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El Apologista

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.

Living In A Post-Truth Culture

1. Does Truth Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Bob Perry

I’ve made the case that truth, goodness, and beauty are objective features of the world we live in. Hopefully, you’ve found that to be interesting. But please don’t think this is just an esoteric triviality. It’s not. We are living in a post-truth culture. But it’s a place where the objective nature of truth, goodness, and beauty are deeply relevant. Our view of objective truth affects everything about how we live our lives. It’s the antidote to moral relativism. Truth matters. And understanding the profundity of that simple fact will revolutionize the way you interact with our world.

Here’s why.

The Assumptions of the Culture

Consider the three topics I’ve been talking about. And think about how you’re used to hearing about them:

Truth — “That may be true for you, but it’s not for me.”

Goodness — “Don’t impose your morality on me!”

Beauty — “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Despite thousands of years of human knowledge and experience, our contemporary culture has made every one of these subjective. Suddenly, they’ve each become things we decide for ourselves.

In fact, if you were to express the notion that anyone of these is not subjective, you would be considered arrogant. Oppressive. A Neanderthal who wants to impose your personal values on the rest of the world.

Who are you to do that?!

The World Turned Upside Down

This is cultural relativism. A place where we are supposed to accept the idea that everyone’s opinion about every topic is equally valid.

And remember that pesky definition of truth as: “correspondence to reality”? That’s out the window. The new normal tells us that our highest calling is to “be true to ourselves.”

But what does that mean, exactly?

Follow Your Heart

When your standard for truth and virtue is the person you see in the bathroom mirror, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what’s coming. Feelings rule. You are encouraged to “follow your heart.” And following your heart means you evaluate reality based on emotion instead of reason and logic.

If it feels good, you do it.

“If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad …”

Sheryl Crow

Conforming to reality becomes passé. An archaic inconvenience.

But there is a problem with that. And the problem is that the “persistent belief in something that does not conform to reality” is called a delusion.

Our culture has elevated delusion to an art form.

Philosophy Is About The Real World

It turns out that the whole discussion of truth, goodness, and beauty is more than the hobby of navel-gazing philosophers. These things have real-world consequences. Ideas always do. Good or bad, we live in a world where those ideas will play themselves out.

And so, we see the consequences of bad thinking in our politics and in the family and community relationships on which our politics depend. We read about them in the news — and in the “fake news” generated at both ends of the political spectrum. We suffer the repercussions of denying reality in our economics. And our children and grandchildren will — quite literally — pay the price for those willful delusions.

Most of all, we see it in the glorification of sexual autonomy that has infiltrated every corner of our culture. Denying reality is at the core of issues like abortion, sexual libertinism, transgenderism, and same-sex behavior. Defending each of them is nothing but a persistent delusion.

Faith Communities Are Not Immune

The Church is most certainly not immune to the corrosive acid of bad thinking. The vacuous nonsense you can find in the Word-Faith Movement, Universalism, and so-called “Progressive” Christianity is proof enough of that. And every societal ill listed above has also found its way into the church.

But when you boil it all down, the problems we see in our culture are nothing new. In fact, they’re as old as mankind. The denial of truth, goodness, and beauty started soon after we came on the scene. The Fall of Man was simply the first instance where human beings made the free-will decision to exchange the truth of God for a lie. Since then, we’ve only pushed the limits of that futile exercise even further.

The good news is that the antidote to bad thinking has always been the same. Seek truth in all its forms. Then align your life with it.

The Church should never be a safe space for bad ideas. It must be a place where people are treated with gentleness and respect, but also a place where corrupted thinking goes to die.

45 Quotes About Relativism vs. Truth

1. Does Truth Exist?, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Luke Nix

“When it comes to truth, the outcome affects not only individuals but nations and even civilizations. What starts looking like a small abstract issue ends with titanic, public consequences for all who love freedom and justice.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“Although someone’s beliefs and assumptions may not be true and do not describe reality, they will still drive their behavior. So if someone doesn’t believe in truth, count on him to lie. If someone says there are no objective facts, expect her to be careless with facts to further her own interests. If someone explains everything by referring to evolution and the ‘selfish gene,’ be sure that at some point, he will be extremely selfish on behalf of the fitness of his own survival.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“Our challenge today is not to lament, protest, or simply talk about the crisis of truth in one of a hundred ways. Rather, it is to do something about it by becoming people of truth and learning to live free.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“Far from being a naive and reactionary notion, truth is one of the simplest, most precious gifts without which we would not be able to handle reality or negotiate life.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“When nothing can be judged except judgment itself– ‘judgmentalism’–the barriers between the unthinkable, acceptable, and doable collapse entirely. And then, since life goes on and the sky doesn’t fall, people draw the conclusion that the original concern was unfounded. Lighten up, the newly amoral say as they skip forward blithely, complicit in their own corruption.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“If truth is truth, then differences make a difference — not just between truth and lies but between intimacy and alienation in relationships, between harmony and conflict in neighborhoods, between efficiency and incompetence in business, between reliability and fraud in science and journalism, between trust and suspicion in leadership, between freedom and tyranny in government, and even between life and death.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“While we all may have a sense of what is evil and what is good under the philosophy of cultural tolerance, evil and good can only be relative ideals. Without an objective truth—a set of universal moral values—good and evil are defined by the individual, community, or society. Therefore we have no moral basis by which to judge another person, community, or nation for what they do or don’t do.” Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, The Beauty of Intolerance
“Right up to the end of the nineteenth century, the most important course in an American student’s college career was moral philosophy, or what we today call ethics.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“Much of today’s focus is on ‘prevention ethics’ rather than on principled ethics. It is more concerned with ‘not being caught’ (or sued or exposed in the press) than with doing right.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“What is seen as important are issues related to corporations, schools, courts, governments, and the treatment of the environment– not the individual’s virtue and responsibility that underlie these secondary issues.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“The current ethics is often taught with a shallow view of human nature and an even more superficial view of evil in human society.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“The emphasis now is on surface, not depth; on possibilities, not equalities; on glamour, not convictions; on what can be altered endlessly; not achieved for good; and on what can be bought and won, not gained by education and formation.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“The present preoccupation with ethics in elite intellectual centers has an element of absurdity because they have no moral content left to teach. The fruit of the Western universities in the last two hundred years has been to destroy the possibility of any moral knowledge on which to pursue moral formation.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“If truth is contingent upon the society in which we live…there is nothing intuitive or universally or absolutely true about freedom from torture or freedom from slavery; our society just happens to have come up with these values over time.” Stephen McAndrew, Why It Doesn’t Matter What YOU Believe If It’s Not True

“If moral truths do not exist as a foundation for law, then the law itself becomes merely a system of raw political power accountable to no one.” Scott Klusendorf, The Case for Life

“Just as iron filings are drawn to the strongest magnet, so minds weakened by a loss of truth are drawn to the most powerful positions.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“What happens when we succeed in cutting away truth-claims to expose the web of power games only to find we have less power than the players we face? If truth is dead, right and wrong are neither, and all that remains is the will to power, then the conclusion is simple: Might makes right. Logic is only a power conspiracy. Victory goes to the strong, and the weak go to the wall.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“Just as the Greeks entered Troy concealed in the hollow wooden statue of a horse, so post-modernism is providing the cover for all sorts of ideas and practices to enter American life–ideas that on their own would have difficulty gaining entrance.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“Short of total isolation, the American society you live in today is going to influence how your children make moral choices in one way or another. Stop and think about it. What are the voices of society telling your children about the choices they are about to make? What is the central theme that today’s culture emphasizes over and over again? If you were to reduce it to a single sentence, it might look like this: You have the right to choose for yourself what is right for you and what is wrong for you–and no one should judge that choice.” Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, The Beauty of Intolerance

“When nothing can be judged except judgment itself— ‘judgmentalism’—the barriers between the unthinkable, acceptable, and doable collapse entirely.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“If everything is endlessly open to question and change, then everything is permitted, nothing is forbidden, and literally nothing is unthinkable.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“Applying to the skeptics the skepticism they apply to others [pushes] them out toward the negative consequences of their own beliefs.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“While all beliefs appear consistent to those who believe them, they always have one of two problems. They are either constricting or contradictory. In the first case, the beliefs are more consistent but are incomplete in the sense that they are too small for the fullness of life…And in the second case, the beliefs are more comprehensive but are inconsistent—which in the worst cases makes them self-refuting- a problem Chesterton calls ‘the suicide of thought.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“Inevitably, moral choices based on our own moral compass will often be wrong choices. And wrong moral choices can result in consequences ranging from minor disappointments to major disasters emotionally, relationally, physically, and spiritually.” Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, The Beauty of Intolerance

“Truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“It is that truth, like meaning as a whole, is not for to us to create but for us to discover. Each of us may be small, our lives short, and our influence puny. But if truth is there—objective, absolute, independent of minds that know it— then we may count on it.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“In order to discover truth it is necessary to coldly dissect and examine all of our prejudices and inherent biases to ensure we receive unbiased answers. This takes effort. It is always easier to simply accept the ideas presented to us than to question the status quo.” Stephen McAndrew, Why It Doesn’t Matter What YOU Believe If It’s Not True

“While we all may have a sense of what is evil and what is good under the philosophy of cultural tolerance, evil and good can only be relative ideals. Without an objective truth—a set of universal moral values—good and evil are defined by the individual, community, or society. Therefore we have no moral basis by which to judge another person, community, or nation for what they do or don’t do.” Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, The Beauty of Intolerance
“We are all entitled to our own beliefs, but this doesn’t mean each of us has our own truths. Our beliefs describe the way we think the world is. Truth describes the objective state of the world, regardless of how we take it to be. Beliefs can be relative, but truth cannot. So when we consider the nature of truth—that it is an objective description of reality—it makes no sense to say that something is true for you and not for me.” Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, The Beauty of Intolerance

“Without truth, a belief may be only speculation plus sincerity.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“While we all may have a sense of what is evil and what is good under the philosophy of cultural tolerance, evil and good can only be relative ideals. Without an objective truth—a set of universal moral values—good and evil are defined by the individual, community, or society. Therefore we have no moral basis by which to judge another person, community, or nation for what they do or don’t do.” Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, The Beauty of Intolerance

“It is often said that to have a fulfilling life, three essentials are required: a clear sense of personal identity, a deep sense of faith and meaning, and a strong sense of purpose and mission.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“For those who find themselves without faith in God and who conclude that the world they desire does not fit with the world they discover, life is fundamentally deaf to their aspirations.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“For all the fragile precariousness of our human existence on our tiny earth in the vastness of space, we may throw the whole weight of our existence on God, including our truth-seeking desires, because he is wholly true.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“Those who put their faith in God do so for all sorts of good reasons, but the very best reason is that they are finally, utterly, and incontrovertibly convinced that the faith which they put their confidence in is true.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“All truth is God’s truth and is true everywhere, for everyone, under all conditions. Truth is true in the sense that it is objective and independent of the mind of any human knower. Being true, it cannot contradict itself.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“The beauty of intolerance is its opposition to wrong and evil in the world—in alignment with God’s righteous and perfect standard of justice, equality, human rights, and caring for others. Intolerance of evil is not mean-spirited and condemnatory; it is actually the only way to be loving and caring.” Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, The Beauty of Intolerance

“What is more beautiful than God’s intolerance expressed in his moral outrage toward the tragedies of poverty, racism, sexual abuse, slavery, AIDS, bigotry, and other such evils?” Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, The Beauty of Intolerance

“Human beings are truth-seekers by nature, and truth persuades by the forces of its own reality.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“It is impossible to experience love without being truthful, and it is impossible to discover truth without loving it.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“Truth is our best friend, and it is an inseparable part of what real love is. While cultural tolerance may disguise itself as caring, understanding, and loving, it lacks the moral authority of an authentic love that looks out for the best interest of others. That is another quality of authentic, real love—it is always other-focused.” Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, The Beauty of Intolerance

“As human beings, we are by nature truth-seekers; as fallen human beings, we are also by nature truth-twisters. And a proper account of truth in the human project must do justice to both.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin
“Conforming our desires to the truth is harder in the short term but easier in the long. We give up our need for control and submit to truth outside us, which, if we were wrong about truth before, requires repentance rather than rationalization. We have to face up to reality rather than trying to fit reality into our schemes. But the long-term outcome is freedom because…truth is freedom and we are engaging with reality at it truly is.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

“What distinguishes God’s unconditional acceptance from that of our culture is authentic love. His love is intended to make the security, happiness, and welfare of another as important as his own. It is other-focused, not performance-focused. God knows the real truth about us—that we were created in his image—and that truth allows him to separate the person from performance. God unconditionally values us for who we are without always approving of what we do because he separates the value of the person from the acts of the person.” Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, The Beauty of Intolerance

“The Christian faith is not true because it works; it works because it is true. It is not true because we experience it; we experience it—deeply and gloriously—because it is true. It is not simply ‘true for us’; it is true for any who seek in order to find.” Os Guinness, Time For Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

Book Review: Time for Truth: Living Free in A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin

1. Does Truth Exist?, Atheism, Legislating Morality, Culture & Politics, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Luke Nix

Introduction

“Time for Truth: Living Free In A World of Lies, Hype, and Spin” by Os Guinness has been on my reading list for several years now. It is a relatively short book, so I popped it in my bag to read during downtime on a trip to see family. By the time I had made it through the first chapter, I wished that I had made time to read it sooner!

In today’s cultural and political climate that seems to twist and spin reality to fit certain narratives, it is vital that people be able to distinguish between truth from falsehood. The history of the East demonstrates the implications of denying truth as an accurate reflection of reality. In “Time for Truth,” sociologist Os Guinness takes the reader through the philosophies and events that led to the fall of the East and compares them to current philosophies and events in the West. He warns that if the West continues on its current trajectory, it is headed for a similar collapse.

As usual, this review will take the form of a chapter-by-chapter summary and conclude with my thoughts and recommendation.

Book Introduction: But Not Through Me

Guinness opens his book by recalling the revolutionary event of the fall of communism in eastern Europe and Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The significance of this at the time was that under communist rule, propaganda was taught instead of truth so much so that the populace believed what was false to be true. But it was only when some members of the populace pointed out that what was being taught by their government were lies told in order to maintain power and control. The taste of and for truth grew and grew until finally, the purveyors of false narratives were overthrown, and the truth set these nations free from the lies and tyranny.
Ironically, at the same time, this revolution of truth took place in the East, the West was busy relativizing truth the way the communists already did in the East. Guinness sets up the rest of his book by pointing out that such a postmodern view of truth violates reality and morality (why it was overthrown in the East), and the West is on the road to accepting the same view of truth. However, if the West does not recognize the mistakes of the past (in the East), then it will suffer a similar fate. But it is not enough to merely make observations about the past; the people of the West must take action now and become “people of truth” to prevent a repeat of history.

Chapter 1: Back to The Moral Stone Age

In order to show that the West is, in fact, on this same path, Guinness takes a look at the change in students’ reactions to the morally repugnant practice described in the story “The Lottery.” The 70s, 80s, and 90s saw a dramatic shift in the schools regarding moral judgments. The 70s and 80s saw students gradually shift their focus from outrage over the most heinous human behaviors (human sacrifice, in the case of “The Lottery”) to focusing on the more trivial aspects of the same tale. Fewer moral judgment were made, and more stylistic critiques became the main focus. In the 90s, this shift seemed almost complete, to where students were allergic to giving moral judgments about another’s cultural practices, no matter how heinous the action.

Guinness observes too that ethical training in today’s higher academy has also shifted from making any moral judgments to merely providing information about cultures and how to avoid punishments if one does not agree and wishes to participate in prohibited practices. On this new view, no one is truly deviating from any objective standard; they just act differently from others. Guinness ties this to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. These writings take the idea that “God is dead” and vehemently attacked the very concepts of knowledge and morality- stating that nothing can be known or trusted, and nothing is as it seems. Nietzsche supports a radical skepticism and distrust about everything and everyone, and thus, a meaningless and purposeless existence is all that any individual has.

Chapter 2: We’re All Spinmeisters Now

With Nietzsche’s idea that with God’s death comes the death of all knowledge and truth about anything, people are free to tell whatever stories they wish that will accomplish their personal goals (or a “greater truth”)- whether the stories are true or not. As multiple people tell their own contradicting stories and these lies are discovered, others’ trust in these people and those who support them dwindles. This causes a vicious cycle of skepticism that self-perpetuates. The singular truth stands alone in a multitude of lies promoted by their own multitude of untrustworthy sources. In this sea of “spin,” the truth ultimately becomes unidentifiable by the individual and even outside their grasp. The individual has nothing solid to grab onto to ground themselves in reality, so they are forced to make up stories of their own and live their own lie of a life.

Guinness illustrates this in practice with the very public figures of Mark Twain and Rigoberta Menchu. The stories that were told by both (Samuel Clemens, in the case of “Mark Twain”) were false, but they each acted as if they were true, and the culture responded accordingly. Clemens’ false story had more pop-cultural effects, while Menchu’s lies had political and educational ramifications. Even after the lies were discovered, both held firm saying that these were “their truths.” Guinness makes the point that when knowledge is not attainable, lies can perpetuate like this easily in a culture, and the culture is eager to accept them even if the stories are discovered to be false. On this postmodern view of truth, everyone is free to make up their own truth from moment to moment, all depending on their feelings at the moment or whatever they feel will accomplish their goal at that moment.

Chapter 3: The West Versus Itself

Quite often, this battle for the concept of truth has been seen as an “East vs. West” battle. Where the eastern philosophies held to relative and subjective views of truth and western philosophies held to the objective view of truth. Guinness observes that Geoge Washington and the other Founding Fathers saw their newly formed country as an experiment with “ordered liberty”- freedom exercised within the confines of objective truth. But postmodern views of truth have sneaked their way into western culture, not unlike a Trojan horse. This attack has been so successful since the formation of America that even the President of the United States in the 1990s saw and exercised the liberty to attempt to adjust truth to fit his own desires.
Guinness takes the time to demonstrate how seven unique characteristics of a postmodern mind were exhibited in President Bill Clinton during his sex scandal. Because of Clinton’s public face and the respect of Americans for the office of the President of the United States, his postmodern actions shifted western thinking more permanently toward postmodern views of truth. This view of truth has become so ingrained in western thought now that the battle is now the older western though versus, the newer western thought. The west is engaged in a war against itself for itself.

Chapter 4: Differences Make A Difference

Unfortunately, many people do not see why it makes a difference in what view of truth one holds. Guinness explains that the way one views truth can have great implications. He takes the atheist survivor of Auschwitz, Primo Levi, and the theist Russian revolutionary, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, to compare and contrast the views’ implications. Levi held that no God exists to ground truth. He tasked himself with ensuring that Auschwitz was never forgotten or repeated, but the weight of such a task, without any ultimate purpose or truth to ground his claims in, ultimately led to his suicide. On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn merely publically promoted his view of truth to release Russia from the shackles of the communist regime, that made a habit of presenting falsehood to its people as truth in order to subjugate them. Solzhenitsyn had an ultimate purpose and objective truth behind his actions that made them meaningful. Levi had no purpose and only relative truth behind his actions that made them meaningless.

These differences are not trivial; rather, they are impactful. Guinness offers that the West has become so hypnotized by the supposed “freedom” that having no objective truth brings, that it has not been able to experience true freedom. True freedom requires identity and limits. But if there is neither (what relative views of truth assert), then the individual must endlessly wrestle with their identity and what limits exist before they can even begin to experience true freedom. Because there is no objective truth about identity or limits, there is no end to their wrestling; thus they never will experience true freedom, and their pursuit becomes a prison. It is only when one recognizes that objective truth exists and the Foundation of Truth (God) that objective identity and objective limits can be discovered and freedom is even possible to experience.

Chapter 5: Turning The Tables

So far, Guinness has argued against relativistic views of truth by demonstrating the implications of such a view. But that is not always the most effective way to argue. It tends to be more effective if one argues on the skeptic’s own grounds. Guinness proposes two strategies for argumentation: one negative and one positive. The negative approach takes the relativist’s own relativism and follows it to its logical implications until it violates something of great value to the relativist. This usually doesn’t take long since the relativist values their own objectivity. While they desire that everyone else be a relativist, they do not apply such a requirement and fate to themselves. Seeing that their own views may be thought but not lived may be enough to jerk their thinking about truth back to reality.

Guinness argues that it is often not until a person is brought face-to-face with the dire implications and emptiness of their view of truth that they are willing to entertain an alternative. Ironically, when an individual or even a nation is at its philosophical and ethical breaking point, is when the opportunity to argue for the alternative is most effective. This opens the door to the positive approach. It also appeals to what the relativist values. With the inability for relativism to produce what the relativist values now in place, the positive approach shows how the objective view of truth genuinely provides what the relativist values. Guinness encourages the reader to consider that while it may seem that darkness has overtaken the individual relativist or a relativistic culture, that darkness may actually be an indicator that a new day is coming.

Chapter 6: On Record Against Ourselves

In Guinness’ final chapter, he encourages the reader to be a seeker of truth. As one is seeking objective truth, though, it is important to realize that there are subjective perspectives that do cause people to come to different conclusions about reality. While this is no excuse for seeing things inaccurately, it is an explanation for such and a beginning point to recognize in our own search for truth to guard against. One more thing can keep people from seeing reality as it is.
The biblical worldview holds that by nature, we are not just truth-seekers; we are truth-twisters. It is a sin in our lives that pushes us towards false narratives and rationalizations. Interestingly enough, it is the dual nature of man that explains both the successes and failures of modern and post-modern views of truth. Guinness explains that is it only the biblical worldview that can provide a foundation for not just the pursuit of truth but also how and why such a pursuit can go wrong. He encourages the reader to accept, because of its explanatory power, the biblical worldview of our sinfulness and our need for the Savior, Jesus Christ. Christ is the truth; thus it is in accepting Him that will allow us to truly be “people of truth,” and it is only as true “people of truth” that we can experience real freedom.

Reviewer’s Thoughts

“Time for Truth” was a fascinating read. I have to admit that I had picked up the book a couple of times in the past and (re)started before I was able to make it through this time. The introduction was a little slow, but once I passed that, it picked right up, and I was hooked! I really enjoyed how Guinness took the reader through several events in recent history that have led to the crisis of truth in American culture. I found myself stopping many times to reflect on events in my own lifetime that Guinness described and older events’ effects on what I experience today. The way that Guinness connects modern events with the crisis of truth that he speaks against is what will draw the reader in. This is not merely a theoretical treatise on truth; it is an analysis of events in our lifetimes and a warning of what will come if the West follows in the footsteps of the East regarding the ideas of truth.

Post-modernism has saturated our culture, and its effects are being played out before our eyes and in ways that are so subtle that we may not even recognize it. For anyone who is concerned about modern western culture’s treatment of truth, this book is highly recommended. For anyone who is fed up with the claims of “fake news,” this book is highly recommended. For anyone who is tired of seeing politicians change the truth for their own agendas, this book is highly recommended. For anyone who is concerned with history, this book is highly recommended. For anyone who is concerned with their children’s future, this book is highly recommended. Needless to say, this book is highly recommended for all serious readers and those who are fascinated by politics and modern culture. It will enhance your perspective on what is taking place today and give you not only an explanation for what is taking place but also provide a solution. Go get this book!

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

2. Does God Exist?, Atheism, Philosophy of Science, Theology and Christian Apologetics

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?

The Idea That Faith is Caught and Not Taught is False…and It’s Hurting the Next Generation

Apologetics for Parents, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Natasha Crain

As Christians, we have all kinds of pithy sayings that make their way through churches and establish themselves as generally accepted truths. Some end up on bumper stickers, some on wall decals, and some just get repeated so many times that people think they’re actually in the Bible.

There’s a popular one among parents that I keep hearing lately, and each time I hear it, I cringe. Not only is it false, but it’s particularly damaging to the discipleship of the next generation.

It’s the idea that “Faith is caught, not taught.”

When people say this, they’re usually trying to emphasize that faith is a matter of the heart, not a cold belief in a set of facts that someone has taught them. And of course, there’s truth to that sentiment. But nine times out of ten that someone relays this saying to me, there’s an implication that our kids’ spiritual development has little to do with the “intellectual stuff” of apologetics, but rather everything to do with how well we live our faith in front of them (apologetics is the study of why there’s good reason to believe Christianity is true).

This belief is desperately wrong. At best, it results in a passive approach to discipleship. At worst, it’s an excuse for intellectual laziness.

Let’s look at why.

First, we have to clearly understand what faith is.

Faith, in its most basic sense, is trust.

A blind faith is a trust that has little or no justification. For example, imagine that I claimed there’s an invisible unicorn living outside my house. When you ask me what reasons I have for that belief, I tell you, “I don’t need reasons. I just have faith.” In this case, I would be acknowledging that I hold a blind faith in my invisible unicorn—it’s a faith without reason.

At the other end of the faith, spectrum is a person trusting in something they have good reason to believe is true. For example, I’m willing to get on an airplane because I have faith that it will safely get me to where I need to be. I can’t be certain, but I know there is a good reason to place my trust in the process.

Importantly, this means that faith is not a way of knowing something. It’s how you respond to what you know. This is such an important distinction. Atheists often suggest that faith is inferior to science as a way of knowing about the world, but faith isn’t a way of knowing about the world at all. It’s trust that we place in Jesus in response to what we know about the world (and that knowledge comes from many sources).

In short, biblical faith is not blind faith. Biblical faith is trusting in what we have good reason to believe is true, based on the extensive evidence God has given us.

Now that we’ve established an accurate understanding of what faith is, we can see two major problems with the idea that “faith is caught, not taught.”

It emphasizes passing on our trust rather than the reasons for our trust.

If faith is trust, then what this saying effectively states is that our trust is something that should rub off on our kids as they see how we live our lives.

Our trust in Jesus may or may not rub off on our kids, but regardless, that shouldn’t be our primary goal in discipleship.

Instead, we need to pass on the good reasons that should lead to our kids’ trust in Jesus. Otherwise, they’re just borrowing our own trust without knowing the justification for it. That’s a faith that’s waiting to crumble as soon as it’s significantly challenged.

It’s worth a side note here that parents shouldn’t assume a well-lived Christian faith is even desirable to their kids. There are numerous kids who grow up in loving Christian homes, with parents who truly “walk the walk,” but abandon their faith. Why? Those kids might admire the sincerity of their parents’ convictions but feel no desire to “catch” that same faith because they don’t believe it’s built on good reason. Once again, this points back to the need to pass on the reasons for the hope we have (1 Peter 3:15), not simply our own trust.

A deep understanding of the reasons for faith is not something that’s simply “caught.”

Even if we restate the saying as “Reasons for faith are caught, not taught,” it still doesn’t work.

Here are just a few major concepts that will never be passively caught based on how you live out your Christian faith:

What objective evidence is there for the existence of God?

Do science and God contradict one another?

Can all religions point to the same truth?

What historical evidence is there for the resurrection?

Was Christianity copied from pagan religions?

How do we know that the Gospels are based on reliable eye witness testimony?

How do we know that the Bible we have today hasn’t been corrupted in the copying process over hundreds of years?

How can a good God permit so much evil and suffering?

Between my two books, I cover 70 of these critical questions that kids need to understand today. My new book, coming in March, focuses on 30 more questions specifically about Jesus (Talking with Your Kids about Jesus: 30 Conversations Every Christian Parent Must Have). That’s one hundred important questions kids need to understand given the challenges today…and that’s one hundred important questions they won’t grasp deeply just by watching how you live your faith.

These things are taught.

And the need to proactively teach is woven throughout Scripture:

“Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely so that you do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them fade from your heart as long as you live. Teach them to your children and to their children after them” (Deuteronomy 4:9).

“…he commanded our ancestors to teach their children, so the next generation would know them, even the children yet to be born, and they, in turn, would tell their children” (Psalm 78:5-6).

“Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching” (Proverbs 1:8).

“Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).

There’s good reason the Bible tells us to teach and train and not just keep walking with the Lord while kids look on. Those eyes can’t physically see all that needs to be mentally learned. And as long as Christian parents think all they need to do is model what it looks like to put their trust in Jesus, kids will keep struggling when challenged on the justification for such a life.

Does passing on an understanding of all the good reasons for faith means a child will necessarily follow Jesus? Not at all. But when we’re obedient in our calling to be teachers (not just walkers!), we can be confident that we have given our kids the opportunity to develop their own trust in Jesus and didn’t simply encourage them to borrow our convictions.

A borrowed faith is readily handed back.

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

Philosophy of Science, Theology and Christian Apologetics

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:

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.)
There is a rational order to the structure of that world.
Objective truth about that world exists.
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.

Correcting four myths about the history of the Crusades

Legislating Morality, Culture & Politics, Theology and Christian Apologetics

By Wintery Knight

Here is an interesting article from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Intro:

The verdict seems unanimous. From presidential speeches to role-playing games, the crusades are depicted as a deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history. In many corners of the Western world today, this view is too commonplace and apparently obvious even to be challenged.

But unanimity is not a guarantee of accuracy. What everyone “knows” about the crusades may not, in fact, be true. From the many popular notions about the crusades, let us pick four and see if they bear close examination.

The four myths:

Myth #1: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world.
Myth #2: Western Christians went on crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims in order to get rich.
Myth #3: Crusaders were a cynical lot who did not really believe their own religious propaganda; rather, they had ulterior, materialistic motives.
Myth #4: The crusades taught Muslims to hate and attack Christians.

Here’s the most obvious thing you should know. The Crusades were defensive actions:

In a.d. 632, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were all Christian territories. Inside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which was still fully functional in the eastern Mediterranean, orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion. Outside those boundaries were other large Christian communities—not necessarily orthodox and Catholic, but still Christian. Most of the Christian population of Persia, for example, was Nestorian. Certainly, there were many Christian communities in Arabia.

By a.d. 732, a century later, Christians had lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Spain, most of Asia Minor, and southern France. Italy and her associated islands were under threat, and the islands would come under Muslim rule in the next century. The Christian communities of Arabia were entirely destroyed in or shortly after 633, when Jews and Christians alike were expelled from the peninsula.6 Those in Persia were under severe pressure. Two-thirds of the formerly Roman Christian world was now ruled by Muslims.

What had happened? Most people actually know the answer, if pressed—though for some reason they do not usually connect the answer with the crusades. The answer is the rise of Islam. Every one of the listed regions was taken, within the space of a hundred years, from Christian control by violence, in the course of military campaigns deliberately designed to expand Muslim territory at the expense of Islam’s neighbors. Nor did this conclude Islam’s program of conquest. The attacks continued, punctuated from time to time by Christian attempts to push back. Charlemagne blocked the Muslim advance in far western Europe in about a.d. 800, but Islamic forces simply shifted their focus and began to island-hop across from North Africa toward Italy and the French coast, attacking the Italian mainland by 837. A confused struggle for control of southern and central Italy continued for the rest of the ninth century and into the tenth. In the hundred years between 850 and 950, Benedictine monks were driven out of ancient monasteries, the Papal States were overrun, and Muslim pirate bases were established along the coast of northern Italy and southern France, from which attacks on the deep inland were launched. Desperate to protect victimized Christians, popes became involved in the tenth and early eleventh centuries in directing the defense of the territory around them.

If you asked me what are the two best books on the Crusades, I would answer God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Baylor professor Rodney Stark and The Concise History of the Crusades by Professor Thomas F. Madden. If you get this question a lot from atheists, then I recommend you pick these up. Anything by Rodney Stark is useful for Christians, in fact.

4 Ways Parents Bore Their Kids Out of Christianity

Apologetics for Parents

By Natasha Crain

The highlight of my summer was a family RV vacation to Kings Canyon National Park. Behind our campground flowed a gorgeous river that I returned to multiple times over the course of our trip. Each time I went, I sat and pondered the “big questions” of life. There’s something about the majesty of creation that bubbles up a deep sense of awe about who God is, what he has done, who we are, and the meaning of life.

But this sense of awe also led me to reflect on how so many kids are apathetic about their worldview. A common thread I hear from parents is that their kids just don’t care about their spiritual beliefs, or just don’t care about Christianity specifically. There are certainly many kids who explicitly reject Christianity today, but I just as often hear about kids who are ambivalent.

How does ambivalence happen? As I sat by a river contemplating that question, a thought struck me:

Kids are being bored out of Christianity.

And they’ve been bored out of it by the Christians around them. Since parents are the primary spiritual influencers in the lives of kids, I want to suggest four ways we sometimes let this happen.

1. Parents rely on Sunday school for their kids’ spiritual development.

The vast majority of Sunday school programs don’t exactly challenge kids to think deeply about their faith. It’s Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Daniel, Jesus’s birth, Jesus’s miracles, and Jesus’s resurrection… repeat. Oh, and how could I forget Jonah! Always a Sunday school favorite.

But hearing the same stories over and over each year without going deeper is hardly different than reading kids the same book over and over and expecting them to really engage.

That’s boring.

When parents aren’t having rich conversations about faith with their kids at home—conversations that help them see the relevance of all those Sunday school lessons—Christianity can start to feel like nothing more than the sum of a handful of Bible stories. That’s pretty easy to leave behind when kids leave home.

2. Parents treat spiritual beliefs as subjective truths.

There are a number of Christian parents who treat spiritual beliefs as a matter of subjective truth—this is what works for them, but something else may work better for their kids. This usually sounds like some version of, “I want my kids to have their own faith journey, and that might not be Christianity for them. I just want them to be happy people with good values.”

Of course, every kid will be on their own faith journey (that goes without saying), but in this context, the parent is suggesting that it doesn’t matter where the child ends up because all beliefs are equally valid. Happiness and good “values” (however the parent defines those) are prioritized over their kids’ pursuit of objective truth—what is true about reality for everyone.

But Christianity is either true or false; it can’t be true for one person and not another. If Jesus was raised from the dead, then he was who he said he was and Christianity is true. If he wasn’t, our faith is in vain, and Christianity is a false worldview (1 Corinthians 15:14).

How does all this lead to boredom? If it doesn’t really matter what you believe, there’s no need to really put effort into determining what’s “true”—true in such a case is just whatever you stumble into thinking works for you over the course of your life. Why bother caring so much about the belief system your parents happen to adhere to?

3. Parents live their lives in a way that’s indistinguishable from those of nonbelievers.

Even for those parents who recognize that Christianity is a matter of objective truth with far-reaching implications, it’s easy for daily life to not reflect that in an obvious way to kids. Parents get busy, and family spiritual disciplines (e.g., Bible reading and prayer), church, serving, and meaningful faith conversations go out the window before anyone really notices what happened.

If the only detectable difference between the lives of a Christian family and those of nonbelieving families is that the Christian family occasionally attends church, kids will (rightly) question what difference being a Christian really makes. And if they don’t know why it matters that much, they won’t be motivated to really commit their own lives to the Lord. They’ll be bored by occasionally listening to “Christian stuff” that doesn’t translate into anything they see as meaningful.

4. Parents don’t teach kids what big faith questions they should be asking.

As I’ve written about before, I grew up in a Christian home and spent hundreds of hours in church. I never rejected my faith, but when I left home for college, it didn’t even occur to me to find a church or join a Christian college group. As far as I had thought through faith, I was saved, I would live my life without doing anything too bad, and go to heaven someday.

In other words, I had some rough “basics” down, yet it was hardly an invigorating faith. No one had ever challenged me to think about big, deep, meaningful questions that would become increasingly relevant as I got older. Things like: How can I be confident that God exists? Why is there so much evil in a world created by a good God? Why is God so “hidden?” What happens to those who haven’t heard about Jesus? Why do some prayers go unanswered? (You can look at the tables of contents in my books for 70 such questions kids should be thinking about.)

No one ever put these kinds of questions in front of me to say, “Hey! Here are some really big questions you should be thinking about when it comes to your faith—questions that have compelling answers and will lead you to a deeper conviction of what you believe!”

Instead, I just kept learning the “basics”—important basics, but only the basics. I wasn’t even aware that there could be so much more richness to my faith. I believed Christianity was true, but it was a boring kind of true. Familiar and comfortable like an old chair.

Plenty of kids today walk out of faith with a big yawn for this reason. Maybe they aren’t explicitly rejecting Christianity in this case, but they’re intellectually bored enough by it that they have no problem relegating it to a small corner of their lives until they feel the need to dust it off again.

Unfortunately, that perceived need often arises in the midst of a life crisis that finally prompts them to ask these questions. And those who have never really taken the time to work through them before will be woefully unprepared. What in the past was boredom can easily then turn to rejection in the darkest of times?

Spiritual apathy may seem less immediately troubling to parents than a child’s outright rejection of faith, but the end result is often the same. Boredom can end up being a quiet faith killer that parents unintentionally foster in their own home.

Need help fighting spiritual boredom? In my next post, I’ll offer ideas for reinvigorating your family’s spiritual life.

What Christian Parents Should Learn from Marty Sampson Losing Faith

Apologetics for Parents

By Natasha Crain

My blog has been quiet since earlier this year because I was finishing my next book (Talking with Your Kids about Jesus; March 2020). Now that I’ve turned it into the publisher and my kids are heading back to school, it’s time to resume blogging!

I debated what my first post should be as I start back up, but decided there were some especially important things to address with the headlines this week about Marty Sampson of Hillsong United saying he’s losing his faith. Hillsong is one of the most popular worship bands today, and Sampson’s announcement has led to endless discussions on social media this week. Last month, a similar high-profile announcement was made by Joshua Harris, a pastor, and author known for his book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye.

If you haven’t seen it, here’s what Sampson posted on Instagram:

“Time for some real talk. I’m genuinely losing my faith, and it doesn’t bother me. Like, what bothers me now is nothing. I am so happy now, so at peace with the world. It’s crazy.

This is a soapbox moment so here I go… How many preachers fall? Many. No one talks about it. How many miracles happen. Not many. No one talks about it. Why is the Bible full of contradictions? No one talks about it. How can God be love yet send four billion people to a place, all ‘coz they don’t believe? No one talks about it. Christians can be the most judgmental people on the planet—they can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people. But it’s not for me.

I am not in any more. I want genuine truth. Not the “I just believe it” kind of truth. Science keeps piercing the truth of every religion. Lots of things help people change their lives, not just one version of God. Got so much more to say, but for me, I keeping it real. Unfollow if you want, I’ve never been about living my life for others.

All I know is what’s true to me right now, and Christianity just seems to me like another religion at this point. I could go on, but I won’t. Love and forgive absolutely. Be kind absolutely. Be generous and do good to others absolutely. Some things are good no matter what you believe. Let the rain fall, the sun will come up tomorrow.”

Some of the takeaways from Sampson’s announcement are obvious and have already been dissected ad nauseum this week (for example, no one should esteem Christian leaders to the point that if they fall away from Jesus, it impacts their own faith). However, there is a less obvious point I want to highlight today with implications for Christian parents specifically.

It’s not enough for kids to know that answers to faith questions are available.

As many have pointed out this week, Sampson’s claim that “no one” is talking about the various faith questions he raised is absurd if taken literally. Of course, people are talking about those questions, and they’ve done so for thousands of years. In fact, they’re so common that I’ve written about every point he raised in one or more of my books. He certainly didn’t stumble upon some kind of unexplored territory.

But I’m pretty sure he knows that, and it’s not what he meant.

In fact, he later posted a list of some apologists (authors and speakers who defend the truth of Christianity) for people to check out if they have similar questions.

Sampson clearly knew that answers to his questions were available. The problem here is not a question of available answers…it’s a question of available processing.

Building a Home Where Kids Process the Big Questions

When I talk to people after speaking engagements, a lot of parents will say something like, “It’s so good to know that the answers are out there! I want my kids to know that!” There’s no indication that they have any intention of personally digging into those answers with their kids. They feel it’s enough to point them to some ethereal box of knowledge when a need eventually arises.

Sampson’s statement attests to the serious problem with that idea.

He knew answers were out there, but was apparently living in a Christian climate that never really engaged with them. That silence screamed, “The Christians around me aren’t thinking about faith as deeply as I am, otherwise they would be talking about this more and questioning too.”

For adults like Sampson, this tends to be a function of the climate in the church you attend and the believers you fellowship with. For kids, it’s in large part a function of the climate in your home.

In homes that foster a thinking climate, parents:

Proactively raise big questions for discussion—even when their kids aren’t asking them. (If you don’t know what those should be, there are seventy conversations to have with your kids in my first two books.)
Explicitly tell their kids that questions are welcome and regularly ask what questions they have.
Share their own questions about faith, and how they’ve searched for answers.
Make it clear that biblical faith isn’t blind, and that God has given us much evidence for the truth of Christianity.
Explore the beliefs and logical implications of other worldviews, so their kids better understand Christianity in context.
Press kids to explain why they believe what they do, not just reiterate their viewpoints (on any topic, not just spiritual matters).
Engage in conversation about hot cultural topics from a biblical worldview rather than avoid them.
Model intellectual curiosity about faith by reading/listening to/watching content that grows their own understanding.
Study the Bible with their kids for understanding, not just to memorize isolated verses.

In homes that don’t necessarily foster a thinking climate, parents tend to:

Instill the idea that when we have questions, we just have to have more faith (but biblical faith is trusting in what you have good reason to believe is true).
Assume kids will learn what they need about the Bible in Sunday school (but they won’t).
Equate discipleship with raising kids with “good values” (but Christianity is far more than a set of values).
Fear their kids’ questions, believing they will lose credibility if they can’t answer them (but kids can learn just as much from exploring answers with you).
Believe they have no other spiritual responsibility than to pray for their kids (but we are called to be active disciplers).

Every Christian parent should take a hard look at whether they’re fostering a “thinking climate” in their home. Giving your kids opportunities to process questions (not just telling them answers are available) so they don’t conclude “no one” is talking about these things is a critical part of discipleship today.

And there’s one other related point I want to note from Sampson’s statement. He said, “Lots of things help people change their lives, not just one version of God.”

A lot of kids today—and clearly adults, too—are looking for the worldview that “works” for them. The one that “changes their life.” The one that “feels” the best. The one that “helps.”

The problem is, that’s not the decision-making criteria we should use when considering worldviews. The question should always be, What is true? What is the true picture of reality?

If Christianity changes my life, but Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, Christianity is still a false worldview, and I shouldn’t hold it. It’s not true.

If atheism changes my life, but Jesus was raised from the dead, atheism is still a false worldview, and I shouldn’t hold it. It’s not true.

Kids not only need opportunities to process big questions of faith, but they also need direction on how to weigh the answers; they need to clearly understand that the search should always be about discovering what is true…not about what subjectively “works.”

I was sitting in a church group recently that was discussing the need for teaching kids these things. One parent very honestly acknowledged his doubts about all this, saying, “It just seems like one more thing we’re supposed to do.”

If that’s how you feel, I want to leave you with this thought. If your child’s math teacher only wanted to teach them addition because subtraction is just “one more thing,” you’d think they were crazy. Subtraction is an integral part of math. In the same way, raising your kids in a home that presses in on deep questions of faith is not one more thing for Christian parents… it’s an integral part of discipleship today, whether you feel like engaging in that process or not.

As you begin this school year, consider what the temperature is in your own home’s thinking climate. If it’s been cold, don’t feel guilty—just turn up the heat. If you don’t, the secular world will… before you even realize your kids have burned out of Christianity.

Tag Archive for: truth

Jorge Gil: Next Gen Apologist to the World

Stopped

Detention: Part One

Detention: Part Two

El Director

Hombre de Dios

Out of the Trenches

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