Category Archives: News

News

How does church appear to someone raised in a non-Christian home?

2 Comments

My friend Wes posted an article about how communication is set up in the church, and why it’s not effective at equipping Christians to defend their worldview in hostile environments. The article describes what I encountered in church, after I was raised in a non-Christian home and become a Christian on my own by reading the New Testament. The view presented in the essay is how I viewed the church, and is probably how most outsiders view church. I think it explains why young people leave the church in droves once they move out of their parents’ houses.

The author writes:

On the Internet, one soon discovers that many respected church leaders are quite unable to deal directly with opposing viewpoints. In fact, many of them can’t even manage meaningful engagement with other voices. Their tweets may be entirely one-way conversations. They talk at their audiences. They can talk about other voices, but fail to talk to them, let alone with them. Their representations of opposing viewpoints reveal little direct exposure to the viewpoints in question.

[…]Around this point, it can start to dawn on one that many church leaders have only been trained in forms of discourse such as the sermon and, to a much lesser extent, the essay. Both forms privilege a single voice—their voice—and don’t provide a natural space for response, questioning, and challenge. Their opinions have been assumed to be superior to opposing viewpoints, but have never been demonstrated to be so. While they may have spoken or written about opposing voices, they are quite unaccustomed to speaking or writing to them (not to mention listening to or being cross-examined by them). There are benefits to the fact that the sermon is a form of discourse that doesn’t invite interruption or talking back, but not when this is the only form of discourse its practitioners are adept in.

Many church leaders have been raised and trained in ideologically homogenous cultures or contexts that discouraged oppositional discourse. Many have been protected from hostile perspectives that might unsettle their faith. Throughout, their theological opinions and voices have been given a privileged status, immune from challenge. Nominal challenges could be brushed off by a reassertion of the monologue. They were safe to speak about and habitually misrepresent other voices to their hearers and readers, without needing to worry about those voices ever enjoying the power to answer them back. Many of the more widely read members of their congregations may have had an inkling of the weakness of their positions in the past: the Internet just makes it more apparent.

One of my friends who comments here as “Wintery’s Friend” actually did his M. Div, and I think it was he who told me that his seminary had dropped the lone course in apologetics that had been part of the curriculum. Now seminary grads don’t learn any opposing views. They just pre-suppose that the Bible is true in the same way that Mormons pre-suppose their Bible is true, or Muslims pre-suppose their Bible is true, etc.

More:

If one’s opinion has never been subjected to and tried by rigorous cross-examination, it probably isn’t worth much. If one lacks the capacity to keep a level head when one’s views are challenged, one’s voice will be of limited use in most real world situations, where dialogue and dispute is the norm and where we have to think in conversation with people who disagree with us.

The teachers of the Church provide the members of the Church with a model for their own thinking. The teacher of the Church does not just teach others what to believe, but also how to believe, and the process by which one arrives at a theological position. This is one reason why it is crucial that teachers ‘show their working’ on a regular basis. When teaching from a biblical text, for instance, the teacher isn’t just teaching the meaning of that particular text, but how Scripture should be approached and interpreted more generally. An essential part of the teaching that the members of any church need is that of dealing with opposing viewpoints. One way or another, every church provides such teaching. However, the lesson conveyed in all too many churches is that opposing voices are to be dismissed, ignored, or ‘answered’ with a reactive reassertion of the dogmatic line, rather than a reasoned response.

You can imagine that the first questions that you’ll be asked by a non-Christian co-worker would be things like “why think God exists?” and “why think the Bible is history rather than legend?”. In order to answer those questions, you would have to know how to counter what a non-Christian believes. You would have to show them the reasons for your view.

Unfortunately, many of the conservative Christian leaders we trust think that the best way to be convincing is not to show your work, but just to speak Bible verses at people who don’t accept the Bible as an authority. Some people attend church for 20 years, and they never meet a single person who didn’t just assume that the Bible is trustworthy without doing an investigation first.

What’s most surprising is that this fideistic view of Christianity is not even Biblical. The Biblical view of faith is that faith is trust in God, based on evidence. This is why Jesus offered his own resurrection as evidence to a generation of unbelievers. His miracles were also evidence offered to unbelievers. And the Old Testament is filled with examples of people like Isaiah presenting evidence to unbelievers. The fideist view sounds more like the Mormon “burning of the bosom” view. We can do better than that!

Look:

That debate has over 6 million views on YouTube. That’s a debate with Christopher Hitchens, one of the most famous atheists of the last 100 years. In the post-debate comments, the atheist admitted he lost. Watch it. You won’t find it in most churches, so you’re going to have to learn it on your own. Without anyone’s help. Don’t be a spectator. Don’t settle for youth pastor Christianity.

News

J. Warner Wallace: I am not a Christian because it works for me

1 Comment

Some of my favorite Christians are the ones that start out as atheists, and do very well at life, but just change direction because they investigate the evidence. One person who had a fabulous career in law enforcement switched sides because of the evidence: J. Warner Wallace. And in a must-read post from Cold-Case Christianity, he explains his motive.

Excerpt:

Life on this side of my decision hasn’t always been easy. It’s been nearly seventeen years since I first trusted Jesus as Lord and Savior. I still struggle to submit my prideful will to what God would call me to do. Christianity is not easy. It doesn’t always “work” for me. There are times when I think it would be easier to do it the old way; easier to cut a corner or take a short cut. There are many times when doing the right thing means doing the most difficult thing possible. There are also times when it seems like non-Christians have it easier, or seem to be “winning”. It’s in times like these that I have to remind myself that I’m not a Christian because it serves my own selfish purposes. I’m not a Christian because it “works” for me. I had a life prior to Christianity that seemed to be working just fine, and my life as a Christian hasn’t always been easy.

I’m a Christian because it is true. I’m a Christian because I want to live in a way that reflects the truth. I’m a Christian because my high regard for the truth leaves me no alternative.

I think this is important. There are people who I know who claim to be Christian, but they are clearly believing that God is a mystical force who arranges everything in their lives in order to make them happy. They are not Christians because it’s true, but because of things like comfort and community. But people ought to become Christians because they think it’s true.

Truth doesn’t necessarily make you happy, though. Truth can impose intellectual obligations and moral obligations on you. Seeing God as he really is doesn’t help us to “win” at life, as the culture defines winning. But it does offer the opportunity for us to walk a similar path to the one Jesus walked. And that is very appealing for real Christians.

The Bible doesn’t promise that people who become Christians will be happier. Actually, it promises that Christians will suffer for doing the right things. Their autonomy will suffer, as they sacrifice their own interests and happiness in order to make God happy, by serving his interests.

Christianity isn’t something you add on to your before-God life in order to achieve your before-God goals. When you become a Christian, you get a new set of goals, based on God’s character and his design for you. And although you might be very successful in the world as part of serving God, there is no guarantee of that. Christianity is not life enhancement. I do think that Christians do well at not hurting themselves though, but because they eliminate selfish desires, not because God gives them stuff.

By the way, if you’re looking for a great speaker to invite to your university campus, J. Warner Wallace is the best, then Frank Turek is my number two choice. Wallace has the homicide detective background, and Turek is a former naval aviator. Two tough guys who are tough-minded about the Christian faith.

News

Did an increase in oxygen levels trigger the Cambrian explosion?

Leave a comment

The Cambrian explosion is the name given to the sudden origin of basically all of the major body plans in nature. It happened in a 3-5 million year period about 540 million years ago. It’s a problem for naturalists, because of the enormous amount of information needed to make these new (and different) body plans. The best explanation they had was that rising oxygen levels did it. Is that right?

Here’s an excellent post by Günter Bechly, writing for Evolution News.

Here’s the naturalistic scenario:

For more than seventy years it was the scientific consensus and undisputed textbook wisdom that the origin of multicellular life in the late Precambrian was triggered by increased oxygen levels (Fike et al. 2006, Sahoo et al. 2012, Lyons et al. 2014, Reinhard et al. 2016, Anonymous 2023, Harrison 2023, Ralls 2023, UCPH 2023). For example, McFadden et al. (2008) identified two pulses of oxidation in the Precambrian and found that “following this second oxidation event, between 550 and 542 million years ago, there was a worldwide increase of Ediacaran organisms, complex macroscopic life forms, an event recently dubbed the Avalon Explosion” (Virginia Tech 2008). Similarily, the study by Pogge von Strandmann et al. (2015) was promoted in a press release as demonstrating that “oxygen provided breath of life that allowed animals to evolve” (Hickey et al. 2015).

This was all a lot of theorizing in order to save naturalism from scientific evidence. But science makes progress, and the smoke gets cleared:

Now a new study (Ostrander et al. 2023) by group of researchers from Denmark has overturned decades of evolutionary dogma and claims the exact opposite: “oxygen didn’t trigger multicellular organisms” (Anonymous 2023, UCPH 2023). What this study found was instead clear evidence of a lower oxygen content correlated with the Avalon Explosion of the Ediacaran biota. The authors summarize their surprising findings as: “Contrary to a classical hypothesis, our interpretations place the Shuram excursion, and any coeval animal evolutionary events, in a predominantly anoxic global ocean.” Co-author Christian Bjerrum commented “Specifically, it means that we need to rethink a lot of the things that we believed to be true from our childhood learning. And textbooks need to be revised and rewritten. So, if not extra oxygen, what triggered the era’s explosion of life? Perhaps the exact opposite” (Anonymous 2023, UCPH 2023). Some even went further and suggested to “forget everything you thought you knew about how life evolved on Earth” (Ralls 2023) because it “turns out we might be very wrong about how life arose on Earth” (Harrison 2023).

Prior to the “increase in oxygen” hypothesis, naturalists used to explain away the Cambrian explosion by saying that we had not studied the fossil record for long enough. “Eventually, we will have a better picture of the fossil record, and that will show that we started with a few simple life forms, and then branched out into more and more complex life forms, over an hundreds of millions of years”.

But that’s not what they are saying now, because the evidence is in:

Here is what Professor Derek Briggs, a world-renowned expert on Cambrian fossils, has to say on this issue: “We now know that the sudden appearance of fossils in the Cambrian (541–485 million years ago) is real and not an artefact of an imperfect fossil record” (Briggs 2015). Likewise, Zhang & Shu (2021) admitted that “multiple sources of evidence are strongly suggestive of a real evolutionary event being recorded rather than an artifact of an imperfect fossil record.” Cabej (2020) put it even more clearly: “Nevertheless, now, 150 years after The Origin, when an incomparably larger stock of animal fossils has been collected, Darwin’s gap remains, the abrupt appearance of Cambrian fossils is a reality, and we are still wondering about the forces and mechanisms that drove it.

How many times does this have to happen, before naturalists admit that they are committing the “atheism-of-the-gaps” fallacy?

Before science, atheists told us that the universe was eternal. Then science progressed, and we now know that the universe – space, time, matter and energy – all came into being out of nothing about 14 billion years ago. What could cause that? Well, the cause of all of nature must be supernatural. 

Before science, atheists told us that any old universe would support life. If gravity was a little different, then people would just have pointy ears, like you see on Star Trek. But then science progressed, and we now have a long list of dozens of constants and quantities in nature that must be finely-tuned to an incredibly high degree in order for complex life of any kind to exist. Fine-tuning requires an intelligent agent – that’s the only explanation that we have experience with.

Before science, atheists told us that the origin of life was easy. Life is just a clump of jello, very boring and simple. No need for a cosmic engineer. But then science progressed, and we discovered biological information, such as DNA, inside the cell. Naturalists tried to say that most (or all) of that information was “junk DNA”, but more science happened proving them wrong again.

I could go on and on with example after example. Naturalism is about faith. They start with the desire for personal autonomy. Autonomy from the moral law. They speculate about how nature can be explained without a Creator and Designer. They take refuge in gaps in our scientific understanding. But then science progresses, the gaps close, and everyone knows for certain.