Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 93
May 6, 2014
Links Mentioned on the 5/06/14 Show
The following are links that were either mentioned on this week's show or inspired by it, as posted live on the @STRtweets Twitter feed:
Video of Brett's Google+ event
Apologetics mission trips for your students
Worldview and Apologetics Events for Students this Summer by Brett Kunkle
Summit Ministries
reTHINK Student Apologetics Conference – September 26-27 in Orange County, CA
Jesus, the Recycled Redeemer by Greg Koukl (Is Jesus just a pagan myth?)
Those Pre-Christian Deities Aren't Much like Jesus after All by J. Warner Wallace
Did the Earliest Christians Think Jesus Was an Angel? by Michael Kruger
Horus? Mithras? Jesus? – Humorous video from Lutheran Satire
Details shared by Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy
Greg's interview with Michael Kruger on Bart Ehrman's new book
Bart Ehrman's Latest Book – How Jesus Became God by Melinda Penner
The Zeitgeist Movie and Other Myth Claims about Jesus by Greg Koukl
12 Historical Facts – Gary Habermas gives evidence for the resurrection
The Wreck of the Titan – Similarities to the Titanic
Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics by Doug Powell
God, Evolution, and Morality (Part 1) by Greg Koukl
Subscribe to Solid Ground
Doug Powell's books, apps, etc.
iWitness Biblical Archaeology App by Doug Powell (soon to be a book)
New Testament iWitness App by Doug Powell (soon to be a book)
Old Testament iWitness App by Doug Powell (soon to be a book)
Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (Find links from past shows here.)
To follow the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00–7:00 p.m. PT), use the hashtag #STRtalk.
Webcast Tuesday
The broadcast is live online today 4-6 p.m. PT. Call with your question or comment at (855) 243-9975, outside the U.S. (562) 424-8229.
Listen live online. Join us on Twitter during the program @STRtweets #STRtalk.
Worldview and Apologetics Events for Students This Summer
Christian parents need help from the Body of Christ, as we work to ground our kids in the historic truths of Christianity. I work full time for an apologetics ministry and I know without a doubt that I need help in this area. It's vital our kids see not only mom and dad as models of thoughtful Christianity, but have other examples, as well. Thankfully, there are more and more good worldview and apologetics training opportunities around the country for our students, led by incredible people. Check them out and get your students signed up:
Impact 360's Immersion (near Atlanta, GA): June 1-14
Faith Ascent Ministries Base Camp (near St. Louis, MO): June 9-13
Summit Ministries – Biola University (in Southern California): June 15-27
Summit Ministries – Bryan College (Dayton, Tennessee): July 6-18
Wheatstone Academy – Azusa Pacific Univeristy (Southern California): July 6-12
Stand Your Ground Youth Apologetics Conference (Charlotte, NC): July 14-18
Wheatstone Academy – Houston Baptist University (Houston, TX): July 20-26
Pennsylvania Family Institute's "City on the Hill" Conference (Lancaster, PA): July 20-26
Summit Ministries – Manitou Springs (near Colorado Springs, CO): Seven two-week summer conferences starting May 18 and running through August 29
And of course, all of this activity culminates in the premeire youth conference of the year: Stand to Reason's reTHINK Student Apologetics Conference on September 26 and 27 in Orange County, California. Okay, maybe I'm a bit biased...but you still won't want to miss reTHINK.
Challenge: Religion Is a Threat to Morality
This week's challenge: Your friend posts this image; how do you respond?
As always, the first thing you need to do in a case like this is pinpoint the claim that's being made and make sure it's explicitly stated. (To do that, you often need to ask your friend clarifying questions.)
Tell us what you would say in the comments below, then we'll hear what Alan thinks on Thursday.
May 5, 2014
How Do Moral Absolutes Prove That God Exists?
Greg explains why the existence of objective morality points to a creator.
May 3, 2014
Psychologist Recommends Intentionally Suppressing Intuition of Design
Well, this is the most literal playing out of Romans 1:18-21* I’ve ever seen. From David Klinghoffer:
The Wall Street Journal salutes the research of Boston University psychologist Deborah Kelemen. She has discovered that it's possible with Darwinian storytelling to suppress common sense in children of the kind that leads them to recognize artifacts of intelligent design in nature.
The Journal notes that quite apart from religious instruction, kids are primed to see life as reflecting "intentional design." It's intuitive. The corrective is to catch them at an early age and train them to see things in a Darwinian light….
The initiative to program children is repeatedly referred to as "intervention," a term used in psychological counseling to refer to an attempt to thwart counterproductive, dangerous thoughts or behavior. The intuitive response of human beings, seeing design in nature, is implicitly compared to destructive patterns of abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, and the like!
Given that bizarre premise, suppressing design thoughts becomes the preferred solution.
Read the rest of Klinghoffer’s post at Evolution News and Views.
_____________________
*"For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened."
May 2, 2014
This Is the Kind of Culture Christianity Creates
CURE International is an organization that builds hospitals in impoverished areas of the world, offering needed surgeries and medical help, particularly to children with birth defects (who are usually being ostracized by their society). Tragically, one of their doctors was murdered last week, along with two others. From their CEO:
It is with deep sadness that I write today, mourning the loss of three lives that were taken by force at the CURE International Hospital compound in Kabul, Afghanistan.
One of these men, Dr. Jerry Umanos…had faithfully served the Afghan people as a pediatrician at the hospital for more than seven years, caring for the most vulnerable members of society – children and premature infants – and helping them survive the harsh realities of childbirth in Afghanistan….
The shooter was not an employee of CURE International, but rather a member of the Afghan police detail assigned to protect the hospital. The assailant shot himself after the attack and was taken into surgery by Jerry’s colleagues at the hospital before being transferred out of our facility into the custody of the government of Afghanistan [emphasis added].
Why did Christianity create a civilization where people seek to heal those lowest on the societal ladder, at great cost to themselves? Because “Jesus...although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men…. He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” for us.
Because Jesus washed His disciples’ feet and said, “Whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant; and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”
In humility Jesus served us; in humility we serve others.
Why did Christianity create a civilization where people heal their enemies? Because “while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Because “while we were enemies,” while we “were by nature children of wrath…God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ.”
By grace God gave to us; by grace we give to others.
Do not take for granted that what Christianity has built will always be.
May 1, 2014
Copernicus and the Scientific Revolution
It's funny that many secularists believe that Christian myths about Jesus evolved over time until they were written down generations later. This is the thesis in Bart Ehrman's latest book. It's not accurate. It's funny because there are things believed by some of the same secularists that actually are myths that evolved over time to create the impression that Christianity is a science stopper and anti-intellectual. One of these myths is about the scientific revolution that was purportedly initiated by Copernicus and the supposed subsequent opposition from the church to his heliocentric theories.
The myth begins with the notion of the "dark ages," a time when the church suppressed education. It's just not true. Scholarship was alive and well prior to Copernicus. In fact, scholars were working on heliocentric theories before Copernicus. He learned these in university and built on them when he published in final work. His theory didn't emerge from a dark vacuum, but from rich science that had been nurtured in the universities, many of them established by the church.
In fact, Copernicus himself was a canon of the church, raised and guided by his uncle who was the bishop of Warmia. Many of the scientists involved in the scientific revolution were Christians. Nancy Pearcey shares this from Rodney Stark's research:
Sociologist of religion Rodney Stark identified the 52 figures who made the most significant contributions to the scientific revolution, then researched biographical sources to discover their religious views. He found that among the top contributors to science, surprisingly only two were skeptics (Paracelsus and Edmund Halley).
Stark then subdivided his subjects once again into those who were "conventional" in their religious views (that is, their writings exhibit the conventional religious views of the time), and those who were "devout" (their writings express a strong personal investment). The resulting numbers show that more than 60 percent of those who jumpstarted the scientific revolution were religiously "devout." Clearly, holding a Christian worldview posed no barrier to doing excellent scientific work, and even seems to have provided a positive inspiration.
The idea that the church opposed Copernicus' ideas and persecuted those who taught his ideas is a useful myth built on a kernel of fact. Some Christians did disagree with the idea that the earth was not the center of the universe because they thought it contradicted what the Bible taught. But this was not a widespread response, and many dropped their opposition when they looked at it more closely. In fact, Copernicus' theory was taught in Christian institutions early on. The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reports:
Though Martin Luther initially rejected Copernican cosmology, Philip Melanchthon, who collaborated with Luther and was an intellectual leader of the Reformation, had it taught at the University of Wittenberg, which eventually became a center for study on Copernicus' ideas.
Christoph Clavius, a Jesuit and leading astronomer who helped develop the Gregorian calendar, taught Copernican mathematical models early on.
Pope Clement VII reacted positively to a talk he heard about Copernican theories.
Pope Paul III never indicated his response and the church had no official position in 1600. It's often assumed that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 because he had adopted Copernican cosmology, but he was actually condemned for other issues.
Johannes Kepler, a committed Christian, wrote the first openly heliocentric book after Copernicus and built on his work to develop a more accurate model of the solar system.
April 30, 2014
Unparallels
Denny Burk makes a careful and important point why the NBA/Sterling case is not like the Mozilla/Eich case. While the concerns for precedents being set and used illegitimately in the future are a valid concern, we still need to make careful distinctions when there are relevant differences. Burk quotes Andrew Sullivan on how actually saying and doing racist things is quite different than holding principled views and supporting them politically.
What Can We Do to Deepen the Cultural Conversation about Christianity?
David Bentley Hart has a post on First Things responding to a New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik:
Ostensibly a survey of recently published books on (vaguely speaking) theism and atheism, [Gopnik’s article] is actually an almost perfect distillation of everything most depressingly vapid about the cogitatively indolent secularism of late modern society. This is no particular reflection on Gopnik’s intelligence—he is bright enough, surely—but only on that atmosphere of complacent ignorance that seems to be the native element of so many of today’s cultured unbelievers.
Hart warns, “The article is intellectually trivial, but perhaps culturally portentous”:
Simply said, we have reached a moment in Western history when, despite all appearances, no meaningful public debate over belief and unbelief is possible. Not only do convinced secularists no longer understand what the issue is; they are incapable of even suspecting that they do not understand, or of caring whether they do. The logical and imaginative grammars of belief, which still informed the thinking of earlier generations of atheists and skeptics, are no longer there. In their place, there is now—where questions of the divine, the supernatural, or the religious are concerned—only a kind of habitual intellectual listlessness….
The real problem with his article is not its dialectical deficiencies so much as its casual inanities….
Almost all public discourse is now instantaneous, fluently aimless, deeply uninformed, and immune to logical rigor…. Principled unbelief was once a philosophical passion and moral adventure, with which it was worthwhile to contend. Now, perhaps, it is only so much bad intellectual journalism, which is to say, gossip, fashion, theatrics, trifling prejudice. Perhaps this really is the way the argument ends—not with a bang but a whimper.
The phrase “casual inanities” is a good way to describe what I’ve observed (see “To the Atheist Who Called Jesus ‘The Magic Carpenter’” and “Atheists’ Small View of Christianity,” for example), but I fear the problem did not begin with atheists.
If we Christians have a small view of God and the story He’s telling through history, if we lack reverence, wonder, and awe when we contemplate and speak of Jesus and the cross, if we view church as a self-help exercise, if our services reflect this empty perspective, we can’t be surprised when the culture around us absorbs the same shallow view.
Christianity’s intellectual history is rich and deep, its art is meaningful, its theology addresses the universal condition of man and responds to our greatest questions, its worldview created Western civilization. We can’t change the atheists’ awareness and appreciation of these things, but we can intentionally increase our own.
I’m not primarily talking here about learning more reasons to think Christianity is true, I’m talking about immersing ourselves in the true story of redemption, as revealed by our Creator in the Bible. This is the story that was powerful enough to change all future Western stories. Know that story. Love that story. Live that story. Connect yourself and your church with centuries of great thinkers and lovers of God. Worship in a way that’s worthy of Him.
Let discussion of Christianity—whether between atheists or Christians—never again be filled with “casual inanities.”
