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William Lane Craig explains the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement

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Probably one of the most common questions that you hear from people who don’t fully understand Christianity is this question: “why did Jesus have to die?”. The answer that most Christians seem to hold to is that 1) humans are rebelling against God, 2) Humans deserve punishment for their rebellion, 3) Humans cannot escape the punishment for their rebellion on their own, 4) Jesus was punished in the place of the rebellious humans, 5) Those who accept this sacrifice are forgiven for their rebelling.

Are humans rebellious?

Some people think that humans are not really rebellious at all, but it’s actually easy to see. You can see it just by looking at how people spend their time. Some of us have no time for God at all, and instead try to fill our lives with material possessions and experiences in order to have happy feelings. Some of us embrace just the parts of God that make us feel happy, like church and singing and feelings of comfort, while avoiding the hard parts of that vertical relationship; reading, thinking and disagreeing with people who don’t believe the truth about God. And so on.

This condition of being in rebellion is universal, and all of us are guilty of breaking the law at some point. All of us deserve to be separated from God’s goodness and love. Even if we wanted to stop rebelling, we would not be able to make up for the times where we do rebel by being good at other times, any more than we could get out of a speeding ticket by appealing to the times when we drove at the speed limit, (something that I never do, in any case).

This is not to say that all sinners are punished equally – the degree of punishment is proportional to the sins a person commits. However, the standard is perfection. And worse than that, the most important moral obligation is a vertical moral obligation. You can’t satisfy the demands of the moral law just by making your neighbor happy, while treating God like a pariah. The first commandment is to love God, the second is to love your neighbor. Even loving your neighbor requires you to tell your neighbor the truth – not just to make them feel good. The vertical relationship is more important than the horizontal one, and we’ve all screwed up the vertical relationship. We all don’t want God to be there, telling us what’s best for us, interfering with our fun. We don’t want to relate to a loving God if it means having to care what he thinks about anything that we are doing.

Who is going to pay for our rebellion?

The Christian answer to the problem of our rebellion is that Jesus takes the punishment we deserve in our place.

However, I’ve noticed that on some atheist blogs, they don’t like the idea that someone else can take our punishment for us to exonerate us for crimes that we’ve committed. So I’ll quote from this post by the great William Lane Craig, to respond to that objection.

Excerpt:

The central problem of the Penal Theory is, as you point out, understanding how punishing a person other than the perpetrator of the wrong can meet the demands of justice. Indeed, we might even say that it would be wrong to punish some innocent person for the crimes I commit!

It seems to me, however, that in other aspects of human life we do recognize this practice. I remember once sharing the Gospel with a businessman. When I explained that Christ had died to pay the penalty for our sins, he responded, “Oh, yes, that’s imputation.” I was stunned, as I never expected this theological concept to be familiar to this non-Christian businessman. When I asked him how he came to be familiar with this idea, he replied, “Oh, we use imputation all the time in the insurance business.” He explained to me that certain sorts of insurance policy are written so that, for example, if someone else drives my car and gets in an accident, the responsibility is imputed to me rather than to the driver. Even though the driver behaved recklessly, I am the one held liable; it is just as if I had done it.

Now this is parallel to substitutionary atonement. Normally I would be liable for the misdeeds I have done. But through my faith in Christ, I am, as it were, covered by his divine insurance policy, whereby he assumes the liability for my actions. My sin is imputed to him, and he pays its penalty. The demands of justice are fulfilled, just as they are in mundane affairs in which someone pays the penalty for something imputed to him. This is as literal a transaction as those that transpire regularly in the insurance industry.

So, it turns out that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is not as mysterious or as objectionable as everyone seems to think it is.

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The simplest argument against Darwinian evolution is Junk DNA

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The Discovery Institute has a new video out in their series on intelligent design, about so-called “junk DNA”. Basically, there are two sides to the origins issue: the design-deniers and the design-recognizers. (And theistic evolutionists belong in the former group). These two groups make different predictions about the information in the human genome. And we can check their predictions.

First, here’s the new video:

Here is description from Evolution News:

The myth of junk DNA is much more than just an evolutionary idea that turned out to be mistaken. As the new episode of Long Story Short makes amusingly clear, it also reflects a “battle of predictions” with intelligent design. Going back to the 1970s, evolutionists predicted that, in line with their premise of a randomly generated genome, DNA would turn out to be full of Darwinian debris, playing no functional role but merely parasitic (atheist Richard Dawkins’s term) on the small portion of functional DNA.

Proponents of intelligent design said the opposite. William Dembski (1998) and Richard Sternberg (2002) predicted widespread function for the so-called “junk.” After all, as a product of care and intention, the genome ought to be comparable in a way with products of human genius, with every detail there for a reason.

On that, ID has since been massively vindicated. Scientific theories are tested by the predictions they make. If those fail, it’s a bad sign for the theory. Mainstream science journals like Science are admitting the truth about the erstwhile “junk” — even as a few diehard Darwinists like Laurence Moran at the University of Toronto deny it.

And these predictions by the design side are not new. My young Earth creationist friend even sent me this today (today is Wednesday, I always write these posts the night before and schedule them for the next morning):

While a Creation/Fall model could account for the accumulation of some random, mutationally defective “extra copies,” evolutionists felt they had a strong point that 97% “junk” DNA pointed more to evolution than intelligent design. Creationists have long suspected that this “junk DNA” will turn out to have a function. In fact, junk DNA research is now a hot topic; not only are more and more functions being detected, but it is suspected that junk DNA is full of yet-to-be-discovered “intellectual riches.

That prediction is from 1994. My friend has a whole article about Junk DNA here, with all the predictions from each side.

He says “Carl Wieland founded CMI”. CMI is Creation Ministries International, which is supposed to be the best YEC web site.

Anyway, if you missed the other videos in the series, there is a playlist, but all the videos are out of order! If you want a quick and snarky introduction to intelligent design, this is it.

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Everyone should watch Climate: The Movie to understand climate change

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In this post, I’ll be posting links to watch the new documentary for free on YouTube and Twitter (with captions in English). I also link to a a review of the movie, and a post that has citations for 70 of the major claims. And a post from just yesterday, showing how climate change alarmism causes real problems for people like you and me. Not just higher electricity prices, but harming the environment.

First, here’s the documentary available at YouTube:

It has over 142,000 views in just four days, as of time of writing.

And if you prefer Twitter / X, then you can watch it there:

With captions in English.

Here is a review from NetZero Watch.

Excerpt:

The first part of the film is about the science, about temperature and carbon-dioxide levels and their respective influences and timescales. It shows that the ‘climatic extremes’ so often reported are not extremes at all. Then it goes into the politics, examining the role of the establishment, the media and net zero, making the point that if we aren’t going to be mauled by the planet, we will be by our reaction to the putative climate crisis.

The other of that review is David Whitehouse, who has a Ph.D in Astrophysics, and has carried out research at Jodrell Bank and the Mullard Space Science Laboratory. He is a former BBC Science Correspondent and BBC News Science Editor.

That page also has the video embedded, hosted by Vimeo.

If, by some stroke of censorship, it’s taken down in all of these places, you can find it on Rumble, as well.

You can find the Annotated Bibliography for Climate: The Movie here.

Finally, I wanted to link to this post from Daily Caller, that shows how climate change alarmism costs you. Everyone knows about how green energy relies on subsidies, and raises the prices of electricity. And that happens everywhere it’s tried – California, Europe, Canada, etc.

But there are other problems with green energy, too:

A severe Texan hail storm damaged thousands of solar panels at a Fort Bend County farm causing neighbors to fear potential chemical leakage from the panels, ABC 13 reported.

The freak and severe hail storm hit the farm and its environs on March 16, causing massive property damage throughout the affected area, the outlet reported.

Are the young people who believe in global warming mythology going to be happy with results like this? Maybe we should be telling them what they are voting for.