Tag Archive for: apologetics

The Universal Problem We Don't Want to Admit

The Universal Problem We Don’t Want to Admit

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How do we fix a world filled with murder, rape, betrayal, adultery, fraud, theft, sexual exploitation, pornography, bullying, abortion, terrorism, cheating, lying, child abuse, racism, assault, drugs, robbery, and countless other evils?

There will be no solutions unless we are honest about their underlying causes. Although we don’t want to admit it, the truth is that every one of those world problems can be traced back to a problem with the human heart.

No one knows that better than an honest cop. My friend Jim Wallace is a cold-case homicide detective in California. He’s been featured four times on Dateline for solving crimes that are decades old. He’s noticed that every crime he has ever solved can be traced back to one or more of these three motives: financial greed, relational lust, or the pursuit of power (money, sex and power). We want these things so much that we are willing to use immoral means to get them.

In other words, the sick condition of our world is preceded and caused by the sick condition of our hearts.  That’s why we won’t improve the external world until we first improve our internal worlds.

You might think that this doesn’t really apply to you. After all, you may be congratulating yourself because you haven’t committed any of the crimes listed at the top of this column.

“Well, not most of them anyway,” you say. “Who hasn’t lied or stolen something?   But I’m better than most people!”

Maybe so. But your very act of self-justification proves the point—instead of admitting our faults, our natural inclination is to minimize them or cover them up while claiming moral superiority.

We don’t want to admit this because it hurts our pride, which is also a heart issue. “Don’t tell me I’m wrong! You’re offending me! You’re hurting my feelings!”

It’s no wonder free speech is under attack in the culture and on campus. To channel Jack Nicholson, we “can’t handle the truth” because the truth exposes the fact that we are not really as good as we claim we are. We can’t bear the fact that we are broken, narcissistic creatures who find it much easier and more natural to be selfish rather than selfless.

This affects even people who deny real right and wrong. For example, leading atheist Richard Dawkins has declared, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.”

But Dawkins doesn’t act like he actually believes that. He recently insisted that a woman has the right to choose an abortion and asserted that it would be “immoral” to give birth to a baby with Down syndrome. According to Dawkins, the “right to choose” is a good thing and giving birth to Down syndrome children is a bad thing.

Well, which is it? Is there really good and evil, or are we just moist robots dancing to the music of our DNA? If there is no objective morality, then there is no “right” to anything, whether it is abortion or the right to life.

And if there is no objective morality, then why does everyone, including atheists, try to justify their own immoral behavior? As C.S. Lewis observed, “If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule or Law pressing on us so— that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility.”

Ironically, when we try to shift the responsibility for our immoral actions, we often appeal to other moral principles to justify ourselves:

  • I used my expense account for personal items because I work harder than what they pay me, and it’s unjust that my boss makes so much more than me.
  • I ran off with my assistant because she really loves me, unlike my wife who doesn’t give me the attention I deserve.
  • I don’t have time for my kids because I’m too busy working hard to provide for their future.
  • I had an abortion because it’s immoral to give birth to a Down syndrome child.

Even our excuses show that we really, deep down, believe in objective morality. We often deceive ourselves into believing that something immoral is really moral (like abortion), but, as Thomas Jefferson famously declared, certain universal moral truths are “self evident.” All rational people know this. Unfortunately, our tendency for moral self-deception is also universal. We know what’s right, but we make excuses for doing wrong by trying to appeal to what is right!

Where does all this leave us?

There is hope. Regardless of what you believe about the Bible, what can’t be denied is that the Bible nails the truth about human nature and our deceptive human hearts. The book of Genesis admits that “every intent of the thoughts of [mankind’s] heart was only evil continually.” Jeremiah wrote, “The heart is deceitful and wicked, who can know it?” Jesus declared, that people “love darkness rather than light.” And Paul observed that we “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” in order to continue in our sins.

But the Bible doesn’t just accurately state the problem; it also reveals the only possible solution. Because of our moral failings, God’s infinite love compelled Him to add humanity over his Deity and come to earth in the person of Jesus that first Christmas. The incarnation was necessary because an infinitely just Being cannot allow sin to go unpunished. Instead of punishing us, God found in Jesus an innocent human substitute to voluntarily take the punishment for us.

Our pride tells us that we can rescue ourselves, but we can’t. No matter how much we try to justify ourselves or pledge to do better in the future, we can’t escape the fact that we’re guilty for what we’ve already done.

So it’s important to ask this Christmas season, “Have you accepted the pardon Jesus came to offer you? And have you asked Him into your life to help heal your self-centered heart?” If not, why not? He’s the only true solution to the world’s evils and the heart problem that afflicts each one of us.

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Was Belief in God a Science-Stopper? Not for Newton

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I’d like to call attention to a couple of excellent blogs by Luke Barnes correcting some historical blunders that Neil deGrasse Tyson made. Tyson argued that Newton failed to discover the stability of the solar system due to blinders that resulted from his belief in God. Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2 of the blogs by Barnes, a cosmologist from Australia.

I had recognized historical misrepresentations by Tyson in the Cosmos series such as that Giordano Bruno was a martyr for science and that Galileo went to jail for his scientific beliefs[1] but I wasn’t aware of the broader story behind this famous interaction between Laplace and Napolean. You really need to read Barnes’s blogs for the details but, in a nutshell, the story is that Napolean upon reading physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace’s writings about the physics of the solar system asked why they never mentioned a Creator. Laplace replied that “Sir, I had no need of that hypothesis.” Also, as Barnes summarizes: “Tyson claims that Newton (1642-1727) should have discovered what Laplace (1749-1827) did – that the combined pull of the planets on each other do not destabilize their orbits – but was hamstrung by his theism.” Tyson wonders why Newton didn’t discover the stability of the solar system but inserted God as a means of intervening to keep things stable:

“What concerns me is, even if you’re as brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God, and then your discovery stops. It just stops. You’re no good anymore for advancing that frontier. You’re waiting for someone to come behind you who doesn’t have God on the brain and who says “that’s a really cool problem, I want to solve it.” And they come in and solve it.”

Barnes points out several problems with Tyson’s claims:

  • This story may have never actually happened – the case for its historicity is somewhat weak as Laplace himself denied it and the earliest reports about the meeting are relatively late.
  • It is simply false that Newton ceased from scientific exploration into this problem – he did develop a theory of perturbations. He failed to develop the proper theory primarily because he had the wrong tools – as one historian summarizes “success came for Newton’s successors only with a new approach, different from any he had envisaged: algorithmic and global.”
  • Laplace had lots of help – as Barnes explains: “note the mathematicians who worked on the problem of perturbations to planetary orbits before Laplace: Clairaut, Euler, d’Alembert, and Lagrange. These are the greatest mathematicians of their age; Leonard Euler is arguably the greatest mathematician of all time: “Read Euler, read Euler, he is the master of us all.” That quote, incidentally, is from Laplace. Euler was a devout Christian and a Lutheran Saint. Apparently, having “God on the brain” didn’t prevent him – as it didn’t prevent Newton – from working on this scientific problem.” “Newton, of course, was a mathematical genius. But we can hardly blame him for not being smarter than Clairaut, Euler, d’Alembert, Lagrange and Laplace combined.”
  • Laplace’s theory is not quite accurate either – “orbits of the Solar System are chaotic over timescales of a few billion years.”

I personally think it’s important to correct this type of misleading historical account because it is often used to argue against interpreting something like fine-tuning as evidence for a Creator – anyone that sees evidence for God is said to be a science-stopper.

Why does Tyson feel the need to inject historical misrepresentations at all into his otherwise excellent public lectures on the beauty majesty of nature and the scientific endeavor? I assume that Tyson didn’t know the broader story but we should expect more thorough research from a scientist and public spokesperson.

Here are some resources you might find helpful that discuss the relationship between science and religion historically:

https://ischristianitytrue.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/science-series-the-myth-that-the-church-hindered-the-development-of-science/

“The Mythical Conflict Between Science and Religion” James Hannam, Medieval Science and Philosophy (website for the book The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution)
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[1] Both of these myths are debunked in Galileo Goes to Jail: and Other Myths About Science and Religion, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Harvard UP, 2009)

 

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Do Objective Moral Truths Exist in Reality

Do Objective Moral Truths Exist in Reality?

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The moral argument for God’s existence is often presented as follows:

Premise 1: If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
Premise 2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.
Conclusion: Therefore, God exists.

As with any valid syllogism, the moral argument can be defeated by proving one of the supporting premises to be false. In many conversations with atheists, I’ve encountered several who agree with premise 1, but deny the truth of premise 2. Is this a rational position, or do we have good reason to believe that objective moral values and duties do in fact exist?

Before we look at the evidence, let’s define clearly the boundaries of the premise. The claim is that our universe contains moral categories of values (good and evil) and duties (right and wrong actions) that exist independently of the opinion of anyone and that apply to the actions and motivations of all persons. Therefore, the topic at hand is a question of ontology—whether these categories actually exist, and not epistemology—how we know these categories. How we come to knowledge of morality is irrelevant to the question; whether we know the speed limit on the streets of our city has no effect on the existence of such a limit. In my hometown, you will still be cited for speeding, even if the road is not posted with speed limit signs!

Secondly, the claim is not interested in whether one believes in objective morality. Belief in, or lack of belief in a truth claim does not make the claim true or false. You may not believe that our town has a speed limit; you can still be given a citation in spite of your lack of belief. What the claim addresses is whether these moral categories exist in reality, not in someone’s belief system.

So the question on the table presents us with two different types of realities; a moral universe in which objective moral categories exist, and an amoral universe that contains only subjective moral categories (where each person’s standard of right, wrong, good, and evil is defined by themselves and applies only to themselves). In order to determine which of these descriptions applies to our own universe, let’s take a look at what both of these realities would be like, and then see which most closely describes the features of our own universe.

In an Amoral Universe, objective moral categories do not exist. No action can be called objectively evil; while one might dislike another’s action, no external standard exists by which any action can be called good or evil. In the overall scheme of things, feeding your child is no better or worse than beheading your child, and any feelings one has to the contrary is simply opinion. In this universe, these moral opinions have no basis in reality; that is to say, nothing objective exists on which to base such a concept.

In a Moral Universe, objective moral categories do exist. Any action can fall into one of three categories:

  • Moral actions — actions that conform to the objective moral standard
  • Immoral actions — actions that violate the objective moral standard
  • Amoral actions — actions which are not addressed by the objective moral standard

While legality is not a synonym for morality, the two are somewhat analogous. It is legal in the United States to peacefully and publicly speak against an policy implemented by our government. It is illegal to murder the government official who is responsible for creating this policy. It is a-legal to read the public information related to the policy. Freedom of speech is expressly permitted by the law, murder is expressly forbidden by the law, and reading public documents is simply not addressed by the law.

As an objective feature of the universe, and not of an individual human, these categories apply to all humans, just as the law of gravity applies to all humans. Just as there’s no escaping the laws of physics for physical creatures, the laws of morality are just as binding on moral creatures. However, the moral categories are necessarily different from other laws of the universe in that they are prescriptive (describing how things ought to be) and not descriptive (describing how things are).

Having described these two universes, let us now consider our own. Which of these two descriptions best describes what we see in our own actual universe? I offer here two reasons why I contend that the description of the moral universe more accurately describes our universe.

The idea of an amoral universe is existentially self-refuting.

The concept of an amoral universe, thought not logically self-refuting, is existentially self-refuting. There is no logical incoherence in the statement “No objective moral values and duties exist.” The problem arises when one attempts to describe how one should live in such a universe… for the instant one makes such an attempt, they have invalidate the concept. In an amoral universe, “how one should live” is meaningless… no standard exists to describe how one should live.

Without considering the implications of such a universe deeply, it’s easy to claim, “Objective moral truths do not exist; I have the right to do as I please!” Yet, this statement makes a moral claim to a “right” while denying moral reality. If you believe that others ought to allow you to live according to the dictates of your own will and your own conscience, then you are appealing to objective morality to justify what others “ought” to do.

The logically correct view in an amoral universe is that everyone will do as they do with no moral implications at all. Yet, atheists commonly make moral demands; for example, that theists “stop imposing their morality”. This demand certainly assumes that theists “ought” to act in a particular way.  Yet, without objective morality, no such “ought” can exist.

Or think of it this way; we are beings who can conceive and consider many different possible courses of action. Does any course of action exist that should always happen, if possible? Does any course of action exist that ought never to happen? Ought theists to never torture atheists for fun? Ought atheists to rebut theists who claim that objective moral categories exist?

If one single course of action ought never to happen, then objective morality must exist. But let’s not get ahead of the evidence; whether it is immoral to torture atheists for fun (a question of epistemology) is irrelevant to the point—the only way that such a statement can logically be true is if there is an applicable objective standard by which we can judge the action in question.

The idea of moral categories would be unintelligible in an amoral universe.

In an amoral universe, one is hard-pressed to determine how the idea of moral categories would come to be. While in such a universe, any moral standard is necessarily subjective, such a subjective morality could have absolutely no basis in reality.

While we certainly conceive of ideas that are fictional, most, if not all of these fictional concepts have their roots in reality; unicorns are an extension of horses; werewolves are a blending of human and animal, a cyclops is an oversized human with a single eye. None of these concepts are completely manufactured out of nothingness.

Yet for the concept of subjective morality to appear in an amoral universe is similar to the idea of blue and green appearing in a colorless universe. It is impossible to convey the richness and experience of color to a man blind from birth, because such a man has no basis on which to relate to such a description. While you might explain that blue is a certain wavelength of light, that doesn’t convey to the blind man what light is, or the experience of seeing blue. To the blind man, color and light do not exist in his experience.

But in an amoral universe, moral categories have no basis of existence in reality. In a world where color had no basis of existence in reality, all would be as the blind man above, completely incapable of understanding the concept of color. Even if one conceived of such a thing as green or red in their imagination, they could never communicate this idea to others without a shared reference point. For purely subjective concepts, such shared reference points cannot exist.

It’s been argued that the fact that different cultures and religions have differing concepts of morality is evidence against objective morality. However, this is not the case. My wife and I frequently disagree on colors; I’ll say something is blue, while she insists that it is green. When it’s brought in to sunlight, we usually find that she’s right!

But notice that while we may disagree on the color of the object, neither of us is claiming that it has no color at all! In order for us to have a meaningful conversation about the object’s color, both of us must assume that color exists, and that the object does have a color. If color does not exist, then our conversation is meaningless, unexplainable, and could only be called delusional.

So the fact that every single person who has reached age two seems to have conversations about what men should and should not do seems to be strong evidence that they actually perceive something in the universe that actually exists. Whether politician, priest, parent, or protester, all make the claim that men should behave in a certain way. It seems remarkably myopic to consider all who hold such views to be sharing the same delusion!

For example, Christianity teaches that we should love our enemies, and as much as it is possible, we should live in peace with all men. Some branches of Islam believe that one should behead their enemies. Again, for this point, which view is correct is irrelevant; but in order for anyone to have a meaningful conversation about which view (if either) is correct, one must assume that a correct view does in fact exist. This requires an objective moral standard.

The implications of these two lines of evidence seem inescapable; unless objective moral categories of good, evil, right, and wrong actually exist in reality, our tendency to think in these terms is unexplainable. But to be fair, we’ve only looked at one side of the evidence. In a later post, I will address the arguments against this view.

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Doubt: A Splinter In The Mind

Doubt: A Splinter In The Mind

Beyond surpassing wonder about God or mere inquiry about Him and His truth, doubt digs much deeper. Doubt doesn’t just ask, “What is real?” It poses the challenge, “Is my faith real?” Is what I believe really valid? Or is it simply a modified myth, an uber-marketed religious fairy tale supported by millions of gullible minds throughout history?

Doubt trumps wondering, and it body-slams mere curiosity. In its worst form, it goes beyond simply searching for answers to questions, inevitably denying the legitimacy of the questions themselves.

FREE “Doubting Toward Faith” Chapter – Click here to DOWNLOAD NOW!

For Christians, doubt can either serve us or sink us. It can drive us to seek truth or it can drown us in despair, hopelessness, and confusion. If ignored or left unchecked, it can bore into our brain, releasing a virus of unbelief, infecting and eventually destroying every healthy thought about God. It can take us to the place where nothing else matters. Where we find ourselves loathing even life itself.

If left unchecked, intellectual doubt metastasizes, seeping its way into our emotions and collecting a wide array of fears, worries, anxieties, anger, confusion, depression, and ultimately despair at the thought of being played or duped or envisioning a life without our once “cherished belief” in God.

Horrifying so, doubt is no stranger to our time. And capturing the zeitgeist of our changing times is quite the project. We live in a multi-textured culture that is replete with innumerable beliefs, opinions, ideas, and life philosophies. Ours is a culture of doubt and longing, faith and questioning, searching and probing. And much of the doubt has been accelerated by fast-paced change. Our culture is living between the tension of what we once were and what we are now becoming. And for many, waiting in the blank space between the definition of what we were and the search to define what we are becoming feels for the moment confusing, and even a bit uncomfortable.

Echoing this angst, Os Guinness writes, “We live in an age of doubt, disillusion and disaffiliation, which naturally prizes what has been described as ‘the faith that you go to when you don’t know where to go.”[i] Both our pluralistic and secularized culture has produced a fragilized-self as it pertains to doubt.[ii] We’ve shifted from Christianity to Anyanity (pluralism) or Noanity (atheism).

Belief isn’t nearly as comfortable and cozy as it once seemed. There’s an irritant to it; like a pebble in a shoe, these competing beliefs have made the faith walk a little less comfortable. Today, record numbers of those who once professed faith in Christ are walking away from the church, even limping, in the name of doubt.

Such torturous doubt splits the mind. And contrary to popular belief, intellectual doubt is not the opposite of faith; unbelief is. Doubt is in between, seesawing and dangling in the middle.

Yet, make no mistake. Doubt never stays put. It’s not neutral.

It makes up its mind.

It’s directional.

It’s going somewhere.

This means a person will either doubt toward unbelief or they will doubt toward faith. You’ll waver one way or another. But thankfully God can discern the nature of our doubts. There’s skeptical doubt and sincere doubt. There is antagonistic doubt and authentic doubt. And the difference between them is worlds apart. Those who hold to the latter want their doubts solved so they can go forward with God, while the former want their doubts confirmed so they can move beyond God.

Next time you find yourself experiencing a bout with doubt, or the angst of a splintered mind let me encourage you to doubt toward faith. And I’m not talking about an empty existential faith that takes a leap into the darkness, but rather a bona fide trusting faith in the Person of Jesus Christ. Yes, next time you doubt.

Doubt.

Toward.

Jesus!

[i] Os Guinness, Renaissance (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 25.

[ii] Philosopher James K.A. Smith describes fragilization as follows, “In the face of different options, where people who lead ‘normal’ lives do not share my faith (and perhaps believe something different), my own faith commitment becomes fragile—put into question, dubitable.” How (Not) To Be Secular (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014), 141.

[iii] Adapted from: DOUBTING TOWARD FAITH

Copyright © 2015 Bobby Conway

Published by Harvest House Publishers

Eugene, Oregon

www.harvesthousepublishers.com

Used by Permission.

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God's Crime Scene

God’s Crime Scene

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It’s about 2 a.m. on an August morning in 1979. A beautiful young nurse by the name of Lynne Knight is living in a bungalow behind a larger house in Torrance, California. As two police officers approach her door, they notice a chair overturned in the entryway and bloody footsteps leading back to the rear bedroom. Each officer has his gun drawn, not sure what to expect.

When they switch on the light, they witness the worst murder scene of their careers. Ms. Knight is lying on her bed, undressed. Her throat is deeply severed, and her lifeless body, which had been stabbed repeatedly, is covered in blood.

Under her body is 18 inches of twisted wire strung between two small pieces of wood that had been sawed off from an old broomstick. Although they’ve never seen one in person before, the officers immediately know it’s a garrote—a homemade weapon used to strangle someone in order to commit a murder quietly.

The killer tried to murder Lynne with the garrote, but couldn’t complete the evil act because she fought back. So the killer stabbed her to death and left the garrote behind in a panic.

Could the garrote lead the cops to this monster? Not soon enough. For nearly three decades, the case went cold until cold case homicide detectives J. Warner Wallace, and Rick Glass got involved in 2007. They dusted off the evidence left in a box at the Torrance PD, and Wallace made it his personal mission to analyze every aspect of the garrote. It turned out to be the key to the murder trial that took place last summer in the same LA courtroom where O.J. Simpson was tried. And there was a familiar face in this trial. The defendant, Doug Bradford, hired O.J. lawyer Robert Shapiro to be his defense attorney.

While Bradford was a former lover of Knight, there was no eyewitness or DNA evidence to link Bradford to the murder. And there were several other suspects in the case, some of whom had since died. Wallace, Glass, and LA District Attorney John Lewin had an uphill battle to convince a jury of twelve that Bradford had indeed committed the crime. There would be no conviction unless all twelve agreed.

But Wallace, Glass, and Lewin had been down this road before. They earned convictions on every cold case they had brought to trial so far. Three of those cases were so intriguing that NBC’s Dateline featured them. This case was no different: Keith Morrison and his Dateline crew were filming the case in an episode they called “The Wire.”

Although Dateline didn’t know it going in, their confidence was rewarded: on August 14, 2014, this LA jury returned a guilty verdict. Robert Shapiro, perhaps aware he had been out argued, didn’t even show up for the verdict. Doug Bradford is now serving a life sentence after being free for 35 years.

How did they get the conviction?

They began by asking the question, all detectives ask at a death scene: can this death be explained by staying inside the room, or does it require us to look outside the room? Obviously, this death was a murder and required a suspect outside the room. Had this been a suicide, natural death, or accidental death, the event could be explained by staying inside the room.

Then Detective Wallace used some very ingenious methods to link the garrote back to Bradford. (You can watch the entire Dateline explanation here.) He linked the effect (the garrote) back to the cause (Bradford).

Now Wallace is employing the same investigative principles he uses to solve cold case murders to eight of the greatest questions we ponder as human beings. He does this in his insightful new book, God’s Crime Scene. In the book Wallace seeks to discover if we can stay inside the room (the natural world) or must go outside the room (the supernatural world) for the causes of the following effects:

  • The origin of the universe
  • The fine-tuning of the universe
  • The origin of life
  • The origin of new life forms and biological machines
  • Consciousness
  • Free will
  • Objective Moral Values
  • Evil

Each of the eight chapters starts with the details of a real criminal case and then applies the principles to the question at hand (the Lynne Knight case is in Chapter 4).

Wallace was a committed atheist until age 35. Now he is a highly skilled author and speaker who presents a unique case for the Christian worldview across the country. Columnist Mike Adams and I have recently teamed with J. to equip Christian youth and their parents with the case for Christianity through a dynamic new College Prep program. I can tell you that audiences are captivated by the way he applies forensic principles to build the case for Christianity.

But don’t think Wallace just tows the party line. Since he is a cold-case homicide detective, Wallace presents you with the evidence pro and con, and then leaves you to draw your own conclusions. He does a masterful job of laying out the evidence and even illustrates that evidence with over one hundred of his own drawings, which clarify and summarize some potentially difficult subject matter. (Who said a serious book can’t have pictures?)

God’s Crime Scene is an engaging and very readable work that investigates some of life’s most important questions. I highly recommend you get it regardless of your religious viewpoint. I can’t guarantee you’ll be convicted, but your thinking will be challenged.

 

Dr. Frank Turek (D.Min.) is an award-winning author and frequent college speaker who hosts a weekly TV show on DirectTV and a radio program that airs on 186 stations around the nation.  His books include I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist and Stealing from God:  Why atheists need God to make their case.

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Are Christian High School Seniors Really Ready for College

Are Christian High School Seniors Really Ready for College?

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We have sent this year’s graduating seniors off to college hoping that we as parents and teachers have prepared them for the challenges of college life. We gave them the best education we could, prodded them when they wanted to goof off instead of study, made college visits, wrote recommendations, and helped them write admissions essays. But have we prepared them for the most serious confrontations to their faith that they will face on the university campus?

College can be a dangerous place for the spiritual life of Christian students. What if your child is assigned a Hindu roommate who sets up a shrine to his or her god in the dorm room? Or, what about the increasingly common situation in which your student ends up rooming with someone who self-identifies as homosexual? Showing Christ’s love to persons with whom we disagree is not the only issue. The question is whether your student is prepared to navigate the intimacy of a dorm room setting with a roommate of the same sex who affirms same-sex attraction.

Hickory Grove Christian High School students in Charlotte, NC with apologist J. Warner Wallace

Hickory Grove Christian High School students in Charlotte, NC, with apologist J. Warner Wallace

Peers aren’t the only source of pressure. Many college professors believe that Christian students are naïve and misguided, and see it as their job to disabuse them of their backward, bigoted Christian notions. How will your student respond when an English professor insists that a sentence has no inherent meaning but rather the reader endows the text with meaning? Will your student be swayed by the philosophy professor who insists truth and morality are relative to culture, or by the New Testament professor who argues that the gospels are full of errors and their accounts about the life and words of Christ cannot be trusted?

Just so you don’t think I am exaggerating about the frontal attack Christian students face a mere twelve weeks after high school graduation, let me share what a former student told me happened the first week she entered college orientation.

Mrs. Scribner,

I just wanted to let you know how much you were right! (Not that there was ever a question:)) I went to college orientation last week and they taught us about tolerance and not pushing your beliefs on others. ‘Your beliefs are your beliefs and let’s keep them that way’ was a major thing. We had to play a ‘get to know you’ game and we were asked about religion. I freely told people I was a Christian and afterward definitely got the cold shoulder. This was at the end of the day so I had already made some friends, but after I told them that it was almost as if the [person] that they had met earlier had ceased to exist. When our group leader talked to us about accepting everyone as they are and not trying to change them it was almost like he was talking directly to me. A couple of the students made it their personal mission to either offend me or change my beliefs; I’m not sure which they had in mind. One made a comment and started out with, ‘Let’s say God  ACTUALLY exists. . . .’  I was most upset by the fact that they were allowed to attack me like this. Not that I would have, but had I made a mean comment about their atheism or unitarianism I feel certain I would have gotten in trouble. I’m already sickened by the double standards and a school hasn’t even started yet!! 

Fortunately, this student was not swayed by the hostile attitudes of teachers and students. In high school apologetics class, we had talked many times about this inevitable reality of college life. Not only was she not swayed, but she was also ready to exercise her apologetics muscles in conversations. She shared one example in which she talked with someone who raised difficult spiritual questions.

I immediately thought back to apologetics and I was ready to discuss! He asked really good questions and at first, I was nervous about answering them. I took a deep breath and remembered my training! I began to ask him questions about what he specifically believed. I used the ‘what do you mean by…?’ question multiple times. I was so excited that I could keep up and even ask questions that took [him] a minute to answer! I just wanted to thank you for everything. You have not only shown me the information but how to use it most effectively. I honestly think your class was the most important one I will ever take. It answered some of my questions and also gave me more. I now have the ability to think for myself and the confidence that I actually know what I’m talking about!!

Now, to be honest, if you asked most of my students what they thought of the apologetics course, they would describe it is far less glowing terms. Studying the evidences for Christianity is hard work, sometimes tedious, and even doubt provoking, as students grapple with questions they have never before asked. Nevertheless, my prayer is that while students may not recall all that we have studied, they will remember that we talked about the questions with which they are later faced, and know where to go for answers.

I applaud this young woman for her perceptive recognition of the disparity between espoused tolerance and the way that students are perceived and treated once they self-identify as Christians. She also was willing to practice what she had learned in class, which requires a willingness to take risks. She even employed effective communication skills in dialogue.

Her story affirms my own conviction that before leaving high school, Christian students need to learn and practice sharing the rational evidences from science, history, philosophy, and logic, for the truth claims of Christianity. Apologetics is not a luxury but a necessity. In fact, a Christian student’s education is incomplete if it has not included focused study of the rationale for Christianity’s claims that:

  • the existence of objective truth and morality is undeniable.
  • the evidence for the God Who created the universe in its entirety and created humans as new and distinctly unique beings in His own image is morally, scientifically, and philosophically overwhelming.
  • Jesus Christ’s deity, miracles, atoning death, and physical resurrection were forecasted in the Old Testament and confirmed in the New Testament.

How do we accomplish this overwhelming task? Parents can proactively teach how to analyze and evaluate truth assertions made by diverse worldviews and share evidences for the truth of Christianity. Church student leaders can incorporate apologetics courses in discipleship plans. Teachers in Christian schools can integrate not only the biblical worldview but also the rationale for that view vertically from pre-K through 12th grade and horizontally across disciplines. We’ll talk more about how to integrate apologetics at home, church, and school in upcoming posts. For now, a good place to start is by equipping yourself as a parent or teacher of elementary, middle school or high school students. Get a good apologetics primer such as I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist and dig in so that you can start the dialogue.

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On the Wrong Side of God, Evolution & Humanity

On the Wrong Side of God, Evolution & Humanity

We’ve been told that people who want to maintain the man-woman definition of marriage are “on the wrong side of history.” Perhaps they are correct. Maybe “history,” which is determined largely by how people behave, will continue to move toward defining marriage as genderless in the 90 percent of governments that still maintain the natural definition. But what’s the take-away? Jump on the bandwagon?

Remember, Moses was on the wrong side of the golden calf. And Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was on the wrong side of Dred Scott — the 1857 Supreme Court decision that declared blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights.” Being on the wrong side of some popular moral assertion doesn’t mean your position is wrong.

Now that five judges say that same-sex marriage is a new “right,” let’s ask a more foundational question. Where do rights come from? Specifically, where does the right to same-sex marriage come from?

If you say that rights come from governments or constitutions, how can they really be rights? Isn’t a right something you have regardless of what a government says? For example, if same-sex marriage is really a right, then you actually possess that right even if you live under a government that doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage. You may not be able to exercise it, but you have it nonetheless.

Moreover, if there is no overarching moral standard that transcends human governments, then how we could prosecute Nazi soldiers for violating the rights of others? The Nazis were just following their government.

The truth is, rights don’t come from men or governments. Instead, “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,” as our Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, that was the entire point of the Declaration — the government of King George was usurping the rights of colonists, so we declared our independence.

Some argue that evolutionary theory provides us with a right to same-sex marriage, but one doesn’t even have to challenge evolutionary theory to see that something is wrong with that argument. If natural selection has a goal of survival and reproduction, then how could same-sex marriage help with that? Such marriages are an agreement to stay in a sterile and medically unhealthy relationship — the exact antithesis of survival. In fact, if everyone lived faithfully in same-sex marriage, the human race would end quite quickly. (I’m not saying that same-sex marriage laws would accomplish this, just that the observation shows a real moral and consequential difference between natural marriage and same-sex marriage).

An even more basic problem with the evolutionary argument is that moral rights don’t result from evolutionary processes. Rights are prescriptive and come from an authoritative person. Evolutionary processes are descriptive and have no authority to tell you what to do. How does a mutating genetic code have the moral authority to tell you how you ought to behave or how you ought to treat others?

The truth is, just as history describes what does happen and not what ought to happen, biology describes what does survive, not what ought to survive. Why should humans survive as opposed to anything else? And which humans? Mother Theresa? Hitler?

Those who want to follow evolutionary theory are led to a dark place. Murder would be OK if it helped you survive, thrive and better reproduce. Rape would be OK because if it helped propagate DNA.  And a society might justify exterminating the weak and undesirables to improve the gene pool and help the desirables survive. In fact, Hitler used evolutionary theory to justify just that. Homosexuals were many of his victims.

So if rights don’t come from governments or evolution, then where do they come from? To truly be rights, they can only come from an authoritative being whose nature is the very standard of perfect Goodness. That’s what we mean by God.

Without God, there is no authoritative moral standard beyond humanity, which means that every action or behavior is merely a matter of human opinion. The murder of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals? It’s just your opinion against Hitler’s opinion. Child crucifixions? It’s just your opinion against that of ISIS. Freedom of speech? That’s just your opinion against that of a dictator. Gay bashing is bad? Again, just your opinion.

The same holds true with any supposed right, including the right to same-sex marriage. While you can get five judges to assert it is a right, without God, it is just an opinion (thus the Court’s judgment is aptly named).

But couldn’t God approve of same-sex marriage?

The major religious books state just the opposite. So does the Natural Law derived from God’s nature. Thomas Jefferson called this “Nature’s Law,” from which we get “self-evident truths,” including the truth that people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” Same-sex marriage is not one of those self-evident truths. In fact, Jefferson and other politically incorrect Founding Founders called homosexual acts “crimes against nature” because such acts go against the natural design of the body and frustrate the goal of perpetuating humanity. This observation is not based on bigotry but on biology. (It’s ironic that our Founding Fathers were more apt to follow science than today’s secular left who ignore science when they insist that biological gender is changeable and sexual behavior is not. The exact opposite is true!)

The issue of slavery does not invalidate Jefferson’s judgment. Jefferson understood that slavery was wrong and admitted so, even if he succumbed to the temptation to keep his slaves throughout his life (it was Darwin who believed in the “favored races”). Simple observation tells us that every race of human is fully human. And nature tells us that mixed-race marriages lead to healthy offspring. Indeed, experience has shown that bigger gene pools are healthier than smaller ones. The natural law that points away from homosexual relationships also points away from racism.

Since real rights can only come from God, if you want to insist same-sex marriage is a right then you must assume that God is for same-sex marriage. But then you must also assume the implausible notion that God wants you to harm your own health and that of the human race by contributing to its extinction. How’s that for love? Don’t be fruitful. Don’t multiply. Don’t survive. Same-sex marriage is not only on the wrong side of God and nature; it’s on the wrong side of humanity.

So if not from governments, evolution or God, where does the “right” to same-sex marriage come from? Our imaginations. Perhaps well-intended imaginations, but imaginations nonetheless.

 

Dr. Frank Turek (D.Min.) is an award-winning author and frequent college speaker who hosts a weekly TV show on DirectTV and a radio program that airs on 186 stations around the nation.  His books include I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist and Stealing from God:  Why atheists need God to make their case.

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To Trust Christ as Savior

To Trust Christ as Savior

Recognize God Created You with Purpose.

*God is the Creator. God created everything, including you; therefore He knows what is best for you. Colossians 1:16, Psalm 139

*God is Holy. He cannot “wink” at sin. If He did not judge sin as evil, then He would not be a holy God. Isaiah 5:16

*God is Love.  He loves you & wants the best for you. Ephesians 5:2; John 3:16

Acknowledge You Have a Sin Problem.  

*We all have sinned and we cannot fix it on our own. Romans 3:10, 23

*Sin is thinking and acting as the boss of ourselves, against God. It is missing the mark, like when you shoot an arrow and miss the bull’s eye. No matter how hard we try, we cannot be perfect and holy as God is. Since Adam sinned we have all sinned just as he did, being sinners by nature and by choice. Romans 5:12, 3:23, Isaiah 53:6

*Because God is holy, sin separates us from Him. “Death” in the Bible means both physical separation of the soul from body and spiritual separation of the soul from God. We have earned death because of our sin and rebellion. Romans 6:23, Isaiah 59:2

*As enemies of God, we cannot make things right by doing “good” things. Isaiah 64:6

Believe God Sent Jesus to Pay the Penalty for Your Sin on Your Behalf.

*Despite your sin, there is hope. As your Creator, God can fix your sin problem. He can give you forgiveness, new life, and hope. Romans 8:3-4, 1 Peter 1:18-19

*Because God created you, your life’s purpose is relationship with Him. Ephesians 2:10

*Because God loves you, He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, to pay the penalty, dying in your place, for your sin, so you would not have to. Death could not defeat Jesus, and three days later, He arose physically to live forever. He offers you spiritual and eternal life, as well. Romans 5:8, 6:4

*If you agree with God (confess) about your sinfulness, and trust His offer of forgiveness through Jesus, He will forgive your sin, restoring your relationship with God. Romans 10:9-10, 1 John 1:9-10

*You can have new life. Through the Holy Spirit, He gives you His very Life. He will lead you into all truth and give you power over sin. 2 Corinthians 5:17, Galatians 5:16

*You have eternal life. You will live with God forever. John 3:16. He will never leave you. Hebrews 13:5.

Trust in Christ as Your Savior.

To accept Jesus’s free gift of salvation, turn from your sin to believe Jesus is God in the flesh, who died in your place for your sin, and rose again to life. Receive His gift of salvation by trusting Him as Savior. Then you will experience peace with God and become His child.  Romans 10:9-10, Ephesians 2:8-9, John 1:12. To talk with God you might say: Jesus, I am a sinner and I cannot fix my sin problem. Thank you for coming to earth as God in the flesh and paying the penalty for my sin. I believe you arose from the dead. I trust you to forgive my sin, live in my life, and give me the sure hope of heaven. Amen.

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Atheists Steal Rights From God

Atheists Steal Rights From God

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Atheist Richard Dawkins has declared, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.”

But Dawkins doesn’t act like he actually believes that. He recently affirmed a woman has the right to choose an abortion and asserted that it would be “immoral” to give birth to a baby with Down syndrome. According to Dawkins, the “right to choose” is a good thing and giving birth to Down syndrome children is a bad thing.

Well, which is it? Is there really good and evil, or are we just moist robots dancing to the music of our DNA?

Atheists like Dawkins are often ardent supporters of rights to abortion, same-sex marriage, taxpayer-provided healthcare, welfare, contraceptives, and several other entitlements. But who says those are rights? By what objective standard are abortion, same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, taxpayer-provided healthcare, and the like, moral rights? There isn’t such a standard in the materialistic universe of atheism. So atheists must steal the grounds for objective moral rights from God while arguing that God doesn’t exist.

Now, I am not saying that you have to believe in God to be a good person or that atheists are immoral people. Some atheists live more moral lives than many Christians. I am also not saying that atheists don’t know morality. Everyone knows basic right and wrong whether they believe in God or not. In fact, that’s exactly what the Bible teaches (see Romans 2:14-15).

What I am saying is that atheists can’t justify morality. Atheists routinely confuse knowing what’s right with justifying what’s right. They say it’s right to love. I agree, but why is it right to love. Why are we obligated to do so? The issue isn’t how we know what’s Right, but why an authoritative standard of Rightness exists in the first place.

You may come to know about objective morality in many different ways: from parents, teachers, society, your conscience, etc. And you can know it while denying God exists. But that’s like saying you can know what a book says while denying there’s an author. Of course, you can do that, but there would be no book to know unless there was an author! In other words, atheists can know objective morality while denying God exists, but there would be no objective morality unless God exists.

If material nature is all that exists, which is what most atheist’s claim, then there is no such thing as an immaterial moral law.  Therefore, atheists must smuggle a moral standard into their materialistic system to get it to work, whether it’s “human flourishing,” the Golden Rule, doing what’s “best” for the most, etc. Such standards don’t exist in a materialistic universe where creatures just “dance” to the music of their DNA.

Atheists are caught in a dilemma. If God doesn’t exist, then everything is a matter of human opinion and objective moral rights don’t exist, including all those that atheists support. If God does exist, then objective moral rights exist. But those rights clearly don’t include cutting up babies in the womb, same-sex marriage, and their other invented absolutes contrary to every major religion and natural law.

Now, an atheist might say, “In our country, we have a constitution that the majority approved. We have no need to appeal to God.” True, you don’t have to appeal to God to write laws, but you do have to appeal to God if you want to ground them in anything other than human opinion. Otherwise, your “rights” are mere preferences that can be voted out of existence at the ballot box or at the whim of an activist judge or dictator. That’s why our Declaration of Independence grounds our rights in the Creator. It recognizes the fact that even if someone changes the constitution you still have certain rights because they come from God, not man-made law.

However, my point isn’t about how we should put objective God-given rights into human law. My point is, without God, there are no objective human rights. There is no right to abortion or same-sex marriage. Of course, without God, there is no right to life or natural marriage either!

In other words, no matter what side of the political aisle you’re on — no matter how passionate you believe in certain causes or rights — without God they aren’t really rights at all. Human rights amount to no more than your subjective preferences. So atheists can believe in and fight for rights to abortion, same-sex marriage, and taxpayer-provided entitlements, but they can’t justify them as truly being rights.

In fact, to be a consistent atheist — and this is going to sound outrageous, but it’s true — you can’t believe that anyone has ever actually changed the world for the better. Objectively good political or moral reform is impossibleif atheism is true. Which means you have to believe that everything Wilberforce, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King did to abolish slavery and racism wasn’t really good; it was just different. It means you have to believe that rescuing Jews from the ovens was not objectively better than murdering them. It means you have to believe that gay marriage is no better than gay bashing. (Since we’re all just “dancing to our DNA,” the gay basher was just born with the anti-gay gene. You can’t blame him!) It means you have to believe that loving people is no better than raping them.

You may be thinking, “That’s outrageous! Racism, murder, assault, and rape are objectively wrong, and people do have a right not to be harmed!” I agree. But that’s true only if God exists. In an atheistic universe, there is nothing objectively wrong with anything at any time. There are no limits. Anything goes. Which means to be a consistent atheist you have to believe in the outrageous.

If you are mad at me for these comments, then you agree with me in a very important sense. If you don’t like the behaviors and ideas I am advocating here, you are admitting that all behaviors and ideas are not equal — that some are closer to the real objective moral truth than others. But what is the source of that objective truth? It can’t be changeable, fallible human beings like you or me. It can only be God whose unchangeable nature is the ground of all moral value. That’s why atheists are unwittingly stealing from God whenever they claim a right to anything.

But how do we know that’s the Christian God? Doesn’t he do evil in the Old Testament? And what about the “separation of church and state”? Those are some of the many questions I address in my new book, Stealing from God: Why atheists need God to make their case, from which this column was adapted.

Atheists Steal Rights From God

 

Dr. Frank Turek (D.Min.) is an award-winning author and frequent college speaker who hosts a weekly TV show on DirectTV and a radio program that airs on 186 stations around the nation.  His books include I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist and Stealing from God:  Why atheists need God to make their case

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Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life and Is This Evidence for God?

Sometimes people ask about fine-tuning and I created this overview to just provide links to all of my fine-tuning blogs on CrossExamined.org. I’ll update this as I add to this. I defend this fine-tuning claim which is actually widely accepted in the physics community:

“In the set of possible physical laws, parameters and initial conditions, the subset that permits rational conscious life is very small.”

Of course whether that implies design is more controversial but I defend the case that it does:

Intro/Philosophical Background

If You Don’t Want God, You Better Have a Multiverse!

How Does Fine-Tuning Provide Evidence for God?

Evidence

Fine-Tuning of Initial Conditions to Support Life

Many Changes to the Laws of Physics Would be Life-Prohibiting

Fine-Tuning of the Force Strengths to Permit Life

Fine-Tuning of Particles to Support Life

Objections

Mistaken Objections that Seek to Trivialize Fine-Tuning

Important Objections in the Fine-Tuning Debate

But We Can’t Even Define Life

Coarse-Tuning vs. Fine-Tuning

For a more in-depth defense of the scientific case (and some excellent philosophical points), I highly recommend Cosmologist Luke Barnes:

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