Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 18

Challenge Response: A Real God Would Have Protected the Original Gospel Manuscripts

Here's my response to this week's challenge:

A Scientist���s Answers May Reflect His Worldview More than Science

In this short video from Ligonier, Stephen Meyer demonstrates not only some evidence for a beginning of the universe, but also how a scientist���s worldview and biases can direct and constrain his findings, distorting what he considers to be ���scientific������sometimes without his even realizing it. Even a scientist as great as Einstein.

Of course, one may easily say, ���Christian scientists will have the same problem!��� That���s fair. This is why you must always consider carefully whether a scientist is making a fair interpretation of the evidence at hand���i.e., that the evidence actually points to his conclusion���and that one of his interpretive principles isn���t to rule out a particular conclusion that falls outside his worldview, prior to and regardless of the evidence (as Einstein did).

(HT: Tim Challies)

Links Mentioned on the 4/06/16 Show

The following is a rundown of today's podcast, annotated with links that were either mentioned on the show or inspired by it:

Commentary: Does Pro-Life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished? (0:00)

Why Pro-Lifers Don't Support Punishing Women for Abortion by Rachel Lu
Pro-Life Crash Course by Amy Hall
The S.L.E.D. Test by Alan Shlemon

Questions:

��� Announcements:

STR Cruise to Alaska ��� August 6-13, 2016 

1. At what point do Christians take their business away from companies who fight for positions contrary to Christianity? (0:28)

Six Reasons North Carolina Got It Right by Frank Turek
Religious Liberty Is Under Fire Once Again by Amy Hall
RFRA Reaction Is Driven by Agenda, Not Principle by Amy Hall (Companies are being hypocritical by refusing to do business in states they disagree with, but denying that same right not to participate to others.)

2. Is it moral to use vaccines that were developed decades ago with fetal tissue? (0:46)

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (Find links from past shows here.)

To take part in the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00���6:00 p.m. PT), follow @STRtweets and use the hashtag #STRtalk.

Challenge: A Real God Would Have Protected the Original Gospel Manuscripts

From ���862 Reasons Christianity Is False��� (formerly known on this blog as ���463 Reasons Christianity Is False������it���s been growing):

Christians claim that God directly inspired the authors of the gospel books, even to the point of dictating each word, so as to make the text inerrant. But if God was so concerned about getting the historical record of Jesus���s ministry correct, why would he have allowed those original, and supposedly inerrant manuscripts to be lost for the generations of Christians to come? Why would he not have protected these documents to ensure there would be no ambiguity as to the ultimate truths he was trying to convey. The loss of the original manuscripts is entirely consistent with a human-inspired product, not one overseen by an unlimited deity.

Does his conclusion follow from our loss of the original manuscripts? Can you think of any reasons why God might not have wanted us to have the original manuscripts forever? Answer this challenge in the comments below, and then come back here on Thursday to hear what Alan has to say.

[Explore past challenges here and here.]

Was the Disciples' Authority to Forgive Sins Passed to the Church?

Greg discusses the authority to forgive sins in this week's video blog:

The Right to Life Is Not Like the Right to Drive

Christopher Kaczor, author of The Ethics of Abortion, has an interesting post at First Things (from 2011) explaining how two human beings could have an equal right to life, yet the killing of one could be a worse wrong than the killing of the other. (See his post for the six reasons he lists that ���justify the common moral intuition that late abortion is worse than early abortion, without justifying early abortion and without denying human equality.���)

His post is written in response to those who argue that a gradualist view of the right to life explains why, for example, killing an adult human is a greater moral wrong than killing a human in the womb. (The gradualist view is the idea that one attains the right to life when one reaches the proper level of development, age, location outside the womb, etc.) Responding to the argument comparing the right to life to other rights like the right to vote (which we don���t have until we reach a particular age), he says:

We should reject, for example, the analogy between the gradual development of a right to life and the gradual attainment of other rights. There is a radical difference between the right to life and the rights to vote or drive or hold public office. Those rights can be enjoyed only by those who can meet the corresponding responsibilities. Five-year-olds have no right to drive, because they cannot meet the responsibilities of drivers. But the right to life does not have any corresponding responsibilities, and so it may be enjoyed by those who cannot discharge any duties, like children before the age of reason or mentally handicapped adults. Although some rights are attained gradually as the person matures, the right to life is not one of them.

The difference between positive and negative rights comes into play here. A positive right (the right to be provided with or have access to something���a right that is created by the government, manmade and dependent on time and place) can be tied to a responsibility that justifies that right. A negative right, on the other hand, is a right to not have something we already possess taken away. The right to life is not a positive right promising the provision of something by the government; it���s a negative right preventing the government (or anyone else) from taking away what is already ours.

As further evidence of the absurdity of the gradualist view, Kaczor offers this scenario:

In addition, some human beings in utero are more physiologically developed than some human beings after birth. Compare a pregnancy that continues two weeks past the due date to a baby born prematurely at twenty-five weeks. The more physiologically developed human being remains within the uterus; the less physiologically developed human being is found outside his or her mother in the nursery. If the gradualist view were true, killing a baby born at twenty-five weeks would be more justifiable than aborting one at forty-two weeks��� gestation. No one thinks this, not even the gradualists.

Read the rest of ���Equal Rights, Unequal Wrongs.���

Links Mentioned on the 4/01/16 Show

The following is a rundown of today's podcast, annotated with links that were either mentioned on the show or inspired by it:

Guest: Michael Kruger on Bart Ehrman's claim we can't trust the Holy Week Gospel accounts (0:00)

Are the Stories in the Bible About the Last Days and Hours of Jesus True? ��� Bart Ehrman's article
The Heresy of Orthodoxy by Michael Kruger
The Question of Canon by Michael Kruger
Canon Fodder ��� Michael Kruger's website
Paul's view on the historicity of the resurrection (Spoiler: It matters!)
Based on Eyewitness Accounts ��� Video of Peter J. Williams
The Gospels: Oral History, Not Oral Tradition by Amy Hall (quoting Richard Bauckham)
Original New Testament Manuscripts Could Have Been Copied for Centuries by Amy Hall (quoting Michael Kruger)
How the Early Church Sought to Resolve Textual Variants by Amy Hall (quoting Dan Wallace)

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (Find links from past shows here.)

To take part in the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00���6:00 p.m. PT), follow @STRtweets and use the hashtag #STRtalk.

Religious Liberty Is Under Fire Once Again

Religious liberty laws are back in the news again, and I���m seeing a huge amount of misunderstanding out there, so here are a few posts (from previous flare-ups) explaining religious liberty laws:

RFRA Reaction Is Driven by Agenda, Not Principle ��� If you only read one of these posts, read this one.
How RFRA Works
RFRA Is Not Jim Crow
The Truth about Arizona���s Religious Freedom Bill
Hobby Lobby Case: Are Religious Exemptions Unconstitutional?
Refusing to Serve Individuals vs. Refusing to Participate in Events
LGBT Activist Says We Should Be Allowed to Discriminate against Ideas
Articles on the Religious Freedom Fiasco

What happened in Georgia (please read Ryan Anderson���s analysis of the situation) has proved it doesn���t matter how the law is watered down or what compromises are made by lawmakers; when a law protecting religious liberty is proposed, hysteria ensues (see the track record in the links above), religious liberty is called ���religious liberty��� by the press, and the law is mischaracterized as a license to discriminate���even though that doesn���t remotely describe how these laws work, and as I wrote last year, ���One federal law and 19 state laws exist���and yet no one can point to a single instance where a RFRA was misused to create any of the Jim-Crow-type scenarios the media are warning us about.���

But that doesn���t matter, because the people throwing their full weight against these laws are opposed to diversity. They have no interest in working out a way for everyone to live together in peace. Their goal is to crush religious liberty and force everyone to actively agree with them in word and deed, and if achieving that goal requires stirring up a little hysteria, misinformation, and anti-religious bigotry, then clearly they have no problem with that. The strategy, after all, is effective.

And don���t think Christians are immune to this strategy. In a comment I saw today on Facebook, a Christian said this, closely mirroring what is endlessly repeated to us by the media: ���I see most of the current conservative fights in states for ���religious freedom��� as thinly veiled attempts to institutionalize the biases of a narrow religious perspective at the expense of those who don���t agree with them.��� (Note the scare quotes.)

The irony of his statement is that the exact opposite is true. Upholding a person���s right to opt out of doing something that goes against his beliefs (e.g., performing a same-sex marriage ceremony) is in no way institutionalizing any perspective, but using the government to force a person to act according to some other group���s beliefs (and against his own) most certainly is. That���s the very definition of ���institutionalizing the biases of one perspective at the expense of those who don���t agree with them.��� How did everyone get so mixed up about this?

Yes, the Evolutionary Process Does Depend on Randomness

Atheists will often assert that evolution is not random. (In fact, I was having this conversation just last night!) This is true if we���re talking about the natural selection part of the process, but natural selection can only select from what already exists. It���s the mutations that must provide the new genetic information, and mutations do not occur according to what is needed for an organism to survive; they can only cause the being to survive (and thus be selected) after they happen to occur. Stephen Meyer explains:

Yes, of course, natural selection is a ���nonrandom��� process as Dawkins correctly insists. Rates of reproductive success correlate to the traits that organisms possess. Those with fitness advantages will, all other things being equal, out-reproduce those lacking those advantages. Got it. Understood.

Yet, clearly, there is more to the evolutionary mechanism than just natural selection. Instead, the standard neo-Darwinian evolutionary mechanism comprises (1) natural selection and/or (2) genetic drift acting on (3) adaptively random genetic variations and mutations (of various kinds). Moreover, as conceived from Darwin to the present, natural selection ���selects��� or acts to preserve those random variations that confer a fitness (or functional) advantage upon the organisms that possess them. It, further, ���selects��� only after such functionally advantageous variations (or mutations) have arisen. How could it do otherwise? Selection does not cause novel variations; rather, it sifts what is delivered to it by the random changes (e.g., mutations) that do cause variations. Such has been neo-Darwinian orthodoxy for many decades.

All this means that as a mechanism for the production of novel genetic information, natural selection does nothing to help generate functional DNA base (or amino acid) sequences. Rather it can only preserve such sequences (if they confer a functional advantage) once they have originated. In other words, adaptive advantage only accrues after the generation of new functional genes and proteins ��� after the fact, that is, of some (presumably) successful random mutational search. It follows that even if natural selection (considered separately from mutation) constitutes a non-random process, the evolutionary mechanism as a whole depends precisely upon an ineliminable element of randomness, namely, various postulated or observed mutational processes. (Nor is any of the above particularly controversial within evolutionary biology....)

Read the rest of the post, and see here for more on why the creation of all life through a random development of meaningful genetic information is, as Meyer said, ���overwhelmingly more likely to be false than true.���

Links Mentioned on the 3/30/16 Show

The following is a rundown of today's podcast, annotated with links that were either mentioned on the show or inspired by it:

Commentary: Jury Duty (0:00)

What Counts As Evidence? by Amy Hall (quoting J. Warner Wallace)

Commentary: Using a Game Plan (0:20)

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

Questions:

��� Announcements:

Upcoming events with STR speakers 
Greg in Playa del Rey, CA on 4/02/16 ��� Decision Making and the Will of God

1. Do the variations in old New Testament manuscripts mean we don't have a reliable Bible? (0:42)

The Fundamental Premise behind Ehrman's Claims by Melinda Penner
"Misquoting" Jesus? Answering Bart Ehrman by Greg Koukl (includes a link to an article explaining how variants are counted���or see here)
Investigating Bart Ehrman's Top Ten Troublesome Bible Verses by J. Warner Wallace
An Interview with Daniel B. Wallace on the New Testament Manuscripts by Justin Taylor (describes the types of variants)
The Heresy of Orthodoxy by Michael Kruger
The Question of Canon by Michael Kruger

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (Find links from past shows here.)

To take part in the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00���6:00 p.m. PT), follow @STRtweets and use the hashtag #STRtalk.