# articles

title: Hell and the Gospel
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 05/09/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/hell-and-the-gospel
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Hell is an offensive idea to a lot of people. Eternal punishment seems harsh to both believers and unbelievers. It could even be a stumbling block. Consequently, some pastors are revising what the Bible teaches and what the church has taught since Jesus.</p>

<p>There are a couple of different revisions: annihilationism and universalism. Both get rid of Hell in different ways. The more aberrant one from Biblical teaching is universalism, which holds that everyone eventually will be in Heaven. This view is contrary to Christianity at the most foundational level, yet it’s something some very public Christian pastors are teaching. Universalism encourages people not to do what they need to do in order to be rescued from the wrath of God, which is put their faith in Jesus, because it doesn’t matter. According to universalism, everyone is going to be ushered into the Kingdom regardless of what they believe or what they do.</p>

<p>Let me make an observation as a person who is committed to defending the Gospel—and that’s what an apologist does. I hope that’s what all Christians do. They proclaim it, and in a certain sense, proclaiming it accurately is a defense of it. By ignoring the Gospel, you’re acting as if it’s inconsequential. By not talking about the Gospel, it’s like it doesn’t matter, and that is almost an attack on the message itself. A careful, accurate proclamation of the Gospel is an acknowledgement that it is true, an affirmation of its importance. It’s a bare minimum, but this bare minimum is under attack. It is certainly under attack outside of broader Christian circles, because people think it’s ridiculous to think that one religion is the only true religion.</p>

<p>People don’t mind Christians who love Jesus. You’re welcome to Him and to your truth. They do mind Christians who love Jesus and say the same things about non-Christians that Jesus Himself said: They are lost. “I have come to seek and to save that which was lost.”&nbsp;(Luke 19:10) “He who believes in the Son has eternal life. He who does not believe, the wrath of God abides on him.”&nbsp;(John 3:36) “If you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.”&nbsp;(John 8:24) “He who believes is not judged, but he who does not believe is judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”&nbsp;(John 3:18)</p>

<p>Every one of those sentences is from the mouth of Jesus Himself. There is no twisting or distorting them when you cite just the verse, because understanding the context only intensifies the meaning that is obvious in the verse itself. So when someone argues there is no final reckoning and there is no Hell, either because of annihilationism (nonbelievers cease to exist when they die) or because eventually all nonbelievers are drawn into Heaven, then they are communicating a message that is diametrically opposed to the Great Commission, the last command that Jesus left the Church.</p>

<p>I know this sounds offensive to a lot of people, but we cannot change what the Bible teaches because it’s offensive. Jesus warned us that there would be wolves that come in and destroy the flock. Paul said in his first letter, “If anyone preaches to you a Gospel other than what I’ve received if anyone brings another message, let him be damned to Hell.”&nbsp;(Galatians 1:8) That’s what the word “anathema”&nbsp;means: “Let him be accursed.”</p>

<p>This is serious business. I have seen this tendency to avoid difficult teachings not only outside the Church, but now increasingly in the Church. People are removing the stumbling block of the cross in the Church and it’s undermining the Gospel.</p>

<p>This is an issue where we can separate the wheat from the chaff. Those who hold to a real Hell, a place where God ultimately accomplishes justice against those who have been in rebellion against Him, where the anger of His holy nature is satisfied, are part of the wheat, and those who do not hold to it are the chaff.</p>

<p>You want criteria to separate the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the foolishness and nonsense? This issue is it. It struck me that using Hell as a dividing line—that is, a way of separating the wheat from the chaff—is almost a pun; that is, a play on words. Early on, before Jesus was introduced, John the Baptist mentions that there will be “one that’s coming after me that came before me, and that will separate the wheat from the chaff.”&nbsp;And that “He would baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”&nbsp;Luke 3:16: “John answered and said to them all, ’As for me, I baptize you with water, but one who’s coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals, He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.’”</p>

<p>Some people have taken the words “Holy Spirit and fire”&nbsp;like the tongues of fire and the fire of the Spirit that falls down from Heaven as a spiritual baptism. I do think he means spiritual baptism when he says “Holy Spirit,”&nbsp;but he doesn’t mean “spiritual baptism”&nbsp;when he refers to fire. It becomes very clear if you keep reading because he continues a contrast between Holy Spirit and fire.</p>

<p>He says, in the next verse (v.17): “And His winnowing fork is in His hand.”&nbsp;Now, what’s a winnowing fork? That’s a fork in which you toss the grain up in the air, and then the wind on the threshing floor blows the chaff away, and it separates the wheat from the chaff. The wheat is the germ, the food, and the chaff is the hull, which you don’t need. That’s just junk, garbage. You burn it. John is using an agricultural picture here that everyone understands. The One who will come and baptize with Holy Spirit and with fire, His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He’s thoroughly clearing the threshing floor. He’s taken all the stuff that’s brought in, and He’s going to thresh it. “He will gather the wheat into His barn, and He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”&nbsp;(v.18)</p>

<p>Jesus is going to separate the wheat from the chaff, and the wheat are those who are baptized with the Holy Spirit, and the chaff are those who are baptized with fire. There’s a contrast between salvation and damnation in this passage.</p>

<p>Some might say, Well, He’s burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire. See, He’s burning it up. He’s destroying them. That’s annihilationism. This can’t be the case because the fire is “unquenchable.”&nbsp;It keeps burning and burning and burning. Jesus said, “Where the worm does not die, and the fire does not go out”&nbsp;(Mark 9:47-49), that is, the judgment of the fire—that’s the instrument of judgment,—continues on. If annihilationism were true, then the fire would burn until things burned up, and then it would be over. The worm would eat until the things that it was eating were gone, and then it would be dead. But the worm doesn’t die, and the fire doesn’t go out, because that which is the subject of the worm in the fire’s work is always there. Plus, we know from Revelation 20, that the devil is thrown into Hell, a place of conscious torment, to be tormented forever, and then those who are without Christ are thrown there too.</p>

<p>I think this metaphor of separating the wheat from the chaff is a good one because it helps us to separate the real Christians from the phonies, the truth from the error. In this period of time, when the Gospel and the Great Commission are under attack heavily from the outside, there are a lot of people on the inside who are starting to bend, they’re giving in, and they’re letting go of something foundational and essential, that is the existence of the place where God does eternal justice: Hell.</p>

<p>In fact, Hell is an evidence for God’s existence. We all have a hunger for justice in this life that is not satisfied. If it is not satisfied here; it must be satisfied somewhere else. This is the argument from desire that C.S. Lewis and others have pointed out. I think it’s compelling, but it only works if there is a place where justice is ultimately done, and God has assigned Hell for that purpose. If there is no Hell, then justice finally is not served.</p>

<p>Anybody who teaches that Hell doesn’t satisfy God’s justice is teaching contrary to the Scripture, and contrary to Jesus. They’re giving people, especially in the case of those who are universalists, false hope: Don’t worry about it. Everybody gets in. Their message gives false comfort and keeps sinners from receiving the forgiveness of sins they desperately need. It undermines the Gospel because if everyone will be reconciled to God no matter what their decision about Jesus is, then there’s little reason to appeal to people to put their trust in Him for rescue. They don’t need it.</p>

<p>Even annihilationism gives false hope, because if you are annihilated, you lose nothing. You are not around to recognize the loss that you might have had as gain. You disappear. And when you disappear, there is no loss for you. You are no more. You have no ontological status. You have no feelings, you have no thoughts, no yearnings, no sense of loss. You are not.</p>

<p>The doctrine of Hell is a way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Go back to Luke 3 and see where John the Baptist makes it clear that Jesus is going to separate the wheat from the chaff, clear the threshing floor, and baptize those who put their trust in Him with His Spirit, and baptize those who don’t with the fire of judgment in a place called Hell. That is, right now, one of the significant dividing lines in Christianity between those who are holding firm to the Bible’s teachings and those who are giving way to change the message to something less offensive but false.</p>

<p>In the end, it’s not faithful to the Bible and it’s not a loving act to avoid offending people, but to let them die in their sins. Loving people and being faithful to God means telling the truth as the Bible teaches it.</p>
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title: The Trinity: Unique, Yet Rational
topic: Theology
author: Melinda Penner
date: 04/24/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-trinity-unique-yet-rational
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Is the doctrine of the Trinity an irrational idea? Does it discredit Christianity?</p>

<p>The ecumenical councils used Scripture as their authority, but sought to work out the doctrine of the Trinity in an intellectually rigorous way. The early theologians were philosophers and brought these categories of thought to bear on the debates. After all, if God is a rational being, His revelation must make logical sense, though this is different than being fully comprehensible to finite minds. Presumably, they also accepted the proposition that one cannot believe what one considers irrational and applied their knowledge and skills diligently to work out a rational explanation of the doctrine. So theology and philosophy must interact, in the tradition of the church, to express the most accurate and logical doctrines possible as we continue to understand the revelation of the Trinity.</p>

<h2>The Categories</h2>

<p>The orthodox doctrines were worked out using philosophic categories of person, substance, and nature. There was (and is) some disagreement about the meaning of these categories. Augustine, for instance, thought that it couldn’t be deciphered what the category of person referred to, just that it was three, whatever it was. Some modern theologians and philosophers are suspicious of importing our modern conception of person into the creedal categories. I start with the premises that there are personal similarities between God and human beings since we are created in His image, and that God is similar enough to us to carry on a personal relationship. In addition, God reveals Himself to us in ways that seem analogous to us as persons, so I will start with what we know of persons and reason from there about how God is personal. My approach is essentially that of a social Trinitarian. I think the following will demonstrate the rationality of this approach and its orthodoxy as well, nullifying the charges of tritheism.</p>

<h2>God Is Three</h2>

<p>A person is a category of immaterial conscious substance. There seem to be three types of persons that we know of: God, angels, and humans. Persons are essentially centers of consciousness. There are some capacities that are common to all persons: cognition, rationality, affect, volition, desire, perception, and morality, and capacity for relationship are examples. The possession of these capacities are sufficient (and perhaps necessary) to qualify a being for personhood. Personhood can be understood as a category of which there are subsets of kinds of persons that are marked off by capacities and properties that are unique to that subset in virtue of substance and nature (discussed below).</p>

<p>The creeds affirm that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are separate persons. Each would then be a center of consciousness with (minimally) the capacities of personal beings. The persons aren’t identical with each other because they have properties that aren’t identical. Each has a unique self-identity. The Father knows that “I am the Father”&nbsp;and doesn’t know that “I am the Son.”&nbsp;If the Father thought “I am the Son,”&nbsp;He’d be confused. Each has His own mind, with unique contents; they do not share one mind. A distinction of what each person knows would be the propositions they know about themselves as a self-conscious being. The Father knows that He sent the Son. The Son knows that He was incarnate and died on the cross. The Spirit knows that He helps us believe. Each of these are propositions that only refer to one person of the Trinity. So the unique contents of their minds mark them off as unique persons. Each has the property of omniscience as God so each person knows all that the others know, but the Father does not know that “I was incarnate”&nbsp;as the Son knows that proposition. Thomas Morris has suggested that the persons share one mind but have unique self-identities and uses examples of split brain phenomena to illustrate this theory’s plausibility. I reject views that God has one mind but three self-conscious identities. The analogies to split-brain phenomena ignore the fact that no matter how well someone can function with such a condition, the condition is still a pathology. God is not sick.</p>

<p>Volition and will are capacities of persons so each has His own will instead of sharing one. Most of the reading I’ve done seems to presume that there must be one will otherwise there would be potential for conflict. I don’t think that is a sufficient reason to deny what seems to clearly be a property of persons, as we normally understand the category. The text also hints at this idea that each person has a will. In the Son’s prayer to the Father in Gethsemene He is obviously expressing a different will than the Father’s. Others have worked this out differently than I, such as the two wills theory, that I don’t have time here to respond to and is more fully explored in the area of Christology. I will presume (with good reason) that Jesus had one will and it was different than the Father’s. So we have good philosophic and Biblical reasons for believing that each person of the Trinity has a unique power of will.</p>

<p>The distinction needs to be made between the power to will and the content of the will. It doesn’t follow that to have separate powers of will that necessarily will lead to conflict in the contents of will so that isn’t good grounds for rejecting this idea. There are two good ways to avoid this conclusion. The first is Richard Swinburne’s suggestion that the persons of the Trinity would willingly cooperate, submitting their wills to one another. This way all of their decisions and actions would be in unison and in agreement. He further suggests that they could delegate tasks to each person whose will would be decisive in that area.</p>

<p>The solution I prefer is an application of Aristotle’s ideal man. God is omniscient and knows all factors in every decision He would make. God is also omnibenevolent, supremely virtuous we could say, and knows the best thing to do in every situation. Given these two properties of God, there never could be disagreement among the persons of the Trinity because they would all arrive at the same conclusion of the best thing to do. And they would never change their minds since, knowing all true propositions, they would have already taken every factor into consideration. The will of God, then, could be spoken of univocally because the contents of their wills would be identical and their separate capacities of volition would be exercised in perfect unison.</p>

<p>The divine persons are also distinguished by their eternal relations. The Father begets the Son; the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Begetting and proceeding are asymmetric and areflexive relations that obtain between the three persons. Each person of the Trinity has a self-awareness of begetting, being begotten, or not being begotten; or proceeding, being proceeded, or not proceeding. Each person certainly distinguishes Himself from the others or knows His own properties—what is true about Him in relation to the other two. Part of what is true about each of them are these relations that help to distinguish them as unique persons.</p>

<p>Traditionally these relations have been held to be ontological dependence of the Son on the Father, and the Spirit on the Father and the Son. It’s not clear to me what these relations mean ontologically other than categories we’ve used to distinguish them without much descriptive content to understand them. I’d like to toy with the idea of functional relations, common with the idea of the economic Trinity, to fill in these relations. In either case, ontological dependence and functional dependence doesn’t imply ontological subordination. In virtue of participating in the divine substance, all three persons are co-equal.</p>

<p>The idea of functional relations might be worked out this way. Each person of the Trinity has a different function or plays a different role in the deity. Begetting and proceeding are asymmetrical relations. The Father begets the Son, in that He sends the Son to accomplish the work of salvation. Perhaps since the Son is also called the Word, He also sends the Son to give the written revelation of Himself and His work. The Father begets and the Son is begotten or sent. The Father and the Son process or spirate the Spirit in that they send the Spirit to be our helper, to accomplish a personal work in believers in a very personal way. The Spirit proceeds in that He is sent on His role in the Trinity. This functional view of these relations help to distinguish the persons, but also might help to fill in the content of what those relations are while (hopefully) remaining orthodox.</p>

<p>Swinburne has also proposed the relation of love to distinguish the persons, but also to explain why three persons are necessary. In his explanation, love is a capacity that must be actively expressed in order to have it so there must be a minimum of three persons to express mutual and corporate love. I have doubts how this reasoning bears up when it is applied to other capacities God has. What other virtues does God have that must be expressed to be had? Mercy seems similar enough to love in that it is an action, not just a sentiment, that requires an object. If God is necessarily merciful, then the object of His mercy must be necessary, according to Swinburne’s reasoning. Creation must be necessary, man’s fall must be necessary, and redemption must be necessary. But these are all considered to be unobliged choices of God’s. Swinburne must provide a non-ad hoc reason why love is unique among the virtues in needing expression if this explanation is to survive. It would be satisfying to have a good rational reason for why three persons, but it seems to me for now we are left with revelation for that fact.</p>

<p>Each person is divine insofar as they instantiate the divine nature, which is identical to the one divine being. There are three centers of consciousness that have being in one individuated nature of divinity.</p>

<h2>God Is One</h2>

<p>The Council of Nicaea affirmed that the Father, Son, and Spirit are one substance. Substances, or substantia, possess properties that make a thing what it is. The substance remains identical to itself through time and change. A substance is a natural kind that is marked off by a set of its ultimate capacities that are possessed by it solely in virtue of the substance belonging to its natural kind.</p>

<p>Substances possess properties and remain identical to themselves through time and change. Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz define substance in their book Substance: Its Nature and Existence:</p>

<p>X is a substance = df. X is an instance of a concrete category, such that: it could have a single instance throughout an interval of time (non-minimal).</p>

<p>A substance can be instantiated as an individual concrete particular, a member of a natural kind, that is traceable through a duration of time. The instantiation of a substance possesses the properties predicated of it. A substance is a natural kind that is marked off by “a set of its ultimate capacities that are possessed by it solely in virtue of the substance belonging to its natural kind.”</p>

<p>The divine substance (secondary substance) only has one exemplification (primary substance) so divine nature is coextensive with divinity. Most substances or natural kinds can be exemplified multiple times, but the divine substance is exemplified only once. The divine substance or nature has essential properties that all three persons of the Trinity share, not as three instantiations of those properties but identical properties of divinity. There is one property of omniscience, for example, that all three persons share in virtue of sharing one substance. The Trinity has the properties of divinity plus the capacities of person, and this is what marks the Trinity off as a unique kind of person in the general set of persons. The divine properties allow the Trinity to operate through their capacities as persons to the maximum degree and quality possible.</p>

<p>Perfect being theology entails there is only one divine being, but I’m not sure this is a good reason. For reasons I’ve argued for above for three persons with distinct wills, it seems there could theoretically be more than one perfect being. Two maximally great beings would cooperate in such a way as to be in complete unison. Revelation does make it clear that there is one God, one exemplification of the divine substance and that is sufficient for affirming that only one being has the properties of divinity.</p>

<p>By using the plural of properties above I don’t mean to imply that God has more than one property, though I also don’t subscribe to Thomistic simplicity. Swinburne offers a tantalizing solution here in expressing all of God’s properties as one: “pure, limitless, intentional power.”&nbsp;God is perfect and always seeks to do the good. God always knows what the good is and there is nothing that prevents God from always doing the good. If God is perfectly free and omniscient, He is not going to fail to do the good because of weakness or irrationality. There is nothing external to God that limits what He can do; He is constrained only by His nature and logical possibility. Swinburne believes that it then follows that God is good. His argument doesn’t begin with goodness but demonstrates how it is entailed by properties of God. And all of God’s other properties can be extracted from this one PLIP property.</p>

<p>The exemplification of any substance requires an individuator. I don’t intend to take up the argument here for what in particular that individuator might be—I’m not sure. But whatever it is, God has one individuator and it individuates the substance, not the persons. This avoids the charge of tritheism. The extension of the divine substance is one. In Swinburnian labels, the individuator of G1, G2, and G3 is in the G.</p>

<p>God exists of metaphysical necessity, but not logical necessity since there is nothing logically contradictory about God not existing. God may exist of modal necessity, that is if anything exists God must exist. Cosmological arguments seem to lead to the conclusion that God is the only sufficient cause of the universe. If the world exists God necessarily exists. In addition, it would seem that God must exist across all metaphysically possible worlds if He is a “maximally great being.”&nbsp;Necessary existence (modally) would seem to be a maximally great-making property.</p>

<h2>God Is Three &amp; One</h2>

<p>God is three persons, rational centers of consciousness, in one divine substance. There’s nothing contradictory in that. It is unusual because our normal experience is a one-to-one correlation of primary substances and persons, but rarity is not the same thing as irrational. The Trinity is not a doctrine the church would have affirmed had it not been revealed, primarily because there is nothing else in our experience like the Trinity. The Trinity is, however, rationally permissible to believe and Biblically obligatory for Christians to believe.</p>

<h2>Conclusion: Unique, Yet Rational</h2>

<p>God is a personal substance, but instead of the usual one-to-one correspondence of person and substance that we are familiar with, God is three persons in one substance. The divine nature, shared by all three persons of the Trinity, is instantiated only once. God is a union of three persons. Though unique, there appears to be no incoherence to the concept of three persons in one substance. Each person of the Trinity has the essential properties of the divine nature instantiated only once.</p>

<p>The early church took both the Bible and rationality seriously. The Bible was the authority and source of doctrine. But the early church was not fideistic; they brought rigorous theological and intellectual efforts to bear in working out the details of the doctrines of the Trinity and the implications this had for Christology. This approach was essential to define orthodoxy and defend the church against heresy. The Bible witnesses to the concept of the Trinity and the doctrine bear up under philosophic scrutiny. The ancient creeds of Christendom and the articulation of one of the most fundamental Christian doctrines are rational and commendable.</p>
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title: Do Animals Have Souls?
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/24/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/do-animals-have-souls-
content:
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		<p><em>If animals do have souls, how are they different from humans? And can human beings have different kinds of souls as well?</em></p>

<p>I can prove to you that animals have souls, and it’s actually not very difficult. There are certain activities of our mental life that are clearly defined and are clearly not physical, therefore they cannot reside in our physical bodies. Those activities include beliefs, intentions, desires and sensations. In other words, we experience feelings. We have beliefs about things. Based on those beliefs we may have a desire that we feel also, and that desire brings forth an intention to fulfill that desire.</p>

<p>A characteristic of soulish beings is to have mental activity that consist of beliefs, intentions, desires, sensations...</p>

<p>Now an intention or a belief or a desire or a sensation are not the kind of things you are going to bump into in the hall. It doesn’t have weight, it doesn’t occupy any space. You don’t brake for these things. They are non-physical things, like ideas and numbers and propositions, and things like that. Since they don’t exist in the physical world they cannot be accessed by the physical senses. So, since you have beliefs, intentions, desires and sensations—and you are clearly accessing them, and you are accessing them in a way that is not physical—then part of you is not physical either. The part of you that is non-physical is your soul.</p>

<p>A characteristic of soulish beings is to have mental activity that consist of beliefs, intentions, desires, sensations and one other which I can’t recall. The point being, anything that has beliefs, intentions, desires or sensations must also have a soul to possess those things.</p>

<p>It doesn’t seem to make any sense to say that a plant has beliefs about its world, or that it has intentions. One would ask, if it had an intention how would it ever fulfill it? It doesn’t pick things up and eat them. It doesn’t move to a new location where it’s more comfortable, therefore it doesn’t seem to have desires about things. It’s not even clear that plants have sensations. Now, when I say a sensation, what I mean is the felt quality of a thing. It is possible for a plant to be cut in one portion of it and for another portion to wither, but because it withers it doesn’t mean that it’s experiencing pain. That may be merely a physical response to a physical stimulus. It is possible to have stimulus response relationships in non-animate objects, but only animate, living objects can even have pain. So, if inanimate objects can have stimulus response kinds of things, then animate objects can have stimulus response reactions with no felt pain either. So it may be that there’s a physical stimulus that goes through the plant’s system that results in the wilting of the leaves even though the plant is not consciously feeling any pain. In any event, it seems to make no sense, given the qualities of the mental life that I’ve just mentioned, to talk about plants having them. And therefore, it does not seem to make sense to argue that plants have souls. However, it seems to make entire sense that animals have those things—that animals have beliefs about things, that they have intentions, that they have desires, that they have sensations.</p>

<p>Also, animals have different kind of souls than human beings. Human being souls are made in the image of God and they live forever, they are everlasting. Animal souls are not made in the image of God, and we have no evidence that I can tell that they are everlasting.</p>

<p>When Pavlov rang his famous bell, the dog salivated because it believed it was about to get some food. As a result of that belief it set up a response in its body to produce the saliva. When the dog sees the food placed before him, it moves toward the food because it has an intention to eat, and there is desire of hunger inside of it that motivates the intention. As it eats, it chooses one food rather than another—and you cat owners know about that—because one food tastes better than another to the cat. Therefore it has sensation, too. In other words, animals have all of these things that are qualities and characteristics of the mental life. They have beliefs, they have intentions, they have desires, they have sensations—or they appear to. Since these things are not physical things, they are non- physical things and they must exist in the animal in the non-physical space that is real. That non-physical place is a soul. Ergo, animals have souls like human beings have souls.</p>

<p>But there are different kinds of souls—even in human beings. I think female souls are different than male souls. This is what encourages our valid generalizations about the differences between male and female, because the differences that we point out are soulish differences, not differences merely in plumbing or chemistry. Also, animals have different kind of souls than human beings. Human being souls are made in the image of God and they live forever, they are everlasting. Animal souls are not made in the image of God, and we have no evidence that I can tell that they are everlasting.</p>

<p>Just some fun thinking about the nature of the soul.</p>
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title: Some Things Are True
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/24/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/some-things-are-true
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>“It is impossible to know the meaning of any written text.”&nbsp;If this is true, log off the web now. If not, read this commentary to find out about self-refuting arguments.</em></p>

<p>I mentioned that I spent last evening and all of this morning with a very, very dear group of people—about 15 adult men and women—who are very committed to Jesus Christ and His gospel. I mentioned earlier that they were a strange group of people; I guess that’s the wrong way to put it. They’re not strange as a group of people but they come from a rather strange world. At least it was strange to me. The irony is that these folks actually, in a sense, probably saw my world as strange because it was very different from theirs.</p>

<p>Let me give you a picture of my world, by and large, at least as it touches this particular issue. My world is a world in which thinking matters, in which there is such a thing as truth, in which truth can be known and in which we use thinking to assess ideas to determine whether they are true or not. There’s really not much room in my thinking system for comments like, Well, that’s just your interpretation, or just your opinion, when the emphasis is on “just.”&nbsp;Of course it’s my interpretation. Of course it’s my opinion, but it’s not just those things in that I’m not simply sharing my point of view, I’m sharing my reasons why I have a point of view.</p>

<p>Now it could be that my opinion or my interpretation is mistaken, but the only way for me to find out whether it’s mistaken or not is to get at the reasons I draw the conclusions which form either my opinion or my interpretation. I don’t believe that all opinions are equal. I don’t believe that all interpretations are equal. I don’t believe that all cultures are equal, or all morals are equal. I think there are value differences and so do you, every single person who is listening to me, even if you deny such a thing. You’re not telling the truth.</p>

<p>So I believe in a world in which there are these distinctions, and these distinctions are possible to determine. We use a number of different tests, if you will, to determine this. I use the same tests everybody else does, I just do it a little more self-consciously than many.</p>

<p>I also come from a world in which there are a lot of people like me who believe in clear thinking and also believe in the orthodox doctrines of Christianity—the virgin birth, miracles, the resurrection of Christ, the substitutionary atonement of the work of the cross, Jesus as God, the revelation that God gives through nature and through the Scripture, the Trinity—all of these things that have been a part of Christianity from its beginning. I happen to believe those things and so do the people I hang out with. Beyond that, these are bright people that I hang out with. They do thinking quite well. You can know that by simply talking to them for a little while.</p>

<p>I come from a world that affirms Christianity and affirms clear thinking, and the two are not at odds with each other.</p>

<p>Last evening I met a whole bunch of people who come from a different world. First of all, they are deeply committed to Jesus Christ and to the truth. Yet, they are in the midst of a world that doesn’t have the same commitment. They do have a commitment to Jesus Christ, the others in this world. But it’s not really clear who Jesus actually is. He certainly isn’t the man in the Bible. Because that Jesus is an invention.</p>

<p>They have a commitment to the truth, this group that they’re in but it’s not really clear what that truth is they’re committed to. It’s not even clear what truth is because there’s a very strong rhetoric that there is no such thing as truth—that truth doesn’t even exist—because truth is simply true for individuals who hold it.</p>

<p>In other words, truth is just a matter of opinion, and since everybody has their own opinion, opinions are mere opinions and there is something wrong with you if you think what you believe is more than just your mere opinion. If you think that Jesus is really God, and He really is the Savior of the world, and all must really believe in Him, and the Bible is really His word, then your opinion is not a good one because it’s not inclusive of all the other religions.</p>

<p>When this denomination has its national meetings and those who have a fire for the truth stand up for their three minutes to make their case in the face of tremendous opposition—people that are teaching and declaring and voting on issues for the denomination that go against everything that the Bible stands for—when they stand up to make their point clear and attempt to speak their point, not from their own opinion or their own authority, but from the only authority that matters, the Scriptures, and they read the Scriptures, this audience of men and women of the cloth laughs at them. The audience laughs. The audience snickers. There’s ridicule. Why? Because they are quoting the Bible.</p>

<p>I can’t relate to that. I have a hard time imagining what it must be like to be in a group of people that, when you quote the Bible, just laughs at you. (By the way, I’ve been in a group like that, like when I street preach at UCLA. I expect that there. I don’t expect it at a national meeting of a Christian denomination.)</p>

<p>It’s a stunner to me because these individuals, to a great degree, are by themselves. Although they are banning together now as orthodox Christians, they’re frightened to call themselves evangelicals because it’s such a negative label. Never mind fundamentalists. But Christians who want to follow the true Jesus by His true word. They’re finally banning together. Apart from that they’re just individuals being laughed down and shamed down in public by those who should be defending the gospel.</p>

<p>I really felt for these folks. I gave them my heart the last two days, trying to encourage them to know how to be able to respond to these attacks coming from other people of the cloth.</p>

<p>You see, the frightening thing is that it isn’t just a matter of standing against these attacks from other people of the cloth (if you were in the situation my friends were in it would be discouraging for you and it would be for me). But guess what else? All of these people were pastors . In other words, they have congregations. Christian pastors all over the country are standing up before their congregations and ridiculing the Christ of the Bible and belief in the Christ of the Bible. They’re ridiculing the truth of the Bible. They’re pointing to so-called evangelicals and saying: Your faith is simplistic and we know better now. Join the 20th century. There are no demons, there are no miracles, there are no god/men, there are no virgin births. Even the issue of sin is up for grabs.</p>

<p>But there is nothing that we’ve learned through science or philosophy or religion or any exploration of the world that has disproven the existence of spiritual things, that has disproven the existence of the soul, that has disproven the reality of miracles, that has disproven life after death, that has disproven anything taught in the Scriptures.</p>

<p>I want to develop these thoughts just a little bit further. The first is simply a snapshot of a circumstance that very dear Christians happen to find themselves in, a circumstance that is odd for me because I’m not exposed to that world. But once I’ve gotten a look into that world, I can see how much of Christendom is captured by it and the thousands of so-called Christian ministers who hold to this very non-Christian world view. And the thousands of Christian workers and lay people who have a hunger and thirst for the truth but are not going to get it in their church because their pastors don’t even believe there is such a thing.</p>

<p>As I’m reflecting on this, I’m thinking not just about those pastors out there who are under siege—like my friends this weekend—but the millions of people who are being sold a bill of goods with regard to Christianity. They wonder why Christianity doesn’t work and why it doesn’t change lives and why it doesn’t make a difference, and part of the reason is it’s so rarely practiced.</p>

<p>What’s been substituted in its stead is a man-made version that bears no resemblance (except for vocabulary) to the Real McCoy. Part of the reason is because people (I’ve mentioned this in different contexts, but I’m seeing it more forcibly now), even these so-called Christians who are ridiculing my friends, have abandoned the idea that there is such a thing as truth that can be known. Therefore, people are reduced in their understanding—especially about spiritual things—to mere opinions. And everybody’s opinion is as good as anybody else’s.</p>

<p>It really doesn’t work out that way because sooner or later you’re going to see that even these same folks think they believe things that are more true than what you believe. It’s always going to come out in some fashion.</p>

<p>This was a very similar situation to what I faced in New Hampshire about two weeks ago when I was there. I didn’t get a chance to talk about it much last weekend, but I ran into a young lady who had come from a college at the session I was teaching. We were talking about these issues and she said that her instructor happened to say in class that there is no objective truth, and the students were out there taking notes like mad. What’s wrong with this picture?</p>

<p>She, as a Christian, was stumped. Stymied. She didn’t know what to say. She was stopped in her tracks. How do you respond to that kind of thing? Not only do you hear it in places like the University of New Hampshire, but when I was in Portland in the spring, I had a young lady come to me who was from a Christian college in the area and her professor told her the same thing. Her professor told her and the students in the class—these students who are Christians, who come to a Christian school to be encouraged and built up and to learn how to go deeper in their faith and to know Christ and defend their faith—and here is a Christian professor at a Christian school telling them that there is no truth. There is no objective truth.</p>

<p>This is intellectual bullying. It’s called post-modernism. It’s also called deconstructionism. I’ve got a new term I just heard this week. When it’s in Christian circles it’s called post-conservative evangelicalism. Post-conservative evangelicalism. Yes, that’s the view that there is no truth. That’s the Christian view that there is no truth.</p>

<p>Now, if there is no truth, what are we to make of the statement in John 14:6 in which Jesus says “I am the way, the truth and the life,”&nbsp;if there is no truth? This is what we get in Christian colleges. I’ve got an article here written by Carl Henry in World Magazine , August 1995, entitled “Trouble at the Peak.”&nbsp;He’s looking at the problems in evangelicalism and he’s talking about post-conservative evangelicalism popping up in schools like Messiah College and Wheaton College and in Intervarsity Press who are sponsoring post-conservative conferences. Do you realize what this stuff is? This is a destruction. This isn’t deconstruction, not just that. It’s destruction of the notion of truth.</p>

<p>At the conference this weekend, as I talked with the pastors, one of them said to me: I can really see how this is a powerful tool to destroy Christianity because, if you go after the notion that there is no truth, then it doesn’t make any sense to talk about things being true or false or right or wrong. Because there is no such thing. It is much better than saying, “Here is a lie that you ought to believe and you who believe in Christianity are false in your beliefs.”&nbsp;At least that would be a point of view that there is something true and you Christians don’t have it. But what do you do when someone says, “Hey it’s meaningless to even talk about whether Christianity is true or not. It’s meaningless to even have the discussion because there is no such thing as truth.”</p>

<p>Now what? Now where do you go? Well, I spoke confidently this weekend and I’ll tell you why. Because not only was this point of view false, it was a point of view that could not possibly be true . It was necessarily false. I want to tell you why the statement, There is no truth, there is no objective reality—and all the stupidity that comes from that point of view which is now infecting the church at the highest levels—is not only false, but it is impossible for it to be true. That’s why I can be so confident.</p>

<p>[portion of comments were missing from tape]</p>

<p>We have at least one statement of objective reality: that there is no objective reality. So this beats itself up. If it’s false, then it’s false. In other words, given the statement that there is no objective reality, if it’s false it’s false and if it’s true it is necessarily false. That’s what I mean that it can’t be true. Because if it’s really true, then that itself is a statement of objective reality and, therefore, it falsifies itself.</p>

<p>They call that a self-refuting argument. It’s like me saying, I can’t speak a word in English. When spoken in English, that seems to beat itself up, doesn’t it? There are no English sentences longer than three words. Well, wait a minute. That sentence itself is longer than three words. There is no objective reality. That sentence itself claims to be a statement about objective reality. It’s called a self-refuting concept. It cannot possibly be true. It is false. If it were true, you would never know it.</p>

<p>I talk about the problem of the elephant. (I did that a few months ago.) Remember the illustration of the elephant? The eastern religious illustration about the blind men touching different parts of the elephant, and they all come up with mistaken understandings of what the elephant is really like? One pulls his tail and says the elephant is like a rope. One feels its side—the elephant is like a wall. They’re all mistaken. They all have a mistaken view based on their subjective experiences.</p>

<p>Now, does it follow from this that there is no elephant? Of course it doesn’t. In fact, somebody sees the elephant. It’s the king observing the circumstances and, because he’s observing from an objective point of view, he can point out the fact that the other people are mistaken. In other words, these kinds of analyses require, even for their utterance, an objective perspective. So how is it someone can utter then, there is no such thing as an objective perspective?</p>

<p>My further question to the professor is, do you really believe that? Yes, I do. Really? No kidding? Then, why are you telling me? In other words, if you believe there is no objective reality, then everybody has their mere subjective reality. You have your subjective reality, I have mine. Leave me alone in mine. All you can tell me is about your world, not mine. I have my own world.</p>

<p>I like Frank Beckwith’s approach, frankly, when a teacher says there is no objective reality. Frank says: Stand up in the middle of the class and say, “Class dismissed.”&nbsp;Why should anybody listen to a teacher who says they have nothing to teach you? That nothing they say is objectively true? That nothing is objectively real? That nothing can be counted on? Why are you taking notes on something like this? There are no correct answers to any test the teacher might give because there is no objective reality. How, in fact, can the professor give a test because doesn’t the test itself falsify his own statements? Because there are right answers and wrong answers that are objectively true, at least in regard to his point of view. Why take notes?</p>

<p>Professor, give yourself a test. That’s your reality. We’ll take our test, that’s our reality. We’ll get 100 percent as we test our own reality. Not only how can you justify giving a test, how can you justify charging us for this course? Professor, you ought to be embarrassed to take a paycheck. Because you have just told me that the only thing you can teach me is that nothing is true. Therefore, if that’s true, then nothing else is worthwhile that you might say.</p>

<p>As it turns out, the one thing you have to offer me is itself false, because it is self-refuting. Worse than that, if you really believed there is no objective reality, you wouldn’t tell anyone. You’d give us our money back and dismiss the class. You’d return your paycheck. You’d resign your useless post, because there is no truth to teach.</p>

<p>But you won’t do these things, will you? Why not? Because even you don’t believe what you’re saying. Which makes you a hypocrite. To add insult to injury, you’re a hypocrite, too.</p>

<p>Do you see how empty and vacuous these kinds of statements are? It’s just the case that there are things that are true and those things are discoverable, many of them, through the process of intelligent, rational discourse and disputation. Is there a guarantee that we’ll never be mistaken? No, there’s no guarantee of that. But can we have good confidence that what we believe is actually true? Of course we can, if we use our heads for what God gave them to us for. (I mean minds, not brains.)</p>

<p>That’s what protects us from this silliness—the intelligence, the rationality that God has given us to weigh the truth. He’s given us more than just rationality. He’s given us prepositional truth in His word.</p>

<p>That’s what protects us.</p>
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title: Truth, Contemporary Philosophy, and the Postmodern Turn
topic: Philosophy
author: Guest Author
date: 04/24/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/truth-contemporary-philosophy-and-the-postmodern-turn
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Delivered by J.P. Moreland at the Evangelical Theological Society, November 18, 2004.</p>

<p>It is difficult to think of a topic of greater concern than the nature of truth. Indeed, truth and the knowledge thereof are the very rails upon which people ought to live their lives. And over the centuries, the classic correspondence theory of truth has outlived most of its critics. But these are postmodern times, or so we are often told, and the classic model, once ensconced deeply in the Western psyche, must now be replaced by a neo-pragmatist or some other anti-realist model of truth, at least for those concerned with the rampant victimization raging all around us. Thus, “We hold these truths to be self evident”&nbsp;now reads “Our socially constructed selves arbitrarily agree that certain chunks of language are to be esteemed in our linguistic community.”&nbsp;Something has gone wrong here, and paraphrasing the words of Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Newman, “We came, we saw, and we conked out!”</p>

<p>The astute listener will have already picked up that I am an unrepentant correspondence advocate who eschews the various anti-realist views of truth. In what follows I shall weigh in on the topic first, by sketching out the correspondence theory and the postmodern rejection of it, and second, by identifying five confusions of which I believe postmodern revisionists are guilty. I shall close by warning that not only are postmodern views of truth and knowledge confused, but postmodernism is an immoral and cowardly viewpoint such that persons who love truth and knowledge, especially disciples of the Lord Jesus, should do everything they can to heal the plague that postmodernism has and inevitably does leave.</p>

<h2>What is the Correspondence Theory of Truth?</h2>

<p>In its simplest form, the correspondence theory of truth says that a proposition is true just in case it corresponds to reality, when what it asserts to be the case is the case. More generally, truth obtains when a truth bearer stands in an appropriate correspondence relation to a truth maker:</p>

<p>truth bearer → correspondence relation → truth maker</p>

<p>Certain clarifications are called for. First, what is the truth bearer? The thing that is either true or false is not a sentence, statement or other piece of language, but a proposition. A proposition is, minimally, the content of a sentence. For example, “It is raining”&nbsp;and “Es regnet”&nbsp;are two different sentences that express the same proposition. A sentence is a linguistic object consisting in a sense perceptible string of markings formed according to a culturally arbitrary set of syntactical rules, a grammatically well-formed string of spoken or written scratchings/sounds. Sentences are true just in case they express a true proposition or content. We will return to the topic of propositions later.</p>

<p>What about truth-makers? What is it that makes a proposition true? The best answer is facts. A fact is some real, that is, obtaining state of affairs in the world, for example, grass’s being green, an electron’s having negative charge, God’s being all-loving. For present purposes, this identification of the truth-maker will do, but the account would need to be filled out to incorporate future states of affairs that will obtain or counterfactual states of affairs that would have obtained given such and such.</p>

<p>Returning to present purposes, consider the proposition that grass is green. This proposition is true just in case a specific fact, viz., grass’s being green, actually obtains in the real world. If Sally has the thought that grass is green, the specific state of affairs, (grass actually being green) “makes”&nbsp;the propositional content of her thought true just in case the state of affairs actually is the way the proposition represents it to be.</p>

<p>Grass’s being green makes Sally’s thought true even if Sally is blind and cannot tell whether or not it is true, and even if Sally does not believe the thought. Reality makes thoughts true or false. A thought is not made true by someone believing it or by someone being able to determine whether or not it is true. Put differently, evidence allows one to tell whether or not a thought is true, but the relevant fact is what makes it true. It goes without saying that “makes”&nbsp;in “a fact makes a proposition true”&nbsp;is not causal, but rather, is a substitution instance of “in virtue of”&nbsp;the proposition is true in virtue of the fact.</p>

<p>Our study of truth bearers has already taken us into the topic of the correspondence relation. Correspondence is a two-placed relation between a proposition and a relevant fact that is its intentional object. A two-placed relation, such as “larger than,” is one that requires two things (say, a desk and a book) before it holds. Similarly, the truth relation of correspondence holds between two things a relevant fact and a proposition just in case the fact matches, conforms to, corresponds with the proposition.</p>

<h2>Why Believe the Correspondence Theory?</h2>

<p>What reasons can be given for accepting the correspondence theory of truth? Many are available, but the simplest is the descriptive argument. The descriptive argument focuses on a careful description and presentation of specific cases of coming to experience truth to see what can be learned from them about truth itself. As an example, consider the case of Joe and Frank. While in his office, Joe receives a call from the university bookstore that a specific book he had ordered Richard Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul has arrived and is waiting for him. At this point, a new mental state occurs in Joe’s mind the thought that Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul is in the bookstore.</p>

<p>Now Joe, being aware of the content of the thought, becomes aware of two things closely related to it: the nature of the thought’s intentional object (Swinburne’s book being in the bookstore) and certain verification steps that would help him to determine the truth of the thought. For example, he knows that it would be irrelevant for verifying the thought to go swimming in the Pacific Ocean. Rather, he knows that he must take a series of steps that will bring him to a specific building and look in certain places for Swinburne’s book in the university bookstore.</p>

<p>So Joe starts out for the bookstore, all the while being guided by the proposition that Swinburne’s The Evolution of the Soul is in the bookstore. Along the way, his friend Frank joins him, though Joe does not tell Frank where he is going or why. They arrive at the store and both see Swinburne’s book there. At that moment, Joe and Frank simultaneously have a certain sensory experience of seeing Swinburne’s book The Evolution of the Soul. But Joe has a second experience not possessed by Frank. Joe experiences that his thought matches, corresponds with an actual state of affairs. He is able to compare his thought with its intentional object and “see,”&nbsp;be directly aware of, the truth of the thought. In this case, Joe actually experiences the correspondence relation itself and truth itself becomes an object of his awareness. “Truth”&nbsp;is ostensibly defined by this relation Joe experiences.</p>

<h2>Postmodernism and Truth</h2>

<p>Postmodernism is a loose coalition of diverse thinkers from several different academic disciplines, so it is difficult to characterize postmodernism in a way that would be fair to this diversity. Still, it is possible to provide a fairly accurate characterization of postmodernism in general, since it friends and foes understand it well enough to debate its strengths and weaknesses.</p>

<p>As a philosophical standpoint, postmodernism is primarily a reinterpretation of what knowledge is and what counts as knowledge. More broadly, it represents a form of cultural relativism about such things as reality, truth, reason, value, linguistic meaning, the self and other notions. On a postmodernist view, there is no such thing as objective reality, truth, value, reason and so forth. All these are social constructions, creations of linguistic practices and, as such, are relative not to individuals, but to social groups that share a narrative.</p>

<p>Postmodernism denies the correspondence theory, claiming that truth is simply a contingent creation of language which expresses customs, emotions, and values embedded in a community’s linguistic practices. For the postmodernist, if one claims to have the truth in the correspondence sense, this assertion is a power move that victimizes those judged not to have the truth.</p>

<h2>Five Confusions that Plague Postmodernism</h2>

<p>According to Brian McLaren, making absolute truth claims becomes problematic in the postmodern context. Says McLaren, “I think that most Christians grossly misunderstand the philosophical baggage associated with terms like absolute or objective (linked to foundationalism and the myth of neutrality)...Similarly, arguments that pit absolutism versus relativism, and objectivism versus subjectivism, prove meaningless or absurd to postmodern people...”&nbsp;McLaren not only correctly identifies some central postmodern confusions, but his statement indicates he exhibits some of the confusions himself. Let’s try to unpack some of the philosophical baggage to which McLaren refers and bring come clarity to the confusion.</p>

<h2>#1 Metaphysical vs. epistemic notions of absolute truth</h2>

<p>The first postmodern confusion involves metaphysical vs. epistemic notions of absolute truth. In the metaphysical and correct sense, absolute truth is the same thing as objective truth. On this view, people discover truth, they do not create it, and a claim is made true or false in some way or another by reality itself, totally independently of whether the claim is accepted by anyone. Moreover, an absolute truth conforms to the three fundamental laws of logic, which are themselves absolute truths. According to objectivism, a commitment to the absolute truth of some proposition P entails no thesis about a knowing subject's epistemic situation regarding P.</p>

<p>By contrast with the metaphysical notion, postmodernists claim that a commitment to absolute truth is rooted in Cartesian anxiety and its need for absolute certainty and, accordingly, claim that acceptance of the absolute truth of P entails acceptance of the conjunction of P’s truth in the objective sense and the possibility of a (finite) knowing subject having Cartesian certainty with respect to P. Thus, one postmodernist recently opined that commitment to objective truth and the correspondence theory is merely “...an epistemic project [that] is funded by Cartesian anxiety,”&nbsp;a “product of methodological doubt...”</p>

<p>As I have already pointed out, this claim is entirely false philosophically. Advocates of a correspondence theory of objective truth take the view to be a realist metaphysical thesis and they steadfastly reject all attempts to epistemologize the view. Moreover, historically, it is incredible to assert that the great Western thinkers from Aristotle up to Descartes correspondence advocates all had any concern whatever about truth and Cartesian anxiety. The great correspondence advocate Aristotle was hardly in a Cartesian quandary when he wisely pointed out that in the search for truth, one ought not expect a greater degree of epistemic strength than is appropriate to the subject matter, a degree of strength that varies from topic to topic. The correspondence theory was not born when Descartes came out of his stove, and postmodernists lose credibility when they pretend otherwise.</p>

<h2>#2 Two confusions about epistemic objectivity</h2>

<p>Postmodernists also reject the notion that rationality is objective on the grounds that no one approaches life in a totally objective way without bias. Thus, objectivity is impossible, and observations, beliefs and entire narratives are theory-laden. There is no neutral standpoint from which to approach the world. Therefore, observations, beliefs and so forth are perspectival constructions that reflect the viewpoint implicit in one’s own web of beliefs. For example, Stanley Grenz claims that postmodernism rejects the alleged modernist view of reason which “...entails a claim to dispassionate knowledge, a person’s ability to view reality not as a conditioned participant but as an unconditioned observer to peer at the world from a vantage point outside the flux of history.”</p>

<p>Regarding knowledge, postmodernists believe that there is no point of view from which one can define knowledge itself without begging the question in favor of one's own view. “Knowledge”&nbsp;is a construction of one’s social, linguistic structures, not a justified, truthful representation of reality by one’s mental states. For example, knowledge amounts to what is deemed to be appropriate according to the professional certification practices of various professional associations. As such, knowledge is a construction that expresses the social, linguistic structures of those associations, nothing more, nothing less.</p>

<p>These postmodernist claims represent some very deep confusions about the notion of objectivity. As a first step towards clearing away this confusion, we need to draw a distinction between psychological and rational objectivity. It is clear from the quote above that Grenz’&nbsp;confused understanding of objectivity is at least partly rooted in his mistaken conflation of these two senses. Psychological objectivity is detachment, the absence of bias, a lack of commitment either way on a topic.</p>

<p>Do people ever have psychological objectivity? Yes, they do, typically, in areas in which they have no interest or about which they know little or nothing. Note carefully two things about psychological objectivity. For one thing, it is not necessarily a virtue. It is if one has not thought deeply about an issue and has no convictions regarding it. But as one develops thoughtful, intelligent convictions about a topic, it would be wrong to remain “unbiased,” that it, uncommitted regarding it. Otherwise, what role would study and evidence play in the development of a one’s approach to life? Should one remain “unbiased”&nbsp;that cancer is a disease, that rape is wrong, that the New Testament was written in the first century, that there is design in the universe, if one has discovered good reasons for each believe? No, one should not.</p>

<p>For another thing, while it is possible to be psychologically objective in some cases, most people are not psychologically objective regarding the vast majority of the things they believe. In these cases, it is crucial to observe that a lack of psychological objectivity does not matter, nor does it cut one off from knowing or seeing the world directly the way it is, or from presenting and arguing for one’s convictions. Why? Because a lack of psychological objectivity does not imply a lack of rational objectivity and it is the latter than matters most, not the former.</p>

<p>To understand this, we need to get clear on the notion of rational objectivity. Rational objectivity is the state of having accurate epistemic access to the thing itself. This entails that if one has rational objectivity regarding some topic, then one can discern the difference between genuinely good and bad reasons/evidence for a belief about that topic and one can hold the belief for genuinely good reasons/evidence. The important thing here is that bias does not stand between a knowing subject and an intentional object nor does it eliminate a person’s ability to assess the reasons for something. Bias may make it more difficult, but not impossible. If bias made rational objectivity impossible, then no teacher including the postmodernist herself could responsibly teach any view the teacher believed on any subject! Nor could the teacher teach opposing viewpoints, because she would be biased against them!</p>

<p>We will return below to the topic of cognitive access to the objects of consciousness, but for now I simply note that Grenz exhibits the twin confusions, so common among postmodernists, of failing to assess properly the nature and value of psychological objectivity, and of failing to distinguish and properly assess the relationship between psychological and rational objectivity.</p>

<h2>#3 Confusions between classical foundationalism and foundationalism per se</h2>

<p>Postmodernists reject foundationalism as a theory of epistemic justification. For example, as they assert “the demise of foundationalism,”&nbsp;Stanley Grenz and John Franke observe with irony, “How infirm the foundation.”&nbsp;Rodney Clapp claims that foundationalism has been in “dire straits”&nbsp;for some time, avowing that “few if any careful thinkers actually rely on foundationalist thinking,”&nbsp;even though they cling like addicted smokers to “foundationalist rhetoric.”&nbsp;Says Clapp, evangelicals “should be nonfoundationalists exactly because we are evangelicals.”&nbsp;Nancey Murphy is concerned to justify a “postmodern”&nbsp;theological method in the face of “a general skeptical reaction to the demise of foundationalism in epistemology.”</p>

<p>A major reason for this rejection is the idea that foundationalism represents a quest for epistemic certainty and it is this desire to have certainty that provides the intellectual impetus for foundationalism. This so-called Cartesian anxiety is alleged to be the root of foundationalist theories of epistemic justification. But, the argument continues, there is no such certainty and the quest for it is an impossible one. Further, that quest is misguided because people do not need certainty to live their lives well. Sometimes Christian postmodernists support this claim by asserting that the quest for certainty is at odds with biblical teaching about faith, the sinfulness of our intellectual and sensory faculties, and the impossibility of grasping an infinite God.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, this depiction of the intellectual motives for foundationalism represents a confusion between foundationalism per se and an especially extreme Cartesian form of foundationalism, with the result that versions of modest foundationalism are simply not taken into consideration. To see this, note that “foundationalism”&nbsp;refers to a family of theories about what kinds of grounds constitute justification for belief, all of which hold the following theses:</p>

<ol>
	<li>A proper noetic structure is foundational, composed of properly basic beliefs and non-basic beliefs, where non-basic beliefs are based either directly or indirectly on properly basic beliefs, and properly basic beliefs are non-doxastically grounded, that is, not based entirely on other beliefs;</li>
	<li>The basing relation which confers justification is irreflexive and asymmetrical; and</li>
	<li>A properly basic belief is a belief which meets some Condition C, where the choice of C marks different versions of foundationalism.</li>
</ol>

<p>Classical foundationalism, of which the Cartesian project is the paradigm example, holds that Condition C is indubitability (or some relevantly similar surrogate): the ground of the belief must guarantee the truth of the belief. It is recognized in nearly all quarters that classical foundationalism is too ambitious. Even granting, as I certainly would, that there are some indubitable beliefs, there simply aren’t enough of them to ground our entire noetic structure. Further, it clearly seems that certain beliefs which are not indubitable may legitimately be held as properly basic, for example, beliefs grounded in perception, memory, or testimony. And more: classical foundationalism is motivated largely by the belief that certainty is a necessary condition of knowledge, or that one must know that one knows in order to have knowledge. But these analyses are either too strict or lead to an infinite regress, leading in either case to the skeptic’s lair.</p>

<p>In point of fact, the past three decades have witnessed the development of various versions of foundationalism that avoid the criticisms leveled against the classical version. Among contemporary epistemologists, modest foundationalism of some form is, as one philosopher put it, the “dominant position.”&nbsp;Thus, it is intellectually irresponsible for Clapp, Murphey and others to claim that foundationalism is losing favor among philosophers. As far as I can tell, apart from intellectual dishonesty, this false viewpoint can be sustained only by conflating classical foundationalism with foundationalism per se, but this is simply mistaken as the widespread acceptance of modest foundationalism makes clear. Modest foundationalism holds that Condition C is something weaker than indubitability: the ground of the belief must be truth-conducive. Thus at least some properly basic beliefs in a modest foundationalism are defeasible (subject to being shown to be false by subsequent evidence).</p>

<h2>#4 Confusions about the identity of the truth bearer</h2>

<p>As we have already seen, the informed correspondence theorist will say that propositions are truth bearers. What is a proposition? Minimally, it is the content of declarative sentences/statements and thoughts/beliefs that is true or false. Beyond that philosophers are in disagreement, but most would agree that a proposition 1) is not located in space or time; 2) is not identical to the linguistic entities that may be used to express it; 3) is not sense perceptible; 4) is such that the same proposition may be in more then one mind at once; 5) need not be grasped by any (at least finite) person to exist and be what it is; 6) may itself be an object of thought when, for example, one is thinking about the content of one’s own thought processes; 7) is in no sense a physical entity.</p>

<p>By contrast, a sentence is a linguistic type or token consisting in a sense perceptible string of markings formed according to a culturally arbitrary set of syntactical rules. A statement is a sequence of sounds or body movements employed by a speaker to assert a sentence on a specific occasion. So understood, neither sentences nor statements are good candidates for the basic truth bearer.</p>

<p>It is pretty easy to show that having or using a sentence (or any other piece of language) is neither necessary nor sufficient for thinking or having propositional content. First it’s not necessary. Children think prior to their acquisition of language how else could they thoughtfully learn language and, indeed, we all think without language regularly. Moreover, the same propositional content may be expressed by a potentially infinite number of pieces of language and, thus, that content is not identical to any linguistic entity. This alone does not show that language is not necessary for having propositional content. But when one attends to the content that is being held constant as arbitrary linguistic expressions are selected to express it, that content may easily be seen to satisfy the non-linguistic traits of a proposition listed above.</p>

<p>Second, it’s not sufficient. If erosion carved an author less linguistic scribble in a hillside, for example, “I’m eroding,” then strictly speaking it would have no meaning or content, though it would be empirically equivalent to another token of this type that would express a proposition were it the result of authorial intent.</p>

<p>Postmodernists attack a straw man when they focus on the alleged inadequacies of linguistic objects to do the work required of them in a correspondence theory of truth. Speaking for himself and other postmodernists, Joseph Natoli claims that “No one representation, or narrative, can reliably represent the world because language/pictures/sounds (signifiers) are not permanent labels attached to the things of the world nor do the things of the world dwell inside such signifiers.”&nbsp;Unfortunately, even granting the fact that language (and certain sensations) is problematic if taken to represent things in the world (e.g., that the language/world hookup is arbitrary), it follows that human subjects cannot accurately represent the world only if we grant the further erroneous claim that representational entities are limited to language (and certain sensations). But this is precisely what the sophisticated correspondence theorist denies.</p>

<p>Again, Richard Rorty says “To say that truth is not our there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is not truth, that sentences are elements of human language, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there cannot exist independently of the human mind because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there...Only descriptions...can be true and false.”&nbsp;It should be obvious that Rorty attacks a straw man and that his argument goes through only if we grant that sentences are the fundamental truth bearers.</p>

<h2>#5 Confusions about perception and intentionality</h2>

<p>Postmodernists adopt a highly contentious model of perception and intentionality, often without argument, and they seem to enjoin serious consideration of a prima facie more plausible model. The result is that postmodernists are far too pessimistic about the prospects of human epistemic success.</p>

<p>Postmodernists adopt a linguistic version of Rene Descartes’&nbsp;idea theory of perception (and intentionality generally). To understand the idea theory, and the postmodern adaptation of it, a good place to start is with a common sense, critical realist view of perception. According to critical realism, when a subject is looking at a red object such as an apple, the object itself is the direct object of the sensory state. What one sees directly is the apple itself. True, one must have a sensation of red to apprehend the apple, but on the critical realist view, the sensation of red is to be understood as a case of being-appeared-to-redly and analyzed as a self-presenting property. What is a self-presenting property? If some property F is a self-presenting one, then it is by means of F that a relevant external object is presented directly to a person, and F presents itself directly to the person as well. Thus, F presents its object mediately though directly, and itself immediately.</p>

<p>This is not as hard to understand as it first may appear. Sensations, such as being-appeared-to-redly, are an important class of self-presenting properties. If Jones is having a sensation of red while looking at an apple, then having the property of being-appeared-to-redly as part of his consciousness modifies his substantial self. When Jones has this sensation, it is a tool that presents the red apple mediately to him and the sensation also presents itself to Jones. What does it mean to say that the sensation presents the apple to him mediately? Simply this: it is in virtue of or by means of the sensation that Jones directly sees the apple itself.</p>

<p>Moreover, by having the sensation of red, Jones is directly aware both of the apple and his own awareness of the apple. For the critical realist, the sensation of red may, indeed, be a tool or means that Jones uses to become aware of the apple, but he is thereby directly aware of the apple. His awareness of the apple is direct in that nothing stands between Jones and the apple, not even his sensation of the apple. That sensation presents the apple directly, though as a tool, Jones must have the sensation as a necessary condition for seeing the apple. On the critical realist view, a knowing subject is not trapped behind or within anything, including a viewpoint, a narrative, an historical-linguistic perspective. To have an entity in the external world as an object of intentionality is to already be “out there”; there is no need to escape anything. One is not trapped behind one’s eyeballs or anything else. It is a basic fallacy of logic to infer that one sees a point-of-viewed-object from the fact that one sees an object from a point of view.</p>

<p>Before leaving the critical realist view, it is important to say that the theory does not limit self-presenting properties to those associated with the five senses and, therefore, does not limit the objects of direct awareness to ordinary sensory objects. The critical realist will say that a knowing subject is capable of direct acquaintance with a host of non-sense-perceptible objects one’s&nbsp;own ego and its mental states, various abstract objects like the laws of mathematics or logic, and spirit beings, including God.</p>

<p>By contrast, for Descartes’&nbsp;idea theory, one’s ideas, in this case, sensations, stand between the subject and the object of perception. Jones is directly aware of his own sensation of the apple and indirectly aware of the apple in the sense that it is what causes the sensation to happen. On the idea theory, a perceiving subject is trapped behind his own sensations and cannot get outside them to the external world in order to compare his sensations to their objects to see if those sensations are accurate.</p>

<p>Now, in a certain sense, postmodernists believe that people are trapped behind something in the attempt to get to the external world. However, for them the wall between people and reality is not composed of sensations as it was for Descartes; rather, it is constituted by one’s community and its linguistic categories and practices. One’s language serves as a sort of distorting and, indeed, creative filter. One cannot get outside one’s language to see if one’s talk about the world is the way the world is. Thus, Grenz advocates a new outlook, allegedly representing some sort of consensus in the human sciences, that expresses “a more profound understanding of epistemology. Recent thinking has helped us see that the process of knowing, and to some extent even the process of experiencing the world, can occur only within a conceptual framework, a framework mediated by the social community in which we participate.”</p>

<p>It has been noted repeatedly that such assertions are self-refuting. For if we are all trapped behind a framework such that simple, direct seeing is impossible, then no amount of recent thinking can help us see anything; all it could do would be to invite us to see something as such and such from within a conceptual framework. Given the self refuting nature of such claims, and given the fact that we all experience regularly the activity of comparing our conceptions of an entity with the entity itself as a way of adjusting those conceptions, it is hard to see why anyone, especially a Christian, would adopt the postmodern view. In any case, I have seldom seen the realist perspective seriously considered by postmodern thinkers, and until it is, statements like Grenz’&nbsp;will be taken as mere mantras by many of us.</p>

<h2>Final Remarks about the Immoral Nature of Postmodernism</h2>

<p>For some time I have been convinced that postmodernism is rooted in pervasive confusions, and I have tried to point out what some of these are. I am also convinced that postmodernism is an irresponsible, cowardly abrogation of the duties that constitute a disciple’s calling to be a Christian intellectual and teacher.</p>

<p>In her provocative book entitled Longing to Know, Ester Meek asserts that humans as knowers exercise a profound responsibility to submit to the authoritative dictates of reality. Thus, “It is not responsible to deny objective truth and reality in knowing; it is irresponsible. It is not responsible to make the human knower or community of knowers the arbiters of a private truth and reality; it is irresponsible.”&nbsp;Again, Meek claims that “Good, responsible knowing brings blessing, shalom; irresponsible knowing brings curse.”&nbsp;In another place Meek warns that “...the kind of freedom implied by the thought that we humans completely determine our reality leaves us with a gnawing sense of the relative insignificance of our choices. I think it leads not to total responsibility but to careless irresponsibility, both with regard to ourselves and with regard to other humans, not to mention to the world. And, paradoxically, it leads not to a deeper sense of [communal or individual] identity and dignity but to a disheartening lack of it.”</p>

<p>We Evangelicals need to pay careful attention to Meek’s claims. As humans, we live and ought to live our lives not merely by truth, but by knowledge of truth. Knowledge of truth gives us confident trust and access to reality. Moreover, as those called to be teachers and scholars for the church and, indeed, for the unbelieving world, we are called not only to impart and defend truth, but to impart and defend knowledge of truth and, even more, to impart and defend knowledge of truth as knowledge of truth. This entails that we must impart and defend the notion that we do, in fact, have knowledge of important spiritual and ethical truths. Among other things, this gives confidence in truth and knowledge to those we serve. Thus, we are irresponsible not simply if we fail to achieve knowledge of reality; we are doubly irresponsible if we fail to impart to others knowledge as knowledge. The corrosive affects of postmodernism eat away at the fulfillment of these duties and responsibilities that constitute our calling from Almighty God.</p>

<p>Meek goes on to point out that the achieving of knowledge and the teaching of it as knowledge “...calls for courageous resolve. And this courageous resolve, when proven true, merits the deep admiration of others.”&nbsp;The need for such courage is especially grave today as we labor in an intellectual milieu in which the worldviews of naturalism and postmodernism both entail that there is no non-empirical knowledge, especially no religious or ethical knowledge.</p>

<p>Faced with such opposition and the pressure it brings, postmodernism is a form of intellectual pacifism that, at the end of the day, recommends backgammon while the barbarians are at the gate. It is the easy, cowardly way out that removes the pressure to engage alternative conceptual schemes, to be different, to risk ridicule, to take a stand outside the gate. But it is precisely as disciples of Christ, even more, as officers in His army, that the pacifist way out is simply not an option. However comforting it may be, postmodernism is the cure that kills the patient, the military strategy that concedes defeat before the first shot is fired, the ideology that undermines its own claims to allegiance. And it is an immoral, coward’s way out that is not worthy of a movement born out of the martyrs’&nbsp;blood.</p>

<h2><a href="http://www.jpmoreland.com" target="_blank">About the Author</a></h2>

<p>J. P. Moreland, Ph.D. is Professor of Philosophy at Biola University. He has authored or co-authored many books including Christianity and the Nature of Science, Scaling the Secular City, Does God Exist?, Immortality: The Other Side of Death and The Life and Death Debate: Moral Issues of Our Times. He is also co-editor of Christian Perspectives on Being Human. His work has appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Christianity Today, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and The American Philosophical Quarterly. Dr. Moreland served with Campus Crusade for 10 years, planted two churches, and has spoken on over 100 college campuses.</p>

<p>Resources by J. P. Moreland Available from Stand to Reason</p>
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title: Stand to Reason’s Statement of Faith
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 05/05/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/stand-to-reason-s-statement-of-faith
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Stand to Reason represents classical Christianity—orthodox Christian beliefs that have been affirmed since the first Christians.</em></p>

<p>1. The Bible, consisting of all the books of the Old and New Testament, is the Word of God, a supernaturally given revelation from God Himself, concerning Himself, His being, nature, character, will and purposes; and concerning man, his nature, need and duty and destiny. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament are without error or misstatement in their moral and spiritual teaching and record of historical facts. They are without error or defect of any kind in the autographs. (2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:21)</p>

<p>2. There is one God, eternally existing and manifesting Himself to us in three Persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (Isaiah 44:6-8; 45:5; Gen. 1:26-27; 3:22; Matt. 28:19; Luke 9:35; 2 Cor. 13:14)</p>

<p>3. Our Lord Jesus was supernaturally conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin, Mary, a lineal descendant of David. (Luke 1:26-37) He lived and taught and performed mighty works, wonders and signs exactly as recorded in the New Testament. He was put to death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. (Luke 23) God raised from the dead the body that had been nailed to the cross. The Lord Jesus, after His crucifixion, showed Himself to be alive to His disciples, appearing to them in the space of forty days. After this the Lord Jesus ascended into heaven, and the Father made Him to be head over all things, including the Church. (Luke 24; John 2:19; 1 Cor. 15)</p>

<p>4. The Lord Jesus, before His incarnation, existed in the exact form of God, and of His own choice, laid aside His divine glory and took upon Himself the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men. He is a divine person possessed of all the attributes of deity and should be worshiped as God by angels and men. (John 1:1; Phil. 2:5-11) “In Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.”&nbsp;(Col. 2:9)</p>

<p>5. By His death on the cross, the Lord Jesus made a perfect atonement for sin, by which the wrath of God against sinners is appeased and a ground furnished upon which God can deal in mercy with sinners. He redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse in our place. He Who Himself was absolutely without sin had our sin counted to Him that we might have His righteousness, the righteousness of God, counted to us. (1 Peter 2:24; 1 John 2:2; 3:4, Isaiah 53:4-6; 2 Cor. 5:21; John 19:30)</p>

<p>6. The Lord Jesus is coming again to this earth, personally, bodily, and visibly. (1 Thess. 4:16-17; Heb. 9:28; Rev 1:7)</p>

<p>7. The Holy Spirit is a person distinct from the Father and the Son, and possesses all of the divine attributes. He is God. (Mt. 28:19; 2 Cor. 3:16-18)</p>

<p>8. Man was created in the image of God, after his likeness, and therefore has transcendent, intrinsic worth. (Gen. 1:27) The unjustified destruction of any human being from conception to natural death (e.g., through abortion, embryonic stem cell research, cloning, doctor-assisted suicide, etc.) is wrong. (Ex. 21:22)</p>

<p>9. The whole human race fell in the fall of the first Adam. All men, apart from spiritual regeneration, are lost, darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, hardened in heart, morally and spiritually dead through their trespasses and sins. They cannot see nor enter the Kingdom of God until they are born again of the Holy Spirit. (Jn. 6:28-29; 8:44; 15:5; Phil. 1:29; Rom. 3:10-12; 8:7; Jn. 1:13; 1 Cor. 2:14; Eph. 2:8-9)</p>

<p>10. Men are justified on the simple and single ground of the shed blood of Christ and upon the simple and single condition of faith in Him Who shed His blood, and are born again by the quickening, renewing, cleansing work of the Holy Spirit, through the instrumentality of the Word of God. These alone become children of God and receive eternal life. At death their spirits depart to be with Christ in conscious blessedness, and at the second coming of Christ their bodies shall be raised, transformed into the likeness of the body of His glory. (Jn. 3:16; Rom. 3:20-28; Eph. 2:8-9; Rom. 4:1-6; Gal. 2:21)</p>

<p>11. All those who persistently reject Jesus Christ in this present life shall be raised from the dead, judged according to their deeds, and punished for their moral crimes and rebellion against God. Throughout eternity they will exist in a state of conscious isolation from God, in endless torment and anguish. (Mt. 8:12; Lk. 16:19-31; Rev. 20:14-15; 21:8)</p>

<p>12. The Church consists of the host of the regenerate, wherever they may be found. It is the body and bride of Christ, which Christ loves and for which He has given Himself. (Eph. 5:25-27; Rev. 21:2; 2 Cor. 11:2)</p>

<p>13. There is a personal devil, a being of great cunning who can exert vast power only so far as God allows him to do so. He shall ultimately be judged and condemned, tormented day and night forever. (2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 6; Mt. 25:41)</p>

<p>14. We believe in the present ministry of the Holy Spirit by whose indwelling the Christian is enabled to live a godly life and to perform good works that are the necessary evidence of their genuine faith in Christ. Persistent, egregious sin (e.g., lying, stealing, witchcraft, active practice of sexual sin, including fornication, adultery, and homosexuality) is inconsistent with biblical teaching. (Ex. 20; 1 Cor. 6:9-10; Gal. 5:19-21; Eph. 5:3-6; Rom. 1:18-32)</p>

<p>15. Biblical marriage consists only of a faithful, heterosexual union between one genetic male and one genetic female, and biblical marriage is the only legitimate and acceptable context for a sexual relationship. (Gen. 2:22-24; Mt. 19:4-6; Heb. 13:4-7)</p>

<p>Statement of Faith on Marriage, Gender, and Sexuality</p>

<p>We believe that God wonderfully and immutably creates each person as male or female. These two distinct, complementary genders together reflect the image and nature of God. (Gen 1:26-27.) Rejection of one’s biological sex is a rejection of the image of God within that person.</p>

<p>We believe that the term “marriage”&nbsp;has only one meaning: the uniting of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in Scripture. (Gen 2:18-25.) We believe that God intends sexual intimacy to occur only between a man and a woman who are married to each other. (1 Cor 6:18; 7:2-5; Heb 13:4.) We believe that God has commanded that no intimate sexual activity be engaged in outside of a marriage between a man and a woman.</p>

<p>We believe that any form of sexual immorality (including adultery, fornication, homosexual behavior, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, and use of pornography) is sinful and offensive to God. (Matt 15:18-20; 1 Cor 6:9-10.)</p>

<p>We believe that in order to preserve the function and integrity of Stand to Reason as representatives of the local Body of Christ, and to provide a biblical role model to the Christian community who follow STR and in general, it is imperative that all persons employed by Stand to Reason in any capacity, or who serve as volunteers, agree to and abide by this Statement on Marriage, Gender, and Sexuality. (Matt 5:16; Phil 2:14-16; 1 Thess 5:22.)</p>

<p>We believe that God offers redemption and restoration to all who confess and forsake their sin, seeking His mercy and forgiveness through Jesus Christ. (Acts 3:19-21; Rom 10:9-10; 1 Cor 6:9-11.)</p>

<p>We believe that every person must be afforded compassion, love, kindness, respect, and dignity. (Mark 12:28-31; Luke 6:31.) Hateful and harassing behavior or attitudes directed toward any individual are to be repudiated and are not in accord with Scripture nor the doctrines of Stand to Reason.</p>
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title: Could Buddhism Be True?
topic: Other Worldviews
author: Guest Author
date: 05/13/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/could-buddhism-be-true-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>An Examination of the Buddhist Worldview by Ted Miyake</em></p>

<h2>Three Questions</h2>

<p>Every worldview has to answer three important questions. First, “How did we get here”? This question is obviously foundational to how it is we see the world around us and how it is we understand our role within that world. Secondly, we have to ask, “How did things get so messed up?”&nbsp;All of us know that there is something broken about the world in which we live and our worldview helps us to understand WHAT has been broken! Finally, we must answer the question, “How can we fix it?”&nbsp;This final question is the culmination and conclusion of our worldview. We begin with an idea related to how we got here, but ultimately find ourselves answering the most important questions of life. Buddhism offers answers to these three worldview questions. Let’s examine these answers and see if they are cohesive and relate to the world as we know it...</p>

<h2>A Short History of Buddhism</h2>

<p>It’s sometimes difficult to ascertain a concise and accurate history of Buddhism due to the large number of diverse writings that exist on the topic and the lack of reliable “fundamental”&nbsp;historic documents that surround the faith system, but a few facts can be reasonably understood. Buddhism was founded by a Hindu prince named Siddhãrtha Gautama, also referred to as Sakyamuni (sage of Sakya clan). He was born in northern India (southern Nepal) around 500 B.C., and according to Buddhist traditions, he led a lavish and sheltered life until at some point he witnessed the sufferings of the outside world. He was very troubled by the sufferings he observed, and at the age of 29 he gave up his life of indulgence (left his wife, kids, and palace) to seek out the meaning of (and solution for) human suffering.</p>

<p>He tried a number of different techniques in this effort, including severe asceticism (severe bodily deprivation) and meditation. He ultimately rejected asceticism, and one day at the age of 35 (and after many days of meditation and seeking under a Bodhi tree that has come to be known as “ficus religious”) he achieved a spiritual breakthrough. He realized certain truths about life, death, reincarnation, karma, and suffering, and his breakthrough included the realization that he had rid himself of the spiritual defilements of cravings (including hunger and thirst), desire, hate, and delusion. This aspect of the breakthrough was his awakening or “enlightenment,” and this is why he took the title of Buddha which means “the enlightened one.” He described this freedom from desire as a state of “nothingness”&nbsp;referred to as “nirvana”; the point at which a being is freed from the cycle of life, suffering, death, and reincarnation.</p>

<p>Buddhism flourished as a monastic movement, then faded from India (pushed out by Hinduism and Islam) but spread to Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and throughout Asia. The Buddha’s supposed teachings were not written down until centuries after his death; different councils came together in an attempt to “canonize”&nbsp;Buddhist writings, but even the historicity of various councils is uncertain, so we really don’t have a commonly accepted body of teachings. There are many “sacred writings”&nbsp;claiming to be the teachings of The Buddha or “consistent”&nbsp;with his teachings. Most well known are the Tripitaka (philosophy, rules, sermons), various Suttras (teachings), and the Tibetan “Book of the Dead”&nbsp;(written by a early Tibetan monk). Various branches and forms of Buddhism have justified their “orthodoxy”&nbsp;based on their own accounts of the councils or their own “inspired”&nbsp;writings. Over time, two major schools (Theravada and Mahayana) emerged as these councils were either accepted or rejected by followers:</p>

<h2>Theravada</h2>

<p>A branch of Buddhism predominant in Southeast Asia: Thailand, Burma, Cambodia and Laos. Historically, the level of personal commitment and sacrifice required to achieve ’nirvana’&nbsp;(or ’nibbana’) is very high in this branch of Buddhism. Therefore, the emphasis is on orders of monks and nuns who are the primary practitioners of Buddhism. Monasteries with large monk populations are more common in this branch of Buddhism. Burma (Myanmar), for example, has 500,000 monks.</p>

<h2>Mahayana</h2>

<p>A branch of Buddhism predominant in Sri Lanka, Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea, Vietnam and Tibet. In this form of Buddhism, the practice of the faith and achievement of ’nirvana’&nbsp;is available to everyone, including the common person. Tibetan Buddhism (led by the Dalai Lama) is sometimes considered a separate school but often included under Mahayana Buddhism. Other well known Mahayana sects include Zen and Nichiren Buddhism ( Japan). Nichiren is distinctly “evangelical”&nbsp;seeking to put down other beliefs and win converts.</p>

<p>Buddhism claims 300 to 400 million followers worldwide (although many are merely “cultural”&nbsp;Buddhists). Though it is generally thought of as a religion, it is more a spiritual philosophy. In fact, Buddhist sects range from atheistic to polytheistic, and some forms could more accurately be described as pantheistic (claiming that the “divine”&nbsp;is in all things). Buddhism is extremely diverse and continues to “adapt”&nbsp;perhaps because of the lack of definitive teachings from the Gautama Buddha. In addition to this, the nature of the basic teaching allows for wide range of interpretations and modifications.</p>

<h2>How Buddhism Answers the Question:</h2>

<p><em>“How Did We Get Here?”&nbsp;(What’s the Nature of the Creator and Creation?)</em></p>

<p>Because Buddhism is this diverse, it’s difficult to get a direct answer to this first worldview question. In fact, most Buddhist schools do not directly answer the question, “How did we get here?”&nbsp;at all. That’s because the idea of an absolute Creator God is absent in most forms of Buddhism. Many Buddhists do venerate and worship Gautama Buddha (and other Buddhas—religious leaders—as well), and this veneration and worship does play a major role in both Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. But while gods, devas, demons, and spirits are common in many early Buddhist stories, they are described in a cynical, sarcastic and mocking way. They are always described as inferior to The Buddha or unnecessary to achieve enlightenment. And while monotheistic religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam clearly delineate and separate the nature of God and man, Buddhism makes no clear distinction.</p>

<p>Among the many diverse definitions of the Divine offered by Buddhists, this definition given by Soyen Shaku (a Rinzai Zen Buddhist roshi), provides at least one Buddhist notion about the nature of God:</p>

<p>“At the outset, let me state that Buddhism is not atheistic as the term is ordinarily understood. It has certainly a God, the highest reality and truth, through which and in which this universe exists. However, the followers of Buddhism usually avoid the term God, for it savors so much of Christianity, whose spirit is not always exactly in accord with the Buddhist interpretation of religious experience...To define more exactly the Buddhist notion of the highest being, it may be convenient to borrow the term very happily coined by a modern German scholar, ’panentheism,’ according to which God is...all and one and more than the totality of existence...As I mentioned before, Buddhists do not make use of the term God, which characteristically belongs to Christian terminology. An equivalent most commonly used is Dharmakaya...When the Dharmakaya is most concretely conceived it becomes the Buddha, or Tathagata...(Truth Body, or Absolute Reality).”</p>

<p>Buddhism does not directly address the issue of our origin, but it does make several claims about our existence, even if it can’t account for the manner in which we came to exist! Buddhism teaches that the material world is not permanent. In fact, we are simply travelers passing through an illusion or misperception of reality. We are caught in a cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth. This cycle is endless for each of us unless we can break out of the cycle by attaining “nirvana.” Buddhism also teaches that as humans we don’t have “souls”; in fact, the Buddhist concept of reincarnation denies the existence of the ’self’&nbsp;altogether. The self is merely an illusion; we wrongly identify perception, consciousness, mind and body as ’self’&nbsp;when there is actually no such thing. The concept of an abiding entity or ’self’&nbsp;is impossible in Buddhism because states of perception, consciousness, and mind are in a constant state of change. According to Buddhism, when the mortal body dies, consciousness and all mental activities cease.</p>

<h2>How Buddhism Answers the Question:</h2>

<p><em>“How Did It Get So Messed Up?”&nbsp;(What Separates Man from God?)</em></p>

<p>When Siddhãrtha Gautama achieved his spiritual breakthrough beneath the Bodhi tree, he came to an important realization concerning the plight of the world and our physical existence within that world. He realized particular truths about the world, now known as the Four Noble Truths:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>There is suffering in life (or life IS suffering)</p>

<p>Suffering is the result of cravings and desires (or attachment)</p>

<p>Freeing oneself or extinguishing these cravings will end suffering.</p>

<p>The way of achieving freedom (“nirvana”) is by the Eight Fold Path.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>The first two truths encapsulate all that is wrong with the world: life is filled with suffering and this suffering is the result of cravings and desires. Buddhism teaches that our desires lead us to become ’attached’&nbsp;to the very things that eventually cause us to suffer. In this regard, ’attachment’&nbsp;is at the root of the problem. As we learn to let go of the things to which we are attached (including such base cravings as thirst, hunger and sexual desire), we will be free of the suffering that we experience in this life.</p>

<p>Some Mahayana Buddhist variations on this idea related to what’s wrong with the world include the idea that denying (or not realizing) the true nature of Buddha, buddha beings, or Buddhist truths can bring about suffering in this life as well. In addition to this, many Buddhists also blame “karma”&nbsp;for any bad luck or difficult situation they may experience in their lives. As an example, a Buddhist might believe that he or she is short as the result of making fun of short people in a prior existence.</p>

<h2>How Buddhism Answers the Question:</h2>

<p><em>“How Do We Fix It?”&nbsp;(How Can We Be Restored to the Divine?)</em></p>

<p>So, how does a Buddhist address the suffering that exists in the world? The answers and solutions are to be found in the second two statements of the Four Noble Truths; we can end suffering and experience a spiritual restoration if we can simply free ourselves from our cravings by employing the “Eight Fold Path”:</p>

<p>“Now this...is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, nonreliance on it”&nbsp;(Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta [Samyutta Nikaya 56.11], trans. Bodhi (2000), pp. 1843-47).</p>

<p>The Buddhist must rely on his or her own self effort in order to practice the Eight Fold Path. Most contemporary Buddhists understand the Path as a series of correct understandings and behaviors:</p>

<h2>Related to “Wisdom”&nbsp;(Prajñ? or Paññ?)</h2>

<p>These first two elements of the Eight Fold Path provide the rational foundation for understanding reality from a Buddhist perspective:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>Right View</em></p>

<p>Buddhists understand this as ’perspective,’ ’vision’&nbsp;or ’understanding’; it is the ability to understand the real way the world works; the ability to understand reality from a Buddhist perspective, including the reality of Karma and suffering.</p>

<p><em>Right Intention</em></p>

<p>This aspect of the Path is concerned with the ’resolve,’ ’aspirations’&nbsp;or ’will’&nbsp;of the believer. It describes the need for the believer to rid him or herself of any desire to do anything harmful or immoral.</p>
</blockquote>

<h2>Related to “Ethics”&nbsp;(??la or S?la)</h2>

<p>Buddhists don’t want their outward actions to defile their minds and their ability to concentrate. For this reason, certain ethical efforts are part of the Path:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>Right Speech</em></p>

<p>Buddhism calls it believers to be careful about the words they use. This aspect of the Eight Fold Path prohibits lying, speaking abusively, or using harsh language.</p>

<p><em>Right Action</em></p>

<p>This aspect of the Path encourages the Buddhist to train oneself so that he or she is able to act in a morally upright manner that will not corrupt or harm others.</p>

<p><em>Right Livelihood</em></p>

<p>The Eight Fold Path also calls Buddhists to seek employment in a trade or occupation that will not harm other living beings, either directly or indirectly.</p>
</blockquote>

<h2>Related to “Concentration”&nbsp;(Sam?dhi)</h2>

<p>Finally, Buddhism teaches that believers must train their higher consciousness in order to create a framework of calm collectedness from which reality can be truly experienced and understood. For this reason, the remaining aspects of the Path are focused on areas of ’concentration’:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>Right Effort</em></p>

<p>The Path calls Buddhists to make a continuing effort to rid oneself of all thought words or actions that might be harmful to either themselves or others in their world. Buddhists are called to make a continuing positive moral effort.</p>

<p><em>Right Mindfulness</em></p>

<p>In addition, Buddhists are called to stay alert mentally; remaining constantly on guard to those influences in their world that are affecting their body and mind. This aspect of the Path calls the believer to be ever mindful and deliberate about saying and doing what is morally right.</p>

<p><em>Right Concentration</em></p>

<p>Finally, the Path calls the Buddhist to engage in the practice of proper concentration, accomplished through meditation, in order to enter into what is known as ’jhana’&nbsp;(a state of consciousness that allows the believer to develop wisdom and insight into the true nature of the world around them).</p>
</blockquote>

<p>The goal of the Eight Fold Path is to understand the nature of life, better comprehend the Four Noble Truths, and to eventually extinguish our ’self’&nbsp;and our cravings (good or bad) so we can ultimately achieve ’nirvana’&nbsp;(the state of nothingness, non-consciousness or ’bliss’). The Eightfold Path is sometimes called the ’Middle Way’&nbsp;since it is neither extreme asceticism nor a life of indulgence. But in all of these elements of the Eight Fold Path, it is clear that the individual believer is charged with responsibility for his or her own spiritual growth or development. Buddhists find the answer within their own effort, and this self-effort is valued in Buddhism. Unlike other faith systems that might call upon God for assistance, this idea of trusting something or someone other than yourself is foreign to Buddhism.</p>

<p>Buddhism teaches that some of us may, in fact, achieve ’nirvana.’ Buddhism proposes that our world does contain individuals who have attained enlightenment (buddhas and boddisatvas) but have chosen to remain with us in the conscious illusion to assist us in our own spiritual progression.</p>

<h2>The Hard Questions Buddhism Has to Answer</h2>

<p>While Buddhism provides answers for the three most important worldview questions, the Buddhist answers raise important questions in and of themselves. There are several important questions that one should ask when talking to a Buddhist to examine the internal and external coherence of the worldview. Let’s take a look at a few questions one might ask from both a philosophical and Biblical perspective:</p>

<h2>Philosophical Questions</h2>

<p>Let’s begin with some questions that spring from basic philosophical concerns:</p>

<p><strong>If Buddhists themselves cannot agree on which scriptural writings or traditions for practice are actually true statements from Buddha, how can Buddhism as a system claim ANY truth?</strong></p>

<p>Even within Buddhism, there are contradictory claims related to the validity of a variety of late appearing religious texts, all of which claim to accurately represent the words of Buddha. None of these texts stands unchallenged as having come from the time in which Buddha lived. Many have very questionable origins. How are we to know which authoritative? Many scholars actually say that it is impossible to say with confidence, “This is what Gautama Buddha said.”&nbsp;How can anyone make a claim for the truth without first establishing the foundation for that truth?</p>

<p><strong>If life is just suffering, as Buddhism claims, why is it that some of us don't see it this way? Why do some of us see life as wonderful rather than filled with suffering?</strong></p>

<p>Buddha’s observations about the world seem to come from his direct experience of that world and the entire religious system is built on the notion that life is filled with suffering that has no positive value on the individual. But what if the individual doesn’t see the world in this way? What if the individual, even though he or she experiences hardship, understands the value of this experience and does not see it as suffering?</p>

<p><strong>If our present suffering is the result of bad karma from a prior life, what is the real PRESENT remedy for suffering in this life?</strong></p>

<p>Can all suffering be alleviated in this life, even through our efforts in the Eight Fold Path? Why engage in any effort related to the Eight Fold Path, if the only true benefits are to be realized in the next life?</p>

<p><strong>Who is the Karma Judge?</strong></p>

<p>If, as Buddhism teaches, there is no personal God that interacts with His creation, who determines whether or not a person has done something to merit either ’good’&nbsp;or ’bad’&nbsp;Karma? If this decision is made at the end of one’s life, who is actually making the decision? How can an impersonal force ’decide’&nbsp;anything? Who is the final judge of Karma, and mustn’t this judge by necessity be a personal being (capable of making a decision)?</p>

<p><strong>If achieving ’nirvana’&nbsp;means that we will be liberated from the illusion of consciousness, how then will we know (be conscious of) our achieving this ’nirvana’? How can we be ’conscious’&nbsp;of this, if ’consciousness’&nbsp;will no longer exist?</strong></p>

<p>Our existence outside the material, physical world, presumes a conscious existence in which we can ’realize’&nbsp;or enlightened condition. How can we be conscious of this if consciousness will no longer exist?</p>

<p><strong>If there is no transcendent ’self’&nbsp;or ’soul,’ how do we transcend this life in order for reincarnation to be possible?</strong></p>

<p>If reincarnation is true, it makes sense that something of our true identity would move from one life to the next. What is this ’something’&nbsp;if not a soul? Who (or what) moves on from this life to the next?</p>

<p><strong>What real evidence do we have that reincarnation is true?</strong></p>

<p>Why is there not consistent evidence for the notion of reincarnation? On what evidence is this idea based, aside from the writings of Buddha? While we have good philosophical reasons to believe in the existence of the soul, what philosophical reasoning brings us to the conclusion that reincarnation is true?</p>

<p><strong>If all of us are re-incarnations of prior human beings, how do we account for the growing population? Where do ’new’&nbsp;humans come from?</strong></p>

<p>Reincarnation implies that all of us were here before, in a prior life. But if humans can only be reincarnated from prior humans, how is it that the global population is growing? If humans can be reincarnated from other animals, does this mean that the total animal population on earth has always been constant?</p>

<p><strong>If ’buddhas’&nbsp;and ’boddisatvas’&nbsp;exist to help others in achieving ’nirvana’&nbsp;what is the true value of ’self-effort’?</strong></p>

<p>If, as a Buddhist, I rely on the help of a ’buddha’&nbsp;or ’boddisatva’&nbsp;how can my assisted work be accredited to me as Karma or even as true obedience to the Eight Fold Path. Doesn’t assistance negate the self-effort required to establish Karma in the first place?</p>

<p><strong>If ’buddha-hood’&nbsp;is actually achievable in this life, how are we to know that we are talking to a true ’buddha’&nbsp;or ’boddisatva’?</strong></p>

<p>If there are those in our midst who have actually achieved this level of enlightenment, how are we to identify them. Why should we trust their own proclamations of ’buddha-hood’? How will we recognize them or even distinguish them from non-Buddhist people who display all the attributes that are consistent with ’buddha-hood’?</p>

<p><strong>If a person’s present suffering is the result of bad karma from a prior life, why should we try to do anything to change their present condition? Aren’t they simply getting what they deserve?</strong></p>

<p>Why help those who are simply paying the price for an evil prior life? Passivity and apathy seem to be a common problem within Buddhism, largely in response to a concept known as ’samsara.’ Take a look at this recent article from an online Burmese magazine:</p>

<p>“This passivity is largely due to the promotion of samsara. Taken from the Pali word sam (succession) sara (going, wandering), it refers to the cycle of human existence, or the cycle of life and death. Samsara poses that people are mere guests in this life, and life is just a transit point. Samsara is the flux of mind and body, of mental and physical phenomena. Humans are travelers in the realm of samsara, where nothing holds permanent. Moments of sadness and misfortune, as well as glory and happiness, are accepted as part of the natural ups and downs of life. Burma’s political and religious elite has affirmed samsara as the only indisputable Buddhist doctrine, and the public has meekly signed on. Because so many Burmese Buddhists tend to see themselves against the backdrop of samsara, it has wide reach over existing social structures, even though Burma is not religiously homogenous. Every experience, even a bad one, is seen as part of life and the impermanent nature of the world. Rather than being angered or aggrieved by unfortunate experiences, Burmese Buddhism preaches that it is best to let them go” (by Min Zin, Engaging Buddhism for Social Change, March, 2003 Irrawaddy.org).</p>

<p><strong>If our present existence is the result of something we could not control (from a prior life), what HOPE can we have related to our present situation in this life?</strong></p>

<p>How do we hold on to hope for THIS life if our situation was predetermined for us and our present behaviors have more impact on the next life than on the present one? Doesn’t this view of our present life lead to an inevitable hopelessness? As it turns out, heavily Buddhist countries like Japan, Korea, and Sri Lanka have some of the highest suicide rates (from young to old). The top twenty most suicidal countries are almost all countries with strong Buddhist or Communist (atheist) histories.</p>

<h2>Biblical Questions</h2>

<p>Now let���s examine some questions related to topics that are directly addressed in the Bible. Buddhism makes a number of claims about the way in which the world operates. Let’s compare these ideas directly to the claims of Christianity:</p>

<p>You don’t believe in the existence of a personal God. As a Christian I do believe that God exists, and I believe Him to be a personal creator:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>Genesis 1:1</em></p>

<p><em>In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.</em></p>

<p><em>Romans 1:19-20</em></p>

<p><em>because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.</em></p>

<p><em>Psalm 14:1</em></p>

<p><em>The fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.”</em></p>
</blockquote>

<p>You don’t seem to have an answer for the origin of the universe or for us as human beings. As a Christian, I believe that the universe and all of us were created by God and that we are therefore real:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>Acts 17:24-31</em></p>

<p><em>The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ’For we also are His children.’&nbsp;Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man. Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead.</em></p>

<p><em>Isaiah 45:18</em></p>

<p><em>For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited), “I am the LORD, and there is none else.”</em></p>
</blockquote>

<p>You seem to deny the reality of our material existence and you also deny the existence of the soul and spirit. As a Christian, I believe that humans are real in body, soul and spirit:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>Genesis 2:7</em></p>

<p><em>Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.</em></p>

<p><em>1 Thessalonians 5:23</em></p>

<p><em>Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.</em></p>

<p><em>Zechariah 12:1</em></p>

<p><em>The burden of the word of the LORD concerning Israel. Thus declares the LORD who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him.</em></p>
</blockquote>

<p>You seem to devalue our present life as fleeting and illusionary. As a Christian, I believe that this physical life may be temporary, but it is valuable and worth living:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>Isaiah 40:6</em></p>

<p><em>A voice says, “Call out.”&nbsp;Then he answered, “What shall I call out?”&nbsp;All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.</em></p>

<p><em>Isaiah 40:21</em></p>

<p><em>Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been declared to you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?</em></p>

<p><em>1 Peter 1:22-2:3</em></p>

<p><em>Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and enduring word of God. For,</em></p>
</blockquote>

<p>“ALL FLESH IS LIKE GRASS, AND ALL ITS GLORY LIKE THE FLOWER OF GRASS. THE GRASS WITHERS, AND THE FLOWER FALLS OFF, BUT THE WORD OF THE LORD ENDURES FOREVER”</p>

<p>And this is the word which was preached to you.</p>

<p>You believe that the goal of good living is all about the personal reward of enlightenment. As a Christian, I believe the goal of good living is to honor God and demonstrate His worth so others would desire to know Him:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>Ephesians 2:10</em></p>

<p><em>For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.</em></p>

<p><em>1 Thessalonians 2:11-12</em></p>

<p><em>just as you know how we were exhorting and encouraging and imploring each one of you as a father would his own children, so that you would walk in a manner worthy of the God who calls you into His own kingdom and glory.</em></p>

<p><em>Colossians 1:9-10</em></p>

<p><em>For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please Him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God.</em></p>
</blockquote>

<p>You believe that suffering is the result of desire (and attachment) and may even be the result of ’bad Karma.’ As a Christian, I believe that suffering is the result of sin, our intentional rebellion against God. I believe that sin is not an abstract notion or a relative concept. It is clearly defined:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>2 Chronicles 6:36</em></p>

<p><em>When they sin against You (for there is no man who does not sin) and You are angry with them and deliver them to an enemy, so that they take them away captive to a land far off or near</em></p>

<p><em>Romans 3:23</em></p>

<p><em>for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.</em></p>

<p><em>Romans 5:12</em></p>

<p><em>Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned</em></p>

<p><em>Psalm 51:3</em></p>

<p><em>For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.</em></p>

<p><em>John 8:34</em></p>

<p><em>Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin.”</em></p>

<p><em>Galatians 6:7-8</em></p>

<p><em>Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life.</em></p>

<p><em>Romans 6:23</em></p>

<p><em>For the wages of sin is death</em></p>

<p><em>Isaiah 3:11</em></p>

<p><em>Woe to the wicked! It will go badly with him, For what he deserves will be done to him.</em></p>

<p><em>Proverbs 21:4</em></p>

<p><em>Haughty eyes and a proud heart, the lamp of the wicked, is sin.</em></p>
</blockquote>

<p>You believe that suffering is something that we should want to eliminate. As a Christian, I see the positive value in suffering; it can teach, it can discipline, it can provide a contrast to joy. As a Christian, I know that we can even find joy in the midst of suffering:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>Romans 5:3</em></p>

<p><em>And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance</em></p>

<p><em>James 1:2-4</em></p>

<p><em>Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.</em></p>

<p><em>Hebrews 12:11</em></p>

<p><em>All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.</em></p>

<p><em>Psalm 30:5</em></p>

<p><em>For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for a lifetime; Weeping may last for the night, but a shout of joy comes in the morning.</em></p>

<p><em>2 Corinthians 8:2</em></p>

<p><em>that in a great ordeal of affliction their abundance of joy and their deep poverty overflowed in the wealth of their liberality.</em></p>

<p><em>1 Peter 4:13</em></p>

<p><em>but to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing, so that also at the revelation of His glory you may rejoice with exultation.</em></p>

<p><em>1 Thessalonians 3:7-9</em></p>

<p><em>for this reason, brethren, in all our distress and affliction we were comforted about you through your faith; for now we really live, if you stand firm in the Lord. For what thanks can we render to God for you in return for all the joy with which we rejoice before our God on your account</em></p>
</blockquote>

<p>You believe that we cease to exist after death. As a Christian, I believe that we do not cease to exist after our physical death, but will instead live on to be judged for our actions:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>Revelation 20:12-13</em></p>

<p><em>And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead which were in them; and they were judged, every one of them according to their deeds.</em></p>

<p><em>John 5:28-29</em></p>

<p><em>Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment.</em></p>

<p><em>Hebrews 9:27</em></p>

<p><em>And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment</em></p>
</blockquote>

<p>You believe that humans can achieve perfection and reach ’nirvana.’ As a Christian, I believe that we can never achieve perfection, freedom from suffering, or any permanent more noble existence by self effort:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>John 3:3</em></p>

<p><em>Jesus answered and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”</em></p>

<p><em>Romans 3:10-12</em></p>

<p><em>as it is written,</em></p>
</blockquote>

<p>“THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE; THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS, THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD; ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS; THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD, THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.”</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>Galatians 2:16</em></p>

<p><em>nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified.</em></p>

<p><em>Titus 3:5</em></p>

<p><em>He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit</em></p>
</blockquote>

<p>You believe that we can escape the suffering of this world and the limits of our material existence by observing and practicing a set of practices. As a Christian, I know that the way of “escape”&nbsp;is only through faith in Jesus Christ as we are spiritually reborn with God’s life through the Holy Spirit:</p>

<blockquote>
<p><em>John 3:3</em></p>

<p><em>Jesus answered and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”</em></p>

<p><em>Galatians 2:20</em></p>

<p><em>I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.</em></p>

<p><em>Ephesians 2:1-9</em></p>

<p><em>And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.</em></p>

<p><em>Philippians 3:9</em></p>

<p><em>and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith</em></p>

<p><em>2 Peter 1:2-4</em></p>

<p><em>Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.</em></p>
</blockquote>

<h2>So, Could This Be True?</h2>

<p>Every worldview has to be both internally consistent (measure up against itself) and externally consistent (measure up against the world it proposes to describe). The challenge for Buddhism is to account for a system of judgment and reward (Karma) that lacks a personal judge that has the ability to DECIDE whether an individual has achieved something noble or committed something despicable. The very judge that is required by a Karma system is, in fact, lacking from Buddhism altogether. There are many philosophical questions that must be answered by Buddhists who cannot reasonably answer the first question of all worldviews (’how did we get here?’) In addition to philosophical difficulties, the Christian must recognize that Buddhism is incompatible with the Christian worldview (for all the reasons we’ve already discussed). As our culture embraces pluralism and tries to find similarities between every view of the world, we must be clear about the differences that define us and ask the tough questions that expose the failings of the Buddhist worldview.</p>
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title: A Whole New World of Pleasures
topic: Theology
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/24/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/a-whole-new-world-of-pleasures
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Greg ruminates on what we might someday experience with senses we do not yet possess.</em></p>

<p>One of the things we do here is talk about speculative issues. We’ve talked about the nature of time and whether God is in time. It’s sometimes fun to sit back and reflect on things. Some of you like to go out into the garage and just tinker, fuss with wood, tools, and things like that. You build things or improve things, and you don’t always know what it is you’re going to find or make when you go out there. I go out and start fussing with my fishing tackle. I don’t have a goal in mind, but sometimes I discover, fix, or change things, and reorganize them in ways that make my fishing easier or more effective.</p>

<p>We can do the same thing with ideas. We can begin reflecting, thinking about particular things. We might take a thought to focus on, but we’re not sure what we’re going to do with it. In the process of talking and knocking things back and forth, we can discover some things to be true we didn’t know were true before.</p>

<p>This, by the way, is why it’s very important for you to be open to concepts you have not come to firm decisions on. I hope you will only come to firm decisions on things because you have proper warrant. You might hold tightly to a theological view, but I hope you do so only because you have good reasons to hold to it. There are probably many things in your life, as there are in mine, that you believe without having really good reasons. You’re working with the best reasons you have so far, but it may be that something will change your mind. There’s no reason why you ought not believe in it, but you shouldn’t cling too tightly to that belief because your warrant or justification for that belief is not strong. When you cling lightly to things that are not well thought out that gives you the freedom to knock them around with somebody else. You are not restricted to a point of view you have to defend when the view may turn out to be wrong.</p>

<p>Sometimes it helps us to stumble on some very interesting things. I was thinking, for example, of what it must be like to explain the color yellow to a blind person. How might you explain that? I was talking to a class at Biola last week and raised this particular issue. Part of my point was that you either know what yellow is or you don’t know. If you don’t know, there’s no real way to explain what it is. A student mentioned that you could say, “It’s a hot color.”&nbsp;I’m not sure what that would mean to a blind person. This caused me to begin thinking about why it is that we’d call yellow a “hot”&nbsp;color. Isn’t it because hot things are yellow? Think of the sun, or a flame. We are familiar with some hot things that glow in a yellow kind of way, so we associate a certain temperature with a color. It’s not that a color has a temperature, but we make that association. Therefore, it wouldn’t help to describe yellow as a “hot”&nbsp;color to a blind person because they don’t see the sun that is yellow and hot. They don’t know the color of hot things so that doesn’t help.</p>

<p>I realized that there doesn’t seem to be any way to explain the quality of a color to someone who is born blind, nor does it seem possible to explain the texture of a sound to someone who is deaf. Textures of sounds are things that are perceived in such a way that you know them immediately, and you can’t describe them in any other terms than the experience itself. What does a strawberry taste like? You might say it tastes kind of like this other thing. What does rattlesnake taste like? Just like chicken. Well, everything tastes like chicken. What do turtles taste like? Chicken. Sometimes we have something analogous to compare other things that share categories, but how do you explain the taste of chicken? You can say rattlesnake tastes like chicken or a strawberry tastes kind of like a raspberry to a person who could taste a raspberry or chicken, but for a person who has no taste at all, how do you explain that kind of thing?</p>

<p>A few weeks ago I saw the movie “Mr. Holland’s Opus”&nbsp;with Richard Dreyfuss. One scene entailed a conversation between Mr. Holland, a music teacher at a high school, and his students. He was talking about Beethoven and his ability to compose music when he was totally deaf. In fact, there was a touching story that I understand is true which was depicted in the film about Beethoven called “Immortal Beloved.”</p>

<p>Beethoven is seen during the first performance of his Ninth Symphony Chorale, “Ode to Joy.”&nbsp;At the end of the performance it was such a shock and a tremendous experience to the audience that they leapt to their feet applauding for the maestro. He was standing on the dais facing the orchestra, and the conductor had to tap the author on the shoulder and turn him around so he could see the audience enthusiastically applauding for this magnificent work at its debut because he was totally deaf. He wrote the entire piece although he was deaf.</p>

<p>One of Mr. Holland’s students had asked him how Beethoven could know what a C note sounded like. Dreyfuss went on to explain that Beethoven wasn’t always deaf, but there was a time when those sounds were implanted into his mind, and even when he was deaf he could recall those sounds and continue to write music.</p>

<p>What this demonstrates is that there are some things that really exist that are pleasures. The pleasures of tastes, of viewing colors, of hearing sound are totally out of reach of comprehension for those who do not have the capability to receive them. In other words, for deaf people, for those who are entirely and completely deaf, or for those who are entirely and completely blind and have been so from birth, there is a whole world of pleasurable sensations that are not only out of their reach, but they cannot even begin to think about the texture of those sensations.</p>

<p>I lived in Thailand for seven months and I discovered a whole group of fruits I had never even imagined existed. There are all kinds of fruits that Western civilization has never even heard of, much less tasted, and some of them are absolutely wonderful. I discovered these delicious pleasures that I never knew existed.</p>

<p>I guess the application is simply this: To some people there are worlds of pleasure never even imagined, and they are not capable of imagining them because they have no “equipment,”&nbsp;so to speak, to experience those pleasures.</p>

<p>That gets me wondering, wouldn’t it be possible that there are a whole group of things out there, that are like colors, tastes and sounds, that we are not able to perceive and enjoy because we don’t have the right capacities? We think we’ve got the whole world here, yet it may be that, in one sense, we are simply seeing in black and white and think that because we can see textures of black and white we have the range of sight without even knowing there could be a whole world of color out there. It may be there are worlds of experiences, all kinds of different things, that could be opened up to us if we had the right apparatus.</p>

<p>It may be that there are things God has planned for us that are not only unexplainable, but completely unimaginable in the context of our experience now. Maybe this is why Paul said that when he was caught up into the third heaven, “I can’t even begin to express such a thing”&nbsp;(2 Cor. 12:2-4). There are no words to express it because there is no analog in our experience to make it possible for Paul to explain what he experienced, just as there is no analog to make it possible to tell a blind person what colors look like.</p>

<p>That makes me a bit excited because I wonder what could be out there that God has planned for those He has loved? What are the new pleasures we might experience? I think it will turn out that there is a whole new world of pleasures waiting to be discovered as God leads us into those things. A whole new world of discovery, a whole new world which will seem like Technicolor to the one-dimensional black and white of our present experience. It’s a world we will not be able to imagine on this side.</p>

<p>We have woefully deficient language to express these whole new worlds of pleasures that are beyond our imagination, but that God has planned for us. What a wonderful thought—and all from just thinking about tastes and colors!</p>
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title: Ambassadors for Christ
topic: Tactics and Tools
author: Brett Kunkle
date: 04/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/ambassadors-for-christ
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Brett’s monthly letter for October 2010</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>“An atheist from Berkeley is here.”&nbsp;The youth pastor’s statement caught me off guard. I was sitting in a church lobby, reviewing notes for a talk I was about to give. My first thought was, “What atheist in their right mind would drive from Berkeley to attend a youth apologetics conference in the Inland Empire?”</p>

<p>Seeing my puzzled look the youth pastor offered more. “His name is Tim. He’s right over there.”&nbsp;I glanced in the direction he pointed and recognized Tim immediately. I had met Tim, a recent graduate from U.C. Berkeley, two years ago on one of our mission trips. He had participated in a couple of our joint events with Berkeley’s atheist student club, S.A.N.E. (<strong>S</strong>tudents for <strong>A</strong> <strong>N</strong>on-religious <strong>E</strong>thos), over the last few years. I hadn’t seen Tim for more than a year and now here he was, attending an apologetics conference where I was speaking.</p>

<p>At the break, Tim made his way to my resource table. “Tim!”&nbsp;I exclaimed. Tim smiled and appeared genuinely happy to see me. Indeed, as he approached I grabbed his hand for a firm shake but additionally, he leaned in for a hug. I was glad to embrace him, realizing this hug was no small gesture. Often, when we imagine interactions between atheists and Christians we envision warfare, not friendship. But despite our opposing views about Christianity, Tim is made in God’s image. Tim is an intrinsically valuable human being deserving dignity and respect, not an enemy to be vanquished.</p>

<p>During the lunch break, Tim sat with me. We shared some fries and he quickly launched into a discussion of the cosmological argument for God’s existence, which another conference speaker had advanced. Tim is a smart guy. He’s well read. He knows science and philosophy. So our exchange was well-informed and lively.</p>

<p>Midway through our discussion, Tim surprised me. “I think there was a first cause to the beginning of the universe.”&nbsp;“What?”&nbsp;I replied. Seeing my disbelief, he quickly added, “I just don’t think the first cause was necessarily God.”&nbsp;I sat forward, eager to engage the issue. “Okay, what are possible candidates for a first cause? What could possibly bring something into existence out of nothing?”&nbsp;We embarked on a lengthy discussion of causation. Tim suggested quantum fluctuations as a candidate, but when I pressed him, he quickly abandoned the notion.</p>

<p>Through our discussion, I realized Tim had trouble giving proper weight to common sense statements because there were always questions he could raise. However, his questions always danced around on the fringe of an issue, preventing him from acknowledging the force of the commonsense notions he actually affirmed. Gently but directly, I addressed this perceived problem. “Tim, I think you suffer from a paralysis of analysis.”&nbsp;I explained, “The ambiguity you find on the edges of an issue shouldn’t stop you from affirming the truth you discover at the core.”&nbsp;Tim didn’t disagree and didn’t get defensive, but nodded approvingly.</p>

<p>Later, during the drive home, I reflected on my conversation with Tim. It had seemed productive. There was genuine warmth between us. I like Tim and he likes me. We had a calm rational discussion about life’s biggest questions. By affirming a first cause, Tim revealed he has made some movement in the direction of theism over the last two years. Hopefully, I was able to give him further reason to think God is the First Cause. But I was also able to direct his steps a bit, helping him recognize the “paralysis of analysis”&nbsp;he struggles with and encouraging him to move beyond his orientation of uncertainty.</p>

<p>Then it dawned on me. I was following Stand to Reason’s Ambassador model. The most effective ambassadors of Christ are those who employ knowledge, wisdom, and character. Tim respects my knowledge and therefore, engages me in discussion. I was able to maneuver in the conversation in a wise, tactical manner, even speaking directly and frankly when needed. But both my knowledge and wisdom were undergirded by an attractive manner—character—that provided the necessary platform from which to speak truth to Tim. It was a stark reminder that our approach at Stand to Reason isn’t merely academic.</p>

<p>And your support not only enables me to be an ambassador, but to equip others with knowledge, wisdom, and character—for the cause of Christ. Thank you for helping me equip a new generation of ambassadors.</p>

<p>Trying to live what I teach,</p>

<p>Brett Kunkle</p>

<p>STR Student Impact</p>
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title: Why Evolution Is Dogma
topic: Science
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/why-evolution-is-dogma
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Alan’s monthly letter for June 2011</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>Atheists like to fancy themselves as rational people. They claim they aren’t encumbered by holy books or divine doctrine. They’re free from the shackles of religious belief so they can follow the evidence where it leads. When a new scientific discovery is made, atheists claim they can welcome it without passion or prejudice. The only problem with this self-assessment is that it’s not entirely true.</p>

<p>Atheists also have sacred beliefs that are rarely, if ever, questioned. Evolution is one of them. They hold on to it with a degree of certainty that rivals religious dogma. Why? Because they have no choice. Let me explain.</p>

<p>Every person has a worldview, a set of beliefs about the universe, the meaning of life, the nature of human beings, and much more. Most worldviews attempt to explain how life arose on earth to give them greater credibility.</p>

<p>Christians base their origin account on the biblical data (although they also believe it is supported through extra-biblical evidence and reason). God supernaturally intervened to create plant and animal life.</p>

<p>Atheists, however, believe in naturalism, the belief that nature is all there is. There is no God, souls, or angels. Only physical things exist. Prior to the 19th century, atheists didn’t have a credible creation account. Then Charles Darwin published his landmark book, <em>On the Origin of Species</em>, and offered an explanation of biological origins <em>without appealing to God</em>. Atheists welcomed his theory because, at last, their worldview of naturalism had a believable story to explain how life arose.</p>

<p>Celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, reflecting on Darwin’s contribution to the worldview of naturalism, wrote, “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Charles Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”&nbsp;In other words, evolution filled in the creation gap of naturalism and bolstered the credibility of their worldview.</p>

<p>But this leads to a costly trade-off. Atheists no longer have the option to follow the evidence where it leads. If they accept naturalism as true, then they <em>must</em> believe evolution is also true. Why? There is no other option to explain how life arose. If there is no God and only <em>physical</em> things exist, then the only possible explanation for living things is a blind and <em>physical</em> process like evolution.</p>

<p>Atheists, then, will defend evolution to the death. It’s scientific dogma—unassailable. Don’t believe me? Ask an evolutionist what possible alternatives exist to evolution. They won’t have an answer because evolution is the only game in town.</p>

<p>It turns out that this is more than a fight over facts. It’s a war over an idea, the idea of naturalism. J. Gresham Machen, the late Presbyterian theologian, explained how to handle such ideas. He wrote:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of a nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Although evolution is a false idea, it’s the philosophy of naturalism that’s the root. Belief in naturalism drives belief in evolution. Simply providing evidence against evolution, then, won’t change an atheist’s mind. They’re not open to that possibility, no matter what science says about it. Atheists <em>need</em> evolution to be true. They have no other choice.</p>

<p>That’s why your support is so critical. Your partnership helps me train believers like yourself to confront the false ideas of this world and give atheists another choice.</p>

<p>Removing obstacles to the Gospel,</p>

<p>Alan Shlemon</p>
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title: My Most Controversial Teaching
topic: Christian Living
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/my-most-controversial-teaching
content:
            <div> 
		<p>A man shouted at me during my presentation: “I vehemently disagree with you!”&nbsp;It was the first time in my six years of teaching on controversial topics like abortion, homosexuality, and Islam that someone interrupted my formal teaching time. You’d think I’d said that abortion was permissible, that some people are born gay, or that Mohammed was a prophet of God. However, I said something even more provocative.</p>

<p>But before I tell you what I said, let me ask you a question. Have you ever said something and later had someone twist your words to mean something you didn’t intend? It probably upset you. That’s because we expect people to represent the meaning of our words accurately. When they don’t, you feel they’ve betrayed your trust.</p>

<p>It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that God doesn’t like His words twisted either. In fact, we’re obligated to use the Bible’s inspired words the way God intended. If not, we’re making the Holy Spirit say things He never said—and giving divine credence to those false statements. <em>That is not good.</em></p>

<p>Besides the ethical concern, there’s a pragmatic problem. Misunderstanding the word of God leads to errant theology, bad advice, and mistaken commands. This makes Spirit-directed transformation very difficult, if not impossible. That’s why Romans 12:2 tells us that if we want to be “able to test and approve what God’s will is—His good, pleasing and perfect will,”&nbsp;then we need to be “transformed by the renewing of our mind.”&nbsp;But that’s only possible if we learn what to transform our mind with: God’s <em>properly interpreted</em> Word.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, that’s not always easy. The Bible was written over 2,000 years ago, in three foreign languages, using at least ten different literary styles, and in cultures unlike our own. Biblical interpretation experts Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart warn us of the implications:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>There is a popular notion that everything in the Bible ought to be clear to everyone who reads it, without study or outside help of any kind. The reasoning is that if God wrote the Bible for us (for all believers), we should be able to understand it completely the first time we read it, since we have the Holy Spirit in us. <em>Such a notion is simply incorrect.</em> Parts of the Bible are obvious on the surface, but parts are not* [emphasis mine].</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Unfortunately for believers, the popular notion these authors warn us of is, well...popular. Indeed, I’d say it’s rampant. And entrenched. Many believers hold on to an understanding of a familiar Bible passage that is incorrect. But because it is meaningful to them in the way they’ve understood it, they’re resistant to considering a different interpretation. That makes the task of educating them about proper biblical interpretation very, very difficult.</p>

<p>So, when I began explaining to a church class how to interpret the Bible, I turned a few heads. And opened a few mouths. One of those mouths yelled at me and then walked out of my class. Why? Because I offered the following explanation.</p>

<p>In order to interpret any biblical text, you have to understand its meaning. There’s only <em>one correct meaning</em> to a passage. It’s the one that <em>author had in mind</em> when he wrote. That <em>meaning doesn’t change</em> over time or from person to person. As a result, there are <em>right</em> interpretations and there are <em>wrong</em> interpretations.</p>

<p>The <em>application</em> of a passage is how to live out the meaning in your life. Although there’s only one correct <em>meaning</em>, there can be many <em>applications</em>. For example, when Jesus says to love your enemies (Matthew 5:44), He means only one thing: love...your...enemies. That’s obvious. But how that passage applies to you might differ from how it applies to me. Your enemies might be the co-workers that harass you outside of work and mine might be family members that spread lies about me. Whoever they are, Jesus demands that we treat them with love. One meaning, many applications.</p>

<p>Although the Matthew verse is straightforward, it’s not always that easy. Sometimes it requires more work to determine the proper meaning of a passage. But one thing is certain: you must <em>first</em> determine the meaning before you can discover the application. With the wrong interpretation, you’re almost certain to get the wrong application and miss God’s message to you. Then you’re not applying God’s Word; you’re simply following your own thoughts. And that’s not spiritual transformation.</p>

<p>* Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, <em>How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth</em> (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003).</p>
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title: Are Mormons Christians?
topic: Other Worldviews
author: Brett Kunkle
date: 04/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/are-mormons-christians-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Brett’s monthly letter for August 2011</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>It was a simple request. “Would you be willing to take a survey on the differences between Christianity and Mormonism?”&nbsp;I asked, standing in the shadow of the Mormon temple in downtown Salt Lake City.</p>

<p>“I <em>am</em> a Christian. Mormons are Christians, too,”&nbsp;declared a puzzled-looking middle-aged woman, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). As we stood on the sidewalk talking, she expressed her confusion.</p>

<p>“We believe in Jesus. He’s our Savior. He died on the cross for our sins. He rose again. Doesn’t that make us Christian?”&nbsp;she argued.</p>

<p>She had a point. All the words sounded right. All the statements seemed solid, at least at first glance.</p>

<p>Clearly, many Christians seem to think so—that a move to Mormonism is just a change of denominations, not a change of religions. This may account for the high conversion rate. According to Mormonism expert Kurt Van Gorden, 75.3 % of all LDS converts “claim a previous Christian affiliation.”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> Southern Baptist leader Richard Land affirms the problem of losing their members to Mormonism: “There are now more Mormons that used to be Southern Baptist than any other denomination.”<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2">2</a></sup></p>

<p>Of course, if Mormons are Christians, then conversion to Mormonism is no big deal. This explains why even Christians push back a bit on the idea of missions to Mormons.</p>

<p>In July, I took 35 staff and students from Harvest Christian Fellowship to Salt Lake City for their first theological missions trip. For trips like this one, I help train them beforehand, and during the trip we create opportunities for dialogue with Mormons. Not only do Mormons object, but Christians reprimand us for trying to “take away a Mormon’s faith.”&nbsp;We’ve had Christian parents forbid their kids from taking part in these trips because they thought it wrong to evangelize Mormons. Why? Because they too think Mormons are Christians. So are Mormons Christians, like you and me?</p>

<p>Not according to Mormonism’s founder and first prophet, Joseph Smith, who allegedly prayed and inquired of God to reveal which church was the true church. Smith described his first vision of the Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, and their answer to his request:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join...“I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: ’they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.’”<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3">3</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>

<p>According to Smith’s account, God declared all Christian sects not merely wrong, but corrupt. The church had become an “abomination.”&nbsp;Mormon doctrine states that shortly after the original apostles died off, the Christian church had a complete falling away from the gospel known as the Great Apostasy. Therefore, the Book of Mormon is severe in its judgment, condemning Christianity as “that great and abominable church”&nbsp;and “the whore of all the earth”&nbsp;(I Nephi 22:13), whose founder is Satan (I Nephi 13:5-6). A brutal indictment indeed.</p>

<p>No, Mormonism does not merely take itself to be another denomination of Christianity. Mormons are the <em>true</em> Christians. Through Joseph Smith, God restored the gospel to the earth (<em>Pearl of Great Price</em>, Joseph Smith—History, 1:1-75) and has declared the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be “the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth”&nbsp;(<em>Doctrine &amp; Covenants</em> 1:30). Mormonism is the restoration of <em>true</em> Christianity according to official LDS doctrine.</p>

<p>And let’s be clear what this claim entails. Christians of any other stripe are <em>false</em> Christians. All other Christian churches are <em>false</em> churches. When LDS members attempt to soften or even deny these implications, we must simply point them back to their own authoritative sources.</p>

<p>What’s the point of this discussion? Are we just trying to beat up on the Mormons? Of course not. In John 17:3, Jesus says, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”&nbsp;According to Jesus, what does eternal life consist of? Knowing God. Any God? No, the <em>only true</em> God. Of course, if there is only one true God, any god who is not <em>that</em> God is a false god. And a false god cannot give you eternal life.</p>

<p>Mormons and Christians worship different gods. We took 35 students to Utah last month because eternity is at stake.</p>

<p>Praying for eternal impact,</p>

<p>Brett Kunkle</p>

<p>STR Student Impact</p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">Kurt Van Gorden, <em>Mormonism</em> (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1995), 16. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:2">Accessed April 4, 2011. http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/11/21/us-usa-politics-romney-idUSN1529102720071121 <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:2">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
	<li id="fn:3"><em>Joseph Smith—History</em>, 1:18-19 in the <em>Pearl of Great Price</em>. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:3">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
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title: Not Making the Social Justice Issue List
topic: Bioethics
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/not-making-the-social-justice-issue-list
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Alan’s monthly letter for January 2011</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>It’s trendy to talk about social justice these days. Poverty. Human trafficking. The homeless. These social ills stir up images of helpless human beings, hungry mouths, and women and children who are exploited. It’s not just politically correct to care about these things, it’s essential. But there’s one issue that often fails to garner as much attention: abortion.</p>

<p>I spoke at a church during a social justice month that had hundreds of people pack the auditorium for the human trafficking talk. But my talk on abortion drew only a few dozen people. Why? Because, as Greg Koukl writes, abortion is a yawner:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>On Tuesday, May 11, 2004, Al-Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi took a large knife and sawed off Michael Berg’s head while a video camera rolled. The clip hit the web like an earthquake. Those who could bear to watch stared, sobbed, or seethed. Nobody yawned.</p>

<p>On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, we watched—again and again—as jumbo jets vaporized World Trade I and II. The toll for the day, 2,752 American bodies, mobilized a nation for war. Nobody yawned.</p>

<p>Mention the word ’abortion,’&nbsp;though, and eyes glaze over.</p>

<p>Ironically, the bare facts are more hideous than Berg’s beheading or thousands of innocent people shredded, burned, or crushed by falling airliners: Every single day for 30 years more innocent Americans perished in abortion clinics than died on September 11, 2001.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Don’t get me wrong. Homelessness is a big problem. Trafficking humans is inhumane. A child starving is awful. But surely killing the most vulnerable members of the human community is equally deplorable, if not worse.</p>

<p>So if a Christian cares about social justice, then caring about abortion should rise to the top of their list. That doesn’t mean they downplay other concerns or focus only on abortion. But abortion can’t be ignored just because it’s not as trendy.</p>

<p>Plus, most people want to end homelessness, trafficking, and poverty because most people consider them evil or bad. But most people don’t consider abortion to be evil. They think abortion is needed. In fact, the right to an abortion is protected in the United States and other countries.</p>

<p>In 2010, I worked hard to fight abortion. I gave 17 training presentations on abortion in four states, was the featured speaker at a pregnancy resource center fundraising banquet, and debated a university professor on the legality of abortion. I trained both Protestant and Catholic audiences, at churches and schools, and spoke to both live and radio audiences. And that was in addition to speaking on Islam, homosexuality, tactics, and all my other topics.</p>

<p>All this was made possible because of your partnership. Your social justice list includes abortion and so you’ve invested in my work, and as a result, more believers are equipped to defend the lives of unborn children.</p>

<p>For life,</p>

<p>Alan Shlemon</p>
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title: Designed by Natural Selection?
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/designed-by-natural-selection-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Could it be the evolutionists who are being irrational? Is it possible that God design everything using natural selection?</em></p>

<p>About a year and a half ago, I gave a response to an article in the L. A. Times about a book called The Moral Animal—Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright. This response resulted in my commentary called “Did Morals Evolve?”&nbsp;There are some interesting things in this book I want to comment on.</p>

<p>Wright’s argument is that it is possible to explain all of man’s mental and moral development in terms of evolution, “survival of the fittest,”&nbsp;and natural selection. One thing he acknowledges is essentially the same point of view held by one of the world’s most famous evolutionists, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins makes the point in his watershed book, The Blind Watchmaker , that the world looks designed. He asserts it looks designed—but isn’t. He believes natural selection can be invoked to account for all of the things that appear to be consciously design.</p>

<p>Robert Wright unabashedly makes the same point. He uses design language in his descriptions all of the time. He talks about nature wanting certain things and natural selection designing particular things, but then is careful at different points to add the disclaimer that this design is just a manner of speaking because Mother Nature doesn’t actually design anything. Natural selection doesn’t design anything. There is no mind behind this, no consciousness. It just looks that way. However, since it looks designed, he feels comfortable using design language to describe natural selection as a designer, which is no conscious designer at all.</p>

<p>I think his work might be more honest if he didn’t use design language, but it’s interesting that he is at least willing to acknowledge that nature does look designed.</p>

<p>Incidentally, I am one who believes that natural selection is a legitimate explanation for many things. I think we can see natural selection at work in the natural realm that does influence the morphological distinctions&nbsp;of populations. The shape of the body is ultimately going to be determined by the genetic makeup of the creature, but whether that phenotype gets passed from generation to generation will be determined by environmental factors—natural selection. And that will then begin to characterize larger groups of the organism.</p>

<p>Basically I believe in what is known technically as the Special Theory of Evolution, or micro-evolution, because it has been demonstrated without question to have occurred. We can observe it happening. This doesn’t go against my Christianity or my conviction that God created the world. Darwinian evolution requires macro-evolution, or trans-species evolution.</p>

<p>Any design creationist of any ilk, whether old-earther or young-earther, can hold to this. For example, a population of mosquitoes can be almost entirely wiped out by DDT, except for those few who may be naturally and genetically resistant to that strain of DDT. Then they reproduce a whole strain of mosquitoes that are resistant to that strain of DDT. But this is unremarkable. When I hear these kinds of descriptions of minute changes and small variations within a species attributed to natural selection, I have no problem with that in itself.</p>

<p>I do have another question regarding the assessment, or acknowledgment, that the world looks designed. If it looks designed, it could be equally explained by either the unconscious “design”&nbsp;of natural selection, as the author argues, or the conscious design of a Creator. If someone looks at the natural realm and observes that it looks designed but thinks that it can be accounted for by natural selection, then they are identifying empirical equivalency between two different explanations. Empirical equivalency means the observable data can be explained by two alternatives equally. In this case, the observation of design can be attributed to natural selection or conscious design. The evidence is equal for both. That’s what it means to say that the world looks designed but natural selection can account for it.</p>

<p>My question is, why opt for the evolutionary explanation if there are two different explanations that will equally do the job? When you have a question that needs resolution and two empirically equivalent solutions, you must look for some other information to adjudicate between the two. Is there something that can be said for one system over the other that would cause us to choose it as the paradigm which better reflects how the world came to be? What is the compelling evidence that would cause us to opt for a naturalistic explanation over some kind of theistic explanation? Frankly, I know of none. There is only a predisposition to look for a naturalistic explanation that leaves God out. If that is the case, then it needs to be acknowledged.</p>

<p>Why go for natural selection rather than for God? Because God is religion and natural selection is science. Science is seen as fact—and religion as fantasy. If we have a set of physical facts that can be accounted for by a theistic explanation, then you have to have some other information that may cause you to want to dismiss the theistic option. I’m asking “where is the evidence that makes the God option an intellectually untenable one, without bringing in a mere philosophic assumption (namely naturalism)?”</p>

<p>One might rightly ask, where is your evidence that God did it? I can give lots of it. I could give independent evidence that is unrelated to religious authority claims. I can give other evidence why it is reasonable to believe and would be intellectually and rationally compelling to believe that there is a conscious mind behind the universe. I could give cosmological and moral arguments that God is the best explanation for the existence and nature of the universe. Many of these rely on scientific evidence.</p>

<p>Given two options to explain the apparent design features of the universe, one seems to be a bald-faced authority claim—the non-religious, so-called scientific one.</p>

<p>We have two options—one scientific and one religious—that equally explain the observation of a designed universe. The so-called scientific argument is sustained simply by a bald assertion that nature did it and not by evidence that God could not have done it. However, the design claim that I am making can be further substantiated by other evidence for the existence of God. When push comes to shove, if you are rational, it is more reasonable for you to adopt the conscious design explanation—the God claim. Most people are not going to do that because it is not scientific.</p>

<p>Why does that matter?</p>

<p>Because science knows the answer.</p>

<p>How do they know the answer?</p>

<p>Because God doesn’t exist.</p>

<p>How do they know that?</p>

<p>Because nature did everything.</p>

<p>But how do you know that?</p>

<p>That is the question we are trying to ask and there are no rationally sustainable answers forthcoming.</p>
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title: An Apologetic for Apologetics
topic: Christian Living
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/an-apologetic-for-apologetics
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Alan’s monthly letter for June 2010</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>Is apologetics a biblical concept? This is a fair question. Christians want to know if apologetics is sanctioned by God. It turns out that God cares a lot about it.</p>

<p><strong>God commands the use of apologetics.</strong> This alone should be sufficient reason to consider apologetics legitimate. Apologetics, or the defense of the faith, comes from the Greek word <em>apologia</em>. It’s a legal term that literally means “defense”&nbsp;and is used in the New Testament eight times. There are three purposes for apologetics:</p>

<ol>
	<li>Apologetics helps to defend against attacks at Christianity.</li>
	<li>Apologetics provides positive reasons for believing in Christianity.</li>
	<li>Apologetics helps believers who doubt their faith.</li>
</ol>

<p>The commands in scripture to defend biblical faith are clear. 1 Peter 3:15 tells Christians, “to make a defense (<em>apologia</em>) to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you...”&nbsp;Jude 3, warning of godless men, encourages us to, “Contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.”&nbsp;And 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 reminds us that “The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds.”&nbsp;We are to “Destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God.”&nbsp;The point is that God clearly commands us to defend the faith.</p>

<p><strong>Jesus modeled apologetics.</strong> John the Baptist’s disciples ask Jesus, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”&nbsp;In response, Jesus doesn’t ask them to believe who He is merely by “faith”&nbsp;or trust in His words. Instead, he points to the evidence of His miracles. He says, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up...”&nbsp;(Luke 7:18-23).</p>

<p>In a similar conversation, Philip asks Jesus to see the Father. Jesus responds by telling Philip that the He is in the Father and the Father is in Him. As proof of the Father’s power in the Son, Jesus says, “At least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.”</p>

<p>In one of my favorite stories about Jesus, some men lower a paralytic through the roof in order to get Jesus to heal him. Jesus tells the paralytic that his sins are forgiven. Realizing that people doubt His authority to forgive sins, Jesus asks, “Why do you question these things in your hearts? Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ’Your sins are forgiven,’&nbsp;or to say, ’Rise, take up your bed and walk’?”&nbsp;But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins—he said to the paralytic—“I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.”&nbsp;And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!”</p>

<p>To prove that He has power in the spiritual realm to forgive sins, Jesus demonstrated His power in the physical realm by healing a paralytic.</p>

<p>Whenever Jesus is challenged, He responds in a way that proves His point and answers his detractors. Indeed, He often uses questions to accomplish this, a tactic that permeates our apologetic approach at Stand to Reason.</p>

<p><strong>The apostle Paul used apologetics.</strong> Paul, who wrote nearly half of the New Testament, describes himself as being “put here for the defense of the gospel”&nbsp;(Philippians 1:16). Acts 17:2-4 describes his work: “Paul went in [the synagogue], as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ’This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.’&nbsp;And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women.”</p>

<p>Not only did Paul reason with the Jewish leaders to make his case, but he was successful at leading converts among them and “many of the devout Greeks”&nbsp;as well.</p>

<p>It turns out, then, that apologetics serves to make the evangelistic enterprise more successful. It’s part of the great commission. It’s part of my work. And it should also be a part of your role as an ambassador for Jesus. God commands Christians to use apologetics to draw people to the truth. I hope that my work and my newsletters have equipped you in some way to fulfill that purpose.</p>

<p>Because of our partnership training Christians to make an <em>apologia</em>, we follow in a tradition set by Paul, the disciples, and Jesus. It’s an important work and exciting work, and I’m thrilled we’re doing it together.</p>

<p>In defense of the Gospel,</p>

<p>Alan Shlemon</p>
</div>

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title: God, Front and Center
topic: Theology
author: Brett Kunkle
date: 04/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/god-front-and-center
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Does Christianity have anything meaningful to say about the most important issues of life? Not according to most teenagers. “For most U.S. teenagers...religion actually appears to operate much more as a taken-for-granted aspect of life, mostly situated in the background of everyday living...”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> Our youth live in such a way that their Christian convictions are severed from most of life. Monday through Friday they study math, biology, chemistry, English, art, history and more. They live with the constant hum of technology all around. They have jobs, earning money within our economy. But they do all of this as practical atheists, devoid of God.</p>

<p>In June, I spent four days at the Acton Institute, a public policy think tank in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was there to think carefully about Christianity’s interaction with law, politics, economics, family life, poverty, globalization and a host of other important issues. And God was front and center. Theology was brought to bear on each and every topic.</p>

<p>While at Acton, I paid close attention to the economic discussions, especially in light of our country’s current financial struggles. Many voices in our culture identify an economic system with greed as its foundation as the chief culprit of our economic woes. Certainly, Christians affirm greed is bad. But is greed the essence of the U.S. economy? Michael Douglas captured this sentiment as corporate villain, Gordon Gekko, in the 1987 movie <em>Wall Street</em>.</p>

<blockquote>
<p>The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Well, if Hollywood is correct, then a free market economy isn’t an option for Christians. Jesus is clear on the matter: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions”&nbsp;(Luke 12:15). Greed is immoral. So is our economy all about greed? No, but as I talk to young people across the country, I can see many have bought into this myth.</p>

<p>Charges of greed are misplaced. Can greed flourish in other countries, with different economies? Absolutely. Wherever you find human beings, no matter their economic context, you find greed. Why? Well, let’s bring theology front and center. Greed exists because human nature is fallen (Romans 3:23). Greed is a matter of the human heart.</p>

<p>As we talk about money and economics, we must distinguish between selfish greed and appropriate self-interest. This distinction is vital to grasp. Self-interest is not wrong. Do you desire food and shelter? Do you wish to take care of your loved ones? I hope so. Are these greedy desires? Of course not. Again, let’s bring theology front and center. Appropriate self-interest is assumed by Jesus. How does He tell us we ought to love others? As we love ourselves (Matthew 22:39).</p>

<p>Does self-interest have limits? Of course. When appropriate self-interest is abandoned and we move into selfishness, we have crossed the line into sin. Paul tells us, “Each of you should look not only to your own interests [appropriate self-interest], but also to the interests of others”&nbsp;(Phil. 2:4). But selfishness must be dealt with in the individual’s heart and not pawned off on an economic system.</p>

<p>On the other hand, are there serious dangers that come with money? Absolutely. Back to theology: Writing to young Timothy, Paul says, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs”&nbsp;(I Tim. 6:10). If we’re careful to bring theology front and center, we won’t fail to teach both appropriate self-interest in regards to money <em>and</em> the dangers of greed.</p>

<p>My time with the Acton Institute was a tremendous lesson in the integration of a Christian worldview with every area of life. And this kind of integration is vital for our young people. Whether it’s economics, psychology, medicine, business, law, entertainment or any other area of their lives, Christian young people must come to understand: Christ is Lord of all. But this won’t happen if we sit back and let the culture have at them. We must be purposeful and we must persevere in the training of our youth to help them develop a robust Christian worldview and live thoroughly Christian lives.</p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">Christian Smith, <em>Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers</em> (New York: Oxford Press, 2005), 130. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
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title: Evolution Is Philosophy, Not Science
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/evolution-is-philosophy-not-science
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Greg shows that Darwinism is driven by philosophy more than science.</em></p>

<p>I’m mystified by the opening sentence of an article in Friday’s Union Tribune (October 25, 1996). It says, “In his most comprehensive statement yet on evolution, Pope John Paul II insisted that faith and science can co-exist.”</p>

<p>So far, so good. I agree with the Pope wholeheartedly on this first point. If you heard my opening address at our conference on Science and Faith, you’d know why I think they can co-exist if they are properly defined. (How science and faith are defined is an important part of answering the question.)</p>

<p>I part ways with the Pope in his next statement. He said that “Charles Darwin’s theories are sound as long as they take into account that creation was the work of God.”</p>

<p>That’s an odd thing to say, it seems to me. I mean no disrespect here at all to Pope John Paul II. But doesn’t that strike you as odd? It seems to me that Charles Darwin’s theories—scientific theories, theories about the origins and development of things—are either sound or not sound. If they’re not sound, you can’t baptize them by bringing God into the picture and miraculously make them sound. And if they are sound in themselves, then you don’t need to add God to make them work, do you? It’s already doing fine on its own. Which is the point of evolution: mother nature without father God.</p>

<p>I don’t think evolution works at all. I don’t think Charles Darwin’s theories are sound, so I’m not in the least bit tempted to baptize them with some form of theistic evolution.</p>

<p>By definition, evolution offered an explanation for how things got to be the way they are without God (I’m referring to what’s known as the “general theory of evolution”). This is why it made such a splash. Do you think that if God could be worked into the evolutionary picture, then evolution would have taken off the way it did? Of course not.</p>

<p>Richard Dawkins, author of The Blind Watchmaker and one of the world’s preeminent evolutionists, was right when he said that Darwin made the world safe for atheism. But if Darwinism can be easily baptized with theism, how can it be that Darwin made the world safe for atheism? It’s precisely because evolution seemed to explain things that used to require the existence of God to explain them that Darwinism became so popular and accepted within ten to fifteen years after Origin of Species was published in 1859. It’s precisely because God is out of the picture that evolution is so appealing.</p>

<p>When you listen to evolutionists like Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould, he’s very willing to admit you can believe in God and also be an evolutionist. No problem. But that doesn’t mean Gould approves of theistic evolution. Gould means that plenty of his friends believe in God, but their belief in God is a religious thing they do in their closets, inside their homes and behind the closed doors of the churches. They don’t mix religion and science, God and evolution, fantasy with fact.</p>

<p>Gould’s attitude is typical of other evolutionary scientists. Believe in God if you want. Practice your religious alchemy in the privacy of your own home if you must. Just don’t pretend that it has anything to do with the real world. When it comes to the real world, the fact of the matter is that God was not involved in the process. Life evolved through non-directed, materialistic processes. Stephen J. Gould and everyone else who writes on this issue makes that very clear.</p>

<p>When people try to fit God into the process of evolution, that’s when evolutionists like Gould stand up and say, “Wait a minute, you don’t understand evolution if that’s what you think actually took place. Evolution is by chance, not design, and you can’t have design by chance.”</p>

<p>Theistic evolution means design by chance. That’s like square circles, ladies and gentlemen. There is no such thing.</p>

<p>The real question is whether the evidence supports evolution or not, not whether we can baptize evolution with the word “God”&nbsp;so Christians feel comfortable.</p>

<p>To put it simply, lest there be any confusion about the matter, evolution must be dealt with scientifically, on its own merits. Is it an adequate explanation of the origin of things?</p>

<p>I think it’s wholly inadequate. Contrary to the Pope’s views, the more knowledge we get, the more problems we see with the origin of life by evolutionary means—the more problems we see with the change from one kind of life into another by evolutionary means.</p>

<p>The passage of time and the increase of knowledge haven’t helped evolution; they’ve hurt it. Evolution was popular early on precisely because there was so little information about the process. Now we know much more about the details of biochemistry and genetics, and information theory, and the incredible complexity of even the simplest living thing. It’s become evident that evolution is just not capable of explaining life.</p>

<p>You want proof for that? Here, it’s very simple. This is my handy-dandy evolution refuter. It’s the simplest way I know to right to the heart of the problem, proving that evolution is not based on fact, but on philosophy.</p>

<p>For evolution to be a fact, you must have two things, minimally. First, you’ve got to have life coming from non-life—abiogenesis. Second, you’ve got to have a change in that life from simple forms to complex forms over time. You must have the kick-off, and you must have the rest of the game.</p>

<p>Now, here’s my question: How did life come from non-life? How did the game get started by evolutionary means. Does anyone know? Guess what? Nobody knows. Oh, there are some ideas and people have suggested some possible ways, but nobody has sketched out any way that really answers the question. There are so many problems and complications. There are competing models that have been suggested, but they’re just starting places. They’re just ways of saying, “Let’s start here, and we’ll see where it leads.”&nbsp;There are possibilities, but no one knows how it happened, or even how it could have happened in enough detail to be compelling.</p>

<p>Now, here’s the kicker. If you don’t know how it happened by naturalistic, evolutionary processes, how do you know that it happened by naturalistic, evolutionary processes? Evolution is claimed to be a fact, but you can’t have the fact of evolution unless you have the fact of abiogenesis. Yet nobody knows how such a thing could ever take place. And if life can’t be shown to have come from non-life, then the game can’t even get started.</p>

<p>Then why do we call evolution a fact when evolution can’t even get off the ground, based on the information we have right now. The answer you get is always the same: Because we’re here. It must have happened. That’s called circular reasoning, friends, based on a prior commitment to naturalism that won’t be shaken by the facts.</p>

<p>Which proves that this is not about science, it’s about philosophy.</p>
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title: Cosmic Junk?
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/cosmic-junk-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Greg’s response to a letter which asserted there is no qualitative difference between animals and humans.</em></p>

<p>Let me sum up my thinking on this. My point was not that all of math historically is discovered before any science is done. People are aware of early math—2 + 2 = 4—and they use it in the exploration of the universe. As they learn, and maybe even discover things about the universe that are not explained by math, people probe the area of math more to learn more about it. The exploration of the physical universe stimulates a pursuit of a non-physical thing, the non-physical arena of math. Math isn’t physical, numbers aren’t physical, plus and equal and minus aren’t physical, and equations aren’t physical. We write them on the board and there is a physical representation of them, but those are only tokens. Math isn’t the scratch of chalk on the board. Math is the concept of the numerals in plus and minus and equal relations. So, we can explore this world much like we explore the material realm. But they are two separate disciplines. Our limitations in exploring the material realm might stimulate our exploration in the non-material realm of math so that we can be more effective at exploring the material realm. But, if math came from science, science would not be limited by the lack of development in math. You observe that there was an attempt to make some sense of the movement of the bodies in the heavens that couldn’t be done because the math wasn’t up to speed. If math came from science in an organic relationship, then the science couldn’t be less than the math. The science would always be more than the math, if it was its parent. As it turns out, science was brought somewhat to a standstill, at least in some areas, until the math could be done that could serve the interests of science.</p>

<p>Now with regards to predictability, it was mentioned that there were charts that people had drawn up. I can sit on my porch every day and watch the movement of the sun across the horizon and notice that the length of the day changes in direct relationship to the position that the sun sets each day on the horizon. It moves across the horizon. Further south in the winter, in the northern hemisphere and further north in the summer. I can do this for 365 days and make a chart. Then, based on the chart that I developed inductively by observing the universe—which is a result of, not my mathematical calculations, but of my empirical observations—I could predict the movement of the sun in the future, given that the future is going to be like the past. That is what they did. They didn’t use any math at all, they simply used an empirical test inductively to be able to predict the future. Now when Newtonian mechanics came around, something else happened. Some mathematical truths were discovered that allowed people to predict the future, not inductively like we did earlier by looking at empirical evidence, but based on the application of the immaterial mathematical truth to the movement of bodies in the heavens. Once that was done, we were able to predict something that our senses had not been able to tell us. For example, we could predict the presence of other planets that should be in our solar system that couldn’t be seen yet. In fact, those planets were later discovered. I think there’s still another one out there. I’m using this illustration to point out the difference between scientific empirical assessment and mathematical discovery. They may go hand in hand, they may be happening around the same time, one might even stimulate the development of another, but math is not a result of scientific discovery. What I mean by that is, we don’t discover the theorems of math because we have observed truths about the universe, or because we have put things in a test tube. We discover truths about math in different ways. There may be empirical observations that help us to discover this, but we can’t even begin making empirical observations unless we know some things to be true about math.</p>

<p>Math is logically prior to discovery in the universe and that is why our discovery in the universe is retarded if our math is retarded. Maybe that’s the best way of putting it. That demonstrates that one is dependent upon the other. Science depends on math, and not the other way around. Also I mentioned that science is inductive, but math doesn’t get its validity based on inductive reasoning. We don’t know that 2 plus 2 equals four because we put it on a piece of paper 500 times and it keeps coming out that way, like doing an experiment over and over. You need only to do that once to realize that this is a true statement and it doesn’t have to be repeated in different parts of the globe by different people for us to be able to be justified in believing that it’s true.</p>

<p>There is one other thing that came up in this letter that I will mention right now. It has to do with the qualitative difference between man and animals. Carl Sagan, in the article I was responding to in Sagan and Scientism, had essentially made the comment that there was no qualitative difference between man and animals. I took exception with that. I think man is qualitatively different in that he has a soul made in the image of God. Here is the response from the gentleman who wrote the letter. See if you can see the implicit flaws of his scientific empirical presuppositions, which is philosophy, by the way, and not science.</p>

<p>He says, “Carl Sagan’s thesis on the qualitative differences between man and animals is based on objective fact. Again, any observer can dissect a human and an animal and find no qualitative difference.”&nbsp;Isn’t that a remarkable saying? I say that human beings have a different quality than animals. He says, no there is no different quality. I say, how do you know? He says, easy, you dissect animals you find blood and guts; you dissect human beings, you find blood and guts. Human beings are blood and guts, animals are blood and guts; therefore, they are the same thing. Now, I wonder how he feels about things like animals rights versus human rights. I wonder whether he gasses termites in his house and he doesn’t agree with gassing human beings.</p>

<p>Probably so, because he goes on to talk about my notions of justice and that “justice and rights are just simply expedient features of social co-existence and not intrinsic to man or animal.”&nbsp;This strikes me as a remarkable statement. Basically he is saying that there is no such thing as intrinsic justice and intrinsic rights as we were discussing last hour. These are just ways that we act towards each other to exercise territorial claims. He says, “the territorial claims (rights) of all animals are objectively testifiable and factual. Rights and justice are usually enforced through contests of brute strength. Mankind has resorted to mutually agreed upon laws to define and enforce rights and justice. The assumption of a higher authority enforcing justice and rights is purely wishful thinking. There is no evidence of a higher authority affecting matters of mankind at all.”&nbsp;Then he goes on to make this comment, “The Bosnian conflict and Rwandan civil war are ample evidence of that. If humans were endowed by a Creator with rights and justice, why would war exist at all? Justice is merely the stronger prevailing over the weak.”</p>

<p>This is the evolutionary explanation of moral things, with justice and rights being two of those moral things. It falls short for a couple of reasons. There are two things wrong with the paragraph that I just read. I want you to listen carefully. Carl Sagan’s thesis is there is no qualitative difference between a man and an animal and this gentleman supports this by saying that when you dissect them both, you find no qualitative difference. This is an example of a category error. In other words, he is looking at the wrong thing to try to discover something.</p>

<p>Let me ask you this question: Is Renoir a great painter? I suspect you would say “Yes.”&nbsp;In other words, he produces quality work. Is your two-year-old a great painter? I doubt it. Ask your friends. In other words, she does not produce quality work. But if you take a painting of Renoir and a painting done by your child and you put them side by side and you dissect them—in other words you look at the physical characteristics of each one—you will not be able to detect a difference. Both are on canvas, both are made of pigments, both made of oil, both made of some kind of paint, brush strokes are on each of them, they both have a wooden frame about them. A purely empirical analysis produces the same kind of characteristics. But, clearly there is a difference between them. Clearly, one is high quality, the other one is low quality, even though the physical assessment is exactly the same. Indeed, an artist can take 20 blocks of different shapes and construct something beautiful out of that. Someone who has no skill whatsoever can throw them all into a box and create a different form of the same physical objects, but it’s not beautiful. Here’s the point: quality is not a physical assessment. You don’t determine quality by assessing the physical characteristics of a thing. That’s patently obvious, it seems to me, with the illustration of Renoir and a child’s drawing. They could have exactly the same amount of paint and canvas and wood, yet one is great and the other one is worthless. Quality is a non-physical assessment of something.</p>

<p>When we go to determining whether there is a qualitative difference, a value difference between humans and animals, it does us no good whatsoever to look at their guts. To look at the chemicals, the placement of organs, and the content of their skin, misses the point entirely. The notion of value is non-physical and what makes a human valuable over an animal is not because they are made of better physical stuff. They are made of better soulish stuff.</p>

<p>That brings us to the next point. This is why the notion of justice applies to human beings and does not apply to animals. The author of the letter says, Oh no, you’ve got it all wrong. Animals have a “justice.”&nbsp;They have “rights.”&nbsp;Rights are just what we agree to allow in terms of territorial claims. What justice is, is merely the stronger prevailing over the weak. In other words, it’s just a behavior pattern of strong people over weak people. That’s all justice is. Let me ask you a question. I’m sure that you’ve said in the past that something is just or unjust. You might have looked at this past trial and said that was terribly unjust or you might have said justice finally prevailed. When you use the word justice, do you mean the stronger prevailing over the weak? Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, the strong using brute force to prevail over the weak is an example of injustice by most people’s assessment. If all justice is is strength, could I by the force of my strength and power, maybe with the help of a gun or something, silence the man who wrote this letter? Taking force over him because my strength with a gun is more powerful than he is? And would he say that it’s justice because I’m merely being stronger, prevailing over the weak? That’s not what justice is at all. That isn’t what we mean when we say “rights.” In fact, if that were the case, then there would be no justice for weak people. That would be a contradiction in terms.</p>

<p>We have an intuitive notion about this. At this point the writer is going to ask, where are your footnotes? My answer is I am the footnote, sir, and humanity is the footnote. Humanity knows that justice isn’t the strong prevailing over the weak. Justice is doing what is right towards the weak and the strong. That which is right, that which is moral, is not a physical thing. The moral rule of justice is not a physical thing. Human beings have rights and we ought to act justly towards them simply because they’re human beings and they aren’t cosmic junk. They aren’t just like everything else. I don’t think that this gentleman believes such a thing. I don’t think he really, down in his gut, believes this. I don’t think he believes that animals and humans are just alike except that they have different territorial claims. We just happen to be stronger than other animals and we call that justice. That isn’t what justice is. Not at all.</p>

<p>He feels my later comments in the letter about man being cosmic junk are “simply a derogatory term that’s emotionally loaded and misleading.”&nbsp;Then he goes on to say, “man is no more and no less than an animal, well-adapted to the conditions of this planet.”&nbsp;Ladies and gentlemen, that is what cosmic junk is! You see that junk out there? See that laying out there in that trash heap? What’s the difference between that and me? Nothing! Not qualitatively. I’m just well-adapted to survive. I maybe have a life force in me, but that isn’t a significant difference. That is not a qualitative difference. If there is no qualitative difference, then we are in fact junk. To say that we aren’t junk is to say that we have more quality than everything else. If we’re offended by that, then maybe we’re offended for good reason. Maybe we’re offended because we realize that there’s something intrinsically valuable about human beings and that’s why we can gas termites and not people. Not because we are just exercising our territorial rights. In fact, the German Nazis were doing that. They were the strongest. This notion of justice justifies what any strong person does against any weak person. But we know that’s not right. Why? Because we understand justice and justice isn’t a physical thing and justice doesn’t apply to animals and to non-physical things and to rocks and to junk in the junk yard. It applies to human beings. We are different.</p>
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title: Dominoes, Determinism, and Naturalism
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/dominoes-determinism-and-naturalism
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Those who choose to believe in determinism or physicalism don’t choose to believe at all—they believe because of prior physical conditions.</em></p>

<p>I want to talk about a concept that I’ve been rolling around in my mind. In fact, I’ve talked to you about it before, but it has come to the front of my mind because I’ve started to take classes again in my master’s program over at Talbot under J.P. Moreland. It’s a class on metaphysics dealing with naturalism.</p>

<p>Naturalism is the idea that the only things that really exist or matter in the universe are physical things operating according to natural laws. There is no God outside of the system. There are no miracles. There are no hidden forces that drive the universe. There are no souls or spirits. There are no prophecies. There is no inspired Scripture. It’s just physical stuff operating according to physical laws.</p>

<p>Of course, you can easily see that is this in direct contradiction to many things in the Christian world view and therefore is hostile to Christianity. One of the underlying claims of naturalism is that human beings can be reduced to mere physical things, and this is especially dangerous to Christianity because it means we have souls.</p>

<p>First, you can imagine the consequence for moral behavior. Second, if we don’t have souls, it seems hard to argue that Christianity is even possibly true. Let’s face it, Christianity talks about God and our relationship with Him, and our spending the rest of eternity with Him. We die, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, according to the Apostle Paul. If we die, our bodies are where? In the ground. And our souls are with God. But if we are our bodies, then our souls aren’t with God because our souls don’t exist and we are where? In the ground because we are our bodies.</p>

<p>This is the primary dogma right now in philosophy of mind and in neurological sciences. Everything is bent towards trying to reduce human beings to the physical makeup. A brain, central nervous system, feelings, emotions—all of these things are simply the result of evolution. Behavior is dictated by our genes. Everything is built into the body.</p>

<p>As Time magazine said in 1995, “There is no you inside of your body that is directing it, governing it, and making it happen.”&nbsp;They don’t know what consciousness is, but they know one thing for sure. There is no soul.</p>

<p>Having laid that foundation, I want to offer you an understanding of why such a thing is seriously problematic.</p>

<p>First, I think is a very powerful and compelling reason. The point of view is that if such things are true, if there are no souls, that there are only physical systems, brain, central nervous system, synapses firing, and that kind of thing, then we could never know it. That’s my point of view. If we are entirely physical, if there is no soul, then we could never know it.</p>

<p>Let me give you my argument why that’s the case. If you are following me at all, you are realizing that if someone wants to assert physicalism and it can be shown that physicalism can never be known if it is actually true, then it’s going to undermine the rationality of holding that point of view.</p>

<p>Let me give you the reasons why physicalism could never be known. I’ve got to start back a couple of steps.</p>

<p>Science seems to work pretty well. It seems to work pretty well for a reason. When you study something scientifically, it keeps happening on a regular basis regardless of where you are. If the conditions are the same, the result is always going to be the same. That is called experimental repeatability. That’s why they do repeat experiments to see if the result is always consistent. And if it is always consistent, then we seem comfortable in saying we have stumbled upon some kind of scientific principle that can be relied on or some kind of scientific law. That is, it operates according to a uniform pattern.</p>

<p>But why is it that things in the physical universe operate according to a fundamental and predictable pattern? It’s very simple. Physical things don’t make decisions. Any physical action turns out to be a reaction to something happening before it.</p>

<p>You ask, why did the earth shake when we have an earthquake. Because of the shifting of the earth’s surface. Why did we have this local shifting? Because of plate tectonics. You could in principle keep going back and back asking why? There will always be some other physical cause before it. So for any particular event, there is a series of physical causes that resulted in that event. And not just resulted in it, but necessitated it.</p>

<p>It’s like a series of dominoes falling. When any particular thing happens in the physical universe we ask ourselves what was the domino before it that caused it? And what was the domino before that? You can chart that. This just points out that all physical systems are deterministic. Every single action is determined, brought by a prior physical action. Science is the discipline that is meant to discover those prior physical conditions so that if we recreate the prior physical conditions, if we set up the dominoes in the exact same way, they are going to fall in exactly the same way every single time.</p>

<p>So the effectiveness is predicated on the idea that physical systems fall like dominoes. You probably never thought of it that way before, but I’m sure you are very familiar with the concept. What caused that other thing?, is the question we often ask. If you have that in your mind, that all physical systems are just a matter of series of dominoes falling and humans are just physical systems, then you will understand why if that is the way reality actually is, we could never know it to be the case.</p>

<p>If we can’t know it, we certainly can’t assert it as so. It might secretly be the case, but we couldn’t know that from any rational analysis. Why would I say a thing like that? Here are the reasons.</p>

<p>Science works because physical systems are strictly determined. Therefore they are very predictable and we can set a certain set of specific initial conditions and always know the outcome of those conditions. Science depends on a deterministic physical universe.</p>

<p>Now, of course, that turns out to be the problem, doesn’t it? Some of you are thinking ahead a little bit. I mentioned that it’s like a row of dominoes falling and in many cases, the cause and effect relationship for any effect that we view may be the result of a very sophisticated flow of dominoes, but they’re just dominoes nonetheless when you get down to the basics.</p>

<p>Picture in your mind two lines of dominoes that are falling. And at the end of the line of dominoes is not another domino, but there is actually a human being, a person standing there right next to a cliff. What happens when the last domino falls and lands on our poor unsuspecting person at the end of the line of dominoes? Well, low and behold, just as every domino has fallen up until then, the last domino strikes the human being and he falls too, right over the cliff. Now, here is my question. Given that scenario, did that person jump off the cliff? The answer is no, of course not. He was pushed. What was he pushed by? A falling domino, a big one, adequate to shove him over the cliff.</p>

<p>Now, what if the person who fell over the cliff actually thought he jumped on his own. Would he have done just as he thought? The answer is, of course no. The guy thought he jumped over the precipice but it was really a domino that pushed him.</p>

<p>The question comes to mind, why would somebody think they jumped when in fact they were pushed? How could they be deceived in such a way? Obviously if they see the dominoes falling and strike their body, they are thrust out over the cliff, and they know they didn’t do it.</p>

<p>Well, sometimes the dominoes are not visible. Sometimes they are invisible. Sometimes they are not external. Sometimes the dominoes are internal. Just as external physical forces can cause us to do things. Certainly internal physical forces, like genetics, can cause us to do something, as well.</p>

<p>On the physicalist view of the universe, everything is dominoes, whether you see them or not. Whether they are outside or inside, everything is dominoes. Sometimes we think we are jumping, but the fact is we are not. Instead, he fell because of prior physical conditions that were sufficient to cause the effect of us jumping one way or another. We are always pushed if there are only physical causes in the universe.</p>

<p>Now, let’s just make a small change in the illustration and you will see the problem with physicalism. What if he is not choosing to jump, which would be an illusion according to physicalism because he was pushed by the dominoes, but instead he chose to believe proposition.</p>

<p>Now, whether he is choosing to jump or choosing to believe, on the basis of physicalism neither of them are real choices. Whether it is the choice to jump or the choice to believe, the choice isn’t a real choice, it is just an invisible domino that caused him to act in that way, whether it was a physical act or a mental act. Once again, it’s all dominoes.</p>

<p>If that is the case, then what of the choice to believe that physicalism is true? You see, some people want us to choose to believe that physicalism is true because they’ve offered the evidence that we can consider, and the smart guy will put his money on physicalism as the point of view that is best supported by the evidence. However, if physicalism is true, then none of the choices we make are real choices, are they? Because then there would be a will acting freely. But there is no room for wills acting freely in physicalism. Everything is governed by prior events. Dominoes falling.</p>

<p>If it’s all physicalism, it is all determinism. You and I never choose to do something or choose to believe anything. It is always chosen for us in a sense, we were pushed by the prior conditions that cause our physical state of mind or our physical actions. There is no free will if physicalism is true. There is no free will to jump or not to jump. There is no free will to believe or not to believe. Our thoughts and our beliefs are determined by prior physical conditions.</p>

<p>Therefore, knowledge would not be possible, ladies and gentlemen. The reason we employ reason is because we believe people can make free will choices based on good ideas and good evidence. We say you ought to choose to believe this because there is good evidence that ought to inform that decision. It presumes we can choose. But if physicalism is true, we don’t choose anything. We certainly don’t choose to believe anything, therefore reasons are irrelevant.</p>

<p>In the final analysis, those who choose to believe in determinism or physicalism don’t choose to believe at all, they believe because of prior physical conditions. And those of us who choose to believe in some religious alternative, free will, and rationality didn’t choose that either. Our beliefs were predetermined by prior physical conditions, falling dominoes.</p>

<p>In neither case do we know anything. We just believe what we have been determined to believe by the falling dominoes.</p>

<p>If physicalism is true, then physicalism leads to determinism, and determinism makes knowledge impossible. Therefore, if physicalism is true, you would never be able to know it as all the physicalists claim they do.</p>
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title: When the Enterprise Got a Soul
topic: Philosophy
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/24/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/when-the-enterprise-got-a-soul
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Greg challenges a misinterpretation of what it means to have a soul which occurred on an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”</em></p>

<p>I don’t really watch Star Trek, and to be honest with you, I’m not quite sure what the big appeal is. I guess you either get it or you don’t.</p>

<p>Now, our friend Frank Beckwith is much more committed to the whole process. He knows all the stories and works some of them into his own talks. It’s interesting—as I hear some of the comments made and some of the plots developed—that issues are touched upon that border on being profound. That is, the issue is profound, even though how they treat it may not be.</p>

<p>One issue I think is profound is the question of consciousness, and what kind of value consciousness has. Apparently in one particular episode of “Star Trek, The Next Generation,”&nbsp;the Enterprise (the machine that flies the crew) begins to develop consciousness; it’s developing a mind. And so there are reflections on board. Consciousness is viewed in this context as an emergent property, a property that emerges from a certain organization of matter.</p>

<p>If you’ve read some of the recent treatments of brain function and neurophysiology, of course, this is the point of view. A year ago July, Time Magazine said, as it did an examination of what consciousness is, that the closest they could come to an answer is that consciousness is an emergent property.</p>

<p>It’s kind of like when you put a lot of H2O’s together, you get water. You put your hand in a bunch of H2O and you feel something; what you feel is wetness. Wetness is a property of water. It’s a property that manifests itself when hydrogen and oxygen are bonded together in a certain configuration and grouped together en mass. And so according to this view, consciousness would be a result—a mysterious result, but a result—of the organization of matter.</p>

<p>Now, I put it that way because I want you to notice that, when we view consciousness as an emergent property—which, as I understand it, is the most popular way of looking at it—we’re looking at the whole picture from the bottom up. What I mean is, on the simplest level—the bottom—we have molecules and atoms and subatomic particles moving about and connecting in such a way as to manifest certain qualities or properties on a higher level. So whatever is manifested on the top is a result of the configuration of atomic particles on the bottom. You put all these particles together and it results in these properties on top. We look on the visible properties and we ask what causes this property, and go back down and look at molecular structures and details and atoms and nuclear particles and that kind of thing.</p>

<p>The main point in that little analysis is for you to understand that properties that are emergent are effects and not causes. Very important. It isn’t that wetness causes the water or does anything to the molecules. It’s the molecules themselves configuring in a certain way that produce, as a result or effect, the property of wetness.</p>

<p>So the idea goes, this is the way consciousness appears in human beings. This approach, by the way, treats human beings as principally physical things. We are a physical body, a brain and central nervous system, and that’s what we are. As Time Magazine put it, there’s no “you”&nbsp;inside there, inside that body directing the process, causing anything to happen; some kind of immaterial homunculi that sits on the throne of your life, as it were, and directs the processes. No, that’s just a leftover from religious superstition, because science has never found such a thing. There’s no place in the brain for it to fit. That’s almost their exact words. Therefore, science has concluded that such a thing doesn’t exist.</p>

<p>That’s a foolish way of thinking. I’ve dealt with it in the past and I’m not going to approach it again right now.</p>

<p>But let’s just take that point of view at face value, that the physical organism functioning in a certain way produces a property called consciousness. This is what happened in the “Star Trek”&nbsp;episode.</p>

<p>The problem, of course, is that those on the Enterprise have a prime directive, and that is they are to respect all sentient life, all conscious beings. Now, what happens when the ship that carries them about—and is a tool for them to use in their endeavors and goals and purposes—turns out to develop sentience itself?</p>

<p>All of a sudden they’re not dealing with an inanimate machine which they can simply use, but with something like a person, which can’t be used in the same way. So they confront an ethical dilemma, which is the dilemma of this particular story.</p>

<p>I want to tell you why this thinking doesn’t work. What happens when the Enterprise gets a soul? How do you treat it? That’s the ethical problem they dealt with in this issue. The particular thing they were concerned with was that, in this case, they felt they needed to respect the autonomy of this consciousness and also respect, as a result, the choices it made. Apparently, they had to back off the controls. The machine which developed a soul had some goals of its own and had the Enterprise crew warping all over the universe, gathering up odds and ends for it to create a different life form which eventually left the ship along with the consciousness of the ship.</p>

<p>And that was that. It was back to a machine again. Solved that problem. It would be hard to have to fly a ship around in deep space when it had a mind of its own which you couldn’t violate.</p>

<p>This raises a couple of questions for me. The first question is about their point of view that the ship has a consciousness which they now must respect, and not violate its autonomy. They must be respectful of its own choices. My first question is, why? What moral obligation compels us to respect the autonomy of all sentient creatures?</p>

<p>In fact, there are other sentient, conscious life forms on the ship—the crew for example—and, I imagine, a bunch of other things, maybe some ship rats or some cockroaches or something like that. I imagine there are other sentient creatures there. Does the prime directive apply to them, too? Do we not squash the cockroach or control the rats because, after all, the rat did desire to get into the food stores? Does it have an autonomy that has to be respected?</p>

<p>That’s a minor issue, really, but it did pop up. But what about the humans on that ship? Don’t they have purposes and desires as well? And why is it that the ship’s desires must now trump the human’s desire? This is a problem with a prime directive that says you have to respect the autonomy of all sentient creatures. What happens when the desires between sentient creatures—their autonomous goals and objectives—are in conflict? How to you adjudicate between those different conflicts?</p>

<p>Why consciousness deserves rights at all is another thing. Where do rights come from? It’s almost as if, just because there’s this fact of consciousness, all kinds of privileges and entitlements accrue to it. Why do privileges and entitlements accrue to consciousness? Why do they have rights?</p>

<p>This is somewhat in keeping with the present mentality that you can pluck rights out of thin air. People do that. I have a right to do this; I have a right to do that. I have an inalienable right to breast feed a baby in public, many women say. I have a right to be a homosexual. Animals have rights to live.</p>

<p>My very first question to anyone who makes this statement is, what is a right? You’ll usually get a silence when you ask such a question. Because these people who are fabricating rights out of thin air—that result in obligations on your part, by the way—have never given any thought to the notion of what a right is anyway and what justifies their claim to having a particular right. Rights are just claims to things. They’re a claim to something that justice gives you.</p>

<p>Now, you can’t have justice without a law. And so you can’t have rights without higher laws that establish this entitlement. But if there is no God, it’s hard to imagine how one might have a higher law. Why can’t I just make up a right? I have a right to receive half of your income for Stand To Reason. Now, how is my rights claim any less legitimate than whatever rights claim you happen to be making?</p>

<p>So that’s another problem. How do you justify the rights? It sure isn’t enough to just manufacture them, because if we can do that, I’ll manufacture all kinds of rights in which I become the beneficiary, and the obligation is upon you to fulfill my entitlements.</p>

<p>But there’s another even greater problem that has more practical application to the question of the mind/body problem: the problem of the soul. The understanding about consciousness in the case of the Enterprise was that its consciousness arose from the material structure of the thing as an emergent property. Remember our earlier discussion? If that’s the case, then consciousness is on the top, not on the bottom. Therefore it’s an effect, not a cause. Consciousness doesn’t cause anything, it’s simply the effect of something. Wetness doesn’t change the water, it’s the property that results as an effect when hydrogen and oxygen molecules come together.</p>

<p>On this view of things, the human physical body operates in such a way as to produce, as the effect, consciousness. And in the case of “Star Trek”&nbsp;here in this episode, the Enterprise was just one of those physical things that produced consciousness. Now, if it’s producing consciousness, then consciousness is the effect. And if it’s the effect, then it doesn’t cause anything. If it doesn’t cause anything, it can’t decide anything. If it can’t decide anything, it can’t choose anything. If it can’t choose anything, it doesn’t make any sense to say that it has a right to autonomous choices.</p>

<p>Here’s the problem with this way of looking at things, the problem with what might be called property dualism, the idea that some physical things have two different types of properties, physical and mental. Notice that this point of view doesn’t leave room for a soul that is a thing in itself with mental properties, but that mental properties are merely the effects of the physical thing itself.</p>

<p>The problem is that mental properties are the results of the physical response. They never cause anything. Now, the problem with that is, it seems that mental states do cause things. It seems that we do make choices. It seems that we do think about things and adjudicate between good ideas and bad ideas and, therefore, exercise rationality.</p>

<p>You see, this bottom-up approach (which treats consciousness merely as a property) results in determinism, meaning that physical systems drive everything and produce consciousness. But all physical systems ultimately are determined.</p>

<p>You say: Here’s a feeling I’m having. What caused that feeling? Well, this configuration of electromagnetic impulses (or whatever) going through your system. C-fibers firing. And you say: What caused that? Well, some kind of chemistry in the body. Well, what caused that? Some kind of physical stimulus to the end of the finger or something like that, which ends up in the feeling of pain, but it’s some other thing that caused that.</p>

<p>And you see you can keep going back further and further and further, and there’s always going to be some prior cause, because all purely physical systems are always the result of some prior necessary and sufficient physical condition that causes the subsequent condition.</p>

<p>Physical systems are always deterministic. This is why science works. We look at purely physical systems and we know that we can set up the same physical conditions and get the same result, because the circumstances determine the result.</p>

<p>But what does that make human beings then, if we’re viewed simply as physical systems? If our consciousness is only an emergent property—it’s only a result—then it’s on the top. It doesn’t effect anything. It’s just riding along.</p>

<p>And if it doesn’t effect anything, then I don’t choose. What appear to be choices are merely the results of chemical reactions that happen on their own in a deterministic way in my physical body.</p>

<p>And if I don’t choose anything, not really, then it doesn’t make any sense to talk about my rights to autonomy as if I had choices. I’m not capable of choosing at all.</p>

<p>And indeed, if we’re not capable of choosing at all, then we’re not capable of choosing a good idea over a bad idea. Which means there is no rationality, because rationality means that we adjudicate between ideas and choose the one that makes the most sense, given the evidence. But if there’s no choosing, then there’s no rationality either.</p>

<p>So what this really does is make us all into just machines. Indeed, we start as machines, we end as machines. The only difference is, this machine has this property floating around on the surface of it that doesn’t cause anything. And if we’re machines, then choice makes no sense...then morality makes no sense...then rationality makes no sense.</p>

<p>And so, if the Enterprise got itself a soul, and the soul is just an emergent property of consciousness, then who cares what it wants? Indeed, even its wants are determined by its machinery.</p>
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title: Outmanned, but Not Outgunned
topic: Bioethics
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/outmanned-but-not-outgunned
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Alan’s monthly letter for August 2011</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>Walking into a philosophy club at a secular college and debating the entire group on abortion wasn’t necessarily easy. I had to offer a rigorous scientific and philosophical defense for the pro-life view, awaken their moral senses with graphic pictures of abortion, respond to debate challenges from any student, and handle a professor who was all too eager to interrupt the flow of the debate. Outnumbered by about 20 people, why did I take the challenge? Two reasons: One, to demonstrate the Christian worldview can compete in the marketplace of ideas no matter how the sides are stacked. And two, to try to save lives.</p>

<p>Since the audience was neither Christian nor respected the authority of the Bible, I offered secular arguments for my view. I began with a scientific defense that the unborn is a human being from the moment of conception. Then I argued philosophically that there is no morally relevant difference between unborn and born human beings. This is where I preemptively critiqued the position that most philosophers adopt.</p>

<p>They usually argue that human beings are <em>not</em> valuable. Instead, additional requirements are necessary to give them value. You have to be human <em>plus</em> meet the requirements on a list—be self-aware, have desires, feel pain, experience joy, etc.—to be valuable like born people. Therefore, abortion is permissible because the unborn, although human, doesn’t carry these qualities.</p>

<p>These lists aren’t new. They’ve been circulating since civilization began. They’re always made by those in power to disqualify the weak, vulnerable, and defenseless. Whether it’s slavery in America, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the Jewish holocaust during World War II, or abortion across the globe today, these lists result in savage inequality.</p>

<p>Part of the problem is that every requirement on the list is a <em>degreed</em> property. You can have greater or lesser degrees of consciousness, desires, ability to feel pain, etc. If humans have value only because of properties like consciousness, then it follows that since these properties come in varying degrees, basic human rights also come in varying degrees. As a result, advocates of this view can’t account for human equality.</p>

<p>It turns out people that hold this view face another problem. The qualities on their list are subjective and somewhat arbitrary. I pointed out to the philosophy club that everyone has a different set of qualities on their list. Who gets to decide which list is the right one? Apparently, the professor of the club didn’t notice the arbitrariness of developing his own list. In an attempt to respond to my view, he wrote a list of qualities on the whiteboard that he believed made a human being valuable, inadvertently illustrating my point.</p>

<p>Thankfully, I was encouraged that someone was listening to my arguments. One of the professor’s students chimed in and asked their teacher, “But aren’t you just creating your own subjective list?”&nbsp;Hallelujah! Even a pro-choice student got it.</p>

<p>The philosophy professor is just the latest in a long history of people making lists and using them to disqualify some human beings from being treated equally. African Americans were treated unequally when they were enslaved. Why? Because people had light skin color on their list.</p>

<p>Less than two months ago, Ratko Mladic was extradited to the Netherlands and indicted for slaughtering 8,000 Muslim men and boys during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). Why? He had a list, but being a Bosnian Muslim was not on it. So, he ethnically “cleansed”&nbsp;those human beings.</p>

<p>Today, people have new lists that include precisely the characteristics necessary to discount unborn human beings. Why? So they can kill them through abortion. Nothing has changed except for what qualities are on the lists.</p>

<p>I’m thankful for the 20 philosophy club students and professor who gave me an audience to present the truth about the most important social justice issue of our day. Fortunately, I was able to do more than just present. I was able to change minds. The pro-life student responsible for getting me invited to the event told me that at least two girls he spoke to the following week abandoned their pro-choice position because of my debate. Let’s pray their views influence others and save lives.</p>

<p>For life,</p>

<p>Alan Shlemon</p>
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title: Learn a Secret Skill of Pastors to Help Understand the Bible
topic: Theology
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/learn-a-secret-skill-of-pastors-to-help-understand-the-bible
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Alan’s monthly letter for April 2011</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>Do you want to learn the skills taught at seminary without the time, money, and energy spent on going to graduate school? Sorry, that’s not possible, but how about learning just one of those skills? You can learn a skill that pastors use to help them understand the Word of God in the time it takes to read this letter. Sound impossible? Not at all! Sit down, buckle up, and get ready to be seminary-ized.</p>

<p>Imagine I’m at a party and my eavesdropping friend overhears me say to my brother that I was building a little butterfly at home. Since my friend has kids like me, he assumes I was making a craft with my four-year old daughter. But he would be wrong. What I was doing was planning an investment strategy in the stock market (a “butterfly”&nbsp;is the name of a specific trade).</p>

<p>My friend misunderstood what I said for two context-related reasons. The first was because he <em>missed the context</em>—he didn’t hear my conversation with my brother from start to finish. Instead, he heard just the one sentence about building a butterfly. Had he heard the whole conversation, he would have heard me talk about my IRA, my retirement, and different strategies in the stock market. It would have been inconceivable to conclude I was talking about my daughter’s craft. Why? Because the context surrounding my butterfly sentence would rule out that possibility. Context, more than anything, drives the meaning of an individual sentence.</p>

<p>The second reason was that he <em>used his own context</em>. My friend was using his own context—about <em>his</em> life and <em>his</em> daughter—and imposing that on my conversation. As a result, my sentence about building a butterfly was understood in light of his own context and not the context of my conversation. But mistaking the meaning of my words is not as significant as mistaking God’s.</p>

<p>Take, for example, Matthew 18:20 which says, “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.”&nbsp;It’s common to quote this verse at Bible studies where two or more believers are present to affirm that God is among them. But remember my friend who didn’t hear the context of my conversation, but instead used his own context to drive the meaning of my phrase, “building a little butterfly”? The same mistake is being made here.</p>

<p>When you read the context surrounding Jesus’&nbsp;words (Matthew 18:15-22), you discover what Jesus was talking about.</p>

<blockquote>
<p>If your brother sins against you, go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that “every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.”&nbsp;If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector...Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. <em>For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.”</em>&nbsp;Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?”&nbsp;Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Jesus begins and ends by talking about how to respond to a sinning brother. Therefore, the meaning of verse 20 must be restricted to that context, making it unlikely that it is about God being present among believers. Instead, Jesus is explaining the conditions that are necessary to render a judgment against a sinful brother (thereby kicking him out of the church). Two or three believers must agree about his sin. When they do, their testimony is ratified by their Father in heaven (“there am I with them.”) on the basis of the church’s judgment (the two or three believers). Now, verse 20 makes sense because we understand it in light of the context created by the Holy Spirit. It’s about church discipline.</p>

<p>Ignoring the context created by the inspired words in scripture is one way to miss the meaning of a passage. But that mistake is compounded by an additional error. If a group of believers at a Bible study cites Matthew 18:20, then their 21st century experience creates a context that is foreign to the passage. Not only does it overwrite the inspired context of the Holy Spirit, it also alters what the verse means.</p>

<p><em>Biblical context <strong>+</strong> verse <strong>=</strong> correct meaning as intended by the Holy Spirit</em></p>

<p><em>Our own context <strong>+</strong> verse <strong>=</strong> incorrect meaning created through our own experience</em></p>

<p>Reading a Bible verse without reading the entire passage creates a context vacuum that is filled with our own experience. By reading the biblical context, we allow the Holy Spirit’s inspired words to “guide our understanding of scripture.</p>

<p>And guess what specialized, complex, and secret seminary skill is necessary to determine the Holy Spirit’s context? Sit down for this...<em>reading</em>. That’s right. It takes the basic skill of reading to avoid the most common interpretive errors. That’s why I teach, “Never Read a Bible Verse.”&nbsp;I believe we should always read a paragraph, chapter, or the whole book. That way you won’t miss what the Holy Spirit intended to say. And you’ll be transformed, not by your own thoughts, but by God’s. That creates a knowledgeable ambassador for Christ.</p>

<p>Transformed by His Truth,</p>

<p>Alan Shlemon</p>
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title: Was Jesus a Universalist?
topic: Theology
author: Brett Kunkle
date: 04/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/was-jesus-a-universalist-
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Hell is always a hot topic. “Rock star”&nbsp;pastor Rob Bell hit a sensitive evangelical nerve by raising provocative questions about Hell and suggesting that no one goes there in his book, <em>Love Wins</em>.</p>

<p>With many Christians saturated in the relativistic views of the culture, Bell’s message has found a hearing. But Bell’s Universalist views don’t square well with Christian orthodoxy. Why? Because Jesus wasn’t a Universalist. Indeed, the declaration that “Jesus is the only way to God”&nbsp;and what it entails—namely Hell—may be the most controversial claim of Christianity, so we had better have good reason for it. And I think we do.</p>

<p><em>What does Jesus say?</em> Let’s start with Jesus. We certainly don’t want to claim something for Him that He wouldn’t claim for Himself. If the Gospels are historically reliable (and we have overwhelming evidence they are), then we have Jesus’&nbsp;own words and we discover <em>He</em> claims to be the only way to God. In John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”&nbsp;Jesus doesn’t leave much room for debate. Indeed, Jesus says whoever rejects Him “rejects the One who sent [him]”&nbsp;(Luke 10:16). So according to Jesus, there’s no other path to God. If you think highly of Jesus, eventually you have to grapple with His claims about Himself.</p>

<p><em>Is Jesus special?</em> Those who claim all religions are basically the same simply haven’t studied them closely. Religions make contradictory claims. Hinduism says God is an impersonal force while Christianity teaches God is a personal being. Both cannot be right. Also, Jesus is completely unique among the religions of the world. Jesus’&nbsp;disciples taught that Jesus is God (John 1:1, Philippians 2:5-7) because Jesus claimed that Himself (Mark 14:61-64, John 10:30-34). No other founder of a major world religion claimed to be God. Now, Jesus was either right or wrong, and He provided a standard to verify His claims. Jesus said His resurrection from the dead would be confirmation (Matthew 12:38-42, Mark 14:28). Siddhartha, the founder of Buddhism, is still in his grave. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, is still in his grave. But not Jesus. He is risen, providing the ultimate evidence for the truth of His unique claims.</p>

<p><em>Why is Jesus the only way?</em> We are conditioned by our culture to think of religion as a personal preference. We are told, “You’ve got yours, I’ve got mine and there’s no right one.”&nbsp;So, to claim Jesus is the only way to God is like claiming chocolate ice cream is the one true flavor. It sounds absurd. However, preference is the wrong category for religious truth, ice cream the wrong analogy. Instead, we ought to think of religion the way we think of medicine. Each religion recognizes the world is sick and offers its own diagnosis, just as a doctor would. In addition, each religion offers a potential cure. And we don’t choose medicine like we choose dessert. It would be absurd to say, “Doctor, I prefer aspirin over chemotherapy.”&nbsp;Instead, we want to know <em>what’s true</em>. Which cure actually works. When you examine the diagnosis and cures offered by other religions, you discover they differ radically from Christianity.</p>

<p>In John 8:24, Jesus says “if you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins.”&nbsp;Here Jesus offers both diagnosis <em>and</em> cure. Sin is the disease we’re all infected with and Jesus is the cure. So, why is Jesus the only way? Because Jesus is the only medicine that can cure the spiritual disease—sin—that is killing us.</p>

<p>Sadly, Christian leaders like Rob Bell will lead many astray. His Universalist message runs contrary to that of Jesus and ultimately undermines the Gospel. But because of his “rock star”&nbsp;status, many young Christians will be enamored with the message of <em>Love Wins</em> because they aren’t equipped with the truth. Therefore, we must tirelessly work to train a new generation of Christians who can separate truth from error. Eternity is at stake.</p>

<p>Trusting that the Truth will win,</p>

<p>Brett Kunkle</p>

<p>STR Student Impact</p>
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title: The Absurdity of Life without God
topic: Philosophy
author: Brett Kunkle
date: 04/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-absurdity-of-life-without-god
content:
            <div> 
		<p>Atheist Christopher Hitchens has cancer. He wrote about his battle in a recent Vanity Fair article. It’s a moving account. And an inconsistent one.</p>

<p>Hitchens’&nbsp;writing presumes life is meaningful. I certainly agree it is. But remember, Hitchens is an atheist. In his worldview, any objective, transcendent meaning to life or its events is an illusion. No purpose here. Just a random collision of atoms in this cold dark universe we call home. Hitchens implies as much: “To the dumb question ’Why me?’&nbsp;the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”&nbsp;“Why me?”&nbsp;is indeed a dumb question when there’s nothing or no one to answer.</p>

<p>However, Hitchens smuggles in morsels of meaning throughout his piece. He tells us that in the “sick country”&nbsp;of cancer patients there appears to be no racism, implying that racism is really objectively wrong. The “egalitarian spirit”&nbsp;of the place accompanied by “hard work”&nbsp;are really good things to Hitchens. But how can we determine such things are objectively good in an atheistic world devoid of objective Good?</p>

<p>Rather than rage, Hitchens is “badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste.”&nbsp;But how do we make sense of waste in an ultimately meaningless universe? Rather than battling cancer, Hitchens wishes for “suffering in a good cause”&nbsp;or risking his life “for the good of others.”&nbsp;Noble ideas to be sure. But if Hitchens merely passes out of existence upon death, ultimately it makes no difference.</p>

<p>Given Hitchens’&nbsp;worldview, I find his atheist forefather Bertrand Russell to be much more consistent:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins...</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Don’t misunderstand me, I wish no ill on Mr. Hitchens. Count me in with the “astonishing number of prayer groups”&nbsp;on his side. I want him to beat cancer. I want Him to know his Savior. But I also want him to be consistent. I don’t want his life to suffer such an ignoble end, “buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.”&nbsp;However, such is the logical outworking of atheism. A meaningful life only makes sense in the context of theism, the very worldview Hitchens has given an entire lifetime to destroying.</p>

<p>My bigger concern is the thousands of young people Christopher Hitchens has influenced. He’s a wildly popular speaker on college campuses. His books are bestsellers and available in many college bookstores. His influence is undeniable. And disastrous. If young people buy Hitchens’&nbsp;atheism, they’ll not only lose God, but themselves.</p>

<p>In the Christian worldview, hope reigns supreme. Meaning exists because there is a Meaning-Giver. Redemption is possible because there really is a Redeemer. He holds out hope, even to the hostile cancer-stricken atheist, until the very last breath of life is taken. He’s the only hope a new generation of young people can count on.</p>
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title: Human Value Isn’t What It Used to Be
topic: Bioethics
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/human-value-isn-t-what-it-used-to-be
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Alan’s monthly letter for March 2010</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>Why would an alcoholic father, strapped for cash, sell his son and daughter for $30? Why would pediatricians at the University Medical Center of Gronigen kill 20 disabled newborn children each year? Why is it legal in Oregon and Washington for your doctor to help you commit suicide? These acts of injustice are possible because of a subtle, yet profound shift in how we value human beings. Our culture is abandoning <em>intrinsic</em> value for <em>instrumental</em> value.</p>

<p>Something has <em>intrinsic</em> value if it has value in itself. Its value is inherent in virtue of the kind of being it is.</p>

<p>Human beings have intrinsic value for one reason: They are made in the image of God. Genesis 1:27 says, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”</p>

<p>This verse implies two things. First, our worth is not based on what we can do or who we can become, but on who we are as an image bearer of God.</p>

<p>Second, our value as a human made in God’s image is not a degreed property. That means your value does not diminish if you lose your limbs, your physical abilities, or your mental faculties. Your value remains constant even if your contribution to society changes. It doesn’t even matter if you’re perceived by others—or even by yourself—as less valuable.</p>

<p>The concept of intrinsic value, instituted in the first few paragraphs of Genesis, has been the bedrock of Western Civilization for over 2,000 years. For example, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”&nbsp;Every human being has an equal amount of intrinsic value.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, the culture is shifting to an <em>instrumental</em> value system. Something has instrumental value when it’s a means to an end. It doesn’t have value in itself. Rather, it’s valuable because it can get you something else that has value.</p>

<p>For example, a lottery ticket has instrumental value. That paper you hold in your hand is not valuable on its own even though you bought it for a dollar. It’s valuable because it can get you something else that has value—the chance to win the lottery. Imagine your lottery numbers don’t match up to the winning numbers. Now, that very same piece of paper in your hand is worthless. It’s no longer worth one dollar because it lost its ability to give you a chance at winning the lottery. The ticket can be thrown away.</p>

<p>Unlike intrinsic value, instrumental value is a degreed property. You can have more or less of it. That’s bad news for people who are seen as only having instrumental value. As their value dwindles, it reaches a threshold where a person is no longer valuable. Some people refer to this scale as quality of life, especially in instances of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. When someone’s quality of life has dropped below a certain point, his life is not worth living.</p>

<p>Human trafficking, infanticide, physician-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research and many other social injustices all have something in common: They treat human beings as having instrumental value. And when humans are treated this way, the strong prevail and the weak get discarded.</p>

<p>Human trafficking victims are valuable because they are a means to some other valuable end: Money, labor, or sex. Once they no longer deliver on these things, they’ve lost what makes them valuable and they can be thrown away.</p>

<p>Disabled newborns, according to some ethicists, can’t bring happiness to their parents. They’ve lost their instrumental value, which is why pediatricians in the Netherlands kill some of them.</p>

<p>The elderly are sometimes encouraged to kill themselves because they’ve lost their ability to drive, walk, and work. Many times they’re considered a “drain on society.”&nbsp;If the only value they had was instrumental and they’ve lost it, then they can be thrown away.</p>

<p>We’re dealing with a culture that increasingly values humans as means to other valuable ends. My training and outreach, especially in bioethics, will, God-willing, help reverse this trend.</p>

<p>I’m privileged to have you at my side to help me defend the weak, the devalued, and the defenseless. And no matter how little instrumental value they may have, their intrinsic worth as image bearers of God is more than we’ll know this side of the resurrection.</p>

<p>In defense of human life,</p>

<p>Alan Shlemon</p>
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title: Weighing a Chicken with a Yardstick
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/24/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/weighing-a-chicken-with-a-yardstick
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Can science disprove the existence of the soul? Here Greg deals with advances in computer science and neurology, and the limitations of science.</em></p>

<p>I received a letter from a listener last week. Some of you might remember the comment that I made about four or five weeks ago that it’s impossible for science to prove that there is no soul. This gentleman was a bit bothered because he felt I was speaking in a vacuum, as it were, and I really didn’t know what I was talking about, and making a comment like that not only misleads my listeners into having a false sense of confidence about this issue, but also to those who know better it makes me a little bit foolish.</p>

<p>Let me give you a couple of points that he made and then I’ll give you my response because I stand fully behind what I said earlier. He mentions that I made this comment that science would never be able to disprove the existence of the soul or the immaterial mind then he quotes Christian philosopher Mortimer Adler. Many of you have probably heard his name. He’s written some fine books. He says that Adler disagrees with me in a particular book that Adler wrote, Intellect: Mind Over Matter. “Adler investigates the body-mind problem from a Christian philosophical perspective. He prefers to call the soul or immaterial mind the intellect. And he agrees with people like J.P. Moreland that the brain is a necessary but insufficient condition to explain the mind.”&nbsp;In other words, the brain works together with the mind, but it’s something different than the mind. It has to be there for the mind to work. Although Moreland doesn’t say that entirely, he does say there’s a connection. But it is something different from the mind, which would be my view.</p>

<p>The writer goes on to say, “[Adler] goes on a step further and says that if science is ever able to produce a machine that can conceptualize on a conversational level it will prove that the brain is sufficient to explain the mind and therefore do away with the necessity of postulating an immaterial mind.”&nbsp;Adler doesn’t believe this is possible, but the way to disprove the existence of the mind and therefore undercut the Christian position is to produce a machine that can conceptualize on a conversational level. And if it can do that then it will do what we think it takes a mind to do. That would prove that a mind is not necessary and therefore, by inference, would prove that human minds don’t exist and Christianity would be discredited.</p>

<p>The writer notes that “Adler spends some time explaining why conceptualization is the premier attribute of the human mind and why the experiencing of emotion is of no consequence, not the attribute of self-awareness.”&nbsp;This is an important point. “The reason I’m writing this is because you made your grand pronouncement that science will never be able to disprove the soul without giving any indication that you are aware of the implications of quantum physics, or of the progress in artificial intelligence and the neurological sciences. Aside from the fact that the onus of proving a proposition is on the person who makes it [presumably me in this case], and certainly the existence of the soul is not proved, it appears contrary to your assertion that this is a metaphysical idea that at least theoretically can be disproved by science. Adler points out that Christians would probably not accept this proof and would go on as if nothing had happened. But he knows that the game would be up and Christianity would never again be what it was.”</p>

<p>He concludes his letter, “I hope you will [respond on the air] because this kind of statement in a vacuum, so to speak, convinces knowledgeable listeners that you haven’t a clue as to what you’re talking about, and of course this contradicts the very premise of your show. Lest you think I’m some kind of rabid physicalist, I am a Zen Buddhist with a great respect for the Christian religion even though I consider dualism to be a profound error.”&nbsp;And it’s signed “respectfully.”</p>

<p>I would like to take a few moments and hopefully convince you that I’m not speaking in a vacuum and that I do know what I’m talking about. But I also want to give you some tools of thinking to help put down this broad concern. The concern is that because of the progress of neurological sciences and computer technology and the idea of artificial intelligence (I’m going to set the quantum mechanics issue aside for today because it’s a separate issue) that we’re actually getting close to a machine that can actually think. Once we do that, once we make a machine that can actually think and, in Adler’s words “conceptualize on a conversational level,”&nbsp;then we will have proven away the existence of the soul. When the soul is gone, Christianity is gone and our position is ultimately refuted. My response is you don’t have to be frightened of that for a number of reasons.</p>

<p>First, my view that science is incapable of proving that souls don’t exist is hard to escape given the current definition of science. That definition is based on a materialistic view of the world called naturalism. Science deals with physical things governed by physical laws. According to this definition, when the writer started talking about non-physical things he’s talking about theology or philosophy, but he’s not talking about science. Modern science deals only with the physical universe of cause and effect, governed by natural laws in a metaphysically closed system. By very definition, science cannot address itself directly to the question of whether non-physical things like souls exist or not. Such a question is outside its capabilities, as science is now currently defined. Some other method is necessary.</p>

<p>It’s as if the scientist is attempting to say, “We don’t see invisible things; therefore invisible things aren’t there.”&nbsp;But one can’t see invisible things precisely because they’re invisible. Of course you wouldn’t be able to physically measure a non-physical thing. Science has a tendency of assuming something doesn’t exist because it can’t measure it. But this approach simply is circular and, therefore, false.</p>

<p>Philosopher Dr. Greg Bahnsen calls this the “Crackers in the Pantry Fallacy.”&nbsp;To answer the question “Are there crackers in the pantry?”&nbsp;one need only go look. But not everything is proven in the same way. This is a physicalist response; it tests the existence of physical things. But a soul by definition is not a physical thing, therefore you can’t “go look”&nbsp;for it in a physical kind of way.</p>

<p>This was my principle point in the comment quoted. He wrote “Contrary to your assertion, this is a metaphysical idea that, at least theoretically, can be disproved by science.”&nbsp;I disagree. Metaphysical arguments can’t be disproved by science, even theoretically, precisely because they’re meta-physical. They transcend the physical realm.</p>

<p>It’s like trying to weigh a chicken with a yardstick. Yardsticks don’t give weight; they give length. If you said your chicken weighed 27 inches, you’d be speaking nonsense. It’s called a category error. Yardsticks simply weren’t made to do that sort of thing. That’s my point. Science, strictly speaking, is not even capable of testing for souls, so how can it disprove the existence of souls? It can’t.</p>

<p>Now on to Mr. Adler’s thoughts, and let me quote the letter writer because the wording is important: “If science is ever able to produce a machine that can conceptualize on a conversational level it will prove that the physical brain is sufficient to explain the mind, and thereby do away with the necessity of postulating an immaterial mind...The experiencing of emotion is of no consequence, nor even the attribute of self-awareness.”</p>

<p>First, when a dualist—one who believes there are two things that make a human being, a body and a soul—when a dualist speaks of the existence of a soul he means something much more than the ability to “conceptualize on a conversational level,”&nbsp;and any attempt to address the mind/body problem in this truncated fashion misses the mark wildly.</p>

<p>If the goal is to somehow prove that the brain and physical nervous system, etc., are fully capable of explaining what we believe the soul does, that the mind is really nothing more nor less than a physical brain, then he’s got to go the distance. His alternate model has to explain it all, not just one aspect.</p>

<p>To the contrary, the experiencing of emotion and the attribute of self-awareness is of tremendous consequence because these are both critical attributes of the mental life that require an explanation from the physicalist. These simply cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand, nor can one dismiss other mental attributes. Does this machine hold beliefs about things? Does it have intentions and purposes? Does it freely will to do things? Does it feel pain or fear? Does it experience the taste of a strawberry or feel the frustration of unrequited sexual desire?</p>

<p>If this machine model of mind cannot actually do these things—not imitate them; a mere imitation won’t do—then it does not do what human minds do. And if it does not account for all of the details of the mental life of a human soul then it does not “do away with the necessity of postulating an immaterial mind.”&nbsp;On the contrary, when we look at all of the details and ask the question, “What view best explains the evidence?”, the idea of an immaterial mind does a better job of explaining the vast landscape of mental experience than does the machine-as-mind alternative.</p>

<p>Secondly, “if/then”&nbsp;assertions (“If science is ever able to produce a machine that can conceptualize on a conversational level, [then] it will prove that the physical brain is sufficient to explain the mind.”) can be true conditionals but still be meaningless in the face of a category fallacy. The conditional statement “If I was a trolley car, then I’d have wheels,”&nbsp;is true but useless; you’re not a trolley car and you’ll never be one, not even theoretically. Adler’s statement about machines and minds is much like the statement, “If I can show you an eighth note that’s colored blue, then I will have proven that musical notes have color.”&nbsp;That’s true enough, as far as it goes, but such a statement doesn’t change one whit the fact that musical notes are not colored things.</p>

<p>The same category fallacy applies to this issue of the mind. A moment’s reflection will demonstrate that mental states simply are not physical things. When we contemplate our own mental life, we are aware of thoughts, beliefs, sensations, yet we’re not the least bit tempted to believe they are the sorts of things that have weight, texture, size or extension into space.</p>

<p>My argument is that these are precisely the kinds of things machines can never do by very nature. Machines are material by nature; mental states are immaterial by nature. And no re-ordering of mechanical parts is going to make emotion and ideas and desires and thoughts pop into existence from machinery.</p>

<p>So first, science by its very nature can’t disprove a soul’s existence because science deals with the physical and is not equipped to measure the meta-physical.</p>

<p>Second, a conversation machine is not enough. One would have to create a machine that could actually do—not imitate-but actually do—everything a soul does.</p>

<p>Third, that will never happen because of a fundamental category fallacy: physical things accomplish physical effects, and the mind’s functions are not physical, therefore a physical machine will not be able to do what a mind does.</p>

<p>With all of that said, I’m going to give you the farm. I’ll concede, for the sake of argument, everything I’ve refuted up until now—I’ll say that science can deal with this, that a physical machine can actually produce non-physical things like thoughts and intentions, and that it could do every little thing that a human soul could do. What then? What would that prove about human souls? Absolutely nothing.</p>

<p>And this brings me to my final criticism of this reasoning. Even if I granted this fabulous machine, a machine that had every single characteristic of a human being’s mental life, if I granted the farm on this one, it would prove absolutely nothing regarding the existence of a human soul.</p>

<p>If a machine was invented that could conceptualize on a conversational level, a machine that could hold beliefs, have intentions and purposes, freely will to do things, feel pain and fear, experience the taste of a strawberry and feel sexual frustration, the only thing it would prove is that a machine could understand, feel, think, desire, and get horny. It proves something about machines; it proves nothing what-so-ever about humans.</p>

<p>It may prove that it’s possible for a machine to feel through its machinery what a human being already feels through his soul. But it would not prove that a human being is a mere machine. It would not prove that a human soul doesn’t exist.</p>

<p>Actually, it might prove another thing (and this I got from a Star Trek episode, though philosopher Richard Swinburne argues this way, too). If a machine can be made to do all the things a human can, it may prove not that men don’t have souls, but that machines do have souls. Once again, it would not prove that human souls don’t exist. In fact, it wouldn’t even speak to the issue.</p>

<p>This is a serious flaw and I’m a bit stunned that someone of Adler’s stature has made this mistake. To “prove that the physical brain is sufficient to explain the mind and thereby do away with the necessity of postulating an immaterial mind,”&nbsp;does not lead inexorably to “human minds don’t exist.”</p>

<p>This is simply a non-sequitur. The second does not follow from the first. To suggest that the shaking house (to use a timely illustration) could have been explained by a large truck driving by does not prove that the truck shook the house, not an earthquake. The suggestion merely identifies the range of possible explanations. Even if a thing is a possible explanation, it doesn’t follow that it’s a necessary explanation or even the best explanation. That’s an entirely different question. An alternate explanation, even a viable one, simply is not a refutation of the first position. And that’s Adler’s mistake.</p>

<p>As you can see, my prior statement was not made in a vacuum, as was suggested.</p>
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title: Are You Ready to Talk to a Muslim?
topic: Other Worldviews
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/23/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/are-you-ready-to-talk-to-a-muslim-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Alan’s monthly letter for November 2011</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>At a recent event, I was introduced as Saeed Ibn Umar. Yes, that’s a Muslim name. But no, it’s not a pseudonym and I haven’t converted to Islam. I made it up because I role-played a Muslim to a class of Christian students. The goal was to see how well they could defend their convictions and respond to common Islamic challenges. The students had no idea I was a Christian, which explains why they suddenly got serious when they thought a Muslim was in their class. But that’s when the fun began.</p>

<p>I began by telling them my goal was to clarify misconceptions they had about Islam <em>and</em> Christianity. I said that Yahweh and Allah is the same God. I argued that the Bible is corrupt. I explained that violent jihad does not exist in Islam, but it does in Christianity. And then I asked them to respond to my points. How did they do? Lousy.</p>

<p>Ten minutes into the interaction and they conceded several of my arguments. One student responded with, “I see what you’re saying about Christians killing Muslims in Iraq right now...”&nbsp;Another said, “Okay, I agree the Bible <em>is</em> corrupted...”&nbsp;What? These were Christian students at a private Christian school. They’re not supposed to agree with my Muslim talking points.</p>

<p>After about a half hour of interaction, they were told my true identity. You could see the relief on their faces. But then it was grading time. On a scale of one to ten, they were asked how well they thought they did. Most students graded themselves with a score between one and four. A 10% to 40% score is not a passing grade—not even close.</p>

<p>That’s the bad news. It was evident they weren’t prepared. They need to be, though. One in five people on the planet is a Muslim. And their numbers are increasing...fast. The more we hear the news, the more we see Islam’s effect in our world. This is not a religion we can ignore. That’s why it was distressing to see the next generation of Christians so ill-equipped.</p>

<p>Here’s the good news. Despite their less-than-stellar performance, one student, named Kennedy, stood out. She was able to respond to my challenges and put me in the hot seat. In fact, she even did it graciously by calmly asking questions that cut through my sophistry. Kennedy’s arguments were so good that I had to lie and make things up on the fly just to avoid the force of her conclusions. I was impressed.</p>

<p>After the class ended and my true identity was revealed, I asked Kennedy about her training. I wanted to know where she studied Islam and learned to offer those effective arguments. Kennedy’s answer made me blush: “I read your book, Mr. Shlemon.”&nbsp;During her summer reading, she picked up <em>The Ambassador’s Guide to Islam</em>, learned its tactics, and applied it to the hostile Muslim she thought I was at that point.</p>

<p>I knew the arguments in my book worked because I’d used them on Muslims myself. But being on the receiving end of them gave me a new appreciation of their effectiveness. That was an experience I won’t forget.</p>

<p>Kennedy was prepared because she used a tool to train herself. But imagine an alternate reality for a moment. What if you and I never met? Although we’re both believers, we never partner together to train Christians. I never produce <em>The Ambassador’s Guide to Islam</em> and, as a result, Kennedy can’t read it. When she meets a Muslim, she’s caught off-guard. She can’t defend her own convictions, let alone challenge his views. Instead, the Muslim pummels her beliefs. Not only does Kennedy make no impact, but she walks away with new doubts that shake her confidence in Christianity.</p>

<p>Thankfully, that is not reality. Instead, you and I <em>have</em> met and partnered together. The fruit of our friendship has produced a tool to equip Christians to witness effectively. That tool has been Stand to Reason’s bestselling <em>Ambassador’s Guide</em>. And because Kennedy read it, she is prepared for her encounter with a Muslim. Not only is her faith not shaken, but she is able to turn the tables and challenge him.</p>

<p>That’s a reality we can get excited about. And that’s why our partnership is critical. What we do prepares Christians to be effective and confident ambassadors for Christ to Muslims. In a world where Islam’s influence continues to grow, this training is essential.</p>

<p>Without you, Kennedy wouldn’t have been prepared. That’s why you’re needed. I thank you. Kennedy thanks you. And one day <em>former</em> Muslims will thank you, too.</p>

<p>Your field partner,</p>

<p>Alan Shlemon</p>
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title: Can Science Test Prayer?
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/can-science-test-prayer-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Does science have the right tools to test whether prayer works? And is that the right question?</em></p>

<p>I have in front of me a piece in the Religion Section of the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>, Wednesday, December 20, 1995. It is about two weeks old. I’ve had it for awhile and I’ve been wanting to respond to it but haven’t had opportunity because other things have preempted it. But I think it is a good time to talk about this since the last couple of shows there has been some discussion of the nature of philosophy as it touched on religious questions. Some people, especially fundamentalist types, are quite hostile to the use of philosophy in helping us to understand our faith, or to defend our faith. To them, the Bible is adequate.</p>

<p>But whenever anybody makes the statement that the Bible is adequate, my question is “Adequate for what?”&nbsp;And that needs to be clarified, which is actually part of the point about philosophy. I mentioned a couple of days ago that the main help of philosophy is allowing you to make distinctions that you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to make. In this case, I am asking for a distinction. When you say the Bible is fully adequate, my question is, “Adequate for what?”&nbsp;Because obviously it is not adequate to fix my plumbing, so it is not adequate for everything one might imagine. It is adequate for particular things. So before you can agree to the truthfulness of the statement that the Bible is adequate, you need more clarification and more precise distinctions.</p>

<p>Prayer, I think, is one of the most—I almost said nebulous—but that isn’t quite what I mean. To be more precise, I think it is one of the most difficult things to understand. It is a hard thing to master. I have attended different conferences on prayer, read books on prayer, done Bible study myself on prayer and I notice that there are some people that approach prayer in what I would consider a very mechanistic fashion. If you look at some, and this tends to be more Pentecostal types, and I’m not putting down Pentecostals because I am one—but it seems to be that those who are of the Pentecostal side of the theological perspective, theological continuum, or more in this area than others. They approach prayer kind of mechanistically. They see it as just the right means to accomplish an end. If you just get all the proper things in a row, and you press the right scriptural buttons and you do these particular things, bang-go, you’ve got your answer to prayer. And so you have these formulas to pray.</p>

<p>I think that there are things obviously that are hindrances to prayer. And there are things that will get prayer answered more readily. But it is a mistake when we start thinking about prayer in a mechanistic fashion, as if we just apply a particular formula and the formula then must accomplish its particular end. Because prayer is not a machine-working kind of thing. And this helps us by the way to understand why some prayers aren’t answered.</p>

<p>C.S. Lewis wrote a wonderful piece just before he died. It is called “Letters to Malcom”&nbsp;mostly, or chiefly, on prayer. And in that, he talks about the reason that prayer doesn’t always get answered, or that we have a hard time even finding a mechanistic way of treating prayer, is because prayer is not a machine. It isn’t like you can just put this cog with this wheel and this lever and the laws of nature then work in the process of the right construction of this prayer machine such as to produce a predictable result if you just work the machine properly. The fact is, when you are dealing with prayer, when you are praying, you’re dealing not with a machine, but with a Person. You are making a request of a Person. And that Person is God. Persons don’t act like machines. There are times that persons just will things that may be different from what we anticipate and part of the mystery of prayer has to do with the will of God.</p>

<p>So, Lewis makes this point and I think this is an underlying problem with people trying to reduce prayer to a mechanistic process. And examine it like that in a somewhat scientific way. That is what is done here in this article entitled, “The Healing Power of Prayer is Tested by Science.”&nbsp;The Wall Street Journal writer here, Joseph Pereira, starts his article this way, “Kate McPherson stands beside a massage table in Loveland, Colorado, praying for someone dying of AIDS in San Francisco whom she has never met. With a photograph of the man in view, she moves her hands over an imaged outline of his body. In her outstretched hands, McPherson says she senses warmth, a connection with God. The patient's ’energy centers are up,’ she says. He ’could have grown strong or he may have passed on.’”&nbsp;(I think that is kind of interesting. He is either getting better or he’s dead is her assessment!). “’Sometimes,’ she continues, ’when you die there is this tremendous burst of energy.’”</p>

<p>The article goes on, “The patient’s post-prayer condition will only be revealed next month when his responses, or lack thereof, become part of a research and report on remote healing. Ms. McPherson, a registered nurse, is praying as a part of a controlled study run by psychiatrists at the University of California in San Francisco, one of a growing number of attempts to prove whether prayer can heal.”</p>

<p>Now one thing you might notice right from the outset is this perspective on prayer, or this description of prayer certainly isn’t what Christians do when they pray. They don’t pass their hands over a photo and by doing so sense energy fields and they think in the process of intending another person’s healing that that person will in fact experience a result. Prayer is addressing a divine being, God, who is a Person, who has the power and capability of changing things in other parts of the world in a supernatural way and it is our request of Him to do so. So, this is not even a really good description of what Christian prayer is. But there is another problem with it.</p>

<p>The problem is obvious to me because I am able to make a distinction between certain types of causes. This distinction, coming from essentially philosophy, allows me to answer this and make corrections in my own prayer life. So the application is coming up here, how knowing certain distinctions in philosophy actually helps you to do better theological work and improve your personal relationship with God.</p>

<p>Part of my point is that being able to make certain distinctions, which is the task of philosophy, helps us to answer this question. I was alerted to this distinction listening to a debate, a fairly well- known debate, between Gordon Stein (who is an atheist) and the late Dr. Greg Bahnson (who was a Christian). The debate was over at UC Irvine and many of you have heard that debate. But in that debate, Dr. Stein raises some objections about some things. For one, he suggests that it is inappropriate to appeal to God as the Creator of the universe because he says that is circular reasoning. You can’t appeal to God as the Creator of the universe because that presumes that God exists which is the very thing that you are debating. First you must prove that God exists before you can assert or even suggest that He might have created everything. Now, I think he was missing the boat there. I’ll explain why and how it relates to this issue of causation in just a moment.</p>

<p>What is interesting is that Gordon Stein is also quoted in this article, “The Healing Power of Prayer is Tested by Science,” in the Wall Street Journal. He makes a comment that I actually agree with and is at the heart of some of my objection about using science to test prayer. The article reads, “Another critic of the prayer research is Gordon Stein, a senior editor of Free Inquiry, a religious magazine with a liberal bent. ’Studies like the one at the University of New Mexico,’&nbsp;he says, ’make the assumption that God is a sort of Pavlovian dog. Say a prayer, and he or she answers.’”&nbsp;Now, I agree with this statement. If you want to test something scientifically, the only things that you can really test are those things in which there is a necessary cause and effect. And if we test God scientifically, we are turning God into a participant in a mere cause and effect process, which makes Him somewhat like a machine. God isn’t a machine, He is a Person.</p>

<p>Now, I think we can use methods of science and scientific testing of what we can see to draw conclusions about that which we can’t see but that is a different kind of thing. It’s an inferential kind of thing and that’s fully appropriate. And that does address the question of the creation of the world. Let me put it this way to bring it more into focus. Facts about the world are discovered in different ways. Take for example the nature of matter verses the guilt or innocence of a criminal case. Can you see how one would use different methods to determine the fact about the nature of matter than he would the fact about the guilt or innocence of a person in criminal case? The one you can do with strict scientific method. You can test things. You measure things. You can weigh things. You can’t do that about the question of fact in a murder trial. Because it doesn’t lend itself to that kind of testing. You use a different method. It doesn’t mean you can’t possibly know with a reasonable assurance who might have killed someone, just because you can’t put it in a test tube, which makes the point that there are different ways of learning things and science is only one of them. A law method would be another way of learning facts about the world. In this case, historical facts. Did a particular event take place, and who was party to that event?</p>

<p>Here is another way of putting that, by the way. I gave you the illustration of the nature of matter, facts pertaining to the nature of matter, and facts pertaining to the guilt or innocence of a person in an alleged crime. What this highlights is two different types of causes. Here comes the philosophic distinction. There is a difference between event causation and agent causation. Event causation where mindless physical events happen in process and in sequence and we intersect that series of events, look at one of those events and infer from that event something that caused it before which was another event. This is the scientific method. We examine the laws of the natural world and we apply science to find out what events caused what particular things. But when it comes to a criminal case, we don’t talk about events, not strictly speaking. We talk about people choosing. Agents causing something by an exercise of their will. He was angry and that was the contributing factor that resulted in his willful decision to commit the crime of murder. And you use one method to prove one kind of thing, event causation, and another method to prove another kind of thing, agent causation. In other words, you must use a method appropriate to the kind of question you are asking.</p>

<p>This relates to what Greg Bahnson called the “crackers in the pantry”&nbsp;fallacy. He said, if there are crackers in the house you just go into the pantry and you look. That’s how you find out if there are crackers in the pantry. But if you want to ask the question about whether God exists or whether human beings have a soul, or whether Jesus rose from the dead or not, you can’t go to the pantry and look. You can’t go anywhere and look in that fashion. You have to use a different method of answering that question. This is why I think Gordon Stein’s objection misses the mark. His objection that positing God as the source of everything, is an example of circular reasoning because you first have to prove God exists. One can use a different method and I will explain that in just a minute, to make the case for God and this relates to the prayer question, too.</p>

<p>Some of you have heard of a scientific project called SETI—Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. They beam this big electronic ear towards other solar systems and they hope to hear something from it. Now, would it be reasonable to conclude from intelligent communication that someone intelligent out there is communicating? What if I said to you, You can’t ascribe this intelligent communication to an extra-terrestrial because that presumes they exist!? You must first prove to me that extra- terrestrials exist before you can ascribe this communication to that extra-terrestrial. See how that silly that is, ladies and gentlemen? Examining effects is just the way we determine if particular kinds of causes, (intelligent agents, in this case), actually do exist. Science is always starting with an effect and tries to infer the nature of the cause. It simply does no good to say, you must first prove that magnetic fields exist before you can suggest that magnetic fields are responsible for this phenomenon of metals filings taking a certain shape around a magnet, for example.</p>

<p>This broad issue, this distinction between event causation and agent causation, (and both can be inferred from the right kind of evidence, it seems to me) relates to the prior question. It does show a problem, I think, with using science to assess the issue of prayer. Strictly speaking, science can only test event causation, where one event causes another event causes another event. Because that is the only thing that is strictly deterministic, which is to say certain combinations of circumstances always and necessarily have particular consequences. You have water, a certain amount of water, subjected to a certain amount of heat and if you know the amount of water and the starting temperature and you know how much heat, you will be able to predict exactly when that water must boil (you also must know the atmospheric pressure) but if you know the surrounding circumstances and other events, you can predict exactly when that water must boil because it is determined by natural laws. That’s what allows experimental repeatability.</p>

<p>But this deterministic element of naturalistic processes that makes science possible is precisely what disqualifies science in its strict sense from answering any questions about agent causation or in answering questions about the non-material world. We can’t use science to answer questions about the nature of prayer because prayer is not a natural process that is determined by certain prior events. Prayer is the act of one willing agent making a request of another willing Agent and that second willing Agent may choose to answer, or He may choose not to. It doesn’t mean that we can’t find out some patterns that relate to the personality of the agents involved to predict how they might respond, but willing agents are not machines and because they are not machines, or as Gordon Stein put it “Pavlovian dogs,” they are not going to necessarily respond in particular ways. And that of course is the problem of prayer. It’s the problem of relationships. You are dealing with wills. You are dealing with agents. This helps by the way, in our relationship with God because we understand that there are different kinds of causes, we can make a philosophic distinction between event causation which is deterministic and can be measured by science, and agent causation which relates to willing beings, personal beings, making choices. And they are not determined by the outside circumstances. The choices are related to their characters and their personalities. The more that we find out then about the personality of God and the kinds of things that are important to Him and that matter to Him, the more we will be able to pray in a way that He will respond. Not mechanistically, but understanding His personality.</p>

<p>This is precisely why we can’t use science to test something like prayer. We can’t use science to test whether a soul exists for that matter. For even whether God exists, because they are outside of the realm of science, strictly speaking. The soul is not material. Science deals with material things, not immaterial things.</p>

<p>Now, I will underscore that you can use science in a looser sense, the methods of scientific testing to test what we can see and experience to infer an unseen reality. So one could argue in that way that you can test God scientifically, if we understand what we mean by that, in the same way that we might use scientific techniques in a law lab or a necropsy lab, in a law trial for example, to infer from these things that we can test, human actions that we can no longer see. Personal actions that we can’t get at. I hope you catch the substance of this. The distinction between event and agent causation which informs our exploration and understanding of the issue of prayer and the existence of God and things like that.</p>
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title: When Apologetics Gets Personal
topic: Christian Living
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/when-apologetics-gets-personal
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Alan’s monthly letter for February 2010</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>“Thank you for existing,”&nbsp;a young woman recently wrote me. Then she explained. Her husband had become an atheist and began challenging her faith. Without sufficient answers, she asked a pastor to help. But her husband thought his responses were cliché. Then she heard I was speaking at her church on “Bad Arguments against Religion.”&nbsp;Intrigued by the title, she came to the event and brought her husband.</p>

<p>While I was teaching, it became clear that her husband had something against Christianity. His questions were more than challenges—they were attacks. His anger against God was palpable. So, he fired off several challenges during my talk.</p>

<p>After my event, our conversation continued. I spent some time talking to him about his concerns as a small crowd formed around us.</p>

<p>But <em>his</em> concerns paled in comparison to <em>his wife’s</em> dismay over his apostasy. She was heartbroken. What upset her even more was her inability to answer his questions and the church’s inadequacy to help.</p>

<p>Our meeting gave her hope, though. Later that evening she sent me an email:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>Thank you for existing, I was starting to give up hope. My husband and I have been struggling these past few months, and I was trying to find someone who had answers for him. It has been frustrating to say the least. For me too, I mean, why don’t I have answers? I was raised in the church and somehow was never equipped to answer these questions. I am full of good feelings and Christian sound bites, but nothing else. My husband makes me feel like my faith is so shallow and stupid—he doesn’t mean to, it just comes off that way sometimes. I am SO GLAD there are people like you training young minds to defend their faith.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>I hope this gives you a glimpse of the kind of impact we are making in the Church. Apologetics goes beyond theory. Its application touches peoples’&nbsp;lives. Our ministry together is a valuable tool that can be used in a variety of ways to serve God’s kingdom.</p>

<p>There’s another tool available this month that will help answer the tough questions many people ask. It’s called the <em>Apologetics Study Bible for Students</em>. Like any study Bible, it contains helpful articles that help the reader better understand the biblical text. In this case, these articles answer the most common apologetic quesitons that Christians and non-Christians ask. It’s the kind of Bible I wish this young woman and her husband had available to them.</p>

<p>I’ve written three articles for this new Bible: “What Does the Bible Say about Homosexuality?”, “Is Homosexuality Natural?”, and “Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?”&nbsp;You’ll be able to pick up a copy from our Stand to Reason online store. I hope you get one for the student in your life and recommend it to others.</p>

<p>With your support I’ll continue to help Christians tackle the tough questions they face from non-Christian worldviews. This woman and her husband are an example of what I see every time I teach. There’s a need for Christians to know how to respond to the attacks on their faith. And you and I are in the midst of meeting that need.</p>

<p>For the defense of the Gospel,</p>

<p>Alan Shlemon</p>
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title: Prophecy and People: Both Design to Fit
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/prophecy-and-people-both-design-to-fit
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Greg sees a parallel between the evidence for grand design in nature and the fulfillment of Messianic prophecy by Jesus.</em></p>

<p>My comments today represent some absolutely new material to me. Something that I got turned on to this last week. I mentioned last weekend that we would have a speaker at Hope Chapel on Thursday night, Dr. Steve Meyer, whom I interviewed two weeks ago about the origin of life. He has a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge and he teaches at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. He talked about some things at the lecture Thursday night that related to the origin of life, design and function, and how the issue of design in nature not just intimates but demands a designer as an explanation.</p>

<p>He went on beyond that and explained some other things about Bible prophecy. Some of the material he taught was very new to me, especially the theory about how information works, and the difference between order and information and how that relates to the origin of life. But beyond that there is an application of information theory to a Biblical issue that I’ve never heard before. As far as I understand, Dr. Meyer has developed this application of information theory to the Bible. What came of it was a stunning defense for the Messiahship of Jesus Christ that is so powerful it even overturns the liberal critics’&nbsp;assessment of the Old Testament. I guess the safe way to put it is, if Dr. Meyer is right in his assessment, it doesn’t even matter what the higher critics say about the Old Testament, we can concede their arguments completely and we’ll still have the Messiahship of Jesus Christ.</p>

<p>In the process of thinking through this I realized that something I had told you in the past was flat out wrong, and I’ll tell you what that is in a little bit.</p>

<p>The first part of this topic really relates to the whole evolution issue. We’ve been talking about this the last few weeks. I’ve mentioned in the past that there are two things that really must be in place for evolution to be proven. The first one is that life comes from non-life in some way, shape or form. That’s the issue of chemical evolution. The chemicals evolved in some fashion to the point where life began.</p>

<p>The second step is that you have to have some transition from that form of life to more complex forms of life. If you don’t have life from non-life, then you don’t have evolution because you must have some explanation where life came from. If it didn’t come from non-life, if it didn’t come about through some bio-chemical process on its own, then it must have come about by design. On the other hand, if you get life but you don’t have development to more complex forms, then you also don’t have evolution. You must be able to prove both.</p>

<p>I don’t believe the evidence demonstrates that life transitioned from one form to another form over a long period of time. We can see smaller changes taking place, micro-evolution as it were, the changes of beaks and fins. But the question of where birds and fish came from to begin with, what they developed from, is still unanswered. Where did the major phyla, which were established during the Cambrian explosion according to evolutionary timetables, where did the seventy major phyla come from? And why did they pop up in ten million years and then for a half billion years after that we have no new phyla developing? That’s the big problem. It’s called the “Biological Big Bang”&nbsp;and Stephen Gould, a Harvard paleontologist, says that this is the crux of the issue.</p>

<p>What Dr. Meyer spoke of, though, was the first issue. If there are problems in the transition end of things, there are more problems in the life from non-life end of things. The issue here is not merely an issue of order. It’s not enough for Christians to look at examples of order in the universe and say that order must imply a designer because you can have order happen in nature. Crystals form through natural processes and there is order to them. You can walk along the beach and watch the waves break against the shore and there’s a pattern that is formed. So one could argue that nature is capable of producing some kind of order. But highly integrated functional systems are an entirely different thing. Let me give you an example.</p>

<p>The Bombardier Beetle, for example, is a beetle that has an explosion thrust out of its back end to protect itself from predators. It must have two chemicals mixed together in precise proportions that allow it to direct a discharge out the back of its abdomen without at the same time blowing itself up. What we’re faced with is a highly integrated functional system which would not be able to survive if it was just the least bit askew. One wonders how such a thing develops by chance. This is an example of functional systems working together, not just mere order.</p>

<p>When we come upon apparently disparate parts of a thing that clearly fit together in a precise and complicated way, we naturally conclude there is a designer behind it. And as the design and function become more complicated, it would be absurd to suggest otherwise.</p>

<p>Let me give you an example. I turned on my Macintosh this morning, inserted a disk, the Macintosh read the information on the disk, and I did my work. Would anyone be the least bit tempted to think that the disk I just inserted had been developed in a vacuum, so to speak, and coincidentally “just happened”&nbsp;to do meaningful work on my computer? Would anyone suppose that the disk was developed apart from the computer itself and they just work together? No one would ever say that.</p>

<p>The absurdity is obvious from two different angles. First, the fit, the hardware issue. The disk fits right in, a little mechanism sucks the disk down and engages it on a spinning affair that allows the computer to read the disk. There’s an amazing fit there. In fact, the fit has to be very precise.</p>

<p>Second, there is all of the highly sophisticated computer interactions that are associated with the fit, in other words, the software. The computer is able to “read”&nbsp;the information on the disk that allows the computer to do work. This is not the kind of thing you’d expect to happen outside of the general computer design itself. Things don’t just happen to fit like that accidentally, and things don’t work together like that accidentally.</p>

<p>Now think a moment with the previous illustration in mind about human sexuality (or any kind of bisexual reproduction). You’ve got a hardware problem and a software problem. Both are pretty complex because of the nature of sexual response. You’ve got to have parts that have to fit in a particular way. I’m trying to think of a way to say this delicately—the software problem, in this case, is very closely connected to the hardware problem. If the software isn’t right then there is no hardware (if you catch my drift). It’s a very delicate balance. Not only does the hardware have to fit, but it has to function. Sperm have to go into the woman’s body and connect with the egg that comes down at just the right time. Those things have to work together. They can’t just be swimming around in there like protozoa that don’t go together. The sperm and the egg have to go together, and that’s all part of the hardware problem.</p>

<p>Even if you get the hardware problem solved, you’ve got the software problem. You’ve got the problem with men being attracted to women and visa versa. You’ve got the problem of all the issues that relate to the intricacies of sexual response, the things that make people appealing, that turn people on, the things that cause people to even desire to put the hardware together to begin with. Do you see what I’m saying? A lot of times we don’t even think about this because it’s very natural, but the software has got to be there that would cause us to think that one thing goes into another in that fashion for a particular purpose. We don’t think about that. We just do it because it comes so naturally. Where did that come from?</p>

<p>My point is that this is very much like the computer and the disk issue on both levels. It’s a parallel with my Macintosh illustration because both the hardware of the computer and the hardware of the disk, and also the software of the computer and the software of the disk would have to coincidentally develop with no thought of design. Not only that, it would have to develop at the same time (it can’t develop sixty years apart from each other) and in the same general location on earth.</p>

<p>Do you see what I’m talking about here? The same thing applies to human bodies and any kind of bisexual reproduction because for evolution to be true all of the hardware has to happen by chance. All of the software has to happen by chance. The software and hardware have to be synchronized in a very delicate fashion. And it not only all has to happen by chance, it’s got to happen at the same time and in the same place.</p>

<p>The simple point is, only someone who is intent on ignoring what is obvious will deny that there is design involved. There is no way that people can apply the rules of the natural development of living things, which are highly integrated machines with hardware and software, to any other area of life because you’d be considered a fool. But of course, many people do deny that there is design involved.</p>

<p>By the way, this same argument applies to the whole question of whether Jesus was Messiah or not. Some of you may have listened a while back when a caller was quoting Messianic prophecy and I cautioned him about using Messianic prophecy because there is a lot of prophecy that is identified as Messianic in the New Testament, but it’s clear in the Old Testament that those writing it didn’t think it was prophecy. So if you quote it, it won’t be compelling because it looks like the New Testament authors made it up. I believe it’s prophecy because we have a divinely inspired New Testament and the writers were given the testimony of the Holy Spirit to apply it. But it won’t be compelling to a non-Christian because it wasn’t clearly prophecy at the time it was given. When you read about Rachel weeping for her children you don’t get the sense that the slaughter of babies is being anticipated by the author who wrote it originally. I believe it is a prophecy because Matthew, moved by the Holy Spirit, identifies it as such. But I was reluctant to encourage people to use passages like that from the Old Testament to prove Jesus’&nbsp;Messiahship. Even the prophecy of the virgin birth is like that.</p>

<p>I did that for the best of reasons. I work very, very hard to be evenhanded and fair, and not to misrepresent a point or to play a point too strongly. If we overplay our hands and people see that our hand is weaker than we presented it, then it may destroy our entire argument.</p>

<p>Well, ladies and gentlemen, I was wrong. I was mistaken. I’ll tell you why I was wrong and why you ought to use that as a powerful example for the design behind the Bible. And I’ll tell you how that all fits in just a moment.</p>

<p>I’m going to explain to you how I was mistaken because if we understand the design of prophecy in the Old Testament properly, this could not only be a great defense for Jesus’&nbsp;Messiahship, but go far beyond that and refute all of the higher critics who criticize the Old Testament.</p>

<p>Let me go back to machines for a moment to bring you up to speed on how information and function work with prophecy.</p>

<p>What if you had a machine shop and you liked to make things. Sometimes you made things because they accomplished a certain function, and other times you made things just because you liked the way they looked. It had an aesthetic appeal. Sometimes you just whittled with wood and machinery just because it was fun to do but you had no particular goal in mind.</p>

<p>Then one day you got together with a bunch of other tinkerers and everybody brought their tinker toys, so to speak, the things that they had made. As you looked at each other’s inventions and parts, one person noticed that his part fit together with your part and when you put them together it was a perfect fit. You all were amazed at how well it went together and you were stunned by the coincidence. Then a third person noticed that his part went in a space your parts created and it fit together. Lo and behold, all of you had parts that fit together. When you got it all together it had a little knob that invited twisting. And when someone twisted it the little thing you just assembled began ticking.</p>

<p>What would you conclude? You would conclude that something was going on here. Someone behind the scenes was involved with all of your tinkering such that even though you may have had your own purposes for your tinker toy, someone else was guiding the whole process, even guided your meeting, and had a broader design and purpose in mind. That design was the watch. You could not conclude otherwise.</p>

<p>Now, what if the inventors were from different continents, came from different walks of life, and lived at different periods of history? Some made parts that had no current function but parts that they believed (and said so) would serve a future purpose, though they weren’t entirely clear on what that purpose would be. In other words, what if someone invented a carburetor 150 years before the internal combustion engine? He didn’t know what it was, but he had to put it together and he believed that someday in the future it would have a function. Still other of the inventors made parts for their own purposes with no anticipation that they would “accidentally”&nbsp;fit into a larger, more complex mechanism in the future.</p>

<p>Ladies and gentlemen, when that mechanism was assembled, who would deny that all of these efforts, whether purposeful or apparently accidental, were not part of a grand, intelligent design that far transcended all the individual efforts that contributed to the specific parts? Who would deny that? In spite of the fact that the individual workers did not intend the parts to fit.</p>

<p>Then you go to Psalm 22 and you realize that in the context this was probably David’s groaning because of the anguish he felt at being pursued by his enemies, even though he was a godly man. He was being hounded and he poured out his heart in this Psalm. Then someone 1000 years later, with the Psalm hidden in their heart, is standing at the foot of the cross. They are looking at Jesus and this Psalm comes to mind and they realize that something is going on here.</p>

<p>Or they think of Isaiah 53 and the details seem to fit perfectly. In fact, in the movie Jesus of Nazareth , Nicodemus is watching the crucifixion and the words of Isaiah 53 come to his lips. It fell into place. This is why the apostles said often that they realized afterwards that it was a fulfillment of prophecy because they saw time after time after time again, not just the times in the Old Testament that the writers said this is about Messiah, but the dozens and dozens of details in the Old Testament that they weren’t sure about and then it fit in the life of Christ. Who would deny that there was a grand design behind it all?</p>

<p>There was a grand design.</p>

<p>By the way, even if the higher critics are right, even if Moses never wrote the Pentateuch, even if Isaiah never wrote Isaiah, even if Daniel never wrote the book of Daniel, the fact is that according to the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Old Testament two centuries before Jesus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which preceded Jesus by a century and a half, all of these writings predate the life of Christ. They all have these prophecies in them regardless of who wrote them. And they all show the grand design of God coming to its final culmination in the person of Jesus Christ.</p>

<p>Now that’s something to think about this Easter.</p>
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title: Smart People Can Make Dumb Mistakes
topic: Science
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/smart-people-can-make-dumb-mistakes
content:
            <div> 
		<p>“It is not necessary to invoke God to...set the Universe going,”&nbsp;concludes Stephen Hawking in his latest book, The Grand Design. Denying God is old hat, but this comes from a world-class theoretical physicist. That’s why Christians are unnerved by his bold claim. A statement from a scientist of his caliber commands attention. But it turns out there is no reason for concern. Everything Hawking has written in his book can be dismissed as irrational. Everything. Let me tell you why.</p>

<p>Hawking advances a view known as scientific determinism. This is the idea that everything in the universe—including human beings—is entirely physical. Human behavior and decisions are governed by the mechanical forces of physics and chemistry. In other words, human beings have no free will. Hawking writes,</p>

<p>It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.</p>

<p>Hawking concludes that “human behavior is indeed determined by the laws of nature”&nbsp;and our actions are “as determined as the orbits of the planets.”&nbsp;That’s why our decisions are not rational, he explains.</p>

<p>If our actions are determined by physical laws, then Hawking’s actions are determined too. Deterministic forces act on all physical objects, even those as small as the neurons in Hawking’s brain. Every one of his thoughts, therefore, results from the collision of billions of atoms governed by mechanical forces. And though the interactions might be inconceivably complex, they are nonetheless determined and irrational by his own admission. Hawking is a biological machine—a deterministic box—without free will and reason to guide his decisions and ideas.</p>

<p>What’s written in his book, then, was also determined by the complex interaction of physical laws and atoms in his brain. Rational thought didn’t produce his ideas and arguments; deterministic laws did. And since the determined actions of physical objects can’t, even in principle, produce rational ideas, his book must be irrational.</p>

<p>But just remind Hawking not to shoot the messenger. Because it turns out I’m not the one who declares his book irrational. It is Hawking himself who does. His own view on determinism is a devastating blow to the rationality of his writing. His book is self-defeating.</p>

<p>True beliefs aren’t produced by the brute force of physical laws. They’re arrived at when people evaluate their merits using reason and sound judgment. But without free will, those intellectual faculties are a farce. That’s why the Christian worldview best explains how one can arrive at true beliefs. Our minds can reason independent of and unencumbered by the physical laws of nature.</p>

<p>The ideas in Hawking’s book are no more rational than those produced by a hailstorm hammering out keystrokes on a computer. Unfortunately, millions of people who read his book won’t know that. They’ll swallow it hook, line, and sinker. And then, ironically, tell you that your beliefs are irrational.</p>

<p>Paul best explains this strange phenomenon when he writes in 1 Corinthians 3:19-20: “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God.” For it is written, “He is the one who catches the wise in their craftiness”; and again, “The Lord knows the reasonings of the wise, that they are useless.”</p>

<p>This latest salvo by an otherwise brilliant thinker misfires at best, and backfires at worst. Hawking’s book should not be feared for its assault on our faith, but for its power to deceive the world that a legitimate critique of the Christian worldview lies within its covers.</p>
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title: Christians Killing Their Children?
topic: Bioethics
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/christians-killing-their-children-
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Alan’s monthly letter for November 2007</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>Followers of Jesus Christ are killing their unborn children. Christians in your church and mine are having abortions. What is going on?</p>

<p>During a recent radio interview with a Sacramento radio station, I told the host that abortion is the most important bioethical issue we face today. Why? Each day approximately 3,500 American children are killed through abortion - more than died on September 11 - and that’s happened every day for the last 30 years.</p>

<p>More troubling is that Christians contribute to the killing. Polls and statistics paint a sobering picture. 13% of abortions are committed by self-proclaimed evangelical or born-again Christians. Protestants are responsible for 43% of abortions. Many pro-life Christians are de facto pro-choice.</p>

<p>The charge that Christians are hypocrites, although often unfounded, strikes a chord here. How can we claim to lead our culture on moral issues when we violate the most sacred of human rights - the right to life? While God will forgive the sin of abortion, we must stop killing our own children.</p>

<p>In an article titled “Why Abortion Is a Yawner”&nbsp;Greg Koukl said if you mention the word “abortion”&nbsp;eyes glaze over. Many think to themselves, <em>Here’s that abortion subject again. Yeah, yeah. Millions of babies are dying. I know. Sure, it’s tragic, but what do you want me to do about it?</em> Some people are overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem. Others “don’t feel called”&nbsp;to do anything about it. The result? Little gets done. And more unborn children are killed.</p>

<p>So what can we do? For starters, we can’t yawn. We must back up our convictions with action. Here are four action steps we can all do that will <em>save lives</em>:</p>

<ol>
	<li>Don’t have an abortion yourself.</li>
	<li>Encourage a friend who has a crisis pregnancy to not have an abortion. You can also refer her to a local crisis pregnancy center for more support.</li>
	<li>Learn a few common arguments that defend the unborn and be prepared to share them. Our website has free articles, radio shows, and information. If you don’t know where to begin, just ask me.</li>
	<li>Financially support and/or pray for a pro-life apologist, trainer, or worker (the name Alan comes to mind) or pro-life organization (the name Stand to Reason comes to mind). Obviously, many of you already support my work and I greatly appreciate that.</li>
</ol>

<p>Abortion is a tragic reality in our country, but it’s also a grievous sin among believers. Let’s do what we can to protect the unborn. It’s my pledge to leverage our partnership to make abortion unthinkable.</p>

<p>Grateful for your support,</p>

<p>Alan Shlemon</p>
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title: If It’s Not Natural, It’s Probably Not Healthy
topic: Sexuality and Gender
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/if-it-s-not-natural-it-s-probably-not-healthy
content:
            <div> 
		<p>It’s cool to be gay. That’s what the younger generation thinks. Our culture not only tolerates homosexuality, it’s often celebrated and considered trendy. Being gay is as normal and healthy as being straight. To think otherwise is homophobic. But we are deceiving ourselves if we think that homosexuals have the same health risks as heterosexuals.</p>

<p>The stark reality of the gay lifestyle is different than what we’re told. It’s <em>not</em> healthy. And I don’t mean “not healthy”&nbsp;in a “bacon is not healthy”&nbsp;sort of way. According to a 2008 Center for Disease (CDC) publication, gay sex among males aged 13-24 represents the <em>only</em> age group who have an increasing rate of HIV/AIDS diagnosis. Their rate increased by 12.4% between 2001 and 2006.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> Every other age group saw the infection rate remain constant during the same years.</p>

<p>While speaking at youth conference in Phoenix last month, I dispelled many myths about homosexuality, including the claim that homosexual behavior is as healthy as heterosexual behavior. My audience was aged 13-24. So guess what I told them? <em>They’re</em> the most likely age group to get HIV if they engage in homosexual behavior. In fact, I charted it out, highlighted it, and said it twice.</p>

<p>Then I told them that just two months ago, the National HIV Prevention Conference fueled more fear. CDC official Dr. Amy Lansky stated that gay men get AIDS at a rate more than 50 times greater than non-gay men.</p>

<p>So, the CDC (a pro-gay, secular, and scientific source) tells us that the gay lifestyle isn’t as normal and healthy as we’re often told. There is a disproportionate danger of getting a life-threatening disease. That should concern a lot of teens.</p>

<p>Like the CDC, I’m not entirely able to explain why the 13-24 year-old age group’s infection rate is increasing so quickly. I’m fairly confident, though, that it doesn’t help that pro-gay groups target young Americans. In an effort to destigmatize homosexuality, they propagate deceitful claims about its normalcy and safety. What else would we expect youth to do? They’re sold the gay lifestyle. And many have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Now they’re paying the price with HIV and possibly AIDS.</p>

<p>I’m also confident in the explanatory power of Paul’s comments in Romans 1:26-27. He says that male homosexuals abandoned their body’s natural sexual function with women. As a result, they receive a “penalty for their error.”</p>

<p>This makes sense. It’s like riding a bike without tires. You might get somewhere, but you’ll severely damage the wheel rims. The bike’s natural function was to ride it with tires. When you abandon that function, you’re bound to damage it. That’s the penalty of your error.</p>

<p>But why was I telling young Christians in Phoenix about the hazards of homosexual behavior? Besides clearing up some myths and protecting them from harm, I realize that these kids are our future. When we’re gone, they’ll be the church. I want them safe from the culture’s lies and educated enough to care for <em>their</em> youth culture when they’re older.</p>

<aside class="footnotes">
<hr>
<ol>
	<li id="fn:1">CDC. Trends in HIV/AIDS diagnoses among men who have sex with men—33 states, 2001-2006. <em>MMWR</em> 2008;57:681-6. <a class="reversefootnote" href="#fnref:1">&nbsp;↩</a></li>
</ol>
</aside>
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title: The Pro-Life Two-Step at Central Michigan University
topic: Bioethics
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/the-pro-life-two-step-at-central-michigan-university
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Alan’s monthly letter for January 2010</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>Some say what I did was crazy.</p>

<p>I was standing alone on a stage at Central Michigan University. My job was simple: Present the pro-life view and then debate <em>any</em> challengers from the audience. Simple? Yes. Easy? Not entirely, but I’ll tell you how I made the engagement more manageable in a moment.</p>

<p>After presenting a 30 minute scientific and philosophical defense that the unborn is a human being, I invited the audience to debate me. One by one the students, professors, and medical professionals in the audience took turns attempting to debunk my view. This went on for an hour. Some students were offered extra credit by their biology department if they could refute my scientific claims.</p>

<p>In the end, I was able to fend off the challenges raised against the pro-life view. I used a little organizing tactic to make my job easier. I call it the pro-life two-step. Most objections against the pro-life view can be categorized into one of two groups.</p>

<ol>
	<li>They <em>assume</em> the unborn is not a human being.</li>
	<li>They disqualify the unborn from being a valuable human being based on an arbitrary quality or characteristic.</li>
</ol>

<p>As I heard each objection, I determined which of the two categories it fell in. Then, I responded accordingly.</p>

<p>The first kind of objection is very common. For example: “Many women can’t afford another child so abortion should remain legal.”&nbsp;Notice this objection assumes the unborn is not a human being. And if it’s not a human being, then it makes sense to have an abortion to avert a financial hardship. But if the unborn <em>is</em> a human being and abortion kills her, then abortion is wrong. With this kind of objection, I expose the hidden assumption and then return to the evidence for the humanity of the unborn.</p>

<p>The second objection is a form of unjust discrimination. Sometimes a person concedes the unborn is a human being, but still denies that she deserves human rights—namely the right to life. You can recognize this objection when someone identifies an attribute that allegedly disqualifies the unborn from being valuable. “The unborn isn’t self-aware,”&nbsp;or “The unborn is no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence,”&nbsp;or “The unborn is dependent on the mother for survival.”</p>

<p>I usually point to at least two flaws to this line of reason. The first is that the qualities mentioned (self-awareness, size, and dependency) are all arbitrary. There’s no reason why they are relevant to the question of value. The second is that they result in unjust discrimination. They disqualify a group of human beings from being valuable based on an arbitrary characteristic.</p>

<p>This is no different than other times in history when human beings have faced unjust discrimination. African-Americans were disqualified as valuable human beings because of an arbitrary characteristic, their skin color. Why? So they could be enslaved. Jews under the Third Reich were disqualified as valuable because of an arbitrary characteristic, their ethnicity. Why? So they could be experimented on and exterminated. Unborn human beings today are disqualified as valuable because of arbitrary characteristics: their ability to think, their size, or their dependency on another. Why? So they can be aborted.</p>

<p>With this organizing tactic in mind, I was able to handle the wide range of challenges that the university audience marshaled against my position. The event’s success caught the attention of Detroit radio talk show host Paul Edwards. He interviewed me on the day before Thanksgiving because he wanted to know about the pro-life two-step.</p>

<p>Even with this small success, there is much work to be done to save unborn children. This month marks the 37th year that Roe v. Wade passed, making abortion legal in all 50 states, through all nine months of pregnancy, and for virtually any reason.</p>

<p>My goal is to do what I can to change minds so lives can be saved. I’m already scheduled to train Christians how to defend the pro-life view in California, Oregon, and Wisconsin in 2010. Without your support, these upcoming events, and many others that will be scheduled, would not occur. And Christians would be left without the best training in the art of pro-life persuasion. So, I thank you. Pro-life Christians thank you. And many unborn children could one day thank you, too.</p>

<p>With many thanks,</p>

<p>Alan Shlemon</p>
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title: Missing Links
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/missing-links
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>The search for missing links assumes the truth of evolution. One big assumption is that similarities in the bodies imply a biogenetic relationship and ancestry.</em></p>

<p>When I pick up a newspaper and see that scholars have proof of things that seem to conflict with my faith, it sends a little shiver of concern up my spine. I am like everybody else in that regard</p>

<p>There is an article I really enjoyed reading in the L.A. Times from August 17. The headline reads, “Bones of New Human Ancestor Found in Africa.”&nbsp;A lot of you probably shuddered just like me when you read that. How can I reply to this? How do I respond to this? How do I explain this? It seems that once again the Christian view of the world is being undermined by new scientific evidence.</p>

<p>I thoroughly enjoyed the article, in part because I am not in the least hostile to this kind of research. I like fossils. I enjoy that kind of thing. In fact, I’ve got a bunch of them around my house. I have a case with my Civil War bullets in it, pieces of mosaic that I got from the shores of the Mediterranean at Cesarea Philippi earlier this year when I was in the Holy Land. I’ve got the first edition of the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, signed by Grant himself just a couple of months before he died. I’ve got all kinds of fun things in there, but I’ve also got trilobites, a mammoth tooth, a chunk of fossilized dromedary tooth, fish and ferns, and all of that stuff.</p>

<p>I’m not the least intimidated by the idea that there were things that used to exist that don’t exist now, which left their imprint in stone because the fossilization process took place, and now we have these things. Some of them are bones of creatures that are rather large and bizarre, and in earlier times were a frustration for Christians because they didn’t want to admit that such a thing existed. They thought that most of them were frauds. Many Christians who want to cling to a creationist view of the world still want to dismiss these things as frauds, especially when it comes to the question of missing links in the evolutionary trail between a non-human ancestor and human beings as they are today.</p>

<p>For the most part there is a lot of confusion and speculation regarding these ancient ancestors or alleged missing links that need to be clarified so that you are not taken by surprise by these kinds of articles. The real question is not, what are the fossils? what have we found?, what do they look like? where are the bones in the fossil record? how old are they? The real question is, what do they mean with regards to man’s supposed evolutionary development?</p>

<p>Apparently, they have found a new fossil, one that is an alleged ancestor to human beings. The article states that researchers in Kenya and the United States unveiled the jaws, teeth and bones of several individuals belonging to the new pre-human species. Apparently, it was a species that combined ape-like facial features, such as primitive jaws and ears (although I don’t know how they can get the ears out of it because ears are soft features that fossil skulls don’t have). But in any event, they had large canine teeth (those are the ones just to the side of your incisors) that have characteristics of apes. But they have other characteristics that are more like human beings, like an upright posture.</p>

<p>The new discovery allegedly pushes back the earliest date when human ancestors are known to have walked upright on two legs by a half a million years. This new fossil is called Australopithecus anamensis. There is an older one called ramidus that is supposedly 4.4 million years old. But Australopithecus anamensis falls between ramidus , which is the oldest, and Australopithecines afarensis, which you know as Lucy. Lucy is the skeleton which was discovered a couple of years back and hailed as a significant find in human paleontology.</p>

<p>What are we to make of this and what evidence does this give us for human evolution? I’ll give you a quick sketch that will help you to understand what is the essential fossil evidence for evolution. Where do the missing links fall, and what is the specific question that we have to address in assessing this information?</p>

<p>It is easy to get very confused about all of this because we hear these names like Nebraska man, Piltdown man, Swanscombe Cro-Magnon, neanderthal, Pithecanthropus, Homo erectus, Lucy, and Australopithecines. What a jumble of words and names. How do we make sense of this?</p>

<p>First I need to clear up a common misconception among creationists. This misconception causes them to say things that are foolish, frankly. The misconception is this: Man evolved from apes. Evolution does not teach that man evolved from apes, it teaches that man and apes have a common ancestor. Apes are pongids; men are hominids, in other words, two-legged primates that walk upright. The search for the missing link is the search for this man-like or hominoid ancestor that is a precursor to both modern apes and modern human beings. In other words, where is the transitional form, the fork so to speak, where apes and man went off in different directions and that links man to an earlier precursor. This is the missing link that is spoken of.</p>

<p>There have been many missing links that have been suggested, and there is a tree of ancestry that has been drawn for human evolution. Not only has it been drawn, it has been redrawn a number of times, which is a concern and I will talk about that in a moment.</p>

<p>Keep in mind that what is at stake here is not the idea that humans evolved from apes, but that humans and apes evolved from a hominoid ancestor, a man-like/ape-like ancestor. Our quest, then, is for the missing link.</p>

<p>There is a problem looking for this missing link because you must already be committed to the idea that a missing link exists. This is an important observation because all analysis of early hominids are based on certain assumptions. The search assumes the truth of evolution, and it assumes, because of evolution, that if there are morphological similarities (similarities in the bodies) that these similarities imply a biogenetic relationship and ancestry.</p>

<p>That is why the article says that there are some similarities here in facial features, jaws, ears, canine teeth with apes; but there are characteristics that look like men—they walked upright, for example. Therefore this is seen to be a link in the evolutionary chain between the two particular kinds of creatures that this fossil seems to be similar to. There is the conclusion that this must be a link between the two because of the presumption of evolution when the similarities to apes and humans to a certain degree are observed.</p>

<p>Virtually all of these kinds of assessments start with the belief that evolution is true. I had an interesting conversation last weekend with Steve from Hollywood who is a paleontologist and an evolutionist. He made the valuable and fair point that you have to start somewhere. You’ve got to suggest a paradigm or picture of how it might have happened, and then you’ve got to see whether the parts fit into that picture.</p>

<p>My problem with this point is that the picture is not just suggested—the picture in this case being evolution—it is asserted as being the only possibility. Then the evidence is made to fit, much of the time, into the picture in order to affirm evolution. I think fossil men is an example of those cases.</p>

<p>Fossil men can be broken down into three different categories: mistakes, frauds, or possibly bona fide missing links.</p>

<p>Some of you might remember Nebraska man discovered in 1922 by Harold Cook. It was considered to be an authentic link. It inspired the illustration of a hairy, stooped caveman in the London News. It was estimated to be a million years old. Now, this whole reconstruction was based on one tooth that turned out to be the tooth of an extinct pig. Nebraska man was a mistake. Throw him out.</p>

<p>Then was Piltdown Man in 1912. He had an ape-like jaw and a human-like skull. He was estimated at half a million years old. The consensus of the world’s greatest authorities at the time was that Piltdown Man was indeed an authentic link in the evolution of man.</p>

<p>It wasn’t until almost 40 years later in 1950 that fluoride tests revealed the skull was only a few thousand years old, not 500,000. The jaw itself was only 40 years old. It turns out that Piltdown Man was not a mistake, he was a fraud. The skull was a human skull, a combination of a human and ape jaw, eight teeth were filled, and the bone was treated with iron salts to give the appearance of age. What’s incredible about that is that not only was this exposed as a fraud at the time and all of the scientific community acknowledged it as such, they were somewhat embarrassed.</p>

<p>In any event, there are two examples of either mistakes or frauds that are not in the running as missing links. So you can eliminate those.</p>

<p>I need to be careful to say that just because there were mistakes and frauds, that doesn’t discredit what might be true links. That doesn’t mean that everything is a mistake.</p>

<p>You also have Cro-Magnon Man, Neanderthal Man and Swanscombe Man. These are now considered to be Homo sapiens—modern men. Their brain capacity was actually larger than modern man. Their skeletal features are virtually indistinguishable from modern man. If you took any of these race of men, gave them a shave, dressed them up in a suit of clothes and walked them down Rodeo Drive, no one would take notice. In other words, they are modern men so you can’t really consider Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, and Swanscombe as missing links because they are just like us, just different races that apparently died out some 100,000 years ago.</p>

<p>When you eliminate the frauds and mistakes on the one hand, and those things that are clearly modern men on the other hand, you are still left with a handful of genuine, bona fide candidates for links that take us back in our evolutionary history. This is where all the big names and fancy terminology come in, and this is where most of the confusion is.</p>

<p>One of the earliest of those transitional types was known as Pithecanthropus, or Homo erectus, apparently about 1.5 million years old. Homo erectus walked erect, that’s why they called it erect man, yet his brain size was between a man and an ape. He used crude tools. Several of Homo erectus were discovered at a number of different places and were given local names like Java Man, Heidelberg Man or Peking Man.</p>

<p>Following that, in 1932, there was another fossil found in India that was different. This was named Ramapithecus, 9 to 14 million years old. It consisted of several teeth and jaw fragments, and because the incisors and canine teeth of this creature, although ape-like, are smaller than those of modern apes. Some evolutionists consider this to be a form of hominid or along man’s evolutionary line, although there were problems with this. Some consider them just simply apes and ancient apes, but it still is a contender for man’s ancestry.</p>

<p>Australopithecines africanus was another that walked upright, also known as Eoanthropus or Homo habilus . The majority of these were found in East Africa by Richard Leakey. You might recall that name because of the Leakey family who has been significant in human paleontology over the last 60 years or so. Leaky believed that Africanus walked upright. So this was more evidence of an ancient human ancestor.</p>

<p>Finally, in 1974, Donald Johanson discovered a 40% skeleton, which is rather remarkable because most of these skeletons were not skeletons at all but just little bits and pieces of bones. He named this discovery Australopithaecus afarensis , or more popularly known as Lucy. She was unique because of her great age and also because of her completeness. Lucy was the earliest known hominid, and possibly the candidate for the first ancestral human.</p>

<p>Then there is this new finding, Australopithaecus anamensis. And the question is, where does anamensis go? It seems that anamensis is even older than Lucy.</p>

<p>What does all this mean? How do we stack these up in terms of human evolution? Does all of this bona fide, ancient fossil evidence of hominid creatures really support the fact that human beings evolved?</p>

<p>Well, answering the question is not so easy because there are a couple of problems. One of them is the problem of fossil evidence, which is acknowledged here in the article. “Fossils of such ancient ancestors are so rare, and the hints they offer of humanities gone so tantalizing, that many scientists spend their careers jousting over the proper interpretation of ancient teeth, bone chips and dust.”</p>

<p>I think it was Hugh Ross who said that the hominid bones in all the world wouldn’t fill one large coffin, and the very best skeletons are only 40% complete. So we’re really working with a paucity of evidence, which makes the job much more difficult. That’s the first problem.</p>

<p>The second problem is the problem of dating, which is critical because dates that are given are valuable because they offer what might be independent evidence that a new fossil form is temporally intermediate to two other forms. If we have a form that is more advanced than an older form and less advanced than a younger one, then it seems to fit time-wise in the evolutionary timeline.</p>

<p>Now, if we have a separate date that dates it as younger than the more primitive form and older than the more advanced form, that’s all the better. But there is a problem there too. Even among evolutionists there is a debate about the dating of these fossils. The article says, “But several researchers suggested this week that those two fossils actually may belong to a later species such as afarensis (Lucy). It is a challenge to date such ancient fossils precisely even under the best circumstances.”</p>

<p>Here’s the point: There are lots of possible missing links. Some of them can be disregarded because they are phonies or mistakes. Others you can disregard because they aren’t links to modern men, they are modern men. But there still is a group of fossil men left that possibly qualify as transitions. The problem is that nobody knows how these things fit together. All of the possible scenarios about how they fit together are based on a commitment to evolution, to begin with, which makes the findings suspect.</p>

<p>Secondly, these possible scenarios are constantly being shifted and changed, a it turns out that many that were considered missing links in the past actually lived at the same time with each other, therefore they weren’t ancestral to each other. That’s the problem with the interpretation of the this evidence.</p>

<p>I see no good reason why all of these primates could not be considered to be contemporaneous—some apes, some forms of true men, some which died out with time as some forms/races of men have, and some of which have endured, as many races of men have. In other words, there is another explanation for the evidence that fits perfectly what a person would expect if God created. Yet that alternative is never considered. Why not? Because evolution happened. It must have happened.</p>

<p>The history of hominid paleontology is a history of shifting charts, shifting theories, and many uncertainties. Simply put, it doesn’t fall neatly together into a nice evolutionary package, and it never has. The evidence supports human evolution only because it must, because evolution is assumed at the outset.</p>

<p>There is a wonderful quote in this article which I think is disarmingly honest. “Could the new species be the ancestors not of modern human beings, but of the great apes of contemporary Africa? Could the fossil fragments exhumed from several sites be the mixed bones of more than one species? Do the three early hominid species now identified lie in the same lineage? Or are they just distant relatives? Peter Andrews, an expert on early apes and human origins at the Natural History Museum in London sums it up this way, ’It seems to me that this fossil raises more questions than it answers.’”</p>
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title: One Bad Argument against Christian Belief
topic: Christian Living
author: Alan Shlemon
date: 04/20/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/one-bad-argument-against-christian-belief
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Alan’s monthly letter for November 2009</em></p>

<p>Dear Friend,</p>

<p>I’ve heard a lot of arguments against Christianity. Skeptics thrive on challenging my beliefs. There’s one argument that mystifies me—not because it’s persuasive, but because it comes back time and time again. Though it may sound convincing at first, it’s hopelessly wrong-headed. It occurs when someone confuses motivation with justification.</p>

<p>You’ve probably heard this kind of challenge before: “Christianity is just a crutch”&nbsp;or “You believe in God because you want a father figure.”&nbsp;Since you came to believe in God in this way—so the argument goes—your belief isn’t true. But these examples commit the same error. They dismiss the merit of one’s belief based on the motivation for it. This is formally known as the genetic fallacy.</p>

<p>This is a big blunder. It makes no difference what <em>motivates</em> a person to arrive at his belief. It only matters <em>why</em> he believes it. It might be true that my real father was awful and abusive, which led me to God as a perfect father substitute. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have good reasons to believe God exists. How does my desire for God to exist cause Him to exist or not exist? It doesn’t. What I wish to be true has no bearing on what actually is true.</p>

<p>It also might be true that my addiction to pornography or drugs led me to rely on Jesus as a “crutch”&nbsp;who carries me through each day without succumbing to temptation. But that doesn’t mean Jesus doesn’t exist. I could still have good evidence that He’s real. If a skeptic wants to challenge my belief, he must refute the evidence for Jesus’&nbsp;existence, not merely point out what motivated me to believe in Him.</p>

<p>One final example of this misstep occurs when one says, “The reason you’re a Christian is because you were born in America. If you had been born in Saudi Arabia you’d probably be Muslim.”&nbsp;My response? So what? It might be true that I’d be Muslim if I had been born in Saudi Arabia, but what follows from that? Nothing. It doesn’t prove that Christianity is false or Islam is true. It merely confuses the origin of my belief with the reasons supporting it.</p>

<p>If a challenger wants to disprove Christianity, they must show why it is false with reasons or evidence. No psychological or sociological discovery about the believer can accomplish this. As C.S. Lewis once explained, “You must show <em>that</em> a man is wrong before you start explaining <em>why</em> he is wrong”&nbsp;(emphasis in the original). It only makes sense to ask how one came to believe something false <em>after</em> they’ve done the hard work of refuting that belief.</p>

<p>Christians can make the same mistake too. Simon LeVay, a Harvard trained neuroscientist, once published a report that homosexuality is biologically caused. Many Christians dismissed his claim when they discovered Dr. LeVay was a practicing homosexual who wanted to prove his behavior was rooted in biology. They confused his motivation for belief with the justification for his claim. It was futile to critique Dr. LeVay’s motivation. The validity of his report stands or falls on his evidence for it.</p>

<p>It turned out his conclusions were rejected by the scientific community due to methodological errors. Since he was refuted by reasonable evidence, it was <em>then</em> fair to speculate what his motivation was for propagating poor science.</p>

<p>After teaching a recent three-week series on bad arguments against religion, the audience was relieved. People were pleasantly surprised to understand the missteps in logic of common challenges against their faith. Many of these arguments that appeared persuasive at first turned out to be misguided upon closer inspection.</p>

<p>And these believers can thank our partnership for this encouragement to their faith. Without us working together to train Christians, these moments of truth can't happen. I’m excited that we are building belief among our brethren for the purpose of expanding the Kingdom.</p>

<p>For the glory of God,</p>

<p>Alan Shlemon</p>
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title: Phar Lap and Fossils
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/phar-lap-and-fossils
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>In scientific debate, the Christian is often saddled with a handicap similar to that of the famed Australian racehorse Phar Lap.</em></p>

<p>“Phar Lap”&nbsp;is a great movie, good family entertainment. It is about a race horse in Australia in the late ’20’s and early ’30’s. This race horse is what is called a dark horse. It had a lineage, but itself was kind of questionable. It had been purchased for about $300, as opposed to about $10,000 for most race horses back then. Nobody believed that it could ever win. As a matter of fact, they nicknamed it Phar Lap because that is the word for lightening in some language and it was a joke because he was so slow. But Harry Telford got a hold of this horse, began training it, and brought out the natural greatness in the horse. Phar Lap began winning nearly every race in sight. This horse was fast. It was great in the movie because the horse would run from behind and win. That was the way Harry taught him to be competitive. Phar Lap would fly by everybody and beat the field by eight or ten or twelve lengths. It was no contest after that.</p>

<p>But a problem arose. Phar Lap was so good that he was always winning and the betting industry was being ruined. Everybody knew he was going to win, so there was nothing to bet on. To handicap Phar Lap, they kept adding more and more weight to his saddlebags. But this dog gone horse kept winning, even when they kept adding weight. But little by little, after added 10, 20, 30 pounds of lead, the weight finally started taking its toll on Phar Lap. The field began to gain on him, and pretty soon it got to the point that there was so much weight on this horse that he lost.</p>

<p>Keep in mind that the horse was not losing because the horse was slow, because it wasn’t a good horse, or because it could not win the race, because it wasn’t up to the field. It was losing because there was artificial weight added to it that slowed it down so the others could beat it. In a sense, the game was rigged. It was rigged purposefully so that the superior merits of Phar Lap were reduced and put it behind the field.</p>

<p>How does this relate to the issue of evolution? I think there is an interesting parallel. I want to talk about it from a broad point of view and how it relates to the issue of truth.</p>

<p>I am not an evolutionist, but the reason that I am not an evolutionist is not principally because of a religious commitment. In fact, having been quite a committed evolutionist before I became a Christian, I still was one after I became a Christian. I just figured that Christians were wrong on this particular issue. Evolution was obviously true. Then I began to study and I ended up rejecting evolution, not principally for religious reasons, but primarily for scientific reasons. In other words, scientific evidence led me to the conclusion that evolution was not the best explanation for the origins of life and the subsequent development of all life on this planet.</p>

<p>That may not be surprising because you have probably heard me or others say this kind of thing in the past.</p>

<p>This is may be the more surprising statement: I genuinely believe that most people who believe in evolution do not believe in evolution because of scientific reasons. They believe in it because of religious reasons.</p>

<p>Most people think that it is the Christian and the creationist that has the commitment to religion and is blind to the facts. It is the scientist who is in possession of all the facts and possession of rationality. Religion and philosophy do not enter into the picture.</p>

<p>Let me try to do my best to explain how this can be the case.</p>

<p>Many of you have seen or at least know of an educational film known as Cosmos. Carl Sagan is a well known evolutionary scientist who narrated the film. He makes a statement in the beginning of the film that really defines what the film is all about and what the cosmos itself entails in terms of its impact and its metaphysical significance.</p>

<p>Here’s the statement he makes: “The cosmos is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be.”&nbsp;There is something odd about that statement coming from Carl Sagan. The odd thing is this, he is speaking as a scientist in a film about the scientific explanation for cosmology, yet he makes a statement that has nothing whatsoever to do with science. Science could not possibly affirm the statement that he just made, even in theory. That the cosmos is all there is? That the cosmos is all that there ever has been? That the cosmos is all that ever will be? This is not a statement that science could ever support.</p>

<p>Science cannot tell you what will be in the future. Science cannot tell us everything that ever has been in the past. How can science tell us everything that used to be but isn’t now? If it has some physical evidence, like dinosaurs used to be and they aren’t now because we have dinosaur bones as evidence for such a thing, science can tell us what was. But it can’t speak to everything that might have existed and say that it didn’t exist, only the physical cosmos existed. It just can’t do that. As a matter of fact, it can’t even tell you everything that exists now.</p>

<p>Sagan’s comment is not a scientific statement, ladies and gentlemen. This statement that introduces this allegedly scientific treatment of cosmology is a statement of philosophy. It is the founding statement of that talk. It is the foundational concept, basically, of science: naturalism. Only the natural world exists. It is within this natural world that we must seek our answers to the question of cosmology.</p>

<p>I will tell you how this particular point of view relates to the movie Phar Lap and really does not at all do the quest for truth any justice whatsoever.</p>

<p>I’m talking about the problem of evolution and how the cards are stacked against a theist who believes that God had something to do with the universe from the get go, much like the cards are stacked against Phar Lap because it was so strong that it had to have a handicap of extra weights, and was finally removed from the race.</p>

<p>There is an ultimate world view that is the starting place of evolutionary thinking—that is methodological naturalism. What is the method of science? The method of science is to come up with the best explanation for a thing in the context of a universe that is a closed system of cause and effect and is run by natural laws. If there is a God, He is unrelated to the question. He doesn’t factor into the equation. He is outside of this universe, He can’t penetrate into it. This is what I mean by a closed system. He can’t influence anything and all of our answers that we come up with for the origin of the universe must be framed in the terms of naturalistic law.</p>

<p>In a sense, that is not so bad by itself. If one wants to define science in that fashion, then one could do that. But they take it a step further. This system is the only system that gives us true information about the universe. This is one of the reasons that I think the concept of theistic evolution is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. You will hear some evolutionists say you can believe in God and evolution. It seems that there is some justification for the notion of theistic evolution. But what they really mean is that naturalistic evolution is the explanation for how things developed, and if you want to believe in Him—something that you can believe in privately—don’t pretend that God had anything to do with anything in the real world. You want to believe in God, fine. But don’t suggest that He had something to do with the real world, the real world of science. Science already explains that and science explains it in terms of natural causes, cause and effect, and a closed system.</p>

<p>The point that I am making is that when one asks the critical questions, How did we get here? Are we the result of blind chance? Are we the result of intelligent creation?, it is very difficult to have an intelligent discussion because only one side is allowed to in the debate. That side is science—with a particular definition that hasn’t always been the definition of science. This definition of science says that no God language is allowed.</p>

<p>It reminds me of a crime scene where you have a body. The inspector comes in and says, “All right, let’s solve this crime. Round up the suspects.”</p>

<p>It is a small town in the South somewhere. You notice something unusual when the ten suspects are rounded up and questioned: They are all black.</p>

<p>You say, “Did you notice that all of these are African American men? How do you know that any of them did it?”</p>

<p>“We don’t know who did it but we know one of them did it.”</p>

<p>You ask justifiably, “If you don’t know which one did it, then how do you know any of them did it?”</p>

<p>The answer is, “They are the only black men in town.”</p>

<p>“What if a white man did it?”</p>

<p>“We don’t believe in such a thing. We don’t believe that white men commit crimes like this. Therefore, since we have a dead man and we have ten black men in town, one of these men must have done it.”</p>

<p>Such a thing is ludicrous. Not only the injustice of it is obvious, but it is utmost stupidity to attempt solve a problem and then arbitrarily restrict the options that are available to you. One could reasonably suggest of this murder that maybe a white man did it. What if it were the case that a white man was the murderer? What then? You’ve convicted the wrong man.</p>

<p>The exact situation applies to the creation/evolution controversy. In the question of origins there is only one kind of answer that is allowed: a scientific answer, i.e., an answer that makes no appeal to agent causation, to an intelligent Creator Who designed the universe. Of course, the question has got to occur to you, What if God did do it? We would never know because the option is not allowed to be discussed.</p>

<p>Just like poor Phar Lap who is given pound upon pound until he was eliminated from the competition, the point of view that God might have done this is eliminated from the discussion before the discussion begins. It is just not allowed to compete.</p>

<p>What if God did it?</p>

<p>Evolution is winning in the marketplace of ideas. But it is not winning because of the facts, it is winning because of the rules of the game. The deck has already been stacked against the theist.</p>

<p>My point of view is simply this: Why don’t we just let every race horse run on his own strength on an even field and let the best horse win? That seems to be more in the interest of truth than the way it is done right now.</p>
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title: Oreos and Origins
topic: Science
author: Greg Koukl
date: 04/22/2013
source: https://www.str.org/w/oreos-and-origins
content:
            <div> 
		<p><em>Many scientists exclude God as an explanation for any event. In some cases, agent causation is the only rational conclusion.</em></p>

<p>I want to try to explain why making reference to a designer is legitimate in the scientific arena. As some have argued, whenever you make a reference to a designer, you are making reference to something that is not natural. It is supernatural by definition, therefore you are talking about religion. Well, I guess I have to plead guilty to that. But when someone makes the comment that now you are talking about religion, what they are essentially saying is “foul.”&nbsp;You cannot bring supernatural questions into the discussion about science because science, by definition, is limited only to naturalistic explanations.</p>

<p>Now, that is philosophically true in our time, but my point is that that is an arbitrary distinction. It implies that the only thing truthful that can be known is known through empirical studies. Science does that kind of thing, so science gives us truth and keep your religion, your metaphysics out of this discussion because it’s out of place in science. The fact is, agent causation is an acceptable scientific explanation for things because we understand that in the world of natural cause and effect, there are acting agents that make things happen.</p>

<p>In fact, when you try to solve a murder, this is precisely what you are trying to determine. Who was the acting agent? Not what are the scientific laws that can account for the body being in this position at this particular time. You are not concerned with that. You are concerned with the guilt and the identity of an individual who made a choice to do an immoral act, a homicide in this case. And so you are trying to determine, even using scientific evidence much of the time, who was the agent who acted.</p>

<p>Now that same mentality can be applied to a lot of scientific examples. For example, we have this thing called a seismograph, right? It’s a little needle on a piece of paper that gets drawn across this needle that wobbles back and forth according to the vibrations of the earth and it makes a little squiggle, right? And by looking at this squiggle you can determine the force of an earthquake or what kind of seismic activity is going on. These are blind natural forces being recorded by this stylus on a seismograph.</p>

<p>What would happen, though, if you were looking at the etchings of the stylus on the seismograph and you saw these wobbly, side-to-side movements with an unbroken line of ink, and you saw someone’s signature written in there and then it continued on with these wobbles. What would you conclude? Would you conclude that this was some really wacky earthquake? Of course not. You would see the unmistakable signs of agent causation and you would rightly conclude that someone got in there and made a conscious, intelligent choice to move the stylus and make the form of a signature. In other words, you don’t explain that even on a scientific instrument by naturalistic causes. You explain it by agent causation.</p>

<p>Now to give you an illustration about how scientific naturalism arbitrarily excludes agent causation from scientific explanations, I have suggested what I have called the Oreo Experiment. You go to your chemistry teacher and ask if he is able to look at a solution and describe, based on his scientific testing, what is in the solution and how the solution, the precipitate, came to be. The precipitate is the heavy stuff that falls out, precipitates in the solution. In a beaker, for example. It seems that someone who is well-versed in the area of chemistry and well-versed in the area of physics can look and measure and test and describe what happened in a simple kind of thing.</p>

<p>Your chemist teacher takes the challenge and you say, “Okay, I’m going to put out a beaker full of stuff. There you see it, and now I’m covering it. Tomorrow we’ll uncover it and you’ll see something that has precipitated. Then it is your job to figure out how that happened.”&nbsp;Sure. Fair enough. I know science. I know the laws of chemistry. We’ll do it.</p>

<p>However, just before the chemist comes into the room the next morning to begin his experiments to look and observe the precipitate and begin to measure it to solve the problem, you lift the cover on the beaker and drop in an Oreo cookie. He walks in, you remove the cover to the beaker, and there is this discolored solution, but clearly visible is this rapidly decaying Oreo cookie. Very obvious. You can still see the word “Oreo”&nbsp;on it. And you say, “Okay, now using the laws of physics and chemistry, explain to me how that Oreo cookie got there.”&nbsp;And he says, “Wait a minute, it’s obvious that someone put it there because Oreo cookies don’t just manufacture themselves out of nowhere in the middle of a beaker. You are playing a trick on me. Someone dropped it in there.”&nbsp;And then you say, “Foul. You’ve broken the rules. You’ve inferred an outside agent here. You’re not being scientific. It’s your job to be a scientist. This is a chemistry lab. Let’s stick with science. You are obliged to come up with some kind of explanation limited to the laws of chemistry and physics and time plus chance to explain how that Oreo cookie got there in the last twelve hours.”&nbsp;Now, he would be hard pressed to do so. Why? Because it was put there. You know it was. The evidence indicates it was. There was an agent that caused that, but the rules have restricted him from concluding what it obvious in the circumstances.</p>

<p>Now I think it’s possible that the rules like that can be so hammered into one that what is obvious to a casual onlooker will not be obvious to the person who is convinced of the rules. Who will deny agent causation even when it is staring him in the face?</p>

<p>This is the argument of Phillip Johnson in <em>Darwin on Trial.</em> He says the cards have been stacked against those who would hold some form of agent causation when it comes to the issue of origins, because when you infer agent causation naturally from the evidence, they say, wait a minute you mean agent as in God? You can’t talk about God here. You’ve broken the rules. So you might legitimately ask, What if the evidence indicates God did it? Isn’t the most important concern that we figure out what actually happened and not necessarily keeping an arbitrarily restricted set of rules? Any conclusions that involve an agent—even if they’re justified by the evidence—are out of bounds and are ruled inappropriate. But that’s philosophy, not science.</p>
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