Tag Archives: Study

Mentoring

What I’m reading and listening to these days

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Guess what?

The Wintery Knight Blog got listed on a prestigious list of apologetics sites compiled by the Internet-King of apologetics, Brian Auten, who runs Apologetics 315. Go pay him a visit and bookmark his site!

By the way, if you are a regular reader, please take a moment to tell your friends about the blog! If you like the blog, chances are that your friends will like it, too! I don’t advertise, so you are my only hope of getting any new readers!

Well, in honor of Brian’s list, I thought that I would write a post explaining what resources I am working through right now!

Books

Right now, I am reading the following books:

  • Lunches at work: Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse “Love and Economics:It Takes a Family to Raise a Village” (autographed!)
  • Lunches not at work: Dr. Regina Hertzlinger “Who Killed Health Care?: America’s $2 Trillion Medical Problem – and the Consumer-Driven Cure“
  • At home in bed: Theodore Dalrymple, M.D. “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass“

And I just received books from two of my favorite ID theorists:

  • Dr. Stephen C. Meyer “Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design“
  • Dr. Jay W. Richards “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem“

Lectures

I got Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse‘s 3-CD set “Smart Sex” in the mail, and I’ve been listening to that. It’s awesome! You can get it from the Ruth Institute. If you want a sample of her thinking, listen to this 29-minute clip about the effects of same-sex marriage on children.

I also like learning apologetics by listening so today, I ordered an apologetics lecture set from It’s a New Day. This is a perfect set for beginners, as the conference was held in a churches! So, if you go to church, this is for you! Try to make your church buy one! I would recommend burning a backup copy for the church library and saving the originals.

Here are the 32 lectures on CD in the set, grouped by topic:

Historical Jesus
Daniel B. Wallace – Is What We Have Now What They Wrote Then?
Paul Rhodes Eddy – The Criteria of Authenticity
Craig Evans – Fabricating Jesus
Lee Strobel – The Case For the Real Jesus
Ben Witherington, III – Knowing the History of Jesus
Gary Habermas – The Resurrection of Jesus: Knowable History

Postmodernism:
Sean McDowell – Truth or Tragedy
Brett Kunkle – Moral Truth: True for You, but Not for Me?
R. Scott Smith – The Emerging Church: The Promise and the Perils
James Stump – Deconstructing Postmodernism: Truth, Rationality, and the Gospel

Science:
Sean McDowell – The Case for a Creator
Steve Davis – The Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God
James Sinclair – Science and the Cosmos: Prospects for the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments
John A. Bloom – Darwin & Design

Apologetics Advocacy:
Craig Hazen – To Everyone An Answer
Glenn Scorgie – Smash-mouth Apologetics vs. Grace-filled Persuasion

The New Atheism:
Chad Meister – Answering the New Atheism
William Lane Craig – The Dawkins Illusion

Philosophy of Religion:
J.P. Moreland – Argument from Consciousness
Michael Murray – Is Belief in God Hard-Wired in the Brain?
R. Douglas Geivett – Wrestling With the Problem of Suffering
Michael Rea – Why Doesn’t God Show Himself?
David P. Hunt – What Does God Know? The Problems of Open Theism
Charles Taliferro – The Coherence of Theism

Philosophical Theology:
Steve Porter – Did Jesus Have to Die? Defending the Christian Doctrine of Atonement
Paul Copan – The Incarnation of Christ in Philosophical Perspective
Garry DeWeese – Making Sense of the Trinity
Brett Kunkle – Is One Way the Only Way?
Paul Copan – Why I Believe in Hell: A Philosopher’s Reasoning

Cults and World Religions:
Kevin A. Lewis – Cults and Crimes: The Limits of the First Amendment
Josh Lingel – Standing Up To Islam

Questions and Answers:
Sean McDowell & Brett Kunkle – Ask Your Toughest Questions

The set was $159. Pretty soon Obama will be confiscating that money for elective abortions paid for by Obamacare, so I thought I’d better splurge now! If this sounds like a lot of money to spend on apologetics, you should pick up the book “Passionate Conviction”, which is based on an earlier conference. This is my favorite apologetics book to give to beginners! Or cut out cable for 3 months! I don’t even have a TV!

Lee Strobel – The Case For the Real JesusJ.P. Moreland – Argument from Consciousness

Paul Rhodes Eddy – The Criteria of Authenticity

Michael Murray – Is Belief in God Hard-Wired in the Brain?

R. Scott Smith – The Emerging Church: The Promise and the Perils

Sean McDowell – Truth or Tragedy

James Sinclair – Science and the Cosmos: Prospects for the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments

Ben Witherington, III – Knowing the History of Jesus

Craig Evans – Fabricating Jesus

Chad Meister – Answering the New Atheism

Steve Davis – The Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God

Glenn Scorgie – Smash-mouth Apologetics vs. Grace-filled Persuasion

Brett Kunkle – Moral Truth: True for You, but Not for Me?

Craig Hazen – To Everyone An Answer

William Lane Craig – The Dawkins Illusion

Daniel B. Wallace – Is What We Have Now What They Wrote Then?

Sean McDowell – The Case for a Creator

Steve Porter – Did Jesus Have to Die? Defending the Christian Doctrine of Atonement

R. Douglas Geivett – Wrestling With the Problem of Suffering

Charles Taliferro – The Coherence of Theism

Paul Copan – The Incarnation of Christ in Philosophical Perspective

Garry DeWeese – Making Sense of the Trinity

Michael Rea – Why Doesn’t God Show Himself?

David P. Hunt – What Does God Know? The Problems of Open Theism

James Stump – Deconstructing Postmodernism: Truth, Rationality, and the Gospel

Brett Kunkle – Is One Way the

Gary Habermas – The Resurrection of Jesus: Knowable History

Sean McDowell & Brett Kunkle – Ask Your Toughest Questions

Kevin A. Lewis – Cults and Crimes: The Limits of the First Amendment

Paul Copan – Why I Believe in Hell: A Philosopher’s Reasoning
John A. Bloom – Darwin & Design
Josh Lingel – Standing Up To Islam

Mentoring

Why won’t Christians defend their faith in public?

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UPDATE: The Pugnacious Irishman has linked to me! Thank you for the link Rich! EVERYONE: GO READ HIS POST RIGHT NOW!

UPDATE: Neil Simpson has a debate going on about whether faith is opposed to reason. 50+ comments so far.

Shout out: Brian Auten of Apologetics 315 helped me to make this post nicer. He’s much nicer than I am.

I would like to describe a situation that arises frequently that concerns me. The situation I describe below brings out a flaw I see in the way that rank-and-file Christians respond to criticisms of Christianity in the public square.

Here is the situation

Eve is busy programming away at her desk, rushing to check in her unit tests so she can spend her lunch hour reading the latest Stephenie Meyer horror novel, or looking through an Avon catalog. Suddenly Eve hears Alice talking to Bob on the other side of her cube. She stops typing to listen to the following unencrypted conversation.

Alice: I was watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel last night that said that the universe has always existed, so there is no God!

Bob: I was watching a documentary on PBS last night showing simulations of how the first life started on Earth! God didn’t do it!

Alice: I saw “Inherit the Spin” on the weekend! The only reason people oppose evolution is because of the Bible! Not because of science!

Bob: I’m going to see “The Va Dinci Code” this weekend! It says that the Gospels are unreliable and that Jesus didn’t even die on the cross!

Alice: I just bought the latest Dichard Rawkins book “Christians Should Be Fed to Lions and the Bible Should Be Burned”!

Bob: I will read that as soon as I finish Histopher Chritchens’ book “Why God is the Evilest, Stupidest Person in the World”!

Eve double-majored in business and computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology, and has an MBA from the London School of Economics. She has spent a ton of time, effort and money studying very difficult subjects for her job, and she even publishes research. She works full-time and runs her own business part-time, and earns about 200K per year. She lives in a huge house, drives a huge car, and goes on vacation abroad to all the best vacation spots.

Eve thinks she is a Christian. She has attended church since childhood, her husband is a church elder and she sings in the church choir. She reads the Bible and prays. She gives money to the poor. She teaches Sunday school to children.  She has even read all of the Narnia novels three times!

But even though God is being maligned in Alice and Bob’s conversation, Eve is not going to stand up to defend God’s reputation to them, (or even to her own children, who are both committed atheists).

Why won’t Eve stand?

I am wondering if anyone can explain to me why it is that most church Christians are not able or not willing to make a public defense when God’s reputation is called into question. It seems to me that there are two bad effects that follow from Eve’s unwillingness to stand up and invite Alice and Bob to lunch so that she can address their questions and concerns.

1) God’s reputation is being trashed by Alice and Bob on the basis of lies they’ve swallowed from pop culture. These lies about God’s existence and character could be easily corrected with a minimal amount of study, which Eve is capable of.  If someone said similar lies about her husband or children, she would speak up, but she won’t speak up for God.

2) Alice and Bob are bound for Hell unless someone cares enough to correct their mistaken beliefs, which, along with their sinfulness, is what is keeping them from a relationship with God that would go on in Heaven. If Eve’s husband or children were mistakenly about to drink poison thinking it was Aspirin, then Eve would speak up. But to save her co-workers from Hell, she won’t speak up.

Eve is capable of studying to defend the faith, because of her great success in other areas where so much time and effort were required to master difficult material. So why has she not applied herself to answering public challenges to her Christian faith from her professors, teachers, actors, the media, politicians, scientists, historians, etc.?

It seems to me that if she did spend some time studying, and then made her defense to her co-workers, then two things would follow:

D1) Eve would be demonstrating her love for God and her friendship with God by protecting his reputation when it is called into question by unbelievers in public settings. That’s what friends do – if Eve wanted to be God’s friend, she would care that no one believed lies about him and told lies about him in public settings.

D2) Eve would be demonstrating her love for her neighbor if she was able to correct some of these false beliefs, such as that the universe is eternal, or that a historical case cannot be made for the resurrection, or that evil is not compatible with theism. It’s important for Alice and Bob to know that Christianity is not stupid.

So why is it that Eve is able to go to church for 20 years, sing in the choir, read the Bible, read the Narnia stories, pray on her knees, and yet still be unwilling to do the best thing for God and the best thing for her neighbor?

Questions for my readers

Can anyone help me to understand why Christians are willing to accept this? Why is this not being addressed by churches?

Do you have an experience where a Christian group stifled apologetics? Tell me about that, and why do you think they would do that, in view of the situation I outlined above? My experience is that atheists (as much as I tease them) are FAR more interested in apologetics than church Christians. Why is that?

My answers

My answers to these problems are given in the following previous posts.

In general:

Also, this debate I blogged about before talks about postmodernism and relativism, which has infected the church and has an impact on this question of whether we will study and defend our beliefs in public. I highly recommend giving it a listen – you will learn something about how we got to this point.

Disclaimer:

I want to clear that this is a problem for male and female Christians. I have seen it manifested by equal numbers of men and women in leadership roles. I picked these names because there is a running gag in computer network security where these names are used to describe the actors. Eve is the eavesdropping hacker, get it?

News

Are the oceans warming?

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We actually have a pretty comprehensive way of measuring the changes in the temperature of the oceans. We use a submersible sensor called an “Argo Buoy” in order to do the measurements. Since 2003, 3000 of them have been taking measurements in all the oceans of the world. The purpose of the buoys is to provide scientists with confirmation that the globe is really warming. But all was not well.

But the Vancouver Sun reports: (H/T Commenter ECM)

So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys’ findings? Because in five years the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters’ hypotheses, must be wrong.

In fact, “there has been a very slight cooling,” according to a U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a scientist who keeps close watch on the Argo findings.

Well, maybe the climate models predicted some cooling?

The big problem with the Argo findings is that all the major climate computer models postulate that as much as 80-90 per cent of global warming will result from the oceans warming rapidly then releasing their heat into the atmosphere.

But surely the other models are being confirmed by observations?

Modellers are also perplexed by the findings of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily over the entire surface of the Earth, versus approximately 7,000 random readings from Earth stations.

In nearly 30 years of operation, the satellites have discovered a warming trend of just 0.14 C per decade, less than the models and well within the natural range of temperature variation.

But maybe if we wait for a while, scientists will discover new measurements that are the opposite of these measurements. The new measurements will confirm that global warming is real, that scientists need more grant money, and that socialists must take control of the economy right now in order to save us from the horrible Flying Spaghetti Global Warming Monster! Those 700 dissenting scientists? Paid off by big oil! All of them!

The polar ice caps were also paid off by big oil. How else do you explain their refusal to melt?

UPDATE: NASA study shows that solar activity is responsible for past global warming.