Tag Archive for: TrueHorizon

Christmas: The Cure For Our Two-Storied World

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By Bob Perry

Even people who don’t celebrate Christmas seem to know what it’s about — the birth of a Savior who comes to rescue us from the consequences of our rebellion against Him. Ultimately, that means it’s part of God’s rescue plan and where we go when we die. But there’s another aspect to Christmas that I think is important too. It’s also about showing us how to live. And right-living depends on how we think. Unfortunately, our thinking is infused with lies that we’ve accepted as being part of “the human condition.” And believing those lies results in dissension, oppression, racism, political wrangling, class struggle, economic strife, and war. Sadly, it’s all part of the gravest story ever told. Christmas offers an antidote to the effects of that story too.

The story started in The Garden. And we’ve been repeating it to each other ever since. It thrives on divided minds. But we are designed to be united. God and man. Husband and wife. Body and soul. Physical and spiritual. The division we experience is a symptom of wrong thinking about the nature of reality. But there is a way to fix it. Christmas shows us how. It’s the cure for our two-storied world.

Focus On The Physical World

There is an assumption in our contemporary society that all of us have tacitly accepted, even if we claim to be “religious.” It is an assumption born in the Enlightenment and nurtured through four-hundred years of modern philosophy, medical breakthroughs, and technological innovation. The assumption is this: That the physical world is all that really exists. And, since science is the study of the physical world, the logical assumption is that it will give the answers to our most profound questions. This is called Naturalism or Materialism. And many of us claim not to accept this view. We may even argue vehemently against it. But it is a difficult assumption to overcome because it is embedded in the fabric of our culture.

When we hear of an inexplicable healing, or an answered prayer, or an eerie “coincidence,” or a Christmas Star, our initial reaction is to seek a scientific explanation. Even those of us who take our faith seriously secretly wonder if the walls of Jericho really just fell down; if the Red Sea really parted, or (though we would be loathe to admit it) if Jesus really rose from the dead. We are hard-wired to be skeptical of those kinds of claims. In a thousand different ways we have assimilated, accommodated, and capitulated to the materialistic world. And with each baby step in that direction, the idea of the miraculous diminishes into a faintly held belief we have little hope of defending.

Non-Physical Reality

The Apostle Paul told us to “test everything” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). So, we take him up on it. But in our knee-jerk reaction to do so we sometimes forget that a Christian view of the world is not limited to physical things. In fact, science is impotent when it comes to answering our biggest questions. And that’s because Ultimate Reality is not physical. It’s transcendent. It’s spiritual.

The Christian worldview encompasses both the physical and the non-physical. Alone, neither is adequate to describe us as persons. And neither can explain the makeup of all we know and experience. Ideas. Values. Reason. Mind. Morals. Love. None of these things are physical. But all of them are real. Life would be meaningless without them.

Creating The Two-Storied World

The modern, materialistic culture we live in disdains such a view. It does its best to belittle and destroy it. The result is that we are constantly engaged in the battle of ideas that this kind of philosophy has created. Francis Schaeffer addressed this conflict many decades ago. He didn’t originate the idea. But he identified its roots in a kind of “split” thinking. And he popularized the notion in a phrase we all recognize when we talk about taking a “leap of faith.”

On Schaeffer’s view, we have created a two-storied vision of reality. And we all live in it. Think of it as a two-story house. Non-physical realities like values, spirituality, religion, faith and the like, reside upstairs. Downstairs we find things like the physical world and science.

UPPER STORY: Values – Spiritual – Religion – Faith — Private

LOWER STORY: Facts – Physical – Science – Knowledge — Public

Living In The Two-Story World

When you think this way, the lower story is where we are told to go when we want to know the true things. Only science can help us. It is public and verifiable. The culture tells us this is where we should be living our lives. It’s the force behind the exhortation we hear every day to “trust the science.”

Conversely, upper story ideas are private and subjective. We are free to take an irrational “leap of faith” to the upper story if we want to. But we must realize that to do so is to ignore rational thought. That kind of stuff has no business seeping into the “real world.” We take the leap upstairs on faith alone. And while no one is permitted to question the thoughts or ideas of your “private world,” neither are we free to allow those ideas to influence how we understand the lower story.

The Consequences Of A Two-Storied View

Unfortunately, most of us go along with this program unwittingly. We tacitly accept the idea that our personal faith and religion are disconnected from, and have little value in, a fact-based world. But this doesn’t fit with what we know and experience. There is no way to understand meaning and purpose.

The lower story is right in front of us. But it contains no hope. Nothing in it can save us. And our world is filled with people who are wallowing in this disconnected reality. They live in the lower-story, but they long for the upper.

Wrong Solutions

Some religions just accept the disconnect. The secularists deny the upper-story. They try to construct a replica of it downstairs using only lower-story stuff. Conversely, the New Age, Gnostic, and eastern religions try to deny or escape the lower-story. They’re happy to float around upstairs with no attachment to the ground.

Both of these are dismal failures because they can’t make sense of the whole show. They don’t even try. All they can offer is a truncated view of the reality.

Christianity is a house where the two stories meld into one. A place where it all makes sense. Facts and values. Spiritual and physical. Religion and science. Faith and knowledge. All of these make up an integrated view of reality.

The two-storied world is not meant to be divided. It never was. There are stairs right in the middle of the house. But they’re too tall for us to climb.

So, God comes down.

Christmas

This is the other Christmas message. The Author steps onto the stage to offer His ultimate revelation. He shows us that human-centered thinking is inadequate to address the human condition we created shortly after we arrived on the scene. We came up with the flawed philosophy that exacerbated those problems. We’re the ones who manufactured a “two-story” view of the world. Our humanistic thinking divided that which was meant to be indivisible.

Christmas reminds us that it all can be fixed in only one way. God gives us the ultimate example of how the world was meant to be through the Incarnation. That’s what it means. God’s essence quite literally “puts on meat.” “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

The spiritual is united with the physical right in front of our eyes.

At Christmastime, the floor joists shatter and a thundering shock wave pierces the night. The ceiling above our human-centered world collapses. And the spirit Who has been rattling around in the attic comes crashing into our living room.

The divine unites with the human in one person. A person who offers us the perfect example of what it means to bear His image. What it means to function as an integrated whole. That person offers us a way out of our self-made morass of idiotic ideas and worldly wisdom. The infinitely perfect man comes downstairs to rescue us. But He also shows us how to live.

Only He can do such a thing. And when He does, the world makes sense again.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Jesus, You and the Essentials of Christianity by Frank Turek (INSTRUCTOR Study Guide), (STUDENT Study Guide), and (DVD)

How Can Jesus Be the Only Way? (mp4 Download) by Frank Turek

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Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal and has also been published in Touchstone, and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and an M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons.

Original Blog Source: https://bit.ly/3WctDyY

 

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On Apologetics and Spiritual Warfare

On Apologetics and Spiritual Warfare

By Bob Perry

In my experience, the typical discussion of “spiritual warfare” centers on the stuff of the old Frank Peretti novels like This Present Darkness or Piercing the Darkness. It’s all about gargoyle-looking demons snarling on our shoulders, power plays, and satanic influences. But the whole “devil made me do it” thing has always seemed a little over-the-top to me. For that reason, it’s a subject I have mostly ignored. It certainly never seemed to have much to do with the things I like to talk about here — arguments and evidence. But it turns out there is a direct connection between apologetics and spiritual warfare. And all of us need to understand what it is.

The Balanced View

As usual, C. S. Lewis encourages us to consider a more reasonable view of the spiritual warfare than the one we usually hear:

“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”

~ C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Balance is always good. And if you want an introduction to that view of spiritual warfare, there is no more entertaining way to get it than reading C. S. Lewis,’ The Screwtape Letters. The gist of the book is that Screwtape is a senior demon who is training his understudy, Wormwood, about how to best mess with humans. The book is a record of their dialogue. It’s a training manual for spiritual warfare — from the bad guys’ point-of-view.

Lewis said it was the most difficult book he ever wrote because it forced him to think backwards. God is the “enemy.” Promoting evil is Screwtape’s mission.

I’ve always enjoyed Lewis’ unique approach. But more recently, I’ve come to see spiritual warfare in an even more pragmatic way.

Close Encounters of a Different Kind

In lesson two of his 8-part course, The Bible Fast Forward, Greg Koukl makes a fantastic insight about this. He points out that much of the emphasis in the church on spiritual warfare has been on engaging in power encounters. We talk about binding, loosing, and casting out demons with specific kinds of prayers. Much like Frank Peretti, we focus on methods we can use to counteract the evil enterprises of the enemy.

But, Koukl says, Scripture suggests something different. His point is that the essential character of spiritual warfare is not about power encounters with the devil. It is about truth encounters. It’s about opposing lies and deception.

Paul’s Take on Warfare

In 2nd Corinthians 10:3-5, Paul addresses the issue this way:

“For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”

Then, in Ephesians 6, the most famously quoted Bible passage on the subject, Paul goes on to describe the fight:

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

But in the plea that follows, Paul doesn’t tell the Ephesians to pray against the rulers, authorities, and powers. Rather, he tells them to pray for perseverance. He asks them to pray that he and those around him might speak the truth fearlessly.

Do you see the difference?

The Battlefield of Ideas

The weapons of spiritual warfare are thoughts. The battlefield is in our minds. And that means that an apologist — a defender of the faith — lives at the forward edge of the battle area. The battlefield is not just a place to make arguments about topics like the existence of God, the design of the universe, or the reliability of Scripture.

It’s a place to fight for the essence of truth itself.

Think about it. Normal, rationally thinking human beings could never come up with some of the ideas our culture accepts without question. Those who argue in favor of corruptions of human sexuality — things like same-sex “marriage” or gender fluidity — aren’t just arguing about the moral nature of their conduct. Reasonable people could debate that kind of thing. Instead, they are denying biological reality itself. And, as Carl Trueman puts it in his book, The Rise & Triumph of the Modern Self, “many in our society [insist that] to deny it or question it in some way is to reveal oneself as stupid, immoral, or subject to yet another irrational phobia.”*

In other words, the culture holds in contempt anyone who claims to see reality for what it actually is. We have arrived at the place George Orwell warned about 100 years ago, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Not Just A Cultural Trend

Human sexuality is at the epicenter of the cultural battles that are raging around the topics of truth and reality. But it’s not the only issue. Our society has also accepted without argument the idea that science will solve all our problems. This philosophical view is called “Scientism.” And it’s based on the notion that science and faith are in a perpetual state of war. But, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, that is a lie. Science and theology are complementary ways knowing things about the world. They are mutually reinforcing allies in the ongoing battle for the truth.

Likewise, those who foment hatred in our society do so by disingenuously politicizing the news. They do it using incidents of racism, oppression, inequity, and inclusion. Surely, we can find blatant examples of abuse with each of these. No thinking person can deny it. But that does not mean our entire society can be reduced to them. Generalizations are never a good idea. You don’t define the whole by the abuses of outliers.

But the really troubling thing about all these trends is that they are not just cultural phenomena. They are also infiltrating our churches under the banner of “Progressive Christianity” and “social justice.” I guess we should expect the world to turn things inside out and upside down. But when the church goes along with it, I don’t see any other way to explain it except as the consequence of spiritual warfare.

The “Social Justice” Deception

Back to C. S. Lewis. In one of his training sessions with Wormwood, the indomitable Screwtape hits on the topic of how to remove spirituality from the Christian’s life. His method may sound familiar:

“We want men to treat Christianity as a means; preferably, of course, as a means to their own advancement, but, failing that, as a means to anything – even to social justice. The thing to do is to get a man first to value social justice as a thing which the enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice … it is quite easy to coax humans around this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that ‘only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilizations.’ … You see the little rift? ‘Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.’  That’s the game …” (emphases mine)

Remember, Lewis wrote those words in 1942. It turns out the battle for our minds hasn’t changed much over the years. Screwtape’s minions have been wildly successful in their mission to deceive the world. Our challenges as defenders of the faith are complicated but they’re not new. When it comes right down to it, they’re as old as the Garden of Eden.

A Reason For Hope

When you see spiritual warfare this way you realize it never stops. The battle of ideas will continue far into the future. We can’t escape the battle. But we can embrace a battle plan that refuses to surrender. As Rod Dreher put it in his fantastic book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Christian Dissidents,

“You have to live in a world of lies, but it’s your choice as to whether that world lives in you.”

~ Rod Dreher

If you watch the news, this can all become very discouraging. But as an apologist, we don’t have time to be discouraged. Our charge is not just to give answers. It is to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have…”

Hope.

In The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton surveys the many forces that have threatened to destroy Christianity over the last 2000 years. “Time and again,” said Chesterton, “the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. But each time, it was the dog that died.”

Our faith and our church have been under attack since the beginning of time. But the Bible and history are littered with examples of the saints who persevered in the face of both physical and spiritual warfare. Our time is unique in many ways. But from an eternal perspective the mission is still the same. Lies are still the enemy. And truth is still unchanging.

And that is the reason we have hope.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Paperback), and (Sermon) by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek 

Stealing From God by Dr. Frank Turek (Book, 10-Part DVD Set, STUDENT Study Guide, TEACHER Study Guide)

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

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)

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

 

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Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal and has also been published in Touchstone, and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and an M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons.

Original Blog Source: https://cutt.ly/wW6E98x 

 

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The Cure For Spiritual Disorientation

The Cure For Spiritual Disorientation

By Bob Perry

I have made the case that the church is suffering from spiritual disorientation. There are many Christians who are flying through this life in much the same way as a pilot who is spatially disoriented. Like that pilot, they’ve lost all reference to the ground. And that’s a dangerous position to be in. The first thing a pilot must do to correct his situation is to find the true horizon. Grounding our faith is no different. And the horizon line of faith is truth itself. Truth, in all its forms, is the reference for a grounded spirituality. It aligns us with reality. The Greeks believed in an impersonal force that was the source of truth, goodness, and beauty. They called it the logos. But the Bible tells us that the Logos is Jesus himself. Aligning ourselves with the Logos is the only way to correct our spiritual disorientation.

Getting Aligned With The World

If you want to fly safely through the sky, you need to have a constant reference to the ground. That seems simple enough. If it’s a nice day, you can see the horizon line just fine. But if you’re in the clouds, you need another method. For that reason, a tremendous amount of effort has gone into designing cockpit instruments that display an artificial horizon to the pilot. But that line has to be trustworthy. It has to replicate the real one. We always need a way to be able to see the “true horizon.”

If the church wants to address its spiritual disorientation problem, it needs to make it a priority to invest in doing the same kind of thing. The church needs a way to stabilize its vision of reality. And the place to begin doing that is with the basics of reality itself.

The Ground You Cannot See

Apologists like me love to talk about the origins, design, archaeology, and the scientific evidence that points to the existence of God. We are known to make a case for God as the Creator, Designer, and Sustainer of the world. That’s great. We need to do all those things. In fact, Christianity is unique among the world religions in its ability to offer tangible evidence for its trustworthiness.

But if the church is going to be properly grounded, we need to go beyond that kind of evidence. We need to re-emphasize things that are vital to rational thought, but that our culture has corrupted. I’m talking about the features of our world that you can’t see, but that are just as real as the ground you walk on. The kinds of things you have to know and understand to think clearly about anything at all. I’m talking about the philosophical triumvirate of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

For thousands of years, thinking people have recognized each of these as objective features of the world. If you want to understand how we’ve gotten disoriented, you have to start with them.

Hijacking Objective Reality

Think about it. For thousands of years, human beings saw Truth, Goodness, and Beauty as objective features of the world. But they weren’t just things that existed outside of us. We understood that they were important and reliable because they were grounded in the nature of God himself.

But contemporary culture has hijacked each of them. It has relativized them. Told us they were things we could decide for ourselves. The results have been disastrous. But there is a way to fix it. And the first step in confirming the church’s true horizon is to put truth, goodness, and beauty back where they belong — as the unmoving reference points for all we do and think.

Truth Is The Essence Of God

Truth has always been central to the human relationship with God. The Prophets of the Old Testament lamented it’s passing.

  • Isaiah 59:14-15— “truth stumbled in the streets. Truth is nowhere to be found”
  • Jeremiah 7:28— “truth has perished; it has vanished from their lips.”

Jesus refers to truth more than 75 times. In the Book of John alone, he uses the double emphatic phrase, “Truly, truly I say to you …” twenty-five times. Truth was the reason he came to Earth at all:

  • John 18:37— “For this reason I was born, and for this reason, I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

Ultimately, he transformed our understanding of the nature of truth itself. He personalized it.

  • John 14:6— “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me …”

If we want our churches to be properly oriented, we have to defend the truth. We have to know that truth before it can set us free.

Goodness Is The Character Of God

Every one of us recognizes what C. S. Lewis put so succinctly:

“Across cultures universally, there are common principles that everybody knows and lives as if they are true.”

You can’t torture toddlers for fun. It is wrong to murder an innocent person. You shouldn’t steal your neighbor’s iPhone. Rape is wrong. We all have human rights.

Where do these ideas come from? As I have discussed elsewhere, the existence of these kinds of things points to the fact that there is a standard we all use to determine morality. Individuals cannot create that standard for themselves. It would lead to chaos. Neither can we agree on them by accepting the consensus of our communities. If that were the case, there would be no way to argue against the actions of the Nazis or southern slave owners. After all, they governed by the consensus of their respective communities.

There is only one other possible explanation for these kinds of things. There is an external standard that defines them. And the only other source of such a standard of goodness is the character of God himself.

Beauty Is The Reflection Of God

As my article, “A Mind For The Beautiful,” points out in great detail, the classic understanding of beauty was that it was a property of objects. Beautiful things displayed symmetry, order, balance, unity, and proportion. They gave the inference of design and purpose.

As an example, the Wright Brothers were not the first ones to build an airplane. They were the first to be able to control an airplane. That’s why you know about them today. And they were able to do that because they spent countless hours studying and cataloging the movement and structure of birds. They watched their feathers warp and twist. They observed how the birds set their wings before takeoff and after landing. In other words, they owed their unique success to their ability to replicate nature.

We don’t create beauty. We recreate it. Beauty is something we find in the world around us. The best we can do is mimic it.

The Divine Mind

As it turns out, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are each objective features of the world. They always have been. We do not create them. We discover them. They are foundational to reality itself. And they are what we need to know to properly orient ourselves to the world. They help form a true horizon.

Even the Greek philosophers knew this. They talked about truth, goodness, and beauty as elements of a concept they saw behind the orderly nature of the universe.

This concept was rich in meaning. It included reason, choice, reflection, and calculation. It explained the relational harmony between belief and actuality. The Greeks considered this to be some kind of impersonal force — a “divine mind.” And they had a name for it.

They called it the Logos.

The Impersonal Comes To Life

When the Apostle John begins his gospel, it is no coincidence that he does so with this Greek idea in mind. He makes it clear that the “force” is far from impersonal. In fact, he knows exactly who it is.

“In the beginning was the Word (“Logos” ), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life and the life was the Light of men.”

It turns out that Jesus is the Logos. He is the Divine Mind behind the universe. The foundation of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Jesus obliterated any notion that the spiritual and physical worlds are disconnected. He is the place where they merge.

If the church is spiritually disoriented, we know where to look to get ourselves right-side up.

As the God who became a man, Jesus showed us that he is our true horizon — the reference for where we should be living our lives. When we focus on truth, goodness, and beauty, we are really focusing on him.

He gives life meaning. He makes life safe.

Jesus — and the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty he defines — is the cure for our spiritual disorientation.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

Jesus, You and the Essentials of Christianity – Episode 14 Video DOWNLOAD by Frank Turek (DVD)

How to Interpret Your Bible by Dr. Frank Turek DVD Complete Series, INSTRUCTOR Study Guide, and STUDENT Study Guide

How NOT to Interpret the Bible: A Lesson from the Cults by Thomas Howe mp3

Can We Understand the Bible? by Thomas Howe Mp3 and CD

How Philosophy Can Help Your Theology by Richard Howe (MP3 Set), (mp4 Download Set), and (DVD Set)

 

Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal and has also been published in Touchstone and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and an M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2w7wthB

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Yes, We Do Need to Put God in A Box

Yes, We Do Need to Put God in A Box

By Bob Perry

“You can’t put God in a box.” It’s a popular saying within the Christian community. And it seems reasonable to say. After all, God can do anything He wants to do. Who would question that? I submit that every thinking Christian should question that … because it’s not true. God’s character does put him in a box. And our failure to recognize that creates a false — and therefore dangerous — picture of God. There is a box God needs to be in. And his character defines it.

God Cannot Do Whatever He Wants

God cannot do whatever he wants to do. If you think that sounds sacrilegious, you first have to understand that God cannot do things that are contrary to his nature. Before we can determine if God can do anything he wants to do, we have to first understand what that nature is. There are several elements to God’s nature but here are a few to consider.

God is Logical

God made an orderly universe. He built the laws of logic into our world and made it predictable. This is why we can communicate with one another. It’s the reason we can use science to understand how the world works. If God made the universe that way, it means that he must also be logical. It means that logic is an extension of his character. And that means God cannot do illogical things.

He can’t make a square circle, a married bachelor, or “a rock so big he can’t lift it.” This is an important point to understand as it relates to the rest of his character traits.

God is Omnipotent

God is all-powerful. But having supreme power doesn’t mean God can do anything. It means he can do anything that power can do. Being immeasurably powerful is what allows God to do miracles or create a universe as immense and complex as the one we see around us. But power does not allow God to do illogical, sinful, hateful, or unjust things. That’s an important distinction to make.

God is Goodness

God is pure goodness. He is “the final standard of good and all that God is and does is worthy of approval.” Because he is good, God is willing and able to demonstrate love in all its forms through mercy, patience, and grace. God loves everything he created. And since human beings are the pinnacle of that creation, God loves humanity in a way that we are incapable of comprehending.

God is Just

Justice occurs when someone gets exactly what they deserve. This can be positive or negative. We know that good acts deserve a reward and evil acts deserve punishment. And we know this intuitively. No one had to teach this to us. Even little babies demonstrate that they know it. All of us inherently value — and seek — justice. God is the source and embodiment of that idea. His character demands it. And since his character is morally perfect, any act of rebellion against that moral perfection — no matter how small — deserves to be punished.

God is Eternal and Self-Existent

God is not the type of being who needs a cause for His existence. The fact that anything exists at all means there must be a permanent, unmovable foundation that sustains it. That’s God. He is the foundation of all being. This is why the question, “Who made God?” is such a silly one. God isn’t the type of thing that you make. He upholds all reality at every instant but does not need to be upheld himself.

God is Omnipresent

The fact that God upholds all reality at every instant means that he is present everywhere. Always. He is not limited by time or space. Don’t get this confused with the ideas that God is everything. That’s pantheism. God’s omnipresence means that he is present everywhere in his creation but also distinct from it.

Putting Them All Together

There are plenty of other character traits that theologians use to describe God. If you are interested in digging more deeply into these kinds of topics, I suggest investing in a book on Systematic Theology. But considering the definitions I’ve briefly mentioned here, I doubt that anyone who takes God seriously would find them to be controversial in themselves. Our problems arise when we forget that God exhibits all these character traits simultaneously. All facets of his nature have to work together. He can’t exercise one if it violates another.

Theological Inconsistencies

Focusing on one aspect of God while ignoring another invites us to accept a false view of him. And many Christians unwittingly do this all the time.

“God showed up!”

When they have an emotional experience in worship, it is common to hear some proclaim that “God showed up today!” But God doesn’t “show up” anywhere. He is always everywhere. Don’t confuse the issue. God doesn’t need our praise to show himself. We need to praise him to remind ourselves of our dependence on him.

“God is so good!”

This is a common refrain to hear from someone who has just received good news of some kind. And while it’s great to acknowledge God’s blessings, it’s wrong-thinking to acknowledge them only when things are going our way. God is good regardless of our personal circumstances. It’s easy to express our love for him when things are good. But it’s imperative that we do the same when things are bad.

“Where was God when …?”

On the flip side, we seem to think God has gone missing when catastrophes occur. We assume that God’s omnipotence means he can and should destroy evil forever. But God made the loving decision to create us as free-will beings. He willingly limits his own power to give us the freedom to choose to follow him. And that means that no matter how powerful he is, God has created a world that allows us to make bad choices. The moral evil we witness all around us depends on our actions, not on God’s absence.

“God is love”

This idea is absolutely true. But contrary to the claims of the universalists and inclusivists among us, God is not just love. The idea that “God is love” is true as far as it goes, but there is more to the story. Ultimate goodness and love are different ways of describing God’s moral perfection. Being pure love and goodness means he cannot sin and he cannot lie. And that means he cannot allow moral imperfection into his presence. When our actions violate his moral law, his justice requires that there be consequences for our decisions. God’s character won’t allow him to accept whatever moral choices we make. This is a reality that often gets ignored by those who insist that a loving God would never allow us to be separated from him. The fact that God loves us does not mean he condones anything we do.

The Box God Needs to Be In

These are just a few examples of how our failure to keep God in the proper box leads not only to theological inconsistencies but to a corrupted view of reality itself. That’s what I mean when I say that we have to put God in a box. It’s a box defined by the sum total of all the elements of his character. Isolating our favorite trait is a bad idea because it doesn’t tell the whole story. And, as is always the case, accepting bad ideas leads to bad real-world consequences.

It turns out that we better keep God in a box. And we better understand how that box is defined. It helps us avoid most of the silly, false, and even dangerous ideas that have become all too common among Christians these days. It’s not always an easy thing to do. But being clear-thinking Christian demands that we acknowledge that God puts himself in a box. And we would do well to keep him there.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

What is God Really Like? A View from the Parables by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3, and Mp4)

What is God Like? Look to the Heavens by Dr. Frank Turek (DVD and Mp4)

How Philosophy Can Help Your Theology by Richard Howe (DVD Set, Mp3, and Mp4)

 

Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal and has also been published in Touchstone, and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and an M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/3694taO

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Materialism Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth

Materialism Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth

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By Bob Perry

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, Darwinian Evolution tells a great story. But that story is wholly disconnected from the actual evidence of life on Earth. That’s especially true when it comes to the origin of life. To be fair, Darwinian Evolution insists it has nothing to do with the question of the origin of life. But that doesn’t let materialism off the hook. If there is no God, there must be a materialist explanation for the origin and diversity of the life we see around us. But there isn’t one. Darwinian Evolution fails to explain the diversity of life on Earth. And Materialism cannot explain the origin of life.

Nothing to Select

Natural selection is the core mechanism in the Darwinian model for explaining life. This is the source of the “survival of the fittest” idea with which we are all familiar. Mutations in some organisms provide them with a competitive advantage over others. These more adaptive traits are “selected” and further enhance the propagation of those species. This seems to make sense. But it cannot apply to the origin of life. A lifeless Earth would have contained no organisms. There was nothing to mutate, so there could not have been any “helpful” mutations. Natural selection had nothing to work with. It may help us understand the diversity of life. But what it cannot do is explain life’s origin. So, evolutionary biologists have been trying for decades to find a way to explain how life got started using only stuff available in the material world.

And they’ve failed.

The Miller-Urey Experiment

In 1953, biochemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey of the University of Chicago conducted an experiment to demonstrate how life began. Their goal was to show that life could have arisen through purely chemical processes. For that reason, they could only use the elements that were available on the early Earth. Their experiment passed electrical impulses through a mixture of methane, hydrogen, and ammonia. These were the elements they thought made up the atmosphere of the early Earth. Their goal was to confirm Charles Darwin’s speculations about the origin of life. Darwin believed that life arose from a “primordial soup” of pure chemicals in a “warm little pond.”

A Myth Repeated

On their first attempt, Miller and Urey were able to form some simple amino acids. They believed they had proved that the origin of life on Earth was no longer a mystery. To this day, you will still see the staggering success of this experiment touted in science textbooks.

But it’s not true. Reports of the success of their experiment have been greatly exaggerated.

For starters, it turns out Miller-Urey assumed the wrong initial conditions that existed on the early Earth. Most importantly, they neglected to include oxygen as being part of the early atmosphere.

The Oxygen Conundrum

As it turns out, oxygen was not only present; it is also required to support life. The problem is that if there is oxygen in the atmosphere, or dissolved in water; it shuts down pre-biotic chemical pathways. But that’s not all. If oxygen is not present, pre-biotic chemistry doesn’t work either. So, whether oxygen is present or absent, it ruins Darwin’s infamous “primordial soup.” Pre-biotic molecules cannot form.

Explaining the origin of life requires that oxygen be present. But the presence of oxygen also wrecks the process. The oxygen conundrum is that both of these have to be true at the same time.

But that’s not all.

Chicken and Egg Scenarios

There are regular conferences that meet to discuss the Origin of Life. If you attend one, you will find that oxygen is not the only problem with explaining how life got started. And they keep piling up. The more biochemists learn, the worse the problem gets.

Metabolism and Replication

Cellular life must be able to use the energy it gets from its surroundings. To survive, it has to transform that energy so that it can develop, grow, and sustain itself. This is known as metabolism. No matter how simple the life form is, it must also have the ability to copy and reproduce itself. This is what we call replication. This means that the very first life form must also have had these processes in place. And both of these processes had to have arisen simultaneously.

Proteins and DNA

Along with the replication issue, there is an even more intractable problem. Replication requires proteins which act to copy DNA and use that copy to form a new cell. But without DNA, the cell cannot produce proteins. DNA is the ‘blueprint” used to build an organism. Proteins are the “workers” that follow the blueprint to assemble the cell. And therein lies the problem.

You can’t create the blueprint (DNA) without the workers.

But you can’t assemble the workers without the blueprint.

You need both the blueprint and the workers to be in place right from the beginning.

An Inevitable Conclusion

You can read more about the origin of life issue in Fazale “Fuz” Rana‘s book linked below. But here’s the bottom line. There is no materialistic explanation for the emergence of life from non-life. Wishful thinking and Darwinian “just-so” stories are easy to concoct. But the evidence against them continues to pile up. The more we learn, the more the existence of life seems to depend on the intervention of an intelligent agent. But one thing is certain — materialism cannot explain the origin of life.

Life and a Creator God

But there is another line of evidence that is sitting right in front of our faces. It may be the most astounding evidence of all. The evidence I’m referring to is the evidence about the origin and nature of life itself. This is just one more aspect of the world we live in that is best explained by an intelligent, powerful being. Someone you might refer to as God.

Here is a great summary of why the evidence for the origin of life points straight to God.

Recommended resources related to the topic:

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)

Defending Creation vs. Evolution (mp3) by  Richard Howe

Exposing Naturalistic Presuppositions of Evolution (mp3) by Phillip Johnson

Macro Evolution? I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be a Darwinist (DVD Set), (MP3 Set) and (mp4 Download Set) by Dr. Frank Turek

Darwin’s Dilemma (DVD) by Stephen Meyer and others

Inroad into the Scientific Academic Community (mp3) by Phillip Johnson

Public Schools / Intelligent Design (mp3) by Francis Beckwith

 

Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal and has also been published in Touchstone, and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and a M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/2of535D

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12 Reasons to Trust The New Testament

12 Reasons to Trust The New Testament

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By Bob Perry

If you claim to believe the Bible, you better be able to trust that what it says is true. Trusting the Bible means knowing two things. First, that the original authors recorded historically accurate information. And, second, knowing that the Bible we have today contains what the original authors wrote down. “Textual criticism” is the science that analyzes these kinds of issues. It’s a complicated discipline. But the conclusions we can draw from it are simple to understand. Here are 12 reasons you can trust the New Testament manuscripts.

Multiple, Independent Sources Contributed to It

We tend to think of the Bible as a book. And it is … today. But that book is a collection of letters, poems, and historical documents that span thousands of years of human history. There are really 66 books in the Bible. They were written by about 40 different authors (35 of which we are very confident of). And they offer us a remarkably coherent story from beginning to end. We should judge the new testament manuscripts just like we would any other historical document. And one mark of reliable documentation is that it comes from multiple, independent sources.

We Have Thousands of New Testament Manuscripts

When you have lots of copies of a document, it is easy to compare them and see where variations in the text may occur. For instance, we have about 1800 known copies of Homer’s Iliad. This is by far the most copies of any ancient document. By comparison, the next closest is the writings of Demosthenes at 400 copies. Then there are the writings of Julius Caesar (10 copies), and the Roman historians Tacitus (20 copies) and Pliny (7 copies). No one disputes the authenticity of these manuscripts.

But when it comes to the New Testament, we have 5824 copies in the original Greek. When you count other languages (Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic), there are more than 20,000!

New Testament Scholar Daniel Wallace puts it this way:

“The average classical Greek writer has less than 20 copies of his works still in existence. Stack them up, and they’re 4 feet high. If you stack up copies of the New Testament manuscripts, they would be over a mile high.”

The Manuscripts Were Written Early

We have good evidence to suggest that most of the New Testament was written before 70 A.D. This is not a unanimous conclusion by any means. But it is reasonable. And it is based on historical facts.

After a Jewish uprising against the Romans that began in 66 AD, the Roman Emperor dispatched his General, Titus, to the region to gain control. A conflict ensued that lasted nearly four years. Finally, in 70 AD, Titus surrounded the city of Jerusalem and attacked. In the end, he destroyed the city and burned the Jewish Temple to the ground.

These are not minor incidents. The Temple was the center of the Jewish culture and the home of Judaism. Yet none of the New Testament authors even mention these events. In fact, John 5:2, contains the following passage: “Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate, a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.”

John’s description of the Temple is in the present tense. This suggests he wrote these words before the Temple was destroyed. And most scholars believe John’s was the last Gospel written. The other Gospels and the Book of Acts were penned well before it.

The Documents Are a Collection of Eyewitness Accounts

There is no denying the New Testament reads like a collection of eyewitness accounts about the life and teachings of Jesus. But that doesn’t mean it is. Details count. And details are exactly what the New Testament provides.

In his book, I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist, Frank Turek lists 84 specific details documented by classical scholar and historian Colin Hemer. And these occur just in the last 16 chapters of the Book of Acts. They include the names of people, places, and other details that have been confirmed by history and archeology.

Likewise, the Gospel of John contains 59 confirmed details. None of them are the kind of detail someone would fabricate. And there is no other set of ancient manuscripts that contain this level of historically verifiable authenticity.

Non-Christian Sources Confirm the Most Important Details

There are 10 non-Christian sources who mention Jesus within 150 years of his life. These people have no motivation to confirm anything about him. But they verify every detail of what the New Testament says about his life, death, and resurrection. By contrast, only 9 non-Christian sources who mention the Roman Emperor of that time, Tiberius Caesar. And, if you count Christian sources, Jesus gets 43 mentions. Tiberius only gets 10.

There is no reason these non-Christian sources would confirm details contained in the New Testament unless they were actually true.

We Can Reconstruct It Using Just Quotes of Early Church Fathers

Writing between about 95 – 110 AD, three leaders of the Christian Church cited nearly the entire New Testament. These early “Church Fathers” (Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp) quoted every book in the New Testament except Jude and 2 John. And since they were quoting the New Testament letters, this serves as further evidence that those letters must have existed well prior to 100 AD.

Historical and Archeological Evidence Corroborate It

There are 30 characters mentioned in the New Testament whose names and positions have been verified by history and archeology.

For instance, we have the actual burial box (“ossuary”) that contains the bones of the High Priest, Joseph Caiaphas, who sentenced Jesus to death. And we have the infamous “Pilate Stone.” This engraved sign authenticates the name and title of the Roman Prefect who released Jesus to his trial by the Jewish authorities.

There are plenty of other examples where archaeology has corroborated the claims of the New Testament, including:

  • The Pool of Siloam (John 9:1-12) uncovered in 2004.
  • The Pool of Bethesda (John 5:1-9) excavated in 1888.
  • Syrian Governor Quirinius (Luke 2:1-3) name discovered on a coin and a statue
  • King Lysanias (Luke 3:1) listed on an inscription near Damascus

It Fulfills Ancient Prophecies in Amazing Ways

There are 9 specific Old Testament prophecies that foretell the origin, nature, and life of Jesus of Nazareth. These were written between several hundred and a couple of thousand years before his birth. Yet, they predict the events of his life with deadly accuracy. Daniel 7, Psalm 22, and Isaiah 53 all contain prophecies about his birth, death, and resurrection. These are so accurate many thought they were written after the fact. But the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 put that notion to rest.

In all, Bible scholar J. Barton Payne identified 71 Old Testament prophecies that were fulfilled by Jesus Christ.

It Contains Embarrassing Details

If you were going to make up or embellish a story about a heroic figure and his henchmen, you certainly wouldn’t include details that embarrassed them. But that’s just what the New Testament manuscripts do. His followers are bumbling fools and cowards who doubt his teachings. His disciples — even his own family — consider Jesus to be out of his mind and a deceiver. Some call him a “drunkard” and “demon-possessed.” But, most amazingly, he suffers the worst kind of defeat any devout Jew could ever imagine. He is hung on a tree (the ultimate curse in the Jewish culture) and killed.

These are not the kind of things that anyone would use to convince you that their hero was a God. They are the kinds of things that a writer includes because he is documenting events that actually occurred.

It Includes the Difficult Sayings of Jesus

Along the same lines, the New Testament writers make Jesus a very difficult figure to serve. He sets new — and unattainable — standards for justice, judgment, lust, marriage, finances, and love. Try to imagine a salesman or storyteller who exhorts you to follow him by imposing those kinds of standards on others. It just makes no sense. Unless the writers were telling the truth.

A “Chain of Custody” Confirms The Content of the Originals

The Monastery of Saint Catherine contains the oldest known complete copy of the New Testament. This manuscript is called Codex Sinaiticus because the monastery was located on the Sinai peninsula. Scholars have dated it to 350 AD.

That’s great. But how do we know it contains what the original authors wrote?

J. Warner Wallace, a retired Los Angeles cold-case detective, applies his methods for evaluating evidence to the biblical manuscripts. In his book, Cold-Case Christianity, Wallace connects the dots between the New Testament authors (Paul, John, Peter, Mark) and their students that leads directly to Codex Sinaiticus. Wallace shows that we have a reliable chain of evidence between the words of the oldest copy of the New Testament and the men who wrote the words contained in it.

It Contains “Undesigned Coincidences” That Verify Its Authenticity

One of the most powerful ways to tell if a story is authentic is to compare how different eyewitnesses tell it. If the accounts are exactly the same, you suspect collusion. If they’re wildly contradictory, you suspect that somebody is lying or that the story just isn’t true. But when two accounts tell the same story from different points of view, that is the hallmark of authenticity. This is especially true if one version inadvertently provides complementary details to another. Some scholars call these “undesigned coincidences.”

As an example, compare Matthew’s account of Jesus’ appearance before the Sanhedrin in Matthew 26:67-68. After they spit in his face, strike him with their fists, and slap him, they say, “Prophesy to us, Christ. Who hit you?” That’s a weird question to ask someone who you just slapped across the face.

Until you read Luke’s account.

In Luke 22:64, we find out that before the Jewish leaders began questioning Jesus, they blindfolded him.

This is a “coincidence” that no one planned. It’s a powerful indication that the accounts are real. And the Bible is littered with these kinds of harmonizing features. Links to detailed resources about these “undesigned coincidences” are available below.

The New Testament Verifies the Old Testament

The reliability of the New Testament is beyond dispute. And that means we can trust its purpose — to give an account of the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is exactly who he said he was. His resurrection confirmed it. And Jesus certifies what the Old Testament says. That means the Old Testament is also reliable for many of the same reasons.

There are plenty of resources (some offered below) that give more detail about these issues. Check them out. Study them.

You can have confidence in the fact that there are plenty of reasons we can trust the New Testament. And knowing why that is true goes a long way toward helping you own your faith.

Resources

Books on “Undesigned Scriptural Coincidences”

Lydia McGrew, Hidden In Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts

Eric Lounsbery, J. J. Blunt’s Undesigned Scriptural Coincidences

Books On the Reliability of the Bible

Walter C. Kaiser, The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable and Relevant?
F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?
Mark D. Roberts, Can We Trust The Gospels?

Recommended resources related to the topic:

The New Testament: Too Embarrassing to Be False by Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3 and Mp4)

Why We Know the New Testament Writers Told the Truth by Frank Turek (DVD, Mp3 and Mp4)

The Top Ten Reasons We Know the NT Writers Told the Truth by Frank Turek (Mp3)

 

Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at: truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal, and has also been published in Touchstone, and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and a M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons.

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How Do We Know The Truth Is Out There?

How Do We Know The Truth Is Out There?

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By Bob Perry

There are two kinds of truth. One depends on our opinion of things. This is called subjective truth. The other depends on the way the world actually is. This is called objective truth. Most people never think about the difference between the two. And that makes any discussion of the concept of truth a difficult one to tackle. But we must tackle it. The way we understand truth impacts every aspect of our lives. And the way we answer life’s biggest questions depends on it implicitly. Truth is an objective feature of the world we live in. It’s foundational to reality itself.

Subjective Truth

When I say cookies and cream ice cream is the best kind of ice cream, that statement is true. For me. It’s my opinion. And my opinion may be completely different than yours. We are both subjects making observations about the world. But our observations about which flavor of ice cream is best say nothing about the nature of ice cream itself. They may be true statements, but they are only statements about us and our preferences. That’s why it’s called subjective truth.

Unfortunately, most people treat all truth the same way they treat their ice cream preferences. They’ll say things like, “Well, that may be true for you, but it’s not for me.” And while that’s a perfectly valid statement when it comes to our favorite kinds of ice cream, it’s wholly inadequate when it comes to our assessment of the nature of reality.

Objective Truth

Making claims regarding the nature of reality requires that we recognize a different kind of truth. It’s called objective truth. And it’s called that because it says something about objects outside of us. Objective things do not just exist inside our heads. They are real features of the real world.

For instance, if I say the Earth revolves around the Sun, I am making a statement about the nature of the Earth-Sun relationship. I am making a statement about an objective fact. My opinion about it doesn’t matter. Neither does yours. The only way to determine if the statement is true is to look at the objects themselves and see if what I say about them matches the way they really are. If it does match, I have made a true statement.

Think of it like gravity. You don’t have to believe in gravity. But saying you don’t believe in gravity doesn’t allow you to step off tall buildings without consequence. Gravity is an objective reality. It doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not. Objective truth is no different.

The Correspondence View Of Truth

This is called the “correspondence view” of truth. And the technical definition of it is this:

If what I believe about the world matches the way the world actually is, my belief about the world is true.

This way of understanding truth is perfectly natural. Our minds are wired to recognize it. You evaluate the world you live in using this definition of truth all the time. In fact, you’re unconsciously doing it right now. You’re reading these words and comparing what the words say to the reality you experience every day. You do that because you are a truth-seeking being. Your Maker made you that way. You want to know the truth. And you don’t (at least, you shouldn’t) accept things other people say unless they correspond to reality.

The truth is out there. And we are made to find it.

Alignment with The Truth

We really can’t escape the truth. Even someone who says, “There is no truth!” is making a truth claim about the world. They are saying that “there is no truth” … is a true statement.

Living in the real world requires that we recognize this definition of truth. We should be doing all we can to align our beliefs with the fixed features of that world. Those features are external to us. We don’t create them. We discover them. And we rely on them to keep us safe. We do it all the time.

If you’re about to step out into the street, you look both ways for a reason. You want to know the truth about whether a car may run you over. Knowing true things means properly aligning yourself with reality. If you believe something false about the world — if you deny reality — we have a word for that. It’s called being deluded. And being deluded will quickly get you in trouble.

False beliefs lead us to act in defiance of the way the world actually works. And that’s why we need to know the objective truth about the existence and nature of God, and our relationship with Him.

A Post-Truth Culture

Most people do not believe in objective truth. In fact, in 2016, the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year was “post-truth.” Some say we live in a post-truth culture. This becomes especially evident when the subject of moral truth comes up. But the answers to life’s most important questions depend on us finding the truth. In fact, the truth lies at the heart of the Christian worldview. And that means Christianity doesn’t allow us to accept the assumptions or demands of a “post-truth” culture.

The Truth of Christianity

Whatever belief system you hold to should reflect the way the world actually is. This is why I believe in Christianity. Not because it “works for me.” And not because it makes my life easier. Christianity doesn’t claim it will do either of those things. It actually warns us of the opposite.

What Christianity does do is offer the most reasonable explanation for the origin and nature of the universe. And it offers the most reasonable explanation for the origin and nature of the human beings who inhabit that universe.

Christianity corresponds to reality. More than any other religion, it makes sense of the world. I believe in Christianity because it’s true. Or, as my favorite Christian apologist put it:

“I believe in Christianity as I believe the Sun has risen;
not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
C. S. Lewis

This video by J. Warner Wallace gives a quick overview of how to think about the difference between objective and subjective truth…

 

Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at: truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal, and has also been published in Touchstone, and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and a M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/33LF1qT

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We live in a beatiful world

We Live In A Beautiful World

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By Bob Perry

In classical thinking, saying that something is beautiful is not a matter of subjective opinion. It’s a way to identify an objective feature of the world. We don’t construct beauty; we discover it. And we try to mimic it. A lot of ink has gone to a paper discussing this view when it comes to truth and goodness. In fact, Christians make the case that truth and goodness are grounded in the character of God. But there’s more to the story. The ancient philosophers who talked about those also included a third feature with them. They called it beauty. For some reason, we don’t talk the same way about beauty anymore. But don’t be confused. Beauty is in the same category. Classical thinkers have always linked truth, goodness, and beauty together as interdependent, objective features of the world.

The Ancient Idea of Beauty

The ancient Greek philosophers saw beauty in objects that displayed symmetry, order, balance, unity, and proportion. In fact, the Greek word we translated into “beauty” was hora. This is the root from which we have derived the word hour. That’s because beauty includes a sense of timing. It takes into account what we know about the purpose for which the object exists.

Think of a flower. The ancients saw beauty not only in the symmetry of the flower’s petals or the vivid colors it displayed. They also recognized that these properties became most prominent when the flower reached its prime – when it bloomed. In the same way, fruit was most beautiful when it ripened. A mature woman was beautiful – and a young girl was beautiful – each in a way that fulfilled their purpose for that stage of their being. There was no beauty in an older woman trying to look younger than she really was. Nor was it beautiful when a young woman tried to look older than she should.

In other words, the characteristics that made something beautiful were built into the object one was observing. Beauty was dependent on an object’s nature and purpose.

It had nothing to do with an observer’s opinion of it.

Recognizing Beauty

design in a Chambered Nautilus Shell
Photo by Pixabay

Scientists uncover evidence of this kind of beauty everywhere in nature. We see it in “eerie proportional coincidences” like the “Golden Number,” Phi (1.618), and the “Golden Triangle” derived from it. The ratio shows up in commonly-accepted shapes of rectangles used to frame pictures and in the triangle-faced sides of the Great Pyramids. Humans design things using these proportions because they make them look pleasing to the eye. The mathematician Fibonacci derived his infamous Fibonacci Sequence from it.

But this ratio also shows up in nature all on its own. The radius of a spiraling Chambered Nautilus shell expands in relation to it. The similarly appealing geometry of flower petals — and the radiating pattern of combs in a honey bee hive — grow by the same proportions. These kinds of forms and patterns appear so often in nature; we use them to our benefit … and for our pleasure.

Leveraging Beauty

In their book, A Meaningful World, Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt show how “the arts and sciences reveal the genius of nature.” One of the examples they use to demonstrate this is the Periodic Table of Elements. That table, we all learned about in junior high school is a snapshot of nature’s beauty. The chemists who developed it did so by finding “elegant mathematical relationships between atomic weights of elements and the properties of elements.” Doing so drove them to predict the existence of elements we didn’t even know to exist. It was the beauty that led them to fill the table in.

Resonant Beauty

The same type of patterns and relationships that led to the Periodic Table bring meaning and transcendence to our lives. Consider the relationship between mathematics and music, for instance. We can describe musical harmony using mathematical equations. But it works because it resonates with our souls.

The philosopher Leibniz described music as “the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.” But music has a way of moving more than just our feet to the beat of a song. It stirs our emotions. Tradition has it that when Handel was composing his epic Messiah, one of his servants walked in on him while he was writing the famous “Hallelujah Chorus.” The composer was weeping.

Handel is said to have remarked, “I do believe I’ve seen the gates of Heaven.”

Beauty Inspires Us

The beauty of a rainbow inspires us
Photo by Frans Van Heerden

The God-glorifying nature of music is just one of the many ways beauty is manifested in our world. The symmetry, form, and vivid colors of a butterfly enchant us. We marvel at the complexion and immensity of a rainbow, or at the power and majesty of a grand landscape.

These things elicit involuntary reactions in us when we experience them. They can take our breath away. They can make our feet start tapping. They can bring us to tears. They are the kinds of things that add richness and depth to our lives.

Reproducing Beauty

We discover beauty in our world and then try to reproduce it in the things we create. And we long to create things because we are made in the image of the ultimate Creator. Part of what it means to be “made in the image of God” is that we attempt to mimic Him. And when we’re successful, the results are stunning.

Today, we are beginning to use the digital capabilities we have discovered in biology to revolutionize our computers. We design airplanes based on the features we see in birds. We write literature and poetry that elevates our aspirations and invokes the divine. We paint landscapes to reflect the majesty of the world we live in.

We build cathedrals that point to the heavens.

And that’s the point.

Beauty Transcends Us

This all makes sense inside the Christian worldview because beauty is just another form of truth. And like truth itself, we don’t make it up. It draws us in. The character of God is the common reality that explains the trinity of truth, goodness, and beauty. They are the essence, character, and reflection of Him.

Beauty is not subjective. It’s part of the fabric of the universe. It inspires us to think outside ourselves.

 

Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal and has also been published in Touchstone, and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and a M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/30TeZzO

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Don’t Buy “The Science Guy”

Don’t Buy “The Science Guy”

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By Bob Perry

Bill Nye, “The Science Guy” used to host an enjoyable and informative TV program for kids. In the last few years, however, Bill Nye has entered into a different realm. Apparently, he fancies himself an arbiter of all truth; the man who can quite literally save the world. But if you have any interest whatsoever in seeking that truth in a coherent, consistent, intelligent way, please watch this two-and-a-half-minute video. As you do, think about what he is saying. And don’t just focus on his defense of Evolution. Listen to his method of reasoning. It really is beyond me how someone who is considered a scientific sage could ever deliver such a rambling string of nonsense. But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to admonish anyone who dares to disagree with him. And if you do, he wants you to shut up and leave the education of your children to real scientists… like him.

The Actual Bill Nye

There are a few facts you should know about Mr. Nye that are directly applicable to the content of this video. For starters, one would think that the media’s favorite “science guy” would be … Oh, I don’t know … an actual scientist. In fact, given the topic of this video, we might assume that our “science guy” would have some kind of background or advanced degree in the biological sciences. Bad assumption.

Bill Nye has nothing of the kind.

Mr. Nye’s education consists of a B. S. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University. While he was a student there, he took an astronomy class from Carl Sagan. Thus ends the list of Bill Nye’s scientific credentials.

After college, Nye was hired by the Boeing Aircraft Company in Seattle, Washington. There, he developed a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor. But that wasn’t what gained him his notoriety. His real fame came after he won a Steve Martin look-alike contest and started doing stand-up comedy in Seattle nightclubs in 1978.  Since then, he has received two Honorary Doctorate Degrees. But these weren’t awarded for scientific work. They were conferred on him for giving a couple of college commencement addresses after he became “Bill Nye, The Science Guy.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

Ridicule Is Not an Argument

I want to be fair here. Just because Bill Nye’s resumé as a “science guy” is lacking, it doesn’t mean we should dismiss him out of hand. We need to look at his arguments. But we also need to recognize the difference between an argument and an assertion. Anyone can make assertions. But no one should accept those assertions unless they are supported by evidence, logic, and sound reasoning. Mr. Nye gives none of these. He simply offers a diatribe that completely collapses when you take the time to think about what he’s saying. So, let’s look at Mr. Nye’s case.

What Does He Mean by ‘Evolution’?

The “science guy” starts off by lecturing us about how ridiculous it is to not believe in “evolution.” The problem is, he never defines what he means by the word. Does he mean that species change and adapt to the environment? If so, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a single person who doesn’t believe that. But there are several other definitions of evolution. Which one must we accept?

Let’s assume that Mr. Nye subscribes to the most comprehensive definition of evolution. This is what I refer to as Big ‘E’ Evolution. It’s the idea that all life is the result of a purposeless, materialistic process that began by a random accident. That process can account for every imaginable life form, from the first self-replicating, single-celled organism to you and me.

Let’s break down his argument.

Truth Doesn’t Depend On Geography

First, he offers us this:

“Denial of evolution is unique to the United States … we are the world’s most advanced technological society … people move to the United States because of our general understanding of science.”

This first assertion is baseless and demonstrably false. I know of plenty of folks who live all over the world who do not accept ‘Evolution.’ They do so because they have not seen any credible evidence to support the most comprehensive view of evolution Mr. Nye subscribes to. But let’s say Mr. Nye is correct. Let’s pretend the only people who don’t believe in Evolution are Americans. What does this prove?

Nothing.

Where someone lives does not determine the truth content of what they believe. And the claim that people immigrate to the United States because of our general understanding of science is ridiculous on its face.

Denying Evolution Holds People Back?

But what of Bill Nye’s second assertion? Here, he claims that:

“When you have a portion of the population that doesn’t believe in Evolution, it holds everybody back.”

How, exactly, did Mr. Nye come to this conclusion? My undergraduate education is in Aerospace Engineering. I learned how to design airplanes and then how to fly them. I don’t accept Evolution. So how is it that I am “holding everybody back”?

To show the absurdity of it, let’s turn this one around. Suppose I claimed that those who do accept Evolution are holding everybody back. Would that be a valid argument against Evolution? Not in the least.

Misapplying Metaphors

So far, Mr. Nye’s comments have only demonstrated some flaws in basic logic. But then he takes things further and detonates a suicide vest on any trust we should have in him as a “scientist.”

“Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science … [Not believing in it] is analogous to doing geology and not believing in tectonic plates … you’re just not gonna get the right answer. Your whole world is just gonna be a mystery instead of an exciting place.”

Whatever one thinks of the concept of Evolution, there is one fact about it that we all agree on. Evolution is a process that explains the emergence and diversity of life on Earth. It is a noble attempt to explain how life emerged from the chemical elements that existed on the early Earth. It is a theory about how those chemicals combined and interacted with one another to produce complex biological systems that live and grow and reproduce.

The heart of Evolution is a process, not the parts that are used by the process.

So, let’s look at Mr. Nye’s comments in that light. He mentions tectonic plates. Tectonic plates are enormous slabs of rock in the Earth’s crust that slide and rub against one another to cause earthquakes. Geology is the study of the process that moves those plates around. So, Mr. Nye is confusing the plates with the process that moves them. He doesn’t seem to understand that he is equating completely non-analogous categories of things. Parts are physical things. But the processes that act on those things are something completely different. It seems to me a “science guy” would comprehend the difference.

A “Complicated” World

Building on his last point, Bill Nye begins his transition to questioning the character and motives of those who disagree with him;

“Once in a while, I get people who don’t really — who claim — they don’t believe in evolution. My response is, ‘Why not?’ Your world just becomes fantastically complicated when you don’t believe in evolution.”

Notice that Mr. Nye believes that no one could really disbelieve in Evolution. They only “claim” to do so. And he never offers any examples of the responses he receives to his “Why not?” question. Who is he asking? Why does he dismiss them? We can’t really know how to evaluate their answers unless we know the actual reasons they are giving. The fact that Mr. Nye doesn’t accept their responses is hardly a reason for us to reject them. After all, we’ve already demonstrated that his reasoning in support of Evolution is flawed.

But there’s another question. Why would someone’s rejection of Evolution make their world “fantastically more complicated”? Once again, the conclusion does not follow.

Using Young Earth Creationist Logic

Mr. Nye’s next point is pretty fantastic all by itself. And let me be clear. I am not taking a stand one way or the other about the age of the universe here. I am simply pointing out how Mr. Nye is using the same logic as a young earth creationist when he says this:

“Here are these ancient dinosaur bones … radioactivity … distant stars … the idea of deep time … billions of years … if you try to ignore that your worldview just becomes crazy.”

Here, Mr. Nye says that rejecting Evolution is the equivalent with believing in a young universe. Or, conversely, believing in an old universe means that you accept Evolution. But, once again, he is confusing categories.

Evolution is a theory about biology. The age of the universe comes from the study of cosmology. These are completely different areas of study! All one would have to do to show that Mr. Nye’s assertion is false is declare themselves to be either an “old universe, non-Evolutionist,” or a “young universe Evolutionist.” Voila!

This is the same false equivalence most young-Earth creationists use against those of us who believe the universe is old. I wonder how Mr. Nye would react if someone pointed out to him that his thinking is exactly like the young-Earth creationists he abhors.

Questioning Your Parenting

Finally, Bill Nye makes it personal. He wants you to know that if you disagree with him, your status as a parent is in question:

“I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world that is completely inconsistent with the universe, that’s fine … but don’t make your kids do it … because we need them … we need engineers who can build things and solve problems …”

Once again, Mr. Nye demonstrates his failure to understand basic logic when he ties belief in Evolution to our ability to produce “engineers who can build things and solve problems.”

It seems fairly obvious that one can be a perfectly competent airplane designer and not have any opinion about Evolution. In fact, a highly competent engineer can be completely ignorant about the concept of Evolution. Mr. Nye proved that himself when he designed a hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor for Boeing.

But beyond that, Mr. Nye has stepped out of a scientific critique (if you could consider him to have ever been inside one). In his arrogance, he assumes he has the right to tell you what you should be allowed to teach your children.

The Totalitarian Impulse

This is the totalitarian impulse. It’s a mindset that thinks some people can determine what other people should be allowed to think. Those of us who honor scientific objectivity, free thought, and academic tolerance need to recognize this kind of talk when we hear it. People who think like this are the most intolerant kinds of people in the world. They are destroying the concept of free thought in the academy. It is intellectual dishonesty writ large. And it can become dangerous for those who don’t think the “right way.”

Mr. Nye insists that you need to believe in Evolution. If you don’t, you must be overcome because our society needs “… scientifically literate voters and taxpayers.”

Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Nye. If scientific literacy suddenly became a prerequisite for voting, it looks to me like a certain “science guy” would have to stay home on election day.

 

Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at: truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal and has also been published in Touchstone, and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and a M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons.

Original Blog Source: http://bit.ly/30bWkij

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Three Signs of the Church’s Spiritual Disorientation

Three Signs of the Church’s Spiritual Disorientation

By Bob Perry

It is a scary thing to be disoriented. At best, it means you’re headed in the wrong direction. But if you’re flying airplanes, it means you have no reference to the ground. You can’t navigate. You may not even know which way is up. In other words, being disoriented is not just an annoyance. It’s dangerous. But there is something even more dangerous than being disoriented — and that is not knowing you’re disoriented. I hate to say this, but I believe many people in the church are becoming spiritually disoriented. And many of them don’t even have a clue.

Let me explain what I mean.

Spatial Disorientation

On the evening of July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy, Jr. crashed his private airplane into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. I remember that night well because I was the First Officer on a Delta Boeing 767 descending into New York’s LaGuardia Airport at exactly the same time.

The visibility over the water that evening was horrible. The haze, humidity, and sun angle combined to turn the sky around us into a giant, yellow-gray blob. There was no horizon. No way to tell which was up. Between us, the Captain and I had nearly 40 years of combined flight experience. Even so, we were uncomfortable. New York air traffic control was allowing airplanes to use visual flight rules. But we insisted on using instrument procedures for our approach and landing.

John Kennedy, Jr. had no business flying in weather conditions like that. He was not an experienced pilot. Sadly, the plane he was flying did have the instrumentation he needed to operate in those kinds of conditions. But Kennedy wasn’t trained to use it. An investigation of the accident revealed the cause. JFK, Jr. had “failed to maintain control of the airplane … as a result of spatial disorientation.”

Unable to Recover

Spatial disorientation occurs when a pilot loses his reference to the ground. With no visible horizon, his inner ear and eyes begin fighting with each other. They give him conflicting signals. He gets the sensation he’s turning when he is actually flying straight. What he sees and feels don’t match. Making the correction that feels right actually exacerbates his problem.

Experienced pilots know how to recognize the symptoms of spatial disorientation. When they do, they are trained to trust their flight instruments. A failure to do so can quickly become a matter of life and death.

Kennedy didn’t understand what was happening to him. Inexperienced pilots rarely do. By the time he realized something was wrong, it was too late. His lack of training doomed him. His attempts to correct the situation only made it worse. Within a matter of seconds, he was plunging toward the ocean in a “death spiral.”

It probably went something like this…

Three Signs of Disorientation

There are three elements of spatial disorientation to be aware of:

  1. You can’t see the ground.
  2. Your sensations lie to you about your alignment with the world. You think everything is fine.
  3. When you realize something is wrong, your attempts to correct things make them worse.

Spiritual Disorientation

I share this story for a very specific reason. I believe that many in the church have become “spiritually disoriented.” They are flying through this life in a way very similar to the way JFK, Jr. was flying over Long Island Sound.

I don’t say this to be provocative. I say it because I have evidence to back it up.

Media research pollster George Barna makes a living studying the beliefs and behaviors of the Christian community. He has published several findings about how evangelical Christians think and act very much like the world around them. He also looks at their actual beliefs and attitudes. The parallels between spatial and spiritual disorientation are fascinating to see…

They Can’t See the Ground

What grounds the Christian worldview? What is our reference point? I submit that it is no different than what grounds reality itself.

The truth.

This is a topic for another discussion that I will engage more completely later. For now, let me say that for thousands of years, thinking humans have seen truth as an objective feature of the world. It is something external to us. We don’t invent it. We discover it. For that reason, truth is as real as the ground we walk on. And truth is what should ground our thinking.

But today, we have come to believe that truth is up to us to decide for ourselves. As one example, George Barna discovered that:

Only 59% of Christians said that there are moral truths that are unchanging, that truth is not relative to the circumstances.

In other words, we have lost sight of what should ground our thinking. We have no firm reference to the truth.

They Think Everything Is Fine

No longer grounded in the truth, most Christians think and act just like the world around them. For example:

At the same time, this little nugget ought to jump out of Barna’s data and grabbed you by the throat:

92% of self-described evangelical Christians view themselves as being “deeply spiritual.”

We think and act pretty much like the world around us. But we overwhelmingly believe ourselves to be “deeply spiritual.” How is that possible?

Part of the answer lies in the fact that society has lured us into redefining what it means to be “spiritual” by dissecting our heads from our hearts. We have let the culture convince us that the heart is the most important thing about us. Feelings and emotions guide us. When those feelings and emotions are positive, we are on the right track. Those who have perfected this search are considered society’s most “spiritual” people.

Their “Corrections” Make Things Worse

Once feelings and emotions replace truth as the most important point of reference, we use them as our primary means of engaging the world. In our efforts to avoid making people feel bad, we dodge the truth. Feelings become more important than reality itself.

Grace abounds, but truth is dying in the streets.

As an example, imagine an anorexic girl who is nothing but skin and bones. When she looks in the mirror, she thinks she is overweight. She diets and purges. Her weight continues to decline.

Would it be loving and kind of us to tell her she’s looking great? Should we encourage her to continue down the path she has chosen? After all, telling her, she looks like death warmed over would certainly hurt her feelings.

Obviously not. We have a duty to tell her the truth, no matter how much it hurts her feelings. Playing along with her delusion would only make things worse. And it wouldn’t be loving. It would be dangerous.

One doesn’t have to think very hard to see the parallels going on in our culture with all forms of sin and rebellion. Yet we have prominent church leaders and spokesmen demanding that we do just that. But a church that avoids the truth by honoring feelings above truth is a church that has lost sight of the meaning of love.

Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is tell someone the truth.

Overcoming Spiritual Disorientation

The culture has infiltrated the church. As a result, the church is becoming more and more spiritually disoriented. Many prominent church leaders deny the core principles of our faith. They promote a disoriented Christianity that allows the culture to critique the church instead of leading a biblical critique of the culture. And too many in the church have accepted what they’re saying.

 

Bob Perry is a Christian apologetics writer, teacher, and speaker who blogs about Christianity and the culture at: truehorizon.org. He is a Contributing Writer for the Christian Research Journal, and has also been published in Touchstone, and Salvo. Bob is a professional aviator with 37 years of military and commercial flying experience. He has a B.S., Aerospace Engineering from the U. S. Naval Academy, and a M.A., Christian Apologetics from Biola University. He has been married to his high school sweetheart since 1985. They have five grown sons.

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

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