Sunday, July 31, 2016

IF IT LOOKS DESIGNED, PERHAPS IT IS DESIGNED





Kyle Butt has written:

·       Richard Dawkins stated: “Living things are not designed, but Darwinian natural selection licenses a version of the design stance for them. We get a short cut to understanding the heart if we assume that it is designed to pump blood” (2006, p. 182, emp. added). Did you catch that? He said that things weren’t designed by any intelligence, but we can understand them more readily if we assume they were. http://www.apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=9&article=1691

·       University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne, in his book Why Evolution is True, wrote:  “If anything is true about nature, it is that plants and animals seem intricately and almost perfectly designed for living their lives” (2009, p. 1, emp. added).  He further stated, “Nature resembles a well-oiled machine, with every species an intricate cog or gear” (p. 1). On page three of the same book, he wrote: “The more one learns about plants and animals, the more one marvels at how well their designs fit their ways of life.” Atheist Michael Shermer, in his book Why Darwin Matters, stated: “The design inference comes naturally. The reason people think that a Designer created the world is because it looks designed” (2006, p. 65, ital. in orig.).

What are the implications of the appearances of design? Well, it suggests that these things might have actually been designed.

And why shouldn’t we believe what our senses tell us? Is it more reasonable to put our faith in the findings of an experiment? In this case, we are compelled to place our faith in the experimenter. However, in order to do this, we also have to also place our faith in our senses to read or hear about this “finding.” Doesn’t it make more sense just to believe in what our senses tell us directly?

Besides, have evolutionists or naturalists ever performed an experiment excluding God from the picture? No! Well, why then do we exclude Him? Perhaps we want to!

SEPARATING SCRIPTURE FROM ITS AUTHOR





How would you answer this challenge:

·       “Yes, Scripture is important. But, frankly, truthfully, it is not part of the Godhead. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are God, Scripture is not. Our salvation is from God, not from Scripture.”

You are needlessly and un-scripturally driving a wedge between God and His Word, I responded. Instead, they are a package deal. We cannot have God without His Word. Paul explained that they must go together:

·       How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? (Romans 10:14; ESV)

Besides, we cannot love God without also loving His Word:

·       Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. (John 14:23-24)

How else are we to love God? I can give my wife a backrub, sweep the floor, do the dishes. However, I can only love God by keeping His Word. Therefore, for God, the supreme test is whether or not we abide in His Word:

·       I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name [essence] and your word. (Psalm 138:2)

This same postmodern Christian responded:

·       “So I therefore conclude that adherence to a particular interpretation of Genesis 1-11 is NOT critical, or even necessary to find salvation, know God and love Him.”

Here is my response:

·       While I agree with you, we are left to wonder where a “Christian’s” heart is, when they dismiss the many clear NT references to the historicity of the Genesis account in favor of evolution. Do they truly love God?

·       We also have to wonder how these blatant compromises will impact their lives, even if they are saved.

Saturday, July 30, 2016

MY LETTER TO A THEISTIC EVOLUTIONIST





You claim that, “Jesus is a central tenant of Christianity, not origins [Gen. 1-3].”

However, these are not distinct issues. To believe in Jesus is not to believe in our own concept of Jesus but to believe in what He had said and how He interpreted Scripture:

·       John 14:23-24 Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me.”

How did Jesus regard Genesis? As an historical record of creation, what God had actually accomplished:

·       Matthew 19:4-6 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female [Gen. 1:26], and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? [Gen. 2:24] So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has [historically and actually] joined together, let not man separate.”

We therefore have no right to understand Genesis as non-historical and to impose our own evolutionary narrative in its place. And when we insist on doing this, we have to rearrange everything else to conform to our new worldview foundation. Consequently, the world that God had created can no longer be considered “very good.” The animals could not have been herbivores. And sin and death could not have originated in the Fall. And Jesus could not have been the “second Adam,” as Scripture teaches us.

Our interpretation of Scripture is therefore not morally neutral. We either do it faithfully or unfaithfully, honoring God with it or dishonoring Him.

Friday, July 29, 2016

RECONSTRUCTION, SEGREGATION, AND THE WHITE CHURCH





Retired Professor of History and Black Church Studies and author of “Black Preaching,” Henry H. Mitchell, had been charged with “teaching Black Church history like it’s your own family album.” Mitchell admitted to the charge, adding that he had also written to raise the esteem of his Black people.

Nevertheless, Mitchell also has some good things to say about the White Church and their role in Reconstruction:

·       After the South was opened up to the missionaries, under protection of military occupation, the Protestant churches of the North launched a veritable crusade to bring literacy to the huge host of the newly freed. (Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings, 142)

Well, how great was this crusade? Mitchell investigated the annual reports of the American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS):

·       I was stunned to see whole pages of names of people who had been sent south to do mission work. There were hundreds of these names, in tiny print, on page after page. (142)

·       Regardless of paternalism and hazards to African American self-esteem, it was this huge crew of volunteer and minimally paid instructors, of not just Baptist but all denominations, who laid the foundation for all the secondary and college work reported in the pages that follow. There may have been only a log cabin church to teach in at first; it may have been by firelight, but these volunteers taught their very hearts out. There simply isn’t room to begin to cover the host of primary reading classes that were begun in churches and elsewhere soon after the Union troops took over. (142-43)

Mitchell later lists a vast multitude of schools started by these White missionaries to train Black teachers, who gradually took their place:

·       There were, of course, some educated African Americans from the North hastening south to lift their sisters and brothers. But this vast number of newly freed African Americans required this white host at the outset… The first Southern generation of locally educated African American instructors was first trained in schools planted by white missionaries. (143)

Why am I writing about this? Well, for one thing, I was thrilled to read about this. I had been so tormented reading about how White Christians had failed their Black brethren during segregation. Reading about Reconstruction was a welcome relief.

This is certainly not because I am White and want to build my own self-esteem. Not at all! I am not White. Instead, I believe in the Church that Christ has purchased with His own blood and I rejoice when I see indications that our Lord still inhabits His people, and that this makes all the difference in the world.

Just the other day, a Black women solemnly informed me, “Whites do not love Blacks.” This perception needs to be countered.

I also do not want White Christians to carry undo guilt and to allow this false guilt to either silence them or to lead them into doing foolish things in a vain attempt to atone for their “sins.”

False guilt helps no one. As a panelist at a conference on racism, Professor Shelby Steele was asked what an ideal America would look like. He writes:

·       I said that what I wanted most for America was an end to white guilt... the terror of being seen as racist— [the] terror that has caused whites to act guiltily toward minorities even when they feel no actual guilt. My point was that this terror— and the lust it has inspired in whites to show themselves innocent of racism— has spawned a new white paternalism toward minorities since the 1960s that, among other things, has damaged the black family more profoundly than segregation ever did. I also pleaded especially for an end to the condescension of affirmative action... the benevolent paternalism of white guilt, I said, had injured the self- esteem, if not the souls, of minorities in ways that the malevolent paternalism of white racism never had. Post- 1960s welfare policies, the proliferation of “identity politics” and group preferences, and all the grandiose social interventions of the War on Poverty and the Great Society— all this was meant to redeem the nation from its bigoted past, but paradoxically, it also invited minorities to make an identity and a politics out of grievance and inferiority... their entitlement and that protest politics was the best way to cash in on that entitlement. (Shame: How America's Past Sins have Polarized the Country)

Steele believes that white guilt is now more destructive to the Black community than white racism. He argues that the very programs intended to help Blacks were not simply ineffective but actually damaged the Black community:

·       White guilt was a smothering and distracting kindness that enmeshed minorities more in the struggle for white redemption than in their own struggle to develop as individuals capable of competing with all others.

However, even more than this, I want to see the different races reconciled together as one in the Body of Christ. I want to remind my Black brethren that they are beloved, even though the White Church has often failed to show it in helpful ways that might result in healing and forgiveness.

Oneness in Christ was Jesus’ prayer (John 17:20-23). It should also be ours.

A RESPONSE TO A SEEKER





I am glad that you are seeking, because a true seeker will find. I am also confident that you will see through Dawkin’s claim that science has made God irrelevant. Why?

For one thing, science has never demonstrated that anything ever happens naturally and without Divine guidance. To do this, science would have to demonstrate that our causal laws/forces of science are of natural derivation and continuation. However, science is ill-equipped for such a task.

More to the point, these laws or causal agents give every indication that they are designed and divinely pieced together (fine-tuned) to promote life. Science cannot disprove the divine origin of these laws but, instead, depends upon them for each of its findings. If these laws were simply a part of this universe, they would be changing as the universe changes, automatically voiding the possibility of any coherent scientific proclamation. Indeed, if it had been possible for our laws to have been created by an explosion (the “Big Bang”), there is no reason to expect them to be immutable and universal, making science possible.

We should not expect these laws to be elegant (simple), enabling scientific discovery and understanding. Instead, we should expect what explosions usually produce – Chaos!

But please continue your exploration. If you want the truth, you will find the truth.