CrossExamined Radio on the Web

We are now doing live call-in radio every Saturday morning at 11 a.m. ET.  You can listen live on the web at www.afr.net or on one of 126 stations across the country.  The show is also podcasted here.

The show on March 7 was with Dr. Mike Licona, co-author of one of the best books examining the evidence for resurrection of Jesus:  The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus.

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Sleeping With Your GirlFriend

This column by Frank Turek appeared on www.Townhall.com Today: 

My friend David has a knack for cutting through the smokescreens people throw up when they’re trying to avoid making commitments, be they commitments to God or to other people.  Last week, with one comment, he blew away all the smoke that a young agnostic was hiding behind.  It was a demonstration of tremendous insight, and it required some courage to say.

For several weeks David was teaching through a series on Christian apologetics, which involves providing evidence for the truth of Christianity.   In addition to the biblical mandate to provide such evidence, David thought it would be wise to do so because 75 percent of Christian youth stop attending church after age 18.  Many of them abandon the church because they’re bombarded by secularism in college and they’ve never been taught any of the sound evidence that supports Christianity.

Last week, after David finished a presentation refuting the “new atheists”—Dawkins, Hitchens and the like—a young man approached him and said, “I once was a Christian, but now I’m an agnostic, and I don’t think you should be doing what you’re doing.”

“What do you mean?” David asked.

“I don’t think you should be giving arguments against atheists,” the young man said. “Jesus told us to love, and it’s not loving what you’re doing.”

David said, “No, that’s not right.  Jesus came with both love and tuth.  Love without truth is a swampy, borderless mess.  Truth is necessary.  In fact, it’s unloving to keep truth from people, especially if that truth has eternal consequences.”

David was absolutely right.  In fact, if you look at Matthew chapter 23, Jesus was more like a drill sergeant than he was like Mister Rogers.

But the young man would have none of it. Without acknowledging David’s point, he immediately brought up another objection to Christianity.  David succinctly answered that one too, but again the kid seemed uninterested.  He fired a couple of more objections at David, who began to suspect something else was up—something I’ve noticed as well.

I’ve found that the machine-gun-objection approach is common among many skeptics and liberals. They throw objection after objection at believers and conservatives but never pause long enough to listen to the answers.  It doesn’t matter that you’ve just answered their question with an undeniable fact—they’ve already left that topic and are rattling off another objection on another topic as if you hadn’t said a word.  They don’t really seem interested in finding answers but in finding reasons to make themselves feel better about what they want to believe.  After all, a skeptic of one set of beliefs is actually a true believer in another set of beliefs.

David recognized that’s exactly what was happening in his conversation. So after the kid fired off another objection, David decided to end the charade and cut right to the heart.  He said, “You’re raising all of these objections because you’re sleeping with your girlfriend.  Am I right?”

All the blood drained from the kid’s face. He was caught. He just stood there speechless. He was rejecting God because he didn’t like God’s morality, and he was disguising it with alleged intellectual objections.
This young man wasn’t the first atheist or agnostic to admit that his desire to follow his own agenda was keeping him out of the Kingdom.  In the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul revealed this tendency we humans have to “suppress the truth” about God in order to follow our own desires.  In other words, unbelief is more motivated by the heart than the head. Some prominent atheists have admitted this.

Atheist Julian Huxley, grandson of “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Huxley, famously said many years ago that the reason he and many of his contemporaries “accepted Darwinism even without proof, is because we didn‘t want God to interfere with our sexual mores.”

Professor Thomas Nagel of NYU more recently wrote, “It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief.  It’s that I hope there is no God!  I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.  My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.”

Certainly the new atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have problems with cosmic authority.  Hitchens refuses to live under the “tyranny of a divine dictatorship.”  Dawkins calls the God of the Bible a “malevolent bully” (among other things) and admits that he is “hostile to religion.”

It’s not that Hitchens and Dawkins offer any serious examination and rebuttal of the evidence for God.  They misunderstand and dismiss hundreds of pages of metaphysical argumentation from Aristotle, Aquinas and others and fail to answer the modern arguments from the beginning and design of the universe.  (Dawkins explanation for the extreme design of the universe is “luck.”)

Instead, as any honest reader of their books will see, Hitchens and Dawkins are outraged at the very thought of God.  Even their titles scream out contempt (god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and The God Delusion). They don’t seem to realize that their moral outrage presupposes an objective moral standard that exists only if God exists.  Objective morality—as well as the immaterial laws of reason and science—cannot exist in the materialist universe they attempt to defend.  In effect, they have to borrow from a theistic worldview in order to argue against it.  They have to sit in God’s lap to slap his face.

While both men are very good writers, Hitchens and Dawkins are short on evidence and long on attitude.  As I mentioned in our debate, you can sum up Christopher’s attitude in one sentence:  “There is no God, and I hate him.”

Despite this, God’s attitude as evidenced by the sacrifice of Christ is: There are atheists, and I love them.

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Cruel Logic: There’s No Morality in DNA

This short film– which is a bit intense– is from Writer/Director Brian Godawa. I think it illustrates as best as one can in six-minutes that objective morality finds no grounding in DNA or society. As always, I appreciate your comments. Please keep in mind as you comment that the issue is NOT epistemology (i.e. how we know murder is wrong), but ontology (WHY murder is wrong).

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Religion Spoils Everything, Jesus Revives the Spoiled

As I drove back to Colorado Springs from Denver today, the fog was so thick I could barely see the car ahead of me, much less the usual splendor of the Rocky Mountains to the west.  I was listening to Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, who made some interesting points about the nature of faith.  In the ongoing dialogue between theists and atheists that permeates society today, theists are often said to rely on faith while atheists rely on reason in the formation of their respective worldviews.  Yet, such a stark dichotomy is too simplistic and out of touch with reality.

Adherents to both views arrive at their beliefs through a combination of faith and reason.  Neither the atheist nor the theist relies solely on reason.  Both rely on a component of faith.  For that matter, there are very few beliefs any of us hold that do not involve faith to some degree.  The simple act of driving through a green light requires faith that nearby drivers who are faced with a red light will actually stop.

Oxford biologist and author Richard Dawkins suggests that religious “faith” is a “virus of the mind.”  In his 1991 article entitled “Viruses of the Mind,” he states that, “Like some computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect.  If you are a victim of one, the chances are that you won’t know it, and may even vigorously deny it.”  So, sufferers of the memetic virus of religious faith may not even know they have been affected by an outside agent.

Conversely, the apostle Paul wrote of non-believers that, “their minds were blinded. For until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament, because the veil is taken away in Christ.” (2 Cor. 3:14)  According to Christianity, Richard Dawkins may have been similarly blinded; a viral virgin infected by a God who disdains his arrogant air of superiority.

But here’s the rub.  It wasn’t the fact that faith exists within all of us that beguiled Dr. Keller; it was how each of us expresses our faith that captured his imagination.  Think about it.  By virtue of our various worldviews, each of us discovers a sense of belonging.  Whether you are a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu or a Freethinker, you will find other people who share your belief system.  You will also soon appreciate that there are many more people who disagree with your beliefs and consider them simply wrong.  What is common to all of us is the tendency to marginalize those who don’t believe as we do; to consider ourselves better than those who haven’t been similarly enlightened.

In this sense, we can’t help but agree with Christopher Hitchens.  Religion does spoil everything.  And he certainly made that point clearly in his debate with Frank Turek.  Christopher emoted, “Isn’t it as plain as could be that those who commit the most callous, the most cruel, the most brutal, the most indiscriminate atrocities of all, do so precisely because they believe they have divine permission?”  In many cases, we must humbly admit, he is correct.  However, wasn’t Pol Pot cruel and indiscriminate?  Wasn’t Joseph Stalin callous and brutal?  Stalin was also indiscriminate.  He copiously murdered people of all religions.

Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, suggests that while these men were indeed atheists, it wasn’t their atheism that drove them to commit such atrocities.  Stalin’s atheism may not have led him to murder had it not been that his atheism first led him to marginalize the masses.  His atheism led to self-supremacy and the marginalization of others, which in turn led to his genocidal acts.  In his Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx described religion as the “opiate of the masses.”  Supremacist thoughts would come easily to someone convinced that everyone else is walking around in a metaphorical drug-induced stupor.  When it comes to atrocities, all religions, and even atheism, are in a dead heat.

But why is this so?  The bottom line is that people are not led to commit atrocities by either religion or atheism, but rather by the insidious seduction of power and the serpentine invasiveness of pride.  These lead to a misguided sense of moral superiority.  When an individual of one group sees himself as superior to those of another group – as more deserving, more enlightened, more noble – he is bound to subjugate outsiders mentally, verbally and eventually physically.

This process of self-aggrandizement is fueled to an even greater degree when one’s holy book(s) specifically encourage the mindset of supremacy.  Consider the writings of Muhammad in The Koran:

You [true believers in Islamic Monotheism, and real followers of Prophet Muhammad] are the best peoples ever raised up for mankind… And had the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) believed, it would have been better for them.  (Surah 3:110)

Verily, those who disbelieve (in the religion of Islam, the Qur’an, and Prophet Muhammad) from among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians)… will abide in the Fire of Hell. They are the worst of creatures.  (Surah 98:6)

Is it any wonder that radical Islam seeks the subjugation of outsiders? Their holy book tells them, in no uncertain terms, they truly are superior.

When religion leads people to view others as lower than themselves, then it does spoil everything.  Consider these sentiments from Richard Dawkins in his Preface to The God Delusion:

Being an atheist is nothing to be apologetic about.  On the contrary, it is something to be proud of, standing tall to face the far horizon, for atheism nearly always indicates a healthy independence of mind and, indeed, a healthy mind.  (The God Delusion, p. 3)

The supremacist leanings of Dawkins’ analogy are rather obvious.  Atheists have healthy minds, whereas theists have been infected by a virus that causes a form of psychopathology.  Sam Harris, in Letter to a Christian Nation, writes:

While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society.  (Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 67)

The clear implication in Harris’s words is that “faith in God” should not hold prestige, but rather, should be considered a mark of madness or stupidity.  Both Harris and Dawkins project an air of superiority by insinuating that the religious, and especially Christians, are ill, mad or stupid.  Some people who claim the title “Christian” may indeed deserve these labels, such as those whom Harris claims sent him hostile emails and letters after the publication of his first book, The End of Faith.  Yet, hostility from those who disagree with you is par for the course in this day and age.  I, too, have received my share of hostile communications from atheists subsequent to my rebuttal of Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation: Counter Point.

So, it would seem the score is tied.  Or is it?  We’ve considered the writings of leading atheists and the words of Muhammad, the founder of Islam.  But what does Christ himself say?  While there are self-professed Christians who hold supremacist views, do they come upon these notions through a reliable study of the Bible?  Is supremacy consistent with the teachings of Jesus?  Consider His words:

If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.  You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.  And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others?  (Matthew 5:39, 43, 44, 47)

Jesus commands His followers to love their enemies.  And the apostle Paul encourages Christians to:

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.  But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.  (1 Peter 3:15, 16)

The dictates of Jesus and Paul, when followed by professing Christians, mitigate against superiority and thoughts of supremacy.  Christians the world over, who live consistently with the mandates of Jesus Christ, find a joy and a peace they long to share with others… all others… for they realize that they are recipients of grace and mercy.  The recognition that they are no more deserving than the next person of that blessed grace leads them to humbly look upon others as greater than themselves.  Religion may indeed spoil everything, but Jesus Christ came to redeem the spoiled.

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Big Bang Evidence for God

When I debated atheist Christopher Hitchens, one of the eight arguments I offered for God’s existence was the creation of this supremely fine-tuned universe out of nothing.  I spoke of the five main lines of scientific evidence—denoted by the acronym SURGE—that point to the definite beginning of the space-time continuum. They are: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Expanding Universe, the Radiation Afterglow from the Big Bang Explosion, the Great galaxy seeds in the Radiation Afterglow, and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

While I don’t have space to unpack this evidence here (see I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist), it all points to the fact that the universe began from literally nothing physical or temporal.  Once there was no time, no space, and no matter and then it all banged into existence out of nothing with great precision.

The evidence led astronomer Dr. Robert Jastrow—who until his recent death was the director of the Mount Wilson observatory once led by Edwin Hubble—to author a book called God and the Astronomers. Despite revealing in the first line of chapter 1 that he was personally agnostic about ‘religious matters,” Jastrow reviewed some of the SURGE evidence and concluded,  “Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.”

In an interview, Jastrow went even further, admitting that “Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover… That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”
Jastrow was not alone in evoking the supernatural to explain the beginning. Although he found it personally “repugnant,” General Relativity expert Arthur Eddington admitted the same when he said, “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.”

Now, why would scientists such as Jastrow and Eddington admit, despite their personal misgivings, that there are “supernatural” forces at work? Why couldn’t natural forces have produced the universe? Because there was no nature and there were no natural forces ontologically prior to the Big Bang—nature itself was created at the Big Bang. That means the cause of the universe must be something beyond nature—something we would call supernatural.  It also means that the supernatural cause of the universe must at least be:

  • spaceless because it created space
  • timeless because it created time
  • immaterial because it created matter
  • powerful because it created out of nothing
  • intelligent because the creation event and the universe was precisely designed
  • personal because it made a choice to convert a state of nothing into something (impersonal forces don’t make choices).

Those are the same attributes of the God of the Bible (which is one reason I believe in the God of the Bible and not a god of mythology like Zeus).

I mentioned in the debate that other scientists who made Big-Bang-related discoveries also conclude that the evidence is consistent with the Biblical account. Robert Wilson—co-discoverer of the Radiation Afterglow, which won him a Noble Prize in Physics— observed, “Certainly there was something that set it off. Certainly, if you’re religious, I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match with Genesis.”  George Smoot—co-discoverer of the Great Galaxy Seeds which won him a Nobel Prize as well—echoed Wilson’s assessment by saying, “There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the Big Bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing.”

How did Hitchens respond to this evidence?  Predictably, he said that I was “speculating”—that no one can get behind the Big Bang event.  I say “predictably” because that’s exactly the response Dr. Jastrow said is common for atheists who have their own religion—the religion of science.  Jastrow wrote, “There is a kind of religion in science… every effect must have its cause; there is no First Cause… This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances, we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized. As usual, when faced with trauma, the mind reacts by ignoring the implications—in science, this is known as ‘refusing to speculate.’”

Hitchens admits the evidence but ignores its implications in order to blindly maintain his own religious faith (watch the entire debate at CrossExamined.org).  How is it speculation to say that since all space, time, and matter were created that the cause must be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial?  That’s not speculation, but following the evidence where it leads.

Dr. Jastrow, despite his agnosticism, told us where the evidence leads.  He ended his book this way:  “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

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What is Evil?

We’ve been having a very spirited debate between atheists and Christians on this blog on another thread that has arrived at a fundamental question.  What is evil?  Specifically, what is evil ontologically?

In order to get the discussion going, I’ll offer an insight from Augustine.  He said that evil was not a thing in itself, but a lack in good.  Evil is like rot in a tree; if you take away all the rot you have a better tree, but if you take away all the tree you have nothing.  We could say that evil is like rust in a car.  You take away all the rust and you have a better car.  But if you take away all the car, you have nothing.

If Augustine is correct, then an ultimate being (i.e. God) could not be evil because evil is not a thing in itself.  It only exists as a kind of parasite in a good thing.

I appreciate your comments and respectful dialogue.

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Atheist Urges Evangelism

Atheist Penn Jillette of the comedy team Penn & Teller believes in evangelism more than do many Christians.  A Christian approached him after one of his Las Vegas shows, and Penn appreciated the man’s effort.  In this short YouTube video, Penn says that he “knows” there is no God, but that it’s hateful to NOT evangelize people if you truly believe in Heaven and Hell.  He also says that atheists ought not be so defensive when people sincerely share the Christian message.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JHS8adO3hM

If only more Christians thought more like this atheist!

By the way, I saw Penn & Teller’s show back in 2003.  It’s certainly worth seeing.

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TV Show Moved to Monday Night

Our TV show, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to an Atheist, has moved from Sunday night to MONDAY night at 8 PM and Midnight ET on DirecTV Channel 378 (The NRB Network).

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Resurrection Reported VERY Early

Some people say that the resurrection is myth.  Unfortunately for them, scholars report that the earliest testimony for the resurrection goes back to the very year it supposedly occurred– far too early for mythological development.  New Testament Scholar Craig Blomberg reports that one such scholar is even an atheist. This is from Blomberg’s blog  (HT: Melinda Penner at STR.org):

At the “Earnestly Contending” Apologetics conference at New Life Church in Smithfield, RI, this weekend, Professor Dr. Gary Habermas of Liberty University, an internationally known expert on the resurrection of Jesus, reported on a forthcoming work of Richard Bauckham, prolific New Testament scholar for many years at the University of St. Andrews.  In it, Habermas explained, Bauckham builds on research by evangelical writer Larry Hurtado and atheist historian Gerd Ludemann, both of whom have argued that belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus must have emerged within two or three years of the death of Jesus (whether or not one believes it actually happened).

The argument goes like this.  1 Corinthians 15:3-6 contains, in credal form, a list of the eyewitnesses to the resurrection of Jesus.  By including reference to Jesus’ crucifixion and burial, Paul makes it clear he is talking about bodily resurrection.  But verses 1-2 describe that this is information that Paul passed on just as he had received it, using verbs that were technical terms for the transmission of oral tradition.  When would Paul have first learned this information?  Almost certainly as one of the very fundamentals of the Christian faith taught him when he first became a follower of the Risen Jesus–perhaps by Ananias who instructed him while he was still temporarily blind, in Damascus, after the Risen Christ appeared to him en route.

But when one compiles the most probable dates of the relevant events, based on Paul’s own information in Galatians 1-2, if Jesus was crucified in A.D. 30, the most likely date, then Paul’s conversion must have come no more than two years later, in 32.  (See any standard conservative New Testament introduction for how the dates are computed).  But for Paul to have been given an already established creed including resurrection witnesses, known not just in Jerusalem but also in Damascus, some time must have already elapsed for this foundational information to have been crystallized in this form and become widely known in the various locations believers lived and become widely agreed on as the kind of information to be passed on to each new convert.

Ludemann, the atheist, says this means within one to two years from Jesus’ death, it was widely agreed on that Christ had been bodily resurrected.  Bauckham, according to Habermas, apparently moves that date back to within about one-half year’s time, in order for the necessary time to elapse for this to become widely standardized by the time of Paul’s conversion.

One may still choose to follow Ludemann’s antisupernaturalism (we know resurrections can’t happen) and thus opt for some version of the mass hallucination hypothesis.  But the most common skeptical alternative in recent years, that the resurrection stories are just late myths in which beliefs about Jesus’ cause living on became embodied in mythological garb, simply doesn’t have the decades (or sometimes centuries) needed for it to have developed the way all other ancient myths did.  At some point, one has to say that it takes more faith to believe in the alternatives to the historic, Christian conviction at this point than to believe orthodox tradition!

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It’s NOT about marriage. It is about normality.

The homosexual movement wants us to believe they want to be married like heterosexuals. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact all the research of the homosexual sub-culture indicates a mere miniscule commitment by their population to “monogamous” relationships over any significant period of time. Very few in their movement will honestly say privately that they personally want life-long monogamous family commitments recognized by the world in the same way that heterosexual marriage is now in the larger society.

So what is it that they want? Why their outrage over the failures of their massive and expensive efforts to convince the public to allow them to “marry?” Put simply: their goal is a new level of acceptance that ameliorates their own deep-seated shame at their difference from the norm. Put another way, they want to be normal. They want the government, the IRS, and the rest of the world to say what they know is not really true. They want society to say to them: “You are normal and we accept you as such.”

However, homosexuality and heterosexuality are not morally, physically, sexually, socially, relationally or any other way equivalent. Simple science demonstrates that there cannot be two norms for human sexuality, because only one relationship can result in reproduction. This reality renders any other version of human sexuality abnormal, sub-normal, or at the least, deviations from the norm. That is simple science and unchangeable fact.

No amount of legislative change, judicial fiat, licensing or religious ceremony will assuage or change the underlying discontent and angst that comes from knowing that one differs from the norm. Most of us differ from the norm in some area of our physical, psychological, emotional, financial, social or spiritual makeup. Does that mean we all get to create and enforce laws to make us feel normal? Shall we seek new laws or change the Bible texts to make fat or skinny people feel better about themselves? How about sado-masochists or necrophiliacs? What about sex or drug addicts or alcoholics? There is an indisputable norm for nearly every behavior, and those who deviate always struggle with it.

If the difference from the norm is a lifestyle decision one makes, which all the evidence so far supports with respect to homosexuality and other sexual deviations from the norm, then there is only one escape from the angst. Abnormal sexual lifestyle choices apparently occur most frequently when certain socio-environmental exist in a person’s life. So in spite of what the movement says, one can change their lifestyle by making different choices. Will it be a painful struggle? It is painful for any of us when we try to change ourselves, but no one should ever expect that making new laws or shifting a society will make folks feel whole, healthy and normal. It never has worked for anyone with any of their deviation struggles, nor will it work for homosexuals with theirs.

Please note that I did not quote the Bible once.

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