Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 23

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Brett Kunkle is live on the broadcast today, looking forward to talking with callers.

Ask your question. Share a piece of your mind. Call with your question or comment at (855) 243-9975, outside the U.S. (562) 424-8229. The broadcast is live today 4-6 p.m. P.T. ��� commentary and your calls. Streaming live online.

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The program is two hours now, and one hour podcast episodes are posted on Wednesday and Friday.

Challenge: The Bible Says Men Are Superior to Women

We���re back to ���40 Problems with Christianity��� again this week:

There are numerous scriptures in the Bible that clearly pronounce that a man is superior to a woman, which was consistent with the times it was written. Consider the following scriptures:

1 Corinthians 11:3: But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.

1 Corinthians 11:8-9: For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.

But times have changed. Societies the world over have bent over backwards to give women equal status and opportunity. Most marriages are now viewed as a 50/50 venture, a two-person team, as opposed to a master and a helper. The sticking point is that a real God and those he allegedly inspired would have foreseen this ultimate evolution of societal mores.

There are definitely some unstated assumptions behind this challenge, so there���s much to say here. I recommend starting by thinking through those Bible verses to determine whether or not they���re speaking of a hierarchy of value. (I think there���s enough in the first verse alone to prove otherwise.) His views on the grounding of morality (see his last sentence) and the place of roles in determining value are also problematic. I���d like to hear your positive case, as well: What does the Bible actually teach about the value of men and women?

Tell us how you would respond to this objection in the comments below, and Brett will post his video response on Thursday.

[Explore past challenges here and here.]

Could Panentheism Be an Understanding of God's Nature?

Is it possible that panentheism is a lost understanding of God���s nature?

LGBT Activist Says We Should Be Allowed to Discriminate against Ideas

After refusing to bake a cake that said ���support gay marriage,��� a couple in Northern Ireland was convicted of political and sexual orientation discrimination. Now LGBT activist Peter Tatchell is publicly disagreeing with the court���s decision, saying, ���Much as I wish to defend the gay community, I also want to defend freedom of conscience, expression and religion.���

[T]he court erred by ruling that Lee was discriminated against because of his sexual orientation and political opinions.

His cake request was refused not because he was gay, but because of the message he asked for. There is no evidence that his sexuality was the reason Ashers declined his order. Despite this, Judge Isobel Brownlie said that refusing the pro-gay marriage slogan was unlawful indirect sexual orientation discrimination. On the question of political discrimination, the judge said Ashers had denied Lee service based on his request for a message supporting same-sex marriage. She noted: ���If the plaintiff had ordered a cake with the words ���support marriage��� or ���support heterosexual marriage��� I have no doubt that such a cake would have been provided.��� Brownlie thus concluded that by refusing to provide a cake with a pro-gay marriage wording Ashers had treated him less favourably, contrary to the law.

This finding of political discrimination against Lee sets a worrying precedent. Northern Ireland���s laws against discrimination on the grounds of political opinion were framed in the context of decades of conflict. They were designed to heal the sectarian divide by preventing the denial of jobs, housing and services to people because of their politics. There was never an intention that this law should compel people to promote political ideas with which they disagreed.

The judge concluded that service providers are required to facilitate any ���lawful��� message, even if they have a conscientious objection. This raises the question: should Muslim printers be obliged to publish cartoons of Mohammed? Or Jewish ones publish the words of a Holocaust denier? Or gay bakers accept orders for cakes with homophobic slurs? If the Ashers verdict stands it could, for example, encourage far-right extremists to demand that bakeries and other service providers facilitate the promotion of anti-migrant and anti-Muslim opinions. It would leave businesses unable to refuse to decorate cakes or print posters with bigoted messages.

In my view, it is an infringement of freedom to require businesses to aid the promotion of ideas to which they conscientiously object. Discrimination against people should be unlawful, but not against ideas.

Tatchell gets it. He didn���t just reflexively cheer the punishment of his political opponents; he recognized the principle behind the ruling (a denial of freedom of conscience), considered what the result would be if the same principle were to be applied to everyone (including his political friends), saw that it was an unjust infringement of a natural right, and realized the whole society is better off when we protect everyone���s political and religious freedom of conscience. He put principle and natural rights above agenda, and I find that very encouraging.

Links Mentioned on the 2/19/16 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: J. Warner Wallace ��� Accidental vs. Evidential Faith (0:00)

J. Warner Wallace���s website
Cold-Case Christianity by J. Warner Wallace
God���s Crime Scene by J. Warner Wallace
The Third Column by Greg Koukl
I���m Grateful to Be a ���One Dollar��� Apologist (You Should Be Too) by J. Warner Wallace
What Counts as Evidence? by Amy Hall (Quoting J. Warner Wallace)
The Atheist���s Dilemma by Jordan Monge
Plantinga Reviews Mind and Cosmos by Amy Hall (Quoting Plantinga's review of Nagel���s book against materialism)
Materialism Can't Explain Our World by Amy Hall

��� Announcements:

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

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.

God���s Glory Is United with Love, Not Selfishness

Christopher Morgan, co-editor of The Glory of God, gave a fantastic response in a recent interview to the question ���If God���s ultimate purpose is to glorify himself, does that mean God is selfish?���

The bare response [that ���good behavior seeks the highest end, so God making himself his own ultimate end is appropriate���] understates God���s genuine desire for the good of his creatures, and it fails to show how God���s love and his glory are united. Passages like Ephesians 1:3-14 and 2:1-10 showcase how God saves us out of love, displays his kindness toward us for all eternity, and is glorified through the entire display. Indeed, as we appropriately highlight the God-centeredness of God, we should stress the self-exalting God is also self-giving. As both self-exalting and self-giving, God saves us for his glory and our good. He gives himself to us, which simultaneously meets our needs and demonstrates his sufficiency. Thus, his love and glory cohere.

That God is simultaneously self-giving and self-exalting is also displayed in the mutual glorification of the persons of the Trinity. The glorious Father sends the glorious Son, who voluntarily humbles himself and glorifies the Father through his incarnation, obedient life, and substitutionary death (Phil. 2:5���11; cf. John 1:18; 6, 7:18; 10:1���30; 14:13; 17). In response the Father glorifies the Son, resurrecting him from the dead and exalting him to the highest place (Acts 3:13���15; Rom. 6:4; Phil. 2:9���11). The Father sends the glorious Spirit who glorifies the Son (John 16:14). And this all takes place to the glory of the Father (Phil. 2:11).

Each member of the Trinity gives to the others as a display of love and as a way of accomplishing cosmic redemption���.

Does any of this sound selfish? Not at all! The Father is out to bless the Son, and the Son is out to bless the Father! The mutuality and reciprocating love of God displayed within the Trinity flows outward even to bless us. Through union with Christ, we are recipients of God���s love and his manifold blessings, including forgiveness of our sins, adoption into his family, and final glorification (17:22). And because it is God who accomplishes all of this, it is for his glory, and it is for our good.

It���s the Trinitarian nature of God that makes all the difference here. Read the rest of the interview.

(HT: Keith Plummer)

Is Religion the Cause of Most Wars?

On Sunday, I returned home from another Berkeley Mission trip, where I intentionally exposed high school students to some of my atheist friends in the Bay Area. For the last six months, we���ve taught apologetics to these high schoolers from Upland Christian Academy. Now it was time for them to ���get off the sidelines and into the game��� and engage non-Christians with the truth. Of course, my atheist friends are more than happy to oblige, so they meet with our missions teams, challenge them with a short lecture, and then dive into some rigorous dialogue.

Without fail, a couple of our atheist guests will contend, ���Religion is the cause of most wars.��� This cultural mantra has been uttered so often and with so much force, it has come to be accepted as an undeniable declaration. Prominent atheists like Sam Harris contribute to the chorus of voices, arguing religion is ���the most prolific source of violence in our history��� (The End of Faith page 27). Richard Dawkins claims, ���There���s no doubt that throughout history religious faith has been a major motivator for war and for destruction.���

But as we trained students for this trip, we equipped them with a simple question to expose such claims: ���How did you come to that conclusion?��� (also known as Columbo Question #2). We simply taught students to recognize when someone makes a claim and then to request their supporting reasons. When our atheist presenters were challenged to provide justification, they could only offer up the Crusades, the Inquisition, 9-11, or vague references to Islamic terrorism. Certainly we recognize religion���s role in these examples, but three or four references cannot support the claim that most wars are caused by religion.

Not only were students able to demonstrate the paucity of evidence for this claim, but we helped them discover that the facts of history show the opposite: religion is the cause of a very small minority of wars. Phillips and Axelrod���s three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars lays out the simple facts. They examined 5 millennia worth of wars���1,763 total���and found that only 123 (or about 7%) were ���religious in nature.��� If you remove the 66 wars waged in the name of Islam, it cuts the number down to a little more than 3%. A second scholarly source, The Encyclopedia of War edited by Gordon Martel, confirms this data, concluding that only 6% of the wars listed in its pages can be labelled religious wars. Thirdly, William Cavanaugh���s book, The Myth of Religious Violence, exposes the ���wars of religion��� claim. And finally, a recent report (2014) from the Institute for Economics and Peace further debunks this myth.

We didn���t stop there. We showed students it gets worse for the atheists��� claim. A strong case can be made that atheism, not religion, and certainly not Christianity, is responsible for a far greater degree of bloodshed. Indeed, R.J. Rummel���s work in Lethal Politics and Death by Government has the secular body count at more than 100 million...in the 20th century alone.

Our students were able to see that a simple examination of the facts relieves religion from blame for most of the world���s wars. In addition, we were able to help cultivate in students a healthy skepticism of atheistic claims. If the skeptic will shout such an unsubstantiated claim so loudly and with so much force, what other skeptical claims might quickly fall apart under rational scrutiny?

Links Mentioned on the 2/17/16 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: Liabilities of a ���Living��� Bible and Constitution View (0:00)

David Clines���s Afterword on the change in his view on how to read a text

Questions:

1. Concerned about influence of grown daughter���s lesbianism on younger children (0:25)

Gay or Straight, We All Must Decide if We Love Jesus above All Else by Amy Hall ��� The question his daughter needs to settle first.

2. Are terrorists wrong in their interpretation of the Quran? (0:49)

Are We at War with Muslims? by Alan Shlemon

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.

How the New Meaning of ���Dignity��� Is Changing Everything

In an article on Public Discourse, Roberta Green Ahmanson explains why our culture���s new understanding of human dignity ���may well be the harbinger of a social transformation the likes of which we have not seen in the West for 1400 years���:

Dignity apparently justifies abortion, transgenderism, the redefinition of marriage, and physician-assisted suicide.

But what exactly constitutes this New Dignity? The work of George Kateb, professor emeritus at Princeton, provides a clue. In a book titled Human Dignity, Kateb writes: ���Since nature has no telos, the human species is at its greatest when it breaks out of nature.��� Human dignity is grounded, according to Kateb, in our ability to defy nature���to go beyond natural limitations and thereby create ourselves anew. Kateb agrees with Sartre: the freedom to ���become different through an upsurge of free creativity,��� which ���can never be conclusively defined or delimited,��� is ���the philosophical anthropology that underlies human dignity.��� This is the meaning of human dignity in a world with no clear origin, no purposeful end, no intrinsic meaning, and nothing real beyond matter in motion.

The New Dignity demands new positive freedoms, freedoms to���to remake our gender, to marry someone without regard to sex or the procreative potential of the union, to choose our time to die and enlist the medical profession in ending our lives, to not only abort a child developing in the womb but also to harvest his or her body parts for commercial gain. It also calls for new negative freedom, freedoms from���from all unwanted pain or discomfort, from limitations on what I can do to or with my body, from language or ideas that offend me or that challenge decisions I have made.

Dignity is no longer so much about who or what we are; it is about what our unfettered will can do, and what it can forbid others to do.

Ahmanson���s observation explains much of what���s happening today. (Remember this controversy?) She goes on to describe how the Christian view of human dignity���intrinsic human value resulting from being made in the image of God, a dignity which cannot be granted or revoked by any government���changed the world, beginning with new sexual norms that revolutionized all of society (see ���Sexual Expression Is a Worldview Issue��� for more on this).

This is all heading towards a very bad end because it���s based on a false foundation. We cannot remake ourselves into whatever we want to be because nature does have telos. Sooner or later, our society will lose its fight against human nature. Reality will win. And it���s likely to beat us up pretty badly in the process.

A Clarification on How Bible Variants Are Counted

In a guest post on Dan Wallace���s blog, Robert Marcello confronts ���a common mistake in apologetic circles���:

Gilbert perpetuates a common mistake in apologetic circles. He states, ���Second, keep in mind that ���400,000 variants��� here doesn���t mean 400,000 unique readings.��� In fact, that is exactly what it means. He illustrates his point by claiming, ���What it means is that if one manuscript says, ���I am innocent of this man���s blood��� and ten others say, ���I am innocent of this righteous blood,��� then you get to count all eleven as ���variants.������ In reality, that would merely count as one variant. This is a common mistake beginning with the 1963 publication of Neil Lightfoot���s, How We Got the Bible, and perpetuated by other apologists.

Marcello points to an earlier post by Dan Wallace that explains further:

Lightfoot was claiming that textual variants are counted by the number of manuscripts that support such variants, rather than by the wording of the variants. His method was to count the number of manuscripts times the wording error. This book has been widely influential in evangelical circles. I believe over a million copies of it have been sold. And this particular definition of textual variants has found its way into countless apologetic works.

The problem is, the definition is wrong. Terribly wrong. A textual variant is simply any difference from a standard text (e.g., a printed text, a particular manuscript, etc.) that involves spelling, word order, omission, addition, substitution, or a total rewrite of the text. No textual critic defines a textual variant the way that Lightfoot and those who have followed him have done.

It���s understandable that people have depended on respected sources like Lightfoot and Geisler and repeated this error, but as apologists, we need to get this right in the future. Wallace sums up what we need to know this way:

[A] variant is simply the difference in wording found in a single manuscript or a group of manuscripts (either way, it���s still only one variant) that disagrees with a base text.

To learn more about textual criticism, see Dan Wallace���s free iTunes U course, ���The Basics of New Testament Textual Criticism.���