the word Bible that the books could be lost? Wait a minute, if God is supernaturally overseeing it, then God is supernaturally involved in seeing that His book gets written down and preserved. So we have God’s supernatural protection if it has a supernatural quality to it. You may say that the supernatural element is bogus, but you can see that from this sense of the definition that it’s not really possible to think that God could lose His own book. “But man wrote it...”&nbsp;Can you make your dog sit? Of course. If you a mere man can make your dog sit, can’t an infinite God oversee the care of His Word? It doesn’t matter if man or monkeys were responsible for taking care of it.</p>

<p>Maybe the Bible isn’t supernatural, it’s a statement of beliefs of the leaders of the church. Okay, if that’s the case then who has the final word on which books belong in the Bible? The leaders of the early church. Therefore, by very definition any books that they cast into outer darkness are not part of the Bible. It’s their decision to decide which books represent their beliefs. And if they say the Gospel of Thomas isn’t our book and somebody else picks it up two thousand years later and say it’s a lost book of the Bible, then it’s fair to ask “In what sense is it a lost book of the Bible?”&nbsp;It might be a lost book of antiquity, a great archaeological find, a wonderful piece of literature, but a lost book of the Bible? No.</p>

<p>The Bible has to be either a supernatural book, or a non-supernatural book. If it’s supernatural—if God is responsible for its writing, it’s transmission and its survival—then God, being God, does the job right. God doesn’t make mistakes, he doesn’t forget things, he doesn’t get confused about what is true and what is false, and He isn’t absent-minded—He doesn’t lose his lessons.</p>

<p>If the Bible is not supernatural—as many will contend, especially those who claim to have found lost books—we have a different problem. By what standard do we claim these are bona fide lost books of the Bible? If, from a human perspective, the Bible is that collection of writings that reflect the beliefs of the leaders of early Christianity, then those writings they discard are not parts of the Bible by very definition. It’s like writing a book of your personal beliefs from a stack of ideas you’ve collected over the years and then have someone rummage through your trash to find other beliefs you didn��t include and then claim that these were your secret or lost beliefs. You say, “No, they’re not my beliefs; that’s why they’re in the trash. If they were really mine, they’d be in the book.</p>

<p>The irony is that many of the “lost books”&nbsp;advocates make the point that these books they’ve rediscovered, books like the so-called Gospel of Thomas, were missing because the church fathers “suppressed”&nbsp;them, which is another way of saying the early Christians threw them out, trashed them. And the accusation is true. They did. Critics think this strengthens their case. It doesn’t; it destroys it, because it proves that these books were simply not accepted by the leaders as representative of their beliefs. So therefore it can’t be their Bible.</p>

<p>The Jesus Seminar people are taking a little different tack. They reject the idea that the Bible has supernatural origins. They suggest that since it’s just man’s opinion anyway, we should have a recall vote on the Bible and fix the defects. We should reconvene and reshuffle the deck, tossing some books out and including others to reflect what the church now believes about spiritual truth, which means “what the Jesus Seminar now believes about spiritual truth.”&nbsp;They are not using the “lost books of the Bible”&nbsp;tack.</p>

<p>So regardless of your view of the Bible—supernatural or natural—there is no sense in which it makes any sense to talk of lost books of the Bible. Ergo it’s impossible, rationally—nothing to do with spiritual commitments at all—that there can be anything like lost books of the Bible. The phrase just doesn’t make any sense.</p>
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title: Does God Exist?
topic: Science
author: Brett Kunkle
date: 02/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/does-god-exist-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>In January of 2004, the atheist community was rocked by a major announcement. Antony Flew, probably the world’s most influential atheist of the last 50 years, publicly acknowledged his move from atheism to belief in God’s existence (he hasn’t embraced Christianity just yet, though). Let me give you some perspective. Flew’s announcement is equivalent to Billy Graham calling a press conference and telling the world he is leaving Christianity. Can you imagine the shock waves throughout the Christian world?</p>

<p>So why did this life-long atheist ditch atheism? Flew said he “had to go where the evidence leads.”&nbsp;And what was that evidence? “I think that the most impressive arguments for God’s existence are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries...I think the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.”</p>

<p>Whoa. Did you hear that? A really smart atheist was convinced by the scientific evidence for God’s existence. If only everyone could be as open-minded and honest as Flew. So what is Intelligent Design? And what evidence is he referring to?</p>

<p>Intelligent Design makes two basic claims: 1) Intelligent agents leave behind evidence or “fingerprints”&nbsp;and 2) in the natural world we have discovered those fingerprints. The first claim is uncontroversial.</p>

<p>Think about it. You’re an intelligent agent. Everywhere you go you leave behind evidence of your presence. It could be a note you wrote, clothes you left on the floor, or actual fingerprints you smudged on a sliding glass door. If someone enters a room after you and looks closely enough, they’ll find evidence you had been there. Likewise, when we investigate the natural world, we find Someone’s fingerprints. Here are two examples.</p>

<p>First, scientific discoveries of the last century provide strong evidence the universe exploded into existence in the Big Bang. Yes, I said the Big Bang. And no, if you accept the Big Bang it does not mean you accept evolution. This is an unfortunate myth Christians sometimes believe. If Big Bang evidence is persuasive to you, then you must also accept an old universe (approximately 12 billions years old). But some Christians think an old earth is necessarily connected to evolution. That’s nonsense. In fact, don’t get stuck on debates about the age of the earth. It’s more important that God created than when He created. Whether you think the earth is young or old, Christians on both sides can join forces against macroevolution.</p>

<p>The important thing about the Big Bang is it points to a beginning and therefore, to a Beginner or First Cause. If you heard a small bang in the room next door and asked your mom what caused it and she said it was nothing, would you be satisfied with her answer? Of course not. You’d check it out for yourself. You’d look for the cause of the small bang. Well, what’s true of small bangs is true of big bangs. The Big Bang implies a beginning and therefore, a Beginner. And no one fits that description better than God.</p>

<p>Second, recent scientific discoveries show our universe is finely tuned. This simply means there are certain details in the universe that had to be “just right”&nbsp;in order to produce life. For example, the gravitational force must be constant. The expansion rate of the universe must be constant. A life-sustaining solar system can have only one star. And on and on.</p>

<p>Scientists tell us there are more than 50 “just right”&nbsp;details in the universe that make life on planet earth possible. What are the chances of this happening? Really smart guys who calculate this stuff tell us there is a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a percent chance. In other words, there is no chance for chance. Instead, a finely tuned universe points to a Fine Tuner, God. These are just two examples of the evidence but we’ve got more. Biological information in DNA. Irreducible complexity at the molecular level. Earth’s special location in the universe. The more we discover about our universe, the more we see God’s fingerprints all around us.</p>
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title: Matthew and John on the Witness Stand
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/21/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/matthew-and-john-on-the-witness-stand
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Were John and Matthew reliable witnesses to the life of Christ? Did Jesus claim to be the Messiah? Did He work miracles? Did He rise from the dead? The court is convened.</em></p>

<p>The whole of the Christian faith is based on certain historical realities, occurrences and statements that happened sometime in the past. These events have to do, fundamentally, with the identity of one man, Jesus of Nazareth. Can we trust the information we have about Him?</p>

<p>The witnesses in question are Matthew and John, companions of Jesus. The details of their testimony consist of lengthy narratives of the life and teachings of Jesus from the time the witnesses first became involved with Him until His death almost four years later.</p>

<p>We are concerned with the credibility of these witnesses. Can we believe their account? Are these men biased? Was their perception distorted? In short, is their testimony impeachable?</p>

<p>The field of law is helpful in answering that question. The legal system is a dispute resolution system. In order to resolve disputes, one must first get the facts. A jury arrives at a verdict by applying established rules of evidence to determine the facts.</p>

<p>Since the question of the identity of Jesus of Nazareth entails claims about facts, they can be processed in the same way the courts process any other fact. The rules of evidence can help us determine if the assertions about Jesus are actually true.</p>

<p>The historical events are made known to us by the testimony of people who claimed to have witnessed them. Their account is contained in documents—commonly known as the Gospels—that detail the events.</p>

<p>The specific questions are these. According to established rules of evidence regarding the testimony of eyewitnesses, can we believe certain specific and pivotal elements of the witnesses’&nbsp;testimony? Were they correct in their contention that Jesus claimed He was the Son of God, the promised Messiah, the Savior of the world? Did they, in fact, see Jesus work miracles? Did they meet with, converse with, and eat with Jesus on any occasions after his execution and burial?</p>

<h2>The Problem of Miracles</h2>

<p>The testimony these men give is remarkable in many respects. The supernatural quality of Jesus’&nbsp;life is an element of the testimony that’s woven throughout the fabric of the account.</p>

<p>Some argue that the miraculous elements of the testimony—especially the claim that Jesus rose from the dead—are patently unbelievable. The events described are contrary to the laws of nature and inconsistent with ordinary human experience. Any reasonable person would reject them out of hand, just as they would reject the claim that an unaided man leaped over a ten-story building or flew faster than a bullet.</p>

<p>This particular objection, however, is inadmissible because it is one of the things at issue before the court. The verdict can’t be presumed; it must be proved by evidence. That’s the legal method. We must decide if the witnesses to these extraordinary events are believable given the standard tests of evidence.</p>

<p>The initial question regarding the credibility of a witness is whether he had personal, first-hand knowledge of the matter. The Hornbook McCormick on Evidence states: “A witness who testifies to a fact which can be perceived by the senses must have had an opportunity to observe, and must have actually observed, the fact.”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> That determination is made by the nature of his testimony and any other corroborating evidence.</p>

<h2>The Witnesses</h2>

<p>The author of the testimony commonly referred to as “The Gospel of John”&nbsp;is John the apostle, one of Jesus’&nbsp;inner core of disciples. He identifies himself simply as the “disciple whom Jesus loved.”<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> He claims to be an accurate and truthful witness to these things.<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3">3</a></sup></p>

<p>Matthew makes no direct claim in his narrative to being an eyewitness. However, he establishes himself as an eyewitness based on the internal evidence of his account. Though he doesn’t name himself, the author reports in the first person about events that he sees and participates in.</p>

<p>We’re not concerned here with the details of the events as much as with the occurrence of the events themselves, what might be called the essential and central facts.</p>

<p>According to this testimony, both were present when Jesus taught about his identity and when he allegedly worked miracles. John personally witnessed the death of Jesus,<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4">4</a></sup> and both Matthew and John testify they saw him on a number of occasions after his death and burial.<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5">5</a></sup></p>

<p>Details of events may be obscure in some instances. This does not, however, weaken the case. Reliability does not require that every detail be perfectly remembered and every item inerrantly recorded.<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6">6</a></sup></p>

<p>McCormick On Evidence states: “While the law is exacting in demanding first-hand observation, it is not so impractical as to insist upon preciseness of attention by the witness in observing or certainty of recollection in recounting the facts.”<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7">7</a></sup></p>

<p>Here are two men who said they saw and heard something remarkable. Were they right? Were John and Matthew reliable witnesses to the central facts in question? Did Jesus claim to be the Messiah? Did He work miracles? Did He rise from the dead?</p>

<h2>Testing the Testimony</h2>

<p>A prosecutor has a formidable battery of weapons at his disposal to discredit a witness. In fact, with all of the sources of distortion possible from the perception of an event to its recall, it’s hard to believe any witness can be trusted. What about these witnesses?</p>

<p>In McCormick on Evidence, Edward Cleary offers a five-pronged attack on the credibility of a witness:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>The first, and probably the most effectively and frequently employed, is an attack by proof that the witness, on a previous occasion has made statements inconsistent with his present testimony. The second is an attack by showing that the witness is biased on account of emotional influences such as kinship for one party or hostility to another, or motives of pecuniary interest, whether legitimate or corrupt. The third is an attack upon the character of the witness. The fourth is an attack by showing incapacity in the witness to observe, remember, or recount the matters testified about. The fifth is proof by other witnesses that material facts are otherwise than as testified to by the witness under attack.<sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8">8</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>

<p>I will defend Matthew and John by examining each of Cleary’s points to determine if the witnesses’&nbsp;testimony can be impeached.</p>

<p>We are concerned with two specific people, Matthew and John, and their testimony regarding particular words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. Their testimony should be judged on its own individual merits, as outlined in the following defense.</p>

<h2>Conflicting or Inconsistent Testimony</h2>

<p>There is no evidence that the witnesses claimed at a previous time that the events in question never happened. There is no record that they contradict themselves regarding the salient facts at issue. They never altered their story. They began proclaiming this testimony from the outset and it hasn’t changed.</p>

<p>Had there been any variation, it would have been seized upon immediately by the witnesses’&nbsp;detractors. New Testament Scholar F.F. Bruce notes:</p>

<p>The disciples could not afford to risk inaccuracies which would at once be exposed by those who would be only too glad to do so. On the contrary, one of the strong points in the original apostolic preaching is the confident appeal to the knowledge of the hearers (Acts 2:22)...Had there been any tendency to depart from the facts in any material respect, the possible presence of hostile witnesses in the audience would have served as a further corrective.<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9">9</a></sup></p>

<h2>Bias and Self-Interest</h2>

<p>Clearly, because of the close relationship between those involved, the question of bias is a fair one. And what of self-interest? These witnesses clearly had a personal investment in this issue.</p>

<p>Isn’t it understandable that Matthew and John would present Jesus in the most favorable light possible? Isn’t it reasonable that such bias, such personal affection and caring, would cause Jesus’&nbsp;friends to overstate His actions or exaggerate His claims, especially if such overstatement and exaggeration would make Him more attractive or desirable to others?</p>

<p>The problem we encounter in this line of reasoning is that bias and self-interest generally work in concert. A person’s bias influences him to give testimony in his own self-interest. This is not the case, however, with these two witnesses.</p>

<p>Because of the nature of the testimony and the time and social conditions under which the testimony was given, any bias in favor of the accused would conflict with the powerful self-interest the witnesses had for personal survival.</p>

<p>These men gave testimony in a hostile atmosphere. In the eyes of both the Jewish ruling authorities and the Romans, the proclamation of this message was a capital crime. Many like these men had met their death at the hands of the Jews early on. Later came the tremendous persecutions of the Christians under the Romans, particularly under the rule of Domitian, and Nero.</p>

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

<p>For this testimony they were crucified en mass, fed to the lions, sacrificed by the Roman gladiators, or beheaded. One simple thing would have saved them this torment: recanting.</p>

<p>The Apostle Peter, a companion of Matthew and John, is a case in point. His personal identification with the convicted Christ put him at risk, so much so that at one point he succumbed to the temptation to deny the association.<sup id="fnref:10"><a href="#fn:10">10</a></sup></p>

<p>No, Matthew and John did exactly the opposite of what self-interest would dictate. It was in their best interests to ignore what might have been a favorable bias towards the defendant. Though they may have been disposed to exaggerate their claims about Jesus because of their deep affection for him, their legitimate concern for self-preservation would win over any competing tendency to bias.</p>

<p>Simply put, these witnesses would not jeopardize their lives for the sake of distorting or embellishing their testimony about a person they cared deeply for. A better explanation is that they told the truth in spite of the peril that such honesty represented. The issue of bias and interest, therefore, actually works in this case to substantiate the testimony of the witnesses rather than to discredit it. It lends credibility to their testimony.</p>

<p>One might suggest that the witnesses had a hidden religious motive. What about their expectation of eternal reward for faithfully preaching the message that was “entrusted”&nbsp;to them? Under those conditions, the threat of loss of life would be a reasonable price to pay, maybe even one to be desired. Isn’t martyrdom an appealing goal for a religious fanatic?</p>

<p>That’s a fair suggestion, but it overlooks a very critical fact about the nature of this testimony. The promise of eternal reward would only represent self-interest for the witnesses if it were a genuine offer and not a fabricated one. That motive simply would not exist for them if they knew they were misrepresenting the facts.</p>

<p>Any expectation John or Matthew might have of divine reward for their sacrifice supports the contention that they believed they were giving truthful and accurate testimony. Once again, this expectation does not bias them to lie. It biases them to tell the truth. The issue of bias and self-interest does not weaken the credibility of these witnesses’&nbsp;testimony, it strengthens it.</p>

<h2>The Witnesses’&nbsp;Character</h2>

<p>Generally, an attack on a witness’s credibility begins with an effort to discredit the witness through cross examination or an appeal to extrinsic evidence. If this tactic fails or is not an option, the focus turns to discrediting the character of the witness. This can only be accomplished by marshaling external proof, usually from other witnesses. A witness’&nbsp;character can only be impeached if there is reasonable grounds to do so.</p>

<p>Where is the evidence of bad character or corruption in this case? There is not a shred of documentation that impugns the character of these witnesses. Not only was it totally inconsistent with the moral standard they professed and lived by, but also, as noted above, there was no motivation to fabricate. In fact, the opposite was the case.</p>

<h2>Observation and Recall</h2>

<p>There is no evidence that the witnesses’&nbsp;capacity to observe was distorted. There is no hint that these witness were mentally inept, habitually drunk, or under the influence of drugs. Their writings are clear and lucid with an abundance of detail.</p>

<p>They had no difficulty recognizing Jesus. Matthew and John spent more than three years with Him in intimate, personal contact. His distinctive features were unmistakable, including nail prints in his hands and feet and a spear wound in his side.</p>

<p>What of their memory? It’s an accepted fact that memory deteriorates with the passage of time. In this case, however, there were a couple of compelling factors that were powerful aids to accurate recall.</p>

<p>First was the frequency of the events in question. Loftus notes that an event repeated often will be remembered with greater detail and accuracy than one that is singular and unique.<sup id="fnref:11"><a href="#fn:11">11</a></sup> According to John and Matthew, Jesus’&nbsp;miracles, claims to be Messiah, and post-resurrection appearances were numerous, witnessed many times by them.</p>

<p>Second, the testimonies are in the form of narrative accounts. Since these are personal recollections and not responses to specific questions, it is less likely that the material is distorted by leading or suggestive questioning that may be considerations in a different type of judicial investigation. Liabilities such as the way a question is worded or who is asking the questions—things that may have been distorting factors—simply are not an issue here.</p>

<p>Third, these men did not wait 30 or 40 years before they began to review the events and write them down. On the contrary, this testimony was communicated immediately and became a firmly established part of the teaching of the early church. This strong oral tradition served as a review and a reminder of the details of the life of Jesus Christ.</p>

<p>F.F. Bruce notes that there was a large group who had witnessed the same things first hand that could corroborate the testimony of these Gospel writers: “The first three gospels were written at a time when many were alive who could remember the things that Jesus said and did, and some at least would still be alive when the fourth Gospel [John] was written.”<sup id="fnref:12"><a href="#fn:12">12</a></sup></p>

<p>Dr. Norman Geisler, an expert in ancient Biblical documents, points out that the numerous eyewitnesses to all the major of events and teachings of Jesus served as a cross-check for the memory of the other.<sup id="fnref:13"><a href="#fn:13">13</a></sup></p>

<p>Finally, the essential or central facts of an incident are much less vulnerable to distortion than are peripheral details, especially when these events are unusual or novel and long lasting. The duration of the event is a critical issue in the ability of the witness to accurately perceive and remember the event.<sup id="fnref:14"><a href="#fn:14">14</a></sup></p>

<p>Stone observes that the vast majority of crimes are of a stark and unmistakable nature.<sup id="fnref:15"><a href="#fn:15">15</a></sup> This is precisely the kind of circumstance we’re facing here. The events in question are, by their very nature, stark and unmistakable. There is little danger of suggestion, which would be a problem in more ambiguous events.</p>

<p>There are a number of liabilities inherent to eyewitness testimonies. When the testimony concerns an issue of fact that occurred in a moment of time, like a holdup or an unheralded act of violence, then these liabilities become critical considerations.</p>

<p>However, this changes when the claims in question involve unique and dramatic events repeated over an extended period. When we note that the miracles Jesus performed were visible and open to scrutiny, then these criticisms lose their force.</p>

<p>Though memory may dim with the passage of time or become altered by intervening influences, the central facts don’t fade. Loftus writes, “The results [of research] indicated that salient or central items were recalled with significantly greater accuracy and were much more difficult to alter with misleading information than were peripheral items.”<sup id="fnref:16"><a href="#fn:16">16</a></sup></p>

<p>Seeing a blind man healed, for example, is not the kind of thing you miss or distort because your personal expectations get in the way, your line of observation is temporarily impaired, or you had a bias towards believing your teacher was a miracle worker. Hair color, height, or time of day may be forgotten, but the fact that a blind man (or lame, or deaf, or deceased) is restored to wholeness and full health would not be obscured over time.</p>

<p>Stone is graphic here: “A robbery or a theft is unlikely to mellow in the fullness of time into a donation of property. A rape will not be transformed into a romance. A vicious assault will probably not be converted into an accidental collision in the street.”<sup id="fnref:17"><a href="#fn:17">17</a></sup></p>

<p>The unique nature of the events of Jesus’&nbsp;life and the opportunity of Matthew and John to witness them lend themselves to accurate observation and recall.</p>

<h2>Corroboration or Contradiction</h2>

<p>Disproving the facts of the first witness is generally accomplished using the testimony of a second witness. Of course, at best this can only show that the first witness may be mistaken, or the second witness may be mistaken, or they both may be mistaken. However, if the second witness agrees with the first, then instead of being impeached, the first witness is supported.</p>

<p>In this case, John and Matthew corroborate each other. When we compare their testimony, their accounts don’t clash. They mesh. Each, of course, is given from a different point of view. Their experiences with Jesus were not identical, so there are some differences, as you’d expect.</p>

<p>Yet they are clearly in concert on the vital issues. Each records numerous times Jesus claimed to be Messiah. Each records various miracles and both go into detail about the appearances of Jesus alive after his crucifixion and burial.</p>

<p>Matthew is not only consonant with John. Both their accounts also coincide with the historical summaries given by Luke, the companion of Paul, and Mark, Peter’s companion.</p>

<p>There is sufficient unanimity between these witnesses to demonstrate corroboration, but sufficient variation in details and viewpoints in the accounts to eliminate the charge of collaboration.</p>

<p>Such extrinsic support silences other concerns. A host of possible errors in perception—compromised memories, the freezing effect, transference—can be eliminated as concerns. The testimonies are in concert, suggesting that these other elements have not been distorting factors. This verifies the reliability of the witnesses.</p>

<p>There is no impeachment by contradiction here. There is no conflicting or inconsistent testimony, no demonstrated incapacity to observe or remember, and no suggestion of faulty character to discredit the testimony of John and Matthew. Further, the issue of self-interest and corroboration supports their credibility rather than discredits it. In the absence of contrary evidence, the witnesses are to be trusted.</p>

<h2>Closing Arguments</h2>

<p>Here we have two men, Matthew and John, who testify about another man they knew intimately. They say Jesus taught He was the promised Messiah, the Savior of all mankind, who called for an allegiance of both faith and obedience. They testify that Jesus verified these claims by working numerous miracles, acts of supernatural power.</p>

<p>Both witnesses claim Jesus was brutally executed and buried. Both affirm He appeared to them alive after his death, spending time with them, teaching them, sharing meals with them, and offering many other proofs of his resurrection. Their testimony is not based on a fleeting glimpse in a crowd. It’s based on detailed, personal, face-to-face discourse with Jesus on numerous occasions over an extended period of time after the purported resurrection. These experiences turned them from skeptics into confident believers.</p>

<p>Rather than being biased in favor of the events in question, these witnesses were actually disinclined to trust what they saw. Their first response was doubt and disbelief until their senses verified for them what simple belief earlier would not allow them to accept.<sup id="fnref:18"><a href="#fn:18">18</a></sup></p>

<p>Though the content of the testimony is extraordinary, its character is compelling. The accounts are clear and lucid, giving an abundance of detail. They 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 the events.</p>

<p>The witnesses’&nbsp;repeated exposure to Jesus both during the time of His ministry and after His alleged resurrection rules out any possibility of psychological deception or delusion. In short, their testimony rings true.</p>

<p>What extrinsic evidence exists to impeach these witnesses? There are no contrary witnesses to these events. In fact, all others corroborate the content of the testimonies in question. In American law, the identification of a single witness is enough to sustain a conviction, yet here we have multiple witnesses.<sup id="fnref:19"><a href="#fn:19">19</a></sup></p>

<p>There is no evidence of faulty observation or impaired recollection due to disease, illness, intoxication, or mental or emotional instability. These men were physically hearty and resilient rather than senile. There is no evidence of moral laxity.</p>

<p>The specific “event”&nbsp;in question was not something that happened in a split moment of time. Instead, this testimony relates to actions and statements made by Jesus many times, over an extended period of time, under conditions that were optimal, most favorable to accurate recall.</p>

<p>John and Matthew expressed the utmost confidence in their account. There is no vacillation, no uncertainty. They clung to their testimony in spite of the tremendous personal peril that resulted. These men were so certain of the accuracy of their observations that they were willing to stake their lives on them. This kind of testimony compels confidence.</p>

<h2>The Defense Rests</h2>

<p>Far from being mistrusted, John and Matthew are model witnesses. I suggest they are the very best of witnesses and that their testimony is utterly reliable.</p>

<p>A witness who has personal knowledge of the subject matter should be believed if his testimony cannot be effectively impeached. There are no reasonable arguments or evidence to impeach these men. Rather, the evidence supports them. The testimony of Matthew and John stands.</p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">Edward W. Cleary, McCormick on Evidence, 3rd ed. (St. Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing, 1984), 23. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:2">John 13: 23. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:2"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:3">John 21: 24, 1 John 1: 1-3. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:3"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:4">John 19:30. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:4"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:5">E.g., John 20: 19, Matthew 28: 16-17. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:5"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:6">Note that the Christian does not have to prove biblical inerrancy to make his case. He need only establish the historical reliability of the Gospels to make his case. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:6"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:7">Cleary, 24. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:7"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:8">Ibid., 72. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:8"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:9">F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1960), 46. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:9"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:10">John 18: 25-27. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:10"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:11">Elizabeth Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 24. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:11"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:12">Bruce, 13. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:12"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:13">Norman Geisler, Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1987), 322. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:13"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:14">Marcus Stone, The Proof of Fact in Criminal Trials (Edinburgh, Scotland: W. Green &amp; Son Ltd., 1984), 32 &amp; 37. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:14"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:15">Ibid., 72. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:15"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:16">Loftus, 63. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:16"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:17">Stone, 65. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:17"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:18">Norman Geisler, Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1987), 315. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:18"> ↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:19">Lawrence Taylor, J.D., Eyewitness Identification (Charlottesville: Michie Co. Law Publishers, 1982), 202. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:19"> ↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
</div>

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title: Greg Koukl and Michael Shermer at the End of the Decade of the New Atheists
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/26/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/greg-koukl-and-michael-shermer-at-the-end-of-the-decade-of-the-new-atheists
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>A transcript of a dialogue between Greg Koukl and Michael Shermer on the Hugh Hewitt Show</em></p>

<p><strong>Thursday, December 31, 2009</strong></p>

<p><strong>Hugh Hewitt</strong>: Special edition of the Hugh Hewitt Show. As we come to the end of what I call the decade of the atheists, I am taking a day here at the end of the year to look back at what that has been about, and what progress or lack thereof has been made in that conversation, what it meant, and what it ought to mean, and whether or not those of you who are just finished celebrating Christmas were in fact simply involving yourself in a pagan kind of ritual that grew up over the years, or whether you’re worshiping the one, true God. All that and more, because this has been the decade of the atheists, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, many others, but today, I want to ask: Did they make a difference at all, or is in fact faith in God generally stronger than ever?</p>

<p>To join me in this all day special conversation in studio, two guests. Greg Koukl is the founder and the president of Stand To Reason, <a href="http://www.str.org/" target="_blank">www.str.org</a>. He is a leading Christian apologist. He’s an author most recently of <em>Tactics: A Gameplan For Discussing Your Christian Convictions</em> from Zondervan Press. Before that, <em>Relativism</em>. He’s got a lot of other books and pamphlets as well at Amazon.com. But you can find out most about Greg at <a href="http://www.str.org/" target="_blank">www.str.org</a>.</p>

<p>Michael Shermer is the editor of Skeptic Magazine. He is the founder of the Skeptic Society, author of a number of books, including <em>The Mind Of The Market: How Biology And Psychology Shape Our Economic Minds</em>, and <em>Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design</em>.</p>

<p>Both Michael and Greg have been guests on the Hugh Hewitt Show before. They’re both very generous with their time to spend an entire day doing this, and so welcome to you both. Gentlemen, I believe in biography before everything. Greg Koukl, K comes before S. Give people a little bit of a rundown on who you are and how you ended up doing this.</p>

<p><strong>Greg Koukl</strong>: Well, just a broad background here. I approach the issue that we’re talking about today not as a philosopher or a theologian (though I have advanced degrees in both), but really as a human being that’s trying to make sense out of my world. What worldview, what picture of reality does the best job of answering the questions?</p>

<p>That wasn’t always my perspective. I was raised in a religious home, nominally religious. And then in the 60s, during the counterculture, like a whole bunch of other young people, I went crazy. You know, you abandon the views of the establishment, you embrace all these new things that are invading the world in the 60s, and I did that.</p>

<p>I was at Michigan State University in their Honors College there as a pre-law student, as it turned out. I had thought I had tried Christianity because of my background. I thought I was too smart to be a Christian. And so I just didn’t give real serious consideration to that until I went to the West Coast, and went, I was a student at UCLA. And at that time, I began to give fresh consideration to the claims that Jesus of Nazareth was making on my life. And in 1973, I made a commitment to follow Him. And that began to change everything.</p>

<p>In 1976, I spent three months in Europe, five weeks of that behind the Iron Curtain working with Christians who are suffering there as a result of their own convictions as Christians, back when they had an Iron Curtain. A number of years later, in 1982, I went to Thailand to work with Cambodian refugees. My job was to feed 18,500 people in Sakeo refugee camp, which the result of the Cambodian holocaust of 1975-1976, and then in 1993, I decided to kind of focus my efforts and start an organization with some other people, particularly Melinda Penner, who many who are listening know as The Enforcer. And that organization is called Stand To Reason.</p>

<p>And Hugh, I had two basic goals with starting Stand To Reason. One is to train Christians to think more carefully about their convictions. There just was a lot of nonsense being spewed by Christians who I think had the right ideas, but were not communicating them well, and were not thinking well about those ideas. And secondly, I wanted to develop some tools to show that Christianity is actually worth thinking about. Some of these were tools of engagement. There was too much of a bellicose atmosphere between those who believed in Jesus and the Christian worldview and those who don’t. And I wanted to see that engagement look more like diplomacy than D-Day. And so there’s kind of a general attitude thing that I wanted to see happen, building ambassadors for Christ.</p>

<p>Secondly, I wanted to help them with the new tools of evidence, and the information that has been coming out in the last ten or fifteen years that have been very, very powerful, I think, to commend the Christian worldview to the rest of the world—things about big bang cosmology, for example, the design inferences that we find in the universe, the evidence for the existence of the soul, the evidence from the primary source documents about Jesus of Nazareth and his resurrection. All of these things, there’s been a lot of work done in the last fifteen or twenty years. And so our goal is to try to bring these things down to a level where people can understand them, throw the ball so that they can catch it, for believers in Christ to do so, but without having a bunch of religious language attached to it, one, and two, using an external approach. In other words, using the philosophy and the science to demonstrate that their views are worth thinking about, instead of simply throwing Bible verses at them, and in the process.</p>

<p>I’ve written a number of books, one of them on abortion called <em>Precious Unborn Human Persons</em>. It’s basically a small monograph. The next one, <em>Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted In Mid-Air</em> that I co-authored with Frank Beckwith, who you know. And the one most recently is the one you just mentioned, <em>Tactics: A Game Plan For Discussing Your Christian Convictions</em>.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: With that introduction, Mike Shermer, how about you?</p>

<p><strong>Michael Shermer</strong>: Well, I was born and raised in the Southern California area, and my home was, neither of my homes, as my parents were divorced, neither of them were religious, but neither were they anti-religious. They were just not religious. But in the nascent Jesus movement of the early 70s, I became a born again when I was in high school, 1971. And I remember it was a, my best friend, he was a Presbyterian, so on a Saturday night, I accepted Christ into my heart. And then Sunday, I went to the local Presbyterian church with his family, and went up to the alter and all that with the other people that were called forward. And then on Monday, I remember returning back to high school to tell my buddy, Frank, that I had finally become religious and accepted Jesus like he had been telling me about, and hoping I would. And instead of being excited, he was disappointed, because he was a Jehovah’s Witness, and that I had gone to the wrong church, the Presbyterians. Anyway, so that always stuck in the back of my mind like wow, aren’t we all on the same bus together in the same journey? Well, not always.</p>

<p>Anyway, so...but I took it pretty seriously. I went to Bible study classes. There was a little place in La Crescenta called the Barn, where Christians met and had Bible study classes, things like that. And then I went to Pepperdine University in Malibu there to, really to matriculate initially into theology, but then I switched to psychology, really for logistical reasons. I just wanted to be a college professor, because it’s, you know, it’s a great gig that you hardly have to work and you get good pay. Don’t ever listen to those professors complain about their pay. It’s the best gig going. And I wanted in on that. And theology was my field, but to get a PhD, you have to do Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic and Latin. And I could barely get through Spanish, so I realized okay, I have to do something I’m actually good at, which was science, which was experimental psychology. And so I switched fields.</p>

<p>But while I was at Pepperdine, I took courses in the New Testament, the Old Testament, the life of Jesus. I took an entire semester course in the writings of C.S. Lewis. We read everything that Lewis wrote, and I really loved C.S. Lewis. I still like C.S. Lewis. I think he’s a great writer.</p>

<p>But then eventually, when I went to graduate school, when I was in a different environment, not surrounded by Christians, and getting different perspectives. And for a number of reasons, I ultimately lost my faith, and let go of God, and became essentially a secularist, or a non-believer, whatever.</p>

<p>I never really call myself an atheist. I mean, I don’t like to identify myself or define myself by what I don’t believe, because atheism doesn’t really stand for anything. There’s no principles behind it. There’s no platform or set of planks that we live our lives by. We just simply don’t believe in God.</p>

<p>So then I got into, well, actually I had a ten year span where I was a bike racer living here in Orange County, and did Race Across America five times, and I was the assistant director, and the executive director of the race. And so I spent quite a bit of time in a completely different profession, but teaching part time psychology. Then after ten years of bike racing, I realized my body wasn’t going to hold out forever, and I might have to use my brain again. So I went back and got a PhD in the history of science at Claremont, and then became a full-time professor at Occidental College in L.A.</p>

<p>But on the side, we just started the Skeptics thing as just sort of a hobby in my garage. It was nothing, really, just for fun, and a lecture series at Cal Tech. And it just got bigger and bigger, and by 1997-98, when my first book, <em>Why People Believe Weird Things</em> did really well, I had a literary agent that got me a big advance for my next book, and a lecture agent, and so on, and I realized you know, I think I could actually make a living as a writer and an editor and a public intellectual, and actually teach more people than I can teach in a classroom, that is just reach more people. And so I’ve been doing that every since.</p>

<p>I quit teaching at Oxy in 98, and returned to teaching just two years ago at Claremont Graduate University, just one class a year, Evolution, Economics &amp; the Brain. It’s a PhD level course. So it’s just for fun. So my main job, my day job, is editing and writing.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: We’ve got a minute and a half to the break, so I’ll let you go first, Greg. What’s your first question for Michael? I’ll lead most of this conversation, but in between, I’ll let you pose each other questions. Do you have a question or anything that you’re curious about his background?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, about his background?</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Just anything.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, I think, and this is just going to seed further conversation, Michael, but I think the biggest, one of the biggest problems, it’s not the only big problem, but one of the biggest problems that atheists have to deal with is the problem of morality. Listen, if you have a guy who drags a woman into an alley, and then molests her, and then...that’s our music. Okay, I’ll finish my illustration in just a few moments. But I want to raise the nature of morality, is the question, or how best to explain the existence of real morality.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: When we went to break, I began just the first opportunity to ask each other a question. So Greg, you were bringing up the...rephrase it for the audience who just tuned in for Michael.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Right. Actually, the big question here, Hugh, is whether it’s possible to be good without God. Now I’m not talking about whether it’s possible to be good without a <em>belief</em> in God. I certainly think that’s possible, but be good <em>without</em> God. And the answer to that question hinges entirely on precisely what you mean by good.</p>

<p>And so I was going to give an illustration. So a man drags a young girl into the alley, he sexually abuses her, strangles here, and tosses her into the dustbin. Is that act wrong?</p>

<p>Now I think everybody listening is going to admit it is wrong. But here is the real question. What do we mean when we say that that act of rape and abuse and murder is wrong? Are we describing the action itself, the object? Are we saying that the object, the rape, the murder, has a quality of being wrong, and therefore, wherever that rape goes, the wrongness follows it, just like your height, 6'2", or whatever it is, is an objective quality of you? Wherever you go, your height follows you in the same way. Does the wrongness follow the rape?</p>

<p>Well, if it’s a quality of the rape, if it’s an objective quality of the rape, then it does. And it doesn’t matter what people think about it, or what cultures decides, or what your evolutionary conditioning is. The rape is still wrong.</p>

<p>The other alternative is that you’re not talking about the rape. You’re talking about yourself. You’re talking about your genetic conditioning. You’re talking about your culture’s decision about that kind of thing. And if that’s the case, then the truth of the wrongness of the rape is simply in the individual or the subject. And this is why philosophers distinguish between ethical objectivism and ethical subjectivism.</p>

<p>Now there’s lots of different subjectivisms in ethics. But simply put, if you’re an ethical subjectivist, you’re a relativist. And actual ethics don’t exist. Ethics are an illusion. If you conclude that ethics are an illusion, there’s lots of different ways to explain it.</p>

<p>Michael’s written a really great book, I think, called <em>The Science Of Good And Evil</em>. I’ve read most of it, and it’s well written, and it’s very compelling. But it’s a description about how the illusion of ethics has taken place. If you want to go that route, you’re welcome to go that route. But what you can’t do is you can’t then talk about morality as if it’s objective when your explanations are subjective.</p>

<p>So this is a problem that I think all atheists, including Michael, have to solve. Are ethics objective or relative? And if they’re relative, then how can we make moral judgments that are meaningful on other people?</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Michael Shermer?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Wow, let’s just get right into it. Well, I don’t think it’s quite so black and white. That is to say I think there are provisional moral truths that exist whether there’s a God or not. In other words, it’s wrong, morally, absolutely morally wrong to rape and murder. And that would be true whether there was a God or not.</p>

<p>In other words, if...is God saying that it’s wrong because it’s really wrong, and He’s instructing us in his Holy Scripture that it’s wrong? Or is it only wrong because He said so? And if it turned out there wasn’t a God, would that make it okay? And my answer is no, it really is wrong, whether God says it’s wrong or not. That is to say I think it really exists, a real, moral standard like that. Why? Well, because first, you could ask the person who is being affected, we should always ask the moral recipient of the act, “How do you feel about being raped or murdered or stolen from or lied to?”&nbsp;And the moral actor will tell you, it doesn’t matter whether, if I could use a current example, I haven’t any idea if Tiger Woods and his wife are religious or not. But you can just ask his wife whether it was morally right or wrong, and she’ll tell you. It doesn’t matter whether there’s a God or not. It’s wrong. And so that’s the first principle. Just ask. Ask the moral recipient of whether it’s right or wrong.</p>

<p>But I think Greg’s after something deeper. That is to say is there something even deeper still behind the moral actor’s feelings about how they’re treated? And the answer is yes, I think so. We’re a social species. We don’t live in isolation. We live as members of a group. And as such, there’s no possible way our group could survive, be cohesive, be a unit of any kind of solidarity against other groups, or against a harsh environment.</p>

<p>If there were too much violations of social norms, that is if there were constant lying and cheating and raping and murdering, there’s no way a social group could hang together. And as such, as we all know, we’re very tribal. We’re tribal against other groups, but within our groups, we’re very pro-social, altruistic, cooperative.</p>

<p>We have a good and evil in our nature. So to this extent, I find myself interesting often in agreement with my conservative friends on most of the things they consider morally, moral truths. That is, we share the same moral values, even though I come at it from a different perspective.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, I’m actually not after something deeper here, Michael. At least to start out the discussion, I’m trying to be as simple and clear and precise as possible, because it’s very easy to weave together a bunch of things that sound persuasive, but turn out to be different things. Like for example, Darwinian evolution, which is a materialistic process, and here I mean the blind watchmaker thesis, the neo-Darwinian synthesis, natural selection working on mutations, and a kind of a cultural evolution that Michael has just referred to as we work together as a group to survive as a group. Those are two entirely different things. One is materialistic, Darwinian, the other one is intelligent design, quite frankly, where the group gets together and makes some determinations to encourage some behavior and discourage others.</p>

<p>What I’m trying to do is to be able to answer the question that came up initially—Is God necessary for morality?—which Michael denies. It’s to say well, what is it that morality, that we’re trying to describe? It is either objective, and therefore an immaterial obligation that applies to certain behaviors, or it is subjective.</p>

<p>The things that Michael described were variously subjective, evolutionary elements, subjective cultural elements, but then he affirmed that we all have good and evil in our nature, or an awareness of that. I agree with that entirely. We all are aware of those things. That’s why even if we don’t believe in God, we can still know morality and follow it. The question is what accounts for real, genuine objective morality?</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: One minute to the break, Michael Shermer.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I’m not arguing for cultural evolution. I’m actually arguing as part of our, what you described as materialistic, natural selection, Darwinian evolution, that it’s not enough to just pretend or fake being a good group member. You actually have to believe it, feel it, and live it. So what I’m arguing is that natural selected certain moral sentiments, as Adam Smith called them, moral feelings, an actual empathy, Adam Smith talked about, we actually empathize with somebody else, we can put ourselves into their shoes and feel their pain, I’m arguing that’s very real. It’s every bit as real a part of our evolutionary heritage as our eyes and our hands.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Michael Shermer, when we went to break, you were saying that evolutionary biology has produced a real morality.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah, I think really, Adam Smith had it right in his very first book, <em>The Theory Of Moral Sentiments</em>, long before Darwin, that we actually have in our biological nature, our human nature, the capacity to feel other people’s pain. He called it empathy. We think of it often either as empathy or sympathy. That is, we really do connect to other people.</p>

<p>A lot of good research on this now, brain scans, you can show somebody a little video of somebody they know, or have feelings for, getting pricked with a pin, and the same areas of their brain light up, the pain receptors, as in the person getting the pin prick. In other words, we have an evolved tendency to really be deeply, emotionally connected to our fellow group members.</p>

<p>And that’s why I say groups like World Vision, where you want to adopt a child, it doesn’t help to show a picture of 10,000 starving African kids. What does affect us is one child, a picture of one child with a little biography. That’s how you get people to adopt a child to donate. The reason for that is because essentially they’re tricking the brain, our brains into making that stranger an honorary family member, an honorary within group member, which is why I argue that free trade is one of the best ways of defusing normal tribal tensions between people. It makes them honorary friends, honorary members.</p>

<p>Well, what’s going on there is we’re tricking the brain into sort of this evolutionary rule of thumb—be nice to people that are like you and that are related to you, and that you know, and that are fellow group members, and don’t do what our natural tendency is, is to be tribal and xenophobic against those other guys. And free trade is one of the best things you can do for that. So I’m arguing that’s actually tapping something deep within us.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg Koukl?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, basically, I agree with Mike completely here. We do have this tendency, and it seems to be universal among humankind. The question is, what is that tendency, actually? And what is the best way to explain it? And I see like a handful of significant problems with using evolution to explain morality.</p>

<p>The first one is that evolution is a materialistic process. And here, I’m going back to an original point, and I don’t want people to lose it. There is no way that you can take molecules, and reorganize them in any fashion, over any length of time, and have pop out of the mixture an objective moral principle that’s immaterial, and that applies to human beings. All you’re going to get is a reorganization of the molecules. And what they can produce, and this is what Mike has done in his book, and he mentioned just a few moments ago, they can produce sentiments. They can produce feelings. They can produce behavior</p>

<p>But this leads us to the second problem of using evolution to explain morality, is that morality is more than sentiments, feelings and behavior. Morality entails things like motive and intention. I mean, you could have a guy walk into a garage, walk out with a hose, and is that wrong? Well, it depends. Is it his hose or somebody else’s hose? Did he intend to take the other person’s hose? Is he borrowing the hose? So we can see here are elements that are part of the moral thing that needs to be explained, that are immaterial, and therefore the Darwinian explanation can’t even in principle go there. It can’t do that job.</p>

<p>But here’s the worst problem. Regardless of what our sentiments happen to be regarding moral actions, we can feel good or feel bad or whatever, the problem is that morality is prescriptive, not merely descriptive. That is it tells us not just what we did, but what we ought to have done in the past, and what we ought to do in the future. That is not something that any Darwinian mechanism can describe, because nothing about my biology can inveigh upon me to act a certain way for moral reasons in the future. It doesn’t tell me why I should be good tomorrow.</p>

<p>This is a huge difference between these two views, the descriptive and the prescriptive. Prescriptive is part of morality, and can’t even, in principle, be explained by an evolutionary materialistic system.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Michael Shermer, I’ll give you a start on that. We have about 45 seconds to the break, so you may want to...we’ll come back after the break and pick up. But what’s your start to that?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, the start would be that again, let’s not think of evolution just as nature red and tooth and claw, and it’s nasty, brutish and short, but that in fact, we have this whole other social evolution. And I’m not talking about cultural evolution where we consciously make decisions, but subconsciously, because it’s in part of our nature to actually, seriously, deeply feel for other people and their actions, and the consequences of our actions, so that we actually have a sense of right and wrong that we’re born with, but then culture taps into and tweaks, one way or the other.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Michael Shermer, when we went to break, Greg had made the argument that the Darwinian model simply cannot explain immaterial concepts like morality, that there’s just no way you can rearrange the molecules to get there. You’re saying well, yes you can.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah, I think so, because if we think of morality as another suite of emotions that are involved with other people’s behaviors, the consequences of our actions, how we feel about them, how people feel about us when we do these things, that’s as every bit as important a biological part of our nature as anything else we talk about.</p>

<p>So let’s take a real simple emotion. When you’re hungry, nobody does any calculations about the caloric input/output ratios of eating an apple versus an ice cream, although now it’s posted on the walls for us to see. But we just feel hungry, and we feel hungry for certain kinds of foods. The feeling of hunger is a proxy for something else. Evolution’s done the calculating for us. You need food, so we’re going to, your hypothalamus is going to secrete these certain chemicals that causes your stomach to rumble and so on.</p>

<p>When you’re attracted to somebody else, a member of the opposite sex, nobody does the calculation by, let’s say, a man finds a woman attractive who has a .67 hip to waist ratio, and an hourglass figure, although that is pretty much universal. Nobody walks about with calipers taking measurements of who they’re going to want to date or ask out. You just look around, and you just go wow, I really find this woman attractive. It’s a feeling you have, okay?</p>

<p>So those are kind of simple emotions, but sliding up the scale, the moral emotions are really no different. When I lie to somebody, I’ve violated a social norm, and they respond in a very angry, hostile way. So those emotions that we both share, guilt, shame, anger, disgust, involved a social relationship that whether it was a norm violation, those are the kinds of emotions that are just like hunger and sexual attraction that are built into us by nature, by evolution.</p>

<p>Or, if you wish, this is how God created the moral sentiments, just like He created everything else in the universe, through a process of nature. I think that’s equally reasonable to argue. So I don’t see that it has to be an atheistic viewpoint versus a theistic viewpoint to get to our moral sentiments. Why couldn’t God have used evolution to create the moral sentiments as I’ve described them?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, well, you don’t actually believe that, I know, Mike, so this is kind of like adding God to the soup, you know, if it makes people feel better. But the basic argument is that evolution all by itself can do the trick. And I think if your listeners are listening carefully, what they’re going to hear is Mike has just described, and if I’m being unfair to your assessment here, let me know, Mike, that moral feelings are simply that. They are sophisticated emotions that do some work for us for survival, and even on a group level.</p>

<p>Now there’s a name for this. It’s called emotivism. A.J. Ayer, the famous atheist, offered this description of morality. It’s a relativistic scheme of morality. Morality doesn’t actually exist, Ayer argued. There is no objective right or wrong. Rape isn’t wrong itself. What happens is, we have feelings about it, and we express it in moral language, but rape isn’t really wrong.</p>

<p>So your listeners are going to have to ask themselves the questions. When they just survey their own moral senses, and we all have access to this, do we want to believe that scientists have figured out that really what we’re doing is feeling sophisticated, complicated emotions, and that the emotions are in us, and we are not seeing anything about the action? Or does it seem like rape is wrong?</p>

<p>Look, when I say rape is wrong, I’m talking about the rape. When I say liver is awful, I’m talking about me. I’m talking about my own tastes and preferences. It’s interesting, as Michael has given his explanation, though, that he’s doing, and I don’t know if you are aware of this, Michael, but you’re doing the very thing that I kind of warned against. You give a description of the foundations of morality that turn out to be relativistic, but then there’s a smuggling of a more objectivistic morality in the back door, like when Michael says you don’t have to do what your nature tells you to do, in other words, what you’ve been programmed by evolution to do. You can kind of rise above that. Well, now we’re talking about a morality that isn’t dictated by evolution, but a morality that we can employ through our acts of will, to rise above this kind of brutish evolutionary morality. And that sounds suspiciously like the very thing that I’m talking about here.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: But I don’t mean, there’s nothing to rise above by itself. Yes, we have to say rise above our tribal instincts to be xenophobic when we meet somebody who’s a stranger, who’s different from us. We all struggle against that, particularly in a black and white America, where there’s always been this underlying tension. Indeed, so culture helps us do that—education, travel, diversity of exposure to different people. That makes you a little more tolerant.</p>

<p>Okay, but I’m not talking about that. What I’m talking about is tapping into the good part of our nature, the fact that in addition to that xenophobic tribalism we have, we also have this other side that almost never gets discussed in evolutionary...even in evolutionary circles, you’ll still hear evolutionary biologists talking about, in a way that Huxley did, and Herbert Spencer did in Darwin’s own time, that we have to somehow struggle mightily against our genes to overcome that nasty tendency we have to want to rape, kill, pillage and destroy.</p>

<p>Well no, actually, we have this whole other side that’s just as genetically programmed into our nature. And the point of culture—education, politics, economics and so on, is to tap into the better angels of our nature as Lincoln said.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Okay, here’s the question I have for you, Michael, then. You’ve identified that really, we have good and we have bad. That’s part of, under your terms, that’s part of our genetic nature, and we can choose to tap into what you call the good side. Why ever should we do such a thing if there is not a higher standard that directs our action to the better side, your words, than the bad side, your words, if really, ultimately, they are both the result of a genetic evolution, and from outside terms, neither is better than the other. Why should we do that, Michael?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah, well I don’t see how entering God into the equation changes that problem at all.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, that’s the next step. What I’m trying to show is that the should comes from the outside, and if we can demonstrate that, then we can ask...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: But there’s no outside.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: That’s my point. On your view, morals are relative, and there is no difference.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: No, but I don’t think even in your view, there’s an outside.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, we can get to that in the next step.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>:...because adding God doesn’t add anything.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg, reset the debate. What just happened there?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, what I’m arguing is basically, you have two choices. You have objective morality, or subjective morality. Subjective morality means that when we say something’s wrong, we’re not talking about the action itself, we’re talking about ourselves. Now there are sophisticated ways of characterizing how we’re talking about ourselves, whether it’s culture, whether it’s evolution. But ultimately, you end up with no morality. I think that’s false.</p>

<p>I think people know there is objective morality. And if evolution, no materialistic system can explain it, given the discovery of objective morality, then we have to take the next step and ask what is the best explanation for objective morality. Michael, I think, wants to deny objective morality, but I think he’s been smuggling the notion in subtly, as many times happens in these kinds of discussions. And he’s, I’m not sure if he’s denied that or not.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, I think there’s only two kinds of people—those who think there’s only two types of morality, objective and subjective, and those that don’t, which is the rest of us.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Okay.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Seriously, I mean, I reject your dichotomy of there’s either objective reality or it’s all subjective relativism and anything goes, and what Hitler did is perfectly fine. No, I don’t believe that. I don’t think anybody, hardly anybody actually really believes that, except for maybe a few academic philosophers who’ve never been in the real world. Really, I think we all recognize that there are deep, provisional truths, moral truths, that we recognize as real. And so what you want to get at is what’s the outside source?</p>

<p>And as you know, since you read my book, this is an old problem that everybody’s familiar with in your business anyway, and that is Plato’s Euthyphro’s dilemma, in which Socrates asks his student, Euthyphro, the point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious, or holy, is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods. In other words, which comes first, that the moral principle really exists out there in sort of an ideational world, and the gods say hey, look...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: They’re beholden to that.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>:...that’s a real, moral principle...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Right.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>:...and we’re going to instruct you through the holy book that’s what you should do.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: And that makes the gods contingent...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Or do they not really exist other than in the mind of God, who says listen, I’ve decided that killing is wrong, and I’m telling you in this particular book, and ignore those other holy books, because they’re wrong. And so now we get to the problem of which is, which do you believe, for example?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Okay, this is a famous dilemma you actually mentioned at one of the earlier segments, and it has been answered very carefully. I’ll give a possible answer for it.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: One minute to the break.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Okay, one minute. One answer is to say that God says something is right because it’s, the rightness of it is grounded in His nature. It’s not an arbitrary act of His will, voluntarism, it isn’t that he has some external standard that makes him now contingent, but that God is good in Himself, and that His commands flow forth from His nature. That’s a possible solution for it. What you can’t do is you can’t jump from evolution and say well, if you go your way, I see a difficulty there, so I can ignore the evidence that’s facing me right now for moral objectivism. That, I think, is a false move. So I can answer the objection, but also I think it’s a false move.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: But you’ll do it after the break.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: But I want to go back and pick up the thread that we were at right before the end of the break. And Michael Shermer, I’m going to have you reset the debate for people wandered in off the street in the middle of this. Where are we in the conversation right now between you and Greg Koukl?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Okay, just in case anybody’s just checking on online, it’s <a href="http://www.skeptic.com/" target="_blank">www.skeptic.com</a> instead of...</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: I’m sorry.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: No big deal. Anyway, so, well, is there an outside source to these moral principles that God then recognizes and says yeah, this is part of the universe, it really is wrong to kill other people, and I as the Deity am telling you this is what I know as part of nature? Or, do no such moral principles actually exist anywhere outside of the Deity Himself, and then He tells us through His Holy books? Okay, so which is the right answer to that question? And two, assuming that...well, you did say something about it’s in God’s nature. Well, if we’re made in God’s image, wouldn’t that also put the moral principles in our nature as well?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: It does...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: So then we’re tapping into those principles that really exist in us. And how is that any different from what I’ve been arguing already?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: No, the difference there, just on that particular issue, is I agreed earlier when you said it’s part of our nature. The <em>source</em> is what’s different. What’s part of our nature is the knowledge of external things. In my case, these things are external. They are external like math principles are external to my mind. I don’t invent them in my mind. In your case, the way you account for them being universal, in the sense that they’re part of all humankind, is that evolution has created this. These are two entirely different things. In my case, I’m talking about an object of reality, and in your case, you’re talking about a subjective reality.</p>

<p>And I know you want to jump in. Just one more point here. I am not complicating things at all, or oversimplifying things. The issue is quite simple if you start at the bottom. Either moral obligations are objects, or they’re part of the object, or they’re part of the subject. They are objectively true, or they’re not. There are no other options.</p>

<p>Now if you agree that morality is not objective, then it’s a crap shoot, really. It’s not whatever you want, if what you mean your society isn’t going to allow you to do whatever you want. It’s not whatever you want if you meant that well, evolution is going to determine certain things for you, that aids the species. But it is whatever you want. What <em>is</em> is right, if there is no outside objective moral standard that’s governing you. Now how you want to ground that, that has it’s own...that’s another issue. And grounding it in God makes a lot of sense, and it even, I’m not even subject to the kind of problems that you Euthyphro dilemma that was just offered there. There is an answer to that, that avoids that problem. But it seems to me if there are objective moral laws, then that suggests an objective moral law giver. And if it’s not, then it’s just deterministic biology, or it’s whatever the group says. And then we could be all over the map.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, then you have the problem, it seems to me, of determining which moral values in the Holy book that you embrace, the Bible, which not everybody embraces as the source, other people have different holy books and sources, so...but anyway, granting yours, which of the moral principles are you going to adhere to, and which not?</p>

<p>So for example, I presume you would reject slavery, as everybody would today. And yet Christians of centuries past embraced slavery, and used Biblical references as political support for slavery, as you well know. And William Wilberforce, who over, you know, sort of single-handedly, against all his fellow Christians who were standing up against him, said no, this is a bad idea. And so I think you have the problem of, like, which moral principles are you going obey, and which not?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Oh, no, you’re absolutely right, Michael. We have the problem as human beings, actually, regardless of our understanding about where morality comes from, of trying to figure out which is the appropriate applicable principle in this given situation. Your system suggests that we’re basically kind of following an evolutionary impulse, and that’s what we’re obeying, and so we’re not really obeying goodness itself, where I’m suggesting that the problem of moral decision making is difficult, because there are a lot of competing moral goods. But there is an answer to the problem if we think through it carefully.</p>

<p>And you don’t have to have a Bible, and I think you understand this, Michael. People...my view isn’t that people have to have a Bible to know right and wrong. The Bible itself, in Romans Chapter 2, teaches that that is on everybody’s heart in some fashion that allows him to have access to it, which is what you said earlier. It’s in all of our natures. We agree on that particular point. So you don’t need to have the Bible. But if you do, then you have a problem with interpretation. That’s true of everything. We don’t make the issue simpler in a sense by saying oh, well, morals are objective, because now we have to ask which objective moral principles apply in this circumstance.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, so...right...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: So I readily agree that there’s a challenge there in moral decision making.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: So how do you know what’s right and wrong? How do you personally know? Is it from the Bible? Do you listen to the still, small voice within? Do you pray?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: I reflect on my moral nature, on my moral intuitions. Just like I know how math principles are right and wrong, I reflect on those things as well.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, me, too. So how is it any different, because I do the same thing.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: And I have a...well, the difference is, well, I just described. You are reflecting on a nature that you’re compelled by certain evolutionary things to do something, and it could just as well have been that evolution pushed you in an entirely different direction, so that rape or child molesting, or something like that, is wrong. I mean, we’re not even talking now so far, Hugh, about the details of how evolution accomplishes this, which is another issue. We’re just talking about it conceptually right now.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Actually, I don’t do that. I don’t even think about evolution or Darwinism or anything like that when I’m thinking about right and wrong.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Right, I know.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Like when I interact with other people...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>:...in the explanation, you do.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah, in my explanation. Yeah, but when I think about well, what should I do in this situation, how should I treat this other person, is this really right or wrong, I just try to put myself in their shoes, and think well, how would I feel?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Fair enough.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: And I think you do, too. I think that’s what we all do.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: We are both drawing on the same faculties.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Right.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: That isn’t the question whether we have the faculties. The question is where do the faculties come from, and what ground them? What makes these things good or bad? You just told me a few moments ago, Michael, that you can go either direction. You could obey your baser nature, which is evolutionary determined, or the higher nature. Well, what is higher and lower in evolution?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, this is a good question. Say...take the slavery issue, for example. How do you know that’s wrong?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Actually, you raised the question of xenophobia earlier. We could do our tribal instinct thing, which we’re by nature dictated to follow, but we can rise above that. So I don’t know why...what’s above that, unless you’re importing some external standard of morality?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Right, so where does it come from?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: How do you adjudicate between the two on an evolutionary basis?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I think...yeah, I think that there is a long term trend over the last, maybe, couple of thousand years, to expanding the circle of moral sentiments of who we’re going to count as fellow group members that we do not rape, pillage, destroy and kill. And the question is why has that happened, let’s say, since the Enlightenment, where we no longer want to treat blacks like we used to, and we want to give women the right to vote, and so on, and now gay marriage is up on the table for discussion and so on. We keep sort of expanding the circle of sentiments. Why would that be?</p>

<p>I actually think that it’s possible there is sort of a built-in to maybe the universe or something, a tendency toward, well, Robert Wright calls this playing more nonzero games, more win-win games, that is all of us benefit if we have more positive moral exchanges between us. This is why I promote free trade. I think it’s one of these mechanisms of generating not just more wealth, but more goodwill between people. And I think that may be very well built into the system, whether there’s a God or not. I think it might actually be there.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, this is a very important juncture in our conversation, because what Michael has appealed to is something very much like a universal mind, that is this perspective over the whole enterprise, looking down saying as all the things fit together, this would be better for everyone, and that somehow directs the process.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I’m not quite committed to that, by the way. I just think it’s an interesting idea...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: But if...okay, now fair enough...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: And I’m not sure if it’s a bottom up process, or a top down process, so...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, this is the question then. If it is a bottom up process, if it’s in the genes, how is it that the genes, then, in any of their working, can anticipate, in a sense, the greater good for all mankind? That strikes me as completely con...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Not just the genes, no, something a higher order than that, that in the species itself, I mean, we’re not talking just about natural selection of individuals, where the organism is the target of selection. But here, I’m talking about group selection. I think group selection has a reasonable case to be built around social organizations, that they themselves are the target of selection. So religion, for example, is a great unifying social force. It brings people together, it unifies them for both good and evil actions, and it’s, I think, also part of our nature.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Okay, very good, group selection. There’s natural selection, which is on the genes, and then there is group selection. Natural selection is materialistic, and it’s unguided. Group selection entails intelligent design, because the group is involved there, encouraging or discouraging the behaviors. And when you form your group, it’s kind of a social contract thing, that’s fine as an explanation, but just keep in mind that both of them are relativistic. And if one group thinks that their group will do better by destroying other groups, it is certainly “morally”&nbsp;within their rights to do so.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Gentlemen, for people who have just walked in on the middle of this, we’ve been not going around in circles, we’ve been actually moving towards a very sharply defined disagreement. But I want you both to state what that disagreement is in one minute or less, not to each other, but for the audience who just walked in. If you had to summarize for them in a minute, or in 90 seconds each, what they missed, Greg Koukl, how would you say that?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: You have to make a decision, listener, as to whether morality is objective in some sense, or merely subjective. Is it a quality of the action, so when we say rape is wrong, we’re talking about rape? Or are we just talking about our feelings or our emotions, or maybe our biological conditioning? As far as I’m concerned, you can go either direction with it at this particular point, but if you decide to go with a subjectivist view, a relativistic view, which is what the evolutionary explanation offers, then you have to be consistent with that to be fair. You can’t start then smuggling what sounds like objective morality in the back door, because now you’ve got another morality that is not accounted for by your evolutionary scheme. And you’ve got to find another accounting for that, and I think this turns out to be one of the best arguments in favor of theism of some sort, the moral argument. But this is the essence of it, what we’re discussing right now.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Michael Shermer?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, I reject what I consider to be a false alternative between objective and subjective morality. I reject subjective morality, I reject relativistic morality. I believe there are objective moral standards. I prefer, I slightly prefer the word transcendent moral values. I don’t believe in God, but I could be wrong. If there’s a God, it seems to me that the moral standards, moral principles should exist anyway, whether there’s a God or not, and that what God is doing, if He’s doing anything, is He’s telling us what those are.</p>

<p>And here, I see a serious problem you have of interpreting what those are, because there’s more than one holy book. People have many claims about moral values based on God, of which we vehemently disagree with. So when I asked you earlier about how do you know what��s right and wrong, you said I reflect upon it, and I used the expression the still, small voice within. And so okay, so we all do that. I think it all begins with the Golden Rule. Everything else is commentary after that, as the great rabbi said, that is how do you feel, how would you feel if I did this, how would I feel if you did this to me? Well, maybe I should put myself in your shoes, and that’s where morality begins, and I think that’s absolute, whether there’s a God or not.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Okay, gentlemen, I had a lot to cover that is not related to this, but I don’t want to move on too expeditiously. Do you think we have covered this issue?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, I think we’ve done a pretty good job, and I think the differences are fairly clear in the, what, hour or so we’ve been talking about this issue. And I mean, I can take another shot here, then I’d get the last word on it, but I think we’ve summed up our views fairly accurately.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: All right, then let me ask you one question before we move to my second set. Michael, you’ve referred a few times to the presence of many holy books as though that somehow diminishes the idea that one may or may not have more authority than the other. Is that necessarily true, just that there are many holy books, there may be a hierarchy of authority among them, correct?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Just take the current events of Islam. Clearly, they have a very different view of morality of how women should be treated than we do, and yet they’re basing it on similar holy texts, and some different holy texts. And so how are people of goodwill, who genuinely believe to get along in the world? Clearly, appeals to God is not going to solve our problem, is it?</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Okay, I didn’t state it very well, then. What I was asking is just does the fact there are many holy books in any way diminish the authority of any one in particular? Just because there are many of them, you’ve said it a few times, and it’s usually as an aside that...it’s kind of...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Oh, okay. There could be one, yeah, there could be one that’s really right, and the rest are wrong.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: You know, there’s kind of an implied, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but when I’m a believer, as I am, in Scripture, and I hear you say that, I hear a sneer, oh, many holy books, but not an argument that one of them can’t be right. Do you see what I’m getting at?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Oh, yes, one of them could be right, and the rest wrong, but how do you know which one?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, that’s a different question.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Because people of genuine belief in faith like you, who are Islamic, believe just as strongly as you do that women should be treated certain ways, and you would disagree. So how are we to settle this?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: I’m so glad he put it that way, because that point has absolutely nothing to do with the discussion. You don’t cancel out...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: But isn’t it an interesting point, though?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Wait, let me finish. No, it is an interesting point, maybe, for sociologists, but as to the issue at question, let me finish the thought, Mike, and then you can respond to it. You don’t decide whether a book or revelation is true or false, or anything else for that matter, by looking at how strongly different people hold the views. You have to look at the reasons for the views.</p>

<p>I mean, let’s just talk about science for example. There are very strongly held views by scientists on a lot of different things, even opposing views about how the Darwinian project worked out. It wouldn’t be fair of me to Michael to say well, your particular view, I don’t know if you’re a punctuated equilibrium guy, or you’re a classical Darwinist, or whatever, but it would be unfair for me to say to Michael look, you couldn’t be right, nor could they be right, because you both have equally strong beliefs that you are true. That is a non-issue in the discussion. Something else has to be focused on to try to break the tie.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Okay, that’s a good example, because in that example, at least in principle, it could be settled through more data collection, whether evolution moves along in fits and starts, as described by punctuated equilibrium, or it moves gradually by gradualism. We can at least in principle settle that dispute.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Why can’t the other one be settled in principle?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: How would you settle the dispute between a Muslim and a Christian on how women should be treated? How would you settle that? I mean, they go look, it says right here in the Scripture, and you say but it says in my Scripture, so how are we going to settle that?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well...the question here, yeah, well in principle, it can be settled in actually two different ways. One, based on the authority of the book, and so you can look at the books, and say do I have any good, independent reasons, not just leaps of faith, but any good reasons to believe that this is actually a communication of God over and against this one being a communication of God? And there are lots of different strategies to go about that. Or one could just look at the claims themselves, and say look, based on what seems to be a common sense of right and wrong and morality that we all seem to have, and using our best faculties to reflect on it, I have reasons to mistrust this one, and trust this one more. Those are two, at least in principle ways, that you can go about adjudicating between those claims.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I have a better way to settle it. Ask the women. How do you feel being treated like this? Which would you prefer? I think you’ll get a pretty straightforward answer there, unless the guy’s behind the door with a shotgun, and she has to give a certain answer.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Okay, this presumes that we ought to care what other people think about how they’re treated, which presumes an objective morality, and now we’re back into that thing again. So that plays into my hands, not his.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: And I agree, there’s an objective morality.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: But I...when I come back from break, we’ve got to go to break, when I come back, and I’ll ask you, Michael, when we start, is there a way to adjudicate between the reasonability of those books, because it seems to me that the audience driving around right now has on their mind, and I always try and put myself in the point of the audience, wait a minute, how do you decide between many books claiming to be the revealed wisdom of God, and if your answer is you can’t, don’t bother, fine. If your answer is you can, pick this one, fine. But let’s get to that. Is there an objective way to pick between the books?</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: But I want to get back to the subject I was raising. As between the books that claim to be the revealed wisdom of God, is there an objective way to judge them on their merits? Greg Koukl, let me start with you.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well yes, let’s say, for example, if the documents in question claim that God communicated in an historical way, penetrated history and certain, particular things happened, now you’ve got an historical test for that kind of thing. You can look at the details that are expressed. Maybe there’s some prophecy that is proclaimed at one time, and you have reason to believe was fulfilled at another time.</p>

<p>You ask me in principle how it could be done, this is a way in principle that it could be done. You could see whether the view of the world that the books portray seem to comport with one’s deepest intuitions about the way the world really is. I actually think religion is a very messy and untidy business. And with my philosophical training, I like to have all the loose ends tied up.</p>

<p>But the fact is, life is not tidy. And no matter what view you take, there are going to be problems and unanswered questions. So I take the perspective, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, Hugh, as a man looking at my universe trying to make the most sense out of it. What picture of the world, what worldview does the best job of answering most of the questions? And I think this worldview-type analysis would be helpful here.</p>

<p>If you have a book that gives a worldview that has a certain feature that seem to resonate with your deepest intuitions about the world, that seems to me a plus for the book. If you have another book that seems to indicate something entirely different, like the Vedas, for example, that suggest that the universe is just an illusion, that it’s all Maya. Well this, to me, does not resonate with my deepest intuitions. So here’s another way that in principle, at least, one could test one worldview against another with their religious books.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Mike Shermer?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: That does seem problematic to me, even within your own Holy book, of how much we, how many of the Old Testament rules and laws we no longer obey—death penalty for disobedient children and adulterous people and so on. We would no longer practice that ever in our country. Why is that? I mean, that was once considered to be Holy Scripture, now it’s rejected by most believers. So obviously, there are decisions being made in people’s minds about what’s right and wrong that is external to the source itself, that comes from, what, culture, parents, upbringing and so on.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Okay, I’m going to recede from it, although my question was how would you choose between the books. I want to come back to that, Michael, but Greg has a response to that.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, of course. Look, the Old Testament law was written for Jews. This is not like we’re just making something up out here. It is a proper hermeneutic It was written to Jews under a very specific situation, and it was meant to be applied to them under the theocracy. There are some people who hold this, but certainly not the majority, that these same laws in the same way ought to be applied today. That’s why we call it the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Even within the Christian worldview, there is a place for that, and now there’s a place for something new. So there’s no contradiction there at all.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Yeah, you know, Michael, that does seem to me, Hitchens has made that argument to me a number of times, and it’s just a silly argument.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Which argument?</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: The argument that the Old Testament rules that have been abandoned somehow indict the New Testament laws and morality. It’s just a silly argument.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well wait. You still obey some of the Old Testament rules. So how do you...</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Yes.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Which ones do you pick and choose from?</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: I’ll give you Al Mohler’s book. Again, I’m not a participant. I don’t want to answer. I want to ask you, though. To me, it was non-responsive when I said as between the books, how do you judge which books?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Okay, which books? I would just say...</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Of all the holy books that claim to have universal wisdom and knowledge about God, and I could name ten of them, is there a way to choose...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I don’t think so. I’m answering your question. I don’t think there is any outside way to do that. Even in principle, because the ultimate, the original source of those books came through some human source, some revelatory experience that somebody had, that had to at some point put pen to paper and write down what the God said.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Let me rephrase it, then. On the basis of human reason, there is no way to evaluate all those books as to which ones are at least more closely approximating the way that people ought to live or not?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Oh, that’s a different question. Maybe I misheard, because I think we could do that, but what’s that standard of the way we ought to live? What are we using for that standard? I would argue there is such a standard, and it’s not from religion.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: And so you would evaluate those books based upon your independently arrived at understanding of what is morality?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I think we <em>do</em> do that.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg Koukl?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, I think we do do that to a degree, too, and here Mike and I have no debate about the existence of a moral sense in human beings. The difference is whether that moral sense is merely an expression of our subjective emotions, which it seems to me what he argues for, though he wants to ennoble that and call that kind of objective morality, or is it our ability to grasp moral realities that are outside of us that would not change, even if our own opinions about it happen to change. That’s the difference between objective and subjective.</p>

<p>And Mike, you appealed for a kind of third category, but either...I don’t see where there is a third category. It’s either in the object or in the subject, and that’s pretty much the law of excluded middle there.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Remember that thought. We’ll come right back to Michael Shermer.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Michael Shermer, what were you going to say?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, so let’s take another current example of whether homosexuality is a sin, leaving aside marriage as a political question, but just is homosexuality a sin or not. Now I presume you would argue it is, and it’s right there in the Old Testament, a man shall not sleep with another man, it’s an abomination. But why stick with that one, which seems to me equally culturally dependent as some of the other Old Testament on small populations struggling in a harsh environment, in which you want lots of marriage, lots of children and so on. I could kind of see that rules back then, but why bother now? I mean, why not abandon that one along with slavery and some of the other ones?</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg Koukl?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, okay, this one goes to a matter of authority, because I think there are complicated, and for some, persuasive arguments that homosexuality is wrong, per se, because of natural law arguments or whatever, but those don’t resonate with most people. I think what Michael’s getting at here is how is it that the New Testament, or now why are you still holding over that from the Old Testament when things have changed? And the reason is, it’s not just an incidental part of the Old Testament law. It seems to be indicated there that the behavior itself transcends, morally speaking, any local law. Some of the laws in the Old Testament were for local things, but some seemed to transcend, like it’s wrong to kill, or rather, wrong the murder is the Hebrew word.</p>

<p>And so in the New Testament, even though we’re not in the Old Covenant situation, we have these same kinds of things, these more transcendent things that apply to all human beings, prohibited. And one of those that’s spoken to is the homosexuality issue. And the reason that Paul gives in Romans Chapter 1 is that God made human beings for one purpose, the man for the woman, and the man, in the case of male homosexuality, abandoned the woman that God made for them and burned in their passion against someone else. So there’s a violation of the natural order.</p>

<p>Now this isn’t&nbsp;something that I’m probably going to come up with all on my own just thinking about, and this is where I think Divine revelation is helpful to have us dial down on some of the moral things. And you’re certainly free not to accept that, but this is what makes homosexuality durable as a sin, in a sense, from the Old Testament times to the New Testament, because of the reasons that God gives that it’s wrong.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: But using that sort of a moral intuition, and the still, small voice or the reflective aspects of morality, given that we live in a modern world in which we have plenty of people, we don’t need more, and somebody, the evidence seems to show people are just born this way, it’s like asking a gay person when they chose to become homosexual would be like me asking you when you chose to become heterosexual. And you’d say, Well, I didn’t choose. This is my nature. And that’s what gay people say. This is my nature. I’ve always felt like this. So why would you care? Who cares if somebody finds love with a member of the same sex, and love and marriage leads to fidelity and more moral behavior that we all agree is good for society? Why block that?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Okay, just as a matter of fact, it is not the case that science has shown that this is genetic. There is no gay gene. This has not been demonstrated.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: No, not a gay gene...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Or anything like that.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Okay, we’re going way off the off-ramp, gentlemen.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Okay, the answer is, why would any Christian object to that?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Because out of fidelity to their God, because they believe that God has said this is wrong, and so they’re going to oppose it in principle, even though it is not within their purview, then, to bring persecution upon that person, because there’s another value that they hold, and that is that all human beings are made in the image of God.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Okay, here’s my prediction.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: I don’t want a prediction. I want to get back to my question, Michael Shermer.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yup.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Based upon what I would say your evolutionarily-constructed moral law, what you consider to be the societal moral law, have you evaluated the various holy books, and given them a hierarchy, which is best, which is not so good, which is terrible?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: No, I guess I have not.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: And why not, if that matters so much?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I don’t, I’m not that interested. I love studying religion, though I have not read the Koran, for example.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg Koukl, is it necessary for someone who’s going to say there’s an evolutionary moral law, and talk about God, to have that kind of assessment?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: I actually don’t, I’m sympathetic to Mike. I mean, there’s a lot of books to read, you can’t read them all. And if he thinks he has come upon a cogent and powerful explanation for the world as he sees it, then he doesn’t have a motivation to go outside of that. My argument has been that it’s not adequate, and that’s why some other kind of solution is going to be necessary.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Okay, here’s my objection. If there’s a moral law, and there’s a societal good, and one of these books is really bad for it, and one of these books generally support it, then you ought to, even as an agnostic, make a choice between that which is really horrific, a Hitlerian approach to, you know, a Nazi, Mein Kampf, don’t read that one, that’s horrible, versus the New Testament is pretty nice. I think...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah, I guess I would attest that the New Testament’s better than the Old Testament. I guess I would agree. I think Jesus was a big step forward. I think the feminization of some of the morality in the book of Ruth toward the end of the Old Testament is a big improvement over the early books, so yeah, I guess I do evaluate.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: And where do you put the Koran in that? You haven’t read it at all, it just doesn’t matter?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Oh, I’ve read it, of course since 9/11, I’ve read lots of parts of it that everybody quotes, which are all the, you know, the horrific parts. And that seems to me far beneath the Bible in terms of what we would consider moral values. But anyway...</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Do any of the books have a better grounding in natural science?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: No, I don’t think so.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Do any of the books have a better grounding in history?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: It depends on which books. I mean, parts of the Old Testament have some good grounding in history, and others don’t.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: This is a transition. Greg Koukl, how is the historical evidence for the accounts of these various books?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, it depends on which one you’re talking about. Some of these books aren’t history books. They’re poetic books that are meant in poetic language (the Bhagavad Gita, for example) to tell something about reality.</p>

<p>I think the unique thing about the Judeo-Christian revelation is that principally, the theological story is told through history, so the history is really important. The big event of the Old Testament is the exodus, you know, and this was the salvation event where God intervened. The big event in the New Testament is similar to that, parallel to that, is the resurrection of Christ.</p>

<p>Now obviously, we have a lot more access to information about the life of Jesus of Nazareth than we do about the exodus. In fact, there’s a kind of a big hole there in terms of archaeology for that period of time. But there’s not a big hole when it comes to the life of Christ. And the documentary evidence is quite extensive. And not just the primary source documentation for the life of Jesus, which we call Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which by the way, should not be simply dismissed because they were written by Christians. Historians don’t dismiss them for that reason.</p>

<p>But we have to look at these as historical documents. And when we do, we find a tremendous amount of powerful testimony from those documents about the person of Jesus, what He taught, and what He did, which also points to a literal time-history resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Now if that actually happened, that puts this worldview in a whole different category.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Well, that’s my transition, is to the person of Christ, because most of our audience is Christian. And a lot of this argument has been, as I’ve had with many of the new atheists, silly to believe in Jesus.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Mike Shermer, as I said at the end of last hour, last segment, is it silly to believe in the historical person of Jesus Christ? And is it silly to believe in the claims and the accounts of him as recorded in the New Testament.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I don’t like the word <em>silly</em>, because it trivializes a serious issue. I think it’s an empirical claim on one level, whether Christ rose from the dead or not, but on the other hand, I think it’s an article of faith. You can show all 13 million Jews in the world that evidence for the risen Christ, and eyewitnesses, and the rock was rolled away or whatever, and they almost universally, except for the small population of Jews For Jesus, reject the evidence. So I don’t think it’s ultimately provable. I do think it’s an article of faith, like many other articles of faith of religion. I don’t like the word silly at all. I think that trivializes it unnecessarily.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg Koukl?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, a frustrating situation for atheists is that the vast majority of people in this country, the rank and file, don’t believe in Darwinian evolution. But I wouldn’t be free then to say well, this is just, evolution’s obviously an article of faith, because look at all the people who look at the evidence that you provide so persuasively and don’t believe it. This is an observation that leads to no conclusion about this issue at all.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: And so, and it’s frustrating as well, because it seems to me central for agnostics, atheists, to answer the question about the empirical evidence, and whether it is of high quality...I had this conversation with Richard Dawkins. Dawkins likes to argue you know, I’m a Latin teacher, and I’m just arguing that Rome existed, and a lot of people are arguing Rome didn’t exist. And it’s the same with evolution. And I challenged him, I asked him the historical evidence for the personhood of Jesus is overwhelming, isn’t it?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yes.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: And so, is the proof...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, I don’t know about overwhelming. I think Jesus existed.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Well, is it overwhelming? Or just a guess?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I think there’s good enough evidence for us to conclude that somebody named Jesus of Nazareth existed.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: And on the basis of what we know generally about historical text, isn’t there pretty good, and perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the Gospels are reliable, historically tested accounts about what this person did?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well now, it’s getting a little fuzzier, because of the inconsistency of the accounts. And you could say well, okay, eyewitnesses saw things slightly differently. Yeah, but there’s some important differences between the four Gospels. And what about the other Gospels that are not in the canonical books, the gospel of Thomas, for example? And there’s legitimate, theological research on these other books, and why can’t those be concluded?</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: One minute, Greg.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, there is legitimate, theological research, and not only on Thomas, but a whole bunch of other pseudepigrapha that come afterwards. There are all kinds of literary documents that make claims to write about Jesus that we know, because of their dating, couldn’t possibly have the eyewitness accounts of the information that the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John canonical Gospels have. So just because there are other things that claim to be gospels, it doesn’t mean that they’re contenders as source of historical information. And the scholars in the field make this distinction.</p>

<p>Now Thomas is one of those few documents where they seem to take seriously, but our documents of Thomas are like 3rd Century, and looks to have been written in the 2nd Century. So why is it that the 1st Century documents of the Gospels don’t get preeminence there as historical documents? They should.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: When we come back, the third hour is given over to do the anti-God people have to put up with the same rigorous defense of their beliefs as they ask the theists to put up with theirs. Stay tuned.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: And I want to spend this hour talking really about the debate over the debate. And it’s occurring at an unusual time, because just a couple of weeks ago surfaced one of the greatest scandals in the history of modern science, Climategate, in which incredibly unscientific behavior on the part of scientists has been revealed.</p>

<p>The atheists have often in the past few years tried to position the debate as between reason and faith. But now we find the tactics that people of faith are often accused of, absolutely evident on the part of the behavior of scientists—data manipulation, witch hunts against scientists with whom they disagreed with, a refusal to confront contrary evidence. And I took that, and I applied it to this debate over intelligent design, Michael Shermer, and I’m wondering whether or not the opponents of intelligent design have been using the same tactics that the Climategate scientists, who are now deeply scandalized, embarrassed and discredited, have been using for the last, obviously, we just learned about it. But have the proponents of the anti-God view been just as intellectually dishonest as the Climategate scientists?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, on the Climategate thing, I think the smoking guns are not what I thought they would be. I have some sympathy for the global warming skeptics. I was once one, and could be persuaded again. I think that’s just a data question there. But what I think it revealed was how political scientists are. They’re very liberal and very tribal, and like everybody else, they circle the wagons when they think they’re being attacked from outside. And I think that’s what we saw.</p>

<p>So to that extent, do atheists, have atheists done that? Yes, they have. They’ve circled the wagons, they feel like they’re under siege. At time, I think particularly since 9/11 with the fear of Islamic terrorism, and then since the Bush administration pushing an Evangelical agenda into politics, way more than Bush Sr., ever did as a Methodist, and certainly more than Reagan ever did, I think that’s what caused non-believers to feel like they needed to push back somewhat.</p>

<p>And then you just get specific cultural phenomenon like Dawkins’&nbsp;book takes off, or Hitchens’&nbsp;book takes off, something like that. I mean, the book sales on those books are more than cumulative all the other books they’ve ever written, plus all of a bunch of other books, so I think you get a combination of those events there.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg Koukl, first your response, then I have a follow up.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well yeah, I think that there is kind of a shell game and a muscling going on, and we see it in the field. And I think what people don’t realize, and I didn’t realize this until maybe six or seven years ago when this was explained to me, and when explained, I really saw this, that there are actually two definitions of science that are in play here, Hugh.</p>

<p>One of them is a methodological definition, the scientific method. You know, follow certain methods, and you come up with the right results. Now if you don’t follow that method, then that’s called bad science, and you can’t trust the results you come up with.</p>

<p>But there’s more going on here. It isn’t just a methodology. There is also a philosophical definition. This philosophical definition is metaphysical materialism, or called naturalism. A metaphysical view is a total view of reality, and on this view, nothing exists but the molecules in motion. That’s materialism. That’s also part of the definition.</p>

<p>So currently, in the state of science, in order to be doing science, good science, you have to be doing the right methodology, but you also have to come to the right kinds of conclusions. You have to come to conclusions that comport with naturalism and materialism. And if you don’t, you’re accused of doing religion instead of science.</p>

<p>I just want people to see that there’s a difference here, and lots of times in this discussion, this metaphysical issue trumps the methodology. Notice that a lot of times, the arguments aren’t against ID proper, that is the evidence that they’ve offered. It’s a dismissal by saying you’re not doing science, you’re doing religion. This isn’t real scientists at work like we are, these are phonies. And so it’s a way of discrediting based on the kind of conclusions that they come up.</p>

<p>Now this happens all the time, and you can see a bullying that’s going on in the field, and a lot of people have identified this, Guillermo Gonzalez for example, a famous example from Iowa State University, denied tenure though very qualified. Francis Beckwith, for goodness sake, a philosopher, not a scientist, but the same kind of thing happened to him at Baylor before it got reversed, and a lot of other people. There’s a political game going on here, and it seems to me that if the evidence for Darwinian evolution is so powerful, then why do you have to do these political moves that are driven not by the methodology, but largely by the metaphysics doing the magic? Why? And I think because the metaphysics are doing a large part of the work, and the method doesn’t give the evidence that’s necessary to convince the most people.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Michael Shermer?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Of course, other fields of science don’t deal with these issues, like why are Christian groups not up in arms about the Krebs cycle being taught in biochemistry classes and biology classes. Why not? I mean, if you’re going to object to methodological naturalism, why pick on just one, particular little sub-field?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Because it doesn’t have any ramifications for these other things.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah, of course. That’s right.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: But it does...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Because certain fields of science do bump up against political and religious implications.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: But it’s not just that, Michael. It has to do with the evidence in question. Nobody has, even from my side of things, has any difficulty with the Krebs cycle, because methodological naturalism is the thing that governs day to day science.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Why don’t you explain the Krebs cycle for our audience.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Oh, it’s just a...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: I can, but he...</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: I know, but don’t use terms like that for the audience.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: It’s just a biochemical process in cells of using energy.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah. And so at this point, to finish my thought, though...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: What this points out is that these kinds of issues are not the kind of thing that affect day to day science. But when it comes to the issue of origins, then it’s something entirely different. You have a different category that you’re talking about, and this is where the muscling has been done, and that’s why the complaints have been raised, muscling that is illegitimate considering what’s at stake.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, muscling on both sides. I mean, it’s political on both sides, so the left and the right both push back against each other, all the way back to the Catholic Church and Galileo.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, okay, I’m glad...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I mean, that tension has always been there. Let’s not...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Great. And it was wrong with Galileo, and it should be wrong now. That’s my point. If it was wrong then, and with the monkey trial and everything, now everything is in reverse, and I think this is what Hugh was getting at. If the power plays were wrong in the past, then they should be wrong now, and why don’t we just let everybody lay their cards on the table and play fair, and then let the best idea win?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I agree. So just put it out there. Like the Climategate? Yeah, let’s get that original data. I agree. Sure.</p>

<p>Now let me just back up for a second on an example not related to religion, but on another field that I deal with, extra sensory perception. Can we actually read the minds of other people? Okay, setting aside the TV psychics and all that silly stuff, there are some scientists who actually believe that mind exists separate from brain, and that we can connect to each other, and there’s a famous physicist named Roger Penrose, who has this theory about that quantum mechanics explains how when neurons fire, the collapse of the wave function inside the atoms, inside the nerves, fire in a sequence that my cells can read your cells. They’re actually communicating, somehow, across a distance, all right? I don’t happen to think that’s true, but let’s say it turned out to be true, and that now we have a naturalistic explanation for extra sensory perception. Well, that would no longer be the paranormal, would it? Now it would be quantum neuroscience, or neurophysics, or something like that.</p>

<p>So at some point, you need some kind of a natural explanation for the phenomenon in question that we can test. So for example, when somebody, when cosmologists talk about well, the galaxies are structured in this odd way where there must be more matter out there, we’ll call it dark energy or dark matter, they don’t actually mean that as an explanation. It isn’t an explanation. It’s just a word filler until we can figure out what’s going on.</p>

<p>So at some point, it’s not that no one’s allowing you to introduce the supernatural, it’s just that no different than calling it ESP, that doesn’t explain it. We need some kind of a mechanism that causes it.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Okay, to be fair, Michael, I was at the debate one week ago that you did with Professor Prothero and Steve Meyer, and the others from the ID thing. And you started out your presentation by saying this is all about religion, it’s not about science. That’s the first thing you said. And then you referred to the other guys as, you and your partner, as ’those guys,’&nbsp;and we are doing real science, and they’re not. In fact, Steve Meyer raised a complaint at the personal attack there, because both of them have advanced degrees in their fields.</p>

<p>Now I mean, this is an example of the kind of thing that I’m talking about. It’s like, you didn’t say to these guys well, you’re real scientists, we’re real scientists, but really, the facts matter, so let’s look at the facts. There are all of these kind of subtle and sometimes not so subtle invectives, or shout across there. Now I’ve been in debates before. I know how that works. I’m just simply saying that your kind of tone of innocence here, it strikes me as disingenuous, because this is a game that you guys play all the time when in public circumstances. And sometimes, it’s not just invectives, it’s actually muscling, we won’t publish your paper, we won’t let people know about it, we’re going to criticize you in front of all these people and try to discredit you.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: A response coming back from Michael Shermer when we return.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Michael Shermer, I was not at this debate. I have no idea what Greg just referenced. So I want to give you a chance to go back to what he was just talking about. Did you attack Steven Meyer’s scientific credentials?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Actually, I didn’t. My partner did. Well, you know...</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Did you correct your partner at that point?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Steven Meyer corrected him, actually, is what happened.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah, I mean, this is a part of the format of debate, right? I mean, it’s a contest. It’s competitive. You’re supposed to, you know, you’re supposed to come out...like a lawyer, you’re supposed to defend your position. You’re not supposed to...if it’s a panel discussion, that’s different than a debate. This was a debate. I actually do think that it’s perfectly fine for Steven Meyer to publish books like his new book on DNA, and put forth testable hypotheses. Okay, at least now we’re getting somewhere, where if you give us something we can take back to the lab and test, then we’re doing science. If it’s just I infer that there’s a designer behind this, okay, that’s nice, but what am I supposed to do with that? So the analogy I made is that let’s say it turns out life did not originate on Earth, that it was seeded here either through meteorites or comets, or maybe even extra-terrestrials brought it here and seeded it, and they are from the Planet Vega, a planet around the Star Vega. Let’s say something like that.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: A dysfunctional GM car, okay.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah, exactly, yeah. Right. Good, we needed some humor there. And...but and let’s say we found a little pod out in Blythe or something in the desert with the blueprints of how they made DNA. Well, that would be interesting, but we’d still want to know well, where did the Vegans come from? I mean, who made those guys? Did they evolve on this planet? Or were they seeded there from someplace else? Or did God do it? Or...in other words, at some point, we need some natural explanation for where life came from. And if you take this back far enough, you will end up at an infinite regress. Well, God, outside of space and time, came into our space and time, stirred the particles, and created life. Okay, but where did, if not God, the intelligent designer, where did He come from? Did he evolve? Or is he a standalone, the last causal link? And there, we bump up against the great unknown. I don’t see how that’s resolvable.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: I’ve got so much to say about this, I’m not sure where to begin. Let me just start with the power play. At that debate, Richard Sternberg was the other I.D. guy there, and Richard Sternberg used to be with the Smithsonian. But he had the audacity of publishing a paper by Steven Meyer in a journal, a peer review journal that was associated with the Smithsonian, and he got bounced. This is the kind of thing that I’m talking about.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: You know, I just called them. He’s still there. At least, he’s still on their list.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Okay, well, the firestorm...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I don’t think he got bounced.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>:...surrounding that, you don’t...okay, forget the bounce thing. The firestorm surrounding it you don’t deny?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yes, of course. We’re all emotional, yeah. Right.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, it goes beyond that. And so the point to bringing up the debate, I understand that there is these things you do in debates, but this in the debate was the microcosm of the bigger issue, and that’s why I pointed that out.</p>

<p>Now with regards to, you know, life beginning on other planets, and then who designed the Designer and that kind of thing, it’s a very odd question. And virtually all the guys on Mike’s side of this debate ask the same question—who created God, or some variation of that. And what’s curious is that Mike and none of these other guys believe that God was created, because they don’t believe in God. I don’t believe that God was created, because I think that God is eternal. So nobody in the discussion believes that God was created or designed. So why does the question come up that who designed the Designer, or who created God?</p>

<p>Frankly, it’s a distraction. It’s a distraction from the evidence in front of us, for intelligent design. If I’m walking down the beach as we could here in Newport, Hugh, and I see a footprint in the sand, a shoe print in the sand, I don’t need to know who the manufacturer of the shoe is before I can properly conclude from the evidence that a shoe made the print. The same thing is true here. We’re focusing on one issue, and that is whether the evidence suggests an intelligent designer. If we come to the conclusion that that’s the case, much like forensic pathology, there’s a dead man with five holes in his chest from bullets, gee, it doesn’t look like natural causes, now let’s go search for the person who did it. That’s the next step. But we can’t say, I think, vacuous challenges like who created God when none, all of these guys know that nothing about our view requires God’s creation. They say this to, I think, distract from the main issue, the evidence for design itself, which is compelling, Hugh.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Oh, I don’t say it as a distraction. I think it’s a really interesting question. Where did the universe come from in the first place. And if there were multiple universes, you still have the same problem—where did those come from.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: I agree. I agree.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: And I do think, Greg, at some point, we do bump up against limitations of our knowledge, of our language...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Right.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>:...of what our brains are capable of solving. And there is a leap of faith for all of us. You either decide to believe, or you decide not to believe. And I don’t think it’s ultimately provable one way or the other.</p>

<p>Now on the other question positing a designer from the evidence of design, I think there is an inference there in which we have vast experience of people shooting each other, and we know what that is. And so you come across somebody with five bullet holes, okay, there’s a natural inference there based on experience. And we’ve seen people make tennis shoes, so we know that they’re made when we see the print. Okay, there’s a natural inference there. But we’ve never seen any designer design DNA. We just have the product, the artifact, from which we infer what? And there, it isn’t the same as an artifact that’s made by us.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: All right. Now gentlemen, I want to switch for the last three segments of the show leading into a larger question about belief in God generally. Is it good or bad for people? And regardless of whether it’s true, or the true true, to use Francis Schaeffer, but is it good or bad? Because that leads me to the second question, are the new atheists involved in an evil project or a good project? Because these are both obvious question. So Greg, you want to take a first pass?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, I’ll take a shot at it, and again, I want to go back to my earliest comment when we started talking about morality. It depends on what you mean by good. And I’m just weighing in now to say that when you’re using the word good, I’m taking this as good in the objective sense.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Yes.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Do objective goods, <em>oughts</em> that we should do and whatever, come to pass better when there is belief in God?</p>

<p>There’s a famous story of a Hassidic Jew that was standing in front of a German machine gun having just dug his own grave. And he said just before he was gunned down, he said God is watching. Now one thing that the German officer didn’t believe at that point was that God was watching. Nor did Mao, nor did Lenin, nor did Stalin, nor did many other people who did great atrocities, did they believe that God was watching. As David Berlinski has pointed out, that’s actually the definition of secularism. God is not watching.</p>

<p>Now I don’t think it takes, you know, a lot of deep thinking to realize, and Michael might call this a shallow motivation regardless, to realize that if people really believe that God is watching, their behavior is going to be better on balance than if they really believe that God is not watching.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Michael Shermer?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, I do think that religion and belief in God is good when it does good, and evil when it does evil. And we can make a laundry list of goods and evils that religion does. You have Hitchens’&nbsp;book here, and he’s got a laundry list in there of all the evils.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: And we agree on that, by the way, Michael.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: And you could take David Brooks’&nbsp;book, Who Really Cares, and he documents how Republicans and conservatives and religious people give more money and more time, and donate more blood and so on then securalists, atheists, nonbelievers, and Democrats. So I would say that’s great. I mean, I sponsor a child through World Vision, because I think they do the job. They put the boots on the ground, and they make things happen. And religion is really good for that. And so I think it’s too simple to say is religion good or evil. I mean, come on, it’s a big, complex, social, historical force that does lots of good things, and lots of bad things.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: When we come back, I’ll follow up, because I don’t think it’s too simple. I think it’s actually the question about whether or not the anti-God people are engaged in evil if they’re destroying belief in God.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: So Michael, I come back to this. You said yeah, religion’s done a lot of good and a lot of bad, but generally speaking, and the utilitarian view, is belief in God good for the planet? And if it is good for the planet, have the anti-God people been involved in an evil project?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I don’t think they have been involved in an evil project. I think what it...it makes it okay to not believe in God. Remember, atheism isn’t a thing. There’s no, like, central set of tenets that we adhere to or believe in, or anything like that as you would a Republican or conservative, or something like that, or a Christian or a Jew or whatever. We don’t have anything like that, because there is nothing. It’s just simply we just don’t believe.</p>

<p>Now because we’re social creatures, we like to feel like we belong to a family, an extended family, a group of friends, a bowling league, social capital, this is called. Everybody likes to feel like they belong. Because religion is so dominant in America, particularly the Christian religion, those of us who are either not Christian or not believers, we feel a little alienated, a little lonely, and a little left out. And we’d like to have our own group.</p>

<p>So in part, what the new atheist movement is tapping into is that social feeling of wanting to belong to a group. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think it’s good that there are people out there, groups out there that make that okay.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg Koukl?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, your question was not whether religion does good, but whether belief in God does good, if I recall it correctly.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Yup.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: And so I want to return specifically to that. The atheists do have a code. It’s not very complicated. It’s just that as Michael just put it, there is nothing. So what is the moral consequence on a people if they believe there is nothing? That’s really the question.</p>

<p>The 20th Century, which we just left, was the bloodiest century in the history of the world. And just a casual adding up of the numbers shows over 100 million that were dead at the hands of just three people—Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse Tung. Now these people had a particular ideology at which atheism was its foundation. Because they didn’t believe in God, and there is a natural kinship here between worldviews and the actions that follow them, because they didn’t believe in God, it was the state that was the greater power. And if the state is the greatest power, and they were the state, then they had no one to answer to. And consequently, they were able to do these things that everyone views as an atrocity.</p>

<p>Now this, I think, is logical. This follows from that worldview. I’m not saying that atheists are all evil like that. They’re not. Mike is a fine guy. What I’m saying is that given the atheistic worldview, you are allowed to do those kinds of things, because there is no transcendent rule that’s keeping you from doing otherwise.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Michael Shermer?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Nobody kills or dies in the name of atheism, because there’s nothing to kill or die for. People kill and die for causes, for ideologies, for beliefs. And communism is a faux religion. It is exactly like a religion, a set of tenets that people adhere to, and then we’re going to go out and change people’s minds, or impose our views on them and so on. That’s what social groups do, whether they’re political, ideological, economic, religious, whatever. And that’s what communism is. And it’s nothing more than that. Nobody killed in the name of that. In any case, Hitler’s not a good example, because as we’ve seen now...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: I didn’t use him.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>:...with the indictment of the Catholic Church, they were very much involved in the whole Nazi process there...</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: That’s...time out, Michael. That’s simply not true, but let’s not go there. I would want to have an expert in the Vatican’s many, many interventions to save lives, and then we’d have a long conversation...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Oh, of course they did. Yes, yes.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Let’s just not throw it out there. Let’s just not throw it out there.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: The real issue here is not whether people did it in the name of atheism or not. But it has to do with the kinship of behaviors to worldviews. Whether people are thinking of this as a rationale, gee, I’m an atheist, so I can go kill people, is not the issue. The issue is how is it that people actually live out the deep beliefs that they have about the world? And it seems obvious that when people have believed that there’s nothing else but us and our rules, what we make, for whatever reasons we do, and we answer to no one, and there isn’t going to be any final justice or final judgment or final reckoning, well, it seems very clear to see how this is going to have a deleterious effect on behaviors.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah, but if Torquemada had gas chambers, wow, what would the numbers have been in the Inquisition? I mean, in the name of God, Torquemada...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: So you’re saying there is no relationship between the worldviews?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, you brought up the numbers.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Right.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: It isn’t numbers that’s important. It’s what your capable of doing. And religious beliefs and political ideologies are no different as belief systems driving behavior that’s moral or immoral. People kill in the name of religion just as much as they do in the name of a political ideology.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: This is false, just quantifiably, first of all.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: No, I disagree.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: But secondly, there is the idea...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Not by the numbers.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: The idea is what’s important. People just have to reflect in the idea. Which one is a better encourager to good behavior, that God exists. That was your question.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: It seems that we’re onto something very important here, and Michael, I sense defensiveness on your part, so I’m going to let you go first. If, in fact, the new atheists launch a series of responses that lead people to not believe in God, and those people in not believing in God act a certain way, that’s causation. That’s responsibility. Ought the new atheists ought to own their responsibility? If they kill God, ought they not to own the results of killing God?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: First of all, I don’t think that’s going to happen. It didn’t happen at the turn of the 20th Century.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Didn’t ask that question, though.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yeah, yeah, I know. Sure, okay, I’ll stand up and be responsible. Why not?</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg Koukl, have they been? It’s a flippant response. That’s okay. But...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, well...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: No, it’s a true response. Yes...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: What I was...okay, great. So what do we take away from that?</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Right.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Listen, I’m arguing if there is no God, then everything is permitted. There is no objective morality.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I don’t agree with that. Come on.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: I understand that. I understand you don’t, but you have ground objective morality...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Yes, you can. We’re back to where we began.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Your morality is subjective.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: No, it’s not.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: It’s something that’s in the subject. It’s in the genes...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: That’s objective.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: And it creates...yes, okay. Well, it is objective, but it’s not objective in the way that I’m talking about it. It’s objectively in the subject, and ethicists have made this distinction for a long time between objective and subjective. I’m not going to go there again. Let me just finish the equation here. If there is no God, then everything is permitted. If the new atheists are right, then there is no God. Therefore, if the new atheists are right, then everything is permitted. Now I think that follows. And I think this, then, creates a problem. Again, I don’t think that all of the atheists are bad people in everything that they do. They’re just as bad as the rest of us religious people. Let’s face it. The question has to do with the impact of worldviews, and that is really what’s in play here.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: I do agree, Michael, that’s where I’m coming back down to. I take responsibility for it if in fact the people who allowed and facilitated the rise of the atheist monsters of the 20th Century were around today, they would deny responsibility for them, even though they facilitated it with the collapse of the orders that previously held back the monsters. It seems to me now that Dawkins, et cetera, your rhetoric is much milder than Dawkins, but that they were about unleashing the beast again, because the beast is eager. The most eager thing in the world for the Devil, the Christians have always said, is not to be believed in. And you guys are doing a good job.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: If they, if Dawkins and Hitchens and so on were promoting some kind of a political agenda hooked to the atheism, whereby you’re supposed to go out and do this or do that, then yes, I’d think you have a point, and I’d be concerned about it. That is, is it leading to greater liberty, or greater tyranny? That’s the question, liberty and tyranny, is at stake in terms of the boots on the ground, actual change.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg Koukl, if you take down a dam when it’s not raining, and nothing happens for give years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, and then the hundred year flood comes, which happens every hundred years, and you destroy everything in front of it...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Then you’re in trouble. Right.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: You’re responsible.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, you made the point. And actually, Sam Harris is very explicit about this in his book. He said that there are some beliefs that are so dangerous, and he’s talking about theism here, that it’s justified to even kill people for that belief. Now two things are in play here. Sam Harris acknowledges the relationship between worldviews. You believe certain things that have certain consequences, which I think is true and that’s what I’m arguing, and then he exemplifies it himself with the danger of atheism. He thinks that they, atheists, not all believe this, and certainly Michael doesn’t, he is not going to get involved in this, but he seems to suggest that some people should be killed for their beliefs. And whether Dawkins has a political agenda or not is irrelevant. If he is laying the foundation that justifies a certain political agenda, then the dominoes are going to fall. It’s a logical slippery slope, and it’s one to be concerned about.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: You see, I place at the feet of the monstrous evil of the 20th Century Marxism, Leninism. If Marx and Lenin just simply said we’re atheists, and they wrote atheist books, nothing would have happened. It’s that they hooked it to something else, which is the confiscation of private property, the confiscation of individual liberties, the ownership of productivity. That’s what destroyed those societies and led to the monstrous problems.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg Koukl?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well yeah, I agree with that as far as it goes, except to say that there was something else that was in place that allowed them to do such a thing, and that there was a, again, a kinship between the belief system and the results of that belief system, the particular things. Now could religious people have done that? Yes, but it’s a lot harder to hang the behavior of Christians who say they’re Christians that’s evil, on Jesus Himself, because Jesus didn’t teach that kind of thing. Instead, you have Christians that are acting contrary to Jesus’&nbsp;own behavior and teaching. In this case, you have behaviors that are fully consistent with an atheistic worldview.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: But you left out the first World War, which was Christian nations fighting Christian nations—Germany and France and England were all Christian nations. They all believed God was on their side. And they imposed just as much destruction as happened in World War II. They just didn’t have any...</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: I actually don’t believe any of them believed God were on their side when they went into that war. I know the history of World War I fairly well. They did not march to war on the basis...??</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, but you would call them Christian nations.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: But they did not, then went to war on the basis of economics...</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Well, okay...</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: But even if they did, it’s not the point.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: It had nothing to do with God.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Okay, I would agree.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: The point is what is it that, does the worldview that they have justify what they did? And now we’re back to Jesus again, which they can’t put it on Jesus, but the atheists can put it on atheism.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Very quickly, this segment and last, of the various world religions, which has contributed the most to human progress in the alleviation of suffering? It’s an objective question. It’s not a question about which is correct or which is true. Just if you look through of all the world religions, which has contributed the most to human progress and the alleviation of suffering? Michael Shermer, do you have an answer to that?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I’d say probably Christianity.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Greg Koukl?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, this is well documented. Under The Influence, for example, is one of the books that has been written to show this is the case.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: Oh, that’s a Judeo-Christian...</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Does that necessarily tell us anything about the truth claims of the religion, Greg Koukl?</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Well, when you look at the particular truth claims, I think it does. These things were done in a way that were consistent with the Christian worldview, and seem to resonate with the other people who didn’t share their worldview as something that’s good. This is why going back to worldview perspective is so valuable. I think these are outliving of a worldview that deeply resonates with our deepest intuitions about the way the world actually is.</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I’m in favor of any ideology that gives more people more freedom and liberty and individual power, whether that’s religious or nonreligious.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: We’ll be back. I’m going to give a minute to each of my guests to wrap this up. Don’t go anywhere, America.</p>

<p>[break]</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: I want to thank Michael Shermer of Skeptic Society, <a href="http://www.skeptic.com/" target="_blank">www.skeptic.com</a>, and Greg Koukl of Stand To Reason, <a href="http://www.str.org/" target="_blank">www.str.org</a> for their time and their patience. Greg Koukl, a minute, fifteen for you.</p>

<p><strong>GK</strong>: Yeah, I started out talking about worldviews. And as a man trying to make sense of my world and finding a worldview that seems to fit reality as I experience it. I think atheism is way too austere for me, Hugh. It commits me to too many counter intuitive things—everything comes from nothing, like comes from non-life, consciousness comes from matter, morality comes from a reorganization of molecules. None of this seems to make sense to me.</p>

<p>There is another alternative that seems to make a lot more sense, that a big bang needs a big banger, that a moral law comes from a moral lawgiver, that design comes from a designer. These notions are captured well, I think, in the Biblical account of life.</p>

<p>And the person of Jesus, especially, exemplifying these notions, and then giving us a way to live that makes sense. And this is why I’m a Christian and not an atheist. I think it makes the best sense of the world as we know it.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Michael Shermer?</p>

<p><strong>MS</strong>: I’m an atheist, because I don’t believe in God, and there’s nothing to follow from that. I think we have an absolute moral standard, we have objective moral truths, we all know what they are, we listen to our small inner voice within that comes from our evolutionary heritage as a social primate species, in which we care deeply about our fellow group members. We have empathy and sympathy, and that’s where the moral emotions come from.</p>

<p>In terms of religion, I think religion is good when it does good, it’s bad when it does bad. In general, I’m in favor of anything that leads to greater freedom, greater liberty, greater autonomy for more people in more places. And that has been the trend for the last five hundred years, that I attribute to the general secular idea, from the Enlightenment, that people have value in and of themselves, and I think religion has fostered, after the fact, sort of just slightly behind the wave, reinforcing those good, human values, and attenuating the bad ones. And that’s why they’ve discarded so many of the Old Testament values that we no longer adhere to.</p>

<p>So I think that’s the long term trend, and I think we should continue to count people, more and more people as part of our fellow in-groups, and I think free trade and travel and the internet is the best way to encourage that.</p>

<p><strong>HH</strong>: Thank you, Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine, <a href="http://www.skeptic.org/" target="_blank">www.skeptic.com</a>, Greg Koukl of Stand To Reason, <a href="http://www.str.org/" target="_blank">www.str.org</a>. Once again, all their books I’ve been talking about are linked at Hughhewitt.com. I want to thank Adam and Generalissimo for all their work in producing today.</p>

<p>End of interview.</p>
</div>

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title: Divine Direction & Decision Making in the Book of Acts
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/divine-direction-decision-making-in-the-book-of-acts
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>See what can be learned about how the Apostles and early Christians sought God’s guidance.</em></p>

<p>Below are all the occasions I could find in the book of Acts (16 total) in where God gave personalized direction in the thirty years that elapsed during that period. In each of these examples, God communicated His specific desires to the recipient. Note, though, that not all 16 are examples of the kind of guidance (“assignments”) we usually have in mind when we’re seeking God’s will.</p>

<h2>Two times before Pentecost:</h2>

<ul>
	<li>Jesus tells the disciples to wait for the coming Holy Spirit.
	<p>&nbsp;</p>

	<p>Acts 1:4 And gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised.</p>
	</li>
	<li>The apostles cast lots to choose Judas’&nbsp;replacement.
	<p>&nbsp;</p>

	<p>Acts 1:24, 26 And they prayed, and said, “Thou, Lord, who knowest the hearts of all men, show which one of these two Thou hast chosen.”...And they drew lots for them, and the lot fell to Matthias; and he was numbered with the eleven apostles.</p>
	</li>
</ul>

<h2>Fourteen times after Pentecost:</h2>

<ul>
	<li>Two were jailbreaks.</li>
	<li>Two were at Saul’s conversion.</li>
	<li>Two were about Cornelius’&nbsp;conversion.</li>
	<li>Two was about Ethiopian eunuch’s conversion.</li>
	<li>Two were about Paul in Jerusalem (“Don’t enter,”&nbsp;and “Get out.”)</li>
	<li>Four were about Paul’s missionary journeys (initial commission, directed away from Asia, directed to Macedonia, told to preach boldly in Corinth).</li>
</ul>

<p>Means of revelation:</p>

<ul>
	<li>Visions—5</li>
	<li>Appearance of angel—3</li>
	<li>The Spirit—2 or 3</li>
	<li>Prophecy—1 or 2</li>
	<li>Heard the voice of Jesus—1</li>
	<li>No indication—1</li>
</ul>

<p>Who:</p>

<ul>
	<li>Paul—7</li>
	<li>Peter—2</li>
	<li>Philip—2</li>
	<li>The apostles—1</li>
	<li>Cornelius—1</li>
	<li>Ananias—1</li>
</ul>

<h2>1. An angel rescues the apostles from prison.</h2>

<p>Acts 5:19-20 But an <strong>angel</strong> of the Lord during the night opened the gates of the prison, and taking them out he said, “Go your way, stand and speak to the people in the temple the whole message of this Life.”</p>

<h2>2. Philip is sent to the Gaza road by an angel.</h2>

<p>Acts 8:26 But an <strong>angel</strong> of the Lord spoke to Philip saying, “Arise and go south to the road that descends from Jerusalem to Gaza.”</p>

<h2>3. Philip is directed to the Ethiopian eunuch by the Spirit.</h2>

<p>Acts 8:29 And <strong>the Spirit</strong> said to Philip, “Go up and join this chariot.”</p>

<h2>4. While traveling on the Damascus road, Saul hears the audible voice of Jesus directing him to go to Tarsus.</h2>

<p>Acts 9:4-6 And he fell to the ground, and <strong>heard a voice</strong> saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?”&nbsp;And he said, “Who art Thou, Lord?”&nbsp;And He said, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting, but rise, and enter the city, and it shall be told you what you must do.”</p>

<h2>5. Ananias has a vision in which the Lord instructs him to visit Saul.</h2>

<p>Acts 9:10-16 Now there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and the Lord said to him in a <strong>vision</strong>, “Ananias.”&nbsp;And he said, “Behold, {here am} I, Lord.”&nbsp;And the Lord said to him, “Arise and go to the street called Straight, and inquire at the house of Judas for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for behold, he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him, so that he might regain his sight.”&nbsp;But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much harm he did to Thy saints at Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call upon Thy name.”&nbsp;But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of Mine, to bear My name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel; for I will show him how much he must suffer for My name’s sake.”</p>

<h2>6. Cornelius is instructed by an angel in a vision to send for Peter.</h2>

<p>Acts 10:3-6 About the ninth hour of the day he clearly saw in a <strong>vision</strong> an angel of God who had just come in to him, and said to him, “Cornelius!”&nbsp;And fixing his gaze upon him and being much alarmed, he said, “What is it, Lord?”&nbsp;And he said to him, “Your prayers and alms have ascended as a memorial before God.” “And now dispatch some men to Joppa, and send for a man named Simon, who is also called Peter; he is staying with a certain tanner named Simon, whose house is by the sea.”</p>

<h2>7. Peter is instructed by the Spirit to visit Cornelius.</h2>

<p>Acts 10:19-20 And while Peter was reflecting on the vision, <strong>the Spirit</strong> said to him, “Behold, three men are looking for you. But arise, go downstairs, and accompany them without misgivings; for I have sent them Myself.”</p>

<h2>8. Peter is ordered by an angel to follow him out of prison.</h2>

<p>Acts 12:7-8 And behold, an <strong>angel</strong> of the Lord suddenly appeared, and a light shone in the cell; and he struck Peter’s side and roused him, saying, “Get up quickly.”&nbsp;And his chains fell off his hands. And the angel said to him, “Gird yourself and put on your sandals.”&nbsp;And he did so. And he said to him, “Wrap your cloak around you and follow me.”</p>

<h2>9. Paul and Barnabas are sent out by the Holy Spirit on their first missionary journey.</h2>

<p>Acts 13:2 And while they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the <strong>Holy Spirit said</strong>, “Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”</p>

<h2>10. The Holy Spirit forbids Paul to speak the word in Asia.</h2>

<p>Acts 16:6-7 And they passed through the Phrygian and Galatian region, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia; and when they had come to Mysia, they were trying to go into Bithynia, and the Spirit of Jesus did not permit them.</p>

<h2>11. Paul is directed through a vision to Macedonia.</h2>

<p>Acts 16:9-10 And a <strong>vision</strong> appeared to Paul in the night: a certain man of Macedonia was standing and appealing to him, and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.”&nbsp;And when he had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.</p>

<h2>12. Jesus appears to Paul in a vision and tells him to preach the Gospel in Corinth.</h2>

<p>Acts 18:9-10 And the Lord said to Paul in the night by a <strong>vision</strong>, “Do not be afraid any longer, but go on speaking and do not be silent; for I am with you, and no man will attack you in order to harm you, for I have many people in this city.”</p>

<h2>13. Paul is told through prophecy not to enter Jerusalem.</h2>

<p>Acts 21:4 And after looking up the disciples, we stayed there seven days; and they kept telling Paul through the Spirit not to set foot in Jerusalem.</p>

<h2>14. Jesus tells Paul in vision to leave Jerusalem.</h2>

<p>Acts 22:18, 21 “And <strong>I saw Him</strong> saying to me, ’Make haste, and get out of Jerusalem quickly, because they will not accept your testimony about Me.’...And He said to me, ’Go! For I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’”</p>

<h2>Supernatural predictions that were not directive:</h2>

<p>There are five other examples of supernatural revelations that were predictive in nature, but did not dictate any direction—they gave no assignments. In fact, in one case—Agabus’&nbsp;prophecy of imminent famine—the Christians determined on their own to send a contribution for the relief of the brethren in Judea. These examples, found in Acts 11:27-30, 20:23, 21:11, 23:11, and 27:22-26, are listed below.</p>

<ul>
	<li><strong>Acts 11:27-30</strong> Now at this time some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. And one of them named Agabus stood up and began to indicate by the Spirit that there would certainly be a great famine all over the world. And this took place in the reign of Claudius. And in the proportion that any of the disciples had means, each of them determined to send a contribution for the relief of the brethren living in Judea. And this they did, sending it in charge of Barnabas and Saul to the elders.</li>
	<li><strong>Acts 20:23</strong> except that the Holy Spirit solemnly testifies to me in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions await me.</li>
	<li><strong>Acts 21:11</strong> And coming to us, he took Paul’s belt and bound his own feet and hands, and said, “This is what the Holy Spirit says: ’In this way the Jews at Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.’”</li>
	<li><strong>Acts 23:11</strong> But on the night immediately following, the Lord stood at his side and said, “Take courage; for as you have solemnly witnessed to My cause at Jerusalem, so you must witness at Rome also.”</li>
	<li><strong>Acts 27:22-26</strong>&nbsp;“And yet now I urge you to keep up your courage, for there shall be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship. For this very night an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I serve stood before me, saying, ’Do not be afraid, Paul; you must stand before Caesar; and behold, God has granted you all those who are sailing with you.’&nbsp;Therefore, keep up your courage, men, for I believe God, that it will turn out exactly as I have been told. But we must run aground on a certain island.”</li>
</ul>

<h2>Important decisions that were not supernaturally directed.</h2>

<p>All together there are at least 70 such instances since Pentecost in the book of Acts alone, contrasted with the 14 occasions of specialized direction.</p>

<ol>
	<li>Peter preaches at Pentecost.&nbsp;(Acts 2:14-40)</li>
	<li>The disciples sell their property, hold everything in common, and share with those in need. (Acts 2:44-45, 4:34-35)</li>
	<li>Peter heals the lame man. (Acts 3:1-10)</li>
	<li>Peter preaches at the temple. (Acts 3:12-26)</li>
	<li>The disciples resolve the complaint about the Hellenistic widows. (Acts 6:1-6)</li>
	<li>Philip begins to proclaim Christ in Samaria. (Acts 8:5)</li>
	<li>Peter and John are sent to join Philip in ministry. (Acts 8:14)</li>
	<li>Paul begins to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues of Damascus. (Acts 9:20)</li>
	<li>Paul is smuggled out of Damascus. (Acts 9:25)</li>
	<li>Out of concern for Paul’s life, the apostles in Jerusalem (?) send him away to Tarsus. (Acts 9:29-30)</li>
	<li>The leaders in Jerusalem send Barnabas to Antioch. (Acts 11:22)</li>
	<li>Barnabas leaves for Tarsus in search of Saul. (Acts 11:25)</li>
	<li>Barnabas and Saul go to Antioch and establish a teaching ministry for a year there. (Acts 11:26)</li>
	<li>The disciples determine on their own and according to their means to send a contribution for the relief of the brethren living in Judea. (Acts 11:29)</li>
	<li>Paul and Barnabas go to Iconium and teach a long time there. (Acts 13:51-14:3)</li>
	<li>Paul and Barnabas flee to Lycaonia, Lystra, and Derbe to preach the gospel there. (Acts 14:6-7)</li>
	<li>The apostles return to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch to strengthen the disciples there. (Acts 14:21-22)</li>
	<li>The apostles appoint elders in the new churches. (Acts 14:23)</li>
	<li>Paul and Barnabas and others are sent to Jerusalem to resolve the problem with the Judaizers. (Acts 15:2-3)</li>
	<li>The Jerusalem council is convened. (Acts 15:6)</li>
	<li>The Jerusalem council resolves the problem with the Judaizers through debate and appeal to Scripture. (Acts 15:7-29)</li>
	<li>Paul and Barnabas depart Jerusalem for Antioch. (Acts 15:30)</li>
	<li>Paul and Barnabas embark on their second missionary journey. (Acts 15:36)</li>
	<li>Barnabas and Mark split off and go to Cyprus, while Paul and Silas depart for Syrian and Cilicia. (Acts 16:39-41)</li>
	<li>Paul chooses Timothy as a disciple and traveling companion. (Acts 16:3)</li>
	<li>Paul has Timothy circumcised out of sensitivity to the Jews. (Acts 16:3)</li>
	<li>Paul casts out a spirit from the slave girl in Philippi. (Acts 16:16-18)</li>
	<li>Paul chooses to stay in the jail even though the doors were miraculously opened. (Acts 16:26-28)</li>
	<li>Paul decides to preach in Thessalonica. (Acts 17:1)</li>
	<li>Paul and Silas flee to Berea for protection. (Acts 17:10)</li>
	<li>Paul and Silas choose to preach to the Jews at Berea. (Acts 17:10)</li>
	<li>Paul flees Berea. (Acts 17:14)</li>
	<li>Silas and Timothy choose to remain in Berea. (Acts 17:14)</li>
	<li>Paul decides to have Silas and Timothy join him in Athens. (Acts 17:15)</li>
	<li>Paul preaches at the Areopagus. (Acts 17:19)</li>
	<li>Paul leaves Athens for Corinth. (Acts 18:1)</li>
	<li>Paul sets up shop as a tentmaker in Corinth and evangelizes on the Sabbaths. (Acts 18:3)</li>
	<li>Paul abandons tent making and devotes himself solely to the ministry. (Acts 18:5)</li>
	<li>Paul abandons the ministry in Corinth and departs for Syria. (Acts 18:18)</li>
	<li>Paul embarks on his third missionary journey. (Acts 18:23)</li>
	<li>Paul spends three months witnessing publicly at the synagogue in Ephesus. (Acts 19:8)</li>
	<li>Paul sets up a discipleship training program for two years at the school of Tyrannus. (Acts 19:9)</li>
	<li>Paul sends Timothy and Erastus to Macedonia. (Acts 19:22)</li>
	<li>Paul decides to stay in Asia for a while. (Acts 19:22)</li>
	<li>Paul goes to Macedonia. (Acts 20:1)</li>
	<li>Paul goes to Greece and ministers for three months. (Acts 20:2-3)</li>
	<li>Paul travels through Macedonia to avoid a plot set for him by the Jews. (Acts 20:3)</li>
	<li>Paul sends a band of disciples ahead to wait for him in Troas. (Acts 20:4-5)</li>
	<li>Paul goes to Troas and stays for a week of ministry. (Acts 20:6)</li>
	<li>Luke is sent ahead by Paul to Assos, where Paul joins him aboard ship. (Acts 20:13-14)</li>
	<li>Paul decides to hurry past Ephesus to Miletus. (Acts 20:15-16)</li>
	<li>Paul summons the Ephesian elders for a meeting. (Acts 21:17)</li>
	<li>Paul finds passage to Tyre. (Acts 21:1-3)</li>
	<li>Paul visits the disciples in Tyre and stays with them a week. (Acts 21:4)</li>
	<li>Paul departs for Ptolemais. (Acts 21:7)</li>
	<li>Paul greets the brethren in Ptolemais and stays with them a day. (Acts 21:7)</li>
	<li>Paul departs for Caesarea. (Acts 21:8)</li>
	<li>Paul visits Philip the evangelist. (Acts 21:8)</li>
	<li>Paul leaves for Jerusalem. (Acts 21:17)</li>
	<li>The leaders in Jerusalem strategize on how to deal with the local Jewish leadership (Acts 21:20-25)</li>
	<li>Paul addresses the mob who had been beating him. (Acts 21:40)</li>
	<li>Paul sends his nephew to warn of the commander of a plot to take Paul's life. (Acts 23:17)</li>
	<li>Paul makes his defense before Felix. (Acts 24:10-21)</li>
	<li>Paul preaches the gospel to Felix and Drusilla. (Acts 24:24)</li>
	<li>Paul appeals to Caesar. (Acts 25:11) (It’s possible that this appeal was not done on Paul’s own initiative, but in response to Jesus’&nbsp;comments in Acts 23:11.)</li>
	<li>Paul makes his defense before Agrippa. (Acts 26:1-29)</li>
	<li>Paul visits the father of Publius and heals him. (Acts 28:8)</li>
	<li>Paul has a healing ministry on the island of Malta for three months. (Acts 28:9-11)</li>
	<li>Paul calls a meeting with the Jewish leaders in Rome. (Acts 28:17)</li>
	<li>Paul preaches the gospel to the Jewish leaders in Rome. (Acts 28:23)</li>
	<li>Paul sets up a ministry of preaching and teaching in Rome for two years. (Acts 28:30-31)</li>
</ol>
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title: Evolution Can’t Explain Morality
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/evolution-can-t-explain-morality
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>If you argue that morality evolved, you may end up saying that one “ought”&nbsp;to be selfish.</em></p>

<p>Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation about morality and whether evolution is an adequate explanation for morality. Many of you know that I have argued for a long time that morality—the existence of moral things, “oughts,” the notion of moral actions and moral motives, the reality of morality—is a very powerful evidence for the existence of a moral God, whose character is the moral standard of the universe. I won’t suggest that this is without problems, but I think it best answers the existence of morality. Those who are physicalistic, naturalistic, or empiricistic in nature—physicalistic are those people who want to define everything in purely physicalistic terms that can be understood by chemistry and physics; those who are naturalistic want to explain everything solely in terms of natural law without any appeal to transcendent law or supernatural things or beings; those who are empiricistic want to explain everything in terms of that which you can access by the five senses—are going to try to find ways of understanding morality that falls within the purview of their belief system without having to make an appeal to a divine being. But I don’t think that works.</p>

<p>One way to go about this is to argue from effect back to cause, looking at effects and asking ourselves what is the simplest, most elegant solution that is an adequate explanation for the effects that we see. Not the simplest solution, but the simplest which is also adequate. This is also known as Ockam’s Razor. I don’t think the evolutionary explanation is adequate. That goes something like this: In order to survive, animals develop. Through the process of natural selection, naturalistic forces mold certain behavior that we call moral behavior which simply functions to allow the organism to exist and continue to survive. Actually, not the organism, but the species, because in some cases it requires sacrificing individual organisms so that the larger species can survive. This is all that morality ends up being.</p>

<p>That which we think is morality, or that which we call morality, turns out to be a description of animals conditioned by their environment to act in certain ways that benefit the survival of the species. We have just given that conduct a label. We call it morality. That is offered as a sufficient, adequate and complete description of how the behavior that we call moral behavior actually came about.</p>

<p>My response to that is it isn’t an adequate explanation at all, because the category of things that we call moral is not adequately engaged by mere descriptions of past behavior. That morality entails a look forward to the future, not just to the past, not just looking backwards to what we have done, or what was done by certain individuals, which they happen to call moral. But it is a look forward into the future about how we ought to behave. Since morality is prescriptive, not descriptive, and if it is normative—if it talks about how we ought to behave—and the evolutionary description of moral behavior doesn’t engage that very fundamental, core element of morality, then it hasn’t explained it and morality still needs to be explained.</p>

<p>There was another bit of step by step reasoning that I used to show, I think, very clearly that what evolution might describe couldn’t possibly be what we understand morality to be. My basic point is this: what naturalists explain when they seek to explain morality in naturalistic, evolutionary terms is not morality at all. They are explaining something different. I get to that by asking a series of questions. Instead of looking backward, I look forward, and I ask a question of moral behavior like “Why ought anyone be unselfish in the future?”&nbsp;for example. The question came up yesterday regarding an observation that was done with chimpanzees. There was a group of chimpanzees which had, in a sense, punished one member for being selfish by withholding food from that member and therefore teaching that member moral behavior. Apparently, the moral rule that undergirded the lesson was that the other chimpanzee ought not be selfish. That’s a moral statement and the question I’m going to ask is “Why ought the chimp (or human) not be selfish?”&nbsp;I’m looking for a justification there.</p>

<p>The answer is going to be that when we’re selfish, it hurts the group. But you see, that answer isn’t enough of an answer because that answer itself presumes another moral value that we ought to be concerned about the health of the group. So, I’m going to ask the question, “Why ought we be concerned about the health of the group?”&nbsp;The answer is going to be because if the groups don’t survive, then the species doesn’t survive. Then you can imagine the next question. “Why ought I care about the health of the species and whether the species survives or not?”&nbsp;You see, the problem with all of these responses that purport to be justifications or explanations for the moral rule, is that all of these things that are meant to explain the moral rule really depend themselves upon a moral rule before they can even be uttered. Therefore, it can’t be the explanation of morality. When I ask the question “Why ought I be concerned with the species?”, the next answer ends the series. The answer is, “I ought to be concerned with the species because if the species dies out, then I will not survive. If the species is in jeopardy, then my own personal self interests would be in jeopardy.”</p>

<p>So, in abbreviated form, the reasoning goes like this: I ought to be unselfish because it is better for the group, which is better for the species, which is better for me. So why ought I be unselfish? Because it is better for me. But looking at what is better for me, is selfishness. So all of this so-called description of where morality comes down to, gets reduced to this ludicrous statement: I morally ought to be unselfish so that I can be more thoroughly selfish. That is silly. Because we know that morality can’t be reduced to selfishness. Why do we know that? Because our moral rules are against selfishness and for altruism. They are against selfishness and for the opposite. When you think about what it is that morality entails, you don’t believe that morality is really about being selfish. Morality is about being unselfish, or at least it entails that. Which makes my point that this description, based on evolution, does not do the job. It doesn’t explain what it is supposedly meant to explain. It doesn’t explain morality. It is simply reduced to a promotion of selfishness which isn’t morality at all.</p>

<p>Morality is something altogether different. We may debate about all that moral views and understandings entail, but one thing we can all agree on, I think, is that when we are looking for a definition of morality, we know it isn’t about selfishness. It is about not being selfish, just the opposite. That’s why these explanations don’t work. They either smuggle morality into the equation by describing the behavior that is meant to be explained by evolution so they depend upon morality to do the job, or else the descriptions and explanations end up being reduced to selfishness, which isn’t what we’re trying to explain. We’re trying to explain why one ought not be selfish, not why one ought to be selfish.</p>
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title: Do You Take the Bible Literally?
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/do-you-take-the-bible-literally-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>How to respond and also how to know if their question is intellectually honest.</em></p>

<p>This question is offered to followers of Christ, sometimes as a challenge, sometimes simply asking for information. I don’t like the question because I think the question is ambiguous the way it’s asked. Saying yes doesn’t really give an accurate answer about the “literal”&nbsp;view of the Bible. I don’t mean that the people who are asking it have bad motives. I think this is the way they think of asking the question. It’s not surprising then that followers of Christ who believe in the Bible and take it “literally”&nbsp;get themselves into a little bit of a bind when they answer directly because what they mean when they say yes is something different than what the questioner means when he asks the question.</p>

<p>One way the question might be understood is whether Christians believe the unusual things the Bible speaks about. When Jesus said “Love one another”&nbsp;nobody wonders whether we take that literally. When Jesus said to help the poor and be kind to one another, nobody asks “Do you take that literally?”&nbsp;because it’s not controversial. Everyone wants to claim those verses.</p>

<p>The question of literalness only comes up about other issues in the Bible, especially moral issues and miraculous events. One common passage is how we understand the first couple of chapters of Genesis. Is it a historical account? If so, how are we to take the history? Were Adam and Eve real people? Were they the first human beings? Were they created out of dust? Was Eve really created out of Adam’s rib? Do you take these things literally? In other words, do you take it in the plain sense? Do you believe what the words say? That’s really what the questioner is getting at. This is really a question then about a broader hermeneutical question that is a legitimate question. When <em>do</em> you take a passage literally and when <em>don’t</em> you?</p>

<p>I don’t think that’s what the question usually means, though, so we have to disarm the equivocation of the question as offered. I have a way that I always answer and it’s very straightforward. When someone asks, Do you take the Bible literally?, I respond by saying that I try to take the Bible with the precision I think the writer intended.</p>

<p>If we back up one step first, here’s how you can lay the groundwork for this answer. If they ask me if I take the Bible literally, I would say that I think that’s the wrong question. The question itself creates some confusion.</p>

<p>For example, what if I asked you if you read the sports page literally? You would pause, wouldn’t you, because there is a sense in which you read the sports page in a straightforward way. You read it with the understanding that the writer is trying to communicate something to you in a clear fashion, and the means he uses to express himself is meant to give you a solid grasp on the details about which he speaks—say which team was victorious in a game. You get an idea of what took place. You don’t think when you open the sports page, Gee, should I read this literally or not? You just read it and it’s the language itself that the writer uses and the conventions that are presumed by all readers that allow the process of communication to take place. You’re not scratching your head and thinking, Gee when he said “the Angels devoured the St. Louis Cardinals,”&nbsp;was this cannibalism? Am I supposed to take that literally or not?</p>

<p>The point is that language works a certain way and in everyday communication we understand that and never think twice about this process—until we come to the Bible. Then topics comes up that some may be disinclined to believe for whatever reason. Maybe it’s for philosophical reasons, such as a presuppositional bias against miracles. The objection may be theological or personal. In other words, there may be reasons people have that incline them to dismiss the plain sense of the Bible, the sense that we would use to read any other kind of document. But people don’t want to dismiss Jesus entirely so they find ways to understand the passages they don’t like that treats the words differently than they do in everyday use.</p>

<p>Notice the tendency is to not read the Bible at face value, but to try to get around discomfiting portions. I think that’s largely what’s going on when the question is posed “Do you take the Bible literally?”</p>

<p>If someone were to ask me this question, I would ramp-up to my other answer by simply saying, I think you’re making a mistake. It’s the wrong question. It’s like asking if you take the sports page literally. Well, you take it in a straightforward way in the literal sense the writer meant them, but you don’t take each of the words literally in a wooden kind of way that ignores all the conventions of language we constantly use to understand each other. Think about the language sportswriters use to describe victory, for example: devoured, crushed, mangled, mutilated, stomped, pounded. You don’t take those literally. You realize that those words are figures of speech meant to communicate something that literally happened in reality. We don’t dismiss the accuracy of the writer because we think he literally means these figures of speech.</p>

<p>Every day, we take the writing with the kind of precision it seems that the author intended and we get an accurate sense of what the writer meant to communicate. That’s not a problem when it comes to the sports page, but it does raise problems for some people when it comes to the Bible because they don’t want to accept what the author seems to be telling them.</p>

<p>I think the responsible thing to with the Bible is to ask that same question: What is this writer trying to communicate? We should not dismiss what the author wrote by saying that we’re not going to take that literally. Well then, how would you take it? Would you invent some meaning that has no direct relation to the words the writer used? No, I take the words in a straightforward sense. Now you may simply disagree with what the Bible has to say. That’s fine. There’s nothing intellectually dishonest about disagreement. But if that’s your view, then I’ll have some other questions for you. But at least that’s an intellectually honest way to deal with it.</p>

<p>My advice to you if you’re asked if you take the Bible literally? Don’t answer the question as offered because your answer won’t give the questioner an accurate idea of what you believe. Reframe the question in a way that can be answered in an accurate, helpful way.</p>
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title: Is It Rational to Believe in God?
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 02/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/is-it-rational-to-believe-in-god-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Seminar in Philosophy of Religion: Apologetics</p>

<p>TTPH 735</p>

<p>December 14, 2001</p>

<p>The question of the epistemic status and rationality of theism in general (vs. atheism or some non-theistic alternative), or of Christianity in particular (vs. competing forms of theistic religions) hinges on two things. First, it hinges on the particular truth claims in question. Second, it hinges on the definition of “rational”&nbsp;and “reasonable.”</p>

<p>The truth claims at stake have been nicely stated by Alvin Plantinga&nbsp;[Alvin Plantinga, “Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism,”&nbsp;in Philip L. Quinn and Kevin Meeker, eds., The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 173.]:</p>

<p>The world was created by God, an almighty, all-knowing, and perfectly good personal being.</p>

<p>Human beings require salvation, and God has provided a unique way of salvation through the incarnation, life, sacrificial death, and resurrection of his divine Son.</p>

<p>Atheists, Buddhists, and pantheists (e.g., Hindus) deny (1). Muslims and Jews affirm (1), but deny (2). Christians hold to (2), which naturally entails (1).</p>

<p>I will use the terms “rational”&nbsp;and “reasonable”&nbsp;to mean justified in Plantinga’s sense of “being within one’s intellectual rights, having violated no intellectual or cognitive duties or obligations in the formation and sustenance of the belief in question”&nbsp;[Alvin Plantinga, “Pluralism: A Defense of Religious Exclusivism,”&nbsp;in Philip L. Quinn and Kevin Meeker, eds., The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 180.].</p>

<p>This is a general definition, and I do not want to try to put too sharp a point on it for my purposes here. Suffice it to say that to be rational is to have reasons. It is not enough, though, merely to give an accounting of one’s beliefs in terms of reasons, that one has her own reasons. The account must give adequate justification; she must believe for good reasons, even though fallible.</p>

<h2>The Epistemic Status of (1)</h2>

<p>What of the epistemic status of (1)? Are there good reasons to believe theism? The answer is undoubtedly yes. Perfectly good arguments with epistemic force have been advanced for a kind of “mere theism.”&nbsp;The kalam cosmological argument comes to mind. It is deductively valid and its premises enjoy strong support, suggesting the argument is also sound. There are arguments from design and from revelation that have merit. The moral argument is compelling given the strength of the case for moral realism and the failure to produce adequate grounding of morality apart from a divine lawgiver whose own moral character is the foundation for perfect goodness.</p>

<p>These arguments may not be decisive for some, or even compelling, but that does not mean they do not have significant epistemic value. Taken as a whole, they represent a cumulative case providing adequate justification to make the theistic case reasonable.</p>

<p>I think we can do better than this, though. Given the formulation either (a) God or (b) not-God, the theistic position can be strengthened by providing evidence for (a) or by pointing to the weakness of (b), that is, the inadequacy of the alternatives. Evidence that plays against (b) would be evidence for (a), and vice versa, given the law of excluded middle.</p>

<p>The main alternatives to (1) would be atheism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Hinduism entails a contradiction, it seems to me. Pantheistic monism claims that the world is illusion (“Maya”), of which each of us is part. If all were illusion, though, how could we know it? How could I possess true knowledge that I, as a substantial self, do not exist? How could I possess any knowledge at all under those conditions? Can members of a dream know they are in a dream? Does Charlie Brown know he is a cartoon character? The Hindu concept of Maya contradicts the idea one can have knowledge of Maya, rendering Hinduism incoherent and therefore not epistemically defensible. Something similar might be said of Buddhism in that it denies a durable self.</p>

<p>Atheism falters for other reasons. The atheist’s strategy largely has been to deny the potency of the theist’s positive case and to offer negative evidence for (1) most notably the problem of evil but to mount no positive case of her own. Therefore, if the theist’s positive case survives (as I think it does) and the atheist’s negative evidence is compromised, the case for atheism suffers.</p>

<p>The deductive argument from evil has been largely put to rest, thanks to Alvin Plantinga. The inductive argument has force when taken in isolation. In the absence of countervailing evidence it would be unlikely that an “almighty, all-knowing, and perfectly good personal being”&nbsp;existed given the magnitude of suffering in the world. However, there is evidence to the contrary. The inductive argument loses much of its impact when all things at the theists’&nbsp;disposal are considered, i.e., the array of arguments just mentioned coupled with plausible explanations answering the inductive challenge.</p>

<p>There is a further line of evidence. My conviction of the truth of theism has long been buttressed by an awareness that the central claims of theism (especially Christian theism) resonate with my deepest intuitions about the way the world is. Theism has explanatory power.</p>

<p>We feel morally guilty because we are morally guilty. We exhibit “moral motions”&nbsp;because we are moral creatures with an immediate awareness of objective moral truth, capable of choosing good and evil. We seek to lead purposeful lives because life has objective purpose and meaning that can be discovered. We hunger for justice in this world even though it is not fulfilled because there is a world in which the accounts will be balanced. We use design language when referring to the universe (e.g., “Mother Nature”) because the universe is designed and we are able to perceive that. We recognize the different obligations we have towards animals than we do towards humans because human beings have value that transcends their animal natures.</p>

<p>This is powerful justification for the truth of theism (on the correspondence view of truth). Each of these elements would be, at very best, odd and unusual features of the world given atheism, Hinduism, or Buddhism.</p>

<p>Is rejection of (1) reasonable? It may be, depending on the alternative. Atheism qualifies as rational, on our definition, but not well justified. It therefore does not have epistemic parity with theism. Hinduism and Buddhism, however, do not fare as well due to their coherence problem. In my estimation, they are irrational belief systems, though this is not considered a vice on their view.</p>

<h2>The Epistemic Status of (2)</h2>

<p>What of the epistemic status of (2), the explicit claim that sets Christian theism apart from all other contenders, most notably Judaism and Islam? Each intuition mentioned above that is available to strengthen the case for Christianity is, arguably, available to the Muslim and the Jew as well. The key question is this: Are there evidences for Christianity not available to other religions? The answer is yes, one in particular: Jesus.</p>

<p>The most compelling evidence for Christianity over all contenders is Jesus of Nazareth. What do we make of Jesus? He is not easy to dismiss. If He is reduced to the itinerant sage of the Jesus Seminar, there is no adequate account for his execution. If He is reduced to a great prophet, we cannot account for the prophetic claims He made of His own identity, which entailed something much greater than prophet. If He is reduced to a great moral teacher, we cannot reconcile His holiness with his pretense to be Messiah.</p>

<p>And then there is the empty tomb. Islam has nothing like this. Jews may point to miracles in the Hebrew Scriptures, even resurrections, but this evidence equally helps the Christian who appeals to the Old Testament for evidence that Jesus is the promised Messiah. How do we explain the empty tomb?</p>

<p>There have been attempts, some more believable than others. None have succeeded, though, in having more epistemic merit than the simple account given by those who knew Jesus and gave their lives for Him: The tomb was empty because Jesus had risen from the dead, just as He said He would.</p>

<p>Are other forms of theism rational? Yes, there are good epistemic reasons to prefer theism over non-theism. Insofar as Christian theism is rational and other forms of theism share foundational characteristics with Christianity, they are rational as well.</p>

<p>Is there epistemic parity between theistic religions? I do not think this is the case. There are good epistemic reasons to prefer Christianity above other forms of theism, principle among them Jesus who, according to the Apostle Paul, was “declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead”&nbsp;(Romans 1:4).</p>
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