Tag Archive for: Apologetics For Parents

A Parent’s Guide to the 5 Skeptics Who Want to Shame Your Kids for Being Christian

A Parent’s Guide to the 5 Skeptics Who Want to Shame Your Kids for Being Christian

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By Natasha Crain 

Having blogged for over six years now, I’ve received hundreds (and hundreds) of comments and emails from skeptics of Christianity. Once in a while, I receive one from a pleasant non-believer who is truly interested in discussing evidence, asking reasonable questions, and engaging in thoughtful discussion.

But that’s the exception.

Those who contact me typically wield the tool of shaming to make their point—something highly ironic given how much skeptics talk about the importance of evidence.

To be clear, none of the non-believers I personally know would use shaming tactics in person. But when people are behind their screens, it brings down the “barrier” of civility, and faith conversations often look very different. You can see it on social media (even with friends who wouldn’t say such things in person), comments on news articles, blog posts—everywhere.

Kids need to understand these emotion-laden shaming attempts they’ll encounter. Like so much else, this is something parents can and should prepare them for. Here are the five most common skeptics who want to shame your kids for being Christian.

  1. The Science Thumper

Shame Tactic: Making the child believe they don’t have enough scientific expertise to understand that belief in God is unnecessary and silly.

The Science Thumper applies some notion of science to each and every conversation about Christianity, making it the final word on any given topic, and implying that science and Christianity are at irreconcilable odds.

For example, in response to one of my blog posts about the meaning of life in a theistic worldview, a skeptic commented:

You need to study the mechanisms of replication, mutation, natural selection if you want to understand why life exists and is the way it is. If life and existence are too amazing, astounding and astonishing to exist naturally… then how much more complex is god [sic] for having created it? … Did you invent Superman as a panacea answer for everything you don’t understand?

Questions of faith and science are very important, but framing faith and science as a choice—one option for the unsophisticated and one for those in the know—is a cheap and false dichotomy.

Parent Solution: Thoroughly address faith and science topics so kids understand how shallow and unnuanced the Science Thumper’s claims are. See Talking with Your Kids about God for six chapters outlining the conversations parents need to have.

  1. The Indoctrination Informer

Shame Tactic: Informing the child that the ONLY reason they believe in Jesus is that they’ve been “indoctrinated” by their parents.

Indoctrination is a word that both Christians and skeptics use wrong. Skeptics often think a kid has been indoctrinated any time they’ve been taught a given religion is true. Christians often think indoctrination means teaching kids Christian doctrine. These misunderstandings lead to conversations that unfortunately sound like this:

Skeptic to Christian parent: “You’re indoctrinating your kids [by raising them in a Christian home]! Let them think for themselves.”

Christian parent to skeptic: “You’re right! I’m teaching my kids Christian doctrine, and I’m proud of it!”

Both skeptics and Christians need to understand that indoctrination means teaching someone to fully accept the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider other ideas, opinions, and beliefs. In other words, indoctrination is a problem with how you teach someone something. It is not inherently related to any particular belief system, though religion is one type of belief system where indoctrination is possible.

Parent Solution: Intentionally introduce your kids to skeptics’ challenges, so they never feel the need to question whether you tried to shelter them from other beliefs. For more on the importance of this, see the post “If Your Kids are Someday Shocked by the Claims of Skeptics, You Didn’t Do Your Job.”

  1. The Miracle Mocker

Shame Tactic: Making the child feel gullible for believing something that doesn’t happen according to natural laws. 

Here’s a recent comment a skeptic left on my blog:

Just because some so-called holy book says something is true doesn’t make it true. Why do you believe outlandish claims about a god [sic] speaking things into existence, or about a man being swallowed by a fish for a few days and surviving, a worldwide flood [and ark] that fit all of the animals in it and eight people, or a story about a virgin getting pregnant? None of that makes sense, you don’t have any proof that it happened, but you still think it’s true. Why do you prefer to believe outlandish claims because they’re religious?

The logic here is what’s “outlandish” (no one believes all miraculous claims simply because they’re religious), but my point is not to critique the details of this particular comment. My point is to show how skeptics present miracles in a way that parades them as “obviously” absurd because (and by definition!), they don’t follow the course of nature.

Parent Solution: Teach kids the basic logic that if God exists, miracles are possible, and if God doesn’t exist, miracles are not possible (for more on this, see chapter 24 in Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side). This brings the question of miracles back to the underlying question of the evidence for God’s existence, so kids understand that the person claiming miracles are silly is simply presupposing God doesn’t exist.  

  1. The Self-Sufficient Scoffer

Shame Tactic: Boasting that the skeptic doesn’t “need” God—and implying that anyone who does has an inferior need for an emotional crutch to get through life.  

Oftentimes, when ex-Christians recount their deconversion story, they conclude with a glib comment of how they moved on because they no longer “needed” God. The subtly condescending implication, of course, is that those who believe in God do so because they don’t have the emotional resources to make it through life admitting that we live in a universe of pitiless indifference.

This is a strange conclusion that betrays a lack of deeper insight.

If God exists, we need Him. All things were created through and for Him; He is the Source and Sustainer of everything by definition. Therefore, if God exists, it’s not a choice to need Him… it’s simply a fact that we do.

If God doesn’t exist, we don’t need Him. We cannot need Him. We cannot need something that doesn’t exist.

In other words, saying that you don’t need God anymore is a nonsensical conclusion. Of course, you don’t need God if He doesn’t exist. And if He does exist, you can’t choose to not need Him.

What this kind of statement betrays, therefore, is that the skeptic originally believed in God based on felt needs (desires) rather than on the conviction that He truly exists. When they realized they didn’t need to believe in God to satisfy those felt needs, they simply eliminated Him from the picture and met those needs in other ways.

Parent Solution: Be mindful of helping kids build a faith based on the conviction of God’s existence and the truth of Christianity—not on felt needs for things like being happy, being a good person, or finding meaning in life. In other words, if anyone ever asks your child why they’re a Christian, you should want their response to be, “Because Christianity is true!” For more on escaping the felt need pattern, see the post “Do Your Kids Know Why They Need God?”

  1. The Tolerance Enforcer

Shame Tactic: Making the child feel like they are unloving and hateful for taking a biblical stance that doesn’t approve of all choices as morally acceptable.

In a spectacular display of irony, the Tolerance Enforcer shames kids into believing that they must be horrible people for disagreeing with non-believers on the morality of various issues. By labeling kids hateful and unloving rather than thoughtfully discussing the evidence for the truth of the underlying worldviews that produce divergent moral conclusions, they rely on purely emotional attacks. Kids without an intellectual foundation for the Christian worldview are left feeling that they must be wrong about the truth of their faith.

Parent Solution: Help kids understand the irony of a person championing tolerance who won’t tolerate Christian beliefs without labeling disagreement hateful. Then demonstrate how Christians and non-Christians will necessarily disagree on moral issues because we have a different source of authority—the Bible. Here’s an example.

In all of these cases, remember that shame, by definition, is “a painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness or disgrace.” In other words, the root of shame is feeling inadequate.

In order for our kids to feel (more than) adequate when they encounter shaming attempts, they need to have the deep conviction that what they believe is really true. Only then will they be able to fully see these shame tactics for what they are—shallow and baseless emotional attacks—and be able to say confidently with the apostle Paul, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).

 

Natasha Crain is a blogger, author, and national speaker who is passionate about equipping Christian parents to raise their kids with an understanding of how to make a case for and defend their faith in an increasingly secular world. She is the author of two apologetics books for parents: Talking with Your Kids about God (2017) and Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side (2016). Natasha has an MBA in marketing and statistics from UCLA and a certificate in Christian apologetics from Biola University. A former marketing executive and adjunct professor, she lives in Southern California with her husband and three children.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2tHfM82

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Your Kids Will Likely Have No Idea How to Choose Their Own Christian Church as Adults… and That’s a Problem

Your Kids Will Likely Have No Idea How to Choose Their Own Christian Church as Adults… and That’s a Problem

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by Natasha Crain 

I grew up mostly in non-denominational churches, with a Baptist church or two thrown in. For all intents and purposes, my understanding of the world was that there were two types of churches: Christian and non-Christian.

Easy peasy.

If you gave me a label maker, I could have visited every church in town and promptly placed “Christian” or “non-Christian” on each one based on my simplistic understanding.

The church has the word Bible in it? Christian.

The church has the word Christian in it? Of course Christian.

The church has the name of one of the major denominations in it? Christian.

The church has the name of one of the cults from my mom’s giant Kingdom of the Cults book? Definitely not Christian.

The church has a generic name like “[Town] Community Church” that doesn’t seem to be affiliated with any of the aforementioned cults? Probably Christian.

I’d venture to say that this is the understanding of churches that many, if not most, kids leave home with. And that’s a very dangerous thing.

Searching for a “Christian” Church

Like many kids who leave home with a nominal faith, I went off to college and didn’t bother to attend church at all. But after college, my husband (who was my boyfriend at the time) and I decided we should find a church to attend together.

For us, picking a church was as arbitrary as picking a marble out of a jar. In retrospect, I think we had just two criteria: close and “Christian.” There was a beautiful old mainline denominational church down the street that seemed to qualify. We went, and eventually became members.

Over the next three years, I noticed a few teachings here and there that didn’t seem to be the same as what was taught in the churches I grew up in. But my husband and I didn’t realize it wasn’t a biblically sound church until the pastor told us one Easter that it didn’t really matter if Jesus was raised from the dead (you can read more about that problem here).

That was my first experience learning that “Christian” doesn’t always mean what I thought it meant. In many churches today, “Christian” means accepting a lowered view of the Bible, dismissing central tenets of the faith, minimizing the gravity of sin, questioning the need for the atonement, and even rejecting the divinity of Jesus.

My mental label maker was revealed to be naïve.

We moved soon after and again found a “close, Christian” church. We eventually realized that this was another church teaching liberal theology.

After a third move, we tried again and visited a church down the street. We only went once because there were no other young families there, but looking at their website today, it’s clear that this church was no different from the other two we attended.

By God’s grace, we then followed a recommendation for a large non-denominational church in our area. This time, the church had biblically sound teaching, and it was in that church that our faith really grew. We attended there for 10 years before moving to our current (biblically sound) church closer to home.

Here’s what I want you to take from this story: Without even trying, I landed in three churches in a row that weren’t teaching the historic Christian faith.

This isn’t a warning about the existence of one or two extreme churches out there. This is a warning that there are numerous churches today that veer from the historic Christian faith. And if we don’t raise our kids to have discernment in church selection, they can easily fall into dangerous teachings—some of which can be a matter of salvation.

Here’s what you can do.

  1. Have a conversation about the importance of thoughtful church selection.

This is basic, but I think it just doesn’t occur to most parents to have a conversation about discernment in choosing a church. This isn’t just for kids ready to move out on their own—kids of all ages should understand the importance of choosing a biblically sound church and how to do so (more on that in the next point). They should know that in today’s world, “Christian” can mean all kinds of things, and we must be vigilant about choosing a place to worship.

  1. Explain what to look for when selecting a church.

As a fun way to get kids thinking about this, ask them to list as many things as they can that would be important to consider when choosing a church. This will probably include factors like proximity, size of the youth group, the pastor, and so on. Then ask them to rank those things in importance. Use that as an opportunity to discuss what matters most and how selecting a church that adheres to biblically sound teaching should always be our first criteria.

If a church isn’t solid in doctrine, none of the other factors matter.

Finish your conversation by looking at a thorough statement of faith online from a trusted church so kids can see what they should consider.

  1. Teach them about warning signs to watch for when evaluating churches.

A lot could be covered here, but some big red flags include:

  • No statement of faith. This isn’t always true, but in my research, churches which veer from the historic Christian faith tend to not have a statement of faith on their website. Biblically sound churches usually have a menu item for “What We Believe” where you can clearly see their doctrine outlined.
  • A statement of faith that doesn’t clearly identify Jesus as part of the Trinity. Many liberal churches skirt around identifying Jesus as God. They may not come out and say they don’t believe in the Trinity, but if the language doesn’t clearly state as much, there is a good chance they don’t. For example, one church says, “We believe that God’s will and way were revealed in Jesus of Nazareth” and then goes on to explain how they live as followers today. But there’s nothing about his deity, and it’s clear from the rest of the site that this is a church which has abandoned biblical teaching.
  • A statement of faith that implies a lowered view of the Bible. One church, for example, says, “We believe that the Bible is a collection of books, letters, poetry, and other writings written by human beings in order to share their experience of God.” Yes, the Bible was written by humans, but if all a church can say about the Bible is that these writings shared people’s experience of God, they probably have a lowered view of the Bible’s divine inspiration (this is certainly true of this particular church).
  • A list of “core values” that could be found in any organization—religious or secular. In lieu of a statement of faith, one church we attended features a “core values” list on their website that includes things like dedication to a nurturing community, accepting diversity, and service to others. If a church doesn’t explicitly tie their core values to who Jesus was, what the Bible says, and how we should live accordingly, it’s likely a bad sign.
  • Any verbiage that indicates a belief such as, “The Christian faith is our way of being faithful to God, but it’s not the only way.”I took that wording directly from the statement of faith on one church’s website (a church with a very traditional sounding name). This is full-blown religious pluralism—the idea that all roads lead to God—and is not consistent with biblical teaching.

The churches our kids attend as adults will have a major impact on their faith. If we’re not intentional in guiding them in this area, there’s a very real possibility they’ll end up a church that can actually harm their faith.

I know how easy it is…it happened to me three times.

 

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2JheOpk

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4 Things That Must Happen Before More Christian Parents Will Care About Questions of Faith and Science

4 Things That Must Happen Before More Christian Parents Will Care About Questions of Faith and Science

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By Natasha Crain 

In my newest book, Talking with Your Kids about God, there are six chapters that focus on the intersection of faith and science. They answer the questions: Can science prove or disprove God’s existence? Do science and religion contradict each other? Do science and religion complement each other? Is God just an explanation for what science doesn’t yet know? Can science explain why people believe in God? And What do scientists believe about God?

I was particularly excited to write these chapters because I know how important the topics are for parents and kids to understand today, yet so many parents are uncertain of how to approach them. However, over the last few months, more than a few readers I’ve talked to at events or online have sheepishly told me they skipped that section of the book because (I’m paraphrasing) science is out of their “comfort zone.”

This is deeply problematic—not that someone would skip a section of my book, but that parents so often resist engaging in such a critical faith issue today.

The belief that Christianity is anti-science has become a leading reason why many young adults are walking away from faith. Researchers at the Barna Group have found that 29 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds with a Christian background say churches are “out of step with the scientific world we live in,” and 25 percent say “Christianity is anti-science.” The fact that more than a quarter of kids from a Christian background accept this harmful and false narrative should raise a giant flag of concern for Christian parents.

Think this subject is being handled or will be handled by your child’s youth group? Think again. Barna research has also found that only one percent of youth pastors address any issue related to science in a given year. The disconnect between the need and the response to that need is huge right now.

That means parents need to take responsibility for discussing these questions with their kids. But there are four things I think will have to happen before more parents do so.

  1. Parents will have to understand that it doesn’t matter whether we personally care about science or not—our kids still need to engage with these issues.

In my experience talking with parents, I think this is the number one reason why most aren’t having these conversations: They just don’t personally care much about science themselves. To be sure, no one actually states that as the reason. Usually, parents just say it’s something they “need to look into” or that it’s “too complicated” (more about that in point four). But as with most things in life, if we truly believe something is important for our kids’ well-being, we will rise to the task. We care out of necessity.

For example, my son recently had an allergic reaction to cashews after eating one for the first time. I went into mommy doctor mode and researched everything I could online to know how to help him best. Is there a ton of information on nut allergies? Yes. Are there differences of opinion on what to do? Yes. Did I feel overwhelmed by learning all this? Absolutely. Did I for one minute decide that it was too difficult to sort out, so I wasn’t going to do anything at all to help him? Absolutely not.

I assure you that I don’t naturally care about nut allergies. But as soon as I knew it was important for my son that I educate myself on them, I got equipped. In the same way, it doesn’t matter whether we “care” about science; the question is whether knowledge of faith and science issues is important for our kids. Research (as I noted earlier) has answered that with an unequivocal yes.

  1. Parents will have to understand that it doesn’t matter whether our kids care about science or not—they still need to engage with these issues.

One parent recently told me that his kids “just aren’t scientists.” He said they are more into the arts, so he wasn’t going to try to get into the details of faith and science issues when that’s not an area of concern or interest for them.

Assuming that science questions won’t affect your kids’ faith because they aren’t into science is a big mistake. In fact, I think kids who don’t dive into science are just as likely to have their faith challenged by these issues as those who do. Why? If they lack interest in personally considering the issues in any depth, they may simply defer to whatever seems culturally accepted. Culture says science and faith are opposites and I have to choose just one? Okay. Culture says science has disproven God and faith is just blind acceptance of something without evidence? I guess I’ll choose science because I don’t want to feel ashamed.

Does that mean every kid needs to understand the intricacies of scientific debate? Not at all. But, as I explain in my chapters on science, everyone should understand the key terms and concepts the debate turns on and the assumptions made by varying worldviews.

  1. Parents will have to recognize that questions of the relationship between faith and science are multifaceted.

While many parents are overwhelmed at the thought of learning about science issues, others have oversimplified the matter. I see this a lot in Facebook groups. Someone posts a question about how their child is starting to question his or her faith because of “science,” and within seconds, everyone in the group has solved the problem by breezily pasting a link to the organization that champions their view on the age of the earth. Don’t get me wrong—age of the earth and evolution questions are extremely important (I wrote eight chapters on this in Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side!), but there are many contours of the conversation beyond those particular issues. Kids who have knowledge of just one area—and just one view within that area—will not have the broader foundation needed to engage with today’s world.

  1. Parents will have to accept that we don’t have to be science experts to be knowledgeable guides.

My nine-year-old daughter has been preparing for her first piano competition. After listening to her practice her piece many times recently, I realized that she kept struggling with the same couple of measures. She insisted, however, that there wasn’t a problem. I couldn’t easily describe where I heard the issue, so I asked her to play the piece while I looked at the music.

Even though I don’t play piano myself, I’ve been in enough of her lessons over the last three years to understand the basics of how to read music. I can follow along and see the rhythm, rests, dynamics, and so on. When she got to the trouble part, I said, “Here! This is the measure you need to look at!” My daughter, who is very independent and never wants help with anything, wasn’t exactly happy with my direction. She replied, “You’re not a piano expert. You don’t even know how to play the piano! How would you know if something is wrong or where it’s wrong?”

It’s certainly true that I’m not a piano expert, but my daughter missed the point that I don’t need to be an expert in order to be a knowledgeable guide for her. I had learned enough of the basics and theoretical framework to show her where the problems lie—even if I couldn’t sit down and play the piece myself.

In the same way, parents don’t need to be science experts to be knowledgeable guides for their kids on the intersection of faith and science. But many parents “bow out” of the conversation because they just don’t feel qualified to have it. There’s no reason to do so. Just because you can’t teach your kids the intricacies of evolutionary theory (or anything else) doesn’t mean you can’t be equipped to guide your kids in a meaningful, God-honoring way.

With a little motivation and effort, you can learn to show how beautifully science describes God’s creation—not disproves it.

 

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2G0YSoM

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Can You and Your Kids Answer These Skeptics of Christianity (Part 1 of 5)

Can You and Your Kids Answer These Skeptics of Christianity? (Part 1 of 5)

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by Natasha Crain

Over the last few months since Talking with Your Kids about God came out, I’ve heard from a lot of parents who especially love the conversation guides provided in the book. Every chapter has one of these guides to help parents have a conversation with their kids about that chapter’s content. There’s an easy conversation starter to get kids thinking (“Open the Conversation”) and several questions to help you dig in deeper (“Advance the Conversation”). For parents with younger kids, it can be enough to just use the question from “Open the Conversation” to hit a couple of key points from the chapter on the way to school in the morning!

One of the most valuable parts of each chapter’s conversation guide is in the section, “Apply the Conversation.” This section features a quote from a skeptic that pertains to the chapter’s subject. This gives you and your kids the opportunity to practice applying what you just learned by developing a response. I didn’t provide sample answers to these in the book, as they’re intended to get you thinking on your own!  However, I’ve received so many requests for sample responses that I’ve started to write them, and I’ll be sharing them here on the blog in five separate posts over time (one post for each of the five book sections).

Today I’m sharing sample responses for Part 1: The Existence of God (6 chapters). I want to emphasize three things before you read these.

First, there are a lot of possible ways to effectively respond to any of these skeptics’ quotes! Don’t consider these answers to be the “right” answers.

Second, all of these responses are based on the chapter content itself. There’s much more that could be said, but I’m only including concepts based on what your kids would learn from reading the chapters.

Third, encourage your kids (if old enough) to try writing their own response after you talk about the chapter’s content. Writing responses really helps kids to flush out their thoughts and process the material. With my daughter’s permission, I’m sharing her response to the chapter 2 skeptic in that section below as an example.

Chapter 1: What Can We Learn about God from Nature?

Skeptic’s Quote 

Atheist author Dan Barker says, “I am an atheist because there is no evidence for the existence of God. That should be all that needs to be said about it: no evidence, no belief.” Based on what you learned in this chapter when someone says there’s “no evidence” for God, what questions could you ask to clarify what that person means?

Sample Response

Evidence is a body of facts that require human interpretation. In other words, evidence itself doesn’t say anything. Humans can all look at the same evidence and come to different conclusions due to factors like our varied assumptions, available information, and motivations. As such, there will always be multiple possible explanations for the evidence we see in the world around us. With that as context, I’d like to ask a few questions about what you mean when you say there’s “no evidence” for God.

First, when you say God, are you generally referring to the existence of any supernatural being, or are you referring specifically to the God of the Bible? Second, when you say there’s no evidence for God’s existence, are you saying that there’s no evidence that could possibly be relevant to the question of God’s existence, or that there’s no evidence which you believe is best explained by the existence of God? Finally, what kind of evidence would you expect there to be if a supernatural being existed?

Chapter 2: Where Did the Universe Come From?

Skeptic’s Quote

In an online forum, a person asked how atheists can argue that the universe came from nothing. An atheist replied, “Personally I do not claim that the universe ‘came from’ anything at all and it did not ‘appear.’ The universe just is… it needs no creation story.” Based on what you learned from this chapter, how would you respond to this person?

Sample Response

I’d like to understand better what you mean when you say the universe “just is” and that it didn’t come from “anything at all.” Do you mean that you believe the universe is eternal, or that it had a beginning but its beginning doesn’t require an explanation?

[If the response is that the universe is eternal…]

While many people before the 20th century agreed that the universe is eternal, scientific evidence mounted in the 1900s that the universe actually had a beginning. For example, in the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered through the world’s largest telescope at the time that galaxies are moving away from us, like spots on an inflating balloon. He and other scientists realized that this expansion implied there was a beginning to the universe (if you rewind the process of something expanding, you logically arrive at a beginning point). Through this and many other discoveries in the 1900s, scientists came to the consensus that the universe began to exist and is not eternal.

The reason that this is a significant point to consider is that an eternal universe, as you say, wouldn’t have “come from” anything at all—it wouldn’t have had a beginning. But if the universe did have a beginning, as the scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows, we have to ask what caused it to exist. We know that nothing in the universe pops into existence without a cause, so it defies our experience to suppose that the universe itself did. Something or someone supernatural—beyond nature—must have caused it to exist. In order to create space, time, and matter, the cause would have to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and uncaused itself. This doesn’t tell us the cause is synonymous with the God of the Bible, but it’s consistent with Him.

[If the response is that the universe began to exist but doesn’t require an explanation…]

We know that nothing in the universe pops into existence without a cause, so it defies our experience to suppose that the universe itself did. If you are claiming that the universe indeed popped into existence from nothing despite this knowledge, why have you concluded that’s the best explanation for it? To simply assert that something doesn’t “need a creation story” is not a replacement for looking at this evidence and determining the best explanation. I could similarly claim that my computer monitor doesn’t need a creation story, but that doesn’t negate the fact that it does indeed have one. Given what we know, the best explanation for the beginning of the universe is that there was something or someone supernatural—beyond nature—that must have caused it to exist. In order to create space, time, and matter, the cause would have to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and uncaused itself. This doesn’t tell us the cause is synonymous with the God of the Bible, but it’s consistent with Him.

[As an aside, here is my 9-year-old daughter’s response after we studied the chapter the first time. While she doesn’t get every detail exactly right, it’s a great start! I love her first line, as that’s the crux of the issue.]

Chapter 3: Where Did Life Come From?

Skeptic’s Quote

A person commenting on an online article said, “Had [fine-tuning] not occurred…life here would either not exist, or it would be different. That doesn’t mean there’s some big fairy who made it happen. Just because we survived on this planet does not mean a god made the planet for us.”

Sample Response

You are correct that “just because” we are on this planet, we shouldn’t necessarily believe that a god (the biblical God or any other supernatural being) put us here. I’m not assuming that’s the case, just as you shouldn’t assume it’s the case that a supernatural being did not put us here. We both should look at the available evidence and consider the best explanation for what we see.

The fine-tuning that we’re talking about is extensive in scope–over 150 parameters of a planet, its planetary companions, its moon, its star, and its galaxy have been identified that must have values falling within narrowly defined ranges for physical life of any kind to exist. The probability of those factors individually taking a precise value and simultaneously taking those values is astronomically low (by some estimates, the probability that even one life-supporting body would occur anywhere in the universe is less than 1 chance in 10 to the 282nd power). Even most atheist scientists acknowledge that the universe at least appears to be finely tuned. The question, then, is: What is the best explanation for this remarkable finding? No one is suggesting a “fairy” made it happen, so let’s set aside facetious explanations and have a serious discussion. The real conversation is whether this fine-tuning is a product of chance or intelligence. To be clear, no one is claiming that the intelligence is necessarily the God of the Bible, so we can also set aside any preconceived notions about who He is. We are only considering whether what we see is more consistent with a series of chance events or with the product of intelligence. Given the delicate fine-tuning that has been identified, I think it’s far more reasonable to believe that it’s the result of a purposeful intelligence beyond nature. Why do you believe a better explanation is chance?

Finally, suggesting that life just wouldn’t exist to witness fine-tuning had it not happened is not an explanation—it’s just a fact. It doesn’t address whether chance or intelligence is the best explanation for the occurrence. And speculating that other kinds of life (non-carbon-based) may have existed instead if the universe was structured differently doesn’t address the fact that much of the fine-tuning we see is necessary for the universe to even exist in the first place. This has nothing to do with the specific kinds of life that may or may not develop.

Chapter 4: Where Did Our Moral Understanding Come From?

Skeptic’s Quote

“Do we really need religion in this day and age? If you know the difference between right and wrong, why do you need religion? If you can show respect, why do you need religion? If you can make a positive difference in someone’s life, why do you need religion? What matters is how you treat someone. Put a smile on their faces. It’s that easy.”

Sample Response

Your questions all assume that religions only exist to provide moral rules for living. To be sure, almost every religion includes moral directives. However, religions also make many other truth claims about things such as where we came from, why we’re here, who we are, and where we’re going. Additionally, religions make logically contradictory claims, so they can’t all be true at the same time (for example, in Christianity, Jesus is the exclusive path to God, and in Islam, he is not).

That leaves us with two possibilities: 1) no religion is true (they are all manmade ideas) or 2) one religion is true. Reading between the lines, you seem to believe the first possibility since you associate religion with a past “day and age” (in other words, you’re assuming religious beliefs are something cultures outgrow as they become more sophisticated). At the same time, you seem to assume that right and wrong in fact exist. If you do believe that there are things that are right or wrong for all people, and not just a matter of personal opinion, then you are acknowledging the existence of what would be called objective moral values. On that, I completely agree with you. I think it’s our deepest human intuition that things like child kidnapping, rape, and torturing someone for fun are wrong, regardless of anyone’s opinion to the contrary. Where we differ is on the implications of that fact. I do not believe that there can be objective moral values if God doesn’t exist. Let me explain.

If objective moral values exist, we have to ask where those values would come from. In a world that is made of nothing more than matter (physical “stuff”), there can be no right or wrong for all people because there is no moral authority. No one could say what anyone should or shouldn’t do because everything would be a matter of opinion. For example, in such a world, you couldn’t say that “what matters is how you treat someone” (unless you are only stating that as your own opinion and aren’t suggesting that’s an obligation for all people). But if objective moral values and duties do exist, that points to a higher-than-human moral authority; moral laws require a moral lawgiver.

Does that mean the moral authority is the God of the Bible specifically? Not necessarily. Knowing that requires a consideration of the evidence for the truth of the Bible. But if that evidence leads us to conclude that the Bible, and therefore Christianity, is true (possibility 2 above), then there’s much more than moral directives at stake: Jesus is the exclusive savior of the world and only by trusting in him will we have eternal life.

Chapter 5: What is the Difference Between God and a Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Skeptic’s Quote

Atheist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins says, “I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.”

Sample Response

By grouping the biblical God with all of these fictional beings, I understand you’re suggesting that there’s no difference between them—those “gods” don’t exist, just as the biblical God doesn’t exist. But simply claiming that the biblical God belongs on a list with fictional beings isn’t a “strategy” for demonstrating He’s fictional as well. It’s simply an assertion based on the assumption that there’s no evidence that any of these beings—including the biblical God—exist. It’s important to acknowledge, however, that theists do believe there is evidence for God’s existence and are not blindly guessing that He exists; it’s not a foregone conclusion that there’s no evidence for God and theists are happy to believe anyway. Rather, theists are looking at a set of facts about the universe and are asserting that the best explanation for those facts is the existence of God. Atheists are looking at the same set of facts and are asserting that there are better natural explanations for those facts. We can legitimately disagree over the interpretation of the evidence, but it’s disingenuous to imply or explicitly claim that theists aren’t basing their beliefs on any evidence at all.

Chapter 6: How Much Evidence Do We Need to Be Confident God Exists?

Skeptic’s Quote

When an agnostic college student was asked what would be compelling reasons for him to believe that the God of the Bible exists, he said, “I would have to say unambiguous, direct evidence…Some people will use their explanation for God existing as things we don’t know… [like] the arguments [that] everything is so fine-tuned, but that doesn’t do much for me. I would very much prefer to have actual, direct evidence of somebody saying, ‘This directly points to God Himself coming down and speaking.’ And at that point, I’d have to verify with someone that I’m not hallucinating…It has to be some direct evidence of God, not an extrapolation of evidence from something else.”

Sample Response

I understand your desire to have God reveal Himself in a very personal, direct way to every individual. I would love that too! However, we should acknowledge that whether or not God chooses to reveal Himself according to our personal preferences has no bearing on whether or not He actually exists. Just as a detective doesn’t get to choose what kind of evidence he has to work with, we don’t get to choose how an all-knowing, all-powerful God would reveal Himself if He exists. Rather, we have to consider the evidence in the world around us and determine what the best explanation is for that evidence.

I know you said you would “prefer” other kinds of evidence than the fine-tuning of the universe, but the fact remains that our universe and planet are precisely structured to support life. We can’t shrug our shoulders at that just because we want other evidence; we have to ask ourselves what we can best infer from that reality. We also have other pieces of evidence to consider—such as the universe having a beginning (which requires a cause from outside of nature), the origin and complexity of life, and the innate moral understanding humans seem to have. In each of these cases (which we could discuss further), the best explanation given what we know from the evidence is the existence of a universe-creating, life-designing, moral law-giving being outside of nature.

Does that leave us with absolute certainty about His existence? No…but we don’t look for that level of certainty with anything in life. We trust based on what we have good reason to believe is true.

And does that tell us this being is the God of the Bible? Not necessarily. It’s certainly consistent with Him, but we would need to look at the evidence for the truth of the Bible to connect them. This, of course, is important to consider—especially since you said you’d like evidence that “directly points to God Himself coming down and speaking.” Christians believe God did exactly that in the person of Jesus Christ. We have compelling evidence that the Gospels of the New Testament were written by or based on eyewitness testimony of those who knew Jesus personally. If we can determine that these witnesses are reliable, then we have good reason to trust their testimony that the kind of evidence you happen to want is exactly what God has given us (albeit 2,000 years ago). Would you like to talk more about the reliability of the Gospels?

If you enjoyed reading these responses, please share this post!

Click here to get your own copy of  Talking with Your Kids about God, or find it at your local bookstore.

 

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The 3 Most Important Conversations about Easter

The 3 Most Important Conversations about Easter that Most Sunday Schools and Parents Aren’t Having with Kids

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by Natasha Crain

When I think back to Easter as a child, I remember year after year in Sunday School coloring cross pictures, making empty tomb crafts, having Easter-themed snacks, and singing celebratory worship songs. There is no doubt I learned that Jesus was raised from the dead after dying on the cross three days before.

But as an adult, I look back on those experiences and realize how much more today’s kids need to understand about Easter given the world they’re growing up in. We can’t take for granted that knowing what the Bible says about the resurrection is enough for kids to have a confident faith when they’re surrounded by a culture that calls such a belief ridiculous. There’s so much more to learn than what kids are getting from their resurrection crafts.

I could write a lot about this, but I’ll narrow it to the three most important conversations about Easter that Sunday Schools and parents rarely have with kids.

1. Why does it matter if Jesus was resurrected?

When my husband and I were first married, we started attending a nearby Presbyterian church. Neither of us had any idea what to look for when choosing a church, so we went with “close, big, and Christian-sounding” (neither of us grew up Presbyterian but we knew it was a Christian denomination).

We attended that church for three years before we realized something wasn’t quite right. It was Easter Sunday when the pastor informed us, “It doesn’t really matter if Jesus rose from the dead or not. What matters is that he lives on in our hearts and we can now make the world a better place.”

We didn’t know the term for it at the time, but we had been attending a “progressive” Christian church (this is not to say that all Presbyterian churches are progressive in their teaching). I knew the pastor was preaching something unbiblical, but I couldn’t have begun to articulate why—even though I had grown up in a Christian home and had spent hundreds of hours in church.

It’s sad to me in retrospect that the question of why it mattered that Jesus was raised from the dead was not completely clear in my mind by that point. But I think it’s a good example of how explicitly we need to connect the dots for kids. We can’t assume they will automatically deduce why the resurrection matters just because they learn the resurrection happened.

So why does it matter? Let’s start here: Jesus repeatedly predicted his resurrection.

Anyone could predict their own death if they were causing a political uproar. But the Gospels each point out at least once that Jesus predicted he would rise after death. For example, Matthew 16:21 says, “From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” (See also Matthew 12:40, 16:21, 17:9, 20:18-19, 26:32, 27:62-64; Mark 9:9-10, 31; 8:31, 10:32-34, 14:28, 58; Luke 9:22; John 2:22.)

If Jesus predicted his resurrection but did not come back to life, he would either have been mistaken or have been an outright liar. In either case, that would mean he wasn’t perfect and wasn’t God. And if Jesus was not God, he had no power to die on the cross for our sins. Nor would we have any reason to care what he taught—he would have just been another human like us. As the apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:14, “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”

But if he predicted his resurrection and did come back to life, it validated his claims to be God (only God could do that!). That’s an extremely significant point that appears to have been lost in some churches—like the one I attended.

2. Why should we believe a resurrection miracle is possible?

Last Easter, Scientific American magazine featured an article by atheist Michael Shermer entitled, “What Would It Take to Prove the Resurrection?” It was subtitled, “How to think about claims, even the Resurrection.” This article featured extraordinarily bad logic, which I fully outlined in a blog post at the time. It basically boiled down to a popular magazine stating that the way to think about a claim like the resurrection is to:

  1. Identify it as a miracle claim.
  2. Accept that any natural explanation is more probable than a miracle explanation.
  3. Reject the miracle claim.

This is what passes for “scientific” today, and it’s a way of thinking kids will frequently encounter. Shermer and skeptics like him simply presuppose supernatural miracles aren’t possible. But here’s better logic to learn: The possibility of miracles depends on whether or not God exists.

If God exists, supernatural miracles are possible because the supernatural exists. If God does not exist, the natural world is all there is, and supernatural miracles are therefore impossible by definition.

This is simple logic that even young kids can understand (I taught it to my kids in Kindergarten). If someone says miracles aren’t possible, kids should immediately recognize that such a statement assumes God doesn’t exist. Of course, we must then be able to share the evidence for God’s existence, as the logical plausibility of the resurrection rests on it (for help with talking about the evidence for God’s existence with your kids, see chapters 1-6 of Talking with Your Kids about God).

3. Why should we believe a resurrection miracle actually happened?

There’s a big leap from miracles being possible given the evidence for God’s existence and being able to determine that a miracle has actually happened.

In the case of the resurrection, there are four facts that are so strongly attested historically that they are granted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject, including skeptical ones (this is known as the “Minimal Facts” argument). Drs. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona lay these out in their book, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. I’ll briefly explain each below. See Habermas and Licona’s book for a comprehensive discussion or chapter 21 in Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side for a more detailed summary.

  • Jesus died by crucifixion.Jesus’ crucifixion is referenced by several non-Christian historical sources, including Josephus, Tacitus, and Lucian of Samosata.
  • Jesus’ disciples believed He arose and appeared to them. Habermas explains, “There is a virtual consensus among scholars who study Jesus’ resurrection that, subsequent to Jesus’ death by crucifixion, his disciples really believed that he appeared to them risen from the dead. This conclusion has been reached by data that suggest that 1) the disciples themselves claimed that the risen Jesus had appeared to them, and 2) subsequent to Jesus’ death by crucifixion his disciples were radically transformed from fearful, cowering individuals who denied and abandoned him at his arrest and execution into bold proclaimers of the gospel of the risen Lord.” A skeptic may claim there are natural (as opposed to supernatural) explanations for what happened to the disciples, but very few deny the disciples experienced something that led them to willingly face severe persecution and death.
  • The church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed.Paul seriously persecuted the early church (Acts 8:3; 1 Corinthians 15:9; Galatians 1:13; Philippians 3:6). But everything changed when he had an experience with who he claimed was the risen Jesus (Acts 9). After that experience, he converted to the Christian faith and tirelessly preached Jesus’ resurrection, eventually being martyred for his claims.
  • The skeptic James, brother of Jesus, was suddenly changed.James was not a believer in Jesus during Jesus’ ministry (Mark 3:21,31; 6:3-4; John 7:5). However, 1 Corinthians 15:7 says Jesus appeared to James, and after this alleged resurrection, James was described as a leader of the church (Acts 15:12-21; Galatians 1:19). He, too, was martyred for this belief, as recorded by both Christian and non-Christian historical writings (Hegesippus, Clement of Alexandria, and Josephus).

Again, these are the facts that the vast majority of scholars agree on…facts which require explanation. In chapter 22 of Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side, I explain the competing naturalistic (i.e., non-resurrection) explanations scholars have offered, and show how none of them adequately account for these facts. Unless you presuppose that miracles don’t happen (which takes us back to point 2), the best explanation for the historical facts is that Jesus actually rose from the dead.

I realize that Sunday Schools have to cover basics for the ongoing group of kids who are new to Christianity. But if the church doesn’t step up to equip kids with the next level of understanding in their faith, we will undoubtedly continue to see a youth exodus from Christianity. That said, while I wish more churches were stepping up to teach subjects like these, ultimately it’s the parents’ responsibility to disciple their kids. This Easter, throw out these three questions to your kids and start some conversations that will be more impactful than empty tomb crafts can ever be.

 

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2GS5AD1

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Your Kids Need to Think Critically About the Resurrection

Your Kids Need to Think Critically About the Resurrection… Because Secular Media Does Not

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By Natasha Crain

This month’s issue of Scientific American magazine features an article by atheist Michael Shermer entitled, “What Would It Take to Prove the Resurrection?” It’s boldly subtitled, “How to think about claims, even the Resurrection.”

Wow! This article in a popular magazine says it’s going to teach us how to think about the resurrection. I couldn’t wait to read it.

It was even worse than I thought it would be.

Every year at Easter time, secular publications feature articles on the resurrection, and every year they’re cringe-worthy.

In this post, I’ll highlight two key ways this particular article actually teaches bad critical thinking, then provide a three-point framework for helping your kids think more logically about the subject.

By the way, if you have time for Easter baskets, egg hunts and egg dying, you have time to have these conversations with your kids. Seriously. This is important.

Bad Thinking 1: Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

Shermer stakes his argument against the resurrection on a favorite motto of skeptics: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

If you haven’t heard this before, it’s a standard line skeptic throw out as an attempted conversation stopper. It’s meant to wave off any supposed evidence for a miracle as inadequate for demonstrating that something as improbable as a miracle actually occurred.

This idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, however, falls squarely in the category of things that sound good but don’t hold up to logical scrutiny.

While much could be said here, the most important point is this: Why must extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Extremely improbable—“extraordinary”—things happen every day, and ordinary evidence is often sufficient for demonstrating that they happened. It’s extraordinarily improbable, for example, that a terrorist attack would happen in a specific place at a specific time. But when investigators evaluate the scene, they look at perfectly ordinary evidence to determine what happened—security footage, weapons at the scene, and the word of eyewitnesses.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is not a test we apply in any other area of life. Skeptics use it to subjectively set the evidential bar for miracles so high that no miracle could ever be believed.

That’s not critical thinking…that’s simply maintaining one’s presupposition that miracles don’t happen.

Bad Thinking 2: Proposing Explanations Without Considering Evidence

After saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, one might expect Shermer to lay out the evidence for the resurrection and demonstrate how that evidence fails to meet his (extraordinary) standard.

He does not.

Without considering any evidence for the resurrection, he simply lists possible reasons the Bible would even report such a thing:

Maybe the eyewitnesses were “superstitious or credulous and saw what they wanted to see.”

Maybe they reported, “only feeling Jesus in ‘spirit’ and over the decades their testimony was altered to suggest they saw Jesus in the flesh.”

Maybe accounts of the resurrection “never appeared in the original gospels are were added later.”

Each of these hypotheses can be strongly refuted, but because I want to focus on Shermer’s proposed method of thinking and not his specific hypotheses, I won’t go into that now. Instead, I want to simply point out that rather than look at historical data and consider what hypotheses best explain the historical facts, he looks at no evidence, lists three hypotheses anyway, then concludes any of these is necessarily more likely than the resurrection…because they don’t involve miracles.

So, to recap, a popular and well-regarded magazine has suggested that the way we should think about a claim like the resurrection is to:

  1. Identify it as a miracle claim.
  2. Accept that any natural explanation is more probable than a miracle explanation.
  3. Reject the miracle claim.

In other words, we’ve just been taught that the way to think about miracles is to assume they aren’t possible. Brilliant!

Sorry, Scientific American, but I’m not impressed.

Please Teach Your Kids to Think More Critically Than This

Parents, we need to do better than this. Our kids need to learn to think more critically than the world around them because they will encounter this kind of poor thinking everywhere. And I assure you they won’t learn this in Sunday School, so the responsibility falls to you. Here’s a 3-point “miracle evaluation” framework every kid should understand. (I talk about this subject in multiple chapters of Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side, so I’ll reference those chapters for each point if you want to read more.)

  1. Are miracles possible?

Shermer, and many skeptics like him, simply presuppose supernatural miracles aren’t possible. They effectively say, “Miracles aren’t possible, so the resurrection didn’t happen.”

Circular logic is not good logic.

Here’s better logic to learn: The possibility of miracles depends on whether or not God exists.

If God exists, supernatural miracles are possible because the supernatural exists. If God does not exist, the natural world is all there is, and supernatural miracles are therefore impossible by definition.

  1. What are the facts surrounding a given miracle claim?

Unless you’re simply throwing out the possibility of miracles because of your prior commitment to atheism, miracle claims must be investigated on a claim-by-claim basis.

In the case of the resurrection, there are four facts that are so strongly attested historically that they are granted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject, including the skeptical ones. Drs. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona lay these out in their book, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. Because this is a blog post and not a book, I’m only going to explain each fact briefly. See Habermas’ and Licona’s book for a comprehensive discussion, or chapter 21 in Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side for a summary.

  1. Jesus died by crucifixion.

Jesus’ crucifixion is referenced by several non-Christian historical sources, including Josephus, Tacitus, Lucian of Samosata, and the Jewish Talmud.

  1. Jesus’ disciples believed He arose and appeared to them.

Habermas explains, “There is a virtual consensus among scholars who study Jesus’ resurrection that, subsequent to Jesus’ death by crucifixion, his disciples really believed that he appeared to them risen from the dead. This conclusion has been reached by data that suggest that 1) the disciples themselves claimed that the risen Jesus had appeared to them, and 2) subsequent to Jesus’ death by crucifixion his disciples were radically transformed from fearful, cowering individuals who denied and abandoned him at his arrest and execution into bold proclaimers of the gospel of the risen Lord.”

A skeptic may claim there are natural (as opposed to supernatural) explanations for what happened to the disciples, but very few deny the disciples experienced something that led them to willingly face severe persecution and death.

  1. The church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed.

Paul seriously persecuted the early church (Acts 8:3; 1 Corinthians 15:9; Galatians 1:13; Philippians 3:6). But everything changed when he had an experience with whom he claimed was the risen Jesus (Acts 9). After that experience, he converted to the Christian faith and tirelessly preached Jesus’ resurrection, eventually being martyred for his claims.

  1. The skeptic James, the brother of Jesus, was suddenly changed.

James was not a believer in Jesus during Jesus’ ministry (Mark 3:21,31; 6:3-4; John 7:5). However, 1 Corinthians 15:7 says Jesus appeared to James, and after this alleged resurrection, James was described as a leader of the church (Acts 15:12-21; Galatians 1:19). He, too, was martyred for this belief, as recorded by both Christian and non-Christian historical writings (Hegesippus, Clement of Alexandria, and Josephus).

Again, these are the facts that virtually all scholars agree on…facts which require explanation and facts which weren’t even considered by Shermer.

  1. What is the best explanation for the facts?

In chapter 22 of Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side, I lay out seven theories people have offered to explain these facts:

  • Jesus only appeared to die.
  • The disciples lied or stole Jesus’ body.
  • Someone other than the disciples stole Jesus’ body.
  • Witnesses went to the wrong tomb.
  • The people who saw Jesus were hallucinating.
  • People invented Christianity based on pagan myths.
  • As Jesus’ teachings spread, they were embellished with supernatural details.

As I show in the book, not one of these explanations fits all of the known historical facts. A supernatural resurrection, however, easily accounts for them.

There’s good historical reason to conclude that a supernatural resurrection is the best explanation of the facts if you don’t have a prior commitment to atheism.

As theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg concludes, “The historical solidity of the Christian witness [to the resurrection] poses a considerable challenge to the conception of reality that is taken for granted by modern secular history. There are good and even superior reasons for claiming that the resurrection of Jesus was a historical event, and consequently, the Lord himself is a living reality. And yet there is the innumerable repeated experience that in the world the dead do not rise again. As long as this is the case, the Christian affirmation of Jesus’ resurrection will remain a debated issue, in spite of all sound historical argument to its historicity.”

I don’t expect Scientific American to come to the conclusion that a supernatural resurrection best fits the historical facts because it’s a secular publication. But I would challenge them in the future to present a more thoughtful approach to considering such issues.

I won’t hold my breath for that to happen.

In the meantime, if Christian parents spent as much time talking about these issues as dying Easter eggs, it might not be as much of a concern.

Can we make that happen?

 

Natasha Crain runs her Christian apologetics blog for parents, ChristianMomThoughts.com. She obtained her MBA in Marketing and Statistics from UCLA and obtained a Christian apologetic certificate from the University of Biola. She currently resides in California with her husband Bryan along with her three young children.

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Thoughts and Prayers

If You’re Sick of Thoughts and Prayers Because Shootings Still Happen, You Don’t Understand Christianity

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By Natasha Crain

In response to the latest tragic school shooting, social media is on the warpath against anyone who dares to offer “thoughts and prayers” for the situation.

Popular articles feature headlines like, “Everyone Is Finally Realizing ‘Thoughts And Prayers’ Are Not Saving Our Kids” and “People Sick of ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ Demand Action After Florida School Shooting.”

The hashtag #thoughtsandprayers is trending on Twitter, with scathing tweets about how worthless thoughts and prayers are.

My own Facebook newsfeed is filled with similar posts and comments.

Scrolling through these articles and social media posts, I can’t help but wonder how many people who make such comments understand the Christian worldview and the role of prayer within it. The online commentary often reflects a serious misunderstanding of what Christians believe.

With that in mind, I’m writing this post for two reasons. First, if you’re a regular reader of my blog, this is an important subject to discuss with your kids. The war on “thoughts and prayers” is one they need to understand given the unfortunate frequency with which this subject is arising. Second, I hope non-Christians will take the time to read this and better understand why being “sick of thoughts and prayers” because shootings still happen doesn’t make sense if you know what Christians believe.

Let’s start here: the phrase “thoughts and prayers” lumps two completely different things together.

The “thoughts and prayers” verbiage became part of our cultural lexicon because people wanted a way to request help and/or care from a mixed audience of religious and non-religious listeners. But just thinking something—no matter how charitable those thoughts may be—does nothing. This is something that Christians and non-Christians should all be able to agree on. “Sending thoughts” is simply an expression of solidarity with no practical consequence.

Now, some people would say, “There’s no difference between those inconsequential thoughts and prayer. Thoughts do nothing, and prayers do nothing. That’s the point.”

If God doesn’t exist, then that’s true. People are praying to a supernatural being who isn’t there. By saying, “I’m sick and tired of thoughts and prayers because they don’t matter,” you’re basically just stating you don’t believe God exists. Fair enough. In that case, it makes more sense just to say, “I don’t believe in God, so I don’t pray as part of my response, but here’s what I think we should do…”

However, there’s no reason to be sick and tired of Christians praying to the God you don’t believe in unless you hold the faulty assumption that Christians see prayer as an alternative to other actions and you’re resentful of that presumed choice. That leads me to the next point.

Christians expect to pray and take other action.

When Christians say, “We’re praying about this,” it doesn’t mean we don’t think anything else should be done. We don’t, for example, say we’re praying over the school shooting, and therefore we don’t need to have discussions about gun control policy, about how to provide for the financial and physical needs of victims, or about school security. Commenting on how prayer won’t do something, but (fill in the blank) action will, betrays the incorrect assumption that Christians think only prayer is needed. Kim Kardashian’s recent tweet is one example of such faulty logic:

Note that some people are complaining specifically about what they see as the hypocrisy of leaders who offer thoughts and prayers and allegedly do nothing else, but that’s another issue. The Bible clearly demonstrates that God asks Christians to pray and take other action.

So what do Christians pray about in a situation like this? A number of things, such as comfort for the victims’ families that God would bring some kind of good from the tragedy, that those who are injured would heal, that the families of the kids who survived would know how to get the help they need, and much more. But for purposes of this post, it’s more important to understand what Christians don’t pray for… 

Christians don’t pray expecting God to rid the world of free will.

Many people, like the Twitter user below, seem to resent that Christians and other theists still believe in God when our past prayers didn’t “work” to prevent school shootings—in other words, could we all just dump this crazy belief in God already?

It’s important to understand why this is a significant misunderstanding of the nature of free will in a Christian worldview.

Christians believe God created humans with the ability to make morally significant choices. We can use that free will to do good or to do evil. If God had chosen to create us without free will, we would simply be robots. Given this nature of our world, it’s hard to imagine how this Twitter user and so many like him envision God eliminating school shootings specifically—through prayer or anything else.

Would God make it so that every time a troubled youth enters a school for such a purpose, they change their mind? Or would He make it, so they accidentally break their gun on the way in? Or would He have them fall and break a leg? Or would He make a vicious dog appear out of nowhere to attack them?

It would be a bizarre world where God completely eliminated the free will to conduct a specific type of evil. Christians don’t pray expecting that as an outcome of prayer because it’s inconsistent with the basic nature of the world we believe God created.

The continuation of school shootings literally has nothing to do with whether or not God exists and whether or not God answers prayer.

There’s, therefore, no reason to look at Christians with contempt for continuing to believe in God after multiple school shootings. We never expected our prayers to eliminate free will.

Furthermore, it should be noted that if God doesn’t exist, there’s little reason to believe people have free will at all. In an atheistic worldview, life is the product of purely natural forces. In such a world, our decisions would be driven strictly by physical impulses—we would be bound by the shackles of physical law.

As biologist Anthony Cashmore acknowledges regarding his atheistic worldview, “The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality, we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar. The laws of nature are uniform throughout, and these laws do not accommodate the concept of free will.”

If you don’t believe God exists, then don’t blame the shooter. He would just be acting according to his physical impulses. And don’t blame people for offering thoughts and prayers. They didn’t have a choice.

Finally, if you assume that shootings are evil and something needs to be done, you’re assuming an objective moral standard that only exists if God exists.

I understand the outrage that everyone feels right now. A tragic event like this is evil. But here’s the thing: If you believe that certain actions like killing 17 people at a school are objectively wrong—meaning they are wrong regardless of anyone’s personal opinion—then you believe objective moral standards exist. However, objective moral standards cannot exist unless a higher-than-human moral authority like God exists.

I’ve talked a lot about this moral argument for God’s existence with my kids, and my 9-year-old son came up with an insightful example to illustrate it last week. He loves Rubik’s Cubes and for some reason had been looking at a video with my husband where someone was using an all-black one. A normal cube has different colors on each square, and the challenge is to turn the cube until each side only has one color.

The day after he saw the video, he came to me with a serious face and wide eyes and said, “I think I have an example of what we were talking about with morality. When a Rubik’s Cube is all black, none of the moves matter. You can do anything. But when they have colors, then there is a pattern you’re supposed to do.”

It took me a second and then I realized what a great insight that is! If God doesn’t exist, morality is like the squares on an all-black Rubik’s Cube. There’s no right or wrong way to go; no move is better than another because there is no pattern or standard in place. It’s just your choice. In such a world, school shootings can legitimately be considered good or evil. But if God exists, He provides the colors and the objective standard for how they are to line up; we can see where the pieces should or should not go. In such a world, school shootings are an example of what should not happen. On all-black Rubik’s Cubes, however, there can be no should.

So let’s sum up what Christians believe:

  • God exists.
  • He’s perfectly good, and that goodness is the basis for the objective moral standards by which we can call things good and evil.
  • School shootings are objectively evil.
  • School shootings and other evil actions will always occur in our world because God created us with free will.
  • We don’t expect prayer to eliminate free will because that’s the nature of our created world.
  • We pray for God’s help in the midst of evil.
  • Prayer is in addition to, not instead of, other human action.

There’s nothing here to resent if you don’t believe in God.

In fact, if you believe that shootings are evil and that people have the free will to choose whether to shoot or not, your worldview is actually more consistent with theism than atheism. Maybe you should reconsider prayer after all.

For full conversations to have with your kids on the subjects discussed in this post, see the following chapters in my book, Talking with Your Kids about God:

Chapters 1-6: Evidence for God’s existence

Chapter 23: How do we know God hears and answers prayer?

Chapter 26: Do we really have free will?

Chapter 29: How should we make sense of evil?

 

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2oADJv9

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Kids walk away from faith

5 Regrets You Don’t Want to Have If Your Kids Walk Away from Faith

By Natasha Crain

Regret.

It’s something I often hear from parents who are heartbroken that their teen or adult kids have walked away from Christianity.

Whether it’s through one of my online books read along groups, private emails, blog comments, Facebook messages, or at speaking events, when parents reach out to me about their kids walking away from faith, their words are laced with painful sadness and a sense that they in some way failed.

My kids are still young (ages 9 and 7), so I haven’t faced this myself, but I relate to these parents because I have so often experienced my own sense of parenting failure.

I haven’t shown enough patience, and I see them exhibiting their own impatience.

I haven’t given them enough conflict resolution skills, and I see them argue constantly.

I haven’t spent enough time showing them how to serve others, and I see them lacking perspective on how to live out their faith.

As a parent, there are so many I haven’ts. And there will always be, because none of us are perfect. We cannot flawlessly deliver all that our kids need. But there’s something about I haven’t that implies opportunity.

I haven’t implies I haven’t yet.

When our kids leave home, however, those I haven’ts will cement into regretful I didn’ts.

As Christian parents, there should be nothing more important to us than raising our kids to know and love Jesus. How could there be something more important if our kids’ relationship with Jesus has eternal implications? Yet we have to recognize that we don’t control whether or not our kids become Christ-followers. The heavy burden of I didn’ts that so often comes with a child’s rejection of faith must be tempered with grace and placed at the foot of the cross.

At the same time, parents with kids still at home can’t ignore the fact that there is much we can do to help our kids develop a lasting faith. We are called to actively disciple our kids (Deuteronomy 6)—not to sit back and see what happens. We should focus on what we can control and give the rest to God.

With that in mind, there are many regrets we can purposefully avoid. They are things that we largely have in our control and that we should be able to reasonably identify as responsibilities long before I didn’t becomes a reality. Here are five you don’t want to have if your kids walk away from faith. Unfortunately, they are five I hear from parents far too often.

  1. You didn’t give them a deep enough understanding of Christianity.

Research has shown time after time that at least 60 percent of kids who grew up in church walk away from their faith by their early 20s (here is an excellent summary of the studies). Don’t be jaded by the numbers—that is a crazy statistic.

Young people often turn away from Jesus, however, with a flawed understanding of the nature of truth, what Christianity even is, and what the Bible teaches.

They think that Christianity requires blind faith; that a person must choose between faith and science; that Christianity basically boils down to living with “good values”; that Christians think they’re better than others; that Christians aren’t loving if they declare something is sinful according to the Bible; and much more.

How sad to think that many turns away from what they think is Christianity, but is actually only a caricature of it based on layers of misunderstandings built from popular culture over time.

One of the most important things we can do as parents is to ensure our kids deeply understand what, exactly, Christianity is—and isn’t. This requires us to 1) study the Bible deeply with our kids and 2) be educated on how the world gets Christianity wrong so we can proactively correct those misunderstandings with our kids.

If my kids reject their faith, I want to know that they accurately understand what they’re rejecting.

  1. You didn’t expose them to the claims of skeptics.

A lot of parents are overwhelmed at the thought of helping their kids learn the case for Christianity and how to defend their faith against the seemingly ubiquitous challenges today.

Where do you start? Where do you end? How can you cover it all? How can kids ever really be sufficiently prepared? How can we even be prepared ourselves?

But here’s what you need to know: Helping your kids develop a faith that’s prepared for today’s challenges is not a nebulous, impossible task.

Skeptics make a predictable set of claims, so we have a pretty specific agenda we should be covering with our kids over time. Think of it like helping them study for a test. You might not be able to anticipate every conceivable question they’ll get, but you can make sure they know what major subject areas they’ll encounter and how to think through the most important questions in those areas. They’re not venturing out into a completely wild blue yonder. This test can be studied for.

If my kids reject their faith, I want to know that it’s not because they were taken aback by shocking claims they hadn’t heard first from me.

  1. You didn’t make enough time for conversations about faith.

In their research for the book Sticky Faith, Kara Powell, and Chap Clark surveyed 11,000 church-going teenagers and asked how many of them talk with their parents about faith. They found that only 12% of kids talk regularly with their mom about faith and 5% with their dads.

What a devastating fact.

How can we help kids navigate the complexities of faith in a challenging world if we’re having zero or few conversations about it with them? Let’s be clear: This is completely in our control. It’s simply a matter of prioritizing the time needed and learning what conversations need to be had.

If my kids reject their faith, I want to know that it’s not because I didn’t invest time consistently and continually in having meaningful and relevant spiritual conversations with them.

  1. You relied on the church to develop their spiritual life.

Being part of a fellowship with other believers is an important part of Christian life. But there’s no question that simply getting your kids to church each week is not enough to prepare them to be independent followers of Jesus—especially in a challenging world like this. Parents must accept responsibility as the primary spiritual influencer in the life of their child.

If my kids reject their faith, I want to know that it’s not because I delegated the responsibility of spiritual discipleship to the church.

  1. You focused more on raising kids with “good values” than raising kids with Jesus.

This might be one of the mantras of this blog given how much I repeat it, but it’s so important, I need to say it over and over: good values are not the same as Christianity. None of us want to raise kids who are little terrors in the world. We want them to be pleasant people who generally exhibit what the Bible identifies as fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It’s easy to forget, however, that those qualities are fruits of the Spirit, not fruits of how hard we try. They are the outcome of a Spirit-filled life: the fruit, not the root.

If we focus on raising kids who are simply “good people” (by whatever behavioral definition you want to assume), and not on raising kids who love Jesus as the root of the fruit, we’re just raising future secular humanists.

If my kids reject their faith, I want to know that it’s not because they believed good values were pretty much the same as Christianity and eventually decided they didn’t Jesus.

If these points raise some I haven’ts for you, take a moment to consider right now what needs to change. Know that they don’t have to become I didn’ts. And rest in the peace of knowing you’re not responsible for your child’s ultimate decision to follow Jesus, but rather for being obedient to your calling as the primary spiritual influencer in your child’s life.

If you need a resource to help you with these points, you’ll find what you need in my latest book, Talking with your Kids about God. You’ll get equipped to help your kids understand Christianity more deeply; you’ll know specifically what claims skeptics make about God that you need to expose them to; you’ll learn how to have those conversations (every chapter has a step-by-step conversation guide); you’ll see what it means to take responsibility for their spiritual development rather than delegating to the church; and you’ll be prepared to teach why good values depend on the existence of God.  

 

Natasha Crain is a blogger, author, and national speaker who is passionate about equipping Christian parents to raise their kids with an understanding of how to make a case for and defend their faith in an increasingly secular world. She is the author of two apologetics books for parents: Talking with Your Kids about God (2017) and Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side (2016). Natasha has an MBA in marketing and statistics from UCLA and a certificate in Christian apologetics from Biola University. A former marketing executive and adjunct professor, she lives in Southern California with her husband and three children.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2EvgtpF

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Crain

Talking with Your Kids about God w/ Natasha Crain

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Christian parenting is hard work–and it’s getting harder. Parents have a deep desire to pass on their faith but fear that today’s increasingly skeptical and hostile world will eventually lead their kids to reject the truth of Christianity. That leaves many parents feeling overwhelmed–uncertain of what they can do to help their children, given the difficulty and extent of the faith challenges they will face. Frank interviews author Natasha Crain about her new book a practical and timely resource that gives parents the confidence of knowing what to discuss with their children and how to discuss it in order to facilitate impactful conversations that will form the basis of a lifelong faith.

Natasha’s Website: http://christianmomthoughts.com/

Natasha’s New Book: http://christianmomthoughts.com/talkingwithyourkidsaboutgod/

Crain

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Kids Resentment Christianity

How Living Counter-Culturally Can Lead to Your Kids’ Resentment of Christianity

By Natasha Crain 

Our family just returned from a wonderful vacation to the mountains of British Columbia. It was stunningly beautiful! We spent our first day there relaxing at this picture-perfect lake.

My husband and kids had a blast swimming out to a wooden platform in the middle of the lake and taking turns jumping off. I’m highly opposed to submerging myself in freezing cold water unnecessarily, so I happily enjoyed reading on the shore.

At one point I decided to walk down to the sand and take some photos. A man soon approached me and pointed to the water with a very serious look on his face.

“Leeches. The lake is filled with leeches. Look around and you’ll see that the big ones are puffed up on the blood they’ve sucked.”

I immediately freaked out, imagining that my family would soon be swimming back covered in blood-sucking creatures I would be too terrified to remove. But when I looked around the shallow water for signs of my family’s impending leech doom, I didn’t see anything. I started feeling better and decided the guy probably didn’t know what he was talking about.

When my husband and kids got back from swimming, I told them what the guy had said. My husband was as grossed out as I was and replied, “Great. I’m sure it’s not a big problem but now I don’t want to go back in. Way to ruin the rest of my day, ‘leech on the beach guy.’”

A little while later, leech on the beach guy spotted me and proudly walked over with a water bottle in hand. Inside was a gigantic leech with several babies attached.

“I told you so. She’s huge and was just sitting near the shore. They are everywhere.”

He walked away with the confidence of someone who had just revealed one of life’s greatest mysteries. But although it turned out he was right, my husband wasn’t exactly grateful for the confirmation. He still resented our leech friend for ruining his swimming plans.

When the Bearer of Bad News is Resented

That same day, I read with disgust about the now infamous Teen Vogue article promoting sodomy among teens. I truly couldn’t believe this was in a mainstream magazine. Speechless. Just speechless. And it made me consider how counter-culturally we have to live today as Christians. We’re no longer talking about a world where counter-cultural means leaving sports practice early for Wednesday night youth group.

We’re talking about having to protect our kids from widely available TEEN FASHION magazines that teach them how to be sodomized.  

(Almost equally unbelievable is the Twitter response from the magazine’s digital editor to those who think this is a problem.)

In a world like this, parents must increasingly say “no.” A lot. But if we’re not careful in how we execute our counter-cultural living, our kids can start seeing us like the alarmist leech on the beach guy and resent Christianity because of it.

There are four ways we can inadvertently allow that to happen.

  1. We focus more on the dangers of the world than on the beauty of Christianity.

There’s no doubt that leech on the beach guy was right about the dangers lurking in the water. But it was astounding to see how absolutely focused he was on the leeches, seemingly missing the stunning beauty around him entirely. He only cared about leeches.

In a world that seems to be going crazier by the second, it’s easy to spend more time pointing out the darkness of culture than the light of Christianity. Now, don’t get me wrong; we absolutely need to make our kids aware of cultural dangers. But when we don’t consistently point them back to the beauty of the Christian worldview which renders our culture so ugly in the first place, our faith will become defined by what we’re against more than what we’re for. There are a lot of problems with that, but for our current purpose, suffice it to say that persistent negativity breeds resentment.

The last six chapters in my new book, Talking with Your Kids about God, are written to help parents understand and communicate the beauty of a Christian worldview versus the atheistic worldview that so often pervades secularism. It was my favorite part of the book to write, knowing how important this knowledge is today.

  1. We spend more time addressing what is problematic about culture than whyit’s problematic.

Because leech on the beach guy was so focused on danger that no one else saw, we assumed his level of concern was disproportionate to the reality of the problem. Without more information to properly evaluate the significance of leech danger, my husband was left with ambiguous fear while having doubt about the legitimacy of the fear.

It’s a recipe for resentment: enough concern to modify your behavior, but not enough understanding to be confident the modification was worthwhile.

When the message our kids hear is an ongoing stream of don’ts without meaningful explanation—don’t listen to this music, don’t visit these sites, don’t use this social media platform, don’t subscribe to this magazine, don’t join this political movement—they’ll start to wonder if our level of concern about the world is warranted. And meaningful explanation requires demonstrating how the problems actually relate to the Christian worldview. Simply telling our kids that a movie has violence and they shouldn’t watch it, for example, is hardly a meaningful explanation. Why is that a problem for Christians? How can that affect us spiritually?Where should we draw the line? These kinds of questions should regularly be discussed.

  1. We frame our lives in terms of worldly limits more than Christian freedom.

If leech on the beach guy had a child with him, I bet that child would be longingly looking around at the groups of people having great fun. Some of the surrounding types of “fun” would be morally acceptable, some not so much. But you can bet the child would feel he or she was missing out on something by spending so much time focused on leeches…and probably resent dad because of it.

I often see ex-Christians comment about the freedom they feel in “letting go of God.” The language they use to describe their deconversion says so much. They saw religion as a limiting approach to life and therefore felt freer after shedding their beliefs in God. But as Christians we know that we are not free in our natural state at all—we are slaves to sin. When we put our faith in Jesus, we are given a new nature that is free from such bondage (Romans 6:18).

The reality, therefore, is that only Christians are actually free.

To embrace the feeling of freedom rather than limitation, our kids need to understand 1) the definition of sin, 2) the reality of sin, 3) why sin is such a big problem, and 4) why we should value being slaves to righteousness rather than to sin (Romans 6:18). Only then will they begin to understand that they’re notmissing out when they don’t make worldly choices.

  1. We focus more on authoritative parental decisions than on cultivating the skill of discernment.

Leech on the beach guy was incredibly smug. When he told me about the leeches, I asked him to show me where they were. He had no interest in doing so; he merely restated that he knew there were many in the lake. Had he not caught one later to show me, I probably would have left not believing him at all.

In many cases, parents have a bigger perspective than kids can possibly have given their limited life experiences. We have to make certain decisions on our kids’ behalves. But if we consistently present our “counter-cultural” lives as a series of decisions made by mom and dad (albeit for good reason), kids will naturally resent what they feel has been forced upon them. To the degree we can, we should always strive to cultivate our kids’ skill of discernment by involving them in the thought process of our decision making. After all, the second they walk out our door as adults, “authoritative parental decisions” no longer apply.

Finally, I want to mention that if you feel like you’re drowning in rather than navigating the cultural waters right now, there’s a fantastic new book out you should know about. It’s called A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today’s World, by John Stonestreet and Brett Kunkle. It explains why culture matters and how to handle topics with your kids such as pornography, the hookup culture, sexual orientation, gender identity, affluence and consumerism, addiction, entertainment, and racial tension. I highly recommend it for all Christian parents.

Just for fun, I managed to snap a picture of leech on the beach guy in anticipation of this post. Here he is, water bottle in hand, combing the beach for more leeches. Don’t be like this guy. Keep your family’s eyes on the beauty of the Lord and don’t let the world’s leeches suck the spiritual life out of you.

Leech on Beach Guy

Original Source Blog: http://bit.ly/2v4Nln7 

 

 

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