Tag Archive for: Terrell Clemmons

¿En qué se diferencia el cristianismo de otras religiones en cuanto a la homosexualidad?

Por Terrell Clemmons

Probablemente no es lo que tú piensas.

Salvando la verdad sobre la sexualidad humana

“Perdonen si esto se sale del tema”, tartamudeó la joven por el micrófono, “pero he buscado respuestas y no encuentro ninguna, así que pensé en venir esta noche a preguntarles a ustedes. ¿En qué difiere el cristianismo, si es que lo hace, respecto a la homosexualidad en comparación con otras religiones, y si es así, cómo?” Sus labios estremecidos y sus manos temblorosas revelaron la magnitud de la lucha que le había costado expresar la pregunta.

El auditorio se quedó en silencio cuando todas las miradas se dirigieron a Abdu Murray, que acababa de participar en un foro abierto de la universidad sobre las principales religiones del mundo.

Abdu guardó silencio por un momento. Se dio cuenta de que ella no solo buscaba otra opinión. Necesitaba una respuesta que la validara como ser humano. ¿Qué podía decir que no comprometiera la sexualidad bíblica y que, al mismo tiempo, le mostrara que Dios se preocupaba por ella sin medida?

“Es solo que hay tantas cosmovisiones para elegir”, comenzó. Y ninguna de ellas podría dar una respuesta que validara incondicionalmente su humanidad. Es decir, ninguna, excepto una. Pero antes de llegar a esa, examinó las demás.

Consideremos el ateísmo naturalista, la cosmovisión que impulsa el secularismo progresista. Según el secularismo naturalista, el ser humano es un animal altamente evolucionado. Esta cosmovisión es doblemente deshumanizadora con respecto a la homosexualidad. En primer lugar, según la narrativa evolutiva darwiniana, no hay nada especialmente significativo en los seres humanos. “Una rata es un cerdo es un perro es un niño”, en palabras de Ingrid Newkirk, fundadora de People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), de modo que lo único que nos distingue de las moscas de nuestra ventana es que estamos por encima de ellas en la cadena alimenticia. En segundo lugar, si, como se nos dice, la evolución darwiniana prosigue a través del proceso evolutivo, entonces la homosexualidad fracasa evolutivamente porque el sexo entre personas del mismo sexo no se reproduce. Por lo tanto, en una cosmovisión naturalista, las personas que practican el sexo entre personas del mismo sexo no son, al igual que todos los demás, nada especial, y además son fallas darwinianas.

¿Qué hay de los sistemas panteístas orientales, como el hinduismo o el budismo, o una espiritualidad al estilo de Deepak Chopra? Pues bien, los fundamentos éticos de estas cosmovisiones son, en el mejor de los casos, ambiguos, ya que enseñan que la moral es relativa. Por lo tanto, ninguna de ellas proporciona una base objetiva para el valor o la identidad humana. Y lo que es peor para el que busca respuestas sólidas, sostienen que el sufrimiento es una ilusión, lo que es un insulto a la persona que sufre. No ofrecen nada más allá de la charlatanería autorreferencial para quien lucha con su identidad.

¿Y el islam? Aunque ofrece solidez, con su fundamento monoteísta y sus claras normas que circunscriben el comportamiento sexual, el islam es abiertamente hostil a la homosexualidad. En algunos países islámicos, los actos homosexuales se castigan con la cárcel, la flagelación y, en algunos casos, la muerte.

Finalmente, entonces, Abdu entró en el cristianismo. Hizo dos observaciones al respecto. En primer lugar, todos sabemos intuitivamente que hay algo en el sexo que lo hace más que un simple acto físico. ¿Por qué se trata la agresión sexual de forma diferente a la mera agresión física? Porque, dijo, hay algo sagrado y frágil en la sexualidad, y las cosas sagradas son tan especiales que merecen ser protegidas. Dios quiere proteger el carácter sagrado de la sexualidad para que no se convierta en algo común, y los límites establecidos por la ética sexual bíblica protegen el carácter sagrado de la sexualidad.

Pero, admitió, eso no explica la proscripción que limita el sexo al matrimonio entre personas del sexo opuesto. Ese fue el tema de su segundo punto. Para abordar el principio del matrimonio entre hombres y mujeres, se refirió al relato bíblico de la creación en el Génesis, donde se nos dice que Dios creó al hombre y a la mujer a imagen de Dios. Que el hombre y la mujer hayan sido creados a imagen y semejanza de Dios es un concepto blasfemo para el islam, un concepto extraño en cualquier panteísmo y un absurdo en cualquier secularismo naturalista. Solo la cosmovisión bíblica, que sostiene que todos los hombres y todas las mujeres son portadores de la imagen divina de Dios, ofrece una base objetiva para la dignidad y el valor humanos inherentes.

Y esto nos lleva a la razón por la que vale la pena limitar la sexualidad humana al matrimonio hombre-mujer: Es porque el sexo es la forma en que la vida humana viene al mundo. “El sexo entre un hombre y una mujer es el único medio por el que viene al mundo un ser tan precioso”, dijo. “Y como un ser humano es el producto sagrado del sexo, el proceso sexual por el que esa persona se hace es también sagrado”. La ética bíblica limita la expresión sexual al matrimonio monógamo, hombre-mujer, porque “Dios está protegiendo algo sagrado y hermoso”. Al someternos a la guía de la creación, “Se nos concede el honor de reflejar un aspecto del esplendor divino”.

Concluyó su respuesta a la joven atribulada diciéndole que Dios ancla toda la dignidad humana, incluida la suya, y la sacralidad en su naturaleza inmutable y eterna. Se nos concede la altísima dignidad de reflejar la gloria de Dios en ese mundo.

Entonces, ¿en qué se diferencia el cristianismo de las demás religiones en lo que respecta a la homosexualidad? Resulta que difiere profundamente de todas las demás, pero no de la forma en que las voces culturales dominantes dicen que lo hace. Abdu relata esta escena en su libro recientemente publicado, Saving Truth: Finding Meaning and Clarity in a Post-Truth World. Aunque tiene mucho más que decir sobre la naturaleza singularmente sublime de la sexualidad dentro del matrimonio natural, Saving Truth no trata solo de la sexualidad. Ese es solo el tema de un capítulo, pero espero que te dé una idea de la belleza que la claridad bíblica puede aportar a un área llena de confusión.

Saving Truth examina todo un paisaje de confusión cultural, ofreciendo refrescantes dosis de claridad para que podamos dar sentido a muchas otras confusiones:

  • ¿Qué significa “posverdad”?
  • ¿Cuál es la diferencia entre autonomía y libertad liberadora?
  • ¿Cómo se atraviesa por el supuesto conflicto entre ciencia y fe?
  • ¿Y qué pasa con el  pluralismo religioso? ¿Pueden realmente coexistir todas las religiones?

Abdu nunca dio el nombre de la joven que hizo la profunda pregunta sobre la sexualidad, pero sí concluyó el relato señalando que, después de que él respondió a su pregunta, “ella pareció saber que era ‘comprendida’. Las lágrimas comenzaron a fluir, y me concedió el honor de orar con ella”. La verdad tiene una forma de calmar el clamor y provocar momentos profundos. Espero que le des un vistazo al nuevo libro de Abdu, Saving Truth, y aún más, espero que busques la verdad allí donde te encuentras. Te cueste lo que te cueste, las lágrimas que te provoque, busca la claridad, busca la verdad. Ahí es donde encontrarás tu propósito.

Recursos recomendados en Español:

Robándole a Dios (tapa blanda), (Guía de estudio para el profesor) y (Guía de estudio del estudiante) por el Dr. Frank Turek

Por qué no tengo suficiente fe para ser un ateo (serie de DVD completa), (Manual de trabajo del profesor) y (Manual del estudiante) del Dr. Frank Turek

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Terrell Clemmons es una escritora y bloguera independiente que escribe sobre apologética y asuntos de fe.

Fuente Original del blog: https://bit.ly/2LZrSFp

Traducido por Jennifer Chavez 

Editado por Monica Pirateque 

/by

El Apologista (en español)

By Terrell Clemmons

Jorge Gil: The next generation apologist for the world

Jorge Gil was born in 1982 to a single mother in Costa Rica. When he was one year old, she left him in the care of his grandparents and moved to the United States, where he died ten years later. Following her death, with a grandfather who was away most of the time, a grandmother who showed her love by giving him everything he wanted, and adolescence approaching, young Jorge began to explore. With no father figure and no boundaries, he soon discovered that he liked liquor and marijuana, and both became regular pastimes. Like much of Latin America, the culture around him was nominally Catholic, and he could easily party all night and go to mass the next day, without qualms. He never doubted the existence of God. He just never cared about him.

Still, he was a smart student. He graduated from high school at sixteen, and by eighteen he had completed three semesters of college. However, with the expansion of freedom had come the expansion of partying. When the aunts who were footing the bill for his education saw that he was squandering the opportunity, they cut off the funding. At that point, his Aunt Shirley invited him to the United States, where she lived, and where he could work and earn his own funds to finish school. He arrived in North Carolina two weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11.

But a change of scenery doesn’t make a change of lifestyle. A steady income of his own simply freed him up to do whatever he wanted, and life settled into a steady cycle of hard work followed by hard partying. Who needed school?

Being musically and technologically inclined, he also built a recording studio in his apartment. This attracted friends, including women, and before long, he had hooked himself on one in particular. Neither of them had a plan or ambition for life, and they drifted into carelessness and recklessness before and after children came into the picture. Jorge’s daughter Leda was born in 2007, followed by son Aiden in 2008. With both Jorge and his mother caught in codependency, Aunt Shirley took charge of everyone’s situation.

Arrested

In 2012, several years of irresponsible living caught up with Jorge. It started with a routine traffic stop while he was driving home from a friend’s house. Although he had been drinking a little, his breathalyzer test registered under the legal limit, so that wasn’t a problem. But his driver’s license was expired. So he was taken to the police station, where, by some mysterious misfortune, a second breathalyzer test showed a blood alcohol concentration 0.1% over the limit. Jorge was held overnight in the Sampson County Jail, and now faced a DUI charge.

The next morning, he woke up to an immigration officer waiting for him. The reason his driver’s license had expired was that he had let his immigration permit lapse, and he was now being placed on immigration hold. Driving with an expired license was a lesser offense, and the DUI charge was on shaky ground. But this immigration situation was a more complicated matter. In consultation with his attorneys, Jorge decided that he would plead not guilty to the DUI charge and remain in county jail while they prepared his immigration case.

Arrest: Part 1

“Do you have anything to read?” he asked his Mexican bunkmate on his first day in jail. His bunkmate had two books, a Colombian classic called One Hundred Years of Solitude and a Bible. Jorge had no interest in reading the Bible, but after finishing the novel in two days, the Bible was the only book there was, and prison days were long. He read the Gospels.

To his surprise, he found himself intrigued. As if in an answer to a nascent prayer, the following week a black man named Cortez was transferred into his pod. (A pod is a large communal cell.) Cortez had what is called “jailhouse preacher syndrome,” meaning he was in and out of jail and while in jail he preached the gospel and taught Bible studies. Jorge took it all in, and when another preacher visited him two weeks later and presented the gospel with all his field preacher fire, Jorge gave his life to Jesus on the spot. At that moment, all the urges and desires of his old life—a pack or two of cigarettes a day, drinks every night, and marijuana here and there—left him, never to return.

Cortez went to work discipling him right away. He told Jorge to stop using profanity, both in Spanish and English. Jorge did, and the two studied the Bible together every day until Cortez was transferred a few weeks later. With Cortez gone, Jorge took it upon himself to become the new crazy preacher. Even though he was new to the Bible, he used whatever he could find. He asked Aunt Shirley to get him some resources, and although he didn’t quite know what to ask for, he soon had a study Bible, some Our Daily Bread devotionals, some InTouch magazines, and a stack of commentaries, which he devoured and spread as best he could like there was no tomorrow. He reached out to some in the community and asked for Bible donations, and soon each new inmate received a warm welcome and a Bible of his own from him. The inmates began to call him preacher and come to him for advice, and between the providence of God and the flame that drove his regenerated heart, Jorge grew into the role of preacher-teacher with passion.

Arrest: Part II

Six months after Jorge entered the Sampson County Jail, he was transferred to a federal immigration detention center in Georgia. The DUI charge had been dismissed, and by the time he got out, in addition to becoming a preacher, he had befriended all the guards, served as their go-to translator, read some sixty books, and accumulated a stack of yellow legal pads filled with notes, ideas, and sermon outlines.

Although he had put himself through “preacher school,” as he now calls it, immigration facilities presented a whole new set of challenges. These were not people who were in prison for crimes per se, but who like him were being rounded up and processed for deportation or reinstatement as residents. In North Carolina, most of the inmates came from some sort of Christianized background and had a reasonable context to relate to the gospel. Here, he encountered Buddhism, Islam, Rasta, Hinduism, Baha’i, and other world belief systems. He began to preach or speak as he had done before, and the men challenged him with questions he had never encountered: “How can you say Jesus is the only way?” and “Hasn’t the Bible been corrupted?” and the like. How was he to respond to this?

He prayed, and his answer came in the form of an AM-FM radio given to him by a Mexican man who was being deported. Holding the antenna up to the window, Jorge found a radio teacher who took his breath away. The man had a funny accent, and Jorge thought he was some kind of Messianic Jew because his name was Ravi, which he assumed was a mispronunciation of rabbi. Jorge sat by that window every day, writing down everything this man said, and asking Aunt Shirley to send him every book she could find related to Ravi Zacharias.

The books and notebooks continued to pile up until November, when Jorge received a full pardon and was released. He returned home 110 pounds lighter, nine months drug-free, insatiably thirsty for knowledge of this Jesus he loved, and with a heart willing to share it with the world. He began searching for online discipleship programs as soon as he could get his hands on a smartphone.

The Director

Life since that pivotal year has taken many twists and turns. His employer had kept him in his job and he was welcomed back enthusiastically, but his relationship with the mother of his children deteriorated rapidly. Not only had he not changed, she was not happy with these changes in him. She left a few months later in a violent rage, never to return.

His Aunt Shirley, who had been like a mother to him all these years, died in 2014 in a horrific murder-suicide shooting, and after that, he discovered in a new way the richness of the body of Christ, when his small rural church stepped in to help him with his children. He went to every apologetics conference he could find within driving distance, and sought out mentors to help him grow as an apologist and man of God. He met Frank Turek of Cross-Examined and in 2015 was hired as Cross-Examined’s social media director. He also met Angelia (“Lia”) in 2015, and in 2017 she became his wife and accepted the mantle of mother to his children.

Today, he serves as the Executive Director of Cross-Examined. He oversees all projects, including the translation and publication of apologetics resources in the world’s languages, including Chinese and Russian. He oversees Cross-Examined’s social media operations and, as the millennial techno-wizard that he is, keeps them always on the cutting edge of technologies, in order to reach younger generations on their own terms and turf.

He speaks and leads seminars abroad on a wide range of topics—postmodernism, same-sex marriage, the problem of evil—contextualizing the content as much as possible for local audiences, and creates and hosts online communities, with the goal of advancing the gospel and offering sound apologetics to the world.

Man of God

He is a busy man who loves what he does. “I certainly didn’t plan this,” he says. “God gave me this opportunity, and it’s a joy to be able to allow him to use me to connect the North American apologetics movement and create one in Latin America.”

However, he finds his greatest joy in his family.

Seeing that family unit that I never had – I never knew my biological father, I was raised by my grandmother, my biological mother died (I barely knew her), and my grandfather who was supposed to be the role model in the house always left for work, and when he came home he was drunk – seeing the relationships I have with my children and with my wife, and the one my children have with her is incredible. I think that’s what I enjoy the most.

The Scriptures speak of God calling His people, establishing them, and making them flourish. I think Jorge Gil has just begun in that flourishing part.

Out of the trenches

How Jorge Gil grew in his calling

“One of the things people don’t know about me,” Jorge says, “is my struggle with not having a title.”

He was at a business meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society one day when the president, Angus Menuge, asked him what his area of ​​expertise was. “Brother,” he said, “I’m riding on a high school diploma.”

Besides Christian scholars of various titles like Dr. Menuge, Jorge’s circle of colleagues includes apologetics giants like J. Warner Wallace, Greg Koukl, and the late Dr. Norman Geisler, so it is understandable that he feels intimidated at times. But the way he is leading his Christian life is hardly “ridable.” Consider this:

Diligence: For one thing, since his Christian conversion seven years ago, Jorge has dedicated himself to learning everything he can related to the Christian faith. Although he was not deported in 2012, his temporary residency status meant he would have to enroll in school as a foreign student, which entailed a much higher tuition cost.

As a single father, formal education simply wasn’t an option for him for some time. So George studied on his own—theology, apologetics, philosophy—which made him a more suitable vessel for sharing the gospel.

Humility: Second, since he never had a father figure to speak of, he intentionally sought out godly, educated men to help and advise him. He met Richard Howe, who was the director of the philosophy doctoral program at the Southern Evangelical Seminary, at an apologetics conference and asked Dr. Howe if he would be his philosophy mentor. He built relationships with people he saw as role models, not because of their “star status,” but to learn from them. One of the many questions he would ask is, “What would you tell your thirty-year-old self that you wish they knew?” He also offered his services as a translator, to subtitle their videos, for example, or to republish their biographies in Spanish. No charge; it was all about offering what he had to give in service to the cause.

Faith: And third, Jorge never let intimidation or the lack of a degree stop him from doing what he believed God was calling him to do. He is currently pursuing his associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees all in one fell swoop. At the same time, he insists that it is not the degrees or seminary that prepare you for the job, but the God who calls you to it.

“If you want it and you believe that God has called you to something,” he tells people,

Then go for it, and things will fall into place. Don’t think, “I’ll graduate and then do apologetics.” No, get in the trenches. If you have to get your degree while you’re in the trenches, do it. But don’t be intimidated by all those people who have big letters in front of or after their names. Remember, God grabbed a bunch of fishermen and turned the world upside down. I believe He still operates the same way today.

Absolutely. I think the rest of us can learn from Jorge’s example. The Christian life is never about what we have or don’t have. It’s about the God we know and what we do with what we have. By those lights, Jorge “graduated” a long time ago.

Recommended resources in Spanish:

Stealing from God ( Paperback ), ( Teacher Study Guide ), and ( Student Study Guide ) by Dr. Frank Turek

Why I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist ( Complete DVD Series ), ( Teacher’s Workbook ), and ( Student’s Handbook ) by Dr. Frank Turek

 

Terrell Clemmons is a freelance writer and blogger who writes about apologetics and matters of faith.

This article was originally published on salvomag.com: http://bit.ly/2HndWQI

Translated by Priscilla Fonseca

/by
El Apologista

El Apologista

By Terrell Clemmons

Jorge Gil: Next Gen Apologist to the World

Jorge Gil was born in 1982 to a single mother in Costa Rica. When he was one year old, she left him in the care of his grandparents and moved to the United States, where she died ten years later. In the wake of her death, with a grandfather who was away most of the time, a grandmother who showed love by giving him whatever he wanted, and adolescence approaching, young Jorge started exploring. With no father figure and no boundaries, he soon discovered he liked liquor and pot, and both became regular pastimes. As in much of Latin America, the culture around him was nominally Catholic, and he could easily party all night and go to Mass the next day, no qualms. He never doubted the existence of God. He just never cared about him.

Still, he was a smart student. He graduated high school at sixteen, and by age eighteen had completed three semesters of college. However, with expanded freedom had come expanded carousing. When the aunts footing the bill for his education saw how he was wasting the opportunity, they cut off the funds. At that point, his Aunt Shirley invited him to America, where she lived, and where he could work and earn his own funds to finish school. He arrived in North Carolina two weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

But a change of setting does not a change of lifestyle make. A steady income of his own simply freed him up to do whatever he pleased, and life settled into a steady cycle of hard work followed by hard-partying. Who needed school?

Being musically and technologically inclined, he also built a recording studio in his apartment. This attracted friends, including women, and before long, he’d taken up with one in particular. Neither of them had any plan or ambition for life, and they drifted along carelessly and recklessly before and after children entered the picture. Jorge’s daughter Leda was born in 2007, followed by his son Aiden in 2008. With both Jorge and his baby-mama stuck in codependency, Aunt Shirley next door picked up a lot of the slack for everyone.

Stopped

In 2012, several years of irresponsible living caught up with Jorge. It started with a routine traffic stop while he was driving home from a friend’s house. Although he’d had some drinks, his breathalyzer test registered under the legal limit, so that wasn’t a problem. But his driver’s license was expired. So he was taken to the police station, where, by some mysterious misfortune, a second breathalyzer test showed a blood alcohol concentration of 0.1% over the limit. Jorge was detained overnight in the Sampson County jail, and now he had a DUI charge to contend with.

The next morning, he woke up to an ICE officer waiting for him. The reason his driver’s license was expired was that he’d let his immigration permit lapse, and now he was being placed on immigration hold. Driving with an expired license was a minor offense, and the DUI arguably stood on shaky ground. But this immigration situation was a more complicated matter. In counsel with his lawyers, Jorge decided he would plead not guilty to the DUI charge and remain in the county jail while they prepared his immigration case.

Detention: Part One

“Do you have anything to read?” he asked his Mexican bunkmate on the first day in jail. His bunkmate had two books, a Colombian classic called One Hundred Years of Solitude and a Bible. Jorge had no interest in reading the Bible, but after finishing the novel in two days, the Bible was the only book around, and prison days were long. He read the Gospels.

To his surprise, he found himself intrigued. As if in response to some nascent prayer, the following week, a black man named Cortez was transferred into his pod. (A pod is a large communal cell.) Cortez had what he called “jail preacher syndrome,” meaning that he would drift in and out of jail and while in jail he would preach the gospel and teach Bible studies. Jorge took it all in, and when another preacher visited two weeks later and laid out the gospel with all his country-preacher fire, Jorge surrendered his life to Jesus on the spot. At that moment, all the urges and desires of his old life—a pack or two of cigarettes a day, drinks every night, and pot here and there for good measure—up and left, never to return.

Cortez went to work discipling him right away. He told Jorge to stop using profanity, both the Spanish words and the English ones. Jorge did, and the two studied the Bible together every day until Cortez was transferred out a few weeks later. With Cortez gone, Jorge took it upon himself to become the new in loco preacher. Still new to the Bible himself, he used whatever he could find. He asked Aunt Shirley to get him some resources, and though he hardly knew what to ask for, he soon had a study Bible, some Our Daily Bread devotionals, a few InTouch magazines, and a stash of commentaries, all of which he devoured and disseminated as best he could like there was no tomorrow. He reached out to contacts in the community and asked for Bibles to be donated, and soon every new inmate received from him a good welcome and his own Bible. Inmates started calling him Preacher and coming to him for counsel, and between the providence of God and the flame driving his regenerated heart, Jorge grew into the preacher-teacher role with a passion.

Detention: Part Two

Six months to the day after Jorge entered the Sampson County jail, he was transferred to a federal ICE detention facility in Georgia. The DUI charge had been dismissed, and by the time he left, in addition to becoming Preacher, he’d become friends with all the guards, served as their on-call translator, read some sixty books, and accumulated a pile of yellow pads filled with notes, ideas, and sermon outlines.

Although he’d pretty much put himself through “preacher school,” as he now puts it, the ICE facility presented a whole new set of challenges. These weren’t people who were in for crimes per se, but like him were being detained and processed for either deportation or reinstatement as a resident. In North Carolina, most of the inmates had come from some kind of Christianized background and had a reasonable context by which to relate to the gospel. Here, he encountered Buddhism, Islam, Rasta, Hinduism, Bahá’í, and other world belief systems. He would start preaching or talking as he’d done before, and men would challenge him with questions he’d never encountered: “How can you say Jesus is the only way?” and “Hasn’t the Bible been corrupted?” and the like. How was he to respond to these?

He prayed, and his answer came in the form of an AM-FM radio a Mexican man who was being deported gave him. By holding the antenna up to the window just so, Jorge found a radio teacher who flat-out blew him away. The man had a funny accent, and Jorge thought he was some kind of Messianic Jew because his name was Ravi, which he assumed was a mispronunciation of Rabbi. Jorge sat by that window every single day, wrote down everything this man said and asked Aunt Shirley to send him every book she could find related to Ravi Zacharias.

The books and notepads continued to accumulate until November when Jorge received a full pardon and was released. He returned home 110 pounds lighter, nine months drug-free, insatiably thirsty for knowledge of this Jesus he loved, and with a heart set on sharing him with the world. He started looking for apologetics programs online as soon as he could get his hands on a smartphone.

El Director

Life since that pivotal year has brought a lot of twists and turns. His employer had held his job for him, and he was welcomed back wholeheartedly, but his relationship with the mother of his children deteriorated rapidly. Not only had she not changed, she was not happy about these changes in him. She left a few months later in a violent fury, never to return.

His Aunt Shirley, who had been like a mother to him all these years, died in 2014 in a horrible murder-suicide shooting, and following that, he discovered in a new way the richness of the body of Christ, as his small rural church stepped in to help him with his kids. He went to every weekend apologetics conference he could find within driving distance, and he sought out mentors who could help him grow as an apologist and man of God. He met Frank Turek of Cross-Examined and in 2015 was hired on as Cross-Examined’s social media director. He also met Angelia (“Lia”) in 2015, and in 2017, she became his wife and accepted the mantle of mother to his children.

Today, he serves as the Executive Director for Cross-Examined. He oversees all projects, including the translation and publication of apologetics resources into world languages, including Chinese and Russian. He oversees Cross-Examined’s social media operations and, techno-whiz Millennial that he is, keeps them ever on the leading edges of technologies, in order to reach younger generations on their grounds and terms.

He speaks and conducts seminars overseas on a wide range of topics—postmodernism, same-sex marriage, the problem of evil—contextualizing the content as much as possible for local audiences, and he creates and hosts online communities, the goal always being to advance the gospel and deliver sound apologetics to the world.

Hombre de Dios

He’s one busy hombre who loves what he does. “I certainly didn’t plan this,” he says. “God gave me this opportunity, and it’s a joy to be able to allow him to use me to connect the North American movement in apologetics and actually create one in Latin America.”

He finds his greatest joy, though, in his family.

To see that family unity that I never had—I never met my biological father, I was raised by my grandmother, my biological mom died (I barely knew her), and my grandfather who was supposed to be the role model in the house was always gone working, and when he came around he was drunk—to see the relationships I have with my children and with my wife, and that my children have with her is incredible. I think that’s the thing I enjoy the most.

Scripture speaks about God calling his people, establishing them, and then making them flourish. I think Jorge Gil is just getting started at that flourishing part.

Out of the Trenches

How Jorge Gil Grew into His Calling

“One of the things people don’t know about me,” Jorge says, “is my struggle with not having a degree.”

He was in a business meeting of the Evangelical Philosophical Society one day, when the president, Angus Menuge, asked him what his area of expertise was. “Bro,” he said, “I’m riding on a high-school diploma.”

In addition to multi degreed Christian academics like Dr. Menuge, Jorge’s circle of colleagues includes such apologetics giants as J. Warner Wallace, Greg Koukl, and the late Dr. Norman Geisler, so it’s understandable if he feels intimidated at times. But the way he’s going about his Christian life is hardly “riding.” Consider the following:

Diligence: For one thing, ever since his Christian conversion seven years ago, Jorge has invested himself in learning everything he can that’s related to the Christian faith. Although he was not deported in 2012, his temporary residential status meant he would have to enroll in school as a foreign student, which carried a much higher tuition cost.

As a single parent, formal education was simply not an option for him for some time. So Jorge studied on his own -theology, apologetics, philosophy-whatever would make him a more suitable vessel for sharing the gospel.

Humility: Second, having never had a father figure to speak of, he intentionally sought out learned, godly men for help and advice. He met Richard Howe, who was director of the Ph.D. program in philosophy at Southern Evangelical Seminary, at an apologetics conference and asked Dr. Howe if he would be his philosophy mentor. He built relationships with people he saw as role models, not because of their “star status,” but in order to learn from them. One of the many questions he would ask is, “What would you tell your thirty-year-old self that you would want him to know?” He also offered his services as a translator to them-to subtitle their videos, for example, or to re-post their biogs in Spanish. No charge; it was all about offering what he had to give in service to the cause.

Faith: And third, Jorge never let intimidation or lack of a degree hinder him from doing what he believed God was calling him to do. He’s currently pursuing his Associate, Bachelor, and Masters degrees, all in one swoop. At the same time, he insists it’s not the degrees or the seminary that prepares you for the work, but the God who calls you to it.

“If you want it and you think God has called you to something,” he tells people,

then go for it, and things will fall into place. Don’t think, “I’ll get my degree and then I’ll do apologetics.” No, get into the trenches. If you have to get your degree while you’re in the trenches, do it. But don’t be intimidated by all of these people who have big letters in front of or behind their names. Remember, God just grabbed a handful of fishermen and turned the world upside down. I think he’s still operating the same way today.

Indeed. I think the rest of us can learn from Jorge’s example. The Christian life is never about what we have or don’t have. It’s about the God we know and what we do with what we have. By those lights, Jorge “graduated” a long time ago.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions by Greg Koukl (Book)

Practical Apologetics in Worldview Training by Hank Hanegraaff (Mp3)

The Great Apologetics Adventure by Lee Strobel (Mp3)

Defending the Faith on Campus by Frank Turek (DVD Set, mp4 Download set and Complete Package)

So the Next Generation will Know by J. Warner Wallace (Book and Participant’s Guide)

Reaching Atheists for Christ by Greg Koukl (Mp3)

Living Loud: Defending Your Faith by Norman Geisler (Book)

Fearless Faith by Mike Adams, Frank Turek and J. Warner Wallace (Complete DVD Series)

 

Terrell Clemmons has a BS in Computer Science and worked as a software engineer with IBM until she hopped off the career track to be a full-time mom. She lives in Indianapolis, IN, and writes on apologetics and matters of faith.

This article was originally published at salvomag.com: http://bit.ly/2HndWQI

/by
One Woman's Quest for Straight Answers from Public Health Organizations

One Woman’s Quest for Straight Answers from Public Health Organizations

By Terrell Clemmons

After three years’ research on traumatic brain injuries he’d seen in prematurely deceased football players, Dr. Bennet Omalu wrote a paper in 2005 detailing his findings on the syndrome he named Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). He was hopeful that NFL doctors would build on his discovery for the well-being of NFL athletes. But instead of welcoming his data, an NFL medical committee called for it to be retracted. A thoroughgoing medical scientist, Omalu would do no such thing, and it took a full four more years of increasing pressure before the NFL publicly acknowledged the link between concussions sustained on the field and CTE.

A similar kind of David versus Goliath challenge may be developing between investigative journalist Punam Kumar Gill and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). A Canadian citizen of Indian descent and a lifelong pro-choice feminist, Gill became troubled after hearing questions raised about potential long-term risks of induced abortion. An honest investigator, she was quick to notice two things: (1) Although the questions did not concern the legality of abortion, because they were associated with abortion, few people seemed willing to listen, let alone talk about them. And (2) she herself might be guilty of allowing bias to blind her to a valid women’s issue where one might lie.

The dual discovery set her mind to thinking: What if there really were critical health risks to abortion? What were women actually being told before having one? And how were they doing afterwards? These were serious health care concerns, in some cases, matters of life and death. Shouldn’t they be discussed openly, rather than being dismissed as pro-life propaganda?

An Unlikely Team & A Balanced Report

She thought they should be, as did pro-life filmmaker Joses Martin of Mighty Motion Pictures. And so, although they came down on opposite sides of the pro-choice/pro-life divide, Gill and Martin teamed up to search out the truth about these questions for the sake of women everywhere. Their investigation is chronicled in the excellently produced documentary Hush: A Liberating Conversation About Abortion and Women’s Health. Here’s an overview.

Abortion & Breast Cancer

Gill interviewed several medical doctors. Is there evidence of a link between abortion and breast cancer? She asked. Yes, said Dr. Ian Gentles, coauthor of Complications: Abortion’s Impact on Women (2013); there have been “many dozens of studies [that] show a real, statistically significant link.” Yes, said Dr. Angela Lanfranchi, a breast cancer surgeon who has seen it in a textbook and in her practice. No, said Dr. David Grimes, an ob-gyn and abortionist for more than four decades, “there are no long-term consequences from abortion.” This issue is settled, he said. Doing continued studies would not only be inappropriate but unethical.

Thus, right off the bat, Gill and Martin encountered the deep divide between medical professionals. But Grimes had underscored his point by adding that his opinion was the same as that of all the major medical organizations. This did seem to add credibility to the “no consequences” side, so that’s where they went next.

One after another, Gill contacted them: The American Cancer Society. The Canadian Cancer Society. The National Cancer Institute. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in London. The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. And finally, the World Health Organization. But to her surprise, not only would none of them consent to an interview, they would not even speak to her. Not one. The case was closed, they all said. Anything she needed to know could be found on their website. It was as if they were all working off the same script.

With no other option, and now starting to feel suspicious of those denying any link, Gill went to their websites. Each one referred to a 2003 conference held by the NIH cancer division, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), where it had been concluded once and for all that there was no link between abortion and breast cancer. Upon this discovery, she tried again to speak with someone at the NCI, going so far as to visit in person. But when she arrived, she was swiftly escorted off the grounds by security. What was going on here?

A thoroughgoing journalist, Gill was not one to be intimidated into silence. She continued to dig and question until, eventually, she located a recording of the 2003 conference online and got to the bottom of the “no abortion-breast cancer link” conclusion. She explains her findings in some detail in the film but suffice it here to say that a careful look raises serious questions about who or what dictated the outcome of this seminal conference. Was it honest medical science? Or was it abortion politics?

Abortion & Pre-term Birth

Pre-term birth rates have doubled in the U.S. since Roe. Every year, more than 11,000 newborns die on the day of their birth in America due to prematurity, and those that survive exact untold emotional and financial costs on health care resources and families before ever leaving the hospital. After discharge, they face heightened risks of such lifelong disabilities as cerebral palsy, autism, chronic lung disease, and other vital organ maladies.

“It seems there’s a real clear unwillingness to deal with the science on this,” said Dr. Martin McCaffrey, a neonatologist who has frontline experience in caring for preemies and their families. He was invited in 2008 to serve as an expert panel member at the Surgeon General’s Conference on Preventing Preterm Birth, held by the NIH. He brought up the abortion-prematurity link and presented 122 articles as supportive evidence, but the co-chairs would not allow discussion, even though the link has been demonstrated in more than 80 studies. McCaffrey estimates that abortion accounts for 18 percent of very preterm births (earlier than 32 weeks’ gestation), yet in all the material published to raise awareness of prematurity, there is no mention of prior abortion as a possible risk factor. None. The question is, why not?

Abortion & Adverse Psychological Effects

This has been covered in Salvo before. Gill cites the alarmingly high rates of such maladies as PTSD, eating disorders, depression, substance abuse, and suicide in post-abortive women, but the most moving evidence of post-abortion trauma comes from the post-abortive women she interviews, many of whom suffer heart-wrenching grief and regret decades later.

Shouldn’t women considering abortion be provided with this information? Gill asks. No, insists Dr. Grimes, the abortionist. That would be “a very overt attempt to dissuade or discourage women from exercising their right to have an abortion.” Apparently this is what passes in his world for medical ethics.

The Moral Imperative of Informed Consent

For people of conscience, though, informed consent matters, and women considering abortion deserve factual information. Since neither the abortion industry nor the bureaus of medical apparatchiks will so much as countenance the data, Gill and Martin have brought it to the public themselves. Meanwhile, they continue to press the NIH and NCI to address the questions Hush raises, but so far, they have received no response beyond the same scripted suggestions to visit the NCI website, which in turn still cites the 2003 conference.

Hush is top-notch work. In many ways, you, the viewer, feel like you’re along on their quest. And where appropriate, well-crafted graphics depict the medical explanations, making the breast cancer and pre-term birth connections understandable.

“Over time,” said Dr. Patrick Fagan, who coauthored a 2014 paper on the abortion-breast cancer link, “the 2003 NCI conference is going to become an embarrassment in the history of the NCI itself.” Indeed, it may. It took Dr. Omalu four years to awaken the conscience of the NFL. The consciences of the NIH and NCI have already been slumbering for over thirteen years. One can hope that Hush will, paradoxically, finally wake them up.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

The Apologetics of Abortion mp3 by J. Budziszewski

Reaching Pro-Abortionists for Christ CD by Francis Beckwith

The Case for Christian Activism (MP3 Set), (DVD Set), and (mp4 Download Set) by Frank Turek

Legislating Morality (mp4 download),  (DVD Set), (MP3 Set), (PowerPoint download), and (PowerPoint CD) by Frank Turek

Legislating Morality: Is it Wise? Is it Legal? Is it Possible? by Frank Turek (Book)

Do Ethics Need God? (Mp3) by Francis Beckwith

 

Terrell Clemmons is a freelance writer and blogger on apologetics and matters of faith.

This article was originally published at salvomag.com: http://bit.ly/2Y4WN69

/by
A Review of Nancy Pearcey's Saving Leonardo

A Review of Nancy Pearcey’s Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning

By Terrell Clemmons

Nancy Pearcey knows the captivating power of secular ideas because she used to hold them herself. As a teenager, she rejected the religion of her childhood and embraced a host of “isms,” from moral relativism to scientific determinism to New Age spiritualism.

But she persisted in her quest for truth, only to find that the biblical worldview offers far better and more complete answers to the real-world questions those philosophies attempted to address. For those of us who lack such intellectual stamina, her books serve as a tour of the long and winding journey by which she arrived at that conclusion.

The Soul of Science, which she co-authored with Charles Thaxton in 1994, defied the deeply embedded cultural myth which said that faith and science occupy mutually exclusive intellectual camps, and showed how, quite to the contrary, scientific progress grew specifically out of Christian culture.

How Now Shall We Live? a joint effort with Charles Colson in 2004, fully developed the concept of worldview as an explanatory system that must fit all of reality. A worldview must therefore satisfactorily answer three foundational life questions: (1) Who am I and where did I come from?, i.e., the question of origins; (2) What’s wrong with the world?; and (3) How can it be fixed? Pearcey and Colson argued persuasively that the biblical metanarrative of Creation/Fall/Redemption provides the most excellent answers to all three.

Total Truth, Pearcey’s first solo work, built upon the core insight of Francis Schaeffer, under whom she studied as a young adult. Schaeffer had observed that modernity has erected a “two-story” view of reality, wherein objective “facts” occupy the lower story and subjective “values” occupy the upper. Total Truth showed how secularists use this fact/value split to banish biblical principles from public discourse, not by disproving them but by dismissing them out of hand.

In Saving Leonardo, Pearcey has turned her attention to the arts, and she analyzes how the fact/value split has fragmented modern thought and therefore compromised modern art. Most people view art as simply personal expression, but Pearcey says that it is much more than that: “Artists always select, arrange, and order their materials to offer an interpretation or perspective.” Art conveys ideas.

Saving Leonardo sets out to train us as consumers to thoughtfully “read” the art we take in, to analyze and interpret it. Not to make us art critics, but to make us wise and effective “change agents,” equipped “to engage in discussion with real people seeking livable answers in a world that is falling apart.”

Secular Devolution

Part One of the book examines the emerging global secularism and the toll it is exacting in human lives and dignity. Secularism is generally defined as the view that religious considerations and any beliefs based on the supernatural should be excluded from civil and public affairs. Today, secular ideologies control what our schools teach, how states govern, how economies are managed, and how (and what) news is reported. Secularism is sold on the premise that it provides a more enlightened ordering principle for social arrangements, but in reality, it works to degrade, rather than advance, a society. It leads to:

Dehumanization. The idea that human rights are universal and inherent to individuals is a uniquely Judeo-Christian concept. It rests on the understanding that human beings were created by God and bear his image. Without this foundation, grounded in a transcendent reality, human rights and human dignity are demoted to just another competing interest.

To illustrate how far out on this precipice, we already stand, Pearcey paraphrases pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty: “Because of Darwin, we no longer accept creation. And therefore, we no longer need to maintain that everyone who is biologically human has equal value. We are free to revert to the pre-Christian attitude that only certain groups qualify for human rights.” What this translates into is a social order in which the strong can oppress, enslave, or exterminate the weak at will. This is how we got such twentieth-century horrors as the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet gulag.

Tyranny. Secularism preaches tolerance but practices tyranny. The biblical worldview unabashedly states that there is such a thing as an objective standard of right and wrong. The secular tenet of moral relativism is the direct converse of that principle. Simple logic says that both principles cannot be true, but secularizers try to have it both ways anyway. “If moral knowledge is impossible,” Pearcey points out, “then we are left with only political and legal measures to coerce people into compliance.” This explains why homosexual activists call their opponents bigots and homophobes (usually in highly moralistic tones), rather than sitting down with them for a good-faith discussion over the risks of ditching policies like “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

In fact, secularism makes its advances, not through good-faith reasoning and persuasion, but by brute hubris. Its relativistic approach to religion derives from a certain set of beliefs that are just as exclusive as the claims of any religion; the secularizers just aren’t “honest” about it. This setup enables them to dismiss opposing views, not by marshaling sound arguments against them, but by baldly excluding them or by categorizing them as private values, which are then declared irrelevant.

Double-mindedness. Secularism not only imposes a certain ideology; it also effectively changes the definition of truth by dictating what kinds of information even qualify as truth. The fact/value split, Pearcey says, is “the key to unlocking the history of the Western mind.” It has fostered a kind of double-mindedness, both for individuals and among societies. It’s reflected in the 2008 comments of a Newsweek editor: “Reason defines one kind of reality (what we know); faith defines another (what we don’t know)”; and in the words of Albert Einstein: “Science yields facts but not ‘value judgments’; religion expresses values but cannot ‘speak facts.'”

It’s alive and well in the churches, too. Tim Sweetman, a teen blogger, noted that many of his peers seem like “double agents.” They “are Christians in church…but have a completely secular mind view. It’s as if they have a split personality.”

Logos: Truth in Toto

In the face of this pervasive yet fragmented view of truth, Pearcey puts forward a game-changing alternative view: The nature of truth is holistic, comprehensive, and coherent. “Because all things were created by a single divine mind, all truth forms a single, coherent, mutually consistent system. Truth is unified and universal.”

This is not new. It was the predominant view in Western culture for over two millennia. The ancient Greeks had a term for the underlying principle that unifies the world into an orderly cosmos, as opposed to randomness and chaos. They called it the Logos. And well into the 1900s, American universities were committed to the unity of truth. Even the word university suggests the pursuit of the whole, integrating truth. But the crack-up has so fractured modern thought that the idea of the “unity of truth” presents a radically reoriented perspective.

This “whole truth” perspective is what Pearcey is urging us to bring to the arts.

Secularism: Truth Fragmented

Part Two of Saving Leonardo begins with a crash course on how to discern worldview themes in a work of art. Using over one hundred reproductions and other images to illustrate, Pearcey traces the intellectual currents that guided modern thought and shows how the two-story recasting of truth has manifested itself in the arts, from visual arts to music to literature to architecture.

In the wake of the scientific revolution, philosophy—and therefore art—split into two opposing streams of thought. Occupying one camp was philosophical naturalism, or the materialist stream, which accepted scientism’s exclusive claim to the realm of knowledge. In the other camp coalesced Romanticism, which rebelled against science and sought to protect everything else—theology, literature, ethics, philosophy, and the arts and humanities.

The materialistic view is reflected in such styles as Picasso’s intersecting lines, arcs, and geometric shapes and Jack London’s “tooth and claw” narratives of Darwinian survival of the fittest. Meanwhile, the Romantics produced such styles as Expressionism, the goal of which was the pure expression of the artist’s “inner self,” indifferent to any outer reality. Consider Van Gogh’s dreamlike paintings, or composer John Cage’s piano piece titled 4’33”, which is “performed” by playing absolutely nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Both streams deny the existence of any transcendent reality or truth beyond the artist or the work itself. If art is whatever you deem it to be, “nothing” qualifies.

But the definition of art as personal expression was a historical novelty. The traditional purpose of art, Pearcey stresses, was to convey “some deeper vision of the human condition.” Modern art has become disconnected from this purpose, and we must fill in the missing elements that can restore the vision of transcendent reality.

Can These Bones Live?

Doing that can take many forms. Here’s an example taken from Fox TV’s crime drama, Bones. Dr. Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist, is the quintessential scientific rationalist. She’s called “Bones” because she solves murders by examining human remains. Her colleague, FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth, possesses all the social finesse she lacks, believes in God, and mistrusts science. As a father, he values relationships, and as a former army sniper, he’s haunted by guilt—two emotions utterly foreign to a materialist.

The relationship between Bones and Booth dances along a perpetual impasse because the two characters operate from completely different—in fact, mutually exclusive—philosophical and intellectual universes. They are an excellent example of the dichotomized understanding of human existence. Their ongoing worldview clashes make for good TV drama, but real humans do not fall into one category or the other. More important, we don’t have to choose one or the other. We are both. “The biblical worldview fulfills both the requirements of human reason and the yearnings of the human spirit,” Pearcey writes, supplying the truth that’s missing from the Bones-style depiction of humanity.

In the modern era, ideological idols have led to dictatorships and death camps. Beliefs shape history, Pearcey says, and worldview questions are a matter of life and death. Saving Leonardo calls us to be prepared with worldview answers that preserve life and human dignity for all and that restore art as a means of conveying truth. Integrated truth that can even make dry bones live.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Is Morality Absolute or Relative? by Dr. Frank Turek DVD, Mp3 and Mp4

Right From Wrong by Josh McDowell Mp3

Counter Culture Christian: Is There Truth in Religion? (DVD) by Frank Turek

Deconstructing Liberal Tolerance: Relativism as Orthodoxy (Mp3) by Francis Beckwith

Defending Absolutes in a Relativistic World (Mp3) by Frank Turek

Is Morality Absolute or Relative? (Mp3), (Mp4), and (DVD) by Frank Turek

 

Terrell Clemmons is a freelance writer and blogger on apologetics and matters of faith.

This article was originally published at salvomag.com: http://bit.ly/2CHT2t7

/by
Clearing Up Cosmos: Fact and Fiction in Neil deGrasse Tyson's Landmark Series

Clearing Up Cosmos: Fact and Fiction in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Landmark Series

, , ,

By Terrell Clemmons

Douglas Ell became an atheist as a youth because of misinformation handed down to him in the name of science. It took him thirty years “to climb out of the atheist hole.” Sadly, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, the 2014 series brought to you by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane, and a host of like-minded celebrity atheists, served up thirteen dazzling episodes containing similar misinformation. The series mixed, quoting Jay W. Richards, “one-part illuminating discussion of scientific discoveries, one part fanciful, highly speculative narrative, and one-part rigid ideology disguised as the assured results of scientific research.”

If you like science—science done well, that is—you’ll find invaluable help making sense out of Cosmos with The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos: Fact and Fiction in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Landmark Science Series, an easily readable volume co-authored by Ell, Richards, David Klinghoffer, and Casey Luskin. The Unofficial Guide to Cosmos sorts out, episode by episode, the legitimate science from the liberal doses of materialist philosophy, revised history, and brazen ideology the makers of the series have carelessly (or intentionally?) stirred into the mix. Here’s a sampling:

Materialist Philosophy. Without acknowledging it, Cosmos presupposes a priori the materialist worldview. This should come no surprise. But the makers deceive themselves if they think they’ve dispensed with the religious. Scientific thought, according to Tyson, is the “light” that has “set us free.” And discovering our “long lost cousins” (organisms with similar DNA sequences) can be a “spiritual experience.”

Science History. With respect to history, there are errors of commission, a deceptive retelling of the Giordano Bruno affair, for example, clearly designed to paint Christianity as a mortal enemy of science. And there are errors of omission, such as the utter desacralization of many revered fathers of science (Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, and more), who were men of open Christian piety.

Ideology. In later episodes, Tyson lectures viewers about a dire need to save the planet, and he casts climate dissenters, who are “in the grip of denial,” as either ignorant or evil—this against a backdrop of cheering Nazis, to round out the propaganda package.

An especially insidious error of omission involves the makers’ failure to even hint that a vigorous debate rages today among scientists. “Cosmos has done a wonderful job of recalling how old mistaken ideas were overturned—ideas about geocentrism, stellar composition, continental drift…and more,” writes Luskin. “However, these are all tales from the annals of scientific history. Cosmos presents current scientific thinking as if it were all correct, with everything figured out…Tyson never discusses evidence that challenges the prevailing evolutionary view.” This is inexcusable.

Even scientists sympathetic to the makers’ agenda have pointed out serious flaws. “Cosmos is a fantastic artifact of scientific myth making,” wrote science historian Joseph Martin of Michigan State University. Yet, he defends the series, including the myth making. Why? Luskin parses Martin’s defense: because Martin thinks it’s permissible to lie if the lie helps “promote greater public trust in science.” Martin calls this kind of useful lie a “taradiddle.”

Luskin furthermore puts his finger on the million-dollar question the thinking public should be asking: If the science academy is condoning telling us ‘taradiddles’ to curry our trust in science, why should we blindly trust them when they claim that only their “science” can explain the origin of life and the cosmos?

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Why Science Needs God by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD and Mp4)

Science Doesn’t Say Anything, Scientists Do by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3 and Mp4)

Oh, Why Didn’t I Say That? Does Science Disprove God? by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD and Mp4)

Stealing From God by Dr. Frank Turek (Book)

 

Terrell Clemmons is a freelance writer and blogger on apologetics and matters of faith.

This article was originally published at salvomag.com: http://bit.ly/2ISmala

/by
Peripheral Visions: Even Science Needs More Than Science to Work Properly

Peripheral Visions: Even Science Needs More Than Science to Work Properly

,

By Terrell Clemmons

Jon Headley has a confession to make. “I’m a 30-year-old man, but until a few years ago, I had no real understanding of the theory of evolution.”

“Ah,” the ex-Christian continues after relieving himself of this confessional burden, “it feels good to get that off my chest.” And with that, the musician and producer expounds upon his religious deconversion in a lengthy Medium.com essay titled “How I Learned to Trust Science: On the difference between dogma and evidence.” “I was taught that capital-S Science was our enemy,” Headley writes, and that there were “three big lies that Science had introduced to the world [that were] especially dangerous.” These are the Big Bang, an old earth, and evolution. As a kid, he was ready to argue with any science teacher because “I was sure of what I believed.”

But in truth, he now confesses, “I didn’t know s***.”

The essay starts out with a potentially helpful dismantling of what might be called “packaged” religion—that is, religious teachings pre-assembled somewhere up the hierarchy and disseminated with the expectation that they will be accepted on church authority. As he explains his upbringing, Headley paints a picture of insulated social groupthink, with the whole package propped up by confirmation bias.

He brings this up to compare and contrast “two foundational ways of looking at the world.” He was raised to look at the world by way of religion, he says, which is based on authority, dogma, and assumptions. The problem with this way, he continues, “was that I had been handed a set of beliefs, and I had never questioned them fully for myself.” By contrast, he now looks at the world by way of the scientific method, the key idea of which goes like this: “Any hypothesis about the world must be tested and proved by repeated experiment.”

He’s right about the problem he identifies with his first way, but sadly, after starting out so well, his second way leaves him in a place that is arguably worse. This is because, while the key principle of proving hypotheses by experimentation is reasonable and works well in the practice of science, it’s highly problematic when taken as the primary way of knowing truth about the world—which is what he has done.

Headley’s second way is what’s called scientism, and he is far from the only one succumbing to it. In Scientism and Secularism: Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology (Crossway, 2018), J. P. Moreland defines scientism as “the view that the hard sciences—like chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy—provide the only genuine knowledge of reality.” Whether expressed in the strong form, which says that science and its methods provide the only valid route to knowledge, or in some weaker form that allows other ways of knowing to have some lesser validity (as long as they bow to science), scientism has become a part of the pseudo-intellectual air we breathe. I say “pseudo” because scientism isn’t intellectual, but is rather, at its very core, intellectually unsound.

From the Ivory Towers to the Streets

We’ll return to that point momentarily, but first, let’s look at a few scenarios that demonstrate how deeply this assumption of scientism has become embedded in the substrate of public life:

  • In academia: Sir A. J. Ayer, knighted professor of philosophy at Oxford University, taught that a proposition can be meaningful only if it’s true by definition (for example, “A = A”) or if it’s empirically verifiable, meaning testable by the scientific method. This is the reigning paradigm in Western education.
  • In government: Robert B. Reich, who served under Presidents Ford, Carter, Clinton, and Obama, said in 2004 that “the greatest conflict of the 21st century [will be] between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma.” Reich’s prognostication reflects the false narrative that knowledge through science and knowledge through revealed religion are inherently in conflict.
  • On the streets: The inaugural annual March for Science took place on Earth Day 2017, with an encyclopedic display of smarmy slogans such as, “Science is our Future,” “Science is Real,” “Defiance for Science” (complete with the raised-fist symbol for Communism), and “Science is the most precious thing we have.”

Celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson especially tipped his scientistic hand when he was asked about the politics of climate change in the era of Trump. He defended the authority of science to the point of expressing his exasperation with those who resist bowing to it: “What will it take for people to recognize that a community of scientists are learning objective truths about the natural world?” he asked CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria.

An emergent scientific truth, for it to become an objective truth, a truth that is true whether or not you believe in it, it requires more than one scientific paper. It requires a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences.

Do you hear the intellectual imperialism in that little sermonette? The high priesthood of science (with himself as a figurehead, of course) learns and then dictates to the rest of us what is objectively true. (This from a man who also wrote, “After the laws of physics, everything else is opinion,” but I digress.)

Hollywood got the memo. In the wake of the 2017 hurricane season, actress Jennifer Lawrence said it’s “scary to know—it’s been proven through science that human activity—that climate change is due to human activity and we continue to ignore it and the only voice that we really have is through voting.” Has Ms. Lawrence tested and proved the climate catastrophe hypothesis by experiment? No, as Derek Hunter clarifies in Outrage, Inc. How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood (Broadside Books, 2018); “an exhaustive search of the Internet could find no record of Lawrence studying meteorology or weather or even studying beyond high school.” No, she believes in climate change based on the authority of science.

Similarly, what Headley has done, apparently blithely unaware, is merely exchange one way of knowing based on a claim to authority for the same way of knowing, only based on a different authority. Instead of “believing Religion,” he now “believes Science.” (On the upside, though, with this way you can announce your enlightened state of consciousness with a $35.00 t-shirt or $19.00 coffee mug from MarchForScienceShop.com, but again, I digress.)

Disambiguating Science from Scientism

In defense of the scientific-method way, Headley writes, “Science begins with no assumptions.” But this is utterly false because the very practice of science is itself based on several assumptions, and those assumptions are not scientific but philosophical.

Moreland identifies six presuppositions that underpin the empirical sciences. Here are the first four:

  1. A natural world exists independent of any mind, language, or theory. In other words, reality consists of real entities and objects outside of observers. (We’re not in the Matrix.)
  2. There is a rational order to the structure of that world.
  3. Objective truth about that world exists.
  4. Human sensory and cognitive faculties are capable of discovering and grasping truth about that world.

The remaining two have to do with ethical, mathematical, and logical truths, and Moreland shows how all six are necessarily a priori assumptions underlying the scientific enterprise that science itself cannot justify because they are philosophical, not scientific, in nature. “Just as the structure of a building cannot be more reliable than the foundation on which it rests,” he writes, “so the conclusions of science… cannot be more certain than the presuppositions of science.” Thus, in the end, scientism ends up being a foe, rather than a friend, of science.

This should suffice to demonstrate that scientism is unreliable as a comprehensive epistemology (“epistemology” means “way of knowing”), but it gets worse for Headley and his epistemological kin. Moreland identifies two more criticisms of scientism, the most devastating one being that scientism is, itself, self-refuting. Here’s how: Scientism asserts that the only propositions that are even capable of being true are scientific propositions. But as we have already seen, scientism is not itself a scientific proposition but is rather a philosophical proposition about science. Thus, on its own terms, scientism is incapable of being true.

But we’re still not done. There is one more coup de grace to be dealt. Scientism denies the existence of true, reasonable beliefs outside of science. And thus, all those moral posturings by Tyson and the marchers for science (and for “climate justice” and for whatever other “justice” cause you might see on a political placard) are rendered null and void according to scientism.

This is no laughing matter. Not only does scientism throw the very foundation of such essential values as human rights under the hegemonic steamroller of “Progress… because Science,” but it also blinds people to potentially liberating and more comprehensive paradigms for conceptualizing reality.

Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow conceded before his death in 2008 that the evidence he saw from Big Bang cosmology implies a creator, and that he found it hard to believe human life is “all a matter of atoms and molecules.” But because of what “my science tells me,” he could not incorporate the concept of a creator into his understanding of reality. It was a situation he found unsatisfactory. “I feel I’m missing something. But I will not find out what I am missing within my lifetime.”

Indeed, given his epistemological constraints, he could not. With apologies to 1970s music fans, Jastrow was so close, and yet so far. Since he couldn’t know God through the methods of science, he found himself, by his own admission, “in a completely hopeless bind.”

Restoring the Mind by Restoring Philosophy First

Whatever Headley was told in his youth about science, being an enemy is false. None of the empirical disciplines we call science are anyone’s enemy. Neither are the Big Bang, an old earth, or evolution. It is the untested, unproven presumption of scientism that is the free mind’s enemy and the dogma that should be dropped.

Still, Headley’s essay raises important questions for parents and churches about how to apprehend and propagate truth in an information-glutted society. Authoritative claims to knowledge won’t cut it (and never should have, anyway) in the absence of other reasons to believe.

“Religion often attracts people by selling certainty,” Headley says, but we don’t know anything for certain. Instead, he recommends “a large dose of humility.” Because “we are all human beings, with limited and treacherous brains, trying to figure out an infinite and complex universe that is way bigger than we are.”

And that, indeed, is excellent advice. All of us would do well to take this wise counsel and direct it toward the self-appointed, certainty-selling high priests and priestesses of scientism.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Why Science Needs God by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD and Mp4)

Science Doesn’t Say Anything, Scientists Do by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3 and Mp4)

Oh, Why Didn’t I Say That? Does Science Disprove God? by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD and Mp4)

Stealing From God by Dr. Frank Turek (Book)

 

Terrell Clemmons is a freelance writer and blogger on apologetics and matters of faith.

This article was originally published at salvomag.com: http://bit.ly/2kr7HUi

/by
Safeguarding Yours from the Modern Cult of Experts

Safeguarding Yours from the Modern Cult of Experts

,

By Terrell Clemmons

[Although this essay was written at another time, Cross Examined considers its content to be current and relevant to share]

Few years ago, Current Biology, a research journal published by Cell Press, carried an article titled, “The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World.” The report, authored by seven psychologists from four continents, related the findings of experiments with approximately 1,200 children ages 5-12 from six nations. The study was funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Science of Philanthropy Initiative.

The article highlighted three findings: (1) that children from religious households are less altruistic than children from secular households, (2) that they are more harsh and punitive than children from secular households, and (3) that their parents don’t see them as less altruistic and more punitive but rather as kinder than other children in terms of empathy and sensitivity to injustice. “Together these results reveal the similarity across countries in how religion negatively influences children’s altruism, challenging the view that religiosity facilitates prosocial behavior,” the summary concluded. In other words, if you’ll pardon the snark, kids exposed to religion are anti-social, and their parents are clueless. Religion is a social pathogen.

As you can imagine, this was a windfall for the secular press. “Religious upbringing linked to less altruism,” announced Science Daily. “Children from nonreligious homes are more generous, altruistic than observant ones,” trumpeted Newsday. And the UK Guardian‘s header bordered on the childish: “Religious children are meaner than their secular counterparts.” Science Codex at least showed enough restraint to headline its report in the form of a question, “Does religion make kids less generous?”

Well, does it? Science said it. Does that settle it?

Of course, it doesn’t. As apologist Frank Turek says, science doesn’t say anything. Scientists do. And because scientists, science writers, and mainstream journalists are all fallible human beings, a level-headed response calls for some critical thinking every time a new finding is being heralded in the name of science.

Experts, Shmexperts

Critical thinking begins with examining exactly what is being said and by what authority. Let’s start with the question of authority. In Shmexperts: How Ideology and Power Politics Are Disguised as Science, Marc Fitch addresses what he calls “the modern myth of experts.” He begins by defining “experts” for his specific purpose. (Personally, I like “shmexperts” better, but I will go with his terminology for now.) First, an expert is not the working professional informed by relevant experience and skill—the man or woman “whose motivation in their work is to produce a result: an actual, testable piece of hardware or a theory that can be proven empirically.” A professional whose product is subject to external standards in this way is not what Fitch is talking about. Second, he’s not necessarily referring to intellectuals—those who make their living in the realm of ideas, although the lines between intellectuals and experts are apt to get blurred.

Experts, for Fitch’s treatment, are primarily defined by their transgression of the boundaries inherent to their fields of expertise. For example, a cell biologist may have a perfectly good, morally sound opinion on the social advisability of religion-based models of childrearing. Or he may be a cold-blooded moral monster. The point is, knowledge in the realm of science does not make him a credible authority in the realm of values. This should not need pointing out, but apparently, it does. Whenever anyone makes statements about non-material realms of thought, or pushes a moral argument, under the banner of science, then the science is not being used in its proper context. It is being coopted to advance an agenda.

When expert “authorities” advance an agenda this way, they are “avoiding an ethical, moral, or political argument,” Fitch points out, and are imbuing “the realm of human ideals with the faulty notion that somehow chemical, biological, or physical sciences can offer an answer to the human condition.” When scientists do this, they are not acting as scientists. They are acting as philosopher kings. The same goes for the gullible (or complicit) media granting them platforms from which to reign.

Critical Examination 101

Now let’s take a look at the Current Biology report on children, religion, and altruism. The first question that ought to come to mind is, What exactly does religion have to do with biology? What has philanthropy to do with biology? Or altruism? Or generosity? Of course, the answer is nothing. Although the study itself was done by psychologists, its publication in a biomedical journal raises a glaring red flag. Realms of thought have been mixed, boundaries blurred.

Now, let’s look at how the experts reached their findings. To assess altruism, they conducted an experiment called the Dictator Game. Children were allowed to choose ten stickers, which they were told: “are yours to keep.” They were also told that not all the children in their group would get stickers because the experimenters didn’t have time for everyone. The children were then given an opportunity to share the stickers they were given, right there on the spot. The experimenters counted the number of stickers each child shared, and that number became the measure of that child’s altruism. So, if a child opted to take his stickers home to share with his little sister or his buddy next door, he did not count as altruistic.

Here’s how they measured moral sensitivity. The children were shown short videos depicting mean actions—one child shoving another, for example. Then their reactions were somehow categorized according to how they judged the mean act they’d been shown. So if the same child exhibited judgment when he saw a boy shove a girl to the ground—if he said, Hey, that’s not fair; that boy should be punished! For example—then he counted as harsh and punitive.

Technically, that may be accurate, but ponder the perverse moral reasoning by which moral sensitivity is being assessed here. Those children exhibiting an indifference to injustice are being appraised as the “nice” ones, the pro-social ones. Meanwhile, those who censured meanness counted as, well, mean.

Should nothing be punished? We might ask. Toward whom should the child have shown sensitivity? Toward the boy doing the shoving? Or toward the girl who was shoved? Wouldn’t a fair-minded observer say the child objecting to meanness is actually more sensitive to injustice than the one who’s indifferent?

To be sure, these are judgment calls. And that is precisely the point. Judgment calls were factory-installed into this study. Either the experts knew it and have not been upfront about it, or they’re blithely clueless regarding their own massive bias.

How they defined “religiousness” is equally overripe for critical deconstruction, but you get the point.

Bad Science

If psychologists want to try to map people’s altruism or generosity or philanthropy in relation to their religiosity—however, they choose to define and quantify such non-exact entities—that’s fine. They can define their terms and presuppositions and have at it. But “The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World” is, at best, bad psychology. And whatever it is, it certainly isn’t biology. It might better be called secular snobbery masquerading as objective science.

Cell Pressbills itself as “a leading publisher of cutting-edge biomedical research and reviews.” How such bunk qualified as biomedical research is a question every self-respecting biologist should be asking every sitting member of Current Biology‘s editorial board. All 103 of them. Anyone with a working baloney-detector can see the egregious transgression of boundaries.

In his book, Fitch touches on several agenda-driven narratives that have been or are (still) being foisted on the public by “experts”: population control; the supposed scientific basis for a host of “victimhood” narratives; the politics of health care; pot legalization; and—the granddaddy of global political agendas—environmentalism. And there are others that he doesn’t take up, but we should: psychiatry, for example, and the deluge of sex and gender “science” flooding the pipeline. To avoid subversion by shmexperts, everything must be put through a critical filter—everything.

Bad Religion

There’s a lot at stake. The ramifications of the modern cult of experts include:

A heightened generalized anxiety. How does one know whom among the “authorities” or what out of the swarming buzz of opinions to believe? The cacophony is enough to tempt anyone to tune it all out because it’s just too hard or too upsetting or too confusing. But tuning out leads to—

A softening of the mind. Widespread outsourcing of thought—and worse, of moral reasoning—renders the public increasingly subject to demagoguery, fear-mongering, and mob mentality. Groupthink sets in like dry rot and totalitarian thought control follows. This creates an environment hostile to sustaining basic political liberties. We already see a soft tyranny suffocating freedom of thought and conscience at the university.

A devaluing of the individual. When awe-inspiring reverence is conferred on those with degrees and titles over the non-academic-but-supremely-practical working Joe, a gap—real or perceived—widens between the intellectual haves and have-nots. This serves no one’s best interest. It breeds narcissism among the elite and a menacing mix of servile dependency and brooding discontent among the rest.

An outsourcing of salvation. The media cite and defer to experts who, for various reasons, sow fears and recommend government interventions. Politicians for their part are happy to promote policies they see as contributing to their immortal legacy. And they will, of course, need the experts to administer the policies, so the ruling class expands. “We rely on a small troupe of Chicken Littles,” Fitch writes, “each telling the world that the sky is falling, the earth is warming, markets are collapsing, diseases are spreading, and people are starving. They present the world of death as a great beast slouching toward your homes [and] they call upon the government to intercede and take further control to alleviate the ‘crisis.'”

It is just assumed that we unthinking, unwashed masses need the anointed elites to save our poor, helpless souls from the big bad world out there. Fitch doesn’t frame it in religious terms, but at some point, the would-be ruling class does assume the role of in loco savior and lord. Except that it can never save. It can only lord.

Sound Minds, Sound Society

Fitch offers some good suggestions for filtering shmexpert fare. Learn to separate empirical data from ethics and morality, and the hard sciences from the inexact, soft humanities. In many cases, bad science doesn’t so much need to be countered as it needs to be exposed to the light of scrutiny and deconstructed, as we have done with the Current Biology mashup on religiousness and altruism.

Most of all, learn to think in broader worldview terms. It is true that the world is not a safe place, and there is a role for government and legitimate experts to play in meeting the challenges people face. And while it is also true that we all stand in need of a savior, no government nor any shmexpert is up to that task.

 

Terrell Clemmons is a freelance writer and blogger on apologetics and matters of faith.

This article was originally published at salvomag.com: http://bit.ly/33l73Jm

/by
Blinded by Science

Blinded by Science?

, ,

By Terrell Clemmons

Don’t Be; That’s Just the New Atheists Masking Their Faith Choice

In the November 2006 cover story of Wired magazine, Gary Wolf thoughtfully gave ear to some of atheism’s most aggressive voices and labeled the movement that they lead “New Atheism.” Envisioning a brave new world in which science and reason overcome religious myth and superstition, New Atheists labor to purvey a comprehensive worldview that explains who we are and how we got here (Darwinian evolution), diagnoses our most urgent ill (ancient superstitions about God), and, most importantly, prescribes a cure for that ill (eradication of religion).

In the same month that Wired reported on New Atheism, Time magazine artfully depicted the science and religion quandary with a combination double helixÆrosary on its cover. The title, “God vs. Science,” might have led a casual reader to expect a story about a theologian opposing science, but the article actually covered a debate between two scientists. Geneticist Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, and biologist Richard Dawkins of Oxford University weighed in on Time’s questions about science, belief in God, and whether the two can peaceably coexist in an intellectually sound world-view. Collins said they can; Dawkins said absolutely not.

Recent battles over textbooks in America lend credence to the notion of science and religion as perennial foes, and ABC News, reporting on a survey of atheism among scientists, casually commented that “the clash between science and religion is as old as science itself,” as if that’s what everybody with any gray matter already knows. But historians of science reveal a different story, one that is more in line with the view of Dr. Collins.

In his course Science and Religion, Lawrence Principe, professor of the History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University, meticulously untangles the historical accounts of events commonly bandied about as proof that religion suppresses science, such as the trials of Galileo and John Scopes. Principe teaches that, contrary to irreligionist lore, the two disciplines were generally viewed as complementary until a little more than a century ago.

Principe identifies two late-19th-century publications as the origin of the idea of warfare between science and religion: A History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science, written by skeptic scientist John William Draper in 1874, and A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, published in 1896 by Andrew Dickson White, first president of Cornell University. It is noteworthy that both writers seemed to want the church to back off; Draper wrote at the request of a popular science publisher, and White in response to criticism that he had received for establishing Cornell as the first American university with no religious affiliation.

Principe reveals that the premise of both books—that science and religion have occupied separate camps throughout history, and that religion has always been the oppressor of science—is unfounded, calling Draper’s book “cranky,” “ahistorical,” and “one long, vitriolic, anti-Catholic diatribe,” while White’s is “scarcely better.” Still, he credits the two sub-scholarly works with crystallizing in the popular mind the image of ongoing, intractable warfare between science and religion. Today’s New Atheists echo and amplify their war cries.

Are We Talking Science or Faith?

Skeptics ardently defend their right to reject religious dogma and make up their own minds about ultimate reality. Certainly, atheists, scientific or not, are free to adopt whatever belief system they choose, but can they legitimately claim science as the basis for atheism? Put more simply, has science disproved God, as the irreligionists maintain?

A closer look at Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins sheds light on that question. The most significant difference between the two scientists is not that one believes in biblical creation and the other in Darwinian evolution. Both affirm Darwinism. The salient distinction is that Collins allows for the possibility of God, whereas Dawkins does not.

But it wasn’t always so. The fourth son of two freethinkers, Francis Collins, was homeschooled until age ten. His parents instilled in him a love for learning, but no faith, and the agnosticism of his youth gradually shifted into atheism as his education progressed. He was comfortable with it, discounting spiritual beliefs as outmoded superstition until he began to interact with seriously ill patients as a medical student. When one of them, a Christian, asked him what he believed, he faced a rationalist’s crisis. “It was a fair question,” he wrote in The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. “I felt my face flush as I stammered out the words ïI’m not really sure.’” At that point, Collins realized that he had never seriously considered the evidence for and against belief.

Determined to practice authentic, what-are-the-facts science, Collins set out to investigate the rational basis for faith. Reluctantly, he found himself feeling “forced to admit the plausibility of the God hypothesis. Agnosticism, which had seemed like a safe second-place haven, now loomed like the great cop-out it often is. Faith in God now seemed more rational than disbelief.”

In contrast to Collins’s rational inquiry and personal struggle over the question of God, Richard Dawkins, the de facto spokesman for scientific atheism (think Madalyn Murray O’Hair with a Ph.D.), lays out his case for unbelief without struggle or reservation. In chapter four of The God Delusion, titled “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God,” Dawkins introduces his “Argument from Improbability,” and though the chapter waxes long, its reasoning distills to something like this:

  1. The universe we observe is highly complex.
    2. Any creator of this complex universe would have to be even more complex than it.
    3. It is too improbable that such a God exists; therefore, there almost certainly is no God.

The first two statements qualify as acceptable premises, but the conclusion that Dawkins reaches simply does not follow from them. This isn’t legitimate reasoning. It’s rationalization—that is, finding some plausible-sounding explanation for arriving at a conclusion that he has already chosen.

Dr. Dawkins is certainly free to choose to disbelieve, but his conclusion was not derived through scientific or rational means. Rather, it hints at an underlying personal, philosophical faith choice to disbelieve. Ernst Mayr, one of the twentieth century’s leading evolutionary biologists, made a similar observation when he analyzed reasons for disbelief among his Harvard colleagues. “We were all atheists. I found that there were two sources,” he said. One group “just couldn’t believe all that supernatural stuff.” The other “couldn’t believe that there could be a God with all this evil in the world. Most atheists combine the two,” he summarized candidly. “The combination makes it impossible to believe in God.”

Former atheist and biophysicist Alister McGrath concurs, noting that most of the unbelieving scientists he is acquainted with are atheists on grounds other than their science. “They bring those assumptions to their science rather than basing them on their science.” Dawkins’s rationalization, as well as the observations of McGrath and Mayr, reveal the choice to disbelieve for what it is—a personal, philosophical choice made apart from reason or scientific inquiry. I call it a “faith choice” because it involves choosing a foundational presupposition concerning a realm about which we have incomplete (but not insufficient) knowledge.

A Choice of Faith

Francis Collins’s conclusion, that the God hypothesis is not only plausible but compellingly supported by evidence, flatly controverts New Atheism’s premise that faith constitutes an irrational belief without evidence. It also reveals that the real conflict isn’t one of science versus God. It’s a conflict between those who allow and those who disallow the possible reality of God.

Polemicists will continue to clamor for converts to their side on the question of God because between the poles live thoughtful, educated people—not necessarily working scientists, but people who value science. Some believe in a supreme being called God, and others haven’t made up their minds. It is these theological moderates that New Atheism seeks to recruit with pithy epigrams such as “God vs. Science” and “My beliefs are based on science, but yours are based on faith.” What believers need is a calm, judicious counter-strategy when New Atheism advances under the guise of science, one that can transform verbal sparring into illuminating dialogue. Let me give you an example of what I mean.

My friend Dana has known Sam for decades. Over the years, Sam has peppered her with questions about her faith. Despite feeling intimidated—Sam is a highly respected leader in their community—she has answered as best she could and maintained their friendship. One evening over dinner in her home, Sam turned his questions on her teenagers, essentially asking them, “Do you really believe all that stuff and why?” Dana allowed them to speak for themselves for a while before intervening.

“Sam,” she started agreeably, “you and I have discussed this many times. I’ve told you what I believe and why, and you’ve told me all of your reasons for not believing.” Then she posed a question that she had never put to him before. “What if there really is a God, but you just don’t know about him? Are you willing to consider that possibility? Are you willing to ask him if he’s out there? Something like ïGod, I’m not even sure if you’re there, but if you are, would you show yourself to me?‘”

Dana let her question hang in the air. The teenagers likewise waited for Sam to break the silence. “No,” he finally said. “I’m not willing to do that.” And he hasn’t brought the subject up since.

Dana gently—but powerfully—pierced the facade of scientific skepticism with one question: Are you willing? It is not a question of scientific reasoning, but a question of choosing, of making a personal faith choice that, once made, establishes the starting point for one’s reasoning. Atheism isn’t founded on science or reason any more than theism is based on faith devoid of reason. The atheist, too, has made a faith choice. He has just chosen differently.

The Eternal Conflict

The “eternal conflict,” as it’s called, is not really between religion and science; after all, the two got along quite amicably before the twentieth century. No, as the following quotations indicate, the real quarrel has always been between those who believe that science and religion are at odds and those who do not.

“A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist. Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”

—Albert Einstein

“It is… Idle to pretend, as many do, that there is no contradiction between religion and science. Science contradicts religion as surely as Judaism contradicts Islam—they are absolutely and irresolvably conflicting views. Unless that is, science is obliged to change its fundamental nature.”

—Brian Appleyard

“Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but both look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out the essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect.”

—Freeman Dyson

“Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

—Pope John Paul II

“When religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic.”

—Thomas Szasz

“Science is an effort to understand creation. Biblical religion involves our relation to the Creator. Since we can learn about the Creator from his creation, religion can learn from science.”

—PaulæH. Carr

“There is more religion in men’s science than there is science in their religion.”

—Henry David Thoreau

“Science makes major contributions to minor needs. Religion, however, small its successes, is at least at work on the things that matter most.”

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Science as Religion

One needn’t speculate about whether science is a religion for Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins. In a 1997 essay published in The Humanist, Dawkins tackles this question directly, arguing that his onetime tendency to deny that science is a religion was a tactical error that he has since repudiated. Instead, he writes, scientists should “accept the charge gratefully and demand equal time for science in religious education classes.” The reason? Well, according to Dawkins, whereas science is a faith “based upon verifiable evidence,” religion “not only lacks evidence,” but “its independence from evidence is its pride and joy.” Thus, science is the only religion worth imparting to future generations.

Rather than delineate the evidence that makes science outclass “any of the mutually contradictory faiths and disappointingly recent traditions of the world’s religions,” however, Dawkins chooses instead to describe what science might someday do for a society that religion does today. Chiefly, this amounts to inspiring in people an awe for “the wonder and beauty” of the universe in the same way that God currently inspires awe in religious believers. Indeed, as far as Dawkins is concerned, “the merest glance through a microscope at the brain of an ant or through a telescope at a long-ago galaxy of a billion worlds is enough to render poky and parochial the very psalms of praise.”

But here is where the evolutionary biologist gets himself into trouble. Yes, science has given us access to astonishing truths about the hidden nature of the universe, and yes, all that it has definitively revealed is based on incontrovertible evidence. It is also true, however, that most religions in the world do not posit faith claims in opposition to such breathtaking factual findings. Rather, religion lacks evidence at precisely those points where science does as well.

The faith that is the “pride and joy” of religious believers is in an invisible God who created the world and still interacts with it. The faith of Darwinian scientists is in the power of evolution to create the world and then continue to adapt it. There is no conclusive evidence for either of these faith claims, which is why some have accused science of being a religion in the first place, as well as why Dawkins must hawk the replacement value of science instead of citing the “verifiable evidence” that makes science superior to conventional religion.

All this is to say that Dawkins is correct to concede that science is a religion for him, but wrong to contend that this particular religion accomplishes something that others do not. When it comes to the significant questions of life—Where did we come from? How did we get here? Why are we here? —Science’s answers prove to be as faith-based as those of even the most fundamentalist religious sect. That science might successfully fulfill the function of religion is thus hardly reason enough to warrant a switch.

 

Terrell Clemmons is a freelance writer and blogger on apologetics and matters of faith.

This article was originally published at salvomag.com: http://bit.ly/2J9O9vV

/by
How a Cold-Case Atheist Detective Became a Case-Making Christian

How a Cold-Case Atheist Detective Became a Case-Making Christian

,

By Terrell Clemmons

I think it may be true,” Jim Wallace said to his wife, Susie. He was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling.

“What may be true?”

“Christianity.” Why did she need to ask? He’d been obsessed with the subject for several weeks now, talking her ears off on multiple occasions. It had all started at Saddleback Church during an otherwise normal Sunday morning service. A friend, a fellow police officer, had been inviting him for months, and he’d finally acquiesced. Susie liked the family to attend church, and although Jim had no use for religion, he loved his wife deeply and placed a very high priority on marriage and family. As for church, he didn’t get it, but he was fine going along for her sake.

Jim managed to ignore most of the sermon, but his ears did perk up when Pastor Rick Warren mentioned some wise principles Jesus taught that could be applied today. He’d described Jesus as “the smartest man who ever lived.” This guy Jesus might have some information I could use workwise, Jim thought. He’d always been open to learning from any ancient sage whose wisdom had stood the test of time. So the following week he dropped $6.00 on a Bible at B. Dalton bookstore and leafed straight to the New Testament Gospels. He wasn’t interested in anything but the red letters. What did Jesus say?

As Jim read, though, he was soon struck by something else. By this time in his career as a police officer and crime investigator, he had interviewed hundreds if not thousands of eyewitnesses and suspects and had read countless written testimonies. The Gospel accounts, he was surprised to note, bore a striking resemblance, not to the mythology or moralistic storytelling he’d always believed them to be, but to actual eyewitness accounts, something with which he was intimately familiar. His investigator’s curiosity was piqued.

Opening an Investigation

Since he’d shown a knack for interviewing early in his career, Jim had received special training in a variety of investigative techniques. One of them, a methodology called Forensic Statement Analysis (FSA), was especially designed to scrutinize eyewitness testimonies to detect deception and other manner of falsification. Wow, Jim thought, wouldn’t it be cool to try to apply this discipline I do at work to one of the Gospels?

He was in his element now. He started with the Gospel of Mark. For a full month, he meticulously picked it apart, hanging on every word, and in spite of deep skepticism going in, ultimately came to the conclusion that the Gospel writer Mark had penned the eyewitness account of the Apostle Peter, exactly what traditional Christianity has held all along. Pressing on, he subsequently reached the conclusion that the other three Gospels also gave every appearance of being exactly what they purported to be—authentic, eyewitness accounts written by men who genuinely believed what they were writing.

Personal Crossroads

This was a wholly unexpected development. At this juncture, Jim’s well-honed drive to uncover truth ran square up against his lifelong aversion to all things religious. The only son of a divorced, cultural Catholic mother and atheist father, Jim had been an avowed atheist all his life. And he was quite happy with it. Religion had always been just plain silly to him, and as a shrewd cop for whom skepticism was a skill that got you home at night, he had a very low threshold for silliness. Christianity might be a useful delusion for some, or an area of weakness for others, but nothing beyond that. Worse, despite his love and respect for Susie as a quiet believer, he’d badmouthed the few people he’d known in the department who were Christians. Now, as a follow-the-facts-wherever-they-lead investigator, he had to contend with the possibility that there might be something to this “garbage” after all.

By now, he was on much more than an intellectual exercise. The Scriptures he’d been examining contained certain claims that were supremely unsettling to a contented atheist. There were supernatural claims, claims about authority, claims about exactly who was God. And some of Jesus’ teachings, if you took them seriously, were devastatingly convicting. What do I do with the claims of Jesus related to his own divinity? And the claims of Jesus related to the nature of my heart?

As an atheist, he’d always felt like he was a good guy. He’d made his own rules for what was appropriate, and according to them, he was living a good life. He wasn’t hurting anybody. He was even devoting his life to stopping the bad guys who were. He didn’t believe in heaven, but if there was one, he was fairly confident he would make it in. But Jesus said differently. Who was right?

“I knew that I was standing on the edge of something profound,” he wrote in Cold Case Christianity.

I started reading the Gospels to learn what Jesus taught about living a good life and found that He taught much more about His identity as God and the nature of eternal life. I knew that it would be hard to accept one dimension of His teaching while rejecting the others. If I had good reason to believe that the Gospels were reliable eyewitness accounts, I was going to have to deal with the stuff I had always resisted as a skeptic. What about all the miracles that are wedged in there between the remarkable words of Jesus?… And why was it that I continued to resist the miraculous elements in the first place?

These were imposing questions, threatening to upheave everything he’d believed all his life.

Sometime during this Gospel investigation, a friend gave him a copy of Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. After reading it, Jim, ever obsessive once onto the trail of something, went out and bought everything C. S. Lewis had written. One quote from God in the Dock resonated powerfully when he read it and never left him afterwards. “Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, is of infinite importance,” Lewis wrote. “The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.” It made such perfect sense. The big-question issues of life, Jim thought, those are the ones I should be spending my time on. The most important thing he could do right now was to answer the question, Are these Gospels divine?

All his adult life, he’d instructed jurors to stay evidential in their examination of what happened. “Live and breathe what the evidence dictates to you,” was the inviolable rule. And just as jurors must make decisions based on the evidence, not personal predispositions, so, he knew, must he. And after a full investigation, he found that the evidence strongly suggested that the Gospels were, in fact, divine. And if they were, it followed that Jesus was right and he was wrong. He knew that to reject this truth any longer would be perilous. He accepted it as transcendent truth and began making life adjustments accordingly.

Case-Making Christianity

Jim became a Christian, not because he had any life problem he needed to fix—he was quite happy with his life—but because he became convinced that Christianity is true. “It’s not convenient for me. It’s not always comfortable, and it doesn’t always serve my purposes. There are times when my brokenness would like to take a shortcut, but I’m stuck with the fact that this is true,” he says. “And like any transcendent truth, you’re either going to measure yourself by it, or you’re going to reject it to your own peril.”

But don’t get the idea that he’s a reluctant convert. He immediately plunged with Wallace-esque drive into full-bore Christian case-making: he enrolled in seminary and seven years later completed a masters in theology. He also served part-time as a youth pastor, all the while still working full-time as a detective. Out of his passion to train believers, particularly young people, to become case-making Christians, he created PleaseConvinceMe.com [coldcasechristianity.com current site] as a place to post and discuss what he was discovering about the evidence supporting Christianity.

The website draws fire at times because Jim doesn’t limit himself to presenting Christian principles for a Christian readership. Quite to the contrary, he regularly puts forth objective truth claims about reality, making the case that Christianity is true, not just true for him and maybe true for you, but transcendently true for everyone at all times.

And he’s amassing formidable evidence to support the claim. Much of it is objective and rational—that’s what draws the fire. But there is also that which is subjective and personal, but no less real. Case in point: this formerly angry atheist who had been ever ready to tell any bothersome Christian why he didn’t accept all that “hooey” engages his detractors with remarkable patience, occasionally hearing echoes of his own younger voice. As a toughened cop and softened believer, he can now “take a punch and deliver a kiss. I no longer have a desire to respond with anger,” he explains. “Not because I’m more clever tactically, but because I think that God has done something in my own life. That God who I discovered was true evidentially, I’m also discovering in my own life is true evidentially. Because he’s changing me.” •

Christian Case-Making 101

Cold Case Christianity

Jim Wallace keeps a leather bag packed beside his bed. His callout bag holds the tools he’ll need if he’s called to a homicide scene during the night—a flashlight, digital recorder, notepad, etc. It also contains an investigative checklist representing years of distilled wisdom gleaned from partners, classes, training seminars, and his own years of experience. His new book, Cold Case Christianity, offers a metaphorical toolkit for both Christians and skeptics and invites them to retrace with him the steps he took when he applied his investigative tools to the Gospels years ago. The real-life detective stories he uses to illustrate the principles will be an added delight for TV crime-show fans. Cold Case Christianity will:

  • Give you ten principles of cold case investigation and equip you to use them to evaluate the claims of the New Testament Gospel authors. Applying these principles will help you gain a firmer handle on the historic evidence for Christianity.
  • Provide you with a four-step template for evaluating eyewitnesses to determine if they are reliable, and walk you through applying these steps to the eyewitness Gospel accounts, showing how they more than adequately pass forensic muster.

The historic truth claims of Christianity are under assault from all directions, but when pressed, they withstand the most scrupulous of investigative techniques. Jim Wallace is passionate about getting this information out, and about training Christians to become skilled case-makers for Christianity. “Most other theistic worldviews are deficient in the very areas where Christianity is strong,” he says. “We have great reasons to believe what we believe.”

—Terrell Clemmons

 

Terrell Clemmons is a freelance writer and blogger on apologetics and matters of faith.

This article was originally published at salvomag.com: http://bit.ly/2VUTDDS

/by